Children of the Revolution Read online

  The threat from the right was in fact squarely dealt with. Those who had conspired against the army were punished, although the officer corps had not been fully republicanized and was still a stronghold of Catholic and conservative opinion. The Catholic Church, in particular certain teaching congregations, was dealt with by eliminating it from the education system. Although the Church remained powerful in society it ceased to be a political threat. In 1902 Albert de Mun founded a Catholic party, the Action Libérale Populaire, but it was not on the same scale as the German Centre Party or the Italian Partito Popolare. Like other reactionary leagues, the Ligue de la Patrie Française became an electoral body of little significance, and petered out in 1904. Action Française was a thorn in the Republic’s side, attacking its leaders as traitors to French interests, and the Camelots du Roi, who sold the daily Action Française on the streets, organized demonstrations such as that of 4 June 1908 when Zola’s ashes were reburied in the Panthéon and pot shots were taken at Dreyfus.83 The main right-wing party, however, were antidreyfusard Progressists who followed Méline into the Fédération Républicaine (1903), while the dreyfusard Progressists followed Waldeck-Rousseau into the Alliance Démocratique. The performance of the right, including the Fédération Républicaine, Action Libérale Populaire, royalists and nationalists, declined steadily in elections from 246 seats in 1902 to 167 in 1906, 148 in 1910 and 121 in 1914.

  The serious political threat came not from the right but from the left, from socialist parties and the anarcho-syndicalist penetration of the labour movement. Guesde and Vaillant issued a manifesto on 14 July 1899 condemning the acceptance of office in a bourgeois government by the so-called socialist Millerand and announced a return to revolutionary class war. The unveiling of The Triumph of the Republic was interrupted by demonstrators waving red and black flags and shouting ‘Vive la Commune’. Jaurès, by contrast, argued that ‘since reaction has formed a bloc, the Revolution must form a bloc.’84 For him the revolutionary seizure of power was a ‘hallucination’ that would lead only to bourgeois repression, as in 1871. In 1900 he and Guesde locked horns in debate at Lille. Jaurès conceded that society was divided between capitalists and proletarians, but argued that the ‘return of forces from the past’ such as the Church and the army sometimes obliged the proletariat to join the defence of the Republic and democracy. In a democratic republic, he said, socialists could come to power legally, by winning a majority, if necessary in alliance with other left-wing parties, and indeed this is what all socialists practised. Guesde, by contrast, argued that Millerand as a minister was a hostage of Waldeck’s bourgeois government and that Jaurès was tying the proletariat to ‘the tail of the imprisoning bourgeoisie, which had the shooting bourgeoisie of 1871 behind it’. The proletariat, he stated, must remain united around the principle of class war and never lose sight of the goal of revolution.85 As a result at the Paris congress of December 1900 the socialists divided over the question of participating in bourgeois governments into a Guesdist Parti Socialiste de France and Jaurès’s Parti Socialiste Français.

  Both Guesde and Jaurès disliked strike action, over which the parties had no control, and in 1902 Jaurès came into conflict with Aristide Briand who, while moving from anarchism to socialism, still believed in the legitimacy of the general strike.86 This was more than ever the strategy of anarchists who penetrated the labour movement. Pelloutier, secretary of the Fédération des Bourses du Travail and author of What is the General Strike? (1895), died of tuberculosis in 1901 at the age of thirty-three and his Fédération was merged with the Confédération Générale du Travail the following year. At its 1904 congress in Bourges, under the influence of Émile Pouget, who was very much Pelloutier’s heir, the CGT espoused the tactic of the general strike in pursuit of a popular goal, the eight-hour day, and launched such a strike on 1 May 1906.87 There followed two years of virtual class war, involving the miners of the Pas-de-Calais and metalworkers of Hennebont (Morbihan) in 1906, shoemakers of Fougères (Ille-et-Vilaine) and Raon l’Étape (Vosges) and the winegrowers of the Midi in 1907, post office workers and instituteurs whose aim to unionize and affiliate to the CGT was opposed by the government, and electricians who plunged the Paris Opéra into darkness. Then in 1908 strikes moved into the unskilled sector when the sand-quarriers of the Seine were fired on by troops, provoking another general-strike call on 3 August that year.88

  Waldeck’s attempt to construct a broad government of republican defence was frustrated by the elections of April–May 1902. In a Bloc des Gauches which won 350 seats his supporters took only 100 seats against 200 Radicals and 48 socialists. He was obliged to resign and died of cancer in 1904. To form the next ministry Loubet invited Émile Combes, a medical doctor and mayor of the small town of Pons in the Charente-Inférieure, and senator, founder and leader since 1891 of the Gauche Républicaine, the equivalent of the Radicals in the Senate. Combes’ finance minister, back after his disgrace in the Panama scandal and a career in banking, was Maurice Rouvier, placed there to reassure the markets. On the other hand, though Combes included no socialist in his ministry the government majority was held together in the Chamber by a Délégation des Gauches dominated by Jaurès, now re-elected to the Chamber. Since losing his seat in 1898 he had worked on his Socialist History of the French Revolution, in which he concluded that though the Revolution was bourgeois it had proclaimed the universal rights of man which it was up to the proletariat to fulfil in a socialist society.89 Revolution, he told the 1902 congress of the Parti Socialiste Français, was not a means but an end, not barricades and bullets but the gradual transformation by social reform from capitalism to collectivism.90

  Despite promises of income tax reform and the nationalization of railway companies the main obsession of Combes was to deal with the Catholic teaching congregations and the army. The former were dissolved by switching the Associations Law from protecting trade unions to eliminating religious congregations that had not been properly authorized. Files on the private lives of army officers included information provided by masonic lodges in order to ascertain who attended mass and used Catholic schools, with the aim of preferring more secular-minded and republican officers for promotion. This was exposed by Le Figaro in October 1904, and in the Chamber on 4 November war minister General André was slapped by Gabriel Syveton, treasurer of the Ligue de la Patrie Française and deputy for Paris.91 This affaire des fiches led to the fall of the Combes ministry, and to the death of Syveton – whether by murder or suicide was unclear – but even before then Combes had lost his supporters on the left.92 ‘I could never imagine that any government could limit the horizon of its ambitions to the struggle against the religious congregations,’ Alexandre Millerand told the Chamber in March 1904, denouncing the failure to undertake any social reform and in particular the delays to his pensions bill. In August Jaurès faced criticism from the International Socialist Congress, meeting in Amsterdam, where the German Social Democratic Party secured a majority against ‘revisionist’ tactics in favour of revolutionary rhetoric, and forced him to abandon Combes.93 In 1905 Jaurès joined Guesde in a united socialist party committed to Marxist principles, the Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO).

  Between 1906 and 1909 the dominant figure in French politics was Georges Clemenceau, who after the Panama scandal returned to parliament in 1902 as senator for the Var. Minister of the interior in March 1906, he finally became president of the council in October 1906, at the age of sixty-five. Never himself a member of the Radical Party he maintained its hold on power while saying of the Fédération Républicaine, ‘I do not claim the right to excommunicate them from the republican party.’94 Picquart, hero of the Dreyfus Affair, became minister of war. Poincaré, who had been finance minister under the previous government, declined to serve under him, so he offered the finance portfolio to Joseph Caillaux, who soon became frustrated by Clemenceau’s refusal to countenance his projects of progressive income tax and railway nationalization. Louis Barthou
, of the same generation as Poincaré and Caillaux, now in their mid-forties, took over Public Works. Aristide Briand, who had run unsuccessfully for the Chamber since 1889, was elected deputy for Clermont-Ferrand in 1902. He had honed his legal and diplomatic skills negotiating the Separation of Church and state in 1905 and been groomed for society in the salon of Madame de Caillavet, muse and mistress of Anatole France.95 Now appointed education minister he was released from his membership of the SFIO by Jaurès, who did not wish a second Millerand Affair. Like him, René Viviani, who was given the new Ministry of Labour, resigned from the SFIO.

  The elections of May 1906 gave another sixty seats to the Bloc des Gauches and reduced the grip of the right, which failed to make political capital out of the Separation of Church and state. The battle was no longer with them but with labour. As interior minister Clemenceau had sent 20,000 troops into the coal basin of the Pas-de-Calais in April 1906 to deal with a miners’ strike that followed a pit disaster in which 1,100 miners had died. He then dismissed 300 post office workers who went on strike, in order to stop public servants forming trade unions. On 1 May 1906 the CGT brought 200,000 workers on to the streets to support a general strike in favour of the eight-hour day. Clemenceau declared a state of siege, sent in the troops and arrested the labour leaders. ‘Your means of action is disorder,’ he declared, ‘my duty is to ensure order.’96 The scourge of government in the 1880s had become the ‘strike-breaker’ or ‘first cop in France’. Aristide Briand, now Clemenceau’s accomplice as a man of order, was violently criticized for his volte-face by Jaurès in a two-day speech in May 1907. This came as troops fired on demonstrating winegrowers on the Mediterranean coast at Narbonne and Montpellier, although in Béziers the soldiers mutinied, refusing to fire on demonstrators. Finally, on 2 June police fired shots on striking building workers holed up in a café at Vigneux, killing two of them. The ‘fusillade de la salle Ranque’ became a cause célèbre, triggering a CGT demonstration at Villeneuve-Saint-Georges on 30 July. Clemenceau had the CGT leaders arrested, which provoked a general strike on 3 August.

  When Briand became president of the council in July 1909 his aim was to break away from the tyranny of the Bloc des Gauches and to seek accommodation with Catholics and conservatives, a strategy that had not been attempted since before the Dreyfus Affair. His ministry left out Caillaux and was dominated by moderates: Barthou at the Justice Ministry, Millerand at Public Works, Viviani at Labour. In a keynote speech at Périgueux on 20 October 1909 he spoke of ‘apaisement’ and ‘détente’ and called for ‘union in the Republic of all French people who understand that struggle and strife offer no real prosperity… Our secret is to make people love the Republic.’ He urged electoral reform to replace the ‘stagnant pools’ of single-member constituencies which favoured the Radicals by a system of proportional representation that would allow all political currents to have a voice and, he hoped, would strengthen government authority.97 In favour of making workers stakeholders in the system rather than rebels and to win over moderate trade unionists he and Viviani finally carried through the workers’ pensions law. The elections of April–May 1910 brought in a new generation of deputies, who approved Briand’s ministry by 404 to 121, only the 75 socialists and extreme right against him. Even Albert de Mun and the Action Libérale Populaire were keen to embrace the new premier. When the railway workers went on strike in October 1910 Briand demonstrated his new hostility to the general strike and forced on his cabinet a law drafting strikers into the army for a period of twenty-one days and thus subjecting them to military law. Barthou, Millerand and Viviani opposed the decree as ultra vires, but it was approved by the Chamber by 329 votes to 183, with socialists and left-wing Radicals voting against.98 At their Rouen congress of October 1910 the Radicals denounced Briand’s ‘policy of reactionary compromises which throws the republican idea into confusion’, the first time a Radical congress had attacked a ministry.99 Briand resigned and formed a new ministry on 4 November. Ironically, since Barthou, Millerand and Viviani refused to serve, he was forced back on to the Radicals and apaisement came to a sudden stop.

  THE UNION SACRÉE

  After 1911 the reins of power were shared between one segment of the generation of 1860, which had originated in the socialist fold, including Briand and Millerand, and another segment, which had originated on the right, composed of Caillaux, Barthou and Poincaré. The latter were linked by their careers and even their private lives: both Caillaux and Barthou were vice-presidents of the Alliance Démocratique and went on holiday to Egypt together with their partners in the winter of 1910–11, Alice Barthou having introduced Caillaux’s future second wife, Henriette Rainouard, to him.100 Poincaré, for his part, was a witness at Caillaux’s wedding to Henriette in October 1911.101 Yet they were divided by political ambition and political style and were all the more savage because they knew the details of each other’s private lives. Caillaux became president of the council in June 1911, but did not include Barthou in his cabinet because Barthou was a former Briandist and Caillaux rejected Briand’s policy of apaisement. Besides, Caillaux – who according to his protégé Émile Roche, ‘with his shiny bald head, precise gestures, monocle, elegant dress, imperturbable confidence, was something of a Balzacian dandy’, a republican aristocrat with all the privileges of birth and education – considered Barthou, whose father was an ironmonger, to be ‘vulgar from head to toe, both morally and physically’.102 Barthou had his revenge in January 1912 when he sat with Poincaré on the parliamentary commission which investigated the Franco-German treaty that Caillaux had secretly negotiated to defuse the Morocco crisis and toppled Caillaux for selling France’s national interests short. Poincaré was invited to form the next government and with a view to continuing apaisement he offered Briand the Ministry of Justice and Millerand the Ministry of War. When the presidency of Armand Fallières came to an end in January 1913 the succession was about both principles and personalities. Clemenceau assumed the role of grand elector and pushed the cause of a Radical-Socialist senator Jules Pams. Raymond Poincaré, the rival candidate, who had been writing a biography of Adolphe Thiers that was never published, was promoted by Millerand and enjoyed the support of moderates and Catholics.103 Indeed he did a secret deal with Catholic leader Albert de Mun that if he won he would solemnize his civil marriage in church. Poincaré was elected with this conservative support and relaunched the policy of apaisement in his choice of premiers: Briand in January 1913, Barthou in March. Barthou announced a ministry of ‘détente, union and republican conciliation’, the centrepiece of which would be an increase in the duration of military service from two years to three, duly approved by parliament in July 1913.104

  France might have gone into the First World War on the basis of this apaisement, but the issue of the Three-Year Service Law provoked a massive backlash on the left. The CGT and SFIO mobilized against the proposed law in the spring and summer of 1913. Jean Jaurès made a speech to a crowd of 150,000 on the Pré-Saint-Gervais on the north-eastern outskirts of Paris on 25 May 1913, and a petition sponsored by the SFIO garnered 700,000 signatures. The antimilitarist movement gained a hold in the universities and lycées, as at the time of the Dreyfus Affair, drawing on a group of militants born around 1890. They included Raymond Lefebvre and Paul Vaillant-Couturier, who had graduated from the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly in Paris to the Sorbonne and were deeply moved by Jaurès’ famous speech.

  The Three-Year Law was voted by parliament in July 1913 but the revival of the left was exploited by Joseph Caillaux who, smarting from his defeat at the hands of Barthou and Poincaré, was in search of a coherent majority to force the gates of power. He managed to get himself elected leader of the Radical-Socialist Party at its Pau congress of October 1913 and on 30 November attacked Briandists as ‘those who sent people to sleep and were of no party because they wished to subjugate all of them’. On 2 December he toppled the Barthou ministry by ridiculing its plans to pay for the Three-Year Law by a public loan rather than by e
spousing his more radical scheme of a progressive income tax. Briand attacked Caillaux in his turn as a ‘plutocratic demagogue’ who ‘shook his fist at wealth while making a fortune with scandalous ease’.105 President Poincaré delayed the moment when he would be obliged to offer the premiership to Caillaux by offering it to the Radical-Socialist deputy of the Gard Gaston Doumergue, who made Caillaux his finance minister. Elections were due in April–May 1914 and while Barthou forged a Fédération des Gauches to stop Caillaux, Caillaux entered into talks with Jean Jaurès about a joint Radical–SFIO ministry should they win. After the elections Caillaux controlled 300 Radical and Socialist seats against 178 in Barthou’s centre and a mere 121 on the right. In order to prevent a cartel of the left which would abrogate the Three-Year Law Poincaré invited Viviani, who was committed to the law, to form a government, which was approved by the Chamber on 16 June.

  To finish off Caillaux, his personal life was exposed. From Caillaux’s first wife, Berthe Guydan, Barthou obtained love letters between Caillaux and Henriette which was evidence that he was having an affair with her during his first marriage, and these he passed on to Gaston Calmette, editor of Le Figaro. Advised that legal proceedings could not stop publication of her correspondence Henriette went to the Figaro offices on 16 March 1914 and shot Calmette dead. Although she was acquitted on 28 July 1914 her husband’s claim to the presidency of the council was in tatters.106 It was the outbreak of war that finally achieved political apaisement in what Poincaré called the ‘Union sacrée’. On 26 August Millerand returned as minister of war, and Briand as minister of justice. Included as minister without portfolio was not Jean Jaurès, cruelly assassinated on 31 July 1914, but Jules Guesde.