Children of the Revolution Read online

  At the turn of the century the new medium of cinema began to emerge. It separated itself from the fairground and theatre only with difficulty. The Lumière brothers from Lyon who manufactured photographic products demonstrated the first film in Paris in 1895 and for the Exposition of 1900 they projected a twenty-five-minute show on to a giant screen 21 by 18 metres. For the 5,000 viewers at a time who saw it the effect of the film was not unlike the panoramas they were already used to, created by a large drum of painted scenes revolving round the audience, showing Madagascar or the trans-Siberian railway. After Georges Méliès bought the theatre of the conjuror Robert Houdin in 1888 and developed special effects such as the guillotined man reluctant to lose his head, it was a short step to the fantastic films he made at his Montreuil studio after 1897, such as Cinderella, Bluebeard or Jules Verne’s Round the Moon, which also used special effects. Charles Pathé, who sold Edison phonographs and cylinders of popular songs in fairgrounds, built his own studio at Vincennes in 1905 and made melodramatic films for a fairground audience such as The Story of a Crime in 1901. More revolutionary were the comic films he made after 1905 with actor Max Linder, a precursor of Charlie Chaplin, such as Max’s Holidays and Max’s Wedding, which created the first film star, fêted from Barcelona to St Petersburg in the years before 1914. Meanwhile film-maker Victorin Jasset engineered the crossover between adolescent fiction and film with his Nick Carter, King of Detectives in 1908, Zigomar, King of Bandits in 1911, and, inevitably, Zigomar against Nick Carter in 1912.47

  Alongside cinema, a new dimension to mass culture at the turn of the century was sport. Until then, sport had meant essentially horse-racing, with the track of Longchamp in the 1870s attracting 200,000 visitors a year (generally punters), 500,000–600,000 in the 1890s. It also meant gymnastics in the German or Swedish style that took off in the wake of the defeat of 1870, with a Union of French Gymnastic Clubs set up in 1873, in an attempt to make the young male population fitter for war. Parallel to this developed athletics clubs, such as the Racing Club de France, which after 1892 organized Sunday races in the Bois de Boulogne, with runners wearing jockey colours and caps, sometimes carrying whips, and bet upon as though they were themselves horses in a flat race. Rugby and football penetrated from England, the first extended along the wine-trade route into south-west France, the second into Channel ports such as Le Havre, into Paris and the northern industrial towns following other business connections. When the Le Havre Athletic Club won the French championship in 1899, six of its players were English. Football and rugby clubs were generally set up by alumni of elite secondary schools, and provided winter activity for those doing athletics in the summer. The development of athletics was furthered by Pierre de Coubertin, a Jesuit-educated noble who studied at the Paris Law Faculty and the École Libre des Sciences Politiques, was worried by the neglect of physical education and character-building in French lycées and believed that England’s enthusiasm for team games helped to fortify its ruling class against revolution and underpinned its empire-building. In 1889 he founded the Union of French Athletic Societies and on 20 March 1892 refereed a football match in the Bois de Boulogne between Stade Français and Racing Club de France in front of a crowd of 2,000. In this period athletics, along with the football and rugby that grew out of it, retained a somewhat bourgeois and English profile. As one sports paper noted in 1891, ‘The Grand Prix de Longchamp attracts over fifty thousand, a football match hardly five hundred.’48

  Much more French and much more popular was cycling. It was the product of a technological revolution that brought down the price of cycles from 500 to 100 francs in the 1890s, so that there were 3.5 million of them in France in 1914. The French Cycling Union set up in 1881 had 44,000 members by 1893, and acted as a formidable lobby, persuading the Paris municipal council and other town councils to fund cycle stadiums as popular race-courses in the 1890s to match those of the rich at Auteuil and Longchamp. In time road-racing became even more popular, with big prizes and accolades for rival manufacturers to be made in the Bordeaux-to-Paris and Paris-to-Brussels races. These gave opportunities to young men of working-class origin, such as Charles Terront, the son of a railway mechanic of Saint-Ouen and a former errand-boy for Havas, to win fame and money. It was however the intervention of the press that made cycling into a sport of mass appeal. This was the work of one man, Henri Desgranges, who gave up a career in the law to become manager of the Parc des Princes cycle stadium in 1897 and three years later took control of a new sports daily financed by the Comte de Dion, L’Auto. In 1903 he boosted the fortunes of both cycling and L’Auto by launching the Tour de France, with prize money of 20,000 francs. L’Auto pumped up the Tour, inventing heroic stories such as that of ‘the Old Gaulois’ Christophe, who in 1911 carried his machine with a snapped fork down the Pyrenees to have it repaired by a blacksmith before he continued his route. Circulation of L’Auto, which had a monopoly of the coverage of the Tour, went from 20,000 to 120,000 in 1913, with 332,000 during the Tour in July 1914.49 This supreme amalgam of racing, journalism and advertising epitomized the versatility and success of mass culture.

  15

  Rebuilding the Nation

  The defeat of 1870 precipitated France into the lower rank of the great powers, below Germany, Great Britain and Russia, above Italy but at about the same level as the Habsburg Monarchy, itself defeated by Germany in 1866. Defeat and occupation led to civil war in 1871 and a country profoundly divided, not least on whether the army should be used to defend France’s frontiers or suppress revolution at home. In addition, defeat demoralized France as a nation and demonstrated the fragility of its national identity. Three challenges therefore confronted France. First, whether it could escape from diplomatic isolation and through military feats, outside Europe, regain a place among the great powers. Second, whether it could rebuild national unity and in particular recover the confidence of the nation in its army. Lastly, whether it could define and propagate a coherent and confident national consciousness to underpin its diplomatic and military endeavours.

  IMPOSSIBLE REVANCHE

  The Treaty of Frankfurt which ended the war of 1870–71 dictated not only the loss of Alsace-Lorraine but the obligation to pay re parations to the new German Empire while German forces occupied part of France. President of the Republic Adolphe Thiers paid the final instalment on 5 September 1871 and German troops marched out of Verdun and across the border on 13 September. A League for the Deliverance of Alsace-Lorraine had been set up after the Treaty by the Alsatian industrialist and deputy to the National Assembly, Scheurer-Kestner, but when Chancellor Bismarck objected it was dissolved and Jules Grévy, president of the Assembly, told him that France must renounce Alsace. ‘Do not believe the madmen who tell you otherwise and who have aggravated our misfortunes by espousing a hopeless cause.’1

  Despite France’s massive humiliation a huge public turned up to watch a military review at Longchamp in June 1871, when 120,000 French soldiers marched past, headed by Marshal MacMahon, commander at Sedan the previous September, who was embraced by Thiers.2 The defeated army had regained some of its lustre by suppressing the Paris Commune, but this had also discredited the army and called into question what kind of an army France should have. Old republicans such as Edgar Quinet deplored the army having ‘its eyes fixed on the interior, obsessed by civil war, and not destined for distant wars’. He argued that it should be drawn from the entrails of the nation like the Prussian Landwehr of 1806, with all citizens doing three years’ military service, the vehicle of national revival.3 The nation-in-arms, however, reminded Thiers too much of Gambetta’s levée en masse of 1870 which had led to the Commune and which would be like ‘putting a gun on the shoulder of every socialist’.4 His alternative was to divide the population of military age into two, to make the first serve under the colours for five years, becoming Napoleonic grognards, while the other half would do only six months’ service, and go into the reserve. Although military service was compulsory, seminarists,
trainee teachers and most students were exempted.5 This semi-professional army may have been insulated against revolution but it did nothing to rebuild national unity.

  Revanche (revenge) against Germany in the sense of a war to recover Alsace-Lorraine was simply not an option in the years after 1870. France had no allies and no stomach for a fight. Although Gambetta had walked out of the Assembly in protest against the Treaty of Frankfurt Bismarck considered that Catholic ultramontanes were more likely to start a war to recover the pope’s lost territories than republicans were to regain Alsace-Lorraine. Seeking to escape his reputation as a warmonger, Gambetta told a republican audience at Saint-Quentin in November 1871, ‘never speak of the foreigner, but let it be understood that we are always thinking of him.’6 There is some evidence that Bismarck provided financial help for the republicans in the 1877 elections that followed the Seize Mai crisis, on condition that they abandon all references to revenge.7 When Gambetta and his mistress Léonie Léon toured Germany in the autumn of 1881 there were rumours that he had visited Bismarck on his country estate of Varzin, but as Bismarck would not relax his grip on Alsace-Lorraine a meeting would have been pointless. That said, Gambetta’s abandonment of the idea of revenge terminated his relationship with the salon hostess Juliette Adam who had sponsored his rise to power for a decade.8

  SHAPING A NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS

  While France’s fight with Germany was taking place on the battlefield in the autumn of 1870 a debate was also taking place in the universities, as historians argued about whether Alsace-Lorraine should be properly French or German. Theodor Mommsen, history professor at Berlin, stated that a nation was defined by its language, which expressed the soul of the people, and thus Alsace and the Moselle department, which predominantly spoke a German dialect, had legitimately been recovered by the Reich. Fustel de Coulanges, who had been a history professor at Strasbourg between 1860 and 1870, argued that a nation was based not on language or race but on ‘a community of ideas, interests, sentiments, memories and hopes’; in a word, ‘la patrie is what you love.’ ‘If Alsace is and remains French,’ he concluded, ‘it is uniquely because it wishes to.’9 After the war, only 10 per cent of the population of Alsace-Lorraine opted to remain French, but this was in large part explained by the fact that to remain French they had to leave their province and their property.10 The view of French intellectuals was nevertheless that even those Alsatians and Lorrainers who stayed in the Reich remained French in memory and aspiration, and thus Alsace-Lorraine became a model for French thinking about nationhood.

  In a seminal lecture at the Sorbonne in 1882 Ernest Renan argued against the Germanic idea that the nation was a Volk defined by a single language and race. ‘France is Celtic, Iberian and Germanic,’ he declared, while ‘Germany is Germanic, Celtic and Slav.’ While the United States and England spoke English and Spain spoke Spanish, he continued, Switzerland spoke three or four languages but was still a nation because nationality was a question of will. He continued,

  A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. This is made up of two things which are really only one. One in the past, the other in the present. One is the collective ownership of a rich legacy of memories, the other is the present consent or desire to live together, the will to continue to develop the inheritance it has received intact… The nation, like the individual, is the culmination of a long past of striving, sacrifice and dedication. The cult of ancestors is of all cults the most legitimate; ancestors have made us who we are. A heroic past, great men, glory (I mean the real kind) are the social capital on which the national idea is based. To have common glories in the past and a common will in the present; to have done great things together and to wish to do more of them, that is the prerequisite of a people. We love in proportion to the sacrifices we have agreed to, to the evils we have suffered. Indeed, collective suffering unites more than joy. As far as national memories are concerned, mourning is more important than triumph, because mourning imposes duties and dictates a collective effort… The existence of a nation is, if you will excuse the expression, an everyday plebiscite, as the existence of an individual is a perpetual affirmation of life… It is never in the real interest of a nation to annex or keep a country in spite of itself. The will of a nation is in the end the only legitimate criterion and the one to which we must always return.11

  After the war was over the French indeed concentrated not so much on revanche as on rebuilding a national spirit that had been demoralized by defeat and was now deeply divided by political and religious conflict. A first step was to devise an ‘official history’ that would underline the continuity of the national struggle and the coherence of its identity over and above its sufferings and divisions. Ernest Lavisse, who succeeded Fustel de Coulanges at the École Normale Supérieure in 1876 and began to lecture at the Sorbonne in 1880, derived a sense of the ever-present past from his grandmother, who recalled the occupation of Picardy by Cossack forces in 1815.12 Beginning his Sorbonne lectures in 1881 he invited historians to ‘give the children of France that pietas erga patriam which must be founded on an understanding of their country’. Over and above the quarrel between the monarchical past and republican present, they must teach ‘the notion of solidarity that unites the present to the past, the living to their ancestors’, and nurture ‘that national pride that is the solid foundation of patriotism’.13 He launched a History of France that was written over the next forty years by his former pupils who were at the École Normale Supérieure in the 1870s, nine volumes preceding the Revolution, nine volumes after. At the same time he wrote school textbooks such as that of 1884 which ended by explaining that France had been defeated in 1870 because the French loved peace too much and had forgotten how to fight. ‘Our disasters teach us that we must not love those who hate us, that we must love our patrie France first, and humanity after.’14

  If the story of common glories and sufferings was taken care of by Lavisse and his acolytes, the cult of France’s great ancestors was undertaken in a series of public commemorations. After the liberation of French territory in 1873 particular focus fell on previous heroes and heroines who had united the country, resisted foreign invasion, and sacrificed themselves in the attempt. Exalted above all were Joan of Arc, who in 1429 steeled the indecisive Charles VII at Chinon to fight the English, raised the siege of Orléans, and had the king crowned at Reims before attacking Paris and being burned at the stake at Rouen. Alongside her was Vercingétorix, the Gallic chief who had defeated Julius Caesar at the battle of Gergovia in 52 bc before succumbing to him at Alésia and being taken in chains to Rome for execution. These two heroes, imagined hand in hand for the Salon of 1872 by the sculptor Chatrousse, symbolized an eternal France that went back to ancient Gaul and a united France, despite the battles that took place between rival political and religious factions to ‘own’ their memory. Joan was claimed both by the republican followers of Michelet, who saw her as a ‘girl of the people’ who saved France despite the incompetence or treachery of king, nobles and clergy, and by the Catholic Church which saw her as sent by God to restore France to its divine mission and as a candidate for sainthood. In fact there was now some convergence in the interpretations. Dupanloup, bishop of Orléans, calling for Joan to be made a saint in 1869, described her as a ‘daughter of the people’ inspired by a double love, ‘the love of God and of her country’. Meanwhile, at the unveiling of the famous Frémiet statue on the place des Pyramides in 1874 poems were read by the republican patriot Paul Déroulède.15 On this model the epic journey of Joan of Arc was commemorated in towns and cities that erected equestrian statues to her at the end of the nineteenth century, from Chinon and Rouen to Orléans and Reims.

  The cult of Vercingétorix was embedded in the landscape rather than the city, but the site of his defeat at Alésia was disputed between partisans of Alise-Sainte-Reine (Côte d’Or), which raised a great statue to him there in 1865, and those of Alaise (Doubs), each side sponsoring frantic excavations. The sculptor Bartholdi exh
ibited an equestrian statue of Vercingétorix in the Salon of 1870, and a group of Gallic chiefs galloping over a fallen Roman at the Salon of 1878. In an overlapping dispute about the origins of the French nation, Fustel de Coulanges took the view that the defeat of Vercingétorix by Caesar in 52 bc had allowed France to be civilized by the Romans, while only the baptism of the Frankish king Clovis had made France the eldest daughter of the Church. On the other hand, Albert Réveille, who became professor of Celtic studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in 1876, defended the Gallic point of view that the chieftain ‘fought and died not for a canton, nor for an overlord, nor for a dynasty, but pro patria, for the Gallic fatherland, which is still ours’.16