The Embrace of Unreason
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March: The National Guard regiments in Paris elect a commune, repudiate the armistice, and induce Adolphe Thiers, the effective head of government, to withdraw regular army troops and batteries from the city.
May: France cedes Alsace and part of Lorraine to Germany in the Treaty of Frankfurt.
May 22–28: Adolphe Thiers unleashes the French army on the Paris Commune in a bloody campaign known as la semaine sanglante.
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La Réforme Intellectuelle et Morale, Ernest Renan.
1874
Frémiet’s statue of Joan of Arc is unveiled at the Place des Pyramides.
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La Tentation de Saint-Antoine, Gustave Flaubert.
1875
After prolonged resistance from Bonapartists and Royalists, the government is officially declared a republic. The First Republic had followed the dethronement of Louis XVI in 1792, and the second, the dethronement of Louis-Philippe in 1848.
1877
Gambetta pronounces a famous indictment of the church for meddling in political affairs: “Le cléricalisme, voilà l’ennemi!” (Clericalism, there is the enemy!).
President Patrice MacMahon (a general promoted to marshal after distinguishing himself during the Crimean War), thwarted by a republican premier and Chamber of Deputies, dismisses the former and dissolves the latter in what is seen as a threat to overthrow the Republic. In the October elections, the public returns a decisive republican majority. MacMahon will resign the following year. No future president will dissolve the Chamber of Deputies, resulting in a government dominated by the legislature.
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L’Assommoir, Émile Zola, the seventh volume of his saga Les Rougon-Macquart. It is his “breakthrough” novel, scandalizing critics with its use of working-class argot.
Le Tour de la France par Deux Enfants, Augustine Fouillée.
1878
June–July: The Congress of Berlin, hosted by Bismarck in the aftermath of the Russo-Turkish War, remaps the Balkan states.
May–November: The Paris World’s Fair, inaugurating the Trocadéro Palace, which will be replaced by the Palais de Chaillot in 1937.
Leo XIII, a liberal pope, succeeds Pius IX, author of The Syllabus of Errors, condemning modern science, among much else of the modern world.
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Trois Contes, Gustave Flaubert.
1879
Léon Gambetta is overwhelmingly elected president of the Chamber of Deputies, an event that signals the beginning of an era of liberal reform, under the leadership of Gambetta and Jules Ferry.
The National Assembly moves from Versailles, where it had convened since 1871, to its traditional home at the Palais Bourbon in Paris. “La Marseillaise” becomes the nation’s official anthem.
1880
June–July: The Jesuits are expelled from their residences and schools. Other “nonauthorized” teaching orders are under threat of expulsion.
July 14 is decreed a national holiday, and the law prohibiting commerce on Sunday is repealed.
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Nana, Émile Zola.
1881
A law is passed abolishing tuition in public primary schools. It will be followed by laws making primary school education compulsory and secular.
1883
The pretender, Henri, Comte de Chambord, whom Charles Maurras will describe as “the priest and pope of royalty rather than a king,” dies at his castle in Austria.
The Catholic newspaper La Croix is founded.
1884
Divorce is legitimized.
Tonkin (Indochina) becomes a French protectorate.
Public prayers opening parliamentary sessions are suppressed.
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À Rebours (Against Nature), J. K. Huysmans.
1885
Jules Ferry is voted out of office after a military defeat at the hands of China in Tonkin. There is rioting in Paris.
May: Two million people follow Victor Hugo’s funeral procession from the Arc de Triomphe to the Panthéon. He is the first grand homme de la patrie to be interred there.
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Germinal, Émile Zola, a novel inspired by the miners’ strike at the Anzin coal fields of northern France.
1886
General Georges Boulanger becomes minister of war.
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Édouard Drumont’s violently anti-Semitic tracts La France Juive and La France Juive Devant l’Opinion appear, months apart. The former will run through 150 editions by the end of the year.
1887
General Georges Boulanger loses his portfolio as minister of war and is assigned to an obscure command in central France. His departure from Paris provokes a tumultuous demonstration of hero worship at the Gare de Lyon. Boulanger will hold secret talks first with representatives of the royalist party, then with Bonapartists.
1888
March: Boulanger is discharged from the army. The Boulangist newspaper La Cocarde begins publication. Maurice Barrès will serve briefly as editor in chief.
April: Boulanger is elected to the Chamber of Deputies from the industrial north. He will subsequently be the victor in three by-elections, affirming his national stature.
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The first volume of the trilogy Le Culte du Moi, by Maurice Barrès, appears under the imprint of Plon.
The Pasteur Institute is founded.
1889
March: Eiffel unfurls the tricolor flag atop the tower named after him, celebrating the centenary of the French Revolution and inaugurating the Universal Exposition.
April: Georges Boulanger flees to Belgium when word spreads that plans are afoot to try him for high treason.
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Plon publishes the second volume of Barrès’s trilogy, Un Homme Libre.
Thadée Natanson founds the short-lived but important avant-garde magazine La Revue Blanche.
1891
May: Leo XIII promulgates the encyclical Rerum Novarum, defining the church’s view of the relationship between capital and labor and refuting the basic premises of Socialism.
1892
February: Leo XIII promulgates the encyclical Au Milieu des Sollicitudes, addressed to French bishops, the clergy, and the faithful, urging all concerned to accept the legitimate authority of the Republic but to resist the onslaught of anticlerical legislation.
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Édouard Drumont founds La Libre Parole. Its first issues feature an exposé of fraud perpetrated by executives and financiers of the defunct Panama Canal Company. It will later bring to light the secret court-martial and conviction of Captain Alfred Dreyfus and will relentlessly argue the case against his retrial in 1899.
1894
France and Russia sign a secret military convention.
December: Alfred Dreyfus is tried and convicted of treason.
Anarchist violence. Auguste Vaillant, who had hurled a bomb into the Chamber of Deputies, is executed. In June, the president of the Republic, Sadi Carnot, is assassinated by an Italian anarchist, Sante Geronimo Caserio.
1895
The major French workers’ union, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), is founded.
Félix Faure is elected president of the Republic.
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La Psychologie des Foule, by Gustave Le Bon, a work of seminal importance in the literature of crowd psychology, is published. Hitler will draw upon it for his theory of propaganda techniques in Mein Kampf.
The Lumière brothers invent the movie camera.
1897
A year after Alfred Jarry’s five-act play Ubu Roi appears in Paul Fort’s review Le Livre d’Art, Maurice Barrès publishes Les Déracinés (the first volume of Le Roman de l’Énergie Nationale), a novel whose title becomes an ideological
argument for the stigmatization of Jews, foreigners, and proponents of Kantian universalism.
André Gide achieves fame and iconic status among the young with the publication of Les Nourritures Terrestres (Fruits of the Earth), a prose poem strongly influenced by Thus Spake Zarathustra, preaching liberation from the family and its moral confinements.
1898
January: “J’accuse,” Zola’s brief accusing the army of framing Alfred Dreyfus, is published on the front page of Clemenceau’s paper L’Aurore. Rioting against Jews erupts throughout France and the Maghreb, with particular ferocity in Algiers.
February: Zola is found guilty of libel. The conviction will be upheld on appeal, prompting him to seek asylum in England.
August: Colonel Hubert Henry, who forged documents used against Dreyfus, commits suicide in his jail cell at the Mont-Valérien military fortress. He becomes a martyr of the extreme right.
October: The High Court accepts a plea by Dreyfus’s defenders for a new trial.
1899
The ultranationalist Ligue de la Patrie Française is founded. Barrès will later preside over it.
August–September: Dreyfus’s second court-martial commences in the city of Rennes. The conviction is upheld. Upon appeal, he is pardoned by the president of the Republic.
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Charles Maurras founds La Revue de l’Action Française. He will be a contributor during the next half decade to Le Figaro and La Libre Parole.
1900
Dissolution of the Assumptionists, a Catholic order active in the campaign against Dreyfus.
The World’s Fair, organized around the theme “An Assessment of the Century,” opens on April 15. The Palace of Electricity is its most impressive pavilion.
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Charles Péguy founds Les Cahiers de la Quinzaine.
L’Appel au Soldat, Maurice Barrès: the second volume of his trilogy Le Roman de l’Énergie Nationale. It chronicles the rise and fall of Georges Boulanger.
1902
September: Émile Zola dies of carbon monoxide poisoning and is buried in the Montmartre Cemetery, from which his remains are later transferred to the Panthéon.
The Radicals soundly defeat the Socialists in the national elections. Émile Combes, a militant anticlerical, accedes to the premiership and wages war against Catholic orders involved in education. Two years later they will be prohibited from teaching.
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Leurs Figures, the last volume of Barrès’s trilogy, is based on the Panama Scandal.
1904
Jean Jaurès, French Socialism’s great orator, founds the newspaper L’Humanité.
On an official visit to Rome, Émile Loubet, president of the French Republic, is rebuffed by Pope Pius X, Leo XIII’s successor. France and the Vatican suspend diplomatic relations.
The Entente Cordiale between France and England settles a number of outstanding issues, including England’s control over Egypt and France’s over Morocco.
1905
December: The National Assembly passes a law decreeing the separation of church and state. Religious orders continue to be expelled or denied a pedagogical function, and France severs diplomatic relations with the Vatican.
Wilhelm II challenges France’s intention of establishing a protectorate in Morocco by paying a state visit to Tangiers.
The Ligue de l’Action Française is founded around a review of that name.
1906
July: The High Court reverses Dreyfus’s conviction and reinstates him in the army.
July: The Radicals remain in power after state elections.
October: Clemenceau becomes premier.
December: The papal nuncio is expelled.
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Paul Claudel’s play Partage de Midi is staged in Paris.
1907
Major strikes and demonstrations take place throughout France. An infantry regiment sent to disband 700,000 demonstrators in Montpellier disobeys orders.
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Alcan publishes Henri Bergson’s L’Évolution Créatrice, a canonical work in the literature of vitalism. It introduces the term “élan vital.”
1908
The bimonthly La Revue de l’Action Française becomes a daily, its name shortened to L’Action Française. Its student hawkers, known as Camelots du Roi, evolve into a body of toughs who will play a conspicuous role in political violence on the streets of Paris.
Austria-Hungary annexes Bosnia-Herzegovina, former Ottoman provinces it had occupied and administered since the Berlin Treaty of 1878.
Georges Sorel’s Réflexions sur la Violence argues that the proletariat, to succeed, must create a violent, catastrophic revolution. Violence is equated with life, creativity, and virtue. He finds disciples on the right as well as the left, in Charles Maurras and Mussolini. Sorel’s contention that myths are important as “expressions of a will to act” comports with a basic premise of L’Action Française.
1909
The Vatican beatifies Joan of Arc.
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André Gide and two colleagues found the literary review La Nouvelle Revue Française.
1911
July: Germany challenges Morocco’s unofficial status as a French protectorate and England’s maritime supremacy by sending a gunboat to Agadir. War fever runs high in Paris.
November: France and Germany negotiate an agreement whereby France surrenders part of the Congo in exchange for a free hand in Morocco.
1912
Raymond Poincaré becomes premier, a post he will occupy for a year before acceding to the presidency and remaining president for seven years.
France imposes a protectorate on Morocco.
The First Balkan War pits Serbs, Bulgars, and Greeks against the Ottoman Empire.
France’s principal trade union, the CGT, stages a general strike against war preparations.
1913
January: Poincaré is elected president of the Republic.
May–June: No sooner does the First Balkan War end than Bulgaria attacks her recent allies.
July: Strongly endorsed by Poincaré, a law is passed increasing the period of obligatory military service from two years to three. It is opposed by the Left.
August: The Second Balkan War comes to an end.
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The premiere performance on May 29 of Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées shocks a French audience devoted to the conventions of classical ballet.
Gallimard publishes Du Côté de Chez Swann, the first volume of Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu.
1914
January–March: Le Figaro conducts a campaign against Joseph Caillaux, a likely successor to the premiership and a political liberal.
March: Enraged by the publication of a love letter written by Caillaux during his adulterous affair with her years earlier, Henriette Caillaux kills Gaston Calmette, editor in chief of Le Figaro.
June: René Viviani, an independent, becomes premier, succeeding Poincaré.
June 28: Archduke Ferdinand, heir to the Hapsburg Empire, is assassinated in Sarajevo by a Bosnian Serb.
July 28: Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia.
July 30: Russia mobilizes.
July 31: Germany delivers an ultimatum to France. She will declare war three days later. Jean Jaurès is assassinated.
August 1: The French government orders general mobilization.
August 4: After the declaration of war, political parties agree to suspend partisan disputes and bond in a “Union Sacrée,” which will prove to be only nominally united and sacred.
August 20–23: The French army suffers 40,000 dead in three days of fighting along the Sambre, near Belgium. By the end of the year, 300,000 French soldiers will have perished.
September 6–9: The headlong German advance is halted in the Bat
tle of the Marne, which leads to a stalemate of four years in trenches scoring the hills and valleys of northeastern France.
1915
May: Italy enters the war on the Allied side.
September: The Zimmerwald Conference in Switzerland, attendance at which is regarded as treasonous by the French government, initiates an international pacifist movement.
1916
February–December: The yearlong Battle of Verdun results in no strategic advantage but in more than 800,000 casualties, the spending of forty million artillery shells, the glorification of French steadfastness, the lionization of General Pétain, and an account of the battle in which Pétain vastly exaggerates the effectiveness of turret guns and fixed fortifications, one consequence being France’s disastrous investment in the Maginot Line fourteen years later. He obstinately champions systematic, defensive warfare.
July 1–November 11: The British and French mount an offensive at the Somme River in Picardy, rivaling Verdun in bloodshed. The opening day of the battle sees the British army suffer the most costly military defeat in its history, with 60,000 casualties. After four months it has advanced six miles. The French army is decimated. In three days of fighting, between September 5 and 8, its death toll surpasses 100,000.
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Henri Barbusse’s antiwar novel Le Feu is serialized, causing violent controversy.
More controversy is stirred by Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, exhibited nine years after Picasso painted it.