Children of the Revolution

by Robert Gildea

  10

  Reconciling Paris and the Provinces

  The war of 1870–71 had a dramatic effect on the supremacy of the French centralized state and the integrity of the French nation. French armies were defeated and German troops occupied the north-east of France and laid siege to Paris. The French government fled first to Tours, then to Bordeaux, tracing a path of shame that another government would take in 1940. Departments, thrown back on their own devices, joined forces in federations such as the Ligue du Midi. Towns and cities reclaimed the freedom to elect their own mayors and run their own affairs. Revolutionary communes were set up not only in Paris but in Marseille, Lyon, Le Creusot, Saint-Étienne, Toulouse and Narbonne. Inspired by the federalist ideas of the late Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the Paris Commune issued a Declaration to the French People on 19 April 1871 denouncing ‘despotic, stupid, arbitrary and onerous centralization’ and calling for a new political unity based on ‘the voluntary association of all local initiatives’.1 Under the Treaty of Frankfurt of 10 May 1871 which ended the Franco-Prussian war France was amputated of the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, which it had ruled respectively since 1648 and 1766, and the population of those areas were given just over a year to decide whether they wished to become French and leave or German and stay. These events thrust open old debates about the centralization or decentralization of the administration, and about the loyalty of the mosaic of populations that composed a French nation which since 1789 had been conceived in terms of political unity rather than of ethnic or linguistic uniformity.

  WEBS ADMINISTRATIVE AND

  POLITICAL

  For the republican government, confronted by German occupation and the disintegration of the country, there could be no alternative to taking up the threads of administrative centralization bequeathed by the Second Empire and drawing them as tightly as it could. Léon Gambetta, who had preached the virtues of local democracy in his Belleville manifesto of 1869, acted as a virtual dictator when he became minister of the interior in September 1870, appointing new prefects in eighty-five departments, postponing municipal elections and setting up republican municipal commissions where necessary, avoiding the election of a National Assembly which he feared would be dominated by royalists and Bonapartists. Adolphe Thiers, who had preached in favour of ‘necessary liberties’ in 1864, as head of the executive power scuppered a project in the National Assembly to permit the election of all mayors. He warned of the threat of the ‘demagogic party’ in the large cities, citing not only Paris but Marseille, where he alleged 500 sailors had attacked the prefecture with axes, and declared, ‘You want us to maintain order and at the same time you deprive us of the means!’2 The law of 14 April 1871 thus gave the government the authority to appoint mayors in all towns with a population of over 20,000 and strict control over municipal budgets and decisions. Paris was not accorded an elected mayor and fell back under the control of the prefect of the Seine and prefect of police. Gaston Crémieux, who had headed the commune in Marseille after the exploits of the axe-wielding sailors, was sent before the firing squad on 30 November 1871. In Lyon the republican municipality under Hénon and his deputy, Désiré Barodet, kept a revolutionary commune at bay by arguing that they had all the autonomy the city needed. This did not prevent Thiers from abolishing Lyon’s city-wide mayoralty on 4 April 1873, leaving nothing between the prefect and the thirty-six wards, a measure which backfired when Barodet defeated Thiers’ foreign minister in the Paris by-election of 27 April and terminated Thiers’ presidency. The Duc de Broglie, largely responsible for the fall of Thiers, although the grandson of that champion of liberty, Madame de Staël, extended government control even further under the Moral Order regime to keep out the republicans with a law of 20 January 1874 which gave the government the right to appoint all mayors, down to the smallest commune.

  The reflex of the government, to deal with revolution in Paris and other towns by tightening the hold of central over local administration, was nevertheless challenged by a rival argument. This was that the best antidote to a seizure of power by the reds in Paris who would use the apparatus of the centralized administration to try to spread revolution over the whole country, in 1871 as in 1848 and 1793, was to permit administrative decentralization, giving greater autonomy to the departments and cities. The argument had been forcefully put in the Nancy manifesto of 1865 and largely endorsed by Émile Ollivier’s commission on decentralization, whose conclusions had not in the end been acceptable to Napoleon III. In 1871 as in 1848, revolution in Paris had been snuffed out by volunteer forces recruited in the provinces. The Communards blamed their defeat on Breton Gardes Mobiles led by General Trochu and on Catholic–royalist Vendeans, led by the grandsons of the Vendean leaders of 1793, Henri de Cathelineau and Athanase-Charles-Marie Charette de la Contrie, seeking revenge for the Terror, although in fact many more volunteers had been drawn from eastern provinces such as Lorraine and the Vosges.3 Reward for their loyalty in the form of administrative decentralization was championed in conservative quarters. Arthur de Gobineau, following Alexis de Tocqueville, whose chef de cabinet at the Foreign Ministry he had been in 1849, since when he had written the notorious Essay on the Inequality of Human Races and had become Legitimist conseiller-général of Chaumont-en-Vexin (Oise), argued that France’s centralized bureaucracy and Paris’s tentacular strength were perennially at the disposal of revolutionaries who seized the Hôtel de Ville.4 Similarly the Catholic historian Henri Wallon argued in his book on the Terror that its driving force had been the Commune of 1793, which intimidated the elected Convention and massacred ‘federalists’ in the departments who rose to defend liberty; he subtitled his study France Defeated by the Paris Commune. ‘And today,’ he warned, ‘if the vanguard of the Jacobins (for there are always Jacobins), if the anarchists as they were called in 1793… seize power, what would France do, I ask you?’5

  The Republic, in time, did bring in measures of administrative decentralization. A law of 10 August 1871 responded to conservative fears by giving more power to the conseils généraux or elected assemblies in the departments, indeed implementing the recommendations of the Ollivier commission. Republicans triumphed in the municipal elections of 1878 and 1881 and demonstrated that they were not red revolutionaries. Although Paris was considered too dangerous to have its own mayor until 1977, Lyon recovered its city-wide mayor in 1881. A law of 28 March 1882 restored to all municipalities, except Paris, the right to elect their own mayors, and a further law of 5 April 1884 transferred more powers to municipalities from the central administration. The Republic took immense pride in its mayors as representatives of the regime in the 36,000 communes of France. They were fêted at great banquets in Paris, 1,119 of them attending on 14 July 1888, and 11,000 on 18 August 1889, on the occasion of the Universal Exposition and centenary of the French Revolution. On 22 September 1900, for the next Exposition, 20,777 mayors lunched in four hectares of tents in the Tuileries gardens, President Loubet sitting beside the mayor of Lyon, the largest commune, and that of the smallest, with only seventeen inhabitants, the youngest mayor and the oldest.6

  The controversy over the appointment of mayors arose because they were the smallest cog in the centralized administration as well as the basic cells of democracy. Whereas under the Second Empire the grounding of the regime in the localities was provided essentially by the administrative system, which appointed mayors and senators and organized the election of ‘official candidates’ as deputies, under the Third Republic the webbing was provided above all by the political system, with deputies and senators key mediators between Paris and the provinces. They often began their political careers as mayors and members of the departmental conseil général, following a filière or path that led to the Palais Bourbon or the Luxembourg.7 A good deputy had what was called the ‘bras long’, a long reach to the goodwill of ministers on whom he hoped to prevail to obtain advantages for his constituents such as funding for new roads, bridges and schools, a decision to have a planned r
ailway line pass through his town, scholarships, exemption from military service or jobs in the administration. He was on good terms with the prefect who would use his patronage and influence to facilitate the deputy’s reelection, and under the Republic a powerful deputy could have an uncooperative prefect moved to another post. Canvassing was done mainly in cafés, and on election days the wine flowed freely, with barrels even finding their way into the polling station.8 The deputy disposed of a local newspaper to record the agricultural shows he opened and school prize-givings he addressed, and to sing the praises of the ministry whose favour he enjoyed. La Dépêche de Toulouse, run by Maurice Sarraut, backed the election of Jean Jaurès to the Chamber in 1893 and of his brother Albert Sarraut in 1902, but it was the paper and networking agent of the Radical-Socialist Party in general and in 1905 the joke ran that it was necessary to be a southerner to succeed in Paris.9 Good management and publicity made the arrondissement into a deputy’s fief, and challengers who did not have access to power found it very difficult to shift him. The introduction of the scrutin de liste in 1885–9 inhibited the cultivation of the fief and the proportion of former deputies in the 1885 legislature fell to 57 per cent, but this rose again where the scrutin d’arrondissement was restored in 1889 and the proportion of former deputies rose to 70 per cent in the legislature of 1906.10

  Senators were often even more embedded in local life than deputies. Gambetta called the Senate the ‘grand council of the communes of France’. Unlike deputies, senators were elected not directly by the individual citizens but indirectly, by colleges in each department composed of other elected representatives: the deputies of the department, members of the conseil général, and delegates from each commune, usually the mayor. The composition of colleges was heavily weighted in the direction of mayors from rural communes and small market towns. Large towns were grossly and explicitly under-represented, in order to limit the influence of latterday Jacobins. In the Bouches-du-Rhône, for example, Marseille, with 500,000 inhabitants, had twenty-four delegates in the college, but so did seventeen other towns with a combined population of only 30,000.11 Although elections took place at the departmental level, senatorial seats by convention ‘belonged’ to certain districts within each department. Thus when two seats needed to be filled in the Nord in 1906, one went to an industrialist from Douai in the south, the other to a candidate from Dunkerque in the north, son of the deceased senator, boss of the port.12 Early in the Third Republic the filière of local government was less important: Pierre-Edmond Teisserenc de Bort, on the board of the Paris–Lyon–Marseille railway and a large landowner in the Limousin by marriage, elected to the National Assembly in 1871 and frequently minister of commerce or agriculture in 1872– 7, failed to win election to the conseil général of Haute-Vienne but served as its senator from 1876 to 1892.13 More typical for the embedded republican regime was Émile Combes, an ex-seminarist who taught in Catholic colleges in Nîmes and Pons (Charente) before he married in 1862, then requalified as a doctor, using his practice as a rural GP to cultivate an electoral clientele. He was elected to the municipal council of Pons at the age of thirty-four, in 1869, became its mayor in 1878, and claimed to know the name of every one of its 1,200 electors. He was elected to the conseil général of Charente in 1879, and to the Senate in 1885, and though he became president of the council in 1902 he declared himself ‘provincial to my fingertips. I adored my Saintonge and, with the Saintonge, my little town of Pons.’14

  ALSACE-LORRAINE, DECENTRALIZATION

  AND REGIONALISM

  The loss of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871 was not simply an amputation of territory but a test of citizens’ loyalty. The government of the newly united Germany gave the population of its recovered provinces until 1 October 1872 to decide whether they would accept German nationality and stay with their houses and property or opt for French citizenship and leave with no more than they could carry. Edmond About, a Lorrainer by birth and Alsatian by choice, argued in 1873 that 1.1 million out of 1.6 million of the population opted for French citizenship, and described the emigrants’ hurried sale of their property, to Jews happy to oblige, before piling their furniture on to carts and joining a ‘pitiful procession’ into France.15 Scholarly research has massively reduced these figures. In fact, only 164,000 people, 10 per cent of the population of annexed Alsace-Loraine, opted for French citizenship, a third of them young men fleeing German military service, to whom should be added 362,000 natives of Alsace-Lorraine living in other parts of France, 7,000 in other European countries and 16,200 living outside Europe.16

  The choices of the population of Alsace-Lorraine were widely debated in French literature, sometimes from a patriotic perspective, sometimes with a greater understanding of the private and local priorities. Alphonse Daudet wrote a tear-jerking short story in 1872 describing the last lesson of a French schoolteacher in his Alsatian school. He tells his pupils that they must not forget French, the language of liberty, makes them copy out ‘France, Alsace’ into their books and writes ‘Vive la France’ on the board before leaving them to their incoming German teacher.17 The irony is, of course, that while the teacher from the French-speaking educated stratum leaves, his pupils, whose dialect is Germanic, stay. The literary team Erckmann and Chatrian took very different views of the Alsatian dilemma. Chatrian, in Paris and writing for the stage, regarded Alsatians who remained in Germany as little better than traitors and had a play banned by the government in 1880 as too anti-German. Erckmann, on the other hand, driven out of Phalsbourg by the Prussians in August 1870 and angry at their razing of its defences in 1871, nevertheless sympathized with those who stayed.18 In his 1872 Story of the Plebiscite the miller and village mayor Christian Weber stays in order to keep the land he has ‘paid for by the fruit of [his] labour’, while his cousin Georges Weber, the innkeeper, marries his daughter to a stone-merchant in anticipation of plenty of rebuilding work.19 Two further Erckmann stories, Brigadier Frédéric and The Banished, relate the fortunes of the forest guard of Saverne, Brigadier Frédéric, who abandons his job and property and goes to France rather than swear an oath to the King of Prussia, his daughter having been beaten to death by Prussian soldiers, but later returns in search of his grandmother’s grave and daughter’s ghost before dying in the garden of his old house.20

  More reassuring for the French public was Le Tour de France par deux enfants, by Augustine Fouillée, published in 1877, which sold three million copies by 1887 and six million by 1901. It tells the story of two boys, aged fourteen and seven, who leave Phalsbourg after it falls to the Prussians and their father is killed, go in search of their uncle in Marseille and decide to become French. On their travels through France they discover the variety of its regions, economies and cultures, but each one combining harmoniously to form a single France. They admire its beauty but also its fertility and the incessant work of its peasants and artisans. They realize that their mission is to work the French soil and to contribute to France’s prosperity and greatness. Their uncle buys them a farm in the Orléa-nais, and the younger boy, ‘in the joy he felt finally to have a fatherland, a house, a family, as he had so often wished’, shouts ‘J’aime la France!’21

  Though the French ‘of the interior’ wanted passionately to believe in the patriotism of Alsatians and Lorrainers, the population of the ‘lost provinces’ made decisions on practical grounds and set more store by the liberty, faith and prosperity of their provinces than by an abstract French or German nationalism. Raphael Dreyfus, a cotton manufacturer of Mulhouse, which was occupied by German troops in September 1870, went to Carpentras to join his daughter Henriette, who had married a Jewish fabric merchant there. He opted for French citizenship, as did his son Alfred, who went to school in Paris, entered the École Polytechnique in 1877 and graduated as a sublieutenant in the French army in 1882. His elder brother Jacques, by contrast, who fought in the French army in 1870, went back to Mulhouse, now German, to run the family business.22 The Reichsland of Alsace-Lorraine was put under
German military and bureaucratic control, the mayors of Strasbourg, Metz and Colmar were removed and Jesuits and other religious orders were expelled in the anti-Catholic Kulturkampf of 1873, leading to republican and Catholic protesters winning the provinces’ fifteen seats in the Reichstag in 1874. However the grant of a territorial assembly and the realization that Alsace-Lorraine was escaping the Third Republic’s attack on Catholic schools led to the success in the Reichstag elections of 1879 of ‘autonomists’ who were happy to accept the Reich so long as local liberties and religion were respected by Berlin. After this there was no sense that the population of Alsace and Lorraine had any desire to become French again.23

  The loss of Alsace-Lorraine and the sense that the German dialect spoken there had weakened loyalty to the French nation stimulated a movement in the French administration to eliminate minority languages such as Flemish and Breton, and to attack the many patois spoken in different parts of France. A survey of 1863 showed that in twenty-four of the eighty-nine departments, south of an arc from Bordeaux to Metz, together with Brittany and Flanders, the population in half the communes did not speak French.24 On 7 June 1880 the Ministry of Public Instruction announced unequivocally that ‘only French will be used in schools’.25 It was not just a question of patriotism: French was seen as the vehicle of liberty and civilization which was to be spread with missionary zeal. In 1888 the official in charge of primary education in the Nord, where Flemish was widely spoken, asked, ‘is it not shameful that a part of the Nord population still does not know French? By uprooting people from their local tongue we are freeing them from a kind of prison where air, sun and life are wanting, where progress does not penetrate, and where souls atrophy in age-old routine.’26