Children of the Revolution Read online

  COLONIALISTS AND THEIR ENEMIES

  After the defeat of 1870 there was very little for ambitious young soldiers to do except to further the colonial ambitions of France. Joseph-Simon Galliéni, who had joined the marines from Saint-Cyr at the age of twenty-one in 1870 and, captured at Sedan, spent six months as a POW in Germany, was sent by the governor of Senegal in 1879 to explore the upper Niger. He concluded a treaty the following year with Ahmadou, sultan of Ségou, establishing a French protectorate and trading rights on the Niger in return for guns and money. Received as a hero on his return in 1882, he married a rich heiress, published Voyage to the Soudan in 1885, and returned there as commander of French Sudan in 1886. Five years younger than Galliéni, Jesuit-educated Hubert Lyautey graduated from Saint-Cyr in 1875 and was involved in Albert de Mun’s workers’ circles before serving in Algeria, where he learned Arabic and championed direct relations between French soldiers and tribal chiefs rather than the expansion of the civil administration. This anticipated a distrust between colonial soldiers and the French administration and politics which persisted throughout the Third Republic.17

  Ambitious young soldiers stuck in Europe were equally frustrated. Vicomte Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, who was also taken prisoner at Sedan, became attaché at the embassy of St Petersburg at the age of twenty-nine in 1877. He was present at the Congress of Berlin in 1878 when the great powers pinned back Russian ambitions in the Balkans, and Great Britain managed to obtain Cyprus from the Ottoman Empire. Vogüé noted that France had no more weight than Italy and that the French ‘returned from Berlin and those satiated giants with such a sadness that you could almost hear the collapse of our old foreign policy. Oh Spain!’18 In fact at Berlin Bismarck and the British foreign secretary Lord Salisbury gave France a green light to further its colonial ambitions in Tunisia, Salisbury as a quid pro quo for Cyprus, Bismarck because he wanted to take France’s thoughts off Alsace-Lorraine. The only other power that had an interest in Tunisia that France could offend was Italy, and when it was offended it jumped straight into Bismarck’s arms in the form of a Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria. The government of Jules Ferry used the pretext of an attack by Krumir tribesmen in the south of the country to impose a protectorate on the Bey of Tunis under the Treaty of Bardo in May 1881. Ferry defended his action as ‘the triumph of civilization over barbarism’ and argued that ‘France was not lightly resigned to play the part of a greater Belgium in the world’, while Gambetta declared, ‘France is recovering its rank as a great power again.’19

  Catastrophe, however, almost immediately followed in Egypt, where the French had built the Suez Canal before 1870. The khedive of Egypt was maintained in power by foreign loans he could no longer pay off, and British and French interference was deeply resented by the local population and military. After riots in Alexandria on 12 June 1882 had killed sixty Europeans, the British and French planned a joint intervention. The Freycinet government, however, was fiercely attacked in the Chamber of Deputies by Georges Clemenceau at the head of radical opinion, who questioned the wisdom of the expedition. As a result the Chamber refused credits for military action, the ministry was toppled on 29 July 1882, and British forces marched into Cairo alone on 15 September. ‘This country’, observed Vogüé, who had just resigned from the diplomatic service, ‘has as many reserves of virility as a eunuch.’20 Once the enormity of the decision became clear, the Chamber was eager to recover some honour, and when the naval captain de Brazza returned from the Congo with a treaty signed with King Makoko the Chamber and Senate endorsed it emphatically, on 22 November 1882, triggering another phase in the ‘scramble for Africa’.21

  France’s bid to become a colonial power was fiercely opposed by radicals who argued that the country was wasting men and resources that needed to be husbanded for a future war on the Rhine, whenever that came, and that by scrambling for Africa it was simply doing the bidding of Bismarck. At the time of the Berlin conference of 1884 which partitioned Africa Clemenceau called Ferry ‘the protégé of M. Bismarck’.22 Another leading anti-colonialist was Paul Déroulède, who resigned from a commission on military education in 1882 when it became clear that Ferry favoured only gymnastics in schools, not a basic military training, and founded the Ligue des Patriotes. This demanded the revision of the Treaty of Frankfurt and the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine and in the meantime ‘the liberation of the soul of France which is still occupied and oppressed by the foreigner’ – this liberation to be furthered by a ‘patriotic and military education by means of books, songs, shooting and gymnastics’. At a prize-giving for the first national shooting championships in 1884 Déroulède declared, ‘I have said it before and I repeat that before going to plant the French flag where it has never flown, we should replant it where it has flown before, where we have all seen it with our own eyes.’23

  As he spoke France was becoming embroiled in a colonial war with China. In what is now Vietnam French power was being built out from Cochin-China in the south to Annam in the centre and Tonkin in the north. Jules Ferry, who oversaw the campaign, defended French strategy as designed to gain control of the Red River and gain access to a market of 400 million consumers in China, while Freycinet endorsed the policy of ‘indirect revanche’.24 However, Chinese forces drove back the French from Langson and when Ferry asked the Chamber on 30 March 1885 for another 100,000 francs to avenge Langson, to defend their grip on Indo-China and ‘for our honour in the entire world’, he was exposed to another scathing attack from Clemenceau. ‘Is there not enough scope here for human ambition,’ he asked, ‘and is not the idea of increasing the sum total of knowledge, prosperity, liberty, law, and organizing the fight against ignorance, vice and poverty a better use of social energies and enough challenge for a politician or party?’25 ‘Ferry the Tonkinois’ was overthrown and Clemenceau and the Ligue des Patriotes lobbied for the promotion to the War Ministry of the republican General Boulanger, who promised to turn the army more into the nation-in-arms and take a firm line against Bismarck. Unfortunately, as in 1870, Bismarck proved a master of political manipulation. Unable to push through the Reichstag the bill that provided seven years of credit for the German army, he made a violent speech to it on 11 January 1887, stating in no uncertain terms that Boulanger meant war. He then dissolved the Reichstag, sent 75,000 reservists to Alsace-Lorraine, secured a governmental majority and had the military credits voted. French republicans were now faced with the possibility of a war of revenge and backed down. The government in which Boulanger was war minister was overturned by a combination of moderate republicans and conservatives on 16 May 1887, and Boulanger was sent to take up a provincial command in Clermont-Ferrand, seen off in style at the Gare de Lyon by the Ligue des Patriotes.

  Although Boulanger enjoyed a brief popularity, this did not suggest that the French were warmongers. His opposition to the republican political class was the main reason for his success. There was indeed a growing hostility to the army as it had been organized in 1872, with long-term service for some and exemption for others. Around 1890 there was a spate of antimilitarist novels, written by men of the generation born around 1860, who had not been marked by the defeat of 1870 as their fathers had, and who criticized the harsh conditions of barrack life. Lucien Descaves, a great admirer of Louise Michel and Pissarro, wrote Sous-offs (NCOs) in 1889, a barely fictionalized account of brutality, drunkenness, disease and prostitution set in garrison towns where he had served for four years. This led to a prosecution of the author and editors brought by the Ministry of War. It was followed by Georges Darien’s Biribi (1890), a story based on his experiences in a disciplinary battalion in Tunisia, and Georges Courteline’s Train de 8h47 (1891), a reaction to his conscription after drawing a short straw.26 Much criticism was aimed at the semi-professional army which since Louis-Napoleon’s coup of 1851 and the suppression of the Paris Commune was regarded in left-wing circles as the vehicle of political reaction and social order more than national defence. The military service law of 18
89 introduced compulsory service for three years and reduced exemptions, moving much closer to a national army. However, the effect was not felt immediately. On 1 May 1891 French troops fired on demonstrating textile workers at Fourmies in the Nord. Marcel Cachin, a student in Bordeaux, recalled that he had joined the socialist party in 1891 on hearing of the Fourmies massacre. The Marxist leader Paul Lafargue, accused of provoking the incident, was defended by the socialist deputy Alexandre Millerand who was a critic of the army then, but as minister of war twenty years later would have a very different attitude to militarism.27

  THE FRANCO-RUSSIAN ALLIANCE

  For twenty years France had been diplomatically isolated as Bismarck locked Austria-Hungary and Italy into the Triple Alliance and Austria-Hungary and Russia into the Dreikaiserbund. Tsar Alexander III was no fan of French ministries with Jacobin generals who expelled members of former French ruling families: ‘your government is no longer the Republic,’ he told the French ambassador, ‘it is the Commune.’28 Relations between the two countries were improving, however, on a course that would lead to a Franco-Russian alliance in 1894. Juliette Adam had long been a friend of Russia. She visited it in 1882, accompanied by Melchior de Vogüé. De Vogüé had witnessed the turn-out of 100,000 people for the funeral of Dostoevsky in 1881, and this moved him to publish his bestselling Russian Novel (1886), which brought Dostoevsky along with Gogol, Turgenev and Tolstoy to the attention of the French reading public as voices of suffering in a noble and passionate country.29 In 1886 Paul Déroulède, a regular of her salon, went to Russia and met Panslav leaders such as Katkov, who preached a forward policy in the Balkans to free Slav peoples under Austrian or Ottoman domination. Juliette Adam founded a Franco-Russian Artistic and Literary Association in 1888, which also popularized Tchaikovsky, and a Society of Friends of Russia in 1890.30 French enthusiasts for Russia were not only literary. In 1888 German bankers lost out to their French counterparts in the battle to offer loans to the Russian government and Russian industry. The so-called ‘Russian loans’ floated in the French money markets were immensely attractive to French investors, mainly in mining and iron and steel industries stimulated by the building of the trans-Siberian railway. At the outbreak of the First World War 25 per cent of all French foreign investment was in Russia, and 38 per cent of new French investments since 1882, as against 13 per cent of German and under 3 per cent of British investment.31 Diplomatic and military ties followed behind. The Reinsurance Treaty of 1887, by which Bismarck tried to tie in Russia after the lapse of the Dreikaiserbund, itself lapsed in 1890 on Bismarck’s fall from power, leaving Russia open to new allies. The arrest of Russian anarchists in France that year persuaded Alexander III that the Republic was a respectable government after all, and in July 1891, when a French squadron visited the Russian naval base of Kronstadt, the tsar stood bareheaded while the Marseillaise was played. Under a military convention of August 1892 France and Russia pledged themselves to a defensive alliance against German aggression, and following a return visit of the Russian fleet to Toulon in 1893 a special train took Russian dignitaries to celebrations in Paris and Versailles, at which Juliette Adam was resplendent.32 A Franco-Russian alliance was formally agreed on 4 January 1894, and a bridge over the Seine was built in honour of Alexander III, which was opened by the new tsar, Nicholas II, when he visited France with the Tsarina Alexandra in 1896.

  SHOWDOWN AND ENTENTE WITH

  GREAT BRITAIN

  After 1890 France’s principal enemy appeared to be not so much Germany as Great Britain. In July that year Great Britain concluded a treaty with Germany giving the latter the North Sea island and naval base of Heligoland in return for Germany renouncing its claims to Zanzibar and Uganda and recognizing the Nile valley as a British sphere of influence. The following month France relinquished similar claims to Zanzibar and the Nile valley in return for a free hand in annexing Madagascar. This was regarded as a sell-out in French colonial circles which now began to organize and agitate. A Committee for French Africa was set up in 1890 under the Prince Auguste d’Arenberg and journalist Harry Allis to support French claims as widely as possible in Africa. The French Colonial Union of 1893 under Joseph Chailley-Bert, a lawyer and professor at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques, was a business lobby which pressed the government to develop railways, mines and settlements in Africa and Indo-China. A Colonial Group formed in the Chamber of Deputies in 1892, ninety strong, rising to 120 after the elections of 1893. One of its leaders was Eugène Étienne, born in Oran to a soldier serving in Algeria, educated in Marseille, a champion of the Marseille–Oran shipping business and elected deputy for Oran in 1881. The other was Théophile Delcassé, the son of a minor legal official in the Pyrenean department of the Ariège who had a career in teaching and the Gambettist press before marrying the widow of a former deputy of the Ariège and winning a seat in the same department in 1889. These leaders soon acquired ministerial influence as under-secretary of state for colonies, Étienne in 1887 and 1889–92 and considered an unofficial colonial minister even when out of office, Delcassé in 1893 and a fully fledged minister for colonies in 1894–5. About the same ages as Galliéni and Lyautey, old enough to be marked as young men by the defeat of 1870, they formed a nexus dedicated to restoring French greatness. Étienne was indeed the patron of General Galliéni, who served in Tonkin with his second-in-command Lyautey and was sent to Madagascar as commander-in-chief and resident-general in 1896, again with Lyautey, on a mission to pacify it.33

  The ambition of the French colonial party, notwithstanding the treaties of 1890, was to prevent Britain building a string of colonial possessions from the Cape to Cairo and instead forge a French empire from Senegal in the west to Somaliland in the east. This would mean sending a military expedition to beat the British forces in Egypt in a race to the headwaters of the Nile. Securing the upper Nile would have the added advantage of putting pressure on the British in Egypt and reopening the question of their unilateral occupation of the country in 1882. The French African Committee put together an expedition commanded by Captain Jean-Baptiste Marchand which was approved by the French government in November 1895 and left from Marseille in August the following year.

  Matters came to a head in 1898. Marchand arrived at Fashoda on 29 August and declared himself high commissioner for the French government in the upper Nile and the Bahr el Ghazel. The British army under Lord Kitchener, pushing south into the Sudan, defeated the Mahdist state at Omdurman on 2 September and challenged Marchand on 19 September. France was at that point in the grip of the Dreyfus Affair. Since Zola’s J’accuse the French military command had been attacked in dreyfusard circles as dominated by Jesuit-trained officers who were more exercised by the influence of Jews, Protestants and freemasons in the Republic than by the idea of restoring French greatness. The antidreyfusard camp, on the other hand, argued that the army was the bearer of French honour and greatness and must be shielded from the attacks of the ‘Jewish syndicate’ that were demoralizing it and undermining its ability to stand up to its enemies. Paul Déroulède, who had been condemned by the high court for his involvement in the Boulanger conspiracy, relaunched his Ligue des Patriotes on 25 September 1898, denouncing those who ignored the fact ‘that the army has been the honour of France for twenty centuries, its holy bayonets, as Michelet said’.34

  British tactics for dislodging the French from Fashoda were two-pronged, first psychological, then military. Lord Kitchener sent extracts from the French press to Marchand’s camp, revealing the attacks of the dreyfusards on the French army. ‘The ten officers were trembling and weeping,’ wrote Marchand in a letter that was published by Le Figaro on 20 November. ‘We learned then and there that the terrible Dreyfus Affair had been opened with its dreadful campaign of infamies and for thirty-six hours not one of us was able to say anything to the others.’35 ‘Nothing can give an idea of the moral disorganization of this country,’ de Vogüé wrote to Lyautey.36 In Paris there was huge agitation by nationalists demanding
that the government stand up to the British. ‘No! the only response worthy of France,’ proclaimed Le Matin on 5 October.37 The sea-port cities of Marseille and Bordeaux were more inclined to compromise, however, and the government did not want to fall into the same trap as in 1870, fully aware that the French navy was in no position to fight a war. Delcassé, now foreign minister in the Brisson government, was keen on a negotiated settlement and on 12 October concluded a deal with Great Britain which involved the withdrawal of Marchand. This provoked a nationalist demonstration on 25 October and the fall of the Brisson government. Lord Salisbury decided on a show of force and on 28 October mobilized the Mediterranean fleet and sent the Channel fleet to Gibraltar. In the new ministry formed on 1 November Delcassé was reappointed foreign minister and two days later the recall of Marchand was ordered.38

  As dreyfusards and antidreyfusards tore each other apart, historian Ernest Lavisse, who was working on the Louis XIV volume of his History of France, joined forces with Lyautey in January 1899 to issue an Appeal to Union.39 The situation was effectively saved by the moderate republican Waldeck-Rousseau, who formed a government of national defence in June 1899 and reappointed Delcassé foreign minister. His war minister, General Gallifet, was supposed to purge the top ranks of the army of officers hostile to the Republic, but the amnesty law of 20 December 1899 in fact removed the threat of court martial from the army’s top brass and with it the threat of a military coup. Waldeck-Rousseau had good relations with General Galliéni and his right-hand man Lyautey, and was keen to support the colonial army even if the army at home was open to criticism. Returning to France from Madagascar in 1899–1900 Galliéni visited the Exposition of 1900, where the Madagascar pavilion was prominent, and he and Lyautey undertook lecture tours, addressing colonial and geographical societies and chambers of commerce on the benefits and virtues of the French Empire and colonial army.40 A law of July 1900 sponsored by Gallifet gave organizational autonomy to the colonial army, so that it had its own general staff and colonial commands were reserved to officers with colonial experience. In this way it was better insulated against metropolitan politics.41