Observing the displays of French art at the Exposition Universelle in 1867, the art critic Théophile Thoré noted an impression of transition and change as he walked through the gallery hall examining the various exhibition pieces. “We are between two worlds,” he wrote, “between a world that is ending and a world that is beginning.”1 Thoré’s remark could have extended to the entirety of the Second Empire and two decades of Bonapartist rule. By the late 1860s, locomotives were facilitating travel and transportation throughout the country, telegraph lines now expedited the flow of communication, and mechanized production was turning out consumer goods at an exceptional pace; in almost every sector of national life under the Second Empire, what was understood as modernity was impinging upon the familiar world to which the French had long been accustomed. And yet despite these technological innovations and feelings of growing expectation, the years of the Second Empire remained nonetheless situated at the crossroads of modernity, a period trapped “between two worlds,” as Thoré stated.
A republican journalist who spent the first decade of imperial rule in Brussels as a political exile, Thoré made an incisive critic, and his depiction of the Second Empire as a threshold between an old, expiring world and a modern world on the cusp of realization was revealing. Although expressing nothing but contempt for Louis Napoleon and his followers, opponents of the imperial regime could hardly dismiss the influence that Bonapartist industrial and economic policies had on the country, even if this recognition was given begrudgingly. Yet they remained unwilling to recognize the detested regime as the embodiment of the new and modern type of society hailed by imperial spokesmen. For republicans, modernity would only come with the founding of a durable republican government and the liberty and national sovereignty that it promised. If the modernizing initiative spearheaded by the Second Empire signaled France’s entrance into the modern era, democratic opponents nonetheless insisted that the Bonapartists remained ill-equipped to bring this change to fruition and lead the nation to its proper destiny. As the positivist critic Hippolyte Stupuy claimed in 1870, under Napoleon III France marched along “a path almost complete” and resembled “a nation nearly free.”2 In the view of self-proclaimed democrats, the years of the Second Empire may have initiated a process toward a more modern type of world and society, but it could never fully represent or embody the modernity associated with France’s democratic-revolutionary heritage.
In the atmosphere of the 1860s, criticism of imperial policies increasingly came to share the opinion that the imperial government was unprepared to deliver the supposed social and political institutions that a modern society required. Everywhere one looked, there existed a state of arrested development and unfilled expectations. Taking in the sight of Paris in the late 1850s, Charles Monselet contrasted the images of a beautified and modern capital touted by government officials with the actuality of demolition yards and debris-littered streets that fast-paced urbanization had produced. “It is no longer the old Paris, but it is not yet the new Paris either,” he remarked soberly. “We are placed between memory and promise.”3 The Algerian notable August Vital would express the exact same sentiment in 1864 when assessing the government’s colonial policies, writing: “We are, as they say in the military, an ass poised between two saddles, between the old organization that has had its time and that is no longer taken seriously by anyone and a new organization that is anticipated and promised but has not yet materialized.” 4 Straddling two worlds, the government of Napoleon III stood accused of adopting palliatives and promoting half measures, seeking to please everyone while, in reality, pleasing nobody. “Half measures are dangerous,” warned the author and republican critic Émile Zola when reflecting on the Second Empire in 1868. “They kill governments.”5 Such became the epitaph of the imperial regime.
This conception of the Second Empire as a liminal period poised between a dying past and an innovative future has remained one of the enduring myths of republican history and identity in France. Ostensibly modern in its social and economic orientation yet hostile to the representative and free institutions that a modern society demanded, the Second Empire became characterized as a hybrid of old and new forms that ultimately proved incompatible with the modernity of a democratic and republican France. This reading of the imperial period has not only served to cast the liberal-republican opposition as the champion of a modernity that would come into existence with the founding of a new republican government—the Third Republic—in 1870; it would equally provide the basis for a narrative and ideological discourse central to French republicanism over the next century, enshrining republicanism at the heart of a nominally “modern” French society defined within the context of a liberal and democratic state.
This mythology overlooks the fact that perceptions of the Second Empire as a threshold period between tradition and modernity constituted a strategy employed by political rivals set on denying the modern identity coveted by the imperial regime and rejecting the master narrative of Bonapartist modernity. Concepts of modern time and society were not necessarily reflections of a world in the throes of industrial and social transformation. They proved a vital means of rationalizing conflicting democratic and imperial aspirations of the nineteenth century. As French social elites came to terms with mass democracy and the contradictory values of colonialism, the idiom of modernity furnished a new discourse with both inclusive and exclusionary implications that was capable of organizing social hierarchies and power relationships along new lines. This style of representation encouraged a shift toward an identity regime grounded in conceptions of time and temporality that not only broke with established tenets of classical “bourgeois” liberalism but also sketched the contours of a novel social order in which modernity became the legitimacy for power and domination in a country ostensibly committed to equality and pluralism.
The Second Empire may have become the victim of its own politics, but the politics of modernity it inaugurated persisted into the coming decades. No matter how despicable the Bonapartist clan may have been for hot-blooded republicans loath to recognize the illegitimate Empire, it was difficult to refute that an entire generation of republicans received its political education under the rule of a Bonaparte. The Third Republic had the example of Napoleon III at its disposal and the tepid formalism of the Second Republic was not to be repeated. The civic festivities, demonstrations of patriotism, and international exhibitions that would be staged over the course of the Third Republic sought to transform the government into an iconic regime with a memory and deep roots in the country.6 Republicans employed national celebrations and public spectacle to attach citizens to a democratic society that symbolically embodied the sovereignty of people and nation. These representations of society, whether described in terms of “nation,” “people,” or even “civilization,” remained intimately tied to the modernizing language and discourses elaborated since the French Revolution. Modernity symbolized an end toward which French political ideologies projected themselves, and while elites increasingly employed the idioms of nation, nationalité, and civilisation in their speeches and writing, they were never divorced from an ideological vision of a modern France.
For both the Bonapartist leadership and their opponents, modernity constituted a means to political action and legitimacy. To this end, the binaries reinforcing a new elite sense of self at midcentury were only essential as long as they were politically useful. If marginalized republicans had been eager to paint the mass of rural voters as vestiges of the old world in the 1860s, this opinion was subject to revision once in power. As a chronic suspicion of the urban working classes and the threat they posed to the social order grew in the late nineteenth century, French political elites were compelled to rely on the support of the rural peasantry in sustaining a conservative democracy. The conventional image of the rural “savage” proved incongruous with elite objectives, and it was unsurprising that in the wake of the Paris Commune leading republicans endeavored to rehabilitate the image of the peasant and associate the countryside directly with the interests and progressive values of the “new social classes” (nouvelles couches sociales). The transformation—both real and imagined—of la France profonde under the Third Republic revealed the extent to which modernity was a construction shaped and reshaped by elites as the cultural representation of the archaic peasant was replaced with that of the modern citizen.7
Modernity furnished political elites with the language and symbols capable of translating political form into a real and living idea that communicated a vision of a unified community associated across space and time. To represent and give embodiment to this abstraction required, however, complimentary actions and “modernizing” gestures. The Bonapartist state proved especially adept at conjuring the modern through economic campaigns, building projects, and industrial exhibitions, yet the extent of its modernizing impulses extended far beyond these theaters. Modernization was a process broadly understood as the colonization of primitive spaces by modernity, and the colonial implications of this outlook illustrated the dynamic relations between metropole and colony that emerged during the period. While the years of republican rule in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were instrumental in forging a mass colonial consciousness and transforming the mission civilisatrice into a national crusade, this does not negate the fact that the civilizing mission acquired a saliency during the years of Bonapartist rule that mutually structured and reinforced ongoing processes of nation and empire building. Nation and Empire, France and North Africa became central to the articulation of the new social imaginary that modernity anticipated. That a renewed French colonialism corresponded to the emergence of the postrevolutionary cult of the modern ensured that the “Algerian question” would occupy a central place in the debates over the meaning and import of modern society and French identity. This relationship between metropole and colony was strengthened over the years as the politics of modernity resonated through a society that was increasingly coming to see itself in national and imperial terms. The growing social and political networks encouraged by colonial migration and advancements in transport and communication entailed that French modernity was a trans-Mediterranean product.
Like the magic lantern shows that fascinated nineteenth-century spectators, visions of modernity were projected onto a North African world that to most Europeans appeared foreign and remote. These images diminished the distance between the Orient and their world, not only in terms of space and time but also in terms of the forms of identification it encouraged. In a political culture that valorized the modern, Algeria furnished a horizon on which claims to modernity were validated and contested, often with a furious violence. Through the cause of Algerian “regeneration,” Napoleon III conveyed his government’s modernizing ambitions and rationalized a nationality policy fraught with contradictions. For the Armée d’Afrique and Arab Offices, colonial modernization provided the legitimacy for military rule and authority once the “pacification” of Algeria had been achieved. Colonists hostile to the “Arabophilic” tendencies of the emperor and military equally pressed modernity into service and drew upon the new language of republican modernization and emancipation to fashion their own image of a French Algeria linked culturally and politically to Europe. Settler activism struggled to ensure that colonization would not simply be a metropolitan project monopolized by elites in Paris. In order to make this arrangement viable, however, the diverse settler population needed to obtain equality with its counterparts across the Mediterranean, demanding it in the name of civil justice and a common modern time and worldview shared with civilized men. It was this very same bond that offered the justification for ostracizing and dominating the primitive other in their midst. Modernity, as the French anthropologist Bruno Latour reminds us, is not merely a “break” in the regular passage of time, but “a combat in which there are victor and vanquished.” 8
When the Second Empire collapsed in 1870 due to a mix of domestic discontent and poorly executed foreign policy maneuvers, the link between the French metropole and Algeria would be strengthened by the new republican regime built on the ruins of the Bonapartist state. Meeting with Algerian delegates in Tours in October 1870, the provisional republican government showed its willingness to meet colon demands, declaring an end to military rule in the colony and granting Algeria representation before the National Assembly. In the coming years, discriminatory legislation against the Muslim population—the infamous Code de l’indigénat—and recourse to harsh extralegal punitive measures would ensure the hegemony and privileged dominance of a small colonial elite composed of European settlers.9 The retention of authoritarian administrative practices and desires on the part of the colonial government to maintain the boundaries between the native and European populations exposed dour misgivings on the part of administrators and politicians about fulfilling the goals of the nation’s civilizing mission and elevating a backward Muslim people to the level of French citizens. If statesmen hailed a modern and republican France as a departure from the authoritarian and obstreperous policies of Bonapartist authoritarianism, Algeria persistently stood as a glaring reminder of the contradictions and paradoxes that French modernity embodied in practice.
Historians have criticized the colonial republic for reneging on its emancipatory promise. Yet it is worth considering to what extent this outcome was a direct product of the logic and ideology that underpinned the brand of republicanism born from the Second Empire. Young republicans always professed adherence to the spirit and heritage of 1789, even as they grappled with the legacy of factionalism and instability the French Revolution left. Looking back to their revolutionary forbearers, republicans were obligated to keep the spirit and memory of the Revolution alive for ideological reasons while seeking to bring an end to the era of revolutionary politics at home. Preserving the revolutionary élan and unifying the community around a shared national mission to modernize the primitive necessitated a colonial French republic. It was in the colonial domain that the modernizing work of the French Revolution could be continually actualized and symbolically conveyed. The colonies were a place for the channeling of these revolutionary and modernizing impulses in a country that had grown weary of radical policies and the instability they invited. Until the very end of the empire, French colonialism remained premised on the promise of a modernity that could never, in reality, be fulfilled. The social imaginary of a modern France continually required “primitive” objects to act upon and others against which the possibilities of the modern could be projected and brought into sharp relief, for a modern people could only be assured of its own modernity through recourse to a project that sustained and nurtured that identity.
Today, as the attributes of European modernity secure themselves firmly beyond the continent, Europe finds its historic claim to a universal modernizing project compromised. The proliferation of nation-states across former colonial empires, the industrialization of world economies and the establishment of global capitalist markets have relegated Europe to a partner in a larger vision of modernity shared with non-Western societies. Modernity, once seen as a particularly European or Occidental phenomenon, has, in the twenty-first century, acquired its own culture, logic, and attributes that can no longer be considered purely Western or European in character.10 The advent of a postcolonial and globalized modernity entails the end of the European civilizing mission and with it the end of a particular idea of European selfhood and history. With Algerian independence in 1962, la France transméditerranéenne as it was understood ceased to exist, provoking a “postcolonial” France to redefine essential categories of nation and people and construct a new idea of Frenchness that, in many ways, is an ongoing project.11