The activities of these political leaders, from around 1863, were designed to restore their influence among former republican militants, as a prelude to the extension of organisation and agitation among the previously largely uninvolved younger generations. Much of the activity was localised and directed at winning urban municipal power. This was easier than might appear at first glance. The constituencies for municipal elections generally differed from those for general elections, in that their boundaries had not been drawn in order to submerge the suspect urban electorate in a mass of rural voters. Thus, it was possible to win control or establish a significant presence on a substantial number of town councils and use this as a base for wider political activity. At Auch (Gers) in 1865, two barristers, two notaries, a solicitor, a doctor, a merchant, a landowner and a banker were elected as republicans (Palmade 1961: 93). Republicans gained control of the Toulouse city council in 1866, and although the council was dissolved and replaced by a nominated commission after a period of tense relations with the local prefect, even this outcome had considerable propaganda value. However, success was not without its problems. Thus, it soon became clear that there was a very real danger that opposition might be moderated or even turned into collaboration once
councillors had been integrated into the broader administrative system. Practical 46
problem solving replaced political combat. The process of gaining republican converts could also be frustratingly slow – inevitably so given that past experience of repression made many potential sympathisers cautious. Nevertheless, a growing awareness of what was possible developed, particularly once the 1868 laws had enlarged the scope for legal political activity. As we have seen, this increased participation in opposition politics, particularly in Paris, was sufficient to cause a crisis of confidence in the future stability of the regime.
The organisational basis for republican activity, as it slowly developed, took much the same forms as in 1848, with the establishment of ad hoc electoral committees, made up mainly of professionals and businessmen, to select and then support candidates. These were frequently associated with local newspapers which performed crucial coordinating functions and with the politicisation of a complex of voluntary associations ranging from the predominantly lower and middle-class masonic lodges and cercles, the artisanal mutual aid societies to the more popular cafés and popular drinking clubs – the chambrées. During the electoral campaigns of 1869–70, these informal structures were supplemented by the organisation of specifically political meetings. There was a trend, moreover, as interest in public affairs intensified for temporary, informal and leisure organisations to become more political and permanent. Nationally, the republican ‘party’ suffered until 1868 from the lack of an obvious leader, although visits by peripatetic opposition deputies like Simon, Pelletan or Favre helped to establish some sort of national coordination and encouraged local groups to feel that they were part of a larger movement. In that year, however, Gambetta achieved fame through his
condemnation of the regime in highly publicised speeches made while serving as a defence lawyer in a series of political trials. In 1869, standing for election at Belleville, a working class district of Paris, and significantly against the veteran moderate republican Carnot, his programme with its vague promises of social reform was taken up by most of the republican press. This confirmed his
ascendancy.
The forms and content of republican propaganda inevitably changed in
response to political liberalisation. They became less dependent upon the illegal distribution of tracts and upon the oral circulation of information, although both remained important, and more upon the newspaper press. The diffusion of
propaganda was made much easier. Numerous provincial newspapers were
established – even if they frequently disappeared because of lack of support and financial difficulties. Moreover, the Parisian press circulated far more widely throughout France due to the railways. It now included such overtly revolutionary 47
newspapers as Rochefort’s La Lanterne (May 1868) and its successor La Marseillaise (December 1869), Delescluze’s Le Réveil (‘The Awakening’ – July 1868) and Victor Hugo’s Le Rappel (‘The Reminder’). One feature of their attacks on the regime was condemnation of its origins in a coup d’état. Republicans were able to use the ammunition provided by the journalist Eugene Ténot whose
damning accounts of the brutality involved – in Paris en décembre and La Province en décembre – attracted widespread interest. Such a regime, according to the Indépendent du Midi (1 January 1869), might accord ‘ liberties but never genuine liberté’. In contrast, a republican alternative was presented based upon interpretations of the Declarations of the Rights of Man, revised since the 1840s to take account of manhood suffrage and the need for social reform.
Another feature of this propaganda was its often virulent anti-clericalism: an outpouring of the hatred accumulated in reaction to two decades of militant and politically reactionary clericalism. This was one of the themes of the well-attended public meetings organised in the popular quarters of Paris. In these, and in spite of the obligatory presence of a police commissaire, all the doctrines of the clubs of 1848 were re-iterated. Yet, although it was the most extreme revolutionary
meetings and newspapers which made the greatest impression on public opinion, most republican papers and gatherings were more moderate. They desperately
sought to avoid identification with the threat of violent revolution. Instead, they pressed for continued political reform, confident that the free working of a system of manhood suffrage must inevitably lead to eventual electoral victory. Beyond this, they held out hope of social justice. In this respect, radicals like Gambetta promised tax reductions following cuts in wasteful government expenditure, the introduction of free and secular primary education and, in even vaguer terms, an improvement in the lot of the poor. It was these particular proposals which distinguished them from both the moderate republicans and socialists. Writing early in 1870, Gambetta typified a determination to attract support from all social groups and to avoid social conflict:
we must re-state . . . that for us the victory of democracy with its free institutions means security and prosperity for material interests, everybody’s rights
guaranteed, respect for property, protection of the legitimate and basic rights of labourers, the raising up morally and materially of the lower classes, but without compromising the posi tion of those favoured by wealth and talent. . . . Our single goal is to bring forth justice and social peace.
(Gambetta, Indépendent du Midi, 19 May 1869)
48
Most bourgeois republicans, even if aware of the need to promise social reform in order to win over the mass electorate, remained totally committed to the interests of private property and a liberal economic system. Furthermore, they were
desperately anxious not to frighten the large numbers of small property owners, artisans and peasants. Their fundamental commitment was to ‘progress without revolution’.
Although there was considerable overlap between radicals and socialists, the former appear to have been less committed to social reform than their predecessors, the démoc-socs of 1849–51. Moreover, they were always afraid of losing control over the urban masses who provided them with the bulk of their popular support.
Ideologically, the lines of division between radicals and socialists were clearer than they had been during the Second Republic. There were few disciples of utopian socialism left by the late 1860s, although among artisans cooperative aspirations remained influential. In Paris, the most prominent spokesmen for a complex of revolutionary and socialist ideas were the disciples, mostly intellectuals and students, of Louis-Auguste Blanqui (‘Blanquists’), proponents of a violent seizure of power by revolutionary secret societies, together with the far less extreme and largely working-class members of the Workers’ International. The latter was founded in London in 1864 and initially tolerated by
a government which
welcomed its moderation and mutualism. Toleration wore thin when, in 1867, its members sought to support strikers and became involved in political
demonstrations. Reports which grossly exaggerated its membership increased
official alarm. In reality, with a nominal membership of around 30, 000 nationally at its peak early in 1870, its influence was limited outside Paris, Lyon, Rouen and Marseille (Rougerie 1964: 112). Its main impact was to add to conservative and to moderate republican fears of a red revolution, already heightened by the virulence of the left’s propaganda and especially by the ways in which this was reported in the conservative press.
Paradoxically, most politically conscious workers, while suspicious of the
motives of the bourgeois republicans, continued to vote for radical electoral candidates like Gambetta. The desire for working-class political autonomy was very much a minority phenomenon. In 1864, when three worker candidates –
Blanc, Coutant and Tolain – had stood for election in Paris in support of social reform, they had been bitterly attacked by established republican politicians and accused of being Bonapartists. They obtained 342, 11 and 500 votes, respectively.
Clearly, working-class milirants still lacked political authority within their own 49
class. It was to middle-class politicians that workers looked to satisfy their aspirations for greater equality and dignity. Far more widespread than adherence to any ideological position in the working-class quarters of Paris was a diffuse sense of injustice which could certainly awaken sympathy for demands for revolutionary change among the large crowds attending political meetings during 1869–70.
Speakers who denounced the bourgeoisie for ‘living off the sweat of the people’ as vampires devouring ‘those who work’ and who condemned those who had
‘assassinated’ the people in June 1848 and the despotism established by the ‘crime of December 1851’, were warmly applauded. Many speakers looked forward to an imminent revolution which would allow a settling of accounts and ‘the
emancipation of the workers’. Nevertheless, it is difficult to judge to what degree this hostility towards employers and a repressive government, evident in the strike waves of the late 1860s, was translated into a desire for revolutionary change. In general, it seems that, although many among the younger generations of worker militants rejected the utopian socialism of their fathers’ generation in favour of collectivism and syndicalism, the widespread desire for social reform was
successfully channelled by republican politicians into a vague reformism redolent of February 1848.
The republican movement, united in opposition to the Empire and on the
principle of popular sovereignty, was otherwise bitterly divided over questions of personality, tactics and principle. For most of its leaders, winning over and then retaining mass support was the major objective. Socialism was seen as a threat to this and to the liberal economic and social principles to which both moderate and radical politicians alike subscribed. They rejected forcefully what they regarded as the extremist propaganda of the left, which by its re-creation of the ‘red spectre’
threatened to frighten the electorate and to alienate in particular the property-owning lower middle classes and peasants. In addition, they were afraid that it would provoke a repressive government response. Moderate republicans like
Favre, Carnot, Simon and Picard, accustomed to working within the institutions of the Second Empire, seem to have been willing to rely entirely upon legal,
parliamentary methods of securing concessions into the indefinite future, insisting upon their commitment to social order and arousing suspicion that they too, like Ollivier and Darimon, might eventually rally to the regime. These hommes de 1848, who had failed once already, were criticised by younger men like Gambetta, Spuller, Allain-Targé and Vermorel. The latter also opposed the violent rhetoric of revolutionaries such as the influential journalist Rochefort, and future leaders of 50
the Paris Commune in 1871 such as the Blanquist Raoul Rigault and the neo-
Jacobin Delescluze, both committed to the organisation of a revolutionary coup.
Relationships between these republican factions were extremely poor and in the 1869 elections in Paris and Lyon, republicans would stand against each other for election.
Support for the republicans cannot be defined easily. It was present in all social groups, but was particularly strong in urban centres, in both the major cities and numerous small towns like Beaune, Gevrey or Nolay in the Côte d’Or, for example, where little groups of activists had been at work since the 1830s. In part, it was the product of the continuing competition for local power between established elites and up-and-coming bourgeois groups. In the industrial centres of Reims and Saint-Etienne, this occurred between the old-established merchant capitalists and the more enterprising among the new manufacturers and members of the liberal
professions. These men were prepared to finance newspapers, organise
committees, select candidates from within their own ranks and offer leadership, and generally to encourage the diffusion of democratic ideas through the network of workshops, cafés and mutual aid societies. Urban workers also increasingly came to support republican electoral candidates. Even if every manifestation of discontent, such as the strike waves of 1869–70, should not necessarily be taken to represent opposition to the regime, as opposed to support for professional demands or a protest against the rising cost of living, support for republicanism tended to be generated by such conflict which frequently brought strikers up against the legal and military representatives of the regime. Although living standards undoubtedly had improved for most workers during the late 1850s and 1860s, they remained more aware of cramped and often squalid housing, rising rents, and constant insecurity of employment, with even the most highly skilled conscious of the intensifying threat to their craft skills and status as industrial mechanisation and the re-organisation of work processes continued. Perceptions matter far more than realities in determining political behaviour.
The rural vote
The rural population as a whole was much less likely to vote for republican candidates. Any exercise in historical political sociology is, however, difficult.
Generalisations are hazardous in the extreme. A complex of factors ensured that particular regions adopted one form of political identity or another. These included 51
existing social relationships, the products of daily social intercourse, as well as the formative influence of memories of past conflict during the ancien régime and the revolution, and more recently during the Second Republic. The development of regular and intensifying links with urban centres and especially with the artisans and professional men resident in the small market centres, as well as factors such as levels of literacy, the forms of habitat structure and established patterns of popular sociability, were other relevant factors facilitating or obstructing the diffusion of ideas and political organisation. The regions of northern France with the most advanced agriculture, prosperous farms and social systems closely
controlled by large-scale commercial and mainly tenant farmers, and from which the most disaffected could migrate with relative ease, tended to support official candidates. In the east, in the Côte d’Or studied in such detail by Lévêque (1983), both the Châtillonais (a society dominated by peasant landowners and where social tension was limited) and the Brionnais (in which large landowners in close alliance with the clergy were dominant) voted for the regime. In contrast, it was the areas of vine cultivation and of predominantly cereal-producing plains around Châlons and Dijon – open societies engaged in commerce, subject to the alcohol tax and
intensifying competitive pressures and especially susceptible to outside influences
– which provided substantial support for republicans. Indeed, this usually appears to have been found in areas in which commercial farming and rural manufacture coexisted as well as in places of passage
, in the east of Côte d’Or, the south of Doubs, Northern Jura, along the Rhône-Saône corridor and in the coastal regions of Provence and Languedoc and in the Garonne valley. In all these places, strong republican minorities existed by 1869. In the Limousin, cantons susceptible to Parisian influence because of the practice of migratory labour began to record 20–
30 per cent support for republican candidates (Corbin 1975). In the central Morvan, republican ideas re-surfaced in areas isolated by poor communications and
dispersed habitat which might have been expected to have remained loyal to the right. In practice, it proved difficult for the administration to dominate an impoverished peasantry which had been alienated by the efforts of largely absentee landowners to restrict traditional rights of usage in the forests – a vital part of traditional pastoral farming systems (Vigreux 1987). In a variety of situations, the rural population might therefore be attracted to the republican cause.
Surprisingly, republican militants made relatively little effort to appeal
specifically to the rural population, although of course it made up a majority of the electorate. Newspapers like the Rappel de la Provence (1869) – with its low price and short and simply written articles designed to appeal to the practical concerns of 52
the habitués of the chambrées of the Var – were rare. In attempting to appeal to peasants , republicans developed programmes similar to, but in many respects les s radical than, those of the démoc-socs in 1849. The condemnation of wasteful government expenditure and high taxes was retained and attacks on the regime’s military adventures and the growing burden of conscription were added.
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