Children of the Revolution

by Robert Gildea

  The harshness of the Millerand law provoked an attempt at bridgebuilding to conscripted soldiers from antimilitarists nationally. Primary school teachers meeting in conference at Chambéry in August 1912 voted the ‘Soldier’s Penny’ by which teachers would send a 5-franc coin to teachers who had just been conscripted, to keep them in touch with civilian life. Since many teachers were followers of Gustave Hervé and had a reputation for antimilitarism, even anti-patriotism, there was a public outcry against teachers who were now ‘sans patrie’ as well as godless, and the education minister clamped down on teachers’ trade unions, which were illegal.68 In fact, however, some teachers followed the model of Maurice Vincent, hero of Psichari’s second novel, The Call to Arms, published in 1913. Vincent, the son of an antimilitarist teacher of the generation of those ‘who had witnessed the defeat as frail innocent children and forgotten it’, falls under the spell of a Captain Nangis who hunts pheasant in his home region of Brie and believes that ‘understanding the former destinies of our races helps us to live in the present and above the contingencies of social life’. Vincent is converted to army and Church by visits to the battlefield of Champigny and the Benedictine Abbey of Jouarre. He recognizes himself as one of the new generation which ‘did not witness the defeat, but remembers it’, and joins up. Psichari dedicated this book to his former adviser Charles Péguy, whom he now saw as embodying ‘the soul of France’. Through Psichari Péguy learned to bring his craving for spiritual values down to earth and see that the soldier ‘measures the quantity of land where a language is spoken, where morals, a soul, a religion, a race hold sway… the quantity of temporal land that is the same as the spiritual land and intellectual land’.69 Psichari himself became the symbol of the generation of 1890, one of the key interviewees in a survey of 1913, Les Jeunes Gens d’aujourd’hui, by his friend Henri Massis of Action Française and the sociologist Alfred de Tarde. Like The Call to Arms this contrasted the decadent, intellectual generation born around 1860 with the young men of 1910 who loved sport, machines and action, were building the Empire and in a year or so would be leading men out of the trenches of northern France.70

  In the autumn of 1912 war broke out in the Balkans, and in January 1913 French national unity and nationalism moved into another phase when Raymond Poincaré was elected president of the Republic by the votes of right-wing parliamentarians such as Albert de Mun as well as those in the centre. ‘A nation can only be peace-loving’, he told the assembled deputies and senators, ‘if it is always ready for war. A France exposed to challenges and humiliations by its own fault would no longer be France.’71 The Action Française argument that only a king would restore French greatness was made redundant. Charles Péguy argued that Poincaré had been raised to power by ‘a deep popular movement, a new leap of national energy’, which responded to moments of crisis and eliminated rois fainéants. The Merovingians, Carolingians and Capetians had been cast aside because they had been too weak, but ‘the Republic was the fourth dynasty, strong in its youth.’72 A second Balkan war in the summer of 1913 resulted in the expansion of Serbia, posing a powerful threat to Austro-Hungarian interests. Germany, allied to Austria-Hungary, passed an army bill on 30 June 1913, massively increasing the size of its armed forces. In order to expand French forces Poincaré replied with a law of 19 July 1913 which increased military service from the two years decreed in 1905 back to three years. This provoked riots in the garrison towns of eastern France – Toul, Belfort and Nancy – when conscripts learned that they would have to serve for another year, and meetings that were addressed by antimilitarists such as Yvetot. The CGT called a massive demonstration against the Three-Year bill on 13 July 1913, and the SFIO and Radical-Socialists under their new leader Joseph Caillaux made opposition to the law the central plank of their programmes. At the traditional march-past of 14 July 1913 at Longchamp, however, the military significance of the French colonies was amply demonstrated as President Poincaré presented tricolour flags to twenty-five new regiments of colonial or mixed colonial and French recruits – ten Moroccan, five Algerian, three from each of Senegal, Indo-China and Madagascar, and two from Chad and Gabon. If conscripts from France were wavering, those from the Empire were ready to fight.73

  The crisis was not over because in the elections of April–May 1914 radicals and socialists won a majority. To redeem the situation Poincaré appointed as premier a socialist who was committed to the Three-Year Law, René Viviani. Antimilitaristic hostility to the Three-Year Law and the struggle for peace did not, however, mean that socialists and trade unionists would stand in the way of national defence if France were attacked. At an extraordinary congress of the SFIO on 15–16 July 1914, three weeks after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo and a week before Austria’s ultimatum to Serbia, a motion was passed endorsing a general strike, not however to trigger revolution or desertion but to persuade governments to defuse the situation by international arbitration. ‘Whatever our enemies say,’ declared Jaurès’ paper, L’Humanité, on 18 July, ‘there is no contradiction between making the maximum effort to ensure peace and, if war breaks out in spite of us, doing the maximum to ensure the independence and integrity of the nation.’74 As the crisis deepened, international workers’ solidarity dissolved. CGT leader Léon Jouhaux met the leader of the German trade-union movement, Karl Legien, in Brussels on 27 July, and was convinced that German unions would not take part in an international general strike against war. The CGT was itself afraid that its leaders, listed in the Interior Ministry’s notorious Carnet B, would be arrested as soon as war broke out and on 31 July it concluded a deal with the ministry: there would be no call for a general strike and no arrest of CGT leaders.75 That evening, Jean Jaurès was assassinated by a nationalist fanatic who considered him a traitor, and socialist resolve to fight growing war fever fell apart.

  For two weeks of the crisis President Poincaré and premier Viviani were on the high seas, sailing to St Petersburg and back both to urge restraint on Russia and to ensure the solidity of the Franco-Russian alliance if it came to war. On their return to France on 29 July they were greeted by a demonstration organized by the Ligue des Patriotes. Paul Déroulède, its president, had died in January, but Maurice Barrès had succeeded to the post. Gustave Hervé now admitted that ‘he had always had a weakness for Déroulède,’ and declared that if German unionists and socialists reneged on the international class struggle, then French unionists and socialists would ‘return to the revolutionary patriotism and idea of national defence that had been favoured by bourgeois democracy and working-class socialism since 1793’. He promptly changed the name of his newspaper from La Guerre Sociale to La Victoire.76 Russia mobilized in defence of Serbia on 31 July and Germany declared war on it on 1 August. The previous day Germany had pressed France to remain neutral but Joffre threatened to resign if France did not mobilize, which it did on 1 August. On 3 August Germany declared war on France and invaded Belgium. Great Britain declared war on Germany the following day.

  This was the moment at which the French nation was put to the severest test. Unlike in 1870, it was not diplomatically isolated. It fulfilled its commitment to the Franco-Russian alliance, and Great Britain made concrete the Entente Cordiale. It had strengthened its army under the Three-Year Law and despite the antimilitarist opposition this had provoked it remained intact. There was very little resentment of the call to arms: citizens who joined up did so not from a desire for greatness or to recover Alsace-Lorraine but because they felt the object of German aggression.77 France was a proud and confident nation once again, buoyed up by a national consciousness that had been formed steadily since 1870. There was a sense of a historical continuity going back a thousand years, whatever the dynasty, whatever the regime. The French were inspired by ‘great ancestors’, some thinking of Joan of Arc, others of Vercingétorix. The myth of the Volunteers of 1792 that had given heart to the embattled Republic in 1870 was once again a potent resource, locking into the nation those who might
have been swayed by anarchist or Marxist antipatriotism. ‘If Jaurès were still here,’ said CGT leader Jouhaux at his open grave on 4 August, ‘he would tell you, comrades, that above the national cause, in the harsh struggle that is beginning, you will be defending the cause of the International, and that of civilization, of which France is the cradle.’78

  Conclusion: 1914

  The great fear in 1914 was that there would be a catastrophic repeat of 1870. German troops drove into Belgium and northern France and by 2 September were within 30 miles of Paris. As in 1870 the government left the capital for Bordeaux and half a million Parisians took to the roads in a flight which prefigured the exodus of 1940. Then, on 3 September, came the news that instead of driving on to Paris the German First Army under von Kluck had turned south in order to encircle the city from the east, exposing its right flank. The commanderin-chief General Joffre now gave the order to the French Fifth and Sixth Armies to attack, and the battle of the Marne was engaged.

  Charles Péguy was a lieutenant in the 276th Reserve Infantry Regiment, part of the Sixth Army. On 5 September, near the village of Villeroy close to Meaux, the regiment advanced on the German lines, resplendent in red trousers. The company captain, Pierre Guérin, aged thirty-two, a veteran of Morocco, was killed, followed by Lieutenant Cornillère. Victor Boudon, a commercial traveller in civilian life and a member of the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, takes up the story:

  Péguy was still standing up, in spite of our shouts of ‘Get down!’, a glorious fool in his bravery. He drew himself up, defying the machine guns, as if inviting the death he had glorified in his poetry. At that very moment a deadly bullet pierced his noble forehead. He fell on his side, without a cry, with a low groan, having had the ultimate vision of a victory so much longed for and finally near. And when, a few metres further on, leaping like a madman, I glanced behind me, I saw the body of our dear, brave lieutenant, on the hot and dusty earth, amid broad green leaves, a black and red blotch among so many others.1

  The battle of the Marne lasted until 12 September, at which point the German armies were in retreat. Two hundred and fifty thousand Frenchmen were killed in the battle, but Paris was saved and the government soon returned there to direct the war effort. More than that, the spectre of another 1870 had been exorcized, and the French Republic and nation had held together under fire. ‘Our troops, as well as those of our Allies, are admirable in morale, endurance, and ardour,’ Joffre telegraphed the minister of war, Alexandre Millerand, on 13 September. ‘The Government of the Republic may be proud of the army which it has prepared.’2

  The death of Péguy symbolized the meeting of a multiplicity of strands in French politics, society, religion and culture that in 1799 had plunged France into civil war and defeat but by 1914 had come together to ensure a consensus around the Republic and the strength and unity of the nation. Maurice Barrès, who had fought Péguy over the Dreyfus Affair and had been unable to win him over to the right in 1910 when Péguy published La Mystère de la charité de Jeanne d’Arc, now hailed him as a national icon. ‘His sacrifice heightens the importance of his work,’ he wrote. ‘He celebrated the moral greatness, abnegation and exaltation of the soul. It was given to him to prove the truth of his work in a single minute. He is now sacred. Dead, he is a guide, who will be more active than ever, and is more than ever alive.’3

  Péguy, for Barrès, brought together the man of the people and the intellectual, the provincial and the Parisian. ‘This grandson of a peasant who entered the École Normale’, said Barrès, ‘was always thinking of his fields, that is of his Cahiers de la Quinzaine, which had to be dug over, fertilized and extended… In his brief career as a man of letters he gave expression to the virtues of a peasant expanding his domain, of a shopkeeper counting and recounting his money, of a printer producing beautiful work, of a curé preaching to his flock and of a line officer leading his men into battle.’4 In his final incarnation as an officer, echoed Victor Boudon in his tribute to Péguy, he defended Paris with a company composed of ‘workers of Belleville and Bercy, and peasants of Seine-et-Marne… More than any other he recognized and used the rugged independence of these workers from the Paris suburbs, these farmers of Crécy and Voulangis, and to see them in a noble light.’ In the 19th Company of the 276th Regiment Péguy was nicknamed ‘the schoolmaster’ or ‘the pion’, but Péguy replied, ‘Joke, joke, my friends, but you wait till you see him at work, your pion.’ Having earlier in the fighting been sent forward into Lorraine when he could overlook the Moselle, he met Ernest Psichari by chance just before Psichari was killed, and may well have wanted to imitate the other man’s embrace of a life of action and death for the patrie.5

  Péguy, for Boudon on the left, as for Barrès on the right, was ‘at the confluence of our traditional and revolutionary forces’. He was a republican, dreyfusard and socialist but also a Catholic and attached to the values of old France, nourished by Joinville and Joan of Arc, embodying the medieval ‘loyalty of man to man, and truth to the faith’.6 As a native of Orléans he was especially drawn to the story of Joan of Arc, writing Joan of Arc in 1897, returning to her with the Mystère in 1910 and going on a pilgrimage to Orléans in 1912 to pray for a child of his who was sick. When in 1914 he saw the cathedral of Senlis bombarded by the Germans he exclaimed, ‘the savages,’ and made a monk, Roussel, both chaplain to the company and his private chaplain. After his death one of Péguy’s friends wrote to Barrès, ‘we have lost a saint,’ and his wife and children later converted to Catholicism.7 As a patriot, Péguy argued that France had two missions, one old, one new. The old one was the divine mission that France honoured as the ‘eldest daughter of the Church’ to defend Christian civilization. The new one was the revolutionary mission incumbent on France as the cradle of liberty since 1789, to defend liberty wherever it should be threatened. The cult of Joan of Arc went hand in hand with the cult of the Convention of 1792 that had declared that France was the friend of all peoples struggling for their freedom.

  For most of the nineteenth century France was torn between forces which embraced the Revolution of 1789 and those that opposed them. Each generation wrestled with the legacy of the Revolution, marked by it but also contributing to the long process of laying to rest the ghosts of division and destruction and recovering what was constructive and unifying about it. By 1914 Revolution no longer evoked civil war or anarchy but was a source of legitimacy for the Republic founded in its name, preached up in school textbooks and ritually commemorated in monuments and on occasions such as 14 July. Revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries were marginalized by a republic of the centre, acceptable to as broad a political spectrum as possible. Even those tempted by the extremes of antimilitarism and royalism, however, answered the call to arms in 1914 and ensured the survival of the Republic through the Great War, which finally fused republic and nation into a single entity.

  The Revolution established France as the One and Indivisible Republic, which then collapsed into the chaos of provinces, cities and departments seeking autonomy, before unity was reimposed by Napoleon’s iron cage of administrative centralization. Over the next century the French learned to combine the benefits of centralization with a growing appreciation of the geographical, linguistic and cultural diversity of the country. Decentralization was made more acceptable by being articulated in terms of regionalism rather than a return to the provinces of the Ancien Régime. French was imposed as the lingua franca in the public places of the Republic, such as schools and town halls, but minority languages were tolerated in private places, including in churches for religious instruction. By 1914 the grande patrie of the French nation had come to coexist harmoniously with the petites patries to which French men and women were so attached.

  France’s economy, which for long had been criticized as backward, embraced agricultural and industrial modernization without doing irreparable damage to its social structure. The weight of agriculture in the economy and in rural life provided ballast against over-rapid c
hange and loss of equilibrium. Small farms and small businesses were disseminated more widely in 1914 than at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and if the old lower-middle class of artisans and shopkeepers was threatened by proletarianization a new lower-middle class of white-collar workers expanding at the end of the century maintained a social balance between the rich and poor. The thickness of this stratum of classes moyennes defused the danger of class struggle which was more pronounced in countries that were more industrialized, such as Great Britain or Germany, or less so, as in Russia. Tensions within the social elite were also reduced. While earlier generations were divided between Ancien Régime and Napoleonic nobilities and between landed and capitalist wealth, in later generations economic developments brought together landed, financial and industrial wealth. Moreover the republican office-holding class was careful to build bridges to the traditional social elite which had been reluctant to embrace the Republic, by a combination of social intercourse and intermarriage, so that a ruling class emerged that was more united than ever before.

  Religious struggles that were reignited by the French Revolution continued throughout the nineteenth century and only gradually was religious peace negotiated. Attempts to reconcile religion and liberty were long frustrated by revolutionaries’ distrust of religion as counter-revolutionary, and by the Napoleonic system of state control for churches at the price of state funding. The solution to the first problem was the invention of the principle of laïcité, under which religion was eliminated from state-run schools, replaced by a moral and civic education appropriate to citizens of the Republic, while parish clergy were not troubled. The solution to the second problem was the Separation of Church and state in 1905. The state ceased to fund the Church but also ceased to persecute it. Catholics were obliged to fall back on their own resources, but Catholicism was able to flourish socially, culturally and intellectually. Anticlericals such as Péguy spoke the same language of admiration for Joan of Arc as Maurice Barrès, who hailed the victory of the Marne in which Péguy died as a miracle worked by Joan of Arc, as he threw himself into a campaign that resulted in her canonization and her nomination as patron saint of France after the war.