Children of the Revolution Read online

  The moderate republicans who exercised power in the 1880s endeavoured to establish themselves as a ruling class. They were determined to avoid tearing themselves apart in fratricidal struggle, as had their predecessors in the First Republic, or being swept away by royalists and Bonapartists, as had their predecessors in the Second Republic. Whereas the ruling republicans of the Directory failed to win elections and had to resort to coups d’état, the republicans of the Third Republic devoted huge amounts of time and resources to nurturing their contacts and constituencies. Deputies were paid an allowance of 9,000 francs a year whereas their expenses in the form of election campaigns, travel, publicity and correspondence, receptions and la vie mondaine to nurture connections and support might be five or ten times as much. No deputy could be without a local newspaper which sang his praises, from his achievement of office to obtaining permission for branch lines in the department. Three preconditions of success were an independent income, a good marriage and involvement in business. Overwhelmingly deputies enjoyed independent incomes – 48 per cent of deputies were in the liberal professions, 18 per cent in state service, 15 per cent in commerce, industry and finance and 8 per cent landowners in 1871–85. Their earnings were often supplemented by membership of the boards of banks and large companies investing in transport, utilities and industry at home and abroad. This could lead to what was known as affairisme – the use of government influence to facilitate business success and vice versa – and lay deputies and ministers open to accusations of corruption.26 A good marriage bringing in a substantial dowry was essential, and the core republican aristocracy was closely related by marriage. Jules Ferry, Charles Floquet, who was president of the council in 1888–9, and life senator Auguste Scheurer married three sisters, respectively Eugénie, Hortense and Céline, of the Alsatian Protestant industrialist Kestner family, who brought substantial dowries and entry into the upper bourgeoisie. It is significant that Clemenceau, whose proposal of marriage had been rejected in 1864 by Hortense Kestner who later married Floquet, led the radical opposition to this ruling group, while Gambetta, though he had a mistress, Léonie Léon, never married. As a result of these strategies, 49 per cent of ministers who died before 1914 left fortunes of between 100,000 and one million francs, which was true of less than 2 per cent of French people who died in 1907, while 29 per cent left fortunes of over a million francs, which was true of only 0.1 per cent of the population.27

  All these resources were put to good electoral purpose. Whereas the political bases of politicians such as Gambetta were in the great cities of Paris, Lyon and Marseille, those of the ruling group were in the provinces. Jules Ferry’s fief was Saint-Dié in the Vosges, where he was elected in 1876. Jules Méline, his minister of agriculture, was deputy for Remiremont, also in the Vosges. René Waldeck-Rousseau, his interior minister, was deputy for the Breton capital Rennes. They were keenly aware of the need to anchor the Republic not only in the towns but in the countryside, hitherto controlled by conservatives. To achieve this Méline introduced a tariff in 1885 to protect the peasantry, in the throes of agricultural depression, from the threat of cheap grain imports and Ferry proclaimed, in the election campaign that year, ‘we have conquered the universal suffrage of the countryside: let us retain it, not trouble it or weary it… It is by a spirit of conservation and love of stability that the French peasant has become the firmest support of the French Revolution,’ which gave him land.28

  The access of the republican ruling group to dynastic alliances, business opportunities, electoral success and ministerial office stoked the resentment of their political opponents, who were both on the right – royalists or Bonapartists – and on the left – radical republicans or socialists. Although the constitution of 1875 had been made by an alliance of moderate republicans and Orleanists, Orleanist and Bonapartist support for the Seize Mai coup enabled republicans to argue that they were the enemies of the Republic and should never be allowed to regain power. A convention arose that no ministry could rely on the votes of the right to sustain it if it could not command the support of a republican majority. The death of the Comte de Chambord without an heir in 1883 deprived Legitimists of their leader and Napoleon III’s son, the prince im perial, died fighting the Zulus as an officer of the British army in 1879. In a speech at Le Havre in 1883 Jules Ferry announced that ‘the royalist threat no longer exists: it is buried beneath two tombs… but another threat has replaced it and we have to consider it squarely in order to confront it with the only cure, the only barrier: the ever closer union of those republican forces that are capable of forming a government.’29

  In fact Ferry underestimated the ability of the royalists and Bonapartists to continue to pose a threat. Royalist and Bonapartist managers who had historically been more hindered than helped by the pretensions of their respective pretenders looked now to achieve a majority of conservatives within the Republic, and their royalist– Bonapartist ‘Union of the Right’ headed by the Baron de Mackau won 176 seats to the republicans’ 127 in the first round of the October 1885 election. This was explained in part because moderate republicans, who now considered the main enemy to be radical republicans, had run against them as well as against conservatives. In the second round the moderate and radical republican wings were obliged to sink their differences, under the slogan of ‘republican concentration’, under which the worst-placed republican candidate, of whatever tendency, retired in favour of the best-placed one. In this round they won 244 seats to the conservatives’ 25, achieving a total of 383 republicans to 201 conservatives.30

  What stood between the moderate republicans on the one hand and the radical republicans and socialists on the other was the ghost of the Paris Commune. Since 1871 survivors of the Commune were either vegetating in New Caledonia, to which they had been deported, or were living in exile in London or Geneva. Their solidarity and anger was forged by the memory of the Semaine Sanglante in which they claimed 30,000 of their number had been massacred. For them class conflict was not just an ideology but a reality. The revolutionary Commune group, for example, set up in London in 1874 and including Blanquists such as Émile Eudes and Ernest Granger, together with Édouard Vaillant, dreamed of a ‘future Commune’ that would rekindle ‘the great battle between the bourgeoisie and proletariat’ and establish a ‘Communard Republic’.31 How they aimed to bring about the new socialist Republic differed in line with the rival factions on the Paris Commune of 1871. The Blanquists urged a seizure of power, although they conceded that elections could be used to raise awareness. Thus Blanqui, in prison at Clairvaux, ran as a candidate in a Bordeaux by-election in 1879. The Jacobin tradition represented by Delescluze, who had died on the barricades in May 1871, was taken up by Jules Guesde, who had been in exile in Switzerland but returned clandestinely to France in 1876 and was converted to Marxist socialism in Paris by German émigrés. He founded L’Égalité in 1877 and the Marxist Parti Ouvrier at a congress of workers in Marseille in 1879. On Sunday 23 May 1880 and each succeeding year Jules Guesde led his Parti Ouvrier on a pilgrimage to the Mur des Fédérés in Père Lachaise cemetery – where during the Semaine Sanglante the last Communards had made a final stand and been summarily shot – in order to maintain a revolutionary class consciousness.32 Ten weeks later his Parti Ouvrier boycotted what they called the ‘bourgeois fête’ of 14 July, arguing that ‘its Bastilles were still to be taken’.33 The anti-authoritarian or Proudhonist tendency, hostile to any dictatorship including that of the proletariat and favouring direct action to bring about a federation of autonomous workers’ associations and communes, was represented by Benoît Malon and Paul Brousse, in exile in Switzerland and affiliated to the so-called anti-authoritarian International of Bakunin.

  Within France, radical republicans such as Georges Clemenceau, Paris municipal councillor and deputy in the 18th arrondissement (Montmartre), who had tried to mediate between the Paris Commune and Versailles on 19 March 1871, campaigned ceaselessly for an amnesty for the Communards. But the Commu
ne was vilified by the likes of Maxime du Camp who argued that ‘the events of the Commune were nothing to do with politics but only about criminality’ and that ‘an amnesty would bring back traitors, incendiaries and assassins to the country whose destruction they have sworn.’34 Moderate republicans such as Ferry, who had himself narrowly escaped the violence of the Commune on 18 March 1871, steered a course between placating conservative opinion and achieving the union of all republicans when public opinion was ready, which earned them the name of ‘Opportunists’. A bill of 1879 tried to confine amnesty to Communards who had not been convicted of criminal acts, only political deeds, but this pleased neither right nor left. Eventually, under pressure from Gambetta and in an attempt to steal the thunder of the left, a full amnesty was proclaimed on 10 July 1880, ahead of the celebrations of republican union on 14 July, and the likes of Henri Rochefort and Louise Michel returned home.35

  There was little possibility of insurrection in 1880s France but the return of the Communards brought about the emergence of socialist parties and reinvigorated radical republicans who did not believe in social equality but desired a far more democratic republic than that provided by the constitution of 1875. For the elections of 1881 Jules Guesde went to London to meet Karl Marx and his son-in-law Paul Lafargue, in order to draft a ‘minimum programme’ of social reforms as the manifesto of the Parti Ouvrier. Guesde’s initiative did not persuade all revolutionaries. After the death of Blanqui in 1881 his disciples Eudes, Granger and Vaillant founded their own Central Revolutionary Committee, and Vaillant as ‘candidate of the social Republic’ was elected to the Paris municipal council in 1884. Brousse opposed the ‘Marxist authoritarianism’ of Guesde’s centralized party which was obedient to London and planned a dictatorship of the proletariat, and broke from him at a socialist congress in Saint-Étienne in 1882 to found the Fédération des Travailleurs Socialistes de France.36 Brousse believed in the right of local socialist federations to set their own agenda and interpreted the anarchist philosophy of direct action as achieving power at municipal level first. In 1887 his Possibilists, as they were known, won nine seats on the Paris municipal council and took control of the Paris Bourse du Travail, the city-funded body which federated all the trade unions in Paris.

  Socialists formed a minority on the Paris municipal council, which was the power-base of radical republicans. The council made clear its commitment to the French Revolution by unveiling a statue of the Republic, capped by a Phrygian bonnet, on the place de la République, on 13 July 1883, a ceremony that was attended neither by President Grévy nor by premier Ferry. In 1887 it commissioned a statue of Danton, portraying him (to placate moderate opinion) as the patriot of 1792 and champion of popular education. Alexandre Millerand, a young lawyer who worked on Clemenceau’s paper La Justice, was elected to the Paris council in 1884 and obtained funding from it to found a chair in the history of the French Revolution at the Sorbonne, the first incumbent of which in 1886 was Alphonse Aulard. Clemenceau himself was the terror of the moderate republicans in the Chamber of Deputies. His reform programme was to abolish the Senate and presidency of the Republic in favour of a sovereign National Assembly, on the model of that of 1848 or the Convention of 1792. He helped to topple Gambetta for defending the Senate in January 1882 and mobilized opposition to the government’s colonial policy to overturn Freycinet in July 1882 and Ferry in March 1885. After the elections of October 1885 the moderate republicans no longer held a majority, but were only 239 strong, squeezed between 201 conservatives and 144 radicals. From now on the republican governing class was under siege.

  THE BOULANGIST MENACE

  In the face of the challenge from radicals and socialists, the long-term project of the republican governing class was to make common cause with the right against them. However, this strategy was hampered by the principle of republican legitimacy, which since 16 May 1877 held that republican ministries should not rely for their parliamentary majority on royalist or Bonapartist votes, and by the reflex of ‘republican concentration’ which dictated that they should build a left-wing alliance of all republicans, moderates and radicals, when the Republic was in danger. However, radical republicans and socialists were often reluctant to fall into line behind the republican oligarchy, preferring to attack the ‘bourgeois Republic’. This opened the way to the possibility that radicals and socialists might, for short-term advantage, themselves make common cause against the republican oligarchy with royalists and Bonapartists. This is precisely what happened in the Boulanger crisis of 1886–9, the first major political crisis that the Republic had to weather after 1877.

  Under the rules of governmental majorities, the moderate republicans were obliged after the 1885 elections to open the ministry to radicals or their nominees, and in 1886 the radical leader Clemenceau put forward as minister of war General Boulanger, a contemporary of his at the Lycée of Nantes who had a reputation for being both patriotic and reforming. Keen to demonstrate these credentials Boulanger struck from the army list officers belonging to the Orleanist or Bonapartist former ruling houses, while after an extravagant wedding reception given by the Comte de Paris for his daughter which seemed to reconstitute the Orleanist court the radicals forced through a law of exile in June 1886 banning members of former ruling houses from French soil.

  In order to check these radical initiatives the moderate republicans challenged the convention whereby ministries should not rely for their survival on the votes of the right. A coalition of moderate republicans and Baron Mackau’s Union of the Right overturned the ministry in which Boulanger was war minister in May 1887, and the Union supported the new ministry headed by Maurice Rouvier, Ferry’s former minister of commerce. Boulanger was sent off to take charge of the XIII Army Corps well out of the way at Clermont-Ferrand, but his departure from the Gare de Lyon on 8 July 1887 was marked by a massive demonstration in his support organized by Blanquists and Paul Déroulède’s patriotic and radical Ligue de Patriotes. While radicals like Millerand attacked the Rouvier ministry as ‘the protégé of the right’, Jules Ferry made a speech at Épinal in the Vosges declaring that ‘a well-constituted republic needs a conservative party. To temper, contain, and moderate democracy is a noble thing.’37

  The radicals, however, were far from finished. A scandal was uncovered revealing that President Grévy’s son-in-law, Daniel Wilson, was selling honours from his office in the Élysée palace. Since the president was not himself constitutionally responsible to the Chamber Clemenceau interpellated the Rouvier government on the question in November 1887 and rallied a majority of radicals and the right to topple the ministry. Grévy, who had always favoured moderate republican ministries, was still the target of newspapers from Rochefort’s Intransigeant to the conservative Figaro, and the tactical refusal of ministers including Clemenceau to form a new government forced Grévy to resign. The obvious candidate to replace him was Jules Ferry, but Ferry was the bête noire not only of the radicals but of the right, who did not forgive his attacks on church schools. Demonstrations on the place de la Concorde on 2 December 1887, organized by the Ligue des Patriotes and Blanquists and opposing the candidature of Ferry, turned to riot. Deputies and senators met at Versailles on 3 December to elect a new president and in order to defeat Ferry radicals gave their votes to Sadi Carnot, a compromise candidate from a great republican dynasty. A week later a mad Lorrainer who thought Ferry unpatriotic approached him in the Palais-Bourbon and tried to kill him, two bullets lodging in his side and chest.

  Boulanger now became the vehicle of a campaign, orchestrated by both radicals and the conservatives, to dissolve parliament and to revise the constitution in a way that would permit the election of the president of the Republic not by the deputies and senators but by universal suffrage. For the radicals this would brush away the Republic of notables and fixers and subordinate the executive to the sovereign people; for the Bonapartists direct presidential elections would open the possibility of a repeat of 1848, when Louis-Napoleon was ele
cted president, while the Comte de Paris was now ready to fall back on the hope of a restoration of the monarchy by plebiscite.

  The dismissal of Boulanger from the army on 15 March 1888 provoked the formation of a Republican Committee of National Protest headed by radicals such as Henri Rochefort, Paul Déroulède and Alfred Naquet. The tactic adopted was to run Boulanger in all by-elections, the magic being that under the scrutin de liste adopted in 1885 a whole department rather than one constituency turned out to vote. Within months the country was rocked from one end to the other by this electoral steeplechase. In the midst of economic recession Boulanger was supported by the weavers of Amiens in the Aisne (25 March 1888), the miners of Anzin and metalworkers of Valenciennes in the Nord (15 April), but also by the Bonapartist peasants of the Dordogne (8 April). A meeting of Boulangist organizers with Émile Eudes sealed an alliance with the Blanquists, but the socialists were divided, Lafargue keen to harness the revolutionary potential of Boulanger’s popular support against the bourgeois republic, but Guesde seeing the dispute as one between rival sections of the bourgeoisie and warning, ‘between cholera and the plague there is no choice.’38

  While the left provided the organization, unbeknown to them it was the right that provided most of the funding. Bonapartists were divided between those such as Paul de Cassagnac who demanded the return of the hereditary Empire or nothing and others like Georges Lachaud who argued that successive elections had endorsed the Republic but that the parliamentary Republic had to be replaced by a national or plebiscitary republic based on direct presidential elections. On 2 January 1888 Bonapartist manager Georges Thiébaud, who was in the second camp, paid a visit to the pretender, Napoleon’s cousin Prince Jérôme-Napoléon, at his Prangins estate in the Swiss Vaud, to obtain approval for their backing of Boulanger. On the royalist side the key player was Count Arthur de Dillon, who won over the Comte de Paris and the Baron de Mackau. Generous funding was provided by flamboyant royalists such as the Duchesse d’Uzès, who was indebted to Boulanger for allowing her when he had been minister of war to hunt in the forest of Rambouillet.