Children of the Revolution Read online

  The crusade against non-French languages was in some sense counter-productive. Rather than dissolve local loyalties and identities it often served to strengthen them. Frédéric Mistral, who retired to his Provençal village of Maillane in 1872, relaunched the Félibrige, his movement dedicated to defending Provençal culture, with new statutes at an inaugural banquet there in May 1876. Provençal liberties were for him a barrier against the ‘revolutionary virus’ spreading out from Paris to Lyon and Marseille and the Provençal language, that of the medieval troubadours, was a way to root people in their local communities, trades and faith. A Catholic and a royalist by instinct, he hoped to achieve many of the same goals by preaching the revival of provincial life rather than that of the Church and king. In the spring of 1884 he went to Paris to promote his new work, Nerto, a celebration of the Avignon papacy of the fourteenth century, and at the Félibrige festival demanded ‘a small place for the maternal tongue alongside French in the schools’. He denied that Provence had any separatist ambitions, but the loss of Alsace-Lorraine sensitized French intellectuals and politicians to the political dangers of local languages, and Edmond de Goncourt denounced Mistral as a ‘separatist troubadour’.27 Speaking in Avignon in 1888, Mistral again deplored the ban on local languages in schools. Respect for Provençal in schools, he reiterated, was ‘not a retrograde or anti-French idea. On the contrary it is the only way to preserve and spread… that provincial and local attachment and enthusiasm which alone gives life to the province, as it once gave liberty to Switzerland, independence to America and the Renaissance to Italy.’28

  Mistral, it is true, had no desire to give Provence or other French provinces any political form: his interest was literary, historical, folkloric. He had, nevertheless, disciples in the Félibrige movement whose ambitions were more political, and politically different. Xavier de Ricard joined the Félibrige at Montpellier in 1877 but his formative experience was the Paris Commune, after which he fled to Switzerland. Far from having royalist sympathies his vision was to bring back the federative republic dear to Proudhon. Where Mistral loved the Avignon of the popes, Ricard sympathized with heretical resistance to the Catholic Church, so potent in Languedoc, whether that of the medieval Cathars or the Cévennes Protestants persecuted by Louis XIV in the seventeenth century, and he told Mistral in 1878 that he was ‘a Huguenot of the will’.29 Most significantly, he was impatient with Mistral’s obsession with the Provençal language, dress and dancing. ‘I believe that the langue d’oc will never be fully revived until the country where it is spoken is liberated,’ he wrote to Mistral in 1879; ‘it is absolutely necessary that we acquire or reconquer our political and national autonomy.’30

  Xavier de Ricard was not the only dissenter. In 1892 a young generation of Félibres, born around 1860, parted company with Mistral not because they disagreed with his Catholic and conservative views but because, like Ricard, they believed that the cultural defence of local languages and customs had to be fortified by political action to reverse centuries of administrative centralization and to restore real power not to the departments, but to the historic provinces of the French monarchy. Where Mistral was concerned only with Provence, the younger generation believed that all French provinces should recover their historic liberties. At a meeting of Parisian Félibres at the Café Voltaire on 2 February 1892, two Prov-ençals, Frédéric Amouretti and Charles Maurras, read a manifesto announcing,

  We are fed up with keeping quiet about our federalist intentions. We can no longer confine ourselves to demanding the rights and duties of freedom for our language and writers; that freedom will not achieve political autonomy but will flow from it… We demand liberty for our communes… We want to release from their departmental cages the souls of provinces that are still used everywhere by everyone: Gascons, Auvergnats, Limousins, Béarnais, Dauphinois, Roussillonnais, Provençaux and Languedociens… We want sovereign assemblies in Bordeaux, Toulouse, Montpellier, in Marseille or Aix. These assemblies will run our administration, our courts, our schools, our universities, our public works.31

  They were duly expelled from Mistral’s Félibrige and set up their own Paris school of the Félibrige. The Republic was increasingly sensitive to the question of decentralization, and an extra-parliamentary commission was set up to examine it in 1895, but after 1898 Maurras marginalized himself by his insistence on political autonomy for the Ancien Régime French provinces, and conversion to the idea that only a restored monarchy would provide the necessary authority to pursue France’s ‘national destiny’, devolving ‘to communes matters that are properly municipal, to the provinces matters that are properly provincial’.32

  In the 1890s pressure to decentralize the French administration built up in a constituency far wider than the disciples of Mistral, and more generally across the political spectrum. Maurice Barrès, a native of that part of Lorraine that remained French, and grandson of an officer in Napoleon’s army, had a profound disdain for the parliamentary Republic which subordinated public to private interest and was elected a Boulangist deputy for Nancy in 1889. After the failure of Boulangism he refined his critique of the Republic, which he called ‘dissociated and decerebrated’. The parliamentary regime, he argued, was headless: ministers were beholden to deputies who could topple them on the most trivial issues, and deputies were beholden to constituents, whom they had to bribe and flatter to get re-elected. Both disposed of a centralized administration reduced to the task of managing the elections by patronage and funding a partisan press, and both were corrupted by private financial interests seeking political sanctions for their speculative schemes. Allied to the politicians were the schoolteachers of the republican school system, in which Catholic education was replaced by a state philosophy to which all citizens had to subscribe, based on an abstract duty to fellow citizens, the task of which however was simply to legitimate the shoddy regime. Barrès’ answer to this was a charismatic leader like Boulanger who would sweep clean the Augean stables, and propagate a morality much closer to home which taught the young to love the soil of their own province and to listen to the voices of their ancestors. Barrès spread these ideas in the short-lived Cocarde newspaper of 1894–5, and the even shorter-lived Ligue Nationale de la Décentralisation, but much more influentially in bestselling novels such as Les Déracinés of 1897. Les Déracinés traces the fortunes of a group of young men, uprooted from their native Lorraine by their philosophy teacher at Nancy, M. Bouteiller, a ‘son of reason’ who becomes a republican politician. It follows their careers in Paris where they discover that parliamentary politics are controlled by German-Jewish financiers such as the baron Jacques de Reinach. Two of the band, deprived of the salutary influence of family and province, descend into murder, leading to the guillotine, but the others are redeemed by rediscovering the message of ‘la terre et les morts’ derived from contact with Lorraine.

  Barrès differed from Maurras in that he believed that the energy of the provinces could be released within the Republic. ‘The federalist doctrine is consonant with the deepest tradition of France and the Revolution,’ he told an audience in Bordeaux in 1895. ‘Between 1789 and 1793 the Revolution was federalist; it was the Jacobins who centralized us decisively in June 1793… to deal with the temporary crises in the Vendée and on the Rhine.’33 For him the Jacobin Republic was an aberration, a more federal republic truer to French history. Similar ideas were upheld by Félibres who followed Xavier Ricard, indebted to Proudhon rather than to Mistral. Jean Charles-Brun, a young academic from Montpellier who took the agrégation in Paris in 1893 and was true to Mistral through his work on troubadours, joined Maurras’ Paris school of the Félibrige and argued in 1896 that ‘the felibrean idea gives patriotism a much more active sense; people dislike notions that are too abstract, and as Charles Maurras has said, a corner of sky or a wall are the surest road to nationalism.’34 He parted company with the Félibrige movement in 1897, considering that talk of restoring Ancien Régime provinces risked marginalizing decentrali
zers as reactionaries. Instead he favoured the notion of the region, a modern concept based on economic, geographical and historical ties. In 1900 he founded the Fédération Régionaliste Française, the ambition of which was to gather the energies of all ‘decentralizers, regionalists or federalists’ who were opposed to the Jacobin over-centralization of the Republic and believed in the ‘management of communal affairs by the municipality, regional affairs by the region and national affairs by the state’. It proclaimed itself resolutely above political parties and in 1904 included on its honorary committee men as diverse as Xavier de Ricard, Maurice Barrès, Charles Beauquier, radical deputy of the Doubs, and the socialist Charles Longuet. Originating in the south it was keen to build bridges to other areas where regionalists were active. Among organizations which affiliated to it were the Comité Flamand de France of Camille Looten, professor at the Catholic university of Lille, and the Union Régionaliste Bretonne, founded by the academic and writer Anatole le Braz in 1898 but soon taken over by the Marquis de l’Estourbeillon, deputy of the Morbihan.35

  CONTAINING SOCIALIST

  MUNICIPALITIES

  One of the fears provoked by the Paris Commune was that decentralization would play into the hands of revolutionaries who would sow a string of communes across the country. For this reason Paris was not allowed a mayor of its own, only a municipal council, each of the twenty arrondissements of central Paris and suburban communes having their own mayors and municipal councils. Other towns and cities benefited from the decentralization measures of 1882 and 1884, and in places where industrial workers were concentrated socialist parties soon began to make gains. In 1882 socialists won control of the mining town of Commentry in the Allier, and ex-miner Christophe Thivrier became mayor. Later elected a deputy, he was proud to wear his workers’ overalls over his frock coat. In 1884 Saint-Amand (Nord) and Vierzon (Cher) fell to the socialists, as in 1888 did Saint-Étienne and the Paris suburb of Saint-Ouen. Eighteen-ninety-two was a breakthrough year, in which socialists took control of sixty towns including the textile town of Roubaix (Nord), the mining town of Carmaux (Tarn), Montluçon (Allier), the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, busy with railway yards, engineering and chemical industries, and the ports of Marseille and Toulon. These industrial towns often returned socialist deputies too, with Jules Guesde elected at Roubaix and Jean Jaurès at Carmaux in 1893.

  Some of the socialist municipalities behaved defiantly. The Blanquists elected at Saint-Denis in 1892 banned religious processions, expelled the police from the police-station and put the likes of Jean-Baptiste Clément, author of the revolutionary song ‘Le Temps des cerises’, on the municipal payroll.36 Others acted more sensibly. Roubaix council, under former weaver, Guesdist socialist and mayor Henri Carette, implemented a wide programme of social welfare, including crèches for working mothers, free school meals, clothing and school equipment for poor children, cheap public restaurants, and assistance to old and sick workers, which both offered protection to the working class and consolidated a clientele.37

  There were in fact limits to how much revolution a socialist municipality could achieve. Municipal liberty was confined by the centralized state – municipal decisions could be overruled by prefects or the Conseil d’État. Christophe Thivrier was suspended as mayor of Commentry in 1888 for alleged ‘political correspondence’, sending a message of support to a trade union conference in Bordeaux, while in 1893 the prefect of the Nord annulled the decision of the Roubaix council to set up a municipal pharmacy offering cost-price drugs to the public.38 The Conseil d’État permitted the municipalization of water services as contributing to the public good, but ruled against that of bus and tram services in 1897 and of gas works before allowing Marseille to go ahead with gas municipalization in 1907, on the grounds that private enterprise would be more efficient and did not drain public finances.39 Struggles against monopoly capitalism were not always won by socialist councils. A project of the socialist municipality re-elected at Saint-Étienne in 1900 to municipalize the electricity supply from the Alps monopolized by the Edison Electrical Company, in order to provide cheap electricity for the machines of ribbon workers in their homes, was frustrated by the Edison Company and the Conseil d’État, which stuck rigidly to free-market principles in this case.40

  Many municipalities did not have the resources to spend as they wished, dependent as they were on the octroi or excise and unable to derive much from rates because of poor housing. Some working-class towns remained faithful to industrial feudalism, which provided for their needs. The steel town of Le Creusot was controlled by Henri Schneider from 1871 to 1896 and thereafter by his son Eugène Schneider II, who responded to strikes and unionization in 1899–1900 by organizing a lockout and sacking militants.41 Socialists, once in power, were frequently defeated at a subsequent poll by right-wing parties representing financial or industrial interests. In 1902 the Roubaix socialists were defeated by cotton magnate Eugène Motte, chair of the Roubaix-Tourcoing Chamber of Commerce and of the board of the Northern Railway, although he was obliged to develop his own social welfare policies to retain support.42 The same year the socialist municipality of Marseille, whose ambitious social welfare policies and support for a dock strike which closed the port for forty-three days in 1901 nearly ruined the city, was ousted by conservatives fronting the powerful Chamber of Commerce.43 More successful was the Lyon municipal council under mayor Victor Augagneur, a professor of surgery at the Lyon Medical Faculty who moved towards socialism as a result of the Dreyfus Affair and built a republican bloc, including socialists, which captured the city hall in 1900. He sorted out municipal finances by replacing the traditional octroi, which fell mainly on the food of the poor, with a range of property rates and taxes on horses, cars and entertainment, borne mainly by the rich, and undertook a programme of municipalization of water and lighting, abattoirs, and nursing and social services hitherto provided by religious congregations who were now expelled.44 In 1905 he was appointed governor of Madagascar but had groomed as his successor Édouard Herriot, history master at the Lycée Ampère who had become politicized by the Dreyfus Affair, a Radical-Socialist who disliked the Communist Manifesto’s idea of class struggle, wrote theses on the friends of liberty Madame de Staël and Madame Récamier, and hated the Terror which in response to the federalist revolt of 1793 had declared, ‘Lyon is no more.’ In these capable hands Lyon was governed, except during the occupation, from 1905 to 1957.45

  GRANDE PATRIE, PETITE PATRIE

  Just as the French state was forced to negotiate with socialist municipalities, so it had to deal with local communities whose first language was not French. The law after 1880, as we have seen, was that French only was to be taught in schools, but central to the education of children was the catechism class in preparation for first communion, which after 1882 was eliminated from publicly funded schools and was generally delivered by the parish priest in the vicarage. In northern Flanders and western Brittany, Flemish and Breton were preserved as the language of instruction for the catechism, and indeed for sermons in the church, not only because they were the mother tongue but because they were felt to be a powerful medium of the faith, whereas French was seen to be the vehicle of modern, irreligious ideas. As the archbishop of Cambrai, whose diocese included Flanders, said in 1882, ‘Flemish is the language of heaven.’46

  Where to draw the line between French as the official language and minority, private languages, even in Flanders and Brittany, was not always clear. In their dark coats, instituteurs or primary school teachers assumed the role of ‘black hussars of the Republic’, bearers of French and republican values from large cities to isolated communes, and they were frequently rivals of the parish priest, whose mission was to defend the faith. In 1900 an incident flared up at Killem in Flanders where the instituteur demanded that his son be taught the catechism for the first communion in French, whereas diocesan practice was that in Flanders it should be taught in Flemish. The education authorities in the Nord discovered that in
twenty-three Flemish communes the catechism was taught in both languages and in twenty in Flemish only, and were worried that Flemish was being used to encourage anti-French feeling. The republican authorities used the sanction they wielded against the clergy under the Concordat, namely to suspend their stipends if the local mayor did not certify that they taught the catechism in French. Seeking a compromise, the archbishop of Cambrai explained that ‘French is studied in school but at home, in the street, at work and at play people speak Flemish instinctively.’ The Flemish, like Bretons, Basques and Provençals, he added, ‘love both their great and little patries’; affection for one did not undermine loyalty to the other.47

  The Republic did not back down from its commitment to French and when Émile Combes became president of the council he issued a decree on 29 September 1902 forbidding the use of non-French languages in catechism classes and in church sermons. ‘The Bretons will only be republicans when they speak French,’ he declared.48 This stirred up particular trouble in Finistère, where the bishop of Quimper reported that over two-thirds of the population could not understand a sermon in French, and only in five of his 210 parishes were sermons given uniquely in French. However, the Radical government in Paris was out of step both with local republican deputies, who argued that the Breton tongue could convey republican as well as reactionary sentiments, and with the prefect of Finistère who feared that such brutal legislation would provoke an anti-republican backlash at the next elections. The government nevertheless insisted on suspending the stipends of sixty-seven parish priests who refused to undertake to preach and teach in French. In the end a compromise was found. Clergy continued quietly to teach catechism and give sermons in Breton and Flemish until, after the Separation of Church and state in 1905, the state no longer had the weapon of suspending clerical salaries. The elections of 1906, which produced an even more convincing republican majority, demonstrated that local people could at one and the same time defend their local language and be loyal to the Republic.49