Children of the Revolution Read online

  Under the premiership of the Radical Combes, relations with both the Church and the army and indeed navy deteriorated. The government and its war minister General André were much exercised by the weight of Jesuit-trained officers in the army who were assumed to be disloyal to the Republic. Not only the police but also the masonic lodges were mobilized to spy on officers, and files were kept on whether they or their wives attended mass and whether they sent their children to Catholic schools. If they did, they were liable to be passed over for promotion in favour of republican officers or ambitious NCOs. This affaire des fiches exploded in October 1904 when Le Figaro published clear evidence that the Grand Orient masonic lodge was influencing promotions.42 Combes entrusted the Navy Ministry to the outspoken Radical Camille Pelletan, who set France resolutely against joining in the naval race engaged in by Great Britain and Germany. He cut back the battleship programme, downsized the Mediterranean fleet on the grounds that officers spent most of their time on the Riviera, and allowed shipyard workers to form a union and affiliate to the CGT.43 The final military legacy of the Combes ministry was the military law of 21 March 1905, which reduced universal military service from three years to two. A victory for those who wanted more of a nation-in-arms, it was severely criticized as not giving enough scope for proper military training.

  This was not to say that French patriotism and French national interests were neglected. Émile Combes lent his weight to the ongoing definition of French national identity by unveiling the huge equestrian statue of Vercingétorix by Bartholdi on the main square of Clermont-Ferrand on 10 October 1903.44 On the colonial side, the governor-general of Indo-China, Paul Doumer, organized an exhibition in Hanoi in the winter of 1902–3 to showcase the capital of newly conquered North Vietnam, highlight the commercial potential of the region and celebrate Western understanding of the East through an International Congress of Far East Studies.45 Meanwhile relations with Great Britain improved by default as Britain became obsessed by Germany’s battleship programme and evidence of German support for the Boers in South Africa. Following a visit of Edward VII to Paris and of President Loubet to London in 1903 twenty years of resentment over Egypt were finally resolved by the Entente Cordiale of 8 April 1904, under which France recognized Britain’s claim to Egypt and Britain gave France a free hand in Morocco.46 The colonial party lost no time in taking advantage of this opening. A French Morocco Committee was formed by the French African Committee, and Étienne, as informal colonial minister, encouraged Lyautey to extend French military influence into Morocco from the Algerian border. This risked provoking conflict with Spain and Germany, both of which had interests in Morocco, but when Delcassé and the Combes government told Lyautey to pull back in July 1904 he called on the support of Étienne and threatened ‘a second Fashoda’.47

  RIVALRY WITH GERMANY

  This Fashoda came not from Britain but from Germany. On 31 March 1905 Kaiser William II landed unexpectedly in Tangier and challenged France’s attempt to control Morocco by declaring the independence of the sultan and demanding equal rights for all the powers. The German government held Delcassé responsible for France’s bid to gain control of Morocco and issued an ultimatum demanding his dismissal. The Rouvier ministry of which Delcassé was foreign minister panicked and dropped him on 6 June.48 The great powers met in conference in Algeciras in January 1906 to decide what to do about Morocco. The Germans tried to bully France into abandoning its claim, but Great Britain regarded this as a first test of the Entente Cordiale and stood firm behind France. In March it was the German chancellor Bülow who suffered a diplomatic defeat, followed by a heart attack. Because Germany was not prepared to go to war over Morocco it was forced to recognize that France had the upper hand there.

  For many on the French left the Moroccan crisis demonstrated an upsurge of militarism and colonialism that had brought France to the brink of war, and an antimilitarist backlash followed. The French national interest had nothing to do with the working class for Gustave Hervé, a schoolteacher from Sens, who declared at a socialist meeting in April 1905, during the Morocco crisis, ‘Our country is our class.’ In the event of an attack on France, ‘without thought of who the aggressor is’, he continued, ‘we will answer the call to arms by a general strike of reservists.’49 An International Antimilitarist Association (AIA) was founded at Amsterdam in June 1904 and in October 1905 the French branch led by Georges Yvetot, secretary of the Fédération des Bourses du Travail, Miguel Almereyda of the anarchist paper Libertaire, and Gustave Hervé launched a poster campaign for the benefit of the new cohort of conscripts. It read,

  When you are ordered to shoot at your brothers in poverty, workers, tomorrow’s soldiers – as has happened in Chalon, Martinique or Limoges – you will shoot, but not on your comrades. You will shoot at the braided stooges who dare to give you such orders. When you are sent to the frontier to defend the capitalists’ strong-boxes against other workers as exploited as you are, you will not march. All war is criminal. You will answer the mobilization order by an immediate strike and insurrection.50

  Antimilitarists argued that, whether they were repressing French workers or killing indigenous populations, armies were the instruments of capitalism and were driven to further their interests by war. A 1905 study of Colonialism by the socialist Paul Louis argued that colonies had been founded since 1880 to provide ‘new sources of exploitation of wealth’ for ‘the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie’. Colonialism, he said, was disguised by the rhetoric of greatness and the civilizing mission but it massacred native populations and imposed slavery, increased the servitude of the proletariat at home and led inevitably to an arms race and war between industrial powers.51

  The government came down hard on these antimilitarists. Twenty-eight members of the Antimilitarist Association were sent for trial in December 1905, and all but two received prison sentences, including four years for Hervé and three for Yvetot and Almereyda. Amnestied in 1906, Hervé and Almereyda continued to broadcast their views in La Guerre Sociale. The antimilitarists, however, were not representative of the mainstream left, which fell back on the revolutionary patriotism of the Volunteers of 1792, who at Valmy had defeated the Austrian and Prussian invaders intent on crushing the French Revolution. They disliked standing armies but embraced a patriotism which held that France was the cradle of liberty and must defend itself not only for France but for the universal cause of liberty. ‘It is impossible to announce in advance’, said Jean Jaurès during the trial, ‘that one will not defend oneself by military force against the invasion of a foreigner who threatens us, our republican liberties, and is the agent of international reaction.’52 Jaurès took on the antimilitarists at the SFIO congress of Nancy in 1907. He rejected such slogans as ‘down with the Republic’, for the Republic was the site that gave the proletariat the freedom to undertake its revolutionary work. If France were ‘threatened, invaded or brutalized, the duty of the socialist and revolutionary would be to defend the independence of the nation’. Otherwise, he claimed, ‘Tsarist Russia could invade and subjugate socialist Germany with impunity or imperial Germany could subjugate republican France.’53 To reconcile hostility to standing armies, which he called praetorian or caste-like, with a love of national independence, he advocated a ‘New Army’ of armed citizens, who would defend the frontier but not shoot workers or start colonial wars, and would eventually bring about a federation of free nations.54

  Other figures on the left also embraced patriotism at this juncture. As a former dreyfusard, Charles Péguy had a profound suspicion of the praetorian army, but he rallied to the nation when it was challenged by Germany in the Morocco crisis. Breaking with Hervé whom he had known as a schoolteacher, and rejecting his notion that the country did not belong to the working class, he argued in Notre patrie that the French people were revolutionary but also patriotic, and peace-loving but also instinctively warlike where necessary. For Péguy the French were a chosen people with a universal mission to spread liberty and
civilization. They must respond to German aggression with a defensive war, not only for France but for humanity, to defeat the oppression and barbarism that Germany represented.55 This was a patriotism that went back to the Republic of 1792 and to Michelet’s notion of France as the vessel of humanity, and closely paralleled the thinking of Jaurès, even though Péguy had broken with Jaurès over what he saw as the latter’s hijacking of dreyfusism for party-political purposes. This patriotism – open, generous, republican, at the service of humanity – was very different from the nationalism of the antidreyfusards, which was inward-looking, defensive, hostile to the Republic and exalted French traditions, although in the wake of 1905 there was increasingly convergence between them.

  The Morocco crisis was widely seen to have engendered a ‘revival of national sentiment’ in France, a new sense of its worth as a nation and willingness to defend it by war if necessary.56 Whereas at the time of the Dreyfus Affair nationalism had been a stick with which to beat the Republic of Jews, Protestants and freemasons, now nationalism and nationalists in general supported the Republic. Paul Déroulède, who had been exiled to Spain in 1900 by the Senate sitting as a high court for his attempted coup of 1899, returned to Paris in November 1905, but did not return to his old frondeur ways. Defeated in the elections of 1906, he abandoned politics in favour of regular pilgrimages of the Ligue des Patriotes to sites of heroic combats during the siege of Paris in 1870–71: the plateau of Châtillon in September, Le Bourget in October, Champigny in November, Buzenval in January. At these gatherings he banned all slogans apart from ‘Long live the Army!’, ‘Long live France!’, ‘Long live the Republic!’, and on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Ligue des Patriotes in 1907 declared that ‘we applaud the foreign policy of the state, the work of Delcassé, against that eternal stranger and enemy, Germany.’ The threat to government interests was no longer from the nationalists but from the antimilitarists. ‘It was to fight against this anarchist and revolutionary agitation’, Déroulède announced, brazenly rewriting history, ‘that the Ligue des Patriotes was already Boulangist in 1887 and nationalist in 1897. In 1907 it will be traditionalist.’57 On the other hand, he was keen to rescue the cult of Joan of Arc for the Republic from the extreme right and the Church. In the winter of 1908–9 the Camelots du Roi, who sold Action Française’s paper and stewarded its meetings, broke up the Sorbonne lectures of Amédée Thalamas, who had called into question Joan of Arc’s divine mission and virginity. When Joan was beatified by the pope on 18 April 1909 in Rome, 40,000 French pilgrims wept. Déroulède, however, speaking at Orléans for the commemorations of May, paid homage to her ‘as the Christian patriot I have always been and the Catholic republican I shall always be’.58

  A few nationalists such as Charles Maurras and Action Française continued to use nationalism to attack the Republic and demand the restoration of the monarchy that alone could restore France’s greatness, but they were isolated even on the right. Maurice Barrès broke with Maurras in 1900, arguing that the Republic had been great, especially during the Revolution, and that the nation should be brought together not around one regime or another but around a cult of the dead and the lost provinces of Alsace-Lorraine. From the 1890s he had gone on a pilgrimage every August to the battlefields of the war of 1870 in Alsace, the climax of which was the visit to Reichshoffen, site of the last charge of the cuirassiers.59 At the time of the Dreyfus Affair he developed a cult of French soldiers buried in what was now German soil in order to promote a sense of solidarity with the lost provinces and an idea of a French nation rooted in la terre et les morts. ‘At Chambière,’ outside Metz, where 7,200 French soldiers from the war of 1870 were buried, he told the Ligue de la Patrie Française in a lecture of 1899, ‘where the sand is mixed with our dead, our heart persuades our mind of the great destiny of France and imposes on all of us a moral unity.’60 In 1905–9 he published a cycle of novels entitled Les Bastions de l’Est which reinvigorated the question of Alsace-Lorraine as a central trope of French nationalism. In one of them, Colette Baudoche (1909), the heroine, a young woman in occupied Metz, is engaged to a German schoolmaster Asmus until she follows the annual pilgrimage to Cham-bière and to the annual mass for the souls of those who died in 1870 in the cathedral of Metz. There the lessons of la terre et les morts persuade her to break off her engagement and espouse France.61

  Barrès was very much the maître à penser of young French nationalists of the generation born around 1890. One of his disciples, Ernest Psichari, was won over not only from his erstwhile guide, Charles Péguy, and his dreyfusard friends, but from the whole university milieu which was congenitally hostile if not to patriotism then to militarism and nationalism. Psichari was the grandson of Ernest Renan, stalwart of the generation of 1830, who had lectured in 1882 on What is a Nation? Renan’s daughter married a linguist of Greek origin who taught at the Sorbonne and was an ardent dreyfusard. Psichari, who studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, was expected by his family to follow an academic career. Instead, after a nervous breakdown in 1903, he joined the new colonial army and took part in an expedition up the Congo to Lake Chad in 1906–7. Not entirely forgetting his literary inheritance, he wrote an account of his adventures, Lands of Sun and Sleep. In this he praised Africa as ‘one of the last refuges of national energy’ and war itself as ‘an unspeakable poem of blood and beauty’. He provided legitimation for the colonial project in national rather than material terms and a new role model for young men bored with endless examinations who craved a life of action and excitement in the service of France. The book was sent to Barrès, who was fiercely opposed to the family over the Dreyfus Affair but recognized Psichari as ‘an admirable man’ and obtained a literary prize for him. Colonial ambitions thus rebuilt a patriotic bridge that had been severed by the Affair.62

  Although nationalist agitation in support of colonies and Alsace-Lorraine ceased criticizing a republic whose national interests were satisfactorily protected by the likes of Delcassé, foreign minister from 1898 to 1905, Georges Clemenceau, who had repeatedly unseated ministries in the 1880s over colonial questions, was still reluctant to let the colonial party and its military protégés such as Lyautey have their heads if there was any danger of risking a war. When he was president of the council in 1906–9 the front line was on the Algerian–Moroccan border, from which Lyautey was keen to push towards Fez, although this would inevitably provoke Spain and Germany. After Clemenceau fell, Lyautey occupied Fez in May 1911, and Germany responded by sending a gunboat to Agadir on the Atlantic coast of Morocco to force France to negotiate. Joseph Caillaux, who became French premier in June, asked the chief of the General Staff Joffre whether France had a 70 per cent chance of winning a war and was told that it did not. Caillaux therefore looked for a deal and on 4 November Germany recognized France’s claim to Morocco in return for cession of slices of the French Congo, enabling Germany if it wished to build a railway from the Cameroons to East Africa. This agreement was ratified by the Chamber of Deputies but severely criticized by nationalist opinion which accused the government of selling out. The Senate was more obstinate and on 10 January 1912 Caillaux was summoned before its foreign affairs committee where he remembered Clemenceau, now reincarnated as a defender of the French Empire, and Poincaré ‘huddled in a corner, whispering to each other, sneering’.63 Caillaux was accused of using secret diplomacy via his banking contacts in Germany and of dismantling the Empire, and was forced to resign as premier.

  This was a turning point in French diplomacy and military thinking. For forty years revanche had been relegated to the realms of fantasy or forgetting; now it was a real possibility. Poincaré became president of the council in January 1912. Under the Treaty of Fez signed on 30 March 1912 the sultan of Morocco agreed to a French protectorate over his country. Alexandre Millerand, who twenty years previously had been defending strikers and antimilitarists, became minister of war and took a series of measures which greatly increased French colonial power and military discipl
ine. He telephoned Lyautey, then garrisoned in Rennes, to ask him to serve as resident-general of Morocco with authority to put down any anti-French disturbances. General Joffre as chief of the General Staff was given supreme control over the French army. ‘All the powers of the military establishment finally became concentrated in my hands,’ he wrote. ‘It was the first time that any such authority had been confided in a single man.’64 To eliminate any remnants of antirepublican sentiment in the officer corps Millerand banned officers from founding any political or religious associations in the army. He organized military parades in garrison towns, Napoleonic style, to dramatize the force and beauty of the military. Finally, to eliminate antimilitarism in the ranks of the army he pushed through a law of 30 March 1912 giving him the authority to send not only criminals but also antimilitarists and strike leaders, when conscripted for military service at the age of twenty, to disciplinary battalions in North Africa, the so-called Bat’ d’Af.65

  A Bat’ d’Af in Tunisia had been the destination of 589 soldiers of the 17th Infantry Regiment which had mutinied in the face of a winegrowers’ demonstration at Narbonne in June 1907, of whom fifteen died.66 Regiments were recruited in specific regions, so a refusal to fire on demonstrators who might be from the soldier’s town or village was a certain risk. In fact the 17th Regiment, like others, was recruited from the south-west in general rather than from Narbonne, Béziers or the Aude specifically, so the mutinies of 1907 remained exceptional. In the pre-war period fewer that 1 per cent of conscripts were disciplined, and that for offences such as rudeness to officers, theft and absence without leave, rather than for mutiny. For most young men conscription was a significant rite of passage to adulthood, and was celebrated in the community. Only those who were not ‘bons pour le service’ were exempted and those who were selected by the military board marked the event by a charivari of conscripts, marching with trumpet and drum to the local town, where they were fêted by the mayor, and returned home to kiss the girls before they left for barrack life.67