France 1870-1914

Robert Gildea

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780582292215
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317887201
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

The period 1870 - 1914 in France saw the consolidation of republican government and the recovery of national self-confidence. Though political crises such as the Dreyfus Affair threatened to tear it apart, the Republic established firm parliamentary rule, built up an Empire and an army which was to see it through the Great War. The new edition of this key text - first published as The Third Republic From 1870 to 1914 - offers a clear introduction to the period and incorporates the latest research.

PART ONE: THE BACKGROUND

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1 WHICH REPUBLIC?

The Third Republic happened almost by accident, but it was the most successful of all French republics, lasting from 1870 until 1940. The first two French republics had existed respectively for twelve and four years, each of them terminated when a Bonaparte assumed the imperial crown. The Third Republic was given its chance by the defeat of the Second Empire at the hands of Prussia, and would not have emerged so quickly, if at all, without that defeat. There was nothing ‘inevitable’ about it; indeed the pattern of French history was for monarchy to be displaced by republic, republic by empire and empire by monarchy. It was something of an oddity in the society of nations: France was the only major power in Europe after 1870 that was a republic. But, unlike the First Republic of 1792–1804, the Third Republic did not have to fight for survival against a coalition of European monarchies. It lived in peace with its neighbours for two generations until 1914, and emerged victorious from the First World War in 1918, before it succumbed to the forces of the Third Reich in 1940 [1–5].

Although the Third Republic was born of military defeat, it is quite legitimate to speak of a republican tradition in France. Or more accurately of strands of a republican tradition, for not all republicans of 1870–1 were in the same vein. One strand was dictatorial and patriotic. These republicans were convinced of the absolute necessity of continuing the war against Prussia after the defeat of the Second Empire in order to preserve the Republic itself. The second element were liberals who thought that the Republic offered the best opportunity to safeguard parliamentary institutions which had been flouted by the Empire. They wanted to make peace with the Prussians as soon as possible, in order to prevent power from falling into the hands of a third group of republicans. These were the insurrectionaries. They were inspired by the Paris Commune of 1792, which had been thrown up by the sans-culottes in the teeth of invasion by Prussia and Austria and aristocratic treachery, and which had saved France and founded the First Republic. In similar circumstances they demanded the same desperate measures. Each group of republicans was epitomized by a single personality: the first by Gambetta, the second by Thiers, the third by Blanqui.

Leon Gambetta was a southerner, the son of an Italian grocer, a lawyer, tribune of the people and fierce opponent of the Second Empire. Under the Empire, for the sake of prudence, he and his associates called themselves ‘democrats’ or ‘radicals’ rather than republicans. He was a champion of universal suffrage, as the only possible expression of popular sovereignty. This had been established by the Second Republic in 1848, curtailed in 1850 when royalists gained a majority in the Republic, but restored by Louis-Napoleon when he seized power in 1851. The fact that for twenty years universal suffrage had played into the hands of the Second Empire did not cause Gambetta to change his mind: the people would in time have to be educated in republican principles [6]. For Gambetta was a republican as well as a democrat. He believed that the Republic was the embodiment of the French Revolution, a militant regime that roared defiance at monarchies and empires alike. He hoped that the Republic would be restored legally rather than by revolution, and when republicans increased their representation in the Legislative Body from 35 to 87 seats in 1869, he set about organizing them into a viable force [Doc. 1a]. The Second Empire in fact received a new lease of life in May 1870 when a new liberal constitution was massively ratified by plebiscite. Gambetta had to confess that it was stronger than ever. Four months later Napoleon III was defeated at Sedan, and republican deputies proclaimed the Republic in Paris on 4 September.

A Government of National Defence was immediately set up to continue the war against the Prussians. The whole of northern France was occupied, Paris was cut off on 19 September, and in provincial towns such as Lyon and Marseille republican groups seized power and set up regional federations of republican strongholds in order to carry on the struggle as best they could [7]. Gambetta emerged as the key figure in the Government of National Defence. As Minister for War, he was determined to win at any cost. This meant reinforcing the depleted regular army by raising an auxiliary citizen army which would fight alongside it [8]. As Minister of the Interior, he tried to bring the provinces under his direct control by the appointment of republican prefects he could trust. Pressure was growing for the calling of a National Assembly to draw up a new constitution. Gambetta resisted this, fearing that such an assembly would be dominated by Bonapartists and royalists rather than republicans. A republican dictatorship was necessary in his eyes to preserve the Republic itself [9].

Not all the members of the Government of National Defence agreed with Gambetta. Foremost among these was Adolphe Thiers, an opposition journalist under the Restoration and many times minister under the July Monarchy. He was a liberal and parliamentarian, who detested universal suffrage, and had supported the disenfranchisement of three million of the ‘vile multitude’ in 1850. He believed that universal suffrage was fickle and irrational, played into the hands of demagogues and warmongers, and should be limited to the educated and propertied. Unlike Gambetta, he wanted to conclude an armistice as soon as possible with Prussia, and to hold elections for a National Assembly which would ratify peace terms. Thiers had his way. An armistice was signed in January 1871, and the following month elections were held. The electorate's priorities were peace and liberty. At the polls it rejected Bonapartists and Gambettist republicans as (in different ways) warmongering and dictatorial, and returned a stream of royalists, including two Orleanist princes. While criticizing universal suffrage, Thiers himself was fairly indifferent as to which regime was best for France. In 1850 he had argued that conservatives were divided between three dynasties and the Republic and that therefore a republic was the regime that divided them least. In 1870 he was delighted to see the end of the Second Empire but now that a republic had been declared he wanted no truck with dangerous plans to restore the monarchy. As he had been elected in twenty-seven departments (elections were on a system of departmental proportional representation and candidates could stand in more than one department) he was the obvious choice to be entrusted with executive power by the National Assembly. He was elected Chief of the Executive Power of the French Republic on 13 February 1871 and sought to keep on board both republicans for the business of making a difficult peace, and royalists in order to negotiate a conservative, parliamentary regime. The government he appointed included one confirmed royalist, three confirmed republicans and five, including himself, uncommitted. The final decision about the regime was yet to be taken [10].

Paris, meanwhile, which had been under Prussian siege since September 1870, was seething with revolutionaries who had no confidence either in the Government of National Defence or in the National Assembly. First, there were Blanquists – comrades of Auguste Blanqui, an exponent of armed insurrection since 1830 and himself currently in prison [11]. Next, there were the Jacobins around Charles Delescluze who, unlike Gambetta, was a veteran of 1848 and was prepared to use revolutionary means in order to obtain a government fully accountable to the people. Finally, there were the adherents of the First Workers' International, grouped in sections and trade unions, numbering between 20,000 and 30,000 workers. The revolutionaries demanded direct democracy, or the retention of power in the hands of the people, not their elected representatives. The instruments of their power were: first, vigilance committees in each of the twenty arrondissements of Paris, to keep often moderate mayors in revolutionary step [Doc. 1b]; second, the National Guard, which had been banned under the Empire but was expanded by Gambetta to defend Paris, and had swollen to about 360,000; and third, revolutionary clubs, the foci of heated political debate. The goal of the revolutionaries was the establishment of a central revolutionary organ to save Paris and the Republic. The enemy were both the Prussians who paraded insolently on the Champs Elysées in Paris by permission of Thiers on 1 March and those Frenchmen who believed that social order was more important than victory, and that the peace agreed by the National Assembly would have to be imposed on Paris by disarming the National Guard [12].

On 18 March 1871 regular troops were sent into Paris to seize the cannon held by the National Guard. But they were too few and unreliable, and many fraternized with the National Guard and the working-class populations of the suburbs who rose in their support. The central committee of the National Guard battalions, formed on 15 March, became a provisional revolutionary government in Paris as the executive power withdrew in disarray to Versailles. On 26 March a Commune to represent the whole of Paris (for the first time since the 1790s) was elected. It was dominated by National Guard militants, Blanquists, Jacobins, Internationalists and other socialists. For weeks the troops of the Commune and those of the government at Versailles were locked in combat, with the execution of hostages on both sides. But, once the peace with newly-united Germany was signed at Frankfurt, the balance of forces shifted to Thiers, as Bismarck allowed 60,000 French prisoners of war to pass through German lines and attack Paris. In the brutal suppression of the Semaine Sanglante (Bloody Week) 25,000 Parisians were massacred. Of the 40,000 arrested, 10,000 were convicted, 5,000 sent to the penal colony of New Caledonia in the Pacific, 93 condemned to death and 23 executed. The Republic of Monsieur Thiers triumphed over the workers' Republic of the Commune, but the memory and mythology of the Commune would continue to define working-class culture and consciousness and perpetuate an irrational fear of class war among French property-owners.

THE REPUBLIC WITHOUT REPUBLICANS

After the Commune a Catholic noble, Albert de Mun, who had been taken prisoner by the Prussians at Metz and then released to help with its suppression, observed that the Republic ‘seemed dishonoured for ever’ [13 p. 57]. A great chance to restore the monarchy presented itself. Many conservatives believed that only the monarchy could guarantee religion, the family and private property. The National Assembly repealed the law of exile which banned heads of the royal families; and the two pretenders – the Comte de Chambord and the Comte de Paris, respectively grandsons of Charles X and Louis-Philippe, Legitimist and Orleanist – returned to France [14].

However, things were not so simple. The reason given by many historians for the failure of restoration at this point is that on 5 July 1871 the Comte de Chambord, who had spent most of his life in exile in Austria, issued a manifesto saying that he would never give up the white flag of Henri IV (which in any case had been regularly used as the royal flag only since 1815) [Doc. 2a]. But the explanation cannot be reduced to the foibles of one man. Royalists included politicians as well as pretenders. The problem was that Chambord failed to consult with the grand old man of royalism in France, the Comte de Falloux, who was obliged to deal in the art of the possible. And in 1871 the plain fact was that only 80 deputies on the extreme Right of the National Assembly accepted the manifesto [15]; the so-called moderate Right and the centre Right (or Orleanists) did not. Failure to consult was symptomatic of something else: Chambord wanted the restoration of a ‘real’ monarchy, which he variously called ‘traditional’, ‘tutelary’ or ‘tempered’. It was not absolute monarchy, but it was not constitutional monarchy either. Unfortunately the vast majority of royalist deputies wanted a constitutional, parliamentary monarchy which left power in their hands. The lessons of 1830 and of the authoritarian Empire had not been learned in vain [Doc. 2b].

While the royalists argued among themselves, Gambetta was stumping the country, delivering speeches and working to recreate the image of the Republic. Above all it had to be dissociated from that of the Commune. Gambetta claimed that the republicans were the party of order; those who opposed the Republic presently established were the sedition-mongers. Republicans did not represent social revolution, he argued, because there was ‘no social question’, no inevitable condition of class struggle, but rather a widening access to property as a result of hard work, saving and education. Republicans were not the propertyless proletarians who had set Paris alight but the ‘new social strata’, the tradesmen, small manufacturers and farmers who, he said, had been thrown up by the industrial revolution and universal suffrage and were now eagerly waiting to take power from the old elites that had been cosseted by the monarchy and Empire [16].

The tide began to move in the direction of republicanism. Republicans did well in the by-elections of July 1871. Thiers, who was elected President of the Republic by the National Assembly, declared himself squarely in favour of the Republic at the beginning of the parliamentary session in November 1872. In order to retain a breadth of support on the Right, he declared, ‘the Republic will be conservative, or it will not exist’ [Doc. 3]. His ideal was a presidential Republic, which vested most power in himself. Increasingly, however, the man who had negotiated peace and saved France from the Commune became suspect to the Right. They wanted not a presidential but a parliamentary constitution, under which ministers would be responsible to them. And they did not trust Thiers to be a strong enough bulwark against the rising tide of republicanism. The crunch came in April 1873, when in a by-election which polled the whole of Paris, Thiers's candidate, none other than his foreign minister, was defeated by the candidate of the radical Left, who had been approved by Gambetta. On 24 May 1873, Thiers was overturned by a majority composed of royalists and Bonapartists [17].

With Thiers gone there was again the possibility of a royalist restoration. The new president might have been the Orleanist Due d'Aumale, but the (Legitimist) extreme Right objected, so the nomination went instead to a military man who had loyally served every regime since the Restoration, Marshal MacMahon. Nothing was settled yet. During the summer of 1873 royalist leaders were deep in conference. The Orleanist pretender, the Comte de Paris, agreed to defer to the claim of the Legitimist branch. The understanding was that he would succeed on the death of the Comte de Chambord, who was childless. But again Chambord slighted royalist notables by refusing to accept the tricolor, which was, after all, the flag not only of the Republic but of the constitutional monarchies of 1791 and 1830 and of the French army. Further, he refused to surrender his title in favour of the Orleanist branch, a gesture which would have saved his honour and France for the monarchy. In the absence of ‘fusion’, as the reconciliation of the claims of the rival branches was called, a consensus of conservatives was possible only within the Republic. On 20 November 1873 the royalist and Bonapartist majority in the National Assembly agreed to extend the presidential powers of MacMahon for seven years.

Chambord and the hard-line Legitimists were not the only obstacle to a royalist restoration. MacMahon took as his prime minister the Orleanist Duc de Broglie, and the Orleanists were anxious to establish a constitution as much like that of 1830 as possible. This would involve a Second Chamber that was largely appointed, and, in elections to the First Chamber, significant restrictions on universal suffrage. But universal suffrage was untouchable in the eyes of both republicans and Bonapartists and to abrogate it would only serve to give them a powerful rallying cry. De Broglie was toppled by an ‘unholy’ alliance of republicans, Bonapartists and Legitimists in May 1874. The Orleanists were now stranded. Moreover, they had reason to fear a revival of Bonapartism which, having been roundly beaten at the polls in 1871, won a series of by-elections in 1874. The Bonapartists argued that the Empire had been terminated by events; the people had not been consulted on the regime since the plebiscite of May 1870. They proposed the dissolution of the bickering National Assembly and a plebiscite which, they thought, would restore the Emperor's son, the Prince Imperial [18].

The Orleanists had no choice but to reach an understanding with moderate republicans on the establishment of a parliamentary Republic which alone would keep Bonapartists, Legitimists and radicals out of power. It would be based on universal suffrage, but the Orleanists insisted on a Second Chamber as a condition of their support. This conjunction of centres was not extraordinary, but represented a natural coalition of talent, wealth and birth. Key negotiations took place between the Orleanist Duc d'Audiffret Pasquier and Auguste Casimir-Périer, a republican in the man...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Editorial foreword
• Note on referencing system
• Acknowledgements
• PART One The Background
• PART Two Analysis
• PART Three Conclusion
• PART Four Documents
• Bibliography
• Index