Children of the Revolution Read online

  For the Legitimist royalists, the Comte de Falloux wrote to Thiers after the collapse of the Commune urging him to restore the monarchy, since ‘in France we will never prevent the Empire from signifying and inviting despotism, the Republic signifying and inviting disorder, and the Bourbon monarchy signifying and inviting representative government.’ In 1872 the Orleanist Duc Albert de Broglie resigned the London embassy where Thiers had placed him and returned to France to attack the Republic as ‘the reign of ill-educated men’.3 The Bonapartists were discredited by association with despotism and defeat, but they argued that the declaration of the Republic on 4 September 1870 by a caucus of Paris deputies had itself been a coup d’état, violating the plebiscite of the previous May which had massively endorsed the Empire. Paul de Cassagnac, heir to his father’s Bonapartist fief of the Gers in south-west France, a journalist whose newspaper, Le Pays, was banned for its denunciation of the republican coup, founded an Appeal to the People Committee in 1872 in which he argued that another plebiscite must be held and that the deeply Bonapartist masses would once again restore the Empire.4

  Thiers’ strategy was to commit himself to the Republic as the de facto regime and the one that divided Frenchmen least, while establishing his credentials as a man of order. Around this he hoped to build a consensus of the ruling class. His ministers were drawn from the so-called centre-left, like himself former Orleanists who had rallied to the Republic such as foreign minister Charles de Rémusat and interior minister Auguste Casimir-Périer, son of the man of order who had put down the revolts of 1832. A law was passed by the Assembly on 14 March 1872 criminalizing membership of the International, which was held responsible for the Paris Commune, leading to the round-up of large numbers of socialists and anarchists.5 At the opening of the parliamentary session on 13 November 1872 Thiers announced that ‘the Republic will be conservative or it will not be,’ but royalists and Bonapartists increasingly considered him a hostage of hardline republicans.6 The breaking point was a by-election in Paris on 27 April 1873 when the government candidate, Charles de Rémusat, was defeated by Désiré Barodet, who had been mayor of Lyon until the government abolished the city-wide mayoralty on 2 April 1873 for alleged sympathy with the Paris Commune. Barodet was adopted by the radical republicans to take their revenge in Paris, and for Albert de Broglie his triumph signalled that ‘the conservative republic was toppled by the radical republic… it was like witnessing the resurrection of the Commune.’7 On 24 May 1873 de Broglie duly tabled a vote of no confidence in the government for failing to impose a ‘resolutely conservative’ strategy which was passed by the opposition by 360 votes to 344, and forced the resignation of Thiers. Marshal MacMahon, a career soldier who had served monarchy and Empire in Algeria, the Crimea and Italy and during the Franco-Prussian war was elected president of the Republic by the conservative majority in the Assembly.

  The fall of Thiers ushered in a ‘new monarchical dawn’ for the Comte de Falloux.8 Thiers’ attempt to bed down a conservative republic had failed and the road was now open for the royalist majority in the Assembly to bring back the king. Why France did not achieve a restoration of the monarchy in 1873 is one of the great ironies of its history. At first everything seemed to be going smoothly. The problem that there were two pretenders, the Comte de Chambord, grandson of Charles X, and the Comte de Paris, grandson of Louis-Philippe, was overcome by the latter paying a visit to the former at Frohsdorf castle near Vienna, where the Bourbon court was in exile, on 5 August 1873. The Comte de Paris surrendered his claim to the throne on the understanding that after the death of the childless Comte de Chambord the title would revert to the Or leanist branch, and the ‘fusion’ of the two houses would thus be complete. A commission of nine royalists, including right-wing Legitimists known as ‘the light horse’, moderate Legitimists who followed the Comte de Falloux, and Orleanists such as the Duc d’Audiffret-Pasquier now drafted terms under which the Comte de Chambord would be restored. For though a minority of so-called ‘light horse’ Legitimists simply wanted to turn the clock back to the Ancien Régime, the majority of Legitimists and the Orleanists wanted the king as the best guarantee of a constitution enshrining ‘necessary liberties’ and parliamentary government in their hands as the ruling class, for which they had battled under the Empire and which they were not prepared to forsake under the monarchy. The division between these views was symbolized by the white flag of the Bourbons: since it signalled the neo-absolutist monarchy of Charles X the majority of Legitimists were prepared to accept only the tricolour of the Republic, Empire and July Monarchy under which French armies had fought for sixty-nine of the previous eighty-four years. On behalf of the commission the moderate Legitimist Pierre-Charles Chesnelong visited Frohsdorf in October 1873 and returned with the triumphant news that the terms had been agreed by the Comte de Chambord. On 27 October, however, the Comte told Chesnelong that he would not after all give up the white flag, concede constitutional guarantees or become ‘the legitimate king of the Revolution’. D’Audiffret-Pasquier, who argued that the pretender must ‘respect the opinions of those who would form the indispensable majority’ and should have accepted the tricolour as Henri IV had accepted the mass, declared, ‘We are lost.’9 Monarchical restoration had failed and the Assembly made another attempt to establish the conservative Republic by voting a seven-year presidential term or Septennate on 10 November 1873 to Marshal MacMahon, who brought back Albert de Broglie as chief minister.

  As the monarchist threat evaporated, however, a new threat to the Republic appeared from a surprising quarter, Bonapartism. The Bonapartist cause had collapsed after the defeat of the Empire in 1870 and only nineteen Bonapartist deputies were elected to the National Assembly in February 1871. The death of Napoleon III in exile at Camden Place, Chislehurst, on 9 January 1873 was a severe blow to the cause. However on 16 March 1874 his son the prince imperial celebrated reaching his majority at eighteen with a reception at Camden Place, attended by seven thousand delegates from Bonapartist organizations in France, at which he announced that an appel au peuple or referendum should be held and ‘if the name of Napoleon emerges an eighth time from the popular vote, I am prepared to accept the responsibility imposed on me by the national will’.10 Bonapartist candidates now won a string of by-elections, beginning with the victory of the Baron de Bourgoing in the Nièvre on 24 May 1874, and the neighbouring department of the Yonne, where Louis-Napoleon had been elected to the National Assembly in June 1848, was flooded by Bonapartist photographs and pamphlets supporting the claim of Napoleon IV, so that, reported La République Française, ‘it was as if the Septennate existed only at Versailles and the Yonne was an annexe of the principality of Chislehurst’.11

  It was in fact the Bonapartist threat that drove together the centre ground of the Orleanists and moderate republicans in the National Assembly to agree the constitution of what was to become the Third Republic. This was managed not by revolution but by negotiation and compromise. After the vote of the Septennate Gambetta’s La République Française had commented, ‘Ah! We know it is the side door… we are far from the admirable ideal of the poet who speaks somewhere of the new generations of French democracy entering the Republic and passing “Under the great sky-lit door / Of the dazzling future”. But perhaps this is the mysterious fate of the republicans of our day.’12 The Orleanist Duc de Broglie argued that if France were to be a republic then the only solution was ‘to surround this republic which we will have created and stamped with conservative institutions’. His fervent wish was to get rid of universal suffrage and revert to the limited suffrage of the July Monarchy, but since universal suffrage had been hallowed by over twenty years’ prescription he demanded a largely appointed second chamber, full of civil servants, magistrates, generals and admirals, ‘the representation of intelligence and interests opposed to the crude representation of numbers’.13 This proposal was rejected on 16 May 1874 by an unholy alliance of Legitimists and republicans and de Broglie fell from power. Initiat
ive now passed to the centre-left of men close to Thiers. Édouard Laboulaye, professor of comparative law at the Collège de France and an expert on Tocqueville and the United States, argued for ‘a republic that resembled a parliamentary monarchy like two peas, a republic that was only lacking a king’. It might be inferior to a constitutional monarch, he joked, ‘but you have not got one!’14 His amendment was lost by 26 votes but on 30/31 January 1875 Sorbonne history professor Henri Wallon, who had called in his 1873 history of The Terror for ‘the union of all decent men’ against revolution, secured a 353–352 majority for his amendment that ‘legislative power is divided between two assemblies, the Senate and Chamber of Deputies; the president of the Republic is elected for seven years’.15 How the Senate would be elected was now brokered in talks between the Orleanist spokesman d’Audiffret-Pasquier and the centre-left spokesman Auguste Casimir-Périer, whose political differences were attenuated by the fact that they were brothers-in-law and lived in adjoining mansions on the Champs-Élysées. The compromise reached was a Senate of 300, whose members had to be over forty and would serve for nine years; 225 would be elected indirectly by electoral colleges of deputies, mayors and local councillors, and 75 would be life senators chosen by the National Assembly before it dissolved.

  Elections to the Senate produced an elite of republican notables, three-quarters of whom had previous parliamentary experience and who occupied the political centre ground. The life senators included twenty royalists such as the Orleanist d’Audiffret-Pasquier and fifty-five republicans, weighted to the centre-left with Édouard Laboulaye and Casimir-Périer but also including left republicans close to Jules Ferry such as Jules Simon and Gambettists like Auguste Scheurer-Kestner. Senatorial elections held in January 1876 returned a list headed in Paris by Victor Hugo, whose 1874 novel Quatre-vingt-treize, set in the Vendée in 1793, celebrated the ‘ideal republic’ that showed mercy against the ‘absolute republic’ committed to destroying its enemies. The centre-left again did well, with senators drawn from the economic and intellectual elite and often from ‘la haute société protestante’ such as the industrialist and Cambridge blue William Waddington (Aisne), Léon Say, son of the economist Jean-Baptiste Say and editor of the Journal des Débats (Seine-et-Oise), and Charles de Freycinet, Gambetta’s technical right-hand man during the war of 1870 (Paris). However Albert de Broglie was elected senator in Normandy and, overall, conservatives – both royalist and Bonapartist – had a majority over republicans.16

  By contrast elections under universal suffrage to the Chamber of Deputies in February 1876 produced a republican triumph of 340 seats out of 533, against 155 conservatives (royalists and Bonapartists). Their success was explained in part by spin and in part by networking. Gambetta delivered key speeches such as that at Auxerre in June 1874 selling the republican party as committed to the principles of the French Revolution yet standing not for social revolution but for the hard-working ‘new social strata’ of smallholders, industrialists, shopkeepers and white-collar workers who together increased the economic and intellectual capital of the country.17 Under pressure to grant an amnesty to the Communards from radicals such as Alfred Naquet, who ran against him in Marseille in February 1876, and Henri Rochefort, who had escaped from New Caledonia but was not yet allowed back into the country, he said that public opinion was not yet ready for such a measure, provoking Rochefort to label him an ‘opportunist’.18 He recruited brilliant young men to service the republican press, such as Joseph Reinach who joined the staff of La République Française.19 To make political alliances he haunted the Wednesday salon of Juliette Adam, taking the advice of her husband Edmond that ‘you can be in opposition from the cafés but you can only be in government from society.’20

  The victory of the republicans did not mean that President MacMahon invited them to form a government. On the contrary, the principle of ministerial responsibility to a majority in the Chamber of Deputies had yet to be established and MacMahon did everything in his power to keep them out. He appointed as premier Jules Simon, who announced that he was ‘resolutely republican and resolutely conservative’. Gambetta wounded him by denouncing his links with political Catholics – ‘clericalism, there is the enemy!’ – and MacMahon dismissed him on 16 May 1877 for his failure to contain the left, unleashing the so-called Seize Mai crisis. The Duc de Broglie was again brought back as premier and used the constitutional mechanism whereby the president, if he had the support of the Senate, could dissolve the Chamber of Deputies and call new elections. The Chamber was duly prorogued for a month on 18 May and dissolved on 25 June. There were echoes of the crisis of July 1830. Political legitimacy now passed squarely to the republican camp: a broad church of 363 republican deputies who acquired heroic status, from the centre-left and republican left of Jules Ferry, deputy of the Vosges, to Gambetta’s republican union and Louis Blanc’s extreme left, passed a vote of no confidence in the government for its ‘violation of the law of majorities, which is the principle of parliamentary government’. In the campaign for the new Chamber they fought a propaganda war against the Seize Mai as a coup d’état and counter-revolution against a sovereign people who had repeatedly declared in favour of the Republic.21 Despite administrative purges, official candidates and recourse to censorship the government could not prevent another republican victory in the elections of October 1877. The leaders of the Republic of 1848 which had established universal suffrage were now commemorated as founding fathers. Both at the funeral of François Raspail in January 1878 and while unveiling a monument to Ledru-Rollin on the thirtieth anniversary of the Second Republic, 24 February 1878, Louis Blanc paid homage to their advocacy of universal suffrage which embedded the Republic not by riot but by a fraternal popular will.22

  The final breakthrough in the slow republican ascent to power was the ‘town hall revolution’ of January 1878 which swept republicans into the mairies of thousands of towns and villages. Since mayors were the bedrock of the colleges that elected senators, republicans gained a majority in the Senate in the elections of January 1879. Without any base of support MacMahon resigned and the deputies and senators elected the first republican president of the Third Republic, Jules Grévy, who had been speaker of the National Assembly in 1871. Even this, however, did not mean that Gambetta took over as premier. The ministry Grévy appointed was headed by William Waddington and included Léon Say (Finances), Charles de Freycinet (Public Works) and Jules Ferry (Education). The great tribune Gambetta remained speaker of the Chamber of Deputies, and was said to exercise an ‘occult power’ over the ministry, but he was kept out of the government until 1882.

  THE REPUBLICAN RULING CLASS

  UNDER SIEGE

  Although the republicans had come to power by democratic means and ruled under democratic principles, it was important for the stability of the regime that what amounted to a republican ruling class be constituted. The president of the Republic, Jules Grévy, was obliged to appoint a president of the council (prime minister) who formed a ministry that had to command a majority in the Chamber of Deputies. The Chamber of Deputies was entitled to ‘interpellate’ the ministry on questions of policy and if it secured a majority for its challenge the ministry was forced to resign. This resulted in a rapid turnover of ministries – 108 between 1870 and 1940 – but the fall of a ministry did not trigger a general election, which was programmed every four years. Another ministry would be reconstituted by ‘replastering’, that is including as ministers politicians from the victorious majority but carrying over old faces from the previous team. In the period 1879–93 a pool of six or seven dominant republican figures formed the basis of almost every ministry and Charles de Freycinet was president of the council four times.23

  This republican political elite found Gambetta frankly an embarrassment. He was seen to be a great tribune but tending, after his moment of unchallenged power in 1870–71, towards a ‘bourgeois dictatorship’.24 When his followers triumphed in the elections of 1881 Grévy was obliged to appoint him
president of the council, but more moderate republicans such as Freycinet, Ferry and Léon Say refused to serve under him and his ministry lasted a mere sixty-seven days (10 November 1881–26 January 1882). He was brought down over his project to change the electoral system from single-member constituencies, which tended to become the fiefs of independent-minded local notables, to a scrutin de liste which obliged parties to put together a slate of candidates for each department and was intended to produce a disciplined republican party under his control. By the end of the year, as a result of a shooting accident and appendicitis, Gambetta was dead, aged forty-four. It was not that the likes of Jules Ferry opposed political reform: indeed, it was during Ferry’s ministries of 1880–81 and 1883–5 that press freedom, compulsory free lay education, the right to form trade unions, the abolition of life senators and indeed the scrutin de liste were conceded. As he told the Chamber at the beginning of his two-year ministry in 1883, however, ‘Yes, we have received a mandate to reform from the country, and we are fulfilling it, but the country requires us at this time, with no less energy, to administer, to govern, to root the republic.’25