reduced to a ‘process without a subject’ and Stalinism was redescribed as a theoreti-
cal error.207 By the mid-1970s, however, the game was up and only the most
blinkered and self-deluded could fail to see the PCF and its spiritual fatherland for
the moribund and discredited institutions that they were. In these circumstances
revolution was exorcized. First, the Bolshevik Revolution and its totalitarian
outcome was subjected to detailed and systematic criticism, the so-called New
Philosophers (Bernard-Henri Lévy, Alain Finkielkraut, and André Glucksmann
among others) claiming great credit for seeing what outside France had long been
self-evident.208 Then, and even more fundamentally, the French Revolution itself
was implicated in the totalitarian nightmare. With (former Communist) François
Furet at the forefront, terror was now seen as an integral and not a contingent part
of the Jacobin project and hence of modern revolutionary politics. If the French
and Bolshevik Revolutions were inextricably linked, it was only for them to be
204 Furet, Le Passé d’une illusion: Essai sur l’Idée communiste au XXe siècle (1995). Furet was a
member of the PCF between 1949 and 1956.
205 Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals 1944–56 (Berkeley, Calif., and Oxford, 1992). Judt’s
text was first publ. in French and was not warmly received. On the broader theme see Judt, The Burden
of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron and the French Twentieth Century (Chicago, 1998).
206 See Sunil Khilnani, Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar France (New Haven,
Conn., 1993).
207 Althusser’s most important books were Pour Marx (1965) and the jointly authored Lire ‘Le
Capital’ (1965). But see also his autobiographical essay L’Avenir dure longtemps (1992), which begins
with Althusser’s account of his murder of his wife. For a biography see Yann Moulier Boutang, Louis
Althusser (1992) and for a sympathetic study see Gregory Elliot, Althusser: The Detour of Theory (1987).
For a less sympathetic appraisal see Judt, ‘French Marxism 1945–1975’, Marxism and the French Left,
169–238.
208 The best-known examples are Lévy’s La Barbarie à visage humain (1977) and Glucksmann’s
La Cuisinière et le mangeur d’hommes: Essai sur les rapports entre l’État, le marxisme et les camps de
concentration (1975) and Les Maîtres penseurs (1977).
Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism
439
inextricably condemned. The irony of ironies was that it was at this very moment,
as its historic vision and sense of ideological identity was on the point of collapse,
that in 1891 the left (with four government ministers drawn from the PCF) came
to power on a programme committed to making a final break with the capitalist
system. Only further disillusionment was to follow.
10
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
I
1896 marked not the opening of the Dreyfus Affair––the innocent Captain
Dreyfus had to wait a further two years before novelist Émile Zola penned his
open letter ‘J’accuse’––but rather another event of immense importance: the
1400th anniversary of the baptism of Clovis, first king of the Franks and founder
of the Merovingian dynasty, at Rheims in 496. It was this act that had secured
France’s place as the ‘eldest daughter’ of the Church and which, when celebrated at
the end of the nineteenth century, provided Catholics with the opportunity to
reassert that Christianity represented the inescapable destiny of France. As Eugène
Léotard stated in one of the many speeches and lectures made to celebrate the
anniversary: ‘France will be Christian or it will no longer be France.’1 From this
perspective, the baptismal act had tied not merely Clovis but the entire French
nation to the Church, bequeathing a spiritual principle that would permanently
define the collective identity of France and her history. ‘Whatever have been our
weaknesses and our faults’, declared the Jesuit Jules Pachau before the church of
Saint-Sulpice in Paris, ‘the public power, word, heart and sword of France appear in
history as a power, a word, a heart and a sword faithful to the cause of the Church
and of God.’2 If France should turn away from this primordial reality the result
would be chaos.
For all this heartfelt celebration, the primacy accorded to the Roman Catholic
religion in this description of the meaning of France ran up against one major, if
not insurmountable, problem: in 1789 France had contradicted her vocation and
her mission, the Revolution and the Republic denying France’s ancient faith
and history. Moreover, this violation of France’s Catholic destiny came replete
with its own conception of France’s identity, one forged by the experiences of the
Revolution and of the Napoleonic Empire and one resting upon less essentialist
and more voluntaristic assumptions: the destiny of France was now wedded to the
new doctrines of liberty, equality, and the rights of man.
Yet, in the aftermath of the defeat of 1870, France was a demoralized nation,
shame at the military ‘debacle’ suffered by her army compounded by the loss of the
1 Le Quatorzième centenaire du baptême de la France: conférence faite aux facultés catholiques de Lyon
(Lyons, 1896), 52.
2 Église et Patrie (1897), 9.
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
441
territories of Alsace and Lorraine to the new German Empire.3 Despite the recovery
and growth of her economy––as well as the air of luxury associated with the Belle
Époque––subsequent diplomatic humiliation at the hands of Great Britain over
territorial claims to the Sudan only seemed to confirm that France was a second-rate
power, somewhere on a par with lowly Italy. Dishonour and cruel deception
appeared to have deprived both the vision of France as the eldest daughter of the
Church and that of France as the beacon of humanity of much of their meaning
and substance.
Given this, it is tempting to imagine that the political thought of the period was
overwhelmingly preoccupied with the military threat posed by Prussia and by a
sense of France’s cultural and intellectual inferiority when compared to her power-
ful eastern neighbour. This was certainly the view presented by Claude Digeon in
La Crise allemande de la pensée française (1870–1914).4 Nor is it a view without
justification. For many defeat on the battlefield derived as much from the superi-
ority of German science and her education system as it did from the inadequacies of
the French army and the folly of Napoleon III. Patriotic duty demanded not only
military reorganization but also the imitation of Germany’s universities. It was in
this spirit that Émile Boutmy established the École Libre des Sciences Politiques.
His express intention was to provide the State with the professionally trained
administrators required for a modern, technically proficient civil service.5 At
another level, the romanticized picture provided by Madame de Staël of Germany
as a temple of philosophy and literature was eclipsed by that of a barbarian nation,
its people subject to an impersonal and hierarchical discipline, its values those of
materialism, organization, and economic might. At best, there appeared to be two
Germanies, one civilized, the other cruel and immoral, with an unbridgeable abyss
separating the two.
It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that political thinking in France
after 1870 consisted solely of an extended comparison between the relative merits
of a Protestant and monarchical Germany and a Catholic and republican France.
Rather, the disorientation and dismay prompted by defeat engendered not only an
analysis of the causes of France’s ignominious surrender and subsequent political
disintegration but also a searching reappraisal of the nature of the nation and of
the character of France herself. If this quest was to continue throughout much
of the remainder of the life of the Third Republic it was because it fostered a debate
without possible resolution. In the first place there could be no agreement about
the mechanism through which national renewal was to be achieved. Was it to be
through a collective display of penitence and moral renovation, or perhaps
the creation of a great overseas empire, or even––perish the thought––a swiftly
executed act of revenge over an ignoble enemy?6 These were just some of the
3 Published to great acclaim in 1892, La Débâcle was the nineteenth and penultimate volume of
Émile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series of novels.
4 Claude Digeon, La Crise allemande de la pensée française (1870–1914) (1959).
5 See Pierre Favre, Naissances de la science politique en France, 1870–1914 (1989), 19–50.
6 See Bertrand Joly, ‘La France et la Revanche’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 46 (1999),
325–47.
442
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
contending views articulated at the time. Still more problematically, for as long as
the deep divide separating republican and Catholic France continued to exist,
there could be no end to the search for the true or real France. Between the rural
France of the peasantry and the land, of the parish priest and the château––Black
France––and the urban, egalitarian, and secular France of the factory worker and
the cosmopolitan intellectual––Red France––there was little common ground and
little room for agreement about the nation’s identity.7
This might be illustrated by reference to the figure of Jeanne d’Arc. In his history
of France, Jules Michelet had presented a potent image of Jeanne d’Arc as the
embodiment of the national sentiment of the people. Scorned by the monarchy,
betrayed by the Church, in his account it had been this simple peasant girl who had
been the saviour of France. It was in part to counter this portrayal of Jeanne d’Arc as
a secular heroine inspired by love of country rather than by religious visions that, in
1869, the Catholic Church in France began moves to secure her beatification and
canonization, a process completed in 1920. In the intervening years, and as
controversy raged, la Pucelle d’Orléans became an object of veneration for the
Catholic (and Anglophobic) right, the very incarnation of the land and of national
unity, the unblemished symbol of purity and spirituality. It was against this
backdrop of post-1870 patriotism and increasing Catholic fervour that the novelist
Anatole France wrote his own account her life and in doing so did much to deflate
many of the myths surrounding her iconic status as the miraculous protector of
Christian France. Anatole France attributed Jeanne d’Arc’s military victories to the
weaknesses of the English army rather than to any supposed act of divine interven-
tion.8 At the time of Jeanne d’Arc, he argued, the notion of a homeland or patrie
had not existed and, although the sentiment had undoubtedly come into existence
under the ancien régime, it was only with the Revolution that the idea of national
unity and of the integrity of the territory became firmly fixed in people’s minds.
‘Twenty-three years of wars’, he wrote, ‘confirmed our forefathers in their love of
the patrie and their hatred of the foreigner.’9
In this context, it is interesting to note that when, in 1913, the political scientist
André Siegfried published his Tableau politique de la France de l’Ouest10 he did so
with the intention of looking beyond the ‘metaphysical’ divisions associated with
political ideology in order to grasp what he saw as the ‘infinite variety’ and ‘complex
personality of the nation’.11 Despite the appearance of rapid change, his detailed
examination of the electoral geography of the region revealed striking levels of
continuity in voting behaviour and ‘political temperament’ over generations. In this
7 See Douglas Johnson, ‘The Two Frances: The Historical Debate’, in Vincent Wright (ed.),
Conflict and Consensus in France (London, 1979), 3–10. See also Herman Lebovics, True France: The
Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900–1945 (Ithaca, NY, 1992).
8 Vie de Jeanne d’Arc (1908).
9 Ibid., p. lxxii.
10 André Siegfried, Tableau politique de la France de l’Ouest sous la Troisième République (1913).
See also Philippe Veitl, ‘Pour une géologie des opinions: André Siegfried et la « science » des cartes’, in
Olivier Ihl, Martine Kaluszyski, and Gilles Pollel (eds.), Les Sciences du gouvernement (2003), 39–52.
11 Tableau politique, pp. v–viii.
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
443
part of ‘old France’, he wrote, ‘the battles of the past carry on’.12 In later work
Siegfried concluded similarly that party divisions were the product of ‘opposing
conceptions of life’. He was also of the view that a Frenchman wore ‘his heart on
the left and his pocket is on the right––and in practice every Frenchman has a
pocket!’13
Next, we need to recognize that the secession of Alsace and Lorraine to Prussia
induced a deep psychological trauma among many members of France’s intellectual
establishment. To take but one example, for Jules Michelet, now nearing the end of
his life, the tearing way of France’s eastern provinces was akin to a form of physical
amputation, with the Germans accused of brutally removing vital organs from a
living body. Of all peoples, he believed, the French were ‘le moins démembrable’
and thus France’s ‘murdered and mutilated’ condition was an affront to her
‘organic unity’ and to her ‘invincible soul’.14 Yet dismembered France was, and
despite Michelet’s hopes that France’s renaissance would save Europe, her dismem-
berment festered like an open wound in the French body politic.
If, in La Réforme intellectuelle et morale de la France, Ernest Renan provided
articulate witness to the crisis afflicting his homeland,15 he was equally adamant
that he could dismiss Prussian claims to France’s lost provinces. This he began to do
as early as September 1870 in the first of two open letters to David Friedrich
Strauss. Carefully avoiding any attribution of blame for the conflict, he argued that
time had legitimized France’s original conquest and that Prussia would be making a
major error if it ignored the wishes of the people of Alsace.16 He developed this
argument, and to great effect, in a lecture given at the Sorbonne in 1882 en
titled
Qu’est-ce que la nation?17 Prussia’s justification of its possession of Alsace rested
upon the claim that in terms of race, culture, and language, it was German. Renan,
like the historian Fustel de Coulanges before him, disputed each of these defences.
The truth of the matter, Renan argued, was that there were no pure races––France
was Celtic, Iberian, and Germanic in much the same way as Germany was
Germanic, Celtic, and Slav––and to base politics on ethnographic or linguistic
considerations was a dangerous illusion. Similar arguments applied to attempts to
define nations in terms of religious affinity, geography, or military exigencies. It
was, Renan argued, more accurate to define a nation as ‘a soul, a spiritual principle’.
The components parts of that soul, he continued, were two-fold: a past and a
present. A nation’s past was a shared past, ‘the possession in common of a rich
legacy of memories’, a past of sacrifice and devotion. ‘Of all cults’, Renan wrote,
‘the cult of ancestors is the most legitimate, since our ancestors have made us what
12 Ibid. 514.
13 Tableau des parties en France (1930), 89.
14 Michelet, ‘La France devant l’Europe’, Œuvres complètes (1987), xx. 637–712.
15 See pp. 373–6 above.
16 See ‘Lettre à M. Strauss’ and ‘Nouvelle lettre à M. Strauss’, in Renan, Œuvres complètes (1947),
i. 437–62.
17 Qu’est-ce que la nation? (1882); ibid. 887–906.
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France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
we are.’18 A nation’s present was one of ‘actual consent’, made manifest ‘in the
desire to live together, the will to continue the heritage that has been received’. As
Renan described it, a nation was an expression of a sense of solidarity and no one
should be ‘a slave to his race, his language, his religion or to the courses of rivers or
the direction of mountain ranges’. The existence of a nation, therefore, was an act
of affirmation, ‘a daily plebiscite’, ‘un plebiscite de tous les jours’.19
Renan’s diagnosis of France’s ills continued to find an audience in subsequent
decades. In particular, his reference to the nation as a ‘spiritual principle’ was
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