Children of the Revolution Page 32

  Despite the sound and fury the Boulangist threat petered out. In the first place its challenge to the Republic was an electoral one and, when it materialized, the division between radical and moderate republicans which had allowed it to develop closed up under the banner of republican concentration. In particular Clemenceau, who had initially promoted Boulanger, began to fear the Caesarist threat he posed and in May 1888 founded the Société des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen which grouped moderate republicans, radicals and socialists, to oppose the general. Second, Boulanger was always a man of style rather than substance. He took his seat in the Chamber on 12 July 1888, immediately demanded its dissolution, and provoked a duel with premier Floquet. Unfortunately he came off worse, wounded in the neck. The moment for action arrived on 27 January 1889 when he was elected in Paris by a combination of opponents of the government on left and right. A crowd of Ligue des Patriotes and Blanquists gathered in front of the Café Durand on the place de la Madeleine where Boulanger was hosting a victory dinner, but he could not be prevailed upon to seize the moment and march on the Élysée palace. Instead he panicked and fled over the border to Belgium. Third, the Republic showed itself to be far more decisive in the face of this kind of threat than it had been in 1799 or 1851. It mobilized the legal, judicial and administrative weapons of the Republic to defeat Boulanger and his associates. The electoral conditions that had made Boulangism possible were terminated by legislation of 1889 which abolished the scrutin de liste and banned candidates from standing in more than one constituency. The Ligue des Patriotes was dissolved and its leader Déroulède sent for trial. The Senate fulfilled its role as the ‘fortress of the Republic’ by sitting as a high court on 14 July 1889 to try Boulanger, Rochefort and Dillon in absentia. In the general elections of October conservatives ran as Boulangists in seats they could not hope to win under their own colours, but interior minister Ernest Constans used every weapon in his armoury to secure the return of 366 republicans against 168 of the right and 42 Boulangists. The young Maurice Barrès was returned as a Boulangist for Nancy, but the election of Boulanger in the 18th arrondissement of Paris was quashed. Fourth, the Republic used the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution in 1889 to proclaim its legitimacy. A banquet for 13,000 mayors was laid on at the Palais de l’Industrie and a preliminary, plaster-cast version of a monument entitled The Triumph of the Republic, sculpted by Dalou, was unveiled by President Carnot on the place de la Nation on 21 September 1889. In September 1891, two months after the death of his mistress (and bankroller) Marguerite de Bonnemain, Boulanger shot himself on her grave in Brussels.

  The republican oligarchy could not be displaced by Boulangism, but a new weapon emerged in the form of political anti-Semitism to dislodge much of the republican ruling group in 1893. Anti-Semitism had the ability to mobilize popular emotions and leap class barriers in a way that Boulangism had failed to do. ‘It is hatred, simply hatred, that is first and foremost expressed by this anti-Jewish sentiment,’ wrote Barrès in Le Figaro.39 The rumour was spread that the regime had won the elections of 1889 only with the help of Jewish gold, provided in particular by the Rothschilds. On the left Henri Rochefort denounced ‘the triumph of Juiverie’ while a French Anti-Semitic League was founded in September 1889 by Édouard Drumont, author of the 1886 bestseller La France juive, together with the Marquis de Morès, a hugely wealthy speculator of Spanish noble descent.40 In 1892 Drumont’s new press weapon, La Libre Parole, exposed the fact that bribes had passed between the Panama Canal Company, headed by Ferdinand de Lesseps, and certain republican politicians whose influence had been needed to pass a 1888 law authorizing the Company to float a share-issue. It delighted to point out that the intermediaries between the Company and the politicians were the German-Jewish banker Jacques de Reinach, uncle and father-in-law of Joseph Reinach, who committed suicide, and the German-Jewish promoter Cornelius Herz. The link between republican politics, business and Jewish influence destroyed the careers, at least in the short term, of moderate republicans such as Rouvier and Joseph Reinach and radical republicans such as Clemenceau, defeated in the elections of 1893.41

  THE RETURN OF CLASS WAR

  After the Boulanger Affair socialists were forced to reconsider their strategy. The demagogic hold of Boulanger on much of the working class had seduced some socialist leaders, until it became clear that he wished to use popular support only for his own ends. The new faith of anti-Semitism was also seductive, and leaders like Rochefort mobilized it to attack what was seen to be Jewish control of the rich and powerful in the Republic. A third siren was that of moderate and radical republicans, who repeatedly called on socialists to rally in defence of the regime against its enemies of the right. After all, the Republic was democratic and the possibility existed that socialists might at some future date conquer a majority under universal suffrage and achieve power by legal means.

  The clear message for socialist movements confronted by these false routes was in fact to turn back to the working class and to organize it as a labour movement for specifically socialist ends. In this respect 1890 and the years immediately following it were a turning point, when class struggle was squarely back on the agenda and memories of the Paris Commune acted both as an inspiration and as an object lesson that caused socialists to rethink how they would achieve a more equal society. There was, however, no single model of socialist opposition.

  On the Proudhonist wing, Paul Brousse and the Possibilists had taken the path of defending the Republic against Boulangism, and benefited by meeting the democratic challenge, both locally and nationally. They had a powerful voice on the Paris municipal council and returned two deputies to parliament in 1889. The rank and file of the movement, however, considered that the Possibilist leaders had become bourgeois politicians and lost touch with the movement. A challenge to Brousse’s leadership was launched by Jean Allemane, a printworker, veteran of the Commune and former deportee to New Caledonia at the Châtellerault congress of the Fédération des Travailleurs Socialistes de France in October 1890, using the slogan that ‘the emancipation of the workers must be the task of the workers themselves’. Breaking away from the Broussists they set up a Parti Ouvrier Socialiste Révolutionnaire and took control of the Paris Bourse du Travail.42 The Bourses du Travail, employment centres that also provided office space for all trade unions in a given town, spread across the country and formed a Fédération des Bourses du Travail at Saint-Étienne in 1892. Although funded by republican city councils, often as a reward for labour support in local elections, they might constitute a threat to the republican regime. In July 1893 the Paris Bourse du Travail was closed down by the government and remained closed for nearly three years.

  Possibilists and the Guesdist Parti Ouvrier – the French Marxists – vied with each other to be the dominant socialist party in France. In 1889 they hosted two separate congresses in Paris of the International Socialist movement, which was starting up again after the collapse of the First International in the early 1870s, this time representing only bona-fide socialist parties from each country. What the rival congresses agreed on, however, was that from 1890 May Day should be celebrated by labour movements in Europe, on the model provided by the USA since 1886, agitating for a straightforward reform, the eight-hour day, and enabling socialist parties to secure a grip on the labour movement.43 The Guesdists dominated the Fédération Nationale des Syndicats after 1886 but were keen to wean it away from open-ended strike action over which it had no control. Governments were not happy with what amounted to a one-day strike and demonstration and on 1 May 1891 the police opened fire on the May Day demonstration in the woollen town of Fourmies (Nord), killing nine and wounding thirty, including many children. The heavily industrialized Nord, with its large-scale textile factories and exploited textile workers, was one of the power-bases of the Parti Ouvrier, and Paul Lafargue, one of its leaders, was arrested for instigating the demonstration. He was defended at his trial in July at the Douai Assize Court b
y Alexandre Millerand, radical republican deputy for Paris XII who was trying to introduce socialist ideas into republicanism and steer socialism towards reformism. Sentenced to a year in prison Lafargue was elected deputy of Lille in November 1891 and released.44 The following year Guesdists conquered a number of municipalities including Roubaix, the textile town adjacent to Lille. The reality of class struggle was feeding into the electoral success of a socialism that was revolutionary only in rhetoric.

  Strike movements and democratic socialism operated in tandem in other parts of France. In the small mining town of Carmaux (Tarn), the miners’ union launched a strike in pursuit of higher wages in March 1892 and took control of the municipality in May. The secretary of the miners’ union, Calvignac, who was elected mayor, was refused two days a week leave to discharge his mayoral functions by the mining company and sacked. The miners left the pits, 1,500 soldiers were sent in, and the town became a focal point for socialists demanding nationalization of coal mines. Most influential was Jean Jaurès, brought up in nearby Castres, a graduate of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris who had returned to teach history at the university of Toulouse, contributed to the Dépêche de Toulouse and was elected a republican deputy for the Tarn, aged twenty-six, in 1885. Defeated at Castres by Baron Reille, chair of the Carmaux board in 1889, while another board member, the Marquis de Solages, was elected at nearby Albi, Jaurès was converted to socialism by the librarian of the École Normale, Lucien Herr, and wrote a thesis on The Origins of German Socialism. He saw socialism as a fulfilment of the revolutionary credo of liberty, equality and fraternity which had been confiscated by the republican bourgeoisie, and was as much about justice as about material decency. In October 1892 the mining company capitulated, Calvignac was reinstated as mayor, the Marquis de Solages resigned from parliament, and Jaurès was elected in his place in the by-election of January 1893. He called himself an independent socialist like Millerand, but he appeared with Guesde at the Tivoli Vauxhall Gardens that January to launch a united socialist front for the 1893 elections while Millerand took possession of La Petite République, which became the mouthpiece of French socialism. Nearly fifty socialist deputies were elected to the Chamber in 1893, including Jaurès (Albi), Guesde (Roubaix), Vaillant, Millerand and the latter’s secretary Viviani in respectively the 20th, 12th and 5th arrondissements of Paris.45 However, whereas Guesde, born in 1845 and personally marked by the Paris Commune, found it difficult to give up the rhetoric of revolutionary class war, even when participating in elections, Jaurès, Millerand and Viviani, born around 1860, subscribed to the notion that the Commune had been a premature revolution and that socialists would not take power until a long preparation of the working classes in party and trade unions had been completed.

  Not all leftist opponents of the regime went down the socialist road. On 1 May 1891, while textile workers were being shot at Fourmies, a group of anarchists infiltrated the demonstration at Clichy, in the northern suburbs of Paris, brandishing the black flag, and exchanged shots with police. After these were arrested and sent for trial, anarchists launched a campaign of terror in retaliation. François-Claudius Ravachol, hitherto little more than an armed robber, set off bombs in the flats of judges who had sentenced the Clichy anarchists. Singing revolutionary songs and calling for vengeance before he was guillotined on 11 July 1892, he became a folk hero. The following year, on 9 December 1893, a casually employed worker Auguste Vaillant (no relation to Édouard) hurled a bomb into the Chamber of Deputies, killing no one but throwing the parliamentary Republic into shock. He was executed on 5 February 1894. A week later, taking the bourgeoisie in general for his target, Émile Henry, the son of a Communard who had himself failed the examination for the École Polytechnique, threw a bomb into the Hôtel Terminus at the Gare Saint-Lazare, killing one person and wounding twenty. He was executed on 21 May 1894. President Sadi Carnot, who had refused to pardon all these terrorists, was himself stabbed to death by an Italian anarchist Santo Geronimo Casiero in Lyon on 24 June 1894.46 The government reacted decisively, pushing a series of laws through the Chamber to criminalize all those associated with or defending terrorism, the so-called lois scélérates. Leading anarchists were rounded up and what became known as the Trial of Thirty, including the shoemaker Jean Grave, editor of La Révolte, Émile Pouget, editor of Le Père Peinard, Sébastien Faure, editor of Le Libérataire, who had been entrusted with the care of Vaillant’s daughter, and the art critic Félix Fénéon, took place at the Assize Court of the Seine in August 1894. The prosecution failed to establish links between them and all but three were acquitted, but the tactic of terrorist attacks was clearly no longer the way for anarchism.47

  The most promising road ahead was a hybrid of anarchism and trade unionism known as anarcho-syndicalism or revolutionary syndicalism. Fernand Pelloutier, the son of a post office employee, expelled from the petit séminaire of Guérande for writing an anticlerical novel, contributed briefly to Barrès’ anti-establishment La Cocarde paper of 1894–5, for which the future royalist Charles Maurras also wrote.48 More important was his association with Aristide Briand, whose father was a wine merchant and café-owner of Nantes, who qualified as a lawyer in Paris then returned to practise at Saint-Nazaire and was elected as a radical to the municipal council in 1888. Repeatedly defeated when he ran for the Chamber, after 1889 Briand moved towards anarchist circles in Paris. In 1892 he and Pelloutier founded a Bourse du Travail at Saint-Nazaire and hit on the strategy of the revolutionary general strike as the way for workers to reclaim control of their own destiny from socialist politicians by direct action. As delegates of the Saint-Nazaire Bourse they challenged Guesde for control of the Fédération Nationale des Syndicats when it held its congress at Nantes in September 1894, and won a majority. This opened the way to the formation of a new trade union umbrella, the Confédération Générale du Travail, in 1895. In that year Pelloutier became secretary of the Fédération des Bourses du Travail, which he was keen to keep separate from the Confédération, although they adopted similar strategies of direct action. He wrote a seminal article in Grave’s Temps Nouveaux urging anarchists to infiltrate the labour movement, educate the working classes and, linking up with the Proudhonian libertarian and federalist tradition, use the general strike as a tool to found a socialist society, ‘the free association of free producers’.49

  THE REPUBLICAN ELITE ON

  CONSERVATIVE CRUTCHES

  The red peril of socialism and anarchism had a profound impact on the political configuration of the Third Republic. The strategy of republican concentration which allied moderate and radical republicans was practised in the elections of 1893, but became increasingly irrelevant as the threat from the left outweighed that from the right. Between November 1895 and April 1896 there was a short-lived experiment of a radical ministry with socialist support. The prime minister, Léon Bourgeois, subscribed to a notion of ‘solidarism’ whereby those who did well out of society should be required to put more back in, notably through a progressive income tax to pay for benefits such as compensation for industrial accidents, medical cover and pensions. This policy was seen by the ruling class as a frontal attack on private property. Since the ministry had a majority in the Chamber of Deputies the Senate was mobilized to pass votes of no confidence in the ministry and finally to reject its budget. Nothing remained of the Bourgeois programme except the bill on accident compensation which became law in 1898.50

  The Bourgeois ministry was in fact an aberration from the new shape of the governing coalition, which was a moderate republican government, now called Progressist, ruling against radicals and socialists with a majority provided by conservative votes in the Chamber. Although it was strictly against the rules of republican legitimacy laid down in 1877 for a republican ministry to rely on conservative support, two things had happened. First, the red peril had divided republicans along class lines, so that moderate republicans, representing the ruling class, had more in common with conservatives, also representing
the ruling class, than with radicals or socialists; and second, after 1890 many conservatives decided to fight no more for the restoration of monarchy or Empire but under what was called the Ralliement to embrace the republic as the de facto regime and work within it to make it more conservative, as it were, more Tory.

  The shadow of this new moderate-republican–Tory-right coalition appeared first on the question of protective tariffs. Confronted by the collapse of farm prices and global manufacturing competition, agricultural and industrial lobbies converged in favour of protective tariffs and achieved a majority of the Chamber elected in 1889. Sponsored by Jules Méline, who had taken through a previous agricultural tariff in 1885, this tariff on the import of agricultural and certain industrial goods was passed 386–105 on 29 December 1891: there were 242 republicans and 144 conservatives in favour with 80 republicans and 25 conservatives against, and the bill passed into law on 11 January 1892.51 The configuration also appeared outside parliament, in pressure-groups set up to explore social reform as an antidote to socialism. The ramifications of the social question, from factory conditions and poor housing to tuberculosis and alcoholism, which helped to foster socialism, could equally be alleviated by reforms carried out by ruling groups of all political persuasions. Such a pressure-group was the Musée Social, founded in 1894 and including ‘rallied’ monarchists such as the Comte de Chambrun, the Prince d’Arenberg and Albert de Mun, moderate republicans such as Jules Méline and René Waldeck-Rousseau and radical republicans such as Léon Bourgeois. Many of these had business interests, such as d’Arenberg, who was president of the Suez Canal Company, and Émile Cheysson, a former director of the Le Creusot steelworks and lecturer at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques, who was deeply committed to social engineering.52