Children of the Revolution

by Robert Gildea

  DECENTRALIZATION DEBATED

  The Revolution of February 1848 ended the cosy and corrupt alliance between the government and well-disposed notables which had ensured political stability since the mid-1830s and yet closed political life to republicans, Legitimist royalists and all those outside the narrow political class. Suddenly universal male suffrage was conceded and all political groups re-entered the electoral arena. The provisional government replaced prefects by commissaires, such as the young Émile Ollivier in Marseille and Toulon, who were supposed to exert some government influence over elections to the National Assembly, but their ability to shape universal suffrage and local interests was limited. Tocqueville, a candidate at Valognes (Manche), led 170 electors, who were either his tenants or members of his local community, on a 3-mile procession to vote at Saint-Pierre-Église on Easter Day 1848, haranguing them on the gravity of their responsibilities, and was certain that all the votes went to him.52

  Rather than bring together French people under the banner of fraternity, the democracy of the Second Republic had a tendency to drive them apart. This was clear in the elections of 1849 to the Legislative Assembly, under the new constitution, when the country polarized between the republican left, the so-called démocrates-socialistes or Montagne, and the Legitimist Right. The Comte de Falloux, who recalled that his grandmother had received Louis de La Rochejacquelein at Angers when the Vendean army occupied the city and was brought up on the Memoirs of the marquise, headed a clean royalist sweep of all eleven seats in Maine-et-Loire (Anjou).53 The Vaucluse divided between the arrondissements of Avignon and Carpentras, which had been in the Papal enclave before 1791 and voted royalist, and the arrondissement of Apt, which had a French past and voted for the Montagne.54 The Comte de Montalembert, elected as a Catholic royalist in the Doubs, the core of the Franche-Comté, thanked his supporters, declaring that there were two Mountains, ‘an enemy Mountain and a friendly Mountain… it is you, the Comtoise and Catholic Mountain, who have chosen me to fight that other Mountain whose doctrine and deeds you detest.’55

  The question of administrative decentralization had been in the air since the June Days, when, it was argued, France had been saved from another 1793 by stout volunteers from the provinces rushing to Paris to quell the revolt. Tocqueville’s cousin, Louis de Kergolay, who had been caught up in the Duchesse de Berry’s attempt of 1832, launched a Provincial Review in September 1848 in which he argued that under the present centralized system ‘a handful of men, an armed coup, is sufficient at any given moment to overturn the government and rule over France by means of the telegraph’. A middle way had to be found between a civil war between the provinces and Paris and a federalism it was feared would fragment France’s precious unity.56 Less squeamish about the term ‘federalism’, which also stood for the provincial movement against the tyranny of the Montagne at Paris in 1793, a group of Lyon royalists called in January 1851 for a ‘Southern federation’ that would emancipate French cities and provinces under a restored monarchy.57 The royalist-dominated Legislative Assembly Campaign engaged with these questions, setting up a commission on decentralization. This proposed to maintain the decree of July 1848 allowing the election of mayors in communes of under 6,000, to widen the powers of municipal councils and conseils généraux vis-à-vis prefects, and to equip conseils généraux with permanent commissions which would meet outside the rare sessions of the full council.58

  Louis-Napoleon’s coup d’état of 2 December 1851, after which he briefly arrested his royalist opponents, including Falloux and Tocqueville, and crushed the uprising orchestrated by the Montagne, which was especially strong in the south-east of France, put paid to all schemes of decentralization. Louis-Napoleon lost no time in reimposing the centralized administration patented by his uncle in 1800. Prefects were given greater powers to control the press under a law of 17 February 1852, and new police powers to close down political opposition under a decree of 25 March 1852. They were also empowered to appoint police commissioners, JPs, gendarmes, post office officials and now primary school teachers or instituteurs. This gave them the ability to mobilize the administration in support of ‘official candidatures’, the government-sponsored candidates who were now put forward to fight elections, with all the carrots and sticks the regime could muster to see off royalist or republican opposition.59 Democracy was removed from municipal councils: prefects recovered the authority to appoint mayors in communes of fewer than 3,000 inhabitants under a law of 7 July 1852, while in larger towns and cities this authority was exercised by the central government. Baron Haussmann told the municipal council of Paris when it was enlarged after the annexation of the suburbs in 1859–60 that there could be no question of the sixty councillors being elected by Parisians with narrow Parisian interests since Paris was ‘the capital of a powerful Empire, the residence of a glorious sovereign, the seat of all major public bodies, the universal centre of literature, the arts and sciences’.60

  Alongside the policy of administrative centralization was a policy of economic modernization which would serve to bring the country together in a single market and help to depoliticize it as growing material success took the edge off political passions. At Bordeaux in October 1852, welcomed by Haussmann who was still prefect there, Louis-Napoleon announced that ‘we have immense uncultivated territories to make productive, roads to open, harbours to dig, rivers to make navigable. Our railway network remains to be completed.’61 The Empire, proclaimed in December 1852, presided over and indeed facilitated an immense capitalist boom. After the crisis of credit and confidence in the railway industry in 1847 Pierre Magne at the Ministry of Public Works favoured the merging of competing railway companies in consortia for the purposes of completing the major lines. Thus the struggle for control of the Paris–Lyon–Mediterranean route was resolved by awarding the contract to four bidding companies – a group of British backers and entrepreneurs, the Rothschilds of Paris, the banker François Bartholony, who controlled the Paris– Orléans line, and the Péreire brothers’ Crédit Mobilier group – who in 1853 formed the Lyon and Mediterranean Company. Four years later, in 1857, this Company merged with the Paris–Lyon Company to form the famous Paris–Lyon–Mediterranean Company.62 The fruits of this new policy were quick to appear. Whereas in 1850 there were only 3,000 kilometres of track in France, there were 6,500 in 1857 and 17,500 in use in 1870.63

  In Paris, the Péreires were heavily involved in financing the rebuilding projects of Haussmann. The Crédit Foncier, founded in December 1852 and, like its twin, able to mobilize savings on a gigantic scale, lent to builders and developers who would then be repaid by the City of Paris. This opened the way to vast private fortunes being made at the expense of city finances, a scandal attacked by the republican Jules Ferry in his 1868 Fantastic Accounts of Haussmann.64 Lyon, linked to Paris by rail from 1845, saw its population grow by 70 per cent under the Empire, and was similarly Haussmannized, with wide boulevards driven through the city, the quais rebuilt, passenger and freight stations going up and parks developed. All this drove the city into serious debt, but political opposition was gagged because Lyon was stripped of its elective municipal council in 1852 and was run solely by the powerful prefect of the Rhône, Claude Marius Vaïsse.65

  Railways stimulated trade, industry and finance; they also underpinned the boom in holiday travel to coastal resorts and spa towns that took place during the Empire. While the Empress Eugénie, of Spanish ancestry, favoured the development of Biarritz as a resort, the Duc de Morny, the emperor’s half-brother, who did not like the crowded and chaotic Trouville on the Normandy coast, developed Deauville, further down the estuary, on its own dedicated railway line from Paris, not to mention its own race-meeting, in augurated on 14 July 1864.66 The emperor himself preferred spa towns, and gave cachet to Plombières in the Vosges, which he visited in 1858, not least to negotiate secretly with the Piedmontese premier Cavour about Italian unification, and to which a rail link was built in 1860. Under that deal France rec
overed Nice, which was developed as a winter holiday resort, and Savoy, which included Aix-les-Bains. Aix was visited by 4,150 spa-goers in 1856, but twice that number after the railway link was completed in 1860, rising to 176,000 in 1879.67

  The attempt of the Second Empire to develop economic activity and leisure in far-flung parts of France along new axes of communication, while retaining the grip of administrative centralization and political paralysis, was a contradictory policy that was bound to fail. The circulation of goods and ideas generated a demand from cities and regions to take their affairs more into their own hands. The traditional regionalist lobby, given a fillip by the June Days but then sidelined by the imperial regime, used regional culture as a way to make a political point. The Association Bretonne, founded in 1843, was closed down in 1859 by the government, which alleged that it was a political vehicle. However, one of its younger leaders, Arthur de La Borderie, had already in 1857 founded a Review of Brittany and the Vendée, which celebrated Breton resistance to Franks and French, Breton liberties as defended by the Estates of Brittany before 1789, the Breton language and the Roman Catholic faith which was once more under attack.68 In Provence Frédéric Mistral interrupted his law studies at Aix after the coup of 2 December and dedicated himself to the development of Provençal literature, certainly as a critique of the centralizing state that used French as its vehicle, but not going as far as to demand Provençal autonomy and indeed exploiting the opportunities afforded by Paris as a literary capital. He went to Paris in 1856 and secured the patronage of the aged Lamartine for his Provençal poem Mirèio/Mireille, about a village Romeo and Juliet. This was published in 1859 and was soon made into an opera by Gounod, opening in Paris in 1867.69

  More weighty than the traditionalists, however, was the liberal and republican lobby which, on the back of the process of modernization and integration, demanded a greater degree of administrative decentralization. Unlike the traditionalists they had no hidden agenda to bring back France’s old provinces. They accepted the division of France into departments but wanted more power to be devolved to the conseils généraux and to municipal authorities. Their great breakthrough was in the legislative elections of 1863, which showed the limits of the system of official candidates. A Lyon magistrate complained that ‘along the railway lines and the banks of the Saône and Rhône it is possible to follow, with the election results, the progress of contagious illness’.70 Louis Hénon, deputy for Lyon, one of the five republican deputies who had taken the oath to the Empire, denounced the ‘virtually irresponsible dictatorship’ of the administration in Paris and Lyon, which was neglecting schools and hospitals in favour of ‘luxury projects’ and opening up boulevards at the expense of private housing, resulting in a doubling of rents. What was required instead, he said, was ‘an elected and independent municipal council’, emanating from and responsible to the local population.71 Enthusiasm for a ‘municipalism’ that would provide an apprenticeship in citizenship and self-government at the lowest level became one of the republicans’ main demands.72 Demands for greater decentralization at both municipal and departmental level were articulated to great effect in the so-called Nancy manifesto published in 1865. Originating with a group of notables from Nancy but endorsed by a galaxy of liberal public figures both royalist – Montalembert, Falloux, Berryer – and republican – Hippolyte Carnot, Jules Ferry, Jules Simon – it declared that ‘centralization is stifling us with the abusive interference of the administration in our affairs.’ Specifically it wanted to ‘emancipate the departments’ by giving conseils généraux greater powers, more staff and permanent commissions to oversee the work of prefects between sessions. More powers also were demanded for municipal councils, although the signatories were divided on whether mayors should be elected or appointed, given that they were both representatives of the town and agents of the state.73

  The Nancy group was seen by many republicans as being too dominated by Catholics and royalists, and there was plenty of republican opinion in favour of decentralization but not represented on it. Republican decentralists were concentrated in the large cities, especially Paris, Lyon and Marseille, which massively returned republicans in the elections of 1869. In the popular Paris suburb of Belleville no official candidate dared to run and Gambetta, whose famous Belleville manifesto called for the election of all mayors, beat the moderate republican Carnot. As a result of the republican triumph in the cities the liberal ministry of Émile Ollivier convened a commission on decentralization, chaired by veteran trimmer Odilon Barrot. Opening in March 1870, it came out in favour of permanent commissions for conseils généraux and the election of mayors by municipal councils in all communes with the exception of Paris and Lyon. This last recommendation was not acceptable to the government, which passed a law in July 1870 retaining the government’s right to appoint mayors.74 The refusal to recognize that the great cities of the country had the maturity to manage their own affairs was one reason for the municipal revolts of August 1870 and indeed for the Paris Commune.

  3

  A Divided Society

  PEASANTS AND THE STRUGGLE

  FOR LAND

  In The Peasants (1844), Balzac presents a peasant community through the eyes of educated outsiders who see it as something alien and violent. ‘They are [Fenimore] Cooper’s Redskins,’ reflects a Parisian journalist, Blondet, ‘you don’t have to go to America to see savages.’ He juxtaposes the château, owned by a count, one of Napoleon’s generals, and the tavern, a ‘viper’s nest’ where drunkenness and greed fuel ‘the hatred of the proletarian and peasant against the master and the rich man’. The curé, sent like a missionary among the infidel, argues that the French Revolution was a jacquerie in revenge for 1,200 years of feudal oppression. At the end of the novel the general is driven out and the peasants divide his estate into a thousand lots which they share between themselves.1

  This account suggests a tremendous land hunger among the French peasantry which drove them to revolt and savagery. They had a passion to become independent smallholders rather than remain the farmers or labourers of great landlords. There was a common belief in the nineteenth century that before the Revolution the peasantry had been the virtually landless serfs of feudal lords and abbots, and had become landholders as a result of the division and sale of church and noble land at the Revolution. Before 1789, in fact, peasants owned between 22 and 70 per cent of French land, more in the uplands or bocage regions of the west, less around large towns where the bourgeoisie bought land.2 About 10 per cent of all land changed hands at the Revolution, mainly as a result of the sale of church lands, confiscated by the National Assembly as biens nationaux in order to solve the state debt crisis, and the sale of lands of nobles who opposed the Revolution and emigrated. At this point it is true that the peasantry gained more land, but not as much as the bourgeoisie and even petite bourgeoisie of traders and artisans, who were better placed to make a killing. In the Nord department, for example, the clergy lost the 20 per cent of the land they held, and the nobility declined from 22 to 13 per cent. The peasantry increased its stake from 30 to 42 per cent, both as smallholders owning less than 10 hectares and as a ‘rural bourgeoisie’ owning between 10 and 40 or even 100 hectares, but the share of the urban bourgeoisie rose from 17 to 29 per cent, especially around large towns such as Lille.3 In the Amboise area on the Loire, where 15 per cent of the land changed hands, the peasantry acquired 32 per cent of the land sold, with winegrowers and larger peasant farmers doing particularly well, and artisans and traders such as coopers, innkeepers, butchers and bakers secured 23 per cent; but again the urban bourgeoisie did best with 35 per cent of the land sold.4 In the Beauce around Chartres, finally, 47 per cent of the buyers were peasants, but they secured only 27 per cent of the land sold, while artisans and traders who were 17 per cent of the buyers obtained 26 per cent of the land, and bourgeois property-owners, liberal professions and civil servants, who also made up 17 per cent of the buyers, obtained 40 per cent of the land.5

/>   Even more profound than the land market was the impact of the Revolution on patterns of inheritance. In 1793 the Convention established the equal right of all children to their parents’ estate, but this democratic right threatened to break up family farms to a degree that made them unviable, so in 1800 the Consulate allowed parents to dispose freely of part of the estate, while dividing the rest up equally among the heirs. This permitted the family farm to be passed down more or less intact to one main heir, while endowing the other children with dowries or some business capital.6 While awaiting their inheritance younger sons and daughters generally worked outside the family farms as day-labourers or artisans. Agricol Perdiguier, whose father was a carpenter and winegrower near Avignon, had two elder brothers who wanted to become farmers, one of whom had done eleven years in the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, so Agricol was apprenticed at the age of thirteen or fourteen, outside the family, to a carpenter.7 Marcel Bourgeois, the second son and one of five children of a mountain farmer in Franche-Comté, saw the farm go to his elder brother and was obliged to become a clockmaker in the next commune. As it turned out he married a tradeswoman, his business did well, and in 1847 he was able to buy out the share of his brother in the farm.8 The heir due to inherit the farm might marry and live and work in the parental household in what was known as a ‘pot and hearth’ community, but the question of when the inheritance would materialize could become pressing. Arnaud Bouzeran, a ploughman who married Marie Sanson, who was due to inherit the family farm near Montauban, lived with his in-laws under such an arrangement for ten years. He came into the farm but on condition that he pay a pension to Étienne Sanson, his father-in-law, a payment that cancelled out his profits. When in 1827 he fell behind with his payments and Sanson threatened to take him to court, Bouzeran killed him with an axe.9 This was violence of Balzacian proportions, but it was rare.