Children of the Revolution Page 3
The last generation, born around 1890, was marked less by the political and religious struggles around the Dreyfus Affair than by the regime that emerged from it. Rather than seeing the pacification of old conflicts in a positive light, it took the view that the politicians of 1860 who held office in the Belle Époque had traded principle for power and ideological commitment for political compromise. They regarded the Republic of the centre as the product of horse-trading by political parties, notably the Radicals, and the sacrifice of the national interest by politicians who were too often Jewish, Protestant or freemasons. They adopted a position on the political extremes, either on the extreme left or on the extreme right. Many of them were inspired by antidreyfusards such as Maurice Barrès or Charles Maurras, and joined the latter’s Action Française organization, which was committed to replacing the corrupt Republic by an energetic, popular monarchy. Others were disciples of Charles Péguy, a former dreyfusard who was disillusioned by the sell-out of former allies on the left and moved in the direction of patriotism and Catholicism.
The identity of this generation was publicized by a survey in 1913 entitled Les Jeunes Gens d’aujourdhui.6 Statistically, its base was rather narrow and it concentrated on the intellectual elite of the universities, grandes écoles and best lycées, and in this sense it was no more than a version of studies of the student population of 1820. The generation born around 1890, it asserted, were completely different from that of 1860 that had become the decadent youth of the 1880s, before the Dreyfus Affair. The new generation, it announced, were characterized not by ennui or listlessness but by ‘a taste for action’, enthusiasm for team sports such as football and admiration for those new acrobats of the sky, the aviators. Whereas their fathers had been anticlericals, materialists and freethinkers who fought to diminish the influence of the Church in state and society, they themselves celebrated the beauty of religion and the grace of God and were the agents of a ‘Catholic renaissance’. Many of them were members of the Christian-democratic youth movement founded by Marc Sangnier, the Sillon or Furrow, and were dedicated to rechristianizing the Republic after the Separation of Church and state. Although some of this generation were antimilitaristic, opposed to France’s participation in the arms race that led up to 1914, their dominant view, according to the survey, was patriotic. They were shocked by manifestations of German aggression in 1905, when Kaiser William landed in Tangier to challenge France’s bid for Morocco, or in 1911 when Germany sent a gunboat to Agadir for the same purpose. This was a generation that believed in French colonial expansion, which at this point focussed on Morocco, and responded to Barrès’ campaign to put the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine at the front of France’s national agenda.
The iconic representative of this generation was Ernest Psichari, the grandson of Ernest Renan, author of the humanistic Life of Jesus but also thinker about French national identity. Psichari graduated from the Sorbonne, a bastion of anticlerical thought, but converted to active Catholicism and rather than follow an academic career joined the colonial army, fought in Africa, and wrote novels on the subject of patriotism, greatness and the nobility of the sword. He was a model for the French officers who led France into battle in 1914 and was one of the first to be killed on the battlefield, in Belgium on 22 August. He was followed two weeks later by one of his mentors, Charles Péguy, killed on the Marne. These were the leaders of the generation of 1890 which was the generation of Verdun and the Chemin des Dames. It left a million and a half of its number dead in the field, demonstrating the strength of the French in national unity and finally burying the divisions inherited from the Revolution.
PART ONE
France, 1799–1870
1
Revolution or Consensus?:
French Politics, 1799–1870
SAVING THE REPUBLIC
On 9 October 1799 a thirty-year-old general landed at Fréjus on the south coast of France, having set sail from Egypt six weeks before. The most successful general to have been thrown up by the French revolutionary armies, he had in fact abandoned his army after a campaign that had been anything but a success, to seize the initiative from his political masters before they could act against him.
Bonaparte, a minor Corsican noble and graduate of the Paris École Militaire, combined military genius with both a political ability uncommon among soldiers and unbridled ambition. His first military exploit as an artillery commander in December 1793 had been to dislodge royalist rebels from the Mediterranean port of Toulon and to drive out the British fleet that was supporting them. Less than two years later, on 5 October 1795, he used his military command for political purposes, scattering with a ‘whiff of grapeshot’ a royalist insurrection against the Convention parliament which, having presided over the Terror, refused to dissolve itself fully and allow free and fair elections which royalists stood a good chance of winning. He was acting on behalf of his political master Paul Barras, a regicide of the Convention who had led the military forces which toppled Robespierre on 27 July 1794, and had become the uncrowned king of the five-man Directory which then ran the Republic.
In 1796 Bonaparte, a novice in love, married Joséphine de Beauharnais, a creole who was doubly a victim of the Revolution in that she had lost her first fortune in the West Indies as the result of war and her first husband on the scaffold after he surrendered Mainz to the Prussians. While writing to her daily, Bonaparte combined military and diplomatic skills commanding the French armies that invaded Italy in the spring of 1796 to take control of it from the Austrians. After the battle of Lodi in May he occupied Milan, after the victory of Rivoli in January he entered Mantua. On behalf of the Directory he forced the Austrians to sign the Treaty of Campo Formio (17 October 1797) under which France secured recognition of its control of Belgium, the left bank of the Rhine and the Cisalpine and Ligurian Republics based respectively on Milan and Genoa. Having set up one satellite republic in Holland in 1795 (the Batavian), in 1798–9 France set up others in Switzerland, Rome and Naples, after ejecting the pope and the Bourbon families. French power had never been so great, but Bonaparte’s ambitions were even greater. He secured the approval of Talleyrand, now foreign minister, for an offensive by an Army of the Orient to Egypt, which belonged formally to the Ottoman Empire but was ruled by a military caste of Mamelukes. Domination of Egypt would allow France to control the whole of the Mediterranean and to disrupt Great Britain’s lucrative trade with and growing Empire in India. On 19 May 1798 a French armada therefore set sail from Toulon under his command. En route it seized Malta from the Knights of St John, a blow to British sea-power in the Mediterranean. Landing in Egypt Bonaparte defeated the Mameluke army at the battle of the Pyramids on 21 July and entered Cairo in triumph on 25 July. Unfortunately, Nelson sank Bonaparte’s fleet at the battle of Aboukir Bay on 1 August 1798, so that there was no easy return for his army. Bonaparte decided to fight his way out by marching north to Syria and confronting the Ottoman armies, but his attempt to take Acre by siege failed and he fell back on Egypt. On 25 July 1799 he won his own battle of Aboukir against the Ottomans, but having given his army this respite he decided that his next battle was to be waged on metropolitan soil, for the control of France.
By the summer of 1799 the French Republic was under siege. Having dominated half of Europe in 1798, it was now in retreat on all fronts. The mobilization of huge armies was increasingly resented by the population, and the country was awash with deserters and draft-dodgers who often made common cause with counter-revolutionary guerrillas. Failure to settle the religious question by any other means than persecuting the clergy and the faithful who looked to them achieved nothing other than to make counter-revolution popular. The state itself was also in crisis, besieged on the one hand by royalists campaigning for the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, and on the other by Jacobins or radical republicans wanting to return to the virtuous, democratic Republic of 1793.
All these issues were connected. Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt unleashed the so-cal
led War of the Second Coalition, declared against an overambitious France by the Ottoman Empire, Great Britain, Austria and Russia. In the spring of 1799 Bonaparte took on the Ottomans in Syria and Egypt, while Generals Jourdan and Bernadotte were sent across the Rhine into Germany. Just as Bonaparte failed in Syria, Jourdan was defeated by the Austrian emperor’s brother, the Archduke Charles, at the battle of Stockach (25 March 1799) and both he and Bernadotte returned to France. In Switzerland General Masséna was forced to abandon Zurich to the Austrians on 6 June. General Macdonald abandoned Naples as power in the south fell into the hands of Catholic irregulars bent on destroying the short-lived French Republic at Naples: a Christian Army organized in Calabria by a buccaneering cardinal, Fabrizio Ruffo, and known as the Sanfedists, supported in the Naples area by a peasant leader who went under the name of Fra Diavolo. More seriously, the Austrian emperor had hired to command his forces in Italy the Russian General Suvarov, scourge of the Ottoman Turks in two wars and of the Poles after their insurrection in 1794. He defeated General Moreau at the battle of Cassano (27 April), entered Milan and Turin, and then defeated Macdonald at the battle of the Trebbia river on 21 June 1799.
The revolutionary armies demanded an unprecedented mobilization of men and resources. The French army reached a maximum of 750,000 in 1794 but declined to 270,000 in 1798. To meet the Second Coalition a law of 5 September 1798 sponsored by General Jourdan made all young men aged twenty to twenty-five liable for conscription and wasted no time calling them to the colours. Unfortunately the growing needs of the Republic were matched by its decreasing ability to enforce the law. In the Paris region and along the eastern frontier, where there was a tradition of soldiering, men answered the call, but many communities tried to prevent the departure of their young men. Those who were recruited often deserted and, now outlaws, took refuge with bands of brigands that roamed the countryside, looting and practising highway robbery. The Beauce south of Chartres was tyrannized by a gang known as the bande d’Orgères led by ‘le beau François’ which was finally rounded up and put on trial in March 1799; twenty-two of the band were executed in July 1800.1 In the west and south-east of France brigandage often merged with counter-revolution, as bands targeted mail coaches, purchasers of church property, factories working to supply the army and republican officials, hacking down trees of liberty into the bargain. In Belgium, which had no tradition of conscription under the Austrians, the Loi Jourdan on top of religious persecution triggered a so-called peasant war, with rebel bands destroying conscription registers, taking Austrian colours and shouting ‘Long live the Emperor!’2 On the left bank of the Rhine French authority was challenged by the brigand leader Johannes Bückler, alias Schinderhannes, who won notoriety as the violent defender of local communities against French officials and Jewish middlemen until his arrest in 1802 and execution with nineteen accomplices outside Mainz in 1803.3
Most of these areas, from Brittany to Belgium and the Rhineland, were deeply Catholic, and resistance was provoked by conscription but sustained by the fierce opposition of communities to republican campaigns of dechristianization. The problem went back a long way. The National Assembly started in 1790 by trying to reform the Church, but split the clergy and their parishes between those who accepted the democratic principle of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy that parish priests and bishops should be elected, and those from the pope downwards who argued that this violated the doctrines of divine calling and apostolic succession. Only the minority of clergy who took the oath to the Civil Constitution were allowed to continue; the non-jurors who refused were ejected from their parishes and subjected to growing persecution. As France sank into civil war in 1793 the Catholic religion was imagined by revolutionaries, with some reason, to be fuelling counter-revolution, and a campaign of dechristianization was launched. Churches were closed, sold off as granaries, warehouses or stables, or given over to temples of Reason. Sundays were replaced by décadi which came round only once every ten days, church bells melted down for cannon, shrines and calvaries vandalized, priests defrocked and married by force to nuns in bizarre ceremonies. At Nevers the Convention’s representative on mission Joseph Fouché, himself a former Oratorian priest, had an atheistic message placarded on cemeteries, ‘Death is eternal sleep.’ At Nantes in December 1793 hundreds of priests were bound and herded on to barges that were then sunk in the Loire estuary.
After Thermidor there was a move to tolerate religious worship (21 February 1795), but on the condition that it was done without processions and vestments in public; bells were to be rung only on the décadi and national festivals. Gradually the practice of religion began to revive in local communities. Churches were recovered by the faithful, and services were held again on a Sunday. Pilgrimages to local shrines to ask for succour or pardon were revived. Clergy were in short supply since non-juring priests were still persecuted and constitutional ones were disliked, so sometimes masses had to be celebrated by the laity themselves. The republican authorities, however, remained to be convinced that the royalist sting had been pulled out of religion, and reverted to persecution at the slightest provocation. The way to separate religion from counter-revolutionary politics had yet to be found.
The constitution of 1795 attempted to secure the Republic on the basis of property and education, which were represented in the two assemblies of the Five Hundred and the Elders, while absolute rule was prevented by splitting the executive between five Directors. Since the Terror, however, property and education looked for peace and order and a restoration of the monarchy. The Directors, most of whom were regicides, responded to the threat of royalists winning elections by invalidating results and purging those elected, if necessary by military force. The Directors were also opposed by Jacobins or radical republicans who detested their corrupt and oligarchical regime and demanded a return to the democratic constitution of 1793, which they hoped would usher in a regime more accountable to the people, more virtuous and more patriotic. The Directors themselves, meanwhile, were prepared to slide one way or another, taking advantage of political crises to eliminate rival Directors.
Elections in 1797 confirmed the revenge of the royalists. Dominating the Council of Five Hundred they elected as president or speaker General Pichegru, who had conquered Holland for the revolutionary armies but now had contacts with Louis XVIII’s court. This was an intolerable threat to the Republic for the Directors under Barras, who now turned to the army. On 4 September 1797 the threat of force supported a purge of about fifty royalist deputies from Pichegru down, and the dismissal of two Directors, including Lazare Carnot, formerly the ‘organizer of victory’ on the Committee of Public Safety now also suspected of making overtures towards royalists. Royalists who had emigrated from France but had since returned were now driven out again on pain of death. Military commissions sentenced forty-seven officers of counter revolutionary armies and forty-eight refractory priests accused of fomenting sedition to be shot. Fourteen hundred priests were deported, of whom 187 died within two years.4 This has sometimes been called the ‘Directorial Terror’, which was sharply focussed on the regime’s enemies, backed by considerable force, and met with little resistance.
This shift to the left opened a way back for Jacobins. This faction supported revolutionary measures against seditious priests and nobles, but also wanted to dispose of the republican oligarchy. They were well organized in the Society of Friends of Liberty and Equality that in Paris met in the Manège near the Tuileries gardens and around radical newspapers such as the Journal des Hommes Libres. Their darlings and patrons were Generals Jourdan and Bernadotte. They did well in the elections of April 1798 but the regime was determined to keep them out of the political process. The Directors passed a law of 11 May 1798 which prevented 127 deputies from even taking their seats, 86 of them Jacobins. The following year, in March 1799, Jacobins exploited electoral apathy and made up a party of ninety-nine deputies as the Directors struggled to survive.5
The Directory’s control over t
he assemblies which could less and less be described as elected might have been effective if the news from abroad had been good. In the spring and early summer of 1799, however, the news from Italy, Switzerland, Germany and Syria was uniformly bad. Public opinion grew angry and restless. ‘This state of alarm and discontent comes from our armies’ lack of success,’ reported the Paris police authorities on 16 June 1799.6 The Jacobin minority in the Council of Five Hundred bayed for heads to roll and for a more decisive and aggressive republic. At their head, General Jourdan, returning from Germany, denounced the incompetence and corruption of the Directors, war ministers and army contractors. For the first time it was the Councils that purged the Directors, not the other way around. The Abbé Sieyès, who had just been elected a director in May, could not be blamed but saw the opportunity to find new allies. Barras took the part of orchestrator of the coup of 18 June 1799, forcing the resignation of three of his rival Directors, replaced by three reliable nonentities. The failure of his foreign policy forced Talleyrand out as foreign minister, Joseph Fouché was appointed minister of police, General Bernadotte became war minister and the regime went into patriotic overdrive to remove the menace of counter-revolution from home and beyond the frontiers. All eligible conscripts were called up, a forced loan was levied to cover the deficit, and a law of hostages allowed the authorities to seize members of noble or émigré families in areas which had fallen prey to brigandage.