France since 1870

Culture, Politics and Society

Charles Sowerwine

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781350307254
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Französische Geschichte

This thoroughly revised, updated and expanded new edition of an established text surveys the cultural, social and political history of France from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the Paris Commune through to Emmanuel Macron's presidency. Incorporating the newest interpretations of past events, Sowerwine seamlessly integrates culture, gender, and race into political and social history. This edition features extended coverage of the 2007-8 financial crisis, the rise of the political and cultural far right and the issues of colonialism and its contemporary repercussions. This is an essential resource for undergraduate and taught postgraduate students of history, French studies or European studies taking courses on modern French history or European history. This text will also appeal to scholars and readers with an interest in modern French history. 'Richly informative and lucidly presented, Sowerwine's France since 1870 offers essential reading for students and researchers. Particularly powerful is the new final chapter, which draws on historical expertise to explore and explain the literary and political malaise of contemporary France.' – Jessica Wardhaugh, University of Warwick, UK. 'This third edition is unparalleled in its reach and excellence as a history of modern France from 1870 to the present. Sowerwine seamlessly integrates culture, gender, and race into political and social history. His incorporation of the newest interpretations of past events as well as the historical perspective he lends to current events such as terror attacks, new laws regarding labor and marriage, modern globalization, neo-liberalism-as well as to France's darkening mood--make this highly readable book a true masterpiece.' – Elinor Accampo, University of Southern California, USA. 'Her recent social and economic challenges have cast deep shadows into the story of modern France that Charles Sowerwine tells so clearly. Those dark questions about culture, politics and society have their full place in this This scholarly but accessible reassessment of French history since 1870. This edition raises new questions about France's story, directly and compellingly, and remains the key text for readers who are curious about modern France.' – Julian Wright, Northumbria University, UK. 'Following on the fine precedent set by earlier editions, this masterful survey offers students and the public alike a readable and illuminating account of the tortuous and ever intriguing path of French history since 1870.' – George Sheridan, University of Oregon, USA.

Part I

The Rise of the Third Republic, 1870–85

Chapter 1

France in the Nineteenth Century

The Third Republic was proclaimed on 4 September 1870. Two days earlier, Napoleon III, Emperor since 1852, had surrendered his army to the Prussians at Sedan. The Second Empire – the First was that of his uncle, Napoleon Bonaparte – lost all legitimacy. When news of the defeat reached Paris, crowds invaded the Palais Bourbon, seat of the Empire’s ‘Legislative Body’. The legislators melted into the crowd. As in 1830 and 1848, the throng proceeded to the Town Hall, where the Republic was proclaimed, as it had already been in Marseille and Lyon. The First Republic had lasted 12 years (1792–1804), the Second barely four (1848–52). This Republic, the Third, began inauspiciously, facing a hopeless war, but it lasted nearly 70 years, longer than any regime France has known since 1789.

Paris, ‘Capital of the Nineteenth Century’¹

Since the time of Louis XIV, if not before, Paris had been Europe’s greatest cultural centre. The Second Empire rebuilt Paris. The Third Republic completed the project, creating a city which became the pole of attraction for artists and intellectuals across Europe for the next century, the capital of the nineteenth century as the German philosopher Walter Benjamin famously called it.

The reconstruction of Paris was a key project of Napoleon III. Elected President of the Second Republic on 10 December 1848, he staged a coup d’état on 2 December 1851 and made himself president for ten years. A year later, on 10 December, he used a referendum to make himself emperor. He immediately appointed Baron Georges Haussmann (1809–91) as Prefect of the Seine (the Paris region) and together they planned Paris as we know it today: great tree-lined boulevards with broad footpaths and harmonious façades of apartments for the wealthy; 200 000 new buildings and 18 000 gas street lamps, which led people to call Paris the ‘City of Light’.

New aqueducts brought in water and new sewers took out waste. The Louvre was completed by the addition of the immense northern wing. Six major rail stations were built to handle the people pouring into the city. Henri Labrouste’s celebrated reading room of the Imperial Library, now the Bibliothèque Nationale Richelieu, and Victor Baltard’s famous covered market, Les Halles, exploited the new possibilities of light and airy construction offered by iron frameworks. An extravagant new Opera was begun, now known as the ‘Garnier Palace’ after its architect. At each end of Paris, two enormous parks were created: the Bois de Vincennes and the Bois de Boulogne. In 1860, nearby suburbs were annexed to the city. The new city was divided into the 20 arrondissements (districts) we know today.

Haussmann demolished 117 000 buildings; 600 000 people who had lived in central Paris – almost all of them poor – were forced to move to the outskirts of the city, joining another 600 000 workers who came from the provinces to take advantage of the jobs resulting from the greatest urban renewal project in history. The demography of central Paris changed dramatically as it became the preserve of the well-to-do.

The Emperor convoked the world’s elite to what came to be known as la fête impériale (the imperial festival), welcoming them in the spectacular state apartments of the new wing of the Louvre – today restored and open to tourists – grand and grandiose rooms with acres of red plush carpet and red velvet furniture, black marble columns, clocks, fireplaces, and gold wherever possible. Millions flocked to the Universal Expositions of 1855 and 1867.

No visit to Paris was complete without seeing one of Jacques Offenbach’s operet-tas; between 1855 and his death in 1880 he produced 90. While they lampooned the loose morals and corruption endemic in imperial society, they also glamorized them. Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld, his great success of 1859, gave us the cancan, which to visitors symbolized the new Paris in which sex seemed to be flaunted openly. Offenbach triumphed again with La Vie parisienne (Parisian Life) in 1866.

The new lights and safe footpaths attracted flâneurs (strollers) and opened city streets to respectable women. New department stores made shopping a pastime for well-to-do women who, in earlier times, had sent their maids to market. The department stores’ courteous staff gave the impression of a well-ordered, well-off household, and their fixed prices ended unseemly bargaining. Au Bon Marché, the Left Bank department store which Émile Zola immortalized in Au bonheur des dames (Ladies’ Delight or Ladies’ Paradise, 1883), offered ‘a reading room with newspapers and writing paper, and a buffet with wines and syrups’. Even more important, it offered ladies’ lounges with toilets. The new stores thus created a respectable environment for women, encouraging them to go out in public, a step towards women’s emancipation. Before 1850, well-to-do women went out with male escorts. Now they could be seen on the street or in cafés with other women or even on their own.²

Au Bon Marché opened in 1852; the building in use today – engineered by the young Gustave Eiffel – was begun in 1869. Zola described it in glowing terms:

There was more space everywhere, air and light entered in abundance, people moved around freely under the solid span of the broad girders. It was the cathedral of modern commerce, solid yet light, made for a congregation of shoppers.³

Other department stores followed quickly: Le Louvre and Le Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville in 1855, Le Printemps in 1865 and La Samaritaine in 1870. By the 1880s, they were the dominant force in Parisian retailing.

An Economy in Transition

Behind the glitter lay France’s Industrial Revolution, which doubled the country’s GDP in the 50 years from 1825 and tripled it by World War I. While French economic development was less spectacular than that of Britain and the United States, by the early twentieth century France reached growth rates equivalent to Britain’s, both substantially aided by income from colonized countries.⁴

The population of metropolitan France (that is, excluding overseas possessions) grew from 29.3 million in the 1811 census to 37.4 million in 1861. The loss to Prussia of Alsace and Lorraine reduced the population under French control to 36.1 million. As the French learned the economic benefit of smaller families, population expanded more slowly, reaching 39.6 million in 1911, an increase of less than 10 per cent over 1872.⁵

By 1870, all major cities of France were linked by trains which travelled at speeds of up to 100 km/h (62 mph). From 1860, rails carried more freight than roads; by 1905, seven times more. Railways required coal, iron and steel. Production of all three tripled during the Second Empire and tripled again between 1870 and 1914. Mines and mills modernized. Many became enormous complexes employing thousands of workers, like Le Creusot in Burgundy and Anzin on the northern frontier, the site of Zola’s masterpiece, Germinal.

The Second Empire also oversaw a revolution in finance, facilitating the creation of modern, limited liability (or incorporated) companies (sociétés anonymes), in which the public could buy shares without becoming liable for the company’s debts, as investors had been under the old partnership arrangements. The Paris Bourse (Stock Exchange) grew to new importance. Seven major banks were founded. Three remain pillars of French finance today: the Crédit Industriel et Commercial (1859), the Crédit Lyonnais (1863) and the Société Générale (1864). The new banks contributed to a more dynamic and entrepreneurial capitalism. Before 1850, most people got their loans from local notables. After 1870, most towns had a bank. People got used to depositing their savings: both the number of accounts and the total amount deposited increased tenfold between 1870 and 1914.⁶

While national wealth increased substantially during this period, the increase was not evenly spread. In 1870, the wealthiest 10 per cent of the population owned more than 80 per cent of the nation’s wealth. By 1910, which turned out to be the high point of inequality around the developed world (except for the contemporary United States, where inequality is now even higher), the wealthiest 10 per cent had increased their share of the nation’s wealth to nearly 90 per cent. The result was substantial income inequality: the wealthiest 10 per cent of the population received almost half the national income. These economic inequalities, however, were reinforced by social inequalities which continued despite the challenge posed to them by the great Revolution, the Revolution of 1789.⁷

French Society in the Nineteenth Century: Nobles and Bourgeois

In many respects, the fundamental division of society by 1870 was not simply a division between the haves and the have-nots. The have-nots were divided between workers and peasants. The haves were divided between nobles, who claimed pre-eminence by birth, and bourgeois, who claimed status by wealth, irrespective of birth.

The great Revolution had eroded the nobility’s economic and political hegemony. Nobles still enjoyed social pre-eminence, but that too was in decline. Indeed, genuine nobles were in decline. Most of those who sported noble titles had obtained them only after the first Napoleon re-established nobility in 1808. Many had got their titles as recently as the Second Empire. Others had titles from foreign rulers, often for ‘financial service’. Some simply invented them. David Higgs estimates that in 1870 fewer than 40 000 old regime nobles remained of perhaps 125 000 before 1789.⁸

Nobles were once distinguished by their distinctive costumes, which only they could legally wear, but such visible differences in clothing had disappeared. How were people to know you were an aristocrat if you looked the same as a wealthy non-noble and if there was no guarantee your title meant anything? People began to use the term notable for whoever lived in the chateau, offered patronage, dispensed financial support and demonstrated political clout in Paris. Conversely, they began to use the term grands bourgeois for the very wealthy, irrespective of their titles.

Thus while nobles still sought to distinguish themselves from bourgeois, the distinction meant less than it once had and was decreasing. By the end of the century, while nobility still carried great prestige in the small, declining world of high society described by the novelist Marcel Proust, the wealth, respectability and education of the grands bourgeois counted for more in the wider world. Such persons retained significant power: in 1893, by one historian’s count, 56 per cent of deputies – members of the lower house of the National Assembly (the Chamber of Deputies) – were grands bourgeois; in 1919, 40 per cent.⁹

The word bourgeois troubles English-language speakers because of usage. Bourgeois is a noun for a male, bourgeoise for a female. Bourgeois is also an adjective: the quality of being bourgeois. Bourgeoisie is the collective noun for all bourgeois as a group. The word bourgeois also troubles English-language speakers because it is wrongly thought to be a pejorative or Marxist term. It derives from bourg, meaning town. In the Middle Ages, town-dwellers lived by making money, while nobles and peasants lived off the land, so bourgeois came to mean a non-noble with money.

By the nineteenth century, a bourgeois meant someone who possessed independent wealth, did no manual labour and was considered respectable; respectability was conferred by having at least one servant and maintaining a home appropriate for formal visits. The philosopher Alain (1868–1951) quipped, ‘I define the bourgeois as a man who profits from the results without thinking about the work.’¹⁰ In popular speech it often meant the one with the money or the one who didn’t have to work: a taxi driver referred to his client as his ‘bourgeois’ and a working-class man called his wife ‘la bourgeoise’. Today still, well-to-do French people are proud of their bourgeois standing; they were much more so in the nineteenth century.

The bourgeoisie thought it had replaced the nobility as the dominant class of society and this claim was widely accepted: an 1864 workers’ manifesto spoke of ‘the bourgeoisie, our elder in emancipation’.¹¹ At the time of the great Revolution and well into the nineteenth century, this status was justified by a notion that the bourgeoisie was morally superior, practising family values and living in a sober and discreet manner. Zola described just such a traditional bourgeois in La Curée (The Booty, or The Kill, 1871–72):

M. Béraud du Châtel, a tall old man of sixty, was the last representative of an old bourgeois family whose pedigree went further back than that of certain noble houses …. In ’93 [1793, the period of the Terror], his father died on the scaffold after welcoming the Republic with all the enthusiasm of a bourgeois of Paris in whose veins flowed the revolutionary blood of the city. He himself was a Republican of ancient Sparta, whose dream was a reign of universal justice and true liberty.¹²

Zola’s description of a bourgeois household reflected the same values of discretion and sobriety:

The rooms of the house had the sad calm, the cold solemnity of the courtyard. All the luxury of the old-fashioned Parisian bourgeoisie was there, a hard-wearing, Spartan luxury. Chairs whose upholstery barely covered their oak frames, beds made with stiff sheets, linen presses whose rough planks threatened to tear the delicate fabric of modern-day garments.¹³

Zola contrasted such virtuous, traditional bourgeois with the grands bourgeois, the new speculative and spendthrift bourgeoisie profiting shamelessly from the reconstruction of Paris. For Zola, as for many of his generation, these new bourgeois had forfeited their moral pre-eminence.

Bourgeois status required at least one domestic servant. Nearly half a million households, the wealthiest 4½ per cent, earned enough to have servants and so could be termed bourgeois. But there were enormous disparities within the bourgeoisie. A parliamentary enquiry in 1894–95 found that the top 3000 households had annual incomes above 100 000 francs. They were the super-rich, the top of the top 1 per cent, the very grande bourgeoisie: bankers, captains of industry, wealthy nobles who had invested well or married into wealth (intermarriage between nobles and wealthy bourgeois further fudged the distinction between noble and bourgeois). Given that the annual wage of a female domestic servant varied between 300 francs in the provinces and 500 francs in Paris, they could have as many servants as they wished. Below them, the next 60 800 households had incomes of 20 000–100 000 francs. They were the very solid bourgeoisie who lived in luxury and had several servants. Together, these two groups accounted for the wealthiest ½ per cent of households.¹⁴

Below them, 417 000 households had incomes of 5000–20 000 francs a year. This included many rentiers – people living off land or investments – but some doctors, lawyers a...