Children of the Revolution Read online

  In this way France might have established a consensus as a conservative, Catholic republic, with the ‘Montagne’ destroyed in 1849 as it had been in 1794, the mass of the people deprived of a political voice and the royalists taking over the Republic as they had not been permitted to do by repeated coups against them under the Directory. Thiers told the Assembly in 1850 that the Republic was ‘of all governments, that which divides us least’.109 Although conservatives might not like it instinctively, it suspended the quarrelling between Legitimists, Orleanists and Bonapartists that broke up the unity of the party of order. Unfortunately, dynastic differences could not so easily be papered over. The death of Louis-Philippe in 1850 opened the possibility of ‘fusion’ whereby the Legitimist Comte de Chambord, son of the Duc de Berry, succeeded first, and if he had no issue would be succeeded by an Orleanist prince, but terms could not be agreed and the royalist branches again fell apart. Meanwhile Louis-Napoleon wished to revise the constitution of the Republic in order to permit him to run for a second term in 1852. This was blocked by the Assembly, in which a two-thirds majority was required. Victor Hugo, one of the deputies, argued that an attack on the Republic was an attack on the Revolution and sneered, ‘Just because we had Napoléon le Grand, do we have to have Napoléon le Petit?’110 Louis-Napoleon had the last laugh on 2 December when he mobilized his supporters in the army to dissolve the Assembly, issued a new constitution which restored the authoritarian regime of 1799 and the universal suffrage foolishly abrogated by the Assembly, and had it acclaimed by a plebiscite on 20 December 1851 by 7.5 million votes to 640,000 with 1.5 million abstentions.

  RE-RUNNING THE EMPIRE

  The coup d’état of 2 December ushered in a project to establish a different kind of consensus in France. Louis-Napoleon now demonstrated his ambition to become ‘national’. Initially this meant dealing harshly with the royalist and republican oppositions. Royalist deputies and former ministers such as Berryer, Falloux, Tocqueville, Barrot, Rémusat and Thiers were sent briefly to Mazas prison to cool their heels, and Rémusat and Thiers spent a few months in exile in Brussels. The republican opposition to the coup, which included an attempt by representative Jean-Baptiste Baudin to raise the people of eastern Paris, with Baudin himself dying on a barricade, and a series of uprisings in south-east France, was more harshly dealt with. Some conspirators were sent to Cayenne, while representatives such as Victor Hugo and Edgar Quinet went into exile.

  How to form a governing class without recourse to the political class that had run France since 1830, if not 1815, was no easy matter. The core of Napoleon’s support came from his family. His half-brother, the Duc de Morny, son of Hortense Beauharnais after her separation from Louis, was the grey eminence of the coup d’état and became interior minister, while Comte Alexander Walewski, an illegitimate son of Napoleon I, was for a long time foreign minister.111 His uncle Jérôme, former King of Westphalia, was briefly president of the Senate, a body of appointed marshals, admirals and cardinals, and including his son, Prince Jérôme-Napoléon, although both were jealous of Louis-Napoleon’s imperial ambitions.112 Victor Persigny, the son of a soldier in Napoleon’s armies who was killed at Salamanca in 1812, was himself dismissed from the hussars in 1830 for republican conspiracy, offered his services to Louis-Napoleon in 1836 and shared his fortunes in London after the Strasbourg fiasco and prison after the Boulogne incident, remaining there till 1848. He was in the inner circle that planned the coup of 2 December and was rewarded with the Ministry of the Interior.113 Whereas senior generals close to the Orleanist circles of power were unhappy about the coup, Saint-Arnaud, who had learned his trade during the pacification of Algeria, was a key player in the coup and was rewarded with the Ministry of War.114

  A second circle was formed by the men of the party of order who had been his ministers in 1849–50. Achille Fould was again appointed minister of finance, Rouher returned to the Ministry of Justice and was a leading drafter of the 1852 constitution, while Baroche became president of the Conseil d’État, the administrative and legislative hub of the regime. Fould and Rouher together with Morny had vestigial Orleanist sympathies and resigned in January 1852 when Napoleon ordered the confiscation of the property of the Orleans family, but Fould was promoted to the Senate where he formally proposed the re-establishment of the Empire in November 1852, Rouher became minister of public works, presiding over the rebuilding of Paris as an imperial capital, and Morny became president (speaker) of the Legislative Body in 1854. The restoration of the Empire was endorsed by 7.8 million votes in a plebiscite of 21 November 1852, with 250,000 against and two million abstentions. Louis-Napoleon, now Napoleon III, refused a coronation on the model of his uncle in 1804, his wedding to the Spanish noblewoman Eugénie de Montijo in Notre-Dame in 1853 serving a similar ceremonial function.115 In addition, the feast of St Napoleon, the birthday of Napoleon I, which coincided with the Catholic Feast of the Assumption on 15 August, became a public holiday with much speech-making and merry-making.116

  The regime combined the personal power of the emperor with a concentration of power in the army and bureaucracy, together with democratic legitimacy provided not only by the plebiscite when the constitution was changed, as in 1799–1815, but by elections to the Legislative Body or lower house. Elections were not left to chance, but there was no such thing as a Bonapartist party. Instead, prefects endorsed ‘official candidates’, who had standing as notables in the community and supported the government line, and put the power and money of the state behind their election. Typical of the prefectoral corps was Georges Haussmann, whose administrative career made only slow progress under the July Monarchy, as he vegetated in a series of subprefectures, and under the Republic, when he was offered the Var and the Yonne, but Louis-Napoleon appointed him prefect of the Gironde at Bordeaux in 1851 and prefect of the Seine in Paris in 1853.117 As for the candidates they were to select, interior minister Morny advised them in January 1852, ‘When a man has made his fortune by work, industry, agriculture, and if he has made himself popular through the noble use of his wealth, he is preferable to those who might have reputations as politicians, because he will bring a practical sense to the preparation of laws and support the government in the work of pacification and reconstruction.’118 Thus, of the deputies elected in 1852, only 26 per cent came from the liberal professions, 15 per cent were high officials, generals or magistrates, while 59 per cent were landowners, bankers, merchants or industrialists, and this profile changed little in the elections of 1857, 1863 and 1869. Among the industrialists favoured by the regime were the cotton magnate Augustin Pouyer-Quertier in Normandy, the iron magnate Charles de Wendel in Lorraine, and in Burgundy the steel magnate Eugène Schneider, who was vice-president of the Legislative Body in 1852–67 and became its president in 1867.119

  All holders of public office, including elective office, were required to take an oath of loyalty to the emperor. Even if they broke through the defences erected by the official candidate system, royalists and republicans would not be able to take their seats without forswearing their political allegiance. Among the Legitimists Tocqueville denounced the ‘rule of the sabre’ and ‘bureaucratic and military despotism’.120 He retired to write The Ancien Régime and the Revolution (1856) which can be read as a polemic against Bonapartism and a defence of liberty. The Comte de Falloux was unable to secure election in the Vendée although Berryer was elected at Marseille in 1863, virtually the only Legitimist mouthpiece in the Chamber. Orleanists hated the Empire which was the reverse of the parliamentary regime of the July Monarchy, at once too personal and too popular. The Duc de Broglie, whose salon was the meeting place of the Orleanist opposition, compared the arbitrary confiscation of the Orleans family property to the murder of the Duc d’Enghien.121 Republicans also detested the Empire, but a gap opened up between the veterans of 1848 such as Cavaignac and Carnot, who could never be reconciled to the Empire and remained ‘exiles of the interior’, and republicans of a new generation who were less w
edded to forms of government and thought that the Empire might be modified from within to become more liberal. Émile Ollivier, whose father Démosthène narrowly avoided deportation to Cayenne after the coup, was won over by Morny, elected to the Chamber in 1857 and was one of five republicans to take the oath, seeing himself as a ‘disinterested moderator of the Revolution’.122 Ollivier now married Blandine, the daughter of Liszt, and the salon of Marie d’Agoult, Liszt’s former lover, became the preferred meeting place of ‘little Olliviers’ such as Jules Favre, another republican deputy who took the oath, along with Jules Ferry and Charles Floquet.123

  ‘A constitution is the work of time,’ Napoleon quoted his uncle, and not all times were propitious. The elections of 1857 were a setback for the government, and concerns increased about opposition in the press. The government attempted to close down newspapers like the Revue de Paris by trying Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, which it had serialized at the end of 1856, for obscenity.124 Then, on 14 January 1858, an attempt was made to assassinate Napoleon III on his way to the opera: eight people were killed, 148 wounded. The bomb was planted by an Italian patriot, Orsini, who believed that Italy would be liberated only by a European revolution. A general was appointed minister of the interior and France hovered on the brink of military dictatorship. Orsini was executed, and, fearing an imminent republican uprising, the government rushed through a law of general security, under which 430 suspects were rounded up, 380 of whom were deported in chains to Algeria. One of these was Benjamin Clemenceau, who had already been arrested in 1851 after the coup d’état. He was released at Marseille but the effect on his son Georges was decisive. Georges was himself arrested and imprisoned in February 1863 for stirring up a demonstration in honour of the Revolution of 1848. Georges was inducted into the republican university of Sainte-Pélagie prison, where he met the likes of Auguste Blanqui and the Alsatian deputy Auguste Scheurer-Kestner.125

  The crisis was resolved by Napoleon III’s alliance with Piedmont and war against the Austrians in 1859 to liberate northern Italy. The Empire’s popularity soared, and Napoleon III took the opportunity to negotiate a more liberal regime that would win over much of the political class as well as the people in a time of relative peace and prosperity. ‘You can put down a riot with soldiers and secure an election with peasants,’ Guizot had said in 1851, ‘but soldiers and peasants are not enough to govern; you need the support of the higher classes, who are the naturally governing classes.’126 Reforms of 1860 gave the Legislative Body greater powers to amend the budget and debate the speech from the throne at the beginning of the session, parliamentary debates could be published in the press, though without comment, and ministers without portfolio, notably Rouher, were authorized to sit in the Legislative Body to engage with the opposition and put the government’s point of view. Napoleon’s ‘reign as an absolute monarch is over’, Thiers told an English observer in 1862. ‘The next step will be to take his ministers from the chambers, and that is parliamentary government.’127

  For the elections of 1863 a Liberal Union was formed which included the ‘little Olliviers’ and Orleanists who were now prepared to work for greater liberty within the Empire. Although Rémusat and de Broglie made no headway against official candidates, Adolphe Thiers was elected in Paris with the help of republican votes and re-entered national politics in January 1864 with a speech in the Chamber on the ‘necessary liberties’ to placate liberal opinion, including the end of official candidatures, freedom from arbitrary arrest, and a free press.128

  The government responded with another instalment of reforms in 1868, when the press was given greater freedom and public meetings were allowed. Political activity returned to the cities for the first time since 1851, but as republicans used the act of political commemoration to make their point, so the government attempted to retain a whip hand to uphold the regime. Charles Delescluze launched a campaign to restore the dilapidated grave of Baudin, a deputy who had died resisting the coup d’état of 2 December. He was sent for trial in November 1868 for disturbing public order and inciting hatred of the government. His defence counsel, Léon Gambetta, used the trial to attack the government for the coup, and though the case was lost one of his political allies announced, ‘The Republic is founded. Gambetta is the lion of Paris today.’129 The name of Gambetta was made and he was duly elected to the Legislative Body in May 1869. These elections were fought in lively political meetings and in over a hundred new newspapers which were hostile to the government, such as Henri Rochefort’s La Lanterne. Republicans won 31 per cent of the vote and were massively elected in the towns and cities.

  The regime was now on a knife-edge between the authoritarian rule of Rouher and republicans on the march. Émile Ollivier grasped the opportunity by rallying 116 deputies on 6 July 1869 to demand greater association of the country in the direction of public affairs, above all a ministry responsible to parliament as well as to the emperor. Napoleon accepted the propositions and Rouher fell from power. In his speech to parliament on 29 November Napoleon announced, ‘It is not easy to establish the regular and peaceful practice of liberty in France… I can provide order. Help me, messieurs, to save liberty.’130 On 2 January 1870 Napoleon III invited Ollivier to form a government, and for the first time deputies were given ministerial office. Ollivier and the emperor collaborated on a more liberal constitution. It was imperfect, in that the emperor retained the right to appeal to the people over the head of parliament, and the right to chair the council of ministers, with Ollivier nothing more than minister of justice.131 In spite of these shortcomings, the new liberal constitution of the Empire was approved by plebiscite on 8 May 1870 by 7.3 million votes to 1.5 million. Gambetta was forced to admit, ‘The Empire is stronger than ever.’132 Unfortunately, the lack of grip that Ollivier had on his ministry, notably his foreign minister Gramont, and the lack of a majority enjoyed by the ministry in the Legislative Body, meant that the combination of an irresponsible foreign minister and a Legislative Body smarting at German provocation led to an outcome that was fatal to the Empire: war.

  2

  Discovering France

  On the evening of Tuesday 5 August 1834 Victor Hugo boarded a mail-coach in Paris and set off in the direction of Brittany. His goal was not literary but to catch up with his mistress, Juliette Drouet, with whom he had had a row and who had fled to her sister’s near Brest. Hugo took the fastest form of transport then available, for the mail-coach travelled through the night, and he was in Brest at dawn on Friday 8 August. ‘Three nights of whiplashes, as fast as the horses could go, without drinking, eating, scarcely breathing, with four diabolical wheels that simply ate up the leagues,’ he wrote to his wife, as if she would sympathize. He was reconciled with Juliette but not impressed by Brittany, which seemed a backward and foreign country. ‘Stupid country! stupid people! stupid government!’ he exclaimed. Hugo nevertheless returned to Brittany two years later. By the time he got to Saint-Malo he had only one obsession, and wrote to a friend:

  Poor Brittany! It has preserved everything, its monuments and its inhabitants, its poetry and its mire, its old colour and its old dirt on top of it. Wash the buildings, they are superb, but I defy you to wash the Bretons. Often, in one of those beautiful heather landscapes… under great oaks bearing their leaves down almost to your reach, you will see a charming cottage with smoke rising above its ivy and roses. You admire it, you enter. Alas, my poor Louis, this golden cottage is a horrible Breton shack where people and pigs sleep in the same room. You have to admit that the pigs get pretty dirty.1

  This ride to Brittany points up an interesting paradox. On the one hand travel was becoming increasingly rapid, along good roads built to move armies and officials at speed, and using high-performance horse-drawn vehicles. In 1785 a coach took three days just to get to Rennes, 150 miles short of Brest.2 On the other hand the encounter with Brittany pointed up its strangeness to the Parisian traveller, a sense of its backwardness compared to the civilization of modern France. This
contradiction was observed by writers such as Victor Hugo, but also by those sent to administer such far-flung provinces.

  PREFECTS DISCOVER FRANCE

  When Bonaparte seized power in 1799 France was on the verge of collapse. Outlying areas of the country, notably the Vendée, Brittany and the Midi, were in the hands of counter-revolutionaries, organized into small armies under the leadership of nobles in communication with the Allies, or into guerrilla bands which emerged at night, such as the Breton chouans. Even larger areas of France fell victim to bands of brigands, formed by draft-dodgers and deserters from the revolutionary armies that were being conscripted to fight the war of the Second Coalition. Both counter-revolutionary forces and brigands, which might merge into one another, targeted mail-coaches that carried money to pay for the regular army and attacked republican officials who had demonstrated their greed and loyalty to the new regime by purchasing church land. To deal with these threats Bonaparte as first consul resorted both to military measures and to negotiation, but in the long term bringing order to the country relied on the establishment of a centralized system of administration, the prefect system.