The war of 1870–71 had a dramatic effect on the supremacy of the French centralized state and the integrity of the French nation. French armies were defeated and German troops occupied the north-east of France and laid siege to Paris. The French government fled first to Tours, then to Bordeaux, tracing a path of shame that another government would take in 1940. Departments, thrown back on their own devices, joined forces in federations such as the Ligue du Midi. Towns and cities reclaimed the freedom to elect their own mayors and run their own affairs. Revolutionary communes were set up not only in Paris but in Marseille, Lyon, Le Creusot, Saint-Étienne, Toulouse and Narbonne. Inspired by the federalist ideas of the late Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the Paris Commune issued a Declaration to the French People on 19 April 1871 denouncing ‘despotic, stupid, arbitrary and onerous centralization’ and calling for a new political unity based on ‘the voluntary association of all local initiatives’.1 Under the Treaty of Frankfurt of 10 May 1871 which ended the Franco-Prussian war France was amputated of the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, which it had ruled respectively since 1648 and 1766, and the population of those areas were given just over a year to decide whether they wished to become French and leave or German and stay. These events thrust open old debates about the centralization or decentralization of the administration, and about the loyalty of the mosaic of populations that composed a French nation which since 1789 had been conceived in terms of political unity rather than of ethnic or linguistic uniformity.
For the republican government, confronted by German occupation and the disintegration of the country, there could be no alternative to taking up the threads of administrative centralization bequeathed by the Second Empire and drawing them as tightly as it could. Léon Gambetta, who had preached the virtues of local democracy in his Belleville manifesto of 1869, acted as a virtual dictator when he became minister of the interior in September 1870, appointing new prefects in eighty-five departments, postponing municipal elections and setting up republican municipal commissions where necessary, avoiding the election of a National Assembly which he feared would be dominated by royalists and Bonapartists. Adolphe Thiers, who had preached in favour of ‘necessary liberties’ in 1864, as head of the executive power scuppered a project in the National Assembly to permit the election of all mayors. He warned of the threat of the ‘demagogic party’ in the large cities, citing not only Paris but Marseille, where he alleged 500 sailors had attacked the prefecture with axes, and declared, ‘You want us to maintain order and at the same time you deprive us of the means!’2 The law of 14 April 1871 thus gave the government the authority to appoint mayors in all towns with a population of over 20,000 and strict control over municipal budgets and decisions. Paris was not accorded an elected mayor and fell back under the control of the prefect of the Seine and prefect of police. Gaston Crémieux, who had headed the commune in Marseille after the exploits of the axe-wielding sailors, was sent before the firing squad on 30 November 1871. In Lyon the republican municipality under Hénon and his deputy, Désiré Barodet, kept a revolutionary commune at bay by arguing that they had all the autonomy the city needed. This did not prevent Thiers from abolishing Lyon’s city-wide mayoralty on 4 April 1873, leaving nothing between the prefect and the thirty-six wards, a measure which backfired when Barodet defeated Thiers’ foreign minister in the Paris by-election of 27 April and terminated Thiers’ presidency. The Duc de Broglie, largely responsible for the fall of Thiers, although the grandson of that champion of liberty, Madame de Staël, extended government control even further under the Moral Order regime to keep out the republicans with a law of 20 January 1874 which gave the government the right to appoint all mayors, down to the smallest commune.
The reflex of the government, to deal with revolution in Paris and other towns by tightening the hold of central over local administration, was nevertheless challenged by a rival argument. This was that the best antidote to a seizure of power by the reds in Paris who would use the apparatus of the centralized administration to try to spread revolution over the whole country, in 1871 as in 1848 and 1793, was to permit administrative decentralization, giving greater autonomy to the departments and cities. The argument had been forcefully put in the Nancy manifesto of 1865 and largely endorsed by Émile Ollivier’s commission on decentralization, whose conclusions had not in the end been acceptable to Napoleon III. In 1871 as in 1848, revolution in Paris had been snuffed out by volunteer forces recruited in the provinces. The Communards blamed their defeat on Breton Gardes Mobiles led by General Trochu and on Catholic–royalist Vendeans, led by the grandsons of the Vendean leaders of 1793, Henri de Cathelineau and Athanase-Charles-Marie Charette de la Contrie, seeking revenge for the Terror, although in fact many more volunteers had been drawn from eastern provinces such as Lorraine and the Vosges.3 Reward for their loyalty in the form of administrative decentralization was championed in conservative quarters. Arthur de Gobineau, following Alexis de Tocqueville, whose chef de cabinet at the Foreign Ministry he had been in 1849, since when he had written the notorious Essay on the Inequality of Human Races and had become Legitimist conseiller-général of Chaumont-en-Vexin (Oise), argued that France’s centralized bureaucracy and Paris’s tentacular strength were perennially at the disposal of revolutionaries who seized the Hôtel de Ville.4 Similarly the Catholic historian Henri Wallon argued in his book on the Terror that its driving force had been the Commune of 1793, which intimidated the elected Convention and massacred ‘federalists’ in the departments who rose to defend liberty; he subtitled his study France Defeated by the Paris Commune. ‘And today,’ he warned, ‘if the vanguard of the Jacobins (for there are always Jacobins), if the anarchists as they were called in 1793… seize power, what would France do, I ask you?’5
The Republic, in time, did bring in measures of administrative decentralization. A law of 10 August 1871 responded to conservative fears by giving more power to the conseils généraux or elected assemblies in the departments, indeed implementing the recommendations of the Ollivier commission. Republicans triumphed in the municipal elections of 1878 and 1881 and demonstrated that they were not red revolutionaries. Although Paris was considered too dangerous to have its own mayor until 1977, Lyon recovered its city-wide mayor in 1881. A law of 28 March 1882 restored to all municipalities, except Paris, the right to elect their own mayors, and a further law of 5 April 1884 transferred more powers to municipalities from the central administration. The Republic took immense pride in its mayors as representatives of the regime in the 36,000 communes of France. They were fêted at great banquets in Paris, 1,119 of them attending on 14 July 1888, and 11,000 on 18 August 1889, on the occasion of the Universal Exposition and centenary of the French Revolution. On 22 September 1900, for the next Exposition, 20,777 mayors lunched in four hectares of tents in the Tuileries gardens, President Loubet sitting beside the mayor of Lyon, the largest commune, and that of the smallest, with only seventeen inhabitants, the youngest mayor and the oldest.6
The controversy over the appointment of mayors arose because they were the smallest cog in the centralized administration as well as the basic cells of democracy. Whereas under the Second Empire the grounding of the regime in the localities was provided essentially by the administrative system, which appointed mayors and senators and organized the election of ‘official candidates’ as deputies, under the Third Republic the webbing was provided above all by the political system, with deputies and senators key mediators between Paris and the provinces. They often began their political careers as mayors and members of the departmental conseil général, following a filière or path that led to the Palais Bourbon or the Luxembourg.7 A good deputy had what was called the ‘bras long’, a long reach to the goodwill of ministers on whom he hoped to prevail to obtain advantages for his constituents such as funding for new roads, bridges and schools, a decision to have a planned railway line pass through his town, scholarships, exemption from military service or jobs in the administration. He was on good terms with the prefect who would use his patronage and influence to facilitate the deputy’s reelection, and under the Republic a powerful deputy could have an uncooperative prefect moved to another post. Canvassing was done mainly in cafés, and on election days the wine flowed freely, with barrels even finding their way into the polling station.8 The deputy disposed of a local newspaper to record the agricultural shows he opened and school prize-givings he addressed, and to sing the praises of the ministry whose favour he enjoyed. La Dépêche de Toulouse, run by Maurice Sarraut, backed the election of Jean Jaurès to the Chamber in 1893 and of his brother Albert Sarraut in 1902, but it was the paper and networking agent of the Radical-Socialist Party in general and in 1905 the joke ran that it was necessary to be a southerner to succeed in Paris.9 Good management and publicity made the arrondissement into a deputy’s fief, and challengers who did not have access to power found it very difficult to shift him. The introduction of the scrutin de liste in 1885–9 inhibited the cultivation of the fief and the proportion of former deputies in the 1885 legislature fell to 57 per cent, but this rose again where the scrutin d’arrondissement was restored in 1889 and the proportion of former deputies rose to 70 per cent in the legislature of 1906.10
Senators were often even more embedded in local life than deputies. Gambetta called the Senate the ‘grand council of the communes of France’. Unlike deputies, senators were elected not directly by the individual citizens but indirectly, by colleges in each department composed of other elected representatives: the deputies of the department, members of the conseil général, and delegates from each commune, usually the mayor. The composition of colleges was heavily weighted in the direction of mayors from rural communes and small market towns. Large towns were grossly and explicitly under-represented, in order to limit the influence of latterday Jacobins. In the Bouches-du-Rhône, for example, Marseille, with 500,000 inhabitants, had twenty-four delegates in the college, but so did seventeen other towns with a combined population of only 30,000.11 Although elections took place at the departmental level, senatorial seats by convention ‘belonged’ to certain districts within each department. Thus when two seats needed to be filled in the Nord in 1906, one went to an industrialist from Douai in the south, the other to a candidate from Dunkerque in the north, son of the deceased senator, boss of the port.12 Early in the Third Republic the filière of local government was less important: Pierre-Edmond Teisserenc de Bort, on the board of the Paris–Lyon–Marseille railway and a large landowner in the Limousin by marriage, elected to the National Assembly in 1871 and frequently minister of commerce or agriculture in 1872– 7, failed to win election to the conseil général of Haute-Vienne but served as its senator from 1876 to 1892.13 More typical for the embedded republican regime was Émile Combes, an ex-seminarist who taught in Catholic colleges in Nîmes and Pons (Charente) before he married in 1862, then requalified as a doctor, using his practice as a rural GP to cultivate an electoral clientele. He was elected to the municipal council of Pons at the age of thirty-four, in 1869, became its mayor in 1878, and claimed to know the name of every one of its 1,200 electors. He was elected to the conseil général of Charente in 1879, and to the Senate in 1885, and though he became president of the council in 1902 he declared himself ‘provincial to my fingertips. I adored my Saintonge and, with the Saintonge, my little town of Pons.’14
The loss of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871 was not simply an amputation of territory but a test of citizens’ loyalty. The government of the newly united Germany gave the population of its recovered provinces until 1 October 1872 to decide whether they would accept German nationality and stay with their houses and property or opt for French citizenship and leave with no more than they could carry. Edmond About, a Lorrainer by birth and Alsatian by choice, argued in 1873 that 1.1 million out of 1.6 million of the population opted for French citizenship, and described the emigrants’ hurried sale of their property, to Jews happy to oblige, before piling their furniture on to carts and joining a ‘pitiful procession’ into France.15 Scholarly research has massively reduced these figures. In fact, only 164,000 people, 10 per cent of the population of annexed Alsace-Loraine, opted for French citizenship, a third of them young men fleeing German military service, to whom should be added 362,000 natives of Alsace-Lorraine living in other parts of France, 7,000 in other European countries and 16,200 living outside Europe.16
The choices of the population of Alsace-Lorraine were widely debated in French literature, sometimes from a patriotic perspective, sometimes with a greater understanding of the private and local priorities. Alphonse Daudet wrote a tear-jerking short story in 1872 describing the last lesson of a French schoolteacher in his Alsatian school. He tells his pupils that they must not forget French, the language of liberty, makes them copy out ‘France, Alsace’ into their books and writes ‘Vive la France’ on the board before leaving them to their incoming German teacher.17 The irony is, of course, that while the teacher from the French-speaking educated stratum leaves, his pupils, whose dialect is Germanic, stay. The literary team Erckmann and Chatrian took very different views of the Alsatian dilemma. Chatrian, in Paris and writing for the stage, regarded Alsatians who remained in Germany as little better than traitors and had a play banned by the government in 1880 as too anti-German. Erckmann, on the other hand, driven out of Phalsbourg by the Prussians in August 1870 and angry at their razing of its defences in 1871, nevertheless sympathized with those who stayed.18 In his 1872 Story of the Plebiscite the miller and village mayor Christian Weber stays in order to keep the land he has ‘paid for by the fruit of [his] labour’, while his cousin Georges Weber, the innkeeper, marries his daughter to a stone-merchant in anticipation of plenty of rebuilding work.19 Two further Erckmann stories, Brigadier Frédéric and The Banished, relate the fortunes of the forest guard of Saverne, Brigadier Frédéric, who abandons his job and property and goes to France rather than swear an oath to the King of Prussia, his daughter having been beaten to death by Prussian soldiers, but later returns in search of his grandmother’s grave and daughter’s ghost before dying in the garden of his old house.20
More reassuring for the French public was Le Tour de France par deux enfants, by Augustine Fouillée, published in 1877, which sold three million copies by 1887 and six million by 1901. It tells the story of two boys, aged fourteen and seven, who leave Phalsbourg after it falls to the Prussians and their father is killed, go in search of their uncle in Marseille and decide to become French. On their travels through France they discover the variety of its regions, economies and cultures, but each one combining harmoniously to form a single France. They admire its beauty but also its fertility and the incessant work of its peasants and artisans. They realize that their mission is to work the French soil and to contribute to France’s prosperity and greatness. Their uncle buys them a farm in the Orléa-nais, and the younger boy, ‘in the joy he felt finally to have a fatherland, a house, a family, as he had so often wished’, shouts ‘J’aime la France!’21
Though the French ‘of the interior’ wanted passionately to believe in the patriotism of Alsatians and Lorrainers, the population of the ‘lost provinces’ made decisions on practical grounds and set more store by the liberty, faith and prosperity of their provinces than by an abstract French or German nationalism. Raphael Dreyfus, a cotton manufacturer of Mulhouse, which was occupied by German troops in September 1870, went to Carpentras to join his daughter Henriette, who had married a Jewish fabric merchant there. He opted for French citizenship, as did his son Alfred, who went to school in Paris, entered the École Polytechnique in 1877 and graduated as a sublieutenant in the French army in 1882. His elder brother Jacques, by contrast, who fought in the French army in 1870, went back to Mulhouse, now German, to run the family business.22 The Reichsland of Alsace-Lorraine was put under German military and bureaucratic control, the mayors of Strasbourg, Metz and Colmar were removed and Jesuits and other religious orders were expelled in the anti-Catholic Kulturkampf of 1873, leading to republican and Catholic protesters winning the provinces’ fifteen seats in the Reichstag in 1874. However the grant of a territorial assembly and the realization that Alsace-Lorraine was escaping the Third Republic’s attack on Catholic schools led to the success in the Reichstag elections of 1879 of ‘autonomists’ who were happy to accept the Reich so long as local liberties and religion were respected by Berlin. After this there was no sense that the population of Alsace and Lorraine had any desire to become French again.23
The loss of Alsace-Lorraine and the sense that the German dialect spoken there had weakened loyalty to the French nation stimulated a movement in the French administration to eliminate minority languages such as Flemish and Breton, and to attack the many patois spoken in different parts of France. A survey of 1863 showed that in twenty-four of the eighty-nine departments, south of an arc from Bordeaux to Metz, together with Brittany and Flanders, the population in half the communes did not speak French.24 On 7 June 1880 the Ministry of Public Instruction announced unequivocally that ‘only French will be used in schools’.25 It was not just a question of patriotism: French was seen as the vehicle of liberty and civilization which was to be spread with missionary zeal. In 1888 the official in charge of primary education in the Nord, where Flemish was widely spoken, asked, ‘is it not shameful that a part of the Nord population still does not know French? By uprooting people from their local tongue we are freeing them from a kind of prison where air, sun and life are wanting, where progress does not penetrate, and where souls atrophy in age-old routine.’26
The crusade against non-French languages was in some sense counter-productive. Rather than dissolve local loyalties and identities it often served to strengthen them. Frédéric Mistral, who retired to his Provençal village of Maillane in 1872, relaunched the Félibrige, his movement dedicated to defending Provençal culture, with new statutes at an inaugural banquet there in May 1876. Provençal liberties were for him a barrier against the ‘revolutionary virus’ spreading out from Paris to Lyon and Marseille and the Provençal language, that of the medieval troubadours, was a way to root people in their local communities, trades and faith. A Catholic and a royalist by instinct, he hoped to achieve many of the same goals by preaching the revival of provincial life rather than that of the Church and king. In the spring of 1884 he went to Paris to promote his new work, Nerto, a celebration of the Avignon papacy of the fourteenth century, and at the Félibrige festival demanded ‘a small place for the maternal tongue alongside French in the schools’. He denied that Provence had any separatist ambitions, but the loss of Alsace-Lorraine sensitized French intellectuals and politicians to the political dangers of local languages, and Edmond de Goncourt denounced Mistral as a ‘separatist troubadour’.27 Speaking in Avignon in 1888, Mistral again deplored the ban on local languages in schools. Respect for Provençal in schools, he reiterated, was ‘not a retrograde or anti-French idea. On the contrary it is the only way to preserve and spread… that provincial and local attachment and enthusiasm which alone gives life to the province, as it once gave liberty to Switzerland, independence to America and the Renaissance to Italy.’28
Mistral, it is true, had no desire to give Provence or other French provinces any political form: his interest was literary, historical, folkloric. He had, nevertheless, disciples in the Félibrige movement whose ambitions were more political, and politically different. Xavier de Ricard joined the Félibrige at Montpellier in 1877 but his formative experience was the Paris Commune, after which he fled to Switzerland. Far from having royalist sympathies his vision was to bring back the federative republic dear to Proudhon. Where Mistral loved the Avignon of the popes, Ricard sympathized with heretical resistance to the Catholic Church, so potent in Languedoc, whether that of the medieval Cathars or the Cévennes Protestants persecuted by Louis XIV in the seventeenth century, and he told Mistral in 1878 that he was ‘a Huguenot of the will’.29 Most significantly, he was impatient with Mistral’s obsession with the Provençal language, dress and dancing. ‘I believe that the langue d’oc will never be fully revived until the country where it is spoken is liberated,’ he wrote to Mistral in 1879; ‘it is absolutely necessary that we acquire or reconquer our political and national autonomy.’30
Xavier de Ricard was not the only dissenter. In 1892 a young generation of Félibres, born around 1860, parted company with Mistral not because they disagreed with his Catholic and conservative views but because, like Ricard, they believed that the cultural defence of local languages and customs had to be fortified by political action to reverse centuries of administrative centralization and to restore real power not to the departments, but to the historic provinces of the French monarchy. Where Mistral was concerned only with Provence, the younger generation believed that all French provinces should recover their historic liberties. At a meeting of Parisian Félibres at the Café Voltaire on 2 February 1892, two Prov-ençals, Frédéric Amouretti and Charles Maurras, read a manifesto announcing,
We are fed up with keeping quiet about our federalist intentions. We can no longer confine ourselves to demanding the rights and duties of freedom for our language and writers; that freedom will not achieve political autonomy but will flow from it… We demand liberty for our communes… We want to release from their departmental cages the souls of provinces that are still used everywhere by everyone: Gascons, Auvergnats, Limousins, Béarnais, Dauphinois, Roussillonnais, Provençaux and Languedociens… We want sovereign assemblies in Bordeaux, Toulouse, Montpellier, in Marseille or Aix. These assemblies will run our administration, our courts, our schools, our universities, our public works.31
They were duly expelled from Mistral’s Félibrige and set up their own Paris school of the Félibrige. The Republic was increasingly sensitive to the question of decentralization, and an extra-parliamentary commission was set up to examine it in 1895, but after 1898 Maurras marginalized himself by his insistence on political autonomy for the Ancien Régime French provinces, and conversion to the idea that only a restored monarchy would provide the necessary authority to pursue France’s ‘national destiny’, devolving ‘to communes matters that are properly municipal, to the provinces matters that are properly provincial’.32
In the 1890s pressure to decentralize the French administration built up in a constituency far wider than the disciples of Mistral, and more generally across the political spectrum. Maurice Barrès, a native of that part of Lorraine that remained French, and grandson of an officer in Napoleon’s army, had a profound disdain for the parliamentary Republic which subordinated public to private interest and was elected a Boulangist deputy for Nancy in 1889. After the failure of Boulangism he refined his critique of the Republic, which he called ‘dissociated and decerebrated’. The parliamentary regime, he argued, was headless: ministers were beholden to deputies who could topple them on the most trivial issues, and deputies were beholden to constituents, whom they had to bribe and flatter to get re-elected. Both disposed of a centralized administration reduced to the task of managing the elections by patronage and funding a partisan press, and both were corrupted by private financial interests seeking political sanctions for their speculative schemes. Allied to the politicians were the schoolteachers of the republican school system, in which Catholic education was replaced by a state philosophy to which all citizens had to subscribe, based on an abstract duty to fellow citizens, the task of which however was simply to legitimate the shoddy regime. Barrès’ answer to this was a charismatic leader like Boulanger who would sweep clean the Augean stables, and propagate a morality much closer to home which taught the young to love the soil of their own province and to listen to the voices of their ancestors. Barrès spread these ideas in the short-lived Cocarde newspaper of 1894–5, and the even shorter-lived Ligue Nationale de la Décentralisation, but much more influentially in bestselling novels such as Les Déracinés of 1897. Les Déracinés traces the fortunes of a group of young men, uprooted from their native Lorraine by their philosophy teacher at Nancy, M. Bouteiller, a ‘son of reason’ who becomes a republican politician. It follows their careers in Paris where they discover that parliamentary politics are controlled by German-Jewish financiers such as the baron Jacques de Reinach. Two of the band, deprived of the salutary influence of family and province, descend into murder, leading to the guillotine, but the others are redeemed by rediscovering the message of ‘la terre et les morts’ derived from contact with Lorraine.
Barrès differed from Maurras in that he believed that the energy of the provinces could be released within the Republic. ‘The federalist doctrine is consonant with the deepest tradition of France and the Revolution,’ he told an audience in Bordeaux in 1895. ‘Between 1789 and 1793 the Revolution was federalist; it was the Jacobins who centralized us decisively in June 1793… to deal with the temporary crises in the Vendée and on the Rhine.’33 For him the Jacobin Republic was an aberration, a more federal republic truer to French history. Similar ideas were upheld by Félibres who followed Xavier Ricard, indebted to Proudhon rather than to Mistral. Jean Charles-Brun, a young academic from Montpellier who took the agrégation in Paris in 1893 and was true to Mistral through his work on troubadours, joined Maurras’ Paris school of the Félibrige and argued in 1896 that ‘the felibrean idea gives patriotism a much more active sense; people dislike notions that are too abstract, and as Charles Maurras has said, a corner of sky or a wall are the surest road to nationalism.’34 He parted company with the Félibrige movement in 1897, considering that talk of restoring Ancien Régime provinces risked marginalizing decentralizers as reactionaries. Instead he favoured the notion of the region, a modern concept based on economic, geographical and historical ties. In 1900 he founded the Fédération Régionaliste Française, the ambition of which was to gather the energies of all ‘decentralizers, regionalists or federalists’ who were opposed to the Jacobin over-centralization of the Republic and believed in the ‘management of communal affairs by the municipality, regional affairs by the region and national affairs by the state’. It proclaimed itself resolutely above political parties and in 1904 included on its honorary committee men as diverse as Xavier de Ricard, Maurice Barrès, Charles Beauquier, radical deputy of the Doubs, and the socialist Charles Longuet. Originating in the south it was keen to build bridges to other areas where regionalists were active. Among organizations which affiliated to it were the Comité Flamand de France of Camille Looten, professor at the Catholic university of Lille, and the Union Régionaliste Bretonne, founded by the academic and writer Anatole le Braz in 1898 but soon taken over by the Marquis de l’Estourbeillon, deputy of the Morbihan.35
One of the fears provoked by the Paris Commune was that decentralization would play into the hands of revolutionaries who would sow a string of communes across the country. For this reason Paris was not allowed a mayor of its own, only a municipal council, each of the twenty arrondissements of central Paris and suburban communes having their own mayors and municipal councils. Other towns and cities benefited from the decentralization measures of 1882 and 1884, and in places where industrial workers were concentrated socialist parties soon began to make gains. In 1882 socialists won control of the mining town of Commentry in the Allier, and ex-miner Christophe Thivrier became mayor. Later elected a deputy, he was proud to wear his workers’ overalls over his frock coat. In 1884 Saint-Amand (Nord) and Vierzon (Cher) fell to the socialists, as in 1888 did Saint-Étienne and the Paris suburb of Saint-Ouen. Eighteen-ninety-two was a breakthrough year, in which socialists took control of sixty towns including the textile town of Roubaix (Nord), the mining town of Carmaux (Tarn), Montluçon (Allier), the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, busy with railway yards, engineering and chemical industries, and the ports of Marseille and Toulon. These industrial towns often returned socialist deputies too, with Jules Guesde elected at Roubaix and Jean Jaurès at Carmaux in 1893.
Some of the socialist municipalities behaved defiantly. The Blanquists elected at Saint-Denis in 1892 banned religious processions, expelled the police from the police-station and put the likes of Jean-Baptiste Clément, author of the revolutionary song ‘Le Temps des cerises’, on the municipal payroll.36 Others acted more sensibly. Roubaix council, under former weaver, Guesdist socialist and mayor Henri Carette, implemented a wide programme of social welfare, including crèches for working mothers, free school meals, clothing and school equipment for poor children, cheap public restaurants, and assistance to old and sick workers, which both offered protection to the working class and consolidated a clientele.37
There were in fact limits to how much revolution a socialist municipality could achieve. Municipal liberty was confined by the centralized state – municipal decisions could be overruled by prefects or the Conseil d’État. Christophe Thivrier was suspended as mayor of Commentry in 1888 for alleged ‘political correspondence’, sending a message of support to a trade union conference in Bordeaux, while in 1893 the prefect of the Nord annulled the decision of the Roubaix council to set up a municipal pharmacy offering cost-price drugs to the public.38 The Conseil d’État permitted the municipalization of water services as contributing to the public good, but ruled against that of bus and tram services in 1897 and of gas works before allowing Marseille to go ahead with gas municipalization in 1907, on the grounds that private enterprise would be more efficient and did not drain public finances.39 Struggles against monopoly capitalism were not always won by socialist councils. A project of the socialist municipality re-elected at Saint-Étienne in 1900 to municipalize the electricity supply from the Alps monopolized by the Edison Electrical Company, in order to provide cheap electricity for the machines of ribbon workers in their homes, was frustrated by the Edison Company and the Conseil d’État, which stuck rigidly to free-market principles in this case.40
Many municipalities did not have the resources to spend as they wished, dependent as they were on the octroi or excise and unable to derive much from rates because of poor housing. Some working-class towns remained faithful to industrial feudalism, which provided for their needs. The steel town of Le Creusot was controlled by Henri Schneider from 1871 to 1896 and thereafter by his son Eugène Schneider II, who responded to strikes and unionization in 1899–1900 by organizing a lockout and sacking militants.41 Socialists, once in power, were frequently defeated at a subsequent poll by right-wing parties representing financial or industrial interests. In 1902 the Roubaix socialists were defeated by cotton magnate Eugène Motte, chair of the Roubaix-Tourcoing Chamber of Commerce and of the board of the Northern Railway, although he was obliged to develop his own social welfare policies to retain support.42 The same year the socialist municipality of Marseille, whose ambitious social welfare policies and support for a dock strike which closed the port for forty-three days in 1901 nearly ruined the city, was ousted by conservatives fronting the powerful Chamber of Commerce.43 More successful was the Lyon municipal council under mayor Victor Augagneur, a professor of surgery at the Lyon Medical Faculty who moved towards socialism as a result of the Dreyfus Affair and built a republican bloc, including socialists, which captured the city hall in 1900. He sorted out municipal finances by replacing the traditional octroi, which fell mainly on the food of the poor, with a range of property rates and taxes on horses, cars and entertainment, borne mainly by the rich, and undertook a programme of municipalization of water and lighting, abattoirs, and nursing and social services hitherto provided by religious congregations who were now expelled.44 In 1905 he was appointed governor of Madagascar but had groomed as his successor Édouard Herriot, history master at the Lycée Ampère who had become politicized by the Dreyfus Affair, a Radical-Socialist who disliked the Communist Manifesto’s idea of class struggle, wrote theses on the friends of liberty Madame de Staël and Madame Récamier, and hated the Terror which in response to the federalist revolt of 1793 had declared, ‘Lyon is no more.’ In these capable hands Lyon was governed, except during the occupation, from 1905 to 1957.45
Just as the French state was forced to negotiate with socialist municipalities, so it had to deal with local communities whose first language was not French. The law after 1880, as we have seen, was that French only was to be taught in schools, but central to the education of children was the catechism class in preparation for first communion, which after 1882 was eliminated from publicly funded schools and was generally delivered by the parish priest in the vicarage. In northern Flanders and western Brittany, Flemish and Breton were preserved as the language of instruction for the catechism, and indeed for sermons in the church, not only because they were the mother tongue but because they were felt to be a powerful medium of the faith, whereas French was seen to be the vehicle of modern, irreligious ideas. As the archbishop of Cambrai, whose diocese included Flanders, said in 1882, ‘Flemish is the language of heaven.’46
Where to draw the line between French as the official language and minority, private languages, even in Flanders and Brittany, was not always clear. In their dark coats, instituteurs or primary school teachers assumed the role of ‘black hussars of the Republic’, bearers of French and republican values from large cities to isolated communes, and they were frequently rivals of the parish priest, whose mission was to defend the faith. In 1900 an incident flared up at Killem in Flanders where the instituteur demanded that his son be taught the catechism for the first communion in French, whereas diocesan practice was that in Flanders it should be taught in Flemish. The education authorities in the Nord discovered that in twenty-three Flemish communes the catechism was taught in both languages and in twenty in Flemish only, and were worried that Flemish was being used to encourage anti-French feeling. The republican authorities used the sanction they wielded against the clergy under the Concordat, namely to suspend their stipends if the local mayor did not certify that they taught the catechism in French. Seeking a compromise, the archbishop of Cambrai explained that ‘French is studied in school but at home, in the street, at work and at play people speak Flemish instinctively.’ The Flemish, like Bretons, Basques and Provençals, he added, ‘love both their great and little patries’; affection for one did not undermine loyalty to the other.47
The Republic did not back down from its commitment to French and when Émile Combes became president of the council he issued a decree on 29 September 1902 forbidding the use of non-French languages in catechism classes and in church sermons. ‘The Bretons will only be republicans when they speak French,’ he declared.48 This stirred up particular trouble in Finistère, where the bishop of Quimper reported that over two-thirds of the population could not understand a sermon in French, and only in five of his 210 parishes were sermons given uniquely in French. However, the Radical government in Paris was out of step both with local republican deputies, who argued that the Breton tongue could convey republican as well as reactionary sentiments, and with the prefect of Finistère who feared that such brutal legislation would provoke an anti-republican backlash at the next elections. The government nevertheless insisted on suspending the stipends of sixty-seven parish priests who refused to undertake to preach and teach in French. In the end a compromise was found. Clergy continued quietly to teach catechism and give sermons in Breton and Flemish until, after the Separation of Church and state in 1905, the state no longer had the weapon of suspending clerical salaries. The elections of 1906, which produced an even more convincing republican majority, demonstrated that local people could at one and the same time defend their local language and be loyal to the Republic.49
The notion that affection for the petite patrie did not threaten affection for the grande patrie, and could indeed nurture it, had in fact been developing for some time in French educational circles. The Tour de France par deux enfants explored each region of France in turn, praising the beauty of the countryside, listing the variety of trades in which people were engaged, and recalling the names and deeds of local heroes. Visual education or ‘l’enseignement par l’aspect’ became popular, so that geography was taught to primary school children less out of books, more on school walks to inspect local industry or agriculture, waterways and railways, and local historical sites such as battlefields. Hachette, which found a mass market in schools, circulated maps of the local department which highlighted notable sites and, through the new technology of the slide show, lent 3,548 collections of slides to schools in 1895–6, of which 57 per cent were geographical.50 Although Lavisse’s History of France was standard in all schools, the study of local history was now seen as complementary. In the preface of an 1891 History of Brittany the historian Charles Langlois wrote,
France is one and indivisible, but it is composed of parts which each have a unity. We are French, but we are also Bretons, Normans, Picards, Flemish, Lorrainers, Burgundians, Provençals, Languedocians, Gascons. Each of us has a petite patrie of whose familiar landscape, customs, costumes and accent we are proud. In order to strengthen our love of France, our common fatherland, nothing is more legitimate, more natural, more proper than to love this petite patrie.51
Local geographical societies were founded in Normandy in 1879, the Nord in 1880, the east in 1882 and Brittany in 1889, nearly half of whose members were instituteurs. Many of these were also secretaries to the mairie and used local knowledge and archives to write the history and geography of their commune for a national competition in 1900. By 1911 the republican government had changed its tune and Briand’s education minister Maurice Faure was complaining that ‘most pupils and too many French people are almost entirely ignorant of the history and geography of their commune, of the department in which they were born and the old province to which the department belonged before the Revolution,’ although ‘love of our native soil, as I told the Chamber of Deputies, is the strongest foundation of our love of the fatherland.’52 He duly set up a Society for Local Studies in Public Education which was headed by historians Lavisse and Langlois and geographer Vidal de la Blache, together with Charles Beauquier, deputy of the Doubs and vice-president of the Fédération Régionaliste Française.53
The legitimation of the petite patrie was echoed by a greater acceptance of the need for decentralization in mainstream republican circles. Although it was still being preached by Félibres around Mistral and by monarchists around Maurras, after 1900 decentralization was no longer identified with reaction. One reason was the achievement of Jean Charles-Brun, whose Fédération Régionaliste Français of 1901 popularized the geographical notion of the region rather than the historic one of the province and sought to attract all political schools to the cause. Another was the Republic’s survival of the crisis provoked by the Dreyfus Affair and the arrival in political circles of a generation of activists who had not been shaped by the republican–reactionary contests of the 1870s and 1880s but had a less ideological and more sociological approach to organizing the Republic. They included Joseph Paul-Boncour, a brilliant young lawyer who professed independent socialist ideas and argued in his law thesis on economic federalism that strong trade unions and co-operatives should be developed alongside regionalism, and a young diplomat André Tardieu, both of whom were recruited to Waldeck-Rousseau’s political office in 1899 and met Charles-Brun in 1900.54
In response to the centralizing thrust of Émile Combes in 1903, these young republicans triggered a debate on the question of decentralization. Paul-Boncour argued against the reactionaries that the Republic had a long and honourable decentralizing tradition, including the laws of 1871, 1882 and 1884, and reminded Radicals that decentralization had long been part of their manifesto, along with the election of judges and the abolition of the presidency of the Republic.55 André Tardieu backed him up by arguing that ‘while decentralization is not opposed to the Republic it is irreconcilable with Radical-socialism’, for ‘nothing is more odious to the Jacobin spirit now in control of France than these [historical] diversities.’56 Georges Clemenceau, replying for the Radicals, claimed at first to agree with Paul-Boncour that ‘we have to be done with Napoleonic centralization that has fallen into the hands of anonymous bureaucrats whose routine stifles all initiative and responsibility.’ However, after the intervention of Charles Maurras who argued that the Republic was incapable of decentralizing because it relied on the centralized administration of ministers, prefects and mayors to ‘make’ elections in the interest of the ruling republican party, Clemenceau warned, ‘interrogate these wild decentralizers and you will soon find that their aim is to decentralize not liberty but reaction.’57 Administrative decentralization found its way back on to the government agenda under Briand in 1909–10, but even he was too dependent on Radical support to achieve anything concrete.
The development of tourism took huge strides forward with the advent of the railway network and then, at the turn of the century, of the motor car. Paris and the provinces were brought closer together in terms of time and ease of transport. However, a study of guidebooks published to help the traveller suggests that little was done to undermine long-held stereotypes about the inhabitants of far-flung parts of France.
Paul Joanne’s guides to France were geared to the railway traveller and were readily on sale in the railway kiosks owned by Hachette. The 1892 guide to Brittany proposed two possible itineraries, the Chemin de Fer d’Orléans leaving the Gare d’Austerlitz and reaching Nantes in eight hours, or the Chemin de Fer de l’Ouest leaving the Gare Montparnasse and reaching Brest in between fourteen and twenty hours. This was a good deal faster than the three days and nights it took Victor Hugo to reach Brest by mail-post in 1834. Prices from Paris to Brest were 82 francs first class, 55 francs second class. Joanne recommended a travel budget of 12 or 15 francs a day for ‘young people who travel in threes and fours, go some of the way on foot and can carry their own baggage. For a woman, who may never carry her own luggage, daily expenditure may rise to an average of 20–25 francs.’ When travelling on foot, Joanne advised the tourist seeking his or her way from a peasant always to ask for the ‘bourg’ or ‘parish’ of a village since ‘Breton communes are generally vast and are composed of a centre, or parish, with the church and numerous scattered hamlets.’ Curiously, the guide’s descriptions of the Bretons who might be encountered differed little from descriptions current in the days of Hugo or Balzac.
The Bretons descend from a mixture of Celts and Kymris, nations of Indo-Germanic origin… The Breton is stubborn, and loves his native soil passionately. The charm of the Breton environment acts just as powerfully on their children, since most of them have not transformed it by labour or opened their minds by study. That is why Bretons removed from home are often overtaken by nostalgia. Enclosing their thoughts in memories of their homeland they are dead to what surrounds them and they die without having escaped from the grip of their dreams.58
Within twenty years the advent of the motor car made provincial France even more accessible. The tyre manufacturers André and Édouard Michelin were among the founders of both the Touring Club de France, founded in 1890 and boasting 104,000 members in 1906, and the more exclusive Automobile Club de France, founded in 1895. The Touring Club published its first handbook in 1891, listing its members, approved hotels and mechanics. The first Michelin red guide was published in 1900, a 400-page book with thirteen city maps, indicating train stations and post and telegraph offices by symbols, and listing hotels by price range. The 1900 edition had a print run of 35,000; that of 1912, with 750 pages and 600 town maps, sold 86,000 copies. After 1907 the guide included seventy-two pages of maps for planning trips. The Touring Club, with the help of the Ponts et Chaussées department, produced its own maps for motorists and cyclists after 1897, and in 1908 produced a series of forty-seven maps of France, 1 centimetre for every 2 kilometres, folding concertina-style, priced at a franc each on paper, 2 francs on cloth.59
The availability of maps and guides did not necessarily break down the barriers between Paris and the provinces. The first touring maps to be produced were for the Paris region, Lyon and the Riviera; others followed. Asking directions from local people, many of whom spoke patois, was to be avoided. To this end Michelin sponsored a petition which in 1912 gathered 200,000 signatures, at a time when there were 125,000 cars on the road, for the government to number roads, erect signposts and paint the road numbers and distances from towns on milestones. Presented to the government at the Paris airshow in November 1912, it became the official policy of the Ministry of Public Works in 1913.60 The Touring Club guidebook on Brittany 1901 argued that with the spread of French the Celtic language would have vanished in a hundred years, or be spoken only by ‘a few old people’. Local fashions such as men with shoulder-length hair, wide felt hats and embroidered waistcoats would also go, although women’s lace headdresses would be slower to disappear, since women were ‘more tenacious, more conservative than their husbands, fathers, brothers and sons’. The Breton character was sturdy, but it was about to be destroyed not by schools or roads or the market, but by drink.
The soul of the Breton-speaking Breton echoes the grey stones, dark by day, sinister by night, under the watery moon, the granite outcrops, the moorland, the old oaks, the mist, the rain, the sighing sea, all that pessimistic nature. He is sad like his moor and his mist, sometimes stormy, like the sea, always tenacious like his rocks. He dreams and he acts. He is a poet and warrior, but above all a man of the sea. But now error, injustice and the abomination of solitude have had their effect. Honesty, uprightness, the spirit of sacrifice, devotion, fidelity, honour, passive courage and active bravery, will, faith, the flower of poetry, all this perishes and dies under the tap of barrels of alcohol.61