Revolution and the Republic

by Jeremy Jennings

  one of his favourite themes and again to underline what he took to be the

  emancipatory and morally uplifting qualities of his own conception of the nation.

  The religion of the world, Michelet proclaimed, was no longer an egoistic faith,

  where salvation was secured in isolation. Our own salvation was only secured

  through the salvation of everyone else, was only to be obtained through what

  Michelet termed ‘the fraternal embrace of humanity by humanity’.136

  I V

  Michelet republished Légendes démocratiques du Nord in 1863, the year in which

  Poland again unsuccessfully rose in revolt against Tsarist Russia. If anything his

  distaste for the Russian ‘monster’ had only intensified over time, although this did

  not prevent him from recognizing the ‘magnanimity’ of Alexander Herzen and

  the ‘heroism’ of Mikhail Bakunin.137 Something had changed however. Upon this

  occasion, Russian repression had formal Prussian support, Bismarck having signed

  an agreement with the Tsar in February 1863 specifying that an uprising in the

  Polish provinces of Prussia would be met by similar repression. The following year

  Prussia went to war successfully with Denmark over the contested duchies of

  Schleswig and Holstein. Two years later Prussia defeated Austria, leaving the way

  open for the establishment of the North German Confederation in 1867 and

  further Prussian expansion. In a few short years Bismarck had overturned the

  European balance of power and France, under the incompetent and vainglorious

  guidance of Napoleon III, found herself facing a politically unified and increasingly

  aggressive Germany. Three years later, under the pretext of a dispute about the

  succession to the Spanish throne, Prussia and France went to war. The French army

  was decisively defeated; and (in an act calculated to inflict maximum humiliation)

  the second German Reich was proclaimed in the hall of mirrors of the Palace of

  Versailles. The latter event, the Goncourt brothers confided to their diary, marked

  ‘the end of the greatness of France’.138

  If the loss of French pre-eminence in continental Europe dramatically over-

  turned the fragile military and diplomatic equilibrium that had existed since 1815,

  136 Ibid. 186.

  137 Ibid. 134.

  138 Pages from the Goncourt Journal (Harmondsworth, 1984), 183.

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  Universalism, the Nation, and Defeat

  it had been an outcome long foretold by pessimists such as Prévost-Paradol. The

  experience of the Second Empire had forced republicans to rethink their very idea

  of the nation and to recognize that the nation could as well be embodied in an

  autocrat as in the people. The military successes in the Crimea (1854–5) and Italy

  (1859) allowed both Napoleon III and the army to bask in the afterglow of national

  triumph. In such a bellicose atmosphere, the romantic messianism associated with

  the likes of Michelet and Ledru-Rollin continued to find a voice but did so in an

  atmosphere increasingly drawn towards anti-militarism and a more overt endorse-

  ment of internationalism. As Napoleon III’s foreign and colonial adventures grew

  in recklessness, so opponents of the regime came more and more to cast themselves

  as the party of peace. Even the myth of Napoleon Bonaparte now began to lose its

  appeal.

  The less bellicose and overtly anti-militarist mood of the period was clearly

  captured and expressed in the writings and actions of Jules Barni. From his exile in

  Switzerland, Barni acted as president of the Ligue Internationale pour la Paix et la

  Liberté, an organization which he helped to launch in 1867. This was no minor

  interest, as the final section of La morale dans la démocratie, published the following

  year,139 demonstrated. There Barni showed himself to be totally opposed to the

  republican ‘just war’ tradition, preferring rather to explore how peaceful relations

  among states could best be achieved.140 Accordingly, Barni was quick to reject all

  the arguments then advanced in defence of war and conquest: those that justified

  war in terms of the advance of civilization, the claims of nationality, and the

  recognition of natural borders. Frequently contradicting each other, even when

  taken together they could not absolve an ‘unjust’ act.141 ‘What’, Barni asked, ‘is a

  state, a people, a nation? Not a herd of animals but an association of men, of free

  beings, forming a kind of moral person. . . . We must therefore grant to states the

  same rights that we grant to individuals and apply the same moral rules to them as

  those which govern the relationship between persons.’142 It followed that no state

  had the right to get involved in the internal affairs of another and that one of the

  first rules of international morality was the ‘principle of non-intervention’. Until

  such time as states moved out of the state of nature and war could definitively be

  abolished, the best that could be hoped for was that we could ‘moralize and

  humanize’ war. To that end Barni recommended a set of preliminary conditions

  including the abolition of standing armies. The ultimate goal—as befitted a

  convinced Kantian—was ‘a federation of free states designed to guarantee the rights

  of each nation and to resolve the differences between them by means of binding

  arbitration’.143 Underpinning all of this was Barni’s unshakable conviction that the

  principal threat to peace came from the militarism and despotism he associated

  with ‘Caesarism’, and therefore from the absence of free, republican systems of

  139 Jules Barni, La Morale dans la démocratie (1868), 218–66.

  140 Sudhir Hazareesingh, Intellectual Founders of the Republic: Five Studies in Nineteenth-Century

  French Political Thought (Oxford, 2001), 246–56.

  141 Barni, La Morale dans la démocratie, 220–4.

  142 Ibid. 219.

  143 Ibid. 255.

  Universalism, the Nation, and Defeat

  231

  government. ‘Let us work’, he told delegates to the 1867 Geneva congress of the

  Ligue Internationale pour la Paix et la Liberté, ‘to oppose the republican spirit to

  the Caesarian spirit, the civic spirit to the militaristic spirit, the spirit of federation

  to the spirit of centralization, in brief, the spirit of liberty and peace to the spirit of

  despotism and war’.144

  The events of 1870–1 sorely tested the anti-militarism and internationalism of

  men like Barni. If, as Karma Nabulsi has shown,145 there was plenty of evidence to

  suggest that ‘a republican culture of war was still operating at the outbreak of the

  Franco-Prussian war’, it was equally the case that expressions of anti-German

  patriotism were not slow to be voiced. As Léon Gambetta, Minister of the Interior

  in the newly formed provisional government, toured the country seeking to rally a

  people’s army to defend the Republic, even old cynics such as Gustave Flaubert

  could not resist the occasional, heartfelt chauvinistic outburst.146 Barni himself

  returned to France with the fall of the Second Empire and immediately offered his

  services to the Government of National Defence.

  To this powerful intellectual challenge was added the emotional trauma asso-

  ciated with the establishment and subsequent violent
repression of the Paris

  Commune. For seventy-three days, between 18 March and 28 May 1871, the

  administration of Paris was in the hands of the people, in open defiance of the

  government located in Versailles. Few, if any, writers of distinction or renown lent

  their support to its cause, most showing themselves deeply troubled by the brutal

  anticlericalism and artistic vandalism of the Parisian mob. Concerns about religious

  freedom and the fate of the Venus de Milo were, however, dwarfed by the shock

  and apprehension that accompanied the deaths of approximately 20,000 Parisians,

  killed or executed by government troops as they recaptured the capital during ‘la

  semaine sanglante’ that brought the Commune to an end. Thousands more were

  arrested, many being deported to far-off New Caledonia. To national humiliation

  was added a sense of bereavement and shame.

  Following the Treaty of Frankfurt, signed on 21 May 1871, France therefore

  faced not one but two questions of central importance. She again needed to decide

  what form of political regime should be put in place. Secondly, France had to find a

  way of responding to Prussian military supremacy whilst rehabilitating herself in

  the eyes of the international community. For many, the answers to the two

  questions were intimately related.

  Michelet, nearing the end of his life, continued to strike a tone of hope and

  defiance.147 If Prussia owed its victory not to the heroism of its troops but to

  espionage and ‘the triumph of the machine’, so also it derived from the ‘rottenness’

  of the Second Empire. Was Napoleon III even French? Michelet asked. Yet the

  ‘soul’ of France was ‘invincible’ and her ‘renaissance’ would save Europe. It was out

  of the trials of military resistance, Michelet contended, that France would overcome

  144 Ibid. 260.

  145 Nabulsi, ‘La Guerre Sainte’, 38.

  146 See Michel Winock, Les Voix de la liberté: Les Écrivains engagés au XIXe siècle (2001), 492–6.

  147 See La France devant l’Europe, Œuvres complètes de Michelet, xx. 1867–1871, 601–712.

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  Universalism, the Nation, and Defeat

  her divisions and again take her place as Europe’s leader in the fight against ‘Prusso-

  Russian militarism’. With her ‘moral unity’ still intact, France would quickly

  restore her ‘material unity’.

  The response of Edgar Quinet was altogether more thought-provoking and

  profound.148 Like Michelet, Quinet had but a few years to live and it is hard not

  to be moved by the passion he brought to the task of sketching out the conditions

  through which France could be regenerated. At their heart lay the necessity of

  confirming the existence of the Republic and therefore the need to break with the

  backward-looking, reactionary doctrines of the past. These doctrines, with ‘their

  aversion to modern liberty’, represented ‘the remains and the ashes of everything

  which is dead in the human spirit’.149 Thus there could be no talk of a republic

  reconciled to the monarchy, of a republic without republicans. To abandon the

  Republic would be for France to turn its back to the light and to descend into

  chaos. In practical terms, this meant: the reform of the army and the re-establish-

  ment of its links with the nation; the reorganization of the educational system with

  a view to reawakening the ‘spirit of liberty’; the separation of Church and State; and

  consequently the eradication of the baneful influence of theocracy. To this Quinet

  added the reform of the diplomatic service (which had been blind to the rise of

  Prussia), of the judiciary (which was still imprinted with the ‘decrepit spirit of the

  past’), and of the education of France’s political leaders (so as to forge closer links

  with the aspirations of the people). These changes, plus other measures such as the

  return of the government to Paris, would, in Quinet’s opinion, lead to an artistic

  and intellectual revival, and would thus allow France to escape from the ‘Prussian

  spectre’. ‘It is unquestionable’, Quinet wrote, ‘that a nation, even one bowed by

  defeat, can quickly raise itself, regenerate itself and surprise the world.’150

  To that extent, Quinet concluded, France had to take the battle to Prussia on the

  ‘field of civilization’.151 All enduring victories, he argued, had had ‘the fusion of

  human races’ as a consequence but this had not been so with the victory of

  Prussia.152 ‘The Germans’, Quinet wrote, ‘boast of extinguishing the Latin race’

  to the advantage of ‘the Teutonic race’. They thought of themselves only as

  Germans and were driven by hatred and ‘the egoism of race’. It was therefore a

  ‘barbarous victory’ and one that was antithetical to civilization. Herein lay ‘the

  superiority of France’, a country bringing together ‘many different races of men, the

  Gallic, the Latin, the Iberian and the German’.153 Herein too lay the particular

  offence that arose from the forced annexation of Alsace and Lorraine. An integral

  part of the spirit of France—the German race—had been torn away. Behind this

  however lay a deeper awareness of the strategic significance of this loss. Alsace and

  Lorraine, Quinet wrote, were ‘not just two provinces; they are the two highways of

  France, the two ramparts’. Annexed to Germany, it meant that France was open to

  the enemy, that he was always ready and able to march on Paris, that he had ‘France

  148 See Edgar Quinet, La République, conditions de la régénération de la France (1873). See also L’Esprit

  Nouveau (1879; 1st publ. 1874).

  149 Quinet, La République, 138.

  150 Ibid. 120.

  151 Ibid. 93.

  152 Ibid. 248–51.

  153 Ibid. 250.

  Universalism, the Nation, and Defeat

  233

  by the throat’. This, Quinet declared, was not peace but rather ‘permanent war

  under the guise of peace’.154

  Quinet was not prepared to accept that France had come to the end of her

  history with the defeats at Metz and Sedan. Peoples were slow to mature and to

  achieve their full greatness and by these criteria France as a nation ‘had a brilliant

  future before her’. Above all, France must not become the feudal vassal of Prussia,

  meekly paying her war indemnity ‘in the manner of the enslaved peoples of

  antiquity’. That fate, and the further dismemberment which would follow, could

  only be avoided through the Republic, the one regime that could, in Quinet’s

  opinion, ‘unite all of the French into the same body’.155

  Yet the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine was like an open wound, a constant

  affront not just to French dignity but to the very conception of France that had

  been built up over the preceding eighty years or more. On this view, France was an

  artificial construct and it was out of this very artificiality that had arisen her special

  genius: the ability to bring different nations and cultures together into a harmoni-

  ous totality that opened itself up to the noblest aspirations of humanity. It was

  precisely this idea that Michelet restated in 1869 when, after a lifetime of study

  spent recovering the history of France, he distanced his account from that provided

  by his distinguished predecessor Augustin
Thierry with its reliance upon the

  unchanging character of races. ‘France’, Michelet wrote, ‘has made France, and

  the fatal element of race seems to me to be of secondary importance. She is the

  product of her liberty. In human progress the essential part falls to the active force

  that one calls man. Man is his own Prometheus.’156 A year later it was arguably the

  ideological antithesis of this sentiment that was triumphant on the battlefield.

  The task of working through the political and intellectual implications of

  France’s defeat was to preoccupy French writers for decades to come. A sense of

  the challenge it represented can nonetheless be glimpsed by looking at one of the

  first, and also best-known, responses to the claims of German nationalism. In 1870

  Numa-Denis Fustel de Coulanges, one of the most distinguished French historians

  of the second half of the nineteenth century, published a short pamphlet entitled

  L’Alsace, est-elle Allemande ou Française?157 It was a direct response to the arguments

  put forward to justify German annexation by Theodore Mommsen, a fellow

  historian at the University of Berlin. According to Mommsen, Alsace was German

  because its people spoke German and because they belonged to the German race.

  Fustel de Coulanges disputed the validity of these arguments on a series of grounds,

  not the least of them being that they could justify Prussian expansion into Holland,

  Austria, Switzerland, and eastward into Russia. At the heart of his reply, however,

  was the contention that ‘neither race nor language constituted nationality’.158

  ‘What distinguishes nations’, Fustel de Coulanges went on, ‘is neither race nor

  language. Men feel in their heart that they belong to the same people when they

  154 Ibid. 290–4.

  155 Ibid. 277.

  156 Michelet, ‘Préface de 1869’, Histoire de France: Le Moyen ge (1981), 17.

  157 Numa-Denis Fustel de Coulanges, L’Alsace, est-elle Allemande ou Française? (1870).

  158 Ibid. 8.

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  Universalism, the Nation, and Defeat

  share a common stock of ideas, of interests, of affections, of memories and of

  hopes.’159 One’s homeland was the place that one loved and by this criterion

  Alsace, irrespective of race and language, was French. And it had been so since