Children of the Revolution Page 9

  France, run before the Revolution through a network of overlapping jurisdictions – military, fiscal, administrative, judicial and ecclesiastical – was divided in 1790 into eighty-three more or less equal departments, which provided the basic unit for all those jurisdictions. Regimes had struggled in the 1790s to find an administrative system that worked, since the Revolution favoured administration by elected bodies and officials who lacked clout, while the representatives on mission sent out by the Convention parliament in 1793–4 had discredited themselves as agents of the Terror. Bonaparte’s solution under the law of 17 February 1800 was a centralized and hierarchical system by which each department would be run by a prefect, appointed by the head of state and directly responsible to him. The representation of opinions and interests was minimal, for elections to representative bodies had for ten years brought little but anarchy. A conseil général of a score or so notables, appointed for fifteen years after 1802 by the consul for life from names submitted by the department’s electoral college, composed of the highest taxpayers, met for no more than two weeks every year, mainly to share out the tax bill. Each arrondissement, of which from four to six normally formed a department, would be run by a subprefect, also appointed by the head of state. Each of the 36,000 communes of France, cities, towns and villages, were to be run by a mayor, who would be appointed by the head of state where the population was over 3,000 and by the prefect where it was fewer. Below each mayor was a municipal council to which appointments for twenty years were made by the prefect from names submitted by the canton assemblies of the highest taxpayers. The exception to this was Paris, which was allowed no mayor, in case the capital become a power-base independent of the central government. Instead, it was divided into twelve arrondissements, each with its own mayor, but real power remained in the hands of two prefects, the prefect of the Seine and the prefect of police.3

  The advantages of this top-down system in terms of uniformity and efficiency were plain to see. What was less clear was how much prefects appointed by the central government would know about the parts of the country they now had to run. Some prefects at least were acquainted with the region. In Brittany Jean-Pierre Bouillé was born at Auray (in what became the Morbihan after 1790) and later was a lawyer at Pontivy (in what became the Côtes-du-Nord). During the Revolution he became an administrator of the Morbihan and then became prefect of the Côtes-du-Nord. The prefect of the Finistère in 1800, however, was François-Joseph Rudler, a native of Alsace, who complained that of the 288 mayors ‘about thirty do not read, write or speak French’.4 Since knowledge was power, in 1801 minister of the interior Chaptal, doctor, scientist, chemical industrialist, administrator of the department of the Hérault, director of the national agency of gunpowder manufacture in 1793, ordered a statistical survey of France. Prefects were to collect information about population, local resources and the local economy, religion and customs, taking into account the legacy of the Ancien Régime and ten years of Revolution, in order to make possible their own governance.5

  The collection of these data obliged prefects to make contact with local agricultural societies, learned societies, doctors, clergy, members of conseils généraux and the like, who could provide them with the information they needed. Not consulted for any political reason, they made the most of this ‘scientific’ survey to establish their credentials as members of the educated, urbane, national society that subscribed to science and reason. Called upon to interpret local customs for the purposes of the national survey, they did so by distancing themselves from ‘the people’ who, in their eyes, were still trapped in ignorance, rustic manners, localism, routine and superstition. Thus when a young secretary of the prefecture of Hautes-Pyrénées wrote of the region that ‘local festivals are still essentially drunken orgies,’ two local notables corrected the draft to read, ‘local festivals attract only the lower classes.’6

  Alongside this rather Enlightenment view of local and provincial life, however, ran another, Romantic notion that rural populations, even in places as backward as Brittany, were not as uncouth as might first be assumed. On the contrary, the manners and customs of local people were seen as vestiges of some bygone civilization that was somehow more authentic than the artificial and polished civilization of the French national elite. Jacques Cambry, the son of a naval engineer in Lorient and much travelled in his youth, was part of the revolutionary administration of Finistère during the Revolution and published an early version of the departmental survey, a Voyage in Finistère, or State of the Department in 1794 and 1795, in 1799. He reflected on the one hand on the province’s intense localism since, with the exception of the few military roads built in the eighteenth century, travel along the sunken tracks in the bocage (where small fields were divided by tall hedgerows) was extremely difficult. The inhabitants of each pays, which corresponded more or less to the arrondissement, were characterized by a distinct natural, historic, religious and even linguistic identity. Cambry noted that:

  the Breton dialect of the Léonais is purer, more sonorous and elegant than those of the other cantons. It is to these parts what Saxon is to the German language. In the Léon the dialect of Cornouaille and Tréguier is understood, but they can make no sense of that of Vannes… The peoples of Léon and Tréguier hate the inhabitants of Cornouaille as brutal and uncouth, with their strange habit of striking themselves on the head.7

  On the other hand, Cambry developed the view that under the uncouthness of the Breton lay an ancient civilization and that beyond the localism was a proud imperial tradition. ‘The Breton is externally a savage if you compare him to a French person civilized by imitation,’ he wrote, ‘but the natural French person is inferior to the Breton.’ The fact that Bretons had preserved their distinct language, argued Cambry, had inoculated them against the pernicious ideas of modern philosophy and saved them from the worst of the French Revolution: ‘there, people slept under Robespierre.’ Again, Bretons might be considered superstitious, but under the Catholic practices that they had adopted and which had been attacked by the Revolution they had preserved a far more resilient Druidic religion. As they had resisted the French Revolution, so 2,000 years before they had resisted Caesar. Indeed they were the hub of a vast Celtic empire that had covered not only the British Isles and Ireland but Spain, Italy, Greece, France, Germany and Asia Minor. ‘The language of the Scythians, who populated a good part of the world, was Celtic in times gone by.’8

  When in 1802 Cambry became prefect of the Oise at Beauvais, north of Paris, he threw himself into the research required for Chap-tal’s statistical survey. He admitted that it was ‘pictureque and anecdotal’ rather than systematic. In fact he was looking for evidence for his theory that Celts had left signs of their passage everywhere in Europe. For example in the Oise he observed the popularity of a Celtic ball game called soule or choulle. The Oise, formerly the Beauvaisis, belonged to the Bellovacques, whom Caesar had called ‘the bravest of the Belgians, as the Belgians were the bravest of the Gauls’.9 In 1805 Cambry founded the Académie Celtique, and addressed its opening meeting in 1805. The Academy devoted itself to propagating the idea that France, rather than England, which had set up a Celtic Academy under Charles II, was the cradle of the Celtic people, and that the empire of the Celts stretched all over Europe and half of Asia. This was the territory that Napoleon’s Empire was destined to recover. When he reached Moscow in 1812 Napoleon is alleged to have said, ‘The civilisation of St Petersburg deceived us; these are still Scythians.’10

  COUNTER-REVOLUTION AND

  PROVINCIALISM

  Although prefects were supposed to be the all-powerful executors of the government’s will, they were only as powerful as the support they obtained from the central government. Two invasions, three changes of regime and a civil war that broke out after Napoleon’s second defeat at Waterloo not only undermined the prefectoral system, but also demonstrated the fragility of the system of centralized administration when stress was applied. Some counter-revol
utionary elements, who had famously ‘learned nothing and forgotten nothing’ since 1789, wanted to go back to the provinces of the Ancien Régime, some of which, such as Brittany, Franche-Comté and Languedoc, had elected provincial estates dominated by the nobility and clergy. In fact, provinces had not stood out as the dominant administrative unit of the Ancien Régime and it was not until the departments were invented that nostalgia for the provinces developed. Perhaps because of this, the restored monarchy of 1814–15 saw no advantage in reverting to this system and, once it had recovered its grip, stuck with the institution, if not the personnel, of the Napoleonic prefectoral admini stration.

  Franche-Comté, on the Swiss border, was formerly a province of the Habsburg monarchy, conquered by Louis XIV in 1678. Its vigorous military nobility, who had revived the provincial estates in 1787, had emigrated to join the counter-revolutionary armies of the Bourbon princes. One of them, Comte Pierre-Georges de Scey-Montbéliard, offered his services to the Austrian commander Schwarzenberg in December 1813, asking him to revive the Franche-Comté under Habsburg protection. After the Austrians took Besançon, Scey-Montbéliard became unofficial governor of Franche-Comté. However, when the Bourbons returned in the spring of 1814, they refused to countenance such a plan; the most they did for Scey-Montbéliard was to make him prefect of the Doubs, one of the three departments into which the province had been divided in 1790. Moreover, though Scey led opposition to Napoleon during the Hundred Days from the Swiss frontier, he was not offered his prefectoral post back after Waterloo. The Bourbon regime favoured moderate royalists who collaborated with the centralized administration it was pleased to inherit from its arch-enemy Napoleon.11

  Brittany, despite Cambry, had not slept under Robespierre, but had rather provided an adjunct to the Vendean uprising in the form of the less organized guerrilla warfare of chouannerie. Though the region had been pacified by Napoleon after 1800, his return in the Hundred Days was greeted by another rebellion. The towns generally remained loyal to him and he entrusted the Loire army to General Lamarque, who said of the uprising, ‘the heart is in the Vendée: we must strike there.’ One of the Vendean leaders, Louis de La Rochejacquelein, was killed on 4 June 1815, and Lamarque was able to force peace on the Vendean leaders at Cholet on 26 June. They were persuaded by Lamarque not to exploit Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, since Prussian troops were moving into the area.12 From this moment the Vendée became a part of Catholic and royalist historic memory rather than a military threat. The Marquise de La Rochejacquelein, widow of Louis, and widowed by another Vendean leader, the Marquis de Lescure, ‘the saint of Poitou’, published her Memoirs in 1815. In this she painted the Vendée as an ideal community, the polar opposite of a system in which citizens equal under the law were subjected to the authority of the state. Here, though feudalism had been abolished by the Revolution, she argued, ‘a sort of union unknown elsewhere’ reigned between peasants and their noble lords.13 As they had hunted together and danced in the château courtyard, so they fought together against the intrusive power of the revolutionary state. The key chapter about Vendée society had in fact been ghostwritten by Prosper de Barante, who had met and worked with the Marquise de La Rochejacquelein when he was prefect of the Vendée in 1809–13. George Sand, who was at convent schools with the marquise’s daughter, remembered her in practice as haughty and obsessed by caste. Despite this, the myth of the Vendée as an idealized microcosm of the Ancien Régime enjoyed enduring currency.14

  Much more dangerous in terms of the collapse of the Napoleonic administration were events in the Midi. After Waterloo a broad crescent of the south from Toulouse to Toulon became a virtually autonomous kingdom under Louis-Antoine, Duc d’Angoulême, son of the Comte d’Artois and nephew of Louis XVIII. In the White Terror, volunteer militias 100,000 strong wreaked vengeance on those who had supported the revolutionary and Napoleonic regimes in the Midi. One flashpoint was the Gard department around Nîmes, the Ulster of France, where Catholic royalist bands known as miquelets took their revenge against the Protestants who had enjoyed political ascendancy since 1789. On 1–2 August 1815 a veritable St Bartholomew’s massacre of Protestants took place in Nîmes.15 Meanwhile, with the help of a British blockade of the coast, royalist bands took control of Marseille and Toulon. Napoleon’s commander in Toulon, Marshal Brune, was given a safe conduct to Paris by the authorities, but on 9 August in Avignon, former apanage of the popes annexed by France in 1791 and hotbed of counter-revolutionaries, he was recognized by the crowd, lynched, and his body tossed into the Rhône. In a similar incident at Toulouse, the authority of the Bourbon prefect, Augustin de Rémusat, another royalist who had rallied to Napoleon and was now recruited by the restored monarchy, was not sufficient to prevent an attack by counter-revolutionary bands of verdets on Napoleon’s General Ramel, who died of his wounds on 17 August.16 The murders of Brune and Ramel were long held up as evidence of the ungovernability and cruelty of the populations of the Midi.

  One of the outcomes of the loss of prefectoral authority after Waterloo was a failure of the administration adequately to influence the elections of 19–20 August 1815, and the consequent return of the ultra-royalist Chambre Introuvable. The tension between Chamber and government continued until chief minister Decazes dissolved the Chamber and called new elections, this time managed by prefects of his choosing. In the Gard things took a little longer but in 1817 a reliable prefect was appointed who sacked the two subprefects in the department, forty mayors and twenty judicial officials, in order to eliminate counter-revolutionary clientage and ensure a victory for government candidates in the elections of 1818. That said, none of the leaders of the White Terror was ever brought to justice.17

  After the collapse of the Bourbon monarchy in July 1830, Charles X gave instructions from exile in England that there should be no insurrection. The only disobedience came from his daughter-in-law, the Duchesse de Berry, widow of the Duc de Berry assassinated in 1820. Unfortunately for her, a large number of servants of Napoleon had rallied to the July Monarchy, including Marshal Soult, now minister of war, who had strengthened the army in the south-east. Moreover, despite the myths of class harmony peddled in the work of the Marquise de La Rochejacquelein, the peasantry of Brittany and the Vendée did not rise in support of the Legitimist cause.18

  After 1832 Legitimism no longer posed a political threat to the Orleanist regime. Elections limited to a small propertied electorate were managed by the government through a combination of corruption and pressure. In his Deputy of Arcis Balzac explored the ‘making’ of an election in 1839 by an alliance of the minister, the Comte de Rastignac, the subprefect of Arcis and the most influential of the local electors, dubbed the grand elector, the Comte de Gondreville, ‘king of the Aube department’. An oath of loyalty to the regime was required of all officials and representatives, and Legitimist nobles who refused to take the oath retired to their town houses in the Faubourg Saint-Germain or to their country estates. Removed as prefects and mayors, they could exercise authority only indirectly. At Boismé (Deux-Sèvres), in the area broadly constituted by the Vendée, the mayor was a farmer and political straw man of the Marquise de La Rochejacquelein. The authorities disqualified him from standing in elections and therefore no elections took place in 1834 and 1837, because the other farmers of the marquise refused to vote for anyone else.19 At Chanzeaux (Maine-et-Loire), in the part of the Vendée area known as the Mauges, the local landowner was Comte Théodore de Quatrebarbes, who was imprisoned after taking part in the Duchesse de Berry’s conspiracy. Though neither mayor nor deputy, he and his wife exerted influence by means of the traditional hierarchy in the countryside, supplying grain, paying for work on roads and distributing charity in the hard winters of the 1840s.20

  In face of the grip of prefects and grand electors on politics and administration, Legitimist nobles excluded from power could find some compensation by reconstituting in a virtual sense provinces that had existed before 1790 but had been destroyed by the Revolutio
n and Napoleon. The Association Bretonne was founded in 1843 by Jules Rieffel, founder of an agricultural college at Grand-Jouan (Loire-Inférieure), who wanted to revive the agricultural society set up by the Breton estates in the eighteenth century. Also part of the Association, however, was the archaeological section, which concerned itself with the preservation of Breton monuments, musical instruments, costume, language and poetry.21 A key figure here was Théodore Hersant de La Villemarqué, who published a collection of popular Breton songs, Barzaz-Breiz, in 1839, arguing in the German Romantic tradition that they were echoes of the Breton soul.22 Against those who argued that Bretons would never be civilized until they learned to speak French, La Villemarqué argued that Breton had preserved Brittany from Calvinism, ‘philosophical impiety and Voltaireanism’, and that ‘amid the storms of the Revolution the preservation of faith and social virtues among the Breton people was due essentially to their language.’23

  WRITERS DISCOVER FRANCE

  In 1837 the poet, novelist and artist Théophile Gautier noted that the vogue for young writers to tour the French provinces and to record their impressions was ‘the veritable Don Quichottisme of our time’.24 By 1830 the outlying parts of France had been brought under the heel of the central administration, and the collaboration of prefects and local notables in the management of elections ensured that the country was politically integrated as well. Communications with the provinces were better and faster. After the last burst of chouannerie in 1832 the July Monarchy invested heavily in strategic roads under a law of 27 June 1833, while local roads were also developed under a law of 21 May 1836. Public transport on the main arteries was provided by the imperial (later royal) stage-coach company (messageries impériales/royales), and the general stage-coach company (messageries générales) founded in 1828 and largely funded by Laffitte. These went only as far as Lyon, Toulouse and Bordeaux, after which other companies ran complementary services. The most rapid form of road transport, however, was provided by the mailpost, which alone was allowed to gallop and to stop only to change horses. Thus under Louis XVIII it took forty-eight hours to reach Bordeaux by stage-coach, but thirty-six hours by mail-post. That said, by the 1830s and 1840s transport was entering the steam age. Steamboats plied the major rivers, and the first railway, providing a short link between Lyon and Saint-Étienne, mainly for the transport of coal, opened in 1832, and another between Paris and Saint-Germain in 1837. It was a law of 11 June 1842, dividing responsibility between public authorities, which would take care of the infrastructure, namely the cost of expropriation, and railway companies, which would provide the superstructure of rails, rolling-stock and maintenance that launched the railway mania of the 1840s. A star of lines radiated out from Paris, reaching Lyon in 1845, and in 1848 it was possible to travel by railway from Paris to Marseille in less than twenty hours.25