The great fear in 1914 was that there would be a catastrophic repeat of 1870. German troops drove into Belgium and northern France and by 2 September were within 30 miles of Paris. As in 1870 the government left the capital for Bordeaux and half a million Parisians took to the roads in a flight which prefigured the exodus of 1940. Then, on 3 September, came the news that instead of driving on to Paris the German First Army under von Kluck had turned south in order to encircle the city from the east, exposing its right flank. The commanderin-chief General Joffre now gave the order to the French Fifth and Sixth Armies to attack, and the battle of the Marne was engaged.
Charles Péguy was a lieutenant in the 276th Reserve Infantry Regiment, part of the Sixth Army. On 5 September, near the village of Villeroy close to Meaux, the regiment advanced on the German lines, resplendent in red trousers. The company captain, Pierre Guérin, aged thirty-two, a veteran of Morocco, was killed, followed by Lieutenant Cornillère. Victor Boudon, a commercial traveller in civilian life and a member of the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, takes up the story:
Péguy was still standing up, in spite of our shouts of ‘Get down!’, a glorious fool in his bravery. He drew himself up, defying the machine guns, as if inviting the death he had glorified in his poetry. At that very moment a deadly bullet pierced his noble forehead. He fell on his side, without a cry, with a low groan, having had the ultimate vision of a victory so much longed for and finally near. And when, a few metres further on, leaping like a madman, I glanced behind me, I saw the body of our dear, brave lieutenant, on the hot and dusty earth, amid broad green leaves, a black and red blotch among so many others.1
The battle of the Marne lasted until 12 September, at which point the German armies were in retreat. Two hundred and fifty thousand Frenchmen were killed in the battle, but Paris was saved and the government soon returned there to direct the war effort. More than that, the spectre of another 1870 had been exorcized, and the French Republic and nation had held together under fire. ‘Our troops, as well as those of our Allies, are admirable in morale, endurance, and ardour,’ Joffre telegraphed the minister of war, Alexandre Millerand, on 13 September. ‘The Government of the Republic may be proud of the army which it has prepared.’2
The death of Péguy symbolized the meeting of a multiplicity of strands in French politics, society, religion and culture that in 1799 had plunged France into civil war and defeat but by 1914 had come together to ensure a consensus around the Republic and the strength and unity of the nation. Maurice Barrès, who had fought Péguy over the Dreyfus Affair and had been unable to win him over to the right in 1910 when Péguy published La Mystère de la charité de Jeanne d’Arc, now hailed him as a national icon. ‘His sacrifice heightens the importance of his work,’ he wrote. ‘He celebrated the moral greatness, abnegation and exaltation of the soul. It was given to him to prove the truth of his work in a single minute. He is now sacred. Dead, he is a guide, who will be more active than ever, and is more than ever alive.’3
Péguy, for Barrès, brought together the man of the people and the intellectual, the provincial and the Parisian. ‘This grandson of a peasant who entered the École Normale’, said Barrès, ‘was always thinking of his fields, that is of his Cahiers de la Quinzaine, which had to be dug over, fertilized and extended… In his brief career as a man of letters he gave expression to the virtues of a peasant expanding his domain, of a shopkeeper counting and recounting his money, of a printer producing beautiful work, of a curé preaching to his flock and of a line officer leading his men into battle.’4 In his final incarnation as an officer, echoed Victor Boudon in his tribute to Péguy, he defended Paris with a company composed of ‘workers of Belleville and Bercy, and peasants of Seine-et-Marne… More than any other he recognized and used the rugged independence of these workers from the Paris suburbs, these farmers of Crécy and Voulangis, and to see them in a noble light.’ In the 19th Company of the 276th Regiment Péguy was nicknamed ‘the schoolmaster’ or ‘the pion’, but Péguy replied, ‘Joke, joke, my friends, but you wait till you see him at work, your pion.’ Having earlier in the fighting been sent forward into Lorraine when he could overlook the Moselle, he met Ernest Psichari by chance just before Psichari was killed, and may well have wanted to imitate the other man’s embrace of a life of action and death for the patrie.5
Péguy, for Boudon on the left, as for Barrès on the right, was ‘at the confluence of our traditional and revolutionary forces’. He was a republican, dreyfusard and socialist but also a Catholic and attached to the values of old France, nourished by Joinville and Joan of Arc, embodying the medieval ‘loyalty of man to man, and truth to the faith’.6 As a native of Orléans he was especially drawn to the story of Joan of Arc, writing Joan of Arc in 1897, returning to her with the Mystère in 1910 and going on a pilgrimage to Orléans in 1912 to pray for a child of his who was sick. When in 1914 he saw the cathedral of Senlis bombarded by the Germans he exclaimed, ‘the savages,’ and made a monk, Roussel, both chaplain to the company and his private chaplain. After his death one of Péguy’s friends wrote to Barrès, ‘we have lost a saint,’ and his wife and children later converted to Catholicism.7 As a patriot, Péguy argued that France had two missions, one old, one new. The old one was the divine mission that France honoured as the ‘eldest daughter of the Church’ to defend Christian civilization. The new one was the revolutionary mission incumbent on France as the cradle of liberty since 1789, to defend liberty wherever it should be threatened. The cult of Joan of Arc went hand in hand with the cult of the Convention of 1792 that had declared that France was the friend of all peoples struggling for their freedom.
For most of the nineteenth century France was torn between forces which embraced the Revolution of 1789 and those that opposed them. Each generation wrestled with the legacy of the Revolution, marked by it but also contributing to the long process of laying to rest the ghosts of division and destruction and recovering what was constructive and unifying about it. By 1914 Revolution no longer evoked civil war or anarchy but was a source of legitimacy for the Republic founded in its name, preached up in school textbooks and ritually commemorated in monuments and on occasions such as 14 July. Revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries were marginalized by a republic of the centre, acceptable to as broad a political spectrum as possible. Even those tempted by the extremes of antimilitarism and royalism, however, answered the call to arms in 1914 and ensured the survival of the Republic through the Great War, which finally fused republic and nation into a single entity.
The Revolution established France as the One and Indivisible Republic, which then collapsed into the chaos of provinces, cities and departments seeking autonomy, before unity was reimposed by Napoleon’s iron cage of administrative centralization. Over the next century the French learned to combine the benefits of centralization with a growing appreciation of the geographical, linguistic and cultural diversity of the country. Decentralization was made more acceptable by being articulated in terms of regionalism rather than a return to the provinces of the Ancien Régime. French was imposed as the lingua franca in the public places of the Republic, such as schools and town halls, but minority languages were tolerated in private places, including in churches for religious instruction. By 1914 the grande patrie of the French nation had come to coexist harmoniously with the petites patries to which French men and women were so attached.
France’s economy, which for long had been criticized as backward, embraced agricultural and industrial modernization without doing irreparable damage to its social structure. The weight of agriculture in the economy and in rural life provided ballast against over-rapid change and loss of equilibrium. Small farms and small businesses were disseminated more widely in 1914 than at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and if the old lower-middle class of artisans and shopkeepers was threatened by proletarianization a new lower-middle class of white-collar workers expanding at the end of the century maintained a social balance between the rich and poor. The thickness of this stratum of classes moyennes defused the danger of class struggle which was more pronounced in countries that were more industrialized, such as Great Britain or Germany, or less so, as in Russia. Tensions within the social elite were also reduced. While earlier generations were divided between Ancien Régime and Napoleonic nobilities and between landed and capitalist wealth, in later generations economic developments brought together landed, financial and industrial wealth. Moreover the republican office-holding class was careful to build bridges to the traditional social elite which had been reluctant to embrace the Republic, by a combination of social intercourse and intermarriage, so that a ruling class emerged that was more united than ever before.
Religious struggles that were reignited by the French Revolution continued throughout the nineteenth century and only gradually was religious peace negotiated. Attempts to reconcile religion and liberty were long frustrated by revolutionaries’ distrust of religion as counter-revolutionary, and by the Napoleonic system of state control for churches at the price of state funding. The solution to the first problem was the invention of the principle of laïcité, under which religion was eliminated from state-run schools, replaced by a moral and civic education appropriate to citizens of the Republic, while parish clergy were not troubled. The solution to the second problem was the Separation of Church and state in 1905. The state ceased to fund the Church but also ceased to persecute it. Catholics were obliged to fall back on their own resources, but Catholicism was able to flourish socially, culturally and intellectually. Anticlericals such as Péguy spoke the same language of admiration for Joan of Arc as Maurice Barrès, who hailed the victory of the Marne in which Péguy died as a miracle worked by Joan of Arc, as he threw himself into a campaign that resulted in her canonization and her nomination as patron saint of France after the war.
Women were initially liberated by the Revolution, then excluded from the public sphere by revolutionaries who associated political women with the court intrigue of the Ancien Régime and perfected a model of the male citizen and soldier and the female wife and mother. Women gradually fought back for emancipation, but they anticipated republican fears that Catholic women would bring back the monarchy if they were given the vote and concentrated on securing civil rights: divorce, control of their property, education, and the opening up of the professions. When they did start to demand the vote they had no time for the civil disobedience of British suffragettes. As women demanded emancipation, society expressed fears of female sexuality, a falling birth rate, family break-up, over-educated bluestockings grown mannish and female voters bringing back the Ancien Régime. French women may have gained less than their British counterparts, but they negotiated an emancipation that was tempered to the demands of femininity, family, society, Republic and country.
In the cultural sphere, there was a tension between the creativity of the artist, the control and patronage of the state, and the demand of the market. Successive generations of avant-garde artists and writers, Romantic, Realist and Symbolist, challenged both artistic and social conventions. Their excesses, however, were balanced by writers and artists who kept faith with the classical canon and more easily pleased audiences. Beneath both of these the growing demand of a mass semi-educated urban market stimulated the beginnings of a mass media which included serialized novels, detective fiction and thrillers, the 1-sou press, comics, the popular theatre and the cinema. Avant-garde creativity was not self-contained but drew on the powerful popular inspirations of myth, folklore and religion, and also sought the public recognition afforded by attention-grabbing manifestos, reputable dealers and publishers, and literary prizes. It was also international in status. What went on in Paris salons and opera-houses, on Montmartre or in Montparnasse, branded Paris as the European, even Western, capital of art.
How France fared on the great-power stage was nevertheless more important to most French people than its cultural standing. The revolutionary generation saw France as the Grande Nation, then the Grand Empire, dominating Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals and from the Mediterranean to the Baltic. It developed an ideology first of bringing liberty to oppressed peoples, then of bringing civilization in the form of the rule of law and enlightenment. All this came to an end in the snows of Russia, the mountain gorges of Spain and the farmland of Belgium. Successive generations through the nineteenth century struggled to reconstruct France’s national greatness and, to sustain it, a national identity. They looked anxiously around to assess which countries enjoyed more liberty or more civilization than France. Hopes that the revolutions of 1830 or 1848 would relaunch French armies to liberate Europe came to nothing. A revival of French power under the Second Empire was checked by the defeat of 1870, the amputation of Alsace-Lorraine, and the loss of great-power ranking to Germany, Great Britain and Russia. France’s greatness was painstakingly rebuilt in the colonies, from Indo-China to sub-Saharan Africa and the Maghreb. Officers who saw action in the colonies and indigenous troops recruited into French units played a significant role in the war effort of 1914–18. At the same time the pain of defeat was used to rebuild French national identity. The cult of Vercingétorix and Joan of Arc, the soldier– citizens of 1792 and Napoleon served to create a coherent national consciousness and confidence. It inspired the jeunes gens d’aujourd’hui, who went to the front as young officers, and the peasants from Brittany to the Alps who became the poilus of the trenches, and who together left a million and a half bodies on the battlefields of France and Belgium to defend the French Republic and French nation.