On the evening of Tuesday 5 August 1834 Victor Hugo boarded a mail-coach in Paris and set off in the direction of Brittany. His goal was not literary but to catch up with his mistress, Juliette Drouet, with whom he had had a row and who had fled to her sister’s near Brest. Hugo took the fastest form of transport then available, for the mail-coach travelled through the night, and he was in Brest at dawn on Friday 8 August. ‘Three nights of whiplashes, as fast as the horses could go, without drinking, eating, scarcely breathing, with four diabolical wheels that simply ate up the leagues,’ he wrote to his wife, as if she would sympathize. He was reconciled with Juliette but not impressed by Brittany, which seemed a backward and foreign country. ‘Stupid country! stupid people! stupid government!’ he exclaimed. Hugo nevertheless returned to Brittany two years later. By the time he got to Saint-Malo he had only one obsession, and wrote to a friend:
Poor Brittany! It has preserved everything, its monuments and its inhabitants, its poetry and its mire, its old colour and its old dirt on top of it. Wash the buildings, they are superb, but I defy you to wash the Bretons. Often, in one of those beautiful heather landscapes… under great oaks bearing their leaves down almost to your reach, you will see a charming cottage with smoke rising above its ivy and roses. You admire it, you enter. Alas, my poor Louis, this golden cottage is a horrible Breton shack where people and pigs sleep in the same room. You have to admit that the pigs get pretty dirty.1
This ride to Brittany points up an interesting paradox. On the one hand travel was becoming increasingly rapid, along good roads built to move armies and officials at speed, and using high-performance horse-drawn vehicles. In 1785 a coach took three days just to get to Rennes, 150 miles short of Brest.2 On the other hand the encounter with Brittany pointed up its strangeness to the Parisian traveller, a sense of its backwardness compared to the civilization of modern France. This contradiction was observed by writers such as Victor Hugo, but also by those sent to administer such far-flung provinces.
When Bonaparte seized power in 1799 France was on the verge of collapse. Outlying areas of the country, notably the Vendée, Brittany and the Midi, were in the hands of counter-revolutionaries, organized into small armies under the leadership of nobles in communication with the Allies, or into guerrilla bands which emerged at night, such as the Breton chouans. Even larger areas of France fell victim to bands of brigands, formed by draft-dodgers and deserters from the revolutionary armies that were being conscripted to fight the war of the Second Coalition. Both counter-revolutionary forces and brigands, which might merge into one another, targeted mail-coaches that carried money to pay for the regular army and attacked republican officials who had demonstrated their greed and loyalty to the new regime by purchasing church land. To deal with these threats Bonaparte as first consul resorted both to military measures and to negotiation, but in the long term bringing order to the country relied on the establishment of a centralized system of administration, the prefect system.
France, run before the Revolution through a network of overlapping jurisdictions – military, fiscal, administrative, judicial and ecclesiastical – was divided in 1790 into eighty-three more or less equal departments, which provided the basic unit for all those jurisdictions. Regimes had struggled in the 1790s to find an administrative system that worked, since the Revolution favoured administration by elected bodies and officials who lacked clout, while the representatives on mission sent out by the Convention parliament in 1793–4 had discredited themselves as agents of the Terror. Bonaparte’s solution under the law of 17 February 1800 was a centralized and hierarchical system by which each department would be run by a prefect, appointed by the head of state and directly responsible to him. The representation of opinions and interests was minimal, for elections to representative bodies had for ten years brought little but anarchy. A conseil général of a score or so notables, appointed for fifteen years after 1802 by the consul for life from names submitted by the department’s electoral college, composed of the highest taxpayers, met for no more than two weeks every year, mainly to share out the tax bill. Each arrondissement, of which from four to six normally formed a department, would be run by a subprefect, also appointed by the head of state. Each of the 36,000 communes of France, cities, towns and villages, were to be run by a mayor, who would be appointed by the head of state where the population was over 3,000 and by the prefect where it was fewer. Below each mayor was a municipal council to which appointments for twenty years were made by the prefect from names submitted by the canton assemblies of the highest taxpayers. The exception to this was Paris, which was allowed no mayor, in case the capital become a power-base independent of the central government. Instead, it was divided into twelve arrondissements, each with its own mayor, but real power remained in the hands of two prefects, the prefect of the Seine and the prefect of police.3
The advantages of this top-down system in terms of uniformity and efficiency were plain to see. What was less clear was how much prefects appointed by the central government would know about the parts of the country they now had to run. Some prefects at least were acquainted with the region. In Brittany Jean-Pierre Bouillé was born at Auray (in what became the Morbihan after 1790) and later was a lawyer at Pontivy (in what became the Côtes-du-Nord). During the Revolution he became an administrator of the Morbihan and then became prefect of the Côtes-du-Nord. The prefect of the Finistère in 1800, however, was François-Joseph Rudler, a native of Alsace, who complained that of the 288 mayors ‘about thirty do not read, write or speak French’.4 Since knowledge was power, in 1801 minister of the interior Chaptal, doctor, scientist, chemical industrialist, administrator of the department of the Hérault, director of the national agency of gunpowder manufacture in 1793, ordered a statistical survey of France. Prefects were to collect information about population, local resources and the local economy, religion and customs, taking into account the legacy of the Ancien Régime and ten years of Revolution, in order to make possible their own governance.5
The collection of these data obliged prefects to make contact with local agricultural societies, learned societies, doctors, clergy, members of conseils généraux and the like, who could provide them with the information they needed. Not consulted for any political reason, they made the most of this ‘scientific’ survey to establish their credentials as members of the educated, urbane, national society that subscribed to science and reason. Called upon to interpret local customs for the purposes of the national survey, they did so by distancing themselves from ‘the people’ who, in their eyes, were still trapped in ignorance, rustic manners, localism, routine and superstition. Thus when a young secretary of the prefecture of Hautes-Pyrénées wrote of the region that ‘local festivals are still essentially drunken orgies,’ two local notables corrected the draft to read, ‘local festivals attract only the lower classes.’6
Alongside this rather Enlightenment view of local and provincial life, however, ran another, Romantic notion that rural populations, even in places as backward as Brittany, were not as uncouth as might first be assumed. On the contrary, the manners and customs of local people were seen as vestiges of some bygone civilization that was somehow more authentic than the artificial and polished civilization of the French national elite. Jacques Cambry, the son of a naval engineer in Lorient and much travelled in his youth, was part of the revolutionary administration of Finistère during the Revolution and published an early version of the departmental survey, a Voyage in Finistère, or State of the Department in 1794 and 1795, in 1799. He reflected on the one hand on the province’s intense localism since, with the exception of the few military roads built in the eighteenth century, travel along the sunken tracks in the bocage (where small fields were divided by tall hedgerows) was extremely difficult. The inhabitants of each pays, which corresponded more or less to the arrondissement, were characterized by a distinct natural, historic, religious and even linguistic identity. Cambry noted that:
the Breton dialect of the Léonais is purer, more sonorous and elegant than those of the other cantons. It is to these parts what Saxon is to the German language. In the Léon the dialect of Cornouaille and Tréguier is understood, but they can make no sense of that of Vannes… The peoples of Léon and Tréguier hate the inhabitants of Cornouaille as brutal and uncouth, with their strange habit of striking themselves on the head.7
On the other hand, Cambry developed the view that under the uncouthness of the Breton lay an ancient civilization and that beyond the localism was a proud imperial tradition. ‘The Breton is externally a savage if you compare him to a French person civilized by imitation,’ he wrote, ‘but the natural French person is inferior to the Breton.’ The fact that Bretons had preserved their distinct language, argued Cambry, had inoculated them against the pernicious ideas of modern philosophy and saved them from the worst of the French Revolution: ‘there, people slept under Robespierre.’ Again, Bretons might be considered superstitious, but under the Catholic practices that they had adopted and which had been attacked by the Revolution they had preserved a far more resilient Druidic religion. As they had resisted the French Revolution, so 2,000 years before they had resisted Caesar. Indeed they were the hub of a vast Celtic empire that had covered not only the British Isles and Ireland but Spain, Italy, Greece, France, Germany and Asia Minor. ‘The language of the Scythians, who populated a good part of the world, was Celtic in times gone by.’8
When in 1802 Cambry became prefect of the Oise at Beauvais, north of Paris, he threw himself into the research required for Chap-tal’s statistical survey. He admitted that it was ‘pictureque and anecdotal’ rather than systematic. In fact he was looking for evidence for his theory that Celts had left signs of their passage everywhere in Europe. For example in the Oise he observed the popularity of a Celtic ball game called soule or choulle. The Oise, formerly the Beauvaisis, belonged to the Bellovacques, whom Caesar had called ‘the bravest of the Belgians, as the Belgians were the bravest of the Gauls’.9 In 1805 Cambry founded the Académie Celtique, and addressed its opening meeting in 1805. The Academy devoted itself to propagating the idea that France, rather than England, which had set up a Celtic Academy under Charles II, was the cradle of the Celtic people, and that the empire of the Celts stretched all over Europe and half of Asia. This was the territory that Napoleon’s Empire was destined to recover. When he reached Moscow in 1812 Napoleon is alleged to have said, ‘The civilisation of St Petersburg deceived us; these are still Scythians.’10
Although prefects were supposed to be the all-powerful executors of the government’s will, they were only as powerful as the support they obtained from the central government. Two invasions, three changes of regime and a civil war that broke out after Napoleon’s second defeat at Waterloo not only undermined the prefectoral system, but also demonstrated the fragility of the system of centralized administration when stress was applied. Some counter-revolutionary elements, who had famously ‘learned nothing and forgotten nothing’ since 1789, wanted to go back to the provinces of the Ancien Régime, some of which, such as Brittany, Franche-Comté and Languedoc, had elected provincial estates dominated by the nobility and clergy. In fact, provinces had not stood out as the dominant administrative unit of the Ancien Régime and it was not until the departments were invented that nostalgia for the provinces developed. Perhaps because of this, the restored monarchy of 1814–15 saw no advantage in reverting to this system and, once it had recovered its grip, stuck with the institution, if not the personnel, of the Napoleonic prefectoral admini stration.
Franche-Comté, on the Swiss border, was formerly a province of the Habsburg monarchy, conquered by Louis XIV in 1678. Its vigorous military nobility, who had revived the provincial estates in 1787, had emigrated to join the counter-revolutionary armies of the Bourbon princes. One of them, Comte Pierre-Georges de Scey-Montbéliard, offered his services to the Austrian commander Schwarzenberg in December 1813, asking him to revive the Franche-Comté under Habsburg protection. After the Austrians took Besançon, Scey-Montbéliard became unofficial governor of Franche-Comté. However, when the Bourbons returned in the spring of 1814, they refused to countenance such a plan; the most they did for Scey-Montbéliard was to make him prefect of the Doubs, one of the three departments into which the province had been divided in 1790. Moreover, though Scey led opposition to Napoleon during the Hundred Days from the Swiss frontier, he was not offered his prefectoral post back after Waterloo. The Bourbon regime favoured moderate royalists who collaborated with the centralized administration it was pleased to inherit from its arch-enemy Napoleon.11
Brittany, despite Cambry, had not slept under Robespierre, but had rather provided an adjunct to the Vendean uprising in the form of the less organized guerrilla warfare of chouannerie. Though the region had been pacified by Napoleon after 1800, his return in the Hundred Days was greeted by another rebellion. The towns generally remained loyal to him and he entrusted the Loire army to General Lamarque, who said of the uprising, ‘the heart is in the Vendée: we must strike there.’ One of the Vendean leaders, Louis de La Rochejacquelein, was killed on 4 June 1815, and Lamarque was able to force peace on the Vendean leaders at Cholet on 26 June. They were persuaded by Lamarque not to exploit Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, since Prussian troops were moving into the area.12 From this moment the Vendée became a part of Catholic and royalist historic memory rather than a military threat. The Marquise de La Rochejacquelein, widow of Louis, and widowed by another Vendean leader, the Marquis de Lescure, ‘the saint of Poitou’, published her Memoirs in 1815. In this she painted the Vendée as an ideal community, the polar opposite of a system in which citizens equal under the law were subjected to the authority of the state. Here, though feudalism had been abolished by the Revolution, she argued, ‘a sort of union unknown elsewhere’ reigned between peasants and their noble lords.13 As they had hunted together and danced in the château courtyard, so they fought together against the intrusive power of the revolutionary state. The key chapter about Vendée society had in fact been ghostwritten by Prosper de Barante, who had met and worked with the Marquise de La Rochejacquelein when he was prefect of the Vendée in 1809–13. George Sand, who was at convent schools with the marquise’s daughter, remembered her in practice as haughty and obsessed by caste. Despite this, the myth of the Vendée as an idealized microcosm of the Ancien Régime enjoyed enduring currency.14
Much more dangerous in terms of the collapse of the Napoleonic administration were events in the Midi. After Waterloo a broad crescent of the south from Toulouse to Toulon became a virtually autonomous kingdom under Louis-Antoine, Duc d’Angoulême, son of the Comte d’Artois and nephew of Louis XVIII. In the White Terror, volunteer militias 100,000 strong wreaked vengeance on those who had supported the revolutionary and Napoleonic regimes in the Midi. One flashpoint was the Gard department around Nîmes, the Ulster of France, where Catholic royalist bands known as miquelets took their revenge against the Protestants who had enjoyed political ascendancy since 1789. On 1–2 August 1815 a veritable St Bartholomew’s massacre of Protestants took place in Nîmes.15 Meanwhile, with the help of a British blockade of the coast, royalist bands took control of Marseille and Toulon. Napoleon’s commander in Toulon, Marshal Brune, was given a safe conduct to Paris by the authorities, but on 9 August in Avignon, former apanage of the popes annexed by France in 1791 and hotbed of counter-revolutionaries, he was recognized by the crowd, lynched, and his body tossed into the Rhône. In a similar incident at Toulouse, the authority of the Bourbon prefect, Augustin de Rémusat, another royalist who had rallied to Napoleon and was now recruited by the restored monarchy, was not sufficient to prevent an attack by counter-revolutionary bands of verdets on Napoleon’s General Ramel, who died of his wounds on 17 August.16 The murders of Brune and Ramel were long held up as evidence of the ungovernability and cruelty of the populations of the Midi.
One of the outcomes of the loss of prefectoral authority after Waterloo was a failure of the administration adequately to influence the elections of 19–20 August 1815, and the consequent return of the ultra-royalist Chambre Introuvable. The tension between Chamber and government continued until chief minister Decazes dissolved the Chamber and called new elections, this time managed by prefects of his choosing. In the Gard things took a little longer but in 1817 a reliable prefect was appointed who sacked the two subprefects in the department, forty mayors and twenty judicial officials, in order to eliminate counter-revolutionary clientage and ensure a victory for government candidates in the elections of 1818. That said, none of the leaders of the White Terror was ever brought to justice.17
After the collapse of the Bourbon monarchy in July 1830, Charles X gave instructions from exile in England that there should be no insurrection. The only disobedience came from his daughter-in-law, the Duchesse de Berry, widow of the Duc de Berry assassinated in 1820. Unfortunately for her, a large number of servants of Napoleon had rallied to the July Monarchy, including Marshal Soult, now minister of war, who had strengthened the army in the south-east. Moreover, despite the myths of class harmony peddled in the work of the Marquise de La Rochejacquelein, the peasantry of Brittany and the Vendée did not rise in support of the Legitimist cause.18
After 1832 Legitimism no longer posed a political threat to the Orleanist regime. Elections limited to a small propertied electorate were managed by the government through a combination of corruption and pressure. In his Deputy of Arcis Balzac explored the ‘making’ of an election in 1839 by an alliance of the minister, the Comte de Rastignac, the subprefect of Arcis and the most influential of the local electors, dubbed the grand elector, the Comte de Gondreville, ‘king of the Aube department’. An oath of loyalty to the regime was required of all officials and representatives, and Legitimist nobles who refused to take the oath retired to their town houses in the Faubourg Saint-Germain or to their country estates. Removed as prefects and mayors, they could exercise authority only indirectly. At Boismé (Deux-Sèvres), in the area broadly constituted by the Vendée, the mayor was a farmer and political straw man of the Marquise de La Rochejacquelein. The authorities disqualified him from standing in elections and therefore no elections took place in 1834 and 1837, because the other farmers of the marquise refused to vote for anyone else.19 At Chanzeaux (Maine-et-Loire), in the part of the Vendée area known as the Mauges, the local landowner was Comte Théodore de Quatrebarbes, who was imprisoned after taking part in the Duchesse de Berry’s conspiracy. Though neither mayor nor deputy, he and his wife exerted influence by means of the traditional hierarchy in the countryside, supplying grain, paying for work on roads and distributing charity in the hard winters of the 1840s.20
In face of the grip of prefects and grand electors on politics and administration, Legitimist nobles excluded from power could find some compensation by reconstituting in a virtual sense provinces that had existed before 1790 but had been destroyed by the Revolution and Napoleon. The Association Bretonne was founded in 1843 by Jules Rieffel, founder of an agricultural college at Grand-Jouan (Loire-Inférieure), who wanted to revive the agricultural society set up by the Breton estates in the eighteenth century. Also part of the Association, however, was the archaeological section, which concerned itself with the preservation of Breton monuments, musical instruments, costume, language and poetry.21 A key figure here was Théodore Hersant de La Villemarqué, who published a collection of popular Breton songs, Barzaz-Breiz, in 1839, arguing in the German Romantic tradition that they were echoes of the Breton soul.22 Against those who argued that Bretons would never be civilized until they learned to speak French, La Villemarqué argued that Breton had preserved Brittany from Calvinism, ‘philosophical impiety and Voltaireanism’, and that ‘amid the storms of the Revolution the preservation of faith and social virtues among the Breton people was due essentially to their language.’23
In 1837 the poet, novelist and artist Théophile Gautier noted that the vogue for young writers to tour the French provinces and to record their impressions was ‘the veritable Don Quichottisme of our time’.24 By 1830 the outlying parts of France had been brought under the heel of the central administration, and the collaboration of prefects and local notables in the management of elections ensured that the country was politically integrated as well. Communications with the provinces were better and faster. After the last burst of chouannerie in 1832 the July Monarchy invested heavily in strategic roads under a law of 27 June 1833, while local roads were also developed under a law of 21 May 1836. Public transport on the main arteries was provided by the imperial (later royal) stage-coach company (messageries impériales/royales), and the general stage-coach company (messageries générales) founded in 1828 and largely funded by Laffitte. These went only as far as Lyon, Toulouse and Bordeaux, after which other companies ran complementary services. The most rapid form of road transport, however, was provided by the mailpost, which alone was allowed to gallop and to stop only to change horses. Thus under Louis XVIII it took forty-eight hours to reach Bordeaux by stage-coach, but thirty-six hours by mail-post. That said, by the 1830s and 1840s transport was entering the steam age. Steamboats plied the major rivers, and the first railway, providing a short link between Lyon and Saint-Étienne, mainly for the transport of coal, opened in 1832, and another between Paris and Saint-Germain in 1837. It was a law of 11 June 1842, dividing responsibility between public authorities, which would take care of the infrastructure, namely the cost of expropriation, and railway companies, which would provide the superstructure of rails, rolling-stock and maintenance that launched the railway mania of the 1840s. A star of lines radiated out from Paris, reaching Lyon in 1845, and in 1848 it was possible to travel by railway from Paris to Marseille in less than twenty hours.25
Despite the growing speed of travel, Paris-based writers who were attracted to the provinces encountered them almost as foreign lands. Naturally, not all parts of France were equally strange. The central part of France around Paris seemed familiar, while the greatest differences were experienced in the west, especially Brittany, and the Midi. Balzac, who was brought up in Tours on the Loire until the age of fifteen in 1814, when his family moved to Paris, saw a clear difference between the Loire valley, where the most perfect French was said to be spoken, and Brittany. In the summer of 1827 he took a coach to Fougères, at the entrance to French-speaking Upper Brittany rather than Breton-speaking Lower Brittany in the west, but foreign enough to serve as the base for his historical novel, The Chouans (1829). He pictured a column of republican soldiers in 1799 isolated in hostile country controlled by chouan rebels who ‘heated the feet’ of informers in front of roaring fires, beheaded traitors and nailed their heads to the door of their cottages, and plundered the bodies of soldiers before sinking them into a lake. The double mission of the republican soldiers, explained the young officer Gérard, was to ‘defend the territory of France’ and to ‘preserve the country’s soul, the generous principles of liberty and independence, the human reason revealed by our Assemblies and which, I hope, will win people over. France is like a traveller carrying a light in one hand and a weapon in the other.’ Yet Balzac hesitated between showing the goatskin-clad, forest-dwelling Bretons, isolated from modern civilization, as benighted assassins or as noble savages. They were ‘as stunted intellectually as the Mohicans and Redskins of North America, but as great, as cunning and as tough as they’.26
The historian Michelet visited Brittany in the summer of 1831 and reported that the wearing of goatskins began at Laval, even before Brittany was reached, as the forests became denser. He argued that the true, Breton-speaking Brittany was ‘a country quite different from ours, because it has remained faithful to our primitive state; scarcely French, so much it is Gallic’, but that it was controlled by four essentially French towns – Nantes, Rennes, Brest and Saint-Malo – so that Breton ‘resistance’ to things French was gradually being eroded. In terms of difference he was just as much struck by the Midi, which he characterized as ‘a country of ruins’, Roman monuments, Roman law, Roman religion. Avignon in particular was ‘the theatre of this decrepitude’, combining ancient Roman architecture and the Roman Catholic religion. Along with its antiquity went a ‘murderous violence’ exploding in wars of religion against Albigensians and Protestants, and the demagogic rhetoric of the likes of Mirabeau.27
Michelet’s analysis fed into his History of France in which he exalted ‘that beautiful centralization by which France becomes France’. He imagined centralization not in administrative terms but in intellectual ones, ‘a general, universal spirit’ that was gradually conquering local differences shaped by material considerations such as soil, climate or race. ‘England is an empire, Germany is a country, a race, France is a person.’28 He drove home the same theory in his lectures at the Collège de France in 1838. Paris, he said, was not only the French capital but a European capital, a world capital. ‘Every state today is seeking to imitate France by way of centralization. Local sentiments are gradually dissolving in favour of a unifying spirit which animates all the parts.’29 The work of national unification, begun by the monarchy, was completed by the Revolution and Republic, but on a higher intellectual plane. Into this context Michelet fitted his attack on the Vendée. ‘Just as the world turned towards France and gave itself to her, becoming French at heart, one country made an exception,’ he explained in the third volume of his History of the French Revolution, published in 1850. ‘There was a people that was so strangely blind and so curiously misled that it took arms against the Revolution, its mother, against the public safety, against itself. And by a miracle of the devil that country was in France… that strange people came from the Vendée.’30
For many writers the south of France was even more barbaric and violent than the west. Prosper Mérimée, who toured France in his capacity as inspector-general of historic monuments, remarked that when he got off the steamboat that had carried him from Lyon to Avignon in September 1834, ‘it seemed to me that I was leaving France… I thought myself in the middle of a Spanish town.’31 Stendhal, who came across Mérimée during his tour of France, was impressed by the speed of the steamboat that took him on the same route from Lyon to Avignon in 1837, a distance of over 60 leagues in ten hours. When he reached Avignon, however, he was keen to confirm it as a violent city, and visited the room in the Hôtel du Palais-Royal where Marshal Brune had been killed in 1815. He reflected that it was incredible that Brune had decided to go to Paris via Avignon; ‘it would have been so simple to go by Gap and Grenoble, where no one ever got murdered.’ For Stendhal, a native of Grenoble, the Dauphiné was a ‘country of fine minds and enlightened patriotism’, quite different from Provence. Three weeks after Waterloo, he boasted, Grenoble was still trying to defend France against invading Piedmontese troops. The ‘civilized part of France’, he argued, was north of a line between Nantes and Dijon; south of that line there was only Bordeaux and Grenoble.32 In his memoirs, The Life of Henri Brulard, he was even more explicit about where civilization stopped, describing ‘the fatal triangle that stretches from Bordeaux, Bayonne and Valence. There they believe in witches, can’t read and don’t speak French.’33
Not all writers had such a negative view of the Midi. Flaubert, brought up among the green fields of Normandy, and promised a trip to the south with a medical colleague of his father’s if he passed his baccalauréat, which he did in 1840, was fascinated by the classic beauty of the girls of Arles and Marseille, where he felt ‘something Oriental’ in the bright mixture of complexions, costumes and tongues. His fear of violence was projected on to the island of Corsica, where he was told by the prefect that at a formal dinner to which he was invited no member of the conseil général would be without a concealed dagger, while bandits roamed the maquis, women were treated like beasts of burden and murders were routinely committed by vengeance groups of extended families.34 His trip to Brittany seven years later with his friend Maxime du Camp was altogether less challenging. They left Paris by train, going as far as Blois before deciding to continue on foot. The main distinction they drew, however, was between the Breton countryside, whose peasantry, attached to their families and village priests, spent as little time as possible in town on market day, and the towns where no one but maids wore the regional costume, and those working in government offices spoke French and read the newspapers. Gradually, Flaubert remarked, the town-dweller was ‘becoming less Breton and more separate from the peasant, whom he increasingly despises and who distances himself all the more, as they each understand each other less’.35
The educated, middle-class elite who began to discover France in the 1830s originated from Paris, but that did not mean that they were familiar with Paris life as a whole. The differences between the educated class and ‘the people’ that obtained in the provinces also obtained in Paris, perhaps even more so. However, just as the provinces were being explored by writers, so Paris was being explored first by officials responsible for public order and the public health and secondly, too, by writers. For Paris was a city undergoing rapid transformation in the early nineteenth century. Its population increased from 547,000 in 1801 to 1,539,000 in 1856.36 This expansion was fuelled not by a rising birth rate, for large cities were dens of high mortality, but from provincials coming in search of work and fortune. Often they concentrated at the margins of the city, outside the gates where tolls were imposed on food and drink brought into the city, so that wine was enjoyed tax free, but where also unhealthy industries such as tanneries, glue factories and slaughter-houses were moved, along with the site of public executions under the July Monarchy.37 Others packed into the medieval centre of Paris, finding work on the waterfront, in bars, in street trading or rag-picking. Unfortunately, the amount of work available was not enough to sustain the number of hands, thus, at the lower end of society, vegetated a population of casual labourers, tipping into vagrancy, crime and prostitution.
A sharper awareness of the social problems of the capital came with the publication of two major studies. Prostitution in the City of Paris by Alexander Parent-Duchâtelet, a medically trained vice-president of the Conseil de Salubrité, was published in 1836, after the author had worked himself to death. Dedicated to issues of public hygiene and social justice Parent-Duchâtelet calculated that while there were only 3,558 prostitutes registered with the Paris authorities in 1832, there were 35,000–40,000 more clandestine ones, often minors exploited by old women posing as midwives or tooth-pullers, posted in bars to bring in custom, concentrated in the narrow streets of the Île de la Cité, where there was one prostitute for every fifty-nine inhabitants. Daughters of workers or peasants who had come from north-eastern France to seek a fortune and failed, often the victims of family abuse or brutality, were sent out to labour in workshops or to help street traders but were often unemployed. ‘Only a reproach, a word, an encounter,’ observed Parent-Duchâtelet, ‘was required to plunge a young girl for ever into an abyss of shame and ignominy.’38 The second study, The Dangerous Classes of the Population in the Great Cities, by H.-A. Fréguier, an administrator in the prefecture of the Seine, was published in 1840. Devoted in fact just to Paris, it examined the fluid frontier between the working and criminal population, suggesting that about a third of the working population lost their jobs in time of cyclical depression. At the bottom of the working hierarchy were the rag-pickers, who were generally alcoholics, homeless youths who hung about markets looking for work or pilfering, prostitutes, pimps and madames, ‘rogues, thieves, crooks, fences’ constantly supplied by liberated or escaped convicts, using a common argot and operating in gangs. Less humane and more alarmist than Parent-Duchâtelet, Fréguier’s analysis was also less sociological and more moralizing. ‘As soon as the poor person, abandoned to evil passions, ceases to work,’ he argued, ‘then he becomes the enemy of society.’39
Path-breaking though these works were, they did not have the same impact on social opinion as a fictionalized account of low life in the capital, The Mysteries of Paris. This rambling work, serialized for the educated public in the Journal des Débats in 1842–3, was the unlikely invention of Eugène Sue, last of a long line of military doctors, who abandoned his career as a naval doctor when his father died in 1830, leaving him a considerable fortune. He became a dandy, haunting the theatre, opera, cafés, salons and the newly founded Jockey Club, until in 1837 he discovered he was ruined. Deciding to write, he was introduced to working-class life in 1841, not in reality but via a play about a poor but honest worker by his friend Félix Pyat.40
The Mysteries opens with the descent into the rue aux Fèves on the Île de la Cité of Slasher, abandoned by his parents, working in an abattoir from the age of ten or twelve, doing fifteen years’ forced labour for knifing his sergeant in the army, now a docker on the quai Saint-Paul. He forms a brutal relationship with a sixteen-year-old girl known as la Goualeuse or Fleur-de-Marie, also abandoned by her parents, who has been begging from the age of eight for a one-eyed crone called la Chouette. The key figure, who stops Slasher beating up la Goualeuse, is Rodolphe, who poses as the son of rag traders in Les Halles but in fact lives in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the son and heir of the Grand Duc de Gerolstein. Locked in combat with the underworld, including a family of hereditary criminals and fresh-water pirates, the Martial family, he discovers that la Goualeuse is in fact his own daughter by the Countess Sarah McGregor. In the final scene Slasher loses his life defending la Goualeuse from the Martial family, whose mother is being executed. Describing the people converging on the place of execution as ‘a muddy and fetid froth of the population of Paris, this immense crowd of bandits and fallen women who derived their daily bread from crime’, Sue cited Fréguier to the effect that 30,000 people in Paris live by crime alone, but his account of the underworld, strangely penetrated and redeemed by a member of high society like himself, was altogether more influential.41
The fear that the working population was also the criminal population developed into the fear that the working population was also the insurgent population. In July 1830 and February 1848 popular insurrection which triggered regime change had rapidly been brought under control by the ruling classes, enrolled in the National Guard as the regular military defending the outgoing regimes collapsed. In June 1848, however, the closure of the national workshops that had kept a large proportion of the unemployed in work provoked the June Days revolt. Alexis de Tocqueville, a deputy in the Assembly, argued that the revolt was ‘not to change the form of government but to alter the social order. It was not, in truth, a political struggle… but a class conflict, a servile war.’42 On 23 June drum rolls and bugle blasts summoned the propertied classes to the ranks of the National Guard. One of them was Maxime du Camp, his battalion sent to protect the Foreign Ministry. Wounded in the leg, he denounced the ‘ferocious and stupid beasts’ who threatened ‘French civilization’.43 However, the National Guard held firm, reinforced by volunteers from the provinces, and put paid to the Paris revolt. Tocqueville remembered the arrival of the volunteers from his native Manche, travelling nearly 200 miles across country not yet linked to Paris by rail. ‘They were 1500 in number. Among them I recognized with emotion my friends and neighbours, landowners, lawyers, doctors, farmers. Almost all the old nobility had taken up arms and joined the column.’44
A Paris redolent of crime and revolt did not befit the capital of a great nation, and when France became an empire once again in 1852, it had to be rebuilt and redefined as an imperial capital. That was the thinking of Georges Haussmann, a career prefect who, as we have seen, ran the Gironde at Bordeaux in 1851 and was offered the prefecture of the Seine in 1853. He lost no time announcing his ambitions at the Hôtel de Ville.
A great city, a capital above all, has the duty to present itself as equal to the role that it plays in the country. When that country is France, when centralization, which is the basis of its strength, has made the capital both the head and heart of the social body, then that capital would betray its glorious mission if, in spite of everything, it became constantly stuck in the ways of superannuated routine.45
Building a modern imperial capital meant piercing broad boulevards, cutting long perspectives from one grand monument to the next, including the ‘great cross’ of the rue de Rivoli, boulevard Sébastopol and boulevard Saint-Michel meeting at the place du Châtelet, increasing the number of avenues radiating from the Étoile from five to twelve, each named after a member of the imperial family or one of Napoleon’s victories, and redesigning the Bois de Boulogne to include lakes, gardens, two race-courses and a zoo.46 In the railway age that was now reaching its apogee it meant driving arterial roads to the main termini, from which railways fanned out to every part of France. ‘Everything moves towards Paris: main roads, railways, telegraphs,’ Haussmann announced in 1859, ‘everything moves out from it: laws, decrees, decisions, orders, officials.’47 The east of the capital, the popular quarters which formed the heart of any insurrection, were to be penetrated by strategic roads too wide for barricades. Haussmann was delighted to show the emperor the boulevard Voltaire, which would enable troops to take the Faubourg Saint-Antoine from the rear, and to remove the rue Transnonain, macabre centre of the massacre of innocents in 1834, from the Paris map. Last but not least, the very population associated with crime and disorder would be eliminated from central Paris by what Haussmann called ‘the disembowelling of old Paris’.48 Thus the maze of narrow medieval streets around Notre-Dame, the stage-set of Sue’s Mysteries of Paris, was razed to make way for a few sublime public buildings: the Prefecture of Police, the Palais de Justice, the Tribunal de Commerce, the Hôtel-Dieu, while Les Halles were rebuilt as a modern steel emporium to replace the old den of iniquity.
Most of the Paris populace was driven into the outskirts of Paris, and the population of central Paris actually fell as public buildings, businesses and sites of pleasure and entertainment multiplied. Suburbs such as Belleville, originally semi-rural villages beyond the old city boundary, with a population of 2,800 in 1801, grew into industrious districts with 60,000 inhabitants by the time they were annexed by the city of Paris in 1859–60.49 However, the shift of popular Paris to the periphery was not uniform. Many workers, needing to stay close to suppliers and clients in the trades they practised, simply crowded more tightly into the lodging houses that remained, or into inner courtyards or attics. Others found temporary accommodation in shanty towns that grew like mushrooms on one development site after another.50 Haussmann had not dealt with the problem of the revolutionary population of Paris, he had simply moved it. ‘Two towns have been created in the capital,’ said one commentator, ‘one rich, one poor. One surrounds the other. The unruly class is like an immense cordon circling the rich class. It would be a lot better if it were not like that.’51
The Revolution of February 1848 ended the cosy and corrupt alliance between the government and well-disposed notables which had ensured political stability since the mid-1830s and yet closed political life to republicans, Legitimist royalists and all those outside the narrow political class. Suddenly universal male suffrage was conceded and all political groups re-entered the electoral arena. The provisional government replaced prefects by commissaires, such as the young Émile Ollivier in Marseille and Toulon, who were supposed to exert some government influence over elections to the National Assembly, but their ability to shape universal suffrage and local interests was limited. Tocqueville, a candidate at Valognes (Manche), led 170 electors, who were either his tenants or members of his local community, on a 3-mile procession to vote at Saint-Pierre-Église on Easter Day 1848, haranguing them on the gravity of their responsibilities, and was certain that all the votes went to him.52
Rather than bring together French people under the banner of fraternity, the democracy of the Second Republic had a tendency to drive them apart. This was clear in the elections of 1849 to the Legislative Assembly, under the new constitution, when the country polarized between the republican left, the so-called démocrates-socialistes or Montagne, and the Legitimist Right. The Comte de Falloux, who recalled that his grandmother had received Louis de La Rochejacquelein at Angers when the Vendean army occupied the city and was brought up on the Memoirs of the marquise, headed a clean royalist sweep of all eleven seats in Maine-et-Loire (Anjou).53 The Vaucluse divided between the arrondissements of Avignon and Carpentras, which had been in the Papal enclave before 1791 and voted royalist, and the arrondissement of Apt, which had a French past and voted for the Montagne.54 The Comte de Montalembert, elected as a Catholic royalist in the Doubs, the core of the Franche-Comté, thanked his supporters, declaring that there were two Mountains, ‘an enemy Mountain and a friendly Mountain… it is you, the Comtoise and Catholic Mountain, who have chosen me to fight that other Mountain whose doctrine and deeds you detest.’55
The question of administrative decentralization had been in the air since the June Days, when, it was argued, France had been saved from another 1793 by stout volunteers from the provinces rushing to Paris to quell the revolt. Tocqueville’s cousin, Louis de Kergolay, who had been caught up in the Duchesse de Berry’s attempt of 1832, launched a Provincial Review in September 1848 in which he argued that under the present centralized system ‘a handful of men, an armed coup, is sufficient at any given moment to overturn the government and rule over France by means of the telegraph’. A middle way had to be found between a civil war between the provinces and Paris and a federalism it was feared would fragment France’s precious unity.56 Less squeamish about the term ‘federalism’, which also stood for the provincial movement against the tyranny of the Montagne at Paris in 1793, a group of Lyon royalists called in January 1851 for a ‘Southern federation’ that would emancipate French cities and provinces under a restored monarchy.57 The royalist-dominated Legislative Assembly Campaign engaged with these questions, setting up a commission on decentralization. This proposed to maintain the decree of July 1848 allowing the election of mayors in communes of under 6,000, to widen the powers of municipal councils and conseils généraux vis-à-vis prefects, and to equip conseils généraux with permanent commissions which would meet outside the rare sessions of the full council.58
Louis-Napoleon’s coup d’état of 2 December 1851, after which he briefly arrested his royalist opponents, including Falloux and Tocqueville, and crushed the uprising orchestrated by the Montagne, which was especially strong in the south-east of France, put paid to all schemes of decentralization. Louis-Napoleon lost no time in reimposing the centralized administration patented by his uncle in 1800. Prefects were given greater powers to control the press under a law of 17 February 1852, and new police powers to close down political opposition under a decree of 25 March 1852. They were also empowered to appoint police commissioners, JPs, gendarmes, post office officials and now primary school teachers or instituteurs. This gave them the ability to mobilize the administration in support of ‘official candidatures’, the government-sponsored candidates who were now put forward to fight elections, with all the carrots and sticks the regime could muster to see off royalist or republican opposition.59 Democracy was removed from municipal councils: prefects recovered the authority to appoint mayors in communes of fewer than 3,000 inhabitants under a law of 7 July 1852, while in larger towns and cities this authority was exercised by the central government. Baron Haussmann told the municipal council of Paris when it was enlarged after the annexation of the suburbs in 1859–60 that there could be no question of the sixty councillors being elected by Parisians with narrow Parisian interests since Paris was ‘the capital of a powerful Empire, the residence of a glorious sovereign, the seat of all major public bodies, the universal centre of literature, the arts and sciences’.60
Alongside the policy of administrative centralization was a policy of economic modernization which would serve to bring the country together in a single market and help to depoliticize it as growing material success took the edge off political passions. At Bordeaux in October 1852, welcomed by Haussmann who was still prefect there, Louis-Napoleon announced that ‘we have immense uncultivated territories to make productive, roads to open, harbours to dig, rivers to make navigable. Our railway network remains to be completed.’61 The Empire, proclaimed in December 1852, presided over and indeed facilitated an immense capitalist boom. After the crisis of credit and confidence in the railway industry in 1847 Pierre Magne at the Ministry of Public Works favoured the merging of competing railway companies in consortia for the purposes of completing the major lines. Thus the struggle for control of the Paris–Lyon–Mediterranean route was resolved by awarding the contract to four bidding companies – a group of British backers and entrepreneurs, the Rothschilds of Paris, the banker François Bartholony, who controlled the Paris– Orléans line, and the Péreire brothers’ Crédit Mobilier group – who in 1853 formed the Lyon and Mediterranean Company. Four years later, in 1857, this Company merged with the Paris–Lyon Company to form the famous Paris–Lyon–Mediterranean Company.62 The fruits of this new policy were quick to appear. Whereas in 1850 there were only 3,000 kilometres of track in France, there were 6,500 in 1857 and 17,500 in use in 1870.63
In Paris, the Péreires were heavily involved in financing the rebuilding projects of Haussmann. The Crédit Foncier, founded in December 1852 and, like its twin, able to mobilize savings on a gigantic scale, lent to builders and developers who would then be repaid by the City of Paris. This opened the way to vast private fortunes being made at the expense of city finances, a scandal attacked by the republican Jules Ferry in his 1868 Fantastic Accounts of Haussmann.64 Lyon, linked to Paris by rail from 1845, saw its population grow by 70 per cent under the Empire, and was similarly Haussmannized, with wide boulevards driven through the city, the quais rebuilt, passenger and freight stations going up and parks developed. All this drove the city into serious debt, but political opposition was gagged because Lyon was stripped of its elective municipal council in 1852 and was run solely by the powerful prefect of the Rhône, Claude Marius Vaïsse.65
Railways stimulated trade, industry and finance; they also underpinned the boom in holiday travel to coastal resorts and spa towns that took place during the Empire. While the Empress Eugénie, of Spanish ancestry, favoured the development of Biarritz as a resort, the Duc de Morny, the emperor’s half-brother, who did not like the crowded and chaotic Trouville on the Normandy coast, developed Deauville, further down the estuary, on its own dedicated railway line from Paris, not to mention its own race-meeting, in augurated on 14 July 1864.66 The emperor himself preferred spa towns, and gave cachet to Plombières in the Vosges, which he visited in 1858, not least to negotiate secretly with the Piedmontese premier Cavour about Italian unification, and to which a rail link was built in 1860. Under that deal France recovered Nice, which was developed as a winter holiday resort, and Savoy, which included Aix-les-Bains. Aix was visited by 4,150 spa-goers in 1856, but twice that number after the railway link was completed in 1860, rising to 176,000 in 1879.67
The attempt of the Second Empire to develop economic activity and leisure in far-flung parts of France along new axes of communication, while retaining the grip of administrative centralization and political paralysis, was a contradictory policy that was bound to fail. The circulation of goods and ideas generated a demand from cities and regions to take their affairs more into their own hands. The traditional regionalist lobby, given a fillip by the June Days but then sidelined by the imperial regime, used regional culture as a way to make a political point. The Association Bretonne, founded in 1843, was closed down in 1859 by the government, which alleged that it was a political vehicle. However, one of its younger leaders, Arthur de La Borderie, had already in 1857 founded a Review of Brittany and the Vendée, which celebrated Breton resistance to Franks and French, Breton liberties as defended by the Estates of Brittany before 1789, the Breton language and the Roman Catholic faith which was once more under attack.68 In Provence Frédéric Mistral interrupted his law studies at Aix after the coup of 2 December and dedicated himself to the development of Provençal literature, certainly as a critique of the centralizing state that used French as its vehicle, but not going as far as to demand Provençal autonomy and indeed exploiting the opportunities afforded by Paris as a literary capital. He went to Paris in 1856 and secured the patronage of the aged Lamartine for his Provençal poem Mirèio/Mireille, about a village Romeo and Juliet. This was published in 1859 and was soon made into an opera by Gounod, opening in Paris in 1867.69
More weighty than the traditionalists, however, was the liberal and republican lobby which, on the back of the process of modernization and integration, demanded a greater degree of administrative decentralization. Unlike the traditionalists they had no hidden agenda to bring back France’s old provinces. They accepted the division of France into departments but wanted more power to be devolved to the conseils généraux and to municipal authorities. Their great breakthrough was in the legislative elections of 1863, which showed the limits of the system of official candidates. A Lyon magistrate complained that ‘along the railway lines and the banks of the Saône and Rhône it is possible to follow, with the election results, the progress of contagious illness’.70 Louis Hénon, deputy for Lyon, one of the five republican deputies who had taken the oath to the Empire, denounced the ‘virtually irresponsible dictatorship’ of the administration in Paris and Lyon, which was neglecting schools and hospitals in favour of ‘luxury projects’ and opening up boulevards at the expense of private housing, resulting in a doubling of rents. What was required instead, he said, was ‘an elected and independent municipal council’, emanating from and responsible to the local population.71 Enthusiasm for a ‘municipalism’ that would provide an apprenticeship in citizenship and self-government at the lowest level became one of the republicans’ main demands.72 Demands for greater decentralization at both municipal and departmental level were articulated to great effect in the so-called Nancy manifesto published in 1865. Originating with a group of notables from Nancy but endorsed by a galaxy of liberal public figures both royalist – Montalembert, Falloux, Berryer – and republican – Hippolyte Carnot, Jules Ferry, Jules Simon – it declared that ‘centralization is stifling us with the abusive interference of the administration in our affairs.’ Specifically it wanted to ‘emancipate the departments’ by giving conseils généraux greater powers, more staff and permanent commissions to oversee the work of prefects between sessions. More powers also were demanded for municipal councils, although the signatories were divided on whether mayors should be elected or appointed, given that they were both representatives of the town and agents of the state.73
The Nancy group was seen by many republicans as being too dominated by Catholics and royalists, and there was plenty of republican opinion in favour of decentralization but not represented on it. Republican decentralists were concentrated in the large cities, especially Paris, Lyon and Marseille, which massively returned republicans in the elections of 1869. In the popular Paris suburb of Belleville no official candidate dared to run and Gambetta, whose famous Belleville manifesto called for the election of all mayors, beat the moderate republican Carnot. As a result of the republican triumph in the cities the liberal ministry of Émile Ollivier convened a commission on decentralization, chaired by veteran trimmer Odilon Barrot. Opening in March 1870, it came out in favour of permanent commissions for conseils généraux and the election of mayors by municipal councils in all communes with the exception of Paris and Lyon. This last recommendation was not acceptable to the government, which passed a law in July 1870 retaining the government’s right to appoint mayors.74 The refusal to recognize that the great cities of the country had the maturity to manage their own affairs was one reason for the municipal revolts of August 1870 and indeed for the Paris Commune.