Modernity and Bourgeois Life

by Jerrold Seigel

  Gambetta’s vision of a changing France as providing support to a more democratic politics did not mean that divisions either inside the bourgeoisie or between it and other groups had been overcome; quite the contrary. The opposition between the competing groups of republicans labeled “opportunists” and “intransigents” defined a major cleft inside the politically active middle classes, one that had something to do with social difference, but just as much with individual temperament and regional conditions. Although many upper bourgeois and well-off businessmen could be found on the more moderate part of the political spectrum, in contrast to a certain number of visible figures whose more modest popular origins predisposed them to side with radicals, such cases were a minority. People at different levels of the middle class were found in all groups (as in other countries), and a recent study suggests that what chiefly allowed some deputies to vote in accord with their consciences while others were drawn into “opportunist” compromises was the greater stability of the former’s electoral districts; in addition, loyalties to particular groups or factions were often determined by friendships, rivalries, and ambitions.43 Little in the social origins of the opportunist luminary Jules Ferry and the “intransigent” leader Georges Clemenceau distinguished the two; both belonged to old provincial bourgeois families with established republican roots, and interestingly both sought to marry into the same clan, the well-known Scheurer-Kestners of Alsace, active in both textile and chemical production (and notable defenders of Dreyfus). Ferry succeeded, but Clemenceau was refused by Hortense Kestner, perhaps because she or her relatives recognized in him the unstable, dissatisfied, impatient temperament that would later make him known as a volatile politician, resistant to compromise and often responsible for the downfall of ministries. Religious divisions provided important fault lines inside the bourgeoisie too, both between Protestants and Catholics, and between believers and secularists; sometimes these divisions ran inside rather than between families, as was the case with the highly skeptical Jules Ferry, responsible for educational reforms that reduced the influence of the Church, and his devout sister, whose piety he always respected in private.44 Given the persisting importance of these and other divisions, there is good reason to regard Gambetta’s project of organizing the republic in a way that brought upper and lower bourgeois together as one manner of giving political unity to a group whose various other divisions it could not dissolve, an effort that recalls those of English liberals and that we will encounter in Germany too.

  The advent of modern parties in France

  Only once the Republic was established on this basis did nationally organized parties make their appearance in France. As in other places, groupings intended to represent the separate position and interests of workers exhibited a special affinity for the new form of organization, turning to it as they withdrew from the cooperation some of them had earlier maintained with liberal circles. In France, however, workers were slower both to call their organizations parties and to engage in electoral activity, since the earlier history of violent conflict and repression left them with a deeper estrangement from “bourgeois” forms of politics than elsewhere. Reluctance to participate in parliamentary activity also played a role in keeping French workers’ organizations from effecting the tactical unity between different currents and factions their German and English counterparts accomplished; only in 1905, after some elements of the workers’ movement had moved closer to parliamentary politics, but also under pressure from their German associates in the Second International, did a unified party emerge, its debt to international involvements displayed in its name, French Section of the Workers’ International (SFIO).45

  Behind this event lay a complex history, a major strand of which emerged with the founding of the first workers’ organizations soon after the crisis of 1877. These were set up partly in response to Gambetta’s failed attempt to draw workers into his liberal coalition, which he sought to do by invoking the common commitment to republicanism that had served as a sometime ground for such cooperation earlier, both before and after 1848. Gambetta held a series of meetings with working-class figures and hoped that the amnesty proclaimed in 1880 for people convicted of insurrection in the aftermath of the Commune would draw them to work with him, but the wounds from that conflict were still too raw, and workers did not take the proffered hand. Their refusal was stiffened in the following years by the difficult economic conditions of the 1880s, which sharpened conflicts between workers and employers, and also by the rapprochement with the Republic effected by many formerly monarchist businessmen, who rallied more from a desire for order than out of republican conviction, and who sought, often successfully, to enlist the government on their side in disputes, particularly by using force against strikers.46

  It was in this atmosphere that a number of working-class organizations were founded, beginning with a “Federation of Socialist Workers” in 1879. The choice of “federation” over party expressed the sense that workers would not pursue their aims through parliamentary means, but unite in preparation for a more radical kind of struggle. Over the next few years a number of other worker and socialist groupings would emerge, most of which also refused to call themselves parties, choosing “federation” or “alliance,” and for the same reasons.47 An exception was the Parti ouvrier founded in 1880 by Marx’s friend Jules Guesde, which modeled itself on the German Social Democrats and put up candidates in elections, with considerable success during the 1890s. The Guesdiste Party became the first in France of any political persuasion to provide itself with a solid network of local, departmental, and national associations and agencies, here too modeled on the German example, and putting in place procedures to assure control over both deputies and newspapers. But it remained closer to the other workers’ groupings in regarding this structure not as a vehicle for winning elections, but as the basis of an “action party,” preparing itself for the revolutionary engagement that promised an end to representative government as then practiced.48

  This is not to say that reformist currents did not emerge inside French socialism. They were fostered both by a minority of moderate workers and by left-leaning liberals, of whom the most eminent was Jean Juarès, who showed that it was possible for a bourgeois republican with a strong belief in the continuity between liberal democracy and socialism to obtain a central position in the movement. Juarès was responsible for convincing many formerly intransigent figures that the Dreyfus affair was no mere dispute between bourgeois factions and that the defense of the Republic ought to be a working-class cause too, since no other regime would provide conditions in which the movement could grow. Juarès became the leader of the unified Party in 1905, and remained its dominant figure until he was assassinated just as World War I broke out. But the tension between his moderation and the persisting radical alternative was demonstrated in 1899, when Alexandre Millerand, like Jaurès coming from the ranks of bourgeois radicals, became the first socialist to occupy a ministerial post, which he accepted out of a similar sense that socialist advance required giving support to the Republic. Although he was able to add somewhat to the regime’s rather limited record of social reform, the fact that one of the government ministers alongside whom he served had been involved in the repression of the Commune provoked a passionate debate inside the workers’ movement, contributing to its continued division, and his own later expulsion from the faction he had headed. By then the old suspicion of parliamentary activity, rekindled by the Millerand affair, had led the group to fuse with followers of the insurrectionist Louis-Auguste Blanqui in 1901. It was this combined formation, renamed Parti socialiste de France, that merged, under pressure from the International, with Juarès’s more moderate Parti socialiste français to form the “Unified Socialist Party” (SFIO) in 1905.

  By this time other new-style political parties had begun to operate in France alongside and in competition with the socialists, but before considering them we need to take note of an inheritance from the French past that
had to be eliminated before the Republic could become a ground on which organized political interaction could develop unhindered: until 1901 political organizations of the type pioneered by the socialists remained officially illegal. The prohibition went back to the Napoleonic Code that still regulated many aspects of public and private life; behind it stood the hostility to organizations that protected the partial and privileged interests of their members that inspired the Allarde and Le Chapellier laws of 1791 and 1793 abolishing Old Regime corporations, as well as a widespread fear of conspiracy and factionalism. More positive attitudes toward associations, often as remedies for excessive individualism, were present in France to be sure, voiced for instance by the Saint-Simonians and even by Guizot in the early 1830s, but the government cracked down on them in 1834 after a series of uprisings in Paris and Lyons. The Second Empire kept these restraints on the books, although, as already noted, it ceased to interfere with local political associations (many of which sought to escape the law by presenting themselves as temporary groupings that only existed at election times) during the 1860s. The republican liberals who gained control of the government after 1877 were in theory committed to freedom of association, and some of them attempted to do away with the old legislation at the time of the amnesty for Communards and the establishment of freedom of the press and other forms of public expression in 1881. But the attempt foundered because political associations were not the only ones against which the law operated; the other main category comprised the religious orders of which many liberals were deeply suspicious, especially those that sought to set up schools where the doctrines and spirit of the Church remained alive and influential. Militant secularism was a major feature of the Third Republic, sometimes providing the kind of bridge between bourgeois and working-class moral attitudes afforded by Protestant Dissent in England. The Republic gave legal existence to unions in 1884, and to mutual aid societies four years later, but only in 1901 did freedom of association become the rule in France.

  The law was passed under the government of “republican defense” set up at the height of the Dreyfus Affair, and headed by René Waldeck-Rousseau (in whose republicanism anti-clericalism was a key component), the one that made Millerand a minister, and which was supported by other moderate socialists. Now any organized group that registered itself as such could legally hold meetings, collect dues, and own property, save that religious orders were subjected to much more restrictive oversight, effectively barring them from operating schools. Proposals to restrict socialist organizations by outlawing groupings that sought to alter the constitution or that advocated the abolition of private property were advanced at the same time, but they were defeated in the Assembly.49

  One thing that made this legislation necessary was that the earlier prohibition of associations had grown increasingly hollow, through the refusal of governments to enforce it. By 1901 there were over 45,000 associations of various kinds in the country, most of them theoretically illegal. At the time the law was passed, however, the major political grouping whose status was regularized by the legalization was the socialists, since other political currents had not moved so far in the reliance on organization as they. The reason for this slowness was not that liberals or conservatives were unaware of the expanding importance that organized parties were assuming in politics. Even before 1870 French figures displayed considerable interest in the American caucus system on which Joseph Chamberlain had modeled himself, and after that date much public attention was given to the new-style parties in both England and Germany. Various French groups took steps to follow their example and create national organizations, but none of them achieved any permanent results. It seems that two things stood in the way, one common to other countries and one more specific to France.

  The first was that some of the habits and expectations of the older politics of notability still operated among both conservative and liberal politicians. Monarchist groups had long relied on webs of personal relations, drawing on private resources of a sort we will later see at work among German Honoratioren, and many of these survived; and Catholics continued to look to Church institutions to spread their views and mobilize support. Even Gambetta’s relationshipto his supporters had features of notable politics, in some ways resembling the “community of sentiment” John Vincent describes in regard to Gladstone. The Union republicaine he set up to give this relationship more solid form was closer to the mid-century Gladstonian Party than to the one that emerged once it took over Chamberlain’s caucus; that it fell apart after Gambetta’s death in 1882 was a sign of how closely it was tied to his person. Many political figures resisted more formal organization, fearing it would subject them to central discipline (just what the socialists did intend in regard to their parliamentary delegation and newspapers) and deprive them of their independence. Such attitudes helped to preserve divisions inside various camps, for instance between the opportunist Association républicaine and the radical Féderation républicaine.50

  In addition, however, these views went together with a second barrier to party organization, namely the persistence of a longstanding conception of national politics that looked to public discussion and action not as a way for different interests and political ideas to compete and find some modus vivendi, but as a vehicle for forming the country as a whole in accord with some particular view of its essential being. Sara Maza points out that already at the end of the eighteenth century French figures insisted on the contrast between their country as seeking “the harmonious integration of various social groups into a transcendent whole,” and the English model of “society as an arena in which opposing groups played out their conflicts, balanced interests, and reached compromises.”51 This notion of an ideal form of the nation, which one or another elite group would bring to realization, survived in the competing teleocratic “legitimacies” that still sought to provide alternatives to the Republic; later it would echo in Charles de Gaulle’s appeal to “a certain idea of France.”

  All the same, a notion of politics more like the English one began to make its way from the 1870s, as the various ambitions to re-establish an ideal unity receded in face of a republican understanding of political life that, in Raymond Huard’s words, “admits the permanent division of opinion into separate camps, distinct and often opposed to each other.” This alteration corresponded both to the higher level of social and cultural differentiation brought about by modernizing trends, and to the expansion of the political public to include many excluded from it before, people whose participation could seldom be mediated by direct connections to notables, instead requiring the more abstract linkages constituted by impersonal organizations and mass-circulation papers. “The creation of the principal French parties between 1900 and 1905 was the culmination of this evolution.”52 The groups in question included, in addition to the Socialists, the Parti radical, consisting of leftist republicans often critical of the government, which gave itself a central organization in 1901, and an Alliance démocratique, peopled by more centrist republicans (who also called themselves “progressives”) and founded in the same year. Groups to the right had still not freed themselves enough from their ancient loyalties to organize in a single grouping, acting instead through personal networks, the Church, or the activist “leagues” that mounted much of the anti-republican agitation in the Dreyfus Affair.

  The conceptual shift described by Huard did not proceed in exact parallel with the organizational one, however. One reason was that socialism, among modern political currents the one whose need to draw in people with limited personal resources made it the most consonant with the new-style parties, resembled certain forms of conservatism in its rejection of the liberal republican vision of a state founded on the neutral rule of law. Nor could French liberals themselves quite live up to this standard, given the resistance many of them exhibited to extending the principle of free association to the religious orders. But they did extend it to the workers’ parties. Whatever role either political calculation or
sentiment may have played in the decision by Waldeck-Rousseau and his allies in 1901 to ignore the socialists’ anti-liberal political rhetoric and anti-capitalist social visions and grant them legal status, the moment pointed toward a future in which socialist claims (their links to liberal principles increasingly acknowledged, despite protests from the far left) would take their place as one among other competing forces inside bourgeois politics, rather than as an alternative to it. The very conditions that made liberal republicanism the form within which modern French politics would develop, putting an end to the longstanding struggle of competing teleocratic legitimacies, also gave working-class parties a prominent place within the system.