France Since 1815

Martin Evans, Emmanuel Godin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134667246
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Idiomas

Part of the Modern History for Modern Languages Series

France since 1815 provides an accessible overview of the major socio-political changes in France during this period. Designed for area studies students studying French, it presents the historical context necessary for language students to understand the complexities of contemporary French society. Adopting a chronological approach, it surveys nearly two hundred years of French history, with events covered including The French Revolution, The Bourbon Restoration, The Third Republic, Occupied France, The Fourth Republic, The Gaullist Revolution and France after 2003.

This revised edition includes new material that focuses on Chirac's second mandate (Iraq war, religion, suburbs and the inability/impossibility of carrying on with reform), an assessment of the controversial Sarkozy presidency, and a final chapter covering the last ten years, culminating in the results of the French presidential elections in 2012.

Features include:

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• clear timelines of main events and suggested topics for discussion

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• glossary inserts throughout of key terms and concepts

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• the use of primary documents to re-create and understand the past

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• free access to a website (http://www.port.ac.uk/special/france1815to2003/) containing a wealth of complementary material

Drawing on the best scholarship, particular emphasis has been given to the role of political memory, the contribution of women and the impact of colonialism and post-colonialism. The relationship between France and her European partners is analysed in greater depth and there are new sections explicitly situating France and the French within a wider transnational/global perspective.

Chapter 1
The French Revolution: history, memory, politics

Timeline

1774

Accession of Louis XVI

1788

8 August Estates-General convoked for 1789

1789

5 May Estates-General convenes

14 July Bastille falls 4 August Abolition of feudalism

26 August Declaration of Rights of Man

1790

12 July Civil Constitution of the Clergy

1791

13 April Pope condemns the Civil Constitution

20–1 June Louis XVI captured trying to flee France

1792

20 April War declared on Austria

13 June Prussia declares war on France

10 August Overthrow of monarchy

20 September French victory at Valmy

22 September Republic proclaimed

1793

21 January King executed 6 April Committee of Public Safety created

31 October Girondins executed

1794

27–8 July Fall of Robespierre

12 November Jacobin Club closed

1795

2 November Directory established

1796

11 April Napoleon invades Italy

1799

9–10 November Napoleon takes power

1804

21 March Introduction of the Civil Code

18 May Napoleon proclaimed emperor

1812

Napoleon invades Russia

1814–15

First Bourbon restoration

1815

20 March–22 June The Hundred Days

18 June French defeat at Waterloo

1989

July Bicentenary celebrations

On the evening of 14 July 1989 1.5 million people congregated along the Champs-Elysées to celebrate the two-hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution. The centrepiece was the huge parade organised by the publicist and fashion photographer Jean-Paul Goude. At a cost of £10 million Goude’s extravaganza was a provocative mixture of high camp and contemporary politics. His floats included Russians on a moving ice rink, British Dragoon Guards being drenched in an artificial rainstorm, as well as Chinese students being butchered, an explicit reference to the communist repression in Tiananmen Square in Beijing just five weeks before. The climax was the black opera virtuoso Jessye Norman on stilts singing La Marseillaise. For Goude the whole parade was premissed upon a rejection of purity. ‘It will have an African rhythm, there will be Africans in it wherever possible. That is because I am against the purity of races. I am against the very idea of purity.’ For him the French Revolution was a universal event which went beyond France to embrace the whole of humanity.

Goude’s daring spectacle was part of a week of celebrations which had opened on the morning of 11 July with a solemn reading of the Declaration of Human Rights in front of the Palais de Chaillot before 37 of the world’s leaders. Backed by the well-amplified humming of a heavenly choir, actors and actresses, including Jane Birkin, read aloud from the works of great revolutionaries including Mirabeau and Condorcet. Thereafter the celebrations included the opening of a new opera house at the Bastille, a symposium of 900 historians from all over the world at the Sorbonne University on the meaning of the Revolution, as well as a meeting of the seven richest countries, the so-called G7.

Having won two presidential elections in 1981 and 1988, President François Mitterrand always had a strong historical consciousness and for him the Bicentenary became something of a personal crusade. The socialist president had taken a leading role in organising the events and from the outset the explicit intention was to celebrate 1789 in a manner which would underline its centrality not just in French history, but in the history of humanity as a whole. By foregrounding the ideas of universal fraternity and human rights Mitterrand wished to underline the enduring legacy of the French Revolution for the forthcoming millennium.

Yet, despite the desire to produce consensus on the meaning of Bicentenary, the celebrations provoked anger within certain quarters of French society. At the beginning of the year several royalist movements combined to form ‘Anti-89’. They laid wreaths in the Place de la Concorde in Paris where Louis XVI was guillotined and said mass for the repose of the king’s soul. One leading member, Abbé Aulagnier, denounced the Revolution as ‘the negation of God and the triumph of rationalism’. In the same vein Philippe de Villiers, a right-wing opposition representative from the Vendée, condemned the celebrations in forthright terms. He characterised the brutal repression of the royalist-led peasant uprising, where an estimated 600,000 Bretons lost their lives, as nothing short of genocide. For de Villiers the Revolution was neither generous nor fraternal. Drawing on the historical research of Reynald Secher he condemned the Revolution as inherently brutal, a precursor of Hitler and Stalin, and he wrote to the president calling on him to remove the name of General Turreau, the man responsible for the 1793 punitive campaign in which one-quarter of Vendéens were killed, from the Arc de Triomphe. Significantly too the attacks on the Bicentenary did not just come from the right. The veteran left-wing commentator Jacques Juillard condemned Mitterrand’s celebrations as highly selective. By focusing on the civil rights, freedom of worship for Protestants and Jews, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, Mitterrand wanted to portray these values as the very essence of the Revolution. However, in doing so, Juillard argued, he downplayed or ignored not only the questions of social equality but also the conflict between church and state, the regions and the centre, as well as the role of state power and the Terror.

history and memory

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History as a professional discipline is concerned with the recreation of the past on its own terms using documentary evidence. Beyond the confines of the discipline a wider sense of the past exists within museums, monuments and the media, as well as more intimate cultural forms such as letters, diaries and family photograph albums. Within these different contexts there are different constructions of the past which are often at war with each other: some achieve centrality whilst others are marginalised. In the case of the Bicentenary, de Villiers’s defence of an alternative Vendean memory was a direct challenge to the image of the Revolution produced within the official, state-sponsored commemorations. Significantly neither history nor the wider processes of memory are static. History is subject to constant reinterpretation, whilst memory, as it is transmitted from one generation to the next, is always evolving.

This snapshot from the 1989 controversy is highly revealing and it illustrates some of the central concerns of this book. Firstly, it shows that history is deeply divisive. The French Revolution was a conflictual event which has continued to divide French society ever since. Thus there is no single truth or interpretation but several. Secondly, the Bicentenary highlights how far history is entangled with politics. 1789 inaugurated a long period of internal conflicts and, as we shall see, this civil war was to be constantly fuelled by appeals to the past. In this precise way the Bicentenary points towards the wider historical consciousness that exists beyond the confines of history writing as a professional discipline. Undoubtedly in the Vendée the memory of 1793 has been passed down from one generation to the next, a kind of past that is permanently present, and this explains why this region in the west of France has consistently voted for the right ever since. Thirdly, 1989 underlines why history is such a subversive subject: because it is not just about the past; it is also about the present and the future. So for some, the Revolution has been a dire warning, whilst for others it has been an inspiration for action, a blueprint for a future society. In this context Goude’s belief that the rejection of purity was the message of the Bicentenary was a thinly veiled attack on the politics of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front national. Finally, the Bicentenary reminds us that any understanding of the past is fashioned by the contemporary context. Clearly, by linking the French Revolution to Stalinism and Nazism, de Villiers was seeing 1789 through the prism of the twentieth century. In this way the Bicentenary provides a telling contrast with the hundred-and-fiftieth and hundredth anniversaries. In 1939 commemorations were dominated by the pending threat of war. Thus Jean Renoir’s cinematic recreation of the Revolution, his 1938 film La Marseillaise, cast the revolutionary wars as a final struggle between free French people and enslaved Prussians, a warning to his compatriots that they must be ready to defend the same rights against Nazi Germany. Likewise 50 years earlier, the commemorations were about the establishment of the fledgling Third Republic still vulnerable to the threat of royalism. In 1889, therefore, the tone was one of triumphalism where the Third Republic was held up as the political embodiment of the principles of the Revolution.

So, from whatever political angle you view it, the French Revolution is clearly a faultline. Put simply, the French Revolution plunged the continent into the most profound and protracted crisis that it had ever known. It divided the continent of Europe. For the champions of the Revolution it represented an attack on the forces of oppression enshrined in monarchy, nobility and organised religion. For its opponents, it was synonymous with the dangerous forces of mob rule. It is vital, therefore, to have an understanding not only of its causes and phases, but also of its legacy.

Causes

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The precise causes of the Revolution have been the subject of endless controversy. Interpretations have not been fixed but have shifted and shifted again, underlining the complex interplay between history and politics. From 1920 until the 1970s the classic Marxist interpretation held sway. This conjured up the Revolution as a rupture in history whose fundamental cause was the transition from feudalism to capitalism. The motor of the Revolution was the revolt of a growing bourgeois capitalist class against the landed aristocracy. Once the bourgeoisie had swept absolutism away and replaced it with a new order supportive of their own economic interests, the stage was set for the titanic struggle between the forces of capitalism and the forces of socialism.

The fact that this mechanistic schema became something of an orthodoxy points to the enormous influence of Marxism within French academia. In 1928 the Sorbonne University in Paris established the prestigious chair in the history of the French Revolution and from the outset the post was a political appointment reserved for histor ians with a clear commitment to socialism. The first was Albert Mathiez, a champion of the Communist Revolution in Russia, who saw the principles of 1917 as a continuation of those of 1789. He was succeeded by Georges Lefebvre, whose The Coming of the French Revolution, published in 1939, argued that four separate movements characterised 1789. These were the aristocratic, bourgeois, peasant and popular revolutions, each of which, because they were motivated by narrow class interests, played their own distinctive role in bringing about the end of absolutism. Lefebvre’s successor, Albert Soboul, continued, through his work on the crowd, to present 1789 as a bourgeois revolution.

By the time Soboul died in 1982 the monopoly of the Marxist interpretation was already under attack. The first challenges came from Anglo-Saxon historians. In 1964 Alfred Cobban, a British historian of France, claimed that the bourgeoisie, as understood in the Marxist sense as a class of capitalists, played a relatively small role in the Revolution. Likewise American historians began to decouple 1789 from 1917 and view the French Revolution as part of an Atlantic Revolution that had begun with the American War of Independence against the British in 1776. Within France the major assault on the Marxist interpretation came in the wake of the student rebellion of May 1968. In the intellectual climate of the late 1960s and early 1970s the orthodoxies of right and left were openly challenged. François Furet, himself a former member of the French Communist Party (PCF), called for an interpretation that was more detached and less political. In doing so he argued that the French Revolution could not be reduced to class conflict. In truth, Furet continued, 1789–95 had less to do with class conflict and much more to do with political struggle between groups within the same class. As such, social continuity was far more significant. It is impossible to overplay the significance of Furet in opening up new interpretative pathways. The Marxist framework had been overturned and the 1970s and 1980s witnessed a mushrooming of research that tried to re-examine the French Revolution in a different light. In place of a narrow class analysis historians such as Keith Baker and Lynn Hunt in America now focused on the language of revolutionary politics, attempting to elucidate what it meant for contemporaries.

Much of this new framework was taken up by the British historian Simon Schama, whose book Citizens was published to coincide with the Bicentenary. Again and again, Schama attacked any mechanistic interpretation. For him the term ancien régime was a loaded category that implied the inevitability of 1789 when in reality there was much that was dynamic about the absolute monarchy. More than anything, Schama maintained, the Revolution had to be understood as the product of people and politics rather than impersonal historical forces. In this way Schama wanted to underline the significance of the contingent and the accidental, and also the reality of the choices facing the historical actors.

Stylistically Citizens was written as a chronological account of the Revo...