Children of the Revolution Read online

  THE VOYAGE EN ORIENT

  The Orient exercised a fascination over the French. Napoleon Bonaparte, pursuing his dream of becoming a new Alexander the Great, invaded Egypt in 1798, defeated the local Mameluke forces at the battle of the Pyramids on 21 July and entered Cairo in triumph. Unfortunately the blow that he hoped to deliver to British and Russian power by taking control of Egypt served only to provoke his rivals into a second coalition against France. Nelson attacked and sank the French fleet in Aboukir Bay on 1 August, the Ottoman Turks and Russians declared war and the Russian fleet entered the Mediterranean. Bonaparte moved north with his army to conquer Syria, but was defeated at Acre by the Turks and a British force under Sir Sidney Smith. The French fell back on Egypt and Bonaparte left almost at once to seize power in France. Under the Treaty of Amiens in 1802 Egypt was evacuated by both British and French.60

  The French failed to found an empire in Egypt but the army of archaeologists, antiquarians, historians and scientists who took part in Bonaparte’s expedition presented their findings in a twenty-three-volume Description de l’Égypte, published between 1809 and 1828. Meanwhile, driven by curiosity rather than the thirst to conquer, French writers, poets and artists regularly undertook a journey to the Orient, by which they generally meant that part of the Mediterranean, from Greece and the Balkans to Constantinople, Syria and Lebanon, and to Egypt, Tunisia and Algeria, which was still in the hands of the Ottoman Turks or, more usually, their vassals. They were not always in search of the same things, but in different ways the Orient was always a mirror which reflected what was individual about France and the French identity.

  Chateaubriand, having broken with Napoleon and forfeited his diplomatic post in Rome, set off from France in July 1806, sailing from Venice to the Peloponnese and Constantinople, returning via Egypt and Tunis, to see the ruins of Carthage, to Spain and France in May 1807. He was bitterly hostile to the Turkish presence in Europe, and searched in Greece for the relics of Ancient Greek liberty and patriotism, and in Constantinople for the sophistication of the Byzantine Empire, under the yoke imposed by the Turks. The goal of his journey was Jerusalem, which he visited as a pilgrim and as a crusader, recounting the epic of the crusaders’ recovery of the tomb of Jesus Christ in Jerusalem in 1099, which they held on to for eighty-eight years. At stake, he said, was the question of ‘which would triumph on earth, a religion that was the enemy of civilization, promoting ignorance, despotism and slavery, or a religion that had revived the genius of learned antiquity among modern peoples and abolished servitude’. Of the persecution of the Christian monks who guarded the tomb of Jesus Christ he used the term ‘Oriental despotism’.61

  Twenty-five years later, in 1832, Alphonse de Lamartine, having resigned from the diplomatic service in opposition to the Revolution of 1830, hired a brig and sailed off with his wife and daughter less, as he put it, like Chateaubriand’s pilgrim and crusader, more as a ‘poet and philosopher’. Greece was now liberated but he was not impressed by the country as it descended into civil war, seeing it as ‘the shroud of a people’.62 What struck him above all was his first encounter with the Lebanon, approached from the sea.

  Never did the sight of mountains impress me so much. The Lebanon has a character that I have not witnessed either in the Alps or in the Taurus. It is the combination of the imposing sublimeness of the lines and peaks with the grace of detail and variety of colour. Like its name it is a solemn mountain: the Alps under an Asian sky.63

  Lamartine’s view of Jerusalem was completely different from that of Chateaubriand. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre had burned down in 1808 and been rebuilt by the Greek Orthodox Church, but control was contested by the Catholic Church and in the light of their squabbles Lamartine saw the Muslims as ‘the only tolerant people’. At Constantinople he reflected that, far from being despotic and cruel, the Turks were ‘a people of philosophers. They draw everything from nature, they relate everything to God.’ His concern was that politically the Ottoman Empire was crumbling. He foresaw that a congress of European powers might have to divide up the Empire into a series of protectorates, but he was concerned that the role of the Turkish people should be preserved. ‘They are a people of patriarchs, of meditators, of worshippers, of philosophers,’ he said, ‘and when God speaks for them, they are a people of heroes and martyrs.’64

  In fact the main threat to the Ottoman Empire was the viceroy of Egypt, Mehemet Ali, who owed allegiance to the Ottoman sultan but wanted to establish himself as an independent, hereditary ruler of Egypt, and secure a hereditary governorship of Syria for his son Ibrahim. In July 1839 he defeated the sultan’s forces and forced the Ottoman fleet to surrender. In some circles Mehemet was vaunted as the creation of Mathieu de Lesseps, sent as consul to Egypt by Talleyrand after 1798 to select someone from the Egyptian army who could bring order to the delta.65 Now the French government under Adolphe Thiers decided to back the cause of Mehemet Ali against the sultan in order to acquire an influence in the region by proxy. Unfortunately the British were unwilling to countenance either the challenge of France’s power or the break-up of the Ottoman Empire that would go with it. They marshalled Prussia, Russia and Austria into a London agreement (15 July 1840) which backed the sultan and gave Mehemet Ali twenty days to accept a hereditary governorship of Egypt as the limit of his ambitions. On 11 September the British made their point by bombarding Beirut and Alexandria. Thiers proposed to reject the treaty and mobilize nearly 100,000 men for war if that was necessary. The nationalist press joined the fray, arguing that this was the moment to throw off the restrictions imposed on France by the treaties of 1815 and to recover its rank among European powers.66 At the last moment, however, the French blinked. King Louis-Philippe was not prepared to risk war and Thiers resigned, to be replaced by his arch-rival François Guizot, French ambassador in London, who smoothed over the situation. France’s dream of an empire in Egypt was again in tatters.67

  The only part of the Ottoman Empire in which France was able to build an empire was Algeria, where its ambitions were not contested by other European powers. Algiers had been seized by French forces in 1830, the last gasp of the Bourbon monarchy before it fell, and was inherited by the July Monarchy as something of a poisoned chalice. In 1834 the patriotic press was quick to equate brutal military measures used to quell insurrection in Paris and Lyon with military measures used to quell resistance by Arab forces in Algeria.68 In fact French aggression provoked the emergence of an Algerian leader, Abd-el-Kader, who began to impose a centralized state on the disparate tribal aristocracies, with the ability to raise taxes and troops, and forced the French back to enclaves around Algiers and Oran in 1837. However, a lobby in favour of the conquest of Algeria and its colonization by well-armed settlers gained strength. In 1840 General Bugeaud was appointed governor-general of Algeria by Thiers who, perhaps fearing that the Egyptian adventure might not come off, argued that rather than fighting each other all European powers were now moving in on ‘barbarian peoples’, the British in China, the Russians in the Caucasus.69 After a visit to Algeria in 1841 Tocqueville argued that if France did not hang on to Algeria other powers would move in and France would descend to the second rank of powers, leaving European affairs to be decided by others. The regime of Abd-el-Kader, whom he described as ‘a kind of Muslim Cromwell’, was destroyed by the military force of General Bugeaud, but for lasting domination this had to be backed up by French settlers colonizing the region, grouped in fortified villages.70

  While French forces were battling with Abd-el-Kader in Algeria, unable to force his surrender until 1846, French travellers continued to visit the Orient, but at the other end of the Mediterranean, which continued to exercise a historic or aesthetic fascination even though France had no military power there. Those who followed in the path of pilgrims or crusaders to Jerusalem after 1840 were generally more sceptical than their predecessors. Many were less impressed by the natural beauty of the Orient, like Lamartine, than aware of the modernization it was u
ndergoing in response to European challenges. At the same time what was increasingly explicit was the Orient as a site for exotic and erotic fantasies, the Orient of the Arabian Nights.

  In January 1843 the poet Gérard de Nerval, recovering from a nervous breakdown, set sail from Marseille to Alexandria, progressing to Beirut and Constantinople. Rather than regarding Arabs as barbarian, he confessed that ‘I am the barbarian, a coarse son of the North.’ In Europe, he said, where modernization meant that physical force was less important, ‘women have become too strong’. He thus came to Cairo to indulge his fantasies about Oriental women, declaring, ‘I am right in the middle of the Arabian Nights.’ However, he soon came face to face with the inaccessibility of Muslim women behind the veil and his travelling companion Soliman-Aga explained that while Muslim men protected their women, European women were anybody’s. Nerval consoled himself with the thought that even behind the veil ‘a few days have taught me that a woman who senses that she is being looked at allows herself to be glimpsed, if she is beautiful,’ but he then succumbed to Soliman-Aga’s advice that he should find a wife. He went to the slave market where Nubian women predominated but bought a Javanese girl, the type familiar from Dutch paintings, for 625 francs. He stayed with her in Cairo for eight months, but she felt humiliated to be with a man Muslims considered to be of inferior race, while when he took her to Beirut the Catholic Maronite clergy were scandalized and he therefore left his wife in the care of a Catholic convent. By this time Nerval had spent all the time and money he should have devoted to a trip to the Holy Land, and was obliged to return to Europe.71

  As sexual tourists Gustave Flaubert and Maxime du Camp, who left Marseille for Egypt in November 1849, were more fortunate. Having smoked a pipe contemplating the Sphinx and visited the battlefield of the Pyramids they sailed up the Nile to Wadi Halfa where they were entertained by dancing girls who provided pleasures all night long, while objecting to Flaubert’s moustache. At the same time he wrote to his mother, ‘Every morning I read a little Homer in Greek and Maxime reads the Bible. We go to bed at 9 p.m.’72 At Damascus Flaubert was struck by the beauty of boys aged eighteen to twenty and joked that if he were a woman he would come to the city on a pleasure trip. While Nerval did not even get to Jerusalem, Flaubert did but felt himself ‘emptier than an empty barrel. This morning, in the Holy Sepulchre, a dog would have been more moved than I was.’ He was struck by the rivalry of the churches at Jerusalem, Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Copt, a rivalry that he found repeated in the Lebanon between the Maronites and Druzes. ‘If the Druzes burn two of their villages, the Maronites burn two of theirs and sometimes four.’73 And yet the Orient was becoming rapidly westernized. ‘Soon the Orient won’t exist any more,’ he told Théophile Gautier, ‘perhaps we are its last observers… I have seen harems passing in steam-boats.’74

  Flaubert returned to the Orient in 1858, this time travelling alone to Tunis and Carthage to research his new novel Salammbô. ‘Bovary has left me disgusted with bourgeois morals for a long time,’ he wrote to Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie. ‘For a few years I am going to find a splendid subject far from the modern world with which I am heartily fed up. What I am undertaking is senseless and will have no public recognition. Who cares? You have to write for yourself first. It’s the only chance to do something beautiful.’75 Salammbô portrays a sumptuous, opulent, decadent Carthage built on war and plunder, turned on by its barbaric mercenary forces. Salammbô, daughter of the Carthaginian commander Hamilcar, representing the mysterious and sensual Oriental feminine, is coveted by the Libyan mercenary chief Mâtho, but both are doomed in a war which sets Carthaginians against mercenaries. Published in 1862, Salammbô in fact generated something of an artistic cult, culminating in the empress’s commanding of a Carthaginian ball at court.

  Not all French travellers in the Orient were obsessed by sex and violence. Certainly not Ernest Renan, who came to the Holy Land in 1860 to research his Life of Jesus. He was accompanied by his new wife but also by his elder sister, Henriette, who was in a real sense his mentor and companion, nothing if not jealous of his pretty wife. Édouard Lockroy, who had been with Garibaldi in Sicily, engaged by Renan’s publisher Michel Lévy to accompany them, said that everything about Renan suggested the priest while Henriette, ‘more mother than sister’, was really ‘the man of the family’.76 Henriette was as much struck by the squalor of Beirut as by the beauty of the Lebanon, itself tarnished by the sorry sight of women who had survived the civil war between Maronites and Druzes. She observed that ‘the role of the woman in the Orient is exclusively that of the housewife, and in her house seems to be only the first servant,’ although she recognized that they were charming hostesses and that their real status came from being mothers.77 Henriette remained in the Lebanon with her brother as his secretary after his wife returned to France, and died there in September 1861.

  French interest in the Orient seemed to be divided between a military and colonial presence in Algeria and a literary and artistic fascination with Egypt and the Lebanon, where the British and Russians conspired to prevent the French from exercising real power. The way out of this impasse was technology, or technology facilitated by diplomacy. Returning to the East in 1864, Renan was met at Alexandria by Ferdinand de Lesseps and for three days shown the works on the Isthmus of Suez, where thousands of Indians and Chinese labourers were at work ‘right in the desert, in the middle of endless plains of sand’. He even took a railway from Suez to Cairo, unable to comprehend how the Egyptians had adapted to the technology. ‘To see these precision machines in the hands of the Arabs is something extraordinary. It is difficult to see why the thing doesn’t derail or blow up.’78

  The Suez canal had been a long time in the making. Ferdinand de Lesseps had first come to Egypt, where his father was consul, as a twenty-six-year-old consular student in 1832. He became the friend of Mehemet Ali’s son Saïd, whom he taught to ride, and also became acquainted with the 1798 plan of Napoleon’s engineer Lepère to build a canal across the Isthmus of Suez. Ferdinand was sent by Lamartine, foreign minister in 1848, to be ambassador in Madrid, then Rome, but when Saïd succeeded as viceroy in 1854 de Lesseps secured a firman from him (30 November 1854) authorizing him to form a company to build the canal. The diplomatic outlook seemed good, with France about to enter the Crimean war in alliance with Great Britain, and de Lesseps enlisted the support of Cobden in London to widen backing for the Suez Canal Company. The British, however, had not forgotten 1840 and were perfectly aware of the military and diplomatic significance of the canal. Britain’s long-serving ambassador in Constantinople, Stratford Canning, who had great influence over Ottoman foreign policy, managed to stonewall ratification by the sultan of the viceroy’s firman until by chance Napoleon III met the Ottoman grand vizir in Marseille in 1865. The canal, on which building work had already begun, was completed in 1869 and was opened in the presence of the Empress Eugénie on 17 November that year.79 De Lesseps realized the dream of Napoleon to establish French influence in Egypt. When in 1884 Renan welcomed de Lesseps into the Académie Française he said, ‘You were king. You had all the trappings of sovereignty. I saw your kingdom in the desert.’80 Ironically, eighteen months before, the British had occupied Egypt and driven out the French.

  PART ONE

  France, 1870–1914

  8

  War and Commune, 1870–1871

  Between the high summer of 1870 and the late spring of 1871 France suffered a series of interrelated crises which all but undid the work of rebuilding the country that had taken place over seven decades since 1799. War against Prussia brought about the collapse of the Empire and ushered in the Republic for the third time since 1792. Northern France was occupied by German forces and Paris besieged, leaving the southern half of the country more or less independent, a pattern that would in many ways be reproduced in 1940. The republican attempt to continue the war against German forces failed and an armistice was agreed, but whereas in 1940 the Germans occupied Paris without en
countering resistance, in 1871 the population of the beleaguered city refused both to give up the fight against the Germans and to be disarmed by the republican government. The result was the insurrectionary Paris Commune and a civil war that cost at least 20,000 lives. The Commune was at one and the same time a class war, a war between Paris and the provinces, a war against organized religion and a revolution in gender roles that left deep scars in French society which would not be healed until the eve of the Great War.

  The Franco-Prussian war of 1870 began as a dynastic and religious war and finished as a national war. Since Prussia’s triumph over Austria at the battle of Königgrätz or Sadowa in 1866 France felt that it had lost its leading rank among European powers, and the sense of humiliation was compounded by Bismarck’s attempt to encircle it by placing a Hohenzollern prince on the throne of Spain. Asking the Legislative Body for war credits on 15 July 1870 Napoleon’s chief minister, Émile Ollivier, said that ministers would go to war ‘with a light heart’ because France’s honour had been impugned and its greatness must be recovered.1 The population of Paris was massively behind the war, coming out on to the streets on the nights of 13, 14 and 15 July, crying ‘Vive la France! Vive la Guerre! À bas la Prusse! À Berlin!’ After the triumph of the plebiscite on the constitution of a Liberal Empire in May, said one report, ‘This war will generate wide enthusiasm and rally the whole of France behind the Napoleonic dynasty; this war will deal the final blow to the republican cause in France.’2