France 1814 - 1914

Robert Tombs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317871422
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: History

Here is an incomparably rich portrait of France in the years when the disparate elements that made up the fragmented kingdom of the ancien regime were forged into the modern nation. The survey begins with an exploration of national obsessions and attitudes. It considers the tendency to revolution and war, the preoccupation with the idea of a New Order and the deep strain of national paranoia that was to be intensified by the dramatic debacle of the Franco-Prussian War. Robert Tombs then investigates the structures of power and in Part Three he turns his attention to social identities, from the individual and family to the nation at large. When every aspect of the period has been put under the microscope, Robert Tombs draws them all into the broad political narrative that brings the book to its rousing conclusion. Bursting with life as well as learning, this is, quite simply, a tour de force.

Part I
Obsessions

Chapter 1
Revolution

Other peoples have had revolutions more or less frequently; but we have revolution permanently.

Parliamentary Enquiry, 1871¹

In their own eyes, and those of others, the French since 1789 have been the revolutionary nation. This, in complete contrast with their image in the eighteenth century as a law-abiding and tranquil people, was the principal distinguishing characteristic of being French in the nineteenth century: for good or ill the turmoil begun in 1789 had made French society and the French nation what they were. The Revolution was 'the only historical event that served as a chronological milestone for all French people . . . the great dividing point that separated the present from the past'.² But every new political crisis made it seem clearer that 'the Revolution' — not a succession of separate events, but one single process — had not ended in 1795 or 1815.

'The Revolution', the sudden violent remaking of society, was a new concept of politics. It upset old certainties, reversed relationships of power and intruded into every aspect of life. It opened up unlimited possibilities and unlimited dangers. A religious, even occultist, view of the universe often formed part of the outlook. 'Why discuss what it is like on the other side of the river?' asked the lifelong revolutionary Auguste Blanqui. 'Let us cross over and see.'

Paradoxically, there formed a 'revolutionary tradition'. It was traditional in two ways. First, 'the Revolution' was seen both as a continuing teleological process, developing from its beginning in the past to a culmination (whether desirable or undesirable) in the future, and also as a cyclical process, passing through certain logical phases observable in the past and likely to reproduce themselves again. Hence the idea of revolution 'advanced further', as Littré noted in 1850, in 'each generation'. Opposition to the Bourbons in the 1820s culminated in the unexpected revolution of 1830, followed by several years of attempted insurrections. This proved that revolution was not past history, but present politics. The revolutionary upheavals of 1848-51 and 1870-71 seemed to open further phases in the revolutionary cycle. The 1890s, marked by strikes and anarchist bombs, were believed by many to be the beginning of yet another period of revolution.

Second, ideas, symbols, myths and ritual actions were not fixed but were continually being elaborated over the century. By 1815, memories of the 1790s were fragmented and confused, varying greatly according to the divergent experiences of individuals, families and regions. Some of the most famous mythical symbols of the Revolution had yet to be propagated. Building barricades — the ritual signal of nineteenth-century Paris revolt — was practically unknown during the Revolution. The tricoteuses —those notorious women knitting at the foot of the guillotine -—only appeared generations later, a cross-Channel reimport via the lurid imaginations of Carlyle and Dickens. Heroes, heroines and stirring events also had to be discovered, promoted and commemorated through speeches, newspapers, histories, novels, plays, textbooks, paintings, statues, street names and ceremonies. In short, the 'revolutionary tradition' had to be created, combining imaginative visions of revolution, rituals of political behaviour and ideological analyses.

The tradition could have a ludicrous side. In rural France in 1868, for example, flowers decorating churches caused riots because they included lilies, the Bourbon symbol, and these were taken to be a signal in a royalist plot to restore the monarchy and re-establish the Church tithe. In one village a crowd of 600 threatened to string up the priest if he refused to hand over all the offending bouquets.³ In the 1870s, republicans still campaigned with the stories that royalists were planning to restore feudalism and the tithe: not an acre, not a centime, not a virgin was safe from the rapacity of the nobles and priests. As late as 1910, a panic was caused in sleepy Provence when a newsboy's shouts of 'la révolution au Portugal' were misheard as 'la révolution au Pont-du-Gard'!⁴

But the revolutionary tradition was far more than mere hot air: it was a living political culture of deeds as well as words. The most telling measure of its power is the appalling total of killed or seriously wounded in political violence during the nineteenth century, which even a fairly modest estimate must place above 60,000.⁵ The long and often bloody struggle to resolve the issues of the Revolution — by defeating it, controlling it or fulfilling it — has been called the Franco-French War. Why this 'war' continued so long and with such intensity is the principal theme of this book.

Visions of Revolution

It created the politics of the impossible, turned madness into a theory, and blind audacity into a cult.

Tocqueville, 1850⁶

If the Revolution was principally a political and cultural phenomenon, as was suggested in the introduction, we need to explore how and in what form it was transmitted over successive generations. There were hopeful and fearful visions of revolution. The hope of a popular uprising, a 'lutte finale' to create a society of harmony and justice, was endlessly inspiring. But in the aftermath of civil violence, endless war, invasion, occupation and catastrophic economic distress, the revolutionary experience was also transmitted to later generations as fear: revolution was uneasily nicknamed 'the tiger'. Fear could transform trivial political disagreement into something more serious. More than once 'France was caught in the trap of its own fantasies of social dissolution'.⁷ Let us examine four principal fantasies, concerning blood, the crowd, religious conflict and apocalypses.

Blood

Marchons! Marchons! Qu'un sang impur abreuve nos sillons.

'Marseillaise'

Human blood has a terrible power against those who have spilt it. . . The Terrorists have done us immense and lasting harm. Were you to go into the last cottage in the farthest country of Europe, you would meet that memory and that curse.

Michelet⁸

What the Holocaust and the Gulag are for us, the violence of the French Revolution was for the nineteenth century: events that alter our understanding of politics and indeed of human nature. The lynching of aristocrats on street lamps, celebrated in the popular song 'Ca Ira', sung by the Left throughout the century; the parading of heads on pikes; the ritual of the guillotine; executions by drowning at Nantes in 1793; the trail of fire and slaughter in the Vendée in 1793 where 200,000 perished; the mass executions by grapeshot at Lyons; and — deepest trauma of all — the September Massacres of 1792, that butchery of prisoners in Paris with blade and bludgeon, which seemed to be the distillation of human savagery. On the other hand, republicans recalled the torture of prisoners by the Vendée rebels and the lynchings and summary executions of the 'White Terror' carried out in the south in 1815.

The nineteenth century inherited an inextricable mixture of fact, propaganda and fantasy, first spread by anti-Jacobin pamphlets in the later 1790s, and later by a flood of memoirs, histories, pamphlets, novels and plays. These conjured up a very intimate kind of horror: pikes and cleavers dripping with blood, hearts torn out and squeezed like sponges, livers eaten, intimacy violated by 'lecherous butchers'.⁹ Some of the most nightmarish details were fictitious (trousers made of human skin; a young girl made to drink a cup of blood to save her father's life) but probably no less effective a reflection of collective fears.

Emotionally and ideologically, revolutionary bloodshed was hard to handle. One reaction was to sweep it under the carpet. While the private medium of the novel reflected fears of violence in the 1820s, in public performances the memory was repressed as too disturbing: censors usually cut out violent material. The 'Marseillaise' was banned for most of the century, for' 'le sang impur of the Marseillaise bawled out' was an unambiguous revolutionary signal, a 'glorification of crime, frightful reminder of '93'.¹⁰ Delacroix's painting Liberty leading the People (1830), with its rampaging mob trampling over corpses, was bought by the government and removed from public display. Bloody and violent spectacles were stopped or at least made less visible in the aftermath of the 1830 and 1848 revolutions. Animal baiting was forbidden in 1833 and so in 1850 was public cruelty to animals. Medical dissection of corpses was removed from public gaze. It became progressively more difficult to get into the morgue — a popular family outing — to gawp at the corpses. The consistent aim was to reduce popular brutality. Though executions remained public, they were moved to quieter places and to daybreak, and the guillotine was taken down from its platform and placed less visibly on the ground.

Moderate partisans of the Revolution felt obliged to explain away the bloodshed, especially when, after 1830, revolution recommenced. Some ascribed it to a minority — 'a handful of murderers' said the great republican historian Jules Michelet — or blamed the brutal traditions of the Old Regime that had carried over into the new era. Some blamed it on counterrevolutionary provocation. Many minimized its extent and alleged that the other side had been even worse, beginning a ghoulish and enduring polemic in which Right and Left accused each other of killing the most.

If moderates wished to muffle reminders of violence, extremists of Right and Left kept fantasies of bloodshed alive. In the 1830s, collecting weapons for the next revolution conferred radical chic. Secret societies in the 1840s named their sections 'Robespierre' or 'Marat'. Lyons republicans struck a medal in 1848 inscribed 'The people have arisen and 1793 may yet return', and threatening death to 'aristocrats, moderates, egoists'.¹¹ In 1871, a revolutionary club in Paris demanded the execution of a hostage every 24 hours. Such bar-room bravado was portentously reported by worried bureaucrats and eagerly spread by alarmist conservatives.

Horrifying stories were readily believed. The same hallmarks recurred: blood, torture, mutilation, sadism (including violence by and towards women), even cannibalism. After February 1848, it was reported that brand new guillotines had been delivered to Lyons. In June 1848, soldiers taken prisoner by the insurgents in Paris were said to have been sawn in two or burnt alive. The December 1851 insurrection inspired hair-raising stories of torture, murder and mutilation reminiscent of the September Massacres of 1792. Bands of syphilitic revolutionaries at Clamecy were reported to have raped the daughters of the bourgeoisie in the presence of priests about to be burnt at the stake. In 1871, the Paris Communards were accused of using poison and dum-dum bullets, and torturing prisoners. Their killing of hostages (arguably rather few in the circumstances of the wholesale slaughter of their own men) was seen as another proof of the enduring horrors of revolution, especially as the killing of priests and the gruesome mass lynching of 50 prisoners by an angry crowd in the Rue Haxo in eastern Paris recalled the September Massacres.

Such lurid accounts, mythical or real, partly explain the harsh reprisals taken by government forces against defeated insurgents in 1848, 1851 and especially in 1871, the crushing of the Paris Commune. This was the bloodiest 'White Terror' in French history. Thereafter, the level of political violence fell to a fairly normal west-European level — far more killing than in Britain (including Ireland), but far less than in Russia or America. Yet the old fears persisted. As before, fact and fantasy made a potent combination. Zola's 1885 novel Germinal reflected a gut fear of revolutionary violence, and portrayed the revolting butchery of a shopkeeper by the angry wives of striking miners — far worse than anything that ever really happened in these years. Yet strikers in the 1880s still sang 'Ca Ira' and the 'Carmagnole', the blood-curdling songs of the 1790s, and verbal violence was the norm. In 1886 at Anzin a mine manager really was lynched. Zola also portrayed troops firing on strikers; and on May Day 1891 troops really did so at Fourmies, killing nine.

Expectation of violence could lower the threshold at which clashes and reprisals really occurred. Yet it also inspired efforts to head them off. The 'silent majority' was horrified by memories of the 1790s — a horror reflected in popular songs and plays, which were consistently hostile to the Terror. Liberals, moderate republicans and many socialists stressed their determination to avoid a return to 1793, and declared hopefully that Terror belonged to the past. After the 1830 revolution the new regime resisted popular left-wing demands to execute the ministers of Charles X, and in 1848 reluctance to engage in a battle with 'the mob' may have helped persuade Louis-Philippe to abdicate. He knew the risks of tangling with revolution: his father, and the fathers of three of his prime ministers, had died on the guillotine. The new Republic in 1848 immediately abolished the death penalty for political offences to prove its rejection of the Terror. Lamartine, its leader, pleaded (with bullets whistling round his head, he related) against the adoption of the red flag, 'that flag of blood!'. The 1871 Paris Commune had the guillotine publicly burnt, and its socialist members opposed the establishment of a Committee of Public Safety because of the frightening memories it evoked. Even 'extremist' leaders in 1848 and 1871 risked their own lives trying to shield prisoners.

Every nineteenth-century revolution shunned deliberate and organized terror. They frightened the property-owning classes none the less. Whatever the intentions of politicians, violence, counter-violence, threats of violence and fear of violence remained characteristics of French political and social life.

The crowd: ‘people’ or ‘mob’?

The people come! Their flowing tide
Is rising endlessly with the waxing moon.¹²

The power of the crowd, an essential image of revolution ...