In the immediate aftermath of the June Days, Henri Lecouturier, a political critic and self-identified republican “realist,” offered his assessment of the worker protests and violent civil war that had shattered the unity of the country and endangered the viability of the infant Second Republic in one demoralizing blow. Reprimanding “idealists” who “[spent] their time searching in the shadows of the future for the ideal republic of their dreams,” Lecouturier issued an ominous warning that he urged his compatriots to heed if they desired to see France remain a republic. The romantics and extremists who sought to revolutionize society with bold gestures or, even worse, the sacrificial blood of their political enemies were a cancer on society. They not only eroded the base of republican virtue in the country but repulsed the great majority of honest citizens who desired nothing more than equitable government and peace. Founding a durable republican democracy in France demanded more than just haughty declarations; it required initiative and progressive action. “The Republic ceases to be a utopia when it is in [our] mores and something more than just a name,” he claimed.1
The dispiriting collapse of the Second Republic in 1852 bore out Lecouturier’s caveat. The breakdown of public order and the slaughter of French citizens in the streets of Paris some four months after the founding of the republican regime cast a pall over the new government, one from which it never completely escaped. Rather than the heroic people’s revolution of February, the Second Republic became memorialized in the butchery of June, making it difficult for republicans to construct a founding mythology for the regime. Republicans’ inability to create a set of new and meaningful political symbols and public ceremonies to represent the state was equally disappointing, leaving little wonder that a charismatic Bonaparte brandishing heraldic imperial eagles and evoking memories of the nation’s glorious Napoleonic past could found an authoritarian government with popular support.2 Even prior to the election of Louis Napoleon in December, Lecourturier had been capable of understanding that a government must be more than just a mere political form if it wished to command the loyalty and respect of its citizens. It had to be a living idea and a way of life, a lesson that republicans would not dare ignore the next time around.
With strident declarations and impressive public spectacles, the Bonapartist government had managed to win over followers and sustain support. Its modernizing program promised national unification and renewal to a fractured country, transforming an elite vision of the world into a veritable cult adhered to by citizens and civilized alike. Republicans may have abhorred the imperial regime, but they could not deny the power and appeal that Bonapartist modernity possessed. They too adhered to the cult of the modern so effectively channeled by their rivals, adapting it to their own ideological proclivities and the currents of postrevolutionary politics. Lacking the power and dynamism of the imperial state, however, opponents were pressed to devise alternate strategies of modernization outside the grand spectacles staged by the Bonapartists. Instead, they turned their attention to politics, civil society, and individual emancipation, subjects closely associated with the revolutionary heritage celebrated by democrats and repeatedly invoked in their criticisms of Bonapartist “despotism.” Reminding that the course of the French Revolution had yet to reach its foreordained conclusion, opposition members insisted that they, rather than the Bonapartists, would be the ones “to apply the principles of the Revolution in their entirety” and found, by consequence, a new and modern order in the country.3
Conveying the modern through symbols and narratives required, however, furnishing counternarratives as well. Although opponents successfully used both the Jacobins and Bonapartists as foils in crafting a political identity for themselves, these juxtapositions were less convincing outside the explicit context of political opposition. Reformers turned their eyes instead to the countryside, finding there a vast population estranged from the modern society they valorized. Distinctions between urban and rural France had a well-established precedent in the country. Medieval histories related tales of the indigenous Gallic tribes conquered and ruled by the Romans. Romantics and nationalists interested in unearthing the roots of an authentic French nation in the early-nineteenth century put stock in these old ethnic genealogies and mapped them onto the present. France was a country made up of “a conquering race and a conquered race, vanquishers and vanquished,” as François Guizot explained in 1820.4 Liberals and conservatives critical of the country’s revolutionary nationhood were especially keen to emphasize continuity with a prepolitical Gallo-Roman nation. “Despite the French Revolution there have always been two peoples in France,” wrote Taine, “the Gauls on one side and the body of Latin fonctionnaires mixed with the debris of the German aristocracy on the other.”5 This story of two primeval and conflicting races was reinforced through ethnographic surveys and anthropological studies over the century as differences between a historic Romano-Germanic aristocracy and a subjugated class of Gallic peasants became central to narratives of the French nation’s historical evolution.6
During the Second Empire, political opponents would elaborate upon and reconfigure these narratives, wedding them to a domestic reform program with putatively modernizing objectives. Most striking were the ways in which quasi-colonial notions of temporality and assimilation were grafted onto former understandings of ethnic and racial difference. Distinctions between a depraved peasantry and French ruling class provided a framework for demarcating “modern” and “archaic” identities, and throughout the 1860s reformers readily employed such categories to define the boundaries and substance of a modern politics and political platform.7 Often exaggerated and erroneous, portrayals of French rurals did serve an important ideological function. As the antithesis of the modern individual, the coarse and ignorant peasant was viewed as “uncivilized” and morally deprived, and as such not logically expected to possess agency in a nominally modern society. Reformers found a collective sense of mission and purpose in calls to “educate” and moralize a barbaric peasantry, entailing that the creation of a modern democratic republic in France was never divorced from the civilizing process. As Alice Bullard has noted, “the moralizing project” of the French republic comprised an essential part of its “imperial character.” 8 Expressed through temporalized identities and dichotomies of civilization and savagery, republican modernity was easily fungible with the practices of colonialism as rural populations were transformed into citizens through a process of internal colonization.9
The imaginative nature of these stereotypes elicits scrutiny on many of the unstated presumptions underpinning ideas of “modern” politics and democracy that modernization theorists and liberal critics have proved reluctant to abandon. Political modernization has typically rested on assumptions that modern democracies are driven by broad sociocultural influences and evolutionary social change.10 Yet this political “modernization” often translates into a process of political “homogenization” between urban and rural spheres, one that can hardly be considered a natural evolution. The journalist Eugène Ténot, one of many advocates of modernizing the French countryside, reasoned accordingly in 1865, informing his fellow reformers that “ideas take their course only when they find men to carry and propagate them.”11 Modernization was a program actively pursued and encouraged by political elites who were seldom reticent when it came to declaring their intentions. “Democracy is not a natural phenomenon or the spontaneous product derived from the genius of a people or race,” Étienne Vacherot wrote in 1859. “It is, like all political societies, and perhaps even more than other political societies, the slow and laborious work of civilization.”12 Much like the civilizing and modernizing language central to Bonapartism and French colonialism, liberal–republican discourse exhibited a similar ideological striving for modernity, one centered on themes of democratization, civic activism, and citizenship that intended to mold a new type of society and individual.
Following the collapse of the Second Republic and the advent of a popularly sanctioned Napoleonic Empire, democratic opponents struggled to make sense of the turn their nation had taken. One culprit was “civic virtue,” or rather the absence of it. Republican and liberal critics chalked up the rise of imperial authoritarianism to a lack of “liberal mores” and educated voters in the country. Bonapartist étatisme and the passivity it inspired in citizens was one of the chief obstacles to establishing a true democracy in France, they contended. Years of centralized authority and rule by an overbearing state had transformed the French into what the liberal Royer-Collard described as overly-regulated population (peuple d’aministrés).13 “France, people say, is habituated to relying on the state,” Laboulaye lamented. “I know that this is our feebleness.”14 The antidote to this chronic passivity was the creation of a new type of citizen befitting the needs of representative liberal government. For young republicans loath to recognize Bonapartist rule, it was essential to nurture civic virtue in the populace and rehabilitate the French people.
The young republican movement of the 1860s was part and parcel of a general period of reflection taking place among republican elites. During the 1840s, republicans had flirted with notions of populism as they worked to enfranchise the majority of people who did not meet the property and financial qualifications to vote under the July Monarchy. This populism sprang partly from Romanticism’s interest in folkloric culture and idealistic belief in le peuple as the truest embodiment of the nation. Republicans of the 1840s enthusiastically spoke of reviving the nation through the collective action of the people and founding a social republic imagined as the mirror image of the oligarchic juste-milieu in power.15 Yet with the coming of the Second Republic, many republicans found their expectations shattered. The declaration of universal manhood suffrage in 1848 empowered the countryside with the vote, making the peasants an imposing three-fourths of the overall electorate. If republicans had supported mass democracy under the assumption that the will of the people was infallible and naturally inclined toward the social good, reality presented a sobering reappraisal.
To the horror of democrats, the newly enfranchised peasantry voted for conservative notables who mounted a formidable opposition in the National Assembly. The turn away from the revolutionary élan of February 1848 was made explicitly manifest at the end of the year with the election of Louis Napoleon, an ominous portent of the popular support that the Bonapartists would use to legitimate their illegal seizure of power three years later. Following the debacle of the Second Republic, various critics became wary of the populism that had played a central role in the ideology and political program of French republicanism since the days of the Revolution. As the rise of Napoleon III and the Bonapartists demonstrated, universal suffrage could be used to buttress authoritarian government, suggesting that democracy did not necessarily guarantee liberty. Moreover, Bonapartist statesmen bolstered a nationalist and democratic platform that attracted republican moderates and ralliés to the Second Empire.16 Bonapartism not only co-opted republican sympathizers but, more important, employed the langue of French republicanism against republicans.
While disgruntled republicans were quick to parcel out blame for this failure on an ignorant peasantry enamored with a Bonapartist pretender, the reality was quite different. The years of the Second Republic profoundly impacted rural politics and society in France. In building support for their platform of social reform between 1848 and 1851, democratic-socialists had carried out an effective campaign in the countryside and successfully forged a broad republican collation composed of rural workers, tradesmen, and urban political elites. Although Louis Napoleon’s police frequently disrupted republican networks, the efforts of republican socialists during the years of the Second Republic did win over supporters in regions situated in the south and center of the country, establishing strong and enduring bases of republican support in the provinces.17 The extent of this rural republicanization was made manifest in late 1851 when Louis Napoleon and his accomplices overthrew the elected government. The major theaters of resistance to the Bonapartist seizure of power came not from Paris, where Louis Napoleon had taken preemptive measures to thwart opposition, but from the countryside. Organizing resistance through regional networks and secret societies, peasants took up arms in defense of the Second Republic, staging, as one historian has called it, “the most serious provincial uprising in nineteenth-century France” with over a hundred communes participating in insurrection. Following the restoration of order, the great majority of rebels either jailed or deported came from the countryside as the Bonapartists attempted to purge the insidious “red” republicanism simmering in the provinces.18 Despite the fact that republican ideas had penetrated rural politics, urban republicans under the Second Empire saw fit to point the finger for the failure of the Second Republic at the mass of peasants who came out to vote in favor of the Second Empire in 1852.
In the following years, republicans abandoned the cult of the people that had long been a cornerstone of republican ideology. The grim situation facing republicans in the 1850s compelled reassessment and inspired a greater appreciation for the new realities that popular sovereignty posed. Democrats typically drawing their support from urban areas were politically marginalized in a country where the majority of citizens—some 70 percent at midcentury—lived outside of cities. Jules Ferry was correct when he claimed that politicians and publicists residing in cities knew only “the France that we are familiar with, that we see and that touches us.” “But,” he solemnly continued, “there is another France that, for the past fifteen years, liberals have hardly taken note of and that the liberals of the future will do well not to forget: it is the France of the peasants.”19
The opposition’s poor electoral showing outside of cities did not necessarily indicate that the provinces were the bastions of imperial support that disillusioned republicans assumed them to be. With the bulk of the former republican leadership in exile, rebuilding the networks that had spanned urban and rural centers under the Second Republic proved exceedingly difficult. Republican abstention also had a pronounced influence on electoral support, with high absentee rates at the polls allowing conservative candidates to take local and national elections with very little contest.20 The damaging effects of abstention had become so grave by the early 1860s that the seasoned republican Louis-Antoine Garnier-Pagès commenced a whistle-stop tour through sixty towns and villages in 1862 in an effort to convince republican supporters that abstention was a futile enterprise. While republicans did occasionally do well at the local level in some departments, victory at the national level proved more challenging, especially as republican candidates in the provinces tended to be former quarante-huitards who, associated with the disasters of the Second Republic, failed to attract sufficient support among rural voters.
In spite of efforts to attract greater support outside of French cities, a disorganized republican movement matched with the strong social networks maintained by conservative notables and parish priests in the countryside typically made for poor electoral showings in these areas by members of the opposition. The building projects and urbanization initiative spearheaded by the government also had an effect on electoral trends, stimulating a rural exodus that witnessed young men flocking to the cities in search of work. Urban migrations between 1852 and 1870 served to relocate the journeymen and colporteurs who had traditionally circulated radical literature and ideas earlier in the century, diminishing the channels through which republican propaganda had once been disseminated.21 Under the circumstances, the majority of oppositional democrats found themselves virtually shut out of the provinces, leaving democrats and reformers to speculate on the chasm separating the two parts of the French population.
“One wants liberty, the other ignorance,” Eugène Ténot, editor of the popular journal Le Siècle, opined in 1865, “one is discontent, the other complacent; one wants liberally, the other docilely.” In the provinces, he insisted, one found a “primordial ignorance” and natural inclination toward subservience that brought into sharp relief the “antinomy between the people of the cities and those of the country.”22 Romantics of the early nineteenth century may have expressed admiration for the Gallic purity of the peasant, celebrating him as the repository of the French traditions and customs that gave the nation its unique culture and identity. By the middle of the century, however, critics were inclined to see things quite differently. The rustic virtues and simple conventions of the French peasant once celebrated by intellectuals were replaced with degrading images of rural poverty and misery or astringently ridiculed as a formidable barrier to social progress. Writing to a friend in 1862, Edgar Quinet claimed he was not astounded by the nation’s support for the Bonapartist pretender, stating that servitude was the condition most natural to the habits and mentality of the French. “In all its years, [France] has never known anything else [but bondage],” he assailed. Servitude was “its tradition, its habit, its old atmosphere,” while liberty, “that true life,” remained to be realized.23
Pronouncements on the ingrained docility and customary deference of peasants were hardly more than excuses to justify the poor performance of oppositional candidates in the provinces, but critics liberally employed such arguments as vehicles for illustrating larger ideological positions. Commenting on the source of this provincial subservience, Grégoire Wyrouboff singled out the swarms of clerics and parish priests operating in the countryside, giving vent to his rabid brand of republican anticlericalism. “In the priest there is a habit of domination and in the people a habit of obedience deeply rooted for centuries,” he complained. Spreading science, that “element of civilization,” offered, in his opinion, the best means of combating this deplorable state of affairs and liberating an enslaved peasantry from the authority of medieval institutions and mentalities.24 Declaring that “Catholicism and despotism are brothers,” Vacherot similarly asserted that a religion preaching submissions and docility contradicted true liberty and could only serve as an obstacle to developing free and democratic institutions in the country.25 “Humility, confidence, obedience, imposed faith,” charged Jules Simon, “all of these phantoms from an abolished world cannot be brought back or exist without folly in the milieu of our modern world governed by reason and politics, and of which the first and last word is the sovereignty of the people.”26
The servility that republicans believed entrenched in the provinces constituted the root of the despotism that France, despite its numerous revolutions, remained unable to depose. Liberty, hailed by Laboulaye as “the common patrimony of civilization,” had yet to be established in a country that ironically prided itself on being the fountainhead of western civilization.27 Accustomed to centuries of despotic monarchial rule, the French were fundamentally ill-prepared to make rational political decisions or even comprehend the duties and responsibilities that democracy incurred. According to Ferry, the peasants’ understanding of legality and justice remained “in an almost savage state.” With his “naive fatalism” and ingrained deference to traditional authority, the peasant made no distinction between just authority and arbitrary power, leaving him to accept the judgments of his social betters and the power of the state without question.28 Ténot concurred. “Due to a longstanding tradition of despotism the sovereign always appears to [the peasant] as the absolute master, the Oriental despot whose will is law.”29 The “Oriental” character Ténot associated with provincial mentalities was telling. The rudimentary intelligence, superstitions, and social resignation routinely assigned to North Africans did not appear all that distinct from the majority of French one might encounter in the remote provinces, and political elites concerned with the nation’s moral character increasingly came to apply the demoralizing language of colonialism when referring to their metropolitan compatriots.
Accusations of social atavism went well beyond the submissive and deferential nature of the peasantry. They extended into the very heart of French rural society itself. Much like colonial indigènes, French rurals were impugned for their regional tribalism, which discouraged larger social associations and confined interests to immediate and contingent needs. The political consciousness of the peasantry remained severely immature, assuming a “local, narrow, self-serving, and timid” character that could not make sense of the larger national community to which they belonged, Ferry contended in 1863.30 If Arabs stood accused of lacking a national consciousness, French peasants were hardly any better, possessing only a rudimentary idea of shared national interests or a national identity. “Each village is a clan,” Michel Chevalier had remarked in the late 1830s after a visit to the eastern Pyrenees, “a kind of state with its own form of [local] patriotism.”31 For political reformers, this clannish aspect endemic to rural life presented a thorny impediment to forging a national and democratic polity. Like the “primitive” tribal social organization of North African Arabs, the parochial forms of sociability found in the provinces had to be dissolved in accordance with the needs and dictates of modern society. As Wyrouboff bluntly put it in 1868, it was now necessary “to wipe out the past and change ideas and mores.”32
In framing their modernizing program, liberals and republicans aimed to radically alter rural society, and the veritable means to achieving this end were first and foremost providing a political education for the mass of French languishing in a depraved state of “degradation and barbarism.”33 Ignorance in a people was, Charles Dollfus professed, akin to an “evil weed” that, when left to grow, corrupted independence and resulted in “moral barbarism.”34 Extirpating the seed of this barbarism was not only desirable but essential, he urged, lest France repeat the fatal error that had precipitated the downfall of the Second Republic. “A nation like ours armed with the universal vote cannot afford to play blindman’s buff with liberty,” Dollfus cautioned in 1861.35 The advent of universal suffrage had exposed the menacing “intellectual midnight extending throughout the countryside” first noted by Louis Blanc in 1848.36 The experience of the Second Republic left no doubt that the most essential task at hand was to create a new type of individual in the provinces. “As long as the political education of a people is not complete,” Vacherot apprised, “universal suffrage remains impractical and cannot be fully realized.”37
Allusions to rural savagery and the patriotic duty of the “enlightened” to spread the light of civilization into the darkest and most remote provinces of the country revealed the increasing penchant of French political elites to think in colonial terms. The advent of universal suffrage encouraged such perceptions as elites confronted questions and concerns regarding the incorporation of the masses into national politics. If the overwhelming majority of newly enfranchised citizens had constituted a virtual unknown for democrats in 1848, by the 1860s liberals and republicans believed they had a more informed, if jaundiced, idea of what lurked outside the cities and were repulsed by what they found.38 La France profonde, with its static time and moral barbarism, bore all the marks of the colonial other. As such, the peasantry appeared little more than raw human material to be worked upon and modified, a premodern and colonized people deprived of an identity and culture of their own.
The harsh critiques of rural society doled out by opponents were more often than not polemical in nature and aimed at discrediting the influence of the government’s economic and building projects in the provinces. Taine, whose depictions of the natives in southwest France during the mid-1860s were hardly flattering, revised his initial impressions of rural life later in the decade, noting in a letter to a friend that the peasantry appeared to be financially better off and less rustic than in the past. “They are contracting certain middle-class ideas,” he reported, “indulging in some comforts . . . thinking of the future and beginning to read newspapers.”39 During the years of the Second Empire, improvements in transport networks, urbanization, the growth of national markets, and the steady rise in the price of agricultural products had begun to generate wealth in certain sections of the country and encourage greater contact with the outside world.40 Opponents averse to acknowledging the regime’s accomplishments certainly found utility in reproducing the conventional images of rural savagery, but perpetuating these caricatures also possessed more constructive purposes as well.
Appropriating the dominant idioms of Bonapartism and tailoring them to the platform of the opposition often proved a more dynamic strategy than directly challenging the master narrative of Bonapartist modernity. In effect, the opposition and the government began to use the same vocabulary, and yet in doing so the picture that emerged in the parlance of the opposition began to look distinct from the state-monitored and capitalist-oriented society touted by imperial ideologues. Just as Persigny had insisted when promoting the government’s program of economic modernization, French civilization appeared “incomplete.” Yet its fulfillment was not necessarily to be found in rail networks winding through the country or factories spouting plumes of smokes. The task of modernizing and civilizing France entailed working directly on the vast majority of the French, enlightening them and familiarizing them with the practices of debate and association essential to the development of liberty, that “glory and force of civilized people.” 41 “Do you not see,” asked Victor Hugo, “that the old world has a fatal flaw, an old soul—tyranny, and that into the new world that is about to descend necessarily, irresistibly, divinely, a young soul—liberty?” 42 Republicans certainly did see the truth of Hugo’s testament and were intent on expunging this “old” despotism lying at the heart of rural society. To do so, however, would require a distinct type of acculturation centered on political practices and the making of new citizens. As Ténot tersely put it, the time had come “to set the peasant straight.” 43
By what means, however, were the peasants to be “set straight”? As a counterbalance to the despotic and insular politics of the countryside, democrats stressed the importance of active civic engagement. As Paul Cottin, a citizen from Ain who claimed to “take politics seriously,” affirmed in 1868: “Public life is necessary because it is indispensable to the free exercise of rights, which are themselves nothing other than the exterior accomplishments of our individual needs.” 44 Liberty was meaningless if citizens continued to remain atomized and detached from the currents of national life. “To attach citizens to their political privileges it is necessary to habituate them slowly to public life by associating them through the affairs of the commune, the department, the Church, the hospice, and school,” Laboulaye admonished. “It is necessary to make them understand these particular liberties that, in modern society, touch upon a great part of sovereignty.” 45 The Bonapartists use of popular sovereignty to prop up an illiberal and illegitimate government had clearly demonstrated that “in a country like France there could be no greater danger than the detachment of citizens from their proper affairs,” as Jules Favre claimed.46 The antidote to imperial “Caesarism” was to be found in refining the intellectual faculties of Frenchmen through education and, subsequently, nurturing a conception of citizenship and national belonging that would draw the disaggregated mass of peasants from their social and cultural isolation.
In encouraging robust civic engagement as an antidote to the apathy that fed despotism, liberals and republicans stood in stark opposition to Bonapartists who stressed the necessity of the centralized state in combating the degenerative forces of social revolution. Since the first days of the Second Empire, Bonapartists had shown an incorrigible suspicion of local government and political activism. If not properly monitored by the authorities, communes and municipal offices elected under universal suffrage could become potential havens for dangerous radicals and enemies of the regime, especially in the larger urban areas where republican clubs and associations had thrived during the Second Republic. Hoping to expunge political contentions and factional rivalries from local political life, the Bonapartists clamped down on the administrative and conciliar organs of the French communes in the name of public order and unity, subordinating municipal governments to the Ministry of the Interior. Prefects appointed by the state wielded great political influence and authority at the local level. They selected mayors without the approval of local constituents and manipulated universal suffrage during national elections by supporting state-sponsored official candidates, men who had curried favor with imperial officials and who would faithfully carry out the policies of the government, even in the provinces farthest from Paris.47
In this restrictive political culture, the roles of civic councils and municipal officials were significantly marginalized. “The members of the municipal councils are really fonctionnaires who have nothing in common with their citizens except for the expenses they impose on them,” Jules Favre reproached in 1867 during a speech before the Corps législatif.48 The relative independence and authority once enjoyed by representative councils and municipalities under the July Monarchy and Second Republic had become eclipsed by the central administration in Paris with the cadre of bureaucrats and state-appointed civil servants virtually doubling between the years 1852 and 1870.49 Political opponents condemned the bloated imperial bureaucracy and maligned imperial officials, painting them as public icons of the Bonapartist despotism they reviled. Prefects became especially popular targets during the 1860s as democrats assailed the “excessive centralization” sapping the vitality of the country and leaving it “ideally mediocre.”50 “Distant despots obeying the orders of another despot, the prefect either ignores the particular interests of the commune or overlooks them for political or personal reasons,” Charles Renouvier criticized. “[He] is in no way entrusted with defending the great moral, intellectual and material interests of those he administers.”51 Depicted as listless and incompetent, imperial officials were vilified as instruments of state authoritarianism who deferred to the wishes of their bureaucratic supervisors “without any responsibility to the public.”52
“It has become quite common to blame the prefects, to incriminate them on the slightest acts, to envelope all of them in a general condemnation,” the journal L’Europe reported in 1865 when summing up the mood of growing discontent. Local officials appointed by the ministry appeared “imposed on the commune, and for that reason, often become very unpopular.”53 Public disapproval of “excessive centralization” was not lost on imperial officials who remained conscious of the adverse effects that municipal appointments and the policy of official candidature had on public opinion. In 1863, Napoleon III directly addressed the issue in the midst of the government’s waning popularity, claiming that centralization had become overly burdensome for the regime. “The incessant control of the administration on almost every matter,” he complained, had become the “raison d’être” of the Empire in the public’s view.54
The extensive scope of state intervention in French public life was a familiar grievance of liberals like Alexis de Tocqueville and Benjamin Constant who saw centralization as an acute threat to liberty and civic virtues in the country. On coming to power, the Bonapartists played upon these liberal concerns, publicly supporting a policy of state decentralization while simultaneously employing the heavy-handed imperial bureaucracy to implement the government’s economic plans and clamp down on opposition. “Centralization makes up the force of France while rendering the hand of power everywhere,” Persigny wrote in 1854. “Yet,” he continued, “it is necessary not to overexaggerate its application and strip local authorities of all initiative.” In his opinion, centralization had destroyed the sense of individual initiative and responsibility in the country, substituting “apathy in place of action, listlessness in place of decisiveness.” Decentralization promised to give prefects and local authorities a more active role in political affairs, resulting in an effective administration that would encourage the formation of “men of government.”55
This view was reiterated in ministerial memorandums drafted over the course of the next decade. Officials incessantly warned of the consequences that the state’s unnecessary interference in local affairs had on the general popularity of the government. Policy initiatives should be more mindful of the “terrain and local customs” of specific localities and official candidates chosen with greater care and the interests of the local electorate in mind.56 Although the Ministry of the Interior defended its prerogative to nominate official candidates, it did not reject granting local officials “complete freedom in selecting candidates” when the election posed “no political significance” for the government directly.57 The growing consensus among officials frustrated by ineffective administrative channels and prefectorial dependency on the capital prompted debates on whether to curtail bureaucratic overhaul and allow civil servants more influence in shaping and directing policies. Prefects familiar with the interests and issues of the departments they administered, the reasoning went, were better suited to address local concerns and the day-to-day affairs of their respective populations than ministers issuing directives from Paris.
The prospect of decentralization first materialized in the late 1850s, and surprisingly it was the colonial administration in Algeria rather than continental France that provided the litmus test for reform. In an effort to appease critics outraged by the malfeasance and near-autocratic rule of the colonial regime in North Africa, Napoleon III announced a radical policy change in June 1858 aimed at diluting the power of the military and bringing the French colonies under a unitary state administration. Selected to head the newly commissioned Ministry of Algeria and the Colonies was Prince Jérôme Napoleon, a member of the Bonapartist inner circle known for his strong republican sympathies. Assuming his new post, Prince Napoleon supplanted the office of the governor-general and appropriated the portfolios of the various ministerial bodies that had hitherto directed Algerian affairs. From the start, civilian administrators were to be given a more pronounced and direct influence over colonial policymaking and the native populations.58 Writing to the emperor that August, Prince Napoleon assured that the new colonial ministry would “carry out modifications in the organization of public powers in Algeria” and “accord to the local authorities a freer and more direct action, permitting them to administer with more independence and responsibility.”59
Making good on his promise, he authorized the reestablishment of general councils (conseils généraux) in Algeria with the intention of allowing civilian administrators greater control over departmental budgets, land transactions, and the allocation of funds for infrastructure and public works. These general councils were not, however, to be subject to popular mandate, with councilors selected personally by the emperor from “among the most capable landowners, industrialists, and merchants of Algeria.” Turning to the role of civil servants in the colony, Prince Napoleon criticized the curtailed powers of the prefects under military rule and wrote it off as “a system where one drafts reports on everything but makes decisions on nothing.” To augment the authority of state-appointed administrators, he called for extending the scope of their powers within their respective departments, insisting that “if there is, in effect, a country where local power must have a certain independence it is Algeria where everything is subject to special conditions.” 60 True to the guiding principles of state authority and administrative control shared by his Bonapartist cohorts, Prince Napoleon’s colonial reforms never planned to reduce state power or democratize representative bodies; rather, they intended to allow state-appointed administrators “a greater latitude” of action in local affairs.61
Lasting a mere sixteen months before an imperial decree dashed the hopes of the settler community and reinstated military rule over Algeria in late 1860, the abortive colonial ministry brought to light the limits and shortcomings implicit in Bonapartist notions of decentralization and administrative reform. The étatiste ideology of prominent Bonapartists refused to countenance the attenuation of state authority in economic and political affairs, upholding the conviction that a strong state alone furnished the means of promoting social progress and the development of modern civilization throughout France. In Bonapartist parlance, decentralization implied freeing the cadre of state-appointed fonctionnaires and officials from the constraints of bureaucratic formalities and Parisian oversight. It sought to encourage competent and patriotic men amenable to the government to act with greater resolve and independence in carrying out their responsibilities. Reducing bureaucratic supervision did not, however, entail surrendering state jurisdiction over municipal and local offices and, least of all, subjecting them to popular elections.
Opponents skeptical of the Second Empire’s dedication to reform were quick to label the government’s talk of decentralization as nothing more than rigmarole intended to gloss a naked authoritarianism with a patina of liberalism. “The government and the opposition do not speak the same language,” Simon charged before the Corps législatif in 1865. “The word ‘decentralization’ does not mean the same thing for the government as it does for us.” 62 Attempts to outline a reform policy consistent with the government’s authoritarian principles and shelter municipal offices from democratic influences furnished political rivals with a crucial opportunity to lay bare the specious logic and deceptive promises of the imperial regime. “Neither the communes nor the departments are more free,” Ferry complained when assessing the situation in 1863. “It is only the prefects who have been emancipated.” 63 By the late 1860s, attacking Bonapartist étatisme constituted a mantra for all self-proclaimed partisans of liberty, rendering calls for decentralization and democratization a key source of unity for an opposition movement composed of various political and ideological persuasions. Criticism of imperial centralization became so pervasive that numerous republicans endeavored to warm conservatives to the idea of a republic by portraying it as the antithesis of the Bonapartist state. “Rather than suffocating municipal freedoms under a system of administrative centralization,” Jules Barni pledged, “the republican state will favor their development.” 64
Calls for greater municipal liberties and decentralization became a popular form of protest for the opposition during the 1860s, one that brought forth a series of reflections on the meaning of “modern” democracy and citizenship in France.65 Favre was not alone in his claim that municipal freedom provided the firmest guarantee of liberty in the country, contending that where municipal freedom did not exist there could only be “the subjugation of citizens.” “Everywhere that liberty is respected, municipal liberty reigns [and] everywhere that liberty perishes, municipal liberty is sacrificed,” he maintained. “To some extent, the social state of a people, in terms of its political, moral, and intellectual freedom can be measured by its municipal liberty.” 66 Yet liberals and republicans both realized that reducing state power in a country accustomed to constant bureaucratic oversight and intervention would have minimal results unless citizens were prepared to take an active role in their own affairs. The simple process of administrative restructuring proposed by the Bonapartists offered little in this respect, Clément Duvernois argued. Decentralization could be successfully implemented in France only if accompanied by “the extension of individual liberties.” 67
Having made a reputation for himself in Algeria as a fierce critic of the military regime during the 1850s, Duvernois migrated to France following the dismantling of the civilian ministry headed by Prince Napoleon and the suppression of his newspaper Algérie Nouvelle in 1860. From Paris, he continued to rail against the pernicious influence of excessive centralization and authoritarianism, adeptly tailoring his criticism of the colonial administration to the larger issue of metropolitan liberalization and democracy. Contesting claims that a strong state accelerated the march of human progress, Duvernois warned of the inimical impact that étatisme and concentrated authority had on the social development of a people. “Far from proceeding from the growth of the state,” he argued, “progress consists in substituting our vast association with distinct and independent ones, in developing the sentiment of individual responsibility through emancipation, and, finally, by diminishing everywhere the role of the state.” 68 Centralized authority was a poor substitute for individual initiative, and its long-term implications would constantly oblige the state to assume “an extensive, equitable, economic, and charitable nature to compensate for the individual.” 69 Lacking vigor and self-initiative, the French were accustomed to being taken care of and attended to in almost all aspects of their life, a condition that would only encourage stagnation, despotism, and decline over the coming years. “Today,” he advised, “the great misfortune of our situation is that the public spirit seems . . . relegated to Paris while the provinces remain disinterested in politics. Excessive centralization is the principle cause of this inactivity while the insufficiency of liberty is equally responsible for this lethargy.”70
Yet all was not lost in Duvernois’s opinion. The remedy to this deplorable situation was to be found in stimulating the “public spirit” and encouraging passive citizens to become engaged in political life. If the imperial government could not be counted on to carry out a policy of decentralization that would emancipate the provinces from the tutelage of Paris, it was necessary to infuse the peripheral territories of the nation with a new life supplied by local journalism and civic political participation.71 As Jules Simon had averred in his address to the Corps législatif, opponents of the Empire were, indeed, speaking a different language than their imperial rivals when confronting the issue of decentralization. In contrast to Bonapartist desires to streamline the state bureaucracy and produce more independent-minded fonctionnaires, liberals and republicans welcomed decentralization as an expansive and transformative process that would nurture self-reliance and foster a sense of civic virtue noticeably absent in imperial étatisme. “Decentralization, in its most natural sense, is to reduce certain central attributes of power and restore them to the individual, to the commune, [and] to the body of citizens,” as Laboulaye explained in 1863.72
Under the Bonapartist yoke- the commune was “only a collective peasant vegetating in poverty and dependence,” Ferry accused.73 These conditions fomented the stagnation and ingrained obedience detrimental to the “public spirit.” Conceptions of decentralized authority and active citizenship touted by liberals and republicans rested upon a conviction that public participation in municipal life would integrate the individual into the community and the larger nation, cultivating a strong social consciousness and civic ethos lacking in France. “The commune is the primary school of governmental science,” the republican deputy Pierre-Joseph Magnin claimed. “Attaining the power of administering their own commune will allow citizens to comprehend the price they must attach to the public sphere . . . [for they] will take a livelier and more ardent interest in the welfare of the locality and the village rather than in the great concerns of the state.”74
Creating this new type of citizen necessitated, however, complementary changes in sociability and a style of life altogether distinct from the autarky rife in the provinces. As Duvernois insisted, only through “the practice of civil liberties” would individuals come to acquire the habits and routines essential to “the practice of political liberty.”75 Within the purview of the new civil society envisaged by democrats, journals, and daily periodicals, what Laboulaye hailed as the “forum of modern people,” occupied a particularly significant role.76 During the course of the nineteenth century, the reading of newspapers increasingly became a familiar feature of urban sociability, amounting to a “ritual of public life” for educated French elites, according to Jeremy Popkin.77 Newspapers could be found everywhere in French cities by the middle of the nineteenth century: on streets corners, in kiosks, at train stations and cafés. “When one wants news, one finds it in the journal that he prefers or buys the closest one at hand,” noted Jules Simon.78 The splenetic Baudelaire summed up the popularity of nineteenth-century journal reading appositely when remarking that newspapers had become “the disgusting apéritif that the civilized man [took] with his breakfast every morning.”79 Whether one expressed admiration or revulsion for the new medium, journalism and newspapers clearly symbolized an integral facet of modern life in public discourse.
For all its rhetorical allusion to modern society and civilization, however, the Second Empire assumed a cautious stance when it came to the press. Committed to destroying factionalism and the seditious ideas that fueled disorder, Napoleon III empowered the government with strong discretionary powers over the press, assigning imperial censors the task of monitoring political journals and reporting any writing considered inflammatory or contrary to public morality. Although Persigny assured critics that “all serious and sincere opinions” would be allowed to publish freely, the imperial government placed controls on the press by requiring editors to obtain official approval in order to publish and extending favorable treatment to proimperial dailies. Punitive measures consisting of fines and imprisonment were used to weed out undesirable opinions and relegate political opponents to the margins of the public sphere.80 Political journals were nothing more than “a society of capitalists surrounded by a certain number of talented writers,” in the words of the journalist and deputy Adolphe Granier de Cassagnac, and, therefore, merited the state’s suspicion.81
A writer for the pro-Bonapartist journal Le Constitutionnel, Granier de Cassagnac was not being overly facetious in labeling newspapers a medium of capitalists and elites. Up until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, liberal elites dominated the French newspaper and publishing industries, with most journals serving as organs for their political views and opinions. It was, therefore, natural for liberals to be among the staunch defenders of the free press in France. “Public opinion” typically meant liberal opinion. In addition to serving as a medium for liberal ideas, newspapers also played a central role in the ideological outlook of classical liberalism. Not only did they represent a virtual public forum in which the “voice of reason” could be expressed; they equally provided the only “legitimate” arena outside of government where politics could be discussed and engaged. By confining the legitimate expression of political opinion to parliament and the press, liberals endeavored to avoid more popular forms of political activism and restrict political power to the educated classes.82
Imperial censorship marked a break with this core tenet of liberalism, and liberal-republican opponents did not hesitate to symbolize their commitment to liberty by vociferously defending journalistic freedoms and extolling the press as a “necessary tool of modern civilization.” 83 “The use of the periodic press is so profoundly entrenched in the mores of modern people, and particularly in France, that it is impossible for any government or revolution to wipe it out,” declared Prévost-Paradol.84 Bristling at the restrictions imposed on free speech and public opinion, critics attacked state policies that hampered suspect journals with high fees and censorship controls while extending privileges to proimperial publicists. “Rather than allow [newspapers] to penetrate the masses, you have rendered the press an aristocratic institution at a time when aristocracy no longer exists,” Simon charged.85 Refusing to capitulate to the shadow of tyranny that had descended upon the nation, Simon maintained his optimism that liberty and justice must ineluctably prevail. “The time approaches,” he claimed before the Corps législatif, “where all fictions and all barriers are going to finally disappear, and where the critic, the true sovereign of democracy and modern societies, will reign absolute.” 86
Simon’s principled defense of free expression stemmed from his conviction that the press was “the singular organ [reflecting] the intellectual and moral life of a country.” 87 More than merely the views of opinionated writers and editors, journals constituted, according to fellow republican Eugène Pelletan, the “daily confession of the nation,” offering a space where France itself was capable of being “entirely assembled as though in a public place.” 88 As a reflection of the political nation, therefore, newspapers occupied a principal role in the shaping of public life and association, providing the people with the “political education” needed for a healthy democracy.89 It was in the pages of daily periodicals that individuals were informed about politics and society, came to recognize their common interests with compatriots, and acquired their identity as citizens. In the purview of liberal-republican ideology, journals were a powerful medium for the dissemination of ideas among the populations of the countryside and, more important, a key vehicle for the process of political modernization envisaged by democrats.
“If you want to forge a political nation that knows its responsibilities and can defend its rights,” Laboulaye advised, “speak to the citizens about their interests every day.”90 The creation of a political society required nourishing a civic spirit and injecting new life into a rural world believed stagnant and dead. This denouement entailed introducing the countryside to new types of socialization and urging men estranged from civil society to appropriate the habits and practices central to an urban and modern milieu. Political elites saw this initiative to transform and assimilate the countryside as a primary duty, contending that failure would render the cause of liberty a dead letter in France. “The small cities and multitude of towns stretching across the countryside will become ardent hearths where the democratic idea will shine,” Ténot exclaimed with the zeal of a missionary.91
Unable to deny political rights to citizens on the grounds of inferior intelligence and lack of “capacity” as the previous generation of liberals had, the next generation of political thinkers was quickly coming to understand that the incorporation of the people into national politics necessitated familiarizing individuals with the values and practices that could buttress and sustain a stable democratic political order. Political modernization did not, therefore, imply a process of democratization tout court in the minds of liberals and republicans. Rather it implied universalizing a certain type of political acumen and the practices associated with it. In more general terms, this strategy translated into a process of democratizing elite values and interests and acculturating the mass of French inhabitants scattered throughout the rural periphery. Much as the republican intellectual Henri Allain-Targé contended in the 1860s, the essential task was “to raise the thirty-five million brutes who [made] up the nation to the level of active citizens and enlightened patriots,” of transforming them, in other words, into the type of men befitting a society conducive to order, economic expansion, and representational government.92
This form of politicization outlined a practical means of synthesizing elite control with democracy through an emphasis on homogenization and assimilation. Yet imposing values and nurturing new social and political practices in a democratic age required, in turn, new forms of power and influence outside of force and violence. Modernity signified the embodiment of this novel type of power, equating the imposition of certain values and cultural norms on others with the benefits of “modernization.” Modern society and the correlative act of modernization through which it was to be realized not only provided the justification to shape society and individuals in accordance with particular interests, but structured the very symbols, representations, and meaning of a new social reality. It became the essence of a lived experience, assuming a normative and irrefutable quality that would, in time, command French citizens to think of themselves as a modern and civilized people. Rather than an evolutionary or social process, “political modernization” actively created a new center of social and political power for a democratic age.
“The art of making men and citizens is the primary function of a democratic society,” the political theorist Étienne Vacherot claimed in 1859.93 This sentiment expressed, ultimately, the guiding principle of a reformulated republican ideology that found its purpose in a modernizing and colonizing agenda. By the late 1860s, critics began to express optimism that it would only be a matter of time before their vision of French society bore substantial fruit. “It is not difficult to perceive,” Léon Gambetta declared in 1870, “that not only in the cities, but in the countryside as well, there is a political fermentation penetrating into the lower classes of the population.”94 For republicans like Gambetta, this emergent society marked the horizon of the new republic, one that had been constructed through words and language during the years of Bonapartist rule but which dedicated republicans never doubted would one day be translated into a definitive reality. By the end of the Second Empire, the efforts of young republicans had synthesized the republican idea with the liberal ambitions of French elites, making it acceptable to a broader segment of the country’s political classes.95 “We shall see it, we shall see it . . . our Republic,” Pelletan exclaimed in 1868, “a beautiful social and political future will flow from the ugly task we are carrying out at this time.”96 Prior to its declaration in 1870, the Third Republic already constituted a living idea in the minds of its founders.