Distorting mirrors: Visions of the crowd in late nineteenth-century France [1 ed.] 0300025882, 9780300025880

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Yale Historical Publications, Miscellany, 127

DISTORTING MIRRORS

Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-Century France SUSANNA BARROWS

New Haven and London Yale University Press

C opyright© 1981 by Yale University. All rights reserved. T his book may not be reproduced, in w hole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying perm itted by Sections 107 and 108 o f the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written perm ission from the publishers. D esigned by Nancy O vedovitz and set in VIP Baskerville type. Printed in the United States o f Am erica by T h e A lpine Press, Stoughton, Mass.

Library o f Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Barrows, Susanna, 1944— Distorting mirrors. (Yale historical publications. M iscellany; 127) Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Collective behavior. 2. Crowds. 3. France— Social conditions. 1. Title. 11. Series. H M 281.B 276 3 0 2 .3'3 81-3014 ISBN 0-300-02588-2 AACR2 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents Preface, Introduction 1 T he Crowd in the Late Nineteenth Century 2 Metaphors of Fear: Women and Alcoholics 3 Hippolyte Taine and the Spectre of the Commune 4 T he Crowd and the Literary Imagination: Emile Zola’s Germinal 5 Social Scientists and the Crowd, 1878—1892 6 Polemics and Politics: T he Question of Priority 7 Gustave Le Bon and the Popularity of an Idea Conclusion Selected Bibliography Index

vii 1 7 43 73 93 1 14 137 162 189 199 215

Preface In the years since I first began studying crowd theory in late nineteenth-century France, I have often remembered Ralph Samuel’s and Gareth Stedman Jones’s editorial in History Workshop (1976); the history of sociology, they claim, must be examined as part of “the development of bourgeois ideol­ ogy, whether as a vehicle of bureaucratic utopianism, scien­ tistic fantasy or social fear.” When I read their article, I had already completed the core of this manuscript (as a doctoral dissertation at Yale University), but I drew comfort nonethe­ less from their advice to plow through “the under life of so­ cial ideas and the circumstances to which they were ad­ dressed.” In part because Le Bon’s claims to be the father of a scientific crowd psychology have often been accepted at face value, I have sought within these pages to examine his writings and those of his contemporaries as complex refrac­ tions on late nineteenth-century French culture, and to fathom the layers of meaning embedded in their rhetoric. T he process of translating a set of ideas into a book was greatly facilitated by a num ber of institutions and individu­ als. A grant from Yale’s Concilium on International and Area Studies in 1973, and a subsequent summer grant from Mount Holyoke College in 1977, enabled me to work in French archives and libraries. In Paris the archivists of the Archives de la Prefecture de Police, the Bibliotheque Nationale, the Archives Nationales, and the Centre d ’Etudes Sociologiques were most helpful indeed. Mrs. Claire Benoit has typed several versions of the manuscript, and I have ap­ preciated her good hum or throughout. The editors of Yale University Press, in particular Charles Grench, Barbara Fol­ som, and my copyeditor Carol Buell, deserve special m en­ tion as the very models of patience and encouragement. A large company of scholars have helped in many ways. Vl l

viii

PREFACE

For my interest in the complex interplay between intellec­ tual and social history, I owe thanks to two form er mentors: professors Klemens von Klemperer and Fritz K. Ringer. It was in Dr. David Musto’s seminar at Yale University that I first broached the subject of crowd theory; I am grateful to him for his suggestions. Professors Henry A. T urner, Jr., Joseph J.-M. Ellis III, and Charles H. T rout have read various chapters along the way and saved me from many an unnuanced assertion. Dr. Barbara Kinder and Dr. John Og­ den translated medical terminology into a language I could understand. And I have profited from lively discussions with two experts on Le Bon: Roger Geiger and Robert Nye. In the past decade, fellow travellers in French history have given generously of their time and wisdom; I would like to thank in particular Michael Burns, Herrick Chap­ man, Nelly Hoyt, Christopher Johnson, Allan Mitchell, Pa­ tricia O ’Brien, Charles Rearick, Robert Schwartz, Robert Soucy, Louise and Charles Tilly, and W. Paul Vogt. But above all, John M. Merriman deserves credit for having en­ dured more talk, and read more pages, about crowd psy­ chology than even Le Bon probably could have tolerated. My colleagues in the history departm ent of Mount Hol­ yoke College and friends on both sides of the Atlantic have lent everything from moral support to typewriters. I am es­ pecially indebted to Pierre Delaunay, Nancy Frieden, Penny Gill, Leo Ribuffo, Mark Shapiro, and Diane Zervas. And for all m anner of sustenance, I am grateful to the households of the Isherwoods, Paintons, and the Michauds in France, and, somewhat closer to home, to the Gays and the Herberts. Most of all, I would like to acknowledge the unfailing sup­ port of three splendid mentors: professors Peter Gay, Stan­ ley Barrows, and the late Sarah Youngblood. As an adviser and friend, Peter Gay led me through what seemed to be a labyrinth of writing, caused me to reconsider both the style and the substance of the manuscript, and displayed throughout a hum ane understanding stretched beyond measure. It was my uncle, Stanley Barrows, who first

PREFACE

IX

charm ed me with his knowledge of French history and who has had the affectionate forebearance not to question my in­ terest in the crowd. At Mount Holyoke College, Sarah Youngblood gave to me, and to many others, a sense of pur­ pose and intellectual courage which no acknowledgment can hope to convey. It is not simply a convention to say that without the inspiration and wisdom of them all, I could not have completed the task. S.B.

Introduction One can no longer mistake that what is taking place today, what the coming year has in store, is the decisive crisis o f the republic, coinciding, by a singular irony, with the ostentatious celebration o f the French Revolution. — Charles de Mazade, December 31, 1888

Charles de Mazade was not a stupid man. For over forty years he had watched the drift of European politics, his eyes focused upon its many revolutions. For nearly thirty years he comm anded the enviable position of political commenta­ tor for the Revue des deux mondes—one of France’s leading journals.1 Mazade was a seasoned, if somewhat conservative, analyst, a man not given to political hyperbole. As he con­ cluded his column for 1888, Mazade predicted that the T hird Republic very possibly was breathing its last. And the irony he discerned in 1889 was not lost upon many of his readers. Yet Mazade’s brittle predictions ring hollow and melo­ dramatic to our ears. His 1889 bears little resemblance to the myth of the Belle Epoque. Enshrined in popular memory is a joyous France, proudly celebrating the centennial of the Revolution, attracting thirty-two million visitors to Paris for the feast of the Universal Exposition. Just three weeks after Mazade’s terse summary, Boulanger would miss his oppor­ tunity to overthrow the Republic, and throughout the sum­ m er months, Frenchmen and foreign visitors alike would ef­ face the stirring memory of Boulanger while promenading around that miracle of engineering—the Eiffel Tower. 1. Charles de M azade, “C hronique de la quinzaine,” Revue des deux mondes 91 (January 1, 1889): 227. M azade had written books as well as ar­ ticles on revolution in Spain, Italy, and Poland; he also published a study entitled Deux femmes de la revolution franqaise. 1

2

INTRODUCTION

Or so it now seems. But even the carefree spectacle of the exposition and the lofty patriotic ceremonies of republican France could not erase the sense of crisis of the T hird Re­ public in 1889. Somewhere between the fall of Boulanger and the trial of Captain Dreyfus lies a decade which only a cafe devotee or a casual tourist would call “gay.” Between 1889 and 1898 France would witness the inauguration of the May Day demonstrations, a wave of terrorist “propa­ ganda of the deed,” a marked increase in the num ber of strikes and violent demonstrations, the Panama scandals, the assassination of President Sadi Carnot, and the opening chapters of the Dreyfus Affair. By 1895 the Third Republic could rally only a fraction of its form er allies, and under the umbrella of antiparliamentary, antidemocratic rhetoric would stand individuals of quite different political sympathies: monarchists, Boulangists, syndicalists, anarchists, as well as disillusioned republicans and elitists of all stripes. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the Republic would lose an enormous percentage of its friends, which the main tendue of Ralliement could not counterbalance. To be sure, a num ber of devout Catholics did rally to the Tricolore after 1890, yet the scandals of the Republic and the spleen of the Assumptionists markedly reduced the effectiveness of Cath­ olic-Republican cooperation. The end of the nineteenth century, then, was as belea­ guered as it was belle, and it is against this backdrop of social tensions and political unrest that France’s artistic and intel­ lectual life must be placed. It is no simple coincidence that the Golden Age of Science was viewed by intellectuals as the apogee of anxiety and anomie. Perhaps only in the novels of Jules Verne did science conquer all adversity, but its pres­ tige, and to some degree its methodology, shaped the con­ tours of fiction, art, and social criticism. But the broad ap­ plication of science was nowhere near as disinterested, as “value-free,” as official histories would lead the casual reader to believe. Serving simultaneously as a window upon social dislocation and as a shield against anxiety, late nine­

INTRODUCTION

3

teenth-century science bore witness to the poet Gerard de Nerval’s observation: “Man has no need of Science when he lives in a Golden Age.”2 As the century drew to a close, many of France’s literary and scientific luminaries responded directly to the grim as­ pects of the Belle Epoque and grappled with social crises that defied facile analysis. In the eighties and nineties a num ber of scientific disciplines emerged that attempted to dissect newly perceived social problems in France. In an ef­ fort to understand rising criminal activities and other ex­ amples of social pathology, French criminal anthropology took shape in the late eighties. U nder the guidance of Eu­ rope’s most famous physician, Charcot, French psychiatry in these years searched for answers to what seemed like a puz­ zling increase in mental illness and sexual deviance. Within the wider sphere of French medicine, a num ber of physi­ cians tackled the formidable problems of alcoholism, the dangerously low birth rate, and the endemic bete noire, ve­ nereal disease. And under the rubric of sociology, Emile Durkheim laid the foundations for a rigorous science of so­ ciety—a science that promised to explain an unprecedented rate of suicide as well as other examples of anomie and so­ cial fragmentation. Unless all of these intellectual move­ ments are viewed in the context of the latent crisis of the T hird Republic, their sense of urgency and their value as chronicles of late nineteenth-century anxiety are lost. By 1895 criminal anthropology, psychiatry, and, to a lesser extent, sociology, were entrenched in French institu­ tions of higher learning. Yet they held no monopoly on French social science. In the decade between 1885 and 1895 at least one branch of social science was born and flourished outside the French academic system. This branch was crowd psychology. In 1895 the most famous of the crowd psychol­ ogists posed a terrifying challenge to his fellow citizens: 2. Gerard de Nerval, “L’E nfance,” Poesies et souvenirs, ed. Jean Richer (Paris: G allim ard, 1974), p. 35.

4

INTRODUCTION

Crowds are somewhat like the sphinx o f ancient fable; it is necessary to arrive at a solution o f the problems offered by their psychology or to resign ourselves to being devoured by them.3

The author of this statement was Gustave Le Bon—an in­ dependent savant, a well-known popularizer of science, a disillusioned elitist, and the close friend of many of France’s political leaders. And the book that summarized his views on the crowd was La Psychologie des foules, a work which Gordon Allport has called possibly the most influential book ever written in social psychology, and one that Sigmund Freud used as the touchstone for his theories on group psychology.4 Yet Le Bon was neither the first nor the most sensitive of crowd psychologists in France. When he examined the mys­ teries of the crowd in 1895, Le Bon borrowed heavily from the works of a num ber of Frenchmen and Italians. Crowd psychology—the “science of mass behavior”—appeared in France not long after the Franco-Prussian War, thrived in the stormy decade between 1885 and 1895, and captured the imaginations and fears of men writing in a variety of fields: fiction, collective animal behavior, criminal anthro­ pology, and history. The study of the crowd was never integrated into French i /academic life; to understand its evolution entails a journey ^ across disciplines and political allegiances. It is a tale that be­ gins with the histories of Hippolyte Taine, is transformed by the literary hands of Emile Zola, then subjected to the sci­ entific scrutiny of Alfred Espinas, Scipio Sighele, Henry Fournial, and Gabriel Tarde. Only after it had been molded by these many hands was crowd psychology crystalized into 3. Gustave Le Bon, La Psychologie des foules (Paris: Alcan, 1895), p. 90. 4. G ordon W. Allport, “T h e Historical Background o f M odern Social Psychology,” in Handbook of Social Psychology, ed. G ardner Lindzey and Elliot A ronson (Reading, Mass: Addison-W esley, 1968 ed.), 1:41. For Freud’s re­ liance upon Le Bon, see his Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, trans. Jam es Strachey (New York: Bantam Books, 1965), chap. 2.

INTRODUCTION

5

memorable form by Gustave Le Bon. Crowd psychology, in short, was an interdisciplinary venture— more baffling to us i J for its many forms. Yet the very diversity of its genres bears witness to the fluidity of ideas and inspirations in fin de siecle France. Beneath its multiplicity of forms lie striking similarities that unite the genres of crowd psychology. First, from Taine to Le Bon, all crowd theorists adopted the imposing mantle of science. Their writings aimed at a definition of the laws of hum an behavior—laws that would stand as immutable as those of the physiologist Claude Bernard. Second, their vi­ sion of the crowd was awesome, almost invariably terrifying. As they described the crowd’s savage, instinctual b e h a v io r,^ / these crowd psychologists encapsulated many of the fears of their wellztordo contemporaries— fears deeply rooted in the social fabric of the time. Their crowds loomed as violent, bestial, insane, capricious beings whose comportment resem -, bled that of the mentally ill, women, alcoholics, or savages: Third, all crowd psychologists were acutely sensitive to con­ temporary uprisings and violence in French political and so­ cial life. Between 1885 and 1895 crowd theorists recorded in magnified form most of the upheavals of the T hird Repub­ lic. Viewed in this light, their writings offer us a set of mir­ rors, refracting the world of popular protest in late nine­ teenth-century France. But how accurate, indeed, were their reflections on the crowd? As mirrors of late nineteenth-century collectivities, did this corpus of “scientific” writings realize the ideal of so­ cial realism established decades earlier by the French novel­ ist Stendhal? In Le Rouge et le noir, Stendhal had defined the novel as “a m irror strolling down a broad highway. Some­ times it reflects the azure blue of the skies, sometimes the mire stagnating in the muddy ditches.”5 As Stendhal’s met­ aphor suggests, the study of social perceptions demands an 5. Stendhal, Le Rouge et le noir (Paris: Editions Garnier Freres, 1960), p. 357.

6

INTRODUCTION

analysis of both the instrument and the object of its focus, a discrimination of “m irror” from “mire.” In order to assess the historical accuracy of crowd psychology, to measure and explain its possible selectivity or distortion, we must focus our attention upon the object of their anxious scrutiny—the crowd in fin-de-siecle France.

1

The Crowd in the • Late Nineteenth Century In the fall of 1885, an Austrian physician came to Paris to study with the celebrated neurologist, Jean-Martin Charcot. Although most of his attention was given to the Salpetriere, Sigmund Freud put aside a few minutes to describe “that overdressed sphinx,” the city of Paris: The city and its inhabitants strike me as uncanny; the people seem to me to be o f a different species from ourselves; I feel they are possessed o f a thousand demons; instead of “Mon­ sieur” and “Voila I’Ecfio de Paris," I hear them yelling “A la lanterne,” and “A bas” this man and that. . . . They are a peo­ ple given to physical epidemics, historical mass convulsions, and they have not changed since Victor Hugo wrote Notre Dam e.1

T he tone Freud adopted was lighthearted; he was attempt­ ing to amuse his future sister-in-law. But behind the enter­ taining facade, Freud had broached a very serious subject: the violent and volatile nature of nineteenth-century French politics. For nearly a hundred years, “revolution” had been associated with France; the uprisings of 1789, 1830, and 1848 claimed Paris as their source and Europe as their delta. A fourth attem pt at revolution in 1871 had been isolated and brutally suppressed; Thiers had snuffed out the Com­ mune, but had he definitively destroyed the revolutionary impulse of France? Freud, and many other Europeans, thought not.

1. Sigm und Freud, Letters of Sigmund Freud, trans. Tania and Jam es Stern (N ew York: Basic Books, 1960), pp. 187-88.

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THE CROWD IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

By the mid-eighties, violence and the prospect of revo­ lution had returned to France. T he reforms of the O ppor­ tunists, Gambetta’s alliance of patriotic republicans, gave French citizens the right to express their discontent with a Republic that was too egalitarian for some and too cowardly, corrupt, or radical for others. Strikes, demonstrations, and anarchist terrorism were patent signs of disaffection, albeit of different sorts. Politics in these years was measured not only by the ballot box or by the affairs of Parliament but also by the “street” and by the crowd. With every scandal that blotted the reputation of the Third Republic, civil dissidence and antiparliamentary rhetoric increased. T he enthusiasm with which citizens of all political persuasions greeted the demagogue Boulanger and the proletarian parades on May Day caused many observers to see the Third Republic as vi­ olent and politically unstable. As Denis Brogan has re­ marked, “May Day in Paris in the ’nineties of the last cen­ tury was not, in the eyes of the alarmed bourgeoisie, a mere proletarian version of July fourteenth; it was a dress re­ hearsal of a revolution.”2 Contemporary witnesses, as I shall argue, were more likely to view it as its opening night. And at stage center stood the crowd. It was the crowd that gave birth to the Third Republic and became the bane of its existence. On September 4, 1870, a group of bellicose Parisians had declared the Repub­ lic; nearly seven years were to elapse before it became a real­ ity. In the meantime, France had been humiliated by a Ger­ man victory, torn by the civil strife of the Commune, and divided over the issue of a monarchist restoration. The seventies had been a strangely silent decade, an era when the future of democracy was tenuous, when many of its most powerful left-wing critics were exiled or in prison. Thiers’s repression of the Commune was directly responsi­ ble for the truncation of the Left. According to Jacques 2. D. W. Brogan, The Development of Modern France, vol. 1, From the Fall of the Empire to the Dreyfus Affair (New York: H arper T orchbooks, 1966), p. 187. ’

THE CROWD IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

9

Rougerie, the most thorough historian of the Commune, nearly one-fourth of all male Parisian workers disappeared from Paris after the semaine sanglante of May 1871. At least 20,000 had been killed and thousands more arrested or in hiding.3 For the Left, the repression was costly indeed; it had lost its leaders, thousands of its followers, its means of organization, even its emblems. Syndicats were illegal, and so was affiliation with the International. Until 1879 the govern­ ment refused to recognize either the Marseillaise as the an­ them or the fourteenth of July as the anniversary of the Re­ public. As if to underscore its autocratic foundations, the government sat—also until 1879—at Versailles. The crowd, in short, was not welcome. But by 1880, the Elysee Palace, the Chamber of Deputies, and the Senate were controlled by Republicans, and for five years, the tenor and promise of the Third Republic shifted keys. T he Comm unards were permitted to return to France in 1880. T he law of July 28, 1881, gave the press—even the left-wing press—great latitude in publishing newspapers, political commentaries, and placards. And the church’s au­ thority in matters of education and the family was roundly attacked. Between 1880 and 1885, the national educational system was restructured by the Ferry laws. Jules Ferry, the minister of education, proposed widespread changes in pri­ mary education, including the end of religious training in state schools, the dismissal of clerical teachers from non­ Catholic institutions, and the formation of teacher-training schools in all departements of France. For the first time, the government provided postprimary and academic secondary education to women and insured that national education be secular and republican in character. And the state similarly asserted its jurisdiction over marital relationships: divorce, which had been abolished in 1816, was reinstated in 1884. In addition to the amnesty of the Communards and the press law, republicans in the early eighties made other 3. Jacques R ougerie, “La Com position d ’une population insurgee: La C om m un e,” Mouvement social 48 (July-Septem ber 1964): 31—48.

10

THE CROWD IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

overtures to the working classes. Public meetings and elec­ toral meetings, which had been ruthlessly patrolled and sup­ pressed in the seventies, were legalized in 1881.4 Three years later, syndicats were officially recognized. Both work­ ers and employers were permitted to organize—with certain stipulations that they register their leaders with the govern­ ment and that their activities not include politics. And the re­ publicans took pains to minimize the interference of the army in civil affairs; Waldeck-Rousseau’s circular of Febru­ ary 27, 1884, urged prefects to use the police, rather than the army, to maintain order in case of strikes or dem ­ onstrations.5 The Opportunists’ programs of secular educational re­ form, limited guarantees of working-class rights and free­ doms, and imperialist expansion achieved a measure of suc­ cess, but at a cost. Militant Catholics—and there were many in France—deplored the “godless” system of education, but the Ferry laws were passed in spite of threats of violence and mass demonstrations. Collectivists often criticized the limi­ tations placed upon the syndicats and argued that the gov­ ernm ent sought to control and weaken, rather than protect, the working poor. And French opinion was sharply divided on the Imperialist question. While nearly all France mourned the “rape of Alsace and Lorraine,” many citizens, and a large percentage of Parliament, felt that Ferry’s plan to recoup prestige by African and Asian expansion was a sorry substi­ tute for grandeur. By 1886, it was clear that the government had done a great deal for the anticlerical factions and somewhat less for 4. O n the liberalization o f press laws and freedom to assem ble, see Louis Gervais, Du Droit de reunion en France et en Angleterre (M ontpellier: Im prim erie Firmin et M ontaine, 1913); M aurice M enanteau, Les Nouveaux Aspects de la liberte de reunion (Paris: Librairie technique et econom ique, 1937); and M ichel Baffrey, Le Droit de reunion en Angleterre et en France (Paris: Les Presses m odernes, 1937). 5. Pierre Sorlin, Waldeck-Rousseau (Paris: A. Colin, 1966), p. 289, and M ichelle Perrot, Les Ouvtiers en greve (Paris: M outon, 1974), 1:190—94.

THE CROWD IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

11

the revanchards and the workers. To paraphrase Peguy, the T hird Republic had been transformed from mystique to poli­ tique, and for many Frenchmen, that shift brought swift dis­ illusionment. A measure of disaffection could be found in several quarters: among the millions who cheered General Boulanger, among workers on strike, and among the protes­ ters during the Wilson scandal. And all of these forms of protest were crowd phenomena. The rapid rise of General Boulanger in the late eighties sharply illustrated the tenuous foundation of the Republic, the popularity of revanche, and the awesome power of the political crowd. Suggested for the post of war minister by the radical politician Clemenceau in 1885, Boulanger quickly became France’s most charismatic figure. The army ap­ plauded his reforms of military dress, food, and lodging; staunch republicans admired his removal of royalty from the officer corps; and countless other Frenchmen were daz­ zled by his handsome equestrian posture and sleek black horse. At the Bastille Day parade in 1886, the full extent of Boulanger’s popularity became clear. One hundred thou­ sand spectators gazed at the dashing war minister, and even the soldiers faced right toward him rather than addressing the president to their left. Boulanger was the hero of the day, immortalized (at least temporarily) in song, soap, and liquor.6 Boulanger initially appeared as the democratizer and friend of the workers. During the violent strike of the coal miners of Decazeville in 1886, he had endeared himself to thousands of French workers by suggesting that the military occupation force in Decazeville had no aims contrary to 6. Louis Lepine said o f B oulanger’s popularity: “Every possible m ethod was em ployed to stir up his grow ing popularity— newspapers, brochures, portraits sent by the m illions to the provinces, songs, prospectuses, even Pa­ risian souvenirs carried his effigy” (Ales Souvenirs [Paris: Payot, 1929], pp. 66—67). See also A drien Dansette, Le Boulangisme (Paris: Librairie A rthem e Fayard, 1946), p. 52, and Jacques N ere, Le Boulangisme et la presse (Paris: A rm and Colin, 1964), for reproductions o f Boulangiana.

12

THE CROWD IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

those of organized labor. He added, “At this very moment, perhaps every soldier is sharing his rations with a m iner.”7 By 1887, he was endowed with a second symbol: General Re­ vanche, General Victoire, for his readiness to provoke Ger­ many. T he republicans feared that Boulanger had comm an­ deered more than his share of followers. In a cabinet upheaval in May 1887, Boulanger lost his post. Three times within the next month, crowds assembled on the streets of Paris to protest the general’s forced resignation.8 Fearing a coup d ’etat, the government unofficially exiled Boulanger to an army post in Clermont-Ferrand. A three-line announce­ ment that Boulanger was to leave Paris on July 8 drew at least 20,000 devotees to the Gare de Lyon. Thousands chanted “To the Elysee!” (the president’s residence), while others wrestled with the police or threw themselves on the tracks in an effort to prevent the general’s departure.9 Several months after Boulanger’s departure, the Wilson affair triggered a new wave of demonstrations in Paris. T he president of the Republic, Grevy, was seriously com pro­ mised by the disclosure that his son-in-law, Daniel Wilson, trafficked in bribes and influence. For two weeks, Grevy re­ fused to resign, preferring rather to save his position and modify the cabinet. By November 30, discontent with Grevy’s continued occupancy of the Elysee provoked dem ­ onstrations and meetings among leftists and Paul Deroulede’s Ligue des Patriotes. T hat evening over 4,000 Blanquists packed the Salle Favie to listen to General Emile Eudes, Edouard Vaillant, and Louise Michel. Most of the speeches dwelt upon the probable successor to Grevy, Ferry—whom the old Communards rem em bered as “Ferry Famine” and others had nicknamed “Ferry le tonkinnois.”10 Amid the sounds of chairs and tables being crushed by the weight of

7. Brogan, Modern France, 1:186. 8. M ichael Curtis, Three against the Third Republic (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1959), p. 28, and Lepine, Souvenirs, p. 66. 9. Lepine, Souvenirs, p. 68. 10. A ssociating Ferry with French im perialist expansion in Indochina, the Left had nicknam ed him “le T onk in n ois” in 1885 and used the un­ popular war with China as the rallying cry for his rem oval from office.

THE CROWD IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

13

the crowd, Eudes explained that a cry of “Down with Ferry” meant not simply “Down with the Tonkinnois ” but rather “Down with the presidency and the senate.” Louise Michel asked her audience to profit from the governmental crises by taking the revolution to the streets. Ferry, she conceded, was an assassin, but the “great villain” of French society was property, and property must be destroyed. And according to the unsympathetic accounts in Le Temps, several speak­ ers—including Duc-Quercy and “a young limonadier”— threatened to use dynamite to effect their revolutionary ends.11 Across Paris, at the crowded Salle Gaucher, two Marxists, Jules Guesde and Paul Lafargue, preached a simi­ lar sermon of revolution, but without the references to dynamite. T hat night, and for the following three days, Paris was flooded by crowds and demonstrations. The Quai d ’Orsay was choked with throngs of Deroulede’s followers (wearing, in equal numbers, the police claimed, bourgeois top hats and workingm en’s caps), chanting, insulting, and evidently stoning the police, who repeatedly charged and dispersed the assembled groups. T he following day, Parliament con­ vened at Versailles to elect Grevy’s successor. Although Ferry at first led the field of candidates, by six o’clock Sadi Carnot, the candidate favored by Clemenceau, had been elected. T he election, concluded the historian Adrien Dansette, “had two great electors: the street and Clemenceau.”12 T he Wilson affair sharply exacerbated discontent with the Republic; meanwhile Boulanger made overtures to the roy­ alists. Shortly after the New Year in 1888, he embarked on a program of “piecemeal plebiscite,” by entering his name in by-elections throughout France. With a few exceptions, Bou­ langer, arm ed with royalist funds and an American-style campaign manager, scored astounding victories. On January 27, 1889, just several months before the general elections, Boulanger won even in Paris, the traditional haven of the \ \ . Le Temps, D ecem ber 2, 1887, p. 2. 12. A drien Dansette, L ’A ffaire Wilson et la chute du President Grevy (Paris: Librairie A cadem ique Perrin, 1936), p. 233.

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THE CROWD IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Left. His victory meant many things to many people: he stood as the hero of royalists, revisionists, the military, and some sectors of the working class, and perhaps most im por­ tant, as the symbol of discontent with the T hird Republic. So powerful was Boulanger’s critique of the regime that the “apolitical” Edmond de Goncourt nearly broke his unblem­ ished streak of refusing to vote. “If I had ever voted,” he confided, “I would have voted for Boulanger, even if it means uncertainty . . . at least the unknown is the deliver­ ance from what now exists.”13 On the evening of his victory in Paris, somewhere between 30,000 and 100,000 Parisians gathered outside the restau­ rant where Boulanger and his friends were celebrating and again serenaded the victor with chants of “To the Elysee.”14 Boulanger faltered, most probably preferring to wait for the general elections and thereby to gain power legally. But the moment had passed. Rumors circulated that the republicans would attempt to try the general; Boulanger became terri­ fied, and in March he fled with his ailing mistress to Bel­ gium. Two years later his mistress succumbed to tuberculo­ sis, and the forlorn and penniless “brave general” committed suicide on her grave. And so the Republic survived, but as many would argue, only by default. Boulanger’s meteoric career had clearly illustrated the staggering potential of crowds and a widespread hunger for a charismatic leader. Only ten years after MacMahon had been forced to resign for the coup de seize mai, Frenchmen showed themselves all too willing to exchange an unstable, unpopular, and corrupt Republic for the “unknown,” even if that meant authoritarian rule. For leftist citizens, scandal 13. Edm ond de G oncourt, Journal des Goncourt: Memo ires de la vie litteraire (Paris: Bibliotheque Charpentier, 1887-95), 8:12. 14. Dansette, Le Boulangisme, pp. 243—51. Frederic H. Seager argues that no m ore than 30,000 people gathered outside the restaurant in The Boulan­ ger Affair: Political Crossroad of France, 1 8 8 6 -1 8 8 9 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1969), p. 204. In either case, the crowd was enorm ous.

THE CROWD IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

15

and the rising star of Boulanger were signals for revolution­ ary agitation. Although Boulanger himself had failed to capture the Elysee, the memory of his extraordinary hold over crowds haunted contemporaries. T he memoirs of Louis Lepine, who during Boulanger’s heyday served as secretary-general of the Paris police, alleged that mass Boulangist demonstra­ tions had three times imperiled the Republic.15 Crowd psy­ chologists like Le Bon and Paul Adam were similarly preoc­ cupied with Boulanger’s inexplicable mass prestige. Adam himself was an active partisan of Boulanger. In 1889 he joined Boulanger’s Parti National, edited the party paper in Nancy, and was a candidate in the Lorraine.16 His experi­ ences in the late eighties furnished material for two of his novels: L'Essence de soleil and Le Mystere des foules. And Gus­ tave Le Bon, in La Psychologie des foules, twice used Boulan­ ger as an example of how prestige could transfix a crowd. T he general, Le Bon contended, commanded the blind “re­ ligious” devotion of a hundred thousand men: No country inn was without a picture o f the hero. People at­ tributed to him the power to rectify all injustices, all evils, and thousands of men would have given their lives for him. No place would have been denied to him in history if his charac­ ter had been equal to his legend.'7

Even Edm ond de Goncourt mused over Boulanger’s “curi­ ous” and “inexplicable” popularity that could “only be ex­ plained by a disaffection with the status quo.” Six months later, Goncourt again broached the subject with a classmate of Boulanger, a M. Brachet, who told the diarist that Bou­ langer had “the talent, the very special talent of appealing to 15. Lepine, Souvenirs, pp. 66—67. 16. For biographical details on Adam , see Marcel Batilliat, Paul Adam (Paris: Bibliotheque internationale d ’Edition, 1903), and G eorgina Hicks, Political and Social Aspects of Paul Adam's Historical Novels (Urbana, 111., 1943). 17. G ustave Le Bon, La Psychologie des foules (Paris: Alcan, 1895), p. 64.

16

THE CROWD IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

the emotions of those he addresses, and that he very often has the good fortune of choosing words which are seductive, in short he is an igniter of crowds."1* Boulanger’s charismatic adventure had profoundly di­ vided the French body politic. In order to mend its wounds, the Republic needed time and tranquility. But such emol­ lients were not forthcoming. Three threats to the fragile equilibrium of the Third Republic were to intersect in the early nineties: the Panama scandal, a formidable wave of strikes and demonstrations, and anarchist terrorism. T he three strands were distinct; striking workers seldom resorted to dynamite and corrupt parliamentarians rarely belonged to the Left. Yet the confluence of these assaults between 1890 and 1895 produced a sense of foreboding among many observers, a sense of fear that led them to confuse and oversimplify their “enemies.” T hroughout the closing months of 1892, staunch republi­ cans, men of the Right, and leftists found reason to believe that the “enemy” had infiltrated the government. T hrough parliamentary inquiry and exposes in the anti-Semitic paper La Libre Parole, the bankruptcy and corruption of the Pan­ ama Canal project became known. In 1889 Ferdinand de Lesseps, the aging hero of the Suez Canal project, had been authorized to build a canal across the isthmus of Panama. To finance the endeavor, a series of public bonds were is­ sued. From the start, the enterprise was disastrous. Yellow fever killed workers in droves, the plans were ill conceived, and the financing of the operation was most irregular. A d­ ditional shares were sold to continue the herculean task, but most of these funds were used as bribery to keep critics, pol­ iticians, and journalists from revealing the full extent of the debacle. By 1892, however, the word was out, and the French public realized that no less than $300,000,000 had been sunk into the project. T he now senile eighty-eight 18. Goncourt, Journal, 8:13, 75.

THE CROWD IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

17

year-old Lesseps and his associates were tried and sentenced to prison, and a num ber of politicians, including Clemen­ ceau and the righteous Floquet, were soon voted out of office.19 Because of the Wilson and Panama scandals, large num ­ bers of Frenchm en in the nineties equated the Republic with graft. In the national elections of 1893, nearly 30 percent of all registered voters refused to go to the polls; abstentions num bered the second highest of all elections during the pe­ riod between 1876 and 1914.20 And anti-Republican senti­ ment took other tangible forms. Socialist candidates, who in 1881 had gathered only 50,000 votes and no seats in parlia­ ment, in 1893 claimed 600,000 votes and nearly fifty seats. T he electoral growth of socialism, both independent and party affiliated, could be traced in part to a widespread dis­ affection with a Republic which had shown itself venal, cor­ rupt, and relatively unsympathetic to the pressing social and economic problems of the day. A few months before the first May Day demonstration in 1890, Edm ond de Goncourt boasted that a phrase from his Idees et sensations, published in 1866, was circulating among many of his friends. “Savagery,” he had written, is necessary every four or five hundred years to revitalize the world. Otherwise, it would die o f civilization. When bellies are full and men can no longer fornicate, they are overrun by sixfoot savages from the North. Now that there are no longer any savages, it will be the workers who in fifty years will ac­ complish the task. And it will be called the social revolution.21

Goncourt had anticipated one of the preeminent character­ istics of the late nineteenth-century conservative mentality— 19. A drien Dansette, Les Affaires du Panama (Paris: Perrin, 1934). 20. See Jean-M arie M ayeur, Les Debuts de la Troisieme Republique (Paris: Seuil, 1973), pp. 178, 209, 210, and Francois G oguel, La Politique des partis sous la Troisieme Republique (Paris: Seuil, 1946), p. 80. 21. G oncourt, Journal, 8:147.

18

THE CROWD IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

the fear of socialism and industrial workers.22 While the “so­ cial revolution” had not come to France by 1890, the growth of working-class organizations, the increase in strikes and demonstrations, and the steady rise o f socialist spokesmen in Parliament gave many men of property cause for alarm. And the signs of proletarian militance, which had been se­ verely muffled in the seventies, returned as soon as the re­ publicans gained control of the government. The legalization of the syndicats and the freedom to pub­ lish and assemble gave the French working classes the pre­ requisites of organization and protest. Most nineteenth-cen­ tury syndicats were apolitical and antiparliamentary in character, and their growth in the closing decades of the century was steady but modest. In 1890, nearly 140,000 workers belonged to 1,000 syndicats; five years later, the membership had nearly tripled (419,172 members in 2,163 syndicats).23 Compared with Germany, France’s syndicats were small indeed. In 1890 the French economy w7as far less industrialized than her eastern neighbor, and the economic slump of the eighties had made organization all the more difficult. Yet despite all these shortcomings, an increasing num ber of workers utilized the strike and the demonstration to protest against what they considered to be inadequate wages. T he curve of strikes between 1885 and 1895 reflects the rising tide of proletarian discontent. According to the figures recently compiled by Michelle Perrot, the num ber of strikes in the seventies and eighties far exceeded the official figures drawn up by the government. Between 1871 and 1879, an average of 80.4 strikes erupted throughout France each year. During the economic slump of the eighties the num ber of strikes more than doubled (186.5). And in the first half of 22. See Sorlin, Waldeck-Rousseau, pp. 3 56 -6 8 ; G oguel, La Politique, pp. 82—85; and Perrot, Les Ouvriers en gr'eve. 23. Edouard Dolleans, I'Histoire du mouvement ouvrier en France (Paris; Librairie Arm and Colin, 1953), 2:30; Perrot, Les Ouvriers en gr'eve, 2:447, lists the num ber o f syndicats and their m em bers from 1876 to 1913.

THE CROWD IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

19

the nineties, the pace accelerated just as markedly: between 1890 and 1894, at least 1,894 strikes were recorded by the newly organized Office du Travail, an average of 378.8 a year.24 By any standards, working-class organizations and re­ bellions had mushroomed, and crowd psychologists were acutely sensitive to these changes. Strikes had increased; they had, in fact, quadrupled within two decades. And although crowd psychologists had not quantified the curve of prole­ tarian dissidence, they were quick to associate strike waves with experiences like the Commune. Recent students of the strikes of the young T hird Repub­ lic have emphasized the “defensive” character of these re­ volts.25 In the face of declining profits, French employers often called for reductions in wages. Workers frequently re­ taliated by refusing to work and were likely to press vehe­ mently for the restoration of their rights and wages. The most infamous of the late nineteenth-century French strikes— Decazeville, Anzin, and Vierzon—fell into this category. Such defensive rebellions were likely to last longer and in­ volve more violence than the offensive strikes for increased wages or improved working conditions. 24. For a full enum eration o f the num ber o f strikes, strikers, and “strike days" in France betw een 1864 and 1913, see Perrot, Les Ouvriers en greve, 1:51. Listed below are the num ber o f strikes between 1885 and 1898: Year Strikes Year Strikes 261 1892 123 1885 634 1893 195 1886 391 1894 194 1887 405 1895 188 1888 476 1896 199 1889 356 1897 341 1890 368 1898 267 1891 25. Perrot, Les Ouvriers en g rh ’e, 2:568; Edward Shorter and Charles Tilly, Strikes in France, 1 83 0 -1 9 6 8 (Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press, 1974), pp. 8 6 -9 2 , 112-14: and Charles Tilly and Edward Shorter, “Le D eclin de la greve violente en France de 1890 a 1935,” Mouvement social 76 (July-Septem ber 1971): 9 5 -1 1 8 .

20

THE CROWD IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

The propensity to strike varied markedly between differ­ ent sectors of the economy, and miners were certainly the most violent and volatile of all workers. That much Zola had dramatized in Germinal. But Michelle Perrot’s work has shown that most strikes of the Third Republic, even those of miners, paled in comparison to Zola’s fictional reconstruc­ tion of rebellions in the Second Empire. According to her research, between 1870 and 1890 only one-tenth of all strikes involved public demonstrations, and a mere 3.6 per­ cent engendered violent acts.26 O f the 2,700 strikes that she has studied in the two decades following 1870, Perrot found only one instance of m urder committed by miners on strike, but that single case—the “defenestration of Decazeville”— became the spectre of most crowd psychologists. On the morning of January 26, 1886, approximately 2,000 miners of Decazeville (Aveyron) went on strike to pro­ test a change in the company’s pay scale which would have lowered wages while increasing work. Proceeding to the town hall late that afternoon, a group of their delegates told the mayor, M. Cayrade, and the deputy director of the min­ ing company, a certain Watrin, that they would not return to work until their wage demands were met and Watrin was fired. Maintaining that he lacked authority to respond to their demands, Watrin left the town hall. Infuriated by his response, the workers pursued him. Watrin panicked and fled to a neighboring building. While the majority of the crowd chanted outside the building, a few strikers followed Watrin inside, beat him, and threw him out the window. Ac­ cording to several sources, Watrin was then mauled by the crowd and trampled by a group of women.27 T he violence 26. Perrot, Les Ouvriers en greve, 1:407; 2:568, 5 7 3 -7 4 . Perrot has con ­ cluded that 9 percent of m iners’ strikes were violent; nearly all o f those cases involved destruction o f property. 27. A num ber o f sources would conclude— probably erroneously— that Watrin had been castrated by the w om en in the crowd. See Le Temps, Jan ­ uary 28, 1886, and January 30, 1886. See also D. Laye, Histoire complete des greves de Decazeville, sum la date lugubre du 26 janvier 1886 (T oulouse: Im pri-

THE CROWD IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

21

of the mob, as even the conservative Le Temps later con­ ceded, m arked the climax of a deep-seated personal hostility of the workers to Watrin. Described in a secret police report as a “clerical reactionary,” Watrin apparently would have re­ ceived a commission for reducing the miners’ salaries, and it was Watrin who had introduced the plan for a companyowned grocery in Decazeville. Such a maneuver, the workers feared, would destroy the local shopkeepers and doubly ex­ ploit the miners. In light of this history of ill-feeling, the workers’ response to Watrin was extreme but hardly coincidental. It was this opening day of the strike that was to obsess Le Bon, Tarde, Sighele, Fournial, and the other writers on the crowd. T heir memories retained the gory image of the m ur­ der while overlooking both its causes and its consequences. Within three days of the murder, the strike ended when the mining company reinstated the old pay-scale and promised to pay miners on a biweekly, rather than a monthly, basis. But in the meantime, the military had been sent to occupy the town, which caused leftist deputies, on four occasions, to question the governm ent’s “severe measures of repression.” T he first such occasion, on February 11, elicited a revealing exchange between the new deputy from the Seine, Basly, and the president of the Chamber of Deputies, Floquet. De­ fending the miners’ actions, Basly asked, “Is not the pain of an outraged and famished crowd legitimate? . . . When an entire population—indignant, rebellious—crushes him who for years has tortured and starved them, don’t we have the right to say: Let popular justice stand?” Interrupting the m erie B oulissiere, 1886), and Archives de la Prefecture de Police, Paris, BA 186 and 187 (hereafter cited as APP). In a report dated January 31, 1886, agent no. 26 claim ed to have overheard in a cafe that “certain wom en, w hose nam es were not m entioned, were particularly noticeable because o f the ferocity with which the) m auled the body o f Watrin and, above all, be­ cause o f the insults which the) hurled at him which inflam ed the fury o f their friends, brothers or husbands; they went so far as to cry, ‘N ous voidons lui arracher les c ................. ” APP, BA 186.

22

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deputy’s speech, Floquet responded: “I cannot allow you to impute such ideas to an entire population. Those ideas may be your own, but they are certainly not those of the people who surrounded the corpse of [Watrin].” When Basly com­ pared the Decazeville m urder to the storming of the Bastille, Floquet closed off the debate.28 In the vote that followed the debate, 287 of the 469 deputies present supported the government. The troubles in Decazeville were by no means resolved. On the twenty-fifth of February, when the company re­ duced wages, the miners walked off the job en masse. Throughout the spring of 1886, Decazeville remained un ­ der military siege. Patrolled by troops under Boulanger’s command, the miners refused to accept the company’s pro­ posals. Their endurance was rewarded. The strike finally ended in mid-June when the company agreed to meet most of the miners’ demands. Decazeville was an atypical strike, all the more haunting to unsympathetic observers. It is worth repeating that of all known strikes between 1870 and 1890, only one person— Watrin—died at the hands of a crowd of strikers, and less than 4 percent of all strikes had violent repercussions. Most strike violence involved destruction of property—buildings, windows, and machines—by individuals or groups throwing rocks. Much less frequently strikers stoned troops or the po­ lice.29 But rock-throwing was not restricted to men on strike; it characterized some of the riots in the Wilson affair, as well as other Parisian demonstrations of the late eighties and early nineties. And while rocks could be utilized as a tool of violence, they were crude and relatively innocuous com­ pared with the bayonets and rifles that were used to subdue riots. A round 1890 the strike assumed a new character—at least 28. A lexandre Zevaes, Histone de la Troisieme Republique (Paris: Editions de la N ouvelle Revue Critique, 1938), p. 252. 29. Perrot, Les Ouvriers en greve, 2:573—74, 585.

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23

so argued contemporaries. Recent students of working-class movements have tended to agree.30 In the closing decade of the nineteenth century, the “m odern” strike began to take shape. Strikes increased in number, reaching a nineteenthcentury apex of 634 in 1893; workers became more orga­ nized and subject to union discipline; the decisions to strike involved an increasing num ber of workers and establish­ ments; and the demands of workers were less confined to a restoration of previous conditions. Such a change obviously did not transpire overnight. Compared with their twentiethcentury counterparts, late nineteenth-century strikes were unruly and often spontaneous uprisings. The participants often saw the strike as the prelude to a new era. Concluding her masterful study of strikes in the first two decades of the T hird Republic, Michelle Perrot has written that “May Day 1890, the first bourgeois ‘great fear’ since the Commune, re­ leased a shiver of things to come. Like many others who during the closing years of the century believed in the ‘end of the world,’ workers awaited the Revolution, the inevita­ ble, serene, peaceful, simple fruit of a long maturation, of a necessary evolution.”31 T he year 1890 marked a watershed in working-class consciousness. Workers still saw the strike as a vital form of economic bargaining, but they were begin­ ning to envision it, along with the massive demonstration, as the key to a new world, purged of exploitation. Braced by the swelling num ber of syndicats and strikes, swayed by the cataclysmic predictions of both anarchists and Marxists, w'orkers simultaneously held two images of collective pro­ test: the spontaneous uprising against inequity and the pro­ logue to a new way of life. At the crossroads between scat­ tered, unruly reaction and large-scale, disciplined ritual, the strike in 1890 represented the dream of workers and the nightmare of the well-to-do. 30. Tilly and Shorter, “Le D eclin’’; Shorter and Tilly, Strikes in France, p. 114; Perrot, Les Ouvriers en gr'eve, 1:52-72, 9 4-10 0 . 31. Perrot, Les Ouvriers en gr'eve, 2:726.

24

THE CROWD IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Strikes were not the sole vehicle for the crowd, but they did strengthen in the minds of observers the associations of crowds with left-wing ideals and with proletarian m em ber­ ship. A “crowd,” as any casual observer could note, could in­ clude a religious cortege, a patriotic parade, a funeral, or an audience at a summer concert. Most crowd psychologists, however, conceived of la foule as a violent and raucous as­ sembly of the lower classes, whose slogans were ominous overtures to the great revolution, the great leveling of civi­ lization. This coupling of the crowd with the hope for revo­ lution was reinforced by the new vision held by a growing num ber of French leftists in the nineties, a vision that came to be known as the “general strike.” In 1890 the idea of the general strike was a new but some­ what inchoate notion whose popularity was growing both among workers’ organizations and among leftist leaders. The general strike was to enlarge the function of work-stoppage and endow it with grander dreams. If exploited by the revolutionary masses, as Briand, Grave, and many anarchists would argue, strikes could be the springboard for the social revolution. Other leftist writers who stood outside the an­ archist tradition praised the strike as a means of uniting kindred souls— regardless of profession. May Day was to give Europe its first taste of the general strike. In July 1889, at the International Congress of Socialist Workers, delegates had agreed to plan a mass demonstration, international in character, for the first of May, 1890. By revolutionary stand­ ards, its platform was modest: the “trois-huit,” the eight-hour day. Yet to employers, government officials, and lawenforcement authorities, the organization of May Day and its alleged goals were terrifying indeed. T en days before the first May Day demonstration in 1890, the matriarch of French anarchism, Louise Michel, assured an interviewer that she would march through Paris on the first of May. “There is no good demonstration without me,” she boasted, “and besides, I adore the crowd.”32 A veteran 32. La Cocarde, April 20, 1890, p. 6.

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25

of the Com m une and of New Caledonia, Michel doubted that the march would be a revolutionary success; she viewed it as an exuberant outing, a show of force perhaps, but no panacea. For Michel, as for thousands of French men and women, May Day promised to be more than a simple march for the eight-hour day. Socialists like Guesde and Vaillant dreamed of a nonviolent yet fearsome gesture of working-class prow­ ess; hundreds of laborers invested millenarian hopes in the march, while scattered anarchists like Duluc, Faure, and Hinart viewed the day as an opportunity to spark the revo­ lution.33 And as the hopes of Michel and the socialists bur­ geoned, so too did the fears of conservative republicans and men of the Right. T he government, meanwhile, took the most stringent measures to avert what it believed would be a proletarian uprising, a resurgence of the Commune. T hroughout the early months of 1890, agents of the Paris police and the Ministry of the Interior collected information about the im pending demonstrations, intercepted mail ad­ dressed to Guesde and other important working-class lead­ ers, and infiltrated local meetings of the syndicats and “sus­ picious” political associations. The Minister of the Interior, Jean Constans, sent circulars to police prefects throughout France urging them to take every “necessary” precaution against demonstrations and marches. Demonstrations and the right of assembly were denied; any citizen who refused to “circulate” risked harassment and arrest.34 A few anti-Semitic letters to the Baron Adolphe de Roths­ child convinced many of the largest financial concerns that May Day would usher in a wave of terrorist activity. As May approached, rumors grew more phantasmagoric, and the actions of a handful of cranks inflamed the anxieties of the authorities. On April 26, when anarchist-Boulangist M. Soudey ordered 600 kilos of sausage to be cut into 1,500 pieces 33. APP, BA 42. 34. Ibid., Circular no. 21, Ministry o f the Interior to Prefects, April 2, 1890.

26

THE CROWD IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

for May 1, the police rushed to interview the owner of the establishment.35 But more severe measures than monitoring charcuteries were taken by the police. During the week pre­ ceding the first, the government arrested many of the most influential radicals, including the celebrated crowd-lover Louise Michel, Sebastien Faure, and the Marquis de Mores.36 The Maison Rothschild and the Credit Lyonnais deem ed it wise to remain closed on May Day and so did the Palais de Justice. For the first time in its history, the Salon did not open on the first of May. Closed too was the Bourse du Travail—under instructions from the government. The Stock Exchange, the Banque de France, and the Senate re­ mained open, but under the heavy guard of the Parisian mounted police. Indeed, by the end of April, Paris was in a virtual state of siege. Some 38,000 armed representatives of the army and the police were garrisoned within the city limits— the great­ est num ber of troops since the Com m une.37 Even though conscious of the unprecedented vigilance of the govern­ ment, many conservative observers persisted in fearing a ca­ tastrophe. The May 1 issue of Charivari described May Day as an “innovation which is not only fin de siecle, but could well be fin du monde.”38 Even Edm ond de Goncourt inter­ rupted his literary chronicle to scrutinize Paris on May Day—though ensconced in a pleasure boat at a safe distance. Goncourt was disappointed: the demonstration, he re­ marked, was a “nothing.”39 In a sense, Goncourt was accu­ rate. The discrepancy between the panic of the authorities 35. APP, BA 42. 36. See M aurice D om m anget, L ’Histoire du premier mai (Paris: Editions de la T ete de Feuilles, 1972), p. 125; Edith T hom as, Louise Michel: La Velleda (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), pp. 3 41-55; and Jean M aitron, L'Histoire du mouvement anarchiste en France (Paris: Societe Universitaire et de Librairie, 1955), pp. 185-89. 37. Estimates vary on the num ber o f troops. Le Temps argued that the num ber was 34,000; leftist papers elevated the figures slightly. 38. Charivari, May 1, 1890, p. 1. 39. Goncourt, Journal, 8:149.

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27

and the actual events of May Day was extraordinary. T hroughout the day, each of the twenty commissariats sent hourly communiques to the headquarters of the police on the Cite; the overwhelming majority of them stressed the “perfect tranquility” of their arrondissements.w By noon, sev­ eral large crowds of mostly “curious” onlookers congregated near th’e Place de la Concorde and the rue Royale. Shortly after 2 p . m ., when thirty delegates of the May Day Commit­ tee arrived at the Palais Bourbon to present eighty-two pe­ titions to the Cham ber of Deputies, the crowd of witnesses was being dispersed by the cavalry. Escorted into the build­ ing by a heavy detachment of troops, the delegates met briefly with Floquet, who solemnized the occasion by add­ ing: “If the wishes of the people are not taken into account, it is certain that there will be danger.”41 For the rest of the afternoon, crowds (estimated by the police as numbering be­ tween one and three thousand) at the Place de la Concorde, the Place de la Republique, and in the Faubourg SaintH onore were jostled by bands of mounted troops. Several hundred individuals were arrested, and as night fell, over eighty meetings were held across Paris to celebrate the first observance of international working-class solidarity.42 May Day, of course, was not restricted to Paris, and in at least 138 other areas of France the police reported dem on­ strations. T he largest of these took place in Marseille, Lille, Toulon, Lyon, Bordeaux, Calais, Saint-Quentin, Roubaix, Angers, and Vienne.43 In nearly every case, the marches were peaceful and were only rarely punctuated by scuffles with the police. If the first May Day proved more tranquil than the most sanguine expectations of the authorities, its second celebra­ tion was to have dire consequences indeed. Despite the non­ violent pronouncem ents of the socialist leaders, Paris armed 40. 41. 42. 43.

APP, BA 43, BA 44. D om m anget, Premier mai, p. 134. APP, BA 44. D om m anget, Premier mai, p. 135.

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again for the great confrontation. On the eve of the dem ­ onstration, Constans ordered the preventive arrest of two hundred “vagabonds.”44 His Ministry of the Interior, with the cooperation of local police throughout France, at­ tempted to suppress all manifestations and processions, however peaceful. On May 1, 1891, Parisian streets were crowded and heav­ ily patrolled. In contrast to the previous year, most of the police reports stressed the brisk business being transacted in the district of Les Hailes. Between 9 a . m . and 1 p . m ., three groups of delegates from the May Day Committee m arched their petitions to the Palais Bourbon. A round 4 p . m ., as the police prefect Loze watched from the Tuileries and m em ­ bers of the Jockey Club gazed from their balcony, the police charged some 20,000 persons gathered at the Place de la Concorde.45 By nightfall, several hundred had been ar­ rested. Undaunted, a large and “jovial” mass filled the Place de la Republique while thousands of other workers retired to meetings to applaud the goal of the “Trois-Huit.”46 Com ­ pared with 1890, May Day in Paris in 1891 was more widely celebrated but no more violent. Police recorded fewer threats to persons or property, and the only stick of dyna­ mite—found on the terrace of a Marquis Trevisse— had not, as the police feared, been deposited by an impassioned an­ archist, but rather by a disgruntled maid.47 T he terror of May Day, 1891, stemmed not from Paris but from the suburbs and from the industrial center in the Nord. For it was in Fourmies, a textile city of 15,000 near the Belgian border, that May Day created its first martyrs. Weeks before the demonstration, many of Fourmies’ work­ ers had announced their plans for the first of May: a pres­ entation of petitions, an afternoon procession, and a ball in 44. 45. 1891. 46. 47.

APP, BA 43, BA 44. Ibid.; the Jockey Club witnesses were m entioned in L'Egalite, May 3, APP, BA 43, BA 44. Le M atin, May 2, 1891.

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29

the evening. Despite the peaceful intentions of the workers, the mayor and a num ber of employers had feared violence and called in several companies of the infantry.48 In the course of the m orning’s demonstrations, several skirmishes had erupted between the troops and the workers; two of the protestors had been arrested. At 6 p . m ., a crowd of two hundred, most of them children and young adults, reap­ peared at the square to request the release of the prisoners. T here they confronted the soldiers of the 145th Infantry; the troops crossed their bayonets; several members of the young crowd apparently tossed rocks at the authorities, and the com m ander ordered his soldiers to fire. A few minutes later, the volley ceased. Nine people lay dead, four of whom were female, and only three were over the age of twentyone. At least eighty others were wounded; several of the cas­ ualties apparently did not survive.49 While the European press recounted the events of the massacre, the residents of Fourmies prepared to honor their dead. T he families of the victims refused to allow the town to pay for burial expenses, and on May 4, amid 3,000 troops, a cortege of 20,000 to 30,000 citizens escorted the coffins to the cemetery. Although the funeral itself did not precipitate a disturbance, authorities scrutinized the num ber of flags as a measure of radical intent; to the eight tricolores were juxtaposed fifteen black flags and thirty-two red.50 O n the day of the funeral, the dem and for a parliamen­ tary inquiry into the massacre was rejected. An interpella­ tion of the government on May 8 provoked heated ex­ 48. For accounts o f the massacre o f Fourm ies, see D om m anget, Premier mai, pp. 157—59; C laude W illard, La Fusillade de Fourmies (Paris: Editions sociales, 1957); and APP, BA 44 and Archives Nationales, F7 12527 (hereafter cited as A N ). 49. Figures on the num ber o f dead and w ounded vary. T h e official in­ quiry listed only nine deaths from the massacre, D om m anget suggests ten, and contem porary versions, including I'Egalite, argued that the final num ­ ber o f deaths was fourteen (AN F7 12527). T h e cem etery at Fourm ies con­ tains the rem ains o f nine “m artyrs.” 50. L ’E galite, May 6, 1891.

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changes between Constans and a num ber of deputies. In an eloquent speech, Clemenceau tried to stir the consciences of his colleagues: Gentlemen, are you not struck by the importance o f the date o f May first? While reading the newspapers, have you not been struck to see this multitude o f dispatches sent from every point o f Europe and America, summarizing what was done or said on May Day in every working-class quarter? . . . It was ob­ vious to even the least clairvoyant observer that throughout the world the workers were rising up, that something new had loomed on the horizon, that a new and formidable force had appeared with which politicians would henceforth have to reckon.

“This new force,” he thundered, was the “fourth Estate which is rising and attaining the conquest of power.” And the spectre of Fourmies would only serve to hasten its triumph: When you examine what happened at Fourmies, which o f you would maintain here, or before Europe, or before the civilized world, that the events o f Fourmies before the fusillade justi­ fied the deaths o f those women, o f those children, whose blood long reddened the pavement? No assuredly, there is an incredible disproportion between the acts which preceded the fusillade and the fusillade itself; there is a monstrous dispro­ portion between the attack and the repression; somewhere on the streets o f Fourmies there lies the stain o f innocent blood which we must wash away at any price . . . Let me caution you! The dead have great powers to convert: we must turn our at­ tention to the dead.31

Despite the impassioned pleas of Clemenceau and a num ber of socialist deputies, the government remained in office. Amnesty for the protesters was rejected, the military com­ m ander of Fourmies was publicly thanked, and in the weeks following the massacre, at least thirty-two civilians, including nine women, were arrested. Two of the most im portant so­ 51. Cited in D om m anget, Premier mai, pp. 160—61.

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31

cialists, Paul Lafargue and Culine, the local Parti ouvrier sec­ retary, were tried for incitement to m urder.52 Although their defense was ably organized by Alexandre Millerand, both men were found guilty and sentenced to one and six years, respectively. Fourmies shocked and polarized public opinion. Public meetings held in Paris and in the provinces drew thousands of leaders and workers to protest the harsh measures taken by the government against,an essentially unarm ed crowd. As critics of the government pointed out, the Lebel rifle used at Fourmies had been designed for a war against Germany; its deadly charges killed only fellow citizens. Emile Zola and the socialist Paul Brousse pleaded publicly for the rights of pro­ letarians to assemble and demonstrate. Zola likened Four­ mies to the bloody strike at La Ricamarie in 1869, which had served as one of the models for the uprising in Germinal.53 Brousse chose to compare Fourmies to Decazeville. Soldiers, he maintained, had no place at demonstrations. To his con­ servative critics, Brousse added: You may say that an employer or an engineer will be killed. A Watrin could be knocked off. Well, I would respond that I prefer the death o f a man—be he an engineer— to the deaths of fourteen persons, the majority o f whom are children and young girls.54

And the Marxist leader, Jules Guesde, predicted that Four­ mies could hasten the revolution. Fourmies, in his interpre­ tation, had made any entente between the bourgeoisie and the workers impossible. “May Day 1892,” he concluded, “will be three times as big as 1891.”55 Am ong those who had little sympathy for the victims of Fourmies stood the police, most of the deputies, and many of the most powerful newspapers. Maxime du Camp, an ar­ 52. 53. 54. 55.

Ibid., and W illard, La Fusillade, pp. 6 1 -6 8 . L'Eclair, May 6, 1891. La France, May 6, 1891. Ibid.

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dent anti-Communard, defended the military’s actions: “It is certainly clear that the soldiers could not let themselves be stoned with impunity.” Jules Simon also supported the army, but added that Fourmies must never happen again.56 The secret report of the police agent “N ourrit” gave another justification for the killing. In a passage reminiscent of the prose of Taine, “N ourrit” argued that The Fourmiesiens are quick to revolt, it seems; they are easily carried away. They belong to the Flemish type which, in the lower classes, takes after brutes and cretins. Judicious individ­ uals say that the soldiers were correct in firing; without this unfortunately necessary volley, the city would have been sacked.37

Chapus, the military com m ander who had ordered the fir­ ing, claimed that the crowd was calm until the arrival of the women and the flag-bearers.58 Constans maintained that the crowd was composed not of young local citizens, but rather of “smugglers,” “ne’er-do-wells,” and Belgians.59 T he con­ servative journal Le Figaro pointed an accusatory finger at “outside agitators.”60 Amid the uproar over Fourmies, few contemporaries noted the second fateful May Day collision in the suburbs of Paris. In the early afternoon of May 1, 1891, a band of dem ­ onstrators bearing a red flag paraded through the streets of Clichy. When charged by the police, most of the group dis­ banded; but a small delegation, still carrying the flag, contin­ ued through the quartier, and shortly after 3 p . m . they stopped at a cafe. While the group drank to the revolution and sang the refrains of La Carmagnole, police burst into the establishment. In the ensuing fracas, both the police and the demonstrators resorted to gunfire. T he police ultimately 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

L ’E clair, May 6, 1891. Rapport de “N ourrit,” APP, BA 44 (May 22, 1891). Paris, July 7, 1891. Cited in W illard, La Fusillade, pp. 54—55. Le Figaro, May 4, 1891, cited in W illard, La Fusillade, p. 58.

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33

rounded up three members of the band who, because of the injuries they had sustained during the scuffle, were not tried until that August. By the end of the summer the govern­ m ent seemed determ ined to punish raucous demonstrators in the harshest possible manner. Despite the fact that no one had died during the Clichy incident, Bulot, the attorney general, asked the jury to give the death penalty to the three prisoners. U nder the circumstances, the jury was lenient. One of the accused was acquitted, the others sentenced to three and five years.61 T he impact of Clichy would emerge only months later, during the wave of anarchist bombings that swept across Paris during the early months of 1892. On March 11, 1892, the apartm ent building that housed the presiding judge of Clichy, Benoit, would explode, and approximately two weeks later, on March 27, a large charge of dynamite would gut the residence of the attorney general, Bulot. T he motive for the crimes was obviously revenge for Clichy; the revanchard was Ravachol. Eighteen ninety-one represented the most threatening emeute of all the May Days in the nineties. With its violence and its indirect consequence—anarchist terrorism—it reached the apogee of ritual revolution. If the peaceful character of May Day, 1890, had made any conservative observers com­ placent about the prospect of a May revolution, May Day, 1891, caused them to be more anxious than ever before. On the nineteenth of March, 1892, L ’Illustration asked its readers the foreboding question, “Will this May Day be more violent than ever?” and documented its fears with references to Fourmies and the recent explosions in Paris.62 On the m orn­ ing of May Day, 1892, Edmond de Goncourt expressed the sentiments of many of his contemporaries when he wrote, “Today . . . one doesn’t know if French society will be turned on its ass and if a huge piece of Paris will be dyna­ 61. M aitron, Mouvem.ent anarchiste, pp. 190-92. 62. L ’I llustration, March 19, 1892, p. 239.

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mited.”63 But as Goncourt traversed the city that day, he found it deserted. “Paris,” he noted, “seems to have been devastated by a plague.”64 And indeed it was, by the plague of anarchist terror. Public demonstrations were much smaller than in 1891; many of the socialist workers feared for their lives. Throughout France, municipal elections were held on May 1, which fell on a Sunday. And although a sizeable num ber of meetings were held both in Paris and in the provinces, the public eclat of May Day, 1892, was severely muffled by anarchism. By 1893, May Day had lost many of its apocalyptic con­ notations. The police and the military still gathered in every working-class center; demonstrations and processions were still formally forbidden. Occasional brawls broke out be­ tween the demonstrators and the authorities, but there was no second Fourmies. With one exception, Paris on May 1 was relatively tranquil, and that exception, a riot near the Bourse du Travail, could be traced to the governm ent’s pro­ vocative policy of closing the building that was designed and built for the workers’ use.65 Surveying the events of the 1893 May Day, two periodicals of differing political persuasion were able to concur. On the fifteenth of May, the archcon­ servative Revue des deux mondes featured an editorial by the Vicomte d’Avenel that began: May Day, which in 1889 symbolized in both hemispheres the program of workers’ demands in opposition to the antiquated pretensions of capitalism, has not proved to be long-lived, be­ cause it has died o f anemia on its fourth birthday in every cap­ ital o f Europe.66

T he anarchist periodical La Revolte also underscored the “ordinary” character of the most recent May Day. “May Day 63. Goncourt, Journal, 9:34. 64. Ibid., p. 35. 65. APP, BA 47. 66. Vicom te G eorges d ’A venel, “C hronique de la quinzaine,” Revue des deux mondes 117 (May 15, 1893): 464.

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35

is beginning to be banal, like the so-called national holiday of the fourteenth of July.” T he two journals, however, inter­ preted this decline quite differently. Whereas the Revue des deux mondes somewhat blithely praised the “good sense” of urban populations, La Revolte more accurately observed that revolutions do “not declare themselves in advance; they are prepared by developing and ripening ideas: [Revolutions] take to the streets only after they have been engrained in people’s minds. Unfortunately, we are not there yet.”67 Eighteen ninety-three, then, marked the transition of May Day from apocalypse to ritual; but in spite of its subdued character, it did not inspire a new sympathy and responsive­ ness to working-class militance. Conservative and bourgeois observers were still quick to identify crowds with proletari­ ans, still quick to repress and provoke the most radical and the poorest sections of the population. Not all crowds, of course, were proletarian, and the events of the student riots of July 1893 suggest that the government of the nineties was considerably more lenient to young bourgeois than to workers. On Saturday night, July 1, 1893, a crowd of 2,000 stu­ dents assembled at the Place de la Sorbonne and the Boule­ vard Saint-Michel to protest the condemnation of one of the organizers of the Bal des Q uat’z Arts. T he bal, it seems, had included a nude display, which had offended Senator Berenger, the founder of “La Ligue contre la Licence des Rues.” Berenger had urged that the organizers be prose­ cuted for public indecency, and by July he had won his case in court. T he students’ demonstration, which consisted of chants of “Conspuez Berenger,” was nearly over when fifty police agents rushed to the scene. When the crowd hissed and whistled, the police charged and in the process wrecked a cafe and mortally injured a student. For over thirty minutes the fracas continued; students threw beer steins at the police, who retaliated with kicks, 67. Ibid., p. 466, and La Revolte, May 4 -1 0 , 1893, p. 3.

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punches, and two arrests. T he July 4 account of Le Temps protested the brutality of the police. Students, they main­ tained, were not like “other groups”; they deserved favored treatment. The police “should not treat them like a pack of anarchists or pimps.”68 But the student rebellion was not over, and for the next few days the Latin Q uarter was be­ sieged by angry crowds. On the night of July 3, the quartier was plastered with affiches calling for the resignation of the Minister of the Interior Dupuy and the police prefect, Loze. A crowd of 3,000 marched to the prefecture on the Cite; for fifteen minutes rocks bombarded the prefect’s apartment. When the door to the prefecture opened, the crowd scat­ tered. About half of the group, chanting “Assassins,” pro­ ceeded to the Rue de Rivoli; the other half retired to the Latin Q uarter where a num ber of kiosks were overturned or burned.69 July 4 was still more tumultuous. T he police were stoned at the Hopital de la Charite (where the body of the dead stu­ dent rested); huge crowds in the Latin Q uarter overturned tramways, benches, kiosks, and vespcisiennes; and shots were fired at the Senate and the Boulevard Saint-Germaine. By dawn, fifteen kiosks and Morris columns had been burned, and no street lamps, public bathrooms, benches, or grills re­ mained intact. Despite repeated charges by the police, the garde republicaine, and the military, the crowds were not dis­ persed until the early hours of the morning. At least twentysix policemen were injured, yet the arrests were small in number. O f the six arrests in the Saint-Germaine area, none was a student; as Le Temps noted, “the majority were unem ­ ployed workers.” According to their account of July 6, pre­ cious little of the looting, stoning, or shooting had been the work of students. “Foreigners” fired the shots, and workers or children did the looting. In the course of the evening, the left-wing leaders Baudin and Roussel had urged workers to 68. Le Temps, July 4, 1893, p. 1. 69. Ibid., July 5, 1893, p. 1, and APP, BA 1525, BA 1526.

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37

join the student rebellion, but the involvement of the Bourse du Travail was marginal. During the July riots, students accomplished what the workers had been unable to achieve: an investigation of police brutality, the forced resignation of Loze, and a reor­ ganization of the police prefecture.70 The government retal­ iated, but not against the students. T he Bourse du Travail was closed, ostensibly because it had refused to comply with the syndicat provisions of 1884 but actually because it was beginning to support and participate in the student riots. Am ong the authorities, so strong was the association be­ tween crowds and proletarians that, when repression came, it was directed at workers rather than the young intelligen­ tsia. T he student riots had been far more violent and tumul­ tuous than those of the workers, yet no massacre similar to that of Fourmies stained the streets around the Sorbonne. In July 1893 the students did receive favored treatment, but the workers paid the consequences. *

*

*

*

*

If May Day represented revolution by advance invitation, anarchist terrorism, which also climaxed the early nineties, was its polar opposite. Like the May Day demonstrations, “propaganda by the deed” was an international phenom e­ non. Russian nihilists in the seventies and eighties had lashed out at im portant political figures, from police com­ missars to the czar himself. T hroughout the eighties, the tac­ tics and the dream of anarchist terrorism penetrated small circles of determ ined followers in western Europe and the United States. Unlike strikes and demonstrations, which re­ quired a sizeable num ber of adherents for success, anarchist activity, by its own standards, could be effective on an indi­ vidual basis. In 1881 anarchist terrorism appeared in France. While the first gesture, an attempt to blow up the statue of Thiers in Paris in June 1881, was relatively innoc­ 70. Le Temps, July 6, 1893, July 12, 1893.

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uous, the seemingly gratuitous shooting of a doctor by an unemployed weaver in October was far more disturbing. Anarchist journals, especially those patronized by intellec­ tuals, often sanctioned such ideological gestures and, in Lyon during 1883, even encouraged the dynamiting of bourgeois restaurants, churches, and religious schools. Vio­ lence, as interpreted by the followers of terrorist anarchism, was the supreme posture of defiance, the retribution for the sins of a capitalist society. Propaganda by the deed was distinct from socialism and the highly organized demonstrations of the syndicats. While socialists—of whatever variety— placed a premium upon o r­ ganization and party loyalty, anarchists preached values of spontaneity and individual action. Not surprisingly, most an­ archists displayed an ambivalent attitude toward May Day. In 1891 La Revolte, though critical of the planned character of the day, saw the crowd as a potential medium for spon­ taneous action: “When the crowd is agitated, one never knows where it may go, especially if it contains individuals of vigorous initiative.”71 After the demonstration that year, La Revolte justified anarchist participation: “Everywhere we will fight at the forefront, because we cannot remain station­ ary in the movement of crowds.”72 Fourmies, according to the editors of the journal, had shown that “M arianne” was the proper wife of the Russian czars and that every regime in the nineteenth century had its symbolic massacre. Just as the monarchy had slaughtered at Transnonain and the Em ­ pire at La Ricamarie, so had the Republic at Fourmies.73 By 1892, however, La Revolte was turning against the crowd. La foule, it claimed, had lost its “enthusiasm,” its vigor; to underscore its disillusionment, the journal included an article entitled “L’Imbecillite des foules.”74 But May Day, 71. 72. 73. 74.

La Revolte, April 3—10, 1891, pp. 1—2. Ibid., May 2 -8 , 1891, p. 1. Ibid., May 9 -1 5 , 1891, p. 1. Ibid., January 2 -8 , 1892, p. 3.

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1892, raised anarchist hopes once again. If anarchist revo­ lutionaries could stir up the crowd, if they could transmit the “breath of their revolutionary enthusiasm, their compre­ hension of the situation, their disdain for political dealings, and their great aspirations, if they can make the hearts of the crowds vibrate with their revolutionary ardor,” then an uprising might succeed.75 But May Day in 1892 proved dis­ appointing; ironically, the crowds which La Revolte had hoped to inflame had been too fearful of anarchist terrorism to assemble. By 1893 the editors of La Revolte had re­ nounced the crowd; as a sign of their disdain, they reprinted passages from Gabriel T ard e’s “Les Foules et les sectes criminelles” in their literary supplement. And they urged their readers to forego the “inane” crowds of May Day and in­ stead use the general strike or a well-placed charge of dynamite. No m atter how vehemently anarchists and socialists were opposed to one another, conservatives and some republicans perceived them as nearly identical. Gustave Le Bon de­ scribed both groups in the same breath; Le Temps and Ga­ briel Tarde saw anarchism as the “light cavalry of socialism.”76 Although their goals and tactics diverged, both anarchism and socialism sought to destroy the preeminence of men of property and aristocratic birth. But rather than making dis­ tinctions between the two movements, anxious observers melded them into a single and highly threatening monster. Rather than reexamining their own political assumptions, they preferred to see any assault on privilege and property as the death charge of a cohesive and desperate enemy. By thus ignoring the profound differences between socialists and anarchists, threatened writers described the social prob­ 75. Ibid., April 30-M ay 7, 1892, p. 1. 76. Gabriel T arde, “Les Foules et sectes au point de vue crim inel,” Revue des deux mondes 120 (N ovem ber 15, 1893), p. 372; Le Temps, July 12, 1894. T h e phrase was apparently coined by Jehan Preval in Anarchie et nihilisme (Paris: Savine, 1892).

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lems of the late nineteenth century in simplistic and hyper­ bolic terms. The simultaneity of socialist and anarchist activity in the early nineties further encouraged many contemporaries to confuse the two movements. Strikes and demonstrations reached their apogee in the early nineties; so did anarchist terrorism. Between 1892 and 1894 two waves of dynamiting and assassination swept across France. T he first, in March and April of 1892, was the work of Ravachol, whom Paul Adam was to characterize as the Christ of m odern France.77 On the eleventh of March, 1892, an explosion rocked the Boulevard Saint-Germain; four days later, another hit the Caserne Lobau, and on the twenty-seventh, yet another was set off on the rue de Clichy. Ravachol’s arrest triggered other explosions, including one in the restaurant where he had been apprehended. Six months later, an explosion in the police headquarters on the rue des Bons-Enfants would further complicate the distinctions between socialism and anarchism. T he bomb had been left in the office of the Carmaux Mining Com­ pany, whose workers were involved in a much publicized and clearly political strike. When the dynamite was discov­ ered, police removed it to the prefecture. While attempting to defuse the bomb, the police inadvertently set it off; five gendarmes died from the blast.78 77. T h e best account o f anarchist terrorism is M aitron, Mouvement anarchiste, pp. 195-236. See also Paul A dam , “Eloge de Ravachol,” Entretiem politiques et litteraires 5, no. 28 (July 1892): 27—30. 78. For accounts o f the Carm aux strike, see Harvey G oldberg, The Life of Jean Jaures (M adison: University o f W isconsin Press, 1962), pp. 97—107, and Rolande Trem pe, Les Mineurs de Carmaux (Paris: Les Editions Ouvrieres, 1971), 2 :5 51 -76 . Jules Ferry, who was not easily intim idated by workingclass militance, described his reactions to the Carm aux strike and to the gov­ ernm ent’s paralysis: “L’affaire de Carm aux a profon d em ent m econte les republicains de gouvernem ent et toute la masse qui vient a n ou s.” By Jan ­ uary 6, 1893, his discontent had becom e “terror”: “N ous avons vecu, nous vivons encore dans une sorte de terreur, sous la dictature de la calom nie” (.Lettres de Jules Ferry, 1 84 6-1 89 3 [Paris: Calm ann-Levy, 1914], pp. 564—65).

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41

No sooner had public furor over the bombs subsided than a second wave of terrorism shook France. On December 9, 1893, an impoverished worker named Auguste Vaillant threw a bomb into the Chamber of Deputies. No one died from the blast; the presiding officer displayed his compo­ sure by ordering that “la seance continue .”79 So great was pub­ lic indignation over this explosion that Vaillant was sen­ tenced to death, one of the few in the nineteenth century to receive the death penalty without having committed a capi­ tal crime. To avenge Vaillant’s sentence, a young graduate student, Emile Henri, tossed a powerful explosive device into the Cafe Term inus at the Gare Saint-Lazare on Febru­ ary 5. O n the twentieth, a bomb claimed one life on the Fau­ bourg Saint-Jacques; on the fifteenth of March, another was detonated at the Madeleine. T he restaurant Foyot was hit on April 4, and the most celebrated French victim of terrorism was attacked several months later in Lyon. On the afternoon of Ju n e 24, the president of the T hird Republic, Sadi Car­ not, was m urdered by an Italian anarchist. Revenge came swiftly. Anarchists, including those who had committed no crimes, were hounded, arrested, and brought to trial.80 T he lois scelerates sharply abridged free­ dom of the press and of speech, and the budgets of the mil­ itary and the police were expanded. T he repression was se­ vere indeed. The anarchist movement was almost completely stifled; the socialists, too, were closely scrutinized. Both groups found it necessary to tone down their grandiose rhetoric, since revolutionary figures of speech alone became grounds for arrest. Socialists in particular took pains to crit­ icize the “insane,” “inhum an” acts of anarchist terrorism. Jules Guesde, considered one of the few orthodox Marxists in France, felt it necessary to warn all his readers that “vio­ lence under any circumstance is odious . . . socialism will trium ph only by legal means and by the peaceful will of all 79. Seances, Cham bre des deputes, D ecem ber 9, 1893, p. 210. 80. M aitron, Mouvement anarchiste, pp. 237—46.

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the people.”81 Anarchist terrorism ultimately imposed re­ straints upon the language and the protests of the dispos­ sessed; for the crowd psychologists it was proof of the death throes of civilization. 81. Jules G uesde, Le Journal, D ecem ber 10, 1893, cited in M aitron, Mouvement anarchiste, p. 223.

2 Metaphors of Fear: Women and Alcoholics Crowd psychology was the most opportune of theories, yet it aimed at the transcendence of time. In late nineteenthcentury France there was reason enough to explore the mys­ teries of the crowd and to comment harshly upon the chaos of the T hird Republic. T he very internal disruption of France would have made the crowd a timely vehicle of polit­ ical commentary, but most crowd psychologists had a more grandiose ambition. By studying the mobs of their own day, these analysts sought to forge a science of mass behavior, as objective as it was timeless. In an attem pt to understand the puzzling irrationality of the mob, crowd psychologists turned to existing sciences. From theories on hypnotism, they articulated the mecha­ nism of imitation so characteristic of groups; from popular doctrines of evolution, they constructed a hierarchy of hu­ man civilization; and from medicine, they borrowed the model for abnormal psychology and the most telling meta­ phors for crowd behavior: crowds, as described by late nine­ teenth-century Frenchmen, resembled alcoholics or women. In the eighties and nineties, unflattering metaphors were richly sprinkled throughout the writings on crowds. Many of these comparisons belonged to the traditional rhetoric on mob behavior, which was developed long before the T hird Republic. Gustave Le Bon, for instance, described the crowd as an enraged child; so had Euripides twenty-three centuries before. Taine, T arde, and Sighele underscored the “insan­ ity” of mass behavior; such a description echoed the theme 43

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METAPHORS OF FEAR: WOMEN AND ALCOHOLICS

of Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, first published in London in 1841.1 Writ­ ers with such differing political convictions as Taine and Zola concurred that the crowd was a “beast, ’ whose actions resembled those of an “enraged elephant,” a stampeding horde, or a desperate carnivore. Only slightly less pejorative was the equation of crowds with savages, a comparison drawn frequently by Tarde, Le Bon, and Zola. And all crowd analysts adopted the perennial assumption that crowds were plebeian, uncouth, and deaf to the subtle reaches of the hum an intellect. To a man they subscribed to the sentiments expressed in Victor Hugo’s celebrated couplet: La foule met toujours, de ses mains degradees, Quelque chose de vil sur les grandes idees.2

Underlying all these comparisons was a firm belief that the crowd was proletarian. In the writings of Taine, the crowd was largely composed of peasants, artisans, and laborers, as well as the less respectable sectors of the poor— vagabonds, prostitutes, and hardened criminals. Le Bon’s crowds sprang from the “popular classes,” those urban workers who were assaulting the old political authorities, founding labor unions, and forcing society back to “primitive communism.”3 W hat­ ever the genre of crowd psychology, nineteenth-century French authors uniformly associated the crowd with the poor, and the poor with the insane, the imbecile, the fero­ cious beast, the barbarian. Such equations long antedated the Belle Epoque; they owed less to the threatened sensibil­ ity of conservatives in the eighties than to an inherited tra­ dition of class prejudice—a tradition which persisted through 1. Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (London: Richard Bentley, 1841). 2. Literally translated, the couplet reads, “With its base hands, the crowd always puts som ething vile on great ideas.” H u go’s passage wras quoted in the article on “La Foule” o f Le Grand Dictionnaire du XIXe si'ecle (Paris, [1876]). 3. Gustave Le Bon, La Psychologie des foules (Paris: Alcan, 1895), p. 4.

METAPHORS OF FEAR: WOMEN AND ALCOHOLICS

45

the Enlightenment and the first half of the nineteenth cen­ tury.4 T hough they were often insensitive to and prejudiced against the poor, Le Bon and his contemporaries shared the spiritual company of such luminaries as Voltaire, Mercier, Balzac, and Eugene Sue—at least on the issue of the crowd and the poor. Not all of the metaphors of fin de siecle crowd psychology were drawn from the fund of inherited rhetoric, however. With vehemence and precision, crowd psychologists like Taine, Tarde, and Le Bon compared the crowd to women and to alcoholics, and these analogies reveal much about French society in the late nineteenth century. Needless to say, France had always had its women and its drunkards. Yet both of these groups were perceived by many in the T hird Republic to be new concerns—more dangerous, more problematical than ever before. In the closing years of the Second Empire scientists and physicians had begun to isolate the “pathological” symptoms peculiar to each, and after the Comm une, whose excesses were often blamed on women and alcoholics, the literature grew to formidable propor­ tions.5 In the nineties alone, at least 93 books were written on alcoholism, 55 on alcohol, and 372 on women (including 149 works devoted to their “illnesses and hygiene”).6 4. For the perceptions o f the poor during the Enlightenm ent, see Harry C. Payne, The Philosophes and the People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976). T h e postrevolutionary im age o f the crowd is described in Louis Chevalier, Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris during the First H alf of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Frank Jellinek (New York: H oward Fertig, 1973). 5. E douard T oulou se, Les Causes de la folie (Paris: Societe d’Editions Scientifiques, 1896), pp. 48, 78. Som e physicians argued that many o f the C om m unards were the children o f alcoholics, others believed that the entire rebellion was a drunken binge. T h e historian M axim e du Camp claim ed that the C om m unards were invariably surrounded by wine, eau-de-vie, and the like. H e began his study o f the C om m une by referring to the rebels as the “chevaliers o f debauchery, the apostles o f absinthe.” See Les Convulsions de Paris (Paris: H achette, 1881), l:vii, 4:115. 6. O tto Lorenz, ed., Catalogue generate de la librairie frangaise (Paris: N ils­ son, 1896 and after), the articles “A lcool,” “A lcoolism e,” “Fem m e.” T h e

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In the eyes of French physicians and scientists, women and alcoholics constituted discrete groups. Alcoholics were presumed to be male and were generally defined as “work­ ing class.” Women rarely drank, and their behavior varied little from class to class, yet both females and drunkards shared certain defining characteristics: both were perceived as irrational, impulsive, uncivilized, bloodthirsty, and dan­ gerous. Both were inferior to normal men. Both threatened to underm ine French civilization. In the course of this chapter, I will attempt to analyze the seemingly bizarre triangle of crowds, alcoholics, and women. In late nineteenth-century France, the very reference to al­ coholics or women evoked violent connotations and psycho­ logical responses which are lost today. When Tarde and his contemporaries drew comparisons between mobs and these two groups, they played on the nineteenth-century reso­ nance of the metaphors. To understand the choice and the highly charged implications of the comparisons, we must understand the referents themselves. By juxtaposing the history of women and alcoholics against the perceptions of French physicians and scientists, the metaphors may regain their intended force. Perhaps the most charitable vision of women in late nine­ teenth-century crowd psychology was that of the frail, un­ stable creature, unfit for cerebral exercise, a victim of her num ber o f publications on wom en, their illnesses, alcohol, and alcoholism had risen markedly during the nineteenth century. Listed below are the num bers o f books published on these subjects since 1840 (tabulated from Lorenz). W omen Womens Illnesses Alcohol Alcoholism 1 886-90 63 30 90 18 1876-85 96 10 114 27 V 1840-75 24 15 307

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47

biological inferiority. Crowds, as Tarde would argue, were “feminine” creatures: By its whimsy, its revolting docility, its credulity, its nervous­ ness, its brusque psychological leaps from fury to tenderness, from exasperation to laughter, the crowd is feminine, even when it is composed, as is usually the case, of males.7

Le Bon, too, saw crowds as womanish hordes; the mob, like women, displayed “impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, the absences of judgm ent and of the critical spirit, the exaggeration of the sentiments.”8 A far more ominous image of women was embedded in the works of Zola and Taine. Women, as these two writers recorded in shocked de­ tail, were potential castrators. Once admitted to public life, women would assault not only the privileges but the sexual­ ity of men. Behind all of these dramatic metaphors for fe­ male behavior, lurked the shadow of French feminism. For better and for worse, the feminist tradition in France was intertwined with the idea of violent revolution. As an articulate movement, French feminism was born during the French Revolution, with the publication of Condorcet’s Sur Vadmission des femmes au droit de Cite (1790) and Olympe de Gouge’s La Declaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne (1791). De Gouge’s manifesto attracted only very limited support, and the few clubs of women established in 1793 were quickly outlawed by the Convention in November of that year. As one of its leaders argued, “women, by their constitution, are open to an exaltation which could be omi­ nous in public life. The interests of the state would soon be sacrificed to all the kinds of disruption and disorder that hysteria can produce.”9 With each successive revolution in the nineteenth century, 7. Gabriel T arde, L'Opinion et la foule (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1922), p. 195. 8. Le Bon, Psychologie des foules, pp. 24, 26, 27, 38. 9. M om teur 18 (Oct. 30, 1793): 2 9 9 -3 0 0 , cited in Jane Abray’s fine arti­ cle, “Fem inism in the French R evolution,” American Historical Review 80 (1975): 4 3 -6 2 .

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feminists came forward to press their claims for social and educational reforms, the “right to work,” and a voice in the civil and political life of France. T hroughout the century, they combatted—unsuccessfully—age-old prejudices as well as the newly imposed constraints of the Napoleonic Code. French feminists, of course, were not limited to the female sex. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Fourier, Enfantin, Pierre Leroux, and others preached a gospel of fe­ male emancipation and the “rehabilitation of the flesh.” But when they attempted to realize their dreams by founding colonies outside Paris, the government brought them to trial for “outrages to public morals.”10 And antifeminists pointed with horror (and fascination) to the scandalous personal lives of independent women like Flora Tristan and George Sand.11 When Paris rose in revolt against Louis Philippe in 1848, women’s clubs and journals emerged both in the capital and in the provinces. Yet in spite of a concerted campaign by Jeanne Deroin, Eugenie Niboyet, and others, women were not included in the platform for “universal suffrage” en­ acted in March of that year. T he demands of many workingclass women for higher wages, better working conditions, day nurseries, and educational reform were similarly ig­ nored.12 Feminist programs for social legislation and politi­ 10. T h e trial, which took place in A ugust 1832, began with the prose­ cuting attorney’s statement: “We have a society, we have a social order, good or bad we m ust preserve it.” See Frank M anuel, The Prophets of Paris (N ew York: H arper Torchbooks, 1965), pp. 185-89. 11. Both Tristan and Sand publicly favored the reinstatem ent o f d i­ vorce into the civil code; both were sym pathetic to socialism; both were known to have “abandoned” their husbands. Sand’s personal life was partic­ ularly shocking: in the course o f her career she had at least a dozen affairs and counted am ong her form er lovers Chopin, de M usset, M erim ee, and Jules Sandeau. For Tristan, see D om inique DeSanti, Flora Tristan: Oeuvres et vie melees (Paris: Union G enerales Editions, 1973); for Sand, see A ndre M aurois, Lelia, ou la vie de George Sand (Paris: H achette, 1952). 12. M arie-Therese Renard, La Participation des femmes a la vie civique (Paris: Les Editions Ouvrieres, 1965), p. 17.

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cal rights failed; Jeanne Deroin was sentenced to prison. W om en’s clubs were outlawed in August 1848, and many Frenchm en were left with violent and even sexually disturb­ ing memories associated with feminism.13 To be sure, de Gouges, Deroin, and Sand represented only a small fraction of a small feminist movement, but their notoriety and so­ cialist stance assumed far greater prominence than the ideas of the “respectable” feminists. After 1851 the widespread repressive measures instituted by Napoleon III effectively quelled reform movements of whatever stripe, and for at least a decade feminism was m ore a memory than a threat. Near the end of the Second Empire, a small, nonviolent women’s rights movement re­ em erged but its platform for modest legal reform was soon upstaged by the revolutionary preeminence of women in the Commune. T he experience of 1870-71 only exacerbated the “de­ structive” and left-wing image of feminism in France. In Paris, and to a lesser extent in the provinces, thousands of women formed clubs and associations. One of the most prom inent was Elisabeth Dmitrieff’s W omen’s Union for the 13. Charles H ugo described them as the “least attractive section o f hu­ manity” and predicted that w om en’s clubs would produce “un bonnet rouge sur un bas bleu." T h e most threatening organization o f women was the Vesuviennes, a small band o f uniform ed women who marched around Paris in the spring o f 1848. Charivari ran a series o f illustrations mocking the group. T h ese depicted women in masculine dress, often armed with hatch­ ets or rifles, and featured such captions as “M e conseilles-tu de me mettre une barbel" and “Malheureuse enfant! Qu'as-tu fa it de ton sexe?” T h e vision o f fem ­ inist wom en as “m en ” was reinforced by the practice (adopted by George Sand, Rosa Bonheur, and others) o f wearing m en’s clothes. Still, in the late nineteenth century, when that craze subsided, radical or degenerate wom en were often described as “mannish”; Maxime Du Camp claimed that the wife o f the Com m unard General Eudes, “wanted to be a woman with a beard,” and Dr. T oulouse argued that “degenerate w om en” could be rec­ ognized by their “low voices, hirsute bodies and small breasts.” See Edouard Dolleans, “Feminisme et syndicalisme,” in 1848: Le livre du centenaire, ed. Charles Moulin (Paris: Editions Atlas, 1948), pp. 2 39 -5 6 , Du Camp, Con­ vulsions. 2:102, and Toulouse, Causes, p. 53.

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Defense of Paris and for the Aid to the W ounded, formed in April 1871. Other local groups of women pressed for the reform of women’s education, the establishment of day care for children, and the separation of church and state.14 But, as Marx pointed out, “time was not allowed to the Com m une.” At the end of 1871, women had organized, but their political and civil status remained essentially un­ changed. The tragic denouem ent of the Commune, m ore­ over, reinforced the association of women with violence. Few Frenchmen in 1871 could dismiss the myth of the “Petroleuses,” who allegedly burned their way through Paris during the semaine sanglante. While there is every reason to believe that women did play an active, even combative, role in the defense of Paris against Thiers’s troops, little evidence substantiates the image of bands of female incendiaries spreading fires in Paris during the final week of the Com­ mune. Even the harshest chronicler of the Commune, Maxime Du Camp, conceded that the Petroleuses belonged more to the world of fantasy than to that of fact.15 T he myth, however, lived on.16 Feminism, however, did not die with the Commune, and during the first decades of the T hird Republic several groups continued their assault on the legal and civil injus­ 14. See Edith Thom as, The Women Incendiaries, trans. Jam es and Starr Atkinson (New York: George Braziller, 1966), and Stewart Edwards, ed.. The Communards of Paris (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973), pp. 36, 112-20, 132-34. 15. Thom as, Women Incendiaries, pp. 165—88, and Maxime Du Camp, Les Convulsions de Paris (Paris: Hachette, 1880), pp. 401—03. 16. It is impossible to know how many wom en were involved in the C om m une. In the months following Thiers’s bloody takeover o f Paris, over 1,000 wom en were arrested, 38 were deported, and at least 8 were ex e­ cuted. Jacques Rougerie, “Composition d ’une population insurgee: La C om m une,” Mouvement social (July—September 1964), pp. 32—33. Figures on w om en killed during the final week are unavailable. In the stark photo­ graphs o f the corpses o f the Comm unards, a num ber o f wom en are pictured.

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tices against women. T he oldest and most moderate of these associations was the Association pour les Droits des Femmes, led by the Freemason Maria Deraismes and Leon Richer. Beginning in 1870, Richer and Deraismes encouraged women to lobby for revisions in the civil code, for increased educational and occupational opportunities—but not for the vote. H ubertine Auclert was more radical. In her journal Le Suffrage des femmes, Auclert championed women’s suffrage, urged cooperation with socialists, and called for a women’s boycott of taxation. In 1880 she reasoned, “Since I have no rights, I ought not to have responsibilities,” and refused to pay her taxes. T he prefect was not pleased and demanded compliance. Auclert fired back the following untranslatable retort: Si Frangais ne signifie pas Frangaise devant le droit, Frangais ne signifie pas Frangaise devant l’im pot.17

However clear her reasoning, the courts were unimpressed; in 1881 she served a short term in prison. Once released from custody, Auclert continued her cru­ sade. By 1879 she had convinced the Socialist Congress at Marseille to accept a motion favoring the enfranchisement of women. In 1885 she attempted, unsuccessfully, to register on the Paris electoral lists. Auclert, in short, belonged to the dedicated and persistent tradition of suffragettes, and like her American and British counterparts, she was an object of ridicule in the conservative press. While Auclert marched to Paris mairies and socialist con­ gresses, a num ber of public figures too important to be laughed at were being won over to the cause of feminism. Victor Hugo agreed to serve as the first honorary president of the Ligue Frangaise pour les Droits des Femmes, and at the Second International Congress of French Feminism in 17.

p. 68.

A ndre Leclere, Le Vote des femmes en France (Paris: M. Riviere, 1929),

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1889 luminaries like Anatole de la Forge, Paul Barbe, Yves Guyot, and de Heredia lent their support.18 Earlier, after the amnesty of 1880, two of the most distinguished women Communards, Louise Michel and Paule Mink, had returned to preach feminism and anarchism throughout France. Michel was popularly rem em bered as the “Red Virgin, and many Frenchmen were convinced that she had figured prominently among the Petroleuses. Paule Mink, too, had actively participated in the Commune, but unlike Michel, she had escaped to Switzerland to avoid arrest. W hen Mink came back to France, she lectured repeatedly on the women’s question and on the benefits of divorce to audi­ ences of varying political persuasions. Until her death in 1901, she remained a fiery anarchist and savored the joy of naming the last of her children Lucifer-Blanqui-VercingetorixRevolution.19 Like Sand before her, Mink specialized in the epatement of the bourgeois. Anarchists as intransigent as Michel or Mink clearly put little faith in suffrage for women or for any other group. Yet, in the interest of women’s rights, they cooperated with middle-class suffragists like Auclert or the elegant Mme Astie de Valsayre and with many of the moderate feminists in Deraismes’s circle. Upon occasion, women representing all these points of view lectured together in support of the ov­ erarching goal of women’s emancipation. Their collabora­ tion in spite of marked political differences was a testimony to their dedication as feminists. For Frenchmen unsym pa­ thetic to their ultimate goals, it figured as an ominous sign indeed. T he police closely scrutinized their meetings and kept dossiers on the most prom inent of the leaders.20 Rather 18. Archives de la Prefecture de Police, Paris, Dossier 4426 (hereafter cited as APP). 19. APP, Dossier 8685, and Jean Maitron, ed., Diclionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier frangais (Paris: Les Editions Ouvrieres, 1970), 7:369— 70. 20. T h e daily reports o f the prefect o f police contain summaries o f the meetings o f “suspicious” groups: am ong these were the Union des fem mes,

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than focusing upon the flexibility of Mink or Michel, anti­ feminists saw the respectable Maria Deraismes as the hand­ maiden of anarchism. Conjuring up the darkest image of “la femme nouvelle,” critics of feminism predicted that women’s emancipation would usher in social chaos, sexual profligacy, and the dissolution of the family. For most crowd psycholo­ gists, feminism meant anarchism.21 Because of such oversim­ plification, they inflated the prowess, size, and revolutionary fervor of the women’s movement. W hen the May Day demonstrations were instituted in 1890, small bands of feminists planned a sympathetic march on the mairies of Paris in an effort to register for the vote. T he women, however, were no more successful than the workers. T hroughout the nineties, both groups continued their fight for increased rights and privileges, but none of the governments was willing to make major concessions to either cause.22 Not until 1936 would the eight-hour day be La Ligue des fem m es socialistes, Egalite sociale, and the Societe du bapteme civil— all o f which prom oted w om en ’s rights. See APP, BA 100-05, 498, 499, and the dossiers on Maria Deraismes (BA 1031), Mink (BA 1178), and on Louise Michel (BA 1183-85, EA 103/7, DA 109). 21. Le Bon and Sighele were the most explicitly antifeminist o f the crowd psychologists. As early as 1881 Le Bon had aired his views on the inferiority o f women, which were so vehem ent that a Dr. Fonssagrives of M ontpellier predicted that Le Bon would share the fate o f Orpheus— namely, be torn to shreds by women. See Le Bon’s L ’H omme et les societes (Paris: Rothschild, 1881) 1:157. Le Bon, however, was not easily intimi­ dated; in 1890 he complained that feminists had refused to accept the “proofs” o f the cranial inferiority o f women and the writings o f psycholo­ gists on their mental deficiencies (“La Psychologie des fem mes et les effets de leur education actuelle,” Revue scientifique 46, no. 15 [October 11, 1890]: 450). In concluding his article, Le Bon argued that educated women were join in g the ranks o f “rebels, enem ies o f man and o f the social order” (pp. 4 5 6 -6 0 ). 22. In 1892 legislation was enacted that limited women to a twelve-hour workday. Many working wom en opposed such reforms, and at least 13,000 o f them organized strikes against the legislation in the year following its passage. This, o f course, was not the sort o f legislation most feminists had in mind. More popular in feminist circles was the passage o f a law allowing

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nationally recognized; not until after the Second World War would French women march to the polls. From the perspective of the 1890s, the campaign for women’s suffrage and legal reforms was a failure. It rallied only a tiny fraction of France’s female population and a still smaller percentage of males in a position to aid their cause. In spite of the remarkable (and short-lived) cooperation across ideological lines, women suffragists made little con­ crete progress.23 Yet reform movements, even abortive ones, can arouse considerable hostility. This the women’s move­ m ent surely did. To conservatives in the late nineteenth cen­ tury, any step, however tremulous, away from the foyer was denounced as a stampede toward anarchy. Disturbed even by Maria Deraismes’s crusade for civil reform, they lashed out at the progress women were making in the spheres of education and occupation. Before 1880, there was practically no secondary education for women. During the Second Empire, Victor Duruy had encouraged the establishment of “cours secondaires” for those few girls who desired more than primary education. Miserably funded, uneven in quality, and casually adminis­ tered, these “cours” were appendages to male lycees and colleges.24 In December 1880 a law was passed to provide for the establishment of independent lycees for girls, which the state promised to support. In the next decade and a half, at least sixty-three lycees and colleges were organized through­ divorce (1884), the hiring o f w om en as inspectors in primary schools (1889). and the election o f wom en to their own tribunes de com m erce (1894). For such reforms, see Frances I. Clark, The Position of Women in Contemporary France (London: King and Son, 1937), p. 219. 23. T h e cooperation endured only as long as the first generation was ac­ tive. Deraismes died in 1894, Mink in 1901, and Michel in 1905. By the time Michel died, feminism was split along ideological lines, and there seems to have been little cooperation. T h e history o f the feminist m ovem ent thus provides a neat contrast with that o f the socialists, and for both groups, 1905 was crucial. 24. Edm ee Charrier, Evolution intellectuelle feminine (Paris: A. Mechelinck, 1931), pp. 108-09.

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out France, and by 1895 they boasted enrollments of over 10,000.25 In order to supply a faculty for these secondary schools, a wom en’s ecole normale superieure was opened at Sevres in 1881. Once their secondary education was legally guaranteed, the wom en’s assault on the facultes was not far behind. In the eighties and nineties, small numbers of determined women entered the facultes of all disciplines in France except the­ ology. For the first time, women took the rigorous exami­ nations for the aggregation and were awarded the doctorat as well as medical and legal degrees. By 1895-96 842 women were enrolled in v arious facultes throughout France.26 To be sure, they had not overrun the French university system; in 1895 women constituted a modest 3 percent of total univer­ sity enrollments. Nevertheless, the doors for women’s higher education and for the liberal professions had been pried open. Like their male colleagues, most women who enrolled in the facultes were drawn from the ranks of the middle classes. T he daughters of less prosperous families, however, had other educational opportunities available. Around 1880, Jules Ferry forced through the legislature a series of laws that guaranteed free and compulsory primary education for all French children. In addition, he called for the creation of secular primary schools, to be staffed by secular teachers of the same sex as their students. Overnight, the Ferry laws generated an enormous dem and for women institutrices. T he law of August 9, 1879, ordered the creation of an ecole nor­ male d ’institutrices in every departem ent in France. Institu­ trices were assigned as teachers in all public primary schools for girls and in all mixed (that is, coeducational) schools. As a result, between 1876 and 1896 the num ber of secular in­ stitutrices more than doubled, to include nearly 46,000 women.27 25. Anmtaire stalistique de la France, 1900, p. 481. 26. Charrier, Evolution, Table 20, facing p. 188. 27. Annuaire statitistique, 1900, p. 479.

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The spectacular increase of secular primary teachers, male and female, disturbed many conservative Frenchmen. T he most famous crowd psychologist, Gustave Le Bon, in­ terrupted his study of the crowd to inveigh against the “god­ less” and anarchic new form of education. Bolstering his ar­ guments with statistics and repeated allusions to Hippolyte Taine, Le Bon concluded that “it is in the schoolroom that socialists and anarchists are found nowadays, and that the way is being paved for the approaching period of decadence for the Latin peoples.”28 T he relationship Le Bon perceived between education and Latin decadence is, of course, debatable, but his percep­ tion of primary teachers as “leftist” was fairly accurate. As early as 1848, a num ber of primary school teachers, includ­ ing Jeanne Deroin, had agitated for political and social re­ forms. Their successors in the nineties had not discarded the radical tradition in political life. In addition to denounc­ ing their politics, Le Bon chastized the schoolteachers for abandoning their social station. Because of the opportunities offered by a new secular educational system, the peasant, he claimed, was leaving his field, the worker deserting his factory, and the woman abandoning her hearth.29 To Le Bon and many of his contemporaries, the secular instituteur and institutrice were “uprooted,” “barren,” “atheist” revolu­ tionaries; from another perspective they might have been seen as socially mobile, often celibate, secular, and politically leftist in sympathy. In deploring the advance of women in education and po­ litical agitation, Le Bon added his voice to a chorus of con­ siderable size and stature. By the nineties, women had artic­ ulated political demands; perhaps more significantly, they had made tangible progress in education. Opposition to these changes was widespread, vehement, and multifaceted. Some antifeminists responded directly, with speeches, tracts, 28. Le Bon, Psychologie des foules, p. 88. 29. Ibid., p. 81.

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and articles underscoring the idiocy of women in public life.30 Others rhapsodized over the tender pleasures of do­ mesticity, which they saw as threatened by “la femme nouvelle.” Less obvious, but scarcely less interesting, were the responses of artists and scientists. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, much of French art was injected with the, image of women as warriors, as vampires, as sadists, as castrators.31 And French medicine and criminal anthro­ pology provided the public with scientific explanations for such behavior. O n at least one issue, most French scientists could agree. W omen, they argued, were rightly described as the “weaker sex.” W hen compared to men, females were less intelligent, m ore emotional, and more susceptible to violent outbursts and mental illness. As one eminent physician put it: T he normal woman has many characteristics which she shares with the savage and the child (irascibility, vengeance, jealousy, vanity) as well as other characteristics diametrically opposed which neutralize the former, but which prevent her from ap­ proximating the conduct of men— that equilibrium between rights and dudes, egotism and altruism, which is the quintess­ ence o f moral evolution.32 30. See, for instance, Dr. Dujardin-Beaumetz, “Surmenage intellectuel des jeu n es filles,” Revue de I'hypnotisme 1 (1887): 120—22, and Le Bon, “La Psychologie des fem m es.” 31. For wom en as warriors, see much o f the Salon art, such as the “Vic­ tors o f Salamis” by Cormon. In A rebours, Huysmans describes a vampire dream o f Des Esseintes. Castration figures prominently in Taine’s Origines de la France contemporaine and in Zola’s Germinal. In addition, the Archives de I’anthropologie criminelle published about a dozen articles in the eighties and nineties on the subject o f eunuchs and individuals whose sexuality was un­ certain or deviant, such as homosexuals and hermaphrodites. Since many critics o f the feminist m ovem ent made the explicit connection between the political liberation o f women and their “masculinization,” it seems logical that criminal anthropologists were responding to many o f the same social issues as the noted antifeminists. For depictions o f women as sadists, see the lithographs o f Steinlen, Mucha, and others. 32. Ryckere, “La Fem m e criminelle et la prostitution,” Archives de I’anlhropologie criminelle 12 (1897): 306.

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In the opinion of many scientists, evolution had passed women by. By the nineteenth century, woman was a “fossil in all intellectual spheres and in all sentiments other than those in which she lives.”33 At the birth of civilization, women stood only slightly inferior to men in terms of their physical prowess, intellectual capacity, and psychological re­ silience. Over the course of centuries, the male half of the hum an race decidedly improved: their skulls enlarged, and they exhibited physical and cerebral strength far surpassing that of savages.34 Women, however, rem ained stunted crea­ tures. They could not boast of geniuses, “even in eras of equal education.” W om an’s moral faculties were far less de­ veloped than those of men; she was more easily drawn into deceit and crime.35 Furthermore, her psychological equilib­ rium was tenuous indeed. H er biological destiny rendered her susceptible to insanity, especially during menstruation, pregnancy, and menopause.36 Possessing more savage in­ stincts than her male counterpart, she was endowed with fewer psychic dikes with which to restrain these primitive and insane impulses. In the minds of French alienists and criminal anthropol­ ogists, this model of female psychology explained a great deal. It accounted for the high percentage of women pa­ tients in insane asylums.37 It demonstrated why it was 33. Scipio Sighele, “La Psychologie fem inine,” Revue des revues 13 (1895): 95. In “Contre le parliamentarianisme,” Sighele argued that collective psy­ chology is like female psychology— full o f contradictions, cruelty, and fickle­ ness. “Parliament, in short, is, from a psychological point o f view, only a woman, often a hysterical w om an.” La Psychologie des sectes, trans. from the Italian by Louis Brandin (Paris: V. Giard & E. Briere, 1898), pp. 2 12 -1 3 . 34. Henry de Varigny, “La F em m e,” La Grande Encyclopedic (Paris: 1886 and after), p. 144. 35. G. Ferraro, “Le M ensonge et la veracite chez la fem m e criminelle,” Archives de Vanthropologic criminelle 8 (1893): 143. 36. Gaston Richard, “Revue de Lourbet, La Femme devant la science," Re­ vue philosophique, 1897, p. 435. 37. According to the Annuaire statistique, wom en patients in mental hos­ pitals did outnum ber men throughout the nineteenth century. Insanity at

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women who suffered most from that mysterious disorder, hysteria. Most important, it provided a scientific rationale for the domestic captivity of women. As many French physicians and social theorists had con­ cluded, women entered the arena of public life at their ex­ treme peril. Only the traditional constraints of society ele­ vated their behavior above the level of barbarism. Once assembled in a crowd, women reverted to their primitive state. At the center of most violent mob activity, women vented their savage impulses. Even without the incitement of crowds, women were often seen as “unfit” for public life. T he strains of “daily assembly,” physicians and theorists ar­ gued, often drove women to insanity and crime.38 And since insanity was transmissible by the “laws of heredity,” the “public” woman, they feared, would pass on her “illness” to the next generation. In this manner, psychiatry in France was married to social thought. By juxtaposing psychiatric research with contem­ porary events, the crowd psychologists lent a moral to the tale of feminism: emancipated women would destroy French civilization. Men would be mutilated, society barbarized, and the “polluted” race would eventually die out. The traditional woman was the linchpin of French civilization; the liberated woman, its enemy and potential annihilator. “Every woman exercising a masculine profession,” declared the critic Emile Faguet, in an awkward but telling phrase, “is a quantity lost from the propagation of space”—and the hum an race. The strong nation, the nation of the future, will be that in which women have no profession other than their traditional role. The access of women to masculine professions is initially the sign, and eventually the cause of a formidable national degeneration.39 that time was divided into five categories. Men exceeded women in the “al­ coholic,” “paralytic,” and “cretin” categories, while women constituted most o f the “simple insanity” and “dementia senilis” categories. 38. For the views o f Gabriel Tarde on this subject, see below, chap. 6. 39. Emile Faguet, Journal des debats, December 12, 1895, p. 2.

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In French social theory and in science, “women” came to stand for savagery, stupidity, and violence. T hroughout the last three decades of the nineteenth century, increased em­ phasis was placed upon the “incontestable anatomic inferi­ ority” of women and upon their many intellectual deficien­ cies. In the seventies the Larousse encyclopedia had stressed woman’s grace, softness, and delicacy; by the nineties, the newest encyclopedia underscored only the negative aspects of her anatomy: her stunted size, her lack of resistance, her “crude muscular system,” her insensitivity to smell or taste.40 In many other descriptions of women written in the nine­ ties, females embodied all that was threatening, debasing, and inferior. Like the insane, they reveled in violence; like children, they were incessantly buffeted by instincts; like barbarians, their appetite for blood and sexuality was insatiable. Clearly, most French women in the late nineteenth cen­ tury did not even faintly resemble the model devised by al­ ienists and criminal anthropologists. As statistics indicated, women committed many fewer crimes than men. Nearly 40 percent of all French women worked; but contrary to the ex­ pectations of conservatives, only a small percentage of them were declared insane. Moreover, intelligent and gifted women had in fact made a mark on French culture, and the small num ber of women who entered the spheres of higher education perform ed remarkably well.41 Yet the myth of the inferior, savage female persisted—in spite of evidence to the contrary. That image, I would argue, was too appealing to renounce. By projecting upon women the most disturbing hum an instincts—violence, sexuality, and aggression— many conservative men could thus assert their superiority, their finely hewn rationality, their moral rectitude. Beginning with Eve, they claimed, it was women who lured men into 40. Varigny, “La Fem m e,” pp. 143-45. 41. Charrier, Evolution, passim.

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sexual encounters, social strife, and cultural decay. For the sordid aspects of life men bore little responsibility. In the late nineteenth century, women were associated with most of France’s social problems—except the epidemic of alcoholism. Nearly all the experts on drink conceded that women and children consumed precious little of France’s distilled spirits. T o be sure, those females who did imbibe strong beverages courted social ruin and most often sank into those two spheres of the underworld: crime and pros­ titution. For the most part, however, scientists agreed that the abuses of drink were rightly attributed to the male citi­ zenry. T he picture of alcoholism was terrifying nonetheless; and in comparing mobs to drunkards, crowd psychologists again evoked the spectre of race suicide, hereditary insanity, and unmitigated violence. In 1852 the Swedish doctor Magnus Huss baptized the disease of drink “alcoholism.” No sooner had it been named than French physicians began to discover its ravages among their patients, especially among the mentally ill. Within twenty years alcohol had ceased to be regarded as a valuable aid to digestion or as a stimulant for circulation and physical activity. Alcoholic spirits, especially “hard” or distilled spir­ its, now appeared to be the root of most social evils—crime, revolution, economic decline, violence, infertility, epilepsy, onanism, and mental disorders of all types. Public awareness of the problems of drink came late to France. As late as 1875 the Grand Dictionnaire du XIXe siecle inform ed its readers that in our country, although drunkenness is not unknown, it is far from having a character as repellent and as nefarious as in England and in America.42 42.

Grand Dictionnaire du XIXe siecle,

p. 1579.

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T he disparity between French moderation and AngloAmerican dipsomania was attributed to race. In the opinion of the Dictionnaire, temperance movements, so common in England, Germany, and America, served to “moderate the hereditary ardor of the Teutonic race and the Anglo-Saxon race for alcoholic spirits.”43 Since the French did not spring from that unfortunate racial tree, they had no need for temperance. The Grand Dictionnaire had made a grievous error. In summarizing tracts on alcoholism, it had confused national concern with national consumption. In 1875 temperance, of course, was a more powerful force in America than in France, but that did not mean that Americans drank more than Frenchmen. Even in regard to the French situation the Dictionnaire was myopic. During the decade preceding 1875, a num ber of French physicians had released statistics that belied the Dictionnaire 's patriotic optimism. Although their numbers and samples varied widely, stud­ ies of the problem of alcoholism pointed to the same dis­ turbing conclusion: France was drowning itself in spirits. In 1790 per capita consumption of wine was 61 liters a year; by 1850 it had risen to 75 liters, and by 1895 to 113 liters.44 T he increase in sales of distilled liquor was even more dramatic. In 1830 the annual per capita consumption of “p ure” alco­ hol (all distilled or fortified liquors adjusted to 100 percent spirits) stood at 1.12 liters. Thirty years later, annual con­ sumption had doubled; by 1890 it was 4.35, nearly a four­ fold increase in sixty years. T he problem, according to French scientists, was graver than these statistics indicated. W omen and children rarely drank at all; only adult men consumed distilled beverages. If the per capita figures were readjusted to include only m a­ ture males, the average consumer of hard liquor imbibed 43. Ibid. 44. J. Lefort, Intemperance et misere (Paris: Librairie Guillaumin, 1875), p. 61.

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13.4 liters of pure alcohol every twelve months. By examin­ ing the geographical distribution of liquor sales, French sci­ entists concluded that such consumers belonged overwhelm­ ingly to the urban working classes.45 T he danger of an alcoholic proletariat haunted scientists and politicians alike. O f course, an alcoholic of whatever so­ cial class was thought to behave in a recognizably degenerate m anner. According to Lefort, one of the most famous stu­ dents of the problem, a drunken individual was stripped of his conscience, his intellect, and his moral faculties. Once re­ duced to bestiality, he became a victim of “instinctive impul­ ses and bad instincts.” Even his appearance reflected his primitive mental state: The entire being is transformed; not only does his blood cir­ culate with increased violence; his face becomes animated, flushed, and assumes a savage air; . . . His habits are modified, extravagance, susceptibility, defiance, and anger appear; the least thing irritates him and provokes excesses which are com­ promising, both for the unfortunate soul plunged in this state and for society.46

Losing all sense of control, drunkards delighted in violent and destructive actions. Inebriated workers, in particular, left their jobs, neglected their families, squandered their in­ come, and fomented strikes and rebellions.47 Drunkenness is, of course, a transitory phenomenon, but in the minds of French physicians, a return to sobriety did 45. T h e working-class nature o f alcoholism was accepted even by Emile Durkheim. See his Suicide, trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson (New York: T h e Free Press, 1964), pp. 77-81. 46. Lefort, Intemperance, p. 6, and W. Babilee, Des Troubles de la memoire dans I’a lcoolisme et plus particulierement de Vamnesie alcoolique (Paris: A. Parent, 1886), p. 67. 47. Lefort, Intemperance, p. 146. M. Rochard estimated that the annual “cost” o f drink in France (including liquor sales, wages and work lost, lunds used to treat alcoholics and maintain extra police, suicides, and deaths) was 1,555,757,296 francs (Toulouse, Causes, p. 171).

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not mean a return to “normal” health. Lefort pointed out that alcohol had addictive properties comparable to m or­ phine and that even a few episodes of drunkenness could engender delirium, insanity, suicidal behavior, brain lesions, or paralysis.48 Still worse, the scourge of drink outlived its victims. T he bad seed of alcoholism was transmitted from one generation to the next, according to the laws of hered­ ity. Children of alcoholics were tainted. Among their many defects were a hereditary disposition for alcoholism, insan­ ity, convulsions, epilepsy, degeneration, and crime. (Accord­ ing to the well-known doctor Morel, the majority of armed children seized during the Commune were children of al­ coholics.) It was clear that if adults drank the downfall of a civilization would soon follow: The race degenerates, because, according to a well-known say­ ing, the drunkard sows nothing worthwhile. Children born o f intemperate parents, carry from birth the germs o f the sick­ ness, die prematurely, or else lead a listless existence, useless to society, depraved and possessing all the bad instincts.49

According to French doctors, society paid dearly for such excesses. At best, alcoholics did not reproduce; at worst, they spawned degenerate offspring. Drunkenness, they em­ phasized, weakened the “generative functions”: The number o f births diminishes . . . because the intemperate person dies at an early age, killed by excesses and maladies which they contract more easily than others.50

W hen doctors related drink to the birth rate, they had sounded a national alarm. Probably no demographic issue was more keenly felt in late nineteenth-century France than infertility and its supposed consequence, race suicide. T hroughout the century, the population of France re­ mained relatively stable, while the populations of Germany, 48. Ibid., p. 9. 49. Ibid., p. 4. 50. Ibid., p. 2.

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Britain, Italy, and Spain rapidly increased. After the FrancoPrussian war, the French became still more sensitive to their demographic stagnation. Public awareness, however, did not solve the problem. In the nineties, French population abso­ lutely decreased for six years out of ten.51 Was alcohol to blame for the myriad symptoms of social decadence in France? Nearly all French scientists agree with the demographic expert, Professor Debove, when he de­ scribed his compatriots thus: Like frail plants suffocated by luxuriant vegetation, we are threatened with perishing in the midst o f other nations, and alcoholism stands foremost among the causes o f this fatal disappearance.52

In a slightly more prosaic manner, the lawyer Henri Sempe added: The immediate consequences o f this deadly intoxication are the diminution o f the life forces o f the nation, the rise in the number o f the insane, the habitual excitation o f the emotions, a sort o f morbid and unconscious nervousness, the increase in criminality, the diminution o f the population, and o f the standard o f living, to say nothing o f the fact that alcohol, ac­ cording to certain economists, reduces the salaries o f workers by nearly a billion francs.53

Something had to be done to stem the epidemic of alcohol­ ism. Immediately after the Franco-Prussian War, concern over alcoholism had crystallized into a French temperance movement and a drive for legislation. Drunkards were re­ moved from public view. In an attempt to stem the tide of 51. Annuaire statistique, 1900. See Aldo Dudley Kirk, “Population and Population T rends in M odern France,” in Edward Mead Earle, ed., Modern France (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1951), pp. 313-33. 52. Cited in Francotte, “L’Alcoolisme au point de vue des ses consequences sociales,” Revue des questions scienlifiques 45 (1899):401. 53. Henri Sem pe, Regime economique du vin: Production, consommation, echanges (Paris: Guillaumin, 1898), p. 86.

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public drunkenness, Dr. Theophile Roussel pushed through the National Assembly the law of April 23, 1873.04 During the next two decades, a num ber of additional bills were in­ troduced to limit the sale of distilled liquor and absinthe and to educate French children about the perils of excessive drink. In the nineties, several programs were approved that required all schoolchildren to read such instructive volumes as Sonnets antibachiques on guerre a Vivrognerie or Jean Le Buveur, Drame antialcoolique en trois actes and Maudite Boisson! Drame antialcoolique pour enfants or Les Enfants du buveur.bD Much of this propaganda was written in conjunction with the Societe Frangaise de Temperance, an organization founded by Drs. Bergeron and Barth in 1872 and closely al­ lied with the Paris Academie de Medecine. In the words of one contemporary, the French Tem perance Society “at­ tacked not the use, but the abuse of alcoholic drinks.”56 In its journal, Temperance, the society published all m anner of ar­ ticles demonstrating the miseries and “degradation” of alco­ holism. It lobbied, moreover, for increased consumption of “healthful” inexpensive wines, cider, and beer, as well as re­ strictions on the sale of “injurious” distilled spirits. French temperance leaders declared war on the cafe. With obvious horror they disclosed the information that working-class debits de boisson were springing up throughout France, especially in the newly industrialized regions of the Nord and the Pas-de-Calais. By comparing the num ber of 54. T h e law specified a scale o f fines and imprisonment for repeated of­ fenses; those who had been convicted more than twice risked the loss o f their right to vote, to bear arms, to serve on a jury, or to hold public or administrative office. Cafe personnel who served liquor to inebriated clients were also liable to fines and/or prison sentences. At least to som e degree, the law was enforced; the Paris police records show that in 1888, for in­ stance, m ore people were arrested for drunkenness than for any other o f­ fense. T h e numbers ranged from 1,735 to 4,159 per month in Paris, out o f approximately 8,000 arrests. APP, BA 100, BA 101, and La Grande Ency­ clopedic, p. 1144. 55. Lorenz, Catalogue, XVI, p. 32. 56. Grand Dictionnaire, p. 1579.

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cabarets or debits in France with the total population, schol­ ars had concluded that France had one bar for every eightyfive inhabitants, or one bar for every thirty male adults.57 In the Nord, however, the density of debits was twice that of the national average. These cafes were entirely too success­ ful. According to several doctors, workers retired to the clos­ est cafe1at least four times during every workday; many of them received their only bonuses in drinks, and all too com­ m on were “alcoholic tournam ents,” in which workers at­ tem pted to outdrink each other.58 Advocates of temperance marshaled their forces. They urged that the num ber of bars, as well as the hours of their commerce, be drastically reduced. To offset the importance of the cafe as a meeting-place, several physicians called for the establishment of libraries, parks, and athletic societies.59 T he benefits of such reforms, the doctors claimed, would extend to all of France. Alcoholism would decline, strikes and riots would subside, crime would practically disappear, and the institution of the family would be revitalized. On the national level, the French Tem perance Society pressed for changing patterns of alcoholic consumption. From the start, this crusade had a curiously patriotic ring. Its aims echoed the cherished ideals of winegrowers throughout France: to increase the sale of wine and to out­ law that of its distilled competitors. T he rhetoric of tem per­ ance and the rhetoric of the wine industry were synony­ mous. T he following statement by Henri Sempe, a lawyer in Bordeaux, is a case in point: 57. “Rapports,” Archives de I’anthropologie criminelle. See also Michael R. Marrus, “Social Drinking in the Belle Epoque " Journal of Social History 7, no. 2 (Winter 1974): 115-41, and Toulouse, Causes, pp. 163-88. 58. Babilee, Troubles, pp. 119-20, and Marie-Hubert Aviat, La Question des etablissements speciaux pour la cure de Valcoolisme (Arcis-sur-Aube: Imprimerie Leon Fremont, 1900), pp. 20—21. 59. Georges Poirson, Du Role de Valcool dans I'etiologie de la folie (Nancy: Gerarain et Nicolle, 1898), p. 94.

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O f all the European nations, France now absorbs the most al­ cohol. Hygienists, statesmen, publicists are terrified by this sit­ uation. We are not, however, a race o f “spirit drinkers,” and we have right in our own country the antidote to alcohol: w i n e . It is to this national drink that we must return.60

With such statements, winegrowers and temperance lead­ ers joined forces to eradicate the “poison” of distilled alco­ hol. Wine, cider, and French beer, they maintained, were salutary and patriotic. In order to convince their public, they paraded a series of statistics that “proved” that even as much as six hundred bottles of wine a year would not cause alco­ holism, yet twelve liters a year of “alcohol” would. Peasants, the physicians contended, were the sturdy pride of the French race, and peasants drank wine. In the major wine­ growing regions of France, they drank a good deal— two hundred liters of wine per capita (including women and children). Yet alcoholism, most physicians told their readers, was not a problem for the peasants. In their enthusiasm for the antidote wine, the temperance physicians overlooked several crucial facts. In the first place, peasants undoubtedly drank far more than the official fig­ ure of two hundred bottles a year. Much of the wine pro­ duced in the Midi was not subject to taxation. Some peasants regularly received wine as part of their wages. Wines made from second and third pressings of grapes were not taxed, nor were any alcoholic beverages produced by home distil­ leries. Fraud and tax evasion, moreover, were widespread, since winegrower and wine consumer alike benefited by avoiding the payment of taxes.61 In short, peasants probably absorbed more pure alcohol than urban workers.62 60. Sempe, Regime, p. 79. 61. Charles K. Warner, The Winegrowers of France and the Government since 1875 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), pp. 13, 14. Warner es­ timates that the untaxed or undeclared production o f wine represented 40 percent o f the officially declared figure. 62. French wines usually contained 10 percent alcohol. If the per capita figures on wine consumption were adjusted to include only adult males, and

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But even more critical for the cause of national tem per­ ance, the wine crusade was doomed to failure. Within three years of the formation of the French Tem perance Society, the French wine industry nearly collapsed. In 1876, phyllox­ era devastated the vineyards of southern France, and throughout the eighties, wine production fell 46 percent be­ low the previous decade.63 For the next ten years, French wines were both expensive and hard to find. It was cheaper for the average urban worker to purchase his spirits in dis­ tilled form. T he phylloxera epidemic paralyzed the temperance phy­ sicians. From their perspective, they had isolated the disease of alcoholism, they had discovered its endemic and tragic ef­ fects on France, they had even devised a cure. Yet through­ out the eighties and nineties, their antidote to alcoholism was in short supply. Unable to cajole urban workers into ab­ stinence, medical experts dramatized the dangers of alco­ holism and inflated its hereditary effects. France, they warned, was the most alcoholic nation in the world, and al­ cohol was the cause of nearly all crime, strikes, and collective violence.64 To all who would listen, they shouted a prophecy of doom. But science, even popular science, had a limited audience. Not everyone would peruse Legrain’s learned treatises or re­ construct M agnan’s polished family trees of insanity. Yet what science could not accomplish, literature could. Through the prose of Emile Zola, the “truth” about drink was soon carried to the reading public. In 1877 he published the dev­ if we assume that the peasant received no untaxed alcoholic beverages, his annual consum ption would still reach 700 to 800 bottles o f wine. Astound­ ing as it may seem, many peasants were probably ingesting 70 to 80 liters o f pure alcohol yearly! 63. Warner, Winegrowers, p. 3. 64. Docteur Legrain, Heredite et alcoolisme: Etude psychologique et clinique sur les degeneres buveurs et les families d'ivrognes (Paris: Octave Dion, 1889), passim; G. Bourcart, Le Peril de Valcoolisme et les remedes (Paris: 1896); and Lefort, Intemperance.

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astating portrait of Parisian working-class culture, I'Assommoir. T he novel brought notoriety to the problem of drink and to Zola. In less than a year, thirty-eight printings of I'Assommoir had been issued, and by 1882 over 100,000 copies had been sold.65 Alcohol blackens the existence of nearly all the characters in Zola’s novel. Liquor propels Coupeau into insanity, the asylum of Sainte-Anne, and a graphically described dance of death. His neighbor, the perpetually inebriated Bijard, m ur­ ders his own daughter. U nder the spell of alcohol, the her­ oine Gervaise abandons her livelihood, sinks to prostitution, and ultimately dies like a dog on a bed of straw. Moreover* she and her children carry the inherited stigmata of alco­ holism. Because Gervaise was conceived in a drunken, vio­ lent sexual encounter, she is born with a humiliating limp, and although she scarcely drinks during her childbearing years, her children inherit other alcoholic defects. H er daughter Nana becomes a notorious, insatiable prostitute, and her son Etienne—the strike leader of Germinal—is trans­ formed into a homicidal monster under the influence of liq­ uor. In later novels of the Rougon-Macquart series, Zola de­ picts the two other sons of Gervaise as a psychopath and a talented but emotionally unstable artist. From reading I’Assommoir, thousands of Frenchm en dis­ covered the fatal legacy of drink. In translating contem po­ rary scientific theory into fictional form, Zola had con­ structed a labyrinth of alcoholism and poverty from which few could ever escape. His gloomy portrayal owed much to science, yet he, far more than his scientific contemporaries, viewed alcoholics compassionately.66 Unlike most French sci­ 65. Robert F. Byrnes, “T h e French Publishing Industry and Its Crisis in the 1890s, "Journal of Modern History 23 (September 1951): 234. 66. Zola took many o f his descriptions o f alcoholics, their character, and illnesses from Dr. M agnan’s De I'alcoolisme (Paris: A. Delahaye, 1874). W hen accused o f plagiarizing from Denis Poulot’s Le Sublime (Paris: Librarie In­ ternationale, 1870), he replied, “1 am astounded that Doctor Magnan has not sued me for having taking so man) passages from his fine book, De

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entists, Zola stressed the crucial factor of the environment that shaped the quality and destiny of working-class existence. In the closing chapters of lAssommoir, Zola provided a key to the difference between his own view of alcoholism and that of most French doctors. Once she discovers that Coupeau has been admitted to Sainte-Anne, Gervaise travels twice to see her dying husband. As she approaches his cell for the first time, she is terrified by Coupeau’s savage screams. Observing her husband is a young, “pink” physi­ cian, tapping his fingers while he takes notes. As Gervaise draws near, he admonishes her to be silent, as her husband is an “interesting case.” Overwhelmed by the sight of Coupeau, Gervaise leaves. T he following day, she returns to the hospital where she finds Coupeau being scrutinized by two physicians— the pink man and an “elderly doctor wearing a ribbon of the Legion of H onor.” When the decorated doctor finally addresses Gervaise, he inquires only about Coupeau’s parents; “Did this m an’s father drink?” “Did the mother drink?” “And you drink too?” As Gervaise stammers, he cuts her off with a sharp prediction: “One of these days you’ll die in the same way!”67 T he doctor was right, but for the wrong reasons. So con­ vinced were French physicians of alcohol’s hereditary effects that they for the most part ignored the debilitating role of squalor, miserable housing, and sheer penury as causal fac­ tors of working-class alcoholism. In their enthusiasm to blame distilled liquor for all of France’s social problems, they cast alcohol as the invariable cause rather than the re­ sult of poverty. Although Zola had subtly intertwined the strands of alco­ holism and environment, very often his readers saw alcohol VAlcoolisme. . . . If you want to compare I'Assommnir to his work, you will find en ough evidence for a new inquiry” (Leon Deffoux, La Publication de VAssommoir [Paris: Societe Franchise d ’Editions Litteraires et Techniques, 1931], p. 84). 67. Emile Zola, L ’A ssommoir, trails. L. W. Tancock (New York: Penguin Books), pp. 4 0 1 -0 4 .

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as the sole villain.68 From I’A ssommoir and from medical trea­ tises, literate Frenchmen formulated an image of alcoholism unparalleled in its ferocity. On the basis of current research, they concluded that alcohol drove hum an beings to sav­ agery, m urder, insanity, and ultimately to the pollution of the race. Seldom has any disease been invested with an emotional resonance as terrifying and well publicized as was alcoholism in late nineteenth-century France. Alcoholism was not merely an illness; it emerged as the nexus of France’s social ills. Crowd psychologists soon exploited the associations to violence, insanity, and hereditary disability that reference to alcoholism entailed. T he crowd, as Taine, Tarde, Sighele, and Le Bon argued, was a ferocious and unpredictable being comparable to the wildest of French drunkards. Such a metaphor, which appears unwarranted to twentieth-cen­ tury readers, embodied for fin de siecle France a lengthy catalogue of national pathology, both social and psychologi­ cal. It suggested, too, that crowds, like alcoholics, could be studied by science, but not cured. Much like the decorated doctor in I’Assommoir, French crowd psychologists had isolated the pathology of the crowd and described its many symptoms and complications. Yet they, like him, were powerless to stem the course of the dis­ ease. T he crowd, like the drunkard and the emancipated woman, would destroy France. By equating crowds with these “irrational” and “threatening” groups—all supposed agents of decadence, insanity, and race suicide—Taine and his contemporaries summarized the fears of a generation in a single stark phrase. 68. Susanna Barrows, “After the Com m une: Alcoholism, Tem perance, and Literature in the Early Third Republic,” in Consciousness and Class Ex­ perience in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. John M. Nlerriman (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1979), pp. 205-18.

3

Hippolyte Taine and the Spectre of the Commune In the wake of the traumatic events of 1870 and 1871, an experienced and respected scholar set about writing a his­ tory of m odern France. He would study his subject, he claimed, as dispassionately as a scientist watching the “metamorphosis of an insect,” or a historian examining the “revolutions of Florence or Athens.”1 His publications would distil historical truth and instruct his fellow citizens in the art of proper government in France. In this spirit, Hippolyte Taine introduced Les Origines de la France contemporaine. It was not the book he had planned to write. Less than a year before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, Taine had published a massive and highly detailed study entitled De I'intelligence. In this two-volume work, Taine had ana­ lyzed the nature of cognition or “intellect” by dissecting mental “sensations.” In his view, the mental perceptions and ideas of sane individuals were reflections of external reality, yet all “norm al” cognition lay dangerously close to halluci­ nations, dreams, and the delusions of the insane. Citing con­ tem porary research on the organic lesions of the brain, on hypnotism, and on split personality, Taine constructed an epistemological model that barely separated the sane from the pathologically disturbed.2 1. Hippolyte Taine, Les Origines de la France contemporaine, vol. 1: L ’A ncien Regime (Paris: Hachette, 1887), p. v, and ibid., vol. 2: La Revolution (Paris: Hachette, 1878), p. iii. 2. Hippolyte Taine, De Vintelligence (Paris: Hachette, 1888), passim. For a discussion o f this work in relation to T aine’s philosophy, see Leo Wein­ stein, Hippolyte Taine (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1972), pp. 28—50.

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Upon completing De VIntelligence, Taine had expressed the hope that if his health and stamina endured, he would next examine “the emotions and the will.”3 O ther things in­ tervened. By April 4, 1871, the spectacle of the Com m une— to which Taine was a witness— prom pted him to change his subject to “contemporary France” and its nefarious origins.4 Even before it began, Taine was traumatized by the Com­ mune. As early as February 12, he feared a recurrence of the June Days of 1848; only three weeks later that fear had assumed the proportions of a nightmare: My grey ideas [about France] have become black; I see within the next year June Days and a civil war, a short time later a second invasion, perhaps in the end a division o f France into two parts, a future comparable to the last three centuries of Italy. . . . Few nations are as remarkable in their political in­ capacity [as France]; those who call themselves republicans, men o f progress, are for the most part raving maniacs.3

By the end of March, Taine had stretched his political analogy to include the French Revolution. T he Commune, he maintained, increasingly resembled the Committee of Public Safety or the Terror. Finding France “grotesque, odious, base and absolutely incorrigible,” Taine pronounced the political situation a “return to barbarism and to the whims of primitive anarchy.”6 T he rank and file of the in­ surgents were permeated with “foreigners”; above them lurked a dangerous sect of “fanatics, cosmopolitan foreign­ ers, and rogues” plotting for a “universal jacquerie.”7 Because Taine believed he could foresee a bloody fate for the Commune, he hastily terminated his lectures at the 3. Letters to John Durand, September 7, 1870. and to T ain e’s mother, December 2, 1870, in Hippolyte Taine, Sa Vie et sa correspondance (Paris: Hachette, 1905), 3:16, 30. 4. Letter to Mme. H. Taine, April 4, 1871, Ibid., p. 90. 5. Letter to Emile Boutmy, March 6, 1871, Ibid., p. 55. 6. Letters to Mme. H. Taine, March 26, 1871, and to T ain e’s mother, March 26, 1871, ibid., pp. 70, 74, 75. 7. Letter to T aine’s mother, April 30, 1871, ibid., p. 105.

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Ecole des Beaux-Arts and left Paris on April 11. After a brief stay in Tours, he travelled to Oxford to read a series of lectures and receive an honorary degree. On May 25, while poring over his lecture notes for the following day, Taine learned of the Paris carnage, the fires, and the infa­ mous Petroleuses. T he darkest of his premonitions had be­ come reality. In June 1871 Taine’s view of the French political disaster was known only to his correspondents; he soon vowed, how­ ever, to reveal these truths to the reading public. By the end of 1871, Taine had written a preliminary outline for the Origines. To expand the basic premises of his controversial argum ent, he needed to draw upon two sources: historical documentation and a general psychological framework. The first he found by sifting through Paris’s two richest archives, the Bibliotheque Nationale and the Archives Nationales.8 T he second required less work, since Taine already consid­ ered himself a psychologist par excellence. History, as he put it, “is psychology applied to more complex cases. The historian notes and traces the total transformation presented by a particular molecule, or a group of hum an molecules.”9 As Taine trained his vision on the "hum an molecules” un ­ leashed in 1789, he was nearly blinded by an explosion of “spontaneous anarchy.” In surveying France, he found the monarchy tottering, the state bankrupt, the economy in ruins, the peasants and laborers near starvation, and author­ ity everywhere in shambles. This chaos had not happened overnight. Ever since the seventeenth century, Taine ar­ gued, France had been veering toward national disaster. Self-control and restraint— those essential harnesses of pri­ mal instincts—were disregarded by the monarchy in its in­ satiable quest for state power and centralization. Like any 8. Taine, in fact, dedicated the Origines to the librarians and archivists o f the two institutions. 9. Hippolyte Taine, On Intelligence, trans. T. D. Haye (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1889), l:ix—x.

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other passion, the lust for power was “contagious. Once the monarchy had indulged its taste for reform, for abstract au­ thority, the intellectual world followed suit. During the eigh­ teenth century, the French philosophes distilled a cultural “poison” by blending two intellectual ingredients, the cult of science and the esprit classique.U) Such a poison, Taine al­ leged, drove sane men to disregard the “blind wisdom” of tradition and the lessons of history as they devised programs for sweeping political reforms or conjured up visions of a “higher” moral sphere. Impervious to the cultural determ i­ nants of race, milieu and moment, the philosophes main­ tained that “truth” was universal, and that they had discov­ ered its component parts. What was good for the philosophes was good for France (and the rest of the world). According to Taine, such abstraction was the disease of the Enlightenment. Had it been isolated, the malady and its victims could have been controlled. These “monomaniacs” of reform, however, were idolized, their “pathological” ideas vulgarized and extolled. By associating with each other in the salons, the clubs, and other “dangerous sects,” the vic­ tims of the Enlightenment’s idees fixes only exacerbated their illnesses. T he ultimate impact of the Enlightenment was cata­ strophic. “Sick” minds degenerated into hopeless and homi­ cidal maniacs. Ignorant and once sensible laborers vora­ ciously swallowed the “poison” of the intellectuals. W hen monarchical authority finally collapsed under the pressures of economic chaos, recent agricultural disasters, and de­ mands for political reform, the now transmogrified horde of French “beasts” reveled in a binge of death and destruction.11 Behind Taine’s impassioned, almost breathless account of the outbreak of the French Revolution lies a comprehensive exposition of hum an psychology and a terrifying theory of 10. Taine, L ’A ncien Regime, pp. 221—38. 11. For an analysis o f Taine s metaphors o f disease and poison, see below.

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the savagery of men in groups. As he baldly put it, men and women in crowds revert to a “state of nature.” T he natural man, as Taine defined him, is a “savage,” a brutal beast in­ capable of reason, a “baboon” chained to base desires.12 As societies have developed, m an’s instincts have been curbed by an intricate and extremely fragile web of civilized con­ straints. Over the course of centuries, these constraints have been institutionalized in the forms of marriage, religious piety, allegiance to tradition, and a secure recognition of one’s place in the social hierarchy. “Civilization,” however, is never distributed in an egalitar­ ian fashion. Certain groups clearly stand as more “ad­ vanced” than others. Men, for instance, have fewer bestial instincts than women, and persons of education and noble birth rank above peasants and laborers on the ladder of civ­ ilization. At the very bottom of the hierarchy lurk the m od­ ern equivalents of pure savages: criminals and prostitutes. But all mankind—rich or destitute, educated or illiterate, law-abiding or criminal— reverts to a savage and instinctual state once a crowd is formed: We can understand how, from the peasant, the worker, the bourgeois, pacified and tamed by an ancient civilization, we see suddenly spring forth the barbarian, still worse, the pri­ mitive animal, the grinning, bloodthirsty, lustful baboon who laughs as he murders, and gambols over the damage he has done.13

According to Taine, the sudden transformation of man into irrational savage is caused by the “laws of mental contagion.” A solitary man can control his bestial instincts, but once he joins a crowd, “mutual contagion inflames the passions; crowds . . . end in a state of drunkenness, from which noth­ ing can issue but vertigo and blind rage.”14 All crowds, then, 12. For T ain e’s view o f “natural m an” see his L ’A ncien Regime, pp. 231, 31 2ff. 13. Taine, La Revolution, 1:70. 14. Ibid., p. 133.

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are destructive, its members uniformly subject to the “laws of mental contagion.” Although mental contagion, in Taine’s view, could elec­ trify the aristocrat as well as the peasant, the social compo­ sition of most crowds described in the Origines is at best ple­ beian and more often dominated by criminals. When Taine described the October Days of 1789, for example, he pic­ tured Lafayette as a cowardly dupe jostled by an army of prostitutes, criminals, outlaws, and other forms of the dregs of society.15 The uprisings of the ordinarily lawful populace of France—the peasants, honest laborers, or hungry women— are obscured by Taine’s incessant emphasis upon the out­ laws and m urderers who allegedly led those revolts. In his descriptions, a crowd begins as a leaderless horde, but the “scum” soon “rises to the surface of the m ob.”16 T he leaders of crowds are inevitably drawn from the “lowest" elements: criminals, vagabonds, smugglers, m urderers, and other fugitives from justice.17 Unwilling to control the m ob’s thirst for violence, these despicable criminals set the exam ­ ple of frenzied violence for the rest of the crowd. Incapable of reason, guided by m urderous instincts, led by “vagrants and foul savages,” the crowd thus embarks on an orgy of crime, debauchery, and drunkenness. Throughout this bacchanalia of destruction, women march at the forefront. According to Taine, women “naturally” led the stampede for food and wine in the riots of 1789. Women, he argued, were the most susceptible to the “infec­ tious malady” of the crowd. Since he thought that even “civ­ ilized” women were more barbaric than men, Taine stressed the natural preeminence of women in crowds. It was a woman, he informs us, who ate the heart of the “innocent” Major de Belzance at Caen, women who screamed as they pillaged granaries, caves, and storage areas for food in the 15. Ibid., pp. 126-38. 16. Ibid.. p. 130. 17. Ibid., pp. 18. 20, 41, 130.

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spring of 1789, women who led the “savage” march on Ver­ sailles in October of that year.18 Famine, the passions of the “stomach,” may have induced them to revolt, but the more primitive mentality in which all women share predeterm ined a feminine fascination with violence. Citing the memoirs of a Monsieur X., Taine pointed out that a “num ber of fash­ ionable women . . . left their carriages at some distance” to feast on the spectacle of the storming of the Bastille.19 In other violent episodes of the Revolution, prostitutes and lower-class women played a more active role than their aris­ tocratic counterparts. In 1789 they swarmed about the Pa­ lais-Royal, intimidated members of the Assembly, and turned the October Days into an “abcess of the most poison­ ous passions and the foulest motives.”20 To underscore the political message of these examples, Taine insisted that the feminine sex has no right to political opinions or participation. When a political idea penetrates such heads, instead o f enno­ bling them, it becomes degraded there; its sole effect is to un­ leash vices which a remnant o f modesty still keeps in subjec­ tion, and free reign is given to lewd or ferocious instincts under the pretense o f public good.21

As illustrations of the “lewrdness” of women in political re­ volts, Taine described the Reveillon riots, the storming of the Bastille, and the October march on Versailles as sexual orgies of prostitutes and shameless women. Abandon, in Taine’s analysis, is not limited to the sphere of sexuality. Scarcely a riot erupts in his account that is not accompanied by an alcoholic debauch. Beginning in the spring of 1789, both rural and urban uprisings are orches­ trated in inebriated refrains. We learn, for instance, that during the Reveillon riots a num ber of rioters 18. 19. 20. 21.

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

pp. 89, 14, 126-38. pp. 5 7 -5 8 . p. 128. p. 133.

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spread out through the cellars, drink liquor and varnish at random until they fall down dead drunk or expire in convul­ sions. Against this howling horde, a corps of the watch . . . is seen approaching. . . . “Tiles and chimneypieces are rained down upon the soldiers,” who fire back four files at a time. The rioters, drunk with wine and fury, defend themselves for several hours.22

T he evening of July 30 exceeded all earlier debauchery of the crowd. The rebellious populace wants, “above all things . . . to have cheap wine.” In the ensuing pillage, one savage band of demonstrators (including several women) expires in an alcoholic coma. Thirty of them, Taine claims, “are found dead and dying, drowned in wine, men and women, includ­ ing one who is nine months pregnant.” T he street, m ean­ while, is inundated with a flood of alcohol. “Brigands” coerce “passers-by to drink, and [pour] out wine to all com­ ers. A stream of wine flows in the gutter, and the smell of it strikes the senses.”23 Taine’s hyperbolic prose graphically underscored the or­ giastic nature of crowd activity.24 Alcoholism, he argued, is essentially a working-class problem. Because of misery, hun­ ger, and overwork, many laborers imbibe excessive amounts of strong liquor. Over time, such habitual drunkenness takes a severe mental and physical toll: bloodshot eyes, convul­ sions, paranoia, delusions of power, and homicidal delu­ sions.25 Because it is, in Taine’s view, the worker who com­ 22. Ibid., p. 40. 23. Ibid., pp. 5 3-54 . 24. In The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), George Rude exam ined the extant material on the events o f April and July 1789. He concluded that drunkenness was a minor factor in the Reveillon riots, since only five people were arrested for inebriation and “abusive language" and since som e 2,000 bottles o f wine were found intact in Reveillon’s cellars after the melee. In a study o f the events culminating in the storming o f the Bastille, he similarly dismissed the myth o f a drunken revelry. T h e “pillage” o f the evenings o f July 12 and 13, he demonstrated, was essentially a search for grain and arms. See Rude, pp. 3 4 -3 7 and 4 9-53 . 25. T aine, La Revolution, 1:459.

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monly suffers from such mental aberrations, and because the scum of society manipulate crazed rioters, Taine paints his crowds in garish tones of savagery, mental illness, social deviance, and alcoholic addiction. T he image of the alcoholic crowd was also to provide Taine with one of the book’s most powerful metaphors. In concluding the first volume of La Revolution, Taine de­ scribed in the following m anner the national dilemma in 1792: France . . ., exhausted by fasting under the monarchy, inebri­ ated by the bad spirits o f the Social Contract, and twenty other adulterated or fiery drinks, is suddenly struck with paralysis of the brain; suddenly she is convulsed in every limb by the in­ coherent play and contradictory twitchings of her discordant organs. At this point, she has passed the period o f joyous madness, and is about to enter the period of somber delirium.26

By a careful interplay between the contemporary scientific description of alcoholism and the image of a diseased, in­ deed deranged France, Taine reshaped the traditional or­ ganic m etaphor of the “body politic” in the mold of medical science. For centuries, political theorists had compared the state with the hum an body. T hen as now, such a metaphor emphasized the organic unity of the state as well as the nec­ essary separation and coordination of civic functions. By stressing the “illness,” “fever,” or “insanity” of France, Taine could diagnose the pathology of his society in scientific terms. »|>

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If the Com m une had affected the intellectual life of Hip­ polyte Taine alone, its impact would have been considerable. But the brutality and civil carnage of 1870-71 scarred all French citizens, regardless of their political affiliation. T aine’s response to the disaster, while hardly unique, was highly influential. By playing upon the sense of despair, na­ tional humiliation, and cultural decline, Taine, “the pathol26. Ibid., p. 460.

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ogist of French society,” offered an explanation for how and why France had lost its primacy among nations. During the last two decades of his life, Taine consciously cultivated the posture of physician to m odern France. His country, he often claimed, suffered from a “brain lesion,” syphilis, or an addiction to liquor or morphine. By pointing out the symptoms of the disease of France, Taine hoped the patient would recognize the illness and take the necessary steps to avoid life-threatening relapses.27 During the years he was writing the six volumes of the Origines, Taine himself suffered from many of the symptoms that he attributed to France in the revolutionary era. Although his published cor­ respondence was severely edited to eliminate any personal remarks, the fourth volume contains many references to his poor health, his “nervous attrition,” his frequent visits to hydrotherapeutic clinics, and the like. Upon his death in March of 1893, his friends and relatives maintained that it was a “profound nervous erosion” that killed him.28 Taine knew too well how tempted future biographers would be to apply the method he and the literary critic Sainte-Beuve had adopted: interpreting a m an’s work in re­ lation to his life. He ordered that no statement which shed light upon his “private affairs” ever be printed; before his death, he had all his journals burned.29 From the evidence that remains in his correspondence, it seems probable that Taine believed he was dying of syphilis—one of the many medical metaphors he used to describe contemporary France.30 27. Taine, Correspondance, 4:39, 45. 28. Ibid., p. 191, and E.-M. de Vogue, “Hippolyte Taine: Pres de son lit de mort,” in Devout le siecle (Paris: Armand Colin, 1896), pp. 2 87-96. 29. Andre Hallays, “Au jour lejour: Le testament de T ain e,” Journal des debats, March 16, 1891, p. 1. 30. From the descriptions Taine provided o f his illness, it seems possible that Taine was suffering from tertiary syphilis with a tabetic com ponent. In the late nineteenth century, syphilis was often called “the great imitator,” so many symptoms did it manifest. Only a third o f all syphilitics showed signs

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It is, of course, impossible to name definitively Taine’s fa­ tal illness, which was diagnosed as early as 1885. It is clear, however, that for the last decade of his life he was in consid­ erable physical pain and knew he could not hope for a cure. In many respects, Taine transfered the medical circumstan­ ces of his own life into the realm of his historical scholar­ ship. As the self-appointed doctor to the French nation, Taine repeatedly offered a diagnosis of its ailments, but he was too ill and exhausted to pursue the search for a com­ plete cure for the French malady.31 Enough strength re­ mained, however, to sketch the broad outline of the therapy. In the final volumes of the Origines, Taine praised the co­ hesive force of the church in national life and the value of a decentralized, varied, and practical system of education. At his death he left unfinished a third section of the book devoted to a glorification of the family. O ut of the traum a of 1871 and the language of French medical science, Taine forged the architectural structure of m odern French right-wing historiography. Although incom­ o f mental decline or insanity. After T aine’s disease was diagnosed in 1885, he went at least once a year to Champel, where his doctors prescribed daily hydrotherapy and strict diets. Throughout the last decade of his life he com plained o f terrible headaches, difficulty with his “animal functions,” fa­ tigue, nervous insomnia, and finally, stiffness, heaviness, and pain in his legs. All o f these symptoms are consistent with a diagnosis o f neurosyphilis. Taine refused to be photographed; it was widely believed that syphilitics could be recognized as such by pictures. Guy de Maupassant, who surely did suffer from syphilis, claimed that Taine too was a victim o f that disease. In any case, Taine suggested that de Maupassant come to Champel where, in the words o f de Maupassant, Taine “was cured o f an illness just like mine in forty days.” De Maupassant’s visit was brief and unsuccessful. For T ain e’s descriptions o f his malady, see his Correspondence, vol. 4, passim; on de Mau­ passant, see Ernest Augustus Boyd, Guy de Maupassant (New York and Lon­ don: Knopf, 1926), pp. 229—30. T h e information on syphilis was taken from United States Public Health Service pamphlet no. 1660, Syphilis: A Syn­ opsis (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1968), pp. 74—79, and a conversation with B. K. Kinder, M.D., on Novem ber 7, 1973. 31. Taine, Correspondance, 4:204.

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plete, his prescription for France was later copied by histo­ rians like Jacques Bainville and Louis Madelin. They bor­ rowed as well the aristocratic psychology which so pervades T aine’s works. Taine, of course, considered himself compe­ tent to evaluate the psychic patterns of all social classes. As even his harshest critics have admitted, Taine’s psychological analysis of the mentality of the oppressed has a certain ring of truth.32 Taine had rightly stressed, for instance, the fa­ mine and misery which forced workers and peasants to rebel in the spring of 1789. His emphasis on the psychological fac­ tors contributing to the Great Fears of that year— fear of bri­ gands, fear of starvation, and fear of conspiracy— provided suggestive insights into the “contagious” nature of rural revolts. Nonetheless, Taine’s sympathies for his historical subjects were unquestionably weighted in favor of the aristocracy. In T aine’s scheme, while the lower classes revolt for “animal” reasons, the aristocratic counteroffensive is interpreted as an altruistic return to civic responsibility. Describing the Second Estate at the outbreak of the Revolution, Taine wrote, “Never was an aristocracy so deserving of power than at the moment of losing it; the privileged class, awakened from their indolence were again becoming public men, and, re­ stored to their functions, were returning to their duties.”33 In surveying the proces-verbaux of the provincial assemblies in 1789, Taine was convinced that he had never seen “better citizens,” nor more honest, diligent, and disinterested administrators.34 Taine clearly preferred salons to slums. His historical ac­ counts, as well as those of his conservative successors, reflect that aristocratic bias. In a letter to Guy de Maupassant, Taine had advised his younger friend to 32. See, for instance, Georges Lefebvre, La Grande Peur de 1789 (Paris: Societe d’Edition d ’Enseignement Superienr, 1932). 33. Taine, L'Ancien Regime, p. 392. 34. Ibid.

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increase the range o f your observations. You portray peasants, the lower middle class, workers, students and prostitutes. Some day you will doubtless portray the cultivated classes, the upper bourgeoisie, engineers, physicians, professors, big in­ dustrialists, and men o f business . . . and I shall be happy when you devote your talent to men and women who, thanks to their culture and fine feelings, are the honor and the strength o f their country.33

T aine’s point of view was, as he admitted, “aristocratic”; de Maupassant ignored his-advice. Crowd psychologists and right-wing historians, however, generally adopted and in­ flated Taine’s perspective. They borrowed, for instance, the picture of the bloodthirsty, deranged, and bestial mob, often without acknowledging the economic factors that led to re­ volt. In Taine’s works it was hunger which forced peasants to perform savage acts; in the subsequent histories of Jacques Bainville or Louis Madelin, even the well-fed work­ ing classes were frequently pictured as beasts.36 In addition to his influence upon reactionary historians, Taine stood as the hero and model for crowd psychologists. His mobs exhibited nearly all the characteristics that Sighele, T arde, and Le Bon were later to include in their “scientific” analyses. As bestial hordes, poisoned by alcohol and de­ bauchery, excited by dissolute viragos, brigands, or similar “scum,” crowds in the Origines de la France contemporaine were indelibly painted in the most terrifying of tones. No other 35. Q uoted in Francis Steegmuller, Maupassant: A Lion in the Path (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1949), p. 288. This letter is not included in the four volum es o f T a in e’s Correspondance. 36. See, for instance, Jacques Bainville, Histoire de France (Paris: Artheme Fayard, 1924), and Louis Madelin, La Revolution (Paris: Hachette, 1922). See also A ndre Bellessort, Les Intellectuels et I'avenement de la Troisieme Republique (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1931), pp. 189—232; Paul Lidsky, Les Ecrivains contre la Commune (Paris: Francois Maspero, 1970); Les Ecrivains frangais devant la guerre de 1870 et devant la Commune, colloquium Novem ber 7, 1970, publications o f the Societe d ’Histoire Litteraire de la France (Paris: Armand Colin, 1972), pp. 58—78.

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nineteenth-century writer in any genre created such fright­ ening, yet memorable machines of savagery. With the exception of the hypnotic model, T aine’s Origines embodies all the rudiments of French crowd psychology. Taine certainly knew of the theories and controversies sur­ rounding hypnotism; the footnotes of De Vintelligence com­ pare his theories of monomania to contemporary works on hypnotism and insanity.37 Furthermore, Taine counted among his friends such eminent psychologists and psychia­ trists as Theodule Ribot, Alfred Binet, and Jean-M artin Charcot. Yet even with a rather sophisticated knowledge of hypnotism, Taine did not include the idea of “scientific sug­ gestion” in his historical accounts of mob violence. Two explanations help to account for this curious omis­ sion. First, Taine had already published over half of the vol­ umes of the Origines before Charcot “opened the gates” for serious consideration of hypnotism in 1882.38 Before 1882, Taine, in describing the pathology of the crowd, had been content to compare mob activity with any num ber of organic and psychological disorders: alcoholism, tumors, bacterial infections, syphilis, delirium, and monomania. As the im pre­ cision of his metaphors indicates, he cared less about analyz­ ing the dynamics of crowd psychology than simply labeling it as pathological. Taine simply stated that passions were contagious, without asking why they were. Secondly, Taine allowed his political prejudices to obscure the question of the leadership of the crowd. In his opinion, only the crazed “dregs” of society could manipulate an assembled multitude. Leaders, apparently, possessed no special skills or charis­ matic power. But by assuming that the social pariahs merely 37. In De Vintelligence, Taine cited, am ong other works, Dr. James Braid's study o f neurohypnology, Dr. Hack T u k e’s De la folxe artificielle, and Maury’s Le Sommeil. In addition, Taine had witnessed hypnotic experiments at the hom e o f Dr. Puel and at the Salpetriere during the lectures o f M. Baillarger. On Intelligence, 1:229, 232, 2:1 12-13. 38. See chap. 5, “Social Scientists and the Crowd.”

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“floated” to the top of a mob, Taine evaded the issue of how such leaders could incite their followers to action. Even if one places Taine’s work in the unique context of nineteenth-century psychology, the Origines contains grave errors in scientific method. Taine’s cast of mind was unques­ tionably, admittedly dogmatic.39 Long before he set foot in the archives, he had decided that the Commune and its predecessor, the Revolution, were monstrous and barbaric; his subsequent research served only to illustrate his precon­ ceived notions. T he idea of empirical investigation was wholly alien to Taine; when conversing with Gabriel Monod about his im pending research trip to Italy, Taine asked, “And what theory are you going to verify there?”40 Despite his dogmatism and deductive method, Taine proudly defined himself as a psychologist. For the motto of his incisive study on English literature he had borrowed a phrase from Guizot: “I have done pure psychology and psy­ chology applied to history— nothing more.”41 And not long before his death, he claimed that psychology had been his sole occupation for the past forty years.42 Taine had crowned psychology as the queen of the sciences, the sun around which all the related disciplines of literary criticism, art history, philosophy, and history revolved.43 But it is literary license, not scientific rigor, that makes T aine’s major works such compelling documents. With a sharp eye for chilling and vivid vignettes, Taine used archi­ val dossiers as a springboard for melodrama. While discuss­ ing, for instance, the ubiquitous “march of the canaille” in 39. “I am the opposite o f a skeptic. I am a dogmatist”; cited in Alfred Cobban’s fine article, “Hippolyte Taine, Historian o f the French Revolu­ tion,” History 53 (October 1968): 333. 40. Cited in Eugen Weber, The Nationalist Revival in France, 1905—1914 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University o f California Press, 1968), p. 1. 41. Letter to Guizot, December 20, 1873, in Carrespondance, 3:259. 42. Letter to Georges Lyon, December 9, 1891, ibid., 4:333. 43. Hippolyte Taine, Histoire de la litterature anglaise (Paris: Hachette, 1864), Introduction to vol. 1.

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France after July 14, 1789, Taine selected six particularly atrocious incidents: rioters in Strasbourg drowning in a lake of wine five feet deep; the “scum” of Cherbourg, Maubeuge, and Rouen pillaging and sacking private residences and royal buildings; a four-day orgy of soldiers and workers in Besangon; and, still worse, the m urder and mutilation of the mayor of Troyes. Using the present tense throughout his narrative, Taine made his subjects both larger and lower than real life. As he has already warned, the rabble behaves like “an elephant on a ram page”: “Almost immediately, an­ other band, screaming for m urder, begins its chase and breaks windows”; “the populace devastates the houses of three of the most powerful merchants”; “the company falls dead drunk under the tables”; “a woman throws herself on the crushed old man, tramples on his face with her feet, and repeatedly plunges her scissors in his eyes.” His conclusion left little to the horrified imagination: Such is public life in France after July 14: in every city, mag­ istrates are at the mercy o f a band o f savages, often, a band o f cannibals. Those of Troyes have just tortured Huez in the manner of the Huron Indians; those o f Caen have done worse; the mayor o f Belsunce . . . was cut to bits like Laperouse in the Fiji Islands, and a woman ate his heart.44

Rejecting nuance and obsessed by the excesses of the Revo­ lution, Taine replicated that passion in his hyperbolic and melodramatic style. Taine the scientist had appropriated the tools and the prerogatives of the litterateur.45 T hat paradox­ 44. T aine, La Revolution, 1:81—89. 45. T h e mixture o f professed objectivity and seductive style struck Maurice Barres, who blamed it on Taine's education. Taine, he said, “was not fundamentally a savant, he did not have a scientific mind: he felt com ­ pelled to work quickly: he was distracted by success, by illness. . . . Educa­ tion at the Ecole normale does not create in students a desire for verification, but they know how to com pose.” Mes Cahiers [Paris: Plon, 1929], 1:86-87. See also T ain e’s own anxiety about the originality, docum entation, and lit­ erary value o f the Origines in a letter to Gaston Paris dated May 15, 1881, Bibliotheque Nationale, Salle des Manuscrits, N.A.F. B.N. 24450, F. 279-80.

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ical combination had taken shape long before the Origines; a characteristic of the young Taine, reinforced by the political climate of the early fifties, it emerged full-blown only in his final crusade. Taine did not begin his career as a scientist. Born in Vouziers (Ardenne) in 1828, he came to Paris in 1841 to study at the prestigious Lycee Bourbon. His intellectual prowess and his passion for philosophy dazzled both his classmates and his mentors. Several months after the June Days of 1848, Taine entered the Ecole Normale Superieure, first in his class. T here he continued to perform brilliantly, al­ though several of his professors saw minor flaws in his taste for iconoclasm, his scorn for Victor Cousin’s brand of phi­ losophy, and his facile acceptance of intellectual formulas.46 Still, Taine was expected to excel in the agregation in phi­ losophy. But because he violated the conventional rules for an “acceptable answer,” he was failed in the examination in 1851. He was awarded, nonetheless, a teaching position in the college of Nevers. In December of that year, when Louis Napoleon required a statement of “gratitude” and “respect­ ful devotion” of all professors, Taine dem urred and lost his post. He then prepared to take the agregation examinations in philosophy for the second time; the new regime sup­ pressed them. He switched his field to letters; it too was sup­ pressed. U ndaunted, he moved to Paris and prepared two doctoral theses (one on sensations, the other on external perceptions), both of which were considered too “controver­ sial” to submit. Taine was profoundly discouraged, and with good reason; “political life,” he wrote to his friend PrevostParadol, “is forbidden to us for perhaps ten years. T he only path is pure literature or pure science.”47 For the next fifteen years, Taine sought temporary refuge in literature. By writing a more conventional thesis on La 46. See Professor Vacherot’s remarks on the young Taine recorded in Taine, Correspondance, 1:123. 47. Ibid., p. 205 and passim.

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Fontaine, he earned his doctorate in 1853, while supporting himself as a tutor in an independent secondary school. T he following year legislation was enacted which forced Taine out of the mainstream of academia.48 He retaliated with lit­ erary scholarship and in 1864 published his masterful I’H istoire de la litterature anglaise. Yet even in a survey of Eng­ lish literature, Taine examined “letters” with the tools of sci­ ence. In the well-known preface to his work, he defended the “scientific” method of literary criticism and the crucial importance of “race, milieu, moment" in the creation of any cultural artifact. It was Taine the “scientist” who challenged his critics with the proposition that “vice and virtue are products like vitriol and sugar.”49 Science, and more particularly psychology, remained Taine’s great love. As one of the clearest examples of polit­ ical victimization in nineteenth-century academic life, Taine later was to devote much of his energies to the reform of the French educational system and the establishment of a more m odern and practical institution such as the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques.50 Until that became possible, he at­ tempted to blunt political criticism of his work by studying literature and art and by adopting the mantle of science. But the cloak of objectivity extinguished neither his impassioned involvement with his subject matter nor his political polem­ ics. T he mixture of science and politics, of determinism and 48. In January 1854 the Minister o f Public Education prohibited any graduate o f the Ecole normale from teaching in a private or independent school. Taine, who had been earning 1,200 francs a year at the Institution Jauffret, decided that resigning his position was preferable to paying the governm ent 3,000 francs— the penalty for breaking the edict. Taine, Correspondance, 2:4, 21—32. 49. Taine, Histoire de la litterature anglaise, l:viii. 50. See T aine’s letters to Emile Boutmy in Taine, Correspondance, vols. 3 and 4, T e iiy N. Clark, Prophets and Patrons: The French University and the Emergence of the Social Sciences (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard Univ ersity Press, 1973), pp. 111—12; and Frangois Leger, “M. Taine et l’universite,” Contrepoint 4 (Summer 1971): 169-75.

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biology, crystallized into the primary intellectual model for Taine and for many of the subsequent luminaries of French conservative and reactionary thought. What was for Taine a reaction against a stultifying, authoritarian, academic system soon became the conventional literary posture of French in­ tellectuals such as Paul Bourget, Louis Madelin, Louis Ber­ trand, and Gabriel Hanotaux.51 In this respect, the Origines de la France contemporaine stands as the bible of an entire gen­ eration of French reactionary thinkers and the most often cited source for French crowd psychologists. In the years following the establishment of the Third Re­ public, the lines hardened between the universities and the rest of the French intellectual establishment. Fewer academ­ ics were ushered into the ranks of the “forty immortals,” into the fashionable salons of the Champs-Elysees, into the gastronomic feasts of the French literary world. If Taine be­ came the apostle of the French Academy, he was also the nemesis of the universities. Alphonse Aulard, one of Taine’s scholarly enemies, announced that “at the Sorbonne, a can­ didate for the diploma in historical studies or the doctorate 51. On T ain e’s influence, see “Enquete sur l’oeuvre de H. Taine,” Revue blanche, August 15, 1897, pp. 263-95; F. Jean Desthieux, Taine: Son Oeuvre (Paris: La Nouvelle Revue Critique, 1923), p. 45; Victor Giraud, Essai sur Taine: Son oeuvre et son influence (Paris: Hachette, 1901), passim; and Paul Bourget, “Les D eux T ain e,” in Etudes et portraits, vol. 3: Sociologie et litterature (Paris: Plon, 1906), p. 113. By 1899, the seven volumes o f the Origines had collectively gone through 89 printings. Giraud, who considered himself a discipline o f Taine, estimated that by 1900 7 million readers had been ex­ posed to the Origines. Paul Bourget’s essay provides a qualitative assessment o f T ain e’s “capital importance” for the French Right: Eli fait, le grand livre des Origines a marque le point de depart du vaste renouveau d ’idees conservatrices que nous voyons se propager aujourd’hui. Le traditionalisme par positivisme, cette doctrine si feconde en consequences encore incalculables, releve de Ini. . . . Son oeuvre est l’arme la plus meurtriere qui ait forgee depnis cent ans contre l’erreur funeste de 89.

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would disqualify himself if he cited the authority of Taine on any historical question.”52 O ther historians of Taine’s generation have been allowed to slip into a peaceful limbo. But not Taine. T he vehement, meticulous, and occasionally petty dueling with the Origines de la France contemporaine began with the publication of its first volume and continues to this day.53 Taine, of course, had started the war. As a young scholar he had realized that one of two paths lay open before him: pure literature or pure science. He refused to make the choice. Posterity has not forgiven him. 52. Alphonse Aulard, Taine, historien de la Revolution Frati^aise (Paris: Armand Colin, 1907), p. viii. 53. T o sample some o f the Taine controversy, see Aulard, Taine; Pierre Nora, “L’Ombre de Taine,” Contrepomt 9 (1973): 67—76; Rude, The Crowd in the French Revolution; and Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1953), pp. 44—54.

4 -

The Crowd and the Literary Imagination: Emile Zola’s Germinal

It is simple, and simplistic, to interpret all crowd psychology as a right-wing phenom enon, a cranky and occasionally om ­ inous tirade against democracy. To be sure, Taine had staunchly positioned himself on the Right, and after the Com m une he denigrated the demands of workers for social and political reform. There were, however, other men of letters in the late nineteenth century who defended what Taine had dismissed as the “republican dream ,” men who applauded, even struggled, for a more egalitarian France yet echoed many of Taine’s denunciations of the mob. These republican writers, as much as Taine, deserve to be seen as crowd psychologists. If Taine was the historian of crowd psychology, Emile Zola was its poet. A generation younger than Taine, Zola was born in Paris in 1840, spent most of his childhood in Aix, then returned to the capital to complete his secondary education. While Taine’s performance had marked him as the brightest of his contemporaries, Zola’s scholarly career came to an early and undistinguished end: he failed the baccalaureat in 1859. Even though he could not hope to dis­ cover the answers to his questions in academic life, the young Zola, like the young Taine, was drawn to the two worlds of science and literature. As early as 1861, Zola was laboring on an essay entitled “On Science and Civilization in their Relations with Poetry.” T hat preoccupation led him naturally to Taine. W hen he published Therese Raquin in 1867, Zola used Taine’s aphorism of “vice and virtue” as its 93

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epigraph. Thus even before the Commune, Zola was de­ scribing himself as a “painter,” a “surgeon,” or a “scientist” of hum an nature.1 The experiences of the Franco-Prussian war and the Commune scarred Zola far less than Taine. Whereas the Commune drove Taine to a categorical rejection of revolu­ tion and, ultimately, to write seven volumes of the Origines, it altered neither Zola’s politics nor his outline for a series of novels on the Second Empire. T hroughout the spring of 1871, Zola’s published articles and private correspondence emphasized the tragic complexities of the political situation. He viewed the Commune as a futile, hopelessly idealistic re­ bellion of those who had “real” and “serious” grievances. In later years, Zola continued to see the “terrible years” more as the last chapter of the Second Empire, less as the culmi­ nation of the French Revolution.2 By the seventies, then, Zola and Taine were political ad­ versaries and methodological kin. Few readers were as ap­ preciative of Taine’s fusion of science and literature as Zola.3 Taine had introduced Zola to many of the precepts of “sci­ entific” inquiry, and the young novelist gratefully called himself “Taine’s humble disciple.”4 But in the late 1870s, Zola—like many other republicans and men of the left— was disturbed by Taine’s professed impartiality in studying the French Revolution. And after a careful reading of the first 1. For details o f Zola’s life, see F. W. J. Hem m ings, Emile Zola (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966). Zola’s early career and his relationship with Taine are discussed on pp. 1—50. 2. Emile Zola, La Republique en marche (Paris: Pasquelle, 1956), and Rob­ ert Minkus, “Three Republican Writers View the Paris Commune, " typescript. 3. In Le Voltaire, Zola told his readers “how much the artist in Taine fas­ cinated us. He not only could analyze, he could color, he had the gift o f evocation. This mathematician was a painter" (“La Reception de Taine a l’Academie frangaise,” reprinted in Zola, Oeuvres completes [Paris: Cercle du Livre Precieux, 1969], 12:610). 4. John C. Lapp, “Taine et Zola: Autour d ’une correspondance,” Revue des sciences humaines, fasc. 87 (1957): p. 319.

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two volumes of the Origines, Zola took issue with Taine’s im­ passioned accounts. As Zola argued in Le Messager de VEurope, Taine had writ­ ten a history which wras brilliant, although biased and bour­ geois in tone. Taine, Zola pronounced, lacked empathy; “the idea of humanity does not appear a single time in the work.”5 Taine’s “bourgeois” sensibilities had been scarred by the revolutions of 1848 and 1871, and he was exacting his revenge upon history. Most victimized was the crowd, which Taine maligned as a “ferocious beast” and which Zola in his turn justified as “the general state of France in a period of extreme crisis.”6 Zola chastized Taine for believing the “non­ sense” that foreigners pervaded the ranks of revolutionaries and that the savage faces of those who stormed the Bastille were not the local poor.7 No, Zola asserted, Taine was grossly mistaken to belittle the poor and the crowd; the his­ torian had learned nothing from the revolutions he wit­ nessed except fear and fantasy. Zola’s critique, although tem pered with occasional praise, was damning. After the publication of I’A ssommoir in 1878, Zola could command the entire literate public of France as his audience, and he was revered as an authority on the poor. Only Victor Hugo outstripped Zola for the title of France’s Prince of Letters.8 Both men were endowed with powerful imaginations, strong wills, and prolific pens. Like 5. “I do not reproach him for having studied history from a personal point o f view, but it is unquestionably true that he views the Revolution through the prism o f a French bourgeois who has been prevented by the agonies o f 1848 and 1871 from leading a calm life” (Emile Zola, “Hippolyte T aine et son nouveau livre sur la France,” Oeuvres completes, 12:557—58). T h e article first appeared in Le Messager de VEurope in February 1876. 6. Emile Zola, “La Revolution franchise dans le livre de M. T aine,” Oeuvres completes, 12:573. This second article on Taine was also published in Le Messager de VEurope in May 1878. 7. Zola, “La Revolution frangaise,” p. 572. 8. H em m ings, Emile Zola, p. 210.

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Huge, Zola demonstrated that he was a sturdy, even vocif­ erous republican, whose social criticism was both artful and acerbic. And most of Zola’s criticism could be found in the Rougon-Macquart cycle, a monumental series of novels which documented the history of France in the Second Empire. By 1880, Zola had completed half of the projected twenty-vol­ ume series, and he was determ ined to devote at least one more novel to the working classes. As early as 1882, Zola told his friend and fellow naturalist Paul Alexis that he planned a sequel to VAssommoir. Germinal, he predicted, would emphasize “public meetings, what is m eant by the so­ cial question, the aspirations and the utopias of the proletar­ iat.”9 Zola dream ed of a “socialist novel,” a crusade for the social conscience of his countrymen. In order to make that appeal effective, he planned a realistic work, a documentary fiction to engage their sympathies and to expose them to the exploitation of French workers. By 1884 Zola had resolved that his novel would focus upon miners, one of the worst paid and most radical ele­ ments of the French working class. Since the Rougon-Macquart series was chronologically situated in the Second Em­ pire, Zola diligently read most of the accounts of the miners’ strikes that erupted in the final years of Napoleon I l l ’s reign; he scanned, too, the parliamentary reports on the coal-mining industry, several documentary novels on m in­ ers, and current socialist and anarchist critiques of the m in­ ing industry.10 His research certainly was solid, and suffi­ 9. Cited in Elliot Grant, Zola’s “Germinal": A Critical and Historical Study (Leicester, Eng.: Leicester University Press, 1962), p. 3. 10. Zola had exam ined Paul Leroy-Beaulieu's La Question ouvriere au XIX siecle, Louis-Laurent Sim onin’s La Vie souterraine ou les mines et les mineurs, the Calners de doleances des mineurs frangais, and Jules G uesde’s articles on social­ ism, as well as the following novels-. Hector Malot, Sans famille; Maurice Talmeyr, Le Grisou; Yves Guyot, Scenes de I'enfer social. On Zola’s research, see, in addition to Grant (Zola's "Germinal") Ida-Marie Frandon, Autour de Ger­ minal: La M ine et les mineurs (Geneva: Droz, 1955): Henriette Psichari, Ana-

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cient for a novel, yet he longed for a personal familiarity with his subject. T he miners of the Nord unwittingly gave Zola the oppor­ tunity to witness a strike. O n February 21, 1884, the mines of Anzin were shut down; Zola rushed to the village, where he spent a week interviewing the workers and their families, drinking beer in their cafes, sketching their surroundings, exploring the somber passages in the mines. He returned to Paris on March 3 shocked and unquestionably sympathetic to the aims of the workers. “I have all my documents for a socialist novel,” he privately confessed to Edouard Rod.11 For the next ten months, Zola was engaged in the trying task of fitting the historical and contemporary views of the min­ ing industry into a stunning mosaic—both artistically persu­ asive and historically accurate. In January 1885 Germinal was published, and Zola’s de­ votees rushed to purchase the thirteenth novel in the Rougon-Macquart series. Within the six hundred pages of the novel, they found much that was familiar; the Lantier fam­ ily, the interlocking determinants of heredity and the envi­ ronm ent, frank exposition, and skilled narration. Yet in spite of all the elements so characteristic of Zola’s earlier works, a num ber of critics viewed Germinal as a new depar­ ture. In Germinal, Zola had shifted his attention from the in­ dividual to the crowd, and the result was a tale of singular violence. T he central dram a of Germinal revolves around mass ac­ tivity, a strike of miners in the prefecture of Lille. The leader of the strike belongs to the Rougon-Macquart family tree; he is Etienne Lantier, Gervaise’s son, who slips into Montsou in search of work. Shortly after he joins the min­ ers, a strike erupts in the village, and Etienne becomes its tomie d ’un chef-d'oeuvre: ''Germinal'' (Mayenne: Mercure de France, 1964); and Richard H. Zakarian, Zola’s “Germinal”: A Critical Study of its Primary Sources (Geneva: Droz, 1972). 11. Grant, Zola's "Germinal," p. 9.

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leader. U nder the hypnotic power of his rhetoric, the ranks of the strikers swell to include some 3,000 workers. But Etienne’s power over the crowd is tenuous indeed; his speeches have inflamed their passion, unleashing a chain of destructive acts against property and hum an life. Ultimately, the miners’ revolt is crushed by the rifles of soldiers, by the sabotage of a Bakunin-styled anarchist, and by the dem or­ alization of the strikers themselves. Only Etienne retains his faith in the socialist vision; stoned by the crowd who once worshiped him, he leaves for Paris still dream ing of the re­ juvenation of revolution. Etienne is undoubtedly the hero of Germinal, yet even he is overshadowed by the crowd. It is the mass of workers which informs most of the dramatic moments of the novel, the public meetings which presage its violent climax, the mobs which destroy and are destroyed. Even the peaceful aspects of working-class existence focus largely on the group— the swarming descent into the mines, the cortege following injured workers, the public stroll, the congested and raucous dance of leisure. In Germinal, Zola carefully documented the crowd in all its guises, but he placed the most striking emphasis upon the politically agitated and po­ tentially violent mob. Four of the most compelling scenes in the novel are cen­ tered upon the crowd of miners on strike. Two of these are political assemblies: the meeting led by the organizer Pluchart to encourage the men to join the International and the subsequent mass meeting of 3,000 workers in the Plan-desDames. Two other haunting scenes describe the crowd in action: the violent day of rioting and pillage in the mines, beginning with the destruction of the Jean-Bart mine and ending with the castration of Maigrat; and the massacre of fourteen workers by the occupying troops. In these four scenes, Zola had encapsulated his vision of crowd behavior into a portrait remarkably similar to that of his old m entor Taine. Although Zola deplored Taine’s emphasis upon the atroc­

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ities committed by crowds, he most dramatically stressed the violence unleashed by men and women in groups. As early in the novel as the meeting at the Plan-des-Dames, the crowd, won over by the religious fervor of Etienne’s social­ ism, becomes enraged at his rival Chaval. Infuriated by his unwillingness to strike, the crowd hounds him with clenched fists, threats and cries of “Kill him.” Chaval artfully diverts the “m urderous instinct” with a promise to strike the follow­ ing day. T he next morning five hundred strikers descend upon the Jean-Bart mines, where they discover that some miners have indeed gone down into the pits. Etienne, who has lost control of the mob, can no longer restrain them from violent retribution. T he owner of the mine narrowly escapes death, his mining operations are wrecked, and his workers are nearly stranded in the mines. When the strikebreakers fi­ nally scramble to the surface, they are manhandled by the crowd. Once the crowd has whetted its lust for destruction, a cre­ scendo of rioting begins. From mine to mine, the swelling crowd pillages all buildings in sight and assaults their col­ leagues who dare to work. The first victims are merely in­ sulted and flailed, but as the day wears on, the blacklegs are stoned, stripped naked, and ridiculed before the m ob.12 At sundown the crowd, which now numbers nearly 3,000, at­ tacks the village of Montsou. Screaming for bread, for so­ cialism, and for death to the bourgeois, the “horde” threat­ ens the persons and property of the rich. T he grocery is stormed, and in an effort to save his establishment, the gro­ cer Maigrat falls to his death. His body is mutilated and quickly castrated by bands of “stampeding furies.”13 T he arrival of the police and of occupying troops post­ pones the final encounter for several weeks. When the min12. Emile Zola, Germinal, in Les Rougon-Macquart (Paris: Biblioiheque de la Pleiade, 1964) 3:1414. 13. Ibid., p. 1452.

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ers learn that Belgians have been imported to work the local mines, they descend upon the pits of Montsou, where they confront sixty soldiers. T he strikers first insult, then stone the military, who eventually retaliate with bullets. Fourteen of the demonstrators die (including women and children); twenty-five are wounded. In Zola’s eyes, this carnage was inevitable, since crowds re­ duce men and women to the brutal state of nature. Any m ember of a crowd reverts to m ankind’s primal state of in­ stinct, violence, and irrationality. Crowds, as Zola describes them, are units capable of only the most primitive levels of reasoning and prone to emotional excitation. They repre­ sent the perfect medium for instinctive catharsis; once aroused, they clamor for revenge, m urder, and destruction. T he true leader of the crowd, then, is instinct. Any indi­ vidual who attempts to direct and control the energies of his followers will be frustrated. Zola sharply delineated the in­ gratitude, even perfidy, of the mob when the miners flatly reject their old idol Rasseneur in the early stages of the strike. With a prophecy few readers could disregard, Rasse­ neur shouts to Etienne, the new hero of the workers: “You think it’s amusing. . . . Well, I hope it happens to you. . . . And mark my words, it will happen.”14 But Etienne is too intoxicated with his own success to ap­ preciate the truth of his rival’s statement. T hat evening the crowd is his to seduce and to win. His power over the crowd, however, is short-lived. The moonlight resolution he has ex­ tracted from three thousand workers fades within twrelve hours to the determination of a mere five hundred. T he crowd’s will is not his to influence; vainly he struggles to control their lust for m urder and the frenzy of destruction. In Germinal, the leader acts as a mere spark in the confla­ gration of a strike. He can ignite, but never control, the ex­ plosion he has engendered. With “simple and energetic im14. Ibid., p. 1382.

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ages,” Etienne—or any other leader—can excite the passions of his followers; he can exploit their messianic fervor to the point of delirium, but no leader can restrain the instincts of an aroused crowd. O f Etienne, Zola writes, “reason tottered . . . and left only the idee fixe of a fanatic. His scruples and good sense were gone, and nothing seemed easier than the realization of this new world.”15 And under the power of Etienne’s idee fixe, the crowd is transformed into a herd of sexually excited beasts: And here, in this glacial night, a fury of faces emerged . . . their eyes shining, their mouths open, a band of people in heat.16

Even at the m om ent of his triumph, Etienne’s ultimate fail­ ure is presaged by Zola; no leader can restrain the instincts of an aroused crowd. Not until the final section of the novel is Etienne actually stoned by the mob, but his alienation from the workers, as well as his impotence in controlling them, have been interwoven throughout the novel. As if to underscore the rising wave of irrationality in crowds, Zola stressed the alcoholic thirst of mobs. U nder or­ dinary circumstances the coal miners drink beer and gin. Although they are virtually surrounded by cafes, the miners drink little during the early stages of the strike. The march on Jean-Bart, however, is accompanied by a thirst for liquor. While pillaging the canteen of La Victoire, the crowd discov­ ers fifty bottles of gin, which disappear “like a drop of water in the sand.”17 Symbolically, Etienne succumbs that day to the ineradicable compulsion for drink he has inherited from his alcoholic parents. Drunkenness, as Zola has already warned, unleashes the “lust for m urder.” Sober, Etienne has at least the possibility of restraining the base instincts of the 15. Ibid., p. 1380. 16. “Et cetait sous l’air glacial, une furie de visages, des yeux luisants, des bouches ouvertes, tout un rut de peuple. . . .” Ibid. 17. Ibid., p. 1423.

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mob; inebriated, he nearly m urders his rival Chaval and loses whatever slender restraining influence he might have had upon his “Flemish” followers.18 As Zola suggests, Etienne’s loss of control has particularly dire consequences, since the miners of Montsou come from Flemish stock. Unlike the impetuous but relatively innocu­ ous crowds of the Midi, Flemish crowds are slow to anger and singularly violent once they are aroused: “All the old Flemish blood was there, heavy and placid, taking months to warm up, but then giving in to abominable savageries . . . until the beast in them was drunk with atrocities.”19 As the crowd storms through the villages around Mont­ sou, Etienne—and Zola—are most terrified by the atrocities of women. Throughout Germinal, women act as the agents of destruction. When first admitted to the mass delibera­ tions, they stand as quiet, as solemn “as if in church.” But their initial decorum rapidly crumbles as they are intoxi­ cated by Etienne’s rhetoric and by the contagious atmos­ phere of the crowd. As they visualize the socialist “cathe­ dral” of the future pictured by their leader, the men become resolute and inspired, the women, “delirious.”20 Because of their excitability, women are the first to threaten violence, the first to gratify their savage instincts. During the day of general pillage, the females push, scream, and exhort the men to lynch the bourgeois, and in a scene reminiscent of a “witches’ sabbath,” they gleefully destroy machines and flog the strikebreakers. In the ultimate con­ frontation between workers and soldiers, it is the women who precipitate the shooting by heaving stones at the mili­ 18. On page 1170, Etienne recounts that he has lost his last job because he hit his employer while drunk. Once he begins drinking, Etienne is over­ com e with an “evil drunkenness,” which makes his eyes bloodshot and saliva run from his “wolf-like teeth” (p. 1424). In descriptions like these, Zola im ­ itates T ain e’s metaphors. 19. Ibid., p. 1442. 20. Ibid., pp. 1380-386.

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tary. T hroughout Germinal, Zola positioned women at the forefront of the crowd. They precede the men, he ex­ plained, for strategic reasons, because neither soldier nor policeman would dare to attack the “gentle sex.” Yet, in an­ other sense, their primacy has a symbolic value as well, since women—as Zola described them—are the instigators and the most merciless perpetrators of violence. T he women’s acts of stoning and machine-breaking serve as vivid proofs of female irascibility, but Zola pushed the im­ age to an even more dramatic and threatening level. Five instances of sexual assault occur in Germinal, all five are en­ acted by women. As a mark of provocative disdain for the bourgeoisie and for the military, La Mouquette twice bares her buttocks, a gesture which Zola interpreted as “fierce” and certainly not amusing.21 In two other scenes, the band of “savage furies” pounces upon a female strikebreaker and the charitable young Cecile with the express purpose of sex­ ual humiliation. T he working-class girl is stripped of her clothes, her nakedness exposed to the laughing crowd.22 T he assault upon the middle-class Cecile is less successful, since she is rescued before her pantaloons are removed. Had she not been snatched from the wild women, Cecile would surely have lost more than her veil.23 Such sexual attacks were shocking to nineteenth-century readers, but none could compare with the horrifying castra­ tion of the grocer Maigrat. Again, it is the women who per­ form the mutilation, an act so bestial that it stuns even the male members of the mob. Like “she-wolves,” the women dance around the dead body of the grocer, hurling insults and seeking revenge for the decades of sexual abuse he has heaped upon them. With their “claws and teeth bared,” they 21. Ibid., p. 1437. A comprehensive study o f sexuality and women in Zola’s work can be found in Chantal Bertrand-Jennings, L'Eros et la jemme chez Zola (Paris: Editions Klincksieck, 1977). 22. Zola, Germinal, p. 1421. 23. Ibid., pp. 1447—48.

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maul his body, stuff his mouth with dirt, castrate him, and parade about the crowd with the “abominable trophy.”24 Thus Zola drew his vision of female aggressive “hysteria” to its dramatic and psychological climax. 5}