Few in 1871 would have predicted that the Republic proclaimed on 4 September that year would still be in place in 1914, let alone last until 1940. Its legitimacy was contested both by Bonapartist apologists of the Empire, who as late as May 1870 had claimed the endorsement of 7.3 million votes, and by both species of monarchist, Legitimists faithful to the Bourbons of 1814 and Orleanists faithful to the July Monarchy of 1830. Yet beneath the quarrels over regimes seethed another issue: fear of popular revolution manifest in 1793, the June Days of 1848 and now in the Paris Commune. There was an underlying pressure on the political class to sink its ideological differences and rally behind the regime most likely to defend the supremacy of the propertied and educated. ‘The masses, sheer numbers, are always stupid,’ wrote Flaubert to George Sand; ‘what we need above all is a natural and therefore legitimate aristocracy.’ ‘Let us cure ourselves of democracy,’ said Renan. ‘Civilization began as an aristocratic creation, the work of a small number of nobles and priests… and its preservation is an aristocratic task too.’1
Although France was a republic in 1871 the National Assembly elected in February that year was dominated by a ‘party of order’ of royalists and conservative republicans very like the one which had controlled the Legislative Assembly of 1849. Many of those elected in 1871 had indeed served in that of 1849. Unlike in 1849, however, there was no president of the Republic elected by universal suffrage who might threaten to dissolve it. The Assembly elected Adolphe Thiers president of the executive power, a tribute to his opposition to the authoritarian and bellicose Empire in the name of ‘necessary liberties’. Having vanquished the Commune he was promoted president of the Republic by the Assembly on 31 August 1871, but made responsible to it for his actions and therefore always liable to be overturned by the Assembly.
Thiers was in fact threatened from three different quarters: republican, Bonapartist and royalist. Gambetta, leader of the republicans, who had stormed out of the Assembly over the abandonment of Alsace-Lorraine and went briefly into exile in Spain, was returned to the Assembly in a by-election in July 1871 and began a long campaign to dissociate the republicans from their violent image. Like the republicans of 1848 he put his faith in the power of universal suffrage which, although it had been manipulated for eighteen years by the Empire, playing on the ignorance of the peasantry, was ‘the strength of numbers and power enlightened by reason’. In a tireless tour of French towns Gambetta argued that the republicans would complete the work of the French Revolution, which was characterized not by violence but by the delivery of political and civil equality, private property, universal education and freedom of conscience.2
For the Legitimist royalists, the Comte de Falloux wrote to Thiers after the collapse of the Commune urging him to restore the monarchy, since ‘in France we will never prevent the Empire from signifying and inviting despotism, the Republic signifying and inviting disorder, and the Bourbon monarchy signifying and inviting representative government.’ In 1872 the Orleanist Duc Albert de Broglie resigned the London embassy where Thiers had placed him and returned to France to attack the Republic as ‘the reign of ill-educated men’.3 The Bonapartists were discredited by association with despotism and defeat, but they argued that the declaration of the Republic on 4 September 1870 by a caucus of Paris deputies had itself been a coup d’état, violating the plebiscite of the previous May which had massively endorsed the Empire. Paul de Cassagnac, heir to his father’s Bonapartist fief of the Gers in south-west France, a journalist whose newspaper, Le Pays, was banned for its denunciation of the republican coup, founded an Appeal to the People Committee in 1872 in which he argued that another plebiscite must be held and that the deeply Bonapartist masses would once again restore the Empire.4
Thiers’ strategy was to commit himself to the Republic as the de facto regime and the one that divided Frenchmen least, while establishing his credentials as a man of order. Around this he hoped to build a consensus of the ruling class. His ministers were drawn from the so-called centre-left, like himself former Orleanists who had rallied to the Republic such as foreign minister Charles de Rémusat and interior minister Auguste Casimir-Périer, son of the man of order who had put down the revolts of 1832. A law was passed by the Assembly on 14 March 1872 criminalizing membership of the International, which was held responsible for the Paris Commune, leading to the round-up of large numbers of socialists and anarchists.5 At the opening of the parliamentary session on 13 November 1872 Thiers announced that ‘the Republic will be conservative or it will not be,’ but royalists and Bonapartists increasingly considered him a hostage of hardline republicans.6 The breaking point was a by-election in Paris on 27 April 1873 when the government candidate, Charles de Rémusat, was defeated by Désiré Barodet, who had been mayor of Lyon until the government abolished the city-wide mayoralty on 2 April 1873 for alleged sympathy with the Paris Commune. Barodet was adopted by the radical republicans to take their revenge in Paris, and for Albert de Broglie his triumph signalled that ‘the conservative republic was toppled by the radical republic… it was like witnessing the resurrection of the Commune.’7 On 24 May 1873 de Broglie duly tabled a vote of no confidence in the government for failing to impose a ‘resolutely conservative’ strategy which was passed by the opposition by 360 votes to 344, and forced the resignation of Thiers. Marshal MacMahon, a career soldier who had served monarchy and Empire in Algeria, the Crimea and Italy and during the Franco-Prussian war was elected president of the Republic by the conservative majority in the Assembly.
The fall of Thiers ushered in a ‘new monarchical dawn’ for the Comte de Falloux.8 Thiers’ attempt to bed down a conservative republic had failed and the road was now open for the royalist majority in the Assembly to bring back the king. Why France did not achieve a restoration of the monarchy in 1873 is one of the great ironies of its history. At first everything seemed to be going smoothly. The problem that there were two pretenders, the Comte de Chambord, grandson of Charles X, and the Comte de Paris, grandson of Louis-Philippe, was overcome by the latter paying a visit to the former at Frohsdorf castle near Vienna, where the Bourbon court was in exile, on 5 August 1873. The Comte de Paris surrendered his claim to the throne on the understanding that after the death of the childless Comte de Chambord the title would revert to the Or leanist branch, and the ‘fusion’ of the two houses would thus be complete. A commission of nine royalists, including right-wing Legitimists known as ‘the light horse’, moderate Legitimists who followed the Comte de Falloux, and Orleanists such as the Duc d’Audiffret-Pasquier now drafted terms under which the Comte de Chambord would be restored. For though a minority of so-called ‘light horse’ Legitimists simply wanted to turn the clock back to the Ancien Régime, the majority of Legitimists and the Orleanists wanted the king as the best guarantee of a constitution enshrining ‘necessary liberties’ and parliamentary government in their hands as the ruling class, for which they had battled under the Empire and which they were not prepared to forsake under the monarchy. The division between these views was symbolized by the white flag of the Bourbons: since it signalled the neo-absolutist monarchy of Charles X the majority of Legitimists were prepared to accept only the tricolour of the Republic, Empire and July Monarchy under which French armies had fought for sixty-nine of the previous eighty-four years. On behalf of the commission the moderate Legitimist Pierre-Charles Chesnelong visited Frohsdorf in October 1873 and returned with the triumphant news that the terms had been agreed by the Comte de Chambord. On 27 October, however, the Comte told Chesnelong that he would not after all give up the white flag, concede constitutional guarantees or become ‘the legitimate king of the Revolution’. D’Audiffret-Pasquier, who argued that the pretender must ‘respect the opinions of those who would form the indispensable majority’ and should have accepted the tricolour as Henri IV had accepted the mass, declared, ‘We are lost.’9 Monarchical restoration had failed and the Assembly made another attempt to establish the conservative Republic by voting a seven-year presidential term or Septennate on 10 November 1873 to Marshal MacMahon, who brought back Albert de Broglie as chief minister.
As the monarchist threat evaporated, however, a new threat to the Republic appeared from a surprising quarter, Bonapartism. The Bonapartist cause had collapsed after the defeat of the Empire in 1870 and only nineteen Bonapartist deputies were elected to the National Assembly in February 1871. The death of Napoleon III in exile at Camden Place, Chislehurst, on 9 January 1873 was a severe blow to the cause. However on 16 March 1874 his son the prince imperial celebrated reaching his majority at eighteen with a reception at Camden Place, attended by seven thousand delegates from Bonapartist organizations in France, at which he announced that an appel au peuple or referendum should be held and ‘if the name of Napoleon emerges an eighth time from the popular vote, I am prepared to accept the responsibility imposed on me by the national will’.10 Bonapartist candidates now won a string of by-elections, beginning with the victory of the Baron de Bourgoing in the Nièvre on 24 May 1874, and the neighbouring department of the Yonne, where Louis-Napoleon had been elected to the National Assembly in June 1848, was flooded by Bonapartist photographs and pamphlets supporting the claim of Napoleon IV, so that, reported La République Française, ‘it was as if the Septennate existed only at Versailles and the Yonne was an annexe of the principality of Chislehurst’.11
It was in fact the Bonapartist threat that drove together the centre ground of the Orleanists and moderate republicans in the National Assembly to agree the constitution of what was to become the Third Republic. This was managed not by revolution but by negotiation and compromise. After the vote of the Septennate Gambetta’s La République Française had commented, ‘Ah! We know it is the side door… we are far from the admirable ideal of the poet who speaks somewhere of the new generations of French democracy entering the Republic and passing “Under the great sky-lit door / Of the dazzling future”. But perhaps this is the mysterious fate of the republicans of our day.’12 The Orleanist Duc de Broglie argued that if France were to be a republic then the only solution was ‘to surround this republic which we will have created and stamped with conservative institutions’. His fervent wish was to get rid of universal suffrage and revert to the limited suffrage of the July Monarchy, but since universal suffrage had been hallowed by over twenty years’ prescription he demanded a largely appointed second chamber, full of civil servants, magistrates, generals and admirals, ‘the representation of intelligence and interests opposed to the crude representation of numbers’.13 This proposal was rejected on 16 May 1874 by an unholy alliance of Legitimists and republicans and de Broglie fell from power. Initiative now passed to the centre-left of men close to Thiers. Édouard Laboulaye, professor of comparative law at the Collège de France and an expert on Tocqueville and the United States, argued for ‘a republic that resembled a parliamentary monarchy like two peas, a republic that was only lacking a king’. It might be inferior to a constitutional monarch, he joked, ‘but you have not got one!’14 His amendment was lost by 26 votes but on 30/31 January 1875 Sorbonne history professor Henri Wallon, who had called in his 1873 history of The Terror for ‘the union of all decent men’ against revolution, secured a 353–352 majority for his amendment that ‘legislative power is divided between two assemblies, the Senate and Chamber of Deputies; the president of the Republic is elected for seven years’.15 How the Senate would be elected was now brokered in talks between the Orleanist spokesman d’Audiffret-Pasquier and the centre-left spokesman Auguste Casimir-Périer, whose political differences were attenuated by the fact that they were brothers-in-law and lived in adjoining mansions on the Champs-Élysées. The compromise reached was a Senate of 300, whose members had to be over forty and would serve for nine years; 225 would be elected indirectly by electoral colleges of deputies, mayors and local councillors, and 75 would be life senators chosen by the National Assembly before it dissolved.
Elections to the Senate produced an elite of republican notables, three-quarters of whom had previous parliamentary experience and who occupied the political centre ground. The life senators included twenty royalists such as the Orleanist d’Audiffret-Pasquier and fifty-five republicans, weighted to the centre-left with Édouard Laboulaye and Casimir-Périer but also including left republicans close to Jules Ferry such as Jules Simon and Gambettists like Auguste Scheurer-Kestner. Senatorial elections held in January 1876 returned a list headed in Paris by Victor Hugo, whose 1874 novel Quatre-vingt-treize, set in the Vendée in 1793, celebrated the ‘ideal republic’ that showed mercy against the ‘absolute republic’ committed to destroying its enemies. The centre-left again did well, with senators drawn from the economic and intellectual elite and often from ‘la haute société protestante’ such as the industrialist and Cambridge blue William Waddington (Aisne), Léon Say, son of the economist Jean-Baptiste Say and editor of the Journal des Débats (Seine-et-Oise), and Charles de Freycinet, Gambetta’s technical right-hand man during the war of 1870 (Paris). However Albert de Broglie was elected senator in Normandy and, overall, conservatives – both royalist and Bonapartist – had a majority over republicans.16
By contrast elections under universal suffrage to the Chamber of Deputies in February 1876 produced a republican triumph of 340 seats out of 533, against 155 conservatives (royalists and Bonapartists). Their success was explained in part by spin and in part by networking. Gambetta delivered key speeches such as that at Auxerre in June 1874 selling the republican party as committed to the principles of the French Revolution yet standing not for social revolution but for the hard-working ‘new social strata’ of smallholders, industrialists, shopkeepers and white-collar workers who together increased the economic and intellectual capital of the country.17 Under pressure to grant an amnesty to the Communards from radicals such as Alfred Naquet, who ran against him in Marseille in February 1876, and Henri Rochefort, who had escaped from New Caledonia but was not yet allowed back into the country, he said that public opinion was not yet ready for such a measure, provoking Rochefort to label him an ‘opportunist’.18 He recruited brilliant young men to service the republican press, such as Joseph Reinach who joined the staff of La République Française.19 To make political alliances he haunted the Wednesday salon of Juliette Adam, taking the advice of her husband Edmond that ‘you can be in opposition from the cafés but you can only be in government from society.’20
The victory of the republicans did not mean that President MacMahon invited them to form a government. On the contrary, the principle of ministerial responsibility to a majority in the Chamber of Deputies had yet to be established and MacMahon did everything in his power to keep them out. He appointed as premier Jules Simon, who announced that he was ‘resolutely republican and resolutely conservative’. Gambetta wounded him by denouncing his links with political Catholics – ‘clericalism, there is the enemy!’ – and MacMahon dismissed him on 16 May 1877 for his failure to contain the left, unleashing the so-called Seize Mai crisis. The Duc de Broglie was again brought back as premier and used the constitutional mechanism whereby the president, if he had the support of the Senate, could dissolve the Chamber of Deputies and call new elections. The Chamber was duly prorogued for a month on 18 May and dissolved on 25 June. There were echoes of the crisis of July 1830. Political legitimacy now passed squarely to the republican camp: a broad church of 363 republican deputies who acquired heroic status, from the centre-left and republican left of Jules Ferry, deputy of the Vosges, to Gambetta’s republican union and Louis Blanc’s extreme left, passed a vote of no confidence in the government for its ‘violation of the law of majorities, which is the principle of parliamentary government’. In the campaign for the new Chamber they fought a propaganda war against the Seize Mai as a coup d’état and counter-revolution against a sovereign people who had repeatedly declared in favour of the Republic.21 Despite administrative purges, official candidates and recourse to censorship the government could not prevent another republican victory in the elections of October 1877. The leaders of the Republic of 1848 which had established universal suffrage were now commemorated as founding fathers. Both at the funeral of François Raspail in January 1878 and while unveiling a monument to Ledru-Rollin on the thirtieth anniversary of the Second Republic, 24 February 1878, Louis Blanc paid homage to their advocacy of universal suffrage which embedded the Republic not by riot but by a fraternal popular will.22
The final breakthrough in the slow republican ascent to power was the ‘town hall revolution’ of January 1878 which swept republicans into the mairies of thousands of towns and villages. Since mayors were the bedrock of the colleges that elected senators, republicans gained a majority in the Senate in the elections of January 1879. Without any base of support MacMahon resigned and the deputies and senators elected the first republican president of the Third Republic, Jules Grévy, who had been speaker of the National Assembly in 1871. Even this, however, did not mean that Gambetta took over as premier. The ministry Grévy appointed was headed by William Waddington and included Léon Say (Finances), Charles de Freycinet (Public Works) and Jules Ferry (Education). The great tribune Gambetta remained speaker of the Chamber of Deputies, and was said to exercise an ‘occult power’ over the ministry, but he was kept out of the government until 1882.
Although the republicans had come to power by democratic means and ruled under democratic principles, it was important for the stability of the regime that what amounted to a republican ruling class be constituted. The president of the Republic, Jules Grévy, was obliged to appoint a president of the council (prime minister) who formed a ministry that had to command a majority in the Chamber of Deputies. The Chamber of Deputies was entitled to ‘interpellate’ the ministry on questions of policy and if it secured a majority for its challenge the ministry was forced to resign. This resulted in a rapid turnover of ministries – 108 between 1870 and 1940 – but the fall of a ministry did not trigger a general election, which was programmed every four years. Another ministry would be reconstituted by ‘replastering’, that is including as ministers politicians from the victorious majority but carrying over old faces from the previous team. In the period 1879–93 a pool of six or seven dominant republican figures formed the basis of almost every ministry and Charles de Freycinet was president of the council four times.23
This republican political elite found Gambetta frankly an embarrassment. He was seen to be a great tribune but tending, after his moment of unchallenged power in 1870–71, towards a ‘bourgeois dictatorship’.24 When his followers triumphed in the elections of 1881 Grévy was obliged to appoint him president of the council, but more moderate republicans such as Freycinet, Ferry and Léon Say refused to serve under him and his ministry lasted a mere sixty-seven days (10 November 1881–26 January 1882). He was brought down over his project to change the electoral system from single-member constituencies, which tended to become the fiefs of independent-minded local notables, to a scrutin de liste which obliged parties to put together a slate of candidates for each department and was intended to produce a disciplined republican party under his control. By the end of the year, as a result of a shooting accident and appendicitis, Gambetta was dead, aged forty-four. It was not that the likes of Jules Ferry opposed political reform: indeed, it was during Ferry’s ministries of 1880–81 and 1883–5 that press freedom, compulsory free lay education, the right to form trade unions, the abolition of life senators and indeed the scrutin de liste were conceded. As he told the Chamber at the beginning of his two-year ministry in 1883, however, ‘Yes, we have received a mandate to reform from the country, and we are fulfilling it, but the country requires us at this time, with no less energy, to administer, to govern, to root the republic.’25
The moderate republicans who exercised power in the 1880s endeavoured to establish themselves as a ruling class. They were determined to avoid tearing themselves apart in fratricidal struggle, as had their predecessors in the First Republic, or being swept away by royalists and Bonapartists, as had their predecessors in the Second Republic. Whereas the ruling republicans of the Directory failed to win elections and had to resort to coups d’état, the republicans of the Third Republic devoted huge amounts of time and resources to nurturing their contacts and constituencies. Deputies were paid an allowance of 9,000 francs a year whereas their expenses in the form of election campaigns, travel, publicity and correspondence, receptions and la vie mondaine to nurture connections and support might be five or ten times as much. No deputy could be without a local newspaper which sang his praises, from his achievement of office to obtaining permission for branch lines in the department. Three preconditions of success were an independent income, a good marriage and involvement in business. Overwhelmingly deputies enjoyed independent incomes – 48 per cent of deputies were in the liberal professions, 18 per cent in state service, 15 per cent in commerce, industry and finance and 8 per cent landowners in 1871–85. Their earnings were often supplemented by membership of the boards of banks and large companies investing in transport, utilities and industry at home and abroad. This could lead to what was known as affairisme – the use of government influence to facilitate business success and vice versa – and lay deputies and ministers open to accusations of corruption.26 A good marriage bringing in a substantial dowry was essential, and the core republican aristocracy was closely related by marriage. Jules Ferry, Charles Floquet, who was president of the council in 1888–9, and life senator Auguste Scheurer married three sisters, respectively Eugénie, Hortense and Céline, of the Alsatian Protestant industrialist Kestner family, who brought substantial dowries and entry into the upper bourgeoisie. It is significant that Clemenceau, whose proposal of marriage had been rejected in 1864 by Hortense Kestner who later married Floquet, led the radical opposition to this ruling group, while Gambetta, though he had a mistress, Léonie Léon, never married. As a result of these strategies, 49 per cent of ministers who died before 1914 left fortunes of between 100,000 and one million francs, which was true of less than 2 per cent of French people who died in 1907, while 29 per cent left fortunes of over a million francs, which was true of only 0.1 per cent of the population.27
All these resources were put to good electoral purpose. Whereas the political bases of politicians such as Gambetta were in the great cities of Paris, Lyon and Marseille, those of the ruling group were in the provinces. Jules Ferry’s fief was Saint-Dié in the Vosges, where he was elected in 1876. Jules Méline, his minister of agriculture, was deputy for Remiremont, also in the Vosges. René Waldeck-Rousseau, his interior minister, was deputy for the Breton capital Rennes. They were keenly aware of the need to anchor the Republic not only in the towns but in the countryside, hitherto controlled by conservatives. To achieve this Méline introduced a tariff in 1885 to protect the peasantry, in the throes of agricultural depression, from the threat of cheap grain imports and Ferry proclaimed, in the election campaign that year, ‘we have conquered the universal suffrage of the countryside: let us retain it, not trouble it or weary it… It is by a spirit of conservation and love of stability that the French peasant has become the firmest support of the French Revolution,’ which gave him land.28
The access of the republican ruling group to dynastic alliances, business opportunities, electoral success and ministerial office stoked the resentment of their political opponents, who were both on the right – royalists or Bonapartists – and on the left – radical republicans or socialists. Although the constitution of 1875 had been made by an alliance of moderate republicans and Orleanists, Orleanist and Bonapartist support for the Seize Mai coup enabled republicans to argue that they were the enemies of the Republic and should never be allowed to regain power. A convention arose that no ministry could rely on the votes of the right to sustain it if it could not command the support of a republican majority. The death of the Comte de Chambord without an heir in 1883 deprived Legitimists of their leader and Napoleon III’s son, the prince im perial, died fighting the Zulus as an officer of the British army in 1879. In a speech at Le Havre in 1883 Jules Ferry announced that ‘the royalist threat no longer exists: it is buried beneath two tombs… but another threat has replaced it and we have to consider it squarely in order to confront it with the only cure, the only barrier: the ever closer union of those republican forces that are capable of forming a government.’29
In fact Ferry underestimated the ability of the royalists and Bonapartists to continue to pose a threat. Royalist and Bonapartist managers who had historically been more hindered than helped by the pretensions of their respective pretenders looked now to achieve a majority of conservatives within the Republic, and their royalist– Bonapartist ‘Union of the Right’ headed by the Baron de Mackau won 176 seats to the republicans’ 127 in the first round of the October 1885 election. This was explained in part because moderate republicans, who now considered the main enemy to be radical republicans, had run against them as well as against conservatives. In the second round the moderate and radical republican wings were obliged to sink their differences, under the slogan of ‘republican concentration’, under which the worst-placed republican candidate, of whatever tendency, retired in favour of the best-placed one. In this round they won 244 seats to the conservatives’ 25, achieving a total of 383 republicans to 201 conservatives.30
What stood between the moderate republicans on the one hand and the radical republicans and socialists on the other was the ghost of the Paris Commune. Since 1871 survivors of the Commune were either vegetating in New Caledonia, to which they had been deported, or were living in exile in London or Geneva. Their solidarity and anger was forged by the memory of the Semaine Sanglante in which they claimed 30,000 of their number had been massacred. For them class conflict was not just an ideology but a reality. The revolutionary Commune group, for example, set up in London in 1874 and including Blanquists such as Émile Eudes and Ernest Granger, together with Édouard Vaillant, dreamed of a ‘future Commune’ that would rekindle ‘the great battle between the bourgeoisie and proletariat’ and establish a ‘Communard Republic’.31 How they aimed to bring about the new socialist Republic differed in line with the rival factions on the Paris Commune of 1871. The Blanquists urged a seizure of power, although they conceded that elections could be used to raise awareness. Thus Blanqui, in prison at Clairvaux, ran as a candidate in a Bordeaux by-election in 1879. The Jacobin tradition represented by Delescluze, who had died on the barricades in May 1871, was taken up by Jules Guesde, who had been in exile in Switzerland but returned clandestinely to France in 1876 and was converted to Marxist socialism in Paris by German émigrés. He founded L’Égalité in 1877 and the Marxist Parti Ouvrier at a congress of workers in Marseille in 1879. On Sunday 23 May 1880 and each succeeding year Jules Guesde led his Parti Ouvrier on a pilgrimage to the Mur des Fédérés in Père Lachaise cemetery – where during the Semaine Sanglante the last Communards had made a final stand and been summarily shot – in order to maintain a revolutionary class consciousness.32 Ten weeks later his Parti Ouvrier boycotted what they called the ‘bourgeois fête’ of 14 July, arguing that ‘its Bastilles were still to be taken’.33 The anti-authoritarian or Proudhonist tendency, hostile to any dictatorship including that of the proletariat and favouring direct action to bring about a federation of autonomous workers’ associations and communes, was represented by Benoît Malon and Paul Brousse, in exile in Switzerland and affiliated to the so-called anti-authoritarian International of Bakunin.
Within France, radical republicans such as Georges Clemenceau, Paris municipal councillor and deputy in the 18th arrondissement (Montmartre), who had tried to mediate between the Paris Commune and Versailles on 19 March 1871, campaigned ceaselessly for an amnesty for the Communards. But the Commune was vilified by the likes of Maxime du Camp who argued that ‘the events of the Commune were nothing to do with politics but only about criminality’ and that ‘an amnesty would bring back traitors, incendiaries and assassins to the country whose destruction they have sworn.’34 Moderate republicans such as Ferry, who had himself narrowly escaped the violence of the Commune on 18 March 1871, steered a course between placating conservative opinion and achieving the union of all republicans when public opinion was ready, which earned them the name of ‘Opportunists’. A bill of 1879 tried to confine amnesty to Communards who had not been convicted of criminal acts, only political deeds, but this pleased neither right nor left. Eventually, under pressure from Gambetta and in an attempt to steal the thunder of the left, a full amnesty was proclaimed on 10 July 1880, ahead of the celebrations of republican union on 14 July, and the likes of Henri Rochefort and Louise Michel returned home.35
There was little possibility of insurrection in 1880s France but the return of the Communards brought about the emergence of socialist parties and reinvigorated radical republicans who did not believe in social equality but desired a far more democratic republic than that provided by the constitution of 1875. For the elections of 1881 Jules Guesde went to London to meet Karl Marx and his son-in-law Paul Lafargue, in order to draft a ‘minimum programme’ of social reforms as the manifesto of the Parti Ouvrier. Guesde’s initiative did not persuade all revolutionaries. After the death of Blanqui in 1881 his disciples Eudes, Granger and Vaillant founded their own Central Revolutionary Committee, and Vaillant as ‘candidate of the social Republic’ was elected to the Paris municipal council in 1884. Brousse opposed the ‘Marxist authoritarianism’ of Guesde’s centralized party which was obedient to London and planned a dictatorship of the proletariat, and broke from him at a socialist congress in Saint-Étienne in 1882 to found the Fédération des Travailleurs Socialistes de France.36 Brousse believed in the right of local socialist federations to set their own agenda and interpreted the anarchist philosophy of direct action as achieving power at municipal level first. In 1887 his Possibilists, as they were known, won nine seats on the Paris municipal council and took control of the Paris Bourse du Travail, the city-funded body which federated all the trade unions in Paris.
Socialists formed a minority on the Paris municipal council, which was the power-base of radical republicans. The council made clear its commitment to the French Revolution by unveiling a statue of the Republic, capped by a Phrygian bonnet, on the place de la République, on 13 July 1883, a ceremony that was attended neither by President Grévy nor by premier Ferry. In 1887 it commissioned a statue of Danton, portraying him (to placate moderate opinion) as the patriot of 1792 and champion of popular education. Alexandre Millerand, a young lawyer who worked on Clemenceau’s paper La Justice, was elected to the Paris council in 1884 and obtained funding from it to found a chair in the history of the French Revolution at the Sorbonne, the first incumbent of which in 1886 was Alphonse Aulard. Clemenceau himself was the terror of the moderate republicans in the Chamber of Deputies. His reform programme was to abolish the Senate and presidency of the Republic in favour of a sovereign National Assembly, on the model of that of 1848 or the Convention of 1792. He helped to topple Gambetta for defending the Senate in January 1882 and mobilized opposition to the government’s colonial policy to overturn Freycinet in July 1882 and Ferry in March 1885. After the elections of October 1885 the moderate republicans no longer held a majority, but were only 239 strong, squeezed between 201 conservatives and 144 radicals. From now on the republican governing class was under siege.
In the face of the challenge from radicals and socialists, the long-term project of the republican governing class was to make common cause with the right against them. However, this strategy was hampered by the principle of republican legitimacy, which since 16 May 1877 held that republican ministries should not rely for their parliamentary majority on royalist or Bonapartist votes, and by the reflex of ‘republican concentration’ which dictated that they should build a left-wing alliance of all republicans, moderates and radicals, when the Republic was in danger. However, radical republicans and socialists were often reluctant to fall into line behind the republican oligarchy, preferring to attack the ‘bourgeois Republic’. This opened the way to the possibility that radicals and socialists might, for short-term advantage, themselves make common cause against the republican oligarchy with royalists and Bonapartists. This is precisely what happened in the Boulanger crisis of 1886–9, the first major political crisis that the Republic had to weather after 1877.
Under the rules of governmental majorities, the moderate republicans were obliged after the 1885 elections to open the ministry to radicals or their nominees, and in 1886 the radical leader Clemenceau put forward as minister of war General Boulanger, a contemporary of his at the Lycée of Nantes who had a reputation for being both patriotic and reforming. Keen to demonstrate these credentials Boulanger struck from the army list officers belonging to the Orleanist or Bonapartist former ruling houses, while after an extravagant wedding reception given by the Comte de Paris for his daughter which seemed to reconstitute the Orleanist court the radicals forced through a law of exile in June 1886 banning members of former ruling houses from French soil.
In order to check these radical initiatives the moderate republicans challenged the convention whereby ministries should not rely for their survival on the votes of the right. A coalition of moderate republicans and Baron Mackau’s Union of the Right overturned the ministry in which Boulanger was war minister in May 1887, and the Union supported the new ministry headed by Maurice Rouvier, Ferry’s former minister of commerce. Boulanger was sent off to take charge of the XIII Army Corps well out of the way at Clermont-Ferrand, but his departure from the Gare de Lyon on 8 July 1887 was marked by a massive demonstration in his support organized by Blanquists and Paul Déroulède’s patriotic and radical Ligue de Patriotes. While radicals like Millerand attacked the Rouvier ministry as ‘the protégé of the right’, Jules Ferry made a speech at Épinal in the Vosges declaring that ‘a well-constituted republic needs a conservative party. To temper, contain, and moderate democracy is a noble thing.’37
The radicals, however, were far from finished. A scandal was uncovered revealing that President Grévy’s son-in-law, Daniel Wilson, was selling honours from his office in the Élysée palace. Since the president was not himself constitutionally responsible to the Chamber Clemenceau interpellated the Rouvier government on the question in November 1887 and rallied a majority of radicals and the right to topple the ministry. Grévy, who had always favoured moderate republican ministries, was still the target of newspapers from Rochefort’s Intransigeant to the conservative Figaro, and the tactical refusal of ministers including Clemenceau to form a new government forced Grévy to resign. The obvious candidate to replace him was Jules Ferry, but Ferry was the bête noire not only of the radicals but of the right, who did not forgive his attacks on church schools. Demonstrations on the place de la Concorde on 2 December 1887, organized by the Ligue des Patriotes and Blanquists and opposing the candidature of Ferry, turned to riot. Deputies and senators met at Versailles on 3 December to elect a new president and in order to defeat Ferry radicals gave their votes to Sadi Carnot, a compromise candidate from a great republican dynasty. A week later a mad Lorrainer who thought Ferry unpatriotic approached him in the Palais-Bourbon and tried to kill him, two bullets lodging in his side and chest.
Boulanger now became the vehicle of a campaign, orchestrated by both radicals and the conservatives, to dissolve parliament and to revise the constitution in a way that would permit the election of the president of the Republic not by the deputies and senators but by universal suffrage. For the radicals this would brush away the Republic of notables and fixers and subordinate the executive to the sovereign people; for the Bonapartists direct presidential elections would open the possibility of a repeat of 1848, when Louis-Napoleon was elected president, while the Comte de Paris was now ready to fall back on the hope of a restoration of the monarchy by plebiscite.
The dismissal of Boulanger from the army on 15 March 1888 provoked the formation of a Republican Committee of National Protest headed by radicals such as Henri Rochefort, Paul Déroulède and Alfred Naquet. The tactic adopted was to run Boulanger in all by-elections, the magic being that under the scrutin de liste adopted in 1885 a whole department rather than one constituency turned out to vote. Within months the country was rocked from one end to the other by this electoral steeplechase. In the midst of economic recession Boulanger was supported by the weavers of Amiens in the Aisne (25 March 1888), the miners of Anzin and metalworkers of Valenciennes in the Nord (15 April), but also by the Bonapartist peasants of the Dordogne (8 April). A meeting of Boulangist organizers with Émile Eudes sealed an alliance with the Blanquists, but the socialists were divided, Lafargue keen to harness the revolutionary potential of Boulanger’s popular support against the bourgeois republic, but Guesde seeing the dispute as one between rival sections of the bourgeoisie and warning, ‘between cholera and the plague there is no choice.’38
While the left provided the organization, unbeknown to them it was the right that provided most of the funding. Bonapartists were divided between those such as Paul de Cassagnac who demanded the return of the hereditary Empire or nothing and others like Georges Lachaud who argued that successive elections had endorsed the Republic but that the parliamentary Republic had to be replaced by a national or plebiscitary republic based on direct presidential elections. On 2 January 1888 Bonapartist manager Georges Thiébaud, who was in the second camp, paid a visit to the pretender, Napoleon’s cousin Prince Jérôme-Napoléon, at his Prangins estate in the Swiss Vaud, to obtain approval for their backing of Boulanger. On the royalist side the key player was Count Arthur de Dillon, who won over the Comte de Paris and the Baron de Mackau. Generous funding was provided by flamboyant royalists such as the Duchesse d’Uzès, who was indebted to Boulanger for allowing her when he had been minister of war to hunt in the forest of Rambouillet.
Despite the sound and fury the Boulangist threat petered out. In the first place its challenge to the Republic was an electoral one and, when it materialized, the division between radical and moderate republicans which had allowed it to develop closed up under the banner of republican concentration. In particular Clemenceau, who had initially promoted Boulanger, began to fear the Caesarist threat he posed and in May 1888 founded the Société des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen which grouped moderate republicans, radicals and socialists, to oppose the general. Second, Boulanger was always a man of style rather than substance. He took his seat in the Chamber on 12 July 1888, immediately demanded its dissolution, and provoked a duel with premier Floquet. Unfortunately he came off worse, wounded in the neck. The moment for action arrived on 27 January 1889 when he was elected in Paris by a combination of opponents of the government on left and right. A crowd of Ligue des Patriotes and Blanquists gathered in front of the Café Durand on the place de la Madeleine where Boulanger was hosting a victory dinner, but he could not be prevailed upon to seize the moment and march on the Élysée palace. Instead he panicked and fled over the border to Belgium. Third, the Republic showed itself to be far more decisive in the face of this kind of threat than it had been in 1799 or 1851. It mobilized the legal, judicial and administrative weapons of the Republic to defeat Boulanger and his associates. The electoral conditions that had made Boulangism possible were terminated by legislation of 1889 which abolished the scrutin de liste and banned candidates from standing in more than one constituency. The Ligue des Patriotes was dissolved and its leader Déroulède sent for trial. The Senate fulfilled its role as the ‘fortress of the Republic’ by sitting as a high court on 14 July 1889 to try Boulanger, Rochefort and Dillon in absentia. In the general elections of October conservatives ran as Boulangists in seats they could not hope to win under their own colours, but interior minister Ernest Constans used every weapon in his armoury to secure the return of 366 republicans against 168 of the right and 42 Boulangists. The young Maurice Barrès was returned as a Boulangist for Nancy, but the election of Boulanger in the 18th arrondissement of Paris was quashed. Fourth, the Republic used the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution in 1889 to proclaim its legitimacy. A banquet for 13,000 mayors was laid on at the Palais de l’Industrie and a preliminary, plaster-cast version of a monument entitled The Triumph of the Republic, sculpted by Dalou, was unveiled by President Carnot on the place de la Nation on 21 September 1889. In September 1891, two months after the death of his mistress (and bankroller) Marguerite de Bonnemain, Boulanger shot himself on her grave in Brussels.
The republican oligarchy could not be displaced by Boulangism, but a new weapon emerged in the form of political anti-Semitism to dislodge much of the republican ruling group in 1893. Anti-Semitism had the ability to mobilize popular emotions and leap class barriers in a way that Boulangism had failed to do. ‘It is hatred, simply hatred, that is first and foremost expressed by this anti-Jewish sentiment,’ wrote Barrès in Le Figaro.39 The rumour was spread that the regime had won the elections of 1889 only with the help of Jewish gold, provided in particular by the Rothschilds. On the left Henri Rochefort denounced ‘the triumph of Juiverie’ while a French Anti-Semitic League was founded in September 1889 by Édouard Drumont, author of the 1886 bestseller La France juive, together with the Marquis de Morès, a hugely wealthy speculator of Spanish noble descent.40 In 1892 Drumont’s new press weapon, La Libre Parole, exposed the fact that bribes had passed between the Panama Canal Company, headed by Ferdinand de Lesseps, and certain republican politicians whose influence had been needed to pass a 1888 law authorizing the Company to float a share-issue. It delighted to point out that the intermediaries between the Company and the politicians were the German-Jewish banker Jacques de Reinach, uncle and father-in-law of Joseph Reinach, who committed suicide, and the German-Jewish promoter Cornelius Herz. The link between republican politics, business and Jewish influence destroyed the careers, at least in the short term, of moderate republicans such as Rouvier and Joseph Reinach and radical republicans such as Clemenceau, defeated in the elections of 1893.41
After the Boulanger Affair socialists were forced to reconsider their strategy. The demagogic hold of Boulanger on much of the working class had seduced some socialist leaders, until it became clear that he wished to use popular support only for his own ends. The new faith of anti-Semitism was also seductive, and leaders like Rochefort mobilized it to attack what was seen to be Jewish control of the rich and powerful in the Republic. A third siren was that of moderate and radical republicans, who repeatedly called on socialists to rally in defence of the regime against its enemies of the right. After all, the Republic was democratic and the possibility existed that socialists might at some future date conquer a majority under universal suffrage and achieve power by legal means.
The clear message for socialist movements confronted by these false routes was in fact to turn back to the working class and to organize it as a labour movement for specifically socialist ends. In this respect 1890 and the years immediately following it were a turning point, when class struggle was squarely back on the agenda and memories of the Paris Commune acted both as an inspiration and as an object lesson that caused socialists to rethink how they would achieve a more equal society. There was, however, no single model of socialist opposition.
On the Proudhonist wing, Paul Brousse and the Possibilists had taken the path of defending the Republic against Boulangism, and benefited by meeting the democratic challenge, both locally and nationally. They had a powerful voice on the Paris municipal council and returned two deputies to parliament in 1889. The rank and file of the movement, however, considered that the Possibilist leaders had become bourgeois politicians and lost touch with the movement. A challenge to Brousse’s leadership was launched by Jean Allemane, a printworker, veteran of the Commune and former deportee to New Caledonia at the Châtellerault congress of the Fédération des Travailleurs Socialistes de France in October 1890, using the slogan that ‘the emancipation of the workers must be the task of the workers themselves’. Breaking away from the Broussists they set up a Parti Ouvrier Socialiste Révolutionnaire and took control of the Paris Bourse du Travail.42 The Bourses du Travail, employment centres that also provided office space for all trade unions in a given town, spread across the country and formed a Fédération des Bourses du Travail at Saint-Étienne in 1892. Although funded by republican city councils, often as a reward for labour support in local elections, they might constitute a threat to the republican regime. In July 1893 the Paris Bourse du Travail was closed down by the government and remained closed for nearly three years.
Possibilists and the Guesdist Parti Ouvrier – the French Marxists – vied with each other to be the dominant socialist party in France. In 1889 they hosted two separate congresses in Paris of the International Socialist movement, which was starting up again after the collapse of the First International in the early 1870s, this time representing only bona-fide socialist parties from each country. What the rival congresses agreed on, however, was that from 1890 May Day should be celebrated by labour movements in Europe, on the model provided by the USA since 1886, agitating for a straightforward reform, the eight-hour day, and enabling socialist parties to secure a grip on the labour movement.43 The Guesdists dominated the Fédération Nationale des Syndicats after 1886 but were keen to wean it away from open-ended strike action over which it had no control. Governments were not happy with what amounted to a one-day strike and demonstration and on 1 May 1891 the police opened fire on the May Day demonstration in the woollen town of Fourmies (Nord), killing nine and wounding thirty, including many children. The heavily industrialized Nord, with its large-scale textile factories and exploited textile workers, was one of the power-bases of the Parti Ouvrier, and Paul Lafargue, one of its leaders, was arrested for instigating the demonstration. He was defended at his trial in July at the Douai Assize Court by Alexandre Millerand, radical republican deputy for Paris XII who was trying to introduce socialist ideas into republicanism and steer socialism towards reformism. Sentenced to a year in prison Lafargue was elected deputy of Lille in November 1891 and released.44 The following year Guesdists conquered a number of municipalities including Roubaix, the textile town adjacent to Lille. The reality of class struggle was feeding into the electoral success of a socialism that was revolutionary only in rhetoric.
Strike movements and democratic socialism operated in tandem in other parts of France. In the small mining town of Carmaux (Tarn), the miners’ union launched a strike in pursuit of higher wages in March 1892 and took control of the municipality in May. The secretary of the miners’ union, Calvignac, who was elected mayor, was refused two days a week leave to discharge his mayoral functions by the mining company and sacked. The miners left the pits, 1,500 soldiers were sent in, and the town became a focal point for socialists demanding nationalization of coal mines. Most influential was Jean Jaurès, brought up in nearby Castres, a graduate of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris who had returned to teach history at the university of Toulouse, contributed to the Dépêche de Toulouse and was elected a republican deputy for the Tarn, aged twenty-six, in 1885. Defeated at Castres by Baron Reille, chair of the Carmaux board in 1889, while another board member, the Marquis de Solages, was elected at nearby Albi, Jaurès was converted to socialism by the librarian of the École Normale, Lucien Herr, and wrote a thesis on The Origins of German Socialism. He saw socialism as a fulfilment of the revolutionary credo of liberty, equality and fraternity which had been confiscated by the republican bourgeoisie, and was as much about justice as about material decency. In October 1892 the mining company capitulated, Calvignac was reinstated as mayor, the Marquis de Solages resigned from parliament, and Jaurès was elected in his place in the by-election of January 1893. He called himself an independent socialist like Millerand, but he appeared with Guesde at the Tivoli Vauxhall Gardens that January to launch a united socialist front for the 1893 elections while Millerand took possession of La Petite République, which became the mouthpiece of French socialism. Nearly fifty socialist deputies were elected to the Chamber in 1893, including Jaurès (Albi), Guesde (Roubaix), Vaillant, Millerand and the latter’s secretary Viviani in respectively the 20th, 12th and 5th arrondissements of Paris.45 However, whereas Guesde, born in 1845 and personally marked by the Paris Commune, found it difficult to give up the rhetoric of revolutionary class war, even when participating in elections, Jaurès, Millerand and Viviani, born around 1860, subscribed to the notion that the Commune had been a premature revolution and that socialists would not take power until a long preparation of the working classes in party and trade unions had been completed.
Not all leftist opponents of the regime went down the socialist road. On 1 May 1891, while textile workers were being shot at Fourmies, a group of anarchists infiltrated the demonstration at Clichy, in the northern suburbs of Paris, brandishing the black flag, and exchanged shots with police. After these were arrested and sent for trial, anarchists launched a campaign of terror in retaliation. François-Claudius Ravachol, hitherto little more than an armed robber, set off bombs in the flats of judges who had sentenced the Clichy anarchists. Singing revolutionary songs and calling for vengeance before he was guillotined on 11 July 1892, he became a folk hero. The following year, on 9 December 1893, a casually employed worker Auguste Vaillant (no relation to Édouard) hurled a bomb into the Chamber of Deputies, killing no one but throwing the parliamentary Republic into shock. He was executed on 5 February 1894. A week later, taking the bourgeoisie in general for his target, Émile Henry, the son of a Communard who had himself failed the examination for the École Polytechnique, threw a bomb into the Hôtel Terminus at the Gare Saint-Lazare, killing one person and wounding twenty. He was executed on 21 May 1894. President Sadi Carnot, who had refused to pardon all these terrorists, was himself stabbed to death by an Italian anarchist Santo Geronimo Casiero in Lyon on 24 June 1894.46 The government reacted decisively, pushing a series of laws through the Chamber to criminalize all those associated with or defending terrorism, the so-called lois scélérates. Leading anarchists were rounded up and what became known as the Trial of Thirty, including the shoemaker Jean Grave, editor of La Révolte, Émile Pouget, editor of Le Père Peinard, Sébastien Faure, editor of Le Libérataire, who had been entrusted with the care of Vaillant’s daughter, and the art critic Félix Fénéon, took place at the Assize Court of the Seine in August 1894. The prosecution failed to establish links between them and all but three were acquitted, but the tactic of terrorist attacks was clearly no longer the way for anarchism.47
The most promising road ahead was a hybrid of anarchism and trade unionism known as anarcho-syndicalism or revolutionary syndicalism. Fernand Pelloutier, the son of a post office employee, expelled from the petit séminaire of Guérande for writing an anticlerical novel, contributed briefly to Barrès’ anti-establishment La Cocarde paper of 1894–5, for which the future royalist Charles Maurras also wrote.48 More important was his association with Aristide Briand, whose father was a wine merchant and café-owner of Nantes, who qualified as a lawyer in Paris then returned to practise at Saint-Nazaire and was elected as a radical to the municipal council in 1888. Repeatedly defeated when he ran for the Chamber, after 1889 Briand moved towards anarchist circles in Paris. In 1892 he and Pelloutier founded a Bourse du Travail at Saint-Nazaire and hit on the strategy of the revolutionary general strike as the way for workers to reclaim control of their own destiny from socialist politicians by direct action. As delegates of the Saint-Nazaire Bourse they challenged Guesde for control of the Fédération Nationale des Syndicats when it held its congress at Nantes in September 1894, and won a majority. This opened the way to the formation of a new trade union umbrella, the Confédération Générale du Travail, in 1895. In that year Pelloutier became secretary of the Fédération des Bourses du Travail, which he was keen to keep separate from the Confédération, although they adopted similar strategies of direct action. He wrote a seminal article in Grave’s Temps Nouveaux urging anarchists to infiltrate the labour movement, educate the working classes and, linking up with the Proudhonian libertarian and federalist tradition, use the general strike as a tool to found a socialist society, ‘the free association of free producers’.49
The red peril of socialism and anarchism had a profound impact on the political configuration of the Third Republic. The strategy of republican concentration which allied moderate and radical republicans was practised in the elections of 1893, but became increasingly irrelevant as the threat from the left outweighed that from the right. Between November 1895 and April 1896 there was a short-lived experiment of a radical ministry with socialist support. The prime minister, Léon Bourgeois, subscribed to a notion of ‘solidarism’ whereby those who did well out of society should be required to put more back in, notably through a progressive income tax to pay for benefits such as compensation for industrial accidents, medical cover and pensions. This policy was seen by the ruling class as a frontal attack on private property. Since the ministry had a majority in the Chamber of Deputies the Senate was mobilized to pass votes of no confidence in the ministry and finally to reject its budget. Nothing remained of the Bourgeois programme except the bill on accident compensation which became law in 1898.50
The Bourgeois ministry was in fact an aberration from the new shape of the governing coalition, which was a moderate republican government, now called Progressist, ruling against radicals and socialists with a majority provided by conservative votes in the Chamber. Although it was strictly against the rules of republican legitimacy laid down in 1877 for a republican ministry to rely on conservative support, two things had happened. First, the red peril had divided republicans along class lines, so that moderate republicans, representing the ruling class, had more in common with conservatives, also representing the ruling class, than with radicals or socialists; and second, after 1890 many conservatives decided to fight no more for the restoration of monarchy or Empire but under what was called the Ralliement to embrace the republic as the de facto regime and work within it to make it more conservative, as it were, more Tory.
The shadow of this new moderate-republican–Tory-right coalition appeared first on the question of protective tariffs. Confronted by the collapse of farm prices and global manufacturing competition, agricultural and industrial lobbies converged in favour of protective tariffs and achieved a majority of the Chamber elected in 1889. Sponsored by Jules Méline, who had taken through a previous agricultural tariff in 1885, this tariff on the import of agricultural and certain industrial goods was passed 386–105 on 29 December 1891: there were 242 republicans and 144 conservatives in favour with 80 republicans and 25 conservatives against, and the bill passed into law on 11 January 1892.51 The configuration also appeared outside parliament, in pressure-groups set up to explore social reform as an antidote to socialism. The ramifications of the social question, from factory conditions and poor housing to tuberculosis and alcoholism, which helped to foster socialism, could equally be alleviated by reforms carried out by ruling groups of all political persuasions. Such a pressure-group was the Musée Social, founded in 1894 and including ‘rallied’ monarchists such as the Comte de Chambrun, the Prince d’Arenberg and Albert de Mun, moderate republicans such as Jules Méline and René Waldeck-Rousseau and radical republicans such as Léon Bourgeois. Many of these had business interests, such as d’Arenberg, who was president of the Suez Canal Company, and Émile Cheysson, a former director of the Le Creusot steelworks and lecturer at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques, who was deeply committed to social engineering.52
The bombing of the Chamber on 9 December 1893 had the effect of converting the coalition into a government. The president of the council, Jean Casimir-Périer, son of Auguste, framer of the 1875 constitution, grandson of Louis-Philippe’s minister and himself a director of the Anzin mining company, sometimes seen as the un acceptable face of capitalism, lurched to the right, enjoying the support of ‘rallied’ conservatives such as the Prince d’Arenberg.53 He rushed through the lois scélérates against terrorists and was elected president of the Republic on 27 June 1894, after the assassination of Sadi Carnot, but he was unable to wield the power he wished to and resigned on 15 January 1895. He was replaced by Félix Faure, a businessman of Le Havre who had been close to Gambetta but defined himself as above party and had voted against the expulsion of the princes in 1886 and therefore benefited from the support of conservatives.54
The governmental manifestation of the moderate–conservative coalition was exemplified by the ministry of Jules Méline, which held office between April 1896 and 1898. Ushered in by the Senate coup against the Bourgeois ministry, it brought in a number of significant younger republicans such as Louis Barthou, lawyer and deputy for Oléron in the Basque country, who became minister of the interior.55 Inside the Chamber it relied on the support of conservatives, much to the anger of radicals and socialists, the latter denouncing the fact that ‘the Méline ministry has a majority of republicans against it; it is saved only by votes from every shade of the right, rushing to support this embattled opportunism.’56 Outside the Chamber, it had the support of business leaders keen on protection and social defence. These were solicited and corralled by the Association Générale du Commerce et de l’Industrie, headed by René Waldeck-Rousseau, who had reverted to making money as a commercial lawyer after electoral defeat in 1889, although he was parachuted in as senator for the Loire in 1894.57 All seemed set for a moderate–conservative victory in the elections due in May 1898. This new ruling class might have taken powerful root had not a momentous event intervened.
In December 1894 a General Staff officer of Alsatian-Jewish origin, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, was court-martialled for passing French military secrets to the German army. After a ceremonial degradation in the courtyard of the École Militaire on 5 January 1895, when his emblems of rank were torn from his tunic and his sword broken, he was sent as a traitor to Devil’s Island off French Guiana. Little sympathy surrounded him: writing in La Justice on Christmas Day 1894 Clemenceau criticized the lightness of the punishment which would have been much harsher for an ordinary soldier, and demanded the death penalty.58
Almost two years later a small group of individuals began to suspect that Dreyfus had been framed by his superior officers in order to cover the guilt of a Gentile officer who was much more closely integrated into the patronage system of the army. This group was partly Jewish – Alfred’s brother Mathieu, the former Gambettist and editor of La République Française, Joseph Reinach, the anarchist Bernard Lazare and the lawyer and intellectual Léon Blum. It was also partly Alsatian, and thus marginal but keen to demonstrate its patriotism. Colonel Picquart, head of the army’s Intelligence Service, who had taught Dreyfus at military school, began to suspect Major Ferdinand Esterhazy, a flamboyant nationalist, and reported his concerns to his superiors and Méline’s war minister, General Billot. Rather than explore that line they posted Picquart to Tunisia in January 1897. Granted a short leave in June 1897 Picquart returned and made contact with a lawyer who had been his contemporary at the Lycée of Strasbourg, Louis Leblois. On 13 July 1897 Leblois met the patron of all Alsatian republicans and Protestants, Auguste Scheurer-Kestner, who was immediately converted to the possibility of a miscarriage of justice. Scheurer-Kestner went straight to the top, calling on President Faure, General Billot and premier Méline. None of them wanted to have anything to do with his concerns and claimed that he had no evidence warranting a fresh look at the case. Méline announced to the Chamber on 4 December 1897, ‘There is no Dreyfus Affair.’59
More than that, the rumour began to spread in the autumn of 1897 that this troublemaking, designed only to bring the army into disrepute and weaken the nation, was the conspiracy of a ‘Jewish syndicate’. This story was spread not only by hardline anti-Semites such as Drumont but by Catholic leaders such as Albert de Mun who denounced the ‘occult power’ behind the campaign and by left-wing nationalists like Henri Rochefort who, parodying Maupassant, dubbed Joseph Reinach ‘Boule de Juif’. The weight of opinion against the ‘syndicate’ pulled socialists along in its wake. Alexandre Millerand told Joseph Reinach, whose uncle had committed suicide during the Panama scandal, to rehabilitate his own family before he tried to rehabilitate Dreyfus, and fought a pistol duel with him.60 Although Jaurès was inclined towards Dreyfus, Jules Guesde and Édouard Vaillant told socialists on 19 January 1898 that they should ignore both sides in what they termed a ‘bourgeois civil war’.
In fact Esterhazy was brought to court martial on 10–11 January 1898, a ploy by the military to clear the air, for he was promptly acquitted. This triggered a second phase of the Affair: an open letter to the president of the Republic, entitled J’accuse, penned by the novelist Émile Zola, and published on 13 January 1898 in L’Aurore by Clemenceau who, as over Boulanger, had changed his mind in mid-course. Zola denounced the cover-up by the military, naming war minister General Mercier, chief of General Staff General de Boisdeffre and Commandant du Paty de Clam as the officers concerned, issued warnings about military despotism, and perorated on the inevitable triumph of truth and justice.61 He was supported by a manifesto of intellectuals, among whom were Anatole France and Marcel Proust, published on 14 January, by Charles Péguy, a graduate of the École Normale Supérieure, who spread the word from his Bellais bookshop in the rue Cujas, and by avant-garde journals such as La Revue Blanche, run by the art-critic Natanson brothers.62 These intellectuals, however, remained a small minority. Of the fifty-five daily newspapers in January and February 1898, forty-eight were antidreyfusard.63 Zola was sent to trial on 7 February 1898 for defamation and sentenced to a year in prison, although he managed to escape to England. Outside the courtyard hostile crowds were orchestrated by Jules Guérin and his newly formed Ligue Anti-Sémitique, composed mostly of butchers’ boys from the abattoirs of La Villette.64 Henri Rochefort, who was sentenced to a mere five days’ gaol for libelling Reinach, was carried shoulder-high by the crowds on his way to Sainte-Pélagie.65 Anti-Semitic riots broke out in the main cities of France, degenerating in Algiers into a veritable pogrom.66 The only response of note on the dreyfusard side was the foundation of the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, primarily by freemasons, Jews and Protestants, who had themselves been persecuted before the Revolution, in order to fight for human rights and tolerance.67
Intellectuals without electoral concerns might join the highly exposed Dreyfusard camp. Politicians with elections to fight in May 1898 did not. In those elections the Dreyfus Affair was not an issue: to mention it was electoral suicide. Any politician suspected of favouring Dreyfus was unceremoniously abandoned: thus not only Joseph Reinach but also Jean Jaurès and Jules Guesde lost their seats, although the latter’s defeat may be explained by the revenge of the Roubaix textile magnate, Eugène Motte. The election saw the return of twenty-two self-confessed anti-Semites, notably Édouard Drumont in Algiers, where the Ligue Anti-Sémitique had been his electoral agents. The main result of the elections was defeat for Jules Méline as opinion shifted to the left, and a radical, Henri Brisson, was appointed premier. The move to the left however, did nothing for the case of Dreyfus. Brisson’s war minister, Godefroy Cavaignac, told the Chamber on 9 July 1898 that he had irrefutable proof of Dreyfus’ guilt. The son of the republican dictator of 1848, he saw himself as a soldier in all but name, while Reinach described him as ‘the Robespierre of patriotism’, determined to put the national interest above individual rights.68 His certainty about Dreyfus’ guilt was punctured by the Preuves published by Jean Jaurès, and suspicion for framing Dreyfus now fell on Colonel Henry of the Intelligence Section. Arrested and confined in the fortress of Mont-Valérien, Henry slit his throat on 31 August 1898, evidence of his guilt for dreyfusards and of his martyrdom for antidreyfusards.
Antidreyfusards now had the wind behind them. The defeat of the moderates around Méline removed the plank along which the ‘rallied’ royalists and Bonapartists sought to return to power. There had always been royalists and Bonapartists critical of the Ralliement; now the initiative shifted to them as it seemed that they would never gain control of the parliamentary Republic, so it must be destroyed. In the autumn of 1898 anti-parliamentary leagues gathered shape and momentum, putting the parliamentary Republic in danger. The royalist pretender, now the Duc d’Orléans, saw the possibility of using the popular fighting-force provided by the Ligue Anti-Sémitique as a route back to power. Jules Guérin and a selection of his butchers’ boys were introduced to the duke in his Brussels exile on 24 January 1899, and royalist money for the Ligue was channelled by Boni de Castellane, who had married the American heiress Anna Gould, and by André Buffet, son of the Orleanist Louis Buffet, who had been a Moral Order premier in 1875.69 The Ligue des Patriotes, dissolved after the Boulanger Affair, was reconstituted in September 1898 by Paul Déroulède, who was elected deputy for Angoulême in 1898. Resistant to pressure from his militants to embrace anti-Semitism, he was if anything Bonapartist, and was looked to by Bonapartist leaders such as Gustave Cunéo d’Ornano, deputy for Charente, who coveted less the Empire than the Consulate of 1799–1804 as the model of a plebiscitary republic, under which the president would be elected by universal suffrage. Déroulède’s moment came on 23 February 1899, the day of the state funeral of President Félix Faure, who had died in the arms of his mistress. Déroulède, at the head of his Ligue, tried to seize the bridle of General Pellieux, who was leading the funeral procession, in order to march on the vacant Élysée palace and take power. But Pellieux refused to co-operate, and the coup d’état was bungled.70
More bourgeois and respectable, less plebeian and streetwise, was the Ligue de la Patrie Française founded in January 1899 by two secondary school teachers, Henri Vaugeois and Gabriel Syveton. Their ambition was to bring over a majority of the Académie Française in order to demonstrate that not all intellectuals were dreyfusards, and they began with the poet François Coppée and the playwright and critic Jules Lemaître. Maurice Barrès delivered a keynote lecture to them, arguing that France had been desiccated and divided by a cerebral, Jacobin notion of the patrie peddled by philosophy teachers and that a deep and unifying nationalism had to be generated by a cult of the soldiers of 1870 who lay in graves in Alsace, now part of Germany, the cult of la terre et les morts. The high point of the Ligue came with the municipal elections of 1900, when several of them were voted on to the Paris municipal council, which was now captured by conservatives.71 Even before then Henri Vaugeois had branched off to join the left-bank journalist Maurice Pujo and Provençal regionalist Charles Maurras to found an Action Française Committee (April 1898), then an Action Française Bulletin (July 1899). Maurras had converted to monarchism during a visit to the eastern Mediterranean in 1896 when he realized how little influence republican France had in comparison to the monarchical empires of Great Britain, Germany and Russia. The Dreyfus Affair convinced him that the Republic had fallen into the hands of the ‘four confederate states’ of Jews, Protestants, freemasons and foreigners, and that only a restored monarchy could bring back a strong state, a united nation and national greatness. His approach to monarchism was theoretical rather than sentimental and his relationship with the Duc d’Orléans and his staff was decidedly ambivalent. Unlike the Ligue de la Patrie Française, Action Française had no truck with elections but communicated its ideas through its publications and street demonstrations and put its faith in a coup de force.72
The turning point of the Dreyfus Affair came in the summer of 1899. On 31 May Déroulède, charged with attacking state security on 23 February, was acquitted by the Assize Court of the Seine. On 1 June Colonel Marchand, who had confronted British forces at Fashoda on the Upper Nile but been recalled by the government, made a triumphant procession through Paris.73 On 3 June the Cour de Cassation decided that the case for revising the Dreyfus conviction had to be answered, and referred the matter back to the court martial. The next day right-wing demonstrators assaulted the new president Loubet, who was thought to favour reopening the case, at the Auteuil races, and knocked his top hat off. Loubet now summoned Waldeck-Rousseau to form a government of so-called ‘republican defence’ that would bring together broad support for the regime and defuse the Dreyfus Affair. His ministry of 22 June 1899 was composed of former supporters of Méline who now broke with him over his refusal to deal with the Dreyfus Affair, and was the first government to include a socialist. His finance minister was Joseph Caillaux, son of an Orleanist Moral Order minister who joined the elite Inspection des Finances, inherited the family constituency at Mamers (Sarthe) as a moderate republican in 1898 and had Maurice Rouvier as a patron.74 In the difficult post of war minister Waldeck placed General Gallifet, who had fought with the Versailles forces in 1871 but had been a confidant of Gambetta. Most significantly, to draw in the left wing he appointed Alexandre Millerand as trade minister, the first time a socialist had held government office. Waldeck pushed through a raft of reforms including an Associations Law of 1901 which permitted trade unions to own property collectively, a factory act which limited the working day first to eleven hours and later to ten, and a pensions bill that did not become law till 1910.
Waldeck’s government acted fast to secure the regime. The arrest of Jules Guérin and his royalist backer André Buffet was ordered for threatening state security. Guérin holed up with his Ligue in their offices in the rue Chabrol, near the Gare du Nord, and police were sent in for what became known as ‘the siege of Fort Chabrol’. The retrial of Dreyfus by court martial was conducted for security reasons outside Paris, in Rennes. Had he been acquitted General Mercier and the military top brass would have been liable to prosecution for obstructing the course of justice, and might have resorted to a coup d’état, but on 9 September the court again found Dreyfus guilty, by a majority vote, ‘with extenuating circumstances’, whatever they might be. This opened the way to a pardon being granted by President Loubet on 19 September, which did nothing to satisfy the dreyfusards, who dreamed of a formal acquittal and punishment of the guilty generals. ‘Once again it is up to us poets’, Zola wrote to Madame Dreyfus, ‘to nail the guilty to the eternal pillory.’75 Only the right-wing civilian conspirators were charged with conspiracy and effectively dealt with. The Senate sat as a high court from November 1899 till January 1900, condemning Guérin to ten years in prison and Déroulède and Buffet to five years’ exile.76 As if to mark this success the final, bronze-cast version of Dalou’s Triumph of the Republic was unveiled on 19 November 1899 on the place de la Nation in the presence of President Loubet and premier Waldeck-Rousseau.77 Finally, in June 1900 Waldeck secured the Chamber’s approval of a bill to amnesty all those implicated in the Affair, cunningly quoting what his first political master Gambetta had said about amnestying the Communards. ‘“When disagreements have divided and torn apart a country,”’ he repeated, ‘“all men of political wisdom understand that the time comes when these need to be forgotten.” Messieurs, I think that the hour of which Gambetta spoke has arrived.’78
The Dreyfus Affair split the political class that had been plastering over its differences in the 1890s in order to deal with the threat of socialism and anarchism. The renewed threat to the parliamentary Republic, even to the Republic itself, provoked a throwback to republican concentration in defence of the regime that had characterized the 1870s and 1880s. The rhetoric of the French Revolution was once more in the air: Aulard’s Political History of the Revolution, which saw it as the inevitable victory of national sovereignty, appeared in 1901. The dominant party until 1940 was the Republican, Radical and Radical-Socialist Party, founded in 1901 as a party that ‘rallies all the sons of Revolution, whatever their differences, against all the partisans of counter-revolution’.79 These Radicals were constantly alert to the militarist and clerical threat from the right that had manifested itself during the Dreyfus Affair, but they had no truck with socialism and were resolute defenders of private property. They represented France’s petites gens – small businessmen, artisans and shopkeepers, small farmers, the salaried lower-middle class of government employees, instituteurs, post office workers, the employees of banks, insurance firms and railway companies, very much the ‘nouvelles couches sociales’ whose advent Gambetta had proclaimed in 1874. These had their ‘hearts on the left and pockets on the right’, subscribing to the principles of 1789 and hostile to monopoly capitalism but believing that people should make their way by hard work, saving and education. They were led by small-town and rural notables: doctors, lawyers, teachers and businessmen, who nurtured the single-member constituencies by obtaining concessions and favours from the government: new schools, roads and branch lines, jobs and scholarships in the public gift, exemption from military service or legal proceedings.80 The increase in deputies’ allowances to 15,000 francs in 1906 made it possible for less wealthy men to envisage a parliamentary career. In the Palais Bourbon, those they might disagree with politically belonged to the same ‘république des camarades’, who ‘sit on benches that touch, receive their constituents and mistresses in the same salons, use the same offices, the same library, the same headed paper and the same café’.81 Between 1906 and 1913 the president of the Republic, Armand Fallières, with his white beard and taste for good living, symbolized a period of pacification after political struggle in what became known as ‘the Republic of Monsieur Fallières’.82
The threat from the right was in fact squarely dealt with. Those who had conspired against the army were punished, although the officer corps had not been fully republicanized and was still a stronghold of Catholic and conservative opinion. The Catholic Church, in particular certain teaching congregations, was dealt with by eliminating it from the education system. Although the Church remained powerful in society it ceased to be a political threat. In 1902 Albert de Mun founded a Catholic party, the Action Libérale Populaire, but it was not on the same scale as the German Centre Party or the Italian Partito Popolare. Like other reactionary leagues, the Ligue de la Patrie Française became an electoral body of little significance, and petered out in 1904. Action Française was a thorn in the Republic’s side, attacking its leaders as traitors to French interests, and the Camelots du Roi, who sold the daily Action Française on the streets, organized demonstrations such as that of 4 June 1908 when Zola’s ashes were reburied in the Panthéon and pot shots were taken at Dreyfus.83 The main right-wing party, however, were antidreyfusard Progressists who followed Méline into the Fédération Républicaine (1903), while the dreyfusard Progressists followed Waldeck-Rousseau into the Alliance Démocratique. The performance of the right, including the Fédération Républicaine, Action Libérale Populaire, royalists and nationalists, declined steadily in elections from 246 seats in 1902 to 167 in 1906, 148 in 1910 and 121 in 1914.
The serious political threat came not from the right but from the left, from socialist parties and the anarcho-syndicalist penetration of the labour movement. Guesde and Vaillant issued a manifesto on 14 July 1899 condemning the acceptance of office in a bourgeois government by the so-called socialist Millerand and announced a return to revolutionary class war. The unveiling of The Triumph of the Republic was interrupted by demonstrators waving red and black flags and shouting ‘Vive la Commune’. Jaurès, by contrast, argued that ‘since reaction has formed a bloc, the Revolution must form a bloc.’84 For him the revolutionary seizure of power was a ‘hallucination’ that would lead only to bourgeois repression, as in 1871. In 1900 he and Guesde locked horns in debate at Lille. Jaurès conceded that society was divided between capitalists and proletarians, but argued that the ‘return of forces from the past’ such as the Church and the army sometimes obliged the proletariat to join the defence of the Republic and democracy. In a democratic republic, he said, socialists could come to power legally, by winning a majority, if necessary in alliance with other left-wing parties, and indeed this is what all socialists practised. Guesde, by contrast, argued that Millerand as a minister was a hostage of Waldeck’s bourgeois government and that Jaurès was tying the proletariat to ‘the tail of the imprisoning bourgeoisie, which had the shooting bourgeoisie of 1871 behind it’. The proletariat, he stated, must remain united around the principle of class war and never lose sight of the goal of revolution.85 As a result at the Paris congress of December 1900 the socialists divided over the question of participating in bourgeois governments into a Guesdist Parti Socialiste de France and Jaurès’s Parti Socialiste Français.
Both Guesde and Jaurès disliked strike action, over which the parties had no control, and in 1902 Jaurès came into conflict with Aristide Briand who, while moving from anarchism to socialism, still believed in the legitimacy of the general strike.86 This was more than ever the strategy of anarchists who penetrated the labour movement. Pelloutier, secretary of the Fédération des Bourses du Travail and author of What is the General Strike? (1895), died of tuberculosis in 1901 at the age of thirty-three and his Fédération was merged with the Confédération Générale du Travail the following year. At its 1904 congress in Bourges, under the influence of Émile Pouget, who was very much Pelloutier’s heir, the CGT espoused the tactic of the general strike in pursuit of a popular goal, the eight-hour day, and launched such a strike on 1 May 1906.87 There followed two years of virtual class war, involving the miners of the Pas-de-Calais and metalworkers of Hennebont (Morbihan) in 1906, shoemakers of Fougères (Ille-et-Vilaine) and Raon l’Étape (Vosges) and the winegrowers of the Midi in 1907, post office workers and instituteurs whose aim to unionize and affiliate to the CGT was opposed by the government, and electricians who plunged the Paris Opéra into darkness. Then in 1908 strikes moved into the unskilled sector when the sand-quarriers of the Seine were fired on by troops, provoking another general-strike call on 3 August that year.88
Waldeck’s attempt to construct a broad government of republican defence was frustrated by the elections of April–May 1902. In a Bloc des Gauches which won 350 seats his supporters took only 100 seats against 200 Radicals and 48 socialists. He was obliged to resign and died of cancer in 1904. To form the next ministry Loubet invited Émile Combes, a medical doctor and mayor of the small town of Pons in the Charente-Inférieure, and senator, founder and leader since 1891 of the Gauche Républicaine, the equivalent of the Radicals in the Senate. Combes’ finance minister, back after his disgrace in the Panama scandal and a career in banking, was Maurice Rouvier, placed there to reassure the markets. On the other hand, though Combes included no socialist in his ministry the government majority was held together in the Chamber by a Délégation des Gauches dominated by Jaurès, now re-elected to the Chamber. Since losing his seat in 1898 he had worked on his Socialist History of the French Revolution, in which he concluded that though the Revolution was bourgeois it had proclaimed the universal rights of man which it was up to the proletariat to fulfil in a socialist society.89 Revolution, he told the 1902 congress of the Parti Socialiste Français, was not a means but an end, not barricades and bullets but the gradual transformation by social reform from capitalism to collectivism.90
Despite promises of income tax reform and the nationalization of railway companies the main obsession of Combes was to deal with the Catholic teaching congregations and the army. The former were dissolved by switching the Associations Law from protecting trade unions to eliminating religious congregations that had not been properly authorized. Files on the private lives of army officers included information provided by masonic lodges in order to ascertain who attended mass and used Catholic schools, with the aim of preferring more secular-minded and republican officers for promotion. This was exposed by Le Figaro in October 1904, and in the Chamber on 4 November war minister General André was slapped by Gabriel Syveton, treasurer of the Ligue de la Patrie Française and deputy for Paris.91 This affaire des fiches led to the fall of the Combes ministry, and to the death of Syveton – whether by murder or suicide was unclear – but even before then Combes had lost his supporters on the left.92 ‘I could never imagine that any government could limit the horizon of its ambitions to the struggle against the religious congregations,’ Alexandre Millerand told the Chamber in March 1904, denouncing the failure to undertake any social reform and in particular the delays to his pensions bill. In August Jaurès faced criticism from the International Socialist Congress, meeting in Amsterdam, where the German Social Democratic Party secured a majority against ‘revisionist’ tactics in favour of revolutionary rhetoric, and forced him to abandon Combes.93 In 1905 Jaurès joined Guesde in a united socialist party committed to Marxist principles, the Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO).
Between 1906 and 1909 the dominant figure in French politics was Georges Clemenceau, who after the Panama scandal returned to parliament in 1902 as senator for the Var. Minister of the interior in March 1906, he finally became president of the council in October 1906, at the age of sixty-five. Never himself a member of the Radical Party he maintained its hold on power while saying of the Fédération Républicaine, ‘I do not claim the right to excommunicate them from the republican party.’94 Picquart, hero of the Dreyfus Affair, became minister of war. Poincaré, who had been finance minister under the previous government, declined to serve under him, so he offered the finance portfolio to Joseph Caillaux, who soon became frustrated by Clemenceau’s refusal to countenance his projects of progressive income tax and railway nationalization. Louis Barthou, of the same generation as Poincaré and Caillaux, now in their mid-forties, took over Public Works. Aristide Briand, who had run unsuccessfully for the Chamber since 1889, was elected deputy for Clermont-Ferrand in 1902. He had honed his legal and diplomatic skills negotiating the Separation of Church and state in 1905 and been groomed for society in the salon of Madame de Caillavet, muse and mistress of Anatole France.95 Now appointed education minister he was released from his membership of the SFIO by Jaurès, who did not wish a second Millerand Affair. Like him, René Viviani, who was given the new Ministry of Labour, resigned from the SFIO.
The elections of May 1906 gave another sixty seats to the Bloc des Gauches and reduced the grip of the right, which failed to make political capital out of the Separation of Church and state. The battle was no longer with them but with labour. As interior minister Clemenceau had sent 20,000 troops into the coal basin of the Pas-de-Calais in April 1906 to deal with a miners’ strike that followed a pit disaster in which 1,100 miners had died. He then dismissed 300 post office workers who went on strike, in order to stop public servants forming trade unions. On 1 May 1906 the CGT brought 200,000 workers on to the streets to support a general strike in favour of the eight-hour day. Clemenceau declared a state of siege, sent in the troops and arrested the labour leaders. ‘Your means of action is disorder,’ he declared, ‘my duty is to ensure order.’96 The scourge of government in the 1880s had become the ‘strike-breaker’ or ‘first cop in France’. Aristide Briand, now Clemenceau’s accomplice as a man of order, was violently criticized for his volte-face by Jaurès in a two-day speech in May 1907. This came as troops fired on demonstrating winegrowers on the Mediterranean coast at Narbonne and Montpellier, although in Béziers the soldiers mutinied, refusing to fire on demonstrators. Finally, on 2 June police fired shots on striking building workers holed up in a café at Vigneux, killing two of them. The ‘fusillade de la salle Ranque’ became a cause célèbre, triggering a CGT demonstration at Villeneuve-Saint-Georges on 30 July. Clemenceau had the CGT leaders arrested, which provoked a general strike on 3 August.
When Briand became president of the council in July 1909 his aim was to break away from the tyranny of the Bloc des Gauches and to seek accommodation with Catholics and conservatives, a strategy that had not been attempted since before the Dreyfus Affair. His ministry left out Caillaux and was dominated by moderates: Barthou at the Justice Ministry, Millerand at Public Works, Viviani at Labour. In a keynote speech at Périgueux on 20 October 1909 he spoke of ‘apaisement’ and ‘détente’ and called for ‘union in the Republic of all French people who understand that struggle and strife offer no real prosperity… Our secret is to make people love the Republic.’ He urged electoral reform to replace the ‘stagnant pools’ of single-member constituencies which favoured the Radicals by a system of proportional representation that would allow all political currents to have a voice and, he hoped, would strengthen government authority.97 In favour of making workers stakeholders in the system rather than rebels and to win over moderate trade unionists he and Viviani finally carried through the workers’ pensions law. The elections of April–May 1910 brought in a new generation of deputies, who approved Briand’s ministry by 404 to 121, only the 75 socialists and extreme right against him. Even Albert de Mun and the Action Libérale Populaire were keen to embrace the new premier. When the railway workers went on strike in October 1910 Briand demonstrated his new hostility to the general strike and forced on his cabinet a law drafting strikers into the army for a period of twenty-one days and thus subjecting them to military law. Barthou, Millerand and Viviani opposed the decree as ultra vires, but it was approved by the Chamber by 329 votes to 183, with socialists and left-wing Radicals voting against.98 At their Rouen congress of October 1910 the Radicals denounced Briand’s ‘policy of reactionary compromises which throws the republican idea into confusion’, the first time a Radical congress had attacked a ministry.99 Briand resigned and formed a new ministry on 4 November. Ironically, since Barthou, Millerand and Viviani refused to serve, he was forced back on to the Radicals and apaisement came to a sudden stop.
After 1911 the reins of power were shared between one segment of the generation of 1860, which had originated in the socialist fold, including Briand and Millerand, and another segment, which had originated on the right, composed of Caillaux, Barthou and Poincaré. The latter were linked by their careers and even their private lives: both Caillaux and Barthou were vice-presidents of the Alliance Démocratique and went on holiday to Egypt together with their partners in the winter of 1910–11, Alice Barthou having introduced Caillaux’s future second wife, Henriette Rainouard, to him.100 Poincaré, for his part, was a witness at Caillaux’s wedding to Henriette in October 1911.101 Yet they were divided by political ambition and political style and were all the more savage because they knew the details of each other’s private lives. Caillaux became president of the council in June 1911, but did not include Barthou in his cabinet because Barthou was a former Briandist and Caillaux rejected Briand’s policy of apaisement. Besides, Caillaux – who according to his protégé Émile Roche, ‘with his shiny bald head, precise gestures, monocle, elegant dress, imperturbable confidence, was something of a Balzacian dandy’, a republican aristocrat with all the privileges of birth and education – considered Barthou, whose father was an ironmonger, to be ‘vulgar from head to toe, both morally and physically’.102 Barthou had his revenge in January 1912 when he sat with Poincaré on the parliamentary commission which investigated the Franco-German treaty that Caillaux had secretly negotiated to defuse the Morocco crisis and toppled Caillaux for selling France’s national interests short. Poincaré was invited to form the next government and with a view to continuing apaisement he offered Briand the Ministry of Justice and Millerand the Ministry of War. When the presidency of Armand Fallières came to an end in January 1913 the succession was about both principles and personalities. Clemenceau assumed the role of grand elector and pushed the cause of a Radical-Socialist senator Jules Pams. Raymond Poincaré, the rival candidate, who had been writing a biography of Adolphe Thiers that was never published, was promoted by Millerand and enjoyed the support of moderates and Catholics.103 Indeed he did a secret deal with Catholic leader Albert de Mun that if he won he would solemnize his civil marriage in church. Poincaré was elected with this conservative support and relaunched the policy of apaisement in his choice of premiers: Briand in January 1913, Barthou in March. Barthou announced a ministry of ‘détente, union and republican conciliation’, the centrepiece of which would be an increase in the duration of military service from two years to three, duly approved by parliament in July 1913.104
France might have gone into the First World War on the basis of this apaisement, but the issue of the Three-Year Service Law provoked a massive backlash on the left. The CGT and SFIO mobilized against the proposed law in the spring and summer of 1913. Jean Jaurès made a speech to a crowd of 150,000 on the Pré-Saint-Gervais on the north-eastern outskirts of Paris on 25 May 1913, and a petition sponsored by the SFIO garnered 700,000 signatures. The antimilitarist movement gained a hold in the universities and lycées, as at the time of the Dreyfus Affair, drawing on a group of militants born around 1890. They included Raymond Lefebvre and Paul Vaillant-Couturier, who had graduated from the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly in Paris to the Sorbonne and were deeply moved by Jaurès’ famous speech.
The Three-Year Law was voted by parliament in July 1913 but the revival of the left was exploited by Joseph Caillaux who, smarting from his defeat at the hands of Barthou and Poincaré, was in search of a coherent majority to force the gates of power. He managed to get himself elected leader of the Radical-Socialist Party at its Pau congress of October 1913 and on 30 November attacked Briandists as ‘those who sent people to sleep and were of no party because they wished to subjugate all of them’. On 2 December he toppled the Barthou ministry by ridiculing its plans to pay for the Three-Year Law by a public loan rather than by espousing his more radical scheme of a progressive income tax. Briand attacked Caillaux in his turn as a ‘plutocratic demagogue’ who ‘shook his fist at wealth while making a fortune with scandalous ease’.105 President Poincaré delayed the moment when he would be obliged to offer the premiership to Caillaux by offering it to the Radical-Socialist deputy of the Gard Gaston Doumergue, who made Caillaux his finance minister. Elections were due in April–May 1914 and while Barthou forged a Fédération des Gauches to stop Caillaux, Caillaux entered into talks with Jean Jaurès about a joint Radical–SFIO ministry should they win. After the elections Caillaux controlled 300 Radical and Socialist seats against 178 in Barthou’s centre and a mere 121 on the right. In order to prevent a cartel of the left which would abrogate the Three-Year Law Poincaré invited Viviani, who was committed to the law, to form a government, which was approved by the Chamber on 16 June.
To finish off Caillaux, his personal life was exposed. From Caillaux’s first wife, Berthe Guydan, Barthou obtained love letters between Caillaux and Henriette which was evidence that he was having an affair with her during his first marriage, and these he passed on to Gaston Calmette, editor of Le Figaro. Advised that legal proceedings could not stop publication of her correspondence Henriette went to the Figaro offices on 16 March 1914 and shot Calmette dead. Although she was acquitted on 28 July 1914 her husband’s claim to the presidency of the council was in tatters.106 It was the outbreak of war that finally achieved political apaisement in what Poincaré called the ‘Union sacrée’. On 26 August Millerand returned as minister of war, and Briand as minister of justice. Included as minister without portfolio was not Jean Jaurès, cruelly assassinated on 31 July 1914, but Jules Guesde.