The defeat of 1870 precipitated France into the lower rank of the great powers, below Germany, Great Britain and Russia, above Italy but at about the same level as the Habsburg Monarchy, itself defeated by Germany in 1866. Defeat and occupation led to civil war in 1871 and a country profoundly divided, not least on whether the army should be used to defend France’s frontiers or suppress revolution at home. In addition, defeat demoralized France as a nation and demonstrated the fragility of its national identity. Three challenges therefore confronted France. First, whether it could escape from diplomatic isolation and through military feats, outside Europe, regain a place among the great powers. Second, whether it could rebuild national unity and in particular recover the confidence of the nation in its army. Lastly, whether it could define and propagate a coherent and confident national consciousness to underpin its diplomatic and military endeavours.
The Treaty of Frankfurt which ended the war of 1870–71 dictated not only the loss of Alsace-Lorraine but the obligation to pay re parations to the new German Empire while German forces occupied part of France. President of the Republic Adolphe Thiers paid the final instalment on 5 September 1871 and German troops marched out of Verdun and across the border on 13 September. A League for the Deliverance of Alsace-Lorraine had been set up after the Treaty by the Alsatian industrialist and deputy to the National Assembly, Scheurer-Kestner, but when Chancellor Bismarck objected it was dissolved and Jules Grévy, president of the Assembly, told him that France must renounce Alsace. ‘Do not believe the madmen who tell you otherwise and who have aggravated our misfortunes by espousing a hopeless cause.’1
Despite France’s massive humiliation a huge public turned up to watch a military review at Longchamp in June 1871, when 120,000 French soldiers marched past, headed by Marshal MacMahon, commander at Sedan the previous September, who was embraced by Thiers.2 The defeated army had regained some of its lustre by suppressing the Paris Commune, but this had also discredited the army and called into question what kind of an army France should have. Old republicans such as Edgar Quinet deplored the army having ‘its eyes fixed on the interior, obsessed by civil war, and not destined for distant wars’. He argued that it should be drawn from the entrails of the nation like the Prussian Landwehr of 1806, with all citizens doing three years’ military service, the vehicle of national revival.3 The nation-in-arms, however, reminded Thiers too much of Gambetta’s levée en masse of 1870 which had led to the Commune and which would be like ‘putting a gun on the shoulder of every socialist’.4 His alternative was to divide the population of military age into two, to make the first serve under the colours for five years, becoming Napoleonic grognards, while the other half would do only six months’ service, and go into the reserve. Although military service was compulsory, seminarists, trainee teachers and most students were exempted.5 This semi-professional army may have been insulated against revolution but it did nothing to rebuild national unity.
Revanche (revenge) against Germany in the sense of a war to recover Alsace-Lorraine was simply not an option in the years after 1870. France had no allies and no stomach for a fight. Although Gambetta had walked out of the Assembly in protest against the Treaty of Frankfurt Bismarck considered that Catholic ultramontanes were more likely to start a war to recover the pope’s lost territories than republicans were to regain Alsace-Lorraine. Seeking to escape his reputation as a warmonger, Gambetta told a republican audience at Saint-Quentin in November 1871, ‘never speak of the foreigner, but let it be understood that we are always thinking of him.’6 There is some evidence that Bismarck provided financial help for the republicans in the 1877 elections that followed the Seize Mai crisis, on condition that they abandon all references to revenge.7 When Gambetta and his mistress Léonie Léon toured Germany in the autumn of 1881 there were rumours that he had visited Bismarck on his country estate of Varzin, but as Bismarck would not relax his grip on Alsace-Lorraine a meeting would have been pointless. That said, Gambetta’s abandonment of the idea of revenge terminated his relationship with the salon hostess Juliette Adam who had sponsored his rise to power for a decade.8
While France’s fight with Germany was taking place on the battlefield in the autumn of 1870 a debate was also taking place in the universities, as historians argued about whether Alsace-Lorraine should be properly French or German. Theodor Mommsen, history professor at Berlin, stated that a nation was defined by its language, which expressed the soul of the people, and thus Alsace and the Moselle department, which predominantly spoke a German dialect, had legitimately been recovered by the Reich. Fustel de Coulanges, who had been a history professor at Strasbourg between 1860 and 1870, argued that a nation was based not on language or race but on ‘a community of ideas, interests, sentiments, memories and hopes’; in a word, ‘la patrie is what you love.’ ‘If Alsace is and remains French,’ he concluded, ‘it is uniquely because it wishes to.’9 After the war, only 10 per cent of the population of Alsace-Lorraine opted to remain French, but this was in large part explained by the fact that to remain French they had to leave their province and their property.10 The view of French intellectuals was nevertheless that even those Alsatians and Lorrainers who stayed in the Reich remained French in memory and aspiration, and thus Alsace-Lorraine became a model for French thinking about nationhood.
In a seminal lecture at the Sorbonne in 1882 Ernest Renan argued against the Germanic idea that the nation was a Volk defined by a single language and race. ‘France is Celtic, Iberian and Germanic,’ he declared, while ‘Germany is Germanic, Celtic and Slav.’ While the United States and England spoke English and Spain spoke Spanish, he continued, Switzerland spoke three or four languages but was still a nation because nationality was a question of will. He continued,
A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. This is made up of two things which are really only one. One in the past, the other in the present. One is the collective ownership of a rich legacy of memories, the other is the present consent or desire to live together, the will to continue to develop the inheritance it has received intact… The nation, like the individual, is the culmination of a long past of striving, sacrifice and dedication. The cult of ancestors is of all cults the most legitimate; ancestors have made us who we are. A heroic past, great men, glory (I mean the real kind) are the social capital on which the national idea is based. To have common glories in the past and a common will in the present; to have done great things together and to wish to do more of them, that is the prerequisite of a people. We love in proportion to the sacrifices we have agreed to, to the evils we have suffered. Indeed, collective suffering unites more than joy. As far as national memories are concerned, mourning is more important than triumph, because mourning imposes duties and dictates a collective effort… The existence of a nation is, if you will excuse the expression, an everyday plebiscite, as the existence of an individual is a perpetual affirmation of life… It is never in the real interest of a nation to annex or keep a country in spite of itself. The will of a nation is in the end the only legitimate criterion and the one to which we must always return.11
After the war was over the French indeed concentrated not so much on revanche as on rebuilding a national spirit that had been demoralized by defeat and was now deeply divided by political and religious conflict. A first step was to devise an ‘official history’ that would underline the continuity of the national struggle and the coherence of its identity over and above its sufferings and divisions. Ernest Lavisse, who succeeded Fustel de Coulanges at the École Normale Supérieure in 1876 and began to lecture at the Sorbonne in 1880, derived a sense of the ever-present past from his grandmother, who recalled the occupation of Picardy by Cossack forces in 1815.12 Beginning his Sorbonne lectures in 1881 he invited historians to ‘give the children of France that pietas erga patriam which must be founded on an understanding of their country’. Over and above the quarrel between the monarchical past and republican present, they must teach ‘the notion of solidarity that unites the present to the past, the living to their ancestors’, and nurture ‘that national pride that is the solid foundation of patriotism’.13 He launched a History of France that was written over the next forty years by his former pupils who were at the École Normale Supérieure in the 1870s, nine volumes preceding the Revolution, nine volumes after. At the same time he wrote school textbooks such as that of 1884 which ended by explaining that France had been defeated in 1870 because the French loved peace too much and had forgotten how to fight. ‘Our disasters teach us that we must not love those who hate us, that we must love our patrie France first, and humanity after.’14
If the story of common glories and sufferings was taken care of by Lavisse and his acolytes, the cult of France’s great ancestors was undertaken in a series of public commemorations. After the liberation of French territory in 1873 particular focus fell on previous heroes and heroines who had united the country, resisted foreign invasion, and sacrificed themselves in the attempt. Exalted above all were Joan of Arc, who in 1429 steeled the indecisive Charles VII at Chinon to fight the English, raised the siege of Orléans, and had the king crowned at Reims before attacking Paris and being burned at the stake at Rouen. Alongside her was Vercingétorix, the Gallic chief who had defeated Julius Caesar at the battle of Gergovia in 52 bc before succumbing to him at Alésia and being taken in chains to Rome for execution. These two heroes, imagined hand in hand for the Salon of 1872 by the sculptor Chatrousse, symbolized an eternal France that went back to ancient Gaul and a united France, despite the battles that took place between rival political and religious factions to ‘own’ their memory. Joan was claimed both by the republican followers of Michelet, who saw her as a ‘girl of the people’ who saved France despite the incompetence or treachery of king, nobles and clergy, and by the Catholic Church which saw her as sent by God to restore France to its divine mission and as a candidate for sainthood. In fact there was now some convergence in the interpretations. Dupanloup, bishop of Orléans, calling for Joan to be made a saint in 1869, described her as a ‘daughter of the people’ inspired by a double love, ‘the love of God and of her country’. Meanwhile, at the unveiling of the famous Frémiet statue on the place des Pyramides in 1874 poems were read by the republican patriot Paul Déroulède.15 On this model the epic journey of Joan of Arc was commemorated in towns and cities that erected equestrian statues to her at the end of the nineteenth century, from Chinon and Rouen to Orléans and Reims.
The cult of Vercingétorix was embedded in the landscape rather than the city, but the site of his defeat at Alésia was disputed between partisans of Alise-Sainte-Reine (Côte d’Or), which raised a great statue to him there in 1865, and those of Alaise (Doubs), each side sponsoring frantic excavations. The sculptor Bartholdi exhibited an equestrian statue of Vercingétorix in the Salon of 1870, and a group of Gallic chiefs galloping over a fallen Roman at the Salon of 1878. In an overlapping dispute about the origins of the French nation, Fustel de Coulanges took the view that the defeat of Vercingétorix by Caesar in 52 bc had allowed France to be civilized by the Romans, while only the baptism of the Frankish king Clovis had made France the eldest daughter of the Church. On the other hand, Albert Réveille, who became professor of Celtic studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in 1876, defended the Gallic point of view that the chieftain ‘fought and died not for a canton, nor for an overlord, nor for a dynasty, but pro patria, for the Gallic fatherland, which is still ours’.16
After the defeat of 1870 there was very little for ambitious young soldiers to do except to further the colonial ambitions of France. Joseph-Simon Galliéni, who had joined the marines from Saint-Cyr at the age of twenty-one in 1870 and, captured at Sedan, spent six months as a POW in Germany, was sent by the governor of Senegal in 1879 to explore the upper Niger. He concluded a treaty the following year with Ahmadou, sultan of Ségou, establishing a French protectorate and trading rights on the Niger in return for guns and money. Received as a hero on his return in 1882, he married a rich heiress, published Voyage to the Soudan in 1885, and returned there as commander of French Sudan in 1886. Five years younger than Galliéni, Jesuit-educated Hubert Lyautey graduated from Saint-Cyr in 1875 and was involved in Albert de Mun’s workers’ circles before serving in Algeria, where he learned Arabic and championed direct relations between French soldiers and tribal chiefs rather than the expansion of the civil administration. This anticipated a distrust between colonial soldiers and the French administration and politics which persisted throughout the Third Republic.17
Ambitious young soldiers stuck in Europe were equally frustrated. Vicomte Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, who was also taken prisoner at Sedan, became attaché at the embassy of St Petersburg at the age of twenty-nine in 1877. He was present at the Congress of Berlin in 1878 when the great powers pinned back Russian ambitions in the Balkans, and Great Britain managed to obtain Cyprus from the Ottoman Empire. Vogüé noted that France had no more weight than Italy and that the French ‘returned from Berlin and those satiated giants with such a sadness that you could almost hear the collapse of our old foreign policy. Oh Spain!’18 In fact at Berlin Bismarck and the British foreign secretary Lord Salisbury gave France a green light to further its colonial ambitions in Tunisia, Salisbury as a quid pro quo for Cyprus, Bismarck because he wanted to take France’s thoughts off Alsace-Lorraine. The only other power that had an interest in Tunisia that France could offend was Italy, and when it was offended it jumped straight into Bismarck’s arms in the form of a Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria. The government of Jules Ferry used the pretext of an attack by Krumir tribesmen in the south of the country to impose a protectorate on the Bey of Tunis under the Treaty of Bardo in May 1881. Ferry defended his action as ‘the triumph of civilization over barbarism’ and argued that ‘France was not lightly resigned to play the part of a greater Belgium in the world’, while Gambetta declared, ‘France is recovering its rank as a great power again.’19
Catastrophe, however, almost immediately followed in Egypt, where the French had built the Suez Canal before 1870. The khedive of Egypt was maintained in power by foreign loans he could no longer pay off, and British and French interference was deeply resented by the local population and military. After riots in Alexandria on 12 June 1882 had killed sixty Europeans, the British and French planned a joint intervention. The Freycinet government, however, was fiercely attacked in the Chamber of Deputies by Georges Clemenceau at the head of radical opinion, who questioned the wisdom of the expedition. As a result the Chamber refused credits for military action, the ministry was toppled on 29 July 1882, and British forces marched into Cairo alone on 15 September. ‘This country’, observed Vogüé, who had just resigned from the diplomatic service, ‘has as many reserves of virility as a eunuch.’20 Once the enormity of the decision became clear, the Chamber was eager to recover some honour, and when the naval captain de Brazza returned from the Congo with a treaty signed with King Makoko the Chamber and Senate endorsed it emphatically, on 22 November 1882, triggering another phase in the ‘scramble for Africa’.21
France’s bid to become a colonial power was fiercely opposed by radicals who argued that the country was wasting men and resources that needed to be husbanded for a future war on the Rhine, whenever that came, and that by scrambling for Africa it was simply doing the bidding of Bismarck. At the time of the Berlin conference of 1884 which partitioned Africa Clemenceau called Ferry ‘the protégé of M. Bismarck’.22 Another leading anti-colonialist was Paul Déroulède, who resigned from a commission on military education in 1882 when it became clear that Ferry favoured only gymnastics in schools, not a basic military training, and founded the Ligue des Patriotes. This demanded the revision of the Treaty of Frankfurt and the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine and in the meantime ‘the liberation of the soul of France which is still occupied and oppressed by the foreigner’ – this liberation to be furthered by a ‘patriotic and military education by means of books, songs, shooting and gymnastics’. At a prize-giving for the first national shooting championships in 1884 Déroulède declared, ‘I have said it before and I repeat that before going to plant the French flag where it has never flown, we should replant it where it has flown before, where we have all seen it with our own eyes.’23
As he spoke France was becoming embroiled in a colonial war with China. In what is now Vietnam French power was being built out from Cochin-China in the south to Annam in the centre and Tonkin in the north. Jules Ferry, who oversaw the campaign, defended French strategy as designed to gain control of the Red River and gain access to a market of 400 million consumers in China, while Freycinet endorsed the policy of ‘indirect revanche’.24 However, Chinese forces drove back the French from Langson and when Ferry asked the Chamber on 30 March 1885 for another 100,000 francs to avenge Langson, to defend their grip on Indo-China and ‘for our honour in the entire world’, he was exposed to another scathing attack from Clemenceau. ‘Is there not enough scope here for human ambition,’ he asked, ‘and is not the idea of increasing the sum total of knowledge, prosperity, liberty, law, and organizing the fight against ignorance, vice and poverty a better use of social energies and enough challenge for a politician or party?’25 ‘Ferry the Tonkinois’ was overthrown and Clemenceau and the Ligue des Patriotes lobbied for the promotion to the War Ministry of the republican General Boulanger, who promised to turn the army more into the nation-in-arms and take a firm line against Bismarck. Unfortunately, as in 1870, Bismarck proved a master of political manipulation. Unable to push through the Reichstag the bill that provided seven years of credit for the German army, he made a violent speech to it on 11 January 1887, stating in no uncertain terms that Boulanger meant war. He then dissolved the Reichstag, sent 75,000 reservists to Alsace-Lorraine, secured a governmental majority and had the military credits voted. French republicans were now faced with the possibility of a war of revenge and backed down. The government in which Boulanger was war minister was overturned by a combination of moderate republicans and conservatives on 16 May 1887, and Boulanger was sent to take up a provincial command in Clermont-Ferrand, seen off in style at the Gare de Lyon by the Ligue des Patriotes.
Although Boulanger enjoyed a brief popularity, this did not suggest that the French were warmongers. His opposition to the republican political class was the main reason for his success. There was indeed a growing hostility to the army as it had been organized in 1872, with long-term service for some and exemption for others. Around 1890 there was a spate of antimilitarist novels, written by men of the generation born around 1860, who had not been marked by the defeat of 1870 as their fathers had, and who criticized the harsh conditions of barrack life. Lucien Descaves, a great admirer of Louise Michel and Pissarro, wrote Sous-offs (NCOs) in 1889, a barely fictionalized account of brutality, drunkenness, disease and prostitution set in garrison towns where he had served for four years. This led to a prosecution of the author and editors brought by the Ministry of War. It was followed by Georges Darien’s Biribi (1890), a story based on his experiences in a disciplinary battalion in Tunisia, and Georges Courteline’s Train de 8h47 (1891), a reaction to his conscription after drawing a short straw.26 Much criticism was aimed at the semi-professional army which since Louis-Napoleon’s coup of 1851 and the suppression of the Paris Commune was regarded in left-wing circles as the vehicle of political reaction and social order more than national defence. The military service law of 1889 introduced compulsory service for three years and reduced exemptions, moving much closer to a national army. However, the effect was not felt immediately. On 1 May 1891 French troops fired on demonstrating textile workers at Fourmies in the Nord. Marcel Cachin, a student in Bordeaux, recalled that he had joined the socialist party in 1891 on hearing of the Fourmies massacre. The Marxist leader Paul Lafargue, accused of provoking the incident, was defended by the socialist deputy Alexandre Millerand who was a critic of the army then, but as minister of war twenty years later would have a very different attitude to militarism.27
For twenty years France had been diplomatically isolated as Bismarck locked Austria-Hungary and Italy into the Triple Alliance and Austria-Hungary and Russia into the Dreikaiserbund. Tsar Alexander III was no fan of French ministries with Jacobin generals who expelled members of former French ruling families: ‘your government is no longer the Republic,’ he told the French ambassador, ‘it is the Commune.’28 Relations between the two countries were improving, however, on a course that would lead to a Franco-Russian alliance in 1894. Juliette Adam had long been a friend of Russia. She visited it in 1882, accompanied by Melchior de Vogüé. De Vogüé had witnessed the turn-out of 100,000 people for the funeral of Dostoevsky in 1881, and this moved him to publish his bestselling Russian Novel (1886), which brought Dostoevsky along with Gogol, Turgenev and Tolstoy to the attention of the French reading public as voices of suffering in a noble and passionate country.29 In 1886 Paul Déroulède, a regular of her salon, went to Russia and met Panslav leaders such as Katkov, who preached a forward policy in the Balkans to free Slav peoples under Austrian or Ottoman domination. Juliette Adam founded a Franco-Russian Artistic and Literary Association in 1888, which also popularized Tchaikovsky, and a Society of Friends of Russia in 1890.30 French enthusiasts for Russia were not only literary. In 1888 German bankers lost out to their French counterparts in the battle to offer loans to the Russian government and Russian industry. The so-called ‘Russian loans’ floated in the French money markets were immensely attractive to French investors, mainly in mining and iron and steel industries stimulated by the building of the trans-Siberian railway. At the outbreak of the First World War 25 per cent of all French foreign investment was in Russia, and 38 per cent of new French investments since 1882, as against 13 per cent of German and under 3 per cent of British investment.31 Diplomatic and military ties followed behind. The Reinsurance Treaty of 1887, by which Bismarck tried to tie in Russia after the lapse of the Dreikaiserbund, itself lapsed in 1890 on Bismarck’s fall from power, leaving Russia open to new allies. The arrest of Russian anarchists in France that year persuaded Alexander III that the Republic was a respectable government after all, and in July 1891, when a French squadron visited the Russian naval base of Kronstadt, the tsar stood bareheaded while the Marseillaise was played. Under a military convention of August 1892 France and Russia pledged themselves to a defensive alliance against German aggression, and following a return visit of the Russian fleet to Toulon in 1893 a special train took Russian dignitaries to celebrations in Paris and Versailles, at which Juliette Adam was resplendent.32 A Franco-Russian alliance was formally agreed on 4 January 1894, and a bridge over the Seine was built in honour of Alexander III, which was opened by the new tsar, Nicholas II, when he visited France with the Tsarina Alexandra in 1896.
After 1890 France’s principal enemy appeared to be not so much Germany as Great Britain. In July that year Great Britain concluded a treaty with Germany giving the latter the North Sea island and naval base of Heligoland in return for Germany renouncing its claims to Zanzibar and Uganda and recognizing the Nile valley as a British sphere of influence. The following month France relinquished similar claims to Zanzibar and the Nile valley in return for a free hand in annexing Madagascar. This was regarded as a sell-out in French colonial circles which now began to organize and agitate. A Committee for French Africa was set up in 1890 under the Prince Auguste d’Arenberg and journalist Harry Allis to support French claims as widely as possible in Africa. The French Colonial Union of 1893 under Joseph Chailley-Bert, a lawyer and professor at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques, was a business lobby which pressed the government to develop railways, mines and settlements in Africa and Indo-China. A Colonial Group formed in the Chamber of Deputies in 1892, ninety strong, rising to 120 after the elections of 1893. One of its leaders was Eugène Étienne, born in Oran to a soldier serving in Algeria, educated in Marseille, a champion of the Marseille–Oran shipping business and elected deputy for Oran in 1881. The other was Théophile Delcassé, the son of a minor legal official in the Pyrenean department of the Ariège who had a career in teaching and the Gambettist press before marrying the widow of a former deputy of the Ariège and winning a seat in the same department in 1889. These leaders soon acquired ministerial influence as under-secretary of state for colonies, Étienne in 1887 and 1889–92 and considered an unofficial colonial minister even when out of office, Delcassé in 1893 and a fully fledged minister for colonies in 1894–5. About the same ages as Galliéni and Lyautey, old enough to be marked as young men by the defeat of 1870, they formed a nexus dedicated to restoring French greatness. Étienne was indeed the patron of General Galliéni, who served in Tonkin with his second-in-command Lyautey and was sent to Madagascar as commander-in-chief and resident-general in 1896, again with Lyautey, on a mission to pacify it.33
The ambition of the French colonial party, notwithstanding the treaties of 1890, was to prevent Britain building a string of colonial possessions from the Cape to Cairo and instead forge a French empire from Senegal in the west to Somaliland in the east. This would mean sending a military expedition to beat the British forces in Egypt in a race to the headwaters of the Nile. Securing the upper Nile would have the added advantage of putting pressure on the British in Egypt and reopening the question of their unilateral occupation of the country in 1882. The French African Committee put together an expedition commanded by Captain Jean-Baptiste Marchand which was approved by the French government in November 1895 and left from Marseille in August the following year.
Matters came to a head in 1898. Marchand arrived at Fashoda on 29 August and declared himself high commissioner for the French government in the upper Nile and the Bahr el Ghazel. The British army under Lord Kitchener, pushing south into the Sudan, defeated the Mahdist state at Omdurman on 2 September and challenged Marchand on 19 September. France was at that point in the grip of the Dreyfus Affair. Since Zola’s J’accuse the French military command had been attacked in dreyfusard circles as dominated by Jesuit-trained officers who were more exercised by the influence of Jews, Protestants and freemasons in the Republic than by the idea of restoring French greatness. The antidreyfusard camp, on the other hand, argued that the army was the bearer of French honour and greatness and must be shielded from the attacks of the ‘Jewish syndicate’ that were demoralizing it and undermining its ability to stand up to its enemies. Paul Déroulède, who had been condemned by the high court for his involvement in the Boulanger conspiracy, relaunched his Ligue des Patriotes on 25 September 1898, denouncing those who ignored the fact ‘that the army has been the honour of France for twenty centuries, its holy bayonets, as Michelet said’.34
British tactics for dislodging the French from Fashoda were two-pronged, first psychological, then military. Lord Kitchener sent extracts from the French press to Marchand’s camp, revealing the attacks of the dreyfusards on the French army. ‘The ten officers were trembling and weeping,’ wrote Marchand in a letter that was published by Le Figaro on 20 November. ‘We learned then and there that the terrible Dreyfus Affair had been opened with its dreadful campaign of infamies and for thirty-six hours not one of us was able to say anything to the others.’35 ‘Nothing can give an idea of the moral disorganization of this country,’ de Vogüé wrote to Lyautey.36 In Paris there was huge agitation by nationalists demanding that the government stand up to the British. ‘No! the only response worthy of France,’ proclaimed Le Matin on 5 October.37 The sea-port cities of Marseille and Bordeaux were more inclined to compromise, however, and the government did not want to fall into the same trap as in 1870, fully aware that the French navy was in no position to fight a war. Delcassé, now foreign minister in the Brisson government, was keen on a negotiated settlement and on 12 October concluded a deal with Great Britain which involved the withdrawal of Marchand. This provoked a nationalist demonstration on 25 October and the fall of the Brisson government. Lord Salisbury decided on a show of force and on 28 October mobilized the Mediterranean fleet and sent the Channel fleet to Gibraltar. In the new ministry formed on 1 November Delcassé was reappointed foreign minister and two days later the recall of Marchand was ordered.38
As dreyfusards and antidreyfusards tore each other apart, historian Ernest Lavisse, who was working on the Louis XIV volume of his History of France, joined forces with Lyautey in January 1899 to issue an Appeal to Union.39 The situation was effectively saved by the moderate republican Waldeck-Rousseau, who formed a government of national defence in June 1899 and reappointed Delcassé foreign minister. His war minister, General Gallifet, was supposed to purge the top ranks of the army of officers hostile to the Republic, but the amnesty law of 20 December 1899 in fact removed the threat of court martial from the army’s top brass and with it the threat of a military coup. Waldeck-Rousseau had good relations with General Galliéni and his right-hand man Lyautey, and was keen to support the colonial army even if the army at home was open to criticism. Returning to France from Madagascar in 1899–1900 Galliéni visited the Exposition of 1900, where the Madagascar pavilion was prominent, and he and Lyautey undertook lecture tours, addressing colonial and geographical societies and chambers of commerce on the benefits and virtues of the French Empire and colonial army.40 A law of July 1900 sponsored by Gallifet gave organizational autonomy to the colonial army, so that it had its own general staff and colonial commands were reserved to officers with colonial experience. In this way it was better insulated against metropolitan politics.41
Under the premiership of the Radical Combes, relations with both the Church and the army and indeed navy deteriorated. The government and its war minister General André were much exercised by the weight of Jesuit-trained officers in the army who were assumed to be disloyal to the Republic. Not only the police but also the masonic lodges were mobilized to spy on officers, and files were kept on whether they or their wives attended mass and whether they sent their children to Catholic schools. If they did, they were liable to be passed over for promotion in favour of republican officers or ambitious NCOs. This affaire des fiches exploded in October 1904 when Le Figaro published clear evidence that the Grand Orient masonic lodge was influencing promotions.42 Combes entrusted the Navy Ministry to the outspoken Radical Camille Pelletan, who set France resolutely against joining in the naval race engaged in by Great Britain and Germany. He cut back the battleship programme, downsized the Mediterranean fleet on the grounds that officers spent most of their time on the Riviera, and allowed shipyard workers to form a union and affiliate to the CGT.43 The final military legacy of the Combes ministry was the military law of 21 March 1905, which reduced universal military service from three years to two. A victory for those who wanted more of a nation-in-arms, it was severely criticized as not giving enough scope for proper military training.
This was not to say that French patriotism and French national interests were neglected. Émile Combes lent his weight to the ongoing definition of French national identity by unveiling the huge equestrian statue of Vercingétorix by Bartholdi on the main square of Clermont-Ferrand on 10 October 1903.44 On the colonial side, the governor-general of Indo-China, Paul Doumer, organized an exhibition in Hanoi in the winter of 1902–3 to showcase the capital of newly conquered North Vietnam, highlight the commercial potential of the region and celebrate Western understanding of the East through an International Congress of Far East Studies.45 Meanwhile relations with Great Britain improved by default as Britain became obsessed by Germany’s battleship programme and evidence of German support for the Boers in South Africa. Following a visit of Edward VII to Paris and of President Loubet to London in 1903 twenty years of resentment over Egypt were finally resolved by the Entente Cordiale of 8 April 1904, under which France recognized Britain’s claim to Egypt and Britain gave France a free hand in Morocco.46 The colonial party lost no time in taking advantage of this opening. A French Morocco Committee was formed by the French African Committee, and Étienne, as informal colonial minister, encouraged Lyautey to extend French military influence into Morocco from the Algerian border. This risked provoking conflict with Spain and Germany, both of which had interests in Morocco, but when Delcassé and the Combes government told Lyautey to pull back in July 1904 he called on the support of Étienne and threatened ‘a second Fashoda’.47
This Fashoda came not from Britain but from Germany. On 31 March 1905 Kaiser William II landed unexpectedly in Tangier and challenged France’s attempt to control Morocco by declaring the independence of the sultan and demanding equal rights for all the powers. The German government held Delcassé responsible for France’s bid to gain control of Morocco and issued an ultimatum demanding his dismissal. The Rouvier ministry of which Delcassé was foreign minister panicked and dropped him on 6 June.48 The great powers met in conference in Algeciras in January 1906 to decide what to do about Morocco. The Germans tried to bully France into abandoning its claim, but Great Britain regarded this as a first test of the Entente Cordiale and stood firm behind France. In March it was the German chancellor Bülow who suffered a diplomatic defeat, followed by a heart attack. Because Germany was not prepared to go to war over Morocco it was forced to recognize that France had the upper hand there.
For many on the French left the Moroccan crisis demonstrated an upsurge of militarism and colonialism that had brought France to the brink of war, and an antimilitarist backlash followed. The French national interest had nothing to do with the working class for Gustave Hervé, a schoolteacher from Sens, who declared at a socialist meeting in April 1905, during the Morocco crisis, ‘Our country is our class.’ In the event of an attack on France, ‘without thought of who the aggressor is’, he continued, ‘we will answer the call to arms by a general strike of reservists.’49 An International Antimilitarist Association (AIA) was founded at Amsterdam in June 1904 and in October 1905 the French branch led by Georges Yvetot, secretary of the Fédération des Bourses du Travail, Miguel Almereyda of the anarchist paper Libertaire, and Gustave Hervé launched a poster campaign for the benefit of the new cohort of conscripts. It read,
When you are ordered to shoot at your brothers in poverty, workers, tomorrow’s soldiers – as has happened in Chalon, Martinique or Limoges – you will shoot, but not on your comrades. You will shoot at the braided stooges who dare to give you such orders. When you are sent to the frontier to defend the capitalists’ strong-boxes against other workers as exploited as you are, you will not march. All war is criminal. You will answer the mobilization order by an immediate strike and insurrection.50
Antimilitarists argued that, whether they were repressing French workers or killing indigenous populations, armies were the instruments of capitalism and were driven to further their interests by war. A 1905 study of Colonialism by the socialist Paul Louis argued that colonies had been founded since 1880 to provide ‘new sources of exploitation of wealth’ for ‘the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie’. Colonialism, he said, was disguised by the rhetoric of greatness and the civilizing mission but it massacred native populations and imposed slavery, increased the servitude of the proletariat at home and led inevitably to an arms race and war between industrial powers.51
The government came down hard on these antimilitarists. Twenty-eight members of the Antimilitarist Association were sent for trial in December 1905, and all but two received prison sentences, including four years for Hervé and three for Yvetot and Almereyda. Amnestied in 1906, Hervé and Almereyda continued to broadcast their views in La Guerre Sociale. The antimilitarists, however, were not representative of the mainstream left, which fell back on the revolutionary patriotism of the Volunteers of 1792, who at Valmy had defeated the Austrian and Prussian invaders intent on crushing the French Revolution. They disliked standing armies but embraced a patriotism which held that France was the cradle of liberty and must defend itself not only for France but for the universal cause of liberty. ‘It is impossible to announce in advance’, said Jean Jaurès during the trial, ‘that one will not defend oneself by military force against the invasion of a foreigner who threatens us, our republican liberties, and is the agent of international reaction.’52 Jaurès took on the antimilitarists at the SFIO congress of Nancy in 1907. He rejected such slogans as ‘down with the Republic’, for the Republic was the site that gave the proletariat the freedom to undertake its revolutionary work. If France were ‘threatened, invaded or brutalized, the duty of the socialist and revolutionary would be to defend the independence of the nation’. Otherwise, he claimed, ‘Tsarist Russia could invade and subjugate socialist Germany with impunity or imperial Germany could subjugate republican France.’53 To reconcile hostility to standing armies, which he called praetorian or caste-like, with a love of national independence, he advocated a ‘New Army’ of armed citizens, who would defend the frontier but not shoot workers or start colonial wars, and would eventually bring about a federation of free nations.54
Other figures on the left also embraced patriotism at this juncture. As a former dreyfusard, Charles Péguy had a profound suspicion of the praetorian army, but he rallied to the nation when it was challenged by Germany in the Morocco crisis. Breaking with Hervé whom he had known as a schoolteacher, and rejecting his notion that the country did not belong to the working class, he argued in Notre patrie that the French people were revolutionary but also patriotic, and peace-loving but also instinctively warlike where necessary. For Péguy the French were a chosen people with a universal mission to spread liberty and civilization. They must respond to German aggression with a defensive war, not only for France but for humanity, to defeat the oppression and barbarism that Germany represented.55 This was a patriotism that went back to the Republic of 1792 and to Michelet’s notion of France as the vessel of humanity, and closely paralleled the thinking of Jaurès, even though Péguy had broken with Jaurès over what he saw as the latter’s hijacking of dreyfusism for party-political purposes. This patriotism – open, generous, republican, at the service of humanity – was very different from the nationalism of the antidreyfusards, which was inward-looking, defensive, hostile to the Republic and exalted French traditions, although in the wake of 1905 there was increasingly convergence between them.
The Morocco crisis was widely seen to have engendered a ‘revival of national sentiment’ in France, a new sense of its worth as a nation and willingness to defend it by war if necessary.56 Whereas at the time of the Dreyfus Affair nationalism had been a stick with which to beat the Republic of Jews, Protestants and freemasons, now nationalism and nationalists in general supported the Republic. Paul Déroulède, who had been exiled to Spain in 1900 by the Senate sitting as a high court for his attempted coup of 1899, returned to Paris in November 1905, but did not return to his old frondeur ways. Defeated in the elections of 1906, he abandoned politics in favour of regular pilgrimages of the Ligue des Patriotes to sites of heroic combats during the siege of Paris in 1870–71: the plateau of Châtillon in September, Le Bourget in October, Champigny in November, Buzenval in January. At these gatherings he banned all slogans apart from ‘Long live the Army!’, ‘Long live France!’, ‘Long live the Republic!’, and on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Ligue des Patriotes in 1907 declared that ‘we applaud the foreign policy of the state, the work of Delcassé, against that eternal stranger and enemy, Germany.’ The threat to government interests was no longer from the nationalists but from the antimilitarists. ‘It was to fight against this anarchist and revolutionary agitation’, Déroulède announced, brazenly rewriting history, ‘that the Ligue des Patriotes was already Boulangist in 1887 and nationalist in 1897. In 1907 it will be traditionalist.’57 On the other hand, he was keen to rescue the cult of Joan of Arc for the Republic from the extreme right and the Church. In the winter of 1908–9 the Camelots du Roi, who sold Action Française’s paper and stewarded its meetings, broke up the Sorbonne lectures of Amédée Thalamas, who had called into question Joan of Arc’s divine mission and virginity. When Joan was beatified by the pope on 18 April 1909 in Rome, 40,000 French pilgrims wept. Déroulède, however, speaking at Orléans for the commemorations of May, paid homage to her ‘as the Christian patriot I have always been and the Catholic republican I shall always be’.58
A few nationalists such as Charles Maurras and Action Française continued to use nationalism to attack the Republic and demand the restoration of the monarchy that alone could restore France’s greatness, but they were isolated even on the right. Maurice Barrès broke with Maurras in 1900, arguing that the Republic had been great, especially during the Revolution, and that the nation should be brought together not around one regime or another but around a cult of the dead and the lost provinces of Alsace-Lorraine. From the 1890s he had gone on a pilgrimage every August to the battlefields of the war of 1870 in Alsace, the climax of which was the visit to Reichshoffen, site of the last charge of the cuirassiers.59 At the time of the Dreyfus Affair he developed a cult of French soldiers buried in what was now German soil in order to promote a sense of solidarity with the lost provinces and an idea of a French nation rooted in la terre et les morts. ‘At Chambière,’ outside Metz, where 7,200 French soldiers from the war of 1870 were buried, he told the Ligue de la Patrie Française in a lecture of 1899, ‘where the sand is mixed with our dead, our heart persuades our mind of the great destiny of France and imposes on all of us a moral unity.’60 In 1905–9 he published a cycle of novels entitled Les Bastions de l’Est which reinvigorated the question of Alsace-Lorraine as a central trope of French nationalism. In one of them, Colette Baudoche (1909), the heroine, a young woman in occupied Metz, is engaged to a German schoolmaster Asmus until she follows the annual pilgrimage to Cham-bière and to the annual mass for the souls of those who died in 1870 in the cathedral of Metz. There the lessons of la terre et les morts persuade her to break off her engagement and espouse France.61
Barrès was very much the maître à penser of young French nationalists of the generation born around 1890. One of his disciples, Ernest Psichari, was won over not only from his erstwhile guide, Charles Péguy, and his dreyfusard friends, but from the whole university milieu which was congenitally hostile if not to patriotism then to militarism and nationalism. Psichari was the grandson of Ernest Renan, stalwart of the generation of 1830, who had lectured in 1882 on What is a Nation? Renan’s daughter married a linguist of Greek origin who taught at the Sorbonne and was an ardent dreyfusard. Psichari, who studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, was expected by his family to follow an academic career. Instead, after a nervous breakdown in 1903, he joined the new colonial army and took part in an expedition up the Congo to Lake Chad in 1906–7. Not entirely forgetting his literary inheritance, he wrote an account of his adventures, Lands of Sun and Sleep. In this he praised Africa as ‘one of the last refuges of national energy’ and war itself as ‘an unspeakable poem of blood and beauty’. He provided legitimation for the colonial project in national rather than material terms and a new role model for young men bored with endless examinations who craved a life of action and excitement in the service of France. The book was sent to Barrès, who was fiercely opposed to the family over the Dreyfus Affair but recognized Psichari as ‘an admirable man’ and obtained a literary prize for him. Colonial ambitions thus rebuilt a patriotic bridge that had been severed by the Affair.62
Although nationalist agitation in support of colonies and Alsace-Lorraine ceased criticizing a republic whose national interests were satisfactorily protected by the likes of Delcassé, foreign minister from 1898 to 1905, Georges Clemenceau, who had repeatedly unseated ministries in the 1880s over colonial questions, was still reluctant to let the colonial party and its military protégés such as Lyautey have their heads if there was any danger of risking a war. When he was president of the council in 1906–9 the front line was on the Algerian–Moroccan border, from which Lyautey was keen to push towards Fez, although this would inevitably provoke Spain and Germany. After Clemenceau fell, Lyautey occupied Fez in May 1911, and Germany responded by sending a gunboat to Agadir on the Atlantic coast of Morocco to force France to negotiate. Joseph Caillaux, who became French premier in June, asked the chief of the General Staff Joffre whether France had a 70 per cent chance of winning a war and was told that it did not. Caillaux therefore looked for a deal and on 4 November Germany recognized France’s claim to Morocco in return for cession of slices of the French Congo, enabling Germany if it wished to build a railway from the Cameroons to East Africa. This agreement was ratified by the Chamber of Deputies but severely criticized by nationalist opinion which accused the government of selling out. The Senate was more obstinate and on 10 January 1912 Caillaux was summoned before its foreign affairs committee where he remembered Clemenceau, now reincarnated as a defender of the French Empire, and Poincaré ‘huddled in a corner, whispering to each other, sneering’.63 Caillaux was accused of using secret diplomacy via his banking contacts in Germany and of dismantling the Empire, and was forced to resign as premier.
This was a turning point in French diplomacy and military thinking. For forty years revanche had been relegated to the realms of fantasy or forgetting; now it was a real possibility. Poincaré became president of the council in January 1912. Under the Treaty of Fez signed on 30 March 1912 the sultan of Morocco agreed to a French protectorate over his country. Alexandre Millerand, who twenty years previously had been defending strikers and antimilitarists, became minister of war and took a series of measures which greatly increased French colonial power and military discipline. He telephoned Lyautey, then garrisoned in Rennes, to ask him to serve as resident-general of Morocco with authority to put down any anti-French disturbances. General Joffre as chief of the General Staff was given supreme control over the French army. ‘All the powers of the military establishment finally became concentrated in my hands,’ he wrote. ‘It was the first time that any such authority had been confided in a single man.’64 To eliminate any remnants of antirepublican sentiment in the officer corps Millerand banned officers from founding any political or religious associations in the army. He organized military parades in garrison towns, Napoleonic style, to dramatize the force and beauty of the military. Finally, to eliminate antimilitarism in the ranks of the army he pushed through a law of 30 March 1912 giving him the authority to send not only criminals but also antimilitarists and strike leaders, when conscripted for military service at the age of twenty, to disciplinary battalions in North Africa, the so-called Bat’ d’Af.65
A Bat’ d’Af in Tunisia had been the destination of 589 soldiers of the 17th Infantry Regiment which had mutinied in the face of a winegrowers’ demonstration at Narbonne in June 1907, of whom fifteen died.66 Regiments were recruited in specific regions, so a refusal to fire on demonstrators who might be from the soldier’s town or village was a certain risk. In fact the 17th Regiment, like others, was recruited from the south-west in general rather than from Narbonne, Béziers or the Aude specifically, so the mutinies of 1907 remained exceptional. In the pre-war period fewer that 1 per cent of conscripts were disciplined, and that for offences such as rudeness to officers, theft and absence without leave, rather than for mutiny. For most young men conscription was a significant rite of passage to adulthood, and was celebrated in the community. Only those who were not ‘bons pour le service’ were exempted and those who were selected by the military board marked the event by a charivari of conscripts, marching with trumpet and drum to the local town, where they were fêted by the mayor, and returned home to kiss the girls before they left for barrack life.67
The harshness of the Millerand law provoked an attempt at bridgebuilding to conscripted soldiers from antimilitarists nationally. Primary school teachers meeting in conference at Chambéry in August 1912 voted the ‘Soldier’s Penny’ by which teachers would send a 5-franc coin to teachers who had just been conscripted, to keep them in touch with civilian life. Since many teachers were followers of Gustave Hervé and had a reputation for antimilitarism, even anti-patriotism, there was a public outcry against teachers who were now ‘sans patrie’ as well as godless, and the education minister clamped down on teachers’ trade unions, which were illegal.68 In fact, however, some teachers followed the model of Maurice Vincent, hero of Psichari’s second novel, The Call to Arms, published in 1913. Vincent, the son of an antimilitarist teacher of the generation of those ‘who had witnessed the defeat as frail innocent children and forgotten it’, falls under the spell of a Captain Nangis who hunts pheasant in his home region of Brie and believes that ‘understanding the former destinies of our races helps us to live in the present and above the contingencies of social life’. Vincent is converted to army and Church by visits to the battlefield of Champigny and the Benedictine Abbey of Jouarre. He recognizes himself as one of the new generation which ‘did not witness the defeat, but remembers it’, and joins up. Psichari dedicated this book to his former adviser Charles Péguy, whom he now saw as embodying ‘the soul of France’. Through Psichari Péguy learned to bring his craving for spiritual values down to earth and see that the soldier ‘measures the quantity of land where a language is spoken, where morals, a soul, a religion, a race hold sway… the quantity of temporal land that is the same as the spiritual land and intellectual land’.69 Psichari himself became the symbol of the generation of 1890, one of the key interviewees in a survey of 1913, Les Jeunes Gens d’aujourd’hui, by his friend Henri Massis of Action Française and the sociologist Alfred de Tarde. Like The Call to Arms this contrasted the decadent, intellectual generation born around 1860 with the young men of 1910 who loved sport, machines and action, were building the Empire and in a year or so would be leading men out of the trenches of northern France.70
In the autumn of 1912 war broke out in the Balkans, and in January 1913 French national unity and nationalism moved into another phase when Raymond Poincaré was elected president of the Republic by the votes of right-wing parliamentarians such as Albert de Mun as well as those in the centre. ‘A nation can only be peace-loving’, he told the assembled deputies and senators, ‘if it is always ready for war. A France exposed to challenges and humiliations by its own fault would no longer be France.’71 The Action Française argument that only a king would restore French greatness was made redundant. Charles Péguy argued that Poincaré had been raised to power by ‘a deep popular movement, a new leap of national energy’, which responded to moments of crisis and eliminated rois fainéants. The Merovingians, Carolingians and Capetians had been cast aside because they had been too weak, but ‘the Republic was the fourth dynasty, strong in its youth.’72 A second Balkan war in the summer of 1913 resulted in the expansion of Serbia, posing a powerful threat to Austro-Hungarian interests. Germany, allied to Austria-Hungary, passed an army bill on 30 June 1913, massively increasing the size of its armed forces. In order to expand French forces Poincaré replied with a law of 19 July 1913 which increased military service from the two years decreed in 1905 back to three years. This provoked riots in the garrison towns of eastern France – Toul, Belfort and Nancy – when conscripts learned that they would have to serve for another year, and meetings that were addressed by antimilitarists such as Yvetot. The CGT called a massive demonstration against the Three-Year bill on 13 July 1913, and the SFIO and Radical-Socialists under their new leader Joseph Caillaux made opposition to the law the central plank of their programmes. At the traditional march-past of 14 July 1913 at Longchamp, however, the military significance of the French colonies was amply demonstrated as President Poincaré presented tricolour flags to twenty-five new regiments of colonial or mixed colonial and French recruits – ten Moroccan, five Algerian, three from each of Senegal, Indo-China and Madagascar, and two from Chad and Gabon. If conscripts from France were wavering, those from the Empire were ready to fight.73
The crisis was not over because in the elections of April–May 1914 radicals and socialists won a majority. To redeem the situation Poincaré appointed as premier a socialist who was committed to the Three-Year Law, René Viviani. Antimilitaristic hostility to the Three-Year Law and the struggle for peace did not, however, mean that socialists and trade unionists would stand in the way of national defence if France were attacked. At an extraordinary congress of the SFIO on 15–16 July 1914, three weeks after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo and a week before Austria’s ultimatum to Serbia, a motion was passed endorsing a general strike, not however to trigger revolution or desertion but to persuade governments to defuse the situation by international arbitration. ‘Whatever our enemies say,’ declared Jaurès’ paper, L’Humanité, on 18 July, ‘there is no contradiction between making the maximum effort to ensure peace and, if war breaks out in spite of us, doing the maximum to ensure the independence and integrity of the nation.’74 As the crisis deepened, international workers’ solidarity dissolved. CGT leader Léon Jouhaux met the leader of the German trade-union movement, Karl Legien, in Brussels on 27 July, and was convinced that German unions would not take part in an international general strike against war. The CGT was itself afraid that its leaders, listed in the Interior Ministry’s notorious Carnet B, would be arrested as soon as war broke out and on 31 July it concluded a deal with the ministry: there would be no call for a general strike and no arrest of CGT leaders.75 That evening, Jean Jaurès was assassinated by a nationalist fanatic who considered him a traitor, and socialist resolve to fight growing war fever fell apart.
For two weeks of the crisis President Poincaré and premier Viviani were on the high seas, sailing to St Petersburg and back both to urge restraint on Russia and to ensure the solidity of the Franco-Russian alliance if it came to war. On their return to France on 29 July they were greeted by a demonstration organized by the Ligue des Patriotes. Paul Déroulède, its president, had died in January, but Maurice Barrès had succeeded to the post. Gustave Hervé now admitted that ‘he had always had a weakness for Déroulède,’ and declared that if German unionists and socialists reneged on the international class struggle, then French unionists and socialists would ‘return to the revolutionary patriotism and idea of national defence that had been favoured by bourgeois democracy and working-class socialism since 1793’. He promptly changed the name of his newspaper from La Guerre Sociale to La Victoire.76 Russia mobilized in defence of Serbia on 31 July and Germany declared war on it on 1 August. The previous day Germany had pressed France to remain neutral but Joffre threatened to resign if France did not mobilize, which it did on 1 August. On 3 August Germany declared war on France and invaded Belgium. Great Britain declared war on Germany the following day.
This was the moment at which the French nation was put to the severest test. Unlike in 1870, it was not diplomatically isolated. It fulfilled its commitment to the Franco-Russian alliance, and Great Britain made concrete the Entente Cordiale. It had strengthened its army under the Three-Year Law and despite the antimilitarist opposition this had provoked it remained intact. There was very little resentment of the call to arms: citizens who joined up did so not from a desire for greatness or to recover Alsace-Lorraine but because they felt the object of German aggression.77 France was a proud and confident nation once again, buoyed up by a national consciousness that had been formed steadily since 1870. There was a sense of a historical continuity going back a thousand years, whatever the dynasty, whatever the regime. The French were inspired by ‘great ancestors’, some thinking of Joan of Arc, others of Vercingétorix. The myth of the Volunteers of 1792 that had given heart to the embattled Republic in 1870 was once again a potent resource, locking into the nation those who might have been swayed by anarchist or Marxist antipatriotism. ‘If Jaurès were still here,’ said CGT leader Jouhaux at his open grave on 4 August, ‘he would tell you, comrades, that above the national cause, in the harsh struggle that is beginning, you will be defending the cause of the International, and that of civilization, of which France is the cradle.’78