The Routledge Handbook of French History 0367406829, 9780367406820, 9781032656441, 9780367808471

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THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF FRENCH HISTORY

Aimed firmly at the student reader, this handbook offers an overview of the full range of the history of France, from the origins of the concept of post-Roman “Francia,” through the emergence of a consolidated French monarchy and the development of both nation-state and global empire into the modern era, forward to the current complexities of a modern republic integrated into the European Union and struggling with the global legacies of its past. Short, incisive contributions by a wide range of expert scholars offer both a spine of chronological overviews and a diverse spectrum of up-to-date insights into areas of key interest to historians today. From the ravages of the Vikings to the role of gastronomy in the definition of French culture, from Caribbean slavery to the place of Algerians in present-day France, from the role of French queens in medieval diplomacy to the youthculture explosion of the 1960s and the explosions of France’s nuclear weapons program, this handbook provides accessible summaries and selected further reading to explore any and all these issues further, in the classroom and beyond. David Andress is Professor of Modern History at the University of Portsmouth, UK. His published research on the era of the French Revolution includes The Terror (2004), Beating Napoleon (2012), and The French Revolution: A Peasants’ Revolt (2019).

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF FRENCH HISTORY

Edited by David Andress

Designed cover image: Alamy First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, David Andress; individual chapters, the contributors The right of David Andress to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Andress, David, 1969– editor, writer of introduction. Title: The Routledge handbook of French history / edited by David Andress. Description: New York : Routledge, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023035373 (print) | LCCN 2023035374 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367406820 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032656441 (paperback) | ISBN 9780367808471 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: France—Civilization. | France—History. Classification: LCC DC33 .R66 2024 (print) | LCC DC33 (ebook) | DDC 944—dc23/eng/20230812 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023035373 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023035374 ISBN: 978-0-367-40682-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-65644-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-80847-1 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9780367808471 Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

List of Contributors List of Maps

xi xv

Introduction David Andress

1

  1 Overview: From Regnum Francorum to Regnum Franciae: Early Medieval France from the Fifth to the Twelfth Centuries Clément de Vasselot de Régné

6

  2 Gaul, Francia, and the Wider Early Medieval World James T. Palmer

21

  3 The Vikings and Francia, 799–936 Matthew Firth

31

  4 Regional Magnates and the Last Carolingians Fraser McNair

42

  5 The World of the Early Capetian Court: 987–1180 Talia Zajac

53

  6 The Queens’ Reflection: French Consorts as a Mirror of French History Derek R. Whaley

64

  7 History and the Shaping of French Identity in the Later Middle Ages Chris Jones

74

v

Contents

  8 Nationhood and Nationalism in French History Writing: Franks, Gallo-Romans, and the Shaping of the Roman National85 Camille Creyghton and Matthew D’Auria   9 Overview: Valois France, 1328–1498 Tracy Adams

96

10 France and the Crusades in the Later Middle Ages Tania M. Colwell

107

11 Prince and Principality in the Breton War of Succession Erika Graham-Goering

119

12 Performing Discontent: Politics and Society in the French Satirical Theater of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries Francesca Canadé Sautman

130

13 Overview: France in the Sixteenth Century: Monarchy, Renaissance, and Reformation, 1494–1610 Elizabeth C. Tingle

140

14 Conduit of the Divine: Theocratic Themes in Political Theory in Renaissance and Reformation France Aglaia Maretta Venters

151

15 Royal Women and the Habsburg–Valois Wars (1494–1559) Susan Broomhall 16 Festival Cultures in Early Modern France: Elite and Popular Celebrations, c. 1560–c. 1640 Bram van Leuveren 17 Overview: Absolutist France to 1715 Darryl Dee

162

172 181

18 Bureaucracy and Royal Administration in the Seventeenth Century – French Absolutism and the State Robert J. Fulton Jr.

191

19 A Century of Saints? The Catholic Reformation in Seventeenth-Century France Alison Forrestal

202

vi

Contents

20 The Royal Manufactories of Absolutist France: Luxury Production and the Politics and Culture of Mercantilism Florian Knothe

213

21 Making History in Old Regime France Robert Wellington

224

22 Overview: France, 1715 to 1815: A Century of Dubious Greatness David Andress

235

23 The French Caribbean in the Era of Slavery Erica Johnson Edwards

246

24 The Development of the French Dimension of the Atlantic Slavery System Sylvie Kandé

257

25 French India in the Eighteenth Century Gregory Mole

272

26 Exploration and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century France Eric F. Johnson

283

27 Enlightenment and the Supernatural: Popular Religious Practice in the Eighteenth Century Angela C. Haas

293

28 The “Masterpiece of the National Assembly”: Criminal Justice and the Revolution Julie P. Johnson

304

29 Performance in Paris, 1789–1815: Setting the Stage for Regime Change and Cultural Revision Dane Stalcup

315

30 Fugitives from France: Huguenot Refugees, Revolutionary Émigrés, and the Origins of Modern Exile Kelly Summers

325

31 The French Campaign in Egypt (1798–1801) Evgeniya Prusskaya

338

32 Monarchy, Memory, and the Chapelle Expiatoire Gemma Betros

348

vii

Contents

33 Overview: 1815–1905: An Era of Tumult and Change Venita Datta

360

34 Memory of Lost Empire Annette Chapman-Adisho

373

35 France and Algeria, 1830–1870 Gavin Murray-Miller

385

36 Environment and Technology in Global France, 1763–1914 Andrew Denning

394

37 The French Periodical Press, 1815–1905 Ross F. Collins

404

38 From Dictator to Democrat? The “Black Legend” of Louis-Napoleon and Subsequent Historical Revisionism W. Jack Rhoden

415

39 Socialism Up to the First World War Eric Brandom

427

40 French Empire in the Asia-Pacific Region, c. 1800–1914 Véronique Dorbe-Larcade

438

41 Imperial Variation: Administration and Citizenship in France’s Colonies Megan Brown

449

42 Overview: Two Frances at War and Peace: The Stories of a Nation and its People, 1905–1958 Jessica Wardhaugh

459

43 Overview: Between Gaullism and Globalization: Opening Up the Fifth Republic, 1958–2020 Andrew WM Smith

471

44 History and Historiography of French Imperialism from 1914 Sibylle Duhautois

483

45 French Feminisms: Patriarchy, Populationism, and Progress, 1870–1950492 Nimisha Barton

viii

Contents

46 Queering France Since the Belle Époque: Between Emancipation and Repression Tamara Chaplin

503

47 Reconstructing French Relations in the South Pacific after World War I Kirsty Carpenter and Alistair Watts

514

48 The Popular Front and France’s Twentieth Century Mattie Fitch

523

49 The Brazzaville Conference and the Future of French Colonialism in Africa Danielle Porter Sanchez

533

50 The Atomic Republic: Nuclear France Since 1958 Roxanne Panchasi

545

51 Young People and Youth Culture, 1958–1968 Susan B. Whitney

555

52 Sustaining the Nation: A Gastronomic Reading of Contemporary France565 Jennifer L. Holm 53 The Year of the Events: 1968 Ben Mercer

574

54 The Algerian Diaspora in France Álvaro Luna-Dubois

585

55 French Museums in the Fifth Republic Déborah Dubald

596

56 Erasing Race in France: Social Consequences of Political Idealism Daniel N. Maroun

606

57 The Memory Politics of the First World War at Its Centenary Elizabeth Benjamin

616

58 French Historical Writing in the Wake of Decolonization Timothy Scott Johnson

628

Index

638 ix

CONTRIBUTORS

Tracy Adams School of Cultures, Languages, and Linguistics University of Auckland, New Zealand

Susan Broomhall Gender and Women’s History Research Centre Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences Australian Catholic University

David Andress School of Area Studies, Sociology, ­History, Politics and Literature University of Portsmouth, UK

Megan Brown Department of History Swarthmore College, USA

Nimisha Barton Department of History University of California, Irvine

Kirsty Carpenter School of Humanities, Media and Creative Communication Massey University, NZ

Elizabeth Benjamin Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities Coventry University, UK

Tamara Chaplin Department of History University of Illinois at Urbana-­ Champaign, USA

Gemma Betros School of History, Research School of Social Sciences Australian National University, AU

Annette Chapman-Adisho Department of History Salem State University, USA Ross F. Collins Department of Communication North Dakota State University, USA

Eric Brandom Department of History Kansas State University, USA

xi

Contributors

Tania M. Colwell School of History, Research School of Social Sciences Australian National University, AU

Mattie Fitch College of Sciences and Humanities Marymount University, USA Alison Forrestal Department of History, School of History and Philosophy University of Galway, Galway, Ireland

Camille Creyghton Department of History and Art History Utrecht University, The Netherlands Venita Datta Department of French, Francophone and Italian Studies Wellesley College, USA

Robert Fulton Department of Humanities, History Emmanuel University, Franklin Springs, GA

Matthew D’Auria School of History University of East Anglia, UK

Erika Graham-Goering Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History University of Oslo, Norway

Darryl Dee Department of History Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada

Angela C. Haas Department of Social Sciences and Humanities Missouri Western State University, USA

Andrew Denning Department of History University of Kansas, USA Véronique Dorbe-Larcade Département Lettres Langues Sciences humaines Laboratoire EASTCO (Sociétés Traditionnelles et Contemporaines d’Océanie) Université de la Polynésie française, PF

Jennifer L. Holm Independent Scholar Eric F. Johnson Department of History Kutztown University of Pennsylvania

Déborah Dubald Laboratoire Sociétés, Acteurs, ­Gouvernements en Europe - UMR 7363 University of Strasbourg, France

Julie P. Johnson Independent Scholar National Museum of Australia, ACT, Australia

Sibylle Duhautois Chercheuse associée au Centre d’histoire de Sciences Po Sciences Po, France

Timothy Scott Johnson Department of Humanities Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, USA

Matthew Firth College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences Flinders University, Australia

Erica Johnson Edwards Department of History Francis Marion University, USA xii

Contributors

Chris Jones School of Humanities University of Canterbury, Aotearoa New Zealand Sylvie Kandé Department of History & Philosophy SUNY Old Westbury, USA Florian Knothe Faculty of Arts and University Museum and Art Gallery The University of Hong Kong Bram van Leuveren Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society Leiden University, The Netherlands Álvaro Luna-Dubois Department of Arts and Humanities New York University Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

James T. Palmer School of History University of St Andrews, UK Roxanne Panchasi Department of History Simon Fraser University, Canada Danielle Porter Sanchez Department of History Colorado College, USA Evgeniya Prusskaya Giorgi Tsereteli Institute of Oriental ­Studies Ilia State University, Georgia W. Jack Rhoden Department of History Bishop Grosseteste University, UK Francesca Canadé Sautman Professor emerita, French and History The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, USA

Daniel Nabil Maroun Department of French and Italian University of Illinois at Urbana-­ Champaign, USA

Andrew W.M. Smith School of History Queen Mary University of London, UK

Fraser McNair Center for Advanced Studies Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Germany

Dane Stalcup Department of Modern Languages, ­Literatures, and Cultures Wagner College, USA

Ben Mercer School of History Australian National University, Australia

Kelly Summers Department of Humanities MacEwan University, Canada

Gregory Mole Department of History Longwood University, USA

Elizabeth Tingle Department of History De Montfort University, Leicester, UK

Gavin Murray-Miller School of History, Archaeology, and Religion Cardiff University, UK

Clément de Vasselot de Régné Institut de recherches historiques du ­septentrion - UMR 8529 Université de Lille, France

xiii

Contributors

Aglaia Maretta Venters Department of History Montclair State University, USA Xavier University, USA Alistair Watts Independent Scholar, NZ Jessica Wardhaugh School of Modern Languages and Cultures University of Warwick, UK Robert Wellington Centre for Art History and Art Theory Australian National University

Derek R. Whaley College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences University of Canterbury, New Zealand Susan B. Whitney Department of History Carleton University, Canada Talia Zajac Department of Religious Studies Niagara University, USA

xiv

Map 1  Expansion of the Frankish realms between the fifth and eighth centuries CE.

xv

Map 2 Growth of French royal domain between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries and the maximum extent of Angevin territories.

xvi

Map 3  Consolidation and expansion of France’s territorial “Hexagon” in the early modern era.

xvii

Map 4 France’s historic provinces, largely consolidated by the eighteenth century (Savoy and Nice added in the nineteenth).

xviii

Map 5 Maximum extent of French territorial claims in North America, c. 1750, mapped against modern state and provincial boundaries.

xix

Map 6 Territories controlled by France in the Caribbean region at various points in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

xx

Map 7 Maximum extent of French imperial territory in Africa, c. 1920, mapped against modern international borders.

xxi

Map 8  Chronology of the extension of French control over Algeria, 1830–1956.

xxii

Map 9  Chronology of the extension of French control over Indochina, 1862–1907.

xxiii

INTRODUCTION David Andress

French history is not what it once was. Writing the history of France was, for a long time, largely the mission of those who sought to tell stories of unification and aggrandizement, of the formation of a strong state, of its underpinning by modernizing values, and of the extension of those into a civilizational destiny. History, in such schemes, was about how the French nation became increasingly more like itself, more focused on the core of its asserted identity and what parts of that identity made it unique (and thus, as with all national histories, what allowed its citizens to think of themselves as superior). Many people today would cling to that kind of identity: not for nothing did the French invent the word chauvinism, although they were always far from unique in practicing it. But a properly professional study of history has moved on. Historians (to make a sweeping generalization) now recognize that nation-states, while a self-evident reality, are not for that reason a natural or inevitable product of history, still less one to be accorded particular or eternal virtues. The modern nation-state form, of which France was an undoubted pioneer, has proven immensely powerful, an incubator of social and technological modernization, and a pillar of the recent global order. But of course, in that time, it has also proven to be an aggressive agent of imperialist ambition, a justification for brutal conquest, and a generator of grinding poverty and exploitation: both in colonial territories held down by force and often within the national homeland itself, where national unity has never meant real equality between citizens. History is about the past, but it is always written in the present, for the present, and with at least one eye on the future. The evolution of history as stories about the past tells us key things about how different “presents” appeared to those who inhabited them, and what they wanted to think about how they got there, and where they were going. And the same is true of all historical writing, including the words in front of you now (and any you may write yourself). As I write, much of the world seems to be trying to forget the COVID-19 pandemic, three years after its first eruption, although it remains an ongoing event which has taught us some extraordinary and disturbing lessons about the fragility of the idea of borders and self-contained political entities, as well as about the very strange things many people can easily be brought to believe. Simultaneously, a war is raging in Ukraine, started by Russia on the basis of a transparently false national-imperial narrative of greatness, 1

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David Andress

loss, and reconquest. One which, as further evidence emerges, seems to contain genocidal elements of motivation and behavior, which are a truly grim echo of the preceding century. We don’t yet know, in the further context of accelerating climate change, what the longterm outcomes of this present will be (or if it will have a long term), but it would certainly be an odd context in which to write an unproblematic history of French national-imperial consolidation and greatness. This book, therefore, is not that. Its many contributors use the handbook format to illustrate the diversity of histories involved in making up the history of what we call “France,” and the expanding number of ways in which continuing study shows how it can be discussed, understood, and learned from. Through the book, there is a spine of chronological overviews, stitching together the general outlines of centuries and epochs, but these are only starting points, because in a few thousand words, it is only possible to give a glimpse of some of the key features of a whole era of life for millions of people. Around these, the majority of chapters are much more highly focused, each one an examination of a particular kind of historical situation or interaction, within or across the time frames of the overview chapters. They illuminate the vast range of different histories it is possible to write about France and the French, and the huge range of choices it is possible, and necessary, to make, in settling on a field of study or a topic of further interest. We hope that, in them, student readers will find stimulation to follow their own paths into the extraordinary, rewarding, often disturbing, but frequently enlightening history of France. Before plunging in, however, readers may appreciate an even broader overview, so that some of the twists and turns of detail may make more sense as pieces of the larger puzzle. To begin at the nearest thing we have to a beginning, the geographical region we call “France” developed a coherent identity only over many centuries. Parts of it align with what the Romans over 2,000 years ago called Gaul – a link that the modern French treasure in many ways – but for the Romans, parts of Gaul were also “cisalpine,” on the Italian side of the Alps, stretching as far south as modern Pisa, and as far east as Venice. The name “France” began to emerge as the Roman Empire declined, and the much-debated Germanic people, the Franks, moved westward, around the fifth and sixth centuries CE. Over several hundred years, and over several dynasties, Frankish dominance of northwestern Europe expanded until in 800 CE, Charles the Great, “Charlemagne,” was crowned Emperor in Aachen (in modern northwestern Germany), reclaiming the old Roman title previously monopolized by the Byzantines. The “Carolingian” Empire was not centered on modern France, any more than the older Franklish lands had been, but when it was partitioned in 843 CE after a succession war between Charlemagne’s grandsons, a slice of territory called “West Francia” emerged. Excluding Brittany and much of modern southeast France, it was nonetheless, for the first time, established as a distinct, more or less coherent political entity. Long centuries of feudal and dynastic conflicts ensued – the normal pattern of mediaeval monarchical life – and what slowly became France grew and shrank alternately with rulers’ political fortunes. In the early 900s CE, Normandy was ceded to vikings, who took on local coloration to become the Normans, dukes on the continent, then kings in England, as well as further afield in southern Italy and Sicily. When the Plantagenet dynasty rose to the English Crown in the mid-1100s, their widespread lands in southwestern France became part of an “Angevin Empire,” and eventually the seat of the Hundred Years’ War from the 1330s, only gradually falling back under the control of the French monarchy. In the same centuries, French-speaking feudal elites took part eagerly in crusading across the Mediterranean lands and were integral to the brief era of Outremer, the Christian kingdoms of the Holy 2

Introduction

Land. At the end of the 1400s, six decades of war began in Italy, ostensibly about French dynastic claims to the whole south of the peninsula. It was not until the later seventeenth century that the Kingdom of France filled out securely most of the places on the modem map of European France, and the process continued, for example, with the acquisition of Lorraine (by marriage treaty) in the 1760s. France as a territory had thus more or less consolidated by the later 1700s. French as an identity remained much more of a work in progress. The French language, slowly evolving as all European tongues were doing, had acquired enough cachet among the kingdom’s leadership by 1539 for King François I to order its use in all official documents, displacing the Latin of the Catholic Church. But for the population at large, this official tongue remained essentially foreign. As late as the French Revolution of 1789, when inquiries were made about the linguistic competence of the newly liberated citizenry, it was clear that most of them, especially in the countryside, spoke dialects that the educated scorned as patois, if not other languages entirely: Basque, Breton, Provençal, German in Alsace, and so on. As with many projects of nationalism over the coming century, turning the people of France into the French people they were supposed naturally to be would involve a great deal of deliberate political effort. As a dominant, elite-led definition of Frenchness carried out various forms of internal colonization of the population, so had France, as a powerful state within the European system, already been asserting itself for centuries in the global colonial competition that followed the “discovery” by Europeans of the New World of the Americas. That assertion was not wholly successful, and in the emerging division of territory, France was unable to secure huge landholdings to rival those of Spain, or even the consolidated fertile territories that the British Crown came to monopolize on the seaboard of North America. Although France by the 1700s laid claim to extensive areas of modern Canada and the American Midwest, its rulers were unable to encourage significant migration from Europe or coerce the Native American population into the semi-feudal relations created by the Spanish conquerors further south. They did, contrary to a self-serving mythology about “friendship” with the natives, take slaves from those northern populations to work in their colonial towns and traded some of those slaves southwards, into the Caribbean, where France was a major player in the complex of human misery we call Atlantic slavery. From the seventeenth century onward, peaking in the later eighteenth, but not stopping until the mid-nineteenth, French merchants, French ships, and French landowners abused and exploited millions of African men, women, and children through the horrors of forced plantation labor and the wider degradations involved in treating people as racialized, disposable property. This was the foundation of the prosperity of France’s string of great Atlantic ports and, in turn, the motor of France’s economic modernization and nascent industrialization. As France lost its North American imperial territories to Britain in the 1760s and saw its ambitions across the globe in India similarly curtailed, the money pouring out of the enslaved labor of the Caribbean became even more central to the kingdom’s economic health. The revolutionary freedom seized by the former slaves of the colony of Saint-Domingue, who fought for a decade to become the independent state of Haiti in 1804, shaking the foundations of the European worldview as they did so, could not liberate the peoples of France’s other slave colonies, held in bondage for another half-century. At the opening of the nineteenth century, building on the epochal revolution in 1789 that brought the rhetoric of universal rights into European politics, but owing more to the brutally militarist upheaval of the following Napoleonic era, French power performed the 3

David Andress

extraordinary feat of erasing much of the traditional order of Europe, including the Holy Roman Empire that descended from Charlemagne himself. Driven back by the concerted efforts of the other European powers, French expansion took another turn in 1830 with the conquest of Algeria. Following on from Napoleon’s short-lived invasion of Egypt in 1798, this consolidated a new French role as an aggressive imperialist in the Mediterranean, where they had been, since the 1500s, an intermittent ally of the Ottoman Turks, notably against the Spanish. Extension and consolidation of settler control in Algeria would remain a near constant through the otherwise-turbulent upheavals of the nineteenth century, as France switched between royal, republican, and imperial regimes before settling on a Third Republic from 1870. Like its great rival Britain, France’s accelerating technological development and economic growth were the foundation through the 1800s for further global aggrandizement. The French Empire, justified through a complex and ever-evolving language of political competition, national mission, self-enrichment, and moral duty, found a foothold on every continent by 1900, from its vast holdings in northwest Africa and across the South Pacific to vigorously exploited territories in Southeast Asia, to the tiny historic remnant of New France off the coast of Newfoundland, Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon. Like the other great European empires, the advancement of democratic civilization for France’s European population – now, the male half at least, equal republican citizens – was held up as a goal for its nonwhite subjects, albeit one carefully calibrated to be unattainable for the foreseeable future. The profoundly traumatic experience of two world wars, and two further Republics, would eventually see decolonization become an imperative from the 1950s, though undertaken with deep unwillingness among much of the elite, and often after brutal armed struggle. Alongside that process of global shrinkage, France’s domestic population benefited from a multi-decade economic boom that, particularly in hindsight, gave them “thirty glorious years” of prosperity – something they have been lamenting the loss of ever since. France remains one of the most populous nations of Europe, a pillar of the European Union that has slowly evolved from early agreements in the 1950s, wrestling to replace the aggressive competition of imperial nation-states with neighborly cooperation. The heritage of revolution, and, most recently, the memory of mass protest in 1968, periodically brings crowds onto the streets. But sometimes what they are defending is the prosperity of groups that benefited from France’s decades of grandeur, while other groups, like France’s many non-white immigrants and their descendants, remain marginalized. And increasingly in recent years, a resentful politics of generally hard-right inclination – reaching more than 40% of the vote in the 2022 presidential election – has accompanied the anxieties of a nation that has faced more deadly Islamist terrorism than its neighbors. French power is still projected across the world: airstrikes on Libya in 2011, a multi-year anti-terror campaign in Mali from 2013. But its role in the world is far from settled, especially as the world itself, and the whole of Europe’s place in it, becomes more unsettled by the year. Whatever the French people, and their sharply divided leaders, decide to do (or are forced to undergo) in the years ahead, nothing about it will be self-explanatory, and all will depend for its outcomes on their shared and contentious histories. In closing this introduction, I  offer my thanks for the work put into this volume by all the contributors appearing in it. I’m particularly grateful to Erika Graham-Goering for arranging for the excellent cartographic work of Hans Blomme to feature here. Many contributors, like so many others, have faced considerable stresses and additional burdens through the COVID years, and I  am profoundly grateful for their perseverance. In the 4

Introduction

same spirit, I should like to acknowledge the several contributors whose evolving burdens eventually made completing a chapter impossible, and to thank them for their interest and efforts. Further thanks also go to Sara Barker, Will Pooley, and Andrew MW Smith, who worked with me on the early stages of developing the structure of the volume and, again, had COVID not intervened, might have had a more active role throughout. It has been a very strange few years to be a historian. I hope that you, the reader, as a potential future historian, enjoy some better times.

5

1 OVERVIEW: FROM REGNUM FRANCORUM TO REGNUM FRANCIAE Early Medieval France from the Fifth to the Twelfth Centuries Clément de Vasselot de Régné Part I: The Merovingian Dynasty Barbarian Gaul At the beginning of the fifth century, Gaul was one of the main regions of the Western Roman Empire. Christian influence had been growing since the second century and was now firmly established. Cathedral churches, baptisteries, and bishop’s residences could be found in the capitals of the various Gallic peoples. With Christianity recognized as the empire’s official religion, bishops played a crucial part in administration, and especially in justice. While the great families of the Roman senatorial aristocracy kept civil power, their members could also be found among the episcopacy (Heinzelmann 1976). Since the beginning of the fourth century, the integration of Germanic groups into the empire had played an important part in the restoration of imperial authority, the reorganization of the army, and the defenses of the Rhine and Danube frontiers. The Roman administration, wanting to distinguish different peoples (gentes) among the “Barbarians” and to identify representative leaders, gave some of them the title of rex, “king,” thus contributing to the ethnogenesis and the shaping of Barbarian groups. In 342, Emperor Constans I established one such group of Franks, the Salians, in Toxandria, in the Rhine’s lower valley. Some of their leaders quickly acceded to important offices, like the consul and magister militum Arbogast (c. 340–394). In the last quarter of the fourth century, the Hunnic eruption in Central Europe triggered many migrations of Barbarian peoples. Violent episodes, most symbolically the sack of Rome itself in 410, were interspersed with a broader desire to merge with the Roman world. Their installation led to a series of foedus, treaties between the Roman administration and Germanic tribes to supervise their settlement in the empire. At the end of the fifth century, Gaul had thus come to be divided into a Visigothic kingdom south of the Loire, a Burgundian kingdom that reached from the Rhône and Saône

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6

From Regnum Francorum to Regnum Franciae

valleys to the Autunois and the Langres plateau, and two Frankish kingdoms to the north of the Somme. Some groups from Great Britain had also settled in Armorica (modern Brittany).

The Birth of the Regnum Francorum, “Kingdom of the Franks” On his signet ring, the Frankish king Childeric I appears with the insignia of a Roman general, illustrating the merging of the Roman world and Germanic tribes. When his son Clovis I acceded to power, in 482, he was only one among several Frankish kings in northern Gaul but rapidly defeated a series of other claimants to Roman legitimacy. Clovis defeated Sygarius in 486 and conquered Soissons and the land between the Somme and Loire. He beat the Thuringians in 491–492, and the Alemanni, first in 496 at the battle of Tolbiac, and again in 505. He confronted the Visigoths in 498, crushed them in 507 at the battle of Vouillé, and with the help of the Burgundians, conquered the larger part of Aquitaine. According to Gregory of Tours, this succession of victories caused the emperor Anastasius I to send Clovis the consular insignia, raising him to the same level of dignity within the empire as his rival, the king of the Ostrogoths, Theodoric the Great. While the Franks were pagans, other Barbarian peoples established in Gaul were followers of Arian Christianity, condemned as a heresy in the Council of Nicaea in 325. Compared to Visigothic or Burgundian promotion of Arianism, Clovis’s paganism was seen as a lesser evil by Rome. Franks were romanized, and Clovis, like his father, had good relations with the Gallic clergy. This relationship developed until Clovis was baptized into Nicaean Christianity, at an unknown date between 496 and 507. This event attained increasing significance as it echoed down the following ages (Dumézil 2019). Almost four centuries later, in 869, the archbishop of Reims, Hincmar, declared for the first time that, during his baptism, Clovis was consecrated with an oil, or chrism, miraculously descended from heaven. Kept in a reliquary called the Holy Ampulla, this chrism was attested in use to consecrate Louis VII at his coronation in 1131. It contributed to creating a succession of Christian kings whose founder was Clovis. Renaissance popes, considering that Clovis was the first Barbarian king to choose the Nicaean faith, attributed to the king of France the title of “eldest son of the Church.” Not only did Clovis succeed in conquering the greater part of Gaul, but he also unified the Franks, getting rid of their other kings. According to Gregory of Tours, he placed the kingdom’s capital at Paris, taking advantage of the posthumous renown of the city’s Saint Genevieve, who was close to him and his father during her life. In 511, he gathered a council of the Gallic episcopacy at Orleans. At his death, the same year, his territories were shared between his four sons. Although holding separate territories, they maintained the unity of the Regnum Francorum and continued their father’s work by conquering the kingdom of the Burgundians and Ostrogothic Provence. After the death of Chlodomer in 524; of Theodobald, grandson of Theuderic I, in 555; and of Childebert I in 558, the united Regnum was recreated by the youngest son of Clovis, Chlothar I.

A Split Kingdom The Regnum Francorum was divided once again by Chlothar  I’s children: Charibert  I, who died quickly; Guntram; Sigebert; and Chilperic  I. In 566, Sigebert had married the

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Visigothic princess Brunhilda. Envious of his brother, Chilperic married Brunhilda’s eldest sister, Galswintha. But he soon killed her in order to marry his older mistress, Fredegund. This crime triggered a continuous cycle of violence, called the Royal Faide. Urged by his wife, Sigebert set out to avenge his sister-in-law but was murdered in 575 by order of Fredegund. In 584, Chilperic I was also struck down by order of Brunhilda. Guntram succeeded in bringing together the Regnum by adopting his two nephews, Childebert II, Brunhilda’s son, and Chlothar II, Fredegund’s son. After his death in 592, Childebert’s in 596, and Fredegund’s in 597, Chlothar II, helped by the Austrasian aristocracy, succeeded in eliminating Brunhilda and Childebert II’s descendants and reunifying the kingdom in 613. This story, with its emphasis on the influence of evil monarchs, comes to us mainly via two sources: Gregory of Tours, a political actor in its early years, and Fredegar, who wrote in the 660s. Both men shaped their narratives to deliver a moral lesson about the need for kings to take outside counsel: from the bishops, according to Gregory, and from the magnates, according to Fredegar. The Royal Faide stimulated a process of development of political identities. Although an overarching sense of a single Frankish realm persisted, some regions emerged: Austrasia, the Ripuarian Franks’ country; Neustria, with the Franks settled between Scheldt and Loire, Burgundy and Aquitaine, heirs of the Burgundian and Visigothic kingdoms. The governing roles of the Frankish aristocracy and Gallic senatorial nobility became more and more enmeshed. With this in mind, Chlothar II chose to maintain the distinct identity of these sub-kingdoms upon his reunification. His reign and his son Dagobert I’s were considered as the Merovingian dynasty’s zenith. In 614, Chlothar gathered the secular elite at Paris to promulgate a peace edict, and the episcopacy to specify their rules of election, and to associate them with his government. Dagobert returned to territorial expansion by subduing the Breton prince Judicael and spreading his authority to the Thuringians, the Alemanni, and the Bavarians. After Dagobert’s death in 639, a succession of young kings allowed the aristocracy to extend its dominance over the Crown and intensified differentiated political identities. From 657, Queen Bathild promoted, in her children’s name, a policy of Neustrian hegemony. Around 665, Ebroin, the mayor of the palace (a role which had once been merely the office of royal estate manager but which had become a key power, second only to the monarch), removed her from power but continued her policy. Around 680, the Austrasian mayor of the palace was Pepin II of Herstal, descendant of two main houses, the Austrasian Arnulfings and the Pippinids from Mercia. He united the Austrasians by reviving war against Neustrians, and reunified the Regnum in 687, taking for himself the mayoral role over all its territories. In the following centuries, Carolingian historiography, to legitimate the Pippinids’ accession to the throne, created a black legend about the last Merovingians as Rois fainéants, “do-nothing kings.” However, despite their weakening power, they still had authority and could arbitrate aristocratic conflicts. Merovingian kings ruled over a very hierarchal society, born from the merger of Roman and Barbarian worlds. People were judged depending on their social origins, following Roman law (Codex Theodosianus) or Germanic law (Lex Salica, Lex Ripuaria, Lex Burgundionum). The greatest social difference opposed the free, who could go to the assemblies (placita) and who owed military service, to the unfree (servi), dependent on a master to whom they owed economic services in exchange for his protection. This labor sustained the great rural estates that survived from Roman Antiquity (villae), which remained the main setting of a rural economy based on cereals and vines. Outside the villae, smaller 8

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landholders gathered in hamlets. During the sixth century, many of these coloni found it in their best interests to subject themselves to more powerful figures in exchange for protection and economic guarantees, handing over titles to their lands, which were granted back in usufruct (so the peasants owned the products of the land). Thus, the differences between free and unfree peasants were gradually diminished, ending in common forms of subordination. Although the towns remained centers of power, as residences of kings, counts, and bishops, or sites of the worship of great saints, they experienced a real decline relative to rural habitation. Roman urban fittings were abandoned or dismantled for their building materials, and much urban land was returned to cultivation. This urban descent was accelerated by the Plague of Justinian, which spread in the West from 541. It was said to have halved the Gallic population, estimated at six million people at the beginning of the fifth century (Russel 1958). However, archaeological evidence suggests that the dramatic effects indicated in written sources may be an exaggeration.

Part II: The Carolingian Dynasty Strengthening the Regnum After the death of Pepin II, several years of succession crisis, from 714 to 718, and a revival of Austrasian–Neustrian rivalry eventually brought to power his illegitimate son, Charles, who was nicknamed Martel, “he who strikes his enemies like a hammer,” because of his energy and his military qualities. He reunified Neustria and Austrasia militarily and was made mayor of the palace for both realms by the Merovingian king Chilperic II. To create a powerful army and to win loyalties, Martel distributed lands to his followers, both from his own domain and from royal and ecclesiastical estates. From 718 to 728, he defeated the dukes of Thuringia and Alsace, conquered Alemannia, subdued the duke of Bavaria, and repulsed the Saxons on the further bank of the Weser. In 720, Charles Martel consolidated his power by agreeing to recognize Aquitaine’s autonomy. But its duke, Odo, had to face numerous incursions from Islamic Iberia, where the Visigothic kingdom had finally been defeated in 711. Despite a great victory in 721, his alliance in 729 with a rebel Berber chief triggered a violent reaction from the wali of Al-Andalus, ʿAbd al-Rahmān. After suffering two defeats, Odo requested Charles’s assistance. His army intercepted the wali’s on the way to plunder Marmoutier Abbey, between Poitiers and Tours, in October 732. After a week of skirmishing, Charles won the decisive battle, in which ʿAbd al-Rahmān was killed, but settled for protecting Marmoutier rather than immediate pursuit. In later years of campaigning, Martel gained the submission of the Burgundian and Rhodanian episcopal principality, reconquered the towns of Languedoc taken by the Islamic forces, and won a new victory on the river Berre in 737. Through his victories, he acquired huge prestige. Pope Gregory III sent him relics from Saint Peter’s tomb and sought his protection. After the death of Theuderic IV in 737, Charles continued to hold power while the Merovingian throne sat vacant. Charles died in 741, leaving custody of the kingdom to his sons, Carloman and Pepin  III “the Short.” Because of a renewal of Aquitanian and Bavarian protests, they appointed a new Merovingian king, Childeric III, in 743. Over the following three years, they once again subdued the Bavarians; beat the duke of Aquitaine, Hunald I, Odo’s son; and crushed the Alemanni. In 747, Carloman chose to become a monk, leaving Pepin alone in power. In 751, Pepin consulted Pope Zachary and, using his prestige, gathered 9

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an assembly at Soissons. This elected him king, while Childeric III and his son had their symbolic Merovingian long hair shaved and were confined in a monastery. This coup was confirmed in 754, when Pope Stephen II, calling on Pepin’s assistance against the Lombards, consecrated the new king and his sons. Pepin laid the foundations of a sanctified royalty based upon the biblical model of King David, in which the Frankish king would have two missions: spreading Christ’s kingdom on earth by supporting evangelization, and bringing Christian people to salvation.

Recreating the Empire Pepin’s two sons, Charles and Carloman, inherited power on his death in 768. Three years of subsequent rivalry ended with Carloman’s death by illness. Charles attacked the Lombards, who threatened the Roman Church, and, in 774, after having taken Verona and Pavia, began to call himself “King of the Franks and the Lombards” and “patrician of the Romans.” He had also launched a war to conquer Saxony in 772, a brutal struggle which lasted, with various phases of attack and revolt, until 804. After a successful raid across the Pyrenees against Zaragoza in 778, his rear guard was destroyed by the Basques when passing through the Pass of Roncesvalles. This defeat would inspire, at the end of the eleventh century, the famous chanson de geste, The Song of Roland. Other campaigns fared better: from 787 to 794, Bavaria was definitively subjugated, and in 796, the Frankish army raided the fortress known as the “Great Ring of the Avars” (in modern-day Hungary), subjecting their leadership and taking huge amounts of booty. Thanks to these campaigns, Charles acquired an unquestionable prestige and a universal authority within Latin Christianity. In 800, he came to Rome to restore the pope Leo III, who had been accused of immorality and assaulted by the Romans. To the east, in Constantinople, the empress Irene had deposed her son in 797 and called herself basileia. In the Franks’ eyes, the throne of the Roman Empire was vacant, and Charles considered having himself hailed by the people as its successor, following the ancient custom. However, on December 25, 800, this plan was superseded by Leo III, who, in crowning Charles, created the tradition of imperial papal coronation (Folz 1964). Nonetheless, Charles’s imperial ambitions were already clearly on display in the construction underway at his capital, Aachen, well before the coronation. Its architecture was inspired by Roman imperial buildings. The chapel showed the sovereign as his people’s spiritual leader. This reflected the emergent Carolingian ideology, presenting the Franks as a new Israel, guided by a new David, who had to extend Christ’s kingdom to the ends of the earth (Große and Sot 2018). Charles died in 814, and by the 840s, his grandson, the historian Nithard, had labelled him “the Great” (Carolus Magnus), leaving him to future generations as Charlemagne. On his death, he had a single surviving heir, Louis  I “the Pious.” This succession was interpreted as proof that imperial unity was God’s will, commanding all to work to preserve its integrity. Louis took the title Imperator Augustus, removing references to different and distinct realms from his self-presentation (Godman and Collins 1990). In 817, he attempted to cement permanent unity with his Ordinatio imperii. This allotted outer territories as kingdoms for his younger sons, who were constrained to obey their elder brother, Lothair, as emperor. But this decree was quickly contested by an unstable aristocracy who, because imperial expansion had ceased, could not be bought off with newly conquered lands. In 829, Louis tried to modify the Ordinatio imperii to take account of his fourth son, Charles, born six years earlier. But this triggered an aristocratic uprising and a civil war between 10

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him and his sons which continued until his death in 840 and beyond. Lothair claimed the succession to the whole empire, provoking his two surviving brothers, Charles and Louis the German, to rise against him. Together, they defeated Lothair in 841 at Fontenoyen-Puisaye and, the following year, confirmed their alliance by the Oaths of Strasbourg. The conflict was resolved in 843 by the Treaty of Verdun, granting Lothair the imperial title and possession of the two imperial capitals, Rome and Aachen, and Italy. Charles received Aquitaine, and Louis Bavaria, while the empire’s heart, Austrasia, Neustria, and Burgundia, was shared between them.

The Birth of Francia Occidentalis, “Western Francia” In 843, Charles  II “the Bald” became king of a part of the empire, now called Francia Occidentalis. He was supported by most of the ecclesiastics, especially the one he chose to be archbishop of Reims, Hincmar. But he had to face his nephew Pepin’s Aquitanian supporters and the rebellion of a Breton noble, Nomenoë. A secular and ecclesiastical elite gathering at Coulaines led to an agreement between the king and the aristocracy based on mutual respect of everyone’s estates and honores (public offices granted by the king). Thanks to this, Charles could finally be consecrated in 848. Although he was forced to recognize Erispoë, Nomenoë’s son, as king of Brittany in 851, he was able to pacify Aquitaine during the 860s and peacefully succeeded his nephew Lothair II as ruler of Lotharingia in 869. In 875, after the death of his other nephew, Emperor Louis II, he also acquired the Imperial Crown. By this point, Gallic territories had been experiencing significant Scandinavian pirate raids for almost half a century, as rising internal difficulties from around 830 weakened resistance to a phenomenon that had begun a generation earlier. Likewise, the Islamic groups who raided Sicily and Italy had begun from 838 to raid Gaul’s coasts. Around 840, Norse raids multiplied and reached a climax between 856 and 862. Contemporary accounts should be read with prudence: the reported plundering and destruction were an avenue for criticism of the king, seen as unable to protect his kingdom, while, on the contrary, peace agreements were a chance for praise of royal success (Bauduin 2009). If the confrontation was very violent, we cannot underestimate the trade and the numerous agreements between Franks and Norse which led, around 880, to permanent settlements by the former raiders in the Cotentin peninsula, at the mouth of the Seine and in Brittany, where the Norse, now become Normans, destroyed the Breton kingdom. The final outcome of this process was the Treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte in 911, when the warlord Rollo accepted baptism and pledged loyalty to the Frankish king Charles III “the Simple” in return for a territory centered on Rouen, with the title of Count of Normandy. To prevent Norse raids, Charles the Bald had authorized some noblemen to hold several counties, creating great military regions under the same command. For example, Robert the Strong (d. 866) controlled the country between Loire and Seine; Bernard of Gothia (d. 878) managed Catalonia and Septimania; Bernard Plantapilosa (841–886) Auvergne and South Aquitaine; and Ranulf of Poitiers (820–866) North Aquitaine. The power acquired by these new magnates was confirmed in 877 by King Louis II “the Stammerer.” After the successive deaths of his sons, Louis III and Carloman, it was the magnates who, in 885, offered the Crown to Louis the German’s last son, Emperor Charles the Fat, who thus reunited the empire. This lasted barely three years until Charles’s death without descendants in 888 (McLean 2003). The Count Odo, Robert the Strong’s son and hero of the siege of Paris 11

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by the Normans in 886–887, was chosen as king by the magnates. Francia subsequently underwent an extended period of dynastic instability. The Robertian Odo (r. 888–898) and Robert I (r. 922–923) alternated with the Carolingian Charles III the Simple (r. 893–929) and the Bosonid Rudolph (r. 923–936). In 936, the Robertian duke of the Franks, Hugh the Great (c. 898–956), installed the Carolingian Louis IV (r. 936–954) on the throne. But Louis and his successors, Lothair (r. 954–986) and Louis V (r. 986–987), tried desperately to escape from the wardship that Hugh the Great, and then his son, Hugh Capet, imposed over their royal functions. The death of the final two Carolingian kings in rapid succession triggered a dynastic crisis, resolved by the accession of the Robertian Hugh Capet on May 25, 987, followed by his consecration on July 3 in the cathedral of Noyon.

Part III: From Francia Occidentalis to Regnum Franciae The Coming of a New Order Through the period of monarchical crisis, royal control of the rules of succession for counties shrank to nothing. Inheritance, which had already become normal, although subject to the king’s approval, became now automatic. Dynasties of counts arose and took control of royal estates and prerogatives. Some of them, managing several counties, called themselves marquis or dukes, such as, from 898, William the Pious in Aquitaine. Their power relied on local elites, with whom they shared out, over time, powers over justice, taxation, fortresses, and military levies. The legitimacy of the more local aristocrats was reinforced by the magnates’ authority, which they purported to represent. These men were united by oaths of loyalty, in which the vassal promised help (auxilium) and advice (consilium) to his suzerain in exchange for his protection and a confirmation of his fiefdom. Varying levels of dependency were signified by variations in the gestures of the homage and the place chosen for the ceremony (Débax 2003). From the end of the ninth century, the first principalities were created by Carolingian aristocrats: the Wilhelmids and the Ranulfids in Aquitaine, the Rorgonids and the Robertians between Loire and Seine, the Herbertians in the northeast, and the Bosonids in Burgundia. During the tenth century, these families declined, bringing about the formation of new principalities by countal or viscountal families, like the Theobaldians of Blois, the counts of Angers, or the viscounts Trencavel. In French historiography of the second half of the twentieth century, these political and social transformations were read as the sign of a sudden change, called the “feudal mutation”. According to this theory, between 980 and 1030, because of Carolingian institutions’ decline, great landlords and fortress wardens violently monopolized sovereign rights (bannum), turned free peasants into serfs, and implemented the “feudal” system. This paradigm was challenged in the 1990s (Barthélemy 1993). Its adversaries have shown that denunciations of violence from clerical authors aimed to discredit the imposition of secular taxation upon ecclesiastical goods. They underline the continuities between Carolingian and feudal power structures, which underwent very gradual modifications. The local lordship or seignory is now understood as the pursuance of local aristocrats’ participation in power with the help of the Church. Even though most of the peasants were dependent on the seignory, serfdom and freedom were the extremes of a range of conditions marked out by diverse levels of judicial dependency, possibilities of mobility, and levels of financial imposition. Meanwhile, rapid growth in the number of fortified castles had more to do with efforts to strengthen power spatially rather than socially (Mazel 2010). 12

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At the beginning of the eleventh century, the ecclesiastical and secular worlds were intermingled. Episcopal seats were occupied by aristocratic dynasties, and monastic estates were managed by secular elites. The awareness of sin and the dream of purifying the Church and society generated a general and multicentered process of reform based on a radical distinction between clerics and laymen, which accelerated in the second half of the eleventh century. Nostalgia for idealized Carolingian unity caused reformers to turn to a newly active and increasingly prestigious papacy. The struggle against Simony (the sale of Church offices) or Nicolaism (clerical marriage) purified the clergy but weakened the king, who had once appointed bishops. In 1108, Pope Paschal II and King Louis VI reached an agreement by which the candidate to a see was first consecrated by the ecclesiastical province’s other bishops and then received investiture from the king with the episcopal estates. In moralizing society, the reformers also hardened matrimonial standards. Thus, King Philip I, who, while separated from his first wife, abducted and married the wife of the count of Anjou, Bertrade de Montfort, in 1092, was excommunicated three times for incest and bigamy.

A World in Expansion From the beginning of the eleventh century, the French aristocracy demonstrated a new dynamism and great mobility. Normans enrolled as mercenaries in Southern Italy’s Lombard principalities in the 1010s and 1020s. Their success set an example for warriors from Brittany, Anjou, Maine, and Champagne who, in the 1060s, also conquered Sicily. In 1130, Roger II of Hauteville united that island to Southern Italy in a newly founded kingdom of Sicily. Warriors from France also travelled to help Iberian kingdoms struggling against Muslim taifas and the Almoravid emirate. This led to Burgundians settling in Castile, Gascons and Normans in Aragon, Provençals and Languedocians in Catalonia. In 1093, the Capetian Henry of Burgundy, Robert II’s great-grandson, married the daughter of King Alfonso VI of León and received the county of Portugal. His son, Afonso I, was proclaimed, in 1139, the first king of Portugal. In 1066, William of Normandy’s claims to the English throne had offered similar opportunities and mobilized warriors from Flanders, Touraine, Anjou, Maine, Brittany, and Poitou. In 1095, at the Council of Clermont, Pope Urban II synthesized two ideas: the penitential pilgrimage of personal redemption and just war against pagans, to create the First Crusade. His appeal had a great success and was taken up by the Duke of Normandy and the Counts of Toulouse, Boulogne, Flanders, Blois, Brittany, and Perche. These armies took Antioch in 1098 and Jerusalem the next year. The Duke of Aquitaine and the Count of Blois led a new expedition in 1101. The new Duke of Aquitaine did likewise in 1109. The Count of Anjou came to Jerusalem in 1129. The Count of Flanders travelled to these new lands of “Outremer” four times from 1139 to 1164. In 1147, a crusade was led personally by the king of France, Louis VII. Adventure and loot were part of the appeal for these expeditions, but religious motivations were primary. Most of the crusaders came back home after having accomplished their pilgrimage. But some settled, built political structures, and acquired lordships in the Holy Land. This expansionism led to familial dispersal but also resulted in individuals holding power across widely different spaces, creating a very transregional aristocracy (Bartlett 1993). Despite their distance, the scattered members of these families, owners of several principalities or lordships, shared the same identity, were united by intense cooperation, and constituted a network that helped them strengthen their power, domination, and political 13

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influence. Each one of these familial transregional groups could be a political and territorial power in itself, now called a “parentat” (Vasselot de Régné 2018). Adoption of inheritance by primogeniture assisted in stabilizing possession of most principalities, but aristocratic expansionism and complexities of succession still produced short-lived dynastic unions, fusion of otherwise-autonomous principalities, or the rise of parentats uniting several principalities in the same family. Odo II, Count of Blois, Chartres, Châteaudun, Troyes, and Meaux, tried between 1032 and 1037 to become king of Burgundy. His great-grandson Theobald IV (1102–1152) united several counties to create the county of Champagne. His younger brother, Stephen, became king of England. And his sons, Henry I the Liberal, Count of Champagne; Theobald V, Count of Blois; Stephen I, Count of Sancerre; and William White Hands, archbishop of Reims, had a powerful political influence upon Capetian royalty during the second half of the twelfth century. The Plantagenet Empire emerged similarly. In 1128, the Count of Anjou and Maine, Geoffrey V, married Matilda, daughter of the king of England and Duke of Normandy, Henry I Beauclerc. Despite Stephen of Blois’s elevation as king of England in 1135, Geoffrey conquered Normandy in 1144. One year after his death, in 1152, his son Henry II married Eleanor, heiress of Aquitaine. Two years later, Henry succeeded Stephen as king of England. And in 1167, he persuaded the Duke of Brittany, Conan IV, to promise his daughter and heiress Constance to Henry’s third son, Geoffrey, and to withdraw from the duchy’s administration.

Structuring Royal Power When he became king in 987, Hugh Capet had merged his estates with those of the last Carolingian kings. Dynastic change thus enriched the monarchy, which further strengthened its power over the next two centuries. Robert II the Pious (a. 972–1031) acquired the counties of Dreux and Melun and the duchy of Burgundy. If Henry I (1008–1060) had to abandon the latter to his younger brother, he kept the county of Sens. His son Philip I (a. 1052–1108) acquired the Gâtinais in 1068, Corbie in 1071, French Vexin in 1077, and Bourges in 1101. Louis VI the Fat (a. 1081–1137) subjugated all the minor lords of the Île-de-France and also intervened in Auvergne in 1122 and 1127. In 1124, he united all the kingdom’s magnates to face the army of Emperor Henry V. In 1127, he was able to punish the Count of Flanders’s murderers and arbitrate his succession. The marriage of Louis VII (1120–1180) with Eleanor of Aquitaine, in 1137, allowed the king to extend his influence in Southern France. In 1138, he received the homage of the count of Toulouse, with whom he remained linked despite the annulment of his marriage to Eleanor in 1152. In the 1160s, Louis VII intervened several times in Auvergne and Burgundy. The assertion of the royal role at the level of the kingdom manifested itself more generally in growing numbers of chancellery staff and the broadening geographical range over which the writ of royal authority successfully ran. The power of the first Capetians was very dependent on Carolingian points of reference. The king should be the guarantor of justice and peace and protect the Church. The reform of the eleventh century, by distinguishing the secular world and ecclesiastical world, had desacralized the monarchy, which was further weakened by the crisis of Philip I’s bigamy and his excommunications. However, some clerics sought to restore the religious basis of royal authority. They reiterated that the king held his power from God with a mission of peace and justice distinct and complementary to that of the priest. With this in mind, Capetian kings developed a favored link with the papacy in its intermittent struggle with the emperor. Their close relationship with the abbey of Saint-Denis was begun by the abbot 14

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Suger (a. 1081–1151), Louis VI and Louis VII’s counsellor, which allowed these kings to create a continuity with Merovingian kings, and especially Dagobert I. The abbey became the warden of royal vestments, the royal necropolis, and historiographical center. According to Suger, the king was superior to the other feudal lords, could not owe homage to anybody, except Saint Denis, and had to receive homage from the magnates of the kingdom. During the twelfth century, his ideas progressively imposed themselves, along with the rise of the notion of “the Crown” to refer to the monarchy or the kingdom existing and acting separately from the king’s person. The Capetians imitated Lothair, the second to last Carolingian king, who, in 979, had had his son Louis consecrated in his lifetime. In this way, they strengthened dynastic rule and, by restricting the claims of younger heirs, removed the risk of splitting the kingdom. This progressively strengthened the unitary identity of the Regnum as a political entity. The consecration became the main royal symbolic event and assumed greater significance as the starting point from which to date the king’s deeds. In the ceremony, the king first received anointing from the archbishop of Reims, granting him the necessary grace to accomplish his ministry. Then the magnates gave their approval, and next, the king was acclaimed by the assembled people. The king also took an oath, first attested in 1059, to preserve the rights of the Church and the bishops, but also those of the “secular people.” During the first half of the eleventh century, royal representation was inspired by Carolingian and Ottonian imperial iconography. Around the middle of the century, Henry I stabilized the model of the royal seal, called “of majesty.” But the main part of royal symbolism was developed by Louis VII to resacralize the monarchy, consciously creating a continuity with the Merovingian and Carolingian dynasties. The Holy Ampulla was attested in use for the first time in his royal consecration in 1131. For that of his son, Philip II, in 1179, the sword Joyeuse, attributed to Charlemagne, first appeared. Louis  VII may have chosen the royal coat of arms, “azure semé-de-lis or,” golden lilies on a field of blue, to put his kingdom under the Virgin Mary’s protection (Pastoureau 2015). These symbolic constructions strengthened Capetian monarchy and elevated its legitimacy.

Part IV: The Capetian Golden Age (Cassard 2011) Asserting Royal Power Louis VII’s son and heir Philip II Augustus (1165–1223), so called because, in 1185, he had extended (augere) the royal demesne with the lands of Artois, Valois, and Vermandois, took the decision in 1204 to abandon his old title of king of the Franks (rex Francorum) for a new one: king of France (rex Franciae). His authority was now stated not to rest on individual feudal links but to extend over a territory, France. Taking advantage of the Plantagenet succession crisis resulting from Richard the Lionheart’s death in 1199 and his brother John Lackland’s subsequent mistakes, Philip confiscated the Plantagenets’ French estates. In 1204, he conquered Normandy, Maine, and Anjou. From 1206 to 1213, Brittany fell under his sway. Philip also reaffirmed his authority in Auvergne between 1190 and 1213. His successes were crowned by his victory at Bouvines, in 1214, against Emperor Otto IV, Ferrand of Flanders, and Renaud of Dammartin. His son Louis VIII (1187–1226) extended royal influence into Languedoc by purchasing in 1218 the rights of Amaury de Montfort, which had been acquired by his father, Simon V de Montfort, during the Albigensian crusade, and also conquered the Poitou in 1224. 15

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The next reign began with a difficult regency, with the monarchy constrained until 1242 by the power of the magnates. Nevertheless, the reign of Louis IX (1214–1270) is notable for the way in which he sanctified the royal figure. His devotion, his foundations, his charitable acts contributed to idealizing his image in his subjects’ eyes. The ceremonies of the “royal mystery” became more complicated. The consecration gave the king a new position, reliant upon his ability to heal scrofula by touching, and this rite is attested with regularity from Louis IX’s reign onward (Bloch 1924). The purchase, in 1238, of the Crown of Thorns and the building, to preserve it, of the Sainte-Chapelle, at the very heart of the royal palace, confirmed the concept of sanctification and religious charisma peculiar to royalty (Mercuri 2004). The king of France became the “Most Christian King” (rex christianissimus). From 1262, Louis IX reorganized the royal tombs in Saint-Denis to underline the continuity between the three royal dynasties. From 1247–1248 and until 1270, he instigated great investigations into the country’s administration, to root out abuses and to return ill-gotten goods while affirming royal authority over the whole kingdom (Dejoux 2014). Imitating his grandfather, Philip Augustus, who took the cross in 1190, Louis IX took the lead in two crusades. From 1248 to 1254, he was first defeated and subsequently imprisoned in Egypt. After his release, he worked to strengthen the defense of Outremer before, in 1270, he died at Tunis. His example associated crusading durably with the royal role, and although none of his successors undertook an actual expedition, the concept remained central to their identity. Royal power continued to strengthen under Louis IX’s successors, Philip III “the Bold” (1245–1285) and Philip IV “the Fair” (1268–1314). The royal demesne grew by incorporating the apanages of Capetian princes who died without heirs, notably the counties of Poitiers and Toulouse, and the royal land of Auvergne in 1272. The same year, Philip III subjugated the counts of Armagnac and Foix. In 1275, he organized his son Philip’s marriage with Joan, heiress of the county of Champagne and of the kingdom of Navarre, which finally took place in 1284. Philip IV extended his influence over the empire’s edges by conquering, in 1301, the count of Bar and annexing, in 1312, the city of Lyon. In 1308, he used the treason of the last French Lusignan to incorporate the counties of La Marche and Angouleme and his Poitevin lordships into the royal demesne. To an increasing extent, the royal court was influenced by legal scholars, who attributed imperial rights to the monarch as defined by Roman law, establishing the doctrine that the king is “emperor in his kingdom.” His jurisdiction was now seen as identical for all the kingdom’s inhabitants, regardless of status, and he was understood to act for the common good and public utility. Unlike the peaceful Louis IX, Philip III led several campaigns and died, in 1285, during a disastrous war against Aragon. Philip IV led two long wars, in Gascony against the king of England from 1293 to 1303, and in Flanders from 1297 to 1305. The lengthy periods of campaigning required the king to pay his warriors, justifying exceptional taxation and highlighting the value of royal service. Philip IV further enhanced his authority through a series of significant political trials against Bernard Saisset (1301), the pope Boniface VIII (1302–1303), and the Knights Templars (1307–1314). In these, inspired by the model of Louis IX, canonized in 1297 as Saint Louis, Philip presented himself as the first champion of the faith and his subjects’ salvation.

An Economic Upswing From the twelfth century, agriculture benefited from a long period of temperate conditions known as the “medieval climatic optimum.” Clearing of new farmland, the propagation of 16

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new farming techniques, and better tools also contributed to improve yields and diminish risks of starvation. A  prosperous peasantry gradually secured further liberties, and serfdom declined while agricultural production diversified. Hand-crafted techniques developed along with water-powered mills and smithies. The introduction of the horizontal weaving loom from the mid-eleventh century permitted the manufacture of large woolen cloths and led to increasing demand for luxurious fabrics. Across society, a wider range of manufactured items for household use and luxury consumption were increasingly to be found. In the towns, populations rose and became more densely concentrated, leading to the agglomeration of some towns and the breaking away of other settlements. This urban growth was also marked by a political movement, from the 1070s through to the second half of the twelfth century, for towns to become self-governing communes, seeking and obtaining charters of liberties from the monarchy. Although the king or a local lord still kept distant control over such places, an urban patriciate appeared, basing its status on the management of their town’s affairs. Urban dynamism produced waves of rebuilding, the repairing of walls, paving of streets, and construction of new bridges and cathedrals. Urban rise was also caused by a growing demand for the processing of raw materials gathered from wide areas, most notably in the textile trade. English wool was brought to Flanders, where cloth production saw exponential growth, assuring the county’s prosperity. Longer-range trading connections between the Mediterranean countries and the northern ones were maintained during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries through a cycle of six great fairs in Champagne, benefitting from many privileges granted by the local counts. Undeveloped roads meant that land transport remained difficult and rivers were a more significant component of wider networks. Seaborne shipping also grew, helped by technical developments, such as the pintle-and-gudgeon rudder, invented around the North Sea at the end of the twelfth century. The risks inherent to traveling joined to the high need for cash led to the development of banking activities, which were also rapidly adopted for royal finances.

An Intellectual Revival Economic improvement also gave birth to the so-called “12th century Renaissance” (Verger 1996), leading to the thirteenth century being called the “medieval century of reason” (Cassard 2011). Urban schools linked to cathedrals, chapters of clerical canons, or a specific teacher multiplied. The idea of universities took shape from the teachers’ and students’ progressive awareness of forming a particular community, which had to defend its interests against other urban communities and secular or ecclesiastical powers. Philip Augustus granted students their first liberties in 1200. The new University of Paris was recognized by the papacy in 1208 and received statutes in 1215. Inspired by this model, other institutions resulted from local schools’ reorganization or the initiatives of the powerful, notably in Montpellier (1220), Toulouse (1229), and Orleans (1306). With the universities arose a system of social promotion through knowledge, and studies became a requirement to be part of the administrative elite. Graduates in theology filled the ranks of the episcopacy, and legal scholars multiplied in royal service. The main intellectual development lay in the rediscovery of Aristotle’s work through twelfth-century translations. This produced the triumph of the scholastic method based on dialectics. Teachers and students discussed a subject or an issue, working through the confrontation of contradictory opinions and claims. This discussion (disputatio) had to be 17

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a logical progression based upon a rational demonstration. This methodology was systematized and extended for use in every field of knowledge. Despite the fact that some elements of Aristotelian philosophy clearly conflicted with core Christian beliefs, the theological value of his intellectual method allowed great authors like Thomas Aquinas (a.  1224– 1274) or Albertus Magnus (a. 1200–1280) to produce huge works to clarify and explain Christian doctrine.

Bibliography Merovingian Dynasty Dumézil, Bruno. 2019. Le baptême de Clovis. 24 décembre 505? Paris: Gallimard (Les journées qui ont fait la France). Effros, Bonnie, and Isabel Moreira, eds. 2020. The Oxford Handbook to the Merovingian World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Geary, Patrick. 1988. Before France and Germany. The Creation and Transformation of the Merovingian World. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goetz, Hans-Werner, Jorg Jarnut, and Walter Pohl. 2003. Regna and Gentes: The Relationship between Late Antique and Early Medieval Peoples and Kingdoms in the Transformation of the Roman World. Leiden: Brill (Transformation of the Roman World 13). Halsall, Guy. 2007. Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West 376–568. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heinzelmann, Martin. 1976. Bischofsherrschaft in Gallien. Zur Kontinuität römischer Führungsschichten vom 4. Bis zum 7. Jahrhundert. Soziale, prosopographische und bildungsgeschichtliche Aspekte. Munich/Zurich: Artemis. Russel, Josiah C. 1958. “Late Ancient and Medieval Population.” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 48 (3). Wood, Ian N. 1994. The Merovingian Kingdoms. 450–751. London and New York: Longman.

Carolingian Dynasty Bauduin, Pierre. 2009. Le monde franc et les Vikings, viiie-xe siècle. Paris: Albin Michel (L’évolution de l’Humanité). Costambeys, Marios, Matthew Innes, and Simon MacLean. 2011. The Carolingian World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. De Jong, Mayke. 2009. The Penitential State: Authority and Atonement in the Age of Louis the Pious 814–840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Folz, Robert. 2008 [1964]. Le couronnement impérial de Charlemagne, 25 décembre 800. Paris: Gallimard (Les journées qui ont fait la France). Fouracre, Paul. 2000. The Age of Charles Martel. London: Routledge. Gerberding, Richard. 1987. The Rise of the Carolinginans and the Liber Historiae Francorum. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Godman, Peter, and Robert Collins, eds. 1990. Charlemagne’s Heir. New Perspectives on the Reign of Louis the Pious. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Große, Rolf, and Michel Sot, eds. 2018. Charlemagne: les temps, les espaces, les hommes. Construction et déconstruction d’un règne. Turnhout: Brepols (Haut Moyen Âge 34). McLean, Simon. 2003. Kingship and Politics in the Late Ninth Century. Charles the Fat and the End of the Carolingian Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2008. Charlemagne. The Formation of a European Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nelson, Janet L. 1996. Charles the Bald. London and New York: Longman (The Medieval World). ———. 2019. King and Emperor. A  New Life of Charlemagne. Oakland: University of California Press.

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From Francia Occidentalis to Regnum Franciae Aurell, Martin. 2007. The Plantagenet Empire 1154–1224. London: Routledge. Barthélemy, Dominique. 1993. La société dans le comté de Vendôme de l’an mil au xive siècle. Paris: Fayard. ———. 2009. The Serf, the Knight, and the Historian, New Haven, Cornell University Press. Bartlett, Robert. 1993. The Making of Europe. Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950– 1350. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bisson, Thomas N. 2015. The Crisis of the Twelfth Century. Power, Lordship and the Origins of the European Government. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bloch, Marc. 2014. The Feudal Society. London: Routledge. Bouchard, Constance B. 1987. Sword, Miter and Cloister. Nobility and the Church in Burgundy (980–1198). Ithaca, New York and London: Cornell University Press. ———. 2001. Those of My Blood. Constructing Noble Families in Medieval Francia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Débax, Hélène. 2003. La féodalité languedocienne, xie-xiie siècles. Serments, hommages et fiefs dans le Languedoc des Trencavel. Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Mirail. Dubabin, Jean. 2000 [1894]. France in the Making, 843–1180. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Duby, Georges. 1980. The Three Orders: Feudal Society Reimagined. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1981. The Chivalrous Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gasparri, Françoise. 2015. Suger de Saint-Denis. Abbé, soldat, homme d’État au xiie siècle. Paris: Picard. Hallam, Elizabeth, and Charles West. 2019. Capetian France 987–1328. London: Routledge. Lewis, Andrew W. 1990. Royal succession in Capetian France. Studies on Familial Order and the State. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Martindale, Jane. 1997. Status, Authority and Regional Power: Aquitaine and France, 9th to 12th Centuries. Aldershot: Routledge. Mazel, Florian. 2010. Féodalités. 888–1180. Paris: Belin (Histoire de France). Pastoureau, Michel. 2015. Le roi tué par un cochon, Une mort infâme aux origines des emblèmes de la France? Paris: Seuil (La librairie du xxie siècle). Poly, Jean-Pierre, and Éric Bournazel. 1990. The Feudal Transformation 900–1200. New York: Holmes & Meier. Reynolds, Susan. 1994. Fiefs and Vassals. The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sassier, Yves. 2002. Royauté et idéologie au Moyen Âge. Bas empire, monde franc, France (ive-xiie siècle). Paris: Armand Colin. Vasselot de Régné, Clément de. 2018. “Le ‘Parentat’ Lusignan (xe-xive siècles): Structures, parenté vécue, solidarités et pouvoir d’un lignage arborescent.” PhD, Université de Nantes, 4 vols.

The Capetian Golden Age Baldwin, John W. 1986. The Government of Philip Augustus. Foundations of French Royal Power in the Middle Ages. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Barthélemy, Dominique. 2018. La bataille de Bouvines. Histoire et légendes. Paris: Perrin. Bloch, Marc. 1924. Les rois thaumaturges. Étude sur le caractère surnaturel attribué à la puissance royale particulièrement en France et en Angleterre. Paris: Istra. Brown, Elizabeth A. R. 1991a. The Monarchy of Capetian France and Royal Ceremony. Aldershot: Routledge. ———. 1991b. Politics and Institutions in Capetian France. Aldershot: Routledge. Cassard, Jean-Christophe. 2011. L’âge d’or capétien. 888–1180. Paris: Belin (Histoire de France). Dejoux, Marie. 2014. Les enquêtes de saint Louis. Gouverner et sauver son âme. Paris: Presses universitaires de France (Le nœud gordien). Gaposchkin, Cecilia, and Jay Rubenstein, eds. 2001. Political Ritual and Practice in Capetian France. Turnhout: Brepols.

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Clément de Vasselot de Régné Grant, Lindy. 2016. Blanche of Castile, Queen of France. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Jordan, William Ch. 1979. Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Jordan, William Ch, and Jenna R. Philips, eds. 2017. The Capetian Century. 1214–1314. Turnhout: Brepols. Krynen, Jacques. 1993. L’empire du roi. Idées et croyances politiques en France, xiiiᵉ-xvᵉ siècle. Paris: Gallimard (Bibliothèque des histoires). Mercuri, Chiara. 2004. Corona di Christo, Corona di Re. Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura. Strayer, Joseph. 1980. The Reign of Philip the Fair. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Verger, Jacques. 1973. Les Universités au Moyen Âge. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. ———. 1996. La Renaissance du xiie siècle. Paris: Cerf. ———. 1997. L’essor des universités au xiiie siècle. Paris: Cerf.

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2 GAUL, FRANCIA, AND THE WIDER EARLY MEDIEVAL WORLD James T. Palmer

When historians turn to write about “early medieval France,” they face a significant challenge: there was no such thing until nearly the eleventh century. In c. 500, the area that would become “l’Hexagone” was still a patchwork of Gallic and Belgic provinces in the later Roman Empire, a fact long remembered in future ecclesiastical organization. For a time until the early sixth century, a kingdom of the Goths overlaid parts of the south, extending into the Iberian Peninsula, while a kingdom of the Burgundians briefly flourished in the east. The expansion of Frankish power which came to be named “France,” meanwhile, started with a military confederation conquering cities in the Germanic provinces of the Rhine and Moselle before extending into the Belgic provinces and beyond. The political dominance of the north and east persisted under the Merovingians (Wood 1994a), and then the Carolingian dynasty (Costambeys, Innes, and MacLean 2011), through to the ninth century, by which time the Frankish kingdoms extended from the Saxon-Danish frontier to near Rome, and even into parts of Spain. At a basic level of political identity, a “kingdom of the Franks” developed only slowly with different faces, shaped by its interactions with its near and not-so-near neighbors over hundreds of years (James 1982). Interactions were not, of course, merely political but also belonged to economic and religious spheres of activity. The purpose of the present chapter is to sketch some of the ways in which the region’s international situations defined perceptions of it. The relative contingency of the early medieval Frankish kingdoms is not always easy to disconnect from later ideas and models. As is well-known, much historiography on the period has been shaped by quests to find “the origins of France” in ways that reflect modern political sentiments directly or indirectly (see Wood 2013; Creyghton and D’Auria, this volume). Greater emphasis on social and economic histories, especially pursued within a comparative framework, has put increased emphasis on changes and continuities that were not dependent on race or cultural identities (e.g. Wickham 2005). Meanwhile, identities have been seen increasingly as situational politicized discourses that may not have had the ubiquitous and precise resonances that people had assumed (Goffart 1988; Reimitz 2014). To refer to a Frank, for instance, could, at different times, refer to ethnic, political, or legal identities without implying all those categories were in play at once (Wood 1995). Early medieval Francia is most meaningful, in short, when it is understood not as a single 21

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well-defined place but as complex and changing systems of meaning and practice that are all part of much wider worlds of action. This is all the more imperative, as we shall see, when we consider the extent to which those changing systems were shaped by how the Frankish kingdoms fitted into the international scene around them.

Trade from the Mediterranean to the Northern Emporia The long-distance trade networks of the Gallic and Frankish worlds provide a useful starting point for understanding how the region has been defined. Up until the fifth century, the region was firmly integrated into the networks of the Roman economic world, defined by the vitality of Mediterranean trade and the demands of imperial centers. The relationship between Gaul and the rest of the empire changed with invasion, immigration, and fiscal developments, which came to a head in the fifth century, followed by devasting wars and pandemic in the sixth. Long-distance trade seems still to have been strong, although it likely relied on the interconnections of smaller networks to function (Wickham 2005). In the 1930s, the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne, in his posthumously published Mahommet et Charlemagne, suggested it was the contempt of Arabs for Roman institutions and ideas that stifled Mediterranean trade following their conquests in the seventh century; it was this that forced the Franks to begin to look inward and develop their own resources (Pirenne 1939, 284). It may have helped that populations were possibly down a third compared to c. 500, perhaps to only a couple of million in Gaul, while tastes for many products had become less cosmopolitan as the Roman Empire waned. Some economic vitality was generated by the rise of North Sea trade emporia, such as Quentovic and Dorestadt – important for Pirenne, at least, because one of his central interests was the rise of late medieval cities in northwestern Europe. However, this model, now over 80 years old, is too simplistic – not to mention prejudiced – to accommodate all the complexities that subsequent research might demand (Effros 2017). More and better archaeological evidence showed that, while trade in some commodities declined, often changes were gradual, and many processes of “decline” started long before the seventh century (McCormick 2001). Arab destructive contempt for Roman institutions also seems more imagined than real, not only when one considers the continuities, but also when one considers the capacity for change and conflict in the region even before the conquests. At the same time, one should perhaps not underestimate the extent to which communication between the Latin and Greek worlds was already becoming patchy by the sixth century, undermined by linguistic incompetence and divergent sensibilities in culture and religion. As long as Mediterranean trade remained strong, Provence was the unrivalled engine room for the Frankish world. Marseilles, for instance, was a vibrant commercial port through to the eighth century, linking Gallic and Mediterranean trade (Loseby 1998, 2000). It played a central role in the trade of things, such as olive oil and spices, that facilitated a sense of shared culture and lifestyle between Gaul and the rest of the Roman world. This was attested as an ideal as late as 716 in a famous royal charter for the monastery of Corbie in Picardy, granting rights to quantities of imported goods from Marseille (Pirenne 1939, 168; Loseby 2000, 187–89). Provence was likely also the entry point for “luxury” items, such as silk and some of the garnets used in Frankish jewelry. For many historians, the region’s decline ahead of the Carolingian period was symptomatic of exogenous pressures that squeezed long-distance supply and forced Gaul to rely increasingly on its own resources. Yet few patterns remain unchanged over time, and there were likely other factors 22

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at work, too, not least the Christian rejection of ostentatious wealth and the rerouting of some trade across the Alps (McCormick 2001, 77–82). The importance of the Mediterranean to Roman trade can obscure the vitality of Gaul’s maritime trade in other areas. Pirenne’s contemporary Alfons Dopsch argued that while commerce was more extensive in the Merovingian period than had been thought, North Sea trade, with the increasingly wealthy and internationally outward-looking English kingdoms, was already squarely part of the picture (Dopsch 1937, 352). A century of further archaeological evidence from across that world, along the British coasts and from Normandy to Scandinavia, has only strengthened that view (Loveluck 2013). Northwestern emporia functioned as hubs, alongside numerous smaller settlements, some probably seasonal (Hodges 2012, 5–10). They may have been dominated by local elites, but the widespread access to imported goods suggests that their control over commerce was limited, probably to toll collection (Dopsch 1937, 377; McCormick 2001, 642–46). This North Sea network was connected to the internal riverine trade arteries of the Frankish world, with Nantes probably the key toll center and market to access the Loire, and Rouen fulfilling the same function for the Seine. Importantly, this vibrant world of trade can be shown to have been growing and in good health before the perceived crises of the seventh century and before the actual slow decline in the Rhône valley trade began to bite. Changes in the south did not necessarily cause northern growth; rather, both were critical to the development of different areas of early medieval Francia. Outward-looking economic vigor naturally worked in partnership with other aspects of travel. Irish and English religious figures, from Columbanus in the sixth century to Alcuin in the eighth, had cause to travel through Gaul on pilgrimage or business (Wood 2016; Levison 1946). Many travelled to Rome, and some even to the Holy Land (McCormick 2001, 129–50). Others founded or took over religious houses as a result, leading to new monasteries such as Péronne and Auxerre that gained reputations for their insular teachers. Books, relics, and people travelled extensively through these developing networks, developing a kind of cultural economic system that was able to take advantage of mercantile infrastructures. On occasion, merchants abused the advantages of free passage for pilgrims by pretending to be pilgrims themselves, as Charlemagne noted to King Offa of Mercia in 796 when explaining that such people would be forced to pay the tolls they were trying to avoid when crossing the Channel (Story 2003, 195–96). The evolutions and revolutions of the late antique economy had not left the nascent Francia as an isolated peripheral zone but, at least on its own terms, as a space that remained lively and connected to the world around it. Moreover, with so much movement, it seems that even relatively modest people within Frankish society had a sense of key happenings in this wider world, from imperial scandals to wars and outbreaks of plague.

The Franks and International Politics Politically, too, the Frankish kingdoms developed with much interest in the ever-changing bigger picture. To do so was, of course, expedient because politics, like trade, does not happen in a closed system. Modern histories of the period have frequently taken a panoramic view of Europe, seeking to understand and conceptualize the different ways in which the Roman world changed into a patchwork of smaller medieval kingdoms, precisely because this is how people at that time understood what was going on. This has been an ever-­present feature of early medieval scholarship, from the sweeping narrative styling of Gibbon in the 23

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eighteenth century to the European Science Foundation’s program Transformation of the Roman World (1993–1997) and beyond (see, for example, Esders et al. 2019). It reflects the ways in which national histories do not easily map onto the limits of medieval pasts, as well as the ways in which the paths of different groups were entwined. The relationship between the Frankish kingdoms and ideas of “Germania” was particularly complicated. In modern scholarship, it has frequently been shaped by modern political conflicts and debates about nations (Creyghton and D’Auria, this volume). On the ground, perhaps one of the great successes of Frankish identity was that it was not overtly racial in its definitions but rather fluid, with many aspects of law, language, and historical tradition contingent rather than essential components that allowed people to buy into it in different ways (Wood 1995; Reimitz 2014). Certainly, by the end of the Merovingian period in the eighth century, Frankishness for many people was more about a shared culture and political community than about narrow family lineages. This cultural-political package, crucially, had embraced many aspects of romanitas early on. From the very first letters extant to a Merovingian king, written by Bishop Remigius of Rheims to Clovis I  around 486, there are assumptions that leading Franks understood Latin and local convention that are contradicted only by disbelieving modern scholars rather than by any evidence. It is only pronouncedly from the reign of Charlemagne (d. 814) – a Frankish ruler who spent little time as far west or south as Paris and who set his capital at Aachen – that there is evidence of Germanic vernacular cultures that helped to divide Franks who spoke lingua Theodica from those who spoke lingua Romana (Fried 2016, 270–73). The growing sense of a linguistic frontier in the ninth century was only one part of the long separation of Francia and Germania, however, and one that would only seem truly definitive by the eleventh century. The Rhineland and the world beyond that was, for the most part, considered an extension of the Frankish world. A  bigger sense of contrast, therefore, was presented by the Goths to the south (Collins 2016). The Goths had had a longer history within the Roman Empire as a political force than the Franks and had been settled in Aquitaine in c. 419, expanding over time into the Iberian Peninsula, while other groups had formed a kingdom in Italy (Halsall 2007, 228–32, 296–300; Arnold, Bjornlie, and Kristina Sessa 2016). They were not only political rivals to the Franks but also maintained a commitment to Arian Christianity – denying that the Son was fully equal to the Father – while the Franks prided themselves on their commitment to the Catholicism favored by Roman Christians. King Clovis conquered Aquitaine in 507 after victory at the Battle of Vouillé near Poitiers, and although some Gothic kings from Spain made claims to the very south over the following decades, the Pyrenees served effectively as the frontier between the two worlds. The Christological disputes ensured some hostility until the Goths renounced Arianism officially under King Reccared I in 589. Despite that, the Frankish king Sigibert I had married the Gothic princess Brunhild in 567 with much fanfare, arguing that it was more prestigious to marry a heretical princess than the local concubines his brothers had wed (although, for good measure, Brunhild converted anyway). In a competitive environment, one sought advantage wherever it lay. Relative peace between the Franks and the political world of the Iberian Peninsula came to an uncertain end after 711 after the Arab conquest of Spain. In some modern histories, this set the scene for a clash of world-historical proportions, as it brought Latin Christendom face-to-face with Islam in a battle for Europe’s future. The religious aspects of this will be covered in the next section. Politically, it is not clear that the changing situation in Spain represented a “clash of civilizations” any more than it did a series of rulers taking 24

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advantage of political and military opportunities. Mayor Charles Martel’s victories over Arab armies in the 730s, for instance, were initially considered important by contemporaries for offering the Franks the chance to put down resistance to northern rule in Lyon, Aquitaine, and Provence (Palmer 2015, 42). Later, Charlemagne’s disastrous intervention in Spain in 778 – the setting of the eleventh-century Old French epic the Chanson de Roland – was notably at the invitation of rebel Arabs seeking to reshape Iberian politics rather than because he opposed Arab rule in principle. Anti-Arab sentiment took a long time to ferment before it became dominated by racial and religious caricatures in the post-1000 period (Turner 2019). In the meantime, it is striking how little developments in Spain actually shaped Frankish politics in the early Middle Ages, except for quietly reinforcing the status of the Pyrenean frontier. In contrast, despite its distance from the Franks, the imperial capital in Constantinople did much to shape the Franks’ outlook (McCormick 1995). The Greeks were able to trade in soft power even when their real ability to control affairs in the West had faded. During Merovingian rule, for instance, expressions of cooperation between Frankish kings and emperors helped legitimize and normalize Frankish rule in former Roman provinces. Emperor Anastasius, according to Gregory of Tours, had made Clovis a consul, which the king had celebrated by wearing purple silks and a diadem (Wood 1994a, 48–49). High-level diplomatic exchanges seem to have been normal, to judge by both correspondence and stories in chronicles, at least until c. 600 (Loseby 2016). Realistically, however, there was little that the emperors could do to direct Frankish affairs, especially as their own problems grew in the seventh century. The most famous shift occurred with the imperial coronation of Charlemagne on Christmas Day 800 (Nelson 2019, 361–63, 380–85). The coronation came about because of the way that Charlemagne’s conquests had made him the dominant figure in the Latin West at the same time that Empress Irene had seized sole rule for herself in Constantinople. The two had had a complicated diplomatic history, involving an aborted marriage alliance between their children, disagreements over Frankish military action against the Lombards in Italy, and dispute over the veneration of images. The absence of a male ruler in the east after Irene had deposed her son in 797 briefly opened the possibility of marriage with Charlemagne to unite east and west, curtailed by the deposition of Irene in 802. Nonetheless, from this point, the Franks could claim an imperial dignity independent of Constantinople. At one point, in the mid-tenth century, Adso of Montier-en-Der even suggested to Queen Gerberga that it was the Franks’ preservation of Roman imperial dignity that held back the coming of the Antichrist and the imminence of Judgement Day (MacLean 2008). Yet the direct relationship between the Franks and the empire was short-lived. After the death of Emperor Louis the Pious in 840, the kingdom of the Western Franks remained part of the larger Carolingian Empire, but Louis’s son Charles II was the only ruler of that kingdom to become emperor himself, and only briefly between 875 and his death in 877. Any practical or ideological force in the idea of Frankish empire was left to the realm of nostalgia (Gabriele 2011). The imperial title itself, meanwhile, became bound up in Italian and German politics instead. The flirtations with imperial dignity say much about the Frankish kingdoms as a product of international politics. The Franks sought time and again to mark themselves out as special, not just another group of barbarian hopefuls. They had a commitment to dynastic politics none of their neighbors could manage or care for. This was fueled in part by the ruthless success of figures from Clovis to Charles, but also by the success with which the 25

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Merovingians used symbols such as long hair to mark them out as different and powerful, and then by the success with which the Carolingians traded on being the best defenders of Christian orthodoxy. Stories celebrated the Franks as descendants of the Trojans, and imagery toyed with connections to a New Israel (Garrison 2000; Innes 2000). The imperial title was just one more addition to Frankish strategies for asserting their difference that drew on the repertoire in play in the wider world.

Old and New Religious Worlds Discourses about religion were important to shaping the patterns of Frankish society too. In the late fifth century, the Franks may still have included many polytheists, but as they were drawn into the fading Roman world, they converted en masse to Catholicism, and the ideals of a universal Christendom became involved in disputes about heresy and promoted new missionary work (Dumézil 2005). The proliferation of religious institutions provided an infrastructure of literacy that preserved much of the non-royal history of the period (and plenty of the royal history too). The earliest frameworks of a modern history were often critically compiled by religious antiquarians, such as the Benedictine monk Jean Mabillon (d. 1707), a pioneer who travelled extensively to find old material in these libraries to compile a history of the Benedictine Order. The value of histories rooted in the monastic, ecclesiastic, or devotional was less appreciated by more self-consciously republican and secularist writers active after 1789. To such writers, the importance of Frankish attachment to the papacy or to the missionary ideal had little value compared to their development of law and state. There remained, however, some such as Frédéric Ozanam (d. 1853), who proclaimed that the absorption of religious influences from Rome to Ireland allowed for positive and important social transformations (Wood 2013, 140–47). Modern religious sensibilities have often shaped how the past was seen. The central issue has often been how the Frankish kingdoms fitted within wider Christendom. Late-antique Christians in Gaul could read the Bible, at least in Latin translation, and would encounter stories that were all set in distant lands at the far end of the Mediterranean and beyond. Stories of distant saints only expanded this worldview. The religious imagination, in that sense, was not unlike the political and economic imaginations sketched earlier, with local aspects of power explicitly defined in relation to distant places and institutions that people in Gaul might never encounter directly. The universal nature of Christianity, however, made a sense of distance mostly irrelevant. Patristic treatises and biblical exegesis explored the allegorical and symbolic aspects of Scripture against literalism, often preferring instead to reflect on the spiritual nature of the Church as a corporate body. Canon law proclaimed a common core of standards and legislation, particularly once Dionysius Exiguus established a body of papal decretals and translated canons early in the sixth century. Ritually, the observance of Easter was supposed to unite all Christians across the world, so the problem of different local calculations of its date generated a wealth of shared literature discussing calendars and concepts from Ireland to Egypt and Greece. Christians in early medieval Francia had to understand their national situation within a universal framework (Brown 2013). Ideas of heresy played an important role in the self-perception of the Frankish Church. The most pressing to begin with was Arianism, the belief that the Son was subordinate to the Father. This was followed by the Goths of Spain and Italy, the Vandals of North Africa, the Burgundians in Gaul, and the Lombards in Italy. The Franks’ conversion to Catholicism 26

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marked them out as distinctive in this context. As noted earlier, some capital was made of opposition to the neighbors, at least until King Reccared of the Visigoths declared an end to the heresy in Spain in 589. New Christological disputes in the east drew, at best, limited criticism in the Frankish kingdoms because of the physical distance and the Latin/Greek divide. (The Franks under Charlemagne briefly considered intervening in Greek disputes over images, but the complexity and language issues combined proved too much). It took a new local variation on Christology to unite the Frankish churches with a sense of common identity against an opponent, as they rallied together to condemn Elipandus of Toledo’s Adoptionism (the claim that Christ was ‘adopted’ into divinity through his resurrection, not born divine) with councils, letters, and treatises in the late eighth century (Cavadini 1993). Such disputes reminded the religious-minded of the Frankish kingdom of the core beliefs they shared. Perhaps surprisingly, in that context, the spread of Islam seems to have done little to frame Frankish identities. The Arab conquest of Spain from 711, mentioned earlier, drew surprisingly little comment from contemporaries north of the Pyrenees for either its religious or political dimensions. Many historians from Edward Gibbon onward have imagined that the Battle of Tours or Poitiers in 732, fought between the Frankish mayor Charles Martel and the Arab governor ‘Abd al-Raḥmān, was a decisive moment in world history because it meant that Europe remained predominantly defined by Christianity rather than Islam (see Palmer 2019). Frankish sources, however, said nothing about religion, instead portraying the Arabs as “Saracens” or “Ishmaelites” who had become involved in ongoing resistance to Frankish rule in the south. Likely, there was no real idea of what Islam actually was, especially not as a distinct “religion.” Heresies seemed far more important. This even left space for positive diplomatic exchange between Muslim and Christian rulers, most famously when Charlemagne gratefully received the gift of an elephant from the Umayyad caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd – whom Frankish sources classicized as “king of the Persians” (Fried 2016, 404–5). Respect from distant powers massaged Frankish egos. Paganism to the north and east was usually a more pressing concern. Interest in missionary work, however, grew only slowly. In the sixth and early seventh centuries, for instance, there was limited support for the conversion of the English, initially at the request of Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604) (Wood 1994b). The transcultural connections of bishops in the Merovingian world, particularly with the Byzantine Empire, may have helped foster a more expanded sense of Christendom that transcended the old limits of the Roman Empire (Esders 2016). Yet there were only isolated moves to evangelize non-Christian people beyond the Rhine during the seventh century, after which the deepening Christianization of the English generated figures such as St. Willibrord (d. 739) and St. Boniface (d. 754), who felt that the English had a duty to convert pagans in Germania (Levison 1946; Palmer 2009). Such operations were expanded dramatically by Charlemagne’s 32-year Saxon war and subsequent renewed interest in missions to Scandinavia and Slavic peoples. Expansion was naturally more important for Frankish religious institutions and communities closer to the frontiers, such as Mainz or Salzburg, than for those in Gaul. That difference in missionary outlook, however, provided another factor that increasingly divided the Frankish east and west. A series of crises in the middle of the ninth century may have been crucial to consolidating these various processes (Palmer 2015, 38–41). The dramatic eruption of the polytheist Vikings onto the international scene presented the fundamental challenge. Raiding along the coast and rivers in the early years of the century reached a climax when Paris was 27

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sacked in 845, humiliating King Charles II, who paid them to go away. A double church council held in response characterized the raids as punishment for sin but also became an opportunity for some to promote anti-Jewish sentiments; these had grown partly as a reaction to the strong position of some Jews at the court of Louis the Pious, and partly because of anger following the surprise conversion of a deacon, Bodo, to Judaism while on pilgrimage to Rome in 838. It may not have helped either that Rome was raided by Arabs in 846, prompting military intervention by Charles’s half-brother Emperor Lothar. Then, to add insult to injury, the former Rheims priest Gottschalk emerged from travels in Dalmatia in 848 and stoked controversy with his views on double predestination, leading to accusations of heresy and then imprisonment at Hautvilliers (Gillis 2017). In a few short years, the sense of opposition and disunity had significantly heightened, and the Frankish world had enemies on all sides. It was a situation that helped reinforce an enduring sense of a West Frankish community.

Conclusion The creation of an early medieval Francia was no straightforward process. Changing economic, political, and religious patterns brought different priorities and connections, shifting the logic and importance of identities in the process. As a result, what the idea of a Frankish kingdom meant varied depending on time, place, and individual – and indeed sometimes may not have meant that much compared to regional or religious identities. Networks of trade and production, linguistic change, migration, diplomacy, anxiety about heresy and paganism, universalizing ideas about empire and Christianity all contributed to the sense of political community. Post-Enlightenment historians had rich material here to place emphasis on the cultural or religious connections that spoke best to their own ideals and prejudices, projecting different kinds of community onto the past to connect it to the present. That community, moreover, always depended not just on what early medieval Francia was in itself but on how it connected to the world around it.

Bibliography Arnold, J., Shane Bjornlie, and Kristina Sessa, eds. 2016. A Companion to Ostrogothic Italy. Leiden: Brill. Brown, Peter. 2012. Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550AD. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2013. The Rise of Western Christendom AD200–1000. 3rd ed. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Cavadini, John. 1993. The Last Christology of the West: Adoptionism in Spain and Gaul. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Collins, Roger. 2016. “Gregory of Tours and Spain.” In A Companion to Gregory of Tours, edited by Alexander Callander Murray, 498–515. Ledien: Brill. Costambeys, Marios, Matthew Innes, and Simon MacLean. 2011. The Carolingian World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dopsch, Alfons. 1937. The Economic and Social Foundations of European Civilization. London: Kegan Paul. Dumézil, Bruno. 2005. Les raciones chrétiennes de l’Europe. Conversion et liberté dans les royaumes barbares Ve-VIIIe siècle. Paris: Fayard. Effros, Bonne. 2012. Uncovering the Germanic Past: Merovingian Archaeology in France 1830–1914. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2017. “The Enduring Attraction of the Pirenne Thesis.” Speculum 92 (1): 184–208.

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Gaul, Francia, and the Wider Early Medieval World Esders, Stefan. 2016. “Nationes quam plures conquiri: Amandus of Maastricht, Compulsory Baptism, and ‘Christian Universal Mission.’ ” In Motions of Late Antiquity, edited by Jamie Kreiner and Helmut Reimitz. Tunrhout: Brepols. Esders, Stefan, Yaniv Fox, Yitzhak Hen, and Laury Sarti, eds. 2019. East and West in the Early Middle Ages: The Merovingian Kingdoms in Mediterranean Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fried, Johannes. 2016. Charlemagne. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gabriele, Matthew. 2011. An Empire of Memory: The Legend of Charlemagne, the Franks, and Jerusalem before the First Crusade. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Garrison, Mary. 2000. “The Franks as the New Israel? Education for an Identity from Pippin to Charlemagne.” In The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle Ages, edited by Yitzhak Hen and Matthew Innes, 114–61. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gillis, Matthew. 2017. Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goffart, Walter. 1988. The Narrators of Barbarian History AD550–800: Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, Bede, and Paul the Deacon. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Halsall, Guy. 2007. Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West 376–568. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hodges, Richard. 2012. Dark Age Economics: A New Audit. Bristol: Duckworth. Innes, Matthew. 2000. “Teutons or Trojans? The Carolingians and the Germanic Past.” In The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle Ages, edited by Yitzhak Hen and Matthew Innes, 227–49. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. James, Edward. 1982. The Origins of France from Clovis to the Capetians 500–1000. London: Palgrave. Lebecq, Stéphane. 2012. “The New wiks or emporia and the Development of a Maritime Economy in the Northern Seas (7th-9th Centuries).” In From one Sea to Another: Trading places in the European and Mediterranean Early Middle Ages, edited by Sauro Gelichi and Richard Hodges, 11–22. Turnhout: Brepols. Levison, Wilhelm. 1946. England and the Continent in the Eighth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Loseby, Simon. 1998. “Marseille and the Pirenne Thesis, I: Gregory of Tours, the Merovingian Kings and ‘un grand port.’ ” In The Sixth Century: Production, Distribution and Demand, edited by Richard Hodges and William Bowden, 203–29. Leiden: Brill. ———. 2000. “Marseille and the Pirenne Thesis, II: ‘ville morte’.” In The Long Eighth Century: Production, Distribution and Demand, edited by Inge Lyse Hansen and Chris Wickham, 167–94. Leiden: Brill. ———. 2016. “Gregory of Tours, Italy and the Empire.” In A Companion to Gregory of Tours, edited by Alexander Callander Murray, 462–97. Leiden: Brill. Loveluck, Christopher. 2013. Northwest Europe in the Early Middle Ages, AD600–1150. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacLean, Simon. 2008. “Reform, Queenship and the End of the World in Tenth-Century France: Adso’s Letter on the Origin and Time of the Antichrist Reconsidered.” Revue belge de Philologie et d’Histoire 86 (3–4): 645–75. McCormick, Michael. 1995. “Byzantium and the West, 700–900.” In The New Cambridge Medieval History, edited by Rosamond McKitterick, Vol. 2, 349–80. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2001. The Origins of the European Economy: Communication and Commerce AD 300–900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nelson, Janet. 1993. Charles the Bald. London: Routledge. ———. 2019. King and Emperor: A New Life of Charlemagne. London: Allen Lane. Palmer, James. 2009. Anglo-Saxons in a Frankish World, 690–900. Turnhout: Brepols. ———. 2015. “The Otherness of Non-Christians in the Early Medieval West.” Studies in Church History 51: 33–52. ———. 2019. “The Making of a World Historical Moment: The Battle of Tours (732/3) in the Nineteenth Century.” Postmedieval 10 (2): 206–18. Pirenne, Henri. 1939. Mohammed and Charlemagne. London: Allen.

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James T. Palmer Reimitz, Helmut. 2014. History, Frankish Identity and the Framing of Western Ethnicity, 550–850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Story, Joanna. 2003. Carolingian Connection: Anglo-Saxon England and Carolingian Francia c. 750– 870. Aldershot: Ashgate. Turner, Victoria. 2019. Theorizing Medieval Race: Saracen Representations in Old French Literature. Cambridge: Legenda. Wickham, Chris. 2005. Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean 400–800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wood, Ian. 1994a. The Merovingian Kingdoms 450–751. London. ———. 1994b. “The Mission of Augustine to the English.” Speculum 69: 1–17. ———. 1995. “Defining the Franks: Frankish Origins in Early Medieval Historiography.” In Concepts of National Identity in the Middle Ages, edited by Simon Forde, Leslie Johnson, and Alan V. Murray, 47–57. Leeds: University of Leeds. ———. 2013. The Modern Origins of the Early Middle Ages. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2016. “The Irish in England and on the Continent in the Seventh Century.” Peritia 27: 189–216.

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3 THE VIKINGS AND FRANCIA, 799–936 Matthew Firth

It is not difficult to understand the panicked tones of Frankish chroniclers through the ninth century.1 Scandinavian raiders plundered Francia for over a century, raiding from Frisia to Provence, from Brittany to Burgundy, with multiple groups operating simultaneously throughout the empire. And when called on to defend their people, Frankish lords were frequently found wanting. The ongoing succession crises that characterized the empire after Charlemagne’s death in 814 rendered regions vulnerable and resources stretched. Seemingly, the Scandinavians were everywhere in pursuit of moveable wealth and had found the monasteries and towns of Frankish coasts and rivers wealthy and exposed. Yet this does not cover the full breadth of their activity in Francia. Former raiders became integrated within Frankish political, military, and economic life. In Aquitaine and Brittany, they served as mercenaries and allies on both sides of succession and secession disputes; in the Seine valley too, they became active political players, and ultimately settlers, integrating with the Frankish communities of the region that became known as Normandy. Nonetheless, it is evident from contemporary chronicles that the Scandinavians were feared, their presence in Francia primarily characterized as violent. Yet the Franco-Scandinavian interaction of this era was also clearly transformative, evolving and developing over time to shape political landscapes throughout the empire. The Scandinavian raiders were commonly termed “Northmen” in Latin Frankish sources, a broadly generic identifier for the same people referred to by the Old NorseIcelandic víkingr (a person who raids). These terms did not denote ethnicity but rather described warriors of Scandinavian origin who participated in seaborne raiding, mostly with the intent of acquiring loot. As used by Frankish chroniclers, “Northmen” is an inimical term designating alterity and highlighting the Frankish experience of the northern fleets that raided their coasts and rivers. In turn, the positive or negative connotations of the Old Norse-Icelandic víkingr are dependent on the literary contexts of its use (Jesch 2015, 6). However, Old Norse-Icelandic literary and historical texts invariably post-date the Viking Age, and in truth, it can only be speculated as to how the Scandinavian raiders selfidentified. In modern scholarship, “vikings” are usually broadly defined: peoples of Scandinavian ancestry who, from the eighth to eleventh centuries, traversed the northeast Atlantic, engaging in piracy, in politics, in trading, and in settlement (Jesch 2015, 7). This is a 31

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useful definition for describing the extent and variety of viking activity in Francia. Moreover, it allows for the term “viking” to encompass not only the peoples of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway but also those of Scandinavian-derived settlements in places such as Ireland, Iceland, England, and the West Frankish territory that became Normandy. Such settlements reflect the regionalization that characterized viking activity and which was prevalent in Francia. Throughout the ninth century, the Scandinavian raiders pillaged along Francia’s coasts and rivers with increasing frequency and in increasing numbers. These viking fleets were well designed for surprise attacks on undefended coastlines, Frankish armies initially ill-equipped to respond to such raids. Though the vikings proved themselves adept at land-based campaigning, their wider movements were facilitated by ship travel, and activity therefore concentrated along Francia’s Atlantic coast and navigable rivers. Thus, the three main regions of viking activity in West Francia corresponded with its great river systems: Aquitaine and the Garonne, Brittany and the Loire, and the Seine estuary and valley (Nelson 1997, 30–35). The remarkable geographical breadth of the raids no doubt fed into the hyperbole of Frankish chronicles. Monastic writers such as Ermentarius of Noirmoutier and the annalist of Saint-Vaast speak of the raiders everywhere “massacring Christians, pillaging, devastating, and burning” (Ermentarius 1905, 59; de Simson 1909, 54–55).2 Aimoin of Saint-Germain-des-Prés describes the viking campaign on the Seine of 845 as an unprecedented attack on Christendom itself (col. 1029). However, such accounts emphasizing the alterity of the vikings must be read with caution: they are imbued with the eschatological and partisan concerns of those authoring them. Viking attacks are framed as a pagan-versus-Christian conflict, the raiders the tools of God’s judgment for the sins of the Franks, the slant given this commentary informed by authorial alignment with a Carolingian political faction (Coupland 1991b). Further, the resulting narratives can imply that viking activity in Francia through the century was a static phenomenon. However, it varied between regions and evolved over time as the Scandinavian raiders adapted to the fractious political milieu of ninth-century Francia and to regional nuances in their spheres of operation.

Aquitaine and the Garonne The earliest recorded viking raid on Frankish territory occurred in Aquitaine in 799. This is attested in a letter of Alcuin, a Northumbrian scholar of Charlemagne’s court. He describes the arrival of “pagan ships” that raided the islands off the coast of Aquitaine (Alcuin of Tours 1895, 309). These may have been Norwegian raiders based in Ireland, given the relative distance of the Aquitanian coastline from Denmark. They faced some opposition to their raids – Alcuin recounts that over a hundred vikings were killed in battle on an unnamed beach, though this represented only a part of their number. Indeed, despite this glimmer of Frankish resistance, Alcuin declares the viking deprivations to have been unprecedented, divine chastisement for faithlessness. This is a thematic concern of ninthcentury Frankish scholarship, and one that comes into particular prominence after 840 as clerical scholars added the scourge of civil war to pagan raid in the rhetoric of God’s retribution Frankish sins (Coupland 1991b). The apparent severity of viking activity in 799, and the ill-preparedness of the Frankish communities to defend against the seaborne raiders, is corroborated by Charlemagne’s activities the following year. According to Royal Frankish Annals (78), in the year 800, Charlemagne built a fleet to patrol the Atlantic, “which was then infested with pirates,” and 32

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established strategic shore guards. This may have been effective, as there is scant record of viking raids on Francia in the remaining 14 years of Charlemagne’s reign. Indeed, as late as 820, Annals record the partial effectiveness of these coastal defenses as a fleet of thirteen viking ships was repelled from the Neustrian coast near the Seine estuary. However, Annals is a court history invested in presenting a positive image of Carolingian rule: the chroniclers largely ignore Frankish defeats and the details of regional conflict. It cannot be presumed that the extant record of viking activity in Francia at this time is complete. There are no contemporary Scandinavian texts, and thus, we only have Carolingian sources to draw upon. This intersects with larger scholarly debates around the scale and purpose of viking activity (Jones 2006, 86–87). It is generally accepted that the extent of viking activity described by Carolingian chroniclers was subject to exaggeration (Coupland 2003). This is not to suggest the attacks did not occur, but rather that their scale and effects were overstated. Moreover, questions remain as to whether the vikings came as settlers or raiders. In short, whether land shortages in Scandinavia encouraged viking migration, or whether their primary intent was the acquisition of wealth and slaves (Sawyer 2003, 106). The growing consensus is that, at least in their origins, vikings were motivated by the acquisition of loot rather than land (Sawyer 2003, 106–7). Yet viking activity took on different characteristics over time. While the raids of the early ninth century tended to be sporadic, characterized by small coastal fleets, from the 830s, chroniclers begin to describe large-scale viking armies, inland incursions, and multi-season campaigns. This coincides with an apparent change in ambition as settlement became a feature of viking activity, even if the acquisition of wealth remained foundational. It is, however, important to recognize that the vikings were not centralized: different groups held different aspirations. The Seine vikings, for example, settled Upper Normandy in 911, while around the same time the Brittany vikings were using their regional dominance to augment their raiding activities. The increasing frequency and severity of viking raids is described by Ermentarius in relation to his monastery on Noirmoutier, a tidal island on the north Aquitanian coast. The 799 viking campaign is often cited as having been an attack on Noirmoutier; however, there is no evidence for this. Alcuin only specifies that raiding occurred “throughout the islands of the Aquitanian seas” (309), while Ermentarius does not tie any of his community’s experiences to specific dates prior to 836. Writing c. 840–862, Ermentarius’s intent was to narrate the translation of Saint-Philibert from Noirmoutier to Messais, some 200 kilometers inland. The translation of the saint’s relics and the relocation of the community were necessitated by intensifying viking activity. As translatio narratives, Ermentarius’s writings are broadly hagiographic and thus his urgent language describing viking deprivations again participates in the pagan–Christian dichotomy. He does, however, seem to have witnessed the events he narrates. Ermentarius writes that, through the early years of the ninth century, the monks and their dependents on the island were forced to seek the mainland during the warmer months, returning only when winter seas kept the raiders away. However, from around 830, the raids became more frequent, the deprivations more extreme, with winter no longer providing refuge, and so the community’s abbot sought audience with Pippin I of Aquitaine in 836 to beg his protection. Noting the logistical difficulties of getting a land force to the island and the ease of access for the vikings, the king and his advisors recommended abandoning the island (23–25). Viking activity in Aquitaine was not, however, limited to coastal regions, and as wealthy communities like Noirmoutier moved away from the shore, the Scandinavians began to 33

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explore the West Frankish interior. From the 840s, viking activity increased throughout Francia; the political disruption caused by the death of Pippin I  in 838 and subsequent competing claims on the kingship of Aquitaine made the region particularly vulnerable. For example, Annals of Saint-Bertin recount that in 844, Pippin’s brother Charles the Bald had besieged Toulouse and was awaiting reinforcements (58–60); however, these troops were intercepted en route and put to flight by Pippin’s son Pippin II. In the aftermath of this conflict, vikings raided along the Garonne as far as Toulouse with little opposition. In many respects, Annals of Saint-Bertin are a critical source for viking activity; however, it is the work of two authors, both with their own political and theological positions (Nelson 1991, 6–13). Authored by Prudentius of Troyes, this entry serves to delegitimize Pippin’s rule by demonstrating that his actions brought God’s immediate judgment – the pagan vikings – on the Franks. This is not to say that the events themselves are fabricated, but rather that it is important to pay attention to how the authors frame them. Nonetheless, it does appear that Pippin was failing in his obligations to his supporters. In 845, the same force returned, raiding between Bordeaux and Saintes, and were not intercepted by Pippin’s forces but by a local army raised by Count Siguin of Bordeaux. The Franks were routed, and Siguin slain (Regenos 1966, 60–61). Annals of Saint-Bertin records these vikings as then tarrying in peace for a time, an assertion that, given Prudentius’s anti-Pippin rhetoric, can be read as an indictment of the Aquitanian king’s failure to confront them (62). Further, through 847 and 848, a viking army besieged Bordeaux, sacking the city despite a defeat to Charles the Bald during the campaign (Laporte 1951, 80–81). Dismayed by Pippin’s inability to defend against viking forays, Prudentius alleges that the elites of Aquitaine switched allegiance to Charles. Initially, however, he seems to have been no more successful than his predecessor: the vikings sacked Périgueux in 849 with no resistance and raided throughout Aquitaine in 855 with little opposition. To Charles’s credit (or relief – his involvement was limited), that same year, local Aquitanian forces crushed an overland attack on Poitiers orchestrated by vikings based in the Loire valley (81). To Pippin’s discredit – at least as Prudentius would have us believe – a subsequent attack on Poitiers in 857 was successful, as he had allied with the vikings in opposition to Charles. Poitiers remained a locus of viking activity over the next decade with regular attacks from the Loire vikings. The city paid tribute in 863 to avoid destruction but was burned in 865, though the raiders suffered substantial losses. However, in 868, the Poitevins took the battle to the vikings, forcing them into flight (Nelson 1991, 127, 152). This was indicative of growing regional stability, also represented in the rebuilding and refortification of Angoulême that same year. Pippin II had been imprisoned in 864 and died soon after, freeing Charles and his lieutenants to concentrate resources on establishing effective defenses against the vikings. However, the abatement in viking activity at this point could also be illusory, stemming from the uneven coverage of our sources. This period coincides with the transition of Annals of Saint-Bertin from the authorship of Prudentius to that of Hincmar of Reims, who had little interest in Aquitanian affairs. Other contemporary annals show similar disinterest in the region, and from 868, accounts of viking activity in southern ­Francia largely ceased.

Brittany and the Loire The chronology of viking activity in Brittany begins in earnest in 843 with an attack on Nantes, located near the entrance to the Loire (Pertz 1859, 486; Ermentarius 1905, 59–61; 34

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Nelson 1991, 55–56).3 The vikings overran Nantes’s defenses, sacked the city, murdered the bishop and his clergy, slaughtered many of its citizens, captured others for sale or ransom, all before continuing up the Loire to raid along its now-undefended shores (Ermentarius 1905, 59–61; Nelson 1991, 55). The Scandinavian raiders subsequently became well-established on the river, and this initial success was directly facilitated by the vicissitudes of Frankish regional politics. A viking fleet had previously tried to penetrate the Loire valley in 841, but forewarned by Charles, Count Rainald of Nantes had effectively repulsed the invaders (Price 1989, 341). Yet only two years later, Rainald was dead, Brittany was in revolt, and vikings were sailing up the Loire. The kings of the Franks had sought to annex Brittany from at least the mid-eighth century, finally establishing overlordship in 799. However, the Bretons did not easily accept subordination, and Frankish invasions in 818 and 824 imply ongoing Breton resistance (Smith 1992, 58–65). This may explain the lack of contemporary accounts for viking raids in Brittany. It would be surprising if the raiders who frequented Aquitaine, Frisia, and England in the 830s bypassed the Breton peninsula. However, the actions of Scandinavian pirates on Breton shores would have been of little interest to Frankish chroniclers, for unless directed at Breton monasteries, it is unlikely these would have been perceived as attacks on Francia per se. The alterity of the Bretons within Francia and their frequent status as enemies of the Franks ensured Frankish chroniclers’ interest in Brittany was largely confined to its place in the intrigues of Frankish politics. In the early 840s, Brittany was an active player in Frankish politics. The lord of Brittany, Nominoë, had been a loyal appointee of Louis the Pious from 831 until the latter’s death in 840. However, in 842/843, Nominoë brought Brittany into revolt against the overlordship of the new West Frankish king, Charles the Bald (Smith 1992, 79–87). So it was that in May 843, allied with a local Frankish rival to Rainald, Breton forces met those of the proCharles Count of Nantes in battle, defeating and slaying the erstwhile defender of the Loire (Pertz 1859, 486; Nelson 1991, 55–56).4 The vikings immediately capitalized on Nantes’s change in fortunes, and the sack of the city occurred only a month later. They would remain an active force on the Loire for nearly a century, using the river as an artery to raid into Brittany, Neustria, and Aquitaine. The Loire vikings who attacked Nantes in 843 established a winter base on an island off the Aquitanian coast, from which they conducted their activities for the following three years. It is the first time a viking force is recorded as overwintering in Frankish territory, denying the region the reprieve that usually came with winter. Annals of Angoulême identify these vikings as Vestfoldings (from Vestfold in modern Norway) (486), and it seems likely this was the same force, accessing southwestern Francia from the Norwegian settlements of eastern Ireland, who penetrated the Garonne in 844 and went on to defeat Count Siguin in 845. Nominoë’s decade-long battle for control over the Breton March stretched the resources of both Brittany and its neighboring Frankish territories, rendering them vulnerable to viking attack. In 844, Nominoë raided as far as Le Mans before being forced to return to Brittany due to viking activity (Nelson 1991, 59). In 847, he met the vikings in battle three times, losing in each instance and finally paying tribute so they would depart,5 one of three instances in which the Bretons resorted to tribute (Nelson 1991, 64).6 Nominoë died in 851, and the vikings continued their ascendency in the region, raiding up the Loire as far as Tours and the Abbey of Saint-Martin in 853. The monks, however, were forewarned of the attack, no doubt facilitated in part by the slow passage of ships against the current (Nelson 1991, 35

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77; Reuter 1992, 34–35). For the following decade, sources record almost annual attacks along the Loire and into Brittany, coinciding with (and participating in) Frankish factional conflicts. In 862, both Bretons and Franks allied with viking forces, the king of Brittany, Salomon, hiring 12 ships while his Frankish opponent Robert “the Strong” responded by hiring his own viking fleet (Nelson 1991, 98–99). In 866, the Bretons were once more in alliance with the vikings, as 400 of them joined a Breton force which attacked and sacked Le Mans. Though the Franks, under Robert’s leadership, intercepted the mounted vikings on their return journey, Robert was killed in the ensuing clash, and the vikings made their escape (Nelson 1991, 134–35; MacLean 2009, 153–54). From 867, Salomon and Charles began to normalize Franco-Breton relations and, working together, won a substantial victory in 873 over a viking force resident in Angers (Nelson 1991, 183–84; MacLean 2009, 168–69). For the next forty years, Salomon and his successors largely opposed the Scandinavian raiders, defending Brittany against their incursions. Despite the vikings’ participation in the Breton succession and secession disputes of the ninth century, the crux of their activity in Brittany occurred in the early tenth century. By 910, the vikings had established a military foothold in the region, with Brittanybased vikings raiding to the south and west of England in 910 and 914 (Swanton 2000, 95, 97–99). According to Flodoard of Reims, in 919, all effective Breton resistance collapsed, and in 921, the Franks ceded the region to the Scandinavians (3–5). Flodoard was a historically minded annalist who produced an uncommonly accurate chronicle that, at times, serves as the only record of events between 919 and 966 (Roberts 2019, 75–78). He describes a region in crisis for the following decade. The vikings were in effective control of Brittany and the Loire, using them as bases to launch further raids into Frankish territory. Viking authority over the region and of Nantes was affirmed in 927 as part of a peace deal with the Franks, while a brief Breton uprising in 931 saw Brittany again forcibly subjugated to viking rule (Price 1989, 361–63). Yet there is little evidence the vikings of Brittany sought to settle the region as their compatriots in Normandy did. They did not establish trading centers or engage in minting activity; hence, few settlements with Scandinavian place-names are known to exist. In effect, the viking presence in Brittany was in the nature of an occupation which drew to a close in 936. In that year, a group of exiled Breton nobles returned from England with a fleet, beginning a war that saw the vikings swept from the region within a year (Fanning and Bachrach 2011, 28–30).

The Seine The viking raids on the Seine, sieges of Paris, and settling of the territory that became known as Normandy are well attested.7 Raiding along the Seine began in 841, in which year the city of Rouen was sacked, the abbey at Jumièges burned, and the abbeys of SaintWandrille and Saint-Denis only spared by payment of tribute (Laporte 1951, 74–75; Nelson 1991, 50). The monasteries of the Seine were willing to pay to avoid the violence that had befallen the citizens of Rouen and monks of Jumiéges, and the vikings were willing to accept this proposal. In March 845, the vikings returned, and the Annals of Saint-Bertin report that 120 ships pillaged Rouen and progressed up the river as far as Paris (84–85). Once more indicating the slow nature of upriver passage, Charles the Bald was forewarned, gathering both an army and a significant ransom by the time the raiders completed the journey (Aimoin 1879, cols 1029–34; Reuter 1992, 23). Broadly speaking, Charles’s defense seems to have been ineffective, and the king resorted to paying 7,000 pounds of silver in 36

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tribute. The vikings seem to have deemed this payment for Paris’s safety only, and the monastery of Saint-Germain-des-Prés still suffered their depredations, as did the communities of the Neustrian coast. Vikings remained active in the region for the next 20 years, with some of the numerous reported raids of particular note. An attack in 853 saw Charles again resort to tribute payment, while one in 858 saw the abbot of Saint-Denis, Charles’s cousin, captured and ransomed for an enormous sum. This latter ties in with a campaign directed at the abbeys of Saint-Denis and Saint-Germain that year in which, if Aimoin’s account is to be trusted, the vikings mounted a partially successful surprise cavalry attack on the monasteries (cols 1044–1045; Gillmor 2001). The use of cavalry by the vikings was not frequent and did not greatly extend their range; the logistics of horse travel necessitated a reliable grain supply. As such, viking cavalry was primarily used for swift short-range forays from riverside military encampments. This was a particular feature of the Seine raids, given the slow and obvious progress of ship travel up the winding river (Gillmor 1988, 103–5). However, the acquisition of horses, with the attendant logistics of keeping and feeding them, may also suggest that the Seine vikings, even at this early stage, had designs on settling the region. Certainly, in the following years, much activity stemmed from viking bands that had established military encampments along the Seine. It was one of these groups that sacked Paris in 861, subsequently disrupting trade along the river. In response, and setting an interesting precedent for Frankish relations with the vikings, Charles engaged a viking fleet from the Somme to attack and evict their colleagues on the Seine. The sum he paid was large – 5,000 pounds of silver alongside livestock and grain – but the offensive was successful, and the besieged vikings paid a further 6,000 pounds to be allowed to flee (Nelson 1991, 92–96). Following these events, Charles began a program of fortification, construction, and bridge repair on the Seine and its tributaries, designed to limit viking access to the Frankish interior and improve troop movement, though the extent of this activity has been debated (Coupland 1991a). Nonetheless, from 866, records of viking raids on Seine cease for 20 years, likely reflecting the success of Charles’s defensive measures as well as the relative political stability of his final years. However, after his death in 877, the vikings renewed their activities along the northern Frankish coasts and river systems. It was not until 884, though, with the crown in the hands of the emperor Charles the Fat, that vikings once more sailed up the Seine. In what is undoubtedly the best-known event of Franco-viking history, an immense viking force proceeded up the river in 885 and besieged Paris for a full year (Dass 2007; MacLean 2009, 194–96).8 The florid description of the siege given by Abbo of Saint-Germain is an eyewitness account, though one much given to hyperbole: the 700 ships Abbo estimates as comprising the attacking force would have “converted [the river] into a lumber yard” (Gillmor 1988, 86). According to Abbo, initial attempts to treat with the Parisians and, subsequently, to overrun city defenses failed, and so the vikings settled in for a siege. Paris refused to pay tribute, and its count, Odo, coordinated an effective defense before seeking Charles out to beg aid. Yet when Charles arrived, it was not to drive the vikings from the walls by force of arms (though he did inflict a defeat on them) but, rather, with permission to raid past Paris into Burgundy, and later with a payment of 700 pounds to depart the Seine. While Abbo’s tone is largely neutral when relating Charles’s actions (82–3), other chroniclers are outright damning (MacLean 2009, 195–96). The reception of Charles’s decisions at Paris – both in medieval and modern scholarship – is in large part informed by Odo’s elevation to the West Frankish crown upon Charles’s deposition in late 887. 37

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Yet there is little contemporary evidence to suggest that Charles’s concessions to the Seine vikings played a major role in either his dethroning or Odo’s crowning. In his reading of Abbo, Simon MacLean (2003, 56–59) notes that much is made of Charles’s legitimacy, his responsiveness to requests for aid, the might of his army, and the extent of his authority. MacLean is somewhat at odds with traditional readings of the text, which emphasize Odo’s heroism in contrast to Charles’s ineptitude (Nelson 1997, 30–31). Yet his argument, that the distinctly pro-Odo tone of Abbo’s work encompasses an emphasis on Charles’s legitimacy in order to legitimate Odo as his direct successor, is compelling. Moreover, many of Odo’s offices prior to claiming the throne were granted by Charles, and neither Abbo nor Odo had much to gain by questioning the emperor’s decision-making. In truth, Charles and Odo’s shifting fortunes in 887 were informed by the Frankish political landscape rather than by a siege later imbued with anachronistic importance. Nonetheless, Odo lived up to his reputation in the early years of his reign, proving effective in defending against viking incursion. However, West Francia descended once more into factionalism through the mid890s, and the vikings profited from Odo’s preoccupation with the civil war (de Simson 1909, 77–78). In a late addition to his text, Odo’s erstwhile champion, Abbo, decried the king’s lack of action in the face of renewed viking aggression (82–3). It is not until the reign of Odo’s successor, Charles the Simple, a third grandson of Charles the Bald, that a permanent solution to the viking scourge on the Seine was realized. In 911, a force of Seine vikings, led by a man named Rollo, was brought to battle by the Franks at Chartres and driven from its walls (Dudo 1998, 42–43; Flodoard 1998, 407). Shortly thereafter, the viking leader and the Frankish king negotiated a treaty to their mutual benefit. As his grandfather had done, Charles was to use vikings to ward off vikings. In return for his baptism, allegiance, and defense of the Seine valley west of Paris (Upper Normandy), Charles recognized Rollo’s lordship over the territory and permitted his followers to settle there (Dudo 1998, 48–49). Charles’s and Rollo’s agreement of 911 stands as the formal foundation of Normandy; however, there is no record of it prior to Dudo of Saint-Quentin’s pro-Norman history a century later. Dudo’s narrative of early Norman history must be treated with great caution – his accounts of the Chartres battle and of the treaty are not wholly reconcilable with contemporary sources. Written in the early eleventh century, Dudo’s history was commissioned by the then Duke of Normandy and is thus composed with a specific ideological schema in mind. Dudo’s intent was to write a dynastic history, modelled on Carolingian histories, that legitimized the rule of his patrons (Pohl 2012). The account of Rollo’s baptism and settlement is, therefore, a construct that serves to recast the peripatetic pagan viking leader as a settled Christian ruler. Thus, though Rollo certainly appears to have received a lordship from Charles in 911, details surrounding the event are obscured. As Mark Hagger (2013, 421–31) has noted, the agreement between Charles and Rollo was, in many ways, a formalization of the status quo. Viking settlement in the region had been ongoing for decades; Rollo had been active along the Neustrian coast and Seine estuary from at least 876. However, the longer-term effects of bringing the Seine vikings into the West Frankish kingdom have been much debated. Some historians, foremost among them David Bates (1989, 853–61), emphasize the continuity of Frankish political structures in Normandy. In this view, the Seine vikings rapidly assimilated into the fabric of Frankish society following the agreement of 911, the subsequent expansion of Norman hegemony resulting from their participation in the wider currents of social reorganization in northern France. Others, such as Eleanor Searle (1988, 232–38), argue that the Normans retained a 38

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distinctively “Scandinavian predatory” character, and that this explains the Norman desire to extend territorial authority in subsequent decades. Certainly, the treaty reached in 911 did not demarcate the full extent of the territories that were to become Normandy, nor did it stop sporadic raiding from other vikings or occasional frictions between the Normans, the Franks, and their neighbors (Hagger 2013). Indeed, Dudo implies things started on shaky footing. When asked to kiss Charles’s foot to symbolize his acceptance of the treaty (and subordination to the king), Rollo refused, and instead, one of his followers acted in Rollo’s place. However, rather than bending a knee to the king, the viking raised the king’s foot to his mouth, laying Charles out on the floor (49). No doubt Dudo, bearing in mind his patron claimed descent from Rollo, intended this to demonstrate the independence and agency of the Normans from their origins, yet it is also symbolic of the oft-fractious nature of Franco–Norman relations. Nonetheless, and despite any hubris, the agreement reached between Rollo and Charles in 911 is a pivotal event in Frankish history, one which permanently shifted the political landscape of West Francia. The Seine vikings had become the Normans, a people who helped shaped Francia’s future, and this is perhaps the most enduring legacy of over a century of viking raids.

Notes 1 I am grateful to Rutger Kramer and to Fraser McNair for their feedback on this chapter’s early drafts. 2 Citations are to the most accessible editions of primary sources, in English translation where available, otherwise to nineteenth/twentieth-century Latin transcriptions. 3 Though earlier attacks are recorded in Chronicles of Nantes, this is a text with a pro-clerical and pro-Nantes agenda and survives only in a fifteenth-century French translation (Price 1989, 333–34, 341). 4 The implication that this rival, Lambert, was allied with the vikings who sacked Nantes is almost certainly fabrication and found only in Chronicles of Nantes (Nelson 1991, 55 n.1, cf. Smith 1992, 94). 5 The vikings are here described as “Danes,” a demonym used in Annals of Saint-Bertin interchangeably with “Northmen” to identify Scandinavian raiders no matter their origin. The suggestion that “Danes” is mainly intended to refer to the Seine vikings is not supported by the text, where, for example, in 845 the Seine vikings are exclusively referred to as “Northmen,” and the Loire vikings as “Danes” (Coupland 1989, 342–43; Nelson 1991, 60–2). 6 The other two tributes were a ransom of church plate for the release of the Count of Vanne in 854 (Nelson 1997, 37) and a tribute of livestock paid in 874; Breton factions had also hired viking mercenaries that year (MacLean 2009, 170–73). 7 A selection of translated readings on viking activity in northern Francia can be found in Somerville and McDonald (2014, 202–224). 8 A selection of translated readings on the 885/886 siege of Paris can be found in Dutton (2009, 507–516).

References Aimoin of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. 1879. De miraculis Sancti Germani. In Patrologiæ Cursus Completus, Series Latina 126, edited by J.-P. Migne, cols 1027–50. Paris: Garnier Fratres. Alcuin of Tours. 1895. Alcvini sive Albini epistolae, no. 184. In Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Epistolae, volume 4: Karolini Aevi II, edited by Ernest Dümmler, 308–10. Berlin: Weidmann. Bates, David. 1989. “Normandy and England after 1066.”  The English Historical Review  104: 851–80. Coupland, Simon. 1991a. “The Fortified Bridges of Charles the Bald.”  Journal of Medieval History 17: 1–12.

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Matthew Firth ———. 1991b. “The Rod of God’s Wrath or the People of God’s Wrath? The Carolingian Theology of the Viking Invasions.” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 42: 535–54. ———. 2003. “The Vikings on the Continent in Myth and History.” History, 88: 186–203. Dass, Nirmal, ed. and trans. 2007. Viking Attacks on Paris: The Bella Parisiacae Urbis of Abbo of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Dudley, MA: Peeters. de Simson, B., ed. 1909. Annales Vedastini. In Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores Rerum Germanicum, Vol. 12, 40–82. Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung. Dudo of Saint-Quentin. 1998. History of the Normans. Edited and translated by Eric Christiansen. Woodbridge: Boydell. Dutton, Paul Edward, ed. 2009. Carolingian Civilization: A Reader. 2nd ed. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Ermentarius of Noirmoutier. 1905. De Translationibus et Miraculis Sancti Filiberti. In Monuments de l’Histoire des Abbayes de Saint-Philibert (Noirmoutier, Grandlieu, Tournus), edited by René Poupardin, 19–70. Paris: Alphonse Picard et Fils. Fanning, Steven, and Bernard S. Bachrach. 2011. The Annals of Flodoard of Reims, 919–966. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Flodoard of Reims. 1998. Historia Remensis ecclesiae. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores, Vol. 36, edited by Martina Stratmann. Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung. Gillmor, Carroll M. 1988. “War on the Rivers: Viking Numbers and Mobility on the Seine and Loire, 841–886.” Viator 19: 79–110. ———. 2001. “Aimoin’s Miracula Sancti Germani and the Viking Raids on St. Denis and St. Germain-Des-Prés.” In The Normans and Their Adversaries at War, edited by Richard P. Abels and Bernard S. Bachrach, 103–27. Woodbridge: Boydell. Hagger, Mark. 2013. “Confrontation and Unification: Approaches to the Political History of Normandy, 911–1035.” History Compass 11: 429–42. Jesch, Judith. 2015. The Viking Diaspora. New York: Routledge. Jones, Anna Trumbore. 2006. “Pitying the Desolation of Such a Place: Rebuilding Religious Houses and Constructing Memory in Aquitaine in the Wake of the Viking incursions.” Viator 37: 85–102. Laporte, Jean, ed. 1951. “Les Premières Annales de Fontenelle (Chronicon Fontanellense).” Mélanges de la Société de l’histoire de Normandie, 15e series: 63–91. MacLean, Simon. 2003. Kingship and Politics in the Late Ninth Century: Charles the Fat and the End of the Carolingian Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———, ed. and trans. 2009. History and Politics in Late Carolingian and Ottonian Europe: The Chronicle of Regino of Prüm and Adalbert of Magdeburg. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Nelson, Janet L., ed. and trans. 1991. The Annals of Saint-Bertin, Ninth-Century Histories, Vol. 1. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ———. 1997. “The Frankish Empire.” In The Oxford Illustrated History of the Vikings, edited by Peter Sawyer, 19–47. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pertz, George Henry, ed. 1859. Annales Engolismenses. In Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores, Vol. 16, 485–87. Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung. Pohl, Benjamin. 2012. “Translatio Imperii Constantini Ad Normannos: Constantine the Great as a Possible Model for the Depiction of Rollo in Dudo of St. Quentin’s Historia Normannorum.” Millennium 9: 299–341. Price, Neil. 1989. “The Vikings in Brittany.” Saga Book 22: 319–440. Regenos, Graydon W., ed. and trans. 1966. The Letters of Lupus of Ferriéres. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Reuter, Timothy, ed. and trans. 1992. The Annals of Fulda, Ninth-Century Histories, Vol. 2. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Roberts, Edward. 2019. Flodoard of Rheims and the Writing of History in the Tenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sawyer, Peter. 2003. “The Viking Expansion.” In The Cambridge History of Scandinavia, Volume I: Prehistory to 1520, edited by Knut Helle, 105–20. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Searle, Eleanor. 1988. Predatory Kinship and the Creation of Norman Power: 840–1066. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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The Vikings and Francia, 799–936 Smith, Julia M. H. 1992.  Province and Empire: Brittany and the Carolingians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Somerville, Angus R., and R. Andrew McDonald, eds and trans. 2014. The Viking Age: A Reader. 2nd ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Swanton, Michael, ed. and trans. 2000. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles. 2nd ed. London: Phoenix.

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4 REGIONAL MAGNATES AND THE LAST CAROLINGIANS Fraser McNair

Introduction Around the year 1000, so goes the story of the Aquitanian chronicler Adhemar of Chabannes, Count Aldebert of Périgord was besieging Tours. King Hugh Capet, who had come to stop him, did not dare give battle but instead sent a message asking him, “Who made you count?” Rather than bringing him to heel, Aldebert sent Hugh a response, saying simply, “Who made you king?” (Zimmermann 2000, 430). For generations of historians, this message has been emblematic of royal weakness and the decline of central power in the face of entrenched regional magnates. Exactly how far the tale told by Adhemar – himself far from a detached observer – reflects the realities of earlier medieval France is up for question. Nonetheless, the evolution of principalities in the tenth and eleventh centuries was a genuine phenomenon, perhaps one of the defining phenomena of the time. First, though, what is a principality? At the most basic level, a principality is a polity which is regional, which is non-royal, and which displays some degree of both coherence and importance (Dunbabin 2000, 44–49). This definition is imprecise, and this is no small problem with the concept of principalities. For instance, bishoprics were non-royal, regional, coherent, and important polities – do they count (Reuter 2011)? Habitually, they do not, but without some more specific conception of a principality, this judgment seems somewhat arbitrary. The terms “prince” and “principality,” moreover, are largely technical terms used by historians rather than reflections of contemporary labels. In Latin, princeps and principatus are themselves fairly generic. Originally, princeps simply meant “the first.” Its use as a title goes back to the early days of the Roman Empire. In the Carolingian world, princeps mostly referred to the king (Pacaut 1973). From the late ninth century, it began to be used for the greatest magnates – and as we shall see, some historians have made much of that – but overall, it remained rare. Its use did increase in the late tenth and eleventh centuries, but this increase did not discriminate much between nobles of different status or power, such that by c. 1050, it could be used for men as mighty as the Duke of Normandy and as local as castellan lords. Without grounding in the language of the sources, then, to talk about principalities (and to decide what does and does not count as a principality) is to lay bare a historian’s fundamental assumptions about earlier medieval politics.

DOI: 10.4324/9780367808471-5

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Traditionally, the emergence of principalities and the concentration of power at a regional level were seen as heralding the breakdown of royal authority, an authority only to be regained in the twelfth century. Increasingly, though, more emphasis was put on the principalities as creative attempts to reconfigure institutional authority at a regional level. More recently still, although principalities continue to be the main actors of narrative political history during this period, they have come to seem less distinctive than in previous decades. The terms “prince” and “principality” rest on the inertia of tradition, rather than on an understanding of principalities as a special type of polity. All these pictures are very different from one another, and therefore, it befits us to look at them in a little more detail as we examine what earlier historians have written on the subject of principalities.

The Historiography of Principalities Jan Dhondt’s 1948 Etudes sur la naissance des principautés territoriales is something of a year zero for the study of principalities. He was far from the first scholar to look at the subject (indeed, he shares a number of key arguments with his predecessor, Jacques Flach), but his work was the most coherent and systematic attempt to explain their emergence, and has been influential ever since (Oudart 2013, 30–31). His work was influenced both by his historiographical assumptions and the historical circumstances in which he was writing. On the historiographical side, Dhondt believed that the nobility was inherently grasping, that what they were greedy for were material resources and particularly land, and that unless constrained by a powerful king, they would take the opportunity to enrich themselves even at the expense of their nominal superiors (Dunbabin 1989, 56). In addition, and worthy of note, given that Dhondt was writing during the Nazi occupation of his native Belgium (where he was involved in the resistance), he also argued that the national sentiment of conquered peoples yearned to break free of their oppressors’ jackboots. This led him to propose a model along the following lines: under the early Carolingians, the Franks had conquered a number of non-Frankish peoples, such as the Aquitanians, and the kings had enriched themselves with huge tracts of land. However, after the death of Emperor Louis the Pious in 840, the ongoing internecine conflicts between the Carolingian family meant that each one of the squabbling kings had to bribe aristocrats to support them with grants of land. Even when intended to be simply benefices held for life, these grants became hereditary, and the kings were unable to recuperate them. As the kings became weaker and weaker, the leading magnates assumed the headship of regional, especially ethnic, communities, in an attempt to remove royal power from the regions entirely. Thus, the stage was set for the creation of territorial principalities. In place of the Carolingian state’s efforts at administrative and institutional government, most of France was now covered in regions where the king could not intervene directly and all power had passed into the hands of the counts (Dhondt 2018). Dhondt’s focus on ethnicity and (illegitimate) aristocratic ambition did not go unchallenged. The important German medievalist Karl-Ferdinand Werner proposed instead a definition of principalities which saw them as essentially the lineal descendants of Carolingian institutions. Werner noted that it was not rebels against Carolingian power who founded principalities but instead men whose authority had been vested in them by royal will. The duchies of France, Werner believed, were precisely coterminous with Carolingian subkingdoms, or regna. The state powers which their rulers wielded – their rights of justice, the exactions they could take from their subjects – were those of the king, albeit wielded on a 43

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smaller scale. Each principality was a kingdom in a bottle (Werner 1979). Werner’s arguments were condensed into an influential article by Olivier Guillot (who, in his own work on the county of Anjou, had come to similar conclusions): for these scholars, a principality was a fundamentally juridical entity, whose ruler exercised the principalis potestas (“sovereign authority,” as Werner conceived of it) (Guillot 1972, 1991). More recently, both views have been undermined. The British historian Charles West (2012) began to question the distinctions made between princely and non-princely power in an article on Count Hugh of Troyes, but a more wide-ranging critique of the idea of specifically princely power was made in 2017 by Florian Mazel. Mazel denied principalities both an ethnic basis and any long-standing administrative one. He emphasized the novelty of principalities, even when they claimed some link with older legacies. He also played down the distinctiveness of princely power: “princely power, like all aristocratic power, depended on personal ties (kinship, loyalty, vassalage) and on the control of certain strongholds (cities, castles, abbeys).” Perhaps, by the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a process of territorialization may have begun to provide principalities with a growing sense of princely “sovereignty,” territorial cohesion, and normative identity; but this was a much later and slower process than previously realized. Mazel therefore suggests referring to “regional” rather than “territorial” principalities, but to the post-Carolingian historian, his arguments push toward a different conclusion. If distinctively princely power is the product of so late an epoch, why keep the term “principality” at all for the tenth and eleventh centuries (Mazel 2017)? This question deserves serious consideration and provides the right note of uncertainty for us to turn to the history of regional power constellations in late- and postCarolingian France.

Principalities in the Long Tenth Century: A Chronological Overview Historians identify several different “waves” of formation of principalities. The beginnings can be seen in the reign of Charles the Bald, before a number of large regional units coalesced in the years around 900. By the mid-tenth century, these larger units were themselves beginning to break down and form smaller principalities. However, if we scratch the surface of any of these events, we will find significant regional and chronological variations. Over the course of Charles the Bald’s reign (840–877), power in the localities tended to accumulate more and more in the hands of a relatively small number of the king’s cronies (Koziol 2012, 122–23). This was not simply a process of enrichment. By concentrating power, Charles could ensure that large chunks of the kingdom were under the control of men whom he could trust (Nelson 1992, 233–34). Thus, over the third quarter of the ninth century, there emerged a handful of magnates in whom Dhondt and Werner saw the ancestors of the territorial princes. In the western Loire valley, a large bloc of honores (lands and offices) centered on the lay abbacy of Saint-Martin of Tours was granted first to Robert the Strong (ancestor of the Capetian dynasty), and then, after his death, to Hugh the Abbot. This bloc, known to historians as the Neustrian March, was the kingdom’s bulwark against Viking and Breton raids, and its holder was ipso facto one of the realm’s most powerful men (Noizet 2004). To the south, several decades of jockeying for position among a genuinely implausible number of aristocrats all named Bernard led to the accumulation of Aquitanian honores in the hands of one Bernard Plantevelue (“Hairy-Paws”), whose honores stretched from Lyon to Quercy (Lauranson-Rosaz 2006, 63–65). In Burgundy, Charles and his successors favored some of his court clerics with powerful bishoprics and extensive landed 44

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resources, notably Adalgar, who became bishop of Autun in 875, and Geilo, who became bishop of Langres in 880 (Koziol 2012, 187–88, 203–10). These blocs, however, were not necessarily regional. It was rare for one man to dominate an entire region (Nelson 1992, 233). In Aquitaine, for instance, the key abbey of SaintJulien de Brioude was in the hands, first, of Archbishop Frothar of Bourges (another of Charles’s favorites) and then of Adalgar of Autun. Similarly, in Neustria, the region around Paris was split between a number of magnates, including the cleric Gozlin (the city’s bishop after 883) and Count Conrad. In Burgundy, too, no one interest predominated. Although different parts of the kingdom saw different patterns of politics – the Neustrian March, for instance, could reasonably be seen as a genuinely consolidated regional power bloc, whereas the Burgundian situation was much more fragmented – there was no straight line of development between the situation under Charles the Bald and the situation under his successors. A key moment was the reign of King Odo (888–898) (McKitterick 1983, 267–72). Odo, who had originally been appointed by Emperor Charles the Fat as ruler of the Neustrian March before his accession to the throne, had a fraught reign, facing revolt after revolt. To manage the west of the kingdom, he appointed his brother, Robert of Neustria, to be his successor in the Neustrian March (whence Robert’s byname). In the south, Bernard Plantevelue’s son William the Pious appears to have inherited his position in Auvergne and Lyon; but he took advantage of the civil wars of Odo’s reign to expand his power north, attacking and killing Odo’s ally Count Hugh of Berry and taking the region for himself. He also benefited from the murder of Adalgar of Autun to take over the abbacy of SaintJulien. Adalgar had been murdered by Richard the Justiciar, who used the excuse of the civil war to hack his way to regional dominance in Burgundy, having Adalgar poisoned, blinding Bishop Theobald of Langres, and imprisoning Archbishop Walter of Sens. These three principalities – Neustria, Aquitaine, and Burgundy – are sometimes termed the “first wave.” The rulers of all three continued to be important into the reign of Charles the Simple (898–923), but their power was not a fait accompli. William the Pious’s position remained unstable. He appears to have suffered reverses in Berry in the mid-910s and perhaps even lost control of Brioude for a time (Brunterc’h 1997, 102–3). When he died in 918, it was in the midst of a war for control of Bourges fought against Robert of Neustria. Robert, by contrast, continued to be favored by the new regime. He was granted important abbeys in Paris and Flanders and was given extravagant titles in royal diplomas, such as “the most faithful executor of Our Serenity.” However, Charles’s patronage of a favorite from the lower echelons of the nobility named Hagano provoked Robert into rebellion. He was crowned as an anti-king in 922 and was slain in 923 at the Battle of Soissons (Koziol 2006). By that point, Richard the Justiciar was also dead. Richard is curiously difficult to find traces of in our existing sources. However, like William, he and his son and successor Ralph of Burgundy appear to have endured opposition in their core territories, notably from the family of Richard’s former right-hand man, Manasses the Old, count in the regions around Chalon and Dijon. Nonetheless, Ralph remained a very important man, and after Robert of Neustria’s death, he was crowned West Frankish king, remaining on the throne until his own death in 936 (McKitterick 1983, 313). The different trajectories of Neustrian, Burgundian, and Aquitanian history in these decades, therefore, reveal that despite some superficial similarities between the three regions, such as the title of duke (dux) which was assumed by William and Richard (although never by Robert), these regions actually show significant variety. We will return to this in the next section, but it 45

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is worth bearing in mind the question of how far we are actually comparing like with like here. In any case, the hegemonies built up by Robert, Richard, and William proved more or less unstable. William’s Aquitaine was the first to go. William the Pious was succeeded by his two nephews, first, William the Younger, and then Acfred. As Acfred lay dying in 927, King Ralph of Burgundy had joined up with two powerful magnates, Ebbo, the lord of Déols, and Abbot Odo of Cluny, to dismember his duchy (Brunterc’h 2001). A coherent power constellation continued to be centered on the Auvergne, but some of the more far-flung elements of William’s miniature empire, such as Berry and the Mâconnais, were lost forever. Moreover, although claims to be duke of Aquitaine were made in the later tenth century, the magnates making these claims were based, first, in Toulouse and then (more successfully) in Poitiers (Dunbabin 2000, 61–62). Ricardian Burgundy itself, though, only lasted about a decade longer. When Ralph died, Burgundy was disputed between his brother Hugh the Black and his successor as king, Charles the Simple’s son Louis IV (r. 936–954, known as “d’Outremer,” or “the Foreigner,” owing to his English upbringing). The end result was to confirm Hugh the Black as ruler of southern Burgundy, whilst Robert of Neustria’s son Hugh the Great claimed the north. When Hugh the Black’s successor, Gilbert of Burgundy (son of Manasses the Old), died without children, Burgundy was again disputed between a number of claimants, including the king and Gilbert’s sons-in-law, one of whom was Hugh the Great’s son Otto (Bouchard 2000). Otto won out and claimed the title of “Duke of Burgundy,” but at that point power in the region was thoroughly divided between a number of different actors. Finally, in the 960s, the Neustrian March dissolved. Out of this dissolution came most of what Werner called the “second wave” of principalities (Werner 1979, 250). Hugh the Great, who had put Louis IV on the throne, was easily the most powerful noble of his time. His tentacles extended over Neustria itself, the royal heartlands in the northeast of the kingdom, northern Burgundy, and even northern Aquitaine. When he died in 956, though, his sons Hugh Capet, Otto of Burgundy, and Odo-Henry of Burgundy were unable to step smoothly into his shoes. The elder Hugh’s old subordinates began to claim greater authority. The most immediately powerful of these men was Theobald the Trickster, formerly Hugh’s main lieutenant, who now allied with Louis IV’s son King Lothar (r. 954–986) and who, in a 958 charter, declared that he and his ally Count Fulk the Good of Anjou “by [God’s] largess were governors and administrators of the regnum [of Neustria]” (Sassier 1997). In Anjou itself, Fulk’s son Count Geoffrey Grisegonelle (“Grey-Cloak”) expanded his power into eastern and western Aquitaine and developed a close alliance with King Lothar, laying the basis for a coherent and powerful principality (Bachrach 1995). Perhaps most significant in the long term, though, were developments in Rouen. Richard the Fearless, count of Rouen, whose grandfather had been Scandinavian, began to exploit this putative ethnic link with incoming Viking factions along France’s Channel coast. He fought and defeated Theobald the Trickster for control of the Évrecin and expanded his influence toward Bayeux. By his death in 996, his principality, under the aegis of a ruling group describing themselves as “Normans,” was one of the most important of France: no future French king could ignore Normandy (McNair 2015). The development of regional polities did not end in the 960s, of course. Other regional units emerged over the eleventh century, especially in eastern France and Lotharingia; Mazel has gone so far as to refer to this as a third wave (Mazel 2017, 69). The formation of Champagne, for instance, could properly be said to be a late eleventh- or even a 46

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twelfth-century phenomenon (West 2012, 545). Similarly, regional polities formed outside of the boundaries of the three areas we have considered thus far: we have not, for instance, touched on Flanders or Brittany. Nonetheless, by the decades surrounding the millennium, the shape of the West Frankish kingdom as a multipolar political environment had been set.

What Were Principalities Like? Institutional and Cultural Sketches Simply listing names and places, though it does situate us in space and time and introduce our dramatis personae, does not really help us get to the core of what significance to give these developments. What characteristics did principalities have? It is important to distinguish this question from “What characteristics did tenth- and eleventh-century aristocratic rule have?” for not all aristocrats could have been princes and not all aristocratic power constellations could have been principalities – if we cannot distinguish between princes and not-princes, the term is analytically useless for studying medieval politics. As we have seen, Werner attempted to draw such a distinction on legal-historical and administrative bases, but Werner’s distinctions, although they have been influential, are problematic. Probably the most problematic are his views on territoriality. Werner’s belief that “the duchies which grew up in the course of the ninth and tenth centuries all over the Frankish empire coincide[d] exactly with the Carolingian sub-kingdoms” in terms of the space they covered now appears straightforwardly incorrect (Werner 1979, 247). In the first instance, the boundaries of Carolingian regions were themselves fluctuating: in 837, for example, Burgundy included the Verdunois (in what would become southern Lotharingia), and in 844, Poitou and its environs were explicitly detached from Aquitaine (Nelson 1991, 38, 61). In the second instance, analogies between regional polities and earlier borders were limited. William the Pious’s Aquitaine, for example, included Mâcon and Lyon; Robert of Neustria’s March included Saint-Amand in southern Flanders, but not Maine, the core of Carolingian Neustria. In general, principalities tended to have more or less consistently held central areas (e.g., Rouen in Normandy, Poitiers in Aquitaine after the 960s, Angers in Anjou . . .) and a fluctuating rim of peripheral areas. Principalities were (with a partial exception in Normandy) not imagined territorially, nor were their territories consistent (Mazel 2017, 71). For this reason, Mazel has quite reasonably proposed doing away with the “territorial principality” moniker entirely. While Werner’s views on the spatial extent of principalities find little purchase in the sources, though, his views on the principalis potestas are worth considering in more depth. He argued that the princes in France claimed the royal dues, which in Carolingian times had been owed to the king, such as fodrum (renders of fodder) (Werner 1979, 254–55). We can certainly see princes claiming such taxes on occasion. However, extrapolating from princes’ sporadic uses of terms associated with Carolingian royal rights to say that a prince’s position was that of a juridical and administrative vice-regent is going too far, for three reasons. First, it is not clear how far the continuity between Carolingian and post-Carolingian exactions actually went. A 978 charter of Count Odo I of Blois-Chartres-Tours refers to the monks of Saint-Florent of Saumur being oppressed by new and unjust customs, but when it names those exactions, they are designated by classically Carolingian terminology, such as ripaticum (mooring fees), cespaticum (a tax on damage caused by passing traffic), and pulveraticum (disputed, but a kind of toll). Now, the monks of Saint-Florent were no strangers to hyperbole when it came to asserting their claims to avoid tax; but the relevant point here is not that these specific renders either were or were not actually new. It is that 47

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new exactions could be hidden under old names just as easily as genuinely old exactions could be denounced as novel by angry monks (Billado 2001). Second, it is not clear how precisely these were, in fact, characterized as specifically regalian rights. The terminology of government in the post-Carolingian world was not necessarily precise – notably, the only contemporary use of the term principalis potestas to refer to aristocratic power comes from a charter of William the Pious saying that “he did not exercise any power, although he was a prince.” The clear meaning is not that he held viceregal sovereignty but that he did not use force to pursue his own interests despite the fact that the people he ruled could not have stopped him. Third, and most simply, it seems likely that such exactions were made by aristocrats at every point on the social scale: one of the first magnates we know to have claimed one of these taxes, rotaticum, was Ebbo of Déols, who was only a sub-regional lord (Hubert 1987, 39). That is, examining so-called “regalian rights” is not at all helpful in looking at how princes may have differed from other aristocrats. The same is true about other aspects of putatively princely authority. Werner emphasized the control of princes over the Church, but in practice, such control was restricted to the eleventh-century dukes of Normandy and (to a rather lesser extent) Aquitaine only (Werner 1979, 252–53; Bates 1982, 189–235; Trumbore-Jones 2009, 61–103). Elsewhere, magnates could play a part in helping bishops get elected (for instance), but this was opportunistic rather than systematic. Even titulature does not help distinguish princes from notprinces in any institutional way. There has been much research carried out on titles, mostly hoping to find system in a bewildering assortment of designators for the great magnates. In the first instance, the title princeps itself was rare until the latter part of the tenth century. In the decades around 900, although it may be true to note that the title was mostly used of rulers of regna, it is more true to note that it was hardly used at all. When it became more common around 1000, moreover, it also appeared further down the social scale: if, in the mid-eleventh century, William the Conqueror could call himself princeps of the Normans, so too could the lord of Châteauroux refer to himself as the princeps of the castle of Déols (Dunbabin 2000, 44). Princeps, then, seems not to have possessed special constitutional significance. The same is probably true of other titles. Duke (dux), for instance, originally a Latin word meaning “leader,” can be found in 911 meaning something very much like “commander” but was also assumed by the great magnates as a way of expressing their particularly exalted status (Goetz 1977). However, the evolution of this title varied heavily by region: in Normandy, for example, the “dukes” were referred to by a bewildering panoply of titles, none of which seem to have been particularly favored (Helmerichs 1997). By contrast, in Poitiers around 1000, the rulers were consistently referred to as the “Dukes of the Aquitanians” and the “Counts of the Poitevins,” a usage which seems to suggest a more fixed conception of authority there (Prell 2012, 62–65). Equally, if the meaning of dux varied from place to place, so did whether or not it was adopted. The Counts of Anjou, for instance, remained just that, counts, without ever claiming the ducal title despite their importance; ditto the Counts and Margraves of Flanders. Princely titulature, for the most part, seems to have been a loose conglomeration of words meaning “important man” rather than precise technical signifiers. More interesting are the words appended to the titles themselves, such as “prince of the Normans,” or “Duke of the Aquitanians.” Such claims to rule peoples, as we saw in our historiographical overview, provoked much interest from mid-twentieth century historians. Since then, though, our understanding of ethnicity in the early Middle Ages has increased 48

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noticeably. In particular, the constructed and situational nature of ethnicity is much better understood. As Katherine Cross, quoting Rogers Brubaker, put it, ethnicity “is a key part of what we want to explain, not what we want to explain things with” (Cross 2018, 20). Group identity has no necessary relevance to political organization, and thus a key question is how some post-Carolingian regional polities ended up yoked to a group identity. However, the role of ethnic discourses in principalities has generally gone under-researched in recent years. Ildar Garipzanov has highlighted the ninth-century paradox whereby sub-kings (in the specific instance, those of Aquitaine) needed to appear as rulers over peoples even though these peoples themselves do not seem to have had any political salience (Garipzanov 2008, 146). The same is true for the Dukes of the Aquitanians, but we have no modern studies of why ethnic discourse was adopted by major magnates, or what role it played in their politics. An exception is Normandy, and it is a revealing case. The area around Rouen certainly had Scandinavians in it, but this had little necessary connection to Norman ethnicity as a political ideology, the content of which was made up of a grab bag of traditional tropes of Frankish ethnography put together by a ruling clique with little interest in authentically Scandinavian experience. Claiming to be a “Norman,” in other words, reflected participation in a specific political community rather than stemming from biological descent and stemmed from the particular circumstances surrounding the disturbances in Rouen between the 940s and 960s, where a number of Scandinavian and Frankish factions came together under the aegis of the Rollonid counts (McNair 2015). Dhondt’s argument, therefore, might reasonably be reversed: it was not ethnic groups yearning for autonomy which created principalities; it was nobles seeking status who adapted, galvanized, and even created ethnic groups. A narrow focus on ethnicity, though, can be misleading. Nobles were concerned with all sorts of groups. Some types of group were relevant at any level of society: family, friends, and followers. Some, however, were more rarefied. A particular phenomenon of the postCarolingian world is the legitimation of regional political hegemonies in relation to abstract ideas. That is to say, whereas in the reign of Charles the Bald regional hegemonies were conceived of strictly in terms of personal bonds, by the time of Hugh Capet, several such hegemonies had begun to be legitimated in more transpersonal ways. “Norman” is a case in point, although these groups did not have to be ethnic. The bishops of Langres are a useful example here. Traditionally, the study of principalities has emphasized lay power, but churchmen, too, could be princes, and the bishops of Langres ruled one of the most important polities in southern Burgundy (Dunbabin 2000, 93–94). Their followers were identified by phrases such as “the sons of the church of Langres.” Throughout the tenth century, they gathered under the synodal government of the bishops, in a regionally distinctive tradition of rule. The political community which the bishops of Langres ruled generated a sense of collective solidarity which was not tied to being a mere personal following but which was not formally institutional and which was distinct to a particular area but which was not ethnic. The specifics of these collective solidarities varied from place to place, but what they had in common was the enduring presence of a coherence which was not institutional but cultural. We are dealing here with something like the normative spaces that Mazel saw principalities becoming in the twelfth century, but operating at a much earlier period, and within the arena of political culture rather than of law (Mazel 2017, 82–85). The linking of regional hegemony to particularly local political cultures over the course of the tenth and early eleventh centuries, although not universal throughout France, was nonetheless a real, important, and distinctive feature of the age, and it is in this linking that we can find what may, with justice, be called principalities. 49

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Conclusion It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the story of French history in the centuries around the year 1000 is one of fragmentation. However, the nature of this fragmentation deserves, and has received, powerful scrutiny. It can be too easy to paint a picture of a tenth century marked by gloomy decline, over-mighty subjects, and endless war. Yet the Carolingian world was no stranger to powerful magnates, regional power bases, or great rebellions. When King Hugh Capet went to confront Aldebert of Périgord at Tours in the encounter mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, he may have suffered under the count’s razor tongue, but the threat to his authority was far from existential. A hundred years earlier, Charles the Bald, who had faced a potentially deadly challenge from Neustrian rebels in 858–859, could have considered himself lucky to deal with such a comparatively small danger in the Loire valley. Drawing a picture of stasis between c. 840 and c. 1040, though, would be foolish. Magnates’ authority had become more tied to regions. Even if not every one of the greatest aristocrats was a prince, all lived in a world of principalities. Regional power, though, is a murky thing to try to understand. We have examined here a number of efforts to clarify and clear up the messy history of principalities, to fit them into a coherent framework, whether ethnic or institutional. Nonetheless, something always escapes: regional authority in the tenth and eleventh centuries was not straightforwardly ethnic, or territorial, or administrative. We can say with confidence, by contrast, that it was significant. By the year 1000, rulers such as the Dukes of Normandy, Bishops of Langres, or Counts of Anjou were significant because they headed distinctive political communities. These figures were clearly different from their late ninth-century predecessors, and the most important change of all had taken place in the way their authority was imagined. The crucial changes in political culture we have seen during these centuries had turned the flavorless provincial hegemonies of the Carolingian period into regional polities coherent, significant, and sufficiently imbued with ideological charge to form the base on which these rulers could take their place as some of the key figures in French politics.

References Primary Sources Hubert, J. 1987. “L’abbaye exempte de Déols et la papauté (Xe-XIIe siècles).” Bibliothèque de l’École des chartes 145: 5–44. Nelson, Janet L., ed. and trans. 1991. The Annals of Saint-Bertin, Ninth-Century Histories. Vol. 1. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Secondary Sources Bachrach, Bernard S. 1995. “Geoffrey Greymantle, Count of the Angevins 960–987: A  Study in French Politics.” In State-Building in Medieval France. No. III, 3–40. Aldershot: Variorum. Bates, David. 1982. Normandy before 1066. New York: Longman. Billado, Tracey L. 2001. “Rhetorical Strategies and Legal Arguments: ‘Evil Customs’ and SaintFlorent de Saumur, 979–1011.” In Oral History of the Middle Ages: The Spoken Word in Context, edited by Gerhard Jaritz and Michael Richter, 128–41. Budapest: Medium Aevum Quotidianum. Bouchard, Constance B. 2000. “Burgundy and Provence, 879–1032.” In The New Cambridge Medieval History, edited by Timothy Reuter, vol. 3, 328–45. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brunterc’h, Jean-Pierre. 1997. “Naissance et affirmation des principautés au temps du roi Eudes: l’exemple d’Aquitaine.” In Pays de Loire et Aquitaine de Robert le Fort aux premiers Capétiens,

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Regional Magnates and the Last Carolingians edited by Olivier Guillot and Robert Favreau, 69–116. Poitiers: Société des antiquaires de l’Ouest. ———. 2001. “La succession d’Acfred, duc d’Aquitaine (927–936).” Quaestiones medii aevi novae 6: 195–240. Cross, Katherine. 2018. Heirs of the Vikings: History and Identity in Normandy and England, c. 950 – c. 1015. York: York Medieval Press. Dhondt, Jan. 2018. Études sur la naissance des principautés territoriales en France (IXe-Xe siècles). Cressé: EDR. Dunbabin, Jean. 1989. “The Reign of Arnulf II, Count of Flanders, and its Aftermath.” Francia 16: 52–65. ———. 2000. France in the making, 843–1180. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Garipzanov, Ildar. 2008. The Symbolic Language of Authority in the Carolingian World (c. 751–877). Leiden: Brill. Goetz, Hans-Werner. 1977. “Dux” und “Ducatus”. Begriffs- und verfassungsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zur Enstehungen des sogennanten “jüngeren” Stammesherzogtums an der Wende vom neunten zum zehnten Jahrhundert. Bochum: Brockmeyer. Guillot, Olivier. 1972. Le comte d’Anjou et son entourage au XIe siècle. 2 vols. Paris: Picard. ———. 1991. “Formes, fondements et limites de l’organisation politique en France au Xe siècle.” Settimane 38 (1): 57–116. Helmerichs, Robert. 1997. “Princeps, comes, dux Normannorum. Early Rollonid Designators and their Significance.” The Haskins Society Journal 9: 55–77. Koziol, Geoffrey. 2006. “Is Robert I in Hell? The Diploma for Saint-Denis and the Mind of a Rebel King (Jan. 25, 923).” Early Medieval Europe 14: 233–67. ———. 2012. The Politics of Memory and Identity in Carolingian Royal Diplomas: The West Frankish Kingdom (840–987). Turnhout: Brepols. Lauranson-Rosaz, Christian. 2006. “Les Guillelmids: une famille de l’aristocratie d’empire carolingienne dans le Midi de la Gaule (VIIIe-Xe siècles).” In Entre histoire et épopée: les Guillaume d’Orange (IXe-XIIIe siècles), edited by Laurent Macé, 45–81. Toulouse: CNRS-Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail. Mazel, Florian. 2017. “De quoi la principauté territoriale est-elle le nom? Réflexion sur les enjeux spatiaux des principautés ‘françaises’ (Xe-début XIIe siècle).” In Genèse des espaces politiques (IXe-XIIe siècle). Autour de la question spatiale dans les royaumes francs et post-carolingiens, edited by Geneviève Bührer-Thierry, Steffen Patzold, and Jens Schneider, 65–88. Turnhout: Brepols. McKitterick, Rosamond. 1983. The Frankish Kingdoms under the Carolingians, 751–987. London: Longman. McNair, Fraser. 2015. “The Politics of Being Norman in the Reign of Richard the Fearless, Duke of Normandy (r. 942–996).” Early Medieval Europe 23: 308–28. Nelson, Janet. 1992. Charles the Bald. New York: Routledge. Noizet, Hélène. 2004. “L’ascension du lignage robertien: du val de Loire à la Francie.” Annuaire bulletin de la Société d’histoire de France 117: 19–35. Oudart, Hervé. 2013. “Prince et principat durant l’Antiquité de le Moyen Âge: jalons historiographiques.” In Le prince, son peuple et le bien commun de l’Antiquité tardive à la fin du Moyen Âge, edited by Hervé Oudart, Jean-Michel Picard, and Joëlle Quaghebeur, 7–52. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes. Pacaut, Marcel. 1973. “Recherche sur les terms ‘Princeps, principatus, prince, principauté’ au Moyen Âge.” Actes des congrès de la Société des historiens médiévistes de l’enseignement supérieur public 4: 19–27. Prell, Jan. 2012. Comtes, vicomtes et noblesse au Nord de l’Aquitaine aux Xe-XIe siècles. Etudes prosopographiques, historiques et constitutionnelles sur le Poitou, l’Aunis et la Saintonge. Oxford: Unit for Prosopographical Research. Reuter, Timothy. 2011. “A Europe of Bishops. The Age of Wulfstan of York and Burchard of Worms.” Translated by Dominik Waßenhoven. In Patterns of Episcopal Power: Bishops in Tenth and Eleventh Century Western Europe, edited by Ludger Körntgen and Dominik Waßenhoven, 17–38. Berlin: De Grutyer.

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Fraser McNair Sassier, Yves. 1997. “Thibaud le Tricheur et Hugues le Grand.” In Pays de Loire et Aquitaine de Robert le Fort aux premiers Capétiens, edited by Olivier Guillot and Robert Favreau, 145–57. Poitiers: Société des antiquaires de l’Ouest. Trumbore-Jones, Anna. 2009. Noble Lord, Good Shepherd: Episcopal Power and Piety in Aquitaine, 877–1050. Leiden: Brill. Werner, Karl Ferdinand. 1979. “Kingdom and Principality in Twelfth-Century France.” Translated by Timothy Reuter. In The Medieval Nobility. Studies on the Ruling Classes of France and Germany from the Sixth to the Twelfth Century, edited and translated by Timothy Reuter, 243–90. Amsterdam: North Holland Press. West, Charles. 2012. “Count Hugh of Troyes and the Territorial Principality in Early Twelfth-Century Western Europe.” The English Historical Review 127: 523–48. Zimmermann, Michel. 2000. “Western Francia: The Southern Principalities.” In The New Cambridge Medieval History, edited by Timothy Reuter, 420–55. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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5 THE WORLD OF THE EARLY CAPETIAN COURT 987–1180 Talia Zajac1

Older historiography considered the rule of the early Capetians as the “nadir of the French monarchy” (Bull 2002, 11). This traditional narrative outlines a decline of royal power under Hugh Capet (r. 987–996), Robert II the Pious (r. 996–1031), Henri I (r. 1031–106), Philip I (r. 1060–1108), and then a gradual revival under Louis VI (r. 1108–1137) and Louis VII (r. 1137–1180). Louis VI and Louis VII gained firmer control over the royal domain and entered into a mutually beneficial alliance with the Abbey of Saint-Denis and with the reformed papacy. By the end of the twelfth century, the king’s authority as the head of a kingdom-wide political community was increasingly recognized by the territorial princes in both theory and practice. How, then, to explain this twelfth-century “renaissance of kingship” (Fawtier [1942] 1982, 19)? For the early Capetian king never faded into complete oblivion or irrelevance. The idea of a king remained a powerful one in the late tenth to late twelfth century. To understand why this was the case, scholars agree that it is important to understand the wider political culture in which the Capetian kings operated, including their use of rituals and material objects to justify, communicate, and expand royal power (Koziol 1992; Field and Gaposchkin 2014). Together with such approaches drawn from cultural history and anthropology, scholarship increasingly has separated the Capetians from a “birth of France” meta-narrative (Hallam 1980; Bull 2002, 1; Kempf 2014). As France itself was in the process of formation during the entire Middle Ages, its borders flexible and not perfectly equivalent to modern-day political boundaries, the prism of a modern nation-state obscures more than clarifies the practice of Capetian rulership (Bull 2002, 1). Instead of examining the Capetians’ role in helping or hindering proto-national political formation, more recent studies place Capetian kingship within its own contemporary context of medieval European and even Eurasian practices of rulership (for instance, Dale 2019). Some important factors that emerge from such contextual studies of rulership are the importance of church liturgy, visual images of royal majesty, personal charisma, and social relationships that the Capetians used to maintain royal power. The practice of Capetian rulership thus cannot be understood without reference to the social, cultural, and political context in which it was embedded: the wider world of the court. From the tenth until the mid-twelfth century, medieval sources use the term “royal 53

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court” (Latin: curia regis) to refer to royal places of residence and to the royal household (as a synonym for the Latin palatium, “palace”), to the king and his entourage, or, more specifically, to the king and his counsellors, when they assembled solemnly in judgment or to celebrate major Christian holidays such as Easter or Christmas. This chapter will explore the changing composition of the royal court in these varied meanings, including its relations with nobles and the Church, during the reign of the first six Capetians, while recognizing that the royal court was but one political center among many during this time of decentralized power. Though royal territorial holdings might have been small, it would be inaccurate to characterize the early Capetian court as parochial: diplomatic relations, the arrival of foreign brides, visits and letters exchanged with popes and emperors, royal pilgrimages, and after 1147, participation in the crusades – all these added to the cosmopolitan character of the court. In addition, gradual changes introduced into the practice and ideology of rulership strengthened the Capetians’ hold on power and helped make wider political consolidation in the thirteenth century possible.

Places of Residence: The Royal Domain At his election, Hugh Capet inherited a patchwork of lands as well as legal, economic, and patronage rights, which formed the symbolic, political, economic, and religious nucleus of his power. The lands concentrated between the Loire and the Seine and directly economically exploited by Hugh and his family are generally called the royal domain (also spelled “demesne”), where the king was lord (Latin: dominus), though there is debate over how expansively this term should be understood. The domain had no fixed borders, and land could be gained or lost by inheritance, marriage, or warfare. Within the royal domain, the king could count on loyal men to fight on his behalf as their lord and could enjoy labor service from serfs (corvée) and revenues from royal forests, judicial fines, rent payments, taxes (such as tallage, taille, a poll-tax, or chevage, an annual tax on unfree persons), and tolls on travelers by road or river (Hallam and West 2020, 100–5). The domain included the lands around Paris incorporating Saint-Denis, Dreux, Senlis, and Compiègne in the north and Orléans in the south. There was no distinction between family and royal land. Hugh Capet inherited the title of Count of Paris, Orléans, and Étampes from his ancestors, the Robertians, while other possessions, like the palace in Compiègne, came from the Carolingians. Together these lands made up the realm (regnum) of “France,” a Carolingian term that originally meant a sub-division of the empire, just as Aquitaine also formed a regnum (Bedos-Rezak 1996, 208). Only gradually in the twelfth century did the term France come to be applied more consistently to the notion of a wider political community. The rhythms of early Capetian court life were characterized by constant travel (itineration): journeys on horseback from royal residence to residence, to military campaigns and to assemblies for feast days. Paris gained greater importance only in the reign of Louis VI (Hallam and West 2020, 175). It remained, however, a favored residence, not a fixed capital. Since royal power was fragile, it needed to be enacted daily (Naus 2016, 31), and itineration permitted the king to be seen. Each solemn entry of the king into a city underlined his status as the Lord’s anointed and symbolically re-enacted Christ’s entry into Jerusalem (Koziol in Bull 2002, 44–45). When Louis VII entered Bordeaux in 1137 following his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine, for instance, he made the occasion one of great pomp, issuing charters and perhaps even staging a symbolic coronation (Dunbabin 2005, 260–61, 342). 54

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Beyond the royal domain was a slightly larger area of royal activity that can be termed the royal principality (Barthélemy in Parisse, and Barral i Altet 1992, n2, 99). This included lands that the king did not hold directly but that were administered by allied counts, bishops, and castellans, who also could be counted upon to join military campaigns and to present themselves at court (Fawtier [1942] 1982, 108; Dunbabin 2005, 162). Even within this royal principality, as in other areas of lordship, control of rights and revenues was never total or stretched over a contiguous block of territory. Rather, Geoffrey Koziol likens the royal principality of the early Capetians, as well as other principalities emerging at the same time, such as Anjou or Blois, to “Swiss cheese, substantial but perforated with great holes” (in Bull 2002, 56). For instance, in the town of Tours itself, the Capetian king had the right of appointing the city’s bishop after 1068, but the city and its wider region were under the jurisdictional right of the Count of Anjou (Farmer 1991, 35). From the reign of Robert II on, royal estates were administrated by a provost (French, prévôt; Latin: praepositus), or steward. The provost also presided over legal cases in the king’s absence within royal lands and witnessed charters in the king’s presence if he was on hand. Louis VI further developed his administration by dividing royal lands into units called prévôtés administrated by these provosts. Successful economic management of the royal domain and, in the twelfth century, the select granting of privileges to towns such as the right to autonomous self-government (communes) helped increase the Capetians’ wealth substantially by the reign of Louis VI. Wealth from the royal domain, in turn, supported the material needs of the royal family and its household. Until the mid-twelfth century, the king’s immediate family and wider royal household (familia) were at the heart of the royal government. As great nobles could not be relied upon to come to court regularly, the king’s own family and immediate household played a central role in government. By the 1030s, charters indicate that royal authority had expanded to encompass not only the person of the king but also all three members of the “Capetian trinity”: king, queen, and heir (Lemarignier 1965, 75–76). All three were set apart from the rest of the royal family by being anointed. The queen, however, likely was anointed with ordinary blessed oil and not the miraculous chrism kept at Reims in the “Holy Ampulla” (a small bottle) (Facinger 1968, 19).

The Royal Family: The King The nobles and clergy of Western Francia chose Hugh Capet to be king in 987 thanks to his reputation for military might and his family descent from the Robertian line of kings who had competed with the Carolingians for the kingship of West Francia in the late ninth century (see de Vasselot de Régné). Hugh’s prestige was increased by the fact that his mother was Hedwig, sister of Emperor Otto I. Election and consent of nobles and clergy were required at Hugh Capet’s and at each subsequent succession. Even if the election was largely a matter of form, each Capetian was formally “acclaimed” by the nobles and clergy, and he entered into a kind of contractual agreement with them, promising to respect their rights in their own lands and extracting as many personal oaths of fidelity as he could. Hugh Capet is usually simply given as elected at Senlis and crowned in Noyon. Robert-Henri Bautier in his wellregarded 1987 article (p. 52) on coronation gives Hugh’s initial royal candidacy as raised at Compiègne, before he is elected at Senlis, crowned in Noyon and anointed in Reims. The Archbishop of Reims usually performed the anointing and crowning (a privilege confirmed by the pope in 1089), though the Archbishop of Sens consecrated Louis VI hastily at Orléans in 1110. More than any other ritual or action, anointing elevated the king to 55

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something more than an ordinary man and allowed him to draw upon the images and practices of kingship across Europe and beyond, including the use of royal seals and monograms that proclaimed his authority, and formal commemoration in the church liturgy. Crowning was part of royal ritual as well, but by the twelfth century, political fragmentation had ensured that even this royal ritual was used by other dukes. Conan I of Brittany (d. 992), for instance, supposedly had himself crowned as duke, and the Duke of Aquitaine also wore a crown (Bouchard 1998, 9). The term “crown” to indicate royal power in the abstract came into use in royal documents only in the second half of the twelfth century (Bournazel 1975, 172–73; Dunbabin 2005, 267). But anointing alone was reserved for royalty. It was a ritual that never seems to have been appropriated by the nobility. The Capetian rite of king-making was modelled on the anointing and crowning of the ancient Israelite kings Saul, David, and Solomon and followed Carolingian precedent established already by Pepin the Short’s example in 751 when he seized the throne from the Merovingians. Through anointing with sacred oil (chrism), the Capetian kings were consecrated to God in a manner similar to that of bishops and endowed with a charismatic power, entrusted with the political and religious care of their people. The ceremonies of anointing meant the king was more than just an individual: he also represented “the king” in the abstract. The Capetians inherited all the expected duties of previous kings, even if they could not always act upon them and even though many of their judicial and patronage functions had been appropriated by nobles, bishops, and sometimes simple castellans (governors of castles). These functions included keeping the peace, defending the church, protecting widows, orphans, and other vulnerable groups, and ensuring protection of the realm from external enemies, the latter an exclusively royal duty. Like bishops and counts, kings also exercised protective responsibility for Jewish communities, settled in the royal domain by the twelfth century. Care of the poor and sick was a prominent feature of the public display of kingship, especially in the reigns of Robert II “the Pious” and Louis VII. The poor came to court to receive alms and to be fed at the expense of the king, who was expected to demonstrate his Christian piety and generosity toward them, especially during major holidays (Barlow1980, 14). Yet “there is a narrow line between ministering to the sick and healing them; between care and cure” (Barlow 1980, 15). Writing shortly before 1124, Abbot Guibert of Nogent was the first to credit King Louis VI with the “customary” gift of healing the disease of scrofula (tuberculous swelling of the lymph glands) (Bloch 1973, 13). From the 1170s on, Parisian scholars taught that it was through anointing that the king received this miraculous power of healing (Buc 1993).

The Royal Family: The King-Designate The second member of the Capetian trinity was the heir to the throne, who was often also king. Like other rulers from Normandy to Byzantium, the early Capetian kings practiced “anticipatory” or “associative” succession (Lewis 1981, 30; Bautier 1987, 52–56). With the exception of Philip I, until the reign of Louis VIII, all the early Capetian consecrated their heir as king-designate (rex designatus) to ensure a smooth succession. The kingdesignate was thus more than a crown prince, but, rather, a second king (Dhondt 1939, 936). For instance, around 996, Abbo of Fleury (d. 1004) dedicated his collection of canon law to “[the] most glorious lords, the kings of France, Hugh and his son Robert.” Anticipatory succession also encouraged an “apprenticeship of kingship,” training the king-designate in 56

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his father’s footsteps while the father was still alive and providing stability to the dynasty’s hold on power (Fawtier [1942] 1982, 227).

The Royal Family: The Queen Finally, the queen made up the third member of the Capetian trinity. Through the intimacy of marriage, the queen became the partner of the king, his consort (consors, literally “sharer of fate”). Like other medieval courts, the Capetian court was itinerant, and the queen travelled at the king’s side, present in the daily business of governance. Following Carolingian practice, the queen’s essential roles included not only giving birth to legitimate (especially male) children but also keeping the royal treasury and ensuring that households on the itinerary route were ready to receive the king and his entourage (Adair in Nolan 2003, 10). The queen and her retinue were often the most prominent foreigners at court, bringing with them material objects, dress, and cultural practices from their natal regions. Since the Capetian kings repudiated brides who did not provide them with male heirs, the queen’s retinue could be a source of factionalism at court in cases when there two competing queens existed at the same time: the first, officially repudiated wife, and the king’s second bride, such as Bertha of Burgundy and Constance of Arles, two rival queens of Robert II. The institutional role of the queen as a member of the curia regis seems to have reached its “apogee” under Adelaide of Maurienne (d. 1155), wife of Louis VI, when the texts of 55 charters from 1115 to 1124 were formally dated not only by the year of the king’s but also the queen’s reign (Facinger 1968, 7, 28, Honeycutt in Nolan 2003, 29). The queen’s institutional role in government began to change in the second half of the twelfth century. Increased royal reliance on male salaried officials as well as the personal incompatibility of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Louis VII may have played a role in this process, as king and queen no longer formed an effective governing partnership. After 1154, the king and queen kept separate tables, which developed into their own separate households, the hôtel du roi and hôtel de la reine (Facinger 1968, 36–37). A strictly institutional view of queenship does not, however, account sufficiently for the ongoing prominence and flexibility of the queen’s role, as exercised, for instance, by Blanche of Castile (d. 1226), twice regent of France in the thirteenth century. The queen remained anointed and crowned, an often powerful figure.

The Wider Household Although great nobles and bishops of the late tenth to mid-eleventh century did not entirely abandon the royal court, charter evidence suggests that the reigns of Henri I  and Philip I saw an increase of men from lesser social status – castellans, knightly families, even clerks from the growing towns – who began to dominate daily attendance upon the king. The king’s faithful men, the members of his household (familiares), were those who shared the royal family’s daily life in itineration, who ate and drank with the king and formed friendships with him, and thus were, in fact, in the heart of power when great nobles were absent. Beginning with the reign of Henri I, but especially under Philip I, a new group of persons, the grand household officers, began to dominate the court, as seen by their presence as witnesses in royal charters until 1191. These household officers included the chancellor, the seneschal, the chamberlain, the constable, and the butler. In general, the chancellor oversaw the production and keeping of documents and, as a cleric, often also headed the royal chapel, which included both chaplains and clerks. The seneschal, successor to the 57

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Carolingian majordomo, headed the royal household and the king’s military forces. The chamberlain oversaw the royal lodgings and wardrobe. The butler was responsible for the cellars, overseeing the cupbearers, while the constable took care of the cavalry, supervising the marshals (Lot and Fawtier 1958, 52–55; Bedos-Rezak 1996, 209–10; Bradbury 2007, 126 and 132). These household officer positions were usually held for life and often were dominated by one minor family of knightly or castellan origin from the Île-de-France region. The importance of royal counsellors can be seen in their constant presence around the king, serving also as another stable point of fiscal, political, and administrative continuity between reigns. Succeeding Capetian kings usually retained their respective fathers’ counsellors in office (Fawtier [1942] 1982, 44–45). Yet the duties of those in attendance upon the king remained personal and not strictly defined. The persistence of this personal, non-bureaucratic mode of early Capetian rule can also be seen by the fact that the most important royal counsellor in the reign of Louis VI and in the first part of Louis VII’s reign was undoubtedly Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis (died 1151), who held no official title at court. Documents call him merely the king’s most faithful man (fidelissimus), or even his friend (amicus) (Bournazel in Gerson 1986, 58). The downfall of great household officers came in the second half of the twelfth century with the failure of the Garlande family’s bid for power. Stephen (Étienne) de Garlande, who simultaneously held the positions of seneschal, chancellor, and arch-deacon of Notre-Dame of Paris, rebelled against King Louis VI and Queen Adelaide in 1127 (Honeycutt in Nolan 2003, 31–33). Though Stephen was forgiven and restored to power in 1131, Louis VI thereafter entrusted the position of seneschal to two loyal relatives in succession (Raoul of Vermandois, and then Count Thibaut V of Blois). Following Thibaut’s death, the positions of seneschal and chancellor continued to exist in theory, but the officeholder’s name was left blank in documents from 1191 to 1328 (Lot and Fawtier 1958, 57–58; Bedos-Rezak 1996, 199). Thus, by the second half of the twelfth century, the great household officers were reduced to purely honorary positions, though ones still held by great men (Hallam and West 2020, 207). Likewise, present at court as the king’s companions were unmarried men of knightly birth, termed “youths” (juvenes, Fr. jeunes), with whom the king formed close brotherly friendships (Duby 1977; Koziol [1995] 2013, 132–33). Changing inheritance practices by 1180 led to an increase of such unmarried “youths” at courts throughout northern France, contributing to the “chivalourization” of Capetian political culture (Bournazel 1975, 102). Odo of Deuil, for example, ends his account of Louis VII’s participation in the Second Crusade in 1147 by describing Louis as generous as a king and keen as a knight. Jean Dunbabin argues that it was precisely while Louis VI was away on crusade in 1147 and Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis was named as regent that an important shift in royal administration occurred (2005, 298). In the latter half of the twelfth century, minor officials with legal training began to appear in the royal administration, some educated in the rediscovered Roman law and new scholastic philosophy. Part of this specialization led subsequently to an administrative division between household and government by the beginning of the thirteenth century.

The King and the Nobles: Court as Council The curia regis in the institutional sense was made up of the royal household, the king’s entourage, the men in attendance on the king, supplemented also by the presence of bishops 58

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and greater nobles summoned to these councils with guarantees of safe conduct (BedosRezak 1996, 210). These great nobles assembled to plan a military campaign, to sit in judgment when a plaintiff demanded justice, and/or to celebrate great occasions such as the high feasts of Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost. Such solemn assemblies drew on a Carolingian institution, the placitum generalis (plural: placita generalia), an annual military muster and assembly of bishops and noble advisors; sometimes, placitum was used as a synonym for curia. Unlike the Carolingian placita generalia, however, the Capetian assemblies never brought the entirety of the nobility from all across the kingdom, nor were these assemblies regularly convened until the reign of Louis VI. Besides the knightly and comital families of the Île-de-France region, the dukes and counts that came most frequently to the royal court were the Counts of Flanders, Blois, and Anjou and the Duke of Normandy. Though these great princes sent military service to the king and occasionally performed homage, there is no sense that they treated the king as more than a “first among equals.” Promises of fidelity from these great princes rather read more like agreements for mutual peace and alliance, an homage de paix, and do not imply a hierarchical relationship between king and subject (Hallam1980, 153–55). More regular assemblies of great men occur from the reign of Louis VI onward, especially after 1124, when vassals from Brittany, Anjou, and Aquitaine came to Reims at the king’s summons to rebuff a planned invasion by the German emperor Henri V. The preaching and planning of the Second Crusade likewise drew nobles and clerics to Louis VII in 1146 at Vézelay and in 1147 in Étampes, and thereafter, great nobles were more often at the royal side. For this reason, Dunbabin suggests that royal authority had not been dead in the eleventh century but only “dozing,” since it was awakened when external threats made the Capetian kings relevant again (2005, xxiv–xxv). Greater recognition of the subordination of nobles to the king formed part of wider social-economic changes, emphasizing hierarchical relations in society, and articulated by salaried officials who began to define more clearly legal obligations of vassals to their lords (Dunbabin 2005, 358). The idea of the king as overlord of the princes was likewise strengthened by the increased prestige of Charlemagne celebrated in the vernacular epics, the chansons de geste. Hugh Capet had sought to distinguish himself from the Carolingians, whose throne he had usurped. But beginning by the reign of Philip I, the Capetians were seeking to link their own dynasty to the Carolingians in diverse ways (Naus 2016, 37–39, 61, 77–78). The epics that celebrated Charlemagne and his legendary 12 peers provided a literary model for the ideal relationship of king and the great nobles and bishops (Jackson 1971, 31; Bradbury 2007, 161). In a case of life imitating art, by the late twelfth century, the Carolingian terms “peers” and “barons” referring to the main secular and ecclesiastical vassals of the king appear in royal letters and charters. Taken from the chansons de geste, these terms evoked the “good old days” of Charlemagne and his loyal men celebrated in these epics (Bournazel 1975, 154–57). Capetian association with their Carolingian predecessors was most developed in the late twelfth century through the display in battle of Charlemagne’s supposed banner, the redgold “Oriflamme,” also called “Montjoie” in the epic Song of Roland. It remains under discussion whether this banner can be connected with the banner of the French Vexin at Saint-Denis brandished by Louis VI in 1124. By the late twelfth century, however, the two were assimilated, and “Montjoie-St-Denis” became the French royal war cry (Spiegel 1975, 58–59). Saint-Denis’s importance for the Capetians had increased under Abbot Suger (d. 1151) of this monastery, and it is through the church that the Capetians found the most important articulation of royal power. 59

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The Court and the Church The royal family’s relationship with the sacred was an important foundation of Capetian rulership. Nevertheless, the relationship between court and Church changed radically from the late tenth to the late twelfth century. Initially, until the mid-eleventh century and the beginnings of the “reform” Church movements, the Capetian kings continued to rule in the Carolingian theocratic tradition, in which the king, by virtue of his anointment, was the summit of the earthly hierarchy who had the right, in consultations with his bishops, to direct the care of the Church in his lands. Thus, in his poem dedicated to Robert II, Bishop Adalbero of Laon (d. 1030) addresses Robert II as an orator, “that is, a preacher, who could say prayers on behalf of the ruled, though he was a layman” (Kleinschmidt 2000, 320). As part of his oversight of the church, for instance, in Orléans, Robert II became the first Capetian king to execute heretics by burning in 1022. Combining the king’s position as secular lord and, at the same time, as nominal head of a monastic community was no contradiction in this period. The Capetians had special protection over monasteries and houses of regular canons as lay abbots. Hugh Capet, for instance, was lay abbot of Saint-Martin of Tours, Saint-Aignan of Orléans, and Saint-Denis, continuing patronage and protection offered to these houses by Merovingian and Carolingian kings. Thus, in addition to the lands in which the king was a secular lord, he also exercised control over his much-larger “ecclesiastical domain” (the term is not a medieval one) beyond the Île-de-France to include 40 to 65 royal abbeys between the late and early twelfth centuries and approximately 26 royal dioceses. Capetian kings also insisted that they had the right to nominate or confirm a royal bishop or abbot in post. When a bishop or abbot died, tenth and eleventh-century Capetians could draw upon the revenues of the deceased hierarch’s estates, and even threaten to hold back control of these so-called “temporalities” if a nominated candidate was not to their taste. In general, monastic patronage was an important source of prestige and mutual benefit: monasteries gained legal privileges, lands, and revenues, while the Capetians gained the power of the ceaseless prayers of the monks and the heavenly friendship and patronage of the saint to whom the monastery was dedicated. Saint-Denis, just north of Paris, had been an important royal necropolis since the sixth century, though it had become somewhat neglected in the ninth and tenth centuries (Naus 2016, 23). Despite some early Capetian burials (Robert II and his third wife, Constance of Arles, Henri I, and Louis VI), SaintDenis’s fortunes and links to the dynasty did not revive fully until the twelfth century under the leadership of Abbot Adam (r. 1099–1122) and Suger (r. 1122–1151). Until then, other ecclesiastical institutions competed for prime royal patronage. Especially during the reigns of Hugh Capet to Philip I, Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire in Fleury, which claimed to possess the body of Saint Benedict of Nursia (d. around 547), an important founder of communal monasticism, was the recipient of significant royal patronage. Fleury produced a number of pro-Capetian royal historiographical works in this period, and Philip I chose it as his burial place. One of Fleury’s rivals, from its founding in 910, was the great Burgundian monastery of Cluny, whose “reformed” monasticism and veneration for the cross was supported by Robert II. Robert II also rebuilt the basilica of Saint-Aignan in Orléans, city of his birth, baptism, and anointing. Adelaide of Maurienne and Louis VI jointly founded the Benedictine female monastery at Montmatre, and Adelaide later founded another female Benedictine monastery, Saint-Jean-aux-Bois. Besides Benedictine monasteries, the early Capetians favored houses of regular canons, such as Saint-Martin-des-Champs, restored from ruins by Henri I and his wife, Anna Yaroslavna (“Anne de Kyiv”), which was later placed under Cluny’s authority by their son 60

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Philip I. Other houses of regular canons supported by the Capetians included Saint-Vincent in Senlis refounded by Anna in her widowhood, and Saint-Victor in Paris patronized by Louis VII. Finally, in the twelfth century, the Cistercians likewise benefited from royal patronage. Louis VII, for instance, chose to be buried at the Cistercian abbey of Notre-Dame de Barbeau. The Capetians’ inheritance of theocratic leadership in the style of the Carolingians was threatened by proponents of so-called “Gregorian” reforms, named after one of their most vigorous promoters, Pope Gregory VII (r. 1073–1085), though many of its key ideas were already being articulated by tenth-century “reformed” monasteries and in the Peace Councils organized by bishops and counts in the tenth century. These reformers more sharply distinguished between lay and clerical status, insisted that kings be subordinate to and guided by popes and bishops and not vice versa, and condemned the buying and selling of church offices (“simony”). Pope Leo IX brought many of the reform goals to France when he presided over the Council of Reims of 1049. King Henri I was not present at the council, and the initial attitude of the royal court was one of disdain toward the reform initiatives. Philip I likewise kept far from the “reforming” clergy and protested in 1078 against the anti-simony church council convoked by Hugh of Die, the papal legate (i.e., a bishop with the power to represent the pope himself). Conflict sharpened in 1092 when Philip repudiated his wife, Bertha, and married Bertrade of Montford, Count Fulk of Anjou’s wife, for which rash action the king was excommunicated multiple times (in 1094, in 1095, and in 1099, until the king’s public penance in 1105). The use of papal legates in France, such as Hugh of Die, was characteristic of the new, more interventionist “reformed” papacy to which Capetian kings had to accommodate themselves from the mid-eleventh century. After the 1070s, with the gradual implementation of “Gregorian” reform, bishops were no longer so visible in the king’s entourage, with the exception of those in Paris, Senlis, Chartres, and Orléans. In addition, after 1095, reflecting the reformers’ notion of laity and clergy as separate orders in society, the king ceased to preside over church councils (Ott 2015, 120–21). But the reformers’ ideals were only fully embraced by the court in the early twelfth century under the reign of Louis VI, who was married to Adelaide, niece of Pope Calixtus II. A  working alliance of “reformed” popes and kings emerged, reviving the alliance of mutual benefit that had existed between the Carolingians and the popes (Schneidmüller in Bull 2002, 37). Indeed, the Capetian royal court became a center for refugees fleeing conflict over reforms elsewhere: most famously from 1164 to 1170, Louis VII hosted the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket (d. 1170). Several popes also spent periods of exile in France, seeking support against the German emperors. These included Pope Pascal II in 1107, Pope Gelasius II in 1119, Pope Calixtus II in 1119 to 1120, Innocent III in 1130, Pope Eugenius III in 1147, and Alexander III in 1162–1165. The Capetian working alliance with the “reform” party of the Church was not without its points of tension. The Capetians still clashed with the papacy and reformed clerics over the issue of the indissolubility of marriage and control of church appointments. Despite tension and reaction, in general, the new link with the reformed party greatly increased the prestige of the Capetian monarchy at the expense of the Norman dukes/kings of England and the German Emperors. A significant moment in this new Capetian–papal alliance was when Pope Eugenius III came in 1147 to consecrate the newly renovated western façade of the Abbey of Saint-Denis and to bless King Louis VII’s departure on the Second Crusade (Naus 2016, 85). Thereafter, the Capetians would claim leadership of crusading ventures as one of the key attributes of their Christian kingship. 61

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Royal support for the “reformed” church meant that the Capetian kings could no longer present themselves as church leaders in the old Carolingian tradition. A new understanding of French kingship was outlined in the letters and writings of Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis and in a forged charter of the eleventh or twelfth century attributed to Charlemagne. The latter asserted that since Charlemagne’s days, the kings of France had held their kingdom in fief from Saint Denis (the saint and his abbey) (Spiegel 1975, 59): suggesting the new idea that the king could hold land from no earthly being but only from a saint in heaven. Suger, too, proposed a hierarchical relationship between Saint Denis, the king, and the nobles, who should be willing to follow the king under Saint Denis’s protection (Dunbabin 2005, 259). Finally, toward the end of the period under consideration, the Capetian dynasty adopted the stylized lily flower, or fleur-de-lis, as its emblem. This was not a sudden innovation but a gradual rise to prominence for this symbol. Though it can be found already on the fleurons (flowering sceptres) and crowns of tenth-century royal seals, the fleur-de-lis on its own appears first on the reverse of Louis VI’s coins. Louis VII increased its use, and the fleurde-lis appeared on his royal counterseal, clothing, and banner. The Capetians’ adoption of the fleur-de-lis as their emblem in the twelfth century highlighted royal devotion to Christ and especially Mary and might also have recalled the biblical Tree of Jesse (Bedos-Rezak in Gerson 1986; Dale 2019, 199–200). Though the royal domain remained relatively modest at the close of the twelfth century, the Capetian court had transformed itself impressively from its shaky foundations in an act of usurpation. The fleur-de-lis scattered on the king’s clothes or on the royal banner invited nothing less than parallels between the royal court and the court of heaven, a grand claim to divine favor that would be further developed in the thirteenth and fourteenth century.

Note 1 I wish to express my great thanks to Dave Andress, Derek Whaley, Theresa Earenfight, Allan Smith, and the anonymous readers, as well as to Charlotte Faucher and to all the members of the Cultures of Diplomacy reading group. I gratefully acknowledge funding support from an Andrew W. Mellon post-doctoral fellowship at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto, Canada, as well as a Leverhulme Trust Early Career fellowship at the John Rylands Research Institute and Library, University of Manchester (ECF-2020-391). I thank Greti Dinkova-Bruun, Richard Carter, and library staff at the Pontifical Institute, the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library and John M. Kelly Library at the University of Toronto, as well as the Rylands and University of Manchester libraries, for their invaluable help with accessing material during the lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic.

References Barlow, Frank. 1980. “The King’s Evil.” English Historical Review 95: 3–27. Bautier, Robert-Henri.1987. “Sacres et couronnements sous les Carolingiens et les premiers Capétiens: recherches sur la genèse du sacre royal français.” Annuaire-Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire de France: 7–56. Bradbury, Jim. 2007. The Capetians: Kings of France, 987–1328. Hambledon: Continuum. Bedos-Rezak, Brigitte. 1996. “Secular Administration.” In Medieval Latin: An Introduction and Bibliographical Guide, edited by F. A. C. Mantello, and A. G. Rigg, 195–229. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Bloch, Marc. 1973. The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France. Translated by J. E. Anderson. London: Routledge and K. Paul; Montreal: McGill-Queen’s. Bouchard, Constance Brittain. 1998. Strong of Body, Brave and Noble: Chivalry and Society in Medieval France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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The World of the Early Capetian Court Bournazel, Éric. 1975. Le Gouvernement capétien au XIIe siècle: 1108–1180, structures sociales et mutations institutionnelles. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Buc, Philippe. 1993. “David’s Adultery with Bathsheba and the Healing Power of the Capetian Kings.” Viator 24: 101–20. Bull, Marcus, ed. 2002. France in the Central Middle Ages, 900–1200. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dale, Johanna. 2019. Inauguration and Liturgical Kingship in the Long Twelfth Century. Male and Female Accession Rituals in England, France, and the Empire. New York-Woodbridge: York Medieval Press and Boydell & Brewster. Dhondt, Jan. 1939. “Élection et hérédité sous les Carolingiens et les premiers Capétiens.” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 18: 913–53. Duby, Georges. 1977. The Chivalrous Society. Translated by C. Postan. Berkeley, CA.: University of California Press. Dunbabin, Jean. 2005. France in the Making, 843–1180. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Facinger, Marion F. 1968. “A Study of Medieval Queenship: Capetian France, 987–1237.” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History. Series 1 5: 3–48. Farmer, Sharon. 1991. Communities of Saint Martin: Legend and Ritual in Medieval Tours. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Fawtier, Robert. (1942) 1982. The Capetian Kings of France: Monarchy & Nation, 987–1328. Translated by Lionel Butler and R. J. Adam. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Field, Sean, and Cecilia Gaposchkin. 2014. “Questioning the Capetians, 1180–1328.” History Compass 12: 567–85. Gerson, Paula Lieber, ed. 1986. Suger and Saint-Denis: A  Symposium. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hallam, Elizabeth M. 1980. “The King and the Princes in Eleventh-Century France.” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 53: 143–56. Hallam, Elizabeth M., and Charles West. 2020. Capetian France: 987–1328. 3rd ed. rev. London and New York: Routledge. Jackson, Richard A. 1971. “Peers of France and Princes of the Blood.” French Historical Studies 7 (Spring 1): 27–46. Kempf, Damien. 2014. “Introduction.” French Historical Studies 37 (2 Spring): FORUM: Capetian France (987–1328): 169–72. doi: 10.1215/00161071–2401575. Kleinschmidt, Harald. 2000. Understanding the Middle Ages: The Transformation of Ideas and Attitudes in the Medieval World. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. Koziol, Geoffrey. 1992. Begging Pardon and Favor: Ritual and Political Order in Early Medieval France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. (1995) 2013. “England, France, and the Problem of Sacrality in Twelfth-Century Ritual.” In Cultures of Power: Lordship, Status, and Process in Twelfth-Century Europe, edited by Thomas N. Bisson, 124–48. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lemarignier, Jean François. 1965. Le gouvernement royal aux premiers temps capétiens, 987–1108. Paris: A. et J. Picard. Lewis, Andrew W. 1981. Royal Succession in Capetian France: Studies on Familial Order and the State. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Lot, Ferdinand, and Robert Fawtier, eds. 1958. Histoire Des Institutions Françaises au Moyen Âge. Vol 2: Institutions royales (Les droits du roi exercés par le roi). Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Naus, James. 2016. Constructing Kingship: The Capetian Monarchs of France and the Early Crusades. Manchester Medieval Studies. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Nolan, Kathleen, ed. 2003. Capetian Women. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ott, S. John. 2015. Bishops, Authority, and Community in North-western Europe, c. 1050–1150. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parisse, Michel, and Xavier Barral i Altet, eds. 1992. Le Roi de France et son royaume autour de l’an Mil: Actes du colloque Hugues Capet 987–1987. La France de l’an Mil, Paris-Senlis, 22–25 juin 1987. Paris: Picard. Spiegel, Gabrielle M. 1975. “The Cult of Saint-Denis and Capetian Kingship.” Journal of Medieval History 1 (1): 43–69. Reprint in Idem. 1997. “The Cult of Saint-Denis and Capetian Kingship.” The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography, 138–62. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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6 THE QUEENS’ REFLECTION French Consorts as a Mirror of French History Derek R. Whaley

Article The dynastic imperative of any hereditary king is to provide healthy sons who can perpetuate his family into future generations. But men being unable to give birth, the responsibility for producing heirs naturally falls upon the monarchs’ wives. In the kingdom of West Francia – later France – queens consort were carefully selected from among all the royalty and nobility of Europe to serve as companions to the kings and potential regents for their heirs. Viewed separately, these influential women span a remarkable range, from timid girls barely out of their nurseries to independent rulers with their own subjects and lands to administer. When considered together, however, the queens of France reflect larger developments in domestic and international politics and provide a window into how a decentralized, factious medieval kingdom evolved into one of the most powerful and influential states of modern Europe. In pre-modern France, marriages between royalty were complicated affairs even in the best of times. Most were political matches that could help solidify treaties and end wars, cement alliances, pacify rivals and rebels, and even expand the territory of the kingdom. And while all queens consorts were important, a woman selected to be the potential mother of a royal heir was especially important because her connections and political prowess could one day be called upon to benefit the realm. As a result, the first wives of heirs and kings were chosen almost exclusively for political purposes, but they were also rigorously examined to ensure that they had the requisite qualities of ancestry, procreative potential, beauty, attitude, and education to ensure an advantageous match. Once married, the royal couple had a goal to produce two sons – the proverbial heir and a spare – to ensure that the dynasty was secure in its position for another generation. Between the election of Hugh Capet in 987 and the abdication of Louis-Philippe in 1848, fifty-three women served as consort to a French king, while several more married a French heir but never became queen themselves. Since this chapter is focused specifically on women who were chosen as potential mothers to a royal heir, many women can be dismissed. At least seven women married a king strictly for procreative purposes, often in an act of desperation by the king because an earlier wife had died before producing the requisite two

DOI: 10.4324/9780367808471-7

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sons. For example, Charles IV divorced his first wife for infidelity, and his second wife died in childbirth, neither of them providing him with a surviving male. Meanwhile, Charlotte of Savoy can be overlooked since her husband, the future Louis XI, married her as an act of rebellion against his father in order to advance his own political agenda. More generally, later wives of kings who had already produced two sons are not considered here, regardless of the political reasons behind their nuptials. Likewise, the dozens of mistresses taken by kings are ignored since their sons could never qualify for the throne. The remaining 40 women who served as consorts and wives of heirs provide a nearperfect reflection of Capetian political ambitions from the advent of the dynasty to the fall of the July Monarchy. The history of Capetian France as a whole can be divided into four distinct phases. From 987 until the reign of Philip II Augustus, which began in 1180, the dynasty desired to consolidate and secure its position within the traditional boundaries of the West Frankish kingdom, especially against the aggressive expansionism of Angevin England. From Philip’s reign until 1328, the family attempted to solidify and define its borders with rivals, specifically those to the south along the Pyrenees and to the east in Burgundy. Resistance from England, however, prompted the third stage, which lasted from 1328 to 1483, wherein the Capetians had to counter threats from traditional enemies as well as contentious members of its own family in order to stabilize the realm. Once stability returned, the dynasty entered its fourth and final phase, from 1483 until 1848, where maintaining a relative balance of power in Europe and the world became an ideal to which all the great families of Europe subscribed. Throughout all four of these periods, Capetian marriage policy evolved to adapt to changing political situations and the needs of the rulers, dynasty, and kingdom as a whole. Even before the Capetians secured the West Francian throne as their hereditary birthright, two ancestral members anticipated later dynastic marriage trends when choosing wives. King Robert I, whose brother Odo was elected king of West Francia in 888, used marriage to strategically place his family within the West Francian elite. In 922, he chose as a bride for his son Hugh the Great a daughter of the powerful Count of Maine, who was a descendant of Emperor Charles the Bald. After his first wife died without progeny, Hugh changed tack and successively married the sisters of two kings: first Eadhild, halfsister of King Æthelstan of England, and then Hedwig, sister of the future emperor Otto I. In Eadhild’s case, the motives for the marriage are not certain, but it seems likely that Hugh wanted to appear as a benevolent uncle to the Carolingian heir, the future Louis IV, who lived in exile at the English court (MacLean 2015, 32–33). The marriage to Hedwig, meanwhile, improved Hugh’s relationship with the leading German royal house and finally provided him with three surviving sons, the eldest of whom was Hugh Capet (Sharp 2001, 85–86). The younger Hugh married, in 969, Adelaide, a daughter of William III, Duke of Aquitaine. The marriage served as a rapprochement for the wars Hugh’s father had led against the Aquitanians in the 950s and established a marital bond between the nascent Capetians and the rulers of the largest single holding in West Francia (Dunbabin 2000, 61). For the next 200 years, every single marriage by a Capetian king or heir was arranged with the intention to tangibly benefit the dynasty. Hugh’s son Robert II married to secure allies and expand Capetian influence. His first marriage, arranged by his father to RozalaSusanna of Italy in 988, situated Robert as guardian of his wife’s son, Count Baldwin IV of Flanders, thereby expanding Capetian influence to the Low Countries. Upon the death of his father in 996, Robert repudiated his marriage to Susanna and married another widow

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with sons, Bertha of Burgundy, thereby briefly placing the adjacent counties of Blois and Chartres under his direct control (Adair 2003, 11). However, this second wife was found to be too closely related, prompting an annulment. Over the centuries, wives would be dismissed for other reasons as well, including religious differences, political rivalries, and even personal appearance and poor hygiene. Robert’s third marriage to Constance of Arles in 1001 linked the king to the count of Anjou, who was Constance’s first cousin, and provided him with the heirs he required. However, his continued favor for Bertha and his mentorship of her children, who were rivals to the Angevins, undermined the political reasons for his third marriage (Adair 2003, 12–14). When the goal of marriage is to perpetuate the dynasty, any excuse for annulment is valid, so long as a fertile wife was ultimately found. But poor luck was also a factor in why kings remarried. Intended as the husband of Emperor Conrad II’s daughter Matilda, Henry I was forced to fall back on one of Conrad’s grand-stepdaughters, Matilda of Frisia, when his betrothed died prematurely. When the Frisian princess herself died four years later without producing a son, Henry was forced to range far afield for a wife due to increasing religious prohibitions against marrying close kin. He eventually found a mostly-qualified bride among the Kievan Rus (Zajac 2016, 722). The son he produced with Anne of Kiev was Philip I, who similarly had bad luck securing a spouse of appropriate distance in blood. His first wife, Bertha of Holland, was the stepdaughter of Count Robert I of Flanders, and their marriage was part of a peace treaty between the two men. But Bertha only produced one surviving son, causing Philip to seek a new wife. However, the Church did not confirm his annulment or his subsequent marriage to Bertrade of Montfort, and it refused to legitimize their two sons (Hallam and West 2020, 95–96). The marriages of Henry and Philip highlight the problem with placing politics foremost when selecting wives. In both instances, the men made political alliances with strong neighbors, but these led to less-than-satisfactory results. Both men then sought somewhat-drastic alternatives to ensure the continuation of their dynasties, to mixed results. Local matches in the first two centuries of Capetian rule were relatively rare. Although Bertrade of Montfort was local, the marriage was conducted illegally and was clearly done for procreative purposes. Louis VI’s marriage to Lucienne de Rochefort, in contrast, had a direct political benefit. Lucienne was the daughter of the Seneschal of France, one of the chief military leaders in the kingdom, and her marriage was intended to ensure his loyalty to the throne. However, the alliance only enraged other nobles in the Île-de-France, and Louis had it annulled, prompting a rebellion from the seneschal as well. When he finally remarried, he returned to a more traditional approach and wed Adelaide of Maurienne, an extremely well-connected noblewoman from the southwest border region of West Francia (Hallam and West 2020, 141). Similarly, Louis arranged for his son, Louis VII, to marry Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine, a massive territory that encompassed nearly a quarter of modern-day France. Louis hoped that by consolidating Aquitaine into West Francia through a dynastic union, the Capetian dynasty would finally be able to assert its dominance over the kingdom as a whole (Hallam and West 2020, 149, 219). And just like his father, Louis VII was disappointed in the results. He was devoutly loyal to the Church, while Eleanor was an independent spirit. Moreover, they had only produced two daughters together. After 15 years, Louis had the marriage annulled (Bouchard 2002, 230–31). Eleanor quickly married his greatest rival, the future Henry II of England, who controlled another sixth of modern-day France. To counter this sudden threat to the north and south, Louis sought an ally in Emperor Alfonso VII of Castile, whose daughter Constance he married in 1154. But 66

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her death in 1160 forced Louis to find an ally closer to home. He chose Adela, daughter of the Count of Champagne and Blois, which flanked the Île-de-France on the east and west (Baldwin 1986, 15). Through this local bond, Louis protected himself from English encroachment and finally received his long-sought son. Philip’s reign ended the first phase of Capetian history, but before he defeated the English in 1214, he made a rather-traditional marriage to Isabella, the daughter of Count Baldwin V of Hainaut and the future countess Margaret I of Flanders. Much has been made of this match and the son, Louis VIII, who resulted, but it was above all else an attempt to end intermittent warfare between Flanders and West Francia. And it failed spectacularly. War between the two houses resumed almost immediately, and Isabella died in childbirth only ten years later. But she brought to Philip both lands and unsought legitimacy. Her dowry included the mid-sized territories of Artois on the Flemish frontier to the north, as well as a dubious claim to Vermandois within the Île-de-France (Baldwin 1986, 16). More importantly for later historians, she brought to the Capetian bloodline Carolingian ancestry. While most Capetian kings had married women with remote Carolingian heritage, Isabella descended directly from Charles of Lorraine, the last legitimate male descendant of Charlemagne. Thus, chroniclers used the marriage of Philip and Isabella and the birth of their son as an omen for the future – a return to the rightful line of French kings (Spiegel 1971). It was certainly convenient timing. Philip’s victories over England, Flanders, and the lords of the south gave the dynasty actual authority over France for the first time, and the combination of Carolingian ancestry and a mature, adult son with several of his own sons by 1223 secured the future of the Capetian monarchy. On a sheer practical level, though, Philip did not have much marriage success. After Isabella’s death, Philip still sought a second son and settled upon Ingeborg of Denmark in 1193, who appears to have provided him with a large cash dowry that he inevitably planned to use to continue his wars. But the couple became estranged immediately, and Philip decided to follow in Philip I’s footsteps and remarry bigamously rather than wait for the confirmation of his annulment. He found a third wife in Agnes of Merania, the daughter of a Bavarian duke, and she gave him his desired second son. Meanwhile, Ingeborg petitioned the pope for a reconciliation. The threat of excommunication in 1200 forced Philip to renounce Agnes and return to Ingeborg, in exchange for which the pope legitimized Agnes’ children with Philip (Baldwin 1986, 82–84). Capetian French history moves into its second phase with the marriage in 1200 of Louis VIII to Blanche, daughter of King Alfonso VIII of Castile and Eleanor of England. This marriage immediately brought a temporary truce between France and England, since Eleanor was King John’s sister, and it also ensured that Castile would remain out of the conflict (Sivéry 1995, 55–57). More importantly for the dynasty, the marriage was abundantly successful in producing four sons who lived to adulthood. The eldest, Louis IX, followed in his father’s footsteps by marrying a princess from the south in 1234. He found his wife in Margaret of Provence, the eldest daughter and presumed heiress of Count Ramon Berenguer IV, who decided belatedly that he would rather leave his vast lands to another daughter. As with the previous marriage, Louis and Margaret’s nuptial secured peace and stability along the southern border and brought an end to intermittent fighting in Languedoc (Le Goff 1996, 128). They also produced, like the generation before them, four surviving sons. By this point, a pattern was emerging of French kings marrying into powerful southern families, primarily as a counter to English aggression in the north, but also as a long-term strategy to establish firm borders in the Pyrenees and recruit Iberian allies. 67

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These strategies reached their culmination in the reigns of Philip III and Philip IV. The elder Philip married Isabella, daughter of King James I of Aragon, in 1262. This had been negotiated four years earlier in the Treaty of Corbeil, which had solidified the borders between Catalonia and France and transferred the rights to several lands between the two kingdoms. Philip succeeded in his first attempt to produce an heir and a spare in the form of Philip IV and Charles of Valois (Hallam and West 2020, 278). The fourth Philip also married into an important Iberian family when he wed Queen Joan I of Navarre in 1284. His ascension in 1285 made him the first Capetian king to rule two independent kingdoms. The couple produced three surviving sons, all of whom eventually succeeded to the thrones of Navarre and France (Woodacre 2013, 29). Through the marriage alliances and military victories of these thirteenth-century kings, France ejected the English out of northern France and secured a strong border to the south and southeast. By 1300, the only area of significant threat to the Capetian monarchy was along the FrancoImperial frontier. Flanders, Burgundy, and other regional powers acted with near-complete autonomy from their French and Imperial overlords, and Philip IV felt it was his duty to correct this situation. The two Burgundies, the duchy and the county, were ruled by scions of the French and Imperial royal houses, respectively, and Philip used his three eligible sons as pawns to marry into both houses. Louis, his eldest, married Margaret, daughter of the duke, while his younger two sons, Philip and Charles, married two daughters of the Burgundian count, whose wife was the countess of Artois. Through this triple marriage, Philip hoped to strengthen his eastern flank and potentially bring several territories under direct Capetian control (Woodacre 2013, 44–46). However, a political scandal in 1314, the Tour de Nesle Affair, in which Louis and Charles’s wives were caught liaising with brothers, almost completely undermined his plan. When Louis ascended the throne at the end of the year, he had his marriage annulled and quickly chose a new wife: a distant cousin, Clementia of Hungary. Later, when Charles IV took the throne in 1322, he also took a new wife, Marie, the daughter of Emperor Henry VII, and, after she died in childbirth, a close cousin, Joan of Évreaux. Only Philip V’s wife, the Countess Joan I of Burgundy, avoided this fate, and it was through their daughters that Artois and both Burgundies ultimately came to the royal family, albeit over a century later. Prohibitions set in 1316 and 1328 disallowed women from inheriting or even transmitting a claim to the throne, meaning that with the death of Charles IV, the senior line of the Capetian dynasty went extinct and the Crown passed to a cousin, Philip of Valois (Whaley 2019). Capetian France had undeniably grown in the long century from Louis VIII’s ascension to Charles IV’s death in 1328. Internally, France was relatively safe and secure, the infighting that had dominated politics for two centuries finally at an end. Internationally, the family had spread its influence widely, with close family connections to Castile, Aragon, England, and the Low Countries. Marriage policy, specifically, had helped secure safe borders along the Pyrenees, and even England and France were on relatively congenial terms. But this new balance was immediately challenged in the reign of Philip VI, when the king of England belatedly asserted a claim to the French throne through his own marriage connection, prompting nearly two centuries of civil war and foreign invasion. Even before war formally broke out between England and France in 1337, the fear of war was such that Philip initiated the third phase of Capetian French history pre-emptively. Most of the royal marriages that took place during the Hundred Years’ War were conducted with the goal of strengthening Capetian power within France. And such was the union of the future John II to Bonne of Luxembourg in 1332. Bonne’s father, John of Bohemia, was a member of the Imperial Luxembourg dynasty, and the marriage created a close 68

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friendship between the two families that lasted into the second generation. Bonne’s father even gave his life for the French cause at the Battle of Crécy in 1346. Yet this close kinship between cousins was undermined by the dynastic rivalry that developed between the four sons produced through the union. John and Bonne’s sons jockeyed for power constantly, even while France was under threat of attack from the English. As a result, the kings were forced to find brides who could help play these rivalries off one another in the hope of dispelling them entirely. Charles V married in 1350 a member of the Capetian House of Bourbon, Joan, whose family had remained relatively loyal to the senior line over the past century (Autrand 1994, 75–76). By bringing the Bourbons back into the royal fold, the Valois ensured loyalty without rivalry. However, both the king and queen died young, leaving their eldest son, Charles VI, as a minor under the control of his factious uncles. To make matters worse, a younger son, Louis of Orléans, sought a role in government as soon as he was old enough, which set him at odds with their uncle, Philip I of Burgundy, who had his own plans for the kingdom. The feud between Philip, Louis, and their descendants and adherents precipitated the Armagnac–Burgundian War, which severely imperiled the stability of France for the first half of the fifteenth century (Sumption vol. 4). Charles VI, meanwhile, found himself with the rare opportunity to seek his own wife. Generally, kings were betrothed when they were young and married their first wife prior to ascending the throne, so instances where this was not the case are especially noteworthy. Philip introduced the young king to the Bavarian princess Isabeau in 1385, and they immediately fell in love and married. This match profited Philip to a small degree, specifically regarding his plans in the Low Countries, but the intended benefit was an alliance with the powerful Wittelsbach dynasty of Bavaria. Isabeau was a great-granddaughter of Emperor Louis IV and was well connected with the German nobility. Philip hoped to bring Wittelsbach might to bear against the English, as his grandfather had done with the Luxembourg alliance 50 years earlier. None of this came to pass, though. Over the course of their marriage, Charles and Isabeau had at least six sons, but only one of them survived to adulthood. Even more problematic, the king began to suffer from a perennial mental illness in 1392, allowing his relatives to steal away his power. This culminated in the Treaty of Troyes of 1420, wherein Charles acknowledged his son-in-law, Henry V of England, as his heir. In the end, the king’s genuine love for his wife, Isabeau, appears to be one of the only semblances of continuity in this otherwise-chaotic period. Charles and Isabeau’s surviving son, Charles VII, had few options except a political marriage when he claimed the throne in 1422. Young, desperate, and with few allies, Charles sought comfort in his Angevin cousins, whose matriarch, Yolande of Aragon, arranged for the king to wed one of her daughters, Marie. The family descended from another of John II’s sons and controlled Provence in the south and had strong claims to Naples in Italy and Anjou-Maine in northwest France. With Angevin help, the French were finally able to end the Armagnac–Burgundian War and put the English on the defensive (Rohr 2016). Further help in the war was sought from James I of Scotland, whose daughter Margaret married the future Louis XI in 1436. With the Burgundians pacified, the hope was that the Scots could split English forces between Great Britain and France, allowing Charles to finally eject the English from the continent. As it happened, James died the next year, leaving a child as his successor, and Margaret never produced any children with Louis before she died in 1445 (Lang 2012, 34). Charles, meanwhile, successfully rid France of the English without substantial help from Scotland or Louis in 1453. 69

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The end of the Hundred Years’ War prompted a short-lived transitional stage where three French kings sought to finally resolve the issue of Brittany, the last rebellious enclave within France. Charles VIII attempted to do this by forcibly marrying the duchess, Anne, who was already betrothed to the German king Maximilian. Charles’s untimely death without an heir in 1498 forced his successor, Louis XII, to annul his marriage and take Anne as his own wife. Unlike his second cousin, Louis succeeded in producing a child with Anne, Claude, who became the new duchess upon her mother’s death in 1514. Realizing that he would never have a son, Louis arranged for his cousin and heir, François of Angoulême, to marry Claude, in the hopes that this marriage would finally complete the annexation of Brittany to France. The gamble paid off when Claude and François I’s son, Henri II, succeeded to the French throne in 1547. With the incorporation of Brittany, all the former English possessions, and some of the former Burgundian territories into the kingdom, France was stable for the first time in two centuries and could finally enter into the wider European political arena as a major player. The marriages that began in the mid-sixteenth century and continued until the end of the French monarchy in 1848 comprise the final phase of French royal history. Unlike in the previous three periods, the marriages of these three centuries encompass less expansionist or protectionist agendas and more a desire to maintain the balance of power in Europe. The major powers throughout this period were France (Valois and Bourbon), Austria (Habsburg), England/Great Britain (Tudor, Stuart, and Hanover), and Prussia (Hohenzollern). Smaller states, such as those of Scandinavia, Russia, Italy, and the Low Countries, sometimes grew influential enough to become substantial players in the balance of power, although none of them remained so throughout the period. The concept itself centered on the idea that no state in Europe should become so large that it could not be defeated by a coalition of the other states. As such, overt expansionism was replaced with aggressive diplomacy, and marriage played a key role in this scheme. For France, the marriage component of the strategy was fairly straightforward: kings and heirs primarily married into other great families, although it was sometimes more beneficial to marry into lesser families that could become a thorn in the sides of the major powers. The greatest rivals to the French kings throughout this period were the Habsburgs, and the two families intermarried on several occasions to keep each other in check. François I married as his second wife Eleanor of Austria as a part of the Peace of Cambrai between France and Austria in 1530 (Knecht 1994, 117). Fifty years later, Charles IX married Elisabeth of Austria as a part of a Catholic alliance against the Huguenots in France (Patrouch 2010). Later, Anne, daughter of the Habsburg Philip III of Spain, married Louis XIII in 1615 as part of a double marriage to ensure peace between France and Spain (Kleinman 1985). In what became a dangerous incestuousness between the two families, Louis and Anne’s son Louis XIV also married a Spanish bride, Maria Theresa, in 1660 to secure another peace between the two realms (Dunlop 1999, 47). This close relationship eventually led to a branch of the French royal family inheriting the Spanish Habsburg domains, prompting a long war with the Austrian Habsburgs (Falkner 2015). To ensure the future loyalty of Spain, Louis XV had his son, Louis the Dauphin, marry Maria Teresa Rafaela, a daughter of the new Spanish king, in 1744, in another double marriage (Bernier 1984, 132–33). Meanwhile, the marriage of Marie Antoinette of Austria to the future Louis XVI in 1770 made clear that the old strategy of balancing power with the Habsburgs remained firmly intact (Seward 1981, 25). An aversion to non-Catholic wives kept French kings from marrying into the families of Protestant and Orthodox great powers, so France chose to maintain the balance in Europe 70

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in other ways by marrying into smaller regional powers. For example, the marriage of Queen Mary of Scotland to François II in 1559 was intended to counter increasing threats against France by England while also ensuring a continued Catholic presence on Great Britain through the ultimate merger of the kingdoms of France, Scotland, and possibly England (Caroll 2009, 51–52). More generally, kings married for immediate returns. In addition to a seemingly genuine love for her, Henri III married Louise of Lorraine primarily to recruit Catholic allies to fight against the Huguenots (Carroll 2009, 227). Similarly, after his accession, Henri IV, the first Bourbon king of France, married Marie of the influential House of Medici in Tuscany in 1600 to get into the good graces of the papacy while also hoping for a reduction in the large amount of money he owed to the Medici bank (Pitts 2009, 230). All three marriages had immediate rewards, including not making enemies and retaining allies. The other marriages of this period were focused on countering Austrian and Russian power. Louis the Grand Dauphin, the eldest son of Louis XIV, married Maria Anna Christina Victoria, a daughter of the influential Elector of Bavaria. Their son, also named Louis, married a Savoyard princess, Marie Adelaide, to avoid a contiguous Austrian presence on France’s eastern border and secure a lasting peace between France and Savoy (Dunlop 1999, 333). Their son, Louis XV, was married in turn to Marie, a daughter of the disgraced Polish king Stanislaw, in 1725, in a match that was viewed at that time as safe since it would not tip the balance of power in any particular direction. The balance tipped, however, when Stanislaw regained the Polish throne eight years later (Dabrowski 2014, 243). The Polish policy was countered a generation later when Louis chose for his son’s second wife the daughter of the man who deposed Stanislaw the second time, Augustus III. The marriage of Maria Josepha to Louis the Dauphin in 1747 secured for France a Catholic ally in the East. The final marriage of a French heir occurred in 1837, when Ferdinand Philippe, the eldest son of Louis-Philippe, wed Helene of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, a Protestant liberal who was related through her sister-in-law to William III of Prussia, with whom the French king wished to ally in order to counter the rising power of the new Austrian Empire (Hervé 2007, 151). From the late tenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, the House of Capet rose from being feudal lords of a small royal fisc in northern West Francia to major power players on the European stage. And this evolution is nowhere more apparent than in the strategic marriages made between the kings and their heirs with the brides of Europe. In the beginning, the dynasty focused on targeted marriages that would bring prestige to the emerging royal house while consolidating its control over West Francia. This strategy expanded to marrying into the ruling houses of neighboring principalities, through which the Capetian dynasty was able to expand its influence and power into the French periphery. But such rapid growth prompted resistance, and for nearly two centuries France experienced intermittent civil war as the Capetians sought to pacify their wayward branches and stabilize the realm. Once stabilized, the kingdom became a major player in European politics, serving a key role in balancing the power of other great states largely through strategic marriage alliances. The queens of France together serve as a perfect reflection of the political history of the French kingdom from its post-Carolingian origins until its ultimate collapse.

Works Cited Note: Unless stated otherwise, all genealogical information, including ancestry, marriages, and children, is derived from Patrick Van Kerrebrouck and Christian Settipani, Nouvelle 71

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histoire généalogique de l’auguste maison de France, 4 vols (Villeneuve d’Ascq, France, 1993–2004).

Adair, Penelope Ann.  2003. “Constance of Arles: A  Study in Duty and Frustration.”  In  Capetian Women, edited by Kathleen Nolan, 9–26. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———.  2010. The Life and Afterlife of Isabeau of Bavaria. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 2012. “Between History and Fiction: Revisiting the Affaire de la Tour de Nesle.” Viator 43 (2): 165–92. https://doi.org/10.1484/J.VIATOR.1.102710. Autrand, Françoise. 1994. Charles V: Le Sage. Paris: Fayard. Baldwin, John W. 1986. The Government of Philip Augustus: Foundations of French Power in the Middle Ages. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bernier, Olivier. 1984. Louis the Beloved: The Life of Louis XV. New York: Doubleday & Company. ———. 2001. Those of My Blood: Creating Noble Families in Medieval Francia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 2002. “ ‘Eleanor’s Divorce from Louis VII,’ Eleanor of Aquitaine.” In Bonnie Wheeler and John Carmi Parsons, 223–35. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bouchard, Constance Brittain. 2002. “Eleanor’s Divorce from Louis VII: The Uses of Consanguinity.” In Eleanor of Aquitaine: Lord and Lady, edited by Bonnie Wheeler and John Carmi Parsons, 223–235. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Carroll, Stuart. 2009. Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dabrowski, Patrice M. 2014. Poland: The First Thousand Years. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press. Dunbabin, Jean. 2000. France in the Making. 2nd ed., 843–1180. Oxford: University Press. Dunlop, Ian. 1999. Louis XIV. London: Chatto & Windus. Falkner, James. 2015. The War of the Spanish Succession 1701–1714. Barnsley: Pen & Sword Book Company Military. Hallam, Elizabeth  M., and Charles  West.  2020.  Capetian  France. 3rd  ed.,  987–1328.  London: Routledge. Hervé, Robert.  2007. Les Princes  d’Orléans: Une Famille en Politique au XIXe Siècle. Paris: Economica. Kleinman, Ruth. 1985. Anne of Austria: Queen of France. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Knecht, Robert. 1994. Renaissance Warrior and Patron: The Reign of Francis I. Cambridge: University Press. Lang, Andrew. 2012. A Short History of Scotland. Andrews, UK: Luton. Le Goff, Jacques. 1996. Saint Louis. Paris: Gallimard. MacLean, Simon. 2015. “Cross-Channel Marriage and Royal Succession in the Age of Charles the Simple and Athelstan (c. 916–936).” In Empires: Elements of Cohesion and Signs of Decay (Medieval Worlds 2), edited by Walter Pohl, 26–44. Vienna: Austria Academy of Science Press. Patrouch, Joseph  F.  2010. Queen’s Apprentice: Archduchess  Elizabeth, Empress María, the Habsburgs, and the Holy Roman Empire 1554–1569. Leiden: Brill. Pitts, Vincent J. 2009. Henry IV of France: His Reign and Age. Baltimore, MA: Johns Hopkins University Press. Rohr, Zita Eva. 2016. “Yolande of Aragon (1381–1442) Family and Power: The Reverse of the Tapestry.” In Queenship and Power. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Seward, Desmond. 1981. Marie Antoinette. London: Constable and Company. Sharp, Sheila.  2001. “The West Saxon Tradition of Dynastic  Marriage: With  Special  Reference to Edward the Elder.” In Edward the Elder 899–924, edited by N. J. Higham and D. H. Hill, 79–88. London: Routledge. Sivéry, Gérard. 1995. Louis VIII Le Lion. Paris: Fayard. Spiegel, Gabrielle M. 1971. “The Reditus Regni Ad Stirpem Karoli Magni: A New Look.” French Historical Studies 7 (2): 145–74. https://doi.org/10.2307/285981. Sumption, Jonathan. 1990–2015. The Hundred Years War, 4 vols. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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The Queens’ Reflection Whaley, Derek  R.  2019.  “From a  Salic Law to the  Salic Law: The Creation and Recreation of the Royal  Succession  System of France.”  In  The Routledge History of Monarchy,  edited by Elena Woodacre et al., 443–64. London: Routledge. Woodacre, Elena. 2013. “The Queens  Regnant of Navarre: Succession, Politics, and Partnership, 1274–1512.” In Queenship and Power. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Zajac, Talia.  2016. “Marriage Impediments in Canon Law and Practice: Consanguinity Regulations and the Case of Orthodox-Catholic Intermarriage in Kyivan Rus, ca. 1000–1250.” In Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Congress of Medieval Canon Law, Toronto, 5–11 August 2012, edited by Joseph Goering, Stephan Dusil, and Andreas Thier, 711–30. Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.

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7 HISTORY AND THE SHAPING OF FRENCH IDENTITY IN THE LATER MIDDLE AGES Chris Jones

You do not need to look far to find Trojan origin myths or the exploits of Charlemagne in the cultural landscape of late medieval France. Colorful and idiosyncratic content abounds. A manuscript of Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie, completed in 1264, provides just one example. Serving as a “kind of extended pre-history” of France (Morrison 2011, 79), the story of Troy’s fall was transposed into the contemporary world and overlaid with the trappings of thirteenth-century chivalric culture: striking full-page illuminations depict a world of medieval kings, knights, and sieges.1 Historians debate how seriously – or literally – such accounts were taken. When the influential Dominican chronicler Vincent de Beauvais stated that Charlemagne’s squire (armiger) lived for over 300 years, were such outlandish claims really credited? The assertion this man died in the mid-twelfth ­century was certainly repeated frequently (Benedictines of Saint-Vaast 1624, 1102).2 It may be, as Gabrielle Spiegel has suggested, that when such legendary material was included in chronicles, it was because their compilers perceived their principal duty as being to pass on received truth: “to leave [such material] out would have been neglectful of that obligation to truth” (Spiegel 1997, 102). Interesting though the question is, the aim of this chapter is not to assess the extent to which the “facts” of history were appreciated in the Middle Ages. Rather, it is to highlight two key aspects of the way in which the Trojan and Carolingian past were understood by contemporaries that have not been appreciated fully and, in so doing, to cast new light on the factors that shaped senses of political identity in late medieval France. Whether or not every story that surrounded Troy and Charlemagne was considered strictly true, historians have long recognized the importance of both in late medieval French identity formation. Nor would it be novel to note that increased interest in both topics accompanied a rapid expansion of royal authority in the thirteenth and first half of the fourteenth century. Indeed, Elizabeth Morrison’s discussion of the aforementioned manuscript of Benoît’s Roman offers just one example of the way in which the growth and development of Capetian kingship can be tied to historical production. However, I would suggest that the relationship between France’s inhabitants and the past was more complex than is sometimes allowed. In recent years, Meredith Cohen has built a strong case for the complexity of Capetian architectural agendas and argued convincingly that royal projects DOI: 10.4324/9780367808471-8

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responded to broader trends in French society (Cohen 2015). As Cohen and others have challenged claims that there existed a single “court style” in art and architecture driven from the center, so too it is worth re-examining multiple understandings of the past in Capetian France.3 This chapter will suggest that conceptions of the Trojan settlement provide evidence for the way in which regional concerns played a key role in molding the presentation of the past. In so doing, they nuanced the political identities that developed in France in this period. In a similar fashion, attitudes toward the Carolingians, and Charlemagne in particular, reveal more than simply political agendas driven from the center; instead, they offer a window onto a range of concerns, including a deeper understanding of the relationship between legitimacy and royal power in the late medieval world. In recent decades, increasing attention has been paid to the link between perceptions of the past and political conceptions in late medieval France. The roots of this lie in the pioneering work of Bernard Guenée, who emphasized the value of chronicles as sources (Guenée 1980). We have been reminded, in particular, that historical narratives were contested. Gabrielle Spiegel, for example, highlights that vernacular accounts of the past were one stage on which the expansion of Capetian authority was resisted by, for example, the nobility of northern France (Spiegel 2010). Nevertheless, there is a tendency to assume that a portrait of the past favored by – or at least favorable to – the Capetians rolled out across the kingdom in lockstep with the extension of royal authority. This is understandable: a great many chroniclers gravitated into a Parisian orbit, and even those with no direct connection to the court drew on the resources of the abbey of Saint-Denis, a few miles north of the city. This center, from the time of Abbot Suger in the mid-twelfth century, produced a distinctive “Dionysian” historical vision that played a key role in shaping what in modern terms might be considered Capetian “public relations.” The Dionysian account of France’s Trojan origins is an excellent example of this. In 1274, the monk Primat completed his Roman des rois at Saint-Denis, a work begun, he tells us, at royal request. Charting the history of France from its beginnings up until the death of Philip II Augustus, the Roman would become, in the following century, the core of the Grandes Chroniques, the most widely distributed vernacular history of France in the later Middle Ages.4 The centrality of the Trojan origin myth is evident from the opening line of the first book: “Four hundred and four years before Rome was founded, Priam reigned in Troy the Great” (Viard 1920–53, 1: 9). There could be no doubt in anyone’s mind that France began with Troy. Indeed, in at least one early fourteenth-century manuscript, Primat’s prologue is preceded by a half-page illumination of the burning city.5 The Roman was written with a concern to ground Capetian kingship in a simple, essentially unbroken, and uncontested genealogy of royal rule. That concern led to a straightforward, linear presentation of the creation and rise of a Frankish kingdom by Trojan refugees. It was a portrait in which Gaul itself was described in some detail but whose original inhabitants were conspicuous by their absence (Viard 1920–53, 1: 18–25). The presence of a second people in the land that became France could only complicate matters. Primat’s solution was to gently erase the Gauls, not by some dramatic act of conquest, but by simple omission. From the end of the thirteenth century, the account presented in the Roman became an influential retelling of the Trojan origin myth in France (Beaune 1985, 27). And yet it was not the only version of the story to appear in this period. Geoffroi de Courlon was, like Primat, a member of the Benedictine order. In the first half of the 1290s, prior to his death

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circa 1295, Geoffroi completed a Latin universal chronicle at the abbey of Saint-Pierre-leVif in Sens, an important ecclesiastical center to the southeast of Paris. Along with a series of other historical projects, it is likely to have been part of a broader intellectual renaissance fostered by Étienne Bécard of Penoul, Archbishop of Sens from 1292 until 1309. While it did not circulate to the extent of the Grandes Chroniques, or even the Latin histories produced at Saint-Denis, Geoffroi’s account enjoyed considerable regional success (Jones 2016, 159–68). Like Primat, Geoffroi did not question the Trojan origins of the Franks. However, notably eschewing the chronicles of Saint-Denis as a source, the history written at SaintPierre-le-Vif presented an entirely different account of events. A long-standing insistence at Sens that a local saint, Saint Savinien, – and not Saint Denis – was responsible for introducing Christianity to Gaul could not have made the monks of Saint-Pierre-le-Vif particularly sympathetic to some aspects of the vision of the past promoted by their fellow Benedictines. While this alone may not be enough to explain Geoffroi’s failure to employ Saint-Denis’s chronicles, relations between the Dionysians and the cathedral of Sens were particularly strained in the 1290s. Shortly before Geoffroi began work, two of Saint-Denis’s monks had been sent to Sens to excommunicate one of the key members of the archbishop’s court; the mission ended with the king ordering an investigation into claims the monks had been assaulted (Jones 2016, 163). Whatever the impact of these events, the roots of Geoffroi’s version of France’s Trojan origins ultimately lie in the Pantheon of Godfrey of Viterbo, a universal history written in the late 1100s. Geoffroi subscribed to an agenda very different to that embraced by Primat: at the heart of Geoffroi’s chronicle lay a concept of “partnership,” not the promotion of Capetian authority. The result is a story of Trojan origins that reintroduces the Gauls while focusing on collaboration and mutual assimilation. In Geoffroi’s account, two separate kingdoms – one belonging to the Franks and the other to the Gauls – first coexisted and then merged. The princes and peers of the Gauls (principes et pares Galliarum) did homage to the Frankish king Pharamond and made him their own king. In case anyone missed the point, Pharamond’s early successors are described as succeeding “in the two kingdoms” (in utroque regno) (Julliot 1876, 186–88). Echoing a tradition originating in twelfth-century literary sources, Geoffroi noted that the Franks had brought their military skills and the benefits of a superior culture to the Gauls. Yet he departed from a tendency to paint this as a one-way process: the Frankish newcomers adopted the local language. Mention of this in the Pantheon had emphasized a connection between the Franks and the Romans; in Geoffroi’s reworking, the connection was now between the Franks and the Gauls (Jones 2016, 181). While the broad brushstrokes of Geoffroi’s account were not particularly original,6 the model he presented of two separate kingdoms that came together in a mutually beneficial partnership resonated strongly with other relationships presented throughout his chronicle. It reflected, for example, a similar partnership envisioned between the abbey of SaintPierre-le-Vif and the cathedral of Sens. While the chronicle’s basic structure, which was arranged by reigns of archbishops, might give the impression it was a throwback to the older genre of gesta episcoporum, Geoffroi’s account was more sophisticated. His own monastery featured alongside the bishops at the heart of the city’s history. The bishops were nearly always buried at Saint-Pierre-le-Vif, even if, as in the case of Savinien, this was the result of his later “translation,” that is, his ceremonial reburial after being declared a saint. Many of the more outstanding bishops, such as Saint Ebbon, had strong links to the monastery. When royal privileges were granted, Geoffroi recorded them as being accorded 76

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to both monastery and cathedral. And when disaster – material or spiritual – struck one, it invariably struck the other. Sens’s other religious establishments enjoy a minimal role at best. If a partnership between monastery and cathedral informed the way in which Geoffroi recounted history at the civic level, another, potentially surprising, partnership is found in his account at the macro level of world history: one between French kings and the German rulers of what continued to be called the “Roman” Empire. The histories, whether Latin or vernacular, written at Saint-Denis put the French Capetian kings at their center, almost always portrayed in the best possible light. Geoffroi, on the other hand, could launch a stinging attack on Louis VII for supporting the commune of Sens to the detriment of the city’s ecclesiastical communities (Julliot 1876, 476). Less dramatic, but perhaps more significant, France’s kings often appear as little more than incidental figures in Geoffroi’s account. For example, he scarcely mentioned Louis IX, even in connection to events in Sens, despite writing at a time of strenuous efforts to promote that king’s canonization. For Geoffroi’s contemporary, the Dionysian Guillaume de Nangis, Louis was not only central to his universal chronicle but was also made the subject of a separate life. Guillaume’s portrait of Louis highlights a significant difference in approach: it made the case for Louis’s sanctity by contrasting his actions with those of a “villainous” emperor, Frederick II (Jones 2006). Indeed, Dionysian accounts were littered with conflicts between French kings and rulers of the Empire. By contrast, Geoffroi’s chronicle is remarkable for the absence of any indication that conflict had ever arisen between French kings and emperors. He included one clash, between the emperor Otto II and the French king Lothar, but even that was amicably resolved by the latter’s decision to gift Lotharingia to the former (Julliot 1876, 370–72). In fact, Geoffroi’s conviction that the normal state of affairs between kingdom and empire was a peaceful one was so strong that he went so far as to airbrush out conflicts that he was, without doubt, aware of. The most notable example is the battle of Bouvines. This victory of Philip II over the emperor Otto IV in 1214, generally seen as a pivotal moment in the consolidation of French royal power and territorial control, was celebrated at Saint-Denis, where the contemporary description by Guillaume le Breton was incorporated into Primat’s Roman.7 Geoffroi had before him a detailed account of the confrontation in a work prepared by an earlier generation of monks at Saint-Pierre-le-Vif (Bautier, Gilles, and Bautier 1979, 228–30). While he certainly abbreviated and summarized from this latter (Jones 2016, 183), in the case of Bouvines, he departed notably from his source. For Geoffroi, the battle remained a great victory, but it became one that Philip won not over a German emperor but over a rebellious French baronage. Otto is as absent from Geoffroi’s account of Bouvines, as the Gauls are from Primat’s Roman. The most Geoffroi would concede was that on the same day, a fracas took place between Otto and a royal knight called “Gérard” after the former had invaded an unspecified part of the French kingdom. Contrary to his source, Geoffroi carefully separated this clash from his account of Bouvines and presented it as an incident that did not involve the French king (Julliot 1876, 508). Harmony prevails between king and emperor in Geoffroi’s chronicle, even at the expense of denying the Capetians one of their most significant triumphs. Here, as in the case of the Franks and the Gauls, Geoffroi’s model was of peaceful partnership. Geoffroi’s history was a reflection of regional identity and the particular concerns of his abbey. At its heart was a story rooted in successful, albeit often unequal, partnerships, whether these existed at the local or global level. Such a partnership was the normative state for the relationship between French kings and German emperors, just as it was between abbey and 77

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cathedral. It was a model whose template could be found in the partnership between Gauls and Franks. It was a model diametrically opposed to the pro-Capetian agenda articulated at Saint-Denis. And yet in other respects, the monks of Saint-Pierre-le-Vif and Saint-Denis could find common ground, as is clearly shown in their presentations of Carolingian emperors. In the early thirteenth century, a monk of Saint-Denis, Rigord, drew up a list of rulers of France as part of his history of Philip II’s reign. As such lists go, it is not remarkable: “Who [engendered] King Pipin. Who [engendered] the Emperor Charlemagne. Who [engendered] the Emperor Louis the Pious. Who [engendered] the Emperor Charles the Bald” (Carpentier, Pon, and Chauvin 2006, 204). The most interesting feature is what happened to this list some 60 years later. Rigord’s work, like much of the abbey’s Latin output, was “recycled” in translation as part of the Roman des rois. Primat, however, clearly felt that Rigord had overlooked some important details. His revised list runs: “This Pepin [engendered] the great Charlemagne, who was king and emperor. Charles the Great [engendered] Louis, who was king and emperor. This Louis [engendered] Charles the Bald, who was king and emperor” (Viard 1920–53, 6: 140). Primat highlighted – by addition – that Charlemagne, his son, and his grandson had all been kings of France as well as emperors. This seemingly minor modification adds to our understanding of the significance attributed to the Carolingians in late medieval France and calls into question the standard modern interpretation of the role of Charlemagne, in particular, in that era’s thought. Primat’s interpolation was part of a trend. The phrase rois et empereres to describe the Carolingians who were considered to have been both kings of France and Roman emperors crops up again and again, notably in the Grandes Chroniques. As the latter emerged in its definitive form toward the middle of the fourteenth century, the tag was employed whenever the Carolingian rulers were mentioned. Thus, it reported that when Philip VI came to Saint-Denis armed and prepared for battle, he was the first to do so since Charlemagne, “who,” it noted casually, “was king and emperor” (Viard 1920–53, 9: 277). The trend was not restricted to the Dionysians. At Sens in the 1290s, Geoffroi de Courlon similarly applied the label “king and emperor,” the only difference being that he sometimes departed from the strict word order observed at Saint-Denis. Charles the Bald, for example, was a “king of the Franks” who was made “emperor of the Romans,” but equally, Charles the Fat was “emperor and king of the Franks” (Julliot 1876, 290, 306). The distinction between the two roles was, however, clearly important to Geoffroi: the list of rulers of the Empire provided at the beginning of his chronicle meticulously employed the label rex Francorum or rex Alemannie. And Geoffroi even offered a careful explanation of the distinction between kings and emperors, drawing attention to the importance of papal benediction in the creation of the latter (Julliot 1876, 20–22, 322). The imposition on the Carolingian world of what was unquestionably an anachronistic separation between royal and imperial roles was not restricted to chronicles. A  striking instance, one which clearly demonstrated Capetian support for the idea, is found in the labels that once accompanied the statues of kings that lined the Grand’salle constructed at the heart of the Palais-de-la-Cité by Philip IV in the early fourteenth century. The label accompanying Charlemagne noted that he was the “King, [who] obtained the Empire of the Romans.” His son and grandson were both labelled as reigning as “King and Emperor.”8 Through this seemingly minor point, we can open up a new discussion of the general significance of the Carolingians to this later period. The modern approach to understanding Charlemagne’s late medieval significance was established by Robert Folz in the 1950s. It informs the work of a diverse range of later 78

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historians and remains dominant.9 Folz observed – correctly – that the thirteenth century witnessed an upsurge of interest in Charlemagne. He interpreted this through a strictly Capetian lens, believing that it reflected royal ambitions to expand at the expense of the contemporary Empire, providing both stimulus and justification. The series of imperial candidatures between the 1270s and the 1330s, in which French kings repeatedly attempted to acquire the imperial throne for themselves or their relatives, was only the most melodramatic expression of this. At the same time, Folz also believed that interest in Charlemagne was important fuel for arguments in favor of the independence of the French kingdom from any form of wider temporal authority, at a time when new ideas about states and their conceptual boundaries were emerging (Folz 1950, 279, 1953, 148–49). There is no doubt that there existed considerable interest in drawing a connection between Charlemagne and the contemporary Capetians in this period. On the other hand, there is little evidence that anyone in northern France – least of all the Capetians themselves – used Charlemagne as a stepping stone to draw a connection with expansion at the expense of the contemporary Empire or to make an argument for French independence. In 1273, the ruler of Sicily, Charles d’Anjou, attempted to convince his uncle, the new French king Philip III, to pursue an imperial candidature that would have pitted Philip against Rudolph of Habsburg and Alfonso X of Castile. Charles drew up a long list of reasons why his nephew should consider claiming the imperial throne. Neither Charlemagne nor any other Carolingian is so much as alluded to (Jones 2003, 2011). This omission struck Folz as notable, yet the connection with the Empire was, he thought, so obvious that Charles simply did not need to state it (Folz 1950, 306). It is certainly true that the dots between the Capetians, Charlemagne, and the contemporary Empire were drawn in some quarters: Italian supporters of Charles d’Anjou’s invasion of southern Italy did so enthusiastically (Folz 1950, 298–304). There is, however, little to suggest their contemporaries in France did the same. The only writer who made the connection directly in a work intended for northern French consumption – Andrew of Hungary – had strong connections to Charles and southern Italy (Jones 2007, 151).10 I would suggest that there is an alternative explanation for the increasing interest in Charlemagne and the Carolingians more generally, one that better fits the available evidence. There was, without doubt, a significant expansion of royal authority under the later Capetians (Strayer 1980). And yet it may be questioned whether French kings were committed to the ruthless policy of expansion that is sometimes attributed to them. Often overlooked is the fact that the Capetians chose to give up control of much territory in the east, notable examples being the marquisate of Provence and the county of Burgundy. The Capetian “policy” in these years is probably better characterized as “consolidation” rather than “expansion” and was arguably about asserting rights over territory that was perceived to lie within the French kingdom; it was not about expanding borders beyond France (Jones 2007, chap. 7). In short, there was little need to find a legitimizing principle to justify French expansion eastward. While eastward expansion was certainly taking place, it was generally framed as an assertion of Capetian rights within the borders of France, not the aggressive annexation of imperial territory. When attempting to understand the place of the Carolingian emperors in contemporary French thought, it is worth returning to the fact they were “kings” as well as “emperors.” Primat’s bold interpolation was part of a broad trend embraced not only by the Capetians but, as frequently, also by those who critiqued them. Charlemagne, for example, was often portrayed as “king” to the exclusion of any other characteristics. In 1246, for example, in 79

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preparing a manifesto against clerical abuses, a group of French barons omitted Charlemagne’s imperial title altogether; he was simply another king of France. The following year, we see exactly the same approach adopted by the king himself in the so-called “Protest of Saint Louis.” When the historian and poet Geoffroy de Paris wanted to use Charlemagne as an exemplar to criticize Louis X, he likewise failed to include any hint of an imperial connection. And in 1317, the Latin verses that closed Ives de Saint-Denis’s chronicle – a work commissioned by Philip IV and presented to another of his sons, Philip V – list Charlemagne alongside Clovis, again, as simply one in the line of French kings from whom Philip was descended.11 This is not to say that a conscious effort was being made in later Capetian France to erase or ignore the fact that Charlemagne had acquired the imperial title. Chroniclers from Vincent de Beauvais to Primat share a common tendency to truncate the first 30 years of Charlemagne’s reign to focus on the relatively brief period he spent as emperor (Jones 2007, 157). Being emperor was by no means insignificant; it was worthy of note and, indeed, was highlighted when appropriate. It added luster to Charlemagne’s kingship: as Primat had established, Charlemagne was king and emperor. But he was king first and foremost. Yet if the imperial office was not seen as the defining feature of his reign, the explanation for an undoubted rising interest in Charlemagne in these years must be sought elsewhere. Part of the reason for increasing interest in both Charlemagne and the Carolingians more generally in the thirteenth century had little to do with the Capetians. Or at least little to do with them directly. It was driven by religious institutions for whom a connection with the Carolingians offered a means to authenticate their relics. Examples can be found at both Saint-Pierre-le-Vif and Saint-Denis. Geoffroi de Courlon employed Charlemagne to support the authenticity of a gift of relics and lands to the cathedral and the transfer of relics to another of Sens’s monasteries, Sainte-Colombe (Julliot 1876, 274, 278).12 At Saint-Denis, the case of the theft of the Holy Nail, a relic gifted to the abbey by Charles the Bald, regis Franciae et imperatoris Romani, offers a parallel case. The story of the theft was first included in a life of Louis IX (Daunou and Naudet 1840, 20: 320). It was retained by translators and compilers working at the abbey as this text was integrated into later versions of the Grandes Chroniques. However, when the abbey’s chronicles came more directly under royal supervision in the fourteenth century, it was, notably, one of several “peripheral” items connected purely with the abbey’s interests to be trimmed and/or cut (Jones 2007, 168). The monks of Saint-Denis also employed Charlemagne to cement the present-day importance of their institution by fabricating an association between the Carolingian emperor and the French coronation regalia, of which they were the guardians. The idea that the French coronation sword was in fact Charlemagne’s sword, Joyeuse, originated in the Roman des rois. Primat’s translation of Rigord’s account of Philip II’s coronation is, like his modification of ruler lists, another example of “improvement by addition.” In this case, Primat simply added Joyeuse to proceedings; the sword is absent in Rigord’s account (Compare Viard 1920–53, 6: 103 with Carpentier, Pon, and Chauvin 2006, 140). The project was remarkably successful. Guillaume de Nangis’s later account indicated that by Philip III’s actual coronation in 1271, the sword’s new identity had completed its transition from fiction to reality (Jones 2007, 165–66). For the Capetians themselves, a concern with similar themes of legitimacy and selfpromotion lay at the heart of their own interest in Charlemagne and other Carolingians. Yet it was not an interest in justifying expansion; their problem was simpler. It reflected 80

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an increased interest in establishing the legitimacy of the Capetian dynasty itself. This is evident in the range of projects in which the dynasty engaged, as has been amply demonstrated by Elizabeth Brown. For Louis IX, the aim was to demonstrate that the Capetians had returned to the line of Charlemagne in the person of his father, Louis VIII. This led to an elaborate re-arrangement of the royal tombs at Saint-Denis and the promotion of the “return to the line of Charlemagne” concept via works like Vincent de Beauvais’s Speculum historiale. Philip IV pursued the same agenda with an entirely different strategy, one that was expressed in a near-obsessive attempt to erase the work of his grandfather in order to demonstrate an unbroken line of French kingship. This led to the further re-arrangement of the royal tombs (Brown 1985, 1990). With the possible exception of Philip II, the consistent approach of the later Capetians was to focus on linking themselves into a line of French kings, of which Charlemagne and his descendants were an integral part. Capetian efforts were a reflection of a society increasingly concerned with how legitimate authority was exercised, and which had come to regard “continuity” in much the same way that modern liberal democracies regard free and fair elections: as the only acceptable mandate for the exercise of power. Those concerns can be seen reflected in the pages of French chronicles when addressing the problem of how one dynasty might succeed another. There was, for example, near unanimity on the northern French page when celebrating Charles d’Anjou’s displacement of the Sicilian king Manfred in 1266. Manfred was, in the technical sense, a bastard; it was quite clear to France’s chroniclers that he did not have the right to rule Sicily (Jones 2007, 191–93). Equally, chronicles—and in particular those that felt the gravitational pull of the court—displayed considerable disquiet at the disinheritance two years later of the last legitimate Hohenstaufen heir to southern Italy, Conradin. Their authors were at pains to point out that Charles, responsible in reality for ordering Conradin’s execution, was not really culpable at all: it was the work of advisors, of lawyers, or even of the citizens of Naples (Jones 2007, 196–97). As the thirteenth century progressed, the status of the Carolingians as French kings became something to be affirmed, whether actively, by those in the Capetian orbit, or passively, by those beyond it. This was because Charlemagne in particular had become a hitching post to which the legitimate exercise of power, and hence the stability of the French kingdom, was tethered. Primat’s addition of “king” to Rigord’s list of rulers was not so much an act of Capetian propaganda as it was a simple recognition of the common consensus. That, similarly, Geoffroi de Courlon chose to emphasize that Charlemagne, like other Carolingian emperors, had been a “king” reflected fundamental underlying assumptions about legitimate political organization. Like the re-telling of France’s Trojan origin myth, stories of King Charlemagne, even outlandish ones, were not simply desirable additions that gave a historical account its piquance; they were essential ingredients that reinforced an underlying framework of continuity that legitimized the exercise of power. A claim that “history” and “identity” are linked is nothing new. This chapter has, however, argued that two points are easily overlooked when examining the way in which history shaped identity in late medieval France. The first is the level of regional variation that should be recognized in any discussion of concepts of “French” identity. We often equate Paris with France and a Parisian perspective with a Capetian perspective in this period. Comparison with the historical landscape as seen from Sens reminds us that what constituted “history” remained a moving target shaped by regional concerns. The second point is that it is worth emphasizing, much as is the case in current debates surrounding the existence of a “court style” in art and architecture, that history was not simply the product of 81

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a royal agenda. The concerns of French kings were, themselves, reflections of broader attitudes in French society. When both Geoffroi de Courlon and Guillaume de Nangis repeated the story of Charlemagne’s 300-year-old squire, it was, on one level, preposterous (Géraud 1843, 1:29; Julliot 1876, 472);13 but it also offers an insight into their understanding of what constituted French identity and an indication of the level of complexity and sophistication with which the past was understood.

Notes 1 For example: Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS français 1610, fol. 17v. Available to view via Gallica, accessed October  18, 2022, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b10507221g/f42.item. For the narrative recounted in this folio: Morrison (2011, 83). As Gabrielle Spiegel puts it, “this newly enlarged domain of the past, receding back into classical antiquity, was relentlessly rewritten in the image of medieval chivalry” (Spiegel 2010, 46). 2 For a project to catalogue all of Jean des Temps’s appearances: Bernard Gineste et al. (2003–06). “Jean d’Étampes a-t-il vécu 361 ans? ou: La légende du Mathusalem étampois,” Corpus Étampois, last modified May 2012, www.corpusetampois.com/che-16-legendedejeandetampes.html#gineste. 3 The concept of the “court style” was first proposed in Branner (1965). 4 The long-standing assumption that the Roman was commissioned by Louis IX has been questioned recently. For a re-evaluation of the work, one that argues for its Dionysian agenda: Guenée (2016). 5 Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS  français 10132, fol. 19r. Available to view via Gallica, accessed October 18, 2022, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b90632136/f24.item. 6 Although Beaune does not discuss Geoffroi’s case, for a broad overview of the Trojan origin myth and particular discussion of the Gauls in later accounts, in some of which they were attributed Trojan ancestry: Beaune (1985, 24–25). For more detailed discussion: Wolf (2009). 7 The classic account of Bouvines remains: Duby (2005). For the battle’s reception in a range of chronicles: Guyot-Bachy (2010). Although the latter does not discuss the case considered here, Guyot-Bachy highlights the importance of the distinction between regional and Parisian perceptions of Capetian involvement in Flanders. 8 These survive only in a sixteenth-century transcription: Bennert (1992, 59). 9 However, for a significant new re-assessment of Charlemagne’s role in constructing imperial authority prior to the mid-thirteenth century: Latowsky (2013); and more generally: Jostkleigrewe (2009). 10 It is possible the Dominican Gérard de Frachet drew a similar link, but if so, it was confined to a manuscript tradition with strong links to southern Italy: Jones (2007, 151–57). 11 For these four instances and further examples: Jones (2007, 169–70). 12 Geoffroi was rather vague about the exact nature of these gifts. 13 Geoffroi’s account does not appear in Gineste’s catalogue; it is likely it was adapted from Martin of Troppau’s chronicle rather than from Vincent de Beauvais directly.

References Primary Sources Bautier, Robert-Henri, Monique Gilles, and Anne-Marie Bautier, eds. and trans. 1979. Chronique de Saint-Pierre-le-Vif, dite de Clarius. Chronicon Sancti Petri vivi Senonensis. Paris: CNRS. Benedictines of Saint-Vaast of Arras, ed. 1624. “Speculum historiale.” In Bibliotheca mundi, seu venerabilis viri Vincentii Burgundi ex ordine Praedicatorum, episcopi Bellovacensis, Speculum quadruplex, naturale, doctrinale, morale, historiale, 4 vols., vol. 4. Douai: B. Belleri. Carpentier, Élisabeth, Georges Pon, and Yves Chauvin, eds. and trans. 2006. Rigord. Histoire de Philippe Auguste. Paris: CNRS. Daunou, Pierre Claude François, and Joseph Naudet. 1840. “Gesta sanctae memoriae Ludovici regis Franciae; auctore Guillelmo de Nangiaco – Vita Sancti Ludovici regis Franciae.” In Recueil des historiens des gaules et de la France, 24 vols, vol. 20, 309–464. Paris: Imprimerie royale.

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History and Shaping of French Identity in Later Middle Ages Géraud, Hercule, ed. 1843. Chronique latine de Guillaume de Nangis de 1113 à 1300 avec les continuations de cette chronique de 1300 à 1368, 2 vols. Paris: Société de l’Histoire de France. Julliot, Gustave, ed. and trans. 1876. Chronique de l’abbaye de Saint-Pierre-le-Vif de Sens rédigée vers la fin du XIIIe siècle par Geoffroy de Courlon. Sens: Duchemin. Viard, Jules, ed. 1920–53. Les Grandes Chroniques de France, 10 vols. Paris: Société de l’Histoire de France.

Secondary Sources Beaune, Colette. 1985. Naissance de la nation France. Paris: Gallimard. Bennert, Uwe. 1992. “Art et propagande politique sous Philippe IV le Bel: le cycle des rois de France dans la Grand’salle du palais de la Cité.” Revue de l’art 97: 46–59. Branner, Robert. 1965. St Louis and the Court Style in Gothic Architecture. London: A. Zwemmer. Brown, Elizabeth A. R. 1985. “Burying and Unburying the Kings of France.” In Persons in Groups: Social Behaviour as Identity formation in Medieval and Renaissance Europe. Papers of the Sixteenth Annual Conference of the Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, edited by R. C. Trexler, 241–66. Binghamton, NY: State University of New York at Binghamton Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies. ———. 1990. “Vincent de Beauvais and the reditus regni francorum ad stirpem Caroli imperatoris.” In Vincent de Beauvais: Intentions et réceptions d’une oeuvre encyclopédique au Moyen-Âge (Actes du XIVe Colloque de l’Institut d’études médiévales, organisé conjointement par l’Atelier Vincent de Beauvais (A.R.Te.M., Université de Nancy II) et l’Institut d’études médiévales (Université de Montréal) 27–30 avril 1988), edited by Serge Lusignan, Monique Paulmier-Foucart, and Alain Nadeau, 167–96. Paris: Vrin. Cohen, Meredith. 2015. The Sainte-Chapelle and the Construction of Sacral Monarchy: Royal Architecture in Thirteenth-Century Paris. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Duby, Georges. 2005. Le dimanche de Bouvines. 27 juillet 1214, preface by Pierre Nora, new ed. Paris: Gallimard. Folz, Robert. 1950. Le souvenir et la légende de Charlemagne dans l’empire germanique médiéval. Paris: Les Belles lettres. ———. 1953. L’idée d’empire en Occident du Ve au XIVe siècle. Paris: Aubier. Guenée, Bernard. 1980. Histoire et culture historique dans l’Occident médiéval. Paris: Aubier Montaigne. ———. 2016. Comment on écrit l’histoire au XIIIe siècle. Primat et le Roman des roys. Paris: CNRS. Guyot-Bachy, Isabelle. 2010. “De Bouvines à Roosebecke: quel souvenir les historiens gardent-ils des batailles du roi en Flandre (XIIIe siècle-début XVIe siècle).” In Une histoire pour un royaume (XIIe-XVe siècle), edited by Anne-Hélène Allirot, Murielle Gaude-Ferragu, Gilles Lecuppre, Elodie Lequain, Lydwine Scordia, and Julien Véronèse, 51–65. Paris: Perrin. Jones, Chris. 2003 “. . .mais tot por le servise Deu? Philippe III le Hardi, Charles d’Anjou and the 1273/74 Imperial Candidature.” Viator 34: 208–28. ———. 2006. “The Role of Frederick II in the works of Guillaume de Nangis.” In Representations of Power in Medieval Germany, c. 700–c. 1500, edited by Björn K. Weiler and Simon MacLean, 273–94. Turnhout: Brepols. ———. 2007. Eclipse of Empire? Perceptions of the Western Empire and Its Rulers in Late Medieval France. Turnhout: Brepols. ———. 2011. “Understanding Political Conceptions in the Later Middle Ages: The French Imperial Candidatures and the Idea of the Nation-State.” Viator 42 (2): 83–114. ———. 2016. “Geoffroi of Courlon and Political Perceptions in Late Medieval France.” Viator 47 (1): 153–89. Jostkleigrewe, Georg. 2009. Das Bild des Anderen. Entstehung und Wirkung deutsch-französischer Fremdbilder in der volkssprachlichen Literatur und Historiographie des 12. bis 14. Jahrhunderts. Berlin: de Gruyter. Latowsky, Anne A. 2013. Emperor of the World. Charlemagne and the Construction of Imperial Authority, 800–1229. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Morrison, Elizabeth. 2011. “Linking Ancient Troy and Medieval France: Illuminations of An Early Copy of the Roman de Troie.” In Medieval Manuscripts, Their Makers and Users: A Special Issue

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Chris Jones of Viator in Honor of Richard and Mary Rouse, edited by Henry Ansgar Kelly, 77–102. Turnhout: Brepols. Spiegel, Gabrielle M. 1997. The Past as Text. The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press. ———. 2010. “The Textualization of the Past in Thirteenth-Century French Historical Writing.” In Imagining the Past in France. History in Manuscript Painting, 1250–1500, edited by Elizabeth Morrison and Anne D. Hedeman, 43–51. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum. Strayer, Joseph R. 1980. The Reign of Philip the Fair. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wolf, Kordula. 2009. Troja-Metamorphosen eines Mythos. Französische, englische und italienische Überlieferungen des 12. Jahrhunderts im Vergleich. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.

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8 NATIONHOOD AND NATIONALISM IN FRENCH HISTORY WRITING Franks, Gallo-Romans, and the Shaping of the Roman National Camille Creyghton and Matthew D’Auria Nations are always conceived of as narratives. As such, they have a beginning, usually a mythical or even miraculous origin, a main body, and a conclusion, which is often a glorious future. As continuous social constructions of a group’s identity, such narratives create boundaries, deciding the “us” and “them” through complex processes and with unpredictable outcomes. As a sensemaking activity, narrating always has a moral purpose, according to the philosopher of history Hayden White, and this is surely the case with national narratives. Their aim is, in most cases at least, to form “good” citizens or even loyal soldiers – an aim patently evident in, for example, nineteenth-century history books, in Europe and beyond. The specific way in which this purpose is attained is by forging a bond between the actors in the narratives and their recipients, creating deep emotional connections, so that these latter might view themselves as part of a historical community. In discourses about the nation, the empathic bond derives its strength from references to the great family of the nation, to its antiquity, to its sacredness, and to past sacrifices made for its sake. References to ethnic pasts, myths, and memories contribute to those processes of inclusion and exclusion that are so crucial to shaping the way a nation conceives of itself. In this process, historians play a vital and substantive role in deciding how the events forming the national narrative are portrayed and, hence, which elements, religious, linguistic, ethnic, cultural, constitute the nation’s identity. Crucially, this identity-formation process requires the veiling of such a decision since a society could not function if it were aware of the fact that its shape is but one possibility among many. Concealing the arbitrary nature of a nation’s identity strengthens the social bond and allows a community to overcome its inner divisions. From this angle, with her or his work, a historian might help strengthen a nation’s identity, repeating and reaffirming the dominant national narrative as it is and thus heighten its aura of objectivity. On the other hand, he or she might question and problematize the main narrative, showing it for what it actually is – one story among other (untold) stories – and might replace it with a different narrative. All this holds true for most nations and most national narratives. As we shall see, it is certainly the case with France. 85

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Thinking the Nation’s Past in Ancien Régime France The ways in which a nation conceives of its past are inextricably tied to political circumstances as well as to shifts in historical scholarship. In the case of early modern France, the official narrative, promoted by state authorities and accepted by most scholars, was centered on the king and the higher aristocracy, who were seen, until the sixteenth century, as the descendants of a group of survivors from Troy (mirroring the mythical origins of Rome) or, until the eighteenth century, as the offspring of ancient Germanic tribes. Such stories were maintained for political purposes. But no less relevant were intellectual reasons – the two, often, intertwining. Here, the issue of the aims of historical scholarship was crucial. Well into the eighteenth century, history could still be understood as a literary form and an artful and “truthful” narrative. Consequently, many historians believed that their duty was to present the works of their worthiest predecessors, simply amending details and embellishing the narrative. Partly for such a reason, the official national narrative was preserved and passed down from one generation of scholars to another, cast within the same old mold. Indeed, the authority of historiographical tradition was an obstacle to radical changes. Yet the difficulty of offering new readings of the past was also a consequence of the limited access to primary sources: state authorities controlled most archives and libraries. The whole issue ultimately pertained to the independence of the historian and posed the question of who ruled over the nation’s past (D’Auria 2020). Since the official national narrative was centered on the king and his ministers, understanding the reasons behind the main events taking place within the kingdom meant having to investigate the rulers’ deeds and intentions. The père Gabriel Daniel, writing in the early eighteenth century, was adamant that the subject matter of the nation’s history should be the state and the king. Individuals had a part in it only inasmuch as they had a relationship to the state or the king. To a degree, underlying such views about the history of France was the assumption, still widespread at that time, that the nation’s unity was a product of the king’s symbolic body. Only through the latter could a shapeless multitude of individuals – who shared little else than being subject to the same king – imagine themselves as a community. Their shared history was thus to be sought in the royal lineage, the common thread tying countless generations of French men and women into a seemingly coherent narrative. The efforts of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century antiquaries, historians, and philosophers to pursue a more critical approach to the study of the past led to the emergence of various counternarratives pitted against the royalist narrative. One author who went to great lengths to contest the royalist narrative, and who did so prompted by political as well as intellectual concerns, was the Count Henri de Boulainvilliers, whose works were mainly published posthumously, in the 1720s and 1730s (Ellis 1988; Furet and Ozouf 1984). Like his fellow scholars Bernard de Fontenelle, François Fénelon, and Nicolas Fréret, Boulainvilliers was part of a momentous intellectual shift, often referred to as the “crisis of the European mind” (Hazard 2013). The claim was then made that reason, more than authority, religion or tradition, should guide man’s quest for truth, and that contesting all received knowledge was a scholar’s first duty. In line with such views, Boulainvilliers believed that the proper study of history required unrestricted access to primary sources and the willingness to criticize the works of other scholars, no matter how eminent they were. Moreover, as he saw it, the main aim of the study of the past was not that of recounting memorable events or imparting moral lessons through the deeds of famous 86

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personages. On the contrary, its purpose was to shed light on the deep-seated causes of historical change. From this angle, Boulainvilliers was particularly skeptical of those monarchical histories that pretended to narrate the nation’s history by focusing on the lives and deeds of kings and ministers. Scholars had instead to grasp the nation’s spirit (génie) and the dominant ideas and passions. This was a clear indictment of the identification of king and nation within the royalist narrative. Of course, such a censuring, in Boulainvilliers’s case, came from an advocate of the rights of the aristocracy in its struggle against the Crown’s encroachments. Indeed, weakening the identification of king and nation would have meant legitimizing the nobility’s own political claims. But many others, also with different political beliefs, subscribed to such views – and Voltaire was of their number. In his reading of the French past, Boulainvilliers claimed that the nation’s origins lay in the conquest, by the Franks, of the Gallo-Romans at the dawn of the Empire. The members of the present-day nobility were essentially the descendants of the conquering tribes, while the commoners were the progeny of the Gallo-Romans. He conceded that during the feudal age, a series of rights and duties had come to bind together the two “races.” However, since time immemorial, the aristocracy had defended the French people – including, that is, the commoners – against their enemies, cementing the nation through its sacrifices on the battlefield and faithfully serving its kings. France owed its existence to its nobility, which, then, thoroughly deserved its rights. As for the commoners, they were denied any real merit, having devoted their lives to their individual petty interests rather than to serving the nation – or so the count contended. Within such a scheme, the French kings were the descendants of the rulers of the Germanic tribes, whose authority, according to Boulainvilliers, had originally been limited, grounded as it was on the Frankish love of freedom. He could not but deplore the debasing of the French nobility, a pallid image of its great ancestors, who had allowed its kings to become despots. Boulainvilliers’s works contributed to shaping two opposite interpretations of the nation’s past. On the one hand, the Germanists, reiterating the count’s arguments, maintained that the nobility, as the heirs of the Germanic conquerors of the Gauls, deserved their rights. On the other, the so-called Romanists argued for a continuity between the Roman rulers and the Frankish kings, who had not conquered Gaul but had simply become allies of the Romans, adopting their norms and laws. In this reasoning, the distance between nobility and commoners was downplayed while, in turn, that between the king, here the formal heir of the Roman rulers, and his noblemen was increased. As might be expected, such arguments were usually espoused by the advocates of the rights of the Crown who, furthermore, sustained the thesis of an alliance, from the twelfth century onward, between the townsmen and the Crown to counter the power of the nobility. Among the most important and strenuous advocates of the latter views was the abbé Dubos. His ideas were, in many ways, antithetical to Boulainvilliers’s, and he set out in his Histoire critique de l’établissement de la monarchie française dans les Gaules (Critical History of the Establishment of the French Monarchy in Gaul) (1734), in the main, to refute the count’s thesis. However, just like his opponent, he focused on the customs, the usages, and the alleged character of the Gallo-Romans and the Franks. Crucially, by doing so, he was implicitly dismissing the royalist paradigm and accepting that the unity of the French lay in their shared usages, language, and traditions rather than in the king’s immortal body (Kaiser 1989). From this angle, it is revealing that the Baron de Montesquieu, whose works were instrumental in forging this new understanding of the relationship between society

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and the state and between the nation and the king, also took part in the quarrel over the origins of France, and that in the Esprit des lois (The Spirit of the Laws) (1748), he dissected Boulainvilliers’s and Dubos’s “systems” (Cox 1983). A  few years later, the abbé Mably also became involved in the debate. As he saw it, the Franks had defeated the Empire and had then merged, over the centuries, with the Gallo-Romans. A  brave and warring tribe, the Franks communicated to the entire nation their love of freedom – a sentiment, Mably maintained, that had gradually been lost and that modern Frenchmen were called upon to restore. The abbé’s was an almost “democratic” reading of the nation’s origins, since it denied any real merit to the distinction between noblemen and commoners as well as any continuity between the French monarchy and the Roman Empire. It was partly for these reasons that Mably’s views became popular among the members of the Third Estate during the Revolution. Yet overall, it is worth noting that the recourse to the past as a source of legitimacy, on the part of the Third Estate, remained marginal. It is telling that the abbé de Sieyès, when referring to the Romanist and the Germanist theses of the nation’s origins, famously wrote in his Qu’est-ce que le tiers-état (What is the Third Estate) (1789) that, even conceding that the ancient Franks had conquered Gaul and subdued its people, the Third Estate now enjoyed the strength of number, and so he asked his readers, why should it not repatriate to the German Franconian forests all those families that still claimed descent from conquerors and thus the inheriting of their rights? Tradition as a source of political legitimacy, at least in these discourses, had been set aside (Sewell 1994).

Looking at the Nation’s Past through the Lens of the Revolution The question of the nation’s origins and the historical legitimacy of its institutions was rekindled in the aftermath of the Revolution (Crossley 1993). The first important work to do so was by the Count de Montlosier. His De la monarchie française (Of the French Monarchy) had originally been commissioned by Napoleon to bolster the legitimacy of the Empire, but its argument for the merits of feudal rule in limiting royal authority meant that it could only be published after the 1814 Restoration. Montlosier’s ideas are often seen as a reiteration of Boulainvilliers’s, not least because he wrote at length on the division of France into two races, the nobility and the commoners, stemming from the Frankish conquest. In truth, the conquest itself had a rather marginal role in the argument, while much more emphasis was placed on the slow emergence of feudal rule, a process lasting centuries and shaping a compound system of duties, rights, and a complex social hierarchy that received the count’s high praise. The publication of Montlosier’s book prompted many reactions. For instance, the leading liberal François Guizot attempted to refute it by claiming that, in the aftermath of the invasion of the Gallic lands, a new nation emerged, formed of the Franks, the high clergy, and those wealthy and powerful Gauls whom the Franks accepted as their equals. All these took part in the national assemblies, while the commoners were excluded, having no political existence of their own. However, over the centuries, thanks to the growth of trade, industry, and the effects of Christianity, the lower classes gained political influence as towns grew wealthier and commoners and burghers obtained municipal liberties from kings and lords. It was only through its relentless struggle against the nobility that the Third Estate came into existence as a political and social actor. In fact, argued Guizot, its existence did not date back to the conquest but was instead the outcome of centuries of sacrifice, hard work, and struggle. The Third Estate had finally turned against the nobility during the 88

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Revolution. Guizot’s history was one of a clash between “classes” – more so than between “races” – a struggle that could help shed new light on the French past and clearly show which actor truly embodied the nation and its history. The latter question was most fully addressed in the works of the Romantic and liberal author Augustin Thierry (Smithson 1973). In his reading of the French past, Thierry adopted Boulainvilliers’s arguments over an original war between the Franks and the GalloRomans and the notion that the initial struggle had finally led to the opposition between the Third Estate and the nobility. That granted, however, Thierry then radically overturned the count’s thesis. Indeed, he argued, it was the descendants of the Gallo-Romans who had built modern France and defended it from its enemies. For Thierry, resolutely condemning the identification of king and nation, the Revolution had finally shown that the history of the Third Estate, which embodied the nation, was the true story of France itself. To overcome the difficulty of replacing the king’s symbolic body with the Third Estate, Thierry offered his readers a simplified version of his views in a short essay of 1820, the “Histoire véritable de Jacques Bonhomme” (“The true history of Jacques Bonhomme”), the biography of a fictional peasant, from the creation of France to the Revolution. The name had been used for centuries, contemptuously, by the nobility to indicate a brutish, ignorant, and simple-minded peasantry. But in Thierry’s narrative, this caricature became a symbol of freedom, hard work, and sacrifice. Jacques was a Gallo-Roman peasant living freely in southern France until he was enslaved by Germanic tribes from the north. Jacques and his oppressors embodied industriousness and idleness, respectively, defining two characteristics that remained unchanged throughout the story. Although Thierry insisted that the story was little more than a jest, the underlying principle was the same as that of his scholarly works, where the Gallo-Romans symbolized the unity of all farmers, tradesmen, and guildsmen who, thanks to their labors, had made the greatness and wealth of France and who, nevertheless, were unjustly subjugated by their idle masters, the descendants of the Franks. Thierry’s narrative was built on a set of historiographical assumptions that contributed, on the one hand, to an increasing professionalization of historical scholarship as such and, on the other, to the forging of so-called Romantic historiography. Thierry was adamant that the study of the past ought to be based on the sound analysis of primary sources alone, not heeding either the accounts given by other historians or their reputation. Yet he also believed that it was necessary to give the reader as much detail as possible on the lives of the French people, thus bringing the past back to life. The aim was to establish an empathic bond between the reader and the protagonists of the French past – essentially, Gallo-Romans, burghers, bourgeois, and commoners. From this angle, it was crucial to show that the nation stemming from the Revolution had, in fact, a much longer past. Only by gaining full awareness of this ancient past, by “remembering” it, could the people of France be a nation despite their differences and divisions. Implicit, here, was a shift from eighteenth-century historical works, essentially written by and for elites, to histories written by professionals and addressed to the wider public and recounting a story of which they were a part – indeed, the most important part. Thierry’s approach was further developed by Jules Michelet, the Romantic historian with the most long-enduring influence in French historiography (Petitier 2006; Mitzman 1990). The protagonist of his seventeen-volume Histoire de France (1833–1867) and his seven-volume Histoire de la Révolution française (1847–1853) was the nation as a whole, which he depicted as if it were a person. Following a narrative structure somewhat akin 89

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to a Bildungsroman, Michelet’s Histoire told how the nation acquired maturity by living through the ages in order to finally attain its freedom during the Revolution. It was a narrative with a clear direction. As he wrote in the preface, Michelet aimed to write a history that considered the nation’s political, social, and economic developments as well as its customs, culture, and ideas. His ambition was to “resurrect the life of the past,” delving into archives that had been nationalized and made accessible in the aftermath of the Revolution (Michelet 1869). Rejecting Thierry’s divisive scheme of the nation’s history and firmly criticizing his allegedly racialist ideas, Michelet relied nonetheless on the work of his predecessor. Like Thierry, Michelet sought to shed light on the history of France by focusing not on its origins but, rather, on key events of the ensuing centuries and collective experiences shared by the whole nation – or at least the “people,” whom he considered to be its core. Given such an aim, one of Michelet’s innovations was to offer a geographical “tableau de la France” in his Histoire to establish a clear connection between the nation’s past and the lands it inhabited. Indeed, Michelet considered the landscape that provided the environment for the nation’s history – as well as the national character – not as a purely natural fact but as something incessantly shaped by human action. Importantly, Michelet interposed his geographical overview after the volume on the Gauls, the Germanic migrations, and the Carolingian Empire, and at the beginning of the volume on the ascension of the Capetian dynasty. This was meant to show his readers that the nation’s history truly began only after the different races inhabiting the territory had merged. France, as a unified whole, resulted from a reconciliation of the different groups and races inhabiting its lands, a process much stronger than all internal strife. Consequently, Michelet interpreted the Revolution not as a struggle for power between different groups but as the moment when the nation finally became itself, granting its people, as a whole, their political rights. The moment during the Revolution that most clearly exemplified this was the “Festival of the federation,” on July  14, 1790, that commemorated the storming of the Bastille and which he described as an immense nationwide ritualistic dance. In Michelet’s writing, French national history turned into a story of reconciliation even despite the Revolution and the deep rifts it had produced in French society. This made his work particularly attractive to subsequent generations of (republican) political leaders (Creyghton 2019).

The Origins of the Nation in Debates on Method in the Early Third Republic The defeat of France by Prussia in 1871 and the birth of the Third Republic changed the context within which historians worked. While they participated in the widespread national soul-searching to explain the defeat, many of them also contributed to the intellectual justification of the newborn state by forging narratives that would anchor the republic in a national past. Moreover, they offered their services to the national education system, deemed essential for the formation of truly republican citizens devoted to the nation. History education, in particular, had to foster a feeling of national identity by transmitting a shared image of the past and nurturing a collective memory. This meant, on the one hand, recognizing the importance of the internal differences that formed the history of the nation; on the other, it required the establishing of a narrative that could encompass them and offer a unifying vision of the French past. 90

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Illustrative of this twofold historiographical preoccupation are two texts by the scholar of early Christianity Ernest Renan: La Réforme intellectuelle et morale de la France (The Intellectual and Moral Reform of France) (1871) and Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? (What is a Nation?) (1882). In the first, Renan explained the recent defeat by the allegedly decadent state of the nation and the weakening of its aristocratic and militaristic spirit. This was due, he wrote, following the conventional ethnic reasoning of the period, to the rejection of the Germanic elements originally part of the French nation, which had allowed its Mediterranean, Catholic, and decadent components to dominate. In Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? Renan expounded a new, forward-looking definition of the nation as an “everyday plebiscite” (Renan 2018). In a somewhat democratic vein, and using voluntaristic arguments, he claimed that a nation was a matter of will and politics rather than race and nature – an argument, not least, set forth to oppose his German counterparts. However, he also added that a shared past was equally crucial, and that nations owed their existence to collective rituals of remembrance and the belief in a shared cultural heritage and a common past. For this to be possible, noted Renan, nations had to forget as much of their past as they had remembered of it. In other words, national unity depended on an act of reconciliation in which past divisions and conflicts were overcome by the feeling of having a shared past. This was a task to which many historians of the Third Republic, more or less deliberately, contributed. The creation of the republic coincided, chronologically, with important developments in the practices of historical research and writing (Den Boer 1998). With hindsight, several educational reforms of the end of the Second Empire proved crucial for the development of the historical profession in the decades to come. Among these was the founding, in 1868, of the École Pratique des Hautes Études, an institute for higher education where students received a practical training in conducting research, following a program inspired by the highly successful German research universities. These had been viewed with admiration and envy by French observers for some time and were deemed to have greatly contributed to Germany’s modernization and, therefore, to its victory in the Franco-Prussian War. The École Pratique des Hautes Études aimed to introduce in France the German pedagogical model. Students would attend seminars, where they participated in the research of their professors, as well as deploying the research methods associated with it. For historians, these consisted mainly in the technical analysis of primary sources. The École pratique tended to recruit young academics who had received part of their training in Germany. Among these was Gabriel Monod, who, in the 1870s, would emerge as one of the leaders of what came to be known as the “methodical” generation of French historians. In 1876, he launched the Revue historique, the first French academic journal exclusively devoted to history, which he directed until his death in 1912. The journal became a central forum for academic history and methodological debate. Its development entwined with the emergence of a long-lasting republican state that invested considerable resources in national heritage and the teaching of history. Monod’s opening text in the first issue, “Du progrès des études historiques en France depuis le XVIe siècle” (“On the progress of historical studies in France since the sixteenth century”), shaped the historiographical agenda for the decades to follow (Monod 1876). The outlined program revolved around refining methods for researching historical sources, with the aim of setting history on a more scholarly, and even “scientific,” footing. Monod announced a break with previous generations, who had all too easily written grand historical syntheses that lacked the necessary methodological grounding and were inspired by religious concerns and political 91

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passion. By becoming a scientific endeavor based on allegedly objective research, history would avoid the risk of political instrumentalization. The changes introduced by Monod or his colleagues and based on their experiences in Germany did not go unchallenged. As Monod himself made clear, France had its own long-standing tradition of antiquarianism and text criticism. In 1886, he entered into an intense methodological discussion with Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, a medievalist who associated himself with the older antiquarian tradition. Focusing on the origins of feudalism and the French nation, the debate laid bare fundamental continuities in French historiography that transcended the proclaimed generational gap. Yet in the context of Franco-German academic rivalry, it acquired important political connotations. The debate was ignited by the publication of a text by Monod on the Historia francorum (History of the Franks), a work on the Franks by the sixth-century bishop Gregory of Tours and in which he criticized Fustel de Coulanges’s interpretation of the same source. Applying the skills he had acquired in Germany, Monod compared the Historia francorum with other Frankish sources of the same period, including the Salic law code. By highlighting the connections between Gallic and Frankish texts, Monod acknowledged the importance of the Frankish element in early medieval French history. Such a conclusion went against Fustel de Coulanges, who, in his Histoire des institutions politiques de l’ancienne France (History of the political institutions of ancient France) (1875), had offered a close reading of the Historia francorum, arguing that the Frankish migrations had played only a minor role in the formation of French feudal institutions. In 1887, Fustel de Coulanges published a fierce reply to Monod in an article with the sober title “De l’analyse des textes historiques” [“On the analysis of historical texts”]. In it he rejected the comparative method as German and defended his own as being truly French. According to Fustel de Coulanges, the approach Monod had learned in German universities had led him to draw an equally “German” conclusion regarding the conquest of the Gauls. Although he refrained from pressing the point, at a time when the traumatic defeat against the German armies was still fresh in everyone’s mind, it was easy to read in his criticism a reproach to Monod for his lack of patriotism (Hartog 2001). In the ensuing years, the theme of the origins of the nation became less prominent, in part because the flourishing of academic historical studies had prompted a diversification and specialization in sub-disciplines. Yet the debate was rekindled at the beginning of the twentieth century in the circles of extreme right-wing nationalism when Charles Maurras, the leader of the virulently nationalist movement Action française, published a series of personal attacks on Monod in 1897 and 1902, blaming him for the unpatriotic direction that, he deemed, French history writing had taken. Against Monod and his colleagues, he hailed Fustel de Coulanges as the truly “national” historian, rehearsing the arguments that Monod and Fustel de Coulanges had used twenty years earlier (even if both had always insisted their disagreement was strictly methodological). Although this attack came from a faction that was still rather marginal, it shows the extent to which historical research, despite its alleged scientism and proclaimed objectivity, remained entwined with politics. This was all the more so because many politicians, and historians themselves, believed that the ultimate end of professional history writing remained to educate the nation’s citizens. Many academic historians wrote textbooks for both primary and secondary schools. The best known was Ernest Lavisse, who, besides editing a multivolume Histoire de France, with which he put himself forward as Michelet’s successor, published a successful textbook for primary schools commonly known as the Petit Lavisse (Little Lavisse) 92

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(Lavisse 1913). First published in 1884 and regularly reprinted and used in classes until the 1960s, it strongly influenced how generations of French men and women conceived of their national history. Although the famous formula “our ancestors the Gauls” did not appear in the book (it did, however, in other texts by Lavisse), its first chapters clearly drew upon the “Gallic” narrative and referred to the Gauls as “our fathers.” However, by stressing the conversion of the Frankish king Clovis to Christianity instead of emphasizing the theme of the conquest, as Boulainvilliers and Thierry had done, Lavisse presented the Germanic settlement as a migration rather than a conquest and, to an extent, as a moment of national reconciliation. A similar pattern of reasoning structured the chapters on the French Revolution, which thus emerged not as a moment of internal rivalry over political power but as a step toward a truly patriotic unity, leading to the rise of the people as a political and military force. Following Michelet, Lavisse subsumed the historiographical debates over the conflicts at the origin of the French nation into a narrative of national unification, showing how historical differences were ultimately overcome by a higher unity.

The Roman National in the Twentieth Century: Critiques and Persisting Features Lavisse’s death in 1922 marked the passing away of a generation of historians. From the 1920s onward, French historians sought to explore new directions in history writing, driven, on the one hand, by the desire to distance themselves from an aggressively nationalist “mobilization” of history and historians in the First World War and, on the other, by new methodological issues. However, the French national story often remained their implicit point of reference. While newer generations did not devote much energy to the question of its origins, the nation was, for the most part, tacitly assumed as the logical geographical unit for historical research. Moreover, both historians and politicians remained convinced that the aim of history writing and history education was to serve as a tool for communicating a national identity grounded in a long-shared history. In part, this explains the enduring popularity of textbooks such as the Petit Lavisse. The extent to which historical narratives about Gallic ancestors reverberated among the wider public is, however, to be found in comic books. It was as both a parody and a reaffirmation of history lessons learned in school that, from 1959 onward, the series by René Goscinny (text) and Albert Uderzo (illustrations) about Astérix le Gaulois (Asterix the Gaul) and his small Gallic village, withstanding the Roman armies thanks to a secret magic potion, achieved immediate and lasting success. However, the social and cultural changes that France was undergoing, as well as the fact that historians had turned away from questions on the origins and historical formation of the national community, inspired history teachers and academics from the 1970s onward to increasingly criticize the established national historical narrative. In her short book published in 1987, Le mythe national: L’histoire de France en question (The National Myth: French History in Question), Suzanne Citron condemned the ideological and historiographical presuppositions in French history education, unmasking these as a “myth” that she traced back to Michelet and Lavisse (Citron 2008). Opposing both the idea that history education should construct a national identity and that this would be grafted onto a common origin, she proposed instead a history education that focusses on the diversity of French society in the past and the present. A more academic critique is that by Pierre Nora, who, between 1984 and 1992, edited the monumental Les lieux de mémoire (Sites of Memory) (Nora 1984–1992). It is in the 93

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introduction to this work that Nora coined the term “roman national” for critically assessing history writing that presents the nation as if it were the protagonist of a novel (roman in French): a pre-existing unit undergoing all kinds of adventures while remaining essentially the same throughout the centuries. Les lieux de mémoire is a collective work in seven volumes taking stock of dozens of “places” (understood both as actual sites and commonplaces, such as symbols, songs, and best-selling books) that had structured French collective memory since the nineteenth century. The project was based on the assumption that this collective memory was about to disappear and therefore needed to become the object of deconstruction by studying how it had come into existence. Yet over the years, Nora came to increasingly regret the loss of a shared idea of the nation’s past and reformulated his project as an attempt to frame a new national history, thus, in fact, reconstructing the “roman national” he had previously tried to deconstruct. Today, the formula “our ancestors the Gauls” has little currency in either textbooks for history education or academic history writing. The programs of history education have changed, paying more attention to darker pages of the national past, such as the Vichy regime and the Algerian War, and to historical developments that explain the ethnic and cultural diversity of present-day French society. Yet the formula is still used in the far from negligible quantities of right-wing and nostalgic popular history books and, at times, by critics of French colonialism and nationalism, who use it precisely to point to the persistent ethno-nationalistic traces within the French self-image. Indeed, the fact that history education is not based any longer on such a narrative does not mean that the image it legitimized has disappeared too, as it still structures a number of heated political and ideological debates. Ironically, the strength of this narrative is partly proven by a remarkable recent attempt to overcome it, the Histoire mondiale de la France, edited by Patrick Boucheron (Boucheron et al. 2018). In this encyclopedic volume, Boucheron and his team present a globalized history of the French nation by connecting some 150 events from the national past to global historical developments. While the Histoire mondiale shows the potential of other geographical scales for history writing, it still takes the French nation as the natural unit of historical analysis instead of problematizing it and thus remains, despite its best intentions, a kind of roman national.

Primary sources Lavisse, Ernest. 1913. Histoire de France: Cours élémentaire. Paris: Armand Colin. Michelet, Jules. 1869. “Préface de 1869.” In Histoire de France, i. 7–38. Sainte-Marguerite-sur-Mer: Éditions des Équateurs, 2008. ———. 2008–2009. Histoire de France. Sainte-Marguerite-sur-Mer: Éditions des Équateurs. ———. 2019. Histoire de la Révolution française. Paris: Gallimard. Monod, Gabriel. 1876. “Du progrès des études historiques en France depuis le XVIe siècle.” Revue historique 1: 5–38. Renan, Ernest. 2018. “What is a Nation?” In What is a Nation? And other Political Writings, edited by Ernest Renan, 247–63. New York: Columbia University Press. Thierry, Augustin. 2012. Lettres sur l’histoire de France. Paris: Classiques Garnier.

Further readings Amalvi, Christian, ed. 2005. Les lieux de l’histoire. Paris: Armand Colin. Bell, David. 2001. The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Nationhood and Nationalism in French History Writing Boucheron, Patrick, et al. eds. 2018. Histoire mondiale de la France. Paris: Seuil. Citron, Suzanne. 2008. Le Mythe national: L’histoire de France en question. Paris: Editions de l’Atelier. Cox, Iris. 1983. Montesquieu and the History of French Laws. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation. Creyghton, Camille. 2019. Résurrections de Michelet: Politique et historiographie en France depuis 1870. Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS. Crossley, Ceri. 1993. French Historians and Romanticism: Thierry, Guizot, the Saint-Simonians, Quinet, Michelet. London: Routledge. D’Auria, Matthew. 2020. The Shaping of French National Identity: Narrating the Nation’s Past, 1715–1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. De Cock, Laurence, and Emmanuelle Picard, eds. 2009. La fabrique scolaire de l’histoire: Illusions et désillusions du roman national. Marseille: Agone. Delacroix, Christian, François Dosse, and Patrick Garcia. 2007. Les courants historiques en France. XIXe – XXe siècle. Paris: Gallimard. Den Boer, Pim. 1998. History as a Profession: The Study of History in France, 1818–1914. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Déruelle, Aude, and Yann Potin, eds. 2018. Augustin Thierry: L’histoire pour mémoire. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes. Ellis, Harold. 1988. Boulainvilliers and the French Monarchy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Furet, François, and Mona Ozouf. 1984. “Two Historical Legitimations of Eighteenth-Century French Society: Mably and Boulainvilliers.” In In the Workshop of History, edited by François Furet, 125–39. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gauchet, Marcel. 2002. “L’unification de la science historique.” In Philosophie des sciences historiques: Le moment romantique. Textes de P. Barante, V. Cousin, F. Guizot, J. Michelet, F. Mignet, E. Quinet, A. Thierry, edited by Marcel Gauchet, 9–43. Paris: Seuil. Gossman, Lionel. 1976. Augustin Thierry and Liberal Historiography. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. ———. 1990. Between History and Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hartog, François. 2001. Le XIXe siècle et l’histoire: Le cas Fustel de Coulanges. Paris: Seuil. Hazard, Paul. 2013. The Crisis of the European Mind: 1680–1715. New York: New York Review. Joly, Laurent. 2013. “Gabriel Monod et ‘l’État Monod’: Une campagne nationaliste de Charles Maurras (1897–1931).” Revue historique 664: 837–62. Kaiser, Thomas E. 1989. “The abbé Dubos and the Historical Defence of Monarchy in Early ­Eighteenth-Century France.” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 267: 77–102. Leterrier, Sophie-Anne. 1997. Le XIXe siècle historien: Anthologie raisonnée. Paris: Belin. Mitzman, Arthur. 1990. Michelet Historian: Rebirth and Romanticism in Nineteenth-Century France. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Nora, Pierre. 1984. “Lavisse, Instituteur National.” In Les lieux de mémoire, i, La République, edited by Pierre Nora, 247–90. Paris: Gallimard. ———, ed. 1984–1992. Les lieux de mémoire. Paris: Gallimard. Abridged English translation: Nora, Pierre, ed. 1996–1998. Realms of Memory. Translated by Lawrence D. Kritzman. New York: Columbia University Press. Petitier, Paule. 2006. Jules Michelet: L’homme histoire. Paris: B. Grasset. Saint Victor, Jacques de. 2007. Les Racines de la liberté: Le débat français oublié, 1689–1789. Paris: le Grand livre du mois. Sewell, William H. Jr. 1994. A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The Abbé Sieyès and What is the Third Estate? Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Smithson, Rulon N. 1973. Augustin Thierry: Social and Political Consciousness in the Evolution of a Historical Method. Geneva: Droz. Tholozan, Olivier. 1999. Henri de Boulainvilliers: L’anti-absolutisme aristocratique légitimé par l’histoire. Aix-en-Provence: Presses universitaires d’Aix-Marseille. Venayre, Sylvain. 2013. Les origines de la France: Quand les historiens racontaient la nation. Paris: Seuil.

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9 OVERVIEW: VALOIS FRANCE, 1328–1498 Tracy Adams

Jeanne of Navarre bore Philip IV three sons, which seemed to assure the continuation of the “Capetian miracle,” the Capetian kings’ unbroken succession of father to son that had begun in 987. And yet none of the three sons, Louis X (r. 1314–16), Philip V (r. 1316– 1322), or Charles IV (r. 1322–28), left a male heir. With the death of Charles IV, the senior branch of the House of Capet became extinct. The throne then devolved to Philip IV’s nephew Philip of Valois, who, reigning as Philip VI (r. 1328–1350), established the royal house sometimes referred to as the first Valois, which retained the throne until Charles VIII died in 1498 with no surviving children. At that point, the Valois ceded to a cadet branch, the Valois-Orleans, with Louis II Duke of Orleans (r. 1498–1515) succeeding his second cousin once removed to reign as Louis XII. Power shifts are always perilous, and the ascension of the Valois, one precipitating factor in the Hundred Years’ War between the French and the English, was no exception. In addition to external conflict, the Valois kings had to contend with factionalism at home. Still, Strayer argues that the period also saw the development of the institutions that formed the basis of what we think of as the modern state: a political entity characterized by its durability in time and space, impersonal political institutions, and a central authority that enjoyed popular support (Strayer 2005). Strayer’s model has been challenged for its failure to take sufficient account of trade, economic organization, or climate, and also for its teleological approach. In addition, James Collins has recently warned against mixing the political language of the “republic,” or monarchical commonwealth, with that of the “state,” showing that the latter predominates only from the third quarter of the sixteenth century (Collins 2022). It is important, therefore, to be aware that the development of the French state was a long and complex process (Potter 1995). This overview of the first Valois traces the Hundred Years’ War, which historians typically divide into four phases, extending from 1337 until 1453. Against this background, the overview also examines the factional fighting that characterized most of the reigns, the development of the major institutions of the French kingdom, the restoration of territory and prestige under Charles V (r. 1364–80), the descent into civil war and subsequent occupation of France by the English under Charles VI (1368–1422), the recovery of territory and expulsion of the English from all of France except Calais under Charles VII (1422–61). DOI: 10.4324/9780367808471-10

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It draws to a close by considering the consolidation of power under Louis XI (r. 1461–83) and the onset of the Italian Wars under Charles VIII (r. 1483–98).

The Rise of the Valois When Louis X died in 1316, leaving a 4-year-old daughter, Jeanne, his brother Philip assumed regency and promised to revisit succession when the princess came of age. Philip later reneged, however, and negotiated Jeanne’s renunciation of her claim with her Burgundian maternal relatives (Giesey 2007; Knecht 2007). With the approval of his barons, he then ascended the throne as Philip V. Doubt over Jeanne’s paternity has sometimes been cited as the reason that the princess was passed over. Louis’s wife, Marguerite of Burgundy, and her cousins Jeanne and Blanche of Burgundy, wives of Philip IV’s two younger sons, had been implicated in an adultery scandal in 1314. However, young Jeanne’s vulnerability and the absence of any law governing succession sufficiently explain why Philip seized the opportunity. He and his barons, regarding the kingdom as a feudal domain, looked to feudal law to reinforce his claim (Whaley 2019), asserting that women could not inherit the throne. With this, he laid the groundwork for the so-called Salic law excluding women from succession, although that law was elaborated only retrospectively, in the fifteenth century. True, feudal law concerning female succession varied, but the claim was not implausible: although women could sometimes inherit, in certain cases only males could inherit. When Philip V died in 1322 without a male heir, the throne passed to his brother Charles IV. But when Charles IV, too, failed to produce a son, succession was disputed. Philip of Valois and Edward III of England (1312–1377) both based their claim to the throne on their descendance from Philip IV: Philip of Valois as Philip IV’s nephew, and Edward III, more directly, as Philip IV’s grandson, although through a woman, his mother, Isabelle. The barons were unwilling to accept an English ruler and backed Philip of Valois. Edward III did not initially press his claim. When he did, he accepted that women could not rule France but argued that they could pass the right to succession to their sons (Sumption 1991). The Valois rejected the argument, adding a new twist to the principle of female exclusion, that a woman could not serve as a bridge, “planche et pont,” for transmitting a claim to the throne to her son. Despite their exclusion from the throne, women were very much present in politics during the period of the first Valois. Although scholarship on French queenship is not as abundant as that on French kingship, the gap has narrowed in recent decades. Valois queenship as an institution has been studied (Gaude-Ferragu 2016; Cosandey 2000), and scholarship on individual Valois queens has also become more common.

The Crisis of Royalty A “crisis of royalty” followed Philip VI’s ascension (Cazelles 1958). Discontent among the barons, who were often ready to ally with England against the French king, had already been rife under Philip IV, especially during his last years. The trouble persisted throughout the reigns of Philip VI and his son, John II, easing up during the reign of Charles V before re-emerging under Charles VI, Charles VII, Louis XI, and during the first years of Charles VIII’s reign. Philip VI got off to a good start, helping the Count of Flanders put down a rebellion just months into his reign (Sumption 1991). But increasing rivalry with the English soon 97

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gave rise to a conflict that was both external and internal. The kings of England, descended through William of Normandy, had always held lands in northern France, and the marriage of Henry II to Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1152 brought her holdings in southwest France to England as well (Curry 2003). This meant that English kings were vassals of the king of France for vast territories, creating continual strife over sovereignty. Although by 1328 the English retained only Gascony and some territory around Ponthieu, the parties failed to reach an accommodation during the early 1330s. In 1337, the French confiscated Gascony, launching the first phase of the Hundred Years’ War, which, lasting until 1360, would see several different centers of action. One was Flanders, where new revolts, led by Jacob van Artevelde and supported by Edward III, broke out in 1338. It was in this context that the English king declared himself king of France, although most scholars now assume that he intended the claim as a bargaining chip (Curry 2003; Sumption 1991). Brittany was another such center, with the French and English intervening on different sides of the War of Breton Succession, sometimes called the War of the Two Jeannes, 1341–1365. The conflict ended in 1364 with the decisive victory at Auray of the Montforts over troops led by the husband of Jeanne of Penthièvre, Charles of Blois. This battle was followed early the next year with Jeanne’s ceding to Jean of Monfort, who ruled as Jean IV of Brittany, with the agreement that should he die heirless, the duchy would revert to the Penthièvres. Women were integrally involved in politics during this war and even in military leadership (Graham-Goering 2020; Sjursen 2019, 2015). Throughout the early years of the Hundred Years’ War, the wealthier French held the upper hand. However, their defeat Crécy in Ponthieu was pivotal. This defeat was immediately followed by the siege and subsequent loss of Calais, which would remain in English hands for the next 200 years. The deterioration of the French position was exacerbated by the Black Death, which, striking first in 1348, decimated a third of the kingdom, killing both Queen Jeanne and the dauphin (Neillands 2001), and by a chronic shortage of funds for the war, even though Philip VI had managed to create the beginnings of a tax system (Small 2009; Henneman 1981). John II, who succeeded his father in 1350, was captured by the English under the Black Prince in the Battle of Poitiers of 1356. The Treaty of Brétigny of 1360 caused still more hardship, requiring the French to pay a ruinous ransom of three million gold écus to release the king and cede sovereignty of extensive territories in the northwest to the English; in return, Edward III would quit calling himself king of France (Sumption 1991). John II traditionally has been regarded as an inept ruler (Perroy 1951). Still, some historians (Murphy 2016) have offered relatively positive views of his kingship, while others mitigate the negative appraisal without offering praise. Curry (2003) emphasizes the French king’s disadvantage relative to the English king, owing to the extreme independence and power of the French feudatories. One of these in particular, Charles of Navarre, represented a constant menace with his power bases in Normandy and his own kingdom, along with further bases around Paris and in the Champagne region. Finally, in 1356, the king had Charles of Navarre thrown in prison. When the king was himself taken prisoner at Poitiers later that year, the dauphin summoned the Estates General to gain consent for taxes to continue the war. However, the Estates General, under Prévôt of the Merchants of Paris Étienne Marcel, seized the opportunity to demand financial reforms, including purging the king’s counselors and holding the dauphin in tutelage. In northern France, the popular revolts known as the Jacquerie broke out in 1357–1358 in response to new demands for taxes (Neillands 2001; Autrand 1994). Marcel encouraged 98

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the revolts and helped liberate Charles of Navarre, who then assisted Marcel in taking Paris. For a time, the dauphin’s hold on the government was tenuous, and the possibility of the Estates General becoming a consultative body loomed. The dauphin regained control, however, and Marcel was murdered by a mob in Paris. Still, Charles of Navarre continued to agitate, claiming the duchy of Burgundy in 1361. Bands of mercenaries left unemployed after the Treaty of Brétigny created further disturbance. John II, returning to France to raise money for his ransom, sought to solve the mercenary problem by taking the cross, the pope having offered indulgences for those who went to Byzantium to fight against the Turks (Janin and Carlson 2014). In January 1364, John II sailed for England to personally negotiate his ransom with Edward III but died that April in London (Sumption 1999).

Restoration of Prestige John II’s son, Charles V the Wise, enjoys the most positive reputation of the first six Valois kings. This honor was due in part to his champion, writer Christine de Pizan (Margolis 2011), but also to his restoration of most of the territory lost to the English with the Treaty of Brétigny. Weeks after John II’s death, French troops under Breton Bertrand du Guesclin definitively defeated Charles of Navarre at Cocherel in Normandy, putting to rest his claim to Burgundy (Autrand 1994). As we have seen, in 1364, the English-backed John of Monfort prevailed over the French-backed Charles of Blois at the battle of Auray. Charles V acknowledged the Monfort succession, but the defeat was not total for the French: over the following decade, many Breton barons turned against Montfort to join Charles V (Sumption 1999). Charles V then set about restoring the kingdom, dealing first with the mercenaries who continued to pillage in central and eastern France. More regular taxation offered a means of financing an internal war to deal with the mercenaries. In addition, in 1365, Charles V sent some of them to intervene in Castile’s war of succession on the side of Henry of Trastámara against Henry’s half-brother, the English-backed Peter of Castile (Sumption 2011). England’s Black Prince defeated the French under Du Guesclin at Najera in 1367; nonetheless, it was a pyrrhic victory for the Black Prince. Protesting the taxes that he imposed to replenish the funds he had invested supporting Peter of Castile, the Gascons appealed to Charles V. The French king summoned the Black Prince; receiving no answer, he declared war in 1369, recalling Du Guesclin from Castile. From 1369 to 1377, Du Guesclin and Breton Olivier de Clisson, who, after initially fighting for the English, in 1370 joined forces with Charles V, led French troops against the English in a war of attrition, employing “Fabian” tactics. The Black Prince returned to England, and most of Gascony was ceded back to France. The lands lost to Edward III were recovered between 1370 and 1374, with Du Guesclin, by then connétable, winning victories at Pontvallain, La Rochelle, and Chizé and holding off English offensives (Sumption 2011). In 1378, Charles V’s armies recovered Charles the Bad’s holdings in Normandy, except for Cherbourg. Charles V’s reputation rests not only on the recovery of France but also on his skill at managing internal conflict. John II had created large apanages for his three younger sons, and Charles V augmented his brothers’ holdings. Despite the potential for dangerous rivalry, particularly from the Duke of Burgundy Philip the Bold, the brothers reliably served the king. Cazelles (1982) holds a less-favorable view of this situation, believing it to have rendered Charles V relatively powerless. Both Autrand (1994) and Small (2009) note the 99

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resentments that arose when Charles V surrounded himself with devoted and competent counselors, the “marmosets.” But they argue that the charismatic king kept his brothers in line, intimidating them when necessary and ceding none of his royal authority. In the later years of his reign, Charles V became an important patron of writers, renowned for devoting time and resources to the cultivation of a court rich in intellectual exchange, where he could construct and embody his ideal of kingship. Among the more than eleven hundred volumes that he left at his death were many “mirrors for princes,” confirmation of his commitment to developing a philosophy of monarchy and justifying himself within a legal framework (McGrady 2019). However, Charles V’s premature demise in 1380 threw his brothers and his 13-year-old heir into a dire financial situation. Possibly motivated by guilt over recent revolts related to taxation (Cohn 2006; Radding 1976; Wolfe 1972), he abolished on his deathbed the fouage which had accounted for 30–40% of his revenues. The royal uncles, faced with the shortfall and no longer subject to the watch of their brother, began to fight among themselves (Autrand 1986). The king had tried to pre-empt just such a struggle by leaving regency instructions that created a system to share power. In ordinances of August and October 1374, the king had separated regency of the realm from tutelle, or guardianship, assigning regency to his brother Louis of Anjou and giving guardianship, tutelle, to a college of guardians which included the queen (although, in fact, she predeceased the king) and the king’s other brothers, Jean of Berry and Philip of Burgundy. But minus the charismatic king, his brothers paid little heed to the ordinances, ruling for the young Charles VI until 1388, when he removed himself from their tutelage.

Renewed Crisis The beginning of Charles VI’s personal reign was auspicious, with the Treaty of Leulinghem in 1389 closing the second phase of the Hundred Years’ War. But in 1392, the young king suffered the first of the intermittent psychotic episodes that would catastrophically disrupt the remainder of his reign. After a second breakdown in 1393, the king, fearing that he would die prematurely, created a set of ordinances that followed the model laid by his father, awarding regency of the realm to his brother, Louis of Orléans, and guardianship of the young king to his queen, Isabeau, aided by his uncles. Although the brother of the living king outranked everyone except the king’s own sons in the hierarchy solidified during the reign of Charles V, Louis’s primacy led to rivalry with the royal uncles, each accusing the other of wanting to usurp the throne. To lessen the possibility of civil war, Charles VI abolished regency altogether in an ordinance of 1403, stipulating instead that in the event of his death, his heir would succeed immediately, whatever his age. Minus a regent, the queen mother, as guardian, would hold the reins of power while her minor son “officially” ruled. The advantage of this scenario was that, unlike a male regent, say, the minor king’s paternal uncle, the queen would prioritize not her own career but the welfare of her son and that, because of the Salic law, the queen would be unable to usurp the throne. The first Valois queen, Jeanne of Burgundy, had served as regent for Philip VI on several occasions during the 1340s while he was occupied with English; Isabeau remained a central, although contested, figure in the government until the death of the king in 1422; Anne of France would serve as a regent for her younger brother Charles VIII. These women of the first Valois created an expectation, continued throughout the later Valois and the Bourbon reigns, that in France regents should be female (Crawford 2004). 100

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But the king’s attempts to control rivalry and assure peaceful governance failed. Uncle and nephew fought about everything (Hutchison 2012; Adams 2010). Another major source of unrest involved the English. In late 1399, the Lancastrians deposed Richard II to crown Henry IV, disrupting the Peace of Paris, sealed in 1396 with the marriage between the Richard II and Isabella, Charles VI’s daughter. When news arrived that Richard II had been murdered, the French decided not to act, afraid of worsening the little queen Isabella’s already-dangerous situation. Still, they refused to recognize Henry IV and provoked the English unofficially, with privateers harrying English ships. This increased tension between Louis of Orleans and Philip of Burgundy, with Louis assuming the role of defender of the royal family’s reputation and Philip defending commercial interests in his Flemish cities and the English. When Philip died in 1404, his son John the Fearless took up his father’s fight for control of the government and the financial opportunities that came with it. Tensions between Louis and John escalated until John had Louis assassinated in 1407, setting in motion a decades-long feud. In 1413, the Cabochian Revolt in Paris, supported by John, furthered social disarray, ultimately sending John fleeing and bringing the Armagnacs to power (Hutchison 2017). Taking advantage of the French disarray, Henry V invaded France and began the march toward Paris. The English won a decisive battle at Agincourt in 1415, which opened the third phase of the Hundred Years’ War. Following the successive deaths of two dauphins in 1415 and 1417, Charles VI’s third son, Charles, an Armagnac, became heir to the throne. Paris, still under Armagnac control, was breached by the Burgundians on May 29, 1418, who slaughtered thousands of Armagnacs (Autrand 1986; Famiglietti 1986). John of Burgundy, once more in control of Paris, sought an alliance with the English against the Armagnacs, but he also solicited the dauphin’s help. A meeting was arranged on the Montereau Bridge in September 1419, where the dauphin’s men hacked John to death. Citing this misdeed, Charles VI disinherited his son in the Treaty of Troyes of 1420, naming as his heir Henry V of England, who was to marry the king’s daughter Catherine and, supported by the Burgundians, rule both kingdoms. However, understanding of the throne had evolved since 1316, when Philip V treated the kingdom like a feudal domain. Between 1413 and 1463, a flurry of treatises focused on the Salic law and the inalienability of the kingdom challenged Charles VI’s right to disinherit his own son as if the kingdom were his to dispose of (Whaley 2019; Taylor 2006). In 1422, the energetic and charismatic Henry V died suddenly. He was followed a few months later by Charles VI, leaving the throne disputed between the dauphin, who proclaimed himself Charles VII, and the supporters of the baby Henry VI. So ended Charles VI’s disastrous reign. And yet institutions had continued to develop during his tenure. The reign saw Parlement become a professional body with a clear identity in what we might think of as the first step toward the rise of the noblesse de robe. The French nobility’s increasing devotion to the monarchy (Beaune 1991) and their contributions to the growing bureaucracy during this period have also been detailed by Autrand (1981). Although Charles VII’s reign opened under the most difficult of situations, it closed having undone much of the damage of the preceding decades. Moreover, for nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century French historians, a sense of French nationalism was born during Charles VII’s reign, the Treaty of Troyes serving as a catalyst. The dispossessed Charles VII became the center around which patriotism formed. Although nationalism has been convincingly traced to the rise of the nation in the eighteenth century (Bell 2001), other recent scholars have made the case that a nascent sense of national identity emerged during this reign (Green 2014; Allmand 1989). 101

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From the day he was born, Charles VII inhabited a kingdom polarized between the Armagnacs and Burgundians (Vale 1974). During his reign, he would make peace with the Burgundians and expel the English from France. However, the path to victory was long and hard. During the Burgundian massacre of the Armagnacs in Paris in 1418, he was spirited away to safety in Bourges, which became the center of his government (Allmand 2000). With the death of Henry V and elevation to the throne of the infant Henry VI, Henry V’s brother John of Lancaster, Duke of Bedford, assumed regency over northern France, including Paris. Charles VII fought back, but his initial success at Baugé in 1421 was soon neutralized by defeats at Cravant in 1423 and Verneuil in 1424. In 1425, Arthur de Richemont, brother of John V, Duke of Brittany and former ally of the Duke of Burgundy, joined Charles VII as connétable. Still, the tide did not turn immediately. The appearance of Joan of Arc, who, in 1429, defeated the English at Orleans and quickly won another decisive victory at Patay before leading Charles VII to Reims, where his coronation reinforced his claim to the throne, marked a turning point (Taylor 2007). This third phase of the Hundred Years’ War is typically agreed to have ended here and the fourth, the recovery of France, agreed to have begun (Curry 2003). Although Joan herself was captured by Burgundians during the battle for Compiègne in 1430 and handed over to the English, who had her tried for heresy by pro-English clergy, convicted, and burned at the stake in 1431, the recovery of France was underway. Why the king abandoned to this cruel fate the young woman who revived French hopes of ultimate victory is debated; in 1456, she was rehabilitated under his charge (Taylor 2007).

Restoration and Consolidation Historians have often discussed Charles VII’s supposed transformation from timid to conquering warrior, contrasting the presumed ineptitude of his earlier years with his post–Joan of Arc successes: the reconciliation with the Burgundians and their recognition of himself as king with the Treaty of Arras in 1435, the Richemont-led recovery of Paris of 1436, and his quelling of the rebellion of the great lords of the kingdom known as the Praguerie in 1440. This rebellion, led by the Dukes of Bourbon and Alençon, along with his own son the dauphin Louis, reveals the persistence of factionalism, but also the king’s political and military skill. Another of his successes was his creation of the first permanent standing army in medieval Europe (Vale 1974). This greatly reduced the looting and violence that had always accompanied the use of mercenaries in war and also helped the king recover Normandy throughout the 1440s. Relations with the dauphin, however, remained tense; in 1446, the young man was caught plotting to dethrone his father and fled the royal court for the Dauphiné. Charles VII regained Normandy in late 1449; with the battle of Castillon in Gascony, in 1453, the English were ejected from all of France, except for Calais, and the Hundred Years’ War came to a close. Charles VII promulgated the Pragmatic Sanction at Bourges in 1438, which required meetings of a Church council superior to the pope, removed the pope’s patronage of ecclesiastical benefices, and restored the election of bishops and abbots. When Charles VII died at Mehun-sur-Yèvre in 1461, some claimed that he had starved, fearing poison at the hands of the dauphin, although in his final months he suffered from mouth sores, which may account for his inability to eat. It is impossible to know who was more to blame for the conflictual father–son relationship, which has been explored from psychological, and, more recently, juridical perspectives (Kendall 1971). Although 102

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contemporaries characterized both men as suspicious and manipulative, the son has typically suffered from the worse reputation. Louis, still in Burgundy when he received news of this father’s death, hurried Reims to be crowned, escorted by Philip of Burgundy. As Small (2009) notes, the new king could have relied on the Burgundians for support. But moving on to Tours, he asserted his independence by swearing never to give another military command to a magnate, surrounding himself with his own men (Kendall 1971), rejecting Burgundians and his father’s counselors, and abolishing the Pragmatic Sanction, which had greatly advantaged noble ecclesiastics. When Barcelona, Roussillon, and Cerdagne revolted against John of Aragon, the king wangled possession of the latter two, which remain part of France today. By 1463, he had raised the money to buy back Picardy and the principal cities along the Somme, which had been ceded to Philip of Burgundy in the Treaty of Arras of 1435 to entice Burgundy away from England (Kendall 1971), incurring the wrath of Philip’s son, Charles the Bold, who would become Louis XI’s mortal enemy. Discontent arose among the barons of both the east and the west (Small 2009), and in 1465, the Dukes of Burgundy, Brittany, Bourbon, and Alençon, along with Charles the Bold, formed the League of Public Weal, with the goal of putting the king’s brother Charles on the throne. The Battle of Montlhéry in August was inconclusive, but the conflict was settled soon afterward with the Treaty of Conflans, which kept Louis XI on the throne but gave Normandy to Charles and made some concessions to Burgundy. During the first years of Louis XI’s reign, the English had been too involved in their own War of the Roses to pay any attention to France, but as of the 1470s, the French king became involved in that dispute. Working through the formerly Yorkist “kingmaker,” the Earl of Warwick, Louis XI joined a plot to overthrow Edward IV and restore the throne to the periodically mad Henry VI, displaced by Edward IV in 1461. This alliance infuriated Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, who was married to Edward IV’s sister Margaret of York. Edward IV took refuge in Flanders. With Charles the Bold’s backing, he returned to England in 1471 and defeated the Lancastrians at the Battle of Tewksbury (Vaughan 2002). Although the end of the Hundred Years’ War is typically dated to 1453, some historians recognize a further phase when, in 1475, Edward IV allied with Burgundy and Brittany to invade France. However, Louis negotiated the Treaty of Picquigny, halting the offensive. Louis next concluded a nine-year truce with Charles the Bold, who then continued his quest to enlarge his territories, attacking Switzerland and Savoy. After Charles the Bold’s death in battle at Nancy in 1477, Charles’s only heir, Mary of Burgundy, and her new husband, Maximilian, Archduke of Austria (Holy Roman Emperor as of 1508), lost the duchy of Burgundy to Louis XI. In addition, by 1481, Louis had annexed Anjou, Maine, Bar, and Provence. The engagement of Mary’s daughter Marguerite of Austria to the dauphin Charles brought the counties of Burgundy and Artois to France. On his deathbed in late 1483, Louis XI stipulated that care of young king Charles VIII should be entrusted to his daughter Anne and her husband, Pierre of Beaujeu, later Duke of Bourbon (Matarasso 2001). In so doing, the dying king passed over Louis of Orleans, new heir presumptive to the throne. The Estates General, assembled in Tours in January 1484, concluded that Anne and Pierre should retain guardianship, provoking Louis to lead a coalition including the Duke of Brittany against the pair in what became known as the Mad War (“Guerre folle”). Lasting from 1485 until 1488, the war resulted in Charles VIII’s marriage to Anne of Brittany, who, with the death of her father in 1488, became duchess. Although already affianced to Marguerite of Austria, Charles VIII decided that marriage 103

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to Anne of Brittany and absorption of the duchy into France were more profitable to the kingdom. Anne of Brittany is a figure worthy of study in her own right. Twice queen of France – she would marry Charles VIII’s successor, Louis XII – she was a significant patron of literature, under whom the roles of women at the royal court began to expand. Charles VIII is perhaps best known for beginning the Italian Wars. In 1489, Pope Innocent VIII offered Naples to the king if he could wrest it from Ferrante I; the next pope, Alexander VI, also initially promoted the French king’s claim to Naples (Mallett and Shaw 2018). At the same time, Ludovico Sforza, regent of the duchy of Milan, sought Charles VIII’s support to bolster his own legitimacy. When Ferrante I died suddenly in 1494, his heir, Alfonso II, claimed Milan with the approval of Alexander VI, arousing the anxiety of Ludovico, who requested that Charles VIII invade. The French army crossed Italy without resistance, taking Pavia, Pisa, and Florence en route to Naples, which they took in February  1495, sending Alfonso II fleeing. But Charles VIII next claimed Milan. In response, Ludovico Sforza joined Venice, Mantua, and Florence, all stunned at Charles VIII’s success, to form the League of Venice against the French in March 1495. Although the French won a resounding victory against the League at Fornovo in July 1495, they were also dispossessed of all their booty and returned home with nothing to show for the Italian escapade. Furthermore, once he was back in France, Charles VIII quickly lost all his gains in Italy and was never able to reclaim them. He died prematurely in April 1498 when he suffered a fatal cranial trauma after striking his head on a doorframe. His death without issue brought Louis of Orleans, great-grandson of Charles V, to the throne as Louis XII, breaking the direct father-to-son descent of the Valois kings.

References Adams, Tracy, 2010. The Life and Afterlife of Isabeau of Bavaria. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Allmand, Christopher, ed. 2000. War, Government and Power in Late Medieval France. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press. ———. 1989. The Hundred Years War: England and France at War c. 1350-c. 1450. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Autrand, Françoise. 1981. Naissance d’un grand Corps de l’État: Les gens du Parlement de Paris, 1345–1454. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. ———. 1986. Charles VI: La folie du foi. Paris: Fayard. ———. 1994. Charles V: Le sage. Paris: Fayard. Beaune, Colette. 1991. The Birth of an Ideology: Myths and Symbols of Nation in Late-Medieval France. Translated by Susan Ross Huston. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bell, David A. 2001. The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cazelles, Raymond. 1958. La société politique et la crise de la royauté sous Philippe de Valois. Paris: Librarie d’Agences. ———. 1982. Société politique, noblesse et couronne sous Jean le Bon et Charles V. Geneva, Switzerland: Droz. Cohn, Samuel K., Jr. 2006. Lust for Liberty: The Politics of Social Revolt in Medieval Europe 1200– 1425. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Collins, James B. 2022. The French Monarchical Commonwealth, 1356–1560. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cosandey, Fanny. 2000. La reine de France: Symbole et pouvoir, XVe – XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Gallimard. Crawford, Katherine. 2004. Perilous Performances: Gender and Regency in Early Modern France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Valois France, 1328–1498 Curry, Anne. 2003. The Hundred Years War. Houndmills, Basingstoke and Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Famiglietti, R. C. 1986. Royal Intrigue: Crisis at the Court of Charles VI, 1392–1420. New York: AMS Press. Gaude-Ferragu, Murielle. 2016. Queenship in Medieval France, 1300–1500. New York: Palgrave. Giesey, Ralph E. 2007. Le rôle méconnu de la loi salique: La succession royale, XIVe-XVIe siècles. Paris: Belles Lettres. Graham-Goering, Erika. 2020. Princely Power in Late Medieval France: Jeanne de Penthièvre and the War for Brittany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Green, David. 2014. The Hundred Years War: A People’s History. New Haven: Yale University Press. Henneman, John Bell. 1971. Royal Taxation in Fourteenth Century France: The Development of War Financing, 1322–1356. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1981. Royal Taxation in Fourteenth-Century France: The Captivity and Ransom of John II, 1356–1370. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society. Hutchison, Emily J. 2012. “Winning Hearts and Minds in Early Fifteenth-Century France: Burgundian Propaganda in Perspective.” French Historical Studies 35: 3–3. ———. 2017. “Knowing One’s Place: Space, Violence and Legitimacy in Early Fifteenth-century Paris.” Medieval History Journal 20: 38–88. Janin, Hunt, and Ursula Carlson. 2014. Mercenaries in Medieval and Renaissance Europe. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Kendall, Paul Murray. 1971. Louis XI: The Universal Spider. New York: Norton. Knecht, Robert. 2007. The Valois: Kings of France 1328–1589. London: Hambledon Continuum. Mallett, Michael, and Christine Shaw. 2018. The Italian Wars 1494–1559: War, State and Society in Early Modern Europe. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Margolis, Nadia. 2011. An Introduction to Christine de Pizan. Gainesville: University of Florida Press. Matarasso, Pauline. 2001. Queen’s Mate: Three Women of Power in France on the Eve of the Renaissance. Aldershot, Hampshire, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. McGrady, Deborah. 2019. The Writer’s Gift or the Patron’s Pleasure? The Literary Economy in Late Medieval France. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Murphy, Neil. 2016. The Captivity of John II, 1356–60: The Royal Image in Later Medieval England and France. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Neillands, Robin. 2001. Revised edition. The Hundred Years War. London: Routledge. Perroy, Edouard. 1951. The Hundred Years War. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. Potter, David. 1995. A History of France, 1460–1560: The Emergence of a Nation State. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Radding, Charles M. 1976. “Royal Tax Revenues in Late Fourteenth Century France.” Traditio 32: 361–68. Sjursen, Katrin. 2015. “The War of the Two Jeannes and the Role of the Duchess in the Fourteenth Century.” Medieval Feminist Forum 51: 4–40. ———. 2019. “Jeanne of Belleville and the Categories of Fourteenth-Century French Noblewomen.” In Medieval Elite Women and the Exercise of Power, 1100–1400: Moving beyond the Exceptionalist Debate, edited by Heather J. Tanner, 135–56. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Small, Graeme. 2009. Late Medieval France. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Strayer, Joseph R. 2005, first published 1970. On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State. Intro. Charles Tilly and William Chester Jordan. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sumption, Jonathan. 1991. Trial by Battle. Volume 1 of The Hundred Years War. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 1999. Trial by Fire. Volume 2 of The Hundred Years War. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 2011. Divided Houses. Volume 3 of The Hundred Years War. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Taylor, Craig. 2006. Debating the Hundred Years War: Pour ce que plusieurs (La Loi Salicque) and A Declaracion of the Trew and Dewe Title of Henry VIII. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———, ed. and trans. 2007. Joan of Arc: La pucelle. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Vale, Malcolm. 1974. Charles VII. London: Methuen.

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Tracy Adams Vaughan, Richard. 2002. Charles the Bold: The last Valois Duke of Burgundy. Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: The Boydell Press. Whaley, Derek. 2019. “From a Salic Law to the Salic Law: The Creation and Re-Creation of the Royal Succession System of Medieval France.” In The Routledge History of Monarchy, edited by Elena Woodacre, Lucinda H.S. Dean, Chris Jones, Zita Rohr, and Russell Martin, 443–64. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Wolfe, Martin. 1972. The Fiscal System of Renaissance France. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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10 FRANCE AND THE CRUSADES IN THE LATER MIDDLE AGES1 Tania M. Colwell

Crusades featured prominently in global geopolitics between the eleventh and seventeenth centuries. First proclaimed in France at Clermont by Pope Urban II in 1095 to protect Constantinople from the Seljuk Turks and recover Jerusalem from Muslim control, the crusade movement built on earlier papally supported military endeavors known today as protocrusades and endured at least until the last anti-Ottoman Holy League was formally called by Innocent XI in 1684. Throughout this period, crusading impacted peoples across Europe, the Mediterranean, the Levant, and North Africa. It gained widespread popularity within Francophone Europe, where, inspired by the success of French noble Godfrey of Bouillon’s conquest of Jerusalem on the First Crusade in 1099, kings and queens, nobles, knights, and commoners swore oaths to take the cross of pilgrimage and combat enemies of the Church for several hundred years. People from across the Capetian kingdom and adjacent regions often dominated pan-European crusading forces and played significant roles in the Second and Third Crusades in the Near East (1147–1149, 1189–1192), the Fourth against Constantinople (1204), the campaigns against Albigensian heretics in southern France (1209–29), and the Seventh and Eighth Crusades, led by Louis IX (r. 1226–1270) in Egypt and Tunis (1248–54, 1270). Those speaking various French vernaculars also comprised the majority of settlers who made the Levant their home across the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, eventually creating new communities in Cyprus and Morea. Crusade victories were celebrated in accounts such as Guibert of Nogent’s Deeds of God done by the Franks (c. 1108). While Franks often referred generically to Latin Christian crusaders as well as to the northern French specifically, over time it came to be aligned with the French more broadly. Semantic fluidity contributed to the rewriting of crusade narratives, liturgies, and imaginative literature which underlined the contribution of French nobles to the successes of the First Crusade and linked Capetian kingship with crusade through the saintly crusader Louis IX. This history subsequently became a cornerstone of nineteenth-century nationalist mythologies seeking to unify the French people by presenting individual crusaders, such as Godfrey and King Louis, as heroic exempla of French chivalric virtue and civilization (Murray 2011; Guhe 2013). Such mythologizing typically focused on the classical period of the Crusades bookended by Clermont in 1095 and the fall of the last crusader settlement in Acre in 1291. Subsequently, the later medieval crusades were often 107

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overlooked in French histories, whether influenced by understandings that the Holy Land remained the only true site of crusade ambition or by the view that after 1291, “Crusading became something to be believed in rather than something to do” (Tyerman 2006, 826). However, French rulers and their subjects continued to discuss, write about, plan, actively take part in, and commemorate a diverse array of crusade activities between the fourteenth and early sixteenth centuries. This chapter explores how the crusade endured as a material and practical, as well as an ideological and cultural, phenomenon in late medieval France, and reviews recent historiographical developments.

Crusade and Holy War Developing a precise understanding of what medieval people understood by crusade is challenging. For much of the period, Latin and vernacular texts referred to crusading events as a journey (iter, passagium) or in terms of the military and/or spiritual character of campaigns/ campaigners (sainte voyage, milites Dei, chevaliers pèlerins). The vernacular croizada and hybrid Occitan/Old French variants only appear from the early 1200s, the first reference to a croisade in Middle French likely occurring in George Chastellain’s contemporary account of Burgundian duke Philip the Good’s crusade efforts in the mid-fifteenth century (Weber 2021; Paviot 2014a). An inclusive definition of crusade as “a holy war fought against those perceived to be the external or internal foes of Christendom for the recovery of Christian property or in defence of the Church or Christian people” offers a useful entry into medieval thinking about these ventures (Riley-Smith 1987, xxviii). Long a feature of medieval Christian experiences, holy war was understood as a just war – one fought to address an injury and legitimated by an appropriate authority – which was embedded within a spiritual and theological framework. While crusading shared with holy war the aim of fighting for God and the faith, it was distinguished by its penitential characteristics: the armed mission was framed by Urban II and his successors as an opportunity for participants to perform penance for their sins both through battle and by undertaking a pilgrimage to the Holy City, itself the supreme penitential act. Following the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, strategic aims, methods of organization, enemies, and theaters of war fought in God’s name varied, but the idea that crusade was a penitential pilgrimage and, from the Second Crusade onward, that death on crusade would be understood as martyrdom endured (Riley-Smith 2014).

Fourteenth Century: Pressures and Opportunities For much of the later Middle Ages, crusades arguably contributed to the ongoing consolidation of authority in the French Crown begun by Louis VII (Naus 2016), even if the nature and level of crusade engagement varied according to regional and local pressures. The first third of the fourteenth century witnessed a gradual evolution in the goals and strategies underpinning French crusade planning and action, patterns also reflected more widely across Latin Europe. While the Holy Land remained a focus of recovery proposals, crusade aims extended to the defense of Christian allies against both Egyptian Mamluk and expanding Ottoman threats around the eastern Mediterranean. This widening theater of action contributed to the increased launching of preliminary campaigns (passagia particulare) aimed toward specific targets as preludes to larger international general passages focused on the Holy Land. Maritime expeditions and naval leagues also gained new 108

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significance from the 1330s. Initiated by crusade exponent Pope Clement V, the Council of Vienne (1311–1312) deliberated on proposals advocating economic blockades on Egypt, cross-confessional alliances with the Mongols, and the inclusion of an evangelist, educative mission alongside military targets. An important theme among proposals such as those of Peter Dubois and William of Nogaret was a focus away from united Christian cooperation toward the French Crown as the source of crusade leadership (Leopold 2000). Tussles between the Crown and papacy for superior authority within France informed ongoing debates about crusade financing across the early fourteenth century. This tension was evident at Vienne in March 1312, when the papal abolition of the Order of the Templars sought by Philip IV (r. 1285–1314) was swiftly followed by the king’s promise to lead a crusade. While debates remain about the extent to which the suppression of the order was politically, financially, or ideologically motivated, the material benefit accruing to the Crown stirred local and European anxiety about the aims underlying Philip’s vow (Barber 2006). Concerns about the Crown’s expenditure of clerical taxes raised for crusade and resistance toward committing the royal treasury to crusade campaigns further colored the reigns of Philip V (r. 1316–1322) and Charles IV (r. 1322–1328), little significant action arising as a result (Housley 1980). The crusading aspirations of Philip VI (r. 1328–1350), the inaugural king of the new Valois dynasty, were arguably informed by both personal inclination – he had publicly taken the cross in 1313 – and the weight of royal tradition. Following reports that the Mamluks had denied pilgrims access to Jerusalem, in 1330, Philip requested Pope John XXII to order preaching for a new crusade. To calm doubts about his intentions regarding crusade funds, in October 1332, Philip again swore to embark personally on crusade; he also conceded oversight of crusade receipts to the papacy and offered his own lands as collateral against inappropriate spending of crusade taxes. In return, in July 1333, the pope nominated the king rector and captain-general of a general expedition to depart in August 1336 (Tyerman 1985). Meanwhile, Genoese and Venetian advisors persuaded Philip to join a Holy League led by the Venetians and Cypriots against a new Islamic foe, the Ottomans, whose territorial expansion across Anatolia had extended into the eastern Mediterranean (Imber 2009). Despite anxiety that collaborative action to suppress Turkish piracy would hinder a general passage – thereby potentially reflecting on the king’s leadership of that campaign – in late 1333, Philip agreed to send a preliminary fleet to assist the League. By September 1334, the League’s concerted naval offensives had successfully alleviated Turkish pressure on Negroponte and neighboring Aegean islands (Tyerman 1985; Housley 1992). This promising start, however, lacked sufficient financial and material resourcing and was challenged by escalating tensions with England. Regional instability consequently informed Pope Benedict XII’s decision to cancel Philip’s general passage in March 1336. The outbreak of hostilities with England in 1337 meant that French attention to the eastern Mediterranean was limited for the rest of the century. In the meantime, crusade leadership shifted from pan-European collaborations to those regional governments directly pressured by the Ottomans, particularly in Cyprus, the Balkans, and Italian city-states with trading posts across the Mediterranean, which increasingly relied on intra-Christendom alliances and leagues (Housley 1992). French attention was redirected to crusades during two periods of truce with England in the mid-1360s and then, consequent upon the Truce of Leulinghem, between 1389 and around 1405. The lull in Anglo-French hostilities following the Treaty of Brétigny (1360) coincided with the coronation of Peter I of Lusignan, king of Cyprus (r. 1359–1369), as 109

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titular king of Jerusalem by his chancellor and crusade advocate, Philip de Mézières. Peter’s call for a general passage to recover Jerusalem resonated with French king John II (r. 1350– 1364). Despite his formal status as English captive, John joined Peter and members of the French nobility in taking the cross in March 1363, and Pope Urban V appointed the king leader of a general expedition to recover the Holy Land. However, recruitment in France was hindered by the destruction caused by unemployed mercenaries (routiers) and by the death of the king himself in 1364. Peter of Lusignan nonetheless gained fame for leading a surprise attack on the Mamluk port of Alexandria in 1365, a move that was rationalized as the first phase of a two-pronged attack on the sultanate but which was arguably equally informed by Cypriot commercial interests (Edbury 1991). From 1378 to 1420, the role of the papacy in coordinating crusade initiatives was hindered by the Schism dividing Latin Christianity between those supporting popes based either in Rome or Avignon. The Schism diminished the spiritual authority traditionally invested in the papacy and ruptured diplomatic networks and administrative structures required for effective crusade organization (Weber 2017). However, it also coincided with the reign of Charles VI (r.  1380–1420), a crusade enthusiast whose education had been overseen by the Cypriot chancellor Philip de Mézières. The first of two major crusade events in which the French participated during Charles’s reign was the campaign against the Ḥafṣid port of Al-Mahdiya (modern Tunisia) in the summer of 1390. A Genoese initiative to curb Berber piracy, the crusade was characterized as a prelude to imposing Christianity upon neighboring emirates. Although around one-third of known French participants died, the eventual truce benefitting Genoa was considered a success, and the campaign stimulated elites’ enthusiasm for action further afield. While the onset of mental illness from 1392 onward impeded Charles’s ability to direct crusade policy in a sustained manner, it allowed his uncle and senior counsellor Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy, to assume responsibility for crusade organization, in a development that shaped crusade planning in France for nearly a century (Housley 1992; Magee 1998). In 1393, the Ottoman annexation of Bulgaria motivated preparations in France for a major passage to assist Hungary. Philip of Burgundy initially planned a joint expedition with the English, whereby a passagium particulare against the Ottomans would be consolidated by a general passage to capture Jerusalem, led by Charles VI and Richard II (r. 1377–1399). Following the collapse of the cross-channel partnership in 1395, a FrancoBurgundian force led by Philip’s son, John of Nevers, and supplemented by a Germanic contingent, journeyed overland through Bulgaria. Arriving outside Nicopolis by September 1396, their advance forced Sultan Bayezid I (r. 1389–1402) to raise the Ottoman siege of Constantinople and enter the Balkans. Abandoned by their Wallachian and Transylvanian allies, and deploying poor strategy, the Franco-Burgundian knights were emphatically routed by Bayezid’s warriors (Paviot 2003; Vaughan 2002a). Bayezid’s defeat of the only major Franco-Burgundian crusade endeavor of the fourteenth century discouraged further planning to implement the intended passagium generale. Nonetheless, the French court continued to respond positively to refugees and embassies seeking targeted assistance: in 1399, it dispatched Nicopolis veteran John le Meingre, the marshal Boucicaut, to relieve the Ottoman blockade of Constantinople, and in 1400, it welcomed the return of Boucicaut with Byzantine emperor Manuel II in person (Çelik 2021). Christian hopes for an alliance with the Mongol Turkic ruler Temür (Tamerlaine; r. 1370–1405) were animated by the decay of Temür’s alliance with Bayezid, marked by the Mongols’ capture of the sultan at Ankara in July 1402. Echoing diplomacy between the Mongol Hülegü and 110

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King Louis IX in the 1260s, letters from Temür offering friendship and commercial exchange in 1403 were reciprocated by Charles VI. However, the prospect of an alliance evaporated with Temür’s demise on his journey to China in 1405 (Colwell 2020). Despite continued interest in addressing the security of eastern Christendom, the French court’s direct involvement in crusade initiatives waned from the early 1400s as civil unrest among the ruling elites and deteriorating relations with England after Henry IV’s usurpation of the throne in 1399 refocused attention closer to home (see Tracy Adams’s contribution to this volume).

Fifteenth Century: Contraction and Accommodation The early decades of the fifteenth century offered Latin and Greek Christians some respite from Turkish offensives as the Ottoman Empire struggled with political instability following the defeat at Ankara. Martin V’s election as pope (1417–1431) contributed to healing the spiritual rift created by the Schism, and the papacy turned attention to the perceived internal threat posed by Hussite heretics (Weber 2017). Domestic and regional concerns meant that the French Crown did not play a significant role in crusading until the reign of Charles VIII (r. 1481–1498), when holy war aligned again with the potential for the expansion of royal power within Europe. In the meantime, Franco-Flemish crusade enthusiasts looked for leadership in this field to Philip the Good, the Duke of Burgundy, who also used crusade as a mechanism for enhancing his political authority. By the end of the century, however, following the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in May 1453, the sultanate had firmly re-imposed itself on the political landscape of Europe. As a consequence, the dominant focus of crusade planning and action continued to move west to the Aegean and the Balkans, and even to the Italian peninsula, although Jerusalem remained a theological and aspirational goal. Recruitment and organizational strategies continued to rely on indulgences and tithes, while new technologies and initiatives, such as the cannon – used with effect at Constantinople – the printing press, and crusade congresses, changed some of the practicalities of crusade activity. Further, crusade enterprises increasingly competed with national interests, and the pragmatics of trans-Mediterranean diplomacy led to the growth of new interfaith alliances across the century. Philip of Burgundy’s crusading initiatives across his rule between 1419 and 1467 have been characterized as primarily private and practical efforts to assist the Holy Land in the first half of his rule to around 1449, and from 1450 onwards, reliant on chivalric and literary crusade traditions as tools to elevate the duke’s international political status, at a time when the Valois monarchy was recovering from the Anglo-French War (Paviot 2003). In practice, political, spiritual, chivalric, and historical influences shaped the duke’s crusade ideology and practice throughout his life (Moodey 2012). From 1421 onward, Philip sent envoys and reconnaissance missions to the Levant, Aegean, Baltic, and Anatolian regions, along with regular donations to pious institutions in Palestine. In the 1440s, he twice supplemented financial aid to the Hospitaller Knights of Rhodes with flotillas to defend the island against Mamluk attacks (Paviot 2003; Vaughan 2002b). Serving Philip’s crusading and political ambitions was his creation of the chivalric Order of the Golden Fleece (Toison d’Or) in 1430, one of whose aims was “the defence of the holy Christian faith . . . to defend, maintain, or re-establish the dignity, estate and liberty of our holy mother Church” (Le Févre 1881, 214).2 Following Ottoman expansion across the Balkans, in 1451, Philip declared his intention to lead a crusade to obstruct Sultan Murad II’s (r. 1421–1444, 1446–1451) campaign 111

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against Constantinople. Regional politics in Ghent and Luxembourg delayed preparations until mid-1453, by which time the Byzantine capital and emperor had been conquered by Mehmed II (r. 1444–1446, 1451–1481). In response to Pope Nicholas V’s 1453 proclamation of crusade and subsequent circulation of printed indulgences, the duke hosted the famous Feast of the Pheasant in Lille, February 1454. Elaborate performances and displays celebrating Burgundy’s chivalric and classical heritage, and lamenting the loss of Constantinople, preceded public vows to take the cross sworn by the duke and over 100 knights (Caron 2003). While levying troops and aides to support the mission, Philip participated in imperial councils and diplomacy to elicit support for crusade from central eastern European leaders, but ecclesiastic politics and tensions with France hindered his departure in the midlater 1450s. Philip subsequently promised armed forces at Pope Pius II’s congress of secular rulers in Mantua in 1459 (a new papal initiative to unite Christendom behind crusade); committed Burgundy to an anti-Turkish alliance with frontline states Venice and Hungary, Bohemia’s Hussite king, and the papacy; and pledged leadership of a crusade against the Ottomans alongside Pius II in 1463. However, pressure from the Valois Crown repeatedly informed the duke’s personal withdrawal from these endeavors. Despite the Burgundian fleet’s eventual departure in May 1464, the death of Pius II in August cancelled this general passage. Thus failed the last major call for united Christian action against the Turks (Vaughan 2002b; Paviot 2003; Housley 2004). For the next 30 years, French crusade activity was limited until Charles VIII revived the monarchy’s claims to Christian leadership in the 1490s. In 1489, the diplomat and historian Robert Gaguin recorded Charles’s ambition to recover the kingdom of Naples for use as a base from which to combat the Ottomans. The Neapolitan title had been invested in the Angevins in 1265 and inherited by Louis XI and his successors in 1481. While commercial interests and concerns about Turkish atrocities raised by their conquest of Otranto in southern Italy in 1480–1481 informed Charles’s crusade plans, the extension of political influence likely also motivated the king (Labande-Mailfert 1975). Indeed, the threat of armed conflict with the Turks had abated since 1482, when Bayezid II’s (r. 1481–1512) brother and rival, Djem, fled to Rhodes, after which the sultan paid Latin states to ensure that he remained in captivity. In 1489, the sultan reportedly offered Charles VIII the Crown of Jerusalem in exchange for both retaining Djem and providing assistance against the Mamluks (Housley 1992). Regardless, in 1490, the king committed land forces to a new crusade effort initiated by Pope Innocent VIII. Bolstered by papal support, in 1494, the French entered Rome and took control of Djem in December, before advancing into Naples in February 1495. However, Djem’s death, Pope Alexander VI’s attempted collusion with the Turks and Venice against the French, a shortage of funds, and the creation of an antiFrench Holy League forced a withdrawal from Naples and return to France by November. Charles’s premature death in 1498 signaled the end of the king’s crusading aspirations. The Naples expedition, however, marked the onset of the Hapsburg–Valois dynastic conflict over control of key Italian city-states that became known as the Italian Wars (1494–1559) (Shaw and Mallett 2019). It was during the reign of Charles’s successor Louis XII (r. 1498–1515) that French forces “for the last time battled the Muslims in what may be termed a crusade” (Baumgartner 1994, 125). In June 1500, Alexander VI imposed tithes on the universal church in support of a campaign against the Turks, who were then harassing Venice and Hungary. In October 1501, a Franco-Genoese flotilla joined Venetian and Hospitaller fleets to recover Mytilene (Lesbos) from the Turks, but the crusaders’ poorly supplied siege of the island 112

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failed. Over the next two decades, the Turks concentrated on their Safavid and Mamluk enemies while pursuing diplomatic relations with Louis XII’s successors. Louis himself continued to pledge material and rhetorical support for armed action and alliances against the Ottomans, and nobles continued to participate in anti-Turkish warfare, but the era of French-led direct crusade action had ended. While crusades remained a powerful ideological and material presence across Europe and the Near East across the following centuries, pragmatism typically outweighed religious ideology in France’s Mediterranean policymaking after the Ottoman conquest of Jerusalem in 1516.

Crusade Historiography: Late Medieval Themes Crusade historiography has flourished in recent decades.3 Older definitional debates, pitting traditionalist views that only an expedition focused on recovering the Holy City properly constituted a crusade against pluralist understandings that papally supported warfare extended beyond the Levant, are now largely overlooked in favor of scholarship exploring the dynamics of crusade practice and ideology. Scholarly research has shifted from seeking to reconstruct crusade narratives, participants, and structures to uncovering how crusades were experienced and understood by Christian and non-Christian communities implicated in this movement. Fruitful sites for pursuing these questions include studies investigating Muslim and Arabic historiography, gender, memory and commemoration, crusading landscapes, material culture and exchange, and affect (Josserand 2021; Christie 2020; CassidyWelch and Spacey 2021).4 Literature exploring the ideological and material dimensions of the crusades after 1291 has grown significantly in the last two decades, particularly in France. Addressed sporadically before 2000 (Housley 2004), later crusades research has been led by historians Norman Housley, Daniel Baloup, and Jacques Paviot. Housley’s seminal surveys of crusading and European religious warfare into the sixteenth century (e.g., 1992) have been supplemented by focused analysis of European responses to the Turks in the aftermath of 1453 (2013). Research networks coordinated by Baloup have contributed fruitfully to the Croisades tardives series, with volumes exploring the commemoration of crusades and crusade culture among Francophone and Bohemian nobles (e.g., Nejedlý and Svátek 2015b) and investigating later crusade recruitment, financing, logistics, and preaching (Baloup and Sánchez 2015).5 Following studies of Burgundian and elite crusading (Paviot 2003, 2006), Paviot oversaw a volume examining diplomatic and geopolitical strategies devised to support late crusade projects (2014b), while late crusade campaigns in Africa have received welcome attention (Weber 2019). Anglophone collections arising from Housley’s collaborative projects have extended understandings of the influences propelling late crusade momentum and complicated our picture of interactions between European, Mediterranean, and Near Eastern cultures (e.g., Housley 2017). Traditional themes remain prominent in such collections, but analysis of late medieval crusading has also revealed exciting new topics. These include the role of humanist tropes and print media in crusade propaganda campaigns and the evolution of anti-Turkish imagery and Ottoman self-fashioning in the wake of 1453 (Bisaha 2004; Meserve 2008). Such studies have been complemented by growth in scholarship on the Ottoman Empire and neighboring eastern regions in this period, including the Byzantine empire and Lesser Armenia. Cumulatively, this flourishing has served not only to recover the crusading impulse and its manifestations in the later medieval period but also to situate it within the political, 113

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religious, economic, and cultural lives of participants and onlookers across Europe and Near East. Research into late medieval French crusading reveals the particular importance to contemporaries of questions surrounding royal power and nation, chivalry and gender, and of the role of literary culture.

Royal Power, Kingship, and National Interests French rulers from Louis VII (r. 1137–1180) onward participated in crusades; by the early fourteenth century, “crusading had so influenced the contours of Capetian kingship that no king could live up to his obligations without proclaiming the ideal of crusade,” and this ideal remained important to the end of our period (Field and Gaposchkin 2014, 573). Much scholarship has focused on Louis IX, canonized in 1297, who – despite his unsuccessful campaigns – was presented as the archetypal crusading king. Literature exploring the king’s piety, religious patronage, and campaigns is vast; relevant to our period are studies of posthumous biographies, liturgies, and sermons produced into the 1320s revealing how the king’s leadership of crusade campaigns manifested Louis’s status as defender of the faith and Most Christian King. Louis was revered by later Capetian and Valois kings, his holiness adding luster to future generations of French rulers (Gaposchkin 2008). French monarchs were also central to recovery tracts and crusade literature produced across our period. Studies of Peter Dubois’s treatises offered to Philip IV in  1308 have highlighted how his reformist program to transfer clerical wealth to the Crown supported the extension of Capetian control across Europe, the Byzantine Empire, and the Holy Land by means of crusade (Sághy 2001). Dubois’s proposal to foster French hegemony across Europe evoked the Charlemagne prophecy circulating at the courts of both Charles VI and VIII, which foretold that a ruler named Charles would conquer Jerusalem and Outremer and win the Imperial Crowns of the East, the West, and the Holy Lands (Paviot 2014a). Crusade advocate de Mézières positioned Charles VI in his Le Songe du Vieil Pelerin (1389) as the earthly savior of Christendom whose crusade conquests would complete the work begun by Peter I  of Cyprus in the 1360s. Nonetheless, national interests competed with crusades for royal attention. While poet Guillaume de Machaut praised Peter I’s crusading in the Prise d’Alexandrie (1370), he also commended Charles V’s (r. 1364–1380) decision to concentrate on securing the realm during the Hundred Years’ War instead of crusading. Charles’s prioritization of the kingdom’s interests over crusade arguably “reflects a widespread evolution in attitudes” for royal power during the fourteenth century (Delogu 2008, 105). The nationalization of crusading was ultimately expressed by Christine de Pizan’s Ditie de Jehanne d’Arc (1429), which interwove national and royal interests with crusade through the person of Joan of Arc, representing Joan’s leadership against English forces in France as the necessary prelude to her conquest of the Holy Land and installation of Charles VII (r. 1422–1461) as imperial ruler (Brownlee 1992).

Chivalry and Gender Crusading was an essential component of late medieval chivalric culture and elite gendered identities. While chivalry remained a fluid set of practices and values throughout the period, it was informed by religious and literary secular ideals which created a spiritual framework justifying knightly military action (Kaeuper 2016). However, despite papal crusade bulls of 1332 addressing “those men most expert in war, the vigorous warriors of the Kingdom of 114

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France” (Housley 1980, 170), knights did not commit to crusade uncritically. Analysis of crusade vows made in 1333–1334 reveals that knightly participation was often contingent on guarantees and patronage provided by the king or one’s overlord (Tyerman 1985). Moreover, knights were not always the core of a crusade army: landless and indigent peoples from France and neighboring regions gathered in unofficial mass movements to support crusade actions in 1309 and 1320. Nonetheless, aspirants to knighthood were routinely advised that fighting the infidel was the ideal path to gaining worldly wisdom and honor (Paviot 2006). Chivalric identities depended on acquiring honor through deeds of arms, and scholars have begun interrogating the relationship between crusade and performances of knighthood. By combining a spiritual mission with a military objective, crusades were an idealized stage for achieving this goal, and knights such as John le Meingre, marshal Boucicaut, won renown through their sustained (if not always successful) crusading activity across Europe and the Mediterranean (Taylor 2019). The association between knightly identity and crusade was also manifest in membership of chivalric orders, such as Philip de Mézières’s chivalric Order of the Passion of Our Lord and the Burgundian Order of the Golden Fleece (Boulton 2000), while the complex role of crusades in shaping ideals of both Christian and non-Christian manhood outside chivalric contexts has recently gained attention (Hodgson et al. 2019). Increased attention has also been paid to the material and ideological function of women in traditional and late crusade contexts; notably, de Mézières assigned women a civilizational role in crusader settlements, a role that would be enduringly feminized throughout (pre)modern colonialism (Blumenfeld-Kosinski 2018). Although Ashe has questioned the extent to which ecclesiastic crusade ideology shaped chivalric values in French literature (2014), chivalric orders nonetheless built on spiritual and secular foundations as vehicles for unifying the Christian elite of western Europe behind the cause of crusade and recovery of Jerusalem. Similar roles were played by rituals and public spectacles, notably Philip IV’s great festival of June 1313 – at which the royal princes’ dubbing ceremony preceded their public crusade vows – and the Feast of the Pheasant in February 1454. This latter spectacle was preceded by a tournament and feast celebrating the Flemish crusading legend of the Swan Knight, mythic ancestor of First Crusader Godfrey of Bouillon. Courtly participants at the tournament demonstrated their prowess as prospective crusaders, while their vows to take the cross affirmed Philip of Burgundy as an appropriate leader of crusade and demonstrated their devout commitment to the ultimate chivalric enterprise (Caron 2003).

Literary Culture While some have criticized the Pheasant banquet as “archaic knightly theatre” (Riley-Smith 2014, 309), such events rich with literary allusion demonstrate the vitality of crusade within late medieval political and cultural imaginations. Francophone literary crusade culture was not limited to production in the French kingdom, but that composed, translated, and ­circulating in Valois territories was prolific. Contemporary research into crusade literature – encompassing chronicles, epics, chansons de geste, romances, songs and lyrics, travel narratives, and more – has moved from seeking out empirically historical detail in such works to exploring how this literature functioned, and how it both reflected and shaped competing attitudes toward, and experiences of, holy war (Parsons and Paterson 2018). Crusade literature played a range of overlapping and competing roles, from the propagandistic to the commemorative, from the critical to the reflective. It also articulated and shaped contemporary attitudes, including Latin Christian perceptions of their Muslim foes. 115

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Pro-crusade historiography and chansons de geste integrated secular motifs from crusade romances and epics to appeal to elites’ desire for chivalric honor, thereby complementing pious messages articulated in crusade sermons; crusade sermons themselves often integrated exemplary literary motifs to the same end (Vander Elst 2017). Crusade and state-building propaganda intertwined with dynastic memory in imaginative literature, particularly prose romances, commissioned at the Valois and Burgundian courts (Moodey 2012). However, lyrics, romances, and spectacles not only exhorted audiences to join expeditions to combat Muslim enemies but also provided opportunities to reflect on spiritual, political, or familial anxieties created by the prospect of holy war, thus revealing the complexity of attitudes toward crusade across the period (Galvez 2020). Literary representations of crusade further enabled people to navigate experiences and imaginings of their Muslim enemies. Saladin’s recovery of Jerusalem in 1187 marks a turning point after which skillful Muslim warriors were often portrayed in chivalric terms as a device to rationalize crusader losses. Saladin himself was widely admired and appropriated by Francophone writers, to the point where he was attributed French ancestry in late adaptations of La Fille du Comte de Ponthieu (Jubb 2000). In contrast with such homogenization of the Muslim Other, ethnographic discursive analysis of travel accounts and firsthand crusader histories, such as Joinville’s Vie (probably written in stages between 1270s and 1309; Gaposchkin 2008), reveals how French encounters with and representations of the Other could also be informed by authorial sensitivity which allowed cultural difference to emerge (Khanmohamadi 2013). Recent historiography thus highlights the manifold ways in which the crusades endured as a “living and entirely contemporary” phenomenon in France at the end of the Middle Ages (Nejedly and Svatek 2015a, 13).6 It moreover uncovers shifting reflections about power and identities which both informed late medieval elite discourses on crusade and subsequently shaped nationalist mythmaking in the modern era.

Notes 1 I’d like to thank members of the Australasian Crusades Studies Network, especially Megan CassidyWelch, for their valuable assistance and comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. Remaining errors and oversights are my own. 2 “la defence de la saincte foy crestienne, .  .  . deffendre, maintenir ou restablir la dignité, estat et liberté de nostre mère saincte Église et du saint siege apostolicque de Romme.” 3 Emphasis has been placed on the inclusion of key recent developments and works in the field since 2000. Readers are encouraged to consult studies cited for orientation concerning earlier trends in crusade historiography. 4 Routledge’s Crusades journal, and Crusade Texts in Translation and Engaging the Crusades: The Memory and Legacy of Crusading series are standard resources. 5 The Croisades tardives series is published by Presses universitaires du Midi. Several volumes are freely available online via Open Edition Books. Accessed March 16, 2022. https://books.openedi tion.org/pumi/16254. 6 “Vivante et parfaitement actuelle.”

References Ashe, Laura. 2014. “The Ideal of Knighthood in English and French Writing, 1100–1230: Crusade, Piety, Chivalry and Patriotism.” In Writing the Early Crusades: Text, Transmission and Memory, edited by Marcus Bull and Damien Kempf, 155–68. Woodbridge: Boydell. Baloup, Daniel, and Manuel Sánchez, eds. 2015. Partir en croisade à la fin du Moyen Âge: Financement et logistique. Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Midi.

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France and the Crusades in the Later Middle Ages Barber, Malcom. 2006. The Trial of the Templars. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baumgartner, Frederic J. 1994. Louis XII. New York: St Martin’s Press. Bisaha, Nancy. 2004. Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Renate. 2018. “Roles for Women in Colonial Fantasies of 14th-cenutry France: Pierre Dubois and Philippe de Mézières.” In The French of Outremer: Communities and Communications in the Crusading Mediterranean, edited by Laura K. Morreale and Nicholas L. Paul, 247–81. New York: Fordham University Press. Boulton, D’Arcy Jonathon Dacre. 2000. The Knights of the Crown: The Monarchical Orders of Knighthood in Later Medieval Europe, 1325–1520. 2nd ed. Woodbridge: Boydell. Brownlee, Kevin. 1992. “Cultural Comparison: Crusade as Construct in Late Medieval France.” L’Esprit créateur 32 (3): 13–24. Caron, Marie-Thérèse. 2003. Les vœux du faisan, noblesse en fête, esprit de croisade: Le manuscrit français 11594 de la Bibliothèque nationale de France. Turnhout: Brepols. Cassidy-Welch, Megan, and Beth C. Spacey. 2021. “Introduction: Landscapes of Conflict and Encounter in the Crusading World.” Journal of Medieval History 47 (3): 293–301. Çelik, Siren. 2021. Manuel II Palaiologos (1350–1425): A Byzantine Emperor in a Time of Tumult. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Christie, Niall. 2020. Muslims and Crusaders: Christianity’s Wars in the Middle East, 1095–1382, from the Islamic Sources. 2nd ed. Abingdon: Routledge. Colwell, Tania. 2020. “Friendship and Trust between Medieval Princes: Affective Strategies for Navigating Intercultural Difference Across the Mediterranean.” Emotions: History, Culture, Society 4: 348–73. Delogu, Daisy. 2008. Theorising the Ideal Sovereign: The Rise of the French Vernacular Royal Biography. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Edbury, Peter W. 1991. The Kingdom of Cyprus and the Crusades, 1191–1374. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Field, Sean L., and M. Cecilia Gaposchkin. 2014. “Questioning the Capetians, 1180–1328.” History Compass 12 (7): 567–85. Galvez, Marisa. 2020. The Subject of Crusade: Lyric, Romance, and Materials, 1150 to 1500. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gaposchkin, M. Cecilia. 2008. The Making of Saint Louis: Kingship, Sanctity and Crusade in the Later Middle Ages. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Guhe, Ines Anna. 2013. “Crusade Narratives in French and German History Textbooks, 1871–1914.” European Review of History 20 (3): 367–82. Hodgson, Natasha R., et al., eds. 2019. Crusading and Masculinities. Abingdon: Routledge. Housley, N. J. 1980. “The Franco-Papal Crusade Negotiations for 1322–3.” Papers of the British School at Rome 48: 166–85. Housley, Norman. 1992. The Later Crusades: From Lyons to Alcazar, 1273–1580. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2004. “Introduction.” In Crusading in the Fifteenth Century: Message and Impact, edited by Norman Housley, 1–12. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2013. Crusading and the Ottoman Threat, 1453–1505. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———, ed. 2017. The Crusade in the Fifteenth Century: Converging and Competing Cultures. Abingdon: Routledge. Imber, Colin. 2009. The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650: The Structure of Power. 2nd ed. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Josserand, Philippe. 2021. “The Crusade and its Fronts in French Historiography from the Interwar Period to 2020.” Crusades 20: 227–46. Jubb, Margaret. 2000. The Legend of Saladin in Western Literature and Historiography. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press. Kaeuper, Richard. 2016. Medieval Chivalry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Khanmohamadi, Shirin A. 2013. In Light of Another’s Word: European Ethnography in the Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Labande-Mailfert, Yvonne. 1975. Charles VIII et son milieu (1470–1498): La jeunesse au pouvoir. Paris: Klincksieck.

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Tania M. Colwell Le Févre, Jean. 1881. Chronique de Jean le Févre, seigneur de Saint-Rémy. Edited by François Morand. Vol. 2. Paris: Renouard. Leopold, Antony. 2000. How to Recover the Holy Land: The Crusade Proposals of the Late Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries. Aldershot: Ashgate. Magee, James. 1998. “Crusading at the Court of Charles VI, 1388–1396.” French History 12: 367–83. Meserve, Margaret. 2008. Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Moodey, Elizabeth J. 2012. Illuminated Crusader Histories for Philip the Good of Burgundy. Turnhout: Brepols. Murray, Alan V. 2011. “National Identity, Language and Conflict in the Crusades to the Holy Land, 1096–1192.” In The Crusades and the Near East, edited by Conor Kostick, 107–30. London: Routledge. Naus, James. 2016. Constructing Kingship: The Capetian Monarchs of France and the Early Crusades. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Nejedlý, Martin, and Jaroslav Svátek. 2015a. “Introduction.” In Histoires et mémoires des croisades à la fin du Moyen Âge, edited by Martin Nejedlý and Jaroslav Svátek, 11–16. Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Midi. ———, eds. 2015b. La noblesse et la croisade à la fin du Moyen Âge (France, Bourgogne, Bohême). Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Midi. Parsons, Simon Thomas, and Linda M. Paterson, eds. 2018. Literature of the Crusades. Woodbridge: Boydell. Paviot, Jacques. 2003. Les ducs de Bourgogne, la croisade et l’Orient latin (fin XIVe siècle-XVe siècle). Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne. ———. 2006. “Noblesse et croisade à la fin du Moyen Age.” Cahiers de Recherches Médiévales 12: 69–84. ———. 2014a. “L’idée de croisade à la fin du Moyen Âge.” In Les projets de croisade: Géostratégie et diplomatie européenne du XIVe au XVIIe siècle, 17–29. Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Midi. ———. 2014b. Les projets de croisade: Géostratégie et diplomatie européenne du XIVe au XVIIe siècle. Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Midi. Riley-Smith, Jonathon. 1987. The Crusades: A Short History. London: Athlone Press. ———. 2014. The Crusades: A History. 3rd ed. London: Bloomsbury. Sághy, Marianne. 2001. “Crusade and Nationalism: Pierre Dubois, the Holy Land, and French Hegemony.” In The Crusades and the Military Orders: Expanding the Frontiers of Medieval Latin Christianity, edited by Zsolt Hunyadi and Jozsef Laszlovszky, 43–50. Budapest: Central European University Press. Shaw, Christine, and Michael Mallett. 2019. The Italian Wars, 1494–1559: War, State and Society in Early Modern Europe. 2nd ed. Abingdon: Routledge. Taylor, Craig. 2019. A Virtuous Knight: Defending Marshal Boucicaut (Jean II Le Meingre, 1366– 1421). Woodbridge: York Medieval Press. Tyerman, C. J. 1985. “Philip VI and the Recovery of the Holy Land.” English Historical Review 100 (394): 25–52. ———. 2006. God’s War: A New History of the Crusades. London: Allen Lane. Vander Elst, Stefan. 2017. The Knight, the Cross, and the Son: Crusade Propaganda and Chivalric Literature, 1100–1400. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Vaughan, Richard. 2002a. Philip the Bold: The Formation of the Burgundian State. New ed. Woodbridge: Boydell. ———. 2002b. Philip the Good: The Apogee of Burgundy. New ed. Woodbridge: Boydell. Weber, Benjamin. 2017. “Toward a Global Crusade? The Papacy and the Non-Latin World in the Fifteenth Century.” In Reconfiguring the Fifteenth-Century Crusade, edited by Norman Housley, 11–44. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ———, ed. 2019. Croisades en Afrique: Les expéditions occidentales à destination du continent africain, XIIIe – XVIe siècle. Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Midi. ———. 2021. “When and Where did the Word ‘Crusade’ Appear in the Middle Ages? And Why?” In The Crusades: History and Memory, edited by Kurt Villads Jensen and Torben Kjersgaard Nielsen, 199–220. Turnhout: Brepols.

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11 PRINCE AND PRINCIPALITY IN THE BRETON WAR OF SUCCESSION Erika Graham-Goering

Jeanne de Penthièvre was fifteen years old when she became duchess of Brittany, and she spent the next twenty four years fighting a war to keep that title. She inherited the powerful duchy from her uncle, Duke Jean III, at his death in 1341, but her rights were immediately challenged by her half-uncle, the duke’s younger brother, Jean de Montfort. Although the king of France, Philippe VI (r. 1328–1350), supported Jeanne and her husband, Charles de Blois, the Montfortists were backed by Edward III of England (r. 1327–1377), drawing the fight for Brittany into the larger rivalry of the so-called Hundred Years’ War. Jeanne and Charles’s rulership for more than two decades thus took place against a backdrop of conflict and struggle. Finally, Charles was killed in battle in 1364, and Jeanne reluctantly conceded defeat. She and her French allies recognized her rival’s son as Duke Jean IV, and his descendants governed Brittany until the early sixteenth century, when the duchy came under the direct control of the French kings. The success of the Montfortist dynasty has been seen as a “golden age” for Brittany, especially after the crisis of the War of Succession. But it was also part of something bigger, for the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in France are known as an “age of principalities.” Many sons and brothers of the Valois kings were given apanages, large territories taken from the royal domain, which these princes held in homage from the king but governed with increasing authority (Wood 1966). The duchies of Anjou, Bourbon, Burgundy, and Orléans are among the primary examples. In addition, large, long-established fiefs, such as Armagnac, Béarn, Foix, and especially Brittany, became increasingly powerful and likewise asserted their independence. John Le Patourel (1965) was one of the first historians (and one of the few in English) to systematically describe how these regional powers developed over the fourteenth century. He defines principalities as “regional autonomies, organized internally as kingdoms in miniature and approaching independence in their relations with the king, with one another and with external powers” (156). Even before their efflorescence in the fifteenth century, many French duchies and counties shared a common trajectory, developing similar bureaucratic institutions, political strategies, and representations of princely power. The timeline and specifics varied from case to case, but the net result was to establish them as “states in miniature” (182). 119

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The significance of this trend depends on one’s perspective (and see Fraser McNair’s contribution to this volume for debates on similar issues several centuries earlier.) Historians interested primarily in regional viewpoints have concentrated on how these principalities achieved effective statehood, tracing the rise of princely power from turbulent origins to a fifteenth-century apogee. For Brittany in particular, Michael Jones charts the development of ducal power from the first Montfortist, Jean IV (Jones 1970), bringing to light the administrative apparatus and the legal and ideological positioning that gave the dukes effective sovereignty in their duchy (Jones 1988, 2003). Scholars working from the perspective of the French kings and kingdom, by contrast, fall roughly into two camps. The more traditional view saw the rise of the great principalities as a crisis for the monarchy, as the princes illegitimately wrested power from the king and destroyed the centralized authority the Capetian rulers had so carefully built over the course of the thirteenth century (Perroy 1947). But subsequent historians have broken down the opposition between royal and princely power (Jones 2002; Small 2002). After all, even the most powerful princes continued to participate in the government of the kingdom, and the kings benefited from delegating power to local elites (Watts 2009, 91). The monopoly of public authority was neither a realistic goal nor even the desired one (Firnhaber-Baker 2010). Still, these angles all prioritize the characteristics highlighted by Le Patourel: the “progress towards autonomy” and the extent to which the princes and their principalities achieved an emulation of royal power (alongside, more recently, their contributions within the French state). But while this progression may appear linear in retrospect, crises like the Breton War of Succession suggest that this model of princely power was not the whole story (GrahamGoering 2020). Unpicking the tensions at each successive stage of the war shows that princely power was an ongoing experiment which combined multiple possible ways of ruling at once.

Brittany or France? A Question of Status Fourteenth-century people would not have spoken about Brittany as “French” history. To be sure, when Jeanne de Penthièvre and Jean de Montfort first contested who was the rightful heir, they turned to King Philippe VI of France for arbitration. Brittany had been held in liege homage from the French kings since the early thirteenth century, and the duke became a peer of France in 1297. But even while bringing their case before the royal court in August 1341, the Penthièvre lawyers leaned rhetorically on the distinction: “France is a completely different region, the ways and manner of living and the customs entirely other – as everyone knows” (Graham-Goering, Jones, and Yeurc’h 2019, all translations my own). While Brittany was part of the kingdom of France, “France” itself referred specifically to the Île-de-France and surrounding areas (Lewis 1968; Small 2009). For the immediate purposes of the ducal succession, this distinction had legal implications. Under the customary inheritance rules of Brittany, Jeanne de Penthièvre took her dead father’s place in the line of succession and should become duchess (Figure 11.1). But in French law, she was treated merely the late duke’s niece, and Jean de Montfort, more closely related as his half-brother, was the rightful claimant. Under normal circumstances, of course, Breton laws applied in Brittany, and French laws in France. The problem was that this was a ducal succession. The Breton princes ruled their own principality but were subservient to the French king. This debate is therefore useful for illustrating how contemporaries approached the tensions underlying the modern historiographical debates outlined earlier. 120

Prince and Principality in the Breton War of Succession

Figure 11.1  Family tree of the Breton War of Succession.

To explain the difficulty, the lawyers used a common medieval image, of society as a body. It would be monstrous, the Penthièvre case argued, if a cow had the head of a horse, or a man the head of an animal: likewise, if the head of the principality followed one set of rules, while the rest of the Breton nobility followed another, the whole could not function. But, countered the Montfortist lawyers, the prince was part of the body of the kingdom, with the king at its head, so the prince should follow the king’s rules. Both sides were, of course, correct on their own terms, so it became necessary to determine whether the prince was more like the ordinary lords of Brittany or like the king. Historians have seen the Montfortist arguments as more noteworthy. Turning to Breton history, the lawyers argued that Brittany had formerly been a kingdom itself (from 849 to 907), and that its subjugation to the French kings had been voluntary. As a result, it was more appropriate that the now-duke follow royal laws. On the surface, this claim seems to fit with the royalizing ideologies expected under the usual model of late medieval princely power. However, this was not an argument for princes’ supremacy within Brittany but actually associated them more closely with the French monarchy, especially since the lawyers also highlighted the duke’s position as a peer of France. The peers operated on a royal, not a regional, stage, supporting the king in war and advising him on matters of government. This position aligns more closely with historians’ recent emphasis on the ongoing integration of the princes within the realm. But the Penthièvre case, with the reverse argument, also matters. It emphasized the duchy’s subjugation to the Crown but then asserted that the social distance between the duke and king isolated Breton affairs. The most important ducal responsibilities – upholding Breton customs, preserving its lands, and bearing the Breton coat of arms – were regional concerns, while a peer’s royal responsibilities were limited and secondary. Similarly, the duke’s personal status was no different from the rest of the nobility: the prince was not sovereign, the way the king was, and so, just like anyone else, had to obey the (Breton) law. The lawyers also used the internal hierarchies of Breton lordship to substantiate this parity. Because the great counties such as Avaugour and Penthièvre had been created from the ducal domain, the counts maintained the same status as the dukes – and since they followed the inheritance practices of Brittany, so should the prince. This offered an argument for princely autonomy not through royal mimicry but through a levelling of difference between ranks. This status dispute also defined the prince in other ways. Most importantly, could the prince be a woman? The end of the Capetian royal line had, famously, determined that women could not succeed to the French throne. In 1316, 1322, and 1328, a male heir had 121

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taken precedence over the daughter(s) of his predecessor, and this became cemented in royal ideology in the fifteenth century (Taylor 2006). By contrast, several women had previously inherited Brittany, most notably Constance (r. 1171–1201) and her daughter Alix (r. 1203–1221) (Everard 2000). So again, on a basic level, Breton custom would allow Jeanne to inherit, while French law favored Jean. But female inheritance depended on the status of the prince. There were many potential barriers to women’s political authority, including the misogynistic claim (repeated here by the Montfortists) that women were too unreliable to exercise judgment and too weak to fight in battle. But worse still, Brittany’s size, prestige, and position in the kingdom made it a public concern, rather than merely private property. It was particularly at this level, the Montfortists claimed, that women’s influence was most harmful. Nonetheless, recent precedent worked against the Montfortists: Mahaut (d. 1329) had overcome a similar challenge to her succession to the county peerage of Artois in 1302. Indeed, women had long inherited and/or controlled lordships (Tanner 2019, 86n14; LoPrete 2007), and this usually went largely unremarked and uncontested. The Penthièvre case thus had an easier argument, for the reservations about women did not apply when they inherited a lordship; and as Brittany was simply one lordship among many, there was no reason to question this practice.

The War of the Two Jeannes Philippe VI ruled in favor of Jeanne and Charles on September 7, 1341 (the judgment [arrêt] of Conflans). Jean de Montfort was not so easily dissuaded. He persuaded King Edward III to recognize his ducal title and supply the military backing to enforce it (Sumption 1999, ch. 11). The Montfortist cause, however, might have been short-lived without Jean’s wife, Jeanne de Flandre (Sjursen 2015). Jean was captured by French forces in November 1341, but Jeanne took up the fight, negotiating with Edward III, Philippe VI, and towns in Brittany to keep her party afloat in the early spring of 1342. In 1343, she even betrothed her infant son Jean (the future duke) to one of Edward’s daughters. The chronicler Jean Froissart (c. 1337–after 1404) dramatized her role: rallying troops, fighting a naval battle, and sallying from a besieged town to burn down the enemy camp. But he also showcased her non-military authority, encouraging her husband’s ambitions and advising him on political strategy. In one manuscript of this chronicle, she is illustrated at Jean’s side as the barons of Brittany performed their homage. There is little external evidence to corroborate her battlefield exploits, but her political importance in the early phase of the war is beyond doubt. Ultimately, Jeanne’s reliance on Edward proved her undoing, for in 1343 he decided his interests would be better served by seizing direct control of the Montfortist cause in Brittany, and placed Jeanne under house arrest in England, where she would remain until her death 30 years later. Froissart, however, fictitiously prolonged her leadership role in Brittany in his chronicle, even when Jean de Montfort escaped and returned briefly to the conflict before his death in 1345. This let Froissart create a neat parallel between the rival factions, for, at the battle of La Roche-Derrien in June 1347, Charles de Blois was likewise captured by English troops, leaving Jeanne de Penthièvre in charge for the next 9 years. From this contrived opposition, Froissart spun the civil war as the “war of these two ladies,” which became the “war of the two Jeannes” by which the fight is remembered today. As well as reminding us of the essentially constructed nature of many historical sources, this literary device points toward the real partnership at the core of ducal power. The 122

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duchess could stand in easily for the duke, and vice versa, because both were implicated in the exercise of princely authority by default. We have better evidence for Jeanne de Penthièvre’s involvement with the administration of the duchy than for Jeanne de Flandre, and it reveals a pattern of cooperation between her and Charles that allowed them to govern more effectively. From the start of the war, Jeanne acted with Charles to reward their supporters with gifts of land, money, and privileges, a key political strategy in this crisis. Charles, often on military campaigns, dealt more with affairs in the contested areas of the duchy, to the south and west, while Jeanne concentrated on their strongholds in the north and east. Having two princes helped ensure that taxes were properly collected, petitions answered, and properties sold or acquired. Charles could even travel to other regions of France for extended periods, while Jeanne remained in Brittany to keep an eye on things. This was not, numerically, a balanced partnership: Jeanne appears in about 25% of the surviving records, as Charles handled more of the daily business. But they consistently made the big decisions together, and all transactions involving large sums of money, important pieces of land, or permanent agreements were undertaken together. As a result, their supporters saw the duke and duchess as having joint authority. Many of them had served Jeanne and her family even before her marriage to Charles and so adapted to him as a newcomer; others began by serving Charles but stayed with Jeanne in his absence. Service to either prince was considered interchangeable, which in turn lent flexibility to their administration. And so when Jeanne and Charles appointed Robin de Lanvalay as captain of the castle of Le Gavre, he vowed loyalty to “[his] dearest and dread lord and lady” together. The dynamics between the two Jeannes and their husbands reflect recent arguments about cooperation between kings and queens (Earenfight 2007; Woodacre 2013; GaudeFerragu 2016). Queenship studies have reframed premodern monarchies as collaborative projects, where both spouses were complementary agents of royal authority. Such partnerships proved strategically useful in confronting political challenges, managing extensive territories, or controlling different aspects of government. This model is particularly key because many historians have identified a fourteenth-century decline in women’s political power (Tanner 2019, 84), heralded by, but not limited to, the exclusion of women from the French Crown. Moreover, princely apanages were usually limited to male heirs, otherwise returning to the king. Jeanne de Penthièvre’s career demonstrates that such restrictions were far from universalized on a princely level, while the example of Jeanne de Flandre further shows that inheritance should not be the only yardstick to measure publicly recognized power. This more holistic understanding of power challenges the blanket narrative of women’s political exclusion for this period. It also complicates the relationship between ducal and royal power, since a simple equation between king and duke does not account for the power-sharing of ruling partnerships.

Political Alliances and Princely Autonomy Political independence is considered a crucial element in the rise of late medieval principalities. Jean de Montfort and Jeanne de Flandre exercised such choice at the start of the Breton War of Succession with their overtures to Edward III. But thereafter, the political alignment of each faction has been considered static for the whole war: the Montfortists allied with England, the Penthièvre camp with the French. Yet this apparent dependency was belied after the English captured Charles de Blois at his siege of La Roche-Derrien in 1347. He was brought to England in 1348 and, barring a few brief excursions, remained there until 123

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1356. During these nine years, Jeanne de Penthièvre conducted a vigorous diplomatic campaign not only to secure his freedom but also to end the civil war and move Brittany into a politically neutral position. Because this attempt ultimately failed, most historians have overlooked its significance, but it reveals the range of options which the duke and duchess felt they were in a position to pursue. While a medieval nobleman captured in battle usually negotiated his freedom in exchange for a ransom appropriate to his status and wealth, Jeanne immediately set her sights on a grander solution to the setback of Charles’s capture: a marriage alliance between her eldest son, Jean, and one of Edward III’s daughters. This bold strategy implicitly proposed that Edward drop his support of the young Jean de Montfort to recognize Jeanne and Charles’s claim to Brittany. After all, the marriage would hardly benefit Edward if he continued to undermine the future succession of his new son-in-law. However, Jeanne also reached out to Philippe VI. This balancing act was particularly essential since Edward initially showed little interest in the marriage alliance. Between 1348 and 1350, when Philippe died and his son Jean II came to the throne, Jeanne and Charles secured only temporary truces with England. By 1351, sticking with French support may have seemed the best route forward. King Jean was close to his first cousin Charles de Blois, having fought alongside him in the early years of the war, and he now inducted Charles as a founding member of his new chivalric company, the Order of the Star (Boulton 1987, 181). We do not know how Charles felt about Jeanne’s plans for an English alliance, but it would be understandable if he preferred to maintain ties with France first and foremost. In 1351–1352, Charles arranged essentially the opposite marriage, that of his daughter to the constable (head of the armies) of France, Charles d’Espagne, who was a favorite of King Jean. Did this mean Jeanne had abandoned her initial plans? Not necessarily. But in light of Edward’s recalcitrance, the immediate financial and especially military benefits from France likely had a strong appeal. But almost immediately, the political scales tipped sharply at the Battle of Mauron in August 1352, where a Franco-Breton army (including most of the new Knights of the Star) was annihilated, ending significant French military involvement in the Breton War. Jeanne quickly sent new ambassadors to Edward to “put an end” to the negotiations by means of the marriage of Jean and an English princess “or by any other means” (Jones [1996] 2016, no. 152). This time, her overtures bore fruit, and on March 1, 1353, a treaty was signed. It not only established Charles’s ransom, arranged the marriage, and recognized Jeanne’s and Charles’s titles but also created an offensive and defensive military alliance between Brittany and England. The terms of this agreement reflected Edward’s stronger position after Mauron to turn the duchy against its former French allies, but there were still some concessions on this point, since Charles was not obliged to fight the French personally until he himself had requested aid. Perhaps he and Jeanne hoped that with their daughter married to the leader of the French armies, they could move into a more or less neutral position in the AngloFrench conflict. If the defeat at Mauron weakened their position in relation to Edward, it also reduced the significance of French power in Brittany, creating the opening for Jeanne to finally accomplish her original aims. This treaty thus attests the range of political strategies which Breton princes were willing and able to employ as a matter of course. In accordance with the treaty, their son Jean was sent to England for his marriage (he had just turned 8), and his younger siblings, Guy and Marie, accompanied him as hostages for the payment of their father’s ransom. Unfortunately, Edward balked at fulfilling the 124

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bargain, claiming his daughter was too ill to wed. (She would marry Jean de Montfort in 1355.) Worse still, their son-in-law, the constable Charles d’Espagne, was assassinated in 1354, cutting off that family tie. In response, Jeanne tried to substitute one of Edward’s other daughters, as permitted by the treaty. But her efforts were in vain: Edward repudiated the treaty, probably because he decided he would rather maintain his control over the young Jean de Montfort and receive the revenues of Brittany as guardian. He demanded that Jeanne and Charles destroy all copies of the treaty – luckily, one survived to be rediscovered in Manchester in 1929 – and agreed to release Charles only in 1356 for an exorbitant sum of money. Only Marie returned with her father; the ongoing burden of the ransom payments and captivity of their two eldest sons would hobble Jeanne and Charles for the rest of the war and after. But even this failure sheds light on the dynamics of princely autonomy, which is usually considered in absolute rather than relative terms. Jeanne and Charles remained, whichever side they aligned themselves with, dependent on their more powerful royal neighbors. Yet they could still manipulate and move about within this system to their own advantage. In the right circumstances, it could make sense to attach the principality to France and work within that political framework. However, this relationship was neither inevitable nor inescapable.

Structures of Power and the Personal Power of the Prince Four years after Charles’s release, Jeanne and Charles finally concluded a successful marriage, between their daughter Marie and Louis d’Anjou in 1360. Louis was King Jean II’s second son, brother of the king-to-be Charles V, and soon duke of the neighboring duchy of Anjou. Their marriage contract paid particular attention to the future succession to the duchy of Brittany. Should Marie inherit, Brittany would normally pass to her first son with Louis (or daughter, if they had no sons). If, however, Louis also inherited the kingdom of France, for which he was currently second in line, there was the danger that their child would inherit both the royal and ducal Crowns, effectively absorbing Brittany into France. The contract stipulated that in such a case, the eldest son would inherit France, while Brittany would pass to another sibling. These considerations reveal how much the fate of late medieval principalities depended on the individual personalities and princely lineages which happened to come to power – or not. A lack of (male) heirs was eventually responsible for the (re)absorption of both Anjou and Brittany, among others, into the royal fold in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. This distinctly “non-modern” political trajectory can be obscured by the focus on the principalities of France as “states-within-states.” The late Middle Ages were a critical period in the formation of the modern western European nation-states (Genet 1992). Although principalities such as Brittany did not, in the end, result in one of the polities familiar to us today, they shared many of the same administrative, and especially fiscal and military, developments as the kingdom. But “state-like practices were not the only, or even the normative, ways in which kings and other powers ruled” (Watts 2009, 32), and older traditions of lordship that emphasized the personal power of the prince remained perfectly compatible with more “modern” modes of government. The War of Succession unfortunately destroyed many of the records needed for a detailed study of the Breton administration. Nevertheless, at the start of the conflict, the principality still had the relatively basic institutions of the thirteenth century (Jones 1988, 7–12, 2003, 125

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IX, 122–123), including a central chancery to produce ducal letters, court of accounts to keep track of revenue, and system of judicial appeals, in addition to various local administrators representing ducal authority across the duchy. These structures, although relatively small and less complex than they would become in the fifteenth century, largely continued to meet princely needs during the war, as the flexibility of a mobile, rather than fixed, administration suited the itinerant co-rulership of Jeanne and Charles. At the same time, some continuity of officeholders may have helped mitigate the chaotic political situation: the local official Pierre de Langon was addressed as “our seneschal (steward) of Nantes” by the Montfortists in 1361 and by Charles de Blois in 1362, suggesting a certain administrative resilience despite the disputed princely authority. The ability to transcend its specific rulers is perhaps the most essential benefit afforded by a state-like government. Moreover, certain important innovations occurred under the pressure of the war. Jeanne and Charles levied new taxes, laying the foundations for the fouage (household tax), which would sustain the fifteenth-century administration. Somewhat more spectacularly, for her negotiations with Edward III in 1352, Jeanne de Penthièvre named ambassadors with the approval of her nobility, churchmen, and towns. While the dukes traditionally consulted their parlement of barons and ecclesiastics in important matters, including the towns was new. This gathering reflected French royal “estates” assemblies, summoned periodically since 1302 to confirm royal decisions. They reinforced the monarchy’s power in times of crisis, just as Jeanne’s assembly affirmed her authority in a politically dangerous moment. This unique meeting can be seen as an important step between the earlier parlement and the later Breton Estates, though it responded more to immediate needs rather than some greater vision of what ducal power should become. At the same time, the power of individual dukes was not restricted to Brittany alone. Jeanne and Charles used a long list of titles in their charters: usually, Duke/Duchess of Brittany, Viscount(ess) of Limoges, and Lord/Lady of Guise and of Mayenne, to which Count(ess) of Penthièvre and/or Richmond and Lord/Lady of Avaugour were occasionally added. Duke Jean IV was similarly Count of Montfort and of Richmond (and initially claimed to be Viscount of Limoges as well). These territories were listed in descending order of status, but the counties and even viscounties represented significant principalities in their own right. This multifocal power is quickly illustrated with a few examples. Richmond lay in ­England, having been granted to the predecessors of the ducal family following their services in the Norman Conquest. As such, it gave the English kings influence over the Breton dukes; Jeanne and Charles naturally never possessed it in practice, though Edward III bestowed it on Jean IV. Conversely, the dukes could offload their own territories to suit political need; Marie received Guise in dowry when she married Louis d’Anjou. Limoges, a decentralized and unstable principality in south-central France, clearly shows the practices and results of long-distance rulership. Jeanne and Charles claimed Limoges independently from Brittany, and Jeanne granted it as a gift to Charles in 1343 to further distinguish it from the duchy (though they continued to rule it jointly). It was a separate source of ­political and financial leverage, as well as a separate source of political discontent – in the 1340s, Jeanne and Charles attempted to reform the administration in response to local complaints, but tensions persisted. Most of the officials remained local, rather than Breton, and few individuals from Limoges pursued careers in Brittany. Each principality or lordship thus contributed to the whole of Jeanne’s, Charles’s, or Jean’s power but was not subsumed within the model of a single principality-as-state. Jeanne vividly 126

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illustrated this branching authority in the wax seal she used to authenticate her charters. In the center she displayed her personal coat of arms, but she surrounded this with smaller coats of arms representing Brittany, Penthièvre, Avaugour/Mayenne, and Limoges in turn, distinguishing the individual domains in her possession. The multiple identities of a single prince, and the disinterest in consolidating or unifying them, counterbalance the emphasis on a centralized mode of power in earlier historiography on state formation. From the perspective of the prince, decentralization was a basic part of the polycentric structure of power. Nevertheless, there was a hierarchy among these properties that affected Jeanne and Charles’s relationships with them. Brittany was something more than just the prince’s personal property (Le Patourel 1965, 183). When the younger Jean de Montfort, now in his early 20s, returned to the duchy in 1362, it sparked a fresh series of conflicts and negotiations. At the Landes d’Evran in 1363, he and Charles provisionally agreed to split the duchy: Jean would receive the southern and western portions, with the capital of Nantes, while Jeanne and Charles took the rest, with the capital of Rennes. However, this proposal was soon rejected by the Penthièvre side, not just from self-interest, but probably in large part because it was politically infeasible. The territorial integrity of the duchy was essential to ducal ideology and well-supported by Breton nobles, who had already protested when the previous duke, Jean III, suggested trading Brittany to the French king. Even if Jeanne and Charles wished to cede half their authority, the move was unlikely to be widely accepted, or long durable, and would have threatened their legitimacy as princes. By contrast, they were freely willing and able to sell off portions of Limoges piecemeal over the course of their rule. A ruler could therefore exercise different degrees of authority over their diverse domains, and their power was in some ways more carefully defined the more significant it was.

The End of the War, the Start of an Era? With compromise off the table, Charles de Blois fought on and died at the Battle of Auray on September 29, 1364. Jeanne de Penthièvre’s supporters resisted the victorious Jean de Montfort for several more months, but eventually, the pope and the king of France convinced her to admit defeat. The first Treaty of Guérande, signed with Jean on April  12, 1365, ceded the duchy to him in exchange for a large annual payment, though she maintained her county of Penthièvre in Brittany, the viscounty of Limoges, and most of her other properties. However, some of the apparently final outcomes of the war remained effectively negotiable. For instance, Jeanne’s defeat seems to fit the pattern of a decline in women’s authority. The Treaty of Guérande agreed that women would no longer inherit the duchy unless no other heir was available, when the duchy would instead pass to Jeanne’s male descendants. However, this restriction did not put a stop to women’s authority in the duchy. The new succession rules prevented the daughter of François I (r. 1442–1450) from becoming duchess in her own right, though she married the future François II (r. 1458–88). But the Montfortists ran out of male heirs in 1488, at which point both they and the Penthièvre line were represented only by women, whose claims were equally recognized by their contemporaries. Moreover, in the interim, several of the Montfortist duchesses by marriage exercised political authority and responded effectively to periods of crisis in the duchy, just as Jeanne de Flandre did at the start of the war. It is therefore an open question whether this period of experimentation in princely power came to an end with the close of the succession crisis. By examining these gray areas, 127

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debates, and possibilities – including practices which did not directly contribute to subsequent manifestations of princely authority (Watts 2009, 11) – we can move beyond the narrow definitions of success framed in Montfortist propaganda to a fuller appreciation of the changes and continuities which created the French era of principalities. Princely power had no “final” form but existed in its own right every step of the way.

References Primary sources Graham-Goering, Erika, Michael Jones, and Bertrand Yeurc’h, eds. 2019. Aux origines de la guerre de succession de Bretagne: Documents (1341–1342). Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes. Jones, Michael, ed. (1996) 2016. Recueil des actes de Charles de Blois et Jeanne de Penthièvre, duc et duchesse de Bretagne (1341–1364), suivi des actes de Jeanne de Penthièvre (1364–1384). Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes. books.openedition.org/pur/28420.

Secondary sources Boulton, D’Arcy Jonathan Dacre. 1987. The Knights of the Crown: The Monarchical Orders of Knighthood in Later Medieval Europe 1325–1520. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. Earenfight, Theresa. 2007. “Without the Persona of the Prince: Kings, Queens and the Idea of Monarchy in Late Medieval Europe.” Gender and History 19: 1–21. Everard, Judith. 2000. Brittany and the Angevins: Province and Empire, 1158–1203. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Firnhaber-Baker, Justine. 2010. “Seigneurial War and Royal Power in Later Medieval Southern France.” Past & Present 208: 37–76. Gaude-Ferragu, Murielle. 2016. Queenship in Medieval France, 1300–1500. Translated by Angela Krieger. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Genet, Jean-Philippe. 1992. “Which State Rises?” Historical Research 65: 119–33. Graham-Goering, Erika. 2020. Princely Power in Late Medieval France: Jeanne de Penthièvre and the War for Brittany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jones, Michael. 1970. Ducal Brittany 1364–1399: Relations with England and France during the Reign of Duke John IV. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1988. The Creation of Brittany: A Late Medieval State. London: Hambledon Press. ———. 2002. “The Crown and the Provinces in the Fourteenth Century.” In France in the Later Middle Ages 1200–1500, edited by David Potter, 61–89. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2003. Between France and England: Politics, Power and Society in Late Medieval Brittany. Aldershot: Ashgate. Le Patourel, John. 1965. “The King and the Princes in Fourteenth-Century France.” In Europe in the Late Middle Ages, edited by J. R. Hale, J. R. L. Highfield, and B. Smalley, 155–83. London: Faber & Faber. Lewis, Peter S. 1968. Later Medieval France: The Polity. London: Palgrave Macmillan. LoPrete, Kimberly A. 2007. “Women, Gender and Lordship in France, c.1050–1250.” History Compass 5: 1921–41. Perroy, Édouard. 1947. “Feudalism or Principalities in Fifteenth-Century France.” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 20: 181–85. Sjursen, Katrin E. 2015. “The War of the Two Jeannes: Rulership in the Fourteenth Century.” Medieval Feminist Forum 51 (1): 4–40. Small, Graeme. 2002. “The Crown and the Provinces in the Fifteenth Century.” In France in the Later Middle Ages 1200–1500, edited by David Potter, 130–54. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2009. Late Medieval France. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sumption, Jonathan. 1999. The Hundred Years War: Trial by Battle. 2nd ed. Vol. 1. London: Faber & Faber.

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Prince and Principality in the Breton War of Succession Tanner, Heather J. 2019. “Women’s Legal Capacity: Was the Thirteenth Century a Turning Point?” In Paradigm Shifts in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: Transformations, Reformation, and Revolutions in the Pre-Modern World, edited by Albrecht Classen, 81–96. Turnhout: Brepols. Taylor, Craig. 2006. “The Salic Law, French Queenship, and the Defense of Women in the Late Middle Ages.” French Historical Studies 29: 543–64. Watts, John. 2009. The Making of Polities: Europe, 1300–1500. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wood, Charles T. 1966. The French Apanages and the Capetian Monarchy, 1224–1328. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Woodacre, Elena. 2013. The Queens Regnant of Navarre: Succession, Politics, and Partnership, 1274–1512. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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12 PERFORMING DISCONTENT Politics and Society in the French Satirical Theater of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries Francesca Canadé Sautman Absent modern notions of “freedom of speech,” the cultural media of theater and performance provided a visible outlet for social and political commentary in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century France. Unlike modern ones, medieval plays were not performed in enclosed buildings serving as dedicated theaters. There were actual texts couched on paper (or parchment), as well as improvisations, but performances were public spectacles in openair spaces, often in the presence of high-ranking personages who commissioned the event. The types of medieval performances varied widely. In fifteenth-century Lille, for instance, theater thrived with a yearly dramatic contest the Sunday after Trinity, when local youth groups were invited to stage plays on wagons, wains, or portable scaffolds (Knight 2005, 239). Professional and religious associations and urban communities performed processions that conveyed messages to power, as when the people sang “Vive le roy sans guerre” (“Long live the King without war”) at the entry of Charles VIII in Troyes in 1486, one among many royal entries with theatrical components. “Theater” could derive from texts requiring only one reader/performer (dramatic monologue) or two (dialogues and debates), not typically classified as theater, yet publicly performed. Assemblages of jokes and nonsequiturs (Old French fatras, or “pile of junk”) were recited on feasts such as Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras) during Carnival. Geste-singers were hired by Northern cities to perform chansons de geste and were also involved in the staging of mystery plays, bridging the oneperson performances and the more elaborate dramatic tradition (Koopmans 2012, 223–25, 244). Many performances included personifications and mock trials to expose the disorders of society. Public performances were thus often embedded in national and local politics and signaled content through body language, stage movements, props, or changes in linguistic registers (from highbrow French to patois, for instance), while winks, gestures, and especially, meaningful silences were eloquent yet hard to censor (Doudet 2018, 431–32). Not all plays survived as texts: they were not primarily written down for the perusal of an individual reader, even though expensive manuscripts, and, later, printed editions, were produced. More common were the often-dog-eared paper copies meant for performance usage (Dominguez 2012, 28). We believe that most medieval play texts were, in fact, performed – over 200 venues for mystery plays have been documented in France from the fourteenth to mid-sixteenth centuries (Hamblin 2012, 44) – but censorship by the king DOI: 10.4324/9780367808471-13

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or Parlement could prevent a performance, and the text itself might be lost. Alternatively, the cash to cover the expenses of a lavish stage production might be unavailable. A performance could also be recorded while no text of the play survives: we thus know that the Mystère de Sainte Catherine was performed in Rouen in 1454 according to the financial records of the city, as well as in Metz, Montélimar, Lyon, and Angers, between 1350 and 1492 (Bouhaik-Girones 2005, 29 and n.2).

Retracing Public Performance Play texts occupy a column in the middle of the page, leaving space on both sides for comments and revisions, and are couched mostly on paper rather than parchment. Most contain stage and acting directions, the didascalies, or instructions to the play master and actors, such as “Now Adam speaks to Jesus” or “And he strikes him quickly . . .” (Dominguez 2012, 28–30). These were often in Latin or mixed French and Latin. Performance notations could indicate that the text was copied before the performance or after it, “to keep a record of its success, possibly to be sold to subsequent stage directors.” (Dominguez 2012, 27). A medieval play often generated multiple versions of the full text, including a master copy, or fair or integral copy, plus annotated versions, including the copy used by the master of the play, and shorter scripts for the actors, called rollets (little rolls) (Hamblin 2012, 43–45). Some genres, such as the sotties (“fools’ plays”), left few performance traces, unlike elaborate mystery plays. The richest performance documents are municipal accounts, which detail payments to actors and stage managers and expenditures for decors and costumes. A collection of 62 documents from the small city of Compiègne offers, with information about plays, staging, actors, and financial backers, details on the role of the city as a whole: the bourgeois meeting as an assembly to plan the staging of a Passion Play, designating organizers for the spectacle and its financial management, and taking specific financial measures to cover the event’s expenses (Kanaoka 2006, 123–25). Date and place also help reconstruct performances: the prologue of the Jeu de Saint Nicolas by Jean Bodel d’Arras (end twelfth to early thirteenth century) states that it was performed on the evening of December 5 for a public of lords and ladies. The performance of a play can be recorded through a violent crime, such as one Passion Play in Chelles in 1395, the backdrop to the judicial record of a brutal sexual assault against a local woman by a group of men, including a chaplain and a police officer, bringing to light the disturbing realization that “the earliest extant records of the medieval French stage are narratives of violence” (Enders 2004, 164–65). Performance venues and publics also varied. We know of about 60 different morality plays dating before 1500, and a given play could be staged in many cities: first performed in 1396, the Moralité de bien avisé mal avisé was performed again in Rennes in 1439, in Nantes in 1454, and in Laval in 1488 for Duke Pierre II of Brittany and the duchess (Beck 2012, 15–17). Large-scale performances were often anchored in the cultural life of a city. The Passion Play was represented in at least three cities in May 1490, Compiègne, Troyes, and Reims; the latter, prepared over nine months and staged for eight days, was by far the largest, attracting some 16,000 spectators (Kanaoka 2006, 125 n. 99). Performance of critical messages could also take place outside the confines of the theater proper. In the fourteenth century, the organization of a ceremony could convey a collective statement, as in the politically motivated show of force by the entire city of Paris in its procession for Isabel and Edward of England (Brown and Regalado 2001). The slightest 131

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modification in a codified performance ritual was perceived as a subversive message, as when the Parlement of Paris attempted to change the order of marching for the coronation of Charles VIII and was forcefully denounced and punished (Perret 2001, 187–88). In the broadest sense, performance could imply collective protest against a historical verdict, such as the condemnation and burning of Joan of Arc, when women performing the role of Joan were rewarded for their visit to towns (as in Metz and Orleans) by public ceremonies and gifts. The first of these took place on May 20, 1436, two decades before Joan was officially rehabilitated (Crowder 2018, 190–210).

Scope and Types of Satire Historians of medieval satire have characterized it as “topical inertia,” borrowing from the Ancients, repeating recriminations as authors imitated each other and echoed conservative postures. This sort of satire may not seem seriously critical of society, with highly predictable targets and general pieties: women, sexual mores, the clergy, social ambition, hypocrisy, even when the pope and cardinals were lambasted for seeking gold and honors rather than saving souls while the poor were being crushed (Strubel 2012, 63–64). An early secular play, the thirteenth-century Jeu de la feuillee, illustrates both the scope and limitations of local satire. Attributed to the poet Adam de la Halle, from Arras, the Jeu was performed there and combined fantasy and folkloric elements with poking fun at institutions and local individuals, very possibly with their approval (Symes 2007, 186–88). The character of the unfettered madman who mocks religion, the town’s literary society, and general hypocrisy might have been intended as subversive. Arras was then a prosperous commercial and literary center. Feuillee reflected its politics, animated by intense rivalry between two centers of ecclesiastical power, the cathedral and its canons and the Abbey of Saint-Vaast, over the control of real estate, public spaces, and the performance of religious processions (Symes 2007, 195–206). Rutebeuf’s contemporaneous Miracle de Theophile, a widely distributed text with many verse and prose versions across Europe, defined the actions of the rich and powerful as evil behavior inspired by Satan: disdaining and abusing the poor, abstaining from charity and aid to the sick, and forcing villeins to labor for them – but named no one. Recognizing satirical intent in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries requires a broad view of what could be polemical, of what commonplaces hid social criticism, and of how current events were coded. Political discourse and morality were inseparable, and certain “moral categories” were the “traditional referents of political discourse,” with a tight connection “between the political and the moral” emerging when speech was given freer rein (Blanchard 1988, n. 19). Even apparently straightforward praise could conceal a more subversive tone, by playing with equivocal phrasing, for instance (Doudet 2005, 130–32). The early fourteenth-century Roman de Fauvel was an ambitious multimedia and mixed-genre work. Its various parts, both recited and sung, written between 1310–1314 and 1314–1317, implicitly criticized the reign of Philip IV the Fair (r. 1285–1314). Its principal manuscript, BNF Fr 146, is illustrated with 78 miniatures in a style consonant with the court tastes of the early fourteenth century, attributed to an artist named “the Fauvel Master.” In the narrative, there is a massive interpolation of 168 innovative musical pieces that illuminate the meaning of the text beyond the allegorical (Strubel 2012, 13–14). Fauvel centered on the figure of a corrupt power-usurper, the russet-hued horse Fauvel, and took aim at the late king, at the pope (a greedy Clement V who colludes with King Philip to 132

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fleece the starving people and submits to temporal power), and at the Knights Templar. The text alludes to Grand Chamberlain and Guardian of the Treasury Enguerrand de Marigny (1260–1315), executed after Philip the Fair’s death, and to Count Ferrand of Flanders, a stand-in for the ongoing conflict with Flanders;1 Charles of Valois, brother of Philip IV, was connected to the work, perhaps even as its commissioner (Strubel 2012, 69).2 Fauvel is not a play, and its satirical targets remain general: greed, careerism, abuse of power, corruption. Yet the power of satire is heightened by its performance orientation and by the musical segments embedded in the text. Fauvel also incorporates a public ritual of social shaming and control, the traditional charivari or rough music, a cacophonous disruption at Fauvel’s wedding. A skilled use of folkloric or vernacular culture elements – belief in the demonic retinue of Hellekin, lord of the dead, who comes back to haunt and wreak havoc on the living at certain times – meshes with an elaborate allegory, the Tournament between Virtues and Vices, adapted from Huon de Mery’s earlier Tournoiement d’Antechrist, and perhaps aping the knighting celebrations for the sons of Philip the Fair in 1313. Such a politicized work could never have been publicly performed, only shared among the legal milieu that produced it and with the patrons who funded it. But its themes, particularly in the context of the real unpopularity of King Philip the Fair, may well have spread to the wider urban public. Satire, indeed, surfaced in many sorts of performance texts, mixing different registers, sacred and profane, allegorical and farcical. In morality plays, personifications and abstract notions were rendered realistically through concrete objects and actions, also entering the later mystery plays. Staged personifications included moral concepts, body parts, illnesses, aspects of time, political power, affects and emotions, and society’s flawed components and institutions (Strubel 2012, 97). Stock figures such as the fool (stultus, rusticus, or Villein) commented on the main action, his characteristic instability authorizing sharper sub-texts, while engaging in vulgar banter and domestic battles, as in the Mystère Saint Sebastien. While he remained on the margin and perhaps thus reinforced the social and spiritual order (Carlson 2012), he also voiced criticism of the nobility for harming the poor. Medieval performances in the flesh held a deep emotional and visual power, even with allegorical figures and personifications (Hindley 2012, 191). The proximity of spectators to the play and actors, the detailed exhibition of tortured bodies or, in satirical or fools’ plays, of brutal and corporal acts, not filtered or mitigated by the structural barriers of a modern theater, all diminished the level of abstraction. Proximity to the body, site of sinfulness and transgression in medieval culture could also entail tension between the message (religious or moral) of the play and its potentially disturbing representation. Finally, the close corporality of religious and moral messages conveyed through a staged plot by flesh-and-blood performers reinforced medieval spectators’ sense of unmediated access to the “real.” These were also factors in the mobilizing potential of the medieval religious theater as anti-Semitic or Crusading propaganda.

Performance in the Fourteenth Century The main work of the fourteenth-century theater was a series of representations of the Miracles of the Virgin, with limited social content, but other types of performances delivered socially or politically inflected messages. By the end of the century, collectivities were resorting to improvised theater to resolve various local issues through public mockery and jokes (Rousse 2005, 485). Under the reign of Charles VI, variations in public ovations and joyful cries by Parisians in response to the king, queen, king’s brother, and Duke of Burgundy 133

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showed that approval and disapproval were carefully orchestrated and controlled. In a 1382 tax revolt in Rouen, artisans improvised street theater, forcing a local worthy to sit on a fake throne, carrying it around the city on a cart and saluting him derisively with parodic versions of the acclamations (laudes) due the king. While such displays were certainly performances, and even sometimes theatrical in the strictest sense, they were not culled from a fictional world but anchored in very “real” current events that local populations would have seen as immediately pressing (Guenée 2002, 30–41). Theater was also inserted in royal ceremonial: chronicles detailed the components of royal formal entries to cities, with early instances of developed theatricality in public displays. The celebrations for the knighting of the future Louis X in 1313 exemplify this crossover culture. Eighty-two verses of a long poem recount the event with costly lighting, numerous musicians, presence of all the trades dressed in their finery, and the spectacle of a religious play with angels, souls, and devils galore, God in judgment, the Virgin Mary, the torments of hell, and biblical episodes such as the Massacre of the Innocents. The performance also included a 12-verse satirical section created by the trade of leather curriers, devoted to Renard the Fox, “physician and doctor,” who was well established as a literary vector of social satire against power and corruption, while a comic interlude of wild men was contrived by the weavers (Jubinal 1835). From the later fourteenth century on, textual performance expanded to a larger audience and different publics, through monologues, dialogues, debates, and jeux-partis (call and response pieces), and, later, farces, fools’ plays (the sotties), and large-scale religious performances. Plays, (called jeux in French), drew inspiration from the allegorical dits or spoken pieces extant for two centuries already. Theatrical satire of a general nature in Latin such as the plays of Terence 195-185 BC-159? BC was standard fare for a late medieval educated public. Features of the fourteenth-century learned disputatio became dramatic elements in the fifteenth century. This shift was apparent in the late fourteenth-century polemic pitting the Dominican Order against the university on the Conception of the Virgin Mary: Was it immaculate or marked by original sin? In 1387, Jehan de Montson, a Dominican doctor of theology, asserted the latter claim in 14 theses. He was roundly condemned by the university, the bishop of Paris, and by Pope Clement VI. In a diatribe against Montson, the allegorical Livre du champ d’or (ca. 1388), Jehan Petit, later a master of theology, stated that his opponent’s only argument was the bodily emanation of blowing smoke, clearly evoking theatrical staging effects. In his Disputoison des pastourelles, Petit then framed a group of virgin shepherdesses debating the issue with sinful old women and concluding with celebratory song. The disputatio thus adapted performance forms within narrative to further a public argument with enormous currency in Petit’s native Normandy, which remained conceptionist and anti-Dominican into the sixteenth century (Hüe 1999, 73–77). Drinking societies also spurred the development of the theater, producing light, sometimes irreverent, satires. A facetious drinking society, the Order of Saint-Babouin (la Baboue means grimace), existed under the reign of Charles VI, as mentioned by the poet Eustache Deschamps (1346–1406). It was dedicated to heavy drinking, sloth, and erotic pastimes and made famous later in a song by the composer Loyset Compere (ca. 1440–1518) (Merceron 2002, 59–60).

Fifteenth Century – Satire and Propaganda Many French texts were intended for public performances in the late fifteenth century. The highly praised Pathelin farces, authored by Pierre Blanchet in the 1480s, coexisted with 134

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abundant mystery and morality plays, pastorals, and sotties. Mystery plays increased in size and numbers after 1440, including just a few non-religious plays: the Mystere du Siege d’Orleans, staged in 1439, followed earlier celebrations of the city’s deliverance in 1435, with or without the mystery play, showing that theater and public ceremony could merge in a political context. The Morality on the Council of Basle (1433–34) (Beck 1979) was explicitly polemical and political. Its allegorical characters, Church, France, Peace, Reformation, and Heresy, albeit in the tradition of the genre, do not readily lend themselves to lively stage action. The play is of considerable historical interest, as one of the first French instances of secular theater used for purposes of propaganda. Beck sees it as an important manifestation of the new patriotism, or even nationalism, which developed in France out of the devastation of foreign occupation and civil war during the Hundred Years’ War. Moreover, it was an expression of the profound desire for peace which prepared the way for the Treaty of Arras (1435), an event celebrated by Burgundian courtier Michault Taillevant in his Moralité d’Arras, in which Peace reproaches France for having banished her. The polemic around some of the council’s decisions, such as calling for the suppression of the Feast of Fools, generated further – unprogrammed – theatrical output. In Troyes, on January 3, 1445, there was a performance of a Morality of the Pragmatic Sanction (first rendered in Bourges on July 7, 1438). It followed on the heels of a public performance of the Feast of Fools. At the sound of trumpets, the canons of the three main churches called on the townspeople to assemble in the most populous area of the city and witness a play that mocked Church hierarchy through the personifications of Hypocrisy, Feintise (Pretense), and Faux-Semblant (False Appearance), transparent renditions of the bishop and some of the canons. As a result, by official letters of April 17, 1445, the king forbade the performance of the Feast of Fools in Troyes. In the Moralité d’Excellence, Science, Paris et Peuple (MS BNF fr 1661), dated between 1468 and 1480, deflection worked to express criticism of institutions. The text complains of the immiseration of the people, unstable currency, recent wars, threats to Paris by competing armies, the Parlement and Church reduced to silence, harsh censorship, and summary justice. These issues point to the beginning of the reign of Louis XI and the end of the War of the Common Weal, and to a composition before 1468, when Louis XI called up the Estates General, a wish expressed in the play. The text gestures toward the fact of performance, ending with the traditional request: “ladies and lords, high and low, please take our little entertainment in good part.” Doudet, who dates the play around 1468 (2018, 201), underlines its performance elements: when the figure of Paris puts on a bonnet with ears, one of them damaged, Excellence asks whether he plans to play a role. Silent up to then, Paris then relies on his costume to imply a critique of current events through visual analogy between the beleaguered capital city and the fool who speaks truth to the disorderly world. While the moral of the play (“know yourself and serve God well”) may reflect the spirit of Church reform of the 1450s, the figure of (the) People (Peuple) stands out and speaks the very last words. Peuple addresses common social themes of the time: Does Death really kill the Great as well as the indigent? When the city is marred by hail, the poor people are the ones crushed, and famine is always afoot. Irreverence is inherent in the use of silenced speech and of Latin versus French. As Science responds in Latin, Peuple first protests sarcastically, then with a silent mark indicated in the play, then by brutally asking, “What the devil are you saying?” When Peuple mentions Famine, he is told to shut up – but instead, he begins to speak Latin too, and mocked for his 135

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lack of formal education, Peuple explains that his sudden mastery of Latin is inspired by his fears for the future of his children and his memory of the misery that famine brings. When Science admits that he cannot cure pestilence, Peuple derisively objects: “Don’t you know anything?” And in contrast to the repeated pious admonition, Peuple insists on praying for concrete results, a stop to war, famine, and pestilence. The Moralité d’Excellence exemplifies what Doudet (2018, 431) calls roundabout tactics in moral satire, including the suspension of dialogue through a silence that speaks volumes. Here, the discussion of who is to blame for these calamities is filled with denials, such as “It is not good to say everything,” “Speaking less is best,” and (in Latin) “The one who knows how to hold his speech is close to God.” Visual props like the bonnet worn by Paris signal that the character may say nothing yet invite the audience to understand everything. In this model, actors try to reach complicit audiences, as incisive speech circulates within the play between the characters, opening up the margin for interpretation. By the end of the fifteenth century, theological disputes, such as those generated around the Conception of the Virgin, had entered the actual theater. In a play by Guillaume Tasserie, Le Triomphe des Normands, composed between 1480 and 1499, William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, celebrated the feast of the Conception against the objections of a heretic who claimed it to be devoid of value. While there is no documentation of the play’s performance, its style, with a liberal use of inserted poetic forms, suggests that it was a performance for a Puy – a local poetic assembly. Among the play’s historical or biblical figures, an allegory named the Common People of Lower Normandy, joins in the disputation in front of Salomon and, speaking in Normand dialect, provides naïve but “commonsense” arguments for the faith, based on customary practice and belief (Hüe 1999, 78–80). The case of the punishment of the poet Henri Baude (1415–1490) – a bourgeois de Paris and tax functionary – shows that morality plays could touch upon serious and sensitive political and social issues, incurring the wrath of the authorities. Baude and his companions were arrested for having performed an “excessively audacious” morality play, uttering undefined “seditious words,” and were accused of having insulted the sacred person of the king by having derided the system of justice as corrupt. Similar measures hit the scholastic theater created by students in the universities from 1452 to 1488, taking aim at ludos inhonestos and, increasingly, at theater proper. Royal control became tighter after 1450 as the university took the Burgundian side during the Hundred Years’ War and was viewed with suspicion (Bouhaik-Girones 2007). Henri Baude was eventually released but had not hesitated, while imprisoned, to send a justificatory poem to his direct lord, Jean II, Duke of Bourbon, seeking his help, in which he defended his moralité as innocuous and not offensive to the king. The poem, in fact, expanded on his attack against the system of corrupted justice, reflecting again the shifting and ambiguous perceptions of transgression and “right to speak” among late medieval persons. The sottie had become a prevalent genre from the mid to late fifteenth century; less structured and less given to lengthy moral exposition than the moralities, its satirical punch worked through nonsense and folly, circumventing restrictions on speech by combining disheveled madness with more coherent satirical allusions. The sottie often included a parodic trial or trial-like examination, and in this court, the People were always the plaintiff: for instance, the Sottie des sots remettant en point Bon Temps mentions 20 years of bad government and endless wars. In the Sottie du roi des sots, censorship of the people’s voice is explicit: a character is rendered mute, tied up in nets that shut his mouth and prevent his complaints from being heard. 136

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Between 1450 and 1550, the allegorical figure of Bon Temps (Good, Happy Time) blossomed in various genres (jeux, sotties, moralities, and pastorals), and many of these plays carry a pointedly political and social message. In the fifteenth century, Bon Temps appears in the Jeu de Jehan D’Estrées, performed on the eve of the Three Kings (January 5) in 1472, by the Confraternity of the Puy of Amiens, in the political pastoral Bergerie de Mieulx-quedevant (1485–1486); in the Sottie Des Sotz qui remettent en poinct Bon Temps (ca 1492); and in the late fifteenth-century farce Faulte d’argent, Bon Temps et les troys gallans. Bon Temps was associated with peace and abundance (especially of wine and wheat), contrasted to the high cost of living. Sometimes, Bon Temps repeatedly departed, embodying a persistent hope for a better life, while spelling out that current social conditions make it precarious. Roch has linked the social comment in these plays to the “genesis of the modern state” as a “transactional object between the people, the bourgeoisie and the monarchy” (Roch 1992, 201–2) and, within the political economy of the sottie, sees Bon Temps himself as a means to entrap power structures through the use of folklore.

Conclusion By the last four decades of the fifteenth century, all satirical genres were using personification and allegory to reflect on major events of the time. The movement of performance genres across this period, from monologues and dialogues to farces, sotties, and elaborate morality plays, displayed an increasing collective awareness and verbalizing of political events and social tensions. The fifteenth century also witnessed a gradual hardening of royal measures repressing certain forms of the satirical theater, as seen in the case of Henri Baude, mentioned earlier. In 1420, a harsh order from the Court of Poitiers prohibited plays by law clerks under penalty of imprisonment or banishment. Under Charles VII (1422–1461), Louis XI (1461– 1483), and Charles VIII (1483–1498), the satirical theatre of the Basoche, a professional society of law clerks, came under intensified scrutiny. The Basoche produced abundant theater pieces, largely sotties and farces, and encountered control, both jurisdictionally protective and openly repressive, from the magistrates. Edicts of 1442 and 1443 limiting the performance freedom of Basochiens resulted in incarcerations. In 1474, Parliament forbade all plays by the Basoche, farces, or moralities, performed publicly or otherwise on May 1, without explicit permission from the Court. An edict of May 15, 1476, amplified these restrictions in public spaces. These prohibitions clarify that satirical theater was performed in both private and public contexts, as they forbade any performances at the Palace (of Justice), the Châtelet, or any other public place, susceptible of attracting crowds (Bouhaik-Girones 2007). By the end of the fifteenth century and beginning of the sixteenth, theater was a conduit for clearly political positions, as shown in the oeuvre of Pierre Gringore (ca. 1475–1538). Translator, playwright, actor, stage director, and urban theater organizer, the first Frenchlanguage writer whose works were published in print with privilege, Gringore acted as a satirist and political weapon for Louis XII (1498–1515). Under this reign, the dispute between the papacy and the French monarchy over the Pragmatic Sanction became very public. Eight of Gringore’s works between 1500 and 1513 specifically supported royal propaganda against the papacy and the king’s military efforts in Italy between 1499 and 1513. One was a play, Le Jeu du Prince des sotz et Mere Sotte, staged at the Halles (1512), and its performance and subsequent publication owed much to Gringore’s public aura as 137

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an actor under his stage name, “Mère Sotte” (Mother Folly). Between 1501 and 1504, the city of Paris accounts record payments to Gringore for various works, including organized tableaux vivants for the entry of Queen Anne of Brittany in 1504 (Brown 2003, 14–15). The record mentions his collaborators by their actual names, but Gringore is listed as Mère Sotte. Gringore frequently associated with this character in his moralizing works, perhaps because this personification of Folly protected him in his critique of the abuses of society. Much of the satirical aim in these various types of performances remained abstract and generic, yet allusions to the major political crises of the time are easy to detect. Over this long period, there was much to incite complaint – the dynastic crises of the early fourteenth century after the death of Philip IV; the conflict within the Church and among the faithful resulting from the Papal Schism of 1378, then, moves to suspend obedience to the Avignon pope (in 1403 and 1408); the Hundred Years’ War from 1337 to 1453,3 bringing famine years and displaced populations; civil war between the Burgundian party and the princes under a weakened Charles VI (r. 1380–1422), from 1413 to 1418, and the bloody Parisian Capeluche rebellion in 1418; resentment of power-grabbers during and following the reign of Louis XI; conflicts between Church and monarchy over the Pragmatic Sanction; and the less-than-enthusiastic response to the continuous Italian Wars (1494–1559). While theatrical output in the fifteenth century is more openly political and critical than in the fourteenth, and even more overtly so in the sixteenth century, especially with the rise of the Reformation, there is no development of greater freedom or latitude for subversive speech in medieval theater and performance over this long continuum. Rather, we see that constraints and levels of repression varied with specific events and reigns – tougher under Louis XI, relatively relaxed under Louis XII if the king’s agenda was not criticized, and fiercely repressive of playwrights, later, under François I. However, throughout this long period, whether from opportunity or overflow of anger, writers, actors, play masters, and their publics, including the late medieval common folk and their urban leaderships, came up with a wide variety of creative conduits inside and outside of theater proper for expressing measures of discontent regarding public affairs.

Notes 1 The Flemish question haunted French policy from the Battle of Bouvines in 1214 through the Hundred Years’ War. Philip the Fair continued hostilities with the Flanders nobility by imprisoning Louis, Count of Nevers and son of Robert III of Flanders, forcing the surrender of Lille, Douai, and Bethune, and the war led to many more unpopular taxes. Ferrand was the imprisoned Count of Flanders after the Battle of Bouvines, and the name is also that of a horse. 2 Other possible commissioners of the work include Philip V himself to rich bourgeois or disaffected members of the nobility. 3 In effect ending in 1475, after Louis XI negotiated the departure of the last occupying English troops.

References Beck, Jonathan, ed. 1979. Le Concile de Basle (1434): Les origines du Théâtre réformiste et partisan en France. (Studies in the History of Christian Thought, 18.) Leiden: E.J. Brill. ———, ed. 2012. Recueil général de moralités d’expression française. Paris: Classiques Garnier. Vol. 3. Blanchard, Joël. 1988. “La moralité juge du pouvoir. Théâtre et politique aux lendemains du règne de Louis XI.” Romania 109 (434–435): 354–77. Bouhaik-Girones, Marie. 2005. “Le Théâtre sur la place de marché: La représentation du mystère de Sainte Catherine à Rouen en 1454.” In Mainte belle œuvre faicte. Études sur le théâtre médiéval

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Performing Discontent offertes à Graham  A. Runnalls, edited by D.  Hüe, M.  Longtin, and L.  Muir, 29–38. Orléans: Paradigme. ———. 2007. Les clercs de la Basoche et le théâtre politique (Paris 1420–1550). Paris: Champion. Brown, Cynthia J. 2003. Œuvres polémiques rédigées sous le règne de Louis XII: Pierre Gringore. Genève: Droz. Brown, Elizabeth A. R., and Regalado, Nancy Freeman. 2001. “Universitas et communitas: The Parade of the Parisians at the Pentecost Feast of 1313.” In Moving Subjects: Processional Performance in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, edited by Kathleen Ashley and Wim Hüsken, 117–54. Amsterdam, Rodopi. Carlson, Marla. 2012. “Le Mystère de Saint Sebastien’s Villain. ‘No Cuckoo is a Sparrowhawk’.” In Les Mystères: Studies in Genre, Text, and Theatricality, edited by Peter Happé and Wim Hüsken, 147–66. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Crowder, Susannah. 2018. Performing Women: Gender, Self, and Representation in Late Medieval Metz. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Dominguez, Véronique. 2012. “Mystère, Farce, moralité: A Reflection upon the Poetics of Drama in the Middle Ages, Based on Ms BnF fr. 904, Passion de Semur (Fifteenth Century) and Some Other Burgundian Manuscripts.” In Les Mystères: Studies in Genre, Text, and Theatricality, edited by Peter Happé and Wim Hüsken, 21–42. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Doudet, Estelle. 2005. “Finis Allegoriae: un trope problématique sur la scène profane française.” In Mainte belle œuvre faicte. Études sur le théâtre médiéval offertes à Graham A. Runnalls, edited by D. Hüe, M. Longtin, and L. Muir, 117–44. Orléans: Paradigme. ———. 2018. Moralités et jeux moraux, le théâtre allégorique en français, XVe-XVIE siècles. Paris: Classiques Garnier. Enders, Jody. 2004. “The Spectacle of the Scaffolding: Rape and the Violent Foundations of Medieval Theatre Studies.” Theatre Journal 56 (2): 163–81. Guenée, Bernard. 2002. L’Opinion publique à la fin du Moyen Age d’après la Chronique de Charles VI du Religieux de Saint-Denis. Paris: Perrin. Hamblin, Vicki L. 2012. “The Theatricality of Pre- and Post-Performance French Mystery Play Texts.” In Les Mystères: Studies in Genre, Text, and Theatricality, edited by Peter Happé and Wim Hüsken, 43–70. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Hindley, Alan. 2012. “’Laisser l’Istoire. . .et Moraliser ung Petit’: Aspects of Allegory in the Mystères.” In Les Mystères: Studies in Genre, Text, and Theatricality, edited by Peter Happé and Wim Hüsken, 189–217. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Hüe, Denis. 1999. “De la Disputatio a l’effusio.” In L’économie du dialogue dans l’ancien théâtre européen, edited by Jean-Pierre Bordier, 69–87. Paris: Champion. Jubinal, Achille, ed. 1835. La Complainte et le Jeu de Pierre de la Borce, Chambellan de Philippe-LeHardi, qui fut pendu le 30 juin 1278; publiés pour la première fois par Achille Jubinal. Paris: Techener. Kanaoka, Naomi. 2006. “La vie théâtrale à Compiègne entre 1450 et 1550.” Bibliothèque de l’école des chartes 164 (1): 97–158. Knight, Alan E. 2005. “Staging the Lille Plays.” In Mainte belle œuvre faicte, edited by D.  Hüe, M. Longtin, and L. Muir, 239–49. Orléans: Paradigme. Koopmans, Jelle. 2012. “Turning a Chanson de Geste into a Mystery, or Non-Religious and Chivalric Mystery Plays.” In Les Mystères: Studies in Genre, Text, and Theatricality, edited by Peter Happé and Wim Hüsken, 219–45. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Merceron, Jacques E. 2002. Dictionnaire des saints imaginaires et facétieux. Paris: Seuil. Perret, Donald. 2001. “The Meaning of the Mystery: From Tableaux to Theatre in the French Royal Entry.” In Moving Subjects: Processional Performance in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, edited by Kathleen Ashley and Wim Hüsken, 187–211. Amsterdam, Atlanta GA: Rodopi. Roch Jean-Louis. 1992. “Le roi, le peuple et l’âge d’or: la figure de Bon Temps entre le théâtre, la fête et la politique (1450–1550).” Médiévales 22–23: 187–206. Rousse, Michel. 2005. “Comment la farce conquit le théâtre.” In Mainte belle œuvre faicte. Études sur le théâtre médiéval offertes à Graham A. Runnalls, edited by D. Hüe, M. Longtin, and L. Muir, 482–501. Orleans: Paradigme. Strubel, Armand, ed. and trans. 2012. Le Roman de Fauvel. Paris: LGF. Symes, Carol. 2007. A Common Stage. Theatre and Public Life in Medieval Arras. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

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13 OVERVIEW: FRANCE IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY Monarchy, Renaissance, and Reformation, 1494–1610 Elizabeth C. Tingle Mack Holt (2002) argues that the reigns of the later Valois kings saw the beginnings of the transformation of France from a medieval, dynastic state based on sacral monarchy to a dynastic nation-state. The Valois did so in the context of two seismic international movements, the Renaissance and the Reformation. What is certainly clear is that across the period, the effectiveness of monarchy and the well-being of the kingdom continued to depend on the capabilities of the king himself. In the first half of the century, Louis XII, François I, and Henri II were adults, physically robust and competent to rule personally. From 1559, the kings were boys and young men: Charles IX, then Henri III. Regency governments and their youth detracted from their exercise of authority. The precarity of dynastic succession and the constraints of the Salic law were also evident. François I succeeded his relation Louis XII peacefully, aided by marriage to Louis’s daughter Claude. Less smoothly, Henri IV Bourbon inherited from a childless Henri III and ended the Valois dynasty. Henri’s mythologizing as one of the ablest French kings came from his exercise of traditional royal masculine attributes, in a monarchy that remained a personal as much as an institutional office (Wolfe 1993).

A “Renaissance” Monarchy? The central historiographical debate about early sixteenth-century France has focused on the nature and authority of kingship: did absolute monarchy have its origins in the reigns of the later Valois kings? (Ladurie 1994; Potter 1995) Early twentieth-century historians such as Georges Pagès saw the origins of absolutism in this period, while later revisionists, such as John Russell Major, disagreed, claiming that Valois rule was consultative and decentralized, its power dependent on popular support rather than physical force (Major 1980). Yet Robert Knecht (2008) sees, in the reigns of François I and his son Henri, a more authoritarian rule with a new style; he called this “Renaissance” monarchy. The federal nature of France, with its diverse jurisdictions, may not have changed, but Knecht argues that these kings acted with greater authority and pursued reforms which enhanced royal power. The aspiration to extend Crown authority can be seen in contemporary debates over the theory of rulership. Claude de Seysell in La Grande Monarchie de France (1519) argued that monarchy was DOI: 10.4324/9780367808471-14

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limited by three constraints: the king’s Christian conscience, the existing body of law, and the moderating role of parlements, a view supported by writers such as Charles Dumoulin. Yet others took a more authoritarian view, particularly Guillaume Budé, whose l’Institution du Prince (1518) advocated a monarchy free of accountability to Church, nobles, or people, answerable only to God, from whom power was held (Garrisson 1995). In practice, the main visible feature of the royal state in this period was an extension of Crown authority, territorially and administratively. When Louis XII became king in 1498, a quarter of France had been acquired only in the last 50 years: Guyenne and Gascony in the southwest; Burgundy in the east; Picardy in the north; Provence, Anjou, and Maine inherited by Louis XI; and Brittany in the west. Five principal languages were spoken, and large areas of jurisdiction lay beyond the authority of the Crown. As Holt (2005) observes, the basis of the royal state was the king’s sovereignty over his subjects, a community of people rather than a territory with fixed boundaries. The main aspiration of these kings was further expansion of territory and reputation through war. Charles VIII invaded Italy in 1494, under pretext of a claim to the kingdom of Naples. War was continued by Louis XII. Neither king was particularly successful. François I had more victories, at least in the early reign, such as Marignano in 1515, but gains were short-lived (Knecht 1982). François was defeated and captured at Pavia in 1525, held in Spain for a year, and exchanged only for a large ransom. Henri II continued the Hapsburg conflicts. Metz was won in 1552, but a defeat at Saint-Quentin in 1557 led Henri II to negotiate a peace settlement in the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559). The celebration of the treaty had grave consequences, however, for Henri was fatally injured in a joust, leaving a youth as king, François II. Janine Garrisson (1995) argues that aggressive foreign policy led to a concentration of power at the center of government, to organize supplies of men and money for war. Certainly, the royal court grew in political and social importance. In 1495, the king’s household comprised 366 officials, rising to 622 by 1535 (Knecht 2008). It was at here that influence was exerted and appointments to army, church, and administration were made: any noble or wealthy urban family wanting a share of power and the fruits of patronage from the king needed to spend time at court. While the court remained peripatetic, mostly around Paris and the Loire Valley, departments changed in size and name. The royal councils became more specialized; business was increasingly divided into a judicial and an executive section, for which the Conseil d’affaires was the direct advisory group for the king (Knecht 1982). The King’s Council was also a legislative body, with laws drawn up by the chancery and registered in the sovereign courts. Two important categories of royal administrator emerged, experts in law and administration, the secretaries of state and masters of request. The court also became the predominant cultural center, partly a result of Italian influence. Queens Anne of Brittany and Catherine de’ Medici effected more formal, Renaissance court styles. Lavish building projects and entertainments enhanced the royal image for domestic and diplomatic consumption. Historians have argued that the sixteenth century saw an evolution of the monarchy from one based in justice to one based in law (Collins 2009). France did not have a single legal system; each region had its own laws and higher court or parlement, such as those of Normandy, Languedoc, and the largest, Paris (Roelker 1996). Yet royal law and justice expanded in this period. First, there was an extension of royal courts and erosion of seigneurial justice, that is, the private courts administered by landowners and nobles that were part of a feudal society. New parlements were created in 1553 in Dijon, Aix, Rouen, 141

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Grenoble, Bordeaux, and Rennes, along with a new intermediate tier of court, the présidial. Second, in all regions, there was a “project” to codify law, to create a definitive body of written law which courts and justices could use. Thirdly, the kings created much new law, through royal statutes. There was also continuity in that jurisdictions continued to be numerous and to overlap: Church courts, urban police magistrates, tribunals for finance and royal estates, and the ancient system of private seigneurial courts remained. Royal law came to dominate, however. War was an engine of fiscal innovation, for the military was costly. As with law, France had no unitary taxation system; revenues were assessed and collected differently in the regions, particularly in the pays d’état, where provincial estates – periodically held regional councils – retained rights of consultation and collection. The taille and its equivalents remained the main tax, along with the salt tax – gabelle – and a variety of tolls and feudal dues. Holt (2005) argues that in the reigns of Louis XII and François I, Crown revenues covered most of the fiscal demands of war, although expedients were used to raise funds. For example, from 1522, offices were sold in increasing numbers and rentes sur l’Hôtel de Ville, or compulsory loans from towns, commenced. Novelties were rarely popular and could provoke opposition. An attempt to extend the gabelle to the southwest of France in 1542 caused a rebellion that was reduced only by force. François I also made adjustments to the administration of finance. He reorganized the system of regional tax districts and increased the numbers of royal collectors. In 1523, a central treasury was created, the Épargne, based in the Louvre. All expenditure was to be supervised by the King’s Council, which kept a general account of income and expenditure. From the mid-1550s, the council was assisted by masters of request with finance expertise and intendants of finance, commissioners accountable directly to the crown (Collins 2009). Yet fiscal crisis occurred after 1550 because of the costs of war. Henri II was forced to borrow money on the international credit market, paying upward of 16% interest. Special war taxes were raised: in 1541, the annual taille raised 4.3 million livres, increasing to 5 million livres in 1552. But by 1559, the Crown was deeply in debt, around 43 million livres or three times the annual budget (Holt 2005). This had serious consequences for Henri’s successors. There were numerous attempts to reform administration. Historians have seen the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêt of 1539 as of great importance here, particularly Article III, which decreed that all legal and administrative documents should be written in northern French, the langue d’oeil. In practice, this reflected rather than caused a move toward linguistic commonality; it did not replace the many local languages, and there was no policy to do so by the Crown. Some of the main changes in administration came in cities and towns. Municipal councils, elected or appointed mayors and aldermen from the city’s upper social groups, along with their employees, took increasing authority over services hitherto organized by the Church or lords: markets, poor relief, sanitation, and police. The century saw expansion of municipal authority, with the support of the Crown. Of the agents who administered France, foremost remained the nobility, which provided the core of the army, royal governors of provinces, diplomats and ambassadors, and other important officers of the military and civilian state. There was still a difficult balance between the relative powers of kings and mighty subjects. In the 1520s, the Constable of Bourbon, a senior commander in the Italian army, rebelled against the king over the queen mother’s inheritance claims to his late wife’s property and his proposition to marry the sister of Charles V. Bourbon fled to Hapsburg territory, forfeiting his estates to the Crown. Under Henri II, factional rivalries became prominent between the Guise and Montmorency 142

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families. While a competent king could keep such tensions in check, noble feuds could tear apart a fragile state, as occurred after the death of Henri. The mechanisms of formal and informal authority between noble cadres have been studied in detail by Sharon Kettering (2002), who shows that clientage and patronage were central to government. Personal ties between aristocratic governors and provincial nobles, royal ministers and local elites, of sovereign and lesser law courts, were the sinews through which armies were raised, taxes granted, and administrative power operated. Roland Mousnier saw the creation of new royal officers and, in particular, the sale of office, or venality, as a hallmark of the French royal state (Mousnier 1979). From 1522, when François I set up a bureau to sell offices, they were eagerly purchased and became a valuable part of family property. Offices were expensive; they gave tax exemptions, influence, and opportunities for wealth, and some conferred noble status. Officers quickly came to dominate socially in cities formerly led by merchants and artisans, so locally prominent families sought marriage alliances with them. Wealthy officers also bought lands and adopted the lifestyle of the old nobility. The creation and sale of offices were a source of revenue for kings but also brought hostility, as in the reign of Henri III. In 1604, Henri IV institutionalized the right of succession to officeholders in return for an annual tax, the paulette. Venality was an increasingly visible and essential structure of the royal state. A third bulwark of the royal state, and of society more widely, was the Church. The institutions and rituals of Catholic Christianity provided the framework of daily life: most French people lived in an ecclesiastical parish in one of the 114 dioceses, with religious, moral, and social support services administered by bishops and priests (Bergin 2009). In addition, there were many convents of religious orders, male and female, from older Benedictine, Augustinian, and Cistercian congregations to newcomers such as Capuchins and Jesuits. On the whole, historians see late medieval Christianity as rich and fulfilling, producing pious works, such as books of hours, encouraging a range of good works and charities, church building and confraternity membership, and stimulating new devotions particularly to the eucharist and the Virgin Mary (Hayden 2013). There were “abuses”: rich prelates who held multiple offices, clergy who lived with wives and children, priests who did not reside in their benefices, all of whom were criticized at that time. As for ecclesiastical politics, in the fifteenth century, the French Church had increasingly asserted its independence from Rome with what it called the Gallican liberties, and kings took more authority over its institutions and personnel. The Concordat of Bologna, agreed with Leo X in 1516, permitted François I to nominate bishops and some abbots and request financial aid from the Church. It was a confirmation of existing royal powers formalized in the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges of 1438. Although the Concordat was unpopular, Crown and Church continued to be ideologically and practically close across the period. In recent years, historians have emphasized the importance of ritual and display in the enhancement of royal power: the term Renaissance monarchy reflects more than anything their material style. The coronation emphasized the sacral nature of monarchy, through anointing, reception of the eucharist in two kinds, and touching of scrofula sufferers in a healing ritual. Royal entries into cities were greeted with expensive imagery and choreography designed to make constitutional statements about monarchy. Funerals of kings and queens emphasized the sacral character of the ruler, with lying in state and the burial itself at the royal mausoleum of Saint-Denis. Further, the artistic patronage of the Renaissance monarchs was extensive. Queen Anne of Brittany was a collector of illuminated manuscripts; François I built a library and patronized classical literary culture, architecture, art, 143

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and sculpture and invited the artistic celebrities of the day to court, including the elderly Leonardo da Vinci and Benvenuto Cellini. Catherine de’ Medici and Diane de Poitiers, wife and mistress of Henri II, were patrons of the decorative arts (Knecht 1998). The kings embellished their residences as theaters of kingship, such as Fontainebleau and Chambord. This acted as the backdrop to the practice of government.

The French Reformation The greatest challenge to the French monarchy in the sixteenth century came from religion. The advent of Protestantism from the 1520s shattered the unity of faith in the kingdom, was a cause of civil war, and weakened the monarchy. The origins of religious division can be seen in two movements. The first was Renaissance humanism, which combined a scholarly study of texts, especially the Bible and early Christian writings, with reform of religious life and personal piety. Desiderius Erasmus (d. 1536) was enormously important, and there were many French humanists as well: Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples (d. 1536); the biblical scholar Guillaume Briçonnet, reforming bishop of Meaux (d. 1534); and both François I and his sister Marguerite were important patrons. Some churchmen, such as Briçonnet, took humanist ideals of spiritual reform into their pastoral work. All this would have been very traditional, but it coincided with a second movement, the greatest disruption to Christianity of the age, the dispute over the ideas of Martin Luther we call the Protestant Reformation. Luther’s dispute with the papacy of 1517–1521, over the pastoral theology of indulgences, rapidly widened into a critique of Church authority supported by new ideas about salvation. His theology of scripture as the fundamental basis of the knowledge of God, and divinity as the sole source of grace, spread quickly throughout central Europe. It was equally rapidly condemned as heretical by the papacy and the Sorbonne in Paris. In France, ­Protestantism emerged early, in the 1520s and 1530s. There were occasional iconoclastic incidences and outrages – such as the Day of the Placards of 1534, when anti-­sacramentarian posters appeared in French towns – and a few executions of heretics, but religious dissent remained an underground movement of literary and urban groups. It was John Calvin’s work that catalyzed the creation of a Reformed church in France. A native of Picardy, Calvin settled in Geneva from 1541, from where he strove to further religious reform. His cogent Protestant theology and, above all, organization of a Reformed church were attractive to many. Preaching and use of the printing press spread Reformers’ ideas rapidly across France. Calvin encouraged converts to form “gathered” churches, with ministers and a consistory of elders for fund-raising, organization and discipline, and regular church services. From 1555, pastors trained in Geneva went to France as missionaries, and the first two Reformed churches were founded, in Poitiers and Paris (Greengrass 1987). At first, worshippers met in secret, but as numbers swelled, confidence grew. After Henri II’s death, Huguenots, as they came to be called, began to worship openly in public, take over churches, destroy religious imagery in acts of iconoclasm, and demonstrate their faith in the streets. In 1559, a national synod in Paris drew up a confession of faith and adopted regional networks of assemblies to create a kingdom-wide church. By 1562, the high-water mark of the reformed movement, there were some 1000 Protestant churches, and perhaps 10% of French people were Protestant (Benedict 2002). Protestantism was geographically and socially patterned, however. Early twentieth-­ century historians saw in the movement the rise of the bourgeoisie or middle classes. The 144

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reality was more complex. Protestants were mostly found in towns and were particularly numerous in Normandy, in Poitou, and in the south of France, where in some cities such as Nîmes, Montpellier, and La Rochelle, they became a majority. Protestants were also largely of middling sort, merchants, artisans, and legal officers, with good levels of literacy. Most visibly, members of the nobility joined the Protestant Church: Louis, prince of Condé; Admiral Gaspard de Coligny; Jeanne d’Albret, queen of Navarre. Noblewomen were particularly prominent in the conversion of their families and households (Roelker 1972). The adoption of Calvinism by sections of the elite had important consequences: it gave military and political protection and encouraged noble clienteles to convert. It also meant that religion would be enmeshed in politics, factionalism, and feuds, with serious repercussions. The impact of the new faith on France was significant. Kings took a coronation oath to protect the realm from heresy, an essential part of their duty. Henri II took firm actions, creating a new chamber in the Paris parlement and urging the royal courts to persecute heresy. This was unsuccessful. By the early 1560s, aristocratic families openly favored Calvinism or Catholicism, which limited the ways in which the Crown could deal with an increasingly militant Protestantism. There was also escalating sectarian violence. Natalie Zemon Davis (1975) argues that “rites of violence” were used by Huguenots to “cleanse” cities and churches of papist, idolatrous worship. Catholics responded with violence against Protestant “pollution,” and vengeance escalated. By 1562, communal violence was growing in many of France’s cities.

The Wars of Religion The causes of the wars of religion which erupted in 1562 were complex (Salmon 1975). Historians such as Lucien Romier saw the conflict as political in origin, the great noble factions fighting for control of a weak monarchy and to restore their own status and wealth, under the cloak of religion. In some Marxist-influenced interpretations, class conflict, between aspirant middle classes and the feudal nobility and Crown, is important. Mack Holt (2005), along with other recent historians, privileges religion, for Protestants and Catholics viewed each other as a threat to ordered society. After the death of Henri II, Duke François of Guise and his brother the Cardinal of Lorraine took control of government during the short reign of François II, which alienated their political opponents, the Montmorency and Condé families. The Crown faced a financial crisis, to which it responded with fiscal cuts and austerity, and they treated the increasing religious tensions with repression (Knecht 2010). The conspiracy of Amboise of 1560, an attempt to overthrow the Guises and take control of the boy king by a range of opposition nobles, was one result. With the accession of the 9-year-old Charles IX in 1561, the regent, the queen mother, Catherine de’ Medici, favored a policy of unity. She brought different aristocratic groups into her council, called the Estates General, at Blois, then Orleans, and organized an attempt at religious reconciliation at the Colloquy of Poissy in 1561. These measures failed to resolve the problems. The result was an experiment in religious coexistence, the edict of Saint-Germain of 1562 (known as the edict of January). It gave Huguenots limited rights to practice their faith both in private and in designated places. For Protestants, it was insufficient, and they were wary of a new zeal being restored to Catholicism by the final session of the Council of Trent, meeting in 1562–1563 under the influence of militants, such as the Jesuits. For Catholics, it conceded too much and ran counter to the royal coronation oath and function of monarchy itself. In March 1562, a 145

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massacre of Protestant worshippers at Vassy by soldiers of the Duke of Guise led the prince of Condé to call for Huguenot troops to mobilize. France tumbled into civil war as armies moved and cities exploded into violence between rival confessions. The civil wars are often divided into three main phases. The first phase began with the outbreak of armed conflict in March  1562, down to 1570: three periods of open warfare were interspersed with unsettled peace riven with communal tensions in towns. In the 1562–1563 conflict, Protestants took control of around one-third of French towns, such as Rouen, Orleans, Troyes, and Lyons, “cleansing” their churches through iconoclasm and abolition of the mass. Most were retaken by Catholic forces, while Paris remained staunchly anti-Protestant (Diefendorf 2009). In return, Catholic cities expelled and, in some, saw massacres of Protestants. Military campaigns were slow and difficult, with the deaths of several leading aristocratic commanders, most famously the Duke of Guise. Peace was restored with the edict of Amboise in 1563 and held for four years. From 1566, Protestant mistrust grew again, particularly over a Spanish-oriented foreign policy in the context of Protestant revolt in the Netherlands, and civil war returned in 1567 and 1568. Yet again, Catholics could not win the war and Protestants could not lose it, so a great effort of pacification was made in 1570 with a second edict of Saint-Germain. This restored Protestant rights of worship, gave them control of four garrison towns, a royal marriage across the confessional divide and the appointment of royal commissioners to enforce peace. Penny Roberts (2013) argues that the Crown made serious attempts to impose peace after each bout of conflict through an unprecedented experiment in religious toleration through royal edicts of pacification. The goal was to restore and maintain the authority of the monarchy by moving disputes from armed conflict into the law courts, and to transcend religious division by an appeal to national unity. Peace was a universal goal, but disagreements quickly arose over the means to achieve it, and in the end, it failed to hold. Ongoing religious hatred peaked in August 1572 with the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacres in Paris and several provincial cities (Sutherland 1973; Jouanna 2013). Protestants gathered in Paris in large numbers for the wedding of Henri of Navarre and the king’s sister Marguerite of Valois. A  failed assassination attempt on the Protestant Admiral Coligny ignited the violence. At some point between August 22 and 24, the Crown decided on a pre-emptive strike on the Protestant leadership, which got out of hand through the actions of Catholic nobles and the Parisian militia. The result was the killing of 5,000 Huguenots over four days. The violence spread to the provinces, through contradictory orders from the Crown. While the causes of the massacre are opaque, its consequences are clear: immediate warfare and large numbers of abjurations of Protestants to Catholicism, including Navarre and Condé. The high tide of Protestantism was falling. The second phase of the war, the 1570s and early 1580s, was the most confused militarily. From the mid-1570s, violence became endemic across France: Huguenot piracy out of La Rochelle, local conflicts between warlords, and periods of open warfare between armies. Arlette Jouanna argues that a significant result of the massacres were new conceptions of royal governance (Jouanna 2013). In a series of works known as Monarchomach tracts, Protestants developed new theories of the obligation of subjects to rulers and debated means by which the actions of tyrants could be resisted. Theodore Beza’s On the Right of Magistrates over their Subjects (1572) argued that while ordinary subjects could not oppose a tyrant, magistrates had a duty to check tyranny and uphold the law. A work attributed to Philippe du Plessis Mornay, Vindication of Liberty against Tyrants (1575–1576), went further and justified armed resistance against rulers who broke their covenant with the 146

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people and thus also with God. Catholic France also responded with new theories of rulership. Jean Bodin’s Six Books of the Commonwealth (1576) argued that sovereignty and law, based in the monarch, were key to good order in a state. This was to be a precursor of theories of absolute monarchy in the seventeenth century. The Crown itself continued to be beset with problems. Charles IX died in 1574, succeeded by his brother Henri III. Catholic aristocrats had great hopes that he would lead armies to defeat Protestantism, but they were disappointed. His reign was beset with factional struggles, initially with his younger brother and heir, the Duke of Alençon (later Anjou) (Greengrass 2007). The Peace of Monsieur of May 1576 was a royal capitulation to aristocratic opposition, granting Protestants generous terms. It led to a Catholic backlash and the creation of an extensive League (of Péronne), so in December 1576, the king held an Estates General at Blois to seek advice on the means of establishing one religion in France. Again, this failed, and France drifted into widespread disorder. The poor financial situation, the endemic warfare, the lack of solution to the religious “problem,” and above all, the lack of an heir saw Henri III’s authority destroyed. Anjou died in 1584. The third phase of the wars began with the succession crisis caused by the advent of the Protestant Henri of Navarre as heir to the throne. In response, a group of aristocrats, led by the Guise brothers, revived the Catholic League and, in 1584, made the secret Treaty of Joinville with the king of Spain. The aims were to rid France of heresy and to secure the succession for the Cardinal of Bourbon. The League grew, attracting noble supporters of the Guises and many town administrations. It mobilized for war, and the king was forced to negotiate a truce with it, the Treaty of Nemours, with a royal edict of July 1585 outlawing the practice of Protestantism throughout the kingdom. The aims of the Catholic League have been much debated. Henri Drouot argued that the League in Burgundy was caused by social tensions, a model supported by Denis Richet and John Salmon for Paris (Richet 1982; Salmon 1975). A study of the Parisian League the Sixteen by Robert Descimon argues that it was in defense of urban autonomy and values. Denis Crouzet sees the League as having an explicitly religious mentality (Crouzet 1990). Above all, it was about control of the Crown. By 1588, Guise began to defeat the Huguenots and to threaten royal autonomy. In May, he entered Paris, despite being forbidden, while the radical Council of the Sixteen took over the city’s government. Henri III fled to Rouen. In the summer, the king was forced to adopt the edict of Union, recognizing the League and giving more powers to its leaders. In October, the king called a new Estates General to Blois, hoping to gain support and finance for further campaigns. But to escape Guise domination, Henri had the duke and cardinal murdered. The result was widespread, open rebellion against the king, who was now considered a tyrant. Radical preachers denounced Henri III, and some even called for regicide (Baumgartner 1975). During the subsequent siege of Paris, a Dominican friar, Jacques Clément, assassinated Henri III. France now had a Protestant successor to the throne, but one whom the majority did not recognize. King according to the Salic law, but unable to take the coronation oath of a Catholic monarch, militarily, financially, and religiously, Navarre was in a weak position. There are many myths about the ultimate success of Henri IV, but the real reasons for his defeat of the League were hard work and luck. Navarre’s position was precarious. He had to retain the loyalty of Protestants, many of whom were convinced he would abjure for the throne, while attracting moderate Catholics; he also lacked money and controlled little of France, including Paris. Philip Benedict explains his victory by four achievements 147

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(Benedict in Holt 2002). Navarre was a better soldier than the League’s commanders: he won victories at Arques in 1589 and Ivry in 1590, which were attributed to divine providence as well as tactical ability. He was also a consummate politician and an affable man, who performed the role of king well. Secondly, the League was divided between its aristocratic and urban components, particularly in Paris. Thirdly, there was no clear alternative monarch, which an Estates General in 1593 did nothing to resolve. The elderly Cardinal of Bourbon died in 1590, and thereafter, there were no obvious successors to the Valois: the Dukes of Mayenne, Lorraine, and Savoy and the Spanish Infanta, daughter of Philip II and Elizabeth Valois, his second wife, were the main contenders, even though the Salic law would not permit a female sovereign. A  fourth factor was war-weariness, for the country was devastated by conflict, famine, and plague. After receiving instruction in the Catholic faith, Henri abjured Protestantism at Saint-Denis in July 1593. While there was no instant adoption of his cause, in the following two years, the major cities, including Paris, and aristocratic leaders, swore allegiance to him. In 1594, he was crowned at Chartres. The last province, Brittany, surrendered in 1598. Henri was generous in victory: he upheld urban privileges and waived taxes, while giving pensions and honors to his new noble supporters. In the end, an ideology of obedience, along with Catholic Reform ideas of penitence, meant that local elites opted to support a king who would guarantee the law and peace. But the issue that started the wars remained, that of religion. Henri’s abjuration left Protestants feeling anxious and betrayed, despite his assurances of support and protection. Huguenot nobles began to militarize independently of the Crown while refusing to fight against the Spanish in 1597. Henri’s response came in the Edict of Nantes of March 1598. In the formal document registered in the parlements, Protestants were granted freedom of conscience, places of worship, full civil rights in the kingdom, and bipartisan parlement chambers to ensure fair justice for them. In a series of secret articles between the king and Protestants, Huguenots were granted subsidized garrisons, schools, and ministers. Yet the state was explicitly constructed as Catholic. The agreement was a compromise that rested on the good faith of the monarch, and it was a temporary arrangement, to bring peace. While he was king, Henri protected the interests of Protestants and ensured toleration of their faith. But the nature of the settlement stored up friction for the future. The civil wars had a profound impact on monarchy in France. One important evolution was toward a legislative monarchy, where the king’s focus moved from adjudicating particular disputes to making general laws (Collins 2009). The period of the religious wars was greatly important for legislation: edicts of toleration and political reforms were all legislative acts of power. Further, law and monarchy became increasingly theorized, for as Bodin wrote, the king had an absolute right to make law “to everyone in general and to each in particular.” A second transformation was the advent of religious toleration, no matter that it was heavily contested, again based in law. Absolute theories of monarchy evolved out of this experience, for it was clear that when strict obedience to a monarch broke down, chaos ensued. The religious wars ultimately promoted reliance on the monarchy as the sole means of unifying the disparate elements of the French state (Roberts 2013).

Aftermath: Bourbon Monarchy The legend of Henri IV as “the great Henri” who put a chicken into the pot of every household took shape shortly after his death. In truth, his rule remained precarious, with 148

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opposition from many places. The king worked to restore order and the effectiveness of government, particularly through the reforms of his Superintendent of Finances, the Duke of Sully. Anxieties over religious difference remained. The Edict of Nantes held an uneasy peace, but it was not a permanent solution. Further, there was no legitimate heir until the birth of Louis in 1601. Jean Châtel nearly assassinated the king in 1594; François Ravaillac succeeded in 1610. To the 9-year-old Louis XIII and his regent mother, Marie de’ Medici, was left the task of pacifying the kingdom and securing the succession: one that would lead France into a new age of conscious absolutism.

References Baumgartner, Frederic J. 1975. Radical Reactionaries: The Political Thought of the French Catholic League. Geneva: Droz. Benedict, Philip. 2002. Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed. A  Social History of Calvinism. New Haven CT: Yale University Press. Bergin, Joseph. 2009. Church, Society and Religious Change in France 1580–1720. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. ———. 2014. The Politics of Religion in Early Modern France. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Collins, James B. 2009. The State in Early Modern France. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crouzet, Denis. 1990. Les guerriers de Dieu: La violence au temps des troubles de religion (vers 1525vers 1610). 2 vols. Seyssel: Champ Vallon. Davis, Natalie Z. 1975. Society and Culture in Early Modern France. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Diefendorf, Barbara. 2009. The St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford/St Martins. Garrisson, Janine. 1995. A History of Sixteenth-Century France, 1483–1598. Renaissance, Reformation and Rebellion. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Greengrass, Mark. 1987. The French Reformation. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2007. Governing Passions: Peace and Reform in the French Kingdom, 1576–1585. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hayden, J. Michael. 2013. The Catholicisms of Coutances. Varieties of Religion in Early Modern France Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Holt, Mack P, ed. 2002. Renaissance and Reformation France, 1500–1648. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———.  2005. The French Wars of Religion, 1562–1629. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jouanna, Arlette. 2013. The St  Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. The Mysteries of a Crime of State. Translated by Joseph Bergin. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kettering, Sharon. 2002. Patronage in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century France. Aldershot: Variorum. Knecht, R. J. 1982. Francis I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1998. Catherine de’ Medici. London: Longman. ———. 2008. The French Renaissance Court 1483–1589. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ———. 2010. The French Wars of Religion 1559–1598. 3rd ed. Harlow: Longman. Ladurie, Emanuel Leroy. 1994. The French Royal State 1460–1610. Translated by Juliet Vale. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Major, J. Russell. 1980. Representative Government in Early Modern France. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Mousnier, Roland. 1979. The Institutions of France under the Absolute Monarchy 1598–1789. 2 vols. University of Chicago Press. Potter, David. 1995. A History of France, 1460–1560: The Emergence of a Nation State. New York: St. Martin’s.

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Elizabeth C. Tingle Richet, Denis. 1982. “Sociocultural Aspects of Religious Conflicts in Paris during the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century.” In Religion, Ritual and the Sacred. Selections from the Annales, edited by Robert Forster and Orest Ranum, 182–212. Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press. Roberts, Penny. 2013. Peace and Authority During the French Religious Wars c1560–1600. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Roelker, Nancy Lyman. 1972. “The Role of Noblewomen in the French Reformation.” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte – Archive for Reformation History 63: 168–95. ———. 1996. One King, One Faith: The Parlement of Paris and the Reformations of the Sixteenth Century. Berkeley CA: University of California Press. Salmon, J. H. M. 1975. Society in Crisis. France in the Sixteenth Century. London: Earnest Benn. Sutherland, N. M. 1973. The Massacre of St Bartholomew and the European Conflict, 1559–1572. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Wolfe, Michael. 1993. The Conversion of Henry IV: Politics, Power and Religious Belief in Early Modern France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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14 CONDUIT OF THE DIVINE Theocratic Themes in Political Theory in Renaissance and Reformation France Aglaia Maretta Venters

French Renaissance political theorists inherited questions of the relationship between the Crown, the king’s person, concepts of “the state,” and the king’s authority over the Gallican Church, from fifteenth-century discourses on secular and ecclesiastical law (Potter 1995). The boundaries between religion and politics lacked clear definition in the laws of Renaissance France. During the sixteenth century, the Reformation further complicated assumptions about these relationships, and vigorous intellectual contention accompanied real strife between Catholics and Huguenots. Recent historiography on medieval France indicates there was longer-standing uncertainty over the king’s role as defender of the Catholic Church in the realm. In a discussion on Philip the Fair’s condemnation of alleged Templar blasphemies and idol worship, Julien Théry noted that ideas of “royal theocracy” gathered support as the king positioned himself as the true defender of the Catholic faith against heresy in his kingdom, and this intertwining of monarchy and religion created a critical step for the development of French absolutism (Théry 2013). Adrianna E. Bakos wrote in her work on Louis XI that sixteenth-century France faced debates over whether or not monarchial power was embodied by the king, or if the king was capable of limiting this power for the good of the people; there was a general sense that some form of natural law drove the apparatus, and theorists used history as support for their arguments (Bakos 1990). Historiography on Renaissance France presents a general narrative of the rise of concepts of absolutism, the theory that a king is ruler of the state according to divinely ordained laws, as the sole coadjutor of God, and is accountable only to God, as taking place at least in part as a reaction to the disorders of the period. French political theories tended to be most inclined, in this view, to praise absolute power during the waning years of less-powerful monarchies and during the beginning years of the reign of an effective king. Ernst Kantorowicz’s work has lasted as the classic work on sanctification of the French monarchy prior to absolutism. He noted the spiritual symbolism of late medieval political rhetoric, promoting the king of France as a consecrated gemina persona, a “twin personality,” who was still human and made divine by God (Kantorowicz 2016). The French monarch thus had the authority of a father figure above all other men, to enforce divine law. More recently, Tyler Lange has explored French legal theory and practice from the sixteenth century, showing 151

DOI: 10.4324/9780367808471-15

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that precedents from Roman law and French customs became the standard for the monarchy, rather than a constitutional ideal based on laws (Lange 2011). Other historians would address French Renaissance monarchy by focusing on the king as a human individual philosophers construed as set apart from and above all other persons. Ronald G. Asch called attention to the failure of the Catholic League’s theocratic ideals, while it does support the argument that kingship in France did react to the Wars of Religion by enforcing dynastic inheritance laws, thus demonstrating that the king was the savior and protector of virtue, and the abstraction of the king as an individual separate from his office served to purify any imperfections (Asch 2014). Jotham Parsons argued that Gallican jurists were more concerned by the power wielded by the Church hierarchy in Rome than they were about local religious officials (Parsons 2004). Joël Blanchard’s study of Commines warned of the pitfalls of teleological approaches to understanding absolutism by pointing out that Commines’s writing about the king as a suffering human who was dying split the king from sacralization and emphasized humanity though makes the king out to face greater suffering than people normally do (Blanchard 2000). The historiography on royal visits to the provinces points out trends throughout France toward stressing divine qualities like omnipresence and royal power to determine privileges according to compliance during the sixteenth century. In other words, French kings desired to communicate their divine connections to all their subjects, including nobles and local officials, who typically had influence in the provinces, so as to ensure their compliance with royal power. Léonard Dauphant noted that the kings of France manifested impressions of their omnipresence through supervision of local administrations and rituals for royal visits (Dauphant 2017). Lawrence M. Bryant’s analysis of royal entry ceremonies explained that French royal authority steadily whittled away the autonomy of local corporations and cities held during the medieval and Renaissance eras (Bryant 1986). Neil Murphy argued in his work on royal entries that distance between the king and the people widened through the sixteenth century, and the monarch’s entry ceremony developed themes that local élites’ status and privileges received royal acknowledgment in return for their loyalty (Murphy 2016). Still, by the middle of the sixteenth century, the ideas of “deified rulers” became part of royal entry ceremonies (Bryant 1986). Having the king nearby was a godsend for his subjects, who wanted relief from the violence and turmoil, as the one appointed by God to lead them and ensure the welfare of the state and the people (Murphy 2016). Indeed, the historiography also addresses the tension between the king’s power and the nobility’s influence in the realm. Robert J. Knecht argues that kings of Renaissance France preferred to think of absolute monarchy as the standard for ideal government, while grudgingly acknowledging that kings were dependent on the cooperation of the nobility (Knecht 1996). Gareth Prosser’s work on fifteenth-century military reforms revealed that French nobles, having lost much of the wherewithal to form their own military forces, were compelled to gain influence via manipulative activities at court (Prosser 2000). Robert Harding’s analysis of Renaissance French patronage networks revealed major preoccupation for theorists like Bodin, who were keeping patronage networks under control via moral precepts (Harding 1981). David Potter argued that phrases like “One God, one king, one faith” (appearing in the early sixteenth century under Louis XII), ritualization of the monarchy, and symbolic images (like the sun) to emphasize the divine connections of the king (especially after François I) were signs of absolutism (Potter 1995). Nannerl Keohane argues that French absolute monarchs soothed widespread desires for order after chaotic years by entrancing the people with spectacular imagery and by appealing to rhetoric 152

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supporting sacralization of the French monarch and legal theory to justify absolute power (Keohane 1980). Arlette Jouanna and Joseph Bergin examined that the inability for French Catholics and Huguenots to come to peace was that tolerance could be gained only when the sovereign asserted his power, sanctified authority, over everyone else (Jouanna and Bergin 2007). Finally, Sophie Nicholls’s recent work argues that French Catholic concepts of religion formed a transcendent “patrie” for all Catholics that borrowed from traditions of heavenly cities made famous by theologians like Augustine and had to be defined in terms of a world in which Christian plurality was irreversible. Furthermore, politiques and Catholic League thinkers alike, in spite of their differences in opinions, inherited from the scholastic traditions questions of reconciling realities for secular realm with lofty spiritual pursuits. The king of France was “God’s ‘lieutenant’ ” and entitled to the full submission that all humans owed to God. Because many of the roots of theories of monarchy in theology rested in theology, French Renaissance concepts of the nature of kingship absorbed the ambiguity of sixteenth-century debates about God and how humans relate to the divine. Determining exactly how divine the king was or how to distinguish a monarch’s will from that or Providence, and the precise manner of a subject’s submission to the king, were questions that had no certain answers. This chapter examines puzzles faced by Renaissance French theorists and jurists as they tried to determine how their society could affect the closest approximation to God’s will possible. Examination of language arguing for the kings of France to acknowledge their role as “God’s representative,” discussing the nature of human fallibility and justice, and exploring the futures of the Estates General and religion reveal intersecting lines of thought between sixteenth-century Huguenot and Catholic theorists. Such intersections often reflected an atmosphere in which both groups shared a general distrust of human agency and power. Huguenot theorists expressed sentiments which some historians interpret as precursors to constitutionalism because of a perhaps understandable wariness about Catholicism and a Catholic king of France. Catholic theorists, in contrast, argued that an absolute monarch would solve the problems of rebelliousness and plurality, thereby affecting as close to God’s direct rule over human realms as the war-wearied French could hope for. Yet Catholic and Huguenot theorists also shared uneasiness about potential for corruption among human kings. While the theoretical solution both sides found was to entrust power over the people into the hands of God, via his appointed deputy’s enforcement of Christian morality, the two factions could not agree on what definitions of Christian morality and God’s law to actually apply. Sixteenth-century Catholic and Huguenot writers had a shared inheritance of accepted ideas that Christianity was a cornerstone of discourse on the French monarchy. In the preReformation generation, Philippe de Commines’s Mémoires, completed in 1498 and published in 1524, described Louis XI’s death as God’s punishment for his harshness as a ruler, emphasizing that the king suffered similar torments, mainly imprisonment and isolation within his weakened state, to those he had inflicted upon others (Commines 1615). Commines demonstrated in these passages his own understanding that God had orchestrated these torments for the king as opportunities for Louis XI to atone for sacrificing his own moral values in the service of political survival and for times when he failed divine tests of power (Blanchard 2000). Commines also asserted that Louis XI’s grueling death was worse suffering than any other human’s, presenting readers with an argument that God’s justice was inevitable, even for kings. 153

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Clear precedents for acknowledgment that all power over everything in the realm ultimately rested with God also appeared in the work of jurists, such as Claude de Seyssel’s La Grande Monarchie de France (first published in 1519). Seyssel also warned kings of France that they, like their predecessors, would receive God’s “punishments” for “abandoning Christian” morals, and that for effective and moral leadership, showing a “state of grace,” “humility,” and “devotion,” they had received great “rewards,” including the “royal touch” that cured scrofula, which God did not grant even to popes and Church officials. This meant, he argued, that the kings of France had an even greater responsibility to God than did the clergy (Seyssel 1557). Like Commines, Seyssel warned new kings that they would be worthy of grievous punishment for behavior that contradicted Christianity, though he balanced his statement by encouraging French kings to be virtuous by reminding them of the rewards of virtue. Seyssel’s work and Commines’s work, published five years apart, offered themes of God’s authority over the king’s life and death, which could remind new kings of France to be mindful of their choices. Such themes also had potential to reassure readers that divine authority watched over all pains and triumphs on Earth. Word choices like “this world” or “temporal” affairs underscored Commines’s observations of Louis XI’s final days and Seyssel’s arguments, affirming that the state and the people were minute among God’s vastness. Guillaume Budé, whose interests in Calvinism remain uncertain, could represent a bridge between Catholic and Huguenot sixteenthcentury political theory. Budé’s sense of God’s authority over all events and persons in the human world appeared in his Institution du Prince (1547), in which he admonished kings that they should not abuse the power God gave them (Budé 1547). Budé sought to place limits around the king’s power via the requirement that kings should model honesty and morality, according to Christian standards, throughout their lives as the standard-bearer for order and godliness in the realm. Commines, Seyssel, and Budé agreed that God was the highest authority, but Budé’s use of words like “censure” implied a stronger sense that the king, watched over by God, had to refrain from being seen to fall below the highest standards. Budé’s possible leanings toward Calvinism might have helped produce this less-sacral view of kingship. Nevertheless, the underlying emphasis for Commines, Seyssel, and Budé was for the king always to remember that he had to submit to God’s authority in order to rule. Only kings who gave God complete submission could be suitable conduits for God’s power to the people. Echoes of Budé’s entreaty for the king of France to recognize that his own behavior was crucial for the maintenance of public godliness reappeared in later works written by Calvinist jurists like Théodore Bèze. His religion notwithstanding, Bèze’s work showed agreement with Catholics like Commines and Seyssel on recognition that kings were not accountable for human shortcomings in the same manner as ordinary subjects. However, Bèze’s commentary on magistrates, Dv Droits Des Magistrats, Svr Levrs Svbjets (1574), contained passages that expressed that princes should be “reprimanded” by those who keep their oaths to God and the “patrie” (Bèze 1575). Bèze also equated princes who permitted the people to cling to “Catholic superstitions” to “tyrants” and demanded that kings defend authentic (Protestant) Christianity with reasonable existing edicts and fair laws of the state (Bèze 1575). Common ground between the Catholic theorists and Bèze’s philosophy could not mask frustration with religious divisions in France that seeped through his near-diatribes on eliminating debauchery among the people by limiting Catholic influence and steering the society toward true faith in moral instruction provided by God (i.e., Calvinism). Commines, Seyssel, and Budé published their works before the French Wars of 154

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Religion, whereas Bèze wrote in the aftermath of iconoclasm and violent events like the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre (1572). This context was echoed in the tone of his dire warnings for the king to enforce Christian morals so as to contain the people’s capacity for violence, even though his idea of royally enforced obedience to God involved rejection of “superstitions” (perhaps even those that involved special sanctification of a mortal prince). From Commines’s and Seyssel’s advising kings to understand God’s punishments and rewards, to Budé’s emphasis on Christian morality in the kingdom, to Bèze’s insistence that the monarch’s own promises to God and the state presented immediate concerns for kings to be mindful of the example they set with their own lives, there is a progression in the sense of urgency for the king to enforce justice that parallels the escalation to religious wars in France. Theorists like Jean Bodin focused on the importance of the idea that the king was conceived of as the dispenser of justice in France (Holt 1991). Jean Bodin, a politique who continues to be remembered as an avid supporter of absolutism, drew particular attention to the human capacity for immorality as justification for strict obedience to central authority in his Les Six Livres de la République (1576). Bodin became renowned for its appeals to divine imagery and natural law to conceptualize kingship as a means for God to demonstrate his qualities through the image of a human king (Bodin 1579), Catholic writers like Bodin (and Seyssel before him) wrote of kingship as channeling divinity directly through the person of a monarch. Contemporary Huguenot writers like Bèze and François Hotman would reject Bodin’s proclamations that God had ordained the king to carry his divine image to the people. For theorists writing during the era of the Wars of Religion, the manner in which kings should fulfill their roles as God’s representatives marked a prominent difference between Catholic and Huguenot models, even as both appealed to religion to alleviate mutually held frustrations with the human potential for violence and crime. The king’s “divinity” became pivotal for directing the trajectories of Huguenot and Catholic political ideologies from their points of intersection regarding the king’s duty to enforce Christian moral standards for the entire realm, and (as religious conflict escalated) grim view of humans left without stringent authority. In fact, the common people preferred for kings of France to exude awesome royal power in order to inspire fear among local elites, thus minimizing harmful consequences resulting from their conflicts with other powerful persons (Keohane 1980). Accordingly, French Renaissance political theory does contain suggestions of deification during royal visitations. Commines made reference to how Charles VIII’s presence in a province was designed to keep the people awestruck and fearful of his power and majesty, which would keep them loyal and obedient to his laws. His use of the word “crainte” conjured images of “God-fearing,” which reflects the combination of awe and fear that made people obedient to God (Commines 1615). Commines’s observation that Charles VIII held public audiences for the poor in order to maintain an idea of “fear” especially among the local officials reinforced the king’s demands for loyalty and obedience, and his image as omnipresent and omnipotent over all of France. In essence, Charles VIII conjured characteristics associated with divine authority throughout France. Local officials may not always have behaved loyally, even though the king could punish them. Still, this model for kings and officials could be applied to princes and God; the king would obey divine will in the same manner local authorities carried through on royal commands. Yet the relationship between royal authority, royal advisers, local officials, parlements, and the Estates General would prove problematic for sixteenth-century French thinkers and resulted in one of the greatest rifts between Catholic and Huguenot political theory. 155

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Huguenot legal theorist François Hotman wrote in his 1573 Francogallia that the correct order for subjects’ loyalty placed the king directly under God and above the state. From Hotman’s words, readers can surmise that his assignment of loyalty to the king as ranking above duty to the commonwealth suggested that the role of the king was as mediator between God and the state. Yet the king’s lofty status above his state and his people did not preclude the possibility of his being led astray by immoral advisers. Hotman’s Calvinist faith, like that of Bèze, possibly disdained the idea that human kings were manifestations of divine presence. Discussions regarding obedience to the king featured philosophy of God’s image and natural law. Seyssel’s observed that people had to “revere,” “fear,” and “obey” one “temporal leader,” by God’s design, because multiple leaders were “pernicious” (Seyssel 1557). Seyssel connected the king’s authority as part of God’s will for all of nature, humanity, and the body politic, despite his own reticence about shared power reflected his own lack of trust in humans to refrain from rebellion when they shared power with the highest authority. Yet Bodin wrote that a monarch’s effectiveness rested in his ability to resemble God’s wisdom, magnificence, and power, which intimated that the people reasonably obeyed kings whose divine sanctification was obvious (Bodin 1579). The people reasonably would be easy to control when they understood that obedience to the king was tantamount to submission to God, who had imitated the “splendor of the Sun” (Bodin 1579). References to natural law and natural justice, clarity and light, and splendor of the sun all suggest God’s handiwork in creating the king and his power. However, Bodin would reveal that even he shared with contemporary Protestants like Bèze and Hotman (and Catholics like Seyssel, Commines, and Budé) when he exhorted that kings always must remain fearful of God and mindful of natural laws that dictated for patriarchs to be heads of household and govern their families, and for the entire universe to be ruled ultimately only by God (Bodin 1579). Natural laws that allowed a human body to be governed by a head, or a human family by a patriarchal figure, or the Earth to depend on the sun, were dictated completely by God as creator of all. As the creator of kingdoms, God had placed the same guidance for kings. Moreover, if the model of bodies and families suited the king’s governance of the state, then the same model could apply to the king’s role with respect to God’s universal scale. Meanwhile, preoccupations with baser sides of human life developed into discussions on justice as one of the greatest duties kings owed to God. French theorists often presented models in which God’s will, entrusted to the king, translated into the concept of “justice.” Bodin demonstrated his concern that widespread public impiety was a sign proving that the people were losing fear of God (Bodin 1579), Bèze, too, expressed sentiments that direct commands from God came to the people through their rulers, and that the king’s responsibility was to not command the people to “iniquity” or disobedience to God (Bèze 1575). Bèze’s writing reveals emphasis that God was the ultimate authority, more than agreement that subjects’ obedience to kings, which shows that he was influenced by the same general reluctance to trust the people as other jurists of the French Renaissance. Still, a rift between Protestant Bèze and Catholic Bodin appeared when Bodin explicitly pointed to religious diversity as a cause for seditions, by writing that religions would not be able to come to agreement (Bodin 1579). Bodin makes references to the dangers of having options for different opinions, solidifying his break from points of agreement with writers like Bèze and Hotman. Instead, Bodin demanded that kings recognize that uniting the people under one perfect religion, state, law, tradition would not prove effective for producing public order if other opinions were accommodated. Frustration stemming from the religious conflicts 156

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throughout France probably factored into Bodin’s harrowing condemnation of diversity among Christians. Most apparently on the side of the Catholics, Bodin extolled the effects wise and virtuous clergy could have to convince rebellious subjects to submit to royal authority. Theorists disagreed on the opinions the royal advisers should voice. One facet of the rift over the advice kings would need to control France during the Wars of Religion would be discussion of the king’s humanity as opposed to his divinity. Logically, French Protestants would be cautious about the possibility that the Catholic king’s status placed him above reproach by anyone other than God. Hotman wrote that believing that a human king could be infallible was an erroneous notion, because power was “irresistible”. Hotman’s idea of the Estates General was that it was the only way to undo the damage done by monarchs, who were irresponsible and too oppressive with power (Bakos 1990). Even some Catholics explored ideas of how to address the king’s own fallibility and means of holding them accountable. Seyssel preferred to entrust the king’s fallibility to be regulated by power of God and the laws because the king was still capable of sins, and for the king to hold himself accountable to God and to his own laws (Seyssel 1557). Seyssel’s inability to trust humans prevented him from believing that respecting a virtuous king who obeyed all the laws of France in all aspects of his life should trust nobility to have power in the government (Seyssel 1557). Seyssel continued to argue that history demonstrated that subjects were likely to obey a justice system as long as the king was not overly forceful by using an oppressive military force (Seyssel 1557). Seyssel added that kings must remember the smallness of their own power compared to that of God and take heed that ambitious kings caused rebellions, which violated divine commands for justice in their realms (Seyssel 1557). Seyssel’s argument and Hotman’s intersected by their assertions that power-seeking monarchs did not produce good results. When taken with Commines’s memoirs about how Louis XI was punished for harsh leadership, an array of French Renaissance political theory presented a view that, no matter how much jurists discussed monarchy, they ultimately were expressing desires for the hands of God to intervene in the workings of the kingdom. Insisting upon extreme obedience to stringent authority reasonably stems an outlook on humans as being motivated by self-interest and only responding to punishment and negative consequences. This outlook had dim implications for the human dimension of the king as well. Politiques had to address ways for the king could live according to the laws yet rule as though he were above the law (Levi 1988). Seyssel’s recommendation was for kings to learn as children to respect Church officials. Here, Seyssel advocated for instruction of royal sons in the customs of France (an assumption that they were based on God’s law), with a general concept of God’s authority over him, and have the appearance of being a man with God walking with him like great kings of the past (Seyssel 1557). Future kings should be respectful of ecclesiastical authority for the same reason. Seyssel advised the kings of France to have a group of prelates who were worthy men to maintain the integrity of the Church and uphold God’s truth (Seyssel 1557). Hence, making an exact replica of God’s law on earth is too lofty a goal for humans, though the history of the state had long-standing precedents for trying to conform to God’s law. Huguenots, on the other hand, preferred for kings to be firm in eradicating public immorality by encouraging the people to study religion. Calvinist theology also probably played a role in the prominence of language referring to “idolatry” and “blasphemy” in the works of Huguenots like Bèze, who preferred for noblemen to study scriptures and the theology of Jean Calvin (Bèze 1575). Additionally, whereas Seyssel’s recommendation was for kings to follow the advice of the clergy, Protestants often assigned this role to the parlements. 157

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Budé wrote of long precedents in French history about living in prosperity under great kings who never “abused privilege” and never allowed their advisers to abuse privilege because of God’s grace (Budé 1547). Budé appeared again as the middle ground between Catholics and Huguenots as he presented this model that could have been taken as admonishment to limit the power of the nobility, a feature that came to be associated with Bourbon absolutism. Yet he was willing to admit that kings could be fallible, and maintained that they would face consequences for mistakes and deliberate wrongdoing. Budé also supported the idea that the people yielded their own power to the prince, yet the prince was accountable to a parlement, in the same manner as classical models (Nicholls 2020). Such observations could imply that Budé expressed that, despite the fact that they had to give up their own agency to govern themselves, the people consented to be ruled by God’s appointee. The prince therefore had to prove himself worthy of God’s trust in order to avoid consequences inflicted upon him in the temporal world. Meanwhile, the politiques also tried to derive some conclusions about the functions of the kings’ advisers. Commines’s depiction of Louis XI was as someone who warned his son not to alienate officers and other powerful men, as he had done after his father had died, because doing so was a threat to the throne (Commines 1615). After the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, Huguenot jurists shifted their discussions of monarchy in ways which blamed the king and Catherine de’ Medici for violent persecution of French Protestants and emphasized the need for the Estates General to play a large role in governing the state (Bakos 1990). Bèze’s Dv Droits Des Magistrats offered favorable views on magistrates and officials who were “created for the people,” in the same manner as those who were charged with duties to be “tutor” and “shepherd” the people to correct morality (Bèze 1575). Bèze argued that the ultimate role of the magistrate to serve the people and to recognize that the people are an eternal force. God left the people to be governed by a prince or magistrates as the one in the senior position, yet the duty of the one in the senior position is greater than any service owed to the governor by the people. For Bèze, princes and magistrates had to remember that their power should not be self-aggrandizing, an idea which put in agreement with Seyssel. In a way, explaining that God created the people as a force older than any magistrate accorded the masses the same sense of eternity that the concept of a divine king had. In the realm of theory, the conceptual king was greater than the conceptual people yet provided guidance according to the will of God. All individual humans involved, however, were to understand their own lives as beneath the model created by God. Despite the Catholic League’s insistence that kings who committed heresy were not to be obeyed, Catholics and Huguenots considered that the Estates General could have a positive influence on the realm because of its roles to speak for the people and uphold French customs (Nicholls 2020). Francis Oakley argued that some sixteenth-century Huguenot and Catholic theorists found potential for cooperation whenever they could agree on ideologies that resembled constitutionalism and popular consent to government, often arising during times in which papal authority over secular matters created tensions for societies (Oakley 2015). Seyssel even questioned the word “absolute” for the king’s authority and argued that the king’s power should be circumscribed by the long-standing precedents within wise laws and precedents (Seyssel 1557). In other words, the king should learn from precedents and make sure to respect the customs of the society if he wanted to keep order. Again, Seyssel mainly advised against not absolute power but totally absolute, meaning, that the king could do what he wanted as long as he remained subject to the rules. This advice would curb the king’s power by restricting how much he could change the realm according to his 158

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own desires. The king was not divine in his own right, not creator of his own world according to his own desires. Seyssel also advised the kings of France to respect the Holy Apostolic See (Seyssel 1557). During the fifteenth century, coronations included the king’s duties to uphold the Church’s privileges and to ensure that the realm remained in a state of peace, justice, and freedom from heretical teachings. The right to appoint men to fill vacant benefices apparently arose from the idea of the king’s duty to protect the Church; the Church acknowledging his authority to appoint men to benefices was the Church’s gift to him in exchange for protection (Bryant 1986). The assumption was that order depended on moral social structures and behaviors, and the place to learn about morality was from God’s will. The king, therefore, had to enforce God’s will as it was wrapped within public morality. Despite points of intersection in their ideas for healing the state and the people, Catholics and Huguenots created irreconcilable trajectories for their factions and their philosophies of government. Both sides eventually found reasons for condemning the other as traitors, and both found reasons for justifying their own open rebelliousness in the other’s arguments for defending their positions. Ultimately, Bourbon absolutism arose from the atmosphere of wanting to have as close to God’s direct control over human capacity for creating violence that plagued Renaissance France as possible. Even though Huguenots and Catholics disagreed on how to accomplish a society in which human vices were contained by God’s supervision, theocratic undertones were present. Areas in which Catholic and Huguenot thinkers expressed similar ideas reveal that both sides acknowledged ideas of the predecessors and felt discontentment about the chaos surrounding them. Catholic and Huguenot theorists alike expressed reluctance to trust humans, which presented an overall picture of Renaissance France as a society in which the people hoped for order via explicit requirements to see God as having control over the state. By the seventeenth century, Frenchmen, not trusting humans’ passions in the state’s affairs, looked to philosophers from the era of the Wars of Religion, such as Bodin and Montaigne, and believed that prominent men had to distinguish between their political realities, which required complete restraint and respect for authority, and their private interests/beliefs, which were gravitating away from religion (Keohane 1980). In a manner similar to Louis XIV’s use of intendants to oversee the provinces, so was the king the intendant of God. Undoubtedly, many factors in French society, including the people’s reactions to the faith of the king and their expectations for royal grandeur, played crucial roles in the development of absolutism. Ancien Régime France grew from an environment pushed through constant pressure of chaos and turmoil and distrust of humans in the manner that pressure changes coal into diamond. Discontent regarding human ability to maintain order without the direct intervention of God, shared by Catholics and Protestants, created common ground for the two sides. As conflicts over religion escalated into violence in France, the factions devised different solutions for bringing order to their society, in spite of the fact that they still shared the same questions and frustrations. The fact that Catholics and Huguenots found a variety of ways to restore order to France from the same beginning assumptions about monarchy as the link between humans and God and the focal point for authority and enforcement of Christian morality showed that absolutism was not a foregone conclusion. Rather, absolutism was one of choices derived from French Renaissance political theory to end the chaos of the Reformation and the Wars of Religion. Absolutism offered means for the people to feel God’s intervention in their lives – because no human could doubt God’s words and laws, and the human dimension of the king was bound to unswerving obedience to God, who had especially chosen him to bring justice and peace to the whole realm. 159

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Having God’s true deputy over them could encourage people to feel assured that God was close enough to the state to hold every individual accountable for immoral behavior.

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Conduit of the Divine Oakley, Francis. 2015. The Watershed of Modern Politics: Law, Virtue, Kingship, and Consent (1300–1650). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Parsons, Jotham. 2004. The Church in the Republic: Gallicanism and Political Ideology in Renaissance France. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Potter, David L. 1995. “Kingship in the Wars of Religion: The Reputation of Henri-III of France.” European History Quarterly 25 (4): 485–528. Prosser, Gareth. 2000. “ ‘Decayed Feudalism’ and ‘Royal Clienteles’: Royal Office and Magnate Service in the Fifteenth Century.” In War, Government and Power in Late Medieval France, edited by Christopher Allmand. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Théry, Julien. 2013. “A Heresy of State: Philip the Fair, the Trial of the ‘Perfidious Templars,’ and the Pontificalization of the French Monarchy.” Journal of Religious Medieval Cultures 39: 2.

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15 ROYAL WOMEN AND THE HABSBURG–VALOIS WARS (1494–1559) Susan Broomhall1

In 1494, the Valois king Charles VIII invaded the Kingdom of Naples, then ruled by Alfonso II of Aragon. Charles insisted that the territory belonged to the French Crown by right of inheritance from the Anjou dynasty. So began a series of fractured conflicts, interspersed with moments of peace, that were felt far across Europe, and, indeed, beyond, over a 60-year period. After Naples fell to the French army in early 1495, a series of interested parties, including Ferdinand II of Aragon (Ferdinand V of Castile) and Maximilian I of Austria, responded by restoring the Aragonese monarchy to power and expelling the French from the Italian peninsula. This might have been the end of the matter, but when Charles VIII died unexpectedly in 1498, his successor, Louis XII, took the opportunity to reignite the war. This time, the primary focus of the French invasion was the wealthy duchy of Milan, to which Louis claimed rights by descent from his grandmother Valentina Visconti. Progressively, rulers of state and church became embroiled in complex military engagements and lavish cultural displays that signaled ever-changing alliances and which passed through successive generations of the Habsburg and Valois dynasties, who give the conflict its name (Shaw and Mallet 2018). This was a conflict that was fought as much in the glittering courts of Europe as on the battlefield. Not before 1559 were peace treaties bringing the wars to a close signed at Le Cateau-Cambrésis by Philip II of Spain and Henri II of France. Women were important participants in the politics of European dynasties at this period. At the royal court in France, they found political expression in a range of official positions and unofficial roles in the orbit of the king, as queen consorts, regents, and mothers and sisters of kings (Crawford 2004; Reid 2009; Broomhall 2018). Recent studies have also demonstrated how other courtly women established positions of influence and persuasion as intimate companions of kings, as courtiers and as ladies-in-waiting, where they could act as factional power players, social networkers, and communication conduits (Kolk and Wilson-Chevalier 2018). This chapter, focusing on royal women, examines how the politics

1 Research for this work was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant (DP180102412).

DOI: 10.4324/9780367808471-16

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of war was also part of their activities in this era. Women were no mere onlookers to this conflict. Just as did elite men, they engaged with the war as invested protagonists, bore its violence on their bodies, and suffered its consequences in deeply emotional terms.

Territorial Possessions In 1494, Charles VIII gathered a massive force of French troops and Swiss mercenaries to press his claim to the throne of Naples, which, Charles argued, had been bequeathed by René of Anjou to his father, Louis XI. Both Pope Innocent VIII and Ludovico Sforza in Milan, in line with their own interests, backed his claim. Charles’s rapid and successful invasion down the Italian peninsula, culminating in his coronation as king of Naples in February 1495, launched over 60 years of wars. While Charles led his troops in Italy, it fell to his elder sister Anne and her husband, Pierre de Beaujeu, to manage the French kingdom. Anne of France had already assumed powers of regency alongside her husband, at 22, when Charles came to the throne in 1483 aged 13, until he came of age in 1491 (Matarasso 2001, 15–21). The desire of French kings such as Charles to lead military campaigns would provide multiple opportunities for consorts and female relatives to take a visible role in managing the kingdom in their stead during the wars. Anne and Pierre’s actions on behalf of Charles were to reshape the geopolitics of the region for decades to come. By the terms of the Treaty of Arras (1482) made by Louis XI and Maximilian I, Charles had been betrothed to Margaret of Austria, who brought the County of Burgundy as part of her dowry. In the following year, Margaret, then just 3, came to the French court under Anne’s watchful eye to prepare for her future role as queen of France. Military and political alliances were routinely underpinned by strategic marriages that united dynasties through ties of blood. Thus, when Anne of Brittany became the Duchess of Brittany in 1488 after her father’s unexpected death when she was 11, she looked to arrange a marriage for herself that would protect the independent territory of Brittany from French aggression. In 1490, she married the much older Maximilian by proxy. However, Anne and Pierre, concerned by the prospect of the French kingdom being surrounded by Habsburgs on three sides, marched troops into Brittany and forced Anne to marry the French king Charles instead in December 1491, just after the end of his minority (Matarasso 2001, 68–71). Charles’s unexpected marriage to Anne of Brittany saw Margaret of Austria (the daughter of the very man whom Anne had just tried to marry) sent home. Although Charles and Anne had many children, none survived childhood. Charles’s untimely death in 1498 briefly brought his younger sister Jeanne to the throne as queen consort of the new king, Louis XII. However, following divorce proceedings that subjected the couple’s intimate life to close and unseemly attention, and following Jeanne’s subsequent retirement to become an abbess of a dynamic new order, Louis married his predecessor’s widow (Matarasso 2001, 152–55). With Anne of Brittany as queen once again, Louis ensured that Brittany remained united with France. From this union survived two daughters, Claude and Renée, who would both play key roles in the following phases of the war. While Claude could expect to inherit the duchy of Brittany from her mother, the French Crown, governed by Salic law, could only be passed to a man. Anne of Brittany hoped to ensure Brittany’s independence from France (which her own marriages had endangered) and thus sought to betroth Claude to Charles of Castile (the future Holy Roman Emperor Charles V) as part of the 1504 Treaty of Blois, in which Claude would bring to the marriage Brittany, Milan, and Burgundy and the French-occupied territories of Genoa, among other 163

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possessions. However, the following year, Claude’s father, Louis XII, with an eye to the territorial power of the French kingdom, secretly arranged for Claude’s marriage to his heir, François of Angoulême. When Anne of Brittany died in 1514, Claude became Brittany’s new duchess and, a few short months later, the wife of François. The Italian territories included in Claude’s dowry were about to become flash points of the ongoing conflict that was taken up by Europe’s next generation of male rulers: François, who become king of France as François I, and Charles, Holy Roman Emperor. In the first major action of this new phase, François prevailed at the Battle of Marignano in 1515, returning Milan (lost in 1512) to French control.

Visibility at Court Anne of France and Anne of Brittany had each asserted a strongly visible, active presence at the French court. Anne of France influenced a generation of elite young women who were raised at court under her supervision. From the time that Anne of Brittany was consort (twice), the queen’s household had progressively grown until it was close to the size of the king’s retinue. Under Queen Claude, Anne’s daughter, the household continued to grow numerically, a recognition of a French consort’s independent functions and need for her own administrative assistance (Kolk 2009). At the same time, both Annes had emphasized the importance of women’s courtly and intellectual education. Anne of France raised many young women at the French court who would take the skills that they learned there far and wide across Europe, including Margaret of Austria and François I’s mother, Louise of Savoy, alongside whom Margaret was raised. Anne of France’s interest in women’s courtly education has become widely known through the work she wrote for her daughter, Suzanne de Bourbon, about the realities of women’s roles and responsibilities (Jansen 2012). Anne of Brittany’s intellectual interests were demonstrated through her commission of many beautiful, illuminated manuscripts for her growing library (Brown 2010). The queen’s reading choices reflected a strong interest in the importance of female education, and her library later grew further in the hands of her daughter Claude with commissions that showed how literature could assert key messages about elite women’s views on contemporary issues of politics and religion (Wilson-Chevalier 2016). Women from the French court were widely visible in ceremonial and diplomatic roles. They were courted by foreign envoys for their insights into the machinations of the court and their influence over its key individuals, not least of whom was the king. As such, their own activities and opinions were widely reported. In 1520, François I and the English king Henry VIII arranged to meet for diplomatic talks near Calais, at a site known as the Field of Cloth of Gold (Richardson 2013). Both Claude and her fellow queen consort Catherine of Aragon attended, each with a large entourage of courtly women (Fisher 2023). So too attended Claude’s mother-in-law, Louise of Savoy, and her sister-in-law, Marguerite of Navarre, both of whom were known to be particularly influential interlocutors with François (Brioist, Fagnart, and Michon 2015). Marguerite was reputed by diplomat Matteo Dandolo as the “wisest woman, not only of all the women in France but also of all the men. . . . [I]n the affairs of state, one can hear no discussion more certain than hers” (Baschet 1862, 412). Frenchwomen “on show” at such events sent messages about the French king’s virility to onlookers. A  heavily pregnant Claude attended the celebrations at the Field of Cloth of Gold, the dates of which had to be arranged around her expected delivery. Claude’s pregnant presence spoke of François’s reproductive success and the prospect of a male heir, something that had eluded Henry VIII (Fisher 2023). Also in attendance was François’s then-intimate companion, Françoise de Foix, whose potential to persuade the king through 164

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emotional and sexual means was not neglected by diplomats or the Tudor king. She was presented with gifts, including an expensive crucifix, by Henry during the course of the event – a fact that was considered noteworthy for the Mantuan ambassador, whose account records the details of the gift (Richardson 2013). When François experienced profound disaster at the Battle of Pavia in 1525, including the loss of many of the court’s leading men and his own captivity under Charles V, it was his mother, Louise, and his sister Marguerite who stepped in to lead the kingdom. Louise became regent, and Marguerite a critical mediator in the negotiations for François’s release (Brioist, Fagnart, and Michon 2015). Marguerite’s letters to François survive, demonstrating her significant role in maintaining the emotional and political connections of the tightknit family group. These letters informed the king about matters at court, including the work of their mother as regent, and also operated as a site for religious discussion and poetic exchange. Marguerite seconded her mother when Louise recurrently fell ill, and her correspondence at this period demonstrates her engagement with the kingdom’s military affairs, including overseeing troop movements, resourcing, and logistics, before the Treaty of Madrid secured the king’s release in March 1526 (Champollion-Figeac 1847).

Peacemaking Elite women played a particularly visible role in peacemaking because it matched contemporary assumptions about appropriate female behavior and feelings. Queens were conventionally expected to deliver mercy, intervening to alleviate the severity of a king’s judgment. Contemporaries extended this traditional work to the settling of treaties, where, not only as wives, but also as mothers and relatives of kings, they might intercede and bring understanding between men and be expected to have particular concern for the suffering of their populations. Women’s promotion of themselves as protagonists for peace and as mediators was often also grounded in gendered ideas about men and their emotions. It was assumed that women could ameliorate male stubbornness and pride, too often intractable elements of noble masculinity, by subordinating their own honor for the sake of dynastic goals. This stance created a rationale for Louise of Savoy and Margaret of Austria’s involvement in the 1529 Treaty of Cambrai (Dumont et al. 2021). Neither woman could speak in her own right politically, but only as the representative of men, Louise for her son François, and Margaret for her nephew Charles. Compromise behind the scenes permitted a resolution to the conflict without the loss of male honor. The pair’s leading role in the negotiations was represented in contemporary chronicles, poems, prints, and commemorative medals, as well as in the epistolary records of both male and female political protagonists, in positive terms, giving this treaty the popular name “the Ladies’ Peace.” The conclusion of the Ladies’ Peace was marked by another transaction of bodies, the marriage of Charles’s sister Eleanor to the widowed French king François I. This tied the leaders of the Habsburg and Valois dynasties together as brothers-in-law, ensuring at least temporary peace. François’s release from captivity in 1526 had been contingent on sending his two eldest sons to Spain in his stead. In 1530, François’s new marriage to Eleanor, along with a sizable ransom, promised the return to France of these vital heirs. Eleanor was actively involved in a campaign of correspondence to secure the release of her stepsons as rapidly as possible after her marriage (Pardanaud 2008). A widow and mother herself, she invoked her feelings as a mother as the impetus for her intervention. The printed account of Eleanor’s coronation noted that she was accompanied in the procession by the two princes, whose return to France she had helped secure (Bochetel [1531] div). 165

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For brides such as Eleanor who moved with marriage across the continent, clothes were an important way to assert a sense of identity and political allegiances. From the time she crossed the border into French territory in 1530, eyewitnesses documented Eleanor’s consistent Spanish attire, a choice that mirrored the styling of her brother Charles. Thus, Eleanor signaled her identification with her natal Habsburg roots at the very moment she was married to its dynastic rival (Anderson 1981; Cox-Rearick 2009). Her new husband was himself well-known to place high significance on the clothing of his female courtiers, even seeking advice from Isabella d’Este about the latest Italian fashions and ordering dolls that displayed them (Croizat 2007). Both Eleanor and François understood clothing as political messaging and opportunities for agency and control. François’s tolerance for Eleanor’s fashion exceptionalism at the French court lasted no longer than the peace that brought her there. In 1536, the year that war broke out again between Charles and François over control of Milan, a portrait showed the queen in French dress (Wilson-Chevalier 2002, 507). Eleanor then turned to patronizing art and deploying particular jewelry as alternative mechanisms to assert her status and foster networks of her own (Jordan Gschwend 2010; Mansfield 2019). Eleanor’s diplomatic and political work as queen consort highlights how ideas about family relationships were deeply enmeshed in public affairs. From her arrival in France, Eleanor had expressed interest in meeting her sister Mary of Hungary, who was then living nearby as governor in the Low Countries. Charles voiced concerns that Eleanor might promote the views of her new husband to Mary. Eleanor pushed back, insisting to his ambassador that the sisters naturally had an interest in visiting each other (Knecht 2011). Nonetheless, this family event that took place at Cambrai in August 1531 involved extensive high-level planning of ceremonial receptions and was attended not only by Eleanor but also by François, a contingent of his senior French political counsellors, and many of the most prominent women of the French court. The very purpose of Eleanor’s marriage to François had been to secure peace, and it was an ambition that her diplomacy foregrounded. Ambassadors remarked on her concern when François and Charles were back at war in 1536, and she participated unstintingly in peace efforts, bringing an entourage of courtly women to the lavish celebrations in Nice in 1538 for the new peace treaty ending fighting once again, and encouraging her brother and husband to meet in person at Aigues-Mortes. In October that year, Eleanor met with her sister Mary again at Compiègne, where a delegation oversaw the end of hostilities between the Low Countries and France. Eleanor’s close relationship to her brother Charles was perceived by ambassadors as critical to their success, and in the winter of 1539–1540, Charles himself arrived as a guest of the French court, feted with celebrations across the royal palaces, raising hopes that a resolution to the long-running disputes between the dynasties might be resolved (Knecht 2011). However, after his departure, Charles invested the duchy of Milan on his son Philip, and in response, those at the French court who were seen as responsible for pro-Habsburg policies were sidelined. In their place, reported an envoy to Charles, was another woman: Anne de Pisseleu d’Heilly, Duchess of Étampes, “the real president of the King’s most private and intimate Council” (Gayangos 1890, no. 120).

Networks of Faith Royal women had traditionally been active religious patrons (Gaude-Ferragu and VincentCassy 2016). While the Habsburg dynasty was firmly attached to the traditional Catholic 166

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faith, the position of the Valois was more ambiguous. During the 1540s, the evangelical interests of Anne de Pisseleu, then Francois’s influential companion, together with his sister, Marguerite, helped significantly re-orient France’s diplomatic alignment toward the Protestant German princes, who were themselves seeking support to break away from Habsburg control (Potter 2007; Reid 2009, 505–71). Together they urged the French king toward tolerance of the growing Protestant movement within the French kingdom as well. Anne and Marguerite were not, however, the first courtly women engaged with religious politics. As queen consort, Claude, too, had been an early supporter of religious reform. Among her ladies-in-waiting was a woman who would prove influential in another courtly environment across the Channel, Anne Boleyn. This Anne arrived at the French court in 1514 in the retinue of Henry VIII’s sister Mary, who became Louis XII’s third wife. Anne returned to England in 1521, and by the early 1530s, her support for church reform and relationship with Henry VIII combined to shift English alliances dramatically, causing a break with Rome and the fracture with the Tudor relationship with the Habsburg dynasty of Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon (Dowling 1984; Ives 1995). Claude’s sister Renée, who became Duchess of Ferrara, supported reform politics too, by harboring persecuted Protestants at her secluded court at Consandolo, where her husband had sent her in a deliberate attempt to limit her ability to assist both Protestants and her French relatives (Peebles and Scarlatta 2021). Elite women’s religious connections helped shape wartime diplomatic alliances. Since the early 1520s, Marguerite of Navarre had supported a circle of like-minded individuals who spanned France’s aristocracy, clergy, and intellectual milieu, in a range of activities, from preaching and writing to practical reforms and policy changes, that helped determine the future shape and direction of Protestant politics in France (Stephenson 2004; Reid 2009). However, her influence extended particularly into England. While attending the Field of Cloth of Gold in 1520, Marguerite had developed a strong relationship with Cardinal Wolsey. Marguerite’s encouragement of closer ties between France and England gave English officials a significant mediating presence close to the French king (Vose 1985). Furthermore, a number of Marguerite’s evangelical writings were translated into English. Perhaps most famously, the young princess Elizabeth gifted her translation of Marguerite’s Mirror of a Sinful Soul to her stepmother, Catherine Parr, working from a copy that had once belonged to her own mother, Anne Boleyn.

Managing War The on-again, off-again nature of Habsburg–Valois fighting ensured the important role of the Habsburg-born queen of France, Eleanor, as a unique go-between. When François again sought peace, in September  1544, following a combined Imperial and English attack in Picardy, a new treaty was signed at Crépy. Eleanor, who reunited with her brother Charles and their sister Mary in Brussels as part of the peace celebrations, shared their discussions with François. Her letters made clear that François had tasked Eleanor to broach a series of topics, including how he could forge a friendship once more with Henry VIII and explore a possible marriage for his younger son, Charles (Knecht 2011). François’s elder son and eventual successor, Henri, had married Catherine de’ Medici in 1533, uniting the royal Valois with the ducal Medici dynasty that had long dominated Florentine political life. The realities of the divergent interests of her natal and marital dynasties were challenging, especially as her cousin Cosimo II de’ Medici had pledged his support for 167

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the Habsburgs, who had, in turn, helped restore him in the duchy of Florence. Catherine, numbering among the next generation of war brides, signaled a vision of her political role as a peacemaker in the adoption of Iris, the Greek goddess of the rainbow, as her visual motif. She continued to use this imagery when Henri became heir to the throne in 1536 and as queen consort, displaying the rainbow symbol on commemorative tokens distributed at her coronation in 1547. The motif echoed conventional ideas about a queen’s role, expected to provide care, charity, and mercy to her husband’s people, as well as forging connections between the two dynasties that she represented as a daughter and a wife. Catherine nonetheless showed that she was more than capable of advancing French interests when Henri II led his troops to engage in combat himself. When he participated on the battlefront, as he did on the Rhine and in northern France in the summers of 1548, 1552–1554, and 1557, Catherine acted as his delegate, interacting with the council and managing affairs of state, including ensuring a steady supply of resources to Henri at the frontline. Catherine relayed the latest intelligence of France’s campaigns through Henri’s political network, using it to prompt delivery of the necessary finances and provisions for his army. Her letters discussed military logistics, provisioning, and tactics. She also successfully addressed the Parlement of Paris in the name of her husband to secure increased financial support for his war effort (Broomhall 2021, 91–108). Catherine’s letters demonstrated to her recipients that she was involved in the kingdom’s military campaign as a key communicator between political and military operatives.

Memorializing Violence Women, too, were responsible for key sites of war memorialization. Marguerite de Navarre’s book of short stories, the Heptaméron, was both a record and reflection of the contemporary courtly culture of France, forged in a time of war (Winn 2007). Its tales explored how the experience of successive generations of young men sent to war abroad and their engagements (political, cultural, and sexual) with populations there, as well as at home, were understood through an evolving elite masculinity that demanded military, sexual, and rhetorical prowess in equal measure. First published posthumously in 1558, the work saw multiple re-editions over the rest of the century, far more than any of Marguerite’s other works, and far more than most other authors, male or female, at that time. The Heptaméron’s tales show a considerable focus on actual and attempted sexual violence, many in settings brought about in the context of men at war. Sexual conquests by French men of Italian women are framed by contact made possible in wartime, as in the 16th tale, set during the French occupation of Milan. This recounts the intimate affair of an elite widow obliged to attend festivities hosted by her wider family for the city’s governor, Charles II d’Amboise, who controlled the city from 1503 to 1511, on behalf of François I. The widow plans a test of her would-be lover, and his willingness to literally fight for her love gains her praise. A gentleman’s successful pursuit of a woman’s sexual favor, and preparedness to accept its consequences for him, becomes a form of masculine virtue in this narrative. Many of the stories’ female protagonists, however, enjoy less-successful resolutions following sexual contact. The tenth tale, recounted by Parlemente, a character most regularly identified with Marguerite’s own views, recounts the struggles of a very young and virtuous widow, Florida, to resist the repeated sexual advances and eventual physical assault of a gentleman, Amador, who is noted for the honor and renown he has gained at war. 168

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The handsome warrior beguiles the adolescent Florida, prosecuting his case for her sexual engagement not only through militarized language but also with the argument that she should succumb since he may soon die in military service. While the tale is set in fifteenthcentury Spain, scholars have noted the intriguing parallels to Marguerite’s own life, and the text itself hints that Amador was an identifiable figure from the court. One of the tale’s male discussants concludes this tale with praise for its hero: I think I recognise him beneath his fictious name. . . . Suffice it to say that if it’s the man I think it is, then he’s a man who never experienced fear in his life, a man whose heart was never devoid of love or the desire for courageous action. (Chilton 1984, 154) In the fourth tale, a widowed princess devotedly attached to her brother, a very great lord (a seemingly thinly disguised Marguerite), is charmed by his friend and narrowly avoids being sexually assaulted by him (Cholakian 1991). At the tale’s conclusion, the discussants disagree about the merits of male seduction and female resistance. Its female narrator opines that the widow’s actions “should inspire courage in the hearts of all women. So if anything like this should ever happen to any of you, you now know what the remedy is!” On the other hand, a male commentator critiques her unsuccessful male assailant: “[T]his tall lord of your story lacked nerve, and didn’t deserve to have his memory preserved. What an opportunity he had! He should never have been content to eat or sleep till he had succeeded” (Chilton 1984, 96). Among its tales of male and female courtly behavior, Marguerite’s work considers carefully the matter of elite male identities achieved in wartime through sexual conquest and misdemeanors wrought on female bodies, including those of women at court. It revealed how women’s bodies operated as the training ground upon which male courtly behavior was defined and refined, a site for the determination of male identity and honor at least as important as the battlefield. The politics of memory raised in relation to this tale reflected another significant aspect of the Heptaméron. The courtiers obliquely referenced here may have died in war, but they lived on in a number of stories, named and unnamed, a repeated haunting presence across the work. In so doing, the work reflected another element of the Habsburg–Valois Wars, the lingering grief of those who remained to mourn the men who died at the battlefront. In the 1512 Battle of Ravenna alone, in which French forces fought those of the Holy League, contemporary accounts estimated between 12,000 and 23,000 had died on the field (Gagné 2014, 814–15). The Heptaméron combined a complex mix of sentiments that emerged for women who watched their male contemporaries go to war, who experienced not only the violence of their sexually charged interactions but also the deep sorrow at their loss. Marguerite’s work record gave voice to a lost generation of France’s courtly elite.

Conclusion The signing of the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559, which marked the end of the Habsburg–Valois Wars, was once more affirmed by a marriage between its leading dynasties. This time Elisabeth, daughter of Catherine de’ Medici and Henri II, married Philip II of Spain, the son of Isabella of Portugal and Charles V. Women fought the war in their own ways; they participated in how the various phases of conflict came about, were conducted, and were resolved, with the contributions of royal women, situated in the upper echelons of 169

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the French court, only the most visible of these. Their bodies may have been enlisted in displays of men’s sexual prowess and overworked to achieve dynastic reproductive demands, but they were also sites that women could control by adorning with jewels and clothing styles to signal their own allegiances. Just as critical to the wars were the skills that their education and experience offered, as sophisticated mediators, negotiators, networkers, educators, writers, patrons, and proselytizers of faiths, both new and old. Considering women’s contributions such as these should push us to extend our conceptualization of how the organized violence of early modern war was achieved.

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Secondary Sources Anderson, Ruth M. 1981. “Spanish Dress worn by a Queen of France.” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 98: 215–22. Brioist, Pascal, Laure Fagnart, and Cédric Michon, eds. 2015. Louise de Savoie (1476–1531). Tours and Rennes: Presses universitaires François-Rabelais and Presses universitaires de Tours. Broomhall, Susan, ed. 2018. Women and Power at the French Court, 1483–1563. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. ———. 2021. The Identities of Catherine de’ Medici. Leiden: Brill. Brown, Cynthia J. ed. 2010. The Cultural and Political Legacy of Anne De Bretagne: Negotiating Convention in Books and Documents. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer. Champollion-Figeac, Aimé. 1847. Captivité du roi François Ier. Paris: Imprimerie royale. Cholakian, Patricia Francis. 1991. Rape and Writing in the Heptaméron of Marguerite de Navarre. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Cox-Rearick, Janet. 2009. “Power-Dressing at the Courts of Cosimo de’ Medici and François I: The ‘moda alla orrespo’ of Spanish Consorts Eléonore d’Autriche and Eleonora di Toledo.” Artibus et Historiae 30: 39–69. Crawford, Katherine. 2004. Perilous Performances: Gender and Regency in Early Modern France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Croizat, Yassana C. 2007. “ ‘Living Dolls’: François Ier Dresses his Women.” Renaissance Quarterly 60 (1): 94–130. Dowling, Maria. 1984. “Anne Boleyn and Reform.” The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 35 (1): 30–46. Dumont, Jonathan, Laure Fagnart, Nicolas le Roux, and Pierre-Gilles Girault, eds. 2021. La Paix des Dames (1529). Tours: Presses universitaires François-Rabelais. Fisher, Sally. 2023. “Queens Consort, Gender and Diplomacy: Catherine of Aragon, Claude of France and the Field of Cloth of Gold.” Gender and History 35 (2): 387–407. Gagné, John. 2014. “Counting the Dead: Traditions of Enumeration and the Italian Wars.” Renaissance Quarterly 67 (3): 791–840.

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Royal Women and the Habsburg–Valois Wars (1494–1559) Gaude-Ferragu, Murielle, and Cécile Vincent-Cassy, eds. 2016. Le patronage religieux des reines et des princesses, XIIIe-XVIIe siècle. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Ives, Eric W. 1995. “Anne Boleyn and the ‘Entente Évangélique’.” In François Ier et Henri VIII. Deux Princes de la Renaissance (1515–1547), edited by Roger Mettam and Charles Giry-Deloison, 83–102. Lille: Publications de l’institut de recherches historiques du Septentrion. Jordan Gschwend, Annemarie. 2010. “Ma Meilleur Soeur: Leonor of Austria, Queen of Portugal and France.” In The Inventories of Charles V and the Imperial Family, ed Fernando Checa Cremades, vol. 3, 2569–92. Madrid: Fernando Villaverde Ediciones. Knecht, Robert J. 2011. “Eléonore d’Autriche (1498–1558).” In Les Conseillers de François Ier, edited by Cédric Michon, 401–14. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes. Kolk, Caroline zum. 2009. “The Household of the Queen of France in the Sixteenth Century.” The Court Historian 14 (1): 3–22. Kolk, Caroline zum, and Kathleen Wilson-Chevalier, eds. 2018. Femmes à la cour de France: Charges et fonctions, Xve-XIXe siècle. Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion. Mansfield, Lisa. 2019. “Lustrous Virtue: Eleanor of Austria’s Jewels and Gems as Composite Cultural Identity and Affective Maternal Agency.” In Sartorial Politics in Early Modern Europe: Fashioning Women, edited by Erin Griffey, 93–114. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Matarasso, Pauline. 2001. Queen’s Mate. Three Women of Power in France on the Eve of the Renaissance. Aldershot: Ashgate. Pardanaud, Chloé. 2008. “Plaider, convaincre, entrer en orre: Éléonore d’Autrche et la liberation des Enfants de France, d’après sa orrespondence inédite.” Seizième Siècle 4: 195–216. Peebles, Kelly Digby, and Gabriella Scarlatta, eds. 2021. Representing the Life and Legacy of Renée de France: From Fille de France to Dowager Duchess. Cham: Springer. Potter, David. 2007. “Politics and Faction at the Court of Francis I: The Duchesse d’Étampes, Montmorency and the Dauphin Henri.” French History 21 (2): 127–46. Reid, Jonathan A. 2009. King’s Sister – Queen of Dissent: Marguerite of Navarre (1492–1549) and Her Evangelical Network. 2 vols. Leiden: Brill. Richardson, Glenn. 2013. Field of Cloth of Gold. New Haven: Yale University Press. Shaw, Christine, and Michael Mallet. 2018. The Italian Wars 1494–1559: War, State and Society in Early Modern Europe. London: Routledge. Stephenson, Barbara. 2004. The Power and Patronage of Marguerite de Navarre. Aldershot: Ashgate. Vose, Heather M. 1985. “Marguerite de Navarre: That ‘Right English Woman’.” Sixteenth Century Journal 16 (3): 315–34. Wilson-Chevalier, Kathleen. 2002. “Art Patronage and Women (Including Habsburg) in the Orbit of Francis I.” Renaissance Studies 16: 474–524. ———. 2016. “Claude of France: Justice, Power, and the Queen as Advocate for Her People.” In Textual and Visual Representations of Power and Justice in Medieval France: Manuscripts and Early Printed Books, edited by Rosalind Brown-Grant, Anne D. Hedeman, and Bernard Ribémont, 241–72. London and New York: Routledge. Winn, Colette. H. 2007. Approaches to Teaching Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron. Berkeley: Modern Language Association.

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Introduction Whether held at court, at church, in the street, or in the countryside, celebratory festivals punctuated the daily lives of French people throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Just like festivals elsewhere in the world, festivals in France were framed by, and dedicated to, key events in the agricultural, religious, and state calendar of the kingdom. Midsummer (solstice d’été), which usually coincided with the summer solstice, was fêted with bonfires, torchlit processions, and competitive dancing around a maypole. Harvest festivals (fêtes de la récolte), which took place in the late summer and autumn, saw excessive dancing, drinking, and lavish meals for the local reapers (Blanchard 1983; McGowan 2008, 183– 208). Carnivals, such as sotties, that is, a series of short satirical plays, and Shrovetide (Mardi Gras), which began on Septuagesima, the ninth Sunday before Easter, were typically centered on public displays of drunkenness, gender reversal, and obscenity among the populace. These were modes of behavior that turned regular societal customs and expectations – enforced by the civic, religious, and royal elite – upside down, but rarely with the intention of genuinely undermining them (Bakhtin [1965] 1968; Sautman in this volume). A special type of carnival was the charivari: a fanfare of deafening noise, produced with pots, pans, tambourines, and horns, in which – usually intoxicated – commoners paraded local offenders, or actors standing in for them, around town, while the latter partly re-enacted their original offense (Davis (1965a) 1987, 1971). For example, a man whose wife had been unfaithful to him would wear clothes that were conventionally associated with women, such as a dress or skirt, while spouses who had been victims of domestic abuse could be seen flogging and verbally abusing their husbands. By thus reversing a town’s social order, the charivari sought in practice to reinforce and, indeed, celebrate that very order. In contrast, religious festivals, such as saints’ days or the Feast of Corpus Christi, held on the second Thursday after Trinity Sunday (Sainte-Trinité), were generally honored with solemn parades in which the urban authorities displayed their banners and crosses while citizens re-enacted episodes from the lives of biblical figures (Davis (1965a) 1987; Elwood 1999). Alongside all these, important state occasions, such as coronations, investitures, betrothals, weddings, and funerals, but also military victories, peace treaties, and visits of foreign dignitaries, were duly commemorated with day-, week-, or even month-long court festivals, DOI: 10.4324/9780367808471-17

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sometimes in different towns, regions, or countries at once (Mamone 1987; Welch 2017; van Leuveren 2023). Unlike recurrent agricultural or religious festivities, these festivals were typically stand-alone events that celebrated once-in-a-lifetime achievements or transformative dynastic moments for France’s ruling elite, often in collaboration with, and involving the participation of, political leaders and their diplomats abroad. They featured both diplomatic ceremonies, including ceremonial processions, public audiences, and exchanges of gifts, and theatrical entertainments, such as court ballets (ballets de cour), equestrian ballets (caroussels), masquerades (mascarades), mock naval battles (naumachiae), and firework displays (feux d’artifice) (McGowan 1963; Welch 2017; van Leuveren 2023). Urban populations in France regularly attended the open-air segments of court festivals, usually herded into standing areas around the performance, while the ruling elite had their own privileged seats in specially built temporary galleries. This was the case, for example, when an equestrian carousel was organized at the Place Royale in Paris to mark the engagement of the royal children of the Habsburg and Bourbon dynasties in April 1612 (Chatenet 2016; van Leuveren 2023, 229–241).

Beauty and Conflict According to the pioneering historian Johan Huizinga (1872–1945), French and Burgundian festivals injected the everyday lives of subjects, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, such as peasants, mendicants, and refugees, with much-needed “beauty” and “pleasure” (Huizinga [1919] 2020, 376). He believed that the aesthetic and corporeal appeal of theatrical entertainments and choreographed ritual helped ordinary citizens cope with the dire and uncertain reality of a period torn by continuous war, disease, and financial precarity. This is what Huizinga famously called “life’s fierceness” (Huizinga [1919] 2020, 8). In his view, festivals constituted fixed points from which subjects could measure the rest of their everyday lives. In December 1564, the French poet Pierre de Ronsard (1524–1585) described the appeal of festivals at the Valois court along similar lines, when he addressed an elegy to Catherine de’ Medici (1519–1589), the queen regent of France. Reminiscing over the magnificent celebrations that she had organized at Fontainebleau in the spring of that year during a two-year progress of the kingdom, Ronsard impatiently asked his mistress: When shall we see another tournament again? / When shall we see once more masquerades dancing from hall to hall throughout Fontainebleau? / When shall we hear again the morning serenades of various lutes joined by voices, and of cornets, pipes, oboes, tambourines, flutes and spinets all sounding together with the trumpets? (Ronsard 1948, 147, lines 123–30; McGowan 2008, 158)1 Ronsard concluded that little of the festive gaiety at Fontainebleau had since been preserved and instead had been overshadowed by “Discord,” by which he meant the ongoing religious wars between Catholics and Huguenots (Ronsard 1948, 149, lines 150–151; see Tingle in this volume). The historian Frances A. Yates (1899–1981), who pioneered scholarship on court festivals in late sixteenth-century France, followed Huizinga’s interpretation of early modern festivals as antidotes against an uncertain existence, especially with regards to the kingdom’s devastating wars (Yates 1947, [1959] 1975, 1975, 121–207). But rather than stressing their beauty or invitation to indulge in dancing and feasting, Yates emphasized the ability of the court festival in late sixteenth-century France to mollify and even reconcile 173

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opposite religionists by “turning real conflict into chivalrous pastime” (Yates [1959] 1975, 54). She argued that exercises of chivalry, such as horse-riding, fencing, and tilting at the ring (course de bague), were so common to the upbringing of French courtiers that they could aid them to “act out their differences” in harmless competition (Yates 1947, 255). The same relaxed atmosphere was, according to Yates, common to the theatrical entertainments that featured at Valois court festivals, many of which were staged in a rural rather than courtly setting (Yates [1959] 1975, 53–60). One example is the rustic-themed dinner at a river island in Bayonne on June  24, 1565, for which both Catholic and Huguenot courtiers dressed up as shepherds and shepherdesses (Jouan 1566, 75). By impersonating rural, that is, non-elite, people, who were thought to be yet untainted by hatred and closer to the allegedly virtuous qualities of nature, it was believed that France’s religiously mixed nobility could momentarily forget about their real-world conflict and pretend to be at peace.2 Commenting in a letter to her lady-of-honor on the festival at Bayonne, which featured the pastoral banquet as well as series of evening balls, Catherine de’ Medici lamented: Everybody dances together so happily, both Huguenots and Papists, that I  find it impossible to believe that they are as they are. If God willed that we are as wise here as we are elsewhere, we should finally be at rest. (La Ferrière 1885, 315)3

Anti-Elite Protest and Rebellion Festivals in early modern France were not always as idealistic, utopian, or peaceful in vision as historians like Huizinga and Yates have suggested, or as contemporaries like Ronsard and de’ Medici wanted their readership to believe. Natalie Zemon Davis and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie were among the first twentieth-century historians to highlight the violent and sporadically anti-elite fervor of festivities in France’s provinces, in cities, villages, and the countryside (Davis (1965a) 1987, (1965b) 1987, 1971; Le Roy Ladurie (1979) 2003). Financed by craft or professional guilds, family, or friends, and occasionally by local magistrates, especially when devoted to an important annual holiday or state event, such fêtes involved, and were targeted at, the wider non-elite population. Davis and Le Roy Ladurie have shown that the inverted social logic of popular festivals like Shrovetide and charivaris, featuring drunk priests, fools impersonating kings, rich people redistributing their wealth to the needy, and citizens masquerading as members of the opposite sex, often inspired civil unrest and uprising against political authorities. For example, the winter celebrations in Romans in 1580 degenerated into carnage among warring social classes (Le Roy Ladurie (1979) 2003); a masquerade in Dijon in 1630 resulted into an open rebellion against royal tax officers; while Shrovetide celebrations in Rouen in 1640 boasted processions modeled after, and potentially mocking, the ceremonial entries of ruling elites that accused part of the local magistrate of corruption (Davis (1965a) 1987; Murphy 2016). Meanwhile, Carnival societies throughout France, known as the “Abbeys of Misrule” (sociétés joyeuses), organized charivaris that openly ridiculed dignitaries of both local and national importance. Non-elite audiences would occasionally disturb and openly criticize festivals of royal or state importance too. The hostile reactions of townsfolk from Angers to the public reconciliation of King Henri IV (1553–1610) with the Duke of Mercœur (1558–1602), the last standing member of the Catholic League, on March 30, 1598, serves as a case in point. 174

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The ritual and the ensuing firework display marked the end of organized Catholic rebellion against the French Crown and thus necessitated the enthusiastic participation of the local populace. The reconciliation was staged near Angers, where the king held presently court, and involved Mercœur riding on horseback toward Henri to salute him and swear allegiance to the monarchy. But rather than rejoicing over the peace between both men, the townsfolk openly ridiculed the duke, crying out, “Here is the tail of the league, here is the little king of Brittany!” referring in jest to the region over which Mercœur had presided as governor and had now lost to the Crown (Owen 1973, 41).4 Although the insolent remarks of the bystanders may have further bolstered Henri’s victory over the Catholic League, the incident suggests that the popular reception of state-significant festivals like these could be unpredictable and potentially offensive to formerly rebellious nobles whom the monarchy rather wished to keep satisfied (van Leuveren 2023, 197–198). Furthermore, the mixed audience for the festival, involving both urban and court populations, demonstrates that festivals in the royal or state calendar were not always exclusively targeted at the ruling elite but frequently attempted to involve the participation of the populace. Henri’s rapprochement with Mercœur, for instance, capped the king’s efforts to rally the high nobility to his new Bourbon dynasty. His designs for peace were meant to be celebrated both at court and in the streets and embraced by both aristocrats and ordinary citizens in order to be successfully implemented across the kingdom (De Waele [2010] 2015; Jaffré 2017). However, as the aforementioned incident shows, it proved difficult for the royal Crown to control the non-elite reception of its festivals and drum up the political support of commoners. Incidents more serious than the boisterous townsfolk at Angers occurred about a decade later, during the ceremonial entries of two Spanish ambassadors, the Dukes of Feria (1587–1634) and of Pastrana (1585–1626), into Paris. Both entries – Feria’s on September 8, 1610, and Pastrana’s on August 13, 1612 – were related to the conclusion of a double marital alliance between France and Spain. Parisian citizens, who had flocked together en masse to catch a glimpse of the foreign guests, reportedly could not stop laughing at the sight of the ambassadors, who, contrary to French custom, entered the capital on donkeys. French male dignitaries typically rode horses on such occasions, as the animal’s use for military affairs reinforced quintessentially French conceptions of masculine nobility (van Orden 2005, 40–45; d’Espèrey 2016). In mountainous Spain, by contrast, donkeys were the preferred mode of transportation, while also being regarded among Habsburg rulers and diplomats as an agent of peace, given the animal’s central role in the biblical story of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem (van Leuveren 2023, 239). The Parisian crowds for Feria’s and Pastrana’s entries, then, refused to pay reverence to the Spanish dignitaries, as would have been customary on such solemn occasions, repeatedly crying “On donkeys!” instead (Hinds 1938, 340; van Leuveren 2023, 239–240).5 But beyond this cultural clash, ordinary citizens seemed to have been generally dissatisfied with the Franco-Spanish double union. During the equestrian carousel staged in early April  1612, noted earlier, commoners openly voiced their discontent over the marital alliance that France had engineered with its former foe. They were overheard by a secret English agent who, rather than joining the dignitaries in the wooden galleries surrounding the Place Royal, preferred to remain incognito by standing among the populace on the pavement (‘Forboyst’ 1612, 263r).6 Although impressed by the horsemanship of the performers, most of whom were kingpins from the French and Spanish nobility, including the Spanish resident ambassador to France, the agent clearly recorded the anti-Habsburg sentiments of the local citizens (van Leuveren 2023, 237–238). Instances like these, of vocal – and occasionally violent – opposition, dissatisfaction, or mockery among especially non-elite 175

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audiences, could endanger France’s relations with important domestic or foreign associates and tested the limits of the monarchy’s ability to control the reception of its festivals.

International Festivalgoers Festivals in early modern France rarely, if ever, involved exclusively French nationals. This held especially true for celebrations of royal or state importance. The enriching, and sometimes contesting, perspectives and opinions of the foreign diplomats, historians, merchants, students, ordinary citizens, and political and religious leaders who attended or learned about them in retrospect, whether by word of mouth, in cheap pamphlets, or in the luxuriously produced books that were sent to courts across Europe, are central to the surviving evidence. But popular festivities, predominantly targeted at non-elite populations, also regularly involved participants from various international backgrounds. This held true for the political authorities who participated in carnivals, such as priests, civil guards, or lawyers, as well as for the less-privileged people who attended such festivities, many of whom had moved from the Habsburg Empire and the Italian peninsula, among other domains, in search for refuge or work (Watanabe-O’Kelly 2004; Bolduc 2016; van Leuveren 2020a). Yet until recently, historians had not commonly studied, let alone compared, the responses to festivals of participants other than those of French nationals. Over the past decade, however, the “transnational” or “European turn” in cultural historical studies (Caldari, Questier, and Wolfson 2018, 3; Katritzky and Drábek 2019) has inspired a flurry of academic publications that have sought to correct nation-centered views of the early modern French festival by emphasizing the European entanglements of both its production and reception (Kociszewska 2012; Welch 2017; van Leuveren 2020a, 2020b, 2023). The controversial festival for the wedding between Marguerite de Valois, the daughter of Catherine de’ Medici, and Henri de Navarre, the later King Henri IV, in August 1572 is nowadays chiefly remembered as a key, and traumatic, event in France’s history (Garrisson 1985, 1987). After a series of attacks on individual leaders, Catholic mobs, rejecting the interfaith union of a Catholic princess to a Protestant prince, violently disturbed the festive proceedings and killed at least 3,000 Huguenots in Paris on August 24, known as St. Bartholomew’s Day, itself a religious festival. An additional 7,000 Protestants were slain in the provinces over the next three weeks (Jouanna 2007, 10). What is less commonly noted is how far this tragically failed festival was highly anticipated among Catholics and Protestants from across Europe. Many foreigners had travelled to Paris to witness the wedding ceremony in front of the Notre-Dame Cathedral on August 18. The blessing inaugurated the festival and was open to anyone, regardless of social status. One of the bystanders, a Calvinist university student from the county of Tyrol, reported in his memoirs that “more than 1,500 German scholars” from various Protestant states in the Holy Roman Empire, including the duchy of Silesia and the margravate of Meissen, had come to the city for that purpose (Geizkofler 1978, 201).7 These humanist students hoped that the marital alliance would defuse religious tension in France and potentially bring an end to confessional strife elsewhere in Europe (van Tol 2019, 125–58). Europe’s diplomatic community, though perhaps not as hopeful about the mixed wedding as the German students, was equally inquisitive about the festival’s proceedings. Some historical sources suggested that the Valois Crown had not invited any foreign ambassadors for fear of offending them, while others listed the representatives of England and the Italian city-states of Ferrara, Florence, and Venice among the participants in the banquet, ballet, and mock combat that followed upon the wedding ceremony and which were held 176

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behind closed doors (Jouanna 2007, 94; McGowan 2008, 87; Prest 2013; van Leuveren 2023, 101–102). It is notable that King Philip II of Spain (1527–1598), who was an ardent Catholic and fearful of endangering his relations with the papacy, had instructed his ambassador in Paris to feign illness if invited (La Ferrière 1892, 90).8 Anecdotes like these testify to the enormous diplomatic importance that French state or court festivals held for organizers and foreign envoys alike. Rather than merely entertaining foreign ambassadors, French festivals required their presence to observe the legal implementation of diplomatic agreements, including the Valois–Navarre alliance; celebrate such accords through feasting and festive performances (many of which directly commented on their diplomatic significance); and work out etiquettes of precedence among the political authorities represented by the visiting envoys. Being able to tell what ambassador was invited to a festival and who was not, and what representative accepted or refused such an invitation, and for what reason, were crucial toward that end. All such information helped map the kingdom’s ever-shifting standing in the complex politics of Europe (Welch 2015, 104; Welch 2017, 33–35; van Leuveren 2023). Pretending to be ill so as to avoid attending a festival, as did the Spanish ambassador, was of course a clever way to evade giving any signals that could potentially start a conflict.

How to Study French Festivals? Entering “the world of French court ballet,” as historian Julia Prest puts it, “requires a leap of faith, a broad and open mind, and a vivid imagination” (Prest 2008, 229). Densely populated with fantastical characters and often featuring intricate references to ancient Greek, Roman, and occasionally Egyptian mythology, as well as to a range of topical affairs of courtly, diplomatic, or religious interest, French court ballets – and indeed French festivals in general – ask students today to bring to bear an elaborate toolbox of interdisciplinary skills, theories, and ideas.9 Studying pageants and rituals in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France means bringing together knowledge from different scholarly fields, even if those fields do not necessarily collaborate or “talk” to each other. The historians cited earlier have drawn on insights from anthropology; theater and performance studies; musicology; leisure and sports studies; book and literary studies; political, diplomatic, and religious history; court and dynastic studies; urban history; and people’s history, or “history from below.”10 Such insights are often relevant to both French and wider European history. Of equal interest, but extending beyond the scope of the present contribution, are fashion studies, art and architectural history, food history, and even robotics.11 Today’s boundaries between scholarly disciplines were rarely, if ever, observed some four to five hundred years ago. Talking to researchers from different disciplines, and learning from their insights and views of the historical material, helps expand our understanding of the early modern French festival, not as an enclosed aesthetic phenomenon, of exclusive interest to musicologists or theater and performance historians, but as an essential lubricant in managing and shaping relations between individuals, communities, and governments. Students who wish to further explore the topic may want to consult eyewitness accounts of French celebrations that have been transcribed and printed in especially nineteenth- and twentieth-century volumes of governmental papers. A good first call of such accounts are the dispatches of English resident ambassadors to France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, excerpts of which have appeared in the Foreign State Papers of the Privy Council of the United Kingdom. Calendars of these state papers are also searchable online and include hyperlinks to the original manuscripts (Gale Primary Sources 2022). Historical evidence of French festivals, in both printed and written form, can often be found in diplomatic 177

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archives, but also among court or governmental resolutions and financial records, as well as in the personal archives of political authorities. Several institutions, however, have digitized printed sources on European festivals – including French ones – in full (BnF 2022; British Library n.d.) or created databases of bibliographical references on those sources (University of Oxford 2011). These online tools not only help students track down relevant historical material from various European archives and libraries but also open up exciting avenues for transnational research, enabling comparison of primary material on French festivals with historical material on other festivals in early modern Europe.

Notes 1 “Quand voirrons nous quelque tournoy nouveau? / Quand voirrons nous par tout Fontainebleau / De chambre en chambre aller les masquarades? / Quand oyrons nous au matin les aubades / De divers lutz mariés à la voix, / Et les cornets, les fifres, les hauts boys, / Les tabourins, les fluttes, espinettes / Sonner ensemble avecques les trompettes?” Cited from Élégie à la Majesté de la Royne ma Maistresse. 2 Ellen R. Welch has argued that although the aesthetic of these and other rustic-themed pageants was not as “simple” as may have appeared at first sight, given that their organizers often sought to convey strongly political messages, they were nonetheless crucial for, and largely successful in, strengthening social bonds between the participants (Welch 2017, 23). 3 “Et tout danse huguenos et papiste ensemble si bien, que je panse qu’i ne seriet au yl an son, set Dieu volet que l’on feult aussi sage alleur, nous serions en repos.” Cited from a letter of Catherine de’ Medici to Catherine de Clèves, Duchess of Guise, Blois, August 3, 1565. 4 “Voycy (sic) la queue de la ligue, vooycy (sic) le petit roy de Bretaigne.” Cited from a dispatch of two English ambassadors, Robert Cecil and John Herbert, to the Privy Council of Queen Elizabeth, Angers, April 2, 1598. 5 “Aux asnes.” Cited from a dispatch of Jean Beaulieu, secretary to the English resident diplomat in Paris, to William Trumbull, the English resident ambassador in Brussels, Paris, July 29, 1612. 6 “Forboyst” in a dispatch to Adam Newton, first Baronet, governor of Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, Paris, April 8, 1612. 7 “Uber die 1500 Teütsche scholarn.” 8 Letter of Philip II to Diego de Zúñiga, Madrid, June 10, 1572. 9 On the role of ancient Greek, Roman, and Egyptian mythology in French festivals and dancing from the sixteenth century, see, for instance, Yates 1947, 60–62, 236–274; Croizat-Glazer (2013); McGowan 2008, 2020. 10 The aforementioned works of Natalie Zemon Davis and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie on popular festivities in early modern France serve as excellent examples of people’s history: (Davis (1965a) 1987, (1965b) 1987, 1971; Le Roy Ladurie (1979) 2003). 11 Automata of biblical, mythological, and historical creatures and objects at early modern French festivals were typically propelled by water or wind power. They featured in pageants such as dramatic plays, ceremonial processions, and mock naval battles (Viano 2018). Alison Calhoun is preparing a monograph on the topic (Calhoun, in progress).

References Archival Source “Forboyst.” 1612. London, British Library, Harleian MS 7015, 263r-264r.

Primary Sources British Library. n. d. “Treasures in Full: Renaissance Festival Books.” www.bl.uk/treasures/festival books/homepage.html. BnF (Bibliothèque nationale de France). 2022. “Gallica.” https://gallica.bnf.fr.

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Festival Cultures in Early Modern France Gale Primary Sources. 2022. “State Papers Online, 1509–1714.” www.gale.com/intl/primary-sources/ state-papers-online-early-modern. Geizkofler, Lucas. 1978. “Historia und beschreibung Lucasen Geizkoflers von Reiffenegg Tyrolensis, herkomen, geburt, leben, studieren, raisen, diensten, fürnembliche verrichtung thuen vnd wesen, biβ auf sein in Augspurg Anno .1590. beschechene verheüratung und folgends weiter, biβ auf das .1600. Jar.” In Lucas Geizkofler und seine Autobiographie, edited by Manfred Linsbauer, Vol. 1, 164–373. Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Vienna. Hinds, Allen B., ed. 1938. Report on the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Downshire, Preserved at Easthamptstead Park Berks. Vol. 3. Papers of William Trumbull the Elder, 1611–1612. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office. Jouan, Abel. 1566. Recueil et discours du voyage du Roy Charles IX. Paris: Jean Bonfons. La Ferrière, Hector de, ed. 1885. Lettres de Catherine de Médicis. Vol. 2. 1563–1566. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale. Owen, Geraint Dyfnallt, ed. 1973. Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Honourable the Marquess of Salisbury, K.G. P.C. G.C.V.O. C.B. T.D. Preserved at Hatfield House Hertfordshire. Vol. 23. Addenda 1562–1606. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. Ronsard, Pierre de. (1564–1565) 1948. Œuvres complètes: ‘La Promesse’ (1564), ‘Le Proces’ (1565), ‘Élégies, mascarades, et bergerie’ (1565), ‘Les Nues ou nouvelles’ (1565). Vol. 13. Paris: Marcel Didier. University of Oxford. 2011. “Early Modern Festival Books Database.” https://festivals.mml.ox.ac.uk/ index.php?page=home.

Secondary Sources Bakhtin, Mikhail. (1965) 1968. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Krystyna Pomorska. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Blanchard, Joël. 1983. La Pastorale en France au XIVe et XVe siècle: Recherches et structures de l’imaginaire médiéval. Paris and Geneva: Champion. Bolduc, Benoît. 2016. La Fête imprimée: Spectacles et cérémonies politiques (1549–1662). Paris: Classiques Garnier. Caldari, Valentina, Michael Questier, and Sara J. Wolfson. 2018. “Introduction.” In Stuart Marriage Diplomacy: Dynastic Politics in their European Context, 1604–1630, edited by Valentina Caldari and Sara J. Wolfson, 1–10. Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press. Chatenet, Monique. 2016. “The Carrousel on the Place Royale: Production, Costumes and Décor.” In Dynastic Marriages 1612/1615: A Celebration of the Habsburg and Bourbon Unions, edited by Margaret M. McGowan, 95–113. London and New York: Routledge. Croizat-Glazer. 2013. “The Role of Ancient Egypt in Masquerades at the Court of François Ier.” In Renaissance Quarterly 66 (4): 1206–49. https://doi.org/10.1086/675091. d’Espèrey, Patrice Franchet. 2016. “The Ballet d’Antoine de Pluvinel and the Maneige Royal.” In Dynastic Marriages 1612/1615, edited by Margaret M. McGowan, 115–36. London: Routledge. Davis, Natalie Zemon. (1965a) 1987. “The Reasons of Misrule.” In Society and Culture in Early Modern France, 97–123. Cambridge: Polity Press and Oxford: Basil Blackwell. ———. (1965b). 1987. “Women on Top.” In Society and Culture in Early Modern France, 124–51. Cambridge: Polity Press and Oxford: Basil Blackwell. ———. 1971. “The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-Century France.” In Past & Present 59: 51–91. www.jstor.org/stable/650379. De Waele, Michel. (2010) 2015. Réconcilier les Français: La Fin des troubles de religion (1589–1598). Paris: Hermann. Elwood, Christopher. 1999. The Body Broken: The Calvinist Doctrine of the Eucharist and the Symbolization of Power in Sixteenth-Century France. New York: Oxford University Press. Garrisson, Janine. 1985. “Deux vieilles France en échauguette: Les Guerres de religion.” In Vingtième Siècle 5: 91–100. https://doi.org/10.3406/xxs.1985.1117. ———. 1987. La Saint-Barthélemy. Brussels: Éditions Complexe. Huizinga, Johan. (1919) 2020. Autumntide of the Middle Ages: A Study of Forms of Life and Thought of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries in France and the Low Countries. Edited by Anton van der Lem and Graeme Small. Translated by Diane Webb. Leiden: Leiden University Press. Jaffré, Marc W. S. 2017. “The Royal Court and Civil War at the Founding of the Bourbon Dynasty, 1589–95.” In French History 31 (1): 20–38. https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/crx003.

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Bram van Leuveren Jouanna, Arlette. 2007. La Saint-Barthélemy: Les Mystères d’un crime d’État, 24 août 1572. Paris: Gallimard. Katritzky, M. A., and Pavel Drábek. 2019. Transnational Connections in Early Modern Theatre. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kociszewska, Ewa. 2012. “War and Seduction in Cybele’s Garden: Contextualizing the Ballet des Polonais”. In Renaissance Quarterly 65 (3): 809–63. https://doi.org/10.1086/668302. La Ferrière, Hector de. 1892. La Saint-Barthélemy. Paris: Calmann Lévy. Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. (1979) 2003. Carnival in Romans: Mayhem and Massacre in a French City. Translated by Mary Feeney. London: Phoenix Press. Leuveren, Bram van. 2020a. “Crossing Borders: Comparative and Transnational Approaches to Court and Civic Festivals in Early Modern Europe.” In Arti dello Spettacolo/Performing Arts 6: 24–35. www.artidellospettacolo-performingarts.com/2020-2/. ———. 2020b. “Disputed State, Contested Hospitality: Dutch Ambassadors in Search of a New Overlord at the French Court of King Henry III, 1584–1585.” In Early Modern Low Countries 4 (2): 205–33. https://doi.org/10.18352/emlc.146. ———. 2023. Early Modern Diplomacy and French Festival Culture, 1572–1615. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Mamone, Sara. 1987. Firenze e Parigi: Due capitali dello spettacolo per una regina, Maria de’ Medici. Milan: Amilcare Pizzi. McGowan, Margaret M. 1963. L’Art du ballet de cour en France, 1581–1643. Paris: Éditions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique. ———. 2008. Dance in the Renaissance: European Fashion, French Obsession. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 2020. “Dancing in Late Sixteenth-Century France: The Greek Legacy.” Arti dello Spettacolo/ Performing Arts 6: 36–44. www.artidellospettacolo-performingarts.com/2020-2/. Murphy, Neil. 2016. Ceremonial Entries, Municipal Liberties and the Negotiation of Power in Valois France, 1328–1589. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Orden, Kate van. 2005. Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Prest, Julia. 2008. “The Politics of Ballet at the Court of Louis XIV.” In Dance, Spectacle, and the Body Politick, 1250–1750, edited by Jennifer Nevile, 229–40. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. ———. 2013. “Performing Violence to End Violence: Theatrical Entertainments for the Marriage of Marguerite de Valois and Henri de Navarre.” In Gender, Agency and Violence: European Perspectives from Early Modern Times to the Present Day, edited by Ulrike Zitzlsperger, 38–55. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Tol, Jonas van. 2019. Germany and the French Wars of Religion, 1560–1572. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Viano, Catherine A. 2018. “Theater as Machine, Theater of Machines in Seventeenth-Century France.” Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Watanabe-O’Kelly, Helen. 2004. “The Early Modern Festival Book: Function and Form.” In Europa Triumphans: Court and Civic Festivals in Early Modern Europe, edited by J. R. Mulryne, Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly, and Margaret Shewring, 3–17, vol. 1. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Welch, Ellen R. 2015. “Rethinking the Politics of Court Spectacle: Performance and Diplomacy under the Valois.” In French Renaissance and Baroque Drama: Text, Performance, Theory, edited by Michael Meere, 101–16. Newark: University of Delaware Press. ———. 2017. A Theater of Diplomacy: International Relations and the Performing Arts in Early Modern France. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Yates, Frances A. 1947. The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century. London: Warburg Institute. ———. (1959) 1975. The Valois Tapestries. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ———. 1975. Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Reference to Ongoing Book Project Calhoun, Alison. In progress. Technologies of the Passions on the French Baroque Stage.

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17 OVERVIEW: ABSOLUTIST FRANCE TO 1715 Darryl Dee

Grandeur and Misery In France today, the years from 1610 to 1715 are known as le Grand Siècle, the great century. It was, schoolchildren learn, one of the most formative periods in the history of their country. Its monuments – statues and gardens, palaces and fortresses – are found everywhere, from Paris to the smallest villages. It is celebrated in popular culture – in film, television, plays, novels, even comic books. The great century began with King Louis XIII (r. 1610–1643) and his prime minister, Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal Richelieu, restoring stability after the turmoil of the sixteenth-century Wars of Religion. More importantly, king and cardinal laid the foundations of the absolute monarchy, the precursor of the modern French state. Abroad, they reasserted French power, waging a long and bitter war against France’s historic enemies, the Habsburgs of Spain and Austria. At the war’s end, France toppled Spain to become Europe’s leading power. The great century reached its apogee during the long reign of Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715). It is said that he perfected the absolute monarchy, making royal authority unquestioned within France and creating a more effective government to administer the country. To overawe and dominate his neighbors, he built the largest army and most powerful navy in Europe. Moreover, Louis XIV wanted to make himself the most glorious and splendid of all monarchs: the fabled “Sun King.” His desire found its greatest expressions in his spectacular court and his magnificent Palace of Versailles. But perhaps the most enduring achievements of Louis XIV’s reign were cultural. The reign witnessed the flowering of French classicism in literature and philosophy, of the baroque in architecture, painting, and music. France became the unrivalled cultural leader of the Western world. For long afterward, in Europe, America, and even elsewhere, to be an educated person meant to speak French and to know French culture. Yet there was another side to this century. For most French men and women, these years were marked by misery. They were first the victims of catastrophic climate change. A prolonged global cooling, the Little Ice Age, reached its nadir after 1600, bringing plunging temperatures and frequent bouts of extreme weather. French agriculture, primitive and unproductive even at the best of times, was strained to its limits just to provide enough food for every hungry mouth. Scarcity became commonplace; famine struck with appalling 181

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regularity. Epidemic diseases, such as the bubonic plague and smallpox, swept through a malnourished population, carrying off tens and hundreds of thousands of victims. The rise of the absolute monarchy then added new hardships. To pay for its seemingly endless wars, the royal state imposed more and more oppressive taxation on its subjects. Pushed to the limits of survival, ordinary French people – peasants, merchants, shopkeepers, artisans, manual laborers – rose up in massive rebellions that made the whole kingdom tremble. Finally, the century was an age of intolerance. Social elites and state authorities brought down ever stricter controls on the poor, the disorderly, and anyone perceived to be morally deviant. For French Protestants, these years saw a steady escalation of popular and official repression, culminating in Louis XIV’s elimination of their religion’s right to exist in France. They were then forced to make a heartbreaking choice: convert to Catholicism, go into exile abroad, or practice their faith in secret at the risk of exposure and punishment. An overview of the long century from 1610 to 1715 must therefore embrace misery as well as grandeur. Only by doing so can we begin to comprehend the experiences of all the French, from Louis XIV in the mirrored halls of Versailles to the poorest peasant in the humblest cot.

French Society in 1610 In 1610, the kingdom of France covered an area of some 425,000 square kilometers, roughly four-fifths the size of the country today. It extended north into the lowlands of Flanders, east to the river Saône, southwest to the Pyrenees Mountains, and southeast to the Alps. It also had long coastlines on the Mediterranean, the Atlantic Ocean, and the North Sea. Within its boundaries was found a great diversity of landscapes from the wide, flat plains around Paris to the rugged uplands and narrow valleys of the Massif Central to the sunbaked hills and olive groves of the Midi. The kingdom was by far the most populous state in western Europe. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, there were some 19 million French compared to 8 million Spaniards, 4 million English, and 1.5 million Dutch. There were 20 million Germans, but they were divided up among the more than 300 feudatories of the Holy Roman Empire. The society formed by these 19 million people was characterized by enormous inequalities in power, status, and wealth. The overwhelming majority of the French – about nine in ten – were peasants: men and women who worked the land for their own subsistence.1 They inhabited over 40,000 villages that varied greatly in size, layout, and appearance (Dewald and Vardi 1998, 22–23). The agriculture they practiced had three general characteristics. The first was the dominance of grains, such as barley, rye, and above all, wheat. Because these crops produced a large number of calories per acre, they were cultivated intensively everywhere in the country, even in regions where growing conditions were far from ideal. The second characteristic was the highly traditional nature of farming technologies and techniques. For example, because grain cultivation depleted the soil of nutrients, French peasants employed systems of crop rotation unchanged since the Middle Ages: in the north, the three-field system, which left one-third of the arable land fallow, was customary; in the south, because of the light soils, a two-field rotation that left half the arable to rest was common. The final characteristic was a low level of productivity even by seventeenthcentury standards. Although a yield of up to 20 grains harvested to 1 seed planted was possible, the normal range was between 4 and 6 to 1. For most peasants, 5 to 1 was the minimum required to feed their families and set aside enough seed for the next planting. By 182

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comparison, English and Dutch farmers were producing much more (Beik 2009, 44; Hoffman 2002, 65). In spite of its shortcomings, peasant production was by far the greatest source of wealth in France. The powerholders of French society – the clergy, the lords, and the state – expropriated as much of it as they could. By the seventeenth century, they were doing so through prélèvements: rake-offs from peasants’ harvests. These took three main forms. First was the tithe of the Catholic Church. Second were seigneurial dues owed to lords because of their possession of a dizzying array of feudal rights over land. Third was the royal government’s main direct tax, the taille, which was paid overwhelmingly by the peasantry because nobles, clergy, and most townspeople enjoyed exemptions. Together, the prélèvements represented a considerable burden. The French historian Jean Jacquart calculated that in the 1620s a well-to-do peasant in the Île-de-France, the region around Paris, could produce, in a good year, a harvest valued at 1,074 livres. Raked off it were 480 to 690 livres in rent to the landlord, 85 to 140 livres in tithe, 24 livres in seigneurial dues, and 150 livres in taille, a total of between 729 and 1,000 livres. The peasant was therefore left with a small surplus in a good year and was completely wiped out in a bad one (1974, 368–89). The dominant group in French society was the nobility. Nobles comprised just 2% of the population, yet they possessed a political, social, economic, and cultural importance out of all proportion to their numbers. Some nobles claimed to be the descendants of medieval warrior knights. While a handful of this noblesse d’epée, or nobility of the sword, could indeed trace their lineages back to the Middle Ages, most had their origins in the fifteenth or even sixteenth centuries. The greatest of them were magnates who dominated entire provinces. These grands created and supported extensive clienteles of lesser nobles and commoners (Kettering 1986). The magnates’ opposites were humble country squires, hobereaux, who owned little more than most peasants. The majority fell between these two poles. Regardless of wealth and status, sword nobles continued to idealize martial values: though few pursued arms as a vocation, many treated a stint in the king’s army as a rite of passage (Parrott 2001, 316–20). Yet overall, the nobility of the sword was slowly evolving from primarily arms-bearers into aristocratic landowners. Sword nobles formed only one branch of the French nobility. Over the course of the sixteenth century, they had been joined by new nobles who had gained their status through service to the royal state. Called the noblesse de robe, or nobility of the robe, after the characteristic garment of royal officials, they included the judges of the Parlements (sovereign law courts – not to be confused with the English Parliament), the royal treasurers, and the chief tax collectors. Stemming from commoner families of merchants and lawyers, they had joined the state through venality of office: the royal government’s practice of selling public posts to private individuals. Virtually all European states had some form of venality. But it was most elaborately developed in France (Doyle 1996). It was at once the state’s human resources program, a system of public finances, and a great engine of social mobility. Eventually, the royal government turned almost every conceivable public function into a saleable office. Furthermore, after 1604, owners could sell their offices on the open market or bequeath them to their heirs; this marked the final step in the conversion of venal offices into private property. The highest-ranking offices conferred nobility on their holders. After multiple generations had held high office – for example, three in the Parlement of Paris – a family enjoyed heritable nobility. Historians once thought sword and robe nobles were bitter rivals. Recent research has shown that despite some spectacular public quarrels, they had more commonalities than 183

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differences: in fact, the two groups formed a unified ruling elite. Sword and robe nobles intermarried. Great magnates recruited judges of the Parlements as valued clients. Scions of robe families served as army officers. But their most significant shared characteristic was land ownership. The nobility was the most important landowning group in France. The 400,000 nobles possessed 25% of the country’s productive land; peasants held 45%, the urban elites 20%, and the Catholic Church 10% (Goubert 1970, 134). Moreover, nobles proved to be canny managers of their estates. After 1500, the value of seigneurial dues decayed because of rising inflation. While never entirely surrendering their feudal rights, nobles shifted their incomes to rent from peasant tenants. In effect, they switched from being medieval lords to more modern landlords. France was an overwhelmingly rural country. Although Paris, with 500,000 inhabitants, was the largest city in Christendom, only 16 other French towns had more than 10,000 people (Benedict 1992, 9–10). All in all, just around one in ten French were city dwellers. Nevertheless, towns represented important concentrations of power, wealth, technical skill, and cultural resources. The royal state paid inordinate attention to urban stability: it taxed towns less and devoted more resources to keeping order within them. Urban society was complex and strongly hierarchical. A small elite composed of royal officeholders, bourgeois – people who lived off investments in land and loans – wealthy merchants, and leading lawyers dominated civic life and monopolized municipal government, which most frequently took the form of councils of aldermen led by a mayor. Below the elite were the skilled occupations. Small-scale traders and shopkeepers engaged in commerce. Artisans, organized into guilds, manufactured virtually everything needed by French society. Many towns had significant numbers of agrarian workers who tended fields just beyond their walls. At the bottom of urban society was a teeming mass of unskilled laborers and the vagrant poor. In the eyes of royal authorities and municipal elites, these people were a restless rabble – a canaille – that posed a chronic threat to order.

The Century of Saints “Oldest daughter of the Church,” one of France’s proudest titles, referred to its thousandyear-old adherence to Roman Catholicism. The French Catholic Church was a formidable institution that reached into all corners of the kingdom. Moreover, while it regarded the pope as its leader in spiritual matters, it also claimed the so-called Gallican liberties, which allowed it to manage its own affairs with considerable autonomy from Rome. The leaders of this Church were the archbishops and bishops, who, after 1519, were appointed by the French monarchy. Because the kings almost always chose members of the leading magnate families, the episcopate became a bastion of the high nobility. Under the bishops’ authority were some 40,000 parishes. The parish priest, the curé, was invariably one of the most important members of his community. In addition, there were numerous orders of monks and nuns, each with its own identity, mission, and rules governing behavior. The 1598 Edict of Nantes that ended the sixteenth-century Wars of Religion had confirmed Catholicism as France’s official faith. It also marked the beginning of a tremendous burst of ecclesiastical reform and spiritual renewal that would continue to the end of our period: the great century was also the century of saints. Because of Gallicanism, the decrees of the Catholic Church’s reforming Council of Trent (1545–1563) never became public law in France. The French Church nevertheless adopted them as its guiding principles. Bishops made pastoral care their priority. Above all, they strove to improve the quality of parish 184

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priests. These efforts resulted in the creation of new cadres of better-trained, more-zealous curés dedicated to the moral disciplining of their parishioners as well as their inculcation in the precepts of orthodox Catholicism. They were aided by religious orders, such as the Jesuits, Franciscans, and Lazarists, that conducted missionary work within France. Renewed, militant Catholicism was not just confined to the Church and its clergy. It was enthusiastically taken up by elite laypeople. Called dévots, they threw themselves into works of charity and projects for the moral improvement of society. Groups such as the Company of the Holy Sacrament worked to ban duels, rescue prostitutes, establish workhouses, and lobby for more restrictions on French Protestants. What was particularly striking about this wave of lay activism was the role played by women. Not only were they some of the most fervent activists among the dévots, but they were also frequently the most energetic and able leaders (Diefendorf 2004). The Edict of Nantes had also extended toleration to the Huguenots, the French Calvinist Protestants. Numbering one million in 1610, they were concentrated in the west and south of the kingdom. The Edict granted them the right to worship in their own churches; furthermore, it afforded them protection in the form of their own fortresses and troops. Peaceful coexistence did develop in many religiously mixed communities. But the most militant Catholics never accepted Protestant toleration and worked tirelessly to undermine it. As the century wore on, their voices grew ever louder. They would be heard by the absolute monarchy.

The Little Ice Age In the 1930s, climate scientists identified a period of global cooling running from c. 1300 to 1860 that they dubbed the Little Ice Age. During it, average annual temperatures at the equator dropped by 1 degree Celsius and weather became unstable, marked by more frequent extreme events. The cooling reached its lowest point from c. 1645 to c. 1715, when average temperatures fell by 2 degrees in the Northern Hemisphere. A cause for the Little Ice Age has not yet been definitively established; the most plausible explanation is a decrease in solar energy reaching the Earth. In the late 1960s, historians began incorporating the Little Ice Age into their analyses.2 A  fall in average temperature of 1 or 2 degrees appears insignificant, but it has serious effects on agriculture. It shortens the growing season by three weeks or more, reduces yields by 15%, and makes farmland of marginal quality unviable. Even worse, more frequent incidents of extreme weather – prolonged droughts, excessive rains, heavy hail, early frosts, late snowfalls – can destroy entire crops in the fields. For French peasants, such conditions courted catastrophe. During the depths of the Little Ice Age, growing even a mediocre crop required maximum effort. All too often, even the best efforts faltered, and there was a significant scarcity of food, leaving large segments of French society, starting with the poorest, suffering malnutrition, while the most indigent starved. In the very worst years – 1630, 1649, 1652, 1661, 1694, and 1709 – the harvest failed in most or even all of France, leading to famines which killed huge numbers of people: for example, in 1694, an estimated 1.2 million died of hunger (Le Roy Ladurie 2002, 321). A malnourished population was especially susceptible to the depredations of disease. Bubonic plague had arrived in Europe during the fourteenth century and then became endemic. During the first half of the seventeenth century, it regularly appeared in France, decimating entire regions. In 1625 and 1630, no part of the kingdom was wholly free of it. 185

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After 1650, the plague retreated. However, other diseases continued to strike to the end of our period and beyond: smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, typhus. Their rates of mortality were appalling: smallpox, for example, killed one-third of all adults it infected and onehalf of all children. Each year, 50,000–80,000 French people might have fallen victim to it. These diseases also spared no one, ravaging peasants and nobles, the poor and the rich, even the king and his family. A 9-year-old Louis XIV survived smallpox; he bore its scars for the rest of his life. It killed his heir, the grand dauphin, in 1711. The next year, measles swept away the king’s eldest grandson, the Duke of Burgundy; his wife; and their eldest son. The French succession then depended on a 2-year-old prince, the future Louis XV.

The Advent and Crisis of the Absolute Monarchy When Louis XIII came to the throne, France was still recovering from the existential crisis of the Wars of Religion. The new king believed that only a strengthened monarchy could prevent a repetition of such trauma. He found an invaluable partner in Armand-Jean du Plessis, Cardinal Richelieu, who became his prime minister in 1624. King and cardinal never intended to create an absolute monarchy, much less fashioned a master plan to achieve it. Richelieu was a brilliant opportunist; many of his most critical decisions were reactions to immediate events. Nevertheless, the reign of Louis XIII was devoted to a dogged and determined drive to expand the power and authority of the royal state. The first obstacle to this drive was the armed might of the Huguenots. The Edict of Nantes had given them control of 200 fortresses garrisoned by their own troops. Between 1621 and 1629, Louis XIII and Richelieu waged three wars against them, culminating in the siege of their chief stronghold of La Rochelle. Following the royal victory, in a feat of outstanding statesmanship, Richelieu convinced Louis XIII to strip the Huguenots of their military power but preserve their religious liberty. The resulting Peace of Alais of 1629 solved the Huguenot problem for the remainder of the reign. Even while they were fighting to disarm the Huguenots, king and cardinal were dealing with another obstacle to royal authority: the disloyalty of overmighty subjects. During the Wars of Religion, powerful magnates had defied the monarchy. By mobilizing their clienteles, they could raise entire provinces in rebellion. Louis XIII punished disloyalty with conspicuous severity: when the Duke of Montmorency, one of the greatest magnates, revolted in 1632, the king had him beheaded. However, Richelieu’s preferred strategy was to build his own massive clientele. He placed his protégés at all levels of government in every part of the kingdom and used the Crown’s resources to reward their loyalty and service. In this way, he extended his control throughout France. But these attempts to strengthen the monarchy within France were soon overshadowed by events outside it. Beginning in 1618, western Europe was engulfed in the Thirty Years’ War between the Catholic Habsburgs and a coalition of Protestant powers. Louis XIII and Richelieu viewed the Habsburgs, rulers of Spain and Austria, as France’s traditional enemies and feared that their victory would lead to the permanent eclipse of French power. The cardinal-minister first covertly aided the Protestants, then declared war in 1635. This decision committed France to a titanic struggle. The French army grew from 50,000 troops in 1610 to 125,000 in 1635 (Lynn 1997, 55–56). Moreover, forces of this scale had to be mobilized year after year until 1659, despite constant attrition from disease and desertion. The war effort immediately emptied the royal treasury. To find more money and so keep France in the field, Richelieu resorted to a series of increasingly desperate expedients. 186

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The main direct tax, the taille, was increased again and again: from 17  million livres in 1610 to 39 million in 1635 to 44 million in 1642 (Collins 1988). Other taxes, such as the much-loathed salt tax, the gabelle, were introduced into previously exempt provinces. The system of venality of offices was ruthlessly exploited in order to squeeze more money out of officeholders. These measures were massively unpopular. Tax avoidance became epidemic. Moreover, the government’s own taxmen became unable or unwilling to perform their duties. In a move that would have momentous consequences, Richelieu sent new royal agents, the intendants, into the provinces to oversee their fiscal administrations. Unlike the existing tax collectors, who all owned their venal offices, an intendant received his authority from a limited, revocable royal commission. Simmering anger at the royal state’s wartime policies soon escalated into open resistance. For French peasants already pushed to the limits of survival by food scarcity and epidemic disease, the run-up in the taille was unbearable. Between 1635 and 1639, they rose up in waves of revolts. Peasant rebels such as the Nu-Pieds (bare feet) and the Croquants (hayseeds – a pejorative coined by their enemies) swept across whole swathes of the kingdom. In addition to these popular furies, noble enemies of Richelieu plotted his overthrow. Their efforts culminated in the failed conspiracy of the Marquis of Cinq-Mars in 1642. The great crisis of the absolute monarchy followed the deaths of Louis XIII and Richelieu. Louis XIV was 4 years old when he inherited the throne. The government of France was in the hands of his prime minister, Jules Cardinal Mazarin, whose determination to continue Richelieu’s policies provoked the most dangerous uprising of all: the Fronde. In 1648, the robe noble judges of the Parlement of Paris rebelled, demanding the end of heavy taxes, the recall of the intendants, and above all, the removal of Mazarin. They were joined first by the people of Paris, then by the princes of the blood, Louis XIV’s closest male relatives. The resulting civil war lasted four years, killed up to a million people, and shook the royal state to its foundations (Moote 1971; Ranum 1993). Louis XIV fled Paris, and Mazarin went into exile. Yet the rebels were fatally weakened by disunity and, more importantly, their inability to conceive of an alternative to the absolute monarchy. The royal government cunningly exploited these weaknesses. By 1652, the Fronde had collapsed. Mazarin returned to power; he would retain it until his death. In 1659, he forced Spain to make peace with France. The crisis was over.

The Sun King and His Subjects After Cardinal Mazarin died in 1661, Louis XIV took up the reins of government and ruled without a prime minister. What would be called his personal reign would last for 54 years. Historians view it as the decisive phase in the rise of the absolute monarchy, during which Louis XIV completed the work begun by his father and the cardinal-ministers. Traditionally, his achievement has been cast as the building of a centralized, bureaucratic state that reduced the French elites to obedience. Beginning in the 1980s, historians developed an alternative interpretation of the reign that has now become the new orthodoxy.3 While acknowledging the creation of a more effective government, this interpretation stresses that the true foundation of the absolute monarchy was an alliance between the king and the elites, particularly the nobility (Beik 2005). Louis XIV demanded that his most powerful subjects acknowledge him as the sole possessor of sovereignty and the ultimate source of patronage. The elites had to give up much of their autonomy, place themselves and their clienteles at the king’s disposal, and cooperate in the carrying out of royal policies. 187

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In exchange, Louis XIV abandoned the confrontational policies of the cardinal-ministers. Instead, he supported the elites’ interests, helped them solve practical problems that had long bedeviled them, rewarded them with a significant slice of the revenues from royal taxation, and gave them numerous opportunities to serve in the greatly expanded state apparatus. This new political dispensation gave France unprecedented stability after the numerous crises of the mid-seventeenth century. Gone was elite resistance to the royal state, replaced by collaboration and cooperation. Even as he was forging a renewed relationship with French elites, Louis XIV was fabricating a magnificent royal image. Following Cardinal Richelieu’s example, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the most important minister of the first half of the personal reign, established academies for the sciences, sculpture, painting, architecture, dance, and music. In exchange for lavish royal patronage, the academicians produced works exalting Louis XIV. Their most well-known motif portrayed him as the Sun King (Burke 1992). This policy of grandeur culminated with the building of the splendid Palace of Versailles. There, at the center of Europe’s most brilliant court, Louis XIV displayed himself as the most glorious king of his day. For the king’s common subjects, the personal reign had much more mixed results. They did benefit from a significant lessening of the weight of taxation. As finance minister, Colbert understood that the taille had become an enormous burden on the peasantry. He therefore ended the ruinous increases in this tax and reformed its administration to make its collection fairer. Equally importantly, he shifted royal finances increasingly to indirect taxes, which fell on the wealthy as well as the poor. Another improvement was a royal effort to end excessive noble violence against commoners, best exemplified by the Grands Jours in Auvergne in 1665 and 1666, special judicial commissions that stamped out lawlessness in this mountainous province. But the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV was also determined to impose greater control on the lower orders of society. To achieve this end, it expected and mostly received the full cooperation of elites. Popular protest by peasants and townsfolk now received no quarter. The largest uprisings of the reign, the rebellions in Bordeaux and Brittany in 1675 and 1676, were put down by thousands of royal troops, with widespread executions. French authorities had always viewed beggars as sources of sedition and inspirers of idleness. In 1662, a royal edict ordered every town in France to solve this problem by establishing socalled general hospitals. Far from being institutions of healing, these were places of confinement and forced labor for the rootless poor. The greatest victims of this obsession with order and control were the Huguenots. From the beginning of the personal reign, they suffered more and more restrictions on their rights of worship. Then, in 1681, Louis XIV dealt them a lethal blow with the dragonnades: royal troops were lodged in the homes of the Huguenots, where they mistreated the inhabitants until they converted to Catholicism. Most converted, if insincerely; others fled into exile. In 1685, the king revoked the Edict of Nantes, ending Protestantism’s legal existence in France. The revocation has long been regarded as the prime example of Louis XIV’s authoritarianism. In fact, it was the most popular decision he ever made. French Catholics had long wanted the end of Protestant toleration. During the 1660s and 1670s, they, not the royal state, had taken the lead in attacking Huguenot rights. For all the attention and energy that Louis XIV devoted to imposing order on France, he regarded a king’s true calling to be the conduct of international relations, particularly

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the waging of war. Victory over the Habsburgs had cleared the way for France to become the dominant power in Europe. With the indispensable assistance of his great ministers of war, Michel Le Tellier and the Marquis de Louvois, Louis XIV built the largest army on the continent: 411,000 men in 1696 (Rowlands 2002, 171). He also gave France a navy that was, by 1690, second to none. During the first half of his reign, he fought to gain glory and to add territory to his kingdom. With the War of Devolution (1667–1668) and the Dutch War (1672–1678), he achieved these goals. He gained a whole province, Franche-Comté, and many valuable towns in the Low Countries. However, the other rulers of Europe feared that he was aiming to achieve “universal monarchy” and banded together to stop him. From 1688 to 1714, France fought two massive conflicts, the Nine Years’ War and the War of the Spanish Succession, against grand alliances of European powers. As in the midseventeenth-century wars, French resources were stretched to their breaking point. To keep its war effort going, the royal state once again resorted to all the old financial expedients and invented a host of new ones. It was left with a debt it could never hope to repay, even under Louis XIV’s successors (Rowlands 2012). Yet the absolute monarchy passed this terrible test. There was no return of large-scale resistance against it, much less another Fronde. The improved methods of social control helped keep the peasants quiet. Even more importantly, the royal government did not repeat the mistake of imposing unbearable taxes on them. As for the elites, during the decades of the personal reign, they had helped rule France in partnership with a great and glorious king. Thus, they could not help but develop deep habits of obedience. Louis XIV spoke perhaps no truer words than his last ones on his deathbed: “I am going, but the state remains.”

Notes 1 From the 1930s to the 1970s, two generations of talented French social historians, including Marc Bloch, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, and Pierre Goubert, subjected the peasantry to intensive study, producing magisterial works that anatomized virtually every aspect of their lives and experiences. Examples of their work in English include Marc Bloch, French Rural History: An Essay on its Basic Characteristics, trans. Janet Sondheimer (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1966); Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The Peasants of Languedoc, trans. John Day (Urbana, IL, and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1976); and Pierre Goubert, The French Peasantry in the Seventeenth Century, trans. Ian Patterson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 2 One of the pioneers of climate history is Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. See his Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate since the Year 1000, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Doubleday, 1971). Two good treatments of the Little Ice Age are Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300–1850 (New York: Basic Books, 2000), and John F. Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), particularly Chapter 2. Geoffrey Parker presents a provocative argument that climate change caused a general crisis in Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). 3 The book that began the revision of absolutism is William Beik, Absolutism and Society in ­Seventeenth-Century France: State Power and Aristocracy in Languedoc (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Other important revisionist books include James B. Collins, Classes, Estates and Order in Early Modern Brittany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Albert N. Hamscher, The Conseil Privé and the Parlements in the Age of Louis XIV: A  Study in French Absolutism (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1987); Sharon Kettering, Patrons, Brokers and Clients in Patrons, Brokers and Clients in Seventeenth-Century France. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); and David Parker, Class and State in Ancien Régime France: The Road to Modernity? (London: Routledge, 1996).

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References Beik, William. 2005. “The Absolutism of Louis XIV as Social Collaboration.” Past and Present 188: 195–224. ———. 2009. A Social and Cultural History of Early Modern France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Benedict, Philip. 1992. “French Cities from the Sixteenth Century to the Revolution: An Overview.” In Cities and Social Change in Early Modern France, edited by Philip Benedict, 7–64. London: Routledge. Burke, Peter. 1992. The Fabrication of Louis XIV. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Collins, James B. 1988. The Fiscal Limits of Absolutism: Direct Taxation in Early Seventeenth-­ Century France. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Dewald, Jonathan, and Liana Vardi. 1998. “The Peasantries of France, 1400–1789.” In The Peasantries of Europe: From the Fourteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries, edited by Tom Scott, 21–48. Harlow, UK: Longman. Diefendorf, Barbara. 2004. From Penitence to Charity: Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Doyle, William. 1996. Venality: The Sale of Offices in Eighteenth-Century France. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Goubert, Pierre. 1970. “La paysan et la terre: seigneurie, tenure, exploitation. In Histoire économique et sociale de la France, volume 2, 1660–1789, edited by Fernand Braudel and Ernest Labrousse, 119–60. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Hoffman, Philip. 2002. “Rural, Urban and Global Economies.” In Renaissance and Reformation France, edited by Mack P. Holt, 62–98. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jacquart, Jean. 1974. “Immobilisme et catastrophes, 1560–1660.” In Histoire de la France rurale, volume 2, L’âge classique des paysans, 1340–1789, edited by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, 185– 358. Paris: Seuil. Kettering, Sharon. 1986. Patrons, Brokers and Clients in Seventeenth-Century France. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. 2002. Histoire des paysans français: de la Peste Noire à la Révolution. Paris: Seuil. Lynn, John A. 1997. Giant of the Grand Siècle: The French Army, 1610–1715. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moote, A. Lloyd. 1971. The Revolt of the Judges: The Parlement of Paris and the Fronde, 1643-1652. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Parrott, David. 2001. Richelieu’s Army: War, Society and Government in France, 1624–1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ranum, Orest. 1993. The Fronde: A French Revolution, 1648–1652. New York: W. W. Norton. Rowlands, Guy. 2002. The Dynastic State and the Army under Louis XIV: Royal Service and Private Interest. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2012. The Financial Decline of a Great Power: War, Influence and Money in Louis XIV’s France. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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18 BUREAUCRACY AND ROYAL ADMINISTRATION IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY – FRENCH ABSOLUTISM AND THE STATE Robert J. Fulton Jr. The Road to an “Absolutist” State State development in Europe took many complicated roads, but none more assertively than that of royal France during the long seventeenth century. This was, as Darryl Dee notes in this volume, an age of “misery as well as grandeur,” where French Bourbon dynastic kings sought to bring their country out of the internal turmoil of the Wars of Religion and into a “golden age” of French pre-eminence in Europe. As these kings strengthened royal power in nuanced ways, it was Louis XIV who effectively directed that power outward, and the rest of Europe reacted with a mix of consternation and emulation. Yet because of these efforts, a subtle but important change in systems of governance occurred. Out of the pressures of war, resource extraction, and dynastic diplomatic quarrels, the French government had to learn how to address these challenges in more coordinated ways. Despite the inefficiencies, government officials applied new methods of administration, gaining experience and learning how to acquire useful knowledge. In the process, the French royal state was transformed. Evaluating the rise in France of what we can refer to as an “early modern information state” engages with three related historical debates: the nature of absolutism, the importance of the military revolution, and our understanding of bureaucracy. Historians have long posited the emergence of “absolute monarchies” during the seventeenth century, especially citing the case of Louis XIV’s France. Yet more recent critics have questioned the very existence of “absolutism.” The relationship between powerful families, provincial elites, and the king had a profound effect on whether the French royal government was “absolutist” or not.1 In addition, the debates on the nature of the early modern military revolution have sought to understand relationships between military technologies, tactics, logistical systems, army growth, finances, and state development. While some historians argue that state development resulted from the growing extraction of revenue, others argue that army growth was closely connected to state modernization. French army administration features prominently in the hotly disputed arguments even over definitions of this “revolution.”2 191

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A third and related debate over the nature of bureaucracy has attempted to define administrative structures, information systems, and bureaucratic forms within early modern states. Rulers such as Louis XIV gathered increasing amounts of information about their kingdoms in order to assert royal control, and historians have sought to understand the methods used to generate and control information.3 What is clear is that French administrators took up new ideas of secular governance and combined them with the notions of what made a powerful state, and the combination allowed Louis XIV, the “Sun King,” to push the French state to international prominence. The seventeenth century was spanned by the reigns of three of the most powerful monarchs ever to sit on the French throne. Each in his own way contributed to processes of state development in France. The first, Henri IV (r. 1589–1610), crafted an accord with French Protestants, the Edict of Nantes, that significantly tamped down religious violence and strife within the country (Holt 2005). He was then free to embark upon a number of ventures which included constructing public works such as roads, bridges, and canals, promoting agriculture, management of royal forests, renovating frontier fortifications, reform of royal finance and taxation, and creating colonies in the New World. It was his first minister, the powerful Maximilien de Béthune, Duke of Sully (1560–1641), who was tasked with implementing these ideas; unfortunately, the work was cut short when Henri was assassinated in 1610. Yet Sully’s reform of the tax farm system, private contractors who collected taxes on behalf of the king for a share of the proceeds, had brought some financial stability, laying the groundwork for change. The second powerful Bourbon king, Henri’s son Louis XIII (r. 1610–1643), was only 8 years old upon his father’s death. In 1624, after a turbulent early reign which saw disputes with his mother, Marie de’ Medici, as well as her favorite councilor, Concino Concini, Louis chose a powerful first minister to continue his father’s work, Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal Richelieu. The new minister set about implementing a vigorous system of royal surveillance both at court and in the provinces. A ruthless politician, Richelieu was also an able administrator who set the state upon a path of change. He moved cautiously, if not conservatively. His political biography, the Testament of Cardinal Richelieu (1680), demonstrates his desire to centralize, that is, to empower, certain aspects of royal administration (Cornette 1993, 243–44). Nevertheless, this was a document that reflected evolutionary, not radical, change within the existing social and government structures. Richelieu was thus not the radically modernizing cardinal presented by prior historiography. In his careful political calculations, he actively worked to secure the king’s power after more than a decade of discord. As historian David Parrott observes relative to his government, “the forces of regional autonomy, privileged interest and influence were too strongly entrenched in the political system to permit the development of powerful centralizing institutions” (2001, 5). Richelieu thus embraced small but significant changes within the existing system, especially army administration. Yet despite the inability to fundamentally reform the army and finances during the crises he faced from the 1630s through 1650s, some progress was made. Under Henri IV, the office of provincial intendant had been a temporary royal commission, but it was made a permanent office by Richelieu. In this system, intendants became the “eyes and ears” of the royal state, well-versed in history, geography, law, and royal rights. They oversaw data collection, addressed specific abuses, improved tax collections, implemented public projects, and pursued cartographic and engineering endeavors (Buisseret 1992). Nevertheless, Richelieu was far from a foresighted strategic planner and was forced by circumstances to work within the confines of factional court politics. His death in 1642, 192

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followed closely by that of Louis XIII, once again left a child-king (Louis XIV, 1638–1715), a regent queen mother (Anne of Austria, 1601–1666), and a favorite, Jules Mazarin, CardinalDuke of Rethel, Mayenne, and Nevers (1602–1661). While foreign policy absorbed much of both the cardinal-ministers’ attentions, Mazarin, an able successor and former assistant to Richelieu, worked to maintain both France’s participation in the Thirty Years’ War and continue his mentor’s reform efforts. Despite the turmoil caused by the series of revolts known as the Fronde (1648–1653), he retained power until his death. After Mazarin passed from the scene, the nobility expected Louis XIV to continue with the tradition of appointing a first minister. It came as a shock when, instead, Louis chose to rule directly over a council of competing ministers. For more than 50 years, Louis exerted power over the council, all of whom were appointed by him, and tasked them with creating a formidable, and “modern,” French state, a state not to be rivaled by others and that he alone would control.

Louis XIV and the Era of His Personal Rule The older definition of “absolutism” as the practice of unlimited power to govern has been rendered obsolete as a way of understanding early modern France and Louis XIV’s reign in particular. Indeed, processes of collaboration and change in royal governance are seen by historians such as William Beik and Nicolas Henshall as a continuity of the policies of the Valois and Bourbon kings rather than a radical departure under Louis XIV (Beik 1985; Henshall 1992). Subsequent historical studies of royal administration have chipped away at the king’s ostensibly “absolute” powers. Relationships with local nobles and power brokers were complex, and noble decisions were based both on increasing family power as well as serving the state (Chapman 2004, 5–6). Bernard Barbiche has written that that “absolutism was not unilateral. The privileges and offices granted or confirmed by the monarch constituted less an obstacle to the operation of absolutism than as a cornerstone of this system of government” (2001, 11). Ministers and others in the government asserted their own dynastic privileges within this evolving system. Thus, it was during this time that the power of government ministers and senior administrators, appointed by and beholden to the king alone, grew tremendously. In addition, salaried, mid-level administrators exercised increasing influence. The growth of bureaucratic state power was intentional in the short term, yet neither Louis nor his ministers could have foreseen the longer-term “revolutions” they created in modern governance. In setting up family-based, but administratively oriented, ministries, it was not “absolute power” that transformed France’s system of governance during Louis XIV’s reign but the transition from “monarchal commonwealth to a monarchical state” (Collins 2009, xxiii). The military revolution, the appearance in early modern Europe of ever-larger, quasi-permanent, and technologically sophisticated armies, has been debated as a cause of the change. Such a change “required the elaboration of more complex administrative structures and, of course, money to pay the troops and the suppliers” (Storrs 2009, 3–4), and yet before 1660, the growth in military capacity was neither product nor cause of state administrative developments (Parrott 2001, 549, 555; Lynn 1997, 597–99; Rowlands 2002, 361). During Louis XIV’s reign, although finances were never adequate, enough money accumulated to vastly increase the size of the army. And as the French state began to extract increasingly more resources from its subjects, the unintended consequence was an expanded administrative infrastructure and power. What has been termed the “fiscalmilitary” state (Bonney 1999) was evolving in France as a “bureaucratic” state. 193

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Therefore, early modern European bureaucracies were created less through planning and more through urgency and need, both with respect to finances and warfare. Administrative expansion was driven by the demands of war and diplomacy and through the imposition of personal rule. Louis XIV brought about a fundamental change in royal governance to councils and the ministers of noble status who would devote themselves to maintaining his authority. Under Louis’s father and grandfather, ministers served in individual capacities. When they left, departments had to be rebuilt from scratch. The change in the nature of ministerial status between the cardinals and Louis XIV’s ministers was striking, as “this small and cohesive group maintained and developed a culture of shared government, where the work of the bureaux [their administrative offices] held a central place” (Sarmant and Stoll 2010, 282–83). Lucien Bély, following Peter Campbell, refers to French royal administration under Louis XIV not as a “modern” but as a “baroque state,” an evolutionary development where ministers served not as courtiers but truly as administrators (2009, 578). In this new world, authority meant that the sovereign ruled through his councils, and his ministers offered advice and consent to the king’s decisions. The ministers, in turn, created hierarchical but also more permanent administrative organizations, the bureaux, to both provide information and to implement those decisions.

The Prosecution of War and the Goals of the Sun King The primacy of tax collection, diplomacy, and positional warfare required gathering significant amounts of information, from demographics to intelligence networks to engineering plans to three-dimensional models of fortress cities. Late seventeenth-century methods of peace and war required information and consequent knowledge in order to develop effective strategies. The winner of this style of war would know more and, vitally, more of the right things about the enemy than the enemy knew of him. War was to be conducted using timely, precise, and verifiable information. Jean-Philippe Cénat has refined this notion of war as “risk management” into a wider thesis that Louis XIV’s wars involved meticulous preparation and the perfection of logistical planning and organization, arguing that the king “more than his rivals sought to make war into a type of rational science and less subject to the fate of combat,” being “particularly obsessed with the complete safety of his kingdom” (2010, 444, 299). This concern for managing the risks of war infers that specialized knowledge came to be increasingly valued. Military planners and diplomats slowly adopted practical principles and theories, sometimes tried and tested by others, but mainly based on personal experience, which led to a developing “science” of early modern politics. Secrecy was as much about controlling perceptions as it was about guarding knowledge, and administrators sought information management tools that would enhance their ability to both safeguard knowledge and also govern, that is, employ it effectively. The creation of information-based networks which could be adapted in response to internal needs or external shocks resulted from the explosion of information which accompanied Louis XIV’s dynastic wars, significantly affecting processes of state development. The department ministers built their organizations over decades in an ad hoc manner to exert control, but also to facilitate the flow and processing of vital information. This idea is crucial to the various ministers’ efforts to create a comprehensive information management system: the pressures of information imperatives for military administration and political change created a crisis of control within the royal government, and because of these pressures, different departments crafted methods to collect and process information, convert it 194

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to knowledge, and then utilize that knowledge to make decisions. In order to manage these exchanges, the departments built organizations which were durable and relatively stable in both form and function. A patron–client social system paradoxically contributed to the permanence of staff, which, in turn, led to stability of careers, specialization, and professionalization of department staff. It also permitted stabilization and formalization of work rules within an adaptive organization. The necessities of diplomacy, tax collection, budgeting, warfare, logistics, and strategic planning all combined to contribute to the stability, specialization, and career professionalization of department staff and led to a continuity of personnel, formalization of processes, and accretion of power. A useful way to understand this idea is through the concept of an “information ecosystem.” Historian James Cortada has employed this term in his historical study of the contemporaneous Spanish diplomatic corps, defining it as a “body of information which circulates within some institution or group of individuals who communicate frequently with each other” (2013, 225). The nature of the information and its transmission, passing through work processes within a large organization-based network, both affect and are affected by organizational change within that network. In addition, agents within the system made conscious determinations about required information, when it should be gathered, how it should be summarized, and how it should be protected. Colbert’s intendants, Louvois’s commissaires, and Torcy’s diplomats worked in strict service to the state, serving as record keepers and information gatherers, representing royal justice, and writing reports. They labored to collect the data necessary to assert and establish Louis XIV’s royal state in long struggles with nobles. Tensions arose between the nobility, who had to collaborate with these state servants, and the salaried administrators, who could limit noble autonomy but rarely overruled them. Information thus became a tool by which administrators could more fully understand their duties as well as their capabilities. The challenge lay in the conversion of raw data into useful knowledge. Information has to be applied as knowledge for it to be of any real consequence (Headrick 2000, 4). Further, this idea of knowledge, the nature and form of which varied widely, raises questions as to how and why knowledge became important to governance. Royal administrators demonstrated high levels of information conversion skills, but the information they collected was intended to address narrowly defined goals. Even so, the responses were directed only to those specific needs. For example, cartography and engineering drawings of particular places provided a level of understanding that conveyed a functional clarity to the user not possible from texts alone. The cartographers and engineers in the War Department served these purposes well: map- and model-making were the result of accurate and direct observation, accumulated through experience. Such visuals provided the knowledge necessary for royal administrators to impose themselves on conquered lands, and it offered a panoptic view of the kingdom. Production of visuals, along with statistical knowledge of provinces and evaluations of demographics, was a process well suited to an emphasis on conquest. Each department, with the king in his councils, required knowledge so that decisions involving everything from spies, campaign plans, fortification repairs, and a thousand other considerations could be acted upon.

From Personal to Professional Networks In the first half of the seventeenth century, these ministry structures had been “temporary” in the sense of continuity of leadership and personnel. That is, each minister (secrétaire) 195

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held his office as his own personal domain until he left. Offices were meagerly staffed, consisting generally of a few trusted associates. When one minister was replaced by another, much of the paperwork and support staff left with him. If he died, most of his papers were considered to be within the private domain of his family (Sarmant and Stoll 2010, 381–89). During the early seventeenth century, successive ministries formed under each officeholder and persisted only for a limited time period. Originally constrained to strictly routine duties, the powers of the war secretary (secrétaire d’État de la guerre), for example, grew under Cardinal-Ministers Richelieu and Mazarin in response to the suppression in 1627 of the office of the constable, a key military office traditionally held by a powerful noble, as well as prolonged warfare lasting from 1635 to 1659. Successive ministers expanded this portfolio by assuming more and more administrative responsibilities for the army, including control over much of the correspondence and field service directives and orders. Our understanding of an increasingly administrative rule should not dismiss the continuing existence of patronage, which remained a cornerstone of political power. The evolving French state was integrated within the dominant social and political framework and its power processes operated through the continuities and expediencies of French nobility. The Le Tellier, Colbert, and Pontchartrain families held power for many decades under Louis XIV, partly by placing family and trusted associates in royal positions. Because of their length of service to the king, the ministerial families left their marks on, and their supporters within, these institutions. The differences between hereditary and venal (purchased) offices and salaried administrative appointments created tremendous tension between the nobility and the rising administrative families. Yet older systems of power relationships remained. Sara Chapman (2004) has evaluated the dynamics between powerful provincial families, patron–client ties, and personal alliances in her in-depth examination of the Phélypeaux de Pontchartrain family. She demonstrates that noble decisions were based a combination of attempts to increase family power as well as intentions to serve the state. Members of the Phélypeaux family engaged in long-standing practices of negotiation, collaboration, and cooperation. These same practices were employed by other families as well, including the Le Tellier (Fulton 2016) and Colbert families (Rule and Trotter 2014). Such processes of power-sharing existed from the High Council down to the most local jurisdictions. It was in 1661, when he assumed direct rule, that Louis XIV began to shift these dynamics. His first step after Mazarin’s death was to remove his too-powerful minister of finance, Nicolas Fouquet, Marquis de Belle-Île (1615–1680), in order to prevent the rise of a new “first” minister. In his place, as noted, he set up a council of equal, but competing, ministers, including Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683) for finance and the navy/colonies, Michel Le Tellier (1603–1685) for war, and Hugues Lionne (1611–1671) for foreign affairs. At Lionne’s death, another branch of the Colbert family, under Colbert de Torcy (1665–1746), was placed in charge of this crucial function. Each of these families sought, in their own manner, to implement lasting administrative change. By doing so over an extended period of time, the secrétaires began to transform the operations of the various ministries, producing a more impersonal organization (Barbiche 2001, 199). Each of these families exhibited “an almost obsessive desire to gather more and more information about the problems” which they faced (Mettam 1988, 225). James B. Collins declares that Colbert as well as Le Tellier “clearly understood that the first precondition of modern government is information” (2009, 135). The information state would be crafted piece by piece. Colbert, a financial and managerial expert who had originally served as Mazarin’s personal assistant, worked tirelessly to improve French financial systems and made progress 196

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reforming the navy. By the time of his death in 1683, his reforms had allowed Louis to finance a long war with the Dutch (1672–1678) and to build a large and potent navy. The tremendous efforts to gather information had produced “something new: a centralized system of information for international relations and political legitimacy” as well as local knowledge (Soll 2009, 107). Colbert’s information networks in the navy department passed to his own son, and eventually to the Pontchartrain family, each of whom sustained this departmental work of information gathering in their own ways. One example was the classification, categorization, and inventorying of French royal forests, a key asset with respect to Colbert’s naval building programs. The Foreign Affairs ministry exhibited the same strategic focus. Under the leadership of Colbert de Torcy, the ministry realized some important developments in clientage and collaboration as Torcy “sought to centralize power and reshape rational institutions for greater efficiency and reliability,” resulting in the formation of extensive international intelligence and diplomatic networks (Rule and Trotter 2014, 281). Yet both finance and foreign affairs were dwarfed by the expansion of information management systems within the War Department due to the increasing prosecution of land-based warfare for Louis XIV. Le Tellier and his son François-Michel, the Marquis de Louvois (1641–1691), led army administration for over 40 years, and both sought to implement serious army reforms. He was able to place his administrators in key support and advisory positions within Louis’s armies. Louvois used his department’s systems of information gathering and analysis to plan troop movements, set up logistical support systems, evaluate and implement military engineering projects, and administer conquered territory. By the time of his death, Louvois had become the most powerful minister of the reign, able to hold the generals and marshals in check and to allow Louis to exercise virtual command of his armies. After his death, the generals reasserted themselves, but in limited and measured ways. More importantly, the Le Tellier family increased the power of both the department as well as field administrators, such as army commissaires, provincial intendants, and other supporting civilian agents. With this massive new administration in place to support them, military reforms, including regular pay and food, uniforms, better arms, barracks, drills, and hospitals, had firmly taken hold by the 1690s.

The Growth of a Professional Secretariat It was thus the increasing logistical and financial needs of a growing French army and navy, as well as diplomatic intelligence needs, that saw the appointment of salaried workers over nascent administrative apparatuses. For example, Le Tellier and Louvois undertook tremendous efforts to establish administrative structures and expand information management networks to enhance their control over both information gathering and decision-­making. While the War Department developed under a prevailing social system of patron–client relationships, it became more structurally responsive to the growth of data collection. This stands in sharp contrast to some historians’ arguments about the power exerted by noble officers who controlled troop movements and military operations by field armies. Operational control was, in some ways, less important than the underlying methods that made it possible to actually wage war. This new system of departmental administration gradually fell under civilian control. The War, Navy, Finance, and Foreign Affairs Departments all developed central offices, or bureaux, organized in a relatively specialized manner. At each bureau, a chief clerk and their staff engaged in a variety of daily administrative tasks. Away from the royal 197

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court, provincial and army intendants were supported by military commissaires appointed by the ministries. The financial clerks at the different ministry bureaux sent or requested information on a regular basis to these appointed officials. The bureaux offices also saw an increasing continuity among personnel, less due to protective influences of “entrenched ministerial dynasties” and more because the secrétaire sought out “knowledgeable and skilled bureaucrats to project the department’s power” (Rule and Trotter 2014, 26–27). While the staff became procedurally dependent upon the information flows which underpinned their efforts, their primary goal of supporting state needs led to their increasing utility through knowledge acquisition, and thus their longevity within the administration. Continuity of personnel, durability of routine work processes, and the creation of organizational structure were required to create an information state. Under these new systems of information management and control, decision-making demands drove the development of the new hierarchical administrative organizations. Under the ministers, who transmitted council decisions to them for implementation, preparatory work was undertaken by departmental clerks and their supervisors, bureaux chief clerks (Bély 2009, 578). Council members made ministerial-level group decisions in the Conseil d’État privé (Private Council of State), while the king made decisions requiring royal assent in the Conseil en Haut (High Council) in consultation with his ministers. As bureau chiefs, the supervisors could control policy discussions through their active selection of what information pieces would reach ministers and then the councils. This dynamic, however, continued to be underpinned by patron–client practices, which paradoxically contributed to institutional stability and thereby an accretion of power by clerks and their immediate bureau chiefs. The rising power of the bureaux clerks in many of these ministries as important information managers is evidenced by the rapidly establishing routines of office work as well as the longevity of workers performing it (Barbiche 2001, 16; Sarmant and Stoll 2010, 397). The importance of the work lay with those directly involved in managing the collection of localized information. Processes and work practices existed, and while ministers and the clerks came and went, the “bureaux and papers remained” (Sarmant and Stoll 2010, 396–98). It was the work of these clerks, as well as the successive amounts of experience they gained as long-term, salaried employees, that led to the transformation into a baroque, quasi-bureaucratic state (Fulton 2016). Louis XIV’s concentration of many administrative units to semi-permanent office spaces at the château de Versailles in the 1680s seems to have accelerated this transformation. Despite the continued itinerant nature of the Bourbon court, ministers and royal administrators established permanent offices within the château, where they could work and also interact with their counterparts in other administrative departments. The bureaux offices provided important sites for the “information state.” Understanding the structure of information networks in terms of what was exchanged, and why, as well as who was doing the exchanging, is crucial to understanding how systems of governance changed over time. The early modern state grew because of the daily work processes occurring within administrative offices, not because they were following models of bureaucratic development. The establishment of relatively fixed office locations, in evidence in France by 1650 and especially after 1683 for most departments, contributed to both permanence as well as changing work processes. The most important of these criteria which remains largely unexplored is the routine of office work. The clerks in the War Department bureaux adopted work procedures and practices resulting in an organization that was not independent of the king but which ensured that he alone would govern. The key in this change is that the exchange and evaluation of certain types of information 198

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became both regular and standardized. Monthly reports on logistics (inventories of munitions) became commonplace, for example. In ministerial relationships, how information was managed, used, and controlled was instrumental in achieving “direct and unchallenged authority” for the king (Parrott 2012, 273). The data collection and management processes of these departments became a crucial component of the information state by the early eighteenth century, transforming early modern French governance.

Growth of a Bureaucratic State Durable in form and function, the bureaux slowly grew in both size and importance over time, thus illustrating how government organizations grow organically. Shared features in early modern governance have to do with the more or less increasing desire of rulers and ministers to gather information which could be converted into knowledge which could be applied for military and policymaking purposes. Although Louis XIV’s government required information so it could effectively respond to specific developments, over the seventeenth century, early modern France made ever-greater efforts to collect the knowledge that would facilitate both processing and use of that information. While ministers struggled to establish organizations which could gather, convert, store, and utilize information on an ongoing basis so as to create routine practices and procedures, it was the clerks who carried out the work and who did so by applying both experience and learning. Establishing standardized, routinized information management practices for clerks in early modern states, in turn, reinforced the growth of a durable infrastructure to create the necessary conditions for routine to thrive. In France, the routines of royal government gradually created an information state in the second half of the seventeenth century (Fulton 2016). Evidence for the “modernization” of these structured and formal information networks can be seen in the transfer of power from father to son, and even between families in late seventeenth-century France. When Louvois’s son Barbezieux took over, the War Department was hard-pressed to even maintain operations, much less accrue added power. Yet while some of Louvois’s responsibilities were transferred elsewhere, notably, the artillery service and the postal system, the department survived intact, despite the incompetence of Barbezieux. The latter part of Louis XIV’s reign was a period where the administrative structure was tested to the breaking point, but in spite of the challenges, it continued to grow and evolve. In a like manner, upon Colbert’s death in 1683, his son the Marquis de Seignelay was unable to deal with the pressures of administration, and yet the Navy Department continued on in its work, developing ever-more systematic data management methods. Once in operation, little change was made to bureaux structure. Similarly, Torcy built an effective administrative structure in foreign affairs that well outlasted him. These information networks persisted despite changes to individual players and the strains within, or exogenous shocks to, the system. These governmental processes worked, and a better understanding of them can qualify prior arguments about the nature and primacy of absolutism in early modern states. The royal French government under Louis XV (r. 1715–1774) continued to utilize and build on these information management networks all the way until the point at which the French Revolution required their substantial restructuring.

Notes 1 For a concise and informative summary of the debates about French absolutism in all its forms, see William Beik, “The Absolutism of Louis XIV as Social Collaboration,” Past & Present 188, no. 1

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Robert J. Fulton Jr. (2005): 195–224. See also Sara E. Chapman, Private Ambitions and Political Alliances: The Phélypeaux de Pontchartrain Family and Louis XIV’s Government, 1650–1715 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2004). One significantly contributing factor to understanding these developments was the system of “clientism” in early modern France. See Sharon Kettering, Patrons, Brokers, and Clients in Seventeenth-century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), Chapter 6. More recently, historians have focused on two specific aspects of governance related to the nature of social collaboration based in either common interests or the relative bargaining power of provincial elites. See Nicholas Henshall, The Myth of Absolutism: Change and Continuity in Early Modern European Monarchy (London: Routledge, 1992); Roger Mettam, Power and faction in Louis XIV’s France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Richard Bonney, The Limits of Absolutism in Ancien Régime France (London: Routledge, 1995). Hurt, John J. 2002. Louis XIV and the Parlements: The Assertion of Royal Authority. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. 2 For a snapshot of the debates, see Geoffrey Parker, “The ‘Military Revolution, 1560–1660’ – A Myth?” in The Military Revolution Debate: Readings on the Military Transformation of Early Modern Europe, ed. Clifford J. Rogers (London: Routledge, 1995), 37–54. For the original explanation of the rise of the fiscal-military state and the relationship of coercion and capital, see Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992 (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1993). 3 To better understand the nature of bureaucracy, see James B. Collins, The State in Early Modern France, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009): “they set out to obtain massive amounts of detailed, statistical information in order to act more efficiently. They succeeded beyond the wildest imagination of any seventeenth-century governmental official, but they could not use this information in the way in which a modern government would.” (135).

References Barbiche, Bernard. 2001. Les institutions de la monarchie française à l’époque moderne, XVIe – XVIIIe siècle. 2nd ed. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Beik, William. 1985. Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth Century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bély, Lucien. 2009. La France au XVIIe siècle: puissance de l’état, contrôle de la société. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Bonney, Richard, ed. 1999. The Rise of the Fiscal State in Europe, c. 1200–1815. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Buisseret, David. 1992. “Monarchs, Ministers, and Maps in France before the Accession of Louis XIV.” In Monarchs, Ministers, and Maps: The Emergence of Cartography as a Tool of Government in Early Modern Europe, edited by David Buisseret, 99–123. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cénat, Jean-Philippe. 2010. Le roi stratège: Louis XIV et la direction de la guerre 1661–1715. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes. Chapman, Sara E. 2004. Private Ambitions and Political Alliances: The Phélypeaux de Pontchartrain Family and Louis XIV’s Government, 1650–1715. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Collins, James B. 2009. The State in Early Modern France. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cornette, Joël. 1993. Le Roi de Guerre: Essai sur la Souveraineté dans la France du Grand Siècle. Paris: Petite bibliothèque Payot. Cortada, James. 2013. “The Information Ecosystems of National Diplomacy: The Case of Spain, 1815–1936.” Information & Culture: A Journal of History 48 (2): 222–59. Fulton, Jr., Robert J. 2016. “Managing an Information Explosion: Civilian Administration and The Army of Louis XIV, 1661–1701.” Ph.D. Diss. Northern Illinois University. ProQuest. AAT Number: 10158929. Headrick, Daniel R. 2000. When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700–1850. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Henshall, Nicholas. 1992. The Myth of Absolutism: Change and Continuity in Early Modern European Monarchy. 2nd ed. London: Longman. Holt, Mack P.  2005 The French Wars of Religion, 1562–2011. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Bureaucracy, Royal Administration in the Seventeenth Century Lynn, John A. 1997. Giant of the Grand Siècle: The French Army, 1610–1715. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mettam, Roger. 1988. Power and faction in Louis XIV’s France. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Parrott, David. 2001. Richelieu’s Army: War, Government and Society in France, 1624–1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2012. The Business of War Military Enterprise and Military Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rowlands, Guy. 2002. The Dynastic State and the Army under Louis XIV: Royal Service and Private Interest 1661–1701. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rule, John C., and Ben S. Trotter. 2014. A World of Paper: Louis XIV, Colbert de Torcy, and the Rise of the Information State. Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Sarmant, Thierry, and Mathieu Stoll. 2010. Régner et gouverner: Louis XIV et ses ministres. Paris: Perrin. Soll, Jacob. 2009. The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s Secret State Intelligence System. Cultures of Knowledge in the Early Modern World. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Storrs, Christopher. 2009. The Fiscal-Military State in Eighteenth-Century Europe: Essays in Honour of P.G.M. Dickson. London: Routledge.

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19 A CENTURY OF SAINTS? THE CATHOLIC REFORMATION IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE Alison Forrestal In the early seventeenth century, the Catholic Church in France found itself on the cusp of an extraordinary period of recovery and innovation. As the violence and bloodshed of four decades of civil war receded, many of its members sought to shape religious devotion and discipline for a new age. They channeled their religious enthusiasm into a wide variety of causes, from the foundation of new religious orders and monasteries to the organization of missions and the patronage of charitable works. What became known as the French Catholic Reformation reached its height in the middle of the seventeenth century and left an enduring legacy for the next.

French Reform in Context The Council of Trent issued its final decrees on reforming religious practices in the Catholic Church in 1563. By this time, France was embroiled in the first of a series of civil wars between its Catholic majority and its Protestant Huguenot minority. Four decades of war subsequently left the infrastructure and resources of the Catholic Church in disarray. Many churches were damaged or destroyed during the wars, and it proved a demanding and extended task to repair or replace them. When, for example, the officials of the archbishop of Lyon carried out a visitation of the parishes under his care in 1614, they found widespread evidence of this. Thus, while the church of Châtillon-lès-Dombes was now amply stocked with thirteen side chapels and five additional altars for worship because substantial repairs had been carried out in 1607, that of nearby Clémencia had not fared so well. It may have even been impossible to enter it, because its main door had been blocked up, but the visitors could still see that its windows were missing, and that the sanctuary and choir had collapsed (Forrestal 2017). As the principal sites of Catholic worship, churches had proved popular targets for Huguenot attacks, but they also simply suffered from years of neglect. Responsibility for their upkeep rested ultimately with the diocesan bishops, entrusted at their consecration with the duty of ensuring that church buildings were fit to host the ceremonial rituals and prayers of the faithful. This proved problematic during the wars, for two main reasons. Firstly, the body of French bishops was badly affected by the challenges, and the attraction, DOI: 10.4324/9780367808471-20

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of the new religion. It was rocked in the early 1560s by the defection of twelve of its members to the Protestant faith and was shaken again in 1566 when Rome condemned seven of them for heresy, including one who unsuccessfully attempted to persuade both Geneva and his local flock that he could remain a bishop while acting as the pastor of the local Huguenot congregation. As the conflict continued, some other bishops opted to leave their dioceses for safety. For those who did stay, it was difficult, if not impossible, for them to carry out visitations, hold synods, or supervise the activities and movements of priests in war-torn or occupied areas. Demoralized bishops were quick to blame the wars and the Huguenots for their failure to operate in their dioceses, complaining of aggression toward their persons and ecclesiastical property and of economic destitution (Bergin 1998; Forrestal 2004). Secondly, specific institutional traditions in the French Church meant that some dioceses rarely saw their bishop, regardless of war. The criticism most often directed at bishops in France was that of worldliness, and those who made it traced the rot back to the 1516 Concordat of Bologna, an agreement between King François I and Pope Leo X which reserved the nomination of bishops to the French monarch, subject to papal confirmation. Their complaints had some basis in fact, for the Concordat had permitted successive kings to use episcopal appointments as rewards or incentives to service, and therefore to treat dioceses as part of royal patrimony. When Henri IV took the throne in 1594, he took advantage, like his predecessors, of this right in order to stabilize the realm and frequently offered benefices of all kinds in return for loyalty. His pragmatic approach resulted in many rewards for those willing to support the new regime, including the former Huguenot Jacques Davy Du Perron (1556–1618), who received the diocese of Evreux in 1595, before being lavished with greater honors in the form of a cardinalate in 1604, and the archdiocese of Sens two years later. He was also appointed to the prestigious office of Grand Almoner of France in the same year, which entitled him to oversee religious practices in the king’s household and included the privileges of administering communion to the king and officiating at royal baptisms and marriages (Bergin 1998). This type of practice also perpetuated the tendency, in turn, of noble families to view episcopal office as a means of strengthening their patrimony in the provinces. It often went hand in hand with a common practice of holding benefices “in confidence,” which enabled noble families to control them by installing a substitute until a time when a family member was of age (officially thirty) to take over. It was also widely used to allow pluralism, meaning, that an individual could control several benefices at once, while not residing there or fulfilling the duties associated with them (Bergin 2009). Such political manipulation of the Church’s resources might lead us to assume that any efforts to introduce reforms had made little headway by the end of the sixteenth century. But the picture is more complex. The decrees of the Council of Trent had not been, and indeed never would be, formally enshrined in French law, because supporters of Gallican liberties argued that this would allow the pope too much influence in French religious affairs. However, there were already some signs that the decrees were being used to exert influence in the church. French translations from Latin of the Council’s decrees were printed eleven times between 1564 and 1600, and a cluster of provincial synods held from the early 1580s officially received the decrees and incorporated the Council’s legislation into the statutes they produced for religious practice. The bishops behind this were generally inspired by the standard-bearer for the Council’s regulations, Archbishop Charles Borromeo of Milan (1538–84), whose experience in implementing reform in Milan provided a model for those bishops who recognized the need for it in France. The provincial synods borrowed heavily from the decrees that Borromeo had produced in regard to diocesan administration and 203

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which ranged from rules for good preaching and conferences for training priests to the foundation of confraternities for laypeople to practice specific devotions, such as veneration of the Holy Sacrament (Forrestal 2004). Turning to laypeople, it is also possible to identify some areas of religious practice that were shaped by the Council of Trent during these decades. The scholarly research for this is so far restricted to urban areas like Paris, Lyon, Limoges, Nantes, Rouen, and Toulouse, but the results suggest that novel devotions associated with the Council were slowly increasing in popularity from the 1570s. They were often promoted initially by new religious orders, like the Society of Jesus (the “Jesuits”), and included the oratoire (the display of the Holy Sacrament and relics on church altars for a week at a time), the Forty Hours (comprising three days of preaching, prayers, torchlight eucharistic processions, and veneration), and the use of new Roman rubrics in ceremonies (Amalou 2009; Lynn Martin 1988; Tingle 2009). From the 1580s, these new practices were accompanied by other distinctive innovations that formed the basis of the reform movement as it developed. Between 1585 and 1593, the Catholic League dominated politics and religion, and it gave rise to a vigorous and militant piety. This was apparent in the collective and penitential rituals that its supporters organized, such as torchlit processions with armed clergy and robed penitents, aggressive sermons, and cries of prayer for the defeat of Protestantism. Men and women engaged in severe ascetic and penitential practices, such as flagellation, all-night vigils, and fasting, imposing suffering on themselves in order to atone for the sins of heresy and plead for God’s mercy. However, a further feature of devotional habits was a marked emphasis, first on emulating the suffering of Christ through ascetic practices, and subsequently on imitating his life through good works. This can be traced in, for instance, a shift in investment in mortuary foundations to charitable works in Nantes or a surge in works of mercy by pious women in Paris (Diefendorf 2004; Tingle 2009).

Who Were the Dévots? At its broadest, the term dévot can be used to describe any Catholic who practiced their faith consistently and sincerely in seventeenth-century France, but it has become synonymous with those zealous Catholic activists who emerged from the late 1580s seeking to bring about Catholic reforms and renewal in France. They emerged first in spiritual circles gathered around individuals like the mystic Barbe Acarie (1566–1618; later, the Carmelite Marie of the Incarnation) but also organized themselves into formal organizations to pursue improvements in religious discipline as time went on. We should also recognize that although many dévots had political interests, they did not form a coherent political faction. Some, but not all, were former Leaguers; some were heavily involved in the efforts to dislodge Cardinal Richelieu and redirect Crown policy regarding the Habsburgs and the Huguenots in the 1620s (culminating in the failed coup led by the queen mother in November 1630) (Bergin 2014). Others were not overtly political at all, although this did not mean that they were politically insignificant. As the period of the League’s dominance drew to an end, the importance of both Christocentric devotions and spiritual circles grew and attracted in particular many socially elevated individuals from the robe, including members of high-profile Leaguer families, such as Acarie (whose husband, Pierre, a member of the Seize, had been forced into exile from Paris in 1594) and her cousin Pierre de Bérulle (1575–1629). Both subscribed to spiritual 204

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ideas that prioritized obedience to the will of God and detachment from the values of the world. Their circle consisted of laypeople and ecclesiastics, whose intense piety centered on a journey of spiritual progress, in which Catholics could move from obeying the rules of the Church to purging the senses, mind, and soul, and ultimately into a state of grace that would enable them to imitate Jesus in obeying God fully. These values owed a great deal to transregional spiritual influences, including Rhenish and Spanish, as well as the spirituality of one of the circle’s members, the English Recusant and Capuchin friar Benet of Canfield (1562–1610). His Rule of Perfection circulated in manuscript among the first dévots from 1592 before being published in 1609 (Forrestal 2017). In the same year, another book that was to become a more popular handbook for Catholic living appeared: in his Introduction to the Devout Life, the Catholic bishop of Geneva, François de Sales (1567–1622), taught his readers that: Devotion must be exercised in different ways by the gentleman, the worker, the servant, the prince, the widow, the young girl, and the married woman . . . the practice of devotion must also be adapted to the strength, activities, and duties of each particular person. (De Sales 1989) This kind of encouraging advice led many to throw themselves into expressing their devotion in strict regimes of prayer and spiritual reading, founding and supporting convents, monasteries, and churches, and public works of charity. With other members of her circle, Acarie organized the foundation of the first convent of austere Discalced (“shoeless”) Carmelite nuns in Paris in 1602, before becoming involved in the process of establishing the Ursulines too (Diefendorf 2004). In 1611, Bérulle united a small number of priests in the Congregation of the Oratory, which was modelled on another foreign religious society established in 1556 by Philip Neri in Rome. Financial support to the tune of 50,000 livres from Charlotte-Marguerite de Gondi, Marchioness of Maignelay, placed the Oratorians on a footing secure enough to allow them to expand outside Paris. By 1630, they had seventythree houses, of which twenty-five were colleges, seminaries, or houses of retreat for other clergy (Bergin 2009; Forrestal 2004). Forty-eight of the seventy-two new convents and monasteries built in Paris in the first half of the century were for women, and the prominence of women both as founders and later patrons of the new convents of Capucines, Visitandines, Augustinians, Dominicans, Benedictines, and others is a remarkable feature of the Catholic reform movement (Diefendorf 2004; Rapley 1990, 1994). For example, the parents of Hélène-Angelique Luillier bestowed 45,000 livres on the first Visitation convent to be founded in Paris in 1620 when she entered it, which enabled her lay sister and niece to enjoy special privileges there for years. The rapidly expanding Order of the Visitation alone had three monasteries in the capital by 1660, and 107 in France at large, having been founded only a half century before in Annecy by François de Sales and the widow Jeanne Frémiot de Chantal (1572–1641) (Diefendorf 2004). Recent research on the development of religious behavior among dévots suggests that works of charity assumed greater importance as the seventeenth century proceeded, reducing the prevalence of more rigorous ascetic practices that had proved especially popular during the League years. In this area, laywomen surged to the fore of public works, such as soup kitchens, visits to the sick, and fundraising. Generally, the women involved had 205

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their greatest impact when they acted collectively in confraternities, organizations specially founded to encourage devotional or charitable activities. Those established on the model pioneered by Vincent de Paul (1581–1660) in Châtillon-lès-Dombez near Lyon in 1617 were highly influential. In Paris, one in particular, the Ladies of Charity of the Hôtel-Dieu hospital, became extremely popular with female aristocrats, merchants’ wives, and other prosperous groups (Forrestal 2017). Another, started by de Paul and the widow Louise de Marillac (1591–1660) in 1633, transformed into the Daughters of Charity, the majority of whose members came from lower society, the daughters of peasants, and often only learned to read and write after they joined the association. The Daughters lived together in a religious community, but they did not take solemn vows and were therefore not nuns. This was unconventional at that time. Imaginatively and rather daringly, to avoid pressure to have them turned into enclosed nuns, which would prevent them from working in the local community, de Paul and Marillac insisted that the Daughters were not a religious order but a confraternity whose members took private, simple, and renewable vows annually (of poverty, chastity, obedience, and service to the sick poor). With the street as their cloister – in the famous rallying call of de Paul – the group was the largest female religious organization in France by the turn of the century (Dinan 2006). These confraternities illustrate both the vibrancy of female religious engagement and the potential for innovation in religious thinking and practice during the Catholic Reformation. However, it should also be recognized that they were unusual in the extent to which they advocated for the active and formal agency of laywomen in public devotional expression, given the “circle of exclusions” that generally restricted female access to most positions of ecclesiastical, civil, and political leadership during this period. Furthermore, they offer proof that it was overwhelmingly laypeople and clerics from outside the episcopate that provided the early energy and resources to change or renew religious practices. Indeed, when bishops became more central from the 1640s, they owed much to the groundwork that had been carried out by these cohorts in the previous decades.

Institutional Reform The best evidence for this debt is provided by the introduction and growth of special institutions, known as seminaries, to train priests in French dioceses. This was a development with roots in Trent’s basic command that bishops should provide some form of college in their diocese to prepare men for ordination and parish ministry, but it took until the second half of the seventeenth century to work out what its features would be in France. In the end, the seminaries offered an innovative means of responding to this need more ­systematically – even though the French model concentrated on youths over eighteen rather than the twelve specified by the Council, and the education in theology and pastoral issues that the seminaries provided was often limited because it was less than six months long. Even so, it diverged markedly from the informal and decentralized ways in which priests had traditionally been trained; although the religious orders trained their novices in their monasteries, most candidates for priesthood learned the rudiments of the liturgy and preaching from their parish priest or a clerical relative before requesting that a bishop ordain them (Bergin 2009; Forrestal 2017). In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, a few bishops had attempted to establish seminaries, but only a few had survived because they lacked stable financial bases and sufficient personnel to run them. Both problems were resolved when patrons emerged, 206

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initially from wealthy laypeople, and new clerical congregations were founded to manage them. The foundation of Bérulle’s Oratorians was quickly followed by other new groups, like the clerical community of Saint Nicolas du Chardonnet (c. 1615), the Lazarists (1625), the Sulpicians (1641), and the Eudists (1643). Their activities began in a piecemeal fashion when the Saint Nicolas community began to offer short conferences at which clerics could discuss practical pastoral issues relevant to their ministry, such as preaching methods or types of sin they might encounter when confessing parishioners. They took a gigantic step forward in 1628 when the founder of the Lazarists, Vincent de Paul, arranged with Bishop Augustin Potier of Beauvais (d. 1650) that they would offer ten-day retreats for those proceeding to ordination in his diocese. Three years later, the archbishop of Paris invited the Lazarists to become the principal providers of residential retreats for ordinands of the diocese of Paris. From the late 1630s, the format for clerical education assumed its mature shape as the groups began to establish residential seminaries to train clergy to serve in parishes in dioceses throughout France. By 1660, thirty-six had been established, with a further eighty-one added before 1720 (Bergin 2009; Forrestal 2017). Reform-minded bishops also approached the improvement of religious discipline from other angles, including the diocesan visitations and synods which Trent had ordered. These gradually became a regular feature of diocesan government, particularly between 1640 and 1670, when episcopal concern for regulating devotional habits reached its peak (Hayden and Greenshields 2005; Hoffman 1984; Luria 1991). The bishops focused especially on improving the faithful’s participation in the sacraments – orders that they should attend mass in their parish every Sunday and complete both confession and communion at least once annually became common features of the regulations that they issued through their synods. But they were also concerned with the future, that is, with the formation of a new generation of lay Catholics versed in their religious and moral obligations. At a basic level, this meant requiring that the parish priest arrange for children to have regular lessons (known as catechesis) in which they could learn the basics, like the meaning of the Trinity, prayers such as the Creed, Our Father, and Hail Mary, how to make a confession and receive communion, and important gestures, such as the sign of the cross. From the 1650s onward, it became common for an approved catechism to be used for this purpose in order to ensure uniformity in what was taught (Carter 2011). It made sense to place this kind of teaching into a school setting, so that children could learn both from their parish priests and a school master or mistress. In this, it was often not bishops themselves who established the petites écoles, or “little schools”; but they worked with local communities who did so, capitalizing on their desire to have their children taught to read, write, and perhaps count, as well as to conduct themselves in ways that ensured social order. At times, the teachers were paid by the locals in kind or money, but this period also saw the development of religious orders that offered their services for this work, such as the Daughters of Charity (1633), the Sisters of Saint Thomas of Villanova (1661), and the Brothers of the Christian Schools (1683). The development of this system of education was patchy, especially in rural areas, but around Paris, the Daughters of Charity ran “little schools” in at least thirteen of the twenty-five parishes in which they worked by 1700. In some areas of the northeast, the “little schools” had become widespread by this time: Karen Carter’s research on Catholic primary education has found that 86% of parishes in the diocese of Reims and 88% in that of Châlons-sur-Marne were equipped with them by the end of the seventeenth century. It is important not to overstate the impact of these schools, however, for attendance was often poor (Carter 2011; Dinan 2006). 207

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The Fields of Mission As the Catholic Reformation evolved in France, the term “mission” came to have two related meanings. In its traditional New Testament or apostolic understanding, it referred to a sense of being “sent out” or called by God to propagate the Christian faith. In the reform era, it also came to refer to a formally organized campaign to evangelize in a specific locality or region. Importantly, too, the human targets or subjects of mission expanded – they now included Huguenots, Catholics at home, and settlers and natives of French overseas settlements. In France itself, the most significant innovation was the parish mission. Parishioners were long accustomed to visits from individual preachers who delivered rousing sermons to instruct, inspire, or edify them. However, the missions that became common in the seventeenth century were collective, were highly organized, and had a greater range of methods. They assumed a normative structure by the 1640s, largely through a process of experimentation beginning in the early 1600s. At first, it was mainly the new orders of Jesuits and Capuchins who set the tone, adapting strategies that they were already using in other areas of Europe to encourage participation. In general, these involved theatrical techniques to press home messages of repentance and conversion: for example, processions and ceremonial planting of crosses at parish limits, Forty Hours devotions, and public acts of penance, such as the trailing of the tongue along the ground (Bergin 2009; Châtellier 1997). Soon, other bands of clerics also began to travel on mission through the countryside, at first drawn together through word of mouth and acting on their own initiative. Adrien Bourdoise (1584–1655), the head of the community of Saint-Nicolas du Chardonnet, was particularly influential in developing the trend, and an influence on Vincent de Paul, who established a new congregation of clerics for the special purpose of rural missions in 1625. Each of the new groupings carried out intensive campaigns in parishes, which lasted anything from five days to four weeks, and in which they led parishioners through a regime of confession, communion, sermons, and catechesis (Bergin 2009; Forrestal 2017). Although the missionaries agreed on these essentials, there were important differences of approach. These become most sharply apparent when we compare the groups’ attitudes to Huguenot conversion. When targeting Huguenots, the Jesuits and Capuchins, for example, took an openly confrontational approach, so that Huguenots witnessed their ministers tackled in debates over the accuracy of their Bibles and were confronted by polemical preaching that unpicked their doctrines. The missionaries sought to demoralize Protestants, pressure them into converting, and draw a clear line of demarcation between the faiths in local communities (Luria 2005; Hanlon 1993). In contrast, de Paul forbade the Lazarist missionaries to engage in confrontations of any kind with Huguenots and devised tactics for their Catholic audiences that did not rely on high drama. They also spent more time than other missionaries on catechesis and emphasized their own humility in inviting conversions. Thus, not all manifestations of reform were overtly militant and triumphal; for some, the wars had the opposite effect, causing them to turn their attention exclusively to the devotion of Catholics and to avoid any activity that might unsettle relations between the faiths again (Forrestal 2017). Missions cost money, and donations flowed to missionaries to cover the costs of travel and lodging as well as teaching aids, like holy pictures and rosary beads. Many wealthy dévots also used their resources to endow missions on their lands: when, in 1625, the noble couple Philippe-Emmanuel and Françoise-Marguerite de Gondi provided an endowment 208

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of 45,000 livres to enable de Paul to found the Lazarists, they specified that its members should complete missions on their estates every five years, devoting “themselves entirely and exclusively to the salvation of the poor common people” in order that God would be “honoured on [the Gondi] estates.” Many other patrons followed in their wake, including the Duchess of Aiguillon, niece of Cardinal Richelieu, who paid for regular missions on her family’s lands around the town of Richelieu in the center-west, and further south, around Aiguillon and Agen (Forrestal 2017). The foundation of new dévot associations enabled many laypeople to take on active roles in deciding on the location, size, and targets of missions. In 1632, the Capuchin Père Hyacinthe de Paris established the Company of the Propagation of the Faith specifically for the conversion of heretics. It organized missions to areas with large Huguenot populations and even trained its lay members to engage in controversy with them. It also founded convents to house and instruct female converts, young and old, and its members watched hawkishly in areas with large Huguenot populations to ensure that the terms of the Edict of Nantes were interpreted as strictly as possible (Bergin 2009; Luria 2005). The Company was an offshoot of the most important of this type of association, the Company of the Holy Sacrament, a male grouping founded five years earlier. Dominated by its lay members, its interests were all-encompassing, ranging from improvements to liturgical practices to eradication of public drunkenness, prostitution, and dueling. In Paris alone, it attracted about 450 members, many of them from prominent families of the old nobility and the robe, such as the Lamoignon. Branches grew in many other towns, including Lyon, Marseille, Aix, Grenoble, Bordeaux, and Rouen (some of which lasted until the 1730s, despite the Crown’s suppression of the Company in 1660). In its quest to “do all good and prevent all evil,” the Company developed a special interest in organizing missions, particularly in America and Asia. It also spearheaded the foundation of the Society of Foreign Missions (or Foreign Missions of Paris) in the early 1660s, whose remit included the formation of French missionaries in its seminary, as well as the foundation of churches and training of native clergy for Asia and North America (quoted in Bergin 2009; Forrestal 2017).

The French Crown and Reform Louis XIV was listed among the financial supporters of the Society of Foreign Missions, and the Crown regularly lent its aid to other ventures initiated and organized by Catholic activists. There were two reasons for this. Firstly, it relied on these private initiatives to encourage greater political integration and public order; secondly, it was forced to do so when it did not possess the ability to act without dévot collaboration. The best example of this is the establishment of the Parisian General Hospital in the late 1650s. The new hospital was designed as a place of confinement for the rising number of vagrants that thronged the streets of the capital. In 1657, the Crown formally established it by a series of royal decrees that amalgamated six existing institutes of charity in the city. However, the huge institution depended on the willingness of a configuration of devout and wealthy subjects to take charge of it thereafter, in the interests of public piety and social order. Indeed, the project had originated with the Company of the Holy Sacrament, and its members, along with the Ladies of Charity of the Hôtel-Dieu, proved dogged in their efforts to gain official sanction for it during the 1650s and active in fundraising and administration once it was erected (Forrestal 2017; McHugh 2007). 209

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In this instance and others, the Crown latched onto proposals and plans that had emerged independently of it to achieve its goals. This was a characteristic of its engagement with the reform movement from the start, because the Bourbons’ early survival required them to support dévot aspirations for religious renewal and the return of the Catholic Church to a position of eminence unrivalled by Protestantism. In his determination to impose peace after he converted to Catholicism, Henri IV had sought to win the loyalty of former opponents by lavishing favors on new Catholic foundations and works in a bid to reassure them of the Catholic character of the Bourbon monarch and monarchy, and to enhance royal control over the ecclesiastical domain. For example, he founded the famous Jesuit College of La Flèche in 1604 and five Capuchin friaries, as well as giving generous grants to an assortment of other orders, some of which had been among his most vociferous opponents during the wars. Marie de’ Medici, Louis XIII, and Anne of Austria adopted a similar tactic, with Anne in particular lavishing funds on causes associated with the confraternities of charity promoted by de Paul and de Marillac (Dinan 2006; Forrestal 2017). The rulers also placed considerable emphasis on their patronage of the episcopate. Under the terms of the 1516 Concordat of Bologna, the French king held the right to nominate bishops within the French Church. By the late 1630s, dévots like de Paul were exercising influence in the decision-making, and in 1643, Louis XIII decided to exploit this when he established the Council of Ecclesiastical Affairs (commonly known as the Council of Conscience) to formalize the process of selection. Although subsequently heavily circumscribed by Cardinal Mazarin’s reluctance to allow religious idealism to trump political realism, the Crown could not afford to ignore the former entirely. As a result, nominees increasingly met at least the criteria that the dévots demanded as a minimum – over age thirty, ordained, educated to university level, and with experience of pastoral care – and a substantial number subsequently became active reformers in their dioceses, such as Nicolas Sévin, who became bishop of Cahors in 1659 and was an associate of de Paul (Bergin 1998; Forrestal 2004, 2017). In the first four decades of the century, their common interest in Catholic reform and renewal allowed dévots to present a united front. From the 1640s, however, the onset of what became known as the Jansenist controversy meant that differences in theological and pastoral opinion threatened to squander the energy of reform in the Church, as the unity of the dévot movement split into pro- and anti-Jansenist factions (Wright 2011). Of the many texts produced by both sides, two were central to the conflict: the Augustinus, published by the bishop of Ypres, Cornelius Jansen, in 1640, and De la Fréquente communion, published by Antoine Arnauld in 1643. When the first appeared in print, claiming to perpetuate the theology of the fourth-century church father Augustine, it quickly attracted accusations, especially from Jesuits, that its author had distorted the saint’s doctrines on grace, sin, free will, and salvation. This was because Jansen advocated a strict understanding of redemption in which confession and communion should only be made available to those who were already holy. Moreover, he seemed to infer that that these people formed an elect who had been chosen by God for salvation, and his detractors thought this was suspiciously close to Calvinist thinking on predestination. Simultaneously, however, the book earned praise, which reflected the presence of a particularly strict approach to moral discipline within the dévot movement (known as rigorism). Prominent among Jansen’s champions was his longtime associate Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, the abbot of Saint-Cyran, who encouraged his protégé Arnauld to publish Fréquente communion as a vindication of Jansen’s work. This had a galvanizing effect on the emergence of pro- and anti-Jansenist parties in France. 210

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Thereafter, public interest was held further captive by a startling train of events, including the miracle of the holy thorn and the appearance of Blaise Pascal’s Lettres provinciales in 1657, which defended Jansenist doctrines by ridiculing the Jesuit approach to moral issues in an audience-friendly format. Pope Urban VIII issued a papal bull (Cum occasione) against five alleged Jansenist propositions in 1653, but it and subsequent condemnations failed to quench the flame of quarrel (Sedgwick 1977). From an early stage, the conflict also raised testing questions about Gallicanism, which meant that it became highly politicized, and the Crown took a keen interest in its outcome. In particular, four bishops and convents of nuns at Port-Royal des Champs and Port-Royal de Paris came under sustained pressure to repudiate Jansenist teaching but found backing from many Gallicans who denied the right of the pope to intervene in what was an affair of the French Church, even if they did not otherwise share their beliefs (Kostroun 2011). Ultimately, Louis XIV’s decision in 1713 to accept yet another papal bull (Unigenitus) in a bid to enforce obedience to a narrow interpretation of orthodoxy settled the affair publicly, but Jansenist sympathizers transferred their culture of resistance to other areas of political and social life during the eighteenth century (Bryant 2017; Doyle 2000). The division and longevity of this controversy remind us forcefully that dévot activism in the Catholic Reformation was a multifaceted phenomenon, characterized by a mix of tradition and novelty, conservatism and innovation, as it evolved. Drawing on a broad set of resources, its proponents were united in their basic quest for Catholic reform, renewal, and resurgence but varied in the suppositions and methods that they applied to achieve them.

References Amalou, Thierry. 2009. “Obedience to the King and Attachment to Tradition: Senlis under the Early Bourbons (1598–1643).” In Politics and Religion in Early Bourbon France, edited by Alison Forrestal and Eric Nelson, 221–45. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bergin, Joseph. 1998. The Making of the French Episcopate, 1589–1661. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. ———. 2009. Church, Society and Religious Change in France 15801730. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. ———. 2014. The Politics of Religion in Early Modern France. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Bryant, Mark. 2017. “The Catholic Church and its Dissenters, 1685–1715.” In The Third Reign of Louis XIV, c.1682–1715, edited by Guy Rowlands and Julia Prest, 145–61. New York: Routledge. Carter, Karen E. 2011. Creating Catholics. Catechism and Primary Education in Early Modern France. Notre Dame, Ind: University of Notre Dame Press. Châtellier, Louis. 1997. The Religion of the Poor. Rural Missions in Europe and the Formation of Modern Catholicism, c.1500–1800. Translated by Brian Pearce. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Diefendorf, Barbara. 2004. From Penitence to Charity. Pious Women in Catholic Reformation Paris. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dinan, Susan. 2006. Women and Poor Relief in Seventeenth-Century France: The Early History of the Daughters of Charity. Aldershot: Ashgate. Doyle, William. 2000. Jansenism: Catholic Resistance to Authority from the Reformation to the French Revolution. New York: Saint Martin’s Press. Forrestal, Alison. 2004. Fathers, Pastors and Kings: Visions of Episcopacy in Seventeenth-Century France. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ———. 2017. Vincent de Paul, the Lazarist Mission, and French Catholic Reform. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hanlon, Gregory. 1993. Confession and Community in Seventeenth-Century France. Catholic and Protestant Coexistence in Aquitaine. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Alison Forrestal Hayden, J. Michael, and Malcolm Greenshields. 2005. 600 Years of Reform. Bishops and the French Church, 1190–1789. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Hoffman, Philip. 1984. Church and Community in the Diocese of Lyon, 1500–1789. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Kostroun, Daniele. 2011. Feminism, Absolutism, and Jansenism: Louis XIV and the Port-Royal Nuns. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Luria, Keith. 1991. Territories of Grace. Cultural Change in the Seventeenth-Century Diocese of Grenoble. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ———. 2005. Sacred Boundaries. Religious Coexistence and Conflict in Early Modern France. Washington: Catholic University of America Press. Martin, A. Lynn. 1988. The Jesuit Mind. The Mentality of an Elite in Early Modern France. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. McHugh, Timothy. 2007. Hospital Politics in Seventeenth-Century France: The Crown, Urban Elites and the Poor. Aldershot: Ashgate. Rapley, Elizabeth. 1990. The Dévotes. Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. ———. 1994. “Women and the Religious Vocation in Seventeenth-Century France.” French Historical Studies 18 (3): 613–31. www.jstor.org/stable/286686. Sales, François de. 1989. Introduction to the Devout Life. Edited and translated by John K. Ryan. New York: Doubleday. Sedgwick, Alexander. 1977. Jansenism in Seventeenth-Century France. Voices in the Wilderness. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Tingle, Elisabeth. 2009. “The Origins of Counter Reform Piety in Nantes, 1585–1617.” In Politics and Religion in Early Bourbon France, edited by Alison Forrestal and Eric Nelson, 203–20. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wright, Anthony D. 2011. The Divisions of French Catholicism, 1629–1645: ‘The Parting of the Ways’. Aldershot: Ashgate.

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20 THE ROYAL MANUFACTORIES OF ABSOLUTIST FRANCE Luxury Production and the Politics and Culture of Mercantilism Florian Knothe Introduction The French royal manufactories, established principally under Louis XIV (1638–1715, r. 1643–1715), represent institutions of international significance for their social setup, their concentration of artistic excellence, and their political status as rivals to well-established guilds (Havard and Vachon 1889; Gerspach 1892; Guiffrey 1912). They excelled in imagemaking and representation and demonstrate how the French Crown assembled Europe’s greatest master craftsmen and artists to carefully construct, install, and distribute (by diplomatic gift) a meticulously “edited” iconography that has influenced Western art and political imagery down to the present. These new enterprises were well funded, international, Île-de-France-based workshops as well as training facilities. The Gobelins workshops also included churches and a school – benefits immigrant artists were offered to lure them to France – and thus the manufacturing enterprise also represents a role model for early modern sponsorship of talent regardless of individuals’ backgrounds. Beyond the novel administrative setup, the hybrid apprenticeship system practiced within the workshops created a new alternative to the medieval guild system, offering naturalization and economic security to those less favored by the older structures. In so doing, the royal manufactories navigated between politics, education, and social welfare, and they established a system that prospered in different constellations throughout the eighteenth century and, against all odds, manifested itself in reorganized structures after the French Revolution in 1789 (Cole 1939, vol. II, 287–91; Wilson 1958; Stürmer 1982, 220–21). The strong social ties between the royal workshops and the French nobility and rising merchant class is of further importance. Not only did the elite artists produce for elite circles, but they also established an early elite industry that imported fine raw materials and created artifacts of unprecedented and unparalleled quality and repute. While mercantilism is generally seen as a form of protectionism, the royal workshops served as an important and novel platform turning foreign goods, artistic talent, and cultural tradition into something entirely French and, eventually, exportable. They helped establish Paris, the seat of the French Crown, as the capital of fashionable luxury production and consumption – economic and social values that still matter today. 213

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This artistic and commercial influence was underpinned by scientific experimentation and discovery. On a semi-industrial scale, the royal workshops profited from the scientific revolution of the Enlightenment and helped drive it. The academic network of the royal manufactories and academies, and the applied experimentation and enhanced production that resulted from it, had wide influence and reached their pinnacle with Colbert’s systematic application of mercantilism and the workshops he established in its name since 1662 (Ekelund and Tollison 1997; Kaplan and Koepp 1986; Magnussen 1994; Minard 1998).

Art Patronage and the Establishment and Success of Royal Workshops in France An interest in art patronage and collecting was first notably exercised by François I (1494– 1547) in the 1530s, when the king built a gallery and patronized workshops at Fontainebleau for its decoration. While the king continued to commission textiles from tapestry weavers in Brussels, he also made workrooms available to the Flemish master weavers Jean and Pierre Le Bries, who directed the weaving of tapestries at Fontainebleau between 1541 and 1550 (Brassat 1992, 131; Campbell 2007, 107–9). In addition, painters, including the Italians Giovanni Battista Rosso (1495–1540, in France since October 1530, at Fontainebleau in 1535) and, later, Francesco Primaticcio (1504–1570, at Fontainebleau 1532–1570), as well as cartoon painters such as Claude Badouin (at Fontainebleau 1535–1550), formed part of the workforce and contributed, either by supplying designs or models, to the manufacture of tapestries – the most costly and precious artifacts of the time. However, the total number of artisans participating in royal production was low, with the size of the atelier comparable to that of contemporary guild workshops (Vitet 1861, 69–70). According to Heinrich Göbel, the weavers, who were of Flemish and Parisian origin, also continued to operate independent private ateliers in and around Fontainebleau and Paris, suggesting that payment for the royal commissions was either late or insufficient and that, in order to survive, the master weavers chose to remain independent entrepreneurs, supplying as large a circle of clients as possible (Göbel 1928, vol. I, 38). François I’s enthusiasm for embellishing the Château de Fontainebleau had most probably been influenced by the ever-growing awareness among the French aristocracy of contemporary Italian collections. This curiosity survived the Wars of Religion (1560–1598), when a restrained public image forbade inessential spending, and was strengthened by ties of marriage (1533) with the Medici family, who cultivated art patronage and education (Erben 2004, 24–26). Support for artists was stimulated ultimately by Henri IV’s political success in ending the Wars of Religion and centralizing monarchical power. With the return of economic prosperity, the king was soon employing artists and artisans to redecorate parts of the Château de Fontainebleau and to extend the Louvre (Verne 1924, 36–41). While the ambition to create a center of artistic culture at court to rival those of Italy had been anticipated by his predecessors, Henri IV’s establishment of royal workshops at the Louvre was unprecedented inasmuch as it regrouped existing ateliers into a larger and more diverse enterprise. The ateliers, opened in 1602 and protected by royal letters patent from December 22, 1608, housed French painters, sculptors, carpet and tapestry weavers, cabinetmakers, silversmiths, engravers, and printers as well as mathematicians. Here, privileged artists were promoted to work as artisans du roi, receiving accommodation and, in many cases, the additional security of further attachment to the royal household by becoming valets de 214

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chambre to the king. In establishing these ateliers, Henri IV clearly expressed the ambition both to support unfortunate workers and to attract an elite group of master craftsmen. In return, he obliged his royal artisans to train apprentices who would later spread their knowledge and communicate their skill throughout the kingdom. The studios in the Grande Galerie remained organized as individual workshops, offering, among other privileges, exemption from guild regulations. The selected artisans du roi were physically and legally separated from the master craftsmen of the guilds and escaped their strict production laws and control visits and, under royal edict, were permitted to practice several different artistic professions at once (Scott 1995, 53). During the second half of the seventeenth century, this privilege became most important for the complex production of furniture, as numerous different craftsmen, wood- and metalworkers, collaboratively achieved the monumental artworks and stylistic repertoire that characterize the “Louis XIV style.” Subsequently, the manufacture of luxury items could also employ materials and techniques previously practiced in neighboring countries, such as in the Italian or German principalities, but not commonly known, or allowed to be practiced, within the guild system in France. By relaxing the laws within the royal workshop, the concentration of artistic production in France consequently became part of an economic strategy at this time. Even before the establishment of workshops at the Louvre and the granting of letters patent and privileges to master craftsmen, Henri IV passed the first trade law (December 7, 1599), prohibiting the importation of foreign tapestries – a measure employed to support and protect local manufacture. In order to reduce imports, and with the aim to control the domestic economy and develop local manufacture, the Crown followed mercantilist politics in that it invested heavily in adopting foreign knowledge, technology, and craftsmen from the early seventeenth century onward. To further this action, Henri IV invited two Flemish tapestry weavers, Marc Comans (1563–1644) and François de la Planche (1573–1627), in 1607 to set up a workshop in Paris, with the intention of stopping the import of Flemish tapestries and expanding and technically advancing French textile weaving. The two men were offered a title, a monopoly over production for 15 years, and 100,000 livres to establish a large shop in 1602 that consequently became the Gobelins factory (Brisson 1906, 147). When Henri IV first granted artisans workshops, he established the social, economic, and legal basis upon which the royal manufactories would grow (“Privileges accordez aux ouvriers qui demeurent dans la gallerie du Louvre”). His plans to create a single but mixed enterprise and to centralize artistic production developed in parallel with the structural modernization of the Bâtiments du Roi and enhanced the patronage, albeit predominantly, of individual artists and small-scale shops, as, despite his ambitions, this first measure only led to a comparatively small enterprise during his reign. The centralization of political power and culture did not survive the reign of Henri IV, and his assassination in 1610 was followed by the discontinuity of royal dominance upon cultural benefaction from the 1610s to the 1650s (Chantrel 1995; Clark 1998, 422). During this period, the previously established royal workshops survived without further development, and the earlier tradition of individual support for writers and artists regained importance. Although a steady rise in the appointment of highly skilled workmen throughout the years of Louis XIII’s reign has been recorded, the royal workshops at the Louvre remained small, and their production modest. The royal manufactory – as an institution – expanded only when the first Flemish tapestry weavers, Marc Comans and François de la Planche, were joined by other foreign artisans, including the Italian Pierre Lefèbvre, favored for their 215

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work and reputation and invited to work in France by Cardinal Jules Mazarin (1602–1661) and First Minister and Intendant of Finance Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683) (Weigert 1962, 33). Unlike the organization of textile production in Flanders, in France master weavers in the royal workshops were subordinate to painters, whose models they copied (Brosens 2004). Their affiliation to artists and their housing at the Louvre therefore followed the need of practice. However, alongside the introduction of collaboration between workshops at the Louvre, additional independent tapestry-weaving ateliers were installed at the former dye-works of the Gobelins family in the Faubourg Saint-Marcel. Whereas the artisans of the Louvre were of French origin, the king’s support at the Gobelins was specifically intended to attract foreign artists to Paris. Politically, Henri IV and Maximilien de Béthune, duc de Sully (1559–1641), conseiller d’état in 1596, and surintendant des finances in 1598–1611, and, under them, Barthélemy de Laffemas, whose Les trésors et richesses pour mettre l’estat en splendeur (Paris 1598) introduced a new approach to economic policy, set an early example of mercantilist policy by establishing the first artisans at the Galerie du Louvre. The attempt to attract foreign workers, the adoption of foreign technologies, and the production of goods in imitation of those abroad in order to cut imports – Flemish tapestries among other luxury goods – were initiatives that followed mercantilist principles, however limited their application in practice. The partial development of an education system and the uninterrupted, though weak, support for the arts by government officials indicates a continuous interest in culture and philanthropy since the early seventeenth century that proved to be of importance to the schools established at the Académie and the Gobelins in the mid-century. Upon Henri’s death, his widow, Maria de’ Medici, continued royal patronage, but her tenure was overshadowed by warfare, the Thirty Years’ War in 1618–1648 and the Fronde in 1648–1653, and altogether the support for art and artists shifted. During the childhood of Louis XIII, Richelieu, and later Mazarin, supported artists to build up their own collections on behalf of the Crown (Schnapper 1986, 185–202, esp. 190–94). This tradition of statesmen excelling as great patrons of the arts was later continued and grown by Colbert and Louvois, who, like Sully, became surintendents des Bâtiments du Roi, and, like Richelieu and Mazarin, earned the trust and financial backing of their king. Like Sully under Henri IV, but with much more money and time at his disposal, Colbert, who also held until his death the positions of contrôleur des Finances (since 1665), as well as the art-related vice-protectorship of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (since 1663), wanted to build up a monopoly of luxury production in France so that its economy would profit by exports to Europe.1 Under Louis XIV, effective control over the royal household remained with the intendant des Bâtiments, as it had been under Henri IV and Louis XIII, and the offices of the surintendant des Bâtiments and the minister of finance were combined. Further, also like Henri IV, Colbert encouraged formal education of artists and pressed for the transfer of knowledge by foreign masters to local apprentices (Sée 1925, 104–5; Göbel 1928, vol. I, 82–83 and 113). Although the newly established École Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture and École des Gobelins followed the concept and idea of the earlier schools at the Trinité and Louvre, it was only under Colbert that the overall political and economic conditions were successfully stabilized to launch and profit from the costly investment in foreign expertise (Apostolidès 1981, 25). In his view, artistic production should serve broad political and economic ends rather than increase individual or, at best, guild prosperity (Göbel 1928, vol. I, 84). Colbert believed that in order to 216

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strengthen French industry, he needed to control it through the enforcement of regulations (Cole 1939, vol. II, 363). His policy was based on the principle that the power of the state was dependent on a flourishing economy, and in developing the royal manufactories, he made them play a significant role in fulfilling this goal (Collins 1995, 91–91). Colbertism, Colbert’s mercantilist policy, was strongly based both on protectionism and nationalism and practically introduced an early form of capitalism by supporting a mercantile system that promoted domestic production and trade and allowed successful entrepreneurs and, through taxes, the state to prosper financially (Wilson 1958, 23; Ekelund and Tollison 1997, 106–16). However, in socioeconomic terms, Colbert’s mercantilism was limited by the fact that overwhelming emphasis was placed on the luxury market enjoyed and financed by the Crown, with little impact on the greater national economy (Wilson 1958, 23–24). The successful enforcement of Colbert’s economic policy and the development of royal manufacture were aided by the representational needs of the king and the public display of gloire. The state-controlled art production apparatus resulting from Colbert’s reforms also meant that the French nobility had very limited access to the objets de luxe originating with the royal manufactories and, consequently, played a reduced role in supporting and commissioning as well as also importing art. The royal monopoly determined the distribution of luxury objects – an aspect that exemplifies the protectionism that existed both in and outside France. Under Louis XIV, the incentive for production, its organization, and the foundation of more royal manufactories resulted in the promotion of a highly sophisticated and successful system of manufacture. In contrast to the situation at the Louvre workshops, cooperation became one distinct characteristic at the Manufacture royale des meubles de la Couronne aux Gobelins, where Le Brun directed a large number of workshops and artisans of a dozen different professions who produced, after his designs, tapestries, furniture, and silver, among other objects, for the royal interiors and as vehicles of royal propaganda (Lacordaire 1852, 23–24). The incorporation of its many different professions was a novelty, and the continuation of the diverse ateliers previously in operation in the faubourg Saint-Marcel and elsewhere allowed for the weaving of all Gobelins tapestries within the manufactory’s walls and after Le Brun’s designs, while the master craftsmen remained independent entrepreneurs. Altogether, the Manufacture des Gobelins consisted of more than 300 workers, many of whom were previously established immigrants of Flemish or Italian origin (Havard and Vachon 1889, 99). The Gobelins’s internal structure and direction was marked primarily by its submission to Colbert and the collaboration of the workshops with other royal institutions. As many of the painters employed at the Gobelins were also members of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture and both institutions were led by Le Brun, the influence of academic theory was felt at the manufactory (Gady 2010, 233–64 and 299–361). The particular relationship between the Gobelins and the Académie strengthened their artistic articulation and allowed the royal artisans to develop a stylistic vocabulary that was influenced by a more theoretical training than previously practiced by the crafts and by Le Brun’s artistic supervision (Knothe 2016, 51–57). In doing so, the artisans du roi had access to resources unavailable to other privileged craftsmen and most guildsmen.2 The Gobelins became an academy for the decorative arts in that it gained the right to teach life drawing and, thereby, offered to its apprentices a practical workshop-based training combined with drawing lessons and technical instruction to enhance the theoretical understanding of art – a program otherwise only practiced at the Académie Royale. The principal teachers who 217

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formed the Académie des Gobelins were François Bonnemer (1638–1689), Antoine Coyzevox (1640–1720), Sébastien Le Clerc (1637–1714), Jean-Baptiste Tuby (1635–1700), and François Verdier (1651–1730), all members of the Académie. They taught drawing at the Gobelins but did not lecture on art theory. Both their personal work and teaching were influenced by the artistic style of Le Brun, upon whom their employment at the Gobelins and involvement in projects at numerous royal châteaux depended. Apart from individual commissions that were channeled through the network of the Bâtiments du Roi, the artists at both the Académie and the Gobelins received a royal pension, as well as free accommodation and workshop space. In 1671, Louis XIV and Colbert confirmed the rights and privileges of the Louvre artisans and granted them privileges, indicating an interest in elite professionalism. The Crown provided lodgings and stipends to artists and privileged them to improve their skills and distinguish themselves from the “commun des autres artisans.”3 This change in policy was an attempt to organize production more effectively, making it coherent with Colbert’s mercantilist policies (Knothe 2016, 34–39). From their beginnings, the Gobelins workshops operated under the artistic direction of Le Brun and were dependent politically and financially on Colbert as directeur des Bâtiments du Roi (1662–1683) and surintendant des finances (1665–83), who banned foreign imports from his country by introducing import limitations and taxes and developed French industries by subsidizing their production. Therefore, with regards to mercantilism, the Gobelins became a showpiece, strictly modelled on the strategic ideas of importing foreign technologies and skill and teaching these to French apprentices. Manufacturing followed mercantilist policy, as the importation of knowledge strengthened an indigenous labor force. The royal edict for the Gobelins workshop introduced instructions for the integration of foreign workers, the training of local apprentices, and the privileged conditions for becoming master craftsmen and for naturalization of foreign masters. In addition to the tapestry workshops, manufactories for other types of luxury goods were established, such as the glass manufactory at Saint Gobain and the ceramics factory at Saint Cloud, as well as the many silk-weaving shops at Lyon and in Saint Maur in Paris. Production at the royal manufactory of mirrors in the Faubourg Saint Antoine and the numerous manufactories of lacework in Puy, Aurillac, Alençon, Bourges, and Auxerres, all established under Colbert in 1665, deliberately involved Italian craftsmen to transfer their artistic traditions to French successors (Brisson 1906, 152–55). The founding legislation of the Gobelins indicates the presence of political interests and highlights the importance of royal manufactories with regards to the commercial policies of absolutism. The manufactures royales were, however, only one among many measures in Colbert’s strategy to build domestic state-controlled production in France, and they symbolize how the economic system was linked to and dependent upon the absolutist rule of the royal administration (Deyon and Guignet 1980, 614). Colbert’s appointment as directeurs des Bâtiments du Roi influenced and facilitated his decision to develop royal workshops as one pillar of his economic policy. He did not trust and systematically ended private initiatives, such as the support of artistic and literary talent by individuals like Nicolas Fouquet (1615–1680), Vicomte de Melun et Vaux and Superintendent of Finance from 1653 until 1661, for, at times, their own political propaganda, as he judged them difficult to control, and sought to position the king and royal household as the principal benefactors of artistic production. The high nobility, to which many important collectors and private patrons of art belonged in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, was deprived of its former political influence by Louis XIV after the 218

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Fronde, when ministerial positions were entrusted to ambitious and hardworking career administrators in an attempt to create a calm and politically stable regime (Hauser 1990, 472 and 520; Collins 1995, 88–90). After the disgrace of Fouquet, private patronage – so important under Richelieu and Mazarin – was discouraged, and royal patronage re-emphasized.4 Colbert enforced new economic measures, partly to end his predecessor’s influence, and partly to strengthen his own relationship with the Crown, in support of mercantilism that would dramatically change French manufacture.5 In so doing, the textile manufactory of Van Robais and the glass manufactory of Saint Gobain both became very successful following these measures (Cochin 1865, Chapter I; Chaplain 1983; Hamon and Mathieu 2006). The Gobelins, on the contrary, was less innovative technologically but provided both goods of the highest quality and the most advanced training program for apprentices of the time. His attempts to forbid imports of objets de luxe by law proved more successful than the measures taken by Henri IV but never fully kept foreign textiles and silver from entering France. In addition, the organization of state-controlled concerns led to the development of French manufactories that supplied a domestic and, to a much lesser extent, an international market previously dominated by foreign producers. Although, like the ministers before him, Colbert acted as a private patron against the official regulations he himself implemented, he worked with unparalleled enthusiasm to turn existing private workshops into state-controlled academies and manufactories. As surintendant des Bâtiments, he oversaw the staffing, the production, and the distribution of art, allowing Le Brun to organize the workforce and to guide both the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture and the royal workshops in artistic matters (Gady 2010, 303). At the Gobelins, Le Brun’s personal interest and ambition to develop artistic production of both fine and decorative artifacts complemented as well as depended upon the newly implemented economic policy that provided for, at least in the prosperous 1660s and 1670s, continuous growth in manufacture (Schnapper 1996, 17–22, esp. p. 19). With regards to the Gobelins, the restrictions on imports were of great importance, as all possibility of expanding its market abroad had been curtailed by its obligation to produce for the Crown in the first instance. Under Louis XIV, the Manufacture royale des meubles de la Couronne, like the Maincy workshops before, delivered exclusively to their patron, who financed their production to furnish his household and satisfy his needs for representation and gloire. The Garde-Meuble received and administered all newly produced paintings and pieces of sculpture, tapestry, furniture, and silver, most of which were displayed in the royal households or presented as diplomatic gifts. More than his predecessors, Louis XIV became an important collector who invested heavily in one single source of artistic production (Bluche 1985, 99). The importance of the Gobelins, however, amounts to more than their manufacture of artifacts and their training of young artists, as both workshops and schools under royal patronage had existed before. However, unlike these precursors, the Gobelins, from its inception in 1662, was involved in producing propaganda and in fabricating the image of the king. In essence, it was a political tool as well as an economic concern. This development guarantied continuous support for the royal artists who added to the royal collection. The royal tapestries, among other artifacts, propagated a political message and served publicly at royal receptions and processions to proclaim the strength of the Bourbon dynasty. Under Louis XIV, this political strategy was both a continuation of the abundant art patronage of François I and Henri IV – and repeated mention of Louis’s dynastic strength and heritage explicitly propagated its historic significance – as well as a renewed employment of art to 219

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serve and further gloire expressed, among other examples, by the visualizing of the king’s achievements in domestic and foreign politics (Erben 2004, 42–43, and 294–98). Socially, royal support, both political and financial, and the development of artistic production in seventeenth-century France led indirectly to the rise of the status of the artist (Goubert 1982, 46). Although the Académie Royale certainly referred to Italian cinquecento arguments to raise the standing of its members above that of craftsmen and artisans, in offering privileges to both fine and decorative artists, Louis XIV, and, to a lesser degree, Henri IV before him, rejected ambitions to separate the “arts nobles” from the “arts mécaniques.” With their backing in the form of freedom from strict guild regulations, traditional classifications and divisions within the organization of artisanal manufacture were bridged, allowing for the cooperation of craftsmen of different professions who created the innovative and divers objets d’art that became characteristic of the Louis XIV style. From the 1690s, the Gobelins lost its importance, not only as a chief designer, but also as producer of an unparalleled variety of decorative artifacts and, thereby, its authority over neighboring workshops. The patronage for Le Brun – and, to a lesser extent, the Gobelins – decreased after the death of Colbert in 1683, and more of the artistic production was entrusted to Mignard by Colbert’s successor, Louvois. However, it is noteworthy that, also at this time, most of the interior decoration and a large part of the gardens at Versailles had been completed, and therefore, Le Brun would not have been involved in as many ongoing and new projects as before. However, although the near completion of the building activity – it never ended – has been seen as another reason for the dismissal of Le Brun, it is worth noting that he remained in charge of all continuous work on decorative schemes at Versailles until his death and that, with regards to the Gobelins, his influence upon royal manufacture persisted under Louvois. Altogether, the continuation of Le Brun and very few other well-paid and highly privileged royal artist suggests that the artistic directorate at Versailles and its influence over design and execution at the royal manufactories were monopolized and that the structure and leadership of the Bâtiments du Roi made it very difficult for skilled artists without royal patronage to advance in their careers. Although, following the establishment of the royal manufactories, the monopoly was clearly held by the artisans du roi there and the few artists and scientists in the Galerie du Louvre who worked continuously for the royal palaces, a few independent entrepreneurs established themselves as regular suppliers to the court. One of them was Jean Titon, who was subcontracted by the Gobelins embroiderer Philibert Balland in 1672 to produce a piece after a model by Nicolas Loir – a design controlled by Le Brun (Gady 2010, 62–63). Another regular supplier was Simon Delobel, who delivered, as marchand-tapissier, textiles and upholstered furniture to the Garde-Meuble for palaces in Paris and Marly in the 1670s and 1680s (Guiffrey 1885–86, vol. II, nos. 191, 192, 347 and 348–49). It is worth noting that, despite the fact that the Gobelins, together with other royal manufactories, produced a wide range of furnishings for the royal châteaux, other entrepreneurs, like Delobel, who worked with master weavers, embroiderers, joiners, and upholsterers, also had a small share in this exclusive market. More than any artisan du roi, Delobel specialized in the manufacture of textile-hung beds, of which, according to the surviving records, he was a principal supplier.

Conclusion The manufactures royales produced luxurious “royal” art indicative and visually representative of the wealth and dominance of the Bourbon reign. Furthermore, as they initially 220

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highly relied on imported talent, they – to further mercantilism – exemplified how foreign influences could be assimilated, adapted, and transferred by training local artisans in order to preserve and make more “French” the rich representation of “gloire” that France fast became world-famous for.6 From about the mid-1680s onward, and even before the reduction of their workshops between 1694 and 1699, an interest in and commissioning of individual artist of several different professions shifted slowly from those at the Gobelins to ateliers at the Louvre. There, Jean Berain, André-Charles Boulle, and François Girardon, among others, found much more regular employment with the Crown and became some of the most important artists in their fields. The economic changes following the Crown’s participation in the War of the League of Augsburg (1688–1697) turned many members of the aristocracy against Louis XIV and led to a more modern era. Many courtiers opposed the stiff courtly routine at Versailles and moved back to Paris. There they commissioned newly designed furniture and interiors from guild masters that were influenced by artists at the Louvre rather in the more baroque and majestic style produced at the Gobelins. Although different professions remained active at the Gobelins throughout the eighteenth century, the taste for the monumental baroque for which the royal manufactory had gained its reputation had passed. Stylistically, the lighter and more playful designs by Berain led the Louvre-dominated artistic manufacture around the turn of the century. Altogether, these developments allowed Paris to become the artistic capital of Europe. This success was based in part upon the artistic production at the workshops of the royal manufactories and the Louvre and reflected a shift toward larger production sites that were heavily influenced as well as supported by the financial input of the French Crown. Royal patronage had led to an unparalleled development of the arts and the cultural fortification of Bourbon monarchy.

Notes Article 17 of the Édit du Roy of 1667 repeats the import law issued under Henri IV in 1601. 1 2 An apprenticeship at the Gobelins differed little in organization and time invested from one completed in a guild shop. The transfer of technical skill took place at a loom or workbench; only the offering of drawing lessons and the involvement of Gobelins painters and sculptors in academic debate at the academy added an extra course elsewhere unavailable. The Académie de Saint-Luc started offering drawing classes in 1705, and Jean-Jacques Bachelier’s Ecole Gratuite de Dessin was founded for apprentices in Paris in as late as 1767 (see Leben 2004). 3 It is worth noting that at this time, one specialist was replaced by another, for example, an ébéniste replaced an ébéniste, and a sculpteur a sculpteur. Consequently, the number of artists belonging to any one métier was kept in proportion throughout the second half of the seventeenth century. Compare “Brevets de logements sous la grande galerie du Louvre accordés à des artistes et à des artisans,” Bibliothèque Nationale de France (8-Z La Senne-10600). 4 Fouquet’s party at Vaux-le-Vicomte was on August  17, 1661, his arrest on September  5, 1661. Although the statutes for the establishment of the Manufacture des Gobelins, the text that clearly turned Colbert’s ambition into law, were only published in 1667, the arrest of Fouquet and the consequent integration of his workshops into the royal household marked the change of politics. 5 The royal edict issued by Louis XIV in 1667 not only regulated the training of apprentices at the Gobelins, and thereby the transfer of knowledge from foreign master craftsmen to native trainees, but also stated that the king would be the sole patron of the arts. See Édit du Roy, A.N. O1 2040A. 6 With regards to the specific knowledge transfer and economics of tapestry weaving and trading, Koenraad Brosens has published illuminating articles comparing the political and legal status of

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Bibliography Archival Sources “Brevets de logements sous la grande galerie du Louvre accordés à des artistes et à des artisans.” Paris, n.d., Bibliothèque Nationale de France (8-Z La Senne-10600). “Édit du Roy pour l’etablissement d’une manufacture des meuble de la couronne aux Gobelins.” Paris, 21 December 1667’, Archives Nationales (O1 2040A). “Privileges accordez aux ouvriers qui demeurent dans la gallerie du Louvre.” Paris, 22 December 1608, Archives Nationales (O1 1672).

Published Sources Adelson, Candace J. 1980. “Cosimo I de Medici and the Foundation of the Tapestry Production in Florence.” In Claudia Beltramo Ceppi and Nicoletta Confuorto (eds.), Firenze e la Toscana dei Medici nell’Europa del cinquecento, 5 vols, vol. III, 899–924. Florence: Electa. Apostolidès, Jean-Marie. 1981. Le roi-machine. Spectacle et politique au temps de Louis XIV. Paris: Minuit. Bluche, François. 1985. “A  propos du ‘mécénat’ de Louis XIV.” Antologia di Belle Arti (27–28): 98–102. Brassat, Wolfgang. 1992. Tapisserien und Politik. Funktion, Kontexte und Rezeption eines repräsentativen Mediums. Berlin: Mann. Brisson, Pierre. 1906. Histoire du travail et des travailleurs. Paris: Delagrave. Brosens, Koenraad. 2004. “The Organization of the Seventeenth-Century Tapestry Production in Brussels and Paris – a Comparative View.” De Zeventiende Eeuw 20 (2): 264–84. ———. 2005. “The Maîtres et Marchands Tapissiers of the Rue de la Verrerie: Marketing Flemish and French Tapestry in Paris around 1725.” Studies in the Decorative Arts XII (2) (Spring–Summer): 2–25. Campbell, Thomas P., ed. 2007. Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor. New Haven: Yale University Press. Chantrel, Laure. 1995. “Les notions de richesse et de travail dans la pensée économique française de la seconde moitié du XVIe et au début du XVIIe siècle.” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 25 (1) (Winter): 129–58. Chaplain, Jean-Michel. 1983. “Avoir ce qui manque aux autres: la manufacture de draps fins Van Robais d’Abbeville au XVIIIe siècle face au millieu local.” in Le Mouvement social 125 (October– December): 13–24. Clark, Henry C. 1998. “Commerce, the Virtue, and the Public Sphere in Early-Seventeenth-Century France.” French Historical Studies 21 (3) (Summer): 415–40. Cochin, Augustin. 1865. La manufacture des glaces de Saint-Gobain, de 1665–1865. Paris: Douniol. Cole, Charles Woolsey. 1939. Colbert and a Century of French Mercantilism. New York: Columbia University Press. Collins, James B. 1995. The State in early Modern France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coornaert, Émile. 1966. Les compagnonnages en France du moyen age a vos jours. Paris: Editions ouvrières. Deyon, Pierre, and Philippe Guignet. 1980. “The Royal Manufacturers and Economic and Technological Progress in France before the Industrial Revolution.” Journal of European History 9/3: 611–32. Ekelund, Robert B., and Robert D. Tollison. 1997. Politicized Economies. Monarchy, Monopoly, and Mercantilism. College Station: Texas A & M University Press. Erben, Dietrich. 2004. Paris und Rom. Die staatlich gelenkten Kunstbeziehungen unter Ludwig XIV. Berlin: De Gruyter. Fenaille, Maurice. 1903–23. État général des tapisseries de la manufacture des Gobelins, depuis son origine jusqu’à nos jours, 1600–1900, 6 vols. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale.

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The Royal Manufactories of Absolutist France Gady, Benedicte. 2010. L’ascension de Charles Le Brun: Liens sociaux et production artistique. Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme. Gerspach, Edouard. 1892. La manufacture national des Gobelins. Paris: Delagrave. Göbel, Heinrich. 1928. Die Wandteppiche und ihre Manufakturen in Frankreich, Italien, Spanien und Portugal, (part II) 2 vols. Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann. Goubert, Pierre. 1982. “La fortune des Français au temps de Louis XIV.” L’Histoire (50) (November): 40–48. Guiffrey, Jules. 1885–86. Inventaire général du mobilier de la couronne sous Louis XIV (1663–1715), 2 vols. Paris: Rouam. ———. 1912. Les Gobelins et Beauvais. Paris: Laurens. Hamon, Maurice, and Caroline Mathieu. 2006. Saint-Gobain, 1665–1937: une entreprise devant l’histoire. Paris: Musée d’Orsay. Hauser, Arnold. 1990. Sozialgeschichte der Kunst und Literatur. Munich: Beck. Havard, Henry, and Marius Vachon. 1889. Les manufactures nationales, les Gobelins, la Savonnerie, Sèvres, Beauvais. Paris: Decaux. Kaplan, Steven Laurence, and Cynthia J. Koepp, eds. 1986. Work in France. Representation, Meaning, Organization, and Practice. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Knothe, Florian. 2016. The Manufacture des meubles de la couronne aux Gobelins under Louis XIV: A Social, Political and Cultural History. Brussels: Brepols. Lacordaire, Antoine-Louis. 1852. Notice sur l’origine et les travaux des manufactures de tapisserie et de tapis réunies aux Gobelins. Paris: Roret. Leben, Ulrich. 2004. Object design in the Age of Enlightenment: The History of the Royal Free Drawing School in Paris. Los Angeles: Oxford University Press. Magnusson, Lars. 1994. Mercantilism: The Shaping of an Economic Language. London: Routledge. Minard, Philippe. 1998. La fortune du colbertisme. Etat et industrie dans la France des Lumieres. Paris: Fayard. Schnapper, Antoine. 1986. “The King of France as Collector in the Seventeenth Century.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History XVII (I): 185–202. ———. 1996. “La fortune de Charles Le Brun.” Revue de l’art 114 (4): 17–22. Scott, Katie. 1995. The Rococo Interior. New Haven: Yale University Press. Sée, Henri. 1925. L’évolution commerciale et industrielle de la France sous l’ancien régime. Paris: Giard. Stürmer, Michael. 1982. Handwerk und höfische Kultur, Europäische Möbelkunst im 18. Jahrhundert. Munich: Beck. Turgan, Julien François. n.d. Les usines de France: Les Gobelins. Paris: Lévy. Verne, Henri. 1924. “Le Louvre sous Henri IV et Louis XIII.” La Revue de l’art 44 (1): 35–43. Vitet, Ludovic. 1861. L’Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture. Paris: Kessinger. Weigert, Roger-Armand. 1962. “La manufacture des Gobelins.” in Les Gobelins (1662–1962), trois siècle de tapisserie française. Coppet: Château de Coppet. Wilson, Charles. 1958. Mercantilism. London: Historical Association.

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21 MAKING HISTORY IN OLD REGIME FRANCE Robert Wellington

The origin of our historical method today is found in late seventeenth-century Europe, where the distinction between primary evidence and secondary commentary was elucidated for the first time (Momigliano 1950). It was an age of historical skepticism. The man charged with completing Louis XIV’s education, François de La Mothe Le Vayer, was a leading voice among the skeptics, publishing a treatise, “On the little certitude there is in history,” in 1668. Skeptics began to look at histories passed down through the ages with suspicion, recognizing the personal and political leanings of those who had worked to record the past. This critique did little to arrest the practice of writing highly partisan court histories. What did change, however, was the historian’s relationship to evidence, with an increasing interest in the study of artifacts, such as coins, medals, and inscriptions on ancient monuments. This chapter discusses the practice of writing both ancient and modern histories in old regime France, with a particular focus on the reign of Louis XIV, which represents the apogee of royal history-making enterprises. It introduces the nascent discipline of history from the official court histories produced by those who held the title of royal historiographer to the courtier memorialists, who recorded what they witnessed for posterity. Various modes of history-making are examined, from the writing of “universal histories” to odes and panegyrics that marked a special occasion. Focus is placed on the role of material culture as evidence for history with the antiquarian turn in history that coincided with the Sun King’s reign. Finally, the prints, paintings, sculptures, palaces, and other monuments that celebrated the reigning French king are reviewed as a form of history-making, objects created with the aim of supplying evidence to the future historian.

Exemplum Virtutis The “great men” model of history – historical narrative that ascribes agency to individual women and men mostly of the ruling class – is rightly discredited today, but it was prevalent in seventeenth-century France (Carlyle 1859; Segal 2000). At that time, histories of great individuals were thought to provide examples to emulate or avoid. The preface to Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet’s (1627–1704) Discours sur l’histoire universelle (1681), written DOI: 10.4324/9780367808471-22

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for the education of Louis XIV’s son, the dauphin, argued that a young prince could gain much from the study of history. He wrote: Where History would be useless to the other men, reading it is necessary for Princes. There is no better way for them to discover passions & interests, eras & economic situations, good & bad counsel. History is made up only of the actions that occupy them, & all seems to be there for their use. If experience is necessary for them to acquire the prudence to reign well, it is no less useful to join the examples of centuries past with everyday experiences. Where they might ordinarily only learn to judge dangerous situations at the expense of their subjects and their own reputation [gloire], with the aid of History they form their judgement based upon past events without risking anything. When they see the most hidden vices of princes, exposed to the eyes of all men, despite the false praise given to them during their lives, they learn to be ashamed of the vain joy of flattery, and they understand that true glory can only be granted by merit. (Bossuet 1681, 1–2) This is what George Nadel calls “the exemplar theory of history” (Nadel 1964). From childhood, aristocrats were made aware that every deed would be subject to eternal scrutiny. No wonder the kings of France, especially Louis XIV, were so keen to ensure that their reign was presented in the best possible light, as history would be the ultimate judge. This period also saw the “quarrel of the ancients and moderns,” a long-running and wide-ranging public debate over whether modern France had matched or even superseded ancient Rome in the arts and sciences (Fumaroli 2001; Rigault 1856). In his poem Le siècle de Louis le Grand (1687), Charles Perrault compared the writers and artists of the ancient and modern world, commencing with the lines: Fine Antiquity was always venerable, But I never thought it was adorable. I look to the Ancients without bending the knee, They are great, it is true, but men like us; Know how to compare and fear not being unjust, The Age of Louis with the fine Age of Augustus. While respecting the glory of the ancient world throughout the poem, Perrault, the consummate modern, finds a very favorable comparison with his own time and his king. Every monarch of the era was supposed to aspire to make their time a new golden age and to inherit the glory of the ancient world. In old regime France, the task of securing the monarch’s reputation, or gloire, in that way was the responsibility of royal historiographers, an official position to which many famous writers were appointed.

Historiographers and Gloire The title of historiographe du roi implies a subtle distinction between the role of the historian and historiographer in early modern France (Grell 2006; Ranum 1980). In Antoine Furetière’s Dictionnaire Universelle (1702), he described the historien as “one who gathers Histories, the actions of past times,” while “one calls [an historiographe] more particularly those who have a commission, a particular office for writing the History of their times. 225

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Kings always take care to have good Historiographes” (Furetière 1702, 1:1090). The distinction is determined by the distance from the object of study: the historian looked back, often engaged with writing “universal histories,” as Bossuet had been. The historiographer was more directly connected to the present, and indeed future, an officer of the court employed by a sovereign to record contemporary deeds for posterity. The position of historiographe du roi can be traced back to at least the fifteenth century (Grell 2006; Ranum 1980). Some of the most illustrious writers from the French literary canon were appointed to the position, including Jean Racine (1639–99) and Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636–1711), who were awarded the office in the late 1670s by Louis XIV (Canova-Green and Viala 2004). Voltaire (1694–1778), perhaps the most famous French writer of his age, was appointed to the role by Louis XV in 1745. Louis XIV’s most able minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–83), formulated a plan to document the history of the king with leading intellectual, poet, and founding member of the Académie française, Jean Chapelain (1595–1674). In a long and considered letter to Colbert, Chapelain noted that it was rare to find any one person who had the very broad knowledge base required to be the ideal royal historiographer: [O]ne would need to be a very great man, to know perfectly the ends of the project and the conduct of the prince who will be its subject, to be informed of the interests of his friends and his adversaries, to possess a theory of politics, to understand the practice of war, to be aware of both chronology and geography, familiar with the manners and the customs of [other] nations, to have seen extracts and the originals of dispatches and treaties, which is not too common. But more than that, and most of all, it would be necessary to have a genius in this profession as so few people have had for three thousand years since it has been practiced. (Chapelain 1868) The royal historiographer must be in possession of a wide range of skills, and the ideal author charged with the task of documenting the reign of Louis XIV would have to be an insider. Contemporary skeptics would rightly treat the work of a such a partisan with suspicion. To complicate matters further, the royal historiographer must work without exposing to the public the inner workings of the cabinet, providing their enemies with the opportunity to thwart [their plans] or to render them useless, and to betray those who would have liaisons, which are maintained only by secrecy and the shade of a profound silence. (Chapelain 1868) Contemporary histories commissioned by the king were a potentially hazardous enterprise that, at worst, could be a threat to national security. With so much at stake, it would be essential for Louis XIV’s histories to be overseen by those who could judge the propriety of all that was put forward. Those documenting the king’s actions had to tread a delicate path. They were obliged to portray his deeds in a flattering light, but they would also need to persuade the audience of their version of events, as truth was the central tenet of history in seventeenth-century France.

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Pierre Richelet’s Dictionnaire Française (1680) asserted that “truth and exactitude are the soul of history,” and that the historian “must be exact, faithful, eloquent and judicious.” The claim to truth was central to history as a practice and an exercise in rhetoric that required evidence to support the claims made by the historiographer. As Chapelain reflected, “if it is not accompanied by careful reflections and documentary evidence, it is but a simple relation, without force and dignity” (Chapelain 1868). Then as now, history as a discipline required scholarly rigor. In 1663, one year after Chapelain wrote those recommendations, Colbert established the Académie Royale des Inscriptions, an institution that still exists today as the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. The company originally included only four members drawn from the Académie française, along with Colbert and his secretary, Charles Perrault, and came to be known as the Petite Académie. Alongside the traditional histories, odes, and panegyrics that members of this group would write, they would be responsible for composing inscriptions for prints, medals, and all other monuments that commemorated contemporary events for the glory of the king. Not long after the group had been assembled, they were presented at court to Louis XIV, who stressed the significance of this task: You can judge, Sirs, the esteem which I hold you in as I entrust you with the thing most precious to me in the world, which is my gloire, I  am sure that you will do marvels; I will be tasked on my part to provide you with material that deserves to be documented by men as able as you are. (Perrault 1909, 41) The double role of history for the sovereign is clear here. The past could provide examples to learn from, but the king was seen to be responsible for history in the making. While the Petite Académie would be responsible for forming the king’s reputation, it was his duty to act in a worthy manner, so their writings would also be seen as truthful. Gloire is a concept of central importance to the discipline of history in old regime France. It was defined by contemporary sources as the “honor acquired by great actions” (Richelet 1680, 374), recognized “by the world in general” (Furetière 1702, 1:1016) and synonymous to reputation or fame (Pompey 1691, 453). Such was the interest in the term that the Académie française made it the subject of their prose composition prize in 1671, awarded to Madeleine de Scudéry (1607–1701) for her Discours de la Gloire (1672). In it she wrote that: Like mirrors are more or less esteemed, for whether they represent the objects in front of them well or badly, one might say that gloire is true or false, in the respect that there is an image in the minds of men based on merit. (Scudéry 1672) Just as gloire was the mirror of one’s actions, as Furetière noted in the definition of history in the Dictionnaire universel (1702), “history is a mirror in which Kings see the image of their flaws.” In practice, of course, the royal historiographer would not dare criticize the monarch, and the problematic relationship between fidelity to the facts in theory and practice was acknowledged by the historical skeptics. Panegyrics and odes such as Jacques Cassagne’s Ode sur les Conquestes du Roy en Flandre (1667), or Sur la Conqueste de la Franche-Comte (1668), framed the king’s military conquests in terms of eternal memory

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and perpetual glory. Poetic flourish and hyperbole were to be expected in this genre of writing, at odds with the sober, measured, and objective approach that we might ask of a historian. It also took a very different approach than another hallmark genre of the period, the aristocratic memoir.

The Age of Memoirs The seventeenth century is “the age of the great memorialists” (Sarmant 2001). The fashion for writing memoirs might be attributed to the mindset of the French courtier, who saw herself or himself at the center of things and as a witness to history in the making. The opening lines of the memoir left by Louis XIV’s famous official mistress, the Marquise de Montespan, helps to show the difference between court-sanctioned histories and personal eyewitness accounts: The reign of the King who now so happily and so gloriously rules over France will one day exercise the talent of the most skillful historians. But these men of genius, deprived of the advantage of seeing the great monarch whose portrait they seek to draw, will search everywhere among the souvenirs of contemporaries and base their judgments upon our testimony. It is this great consideration, which has made me determined to devote some of my hours of leisure to narrating, in these accurate and truthful Memoires, the events of which I myself am witness. (Montespan 1829, 1.) Montespan’s memoirs, and those of her contemporaries, would indeed be of great aid to future historians. Those memoirs were made to leave what was, in her opinion, the best form of evidence, the testimony of an eyewitness, albeit one who is surely too partisan to be trusted absolutely. The claim to exclusive access that only an eyewitness could provide is a recurrent theme in memoirs of the period. Louis XIV’s first cousin, known as la Grande Mademoiselle, recommended her memoirs as recounting “all that [she] ha[s] noticed from [her] childhood until now” (Montpensier 1728, 1). Likewise, the most famous memorialist of the period, the duc de Saint-Simon, promoted his memoirs as being “described with truth and the most exact fidelity all that has come to my knowledge through my own experience, or by those who have seen or handled matters and affairs, during the last twenty-five years of Louis XIV’s reign” (Saint-Simon 1829, 25, 1). He did so as a proponent of the exemplar theory: However insipid and perhaps superfluous details so well-known may appear after what has been already given, lessons will be found therein for Kings who may wish to make themselves respected, and who may wish to respect themselves. What determines me still more is, that details wearying, nay annoying, to instructed readers, who had been witnesses of what I relate, soon escape the knowledge of posterity; and that experience shows us how much we regret that no one takes upon himself a labor, in his own time so ungrateful, but in future years so interesting, and by which princes, who have made quite as much stir as the one in question, are characterized. (Saint-Simon 1829, 1–3) 228

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As partisan as this testimony was (including marvelously witty and bitter diatribes against figures of court), it was calculated to come down to us as primary material with which we, the future audience, could make our historical judgments. Those memoirs differ in obvious but important ways from the official, scholarly, and poetic histories published by the king’s historiographers. They were not intended to be published during the author’s life and were only circulated to a very limited audience. Both Saint-Simon and Voltaire had access to the journal of Philippe de Courcillon, Marquis de Dangeau, which documented daily life at the court of Louis XIV, but that journal was not published in its entirety until the nineteenth century. Likewise, Saint-Simon’s memoirs were only published in full after they were returned to his heirs in 1828, after being long sequestered by the Crown. The subjective and deeply partisan nature of those courtly memoirs makes them a form of source to be handled with care by the modern historian. But that problem itself, of the writer’s self-interest, had long been recognized by seventeenth-century skeptics, who questioned the reliability of written evidence for historical discourse.

Skepticism By the mid-seventeenth century, religious and political disputes that were the cause of nearconstant war pervaded historical texts too. History was narrated from every position and counter-position, and this discredited the discipline as a whole (Momigliano 1950). François de la Mothe Le Vayer, one of the leading historical skeptics in France, had close ties to the court. He was a Paris intellectual, elected to the Académie Française in 1638. Appointed preceptor to Louis XIV’s brother Philippe in 1659, four years later, he was entrusted with finishing the education of the king. As an educator of royal princes, Le Vayer’s influence on historical thinking at court was profound. Le Vayer was particularly interested in theories of history, publishing his first critical Discourse de l’histoire in 1638 (Le Vayer 1756). His critiques of historical method established him as a voice of “historical pyrrhonism,” a school of thought taking its name from the ancient Greek skeptic Pyrrho of Ellis (Momigliano 1950, 295). Pyrrhonists challenged certainty in all fields, so much so that their maxim, that one could be certain of nothing, was itself subject to scrutiny and thought too dogmatic. Historical pyrrhonists like Le Vayer scrutinized the work of former historians and were especially critical of testimony that was deemed to be prejudiced either in favor or against the subject. Those ideas remained influential as the seventeenth century progressed, with notable proponents including Pierre Bayle, whose Dictionnaire Historique et Critique (1697) has supplementary footnotes drawing out inconsistencies in the work of ancient historians. That critical approach to history carried through into the eighteenth century with Voltaire, whose entry on history for the Encyclopédie lays the groundwork for modern history methods based on a rigorous and skeptical approach to evidence. Citing a maxim of ancient Roman historian Polybius, Le Vayer argued that history must be impartial; otherwise, it was like “an animal that had lost its eyes, & which was no longer good for anything” (Le Vayer 1756, 1: 315). Such a view was clearly at odds with the protocols of elevated language to be found, for example, in the obsequious historical panegyrics for Louis XIV pronounced at the Académie française (Zoberman 1991). Historical writing, according to Le Vayer, should avoid rhetorical flourishes that aggrandize the subject. In his view, poetry is fictitious, whereas history is based on facts. Le Vayer illustrated this point in his Discourse du peu de certitude qu’il y a dans l’histoire (1668), where he compared a 229

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partisan history to a portrait that flatters its sitter like “painters who for the pleasure of the ladies that they undertake to represent, paint them indulgently as more beautiful than they are” (Le Vayer 1668, 81). The great difficulty in providing impartial testimony of one’s own times led Le Vayer to conclude that histories of the present must be written for future eyes: The true way not to fall into so great a problem, is to never write history of your times to be shown in the same age, never have regard for the present time, but only for the future, do not merely consider those living, and of whom one speaks in the body of the work to the cost of posterity who must pronounce a judgment based on our work. (Le Vayer 1668, 84–85) Given a choice between the panegyrics of the Académie française or the private papers of the court memorialist, consciously constructed for posterity, it might seem that the skeptic would favor the latter. But such thinkers found the problem of history based on any written accounts to be almost insoluble and turned to other forms of evidence to find a more solid basis for recounting past events (Momigliano 1950).

Antiquarianism Antiquaries saved history from the skeptics in the seventeenth century, where the distinction between primary evidence and secondary commentary was elucidated for the first time (Momigliano 1950). Historians turned to non-literary sources: official documents, such as charters, and visual evidence taken from coins, inscriptions on monuments, and statues. The study of such things had previously been understood as the province of the antiquarian, a savant, often a scientist and polymath, who took a connoisseur’s interest in objects of the past. While antiquarianism might be understood as a discrete branch of historical inquiry, the antiquarian was not necessarily a historian. They were often more interested in assembling collections and inventories of rare objects, without considering their value as evidence for constructing narratives of the past. Antiquarianism was a courtly pursuit based in a deep fascination with the material culture of the ancient world. Alongside the ruins of buildings, monuments, and sculptures that were to be found across the lands that constituted the ancient Roman Empire, there were the smaller and perhaps even more prized ancient coins and engraved gems. With a labelled portrait of an emperor, king, or queen on one side and an allegorical image and inscription on the reverse, coins allowed the antiquarian to identify historical figures and link them to historical events and cultural ideas of their time (Haskell 1993; Cunnally 1999). Coins were thought by many to be the “uncorrupted witnesses” of history (Burke 2003, 285). Some early modern numismatists went as far as to claim that without the evidence from coins, there would be no proof in history and only the opinions of the historians who had left accounts of the past. This may seem a strange claim, given the preponderance of nonliterary archival sources favored as evidence by historians today, but archival material was rarely, if ever, available for the study of ancient Greece and Rome that formed the model for historical inquiry in early modern Europe. The fashion for studying history by coins and medals at the French court began during the reign of the Valois (Wellington 2015). Catherine de’ Medici brought a collection of medals with her to France from Florence to use in the education of her sons, the future kings of France. In the next century, Louis XIV formed a fascination for antiquarian study 230

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early in his life and, in one portrait, is shown receiving lessons in numismatic history from the head of the royal mint and most accomplished medal maker of the age, Jean Warin. Throughout his reign, Louis XIV amassed the most impressive collection of ancient and modern coins and medals in Europe. When it was installed in a special room at the Palace of Versailles in 1683, the king visited it every day, sitting with the royal antiquarians, who catalogued the collection, to learn more about his treasured artifacts. This interest in history embodied in coins and medals was widespread among the French elite. Antiquarian salons met to discuss and interpret history based on the coins and medals that members had collected. One such salon at the house of the duc d’Aumont proposed to write a history of Ancient Rome based on inscriptions, medals, and engraved gems, to be presented as a series of lectures by members at each meeting. The group included high-ranking aristocrats, antiquaries employed by the Crown, and the authors of published numismatic texts. Since the fifteenth century, many such illustrated books had been published to narrate older histories (Cunnally 1999). By the 1680s, antiquarians turned their attention to contemporary history, applying those same methods to writing numismatic texts based on the inscriptions, and allegorical devices, coins, tokens, and medals that were commissioned by ruling elites to commemorate their deeds for posterity. In such new productions, the notion of finding and preserving physical evidence for history came full circle.

Visual Histories Viewed through the lens of antiquarianism, the works of art produced to commemorate the history of French kings can be better understood as historical evidence for posterity. The Sun King’s reign is the pinnacle of royal history-making in France. There was a sustained preoccupation with the king’s own history as a subject for works of art and design of all kinds. No other monarch in France, or elsewhere for that matter, would pursue the documentation of their own reign across media with such enthusiasm. In early modern France, the portrait medal was the historical object par excellence. Medals were designed to emulate ancient coins that survived in excellent condition due to the durability of metals from which they were made. Having proven to be so fruitful for the study of the past, such coins inspired a new kind of miniature sculpture to commemorate contemporary people and events for posterity. It was hoped that medals would outlast more ephemeral items, such as prints or paper documents, as a record for the distant future. While medals had been commissioned widely across Europe from the fifteenth century, Louis XIV had more medals made to commemorate his reign than any monarch before or since. Medals had been struck to commemorate Louis XIV soon after he was born, but the project to create a comprehensive numismatic history of the reign began in earnest in 1663, when Colbert formed the Académie Royale des Inscriptions, for whom the design of medals was the main task. In 1694, that Académie finally began the long-planned project to publish a histoire métallique of Louis XIV’s reign (Loskutoff 2016; Wellington 2015). Inventories were made of existing designs for medals celebrating important events of the reign. New medals were made for events that were deemed significant but which currently lacked such a commemoration. Dies for a new uniform series of 287 medals were engraved to accompany the book that was perhaps the most ambitious publication of the age: Médailles sur les principaux événements du regne de Louis le Grand (1702). This text, which was republished in 231

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a revised and expanded edition in 1723, 8 years after the king’s death, showcased the latest in printing technology, with a new typeface created especially for the volume. Medals were not the only works of art to document contemporary history in old regime France. Under the guidance of the Académie Royale des Inscriptions, nearly all commissions for paintings, tapestries, and other furniture for royal palaces made a direct reference to events from the history of Louis XIV (Sabatier 1999). These works of art were often allegorical in design, using a mix of personifications, symbols, attributes, gods, and goddesses from the ancient Roman pantheon, alongside recognizable portraits of the king himself. Charles Le Brun’s cycle of paintings of the king’s history for the ceiling of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles is perhaps the most famous of these (Sabatier 1998, 1999). The “quarrel of the ancients and moderns” played out in those commissions too. The king’s advisors from the Académie Royale des Inscriptions debated the appropriate subjects, symbols, and inscriptions to be used. While the ancients succeeded for the most part in retaining Latin as the sober and intellectual language most appropriate for inscriptions on medals and public monuments, the inscriptions for the Hall of Mirrors were a notable exception. Originally composed in Latin, they were changed to French for the double reason that more visitors would understand them, and to assert the precedence of French as the new lingua franca of the European Court (Sabatier 1999). In these semi-allegorical images of the conquests and achievements of the early decades of his reign, the king is depicted as the sole actor and agent of a history in the making, starkly embodying the “great men” model of history (Burke 1992; Marin 1998). The king’s history was a subject for artists in the royal manufactories at all levels. It was proposed as an elevated topic suitable for testing the skills of the new generation of artists at the Académie Royale de peinture et de sculpture and was the subject set for students who competed for prize medals. Many works, including the cycle of tapestries of the king’s history woven at the Royal Gobelins Manufactory, the prints of the king’s conquests, and Adam Frans Van der Meulen’s monumental canvases for the château de Marly, were produced as direct historical representations, without recourse to allegory (Wellington 2015). Set within accurately depicted places and landscapes, such multi-figure studies report events as if from an eyewitness perspective. Similar designs were presented across media in prints, paintings, bronze and marble reliefs on public monuments, tapestries, embroideries, and even on silver, as accurate testaments to historical events for the benefit of posterity. An article in the Nouveau Mercure Galant (May 1685) promoting a series of prints of Louis XIV’s conquests designed by van der Meulen introduced the artist as a master of fidelity. His work was praised for its legibility: “[it] only takes a glance to conceive what one would have difficulty in understanding after reading several volumes.” Notwithstanding license and hyperbole, the closing comments focus on the veracity of his work: Although it is permitted for painters as well as Poets to invent many things, Mr Vander Meulen has no need for fiction in his works. No part of his brush does not represent the truth, & we see from the first glance what he designed to show. Artists like van der Meulen were admired for their ability to render a complex event on canvas that gave the impression of a scene glimpsed from life in all its diversity. He was able to recreate an eyewitness perspective for the viewer, to show them the event as it might have appeared, albeit from an idealized and absolutist standpoint. 232

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Conclusion Following the death of Louis XIV, no other Bourbon king would commission such a comprehensive program of works of art to commemorate their reign. Indeed, the subject of history in French art did not receive programmatic attention from a monarch until LouisPhilippe converted the Palace of Versailles into a museum for French history in the 1830s. Medals would continue to be commissioned to commemorate events, but not with the same fervor as they were by the Sun King. Louis XV and Louis XVI showed little interest in the royal numismatic collection, which was sent to Paris in 1724 to a new collection room, where it remains today as the longest-established museum in France (Sarmant 2001). Voltaire has been credited with bridging the gap between the crisis of historical skepticism and the modern discipline of history. His Siècle de Louis XIV (1775) takes a broad view of the period. Looking beyond a chronological narration of the principal events of the reign, he discusses the great achievements in the arts and sciences too. Voltaire’s entry on “history” for Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie presents a thorough and distinctly modern account of the practice of writing history from an objective and critical standpoint (Voltaire 2019). Not only does he comment on the histories of ancient and modern Europe, but he also touches upon other countries across the world. Unlike the antiquarians of the previous century, who had placed so much trust in public monuments, coins, and medals for historical evidence, Voltaire recognized that any form of evidence must be looked upon with a critical eye. His comments on medals seem particularly targeted to those who held them to be incontestable evidence: “Medals are irreproachable testimonies only when the event is attested to by contemporary authors; they are supporting proof” (Voltaire 2019, 8: 224). For Voltaire, “the art of writing history well will always be very rare.” For it requires “a grave, pure, varied and agreeable style [there are] . . . many precepts, & few great artists” (Voltaire 2019, 8: 225).

References Bossuet, Jacques Bénigne. 1681. Discours sur l’histoire universelle à Monseigneur le Dauphin: pour expliquer la suite de la religion et les changemens des empires. Paris. Burke, Peter. 1992. The Fabrication of Louis XIV. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 2003. “Images as Evidence in Seventeenth-Century Europe.” Journal of the History of Ideas 64 (2). Canova-Green, Marie-Claude, and Alain Viala, eds. 2004. Racine et l’histoire. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag. Carlyle, Thomas. 1859. On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History; Six Lectures Reported, with Emendations and Additions. New York: Wiley & Halsted. Chapelain, Jean. 1868. “lettre à Colbert 18 novembre 1662.” In Lettres, Instructions et Mémoires de Colbert: tome V: Fortifications, sciences, lettres, beaux-arts, bâtiments, edited by Pierre Clement, 589. Paris: Imprimerie Imperiale. Cunnally, John. 1999. Images of the Illustrious: The numismatic presence in the Renaissance. Princeton and Chichister: Princeton University Press. Fumaroli, Marc. 2001. La Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. Paris: Gallimard-Folio. Furetière, Antoine. 1702. Dictionnaire Universel. The Hague & Rotterdam: Arnoud et Reinier Leers. Grell, Chantal. 2006. “Les historiographes en France XVIe-XVIIIe siècles.” In Les historiographes en Europe de la fin du Moyen Âge à la Revolution, edited by Chantal Grell. Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne. Haskell, Francis. 1993. History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past. New Haven: Yale University Press. Jacques Cassagne. 1667. Ode sure les Conquestes du Roy en Flandre. Paris: Edme Martin. Jacques Cassange. 1668. Sur la Conqueste de la Franche-Comte, Poeme. Paris: Sebastien Marbre-Cramoisy.

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Robert Wellington Le Vayer, François de la Mothe. 1668. Deux discours: Le premier, du peu de certitude qu’il y a dans l’histoire; Le seconde, de la connoissance de soy-mesme. Paris: Louis Billaine. ———. 1756. Oeuvres de François de la Mothe le Vayer conseiller d’etat ctc. Nouvelle édition revuë & augmenté. Dresden: Michel Groell. Loskutoff, Yvan, ed. 2016. Les Médailles de Louis XIV et Leur Livre. Mont-Saint-Aignan: PURH. Marin, Louis. 1998. Portrait of the King. Theory and History of Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Momigliano, Arnoldo. 1950. “Ancient History and the Antiquarian.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 3 (3/4): 285–315. Montespan, Françoise-Athénaïs de Rochechouart de. 1829. Mémoires de Madame la Marquise de Montespan, edited by Gaspard Louis Lafont d’Aussonne. Paris: Mame et Delaunay-Vallée. Montpensier, Anne Marie Louise Henriette D’Orléans de. 1728. Mémoires De Mademoiselle De Montpensier, Fille de Mr. Gaston D’Orléans, Frère De Louis XIII. Roi de France, vol. 1. Paris: Chez Le Breton. Nadel, George H. 1964. “Philosophy of History before Historicisim.” History and Theory 3 (3): 291–315. Perrault, Charles. 1909. Mémoire de ma vie. Paris: H. Laurens. Pompey, François. 1691. Le Dictionnaire Royale. Lyon: Antoine & Horace Molin. Ranum, Orest. 1980. Artisans of Glory: Writers and Historical Thought in Seventeenth-Century France. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Richelet, Pierre. 1680. Dictionnaire François. Geneve: Jean Herman Widerhold. Rigault, M. Hippolyte. 1856. Histoire de la Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. Paris: Librarie de L. Hachette et Cie. Sabatier, Gérard. 1998. “Beneath the Ceilings of Versailles: Towards an Archaeology and Anthropology of the use of the King’s Signs During the Absolute Monarchy.” In Iconography, Propaganda, and Legitimation, edited by Allen Ellenius. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1999. Versailles ou la figure du roi. Paris: Éditions Albin Michel S.A. Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvroy, duc de. 1829. Mémoires complet et authentiques du duc de SaintSimon sur le siècle de Louis XIV et le Régence. . ., 21 vols. Paris: A. Sautelet et Cie. Sarmant, Thierry, ed. 2001. Le grand siècle en mémoires: Anthologie presentée par Thierry Sarmant. Paris: Perrin. Scudéry, Madeleine de. 1672. “Discourse de la Gloire.” In Relation contenant l’histore de l’académie françoise, edited by Paul Pellisson-Fontanier, 561–580. Paris: Thomas Jolly. Segal, Robert A. ed. 2000. Hero Myths. Oxford, MA: Blackwell. Voltaire. Siècle de Louis XIV (1A-VI). 2019. Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire 11A:13D. Edited by Diego Venturino. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation. Wellington, Robert. 2015. Antiquarianism and the Visual Histories of Louis XIV: Artifacts for a future past. Burlington: Ashgate. Zoberman, Pierre. 1991. Les panégyrics de roi prononcés dans l’académie française. Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne.

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22 OVERVIEW: FRANCE, 1715 TO 1815 A Century of Dubious Greatness David Andress

In both of the years 1715 and 1815, France appeared on the European stage as a failed rule-breaker, a disruptive giant that had twice threatened to transform the political shape of the continent before being beaten back by a grand coalition of other powers. Such a repetition testifies to the growing significance of France as part of that European system and, by extension, the global power structures beginning to spread from it.

The France of Louis XV Louis XIV’s failure to create a unified Franco-Spanish superpower in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) was reinforced by the serial deaths of his closest heirs, leaving a 5-year-old great-grandson to inherit as Louis XV when the Sun King finally expired in 1715. Having built his version of absolutism around him by force and guile, the old king tried even after death to uphold his power: inserting his illegitimate sons into the line of succession, and imposing restrictions on the operation of a regency, in his last will and testament. The appointed regent, the duc d’Orléans, used the judges of the kingdom’s highest court, the Parlement of Paris, to throw out these measures. In return, the judges gained back the entitlement Louis XIV had stripped from them, to “remonstrate” against new laws before registering them (thus holding up their implementation) if they felt they were incompatible with historical constitutional norms. In this short-term deal lay the seeds of much future political turmoil (Jones 2002). Orléans’s regency experimented in many ways. The short-lived polysynodie, or “multicouncil” government, brought resentful aristocratic grandees back to the business of rule that the Sun King had barred them from, but they got bored and drifted away. The “System” of the Scots financier John Law wrestled the massive debts of Louis XIV’s wars into submission by swapping state obligations for shares in overseas ventures that inflated and collapsed. This apparent con-trick helped make the country allergic to future systematic fiscal reform. Over time, as the young king matured and a court began to consolidate around him, politics was drawn back into familiar grooves of aristocratic factional competition. The court nobility remained the pinnacle of a highly stratified grouping of the “sword” nobility in general, its roots in a rural squirearchy that provided the military officer class, 235

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but which also rose to heights of astronomical wealth, often supported directly by the politically expedient generosity of the public purse. Members of this culture increasingly competed for influence with the “robe nobility” of legally qualified officeholders – men owing their noble status to the perquisites of the public positions they had bought from the Crown, which increasingly farmed such “venal office” as a key source of income (Doyle 1996). Parlementaire judges, at the top of this hierarchy, took care to insist on its prerogatives. The existence of parallel noble elites, to which we can add the hierarchy of the Catholic Church drawn from their brothers and cousins, marks the complex nature of this supposedly “absolute” monarchy. Absolutism itself – the notion that the monarch was “absolved” of accountability to anyone except God – remained only one understanding of the state, the thèse royale, or “royal thesis.” Against it, the “noble thesis,” or thèse nobiliaire, proclaimed that the historic rights and privileges of the powerful – that the king swore solemnly to uphold in his coronation oath – were its real foundation (Collins 2009). Looking at governance in practice, it is easy to see why this might ring true. France had no single code of laws: each of the 13 parlements guarded its own region’s traditions, which might, in matters of inheritance, for example, starkly contradict practices elsewhere. There was no single structure of permanent taxation. The Crown successfully imposed temporary wartime taxes on the privileged classes, but the notion that privilege, by definition, exempted the powerful from permanent obligations prevented real change. Some provinces were administered directly by state officials, but others had historic elite assemblies – estates – with whom the Crown had to negotiate (in practice, if not in theory) for taxes to be collected. What counted as “administration” often ran through multiple layers of venal office, piled up by new creations sold off to meet short-term needs, and all entitled to profit from their position (Felix 2011). Much of the history of the eighteenth century revolved around the efforts of the state to encourage a more “modern” approach to the organization of social and economic life, while at the same time upholding the fundamental structures of privilege. Long-term pillars of state rationality around the logistics of war-making and empire-building meshed with advances in the mathematics of land surveying. Three generations of the Cassini family of astronomers worked on new detailed maps of the country that spanned a century of work to the eve of the 1789 Revolution. The royal bridges and roads authority, the Ponts et Chaussées, encouraged, funded, and oversaw improvements in communications infrastructure. A wider concern with agricultural improvement led to royal encouragement of local societies, reading circles, and academies, where the leisured elite were supposed to assimilate and then disseminate the latest thinking to their neighbors and tenants. Schemes involving tax exemptions and other incentives were directed toward reclaiming large areas of unproductive “waste” land for cultivation, and important work was done on managing ancient forests “scientifically,” under growing pressure from charcoal-burning and maritime construction (Matteson 2015). We now know that the French population was growing healthily throughout this period, from some 20 million toward perhaps 28 million by 1789. The last widespread famine had been in 1709, and a paranoid fear of speculation in basic foodstuffs – the “famine–plot persuasion” – kept markets stocked by official orders to uphold social peace, even in years of shortage (Kaplan 1982). One underlying reason for many forms of “improvement” was to try to break the highly regional nature of the agricultural economy and achieve greater food security. Many, even among the elite, were certain that the French population was actually in decline, aggravating the perception that change was needed. 236

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Epidemic diseases still periodically ran wild, and some areas were prone to endemic malarial fevers. Smallpox claimed kings, Louis XV in 1774, and tuberculosis princes: his son and heir a decade before. Among the poorest, child mortality could still reach 50% and was easily over 20% in the general population. Pioneering mid-century work in midwifery and obstetrics by Angélique du Coudray, preserving the field from takeover by male surgeons while advocating for the latest techniques, along with the slow spread of inoculation, nonetheless assisted in reducing the toll a little (Gelbart 1998). The peasant majority were bent beneath the harshest burdens of privilege, paying not just taxes and church tithes but also onerous dues and fees to manorial lords, or seigneurs (Markoff 1996). The urban population, perhaps a fifth of the country overall, distributed in dozens of medium-sized towns and significant cities, was also bound by privilege – if they were free from seigneurial exactions, they often had to pay additional tolls on goods entering their walls, and economic life was structured by the vigorous competition between artisan guilds to safeguard their legally-determined fields of expertise. Going to court was almost as much a part of economic life as going to the workshop. Through the system of guild privileges, some women were able to obtain an independent economic status: the category of “female public merchant,” marchande publique, gave women owners of shops and artisan businesses legal rights denied to the vast majority of other women, who worked on without them anyway (Hafter 2007). The booming economies of the great port cities partly escaped guild constraints, though colonial trade was bound by its own mercantilist and monopolistic rules. To prosper in any new field of enterprise, it was often as important to have official contacts and to procure legal privileges as it was to produce a genuine innovation – without the former, the latter could be ground to dust by legalistic opposition (Horn 2015). It was perhaps unsurprising in such contexts that the typical lawyer or merchant, right down to 1789, still invested his savings in land, and in the direct purchase of seigneurial status, and thus in “living nobly,” in the hope his descendants might become actually noble (while also expecting a solid return on such investments). Thus, the rising wealth of the middle classes was turned, ironically, into heightened hierarchical burdens on the peasantry. In response, abetted by royal courts eager to assert control over seigneurial jurisdictions, many village communities by the later decades of the century were vigorously contesting the asserted rights of their new rapacious overlords (Hayhoe 2008).

Enlightenment and Its Echoes The eighteenth century was “the Age of Enlightenment,” and France, despite its troubles, was undoubtedly at the center of this phenomenon. Versailles was no longer the exclusive focal point of culture it had been before Louis XIV’s long decline, and Paris, throughout the middle decades of the century, hosted a glittering panoply of wealth. From court aristocrats and princes of the Church to august judges, high financiers, and noble foreign diplomats, and even from the king’s own mistress, Madame de Pompadour, patronage in cash and in kind flowed to generations of artists, composers, poets, and thinkers. The overarching quest of the Enlightenment was for rational improvement: the great mid-century Encyclopédie was packed with information on new technologies and manufacturing techniques. But in practice, it also fomented discontent and dispute (Outram 2019; Edelstein 2010). The archetypal elite institution of the Enlightenment was the salon, though the term itself only came into use in the 1800s (Lilti 2015). Meeting and talking in each other’s 237

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homes, sometimes over dinner, was what this leisured class did, and the lady of the house was, by convention, the hostess. The minority of circles that met with a genuine intellectual goal was part of a much wider spectrum of elite sociability. Many such gatherings were frivolous, or pious; a few were famed for their scurrilous interest in street gossip. Only a handful were intellectual powerhouses, where female salonnières and their daughters made their own contributions to the fabric of shifting thought (Goodman 1994). Such contributions have often been wrongly minimized. Émilie du Châtelet, for example, was once seen largely in her role as a correspondent and lover of Voltaire, but she is now recognized as a pioneering mathematical and physical scientist, her career tragically curtailed by death from the complications of childbirth at 42 in 1749 (Zinsser 2006). The extraordinary career of Julie de Lespinasse, an aristocrat’s illegitimate daughter taken in by her father’s sister as a companion, largely self-educated, and with a talent for facilitating intellectual conversation that eventually allowed her to set up an independent household to carry on such gatherings, is testimony to what was possible for an exceptional individual. It parallels the way in which men of humble background like Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau could leverage their talent into a position of renown, as long as the infrastructure of elite patronage was there to buoy them up. Even with patronage, safety was not guaranteed: Diderot was imprisoned in 1749 for the impious ideas in one of his first notable works, the Letter on the Blind. Many of his later, more dangerous ideas were only published long after his death. Those who lacked elite supporters had to navigate a cultural landscape in which both royal and parlementaire authorities, backed by the moral dictates of the Church, believed that censorship was an essential tool for the preservation of good order. Publication without the imprimatur of the censor was simply illegal, while mere possession of information the authorities found disturbing could result in arrest and long interrogation over its source. Repression did not impose a blanket of silence. Scurrilous information circulated with remarkable complexity between elite and popular, written and oral, forms, demonstrating that there was a multilayered, cross-class interest in forbidden knowledge, especially about the Court elite (Darnton 2010). The illegality of such material encouraged an elite tendency to finance its production as supposedly hidden truth to hurl at factional enemies, leading, in turn, to a rise in independent efforts at libelous blackmail. Several notable authors by the 1770s were making a living simply by threatening to print terrible things about aristocrats and the royal family itself (Burrows 2010). Meanwhile, the steadily growing “reading public” of France obtained illegal books through widespread and effectively institutionalized networks of clandestinity. Much came via under-the-counter sales of material smuggled from publishers in neighboring territories. Historians working with different parts of the same Swiss-based publisher’s archives have differed over the salience of the most scurrilous material in the overall market. Nonetheless, research overall clearly depicts a society in which the upper- and middle-class mainstream (and male) reader from mid-century on found it normal to own at least some illegal books (Darnton 1996; Curran 2018; Burrows 2018). This does not mean that French public life was becoming “enlightened” in any strongly secularizing sense. One of the key grievances of the parlementaire judges against the Crown was theological: resisting half a century of governmental efforts to suppress the heterodox “Jansenist” tendency within the Church. This resistance scored a dramatic triumph in 1764 with the expulsion of the Jesuit order, ardent supporters of papal orthodoxy. Yet this was also acclaimed as a triumph by haters of religious influence, such as Voltaire (Van Kley 1996). 238

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The latent cultural rupture of this situation was amplified by a parallel tendency in the broader political culture. Decades of sparring between royal and parlementaire authorities over abortive efforts at tax reform had increasingly been played out in printed public texts. Authors and sponsors of these helped shift the meaning of “opinion,” previously seen as a fickle quality, especially among the general population. By the 1770s, it was becoming commonplace to treat “public opinion” as a reality, and to call on it rhetorically as an incorruptible tribunal to judge the intentions and projected outcomes of public policy. Claiming the support of public opinion (in reality, of course, an unmeasurable quality) became a standard political move. This encouraged readers to think that, at some future point, they might be asked to express that opinion definitively (Ozouf 1988).

The France of Louis XVI The toxic problem of privilege, reform, and public opinion crashed over Louis XVI from the moment he succeeded his grandfather in May 1774, a few months short of his 20th birthday (Hardman 2016). The old king, having spent two-thirds of the time between 1740 and 1763 at war and most of the following years trying to pay down the debts incurred, died in public odium. The parlements had persistently blocked fiscal reform and had to be bullied into even short-term expedients. Louis XV’s answer, in January 1771, was to strip the Paris judges of office, exile them to the country, and install pliant replacements. Provincial parlements were abolished wholesale, replaced by just six regional judicial councils. Over the next three years, against a hurricane of protest, much of it scurrilous, some progress was finally made with fiscal reform. This “Maupeou revolution,” named for the chancellor who oversaw it, did not survive the young Louis XVI’s earnest desire to follow public opinion. The parlements were restored and returned the favor in ironic fashion at once, helping destroy the radical economic reforms of the king’s new minister, Turgot. Solidly grounded in Enlightenment physiocrate economics, Turgot’s desires to free the regulated grain trade, end the constraints imposed by urban guilds, and otherwise create a more individualist economy were dismissed as midway between despotism and pure madness. Incessant criticism and a furious wave of popular protest at grain movements in 1775 cost him his job the following year (Jones 1995). Caught between “public opinion” and the apparent impossibility of reform, Louis’s government drifted into support for the American Revolution. Geopolitical revenge on the British victors of 1763 blended with the excitement of enlightened aristocrats at seeing a “new world” (credited with all sorts of authentic natural virtues) take on the corrupt power of the old. French finances were now run by the Swiss banker Jacques Necker. Although never achieving full ministerial rank, due to his Protestantism, Necker had a model of loan-based war finance that was initially highly successful, shunting problems of repayment into the future. Necker also pioneered rationalizing administrative reforms, though none as disruptive as Turgot’s. When around 1780 Necker began to think about the fiscal future, he ran into trouble. As part of a pamphlet war with more conservative factions, he published in 1781 a highly optimistic version of the royal finances, the Compte rendu au Roi, to reassure prospective lenders. It caused a storm of outrage among other ministers at its exposure of the internal affairs of the Crown to hundreds of thousands of eager readers. With Necker pushed out, the war was fought to a successful military conclusion in 1783, but at the cost of a significant further increase in a debt that was becoming unmanageable. 239

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The French state sank into an irrecoverable crisis. Against implacable opposition from the parlements to “despotic” attempts to change the relationship between taxation and privilege, the Crown’s minister Calonne resorted in February  1787 to summoning an Assembly of Notables. This body, last used in the 1620s, was a handpicked sample of the wider elite, asked to give legitimacy to change. They refused, mixing the asserted rights of privilege with a sense that the levers of real power might soon be within their grasp, or that of “the nation.” Calonne was dismissed, and his successor, Brienne, fought the parlements for another year, drifting closer to real bankruptcy. Politics raged in front of “public opinion.” Royal ministers found themselves threatening to turn the people on their opponents. But the increasingly obsessive interest of the actual reading public favored dissent, as did the occasionally violent responses of crowds supporting their local judges against monarchical diktats. In May  1788, the parlements were abolished by royal order, but this led only to widespread demonstrations in their favor and a further collapse in royal credit. In August, they had to be reinstated to ward off fiscal collapse, in a humiliating blow for royal authority (Gruder 2008). Amid increasingly feverish agitation, there was general agreement: the answer lay in the past, in the historic Estates General of the realm, last summoned in 1614, which could give representatives of “the nation” a legitimate voice in finding a new dispensation. Having originally promised such a body for 1792, the Crown now conceded its summoning for 1789. In September 1788, the restored parlement of Paris offered its view that, to be legitimate, the gathering should obey the dictates of history and meet in the “forms of 1614.” This shattered the alliance between the conservative elite and the general public. The “forms of 1614” meant three separate chambers, clergy, nobility, and the remaining 98% as the Third Estate, each voting separately, and the voices of privilege thus outvoting the rest. The wider public, and even some leading figures for reform among the privileged, expected better. Necker, returned to office to head off bankruptcy, succeeded in getting governmental agreement to at least give the Third Estate a doubled representation, and the possibility of influence, but the question of “voting by head” was deferred to the meeting itself. The fateful year of 1789 opened with all of France abuzz at the new possibility of radical constitutional change, and at the sudden looming threat that the social elite might abandon opposition to “despotism,” allying with it to block such change (Kaiser and Van Kley 2010).

The Revolutionary Maelstrom The French Revolution was a set of events so fast-moving (indeed, bewildering, even to participants) that they cannot be catalogued here. We can only address what was so thoroughly “revolutionary” about them (McPhee 2013; Andress 2015). Firstly, and fundamentally, 1789 saw an explosion of the voices of ordinary people onto the historical stage. From the beginning of the year, when peasant communities were asked to write traditional cahiers de doléances, “registers of grievance,” to accompany the Estates General, and condemned every aspect of the political and social system that oppressed them, those voices were loud, and often matched by actions (Shapiro and Markoff 1998). Thousands of villages seized control of their communities’ resources at this point and refused thereafter to compromise with revolutionary authorities that wanted to turn their feudal burdens into capitalist debts (preserving the investments of the lawyerly class that made up so much of the new political elite). One of the central narratives of the 1790s is of 240

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continual peasant resistance to control over their lives by outside authorities, coupled with a determined assertion of the liberation that the original Revolution of 1789 had brought them (Markoff 1996). The Revolution was also about accomplishing ambitious change. When royal authority definitively collapsed in mid-1789, the swathe of elite and middling figures who had taken control of an Estates General boldly renamed as the “National Assembly” were at first daunted, then determinedly struck out to remake France from first principles. The notion that a new Constitution could, in fact, be written, and that the country was not beholden to the past for authority, was one of the deepest cultural “revolutions” of the era and struck chords across Europe (Blackman 2019). The changes the Revolution effected were violently contested, but many of them proved irresistible. France became a uniform legal space, not a patchwork of accumulated historical codes. Jurisdictions acquired clear, unambiguous borders; organizational hierarchies were logical and (superficially, at least) responsive to general needs, as well as grounded in elective democracy (for male taxpayers). The sense that power and privilege were things that belonged to a certain social stratum or could be bought – and that this was natural and right – was banished to the past (Woloch 1994). Violence was also central to the experience of the decade. Not as is sometimes suggested as a one-sided unleashing of the “mob,” but often as dramatic outbreaks of bloody action, in response to fears that the “old regime,” the “aristocracy,” was intent on slaughtering its way back to power. The king’s conservative advisors provoked upheaval by launching a coup d’état in July 1789 that failed because of the massed resistance of Paris (and their own loss of nerve). The king’s own brother Artois then fled the country, among the first of the émigrés pledged to vengeance and destruction and actively plotting thereafter. The king himself briefly fled Paris with his family in June 1791, and Queen Marie Antoinette actively conspired to bring France to defeat in war (Price 2003). Much of the clergy, from the end of 1790, became actively disaffected and preached resistance, and much of the rural population followed them into opposition. But there was also a spiral of twisted, paranoid alarm among revolutionary “patriots” and a construction of political identities (“Jacobin,” “sansculottes”) around the constant stoking of that alarm. These pushed France through war in 1792, to the toppling of the monarchy, and into a “Terror” in 1793/1794 that exploded into civil war, consuming lives by the tens of thousands and, in bare months, also consuming much of the political class that had spurred it on (Tackett 2015). The shadow of the Terror hung over the rest of the decade, as did a perception by elite survivors that uncontrollable popular impulses had been to blame (and were certainly more convenient to take that blame than looking too closely at themselves). The lip service of the most radical “terrorists” to social equality and the reassertion of the prerogatives of wealth after their fall have led this period to be often painted as the archetype of conflict between a progressive, lower-class “left” and a reactionary, wealthy “right.” There is a grain of truth in that, but it is also true that the relationship between violent anti-aristocratic rhetoric, a pantomime image of the so-called “sansculottes” popular radicals, and the real social positions and aspirations of actual individuals has proved much more complex to map in practice. It is clear, however, that even a rhetorical commitment to equality faded over time, during the years of economic and political chaos in the later 1790s. This was partly provoked by the inability of groups, at both national and local levels, to let go of feuds that had either begun in the period of “Terror” or been exacerbated into murderous vendettas by its grim 241

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climate of bloodshed. Hopes of quickly restoring a balanced liberal constitutional structure from 1795 had, by 1797, dissipated into systematic governmental meddling in annual elections, a see-saw policy of counteracting swings among the electorate to right or left by purging results and unseating chosen officials (Sutherland 2009; Brown 2008). Internal disorder was matched, paradoxically, by growing national strength. French armies from the summer of 1794 through to 1798 smashed enemy after enemy into submission, building a dominant strategic position west and south of the Rhine and Alps and filling the depleted national coffers with loot. The “Directorial” government of these years rebuilt a scientific and intellectual elite and began to label France as “the Great Nation,” capital letters and all. They had begun to use military force to pacify the country internally when, in 1799, a combination of sudden external defeats and consequent internal unrest propelled a group of conservative republican conspirators to seek a military strongman as figurehead for a more sturdy regime.

The France of Napoleon Arguably, Napoleon Bonaparte succeeded in the early years of his rule because he was able to embody the best qualities people desired in a monarch. He presented the figure of a leader who was personally capable, who actually led men in triumphant battle and yet also made peace, both internationally and with major internal enemies, most notably the Catholic Church. Bonapartist rule pushed the unseemly squabbles of factional politics that had occupied the whole stage of public life for much of the 1790s back behind a curtain of heroic decorum (Broers 2014). His rule also came to personify many of the worst aspects of monarchy: the closing down of political initiative from below, the rapacious enrichment of family members and cronies, the single-minded devotion of the public sphere to propaganda that was increasingly barefaced lies, the steady accumulation of indications of a megalomaniac belief in his own exceptional talents, and the resultant callous disregard for the victims of his self-glorifying endeavors. Even while he lived, Napoleon polarized opinion more than almost any other historical figure, and two centuries later, there are still few who have prompted so much discussion from diametrically opposed perspectives (Englund 2005; Dwyer 2019). Internally, Bonapartist rule meant pacification: the extension and consolidation of the use of armed force to repress both political and non-political banditry that had already begun in the later 1790s, and the steady removal of active political partisanship as a source of local strife. The consulate and later empire took all the rationalizing measures of the revolutionary reordering of French administrative geography and capped them with electoral processes that merely nominated candidates for approval by higher authority, alongside the new centrally appointed figure of the prefect in every locality to monitor all that took place and disseminate orders from above. Napoleon spoke of his system in 1802 as rebuilding a nation that had been shattered into “grains of sand” by setting down “masses of granite.” Such “masses,” alongside collaboration with the Church, included the stabilization of the currency, the creation of a national bank, and the reconstruction of an elite education system to breed the next generation of savants and administrators. In 1804, the regime produced a new consolidated code of civil laws, later dubbed the “Code Napoleon.” Presented as the product of the new order, and in some respects as that of his personal genius, the Code, like much else at this moment, plundered the best ideas of the revolutionary period (Woloch 2001). 242

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From 1803, the regime of pacification became once more one of war, and the following year an empire. Although naval defeat at Trafalgar ended any scheme of invading Britain, by the end of 1805, Austria had been cowed, as by the end of 1806 had almost all of Germany, and by early 1807 the remainder, including Prussia. Russia became an ally, but Napoleon’s eyes turned southwest, and by 1808 (seeking to cut off Portugal from its British alliance), he had plunged French forces into the hornet’s nest of Spanish resistance and a Peninsular War that became an “ulcer” eating at his power. Austria attempted a resurgence in 1809, only to be brutally crushed, and the following two years saw rising tensions with Russia over its adherence to the “Continental System” that tried to cut Britain’s economy off from Europe. The 1812 invasion and its catastrophic outcome were testament both to the scope of Napoleon’s ambition and its fatal flaws: not least a total disregard for the human cost (Forrest, Hagemann, and Rendall 2009). Over the course of the previous decade, Napoleonic rule had become steadily more monarchist – the Legion of Honor had been augmented by a new hierarchical imperial nobility; grand titles and huge tracts of land had been granted to key collaborators; Napoleon himself, opponent of divorce for others, had divorced his own Empress Josephine to marry the Austrian emperor’s daughter and sire an heir; his subsidiary Italian title had been used to increasingly name him “king and emperor.” Napoleon fought on to preserve all this (declining serious offers of peace) until the spring of 1814, costing literally millions of lives in the process (Forrest and Wilson 2009). After his abdication and brief exile to Elba, Napoleon returned in the spring of 1815 an apparently changed man. He played up to French discontent with the rule of the “restored” Louis XVIII by offering liberal reforms, enshrined in a new “Additional Act” to the Constitution. Whether he would have stuck to any of it was rendered a moot point by the Battle of Waterloo. France was left exhausted and occupied, with some of the wounds of the 1790s suddenly ripped open again: a “White Terror” of right-wing revenge followed that 1814 had avoided. Louis XVIII nonetheless refused to unleash the full weight of a returned aristocracy, continuing to rule by a Charter that was, in some respects, remarkably close to the 1791 Constitution in its general vision, albeit preserving to him rather more initiative and power than his elder brother. For the mass of the common people, the historian François Furet famously argued that nothing more resembled pre-revolutionary France than the post-Napoleonic country (Furet 1981, 24). In terms of crude social structure – the dominance of agriculture, the prevalence of landed wealth among the elite – this was true. But those peasants were no longer feudal vassals, and as Furet also famously argued, it would take most of another century for the echoes of revolution to finally leave politics (Furet 1995). And when they did, France had become definitively what it was first, briefly, from 1792: a democratic republic.

References Andress, David, ed. 2015. The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Blackman, Robert H. 2019. 1789: The French Revolution begins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Broers, Michael. 2014. Napoleon: Soldier of Destiny. London: Faber. Brown, Howard G. 2008. Ending the French Revolution: Violence, Justice, and Repression from the Terror to Napoleon, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Burrows, Simon. 2010. A King’s Ransom: The Life of Charles Théveneau de Morande, Blackmailer, Scandalmonger, and Master-Spy. London: Continuum.

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David Andress ———. 2018. The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe II: Enlightenment Bestsellers. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Collins, James B. 2009. The State in Early-Modern France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Curran, Mark. 2018. The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe I: Selling Enlightenment. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Darnton, Robert. 1996. The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France. New York: W.W. Norton. ———. 2010. Poetry and the Police; Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris. Cambridge: Belknap Press. Doyle, William. 1996. Venality; The Sale of Offices in Eighteenth-Century France. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Dwyer, Philip. 2019. Napoleon: Passion, Death and Resurrection 1815–1840. London: Bloomsbury. Edelstein, Dan. 2010. The Enlightenment; a Genealogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Englund, Steven. 2005. Napoleon; A Political Life. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Felix, Joel. 2011. “Finances.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Ancien Regime, edited by William Doyle, 75–92. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Forrest, Alan, and Peter Wilson, eds. 2009. The Bee and the Eagle; Napoleonic France and the End of the Holy Roman Empire, 1806. London: Palgrave. Forrest, Alan, Karen Hagemann, and Jane Rendall, eds. 2009. Soldiers, Citizens and Civilians; Experiences and Perceptions of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1790–1820. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Furet, François. 1981. Interpreting the French Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1995. Revolutionary France, 1770–1880. Oxford: Wiley. Gelbart, Nina Rattner. 1998. The King’s Midwife: A History and Mystery of Madame du Coudray. Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press. Goodman, Dena. 1994. The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Gruder, Vivian R. 2008. The Notables and the Nation; The Political Schooling of the French, 1787– 1788. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hafter, Daryl M. 2007. Women at Work in Preindustrial France. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Hardman, John. 2016. The Life of Louis XVI. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hayhoe, Jeremy. 2008. Enlightened Feudalism: Seigneurial Justice and Village Society in EighteenthCentury Northern Burgundy. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Horn, Jeff. 2015. Economic Development in Early Modern France: The Privilege of Liberty, 1650– 1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jones, Colin. 2002. The Great Nation; France from Louis XV to Napoleon. London: Allen Lane. Jones, Peter M. 1995. Reform and Revolution in France: The Politics of Transition, 1774–1791. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kaiser, Thomas E., and Dale Van Kley, eds. 2010. From Deficit to Deluge; The Origins of the French Revolution. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kaplan, Steven L. 1982. “The Famine Plot Persuasion in Eighteenth-Century France.” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 72 (3): 1–79. Lilti, Antoine. 2015. The World of the Salons; Sociability and Worldliness in Eighteenth-Century Paris. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Markoff, John. 1996. The Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords, and Legislators in the French Revolution. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Matteson, Kieko. 2015. Forests in Revolutionary France; Conservation, Community, and Conflict, 1669–1848. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McPhee, Peter, ed. 2013. A Companion to the French Revolution. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Outram, Dorinda. 2019. The Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ozouf, Mona. 1988. “ ‘Public Opinion’ at the End of the Old Regime.” Journal of Modern History 60: S1–S21. Price, Munro. 2003. The Road from Versailles: Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, and the Baron de Breteuil. London: Pan. Shapiro, Gilbert, and John Markoff. 1998. Revolutionary Demands: A  Content Analysis of the ‘Cahiers de doléances’ of 1789. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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France, 1715 to 1815 Sutherland, D. M. G. 2009. Murder in Aubagne: Lynching, Law, and Justice during the French Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tackett, Timothy. 2015. The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution. Cambridge: Belknap Press. Van Kley, Dale K. 1996. The Religious Origins of the French Revolution; From Calvin to the Civil Constitution, 1560–1791. New Haven: Yale University Press. Woloch, Isser. 1994. The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civic Order, 1789–1820s. New York: W. W. Norton. ———. 2001. Napoleon and His Collaborators: The Making of a Dictatorship. New York: W. W. Norton. Zinsser, Judith P.  2006. La dame d’esprit: A  Biography of the Marquise Du Châtelet. New York: Viking.

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23 THE FRENCH CARIBBEAN IN THE ERA OF SLAVERY Erica Johnson Edwards

French activity in the Caribbean can be dated from the 1530s, when privateering flibustiers targeted Spanish vessels, including those carrying enslaved Africans. However, France was slow to engage in the colonization of the Caribbean in comparison to its European rivals, hampered by more than half a century of internal strife, the Wars of Religion, from the 1560s. The French began to settle parts of the Caribbean in the early seventeenth century through unofficial efforts or commercial companies. From the start, the French intertwined a religious mission with their colonization efforts. In 1625, Pierre Bélain, sieur d’Esnambuc, established France’s first Caribbean colony on the island of Saint-Christophe (now known as St. Kitts) in the Lesser Antilles. The English had already settled part of the island, but they agreed to a partition, with the British in the center and the French on the coasts (Dubois 2011). Upon returning to France, d’Esnambuc applied for a charter for a private company called the Compagnie de Saint-Christophe. The company’s charter included a mission to Christianize the indigenous inhabitants of Saint-Christophe, the Island Caribs. Believed to have originated in present-day Venezuela and the Guianas of South America, the Island Caribs inhabited several islands in the Lesser Antilles, including St. Vincent, Martinique, and Guadeloupe. In 1635, Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister to King Louis XIII (r. 1601–1643), charged superintendent of finances François Fouquet with reorganizing the Compagnie de SaintChristophe as the Compagnie des îles de l’Amérique (Company of the American Islands) and colonizing additional islands in the French Caribbean. Its charter extended French naturalization to indigenous converts to Christianity. That same year, d’Esnambuc claimed Martinique for France, and Léonard de L’Olive and Jean Duplessis d’Ossonville established a French colony on the island of Guadeloupe. Cardinal Richelieu sent four Dominican missionaries to Guadeloupe. One of these, Raymond Breton, lived among the Island Caribs for over a decade. He created a French–Carib dictionary, translated the Catechism into the Carib language, and wrote an ethnography of the Caribs (Garraway 2005). French adventurers and enslavers described the Island Caribs as particularly hospitable, even reporting that the natives provided them with food and shelter. In the early decades of their encounters, Island Caribs sold captive Arawak Indians to Europeans to enslave, but relations soured as the Arawak population quickly diminished from disease and enslavement, and Europeans sought to enslave the Island Caribs in their place. The Island Caribs DOI: 10.4324/9780367808471-24

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were notorious for their fierce resistance to enslavement and colonization (Garraway 2005), but they could not prevent the Europeans from expanding their settlements in the Lesser Antilles. The French had driven the Island Caribs from Guadeloupe by 1641. Colonists from Martinique successfully settled in St. Lucia and Grenada in 1650. On the former island, the French were able to agree a treaty with the Caribs a decade later (Garrigus 2010). In Grenada, however, the Caribs carried out a mass suicide at a location now called morne des sauters (Leaper’s Hill) in response to French colonization (Garraway 2005). In 1660, French, British, and Carib leaders agreed to establish Dominica and St. Vincent as “reserve islands.” Intended to stop warring between Europeans and the Island Caribs, the French and British promised not to settle on either island. However, in 1719, the French moved on to St. Vincent. Relations between Island Caribs and the French on St. Vincent remained relatively peaceful (Dubois 2011). When cultivatable land ran out in Martinique and Guadeloupe in the 1740s, more French colonists established coffee plantations with enslaved labor in Dominica, St. Vincent, St. Lucia, and Grenada. Island Caribs began incorporating enslaved African runaways into their populations. Europeans referred to the offspring of Africans and Island Caribs as Black Caribs. In juxtaposition, Europeans began to refer to the Island Caribs as Yellow or Red Caribs. The largest concentration of Black Caribs settled on the island of St. Vincent (Boucher 1992). Initially, the economic basis of French colonization was tobacco grown by combination of engagés (white indentured laborers) and enslaved Africans on small plots. By 1655, there were around 13,000 white colonists and 10,000 enslaved Africans in France’s Caribbean colonies (Dubois 2011). However, in the mid-1650s, Dutch refugees from Brazil arrived in the Caribbean and instructed France’s colonists in Saint-Christophe, Martinique, and Guadeloupe in sugar cultivation. Sugar required more land, resulted in deforestation, and transformed the labor demographics from tobacco. The French began to enslave large numbers of West African peoples and phased out indentured servitude. Consequently, France developed its own transatlantic slave trade out of ports in the Bight of Benin, Angola, and Kongo. Planters also engaged in the production of indigo, coffee, and cotton with enslaved labor (Garrigus 2010). By the end of the seventeenth century, enslaved people outnumbered free people in the French Caribbean. In 1664, the French Crown had given the Compagnie des Indes Occidentales monopoly rights over the slave trade and control over France’s Caribbean colonies. In 1671, the seat of the French administration in the Caribbean shifted from Saint-Christophe to Martinique. The French Crown dissolved the Company in 1674 and assumed direct royal control over the colonies (Dubois 2004b). Soon after, Minister of the Marine Jean-Baptiste Colbert implemented L’Exclusif (the Exclusive), a protectionist economic policy, in line with wider contemporary notions of mercantilism. This required France’s colonies to trade directly with France instead of other countries, understanding the very existence of the colonies to be for the benefit of the home nation. This was particularly frustrating for French Caribbean colonists when the intercolonial trade could have been quite lucrative. The policy was difficult to enforce, given the distances and territories involved, and was often uneven in application, especially in its marginal colonies like French Guiana (Losier 2021). The royal government allowed merchants from five French port cities to engage in the slave trade in 1716 and eventually extended the trade to private traders in 1725 (Garrigus 2010). However, the demand for enslaved labor in France’s Caribbean colonies outmatched the supply French vessels could provide. So French colonies opened their ports to foreign contraband. Concerned with maintaining l’Exclusif, the French state only formally 247

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allowed this in wartime, as when during the American Revolutionary War, foreign slaving ships were granted entry into Martinique, Guadeloupe, and the southern part of SaintDomingue (Geggus 2001). However, the practice was widespread, and overall, between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, Europeans imported approximately 1.1 million enslaved Africans into France’s Caribbean colonies. Nearly 800,000 of those went to SaintDomingue, and 200,000 arrived in Martinique, while Guadeloupe and French Guiana each received around 30,000 (Dubois 2011). French Guiana dated from 1604, when a French expedition under Daniel de la Tousche La Ravardière claimed the island of Cayenne, but early colonization efforts failed. The small French population battled against the Dutch and English to maintain the settlement. The Dutch briefly seized control of the colony from 1654 to 1663, but the French regained control through an expedition led by Francois de Lefebvre de la Barre in 1664. The colonists sought to cultivate plantation crops, such as sugar, cotton, and tobacco, while the French government saw the colony as a barrier to Spanish and Portuguese domination of South America. Despite attempts to retake Guiana, the Dutch finally ceded the territory to France through the Treaty of Breda in 1667, a repayment for French support in the Second AngloDutch War (1665–1667). In 1674, the Guianese colony officially came under French royal rule, and French settlers expanded into the coastal regions of the South American continent two years later. The French expelled the remaining Dutch colonists from Cayenne in 1677. However, due to a lack of labor and unsuccessful land cultivation, the colony stagnated from 1677 to 1763. Without financial resources, it was difficult for Guiana’s colonists to attract slave traders or merchants (Losier 2021). For most of the eighteenth century, French Guiana experienced food shortages. Overall, the French government neglected Guiana for nearly a century. France’s most successful Caribbean colony, Saint-Domingue, had its own uncertain start. Christopher Columbus first landed on and claimed the island of Hispaniola in the 1490s, but the Spanish abandoned the eastern part, leaving it vulnerable to French squatters in the mid-1600s. Saint-Domingue became the French name for this unwanted territory. French flibustiers and boucaniers (hunters) settled along its northern coast and on the island of Tortuga. Even though Saint-Domingue was not an official colony yet, France sent a governor and began recruiting colonists in 1664. By 1680, there were around 4,000 settlers. In 1689, France battled against much of Europe, including Spain, in the War of the Grand Alliance, also known as the Nine Years’ War (1689–1697), and the war expanded to include Caribbean colonies. Near the end of the war, French forces planned a raid on the Spanish port of Cartagena, calling upon free people of African descent in Saint-Domingue to join them. Finally, in 1697, Spain ceded Saint-Domingue to the French through the Treaty of Ryswick (Dubois 2004a). During this time, indigo plantations had been successfully developed, nearly tripling the enslaved population in the colony between the 1670s and 1700. By the 1690s, Saint-Domingue’s population was majority Black. In the 1730s, the colonists shifted to sugar production. To encourage French colonists to produce sugar, the French government granted them subsidies and imposed a high import tax on foreignrefined sugar (Dupuy 1985). This, along with a coffee boom and increased irrigation, increased the enslaved population again (Garrigus 2010). The enslaved populations of Martinique and Guadeloupe were largely Caribbean-born, or creole, by the 1770s. However, due to the rapid increase in numbers, Saint-Domingue’s enslaved population remained primary African-born (Garrigus 2010). Enslavers in the French Caribbean had preferences for the sex, age, and geographic origins of Africans they 248

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enslaved. For instance, Saint-Domingue’s colonists enslaved the largest numbers of men and the smallest number of children, while Guadeloupe and French Guiana received the highest numbers of enslaved Africans from Sierra Leone, Biafra, and the Windward Coast. SaintDomingue produced more coffee than France’s other colonies, and colonists preferred West Central Africans, often listed as “Congo,” to enslave on coffee plantations. This meant that West Central Africans were at least half of those enslaved in the mid- to late eighteenth century. Captives from the Bight of Benin made up nearly half of those enslaved in Martinique. Guadeloupe’s and French Guiana’s enslaved populations had the most diverse regional origins (Geggus 2001). Despite the colonists’ predilections in Saint-Domingue for enslaving Africans from particular areas, those from the Bight of Benin appeared to have had a significant influence on the overall enslaved population through Vodou. Africans from this region, generally referred to as “Arada,” only represented around one-fourth of the enslaved population in Saint-Domingue. However, the vocabulary and deities in Haitian Vodou reflect the language and culture of peoples from the Bight of Benin (Geggus 2001). Vodou was more than a religion; it was an expression of African identity within slavery. It involved ceremony, drums, and dancing led by a houngan (priest). However, French officials forbade Vodou, so the enslaved blended it with elements of Catholicism. This syncretism allowed them to resist their enslavement by continuing to practice Vodou without violating the Code Noir (Black Code) (Fick 1990). The Code Noir, decreed by the French Crown in 1685, cemented the relationship between its colonies and the Catholic Church. Although primarily intended to regulate relations between enslavers and enslaved people, Catholicism appeared throughout the Code Noir – in its preamble, as the focus of the first article, and through the following 13. The edict explained the need for the authority and justice of the French Crown “to maintain the discipline of the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman Church” before mentioning the decree’s announced purpose of regulating the status and condition of the enslaved. Paralleling the contemporary revocation of toleration for French Protestants, this approach reflected the commitment to religious uniformity and authority as a foundation for general good order, manifested since the first years of official colonization. The Code Noir required the baptism and Catholic instruction of all the enslaved and adherence to Church practices around working on holidays, marriages, and burials. Overall, the French Crown intended for the Catholic Church to play a significant role in justifying the institution of slavery, as enslavers were supposedly saving the souls of the enslaved (Johnson 2018). Movement toward this position with regard to Jewish and Protestant colonists had begun two years earlier. In September 1683, Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715) expelled the Jews from the islands, giving them one month to leave and claiming that they set a “bad example.” In addition, the king prohibited French Protestants from practicing their religion in the colonies and forbade their residence there without his express permission. Louis XIV relied upon the colonial authorities to enforce his orders. The Code Noir reiterated these positions. The first article gave all Jews in the French Caribbean three months to leave or face arrest and property confiscation. This suggests the Jewish population in the Caribbean had not obeyed the initial expulsion order of 1683, as well as the inability of the colonial authorities to enforce fully the king’s commands. Further, the third article forbade any religion other than Catholicism and threatened punishment of any offenders. Although some non-Catholics may have broken this law, as the Jews had the previous order, the primary religion with which the enslaved had contact was Roman Catholicism (Johnson 2018). 249

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Article 9 of the Code Noir addressed miscegenation between French whites and enslaved Africans in the French Caribbean. Although there had been little miscegenation between the French and Caribs, French enslavers raped enslaved women as an inherent component of their coercive control throughout this era. French law designated the offspring of this sexual violence as gens de couleur (free people of color). French writers justified the interracial sexual violence by describing enslaved women as seductresses (Dubois 2011). Free people of color in the French Caribbean inherited property, received educations, served in the militia and colonial military, and enslaved peoples of African descent. However, rising attention to concepts of “racial” difference saw them treated with greater suspicion later in the eighteenth century. In the 1760s, Martinican laws limited the rights of free people of color, barring them from medical and judicial positions and from gathering in large crowds. Further, officials forbade them from taking names of Martinican whites and wearing certain clothing and hairstyles in the 1770s. Legal changes in the 1780s prohibited them from using the titles monsieur or madame in official documents (Schloss 2009). Authorities attempted to regulate marronage (running away or self-liberation) by enforcing Article 38 of Louis XIV’s Code Noir, which defined it as a crime and outlined punishments for it. The law only considered it a punishable crime if an enslaved person remained away for one month after their enslaver reported them gone to the courts. This distinction reflects two types of marronage, petit and grand. Petit marronnage, where an enslaved person was gone for less than a month and returned voluntarily, was most common. This everyday form of resistance was a way for enslaved people to carve out a life within bondage, as they could visit friends and family who were not enslaved in the same location. On the other hand, grand marronage was when an enslaved person never intended to return (Fick 1990). The punishments outline in the Code Noir assumed that a runaway had been captured. For the first offense, authorities would cut off the enslaved person’s ears and brand them on the shoulder with a fleur-de-lis (the lily flower emblem of the monarchy). For a second transgression, the colonial administrators would cut one of the enslaved person’s hamstrings and brand them on the other shoulder with a fleur-de-lis. Upon running away the third time, the enslaved runaway would be executed by officials (Ghachem 2012). Metropolitan officials believed enslaved peoples ran away because enslavers mistreated them. Therefore, they encouraged officials in Saint-Domingue to require enslavers and managers to adequately feed and clothe their enslaved populations (Burnard and Garrigus 2016). Evolving over time from its establishment in the 1720s, the maréchaussée (rural police force) was the organization responsible for capturing runaways (if they did not kill them in the process). Enslaved men enlisted, or more likely their masters enrolled them, in the maréchaussée to earn their freedom, because it made tax-free manumission possible (Ghachem 2012). Allowing enslaved men to serve in the maréchaussée provided enslaved peoples of African descent with an opportunity to improve their lives through manumission. In turn, the free colonists ensured the loyalty of some peoples of African descent by offering liberty for service in the maréchaussée, all the while protecting the institution of slavery by policing marronage. Yet marronage was not the only form of resistance. Peoples of African descent also resisted their enslavement through poisonings and religious cultures. For instance, François Makandal was an enslaved runaway and rebel leader in Saint-Domingue. He led other runaways in the colony in carrying out a series of poisonings in 1757 and 1758. The poisonings reportedly killed livestock, free whites, and enslaved people. Makandal embraced a form of syncretism that combined what French officials perceived as a type of magic, Christianity, and Islam. The seneschal (royal officer) 250

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of Saint-Domingue’s capital city, Le Cap, Sébastien Jacques Courtin, explained that the court convicted Makandal for “mingling holy things in the composition,” referring to Allah and Jesus Christ, and using “allegedly magical packets,” and casting “evil spells .  .  . in addition to [having] created, sold and distributed poisons of all kinds” (Peabody 2002). The seneschal also noted the subversive actions of Jesuit Father Duquesnoy, a curé des nègres, a priest charged with the religious instruction of enslaved peoples. Assam, a young enslaved woman captured for poisonings with Makandal, claimed during her interrogation that Duquesnoy suggested she would go to hell if she gave up the other co-conspirators and advised her to bear any torture exacted by the white colonists. The priest did not condemn Assam for her actions against her enslaver but instead appeared to justify her fighting back against her enslavement. He believed a society based on racial slavery presented many reasons for condoning her crimes and offering her forgiveness for her sins (Fick 1990). Even though Jesuits enslaved peoples of African descent, colonists and colonial officials in the French Caribbean perceived them as another internal threat. While the highest court in Saint-Domingue, the Council of Cap, was considering the fate of the Jesuits in SaintDomingue in February 1761, their proceedings revealed the clandestine religious actions of the enslaved in and around the city. The attorney general explained that free and enslaved Black men were leading worship in the Church independent of a priest or any white supervision. Others served as choir leaders, beadles, and churchwardens. As a result, the Council forbade enslaved peoples from serving in any function of the Church and required the clergy to close the churches during certain hours to prevent these autonomous religious services. It laid the responsibility for the independent worship by the enslaved on the Jesuits, whose instruction seemed to encourage the enslaved to form their own congregations. On November 24, 1763, the Council of Cap found the Jesuits guilty of teaching the enslaved immorality, which led to “enormous crimes, including desecration and poisoning,” as well as violations of various other decisions previously put forth by the Council (Breathett 1962). They alluded to Jesuit involvement in the Makandal affair by mentioning poisonings. Consequently, Saint-Domingue expelled the Jesuits in 1763. The French Crown saw Jesuits as ideological enemies in its colonies as well as the metropole, so it removed them from the entire realm in 1764. The expulsion of the Jesuits came at a time when the revenues of the Caribbean colonies continued to soar, and they were becoming pawns in ever-more significant military and political conflict. Throughout the early eighteenth century, British leaders had grown increasingly concerned with the economic success of France’s sugar islands in the Caribbean and struck hard at the Lesser Antilles during the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763). Guadeloupe’s colonists did not put up much of a fight, capitulating in 1759, and the British allowed them to retain their property and trade in British markets. This was particularly beneficial for Guadeloupe as it expanded the colony’s access to the slave trade. In 1761, British troops captured neighboring Dominica and went on to blockade Martinique, forcing it to surrender in 1762. At the end of the war, the British returned Martinique and Guadeloupe to the French but maintained control of Grenada and Dominica (Burnard and Garrigus 2016). French officials in Saint-Domingue issued various laws limiting the rights of free people of color after the Seven Years’ War. The colonial militia in Saint-Domingue experienced a period of crisis in the late 1760s. In March 1763, French colonial officials dissolved the militia, but by 1764, colonists who favored reestablishing the colonial militia began to claim raids by enslaved runaways had increased because of the peacetime anarchy that had 251

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replaced “wartime discipline” (Garrigus 2006). Indeed, militiamen of color often assisted the maréchausée in pursuing runaways (King 2001). When Louis-Armand-Constantin de Rohan-Montbazon became Saint-Domingue’s governor in 1766, he immediately pursued the re-establishment of the colonial militia, despite opposition from whites and free men of color who enslaved Africans and owned plantations. However, the Council of Port-auPrince refused to approve such a measure. In October 1768, King Louis XV (r. 1715–1774) sent his support for Rohan-Montbazon’s militia law. Instead of mustering, antimilitia whites and free men of color gathered in protest in early 1769, and Rohan-Montbazon sent royal troops to repress them (Garrigus 2006). Although colonists in Saint-Domingue had largely treated free people of color as white until the 1760s, the militia crisis was a turning point toward exclusionary application of racial labels. After the Seven Years’ War, Minister of the Marine Etienne-Francois duc de Choiseul sent the Korou expedition to French Guiana. The goal was for French Guiana to produce foodstuffs for France’s other colonies using a paid workforce made up primarily of Acadian and Canadian refugees. It is likely the French saw value in a colonial plan involving breeding future generation of white laborers to match that of the British North American colonies. Unfortunately, the marshy Korou region was not suitable for the project. France sent nearly 11,000 colonists to Guiana in 1764 and 1765, but 5,000 returned quickly and 6,000 died within months. Despite the failure of the expedition, French Guiana found success trading outside French mercantilism with Britain’s mainland colonies. The French colony sent sugar, cane syrup, and rum in exchange for American wood, flour, fish, and oil. In 1768, the French government extended the l’Exclusif mitigé (mixed exclusive), loosening restrictions on trading with the metropole. During the American Revolutionary War (1776–1783), the French signed a Treaty of Alliance with the 13 new states. The treaty included trade with the French Antilles and French Guiana, and the commercial ties continued until the French first abolished slavery in 1794 (Loiser 2021). The impact of “enlightened” anti-slavery sentiment had first begun to be felt in the 1780s. Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, experimented with gradual emancipation in French Guiana in 1785. He purchased a plantation called “La Belle Gabrielle” and around 70 enslaved people, forbidding their resale. Under the management of Henri de Richeprey, the enslaved worked on the plantation, growing cloves and cinnamon for a wage, and received religious instruction and an education. Lafayette proudly wrote to his American friend George Washington about his experiment. Around this same time, Charles-EugèneGabriel, Maréchal de Castries, Minister of the Marine, sent orders to the commissioner in French Guiana, Daniel Lescallier, to emancipate enslaved people held directly by the state. In Paris in the 1780s, both Lafayette and Lescallier joined a philanthropic organization dedicated to ending the slave trade and ending racial inequalities, known as the Société des Amis des Noirs (Society of the Friends of the Blacks). Lescallier, ironically, failed to carry out Castries’s instructions, but Lafayette manumitted those he enslaved in 1789 (Ghachem 2012). As he became more involved in revolutionary activities in France, his wife and fellow member of the Friends of the Blacks Adrienne de Noailles, Marquise de Lafayette, began to administer the plantation, corresponding with the manager. Ironically, the French revolutionary government seized and resold Lafayette’s property, including the plantation and people of African descent on it, after he fled France in August 1792 (Dubois 2004b). From July 1789, the French Revolution rapidly reverberated across the Atlantic Ocean into France’s colonies. In August  1789, the French revolutionary government approved the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, and an abortive revolt among the 252

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enslaved broke out in Martinique (Cormack 2019). In Saint-Domingue, free people of color in Saint-Domingue invoked the Declaration to claim citizenship for themselves while the white colonists demanded more colonial representation in the metropole and greater economic autonomy. After attempting to persuade officials in Paris to give equal rights to free people of color throughout France’s colonies, free man of color Vincent Ogé led a revolt of the enslaved and free people of color in Saint-Domingue in October 1790. As the whites and free people of color within the French Atlantic continued to fight over the status of men like Ogé, the enslaved population in Saint-Domingue organized a violent and bloody revolt against the enslavers of the island in August 1791. Consequently, the French revolutionary government in Paris sent three white civil commissioners to Saint-Domingue to restore order: Edmond de Saint-Léger, Frédéric Ignace de Mirbeck, and Philippe Roume de SaintLaurent. After numerous attempts to mediate between free and enslaved peoples, the first civil commission returned to France. In April 1792, the French revolutionary government granted rights for free people of color in Saint-Domingue and once again sent three white civil commissioners, Etienne Polverel, Jean-Antoine Ailhaud, and Léger-Félicité Sonthonax, to Saint-Domingue to ensure those rights later that year (Dubois 2004a). In early 1793, revolutionaries in France executed the monarch, having declared the First French Republic four months earlier, and quickly went to war against England and Spain. In June, violence erupted in Saint-Domingue from a dispute between the French civil commissioners and colonial governor, resulting in the burning of the capital city, Le Cap. The French revolutionary government abolished subsidies for the slave trade in the summer of 1793, though the slave trade continued throughout the revolutions (Girard 2019). The Revolutionary Wars in Europe soon carried over into the Caribbean. British troops invaded southern Saint-Domingue, and major leaders of the enslaved uprising, including JeanFrançois, Georges Biassou, and Toussaint Louverture, allied with the Spanish in neighboring Santo Domingo, joining the Black Auxiliaries of Carlos IV in late 1793 (Fick 1990). After the civil commissioners declared emancipation in Saint-Domingue, the French revolutionary government in Paris formally abolished slavery in the French Empire on February 4, 1794. That year, the British occupied Martinique, maintaining slavery and revoking rights for free people of color (Schloss 2009). The rapidly changing circumstances on both sides of the Atlantic jeopardized permanent abolition. France sent Victor Hugues to Guadeloupe to implement abolition and keep the British out. Although Hugues mobilized the formerly enslaved to fight the British, he also forced them to return to work in the fields. In the summer of 1794, Louverture allied with the French in Saint-Domingue, and the French government recalled the second civil commission. The next year, Spain ceded Santo Domingo to the French, but they could not spare troops to occupy it for five years (Dubois 2004a). Hugues fomented resistance to British rule in St. Vincent and Grenada, appealing not only to White colonists and the enslaved but also the Black Caribs (Cormack 2019). In late 1795, under a new constitution, the “Directorial” regime took power in France and sent a third civil commission, including Sonthonax, in mid-1796. They oversaw philanthropic efforts in education, established an interracial learned society, and implemented new agricultural policies intended to keep the formerly enslaved working on plantations as wage laborers. In late 1796 and early 1797, Saint-Dominguans elected deputies of all colors to the revolutionary government in Paris. There these deputies joined the Société des Amis des Noirs et des Colonies (Society of the Friends of the Blacks and the Colonies), a reorganization of the Parisian society of the 1780s devoted to maintaining general emancipation in France’s colonies (Johnson 2018). 253

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When Napoleon Bonaparte rose to power in 1799, Louverture had expelled foreign intruders and established his authority over the whole island of Hispaniola. Louverture successfully led an interracial army in ridding the West and South of Saint-Domingue of British occupation in 1798. At the end of April  1800, Bonaparte appointed Louverture as commander-in-chief of the army of Saint-Domingue. In August 1800, Louverture consolidated his control of the entire French portion of Saint-Domingue by winning the war of the South against free man of color André Rigaud. Later that year, he completed the long-delayed French occupation of Santo Domingo. The next year, Louverture assembled a group of white French and Spanish colonists and free men of color to draft a constitution for Saint-Domingue (Hazareesingh 2020). When representatives delivered the colonial constitution to France, many Parisians reacted negatively, but Bonaparte was not able to take any action overseas until agreeing what would become the tenuous Peace of Amiens with England in 1801. He then sent multinational expeditions under French command to the Caribbean to remove those of African descent from power. Louverture was seized and deported to France, where he died in prison in 1803. Bonaparte also charged Antoine Richepance and the 3,500 troops under his command with restoring slavery in Guadeloupe. In response, Louis Delgrès led a group of over 500 people of African descent in a mass suicide, blowing themselves up with gunpowder, to avoid enslavement. In the summer of 1802, authorities deported nearly 1,800 people who resisted French control of the colony. Richepance’s successor, Jean-Augustin Ernouf, legally reinstituted slavery in Guadeloupe in May 1803 (Girard 2019). While efforts to restore slavery were successful in Guadeloupe, they failed in SaintDomingue. After the Saint-Dominguan expedition’s leader, Bonaparte’s brother-in-law General Charles Victoire Emmanuel Leclerc, died of yellow fever, Donatien Rochambeau took command. Rochambeau launched a murderous campaign, employing dogs imported from Cuba and trained to attack peoples of African descent and ordering the burning and drowning alive of anyone his soldiers captured (Dubois 2004a). Despite the aggressive tactics of the French expedition, the Saint-Dominguan forces, including some white supporters, defeated the French forces, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared independence in 1804, taking an indigenous name, Haiti, for the new nation. After the Haitian Revolution ended, some white supporters of independence remained in Haiti, notwithstanding the execution of 3,000 to 5,000 whites carried out by Dessalines and the anti-white rhetoric of the Haitian Constitution of 1805, which declared all Haitian citizens were Black. Despite losing Haiti, France regained control of Martinique and began to re-establish slavery in all its remaining Caribbean colonies in 1802. Bonaparte sent Hugues, formerly in Guadeloupe, to French Guiana, where he reinstituted slavery. Santo Domingo remained under French control, administered first by François de Kerversau and then Louis Ferrand. While Kerversau preferred abolition, Ferrand believed the slave trade could be a way to raise funds to attack the new Haitian state. When again at war from 1803, France lost control of Martinique to the British, Guiana to Portugal, and later Santo Domingo to the Spanish in 1809, and Guadeloupe to the British in 1810 (Girard 2019). Sweden briefly controlled Guadeloupe after receiving it from the British through the Treaty of Stockholm. The French regained control of Martinique, Guiana, and Guadeloupe in 1814 through the Congress of Vienna. The French and Haitian Revolutions and Napoleonic Wars halted most of the legal slave trade into the Caribbean. Although efforts to resume the slave trade began in 1802, it only fully resumed in 1815. Yet France began to end its trade in 1818 after signing a treaty with 254

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Great Britain. However, with a renewed interest in Martinique and Guadeloupe in the nineteenth century, the two colonies received over 80 slaving vessels with approximately 85,000 enslaved Africans in the 1820s (Garrigus 2010). During the nineteenth century, French slave traders focused on Biafra and Sierra Leone (Geggus 2001). In February  1831, there was an uprising in Martinique. The colony had two unique populations, the libres en fait and patronés, people who lived a free and independent life but whose enslavers had not paid the required manumission tax. While the revolutionary upheaval in the metropole resulted in policies favoring free people of color in Martinique, colonial leaders refused to implement them. Therefore, libres en fait and patronés attacked plantations near and homes in the city of Saint Pierre. Colonial militias put out fires and quelled the rebellion, and authorities arrested over 250 people. The uprising resulted in debates in the colony and in France over the status of these people. In April  1831, the French constitutional monarch granted full civil liberties to Martinique’s gens de couleur but denied them the right to vote or hold office. The French also began to ameliorate the conditions of the enslaved. For instance, in 1833, the government outlawed mutilation and branding but still permitted whipping. From 1839 to 1842, leading men in France debated the “sugar question,” as colonial sugar production seemed to be in crisis, especially with rising competition from European-grown beet sugar. In the 1840s, new colonial laws placed the enslaved under the protection of procureurs généraux (attorneys general) and restricted working hours from six in the morning until six in the evening, with a two-hour siesta. Further, enslavers had to compensate the enslaved for working beyond those hours during harvest. This allowed the enslaved to accumulate pécule, or savings they could use to purchase their manumission. Finally, France abolished slavery a second time during the Revolution of 1848. The government made the emancipation decree in April but intended for colonial authorities to implement it two months later. However, the enslaved in Martinique heard about it and began to protest. After authorities killed around 75 protestors and protestors set fire to homes and plantations, the governor declared emancipation (Schloss 2009). Even at the moment of final emancipation, the essentially murderous nature of the institution of slavery made itself felt.

References Boucher, Phillip P. 1992. Cannibal Encounters: Europeans and Island Caribs, 1492–1763. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Breathett, George. 1962. “Jesuits in Colonial Haiti.” The Historian XXIV (2): 153–71. Burnard, Trevor, and John Garrigus. 2016. The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Cormack, William S. 2019. Patriots, Royalists, and Terrorists in the West Indies: The French Revolution in Martinique and Guadeloupe, 1789–1802. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Dubois, Laurent. 2004a. Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2004b. A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. ———. 2011. “Slavery in the French Caribbean, 1635–1804.” In the Cambridge World History of Slavery, edited by David Eltis and Stanley Engerman, vol. 3, 431–49. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dupuy, Alex. 1985. “French Merchant Capital and Slavery in Saint-Domingue.” Latin American Perspectives 12 (3) (Summer): 77–102. Fick, Carolyn E. 1990. The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press.

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Erica Johnson Edwards Garrigus, John. 2006. Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2010. “French Caribbean.” In The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas, edited by Robert Paquette and Mark Smith, 173–200. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Garraway, Doris. 2005. The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Geggus, David. 2001. “The French Slave Trade: An Overview.” William and Mary Quarterly 58 (1): 119–38. Ghachem, Malick. 2012. The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Girard, Philippe. 2019. “What’s in a Name? Slave Trading during the French and Haitian Revolutions.” William and Mary Quarterly 74 (4) (October): 763–96. Hazareesingh, Sudhir. 2020. Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Johnson, Erica. 2018. Philanthropy and Race in the Haitian Revolution. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. King, Stewart R. 2001. Blue Coat and Powdered Wig: Free People of Color in Pre-Revolutionary Saint-Domingue. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Losier, Cathrine. 2021. “Theory and Practice: French Guiana and the Eighteenth Century Atlantic Economy.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 25: 486–514. Peabody, Sue. 2022. “ ‘A Dangerous Zeal’: Catholic Missions in the French Antilles, 1625–1800.” French Historical Studies 25 (1) (Winter): 53–90. Schloss, Rebecca Hartkopf. 2009. Sweet Liberty: The Final Days of Slavery in Martinique. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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24 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE FRENCH DIMENSION OF THE ATLANTIC SLAVERY SYSTEM Sylvie Kandé

France’s modern history, like that of other Western European nations, has been shaped by its participation in the transatlantic slave trade, which forcibly displaced a total of 12.5 million Africans. Exchanged for imported European commodities, African labor drove the growth of plantation economies in the American colonies and brought back to the metropoles tropical products such as sugar, coffee, cotton, or indigo, as well as manufacturing and industrial opportunities, and other major profits. The transatlantic voyages constitute a segment of a global trade that, from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, tied together Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas in complex entanglements, many of them still unexplored. As the third largest of the national slave-trading groups (after Portugal and Great Britain), and the second in the eighteenth century (after Great Britain), France inscribed itself firmly on the map of the global economy of modernity. French traders who, in the eighteenth century, used the Kerimba islands’ cowrie shells they received from the Portuguese to purchase, in their Bengal trading post, textiles to be exchanged for men, women, and children in Africa, emblematize this early slave-based globalization (Alpers 1970). As for the Africans, regardless of the enslavers’ nationality, or the era, the brutality of their prolonged experience of enslavement, deportation, and coerced labor on plantations or in domesticity remains unparalleled in history. In the absence of slave narratives transcribed or written in French, iconographic, written, and material sources attest to the effects the slave trade and slavery, recognized in French law since 2001 as a crime against humanity, had both on its victims and its perpetrators. The Slave Voyages Database indicates that 1,381,404 Africans were carried away on ships flying a French flag between 1643 and 1831, with a 13% mortality rate during the Middle Passage: a quarter of the captives transported from Indian Ocean ports to the Mascarene Islands or the Americas and one-tenth of those embarked on the Western African coast died along the way. Considering that an “illegal” trade continued well past the midnineteenth century, French carriers must have been responsible for one-eighth of the total transatlantic traffic (Geggus 2001). “The French version of the Atlantic, perhaps more than any other, was triangular in its configuration,” writes Christopher Miller, who describes the pioneering expedition of Jean Alfonce Fontenau de Saintonge, a Portuguese navigator and resident of France. At the 257

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service of King François I and his desire to subvert the 1493 Treaty of Tordesillas, which split the non-European world between Spanish and Portuguese monopolies, Fontenau de Saintonge sailed to the Grain Coast of Africa (today’s Sierra Leone), crossing the Atlantic in the 1540s toward “France Antartique” in Brazil (Miller 2007, 3 and 18). Even earlier, from at least 1364, Norman merchants from Dieppe may have been active on the African coast from the Canary Islands to what is now Ghana (Biondi 1987). By mid-fifteenth century, the route to Cape Verde was probably familiar to French merchants and sailors, as Jean de Béthencourt’s 1402 voyage to the Canary Islands and Georges Bissipat’s 1483 commission to Cape Verde on behalf of Louis XI suggest (Maneuvrier 2018). Moreover, the voyage of L’Espérance, a ship that left La Rochelle in 1594 to go to Brazil via Gabon, seems to confirm that France was already unofficially involved in slave-trading ventures, a legal Portuguese prerogative, the Asiento, since the 1493 Treaty. However, it was through direct and repeated state interventions that slave-trading activities came to play a significant role in making France a major economic power. The system rested on a state-approved legal dichotomy between metropolitan France and its American colonies. Within France, judgments such as that of the Parlement of Bordeaux in 1571 could affirm the prohibition of slavery and liberate a group of recently landed slaves, reckoning that “France, the mother of liberty, does not permit any slaves.” But in the American territories, colonized by Louis XIII’s permission in 1642, slavery was accepted de facto to meet local labor demand. Moreover, the principle of freedom on French soil was limited by the fragmented and local nature of French jurisdictions under the Ancien Régime, and the state could further manipulate the metropole/colonies divide for the benefit of slavers: in response to the 1571 decision, the king issued an order of special protection for the Iberian slave traders residing in Bordeaux “so that they may freely and securely continue the trade” (Rushforth 2014, 87). Such complexities continued down to the era of the French Revolution. On the one hand, a 1791 law stipulated that a person was free upon entering France, and that color cannot limit a citizen’s rights, thus challenging both the toleration of Caribbean planters’ enslaved retinues on French soil and the 1777 Police des Noirs edict barring Africans and Afrodescendants’ immigration. On the other hand, in spite of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the revolutionary National Assembly gave planter-dominated colonial assemblies the right to legislate on slaves and free people of color on their territories. Such dichotomies were not incompatible with the imperative of national unity. Stateled imperialist objectives and colonial commercial interests found common outlet in the mercantilist concept of a chartered company, a state-supported investors’ organization that enjoyed privileges for business ventures based on tolerated or promoted slavery, in a newly open region whose control would strengthen state power against its rivals. In 1626, Cardinal Richelieu, on behalf of Louis XIII, granted a charter to Pierre Belain d’Esnambuc, who had brought 40 Africans to Saint-Christophe Island (St. Kitts) in the hope of stimulating further such operations. Richelieu, who had contributed 25% of the Compagnie de SaintChristophe’s capital stock, reorganized it as the Compagnie des Îles d’Amérique for the colonization of Saint-Christophe, Martinique, and Guadeloupe in 1635. Simultaneously, business groups from Dieppe and Rouen obtained from the French Crown a monopoly on trade with Senegal. In 1664, an edict from Louis XIV created the Compagnie des Indes occidentales to take over the monopoly on trade with Africa and the Americas from the now-defunct Compagnie du Cap-Vert et du Sénégal. Despite such official initiatives, the French slave trade stagnated in these decades, partly because it was heavily taxed through an unrealistic assessment of its profitability. Overall, 258

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from the state’s point of view, these early charter companies failed because of insufficient investment and their mixed nature as “tax-leasing consortium and proprietary companies” (Banks 2007, 80), coupled with their inability to prevent unlicensed interlopers from undercutting both the state and foreign powers’ slaving operations. Yet the French triangular trade system had the ability to reinvent itself. Thus, the Compagnie des Îles d’Amérique, declared insolvent in 1648, sold the islands to the governors: Jacques Dyel du Parquet bought back Martinique, Sainte-Lucie, Grenade, and the Grenadines for 41,500 livres. Similarly, Jean Oudiette bought back the rights of the moribund Compagnie des Indes occidentales in 1675 and committed to delivering 800 slaves per year for four years to the Antilles, where sugar cultivation was on the rise: he was promised a state subvention of 13 livres per imported slave. Furthermore, in 1670, Colbert granted French merchants free trade with the Caribbean islands, provided that they pay a 5% fee (lowered to 3% the following year) on their returns on investment. As a result, La Rochelle, a port that launched 45 slave ships over a 20-year period, as well as Bordeaux, Nantes, and Saint-Malo, experienced an economic boom (Bergès 2007). Nantes was to become the leader among the twenty-some French slave-trading ports, eventually dispatching some 44% of all such expeditions. Over time, the set of monopoly rules imposed by the Crown, known generally as the Exclusif, was amended for better sustainability. While French merchants were forced to use only French ships with French crews, and settlers to trade only with French merchants, the monopoly over the Atlantic trade, initially granted to Parisian finance groups, was eventually transferred to merchants and shipowners in the main French Atlantic ports, giving them a greater margin of maneuver in a resolutely “centripetal trade” (Miller 2007, 12). Royal letters patent in 1716 went further, allowing all merchants in the kingdom to “engage freely in the slave and gold powder trade & trade in all other goods that can be obtained on the African coast, from the Sierra Leone River to the Cape of Good Hope” (Saunier 2010, 4). In the 1760s, after the Seven Years’ War, more flexible rules were instituted, predicated on robust state subventions: French shipowners were granted complete freedom of trade by the state, as well as exemption from importation tax and an increased subvention per slave head and per tonnage. In 1784, l’Exclusif mitigé allowed for some foreign importation and for French exportation abroad of tafias, molasses, and syrups from seven ports, three of them located in Saint-Domingue. From 1789, revolutionary authorities remained deeply attached to the wealth this system generated: while attempting to control the planters’ independent spirit, the Revolution neglected the problem of slavery until 1794. The restoration of the Exclusif, jeopardized in large part by the trade monopoly the United States had secured from Toussaint Louverture, was probably the main impulse behind Napoleon’s expeditions to St. Domingue in 1802–1803 (Covo 2014). Major fortunes were made in the vicinity of French ports with a trickle-down effect on urban development and society at large. Whole neighborhoods, such as La Fosse in Nantes, or Les Chartrons in Bordeaux, were reconstructed with grand residences for families granted ennoblement through their successful colonial business. The port of Honfleur excavated a new harbor (today called Vieux Port), where the Compagnie du Sénégal settled. Reportedly, the livelihoods of six million French laborers depended on colonial commerce (Pluchon 1980, Chapter 2). Shipowners (armateurs) were either individuals investing their own funds or a dynasty: the Nairac family from Bordeaux is emblematic of such self-sufficient, multi-­ generational enterprises whose financial operations were partially hidden by kinship and other unrecorded alliances (Deveau 1994). Shipowners could also be a royal charter company, a consortium, such as the one managed by Daniel Garesché from La Rochelle, or a group of 259

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partners; these might solicit foreign capital, notably from the Netherlands, and individual investments that could amount to a mere 1/512th part of the subscription. Colonial trade remained a risky, though lucrative, business: to palliate such risks and the notorious queues de traite, delayed payments from the colonies, which caused an immobilization of invested funds, successful shipowners always divided their funds between several voyages and had a portfolio of concomitant economic activities, as planters, insurers, textile manufacturers, etc. The value of the cargoes carried across the Atlantic, in 15-month- to two-year-long voyages (Gardey), had to offset the major costs involved. Once a new or secondhand ship was purchased, outfitted, or repaired, shipowners had to gather food and water provisions, various supplies and replacement parts, as well as funds to cover trading duties, insurance, and bribes. They were to pay the salaries of the crew, among whom the captain, the carpenters, the cooper, and the surgeons occupied prominent positions. In a context of economic warfare between European governments and between authorized merchants, pirates, and corsairs, slave ships carried cannon, as well as good-quality specialized European or Asian goods for trade into Africa. Among those figured luxury textiles, such as guinées or indiennes, and clothing (uniforms, hats, umbrellas, a few of the fifteen available models of the famed handkerchiefs made in Cholet, etc.); gunpowder and weapons bought from the French cities of Tulle and Châteaubriant, or in Denmark, Liege, and Birmingham; cowrie shells, known as bouges, the horseshoe-shaped bronze “manillas” widely used as currency in West Africa, beads from Bohemia and Italy called rassades, bars of so-called “voyage iron” (a malleable type of the metal in demand for blending with harder African forms); spirits and Portuguese tobacco; as well as pacotille, a general term for the merchandise the crew was authorized to add to the cargo to personally purchase esclaves de pacotille/nègres de port-permis they would sell in the Americas for their own gain. Slave ships from France and other European nations were commercial ships of all types (galleons and frigates, as well as schooners, clippers, and two-mast bricks whose speed was an asset against anti-slavery patrols after 1815) and all tonnages, with a preference for a 120- to 250-ton model that could be anchored close to the African coast, and sell its cargo fast, increasing capital turnover. Though by the later 1700s, some were custom-built with copper sheathing to withstand the action of teredo worms in tropical waters, most were devoid of any specific feature as they left Western Europe: refitted along the way to accommodate their human cargo, they were sometimes returned to their original state near their homeport. The Slave Voyages Database displays a 3D reconstitution of two French slave ships: L’Aurore, which left La Rochelle in 1784, and La Marie-Séraphique, from Nantes, which made six slaving voyages between 1764 and 1770. Based on one of the rare extant sets of slave ship plans and three illustrations of life on board drawn by ship officers, they both show the spiked barricado erected across the main deck. In everyday use, this separated enslaved men brought up from the hold to eat, work, and exercise from enslaved women and children kept at the crew’s reach on the quarterdeck; it also created, above the captain’s cabin, a fortified space from which to fight off slave insurrections: a real threat experienced by around one in every fifteen voyages, by some accounts. Below both ships’ decks, an added platform doubled the area where men, shackled in pairs, were confined in rough weather and at night, lying packed in rows. To mitigate pestilence, excessive heat, or complete darkness belowdecks, some of these “floating dungeons” featured portholes, hatchways, and special sails dedicated to funneling air into the hold. Giant awnings over the deck were positioned to block the sun, and rope nets were wrapped around the masts and the hull so as to protect the crew and prevent evasions or suicides. 260

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Despite efforts to preserve the lives of the enslaved for profit, the Middle Passage was an ordeal that included their initial disrobement and branding, public punishments and tortures (notably for those on a hunger strike), rapes, madness or terror-inducing confinement, malnourishment, exposure to infections, and in the colonial harbors, the visit of settlers, who would squabble over them aboard before rebranding them. “As charged in signs as obelisks in Egypt” (Vissière and Vissière 1982, 23; Eltis and Richardson 2010, 91), the survivors of the Middle Passage landed disease-ridden, wounded, deeply traumatized, and attached for life to their shipmates. The slave ship experience was also designed to forcibly mold individuals from Africa’s various nations or linguistic groups into enslaved workers solely defined by their complexion and unpaid labor, that is, Nègres. As notions of serfdom or indenture for Europeans faded into the past, the exclusive enslavement of Africans cemented by the Middle Passage came to represent a crucial moment in the nefarious invention of race. Yet for Édouard Glissant (1997), the hold is the abhorrent matrix that generated the promise of the Tout-Monde, a new humanity emerging from massive, infinite, and unpredictable encounters between peoples. For the arts and academia, the staggering number of triangular voyages has delineated a new epistemological region of the world or space of imagination, the Atlantic, whose histories, economies, and cultures are intertwined. In this ensemble, Paul Gilroy (1993) identified the contours of a Black Atlantic, where stereophonic cultural resonances are endless. Figure of heterotopia, the slave ship is also the heir of Columbus’s caravel, “this historical vessel for the emergence of capitalism, a new and unprecedented social and economic system that remade large parts of the world beginning in the 16th century” (Rediker 2007, 41). While in the 1940s Eric Williams had posited a direct link between the slave trade and the Industrial Revolution, today’s scholarship examines the contribution enslaved Africans made between 1500 and 1850 to the American and European regions of the Atlantic world, whose development led to the creation of a capitalist global economy. Cheap African labor, off-setting high-cost transatlantic transportation, produced on a large scale specialized commodities, which in turn not only boosted Western industrialization, domestic consumption, and technological inventions but also allowed integrated market-based economies to flourish (Inikori 2020) and even ushered in the era of wage labor. Throughout the eighteenth century, France was indeed part of what François Crouzet called “the Atlantic stage of European economic development.” The influence of French ports whose prosperity was tied to colonial commerce “penetrated far into the interior, connecting landlocked provinces, such as Dauphiné, to the American trade” (Crouzet 1964, 568–69). Shipyards employed “a small army of workers” to build and repair ships (Rediker 2007, 54), and each port had its own industries and hinterland. Bordeaux, for instance, built sugar refineries, distilleries, tobacco factories, and glassworks, while along the Garonne, there were “sail and rope-making [industries], foundries for guns for West Indiamen and boilers for sugar mills, manufactures of linen for slaves and woolens for planters as well as cornmills producing fine flour for export to the West Indies” (Crouzet 1964, 568). The French textile industry boomed with the local production of toiles and (previously illegally imported) indiennes. In Nantes, two textile mills were built in 1729 and 1759, and two dye processing plants opened in order to respond to shipowners’ demands: by the end of the century, the city boasted eight factories. All of Europe was complicit in a slave trade that absorbed a variety of complementary resources (Deveau 1994, ch III). Timber and pitch came from Scandinavia, nails from Spain, iron from Sweden, the Netherlands, Russia, or England, and copper from Hamburg. 261

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Salted or smoked meats came from Ireland, cheese from Holland, tobacco from Portugal or Brazil. African traders were reportedly partial to French guns, and across Europe, six to seven million fusils de traite, “slave-trade muskets,” were produced. As a global commercial project, the transatlantic trade led to the accumulation of capital and professional competence in Europe and the Americas; industrial competition and a growth mindset developed there, facilitated by the availability of a large trained labor force. A contrario, the 1807 British blockade, by crippling the triangular trade economy – Bordeaux, for instance, had 40 sugar refineries before 1789, and 8 in 1809 – may have slowed down the advent of the French Industrial Revolution (Coquery-Vidrovitch 2018). African coastal elites’ and hinterland merchants’ own complicity in slaving expeditions is well-established (Lovejoy 1991). Unwelcome in the hinterland and vulnerable to tropical diseases, European traders and administrators settled on islands or near the sea. Their presence redirected interregional trade networks to the coast that was broken down into six commercial regions: Upper Guinea (Senegambia, Sierra Leone, and the Windward Coast), the Gold Coast, the Bight of Benin, the Bight of Biafra, West Central Africa, and Southeast Africa (Eltis and Richardson 2010, 18). Slave traders shifted their attention between regions according to demand and supply, commodity prices, and international events. In the seventeenth century, French traders purchased slaves from Senegambia and the Bight of Benin, then moved to West Central Africa (Malombo), which became their second source of captives after Whyda/Ouidah. In the second half of the eighteenth century, they ventured to the Loango coast that, in turn, became the main supplying region, and, probably clandestinely, to Portuguese-controlled “Angole.” In the eighteenth century, they also sought slaves from East Africa (Moçambique, Kilwa, and Zanzibar notably) for the developing coffee and sugar plantations on French-owned islands in the Indian Ocean: in 1717, there were already 1,100 slaves from Madagascar on Bourbon. This “Southern Atlantic” region supplied slaves for the French Caribbean colonies during the Seven Years’ War, when France lost Senegal and Gorée to the British. The nineteenth century saw a renewed French interest for Biafra and Sierra Leone. On the West African coast, the mode of settlement adopted by French representatives of charter companies and private traders depended on the environment, the presence of competitors, planters’ demands for specific “ethnicities,” but mostly on their relationship with coastal elites. Trading along the coasts, cabotage, in outlying areas, European merchants preferred to secure their position, when possible, by establishing factories or forts: they paid customs fees to local leaders and negotiated with courtiers for the purchase of captives from the hinterland. Consequently, prisoners of war and victims of kidnapping, starvation, judicial sentencing, political machinations, or religious servitude were crammed into coastal barracoons and pens, or in forts’ warehouses and merchants’ cellars (captiveries). Seizure of debtors, poignade in French, and known locally as panyarring, could also lead to deportation (Deveau 1994). In 1777, a Nantes captain, Charles-Augustin Bridon, brought back Adonis, a boy from Ouidah, “as an hostage for a sum owed to him.” Since slaves were then allowed on French soil for a maximum of three years and for the sole purpose of religious education or craft training, Bridon claimed that rumors of war derailed all plans for his repatriation (Boulle 2009, 178). The coastal forts, with their storage rooms, chapel, and prison, housed companies’ employees and soldiers, who depended on their African neighbors for food, water, and at times, their continued employment (Sinou 1993). Material representation of the inter-­ European economic competition around slave trade, the forts “were African property as 262

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much as European,” used to assert political power, do exponentially growing business deals, and extract fees on services. The case of Anomabo (Annamaboe), a village that became a major Atlantic port on the Gold Coast, exemplifies the agency of coastal elites who manipulated European ambitions and rivalries. Prior to the 1753 construction of a fort that would be successively occupied by Dutch, English, and Swedish companies, a local “big man” named Eno Baisiue Kurentsi (a.k.a. John Currantee) had personally housed transatlantic traders and administrators. As the Compagnie du Senegal attempted to secure land rights in the region for the construction of a fort in 1736, and again from 1748 to 1753, Kurentsi received lavish gifts from the French, though he was already demanding rents from the British with the promise that he would oppose any French settlement on the Fante coast. Kurentsi sent one of his sons, Lewis Banishee, to France, and the other, William Ansah Sessarrakoo, to the court of George III (Shumway 2011). In Senegal, mid-seventeenth century colonial efforts led to the construction of a fort on the island of Ndar (Saint-Louis); the 1678 seizure of Gorée Island strengthened what was the first French settlement in Africa. The two centers brought together French residents and soldiers, their African wives married in church or à la mode du pays – that is, through a customary yet temporary marriage – their métis children, their slaves, and free African laborers. Known as signares, African and métisse women of business acumen and cultural fluency had access to real estate, company storage rooms, slaves and a French patronym for their children. In turn, they would introduce their husbands to local networks and share their ties with the Waalo and Trarza lineages as they sponsored seasonal trips upriver to the Galam country for gum, gold powder, and slaves. In 1788, three of the wealthiest shipowners in Saint-Louis were signares involved in this commerce (Biondi 1987). Cathy Louette, daughter of a Compagnie des Indes Orientales agent and wife of another, and Anne Pépin, companion of the governor of Senegal, Stanislas de Boufflers, invested their wealth like other signares in two-story stone houses. A replica of one of these, “la Maison des Esclaves,” on Gorée Island, is now a UNESCO World Heritage site. Though they had counterparts in Guinea and Gambia, the métis communities of Saint-Louis and Gorée were uniquely involved in French affairs, helping France reconquer Senegal from the British on several occasions. Their first mayor was elected in 1778, and in 1789, a Cahier de doléances was presented to the Estates General in the name of the 6,000 habitants of Saint-Louis, who defined themselves as “Nègres et Mulâtres, tous Français.” Their complaints about their exclusion from the gum trade and the rising cost of slaves were heard: a 1791 edict allowed all French people the freedom to trade in Senegal. In the métis quarters, the 1793 abolition of slavery by the Convention came to naught, and that of 1848 was long disputed. However, Saint-Louis and Gorée were two of the four communes whose habitants were permanently granted French citizenship, along with the right to send an elected representative to the French Parliament (Jones 2013, 126). Undeniably, the transatlantic slave trade enabled a number of African coastal kingdoms, leaders, and individuals to consolidate their political and economic power. This is perceptible in the signares’ commercial dealings, or in various contracts, such as the 1770 agreement between a French slave trader and the sultan of Kilwa, charged to deliver 1,000 slaves per year to Île de Bourbon and Île de France (Coquery-Vidrovitch 2018, 70). Its articulation to “domestic” and “Oriental” slave trades intensified and diversified the use of slave labor within Africa, turning slavery into a distinct mode of production there, as Paul Lovejoy contends (1991, 22). But the slave trade also induced a prevalent state of warfare, insecurity, and famine across much of the region. Aggravated by the importation of horses and 263

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firearms, it pushed vulnerable, non-centralized communities away from the coastal regions, annihilated several languages, and undermined local religions, since conversion to Christianity or Islam afforded some protection against enslavement. Polygyny may have increased in reaction to the new gender imbalance: an estimated two-thirds of the Africans transported were males, and 27% were children. Overall, this four-century business resulted in a multi-generational and exponential loss of persons, productive and reproductive forces, and intellectual and artistic abilities. The deleterious effects of this trade continued well beyond its abolition: at the end of the nineteenth century, slave-trafficking Arab, Swahili, and African warlords built empires in today’s Chad and Tanzania, harvesting European guns imported through the Mediterranean and, after 1869, via the Suez Canal through the Red Sea (Coquery-Vidrovitch 2018). Various forms of enslavement continued unabated on the continent through the era of European colonialism until the mid-twentieth century. The vast horrors of slavery in the French Caribbean are discussed by Erica Johnson Edwards in her contribution to this volume. Even hard-won revolutionary independence did not free Haiti from the burdens this system imposed. To be released from French blockade in the 1820s, its rulers and people had to pay the equivalent of 21 billion dollars for the loss of property incurred by French planters during the Revolution – the “first and only instance in which generations of free people had to pay the descendants of their former slave masters” (Apuzzo et al. 2022). From 1825 to 1947, payments were made to France and to the National Citibank of New York. In the 1880s, the Parisian bank CIC (Credit Industriel et Commercial) and its president, Henri Durrieu, with the support of corrupt members of the Haitian elite and the French government, set another trap for Haiti. As revealed by a 2022 New York Times investigation, predatory loans, commissions and fees, the taxation of coffee exports, and the seizure of the country’s treasury operations deepened Haiti’s indebtedness, until US invasion in 1935 completed the takeover of Haitian finances (Apuzzo et al. 2022). Despite such sequels, as Myriam Cottias has observed, it was the example of “St. Domingue that organized 19th-century abolitionist thinking” (1998, 8). Indeed, Haiti became a beacon of hope for the enslaved and disenfranchised, and a source of terror for slave owners. Prior to the second half of the eighteenth century, African enslavement had not been perceived as an ethical issue. Only 7% of the 1789 Cahiers de doléances allude to it: that of Champagney, Haute Saône, with its poignant 29th article, was a rare exception: “The residents and community of Champagney, when thinking of the sufferings of blacks in the colonies, their fellow men, more harshly treated than beasts of burden, feel their hearts overwhelmed with the deepest sorrow” (Lambert 2015, 120). As to the philosophes, their writings are remarkably tepid or ambivalent on the subject: among the 72,000 articles in the Encyclopédie, only thirty-three explicitly address slavery. Both Montesquieu, with his Januslike theorizations and ambiguous irony, and Voltaire, an avowed polygenist, possessed shares in the Compagnie des Indes orientales (Giovannetti-Singh 2022, 24–25) that obtained a monopoly of trade with West Africa in 1750. Going against the grain, the Société des Amis des Noirs, founded in 1788 by Jacques Pierre Brissot, Étienne Clavière, and Abbé Grégoire, drew inspiration perhaps from the privately held abolitionist opinions of Louis XVI’s minister, Jacques Necker – who, in public, barely considered cancelling the state subventions to slave traders (Pluchon 1980; Debbasch 1961) – and definitely from the British abolitionist movement. The Amis des Noirs developed an abolitionist doctrine that aimed at ending both slave trade and slavery, presenting them as crimes. But the Amis des Noirs, which fought also for the rights of free people of color against the planter-supported 264

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Club Massiac, disappeared with the outbreak of the St. Domingue Revolution, for which they were deemed in part responsible: this economic harm became part of the web of conspiratorial accusations thrown over what became the “Girondin” faction and helped doom it at the hands of more radical republicans in 1793. However, on February  4, 1794 (16 Pluviôse Year 2), the Convention abolished both slavery and the slave trade by acclamation, extending citizenship to ex-slaves. The Comité de Salut public sent troops to enforce the decree in the French colonies: it was applied in St. Domingue, Guadeloupe, and Guyana, but not in Martinique, Senegal, Reunion, Île de France, or French India. When Napoleon Bonaparte rose to power, he sought to end the single legislative regime for metropole and colonies. Close to the planters’ party through his wife, in 1802 he had the 30 Floreal Year 10 law voted: slavery was maintained in the territories returned to France through the Amiens peace treaty (Martinique, Tobago, and Sainte-Lucie) and in the South Atlantic. Secretly, Napoleon gave orders to re-establish slavery in St. Domingue, Guadeloupe, and Guyana. Although in St. Domingue General Leclerc’s troops were repelled by Toussaint’s army, shackles were put on French citizens of African descent in spite of Delgrès’s resistance in Guadeloupe, Kina’s in Martinique, and several riots in Guyana. Slave trading also resumed immediately, led by Bordeaux and Nantes. Ironically, the second call for the abolition of the trade would come from Napoleon himself during the Hundred Days (1815) – possibly in retaliation against the ports’ rejection of him in 1814; or under the influence of his ally, former Jacobin Lazare Carnot; and more probably, in recognition that the Congress of Vienna favored universal abolition. During the Napoleonic Empire, the abolitionist cause was represented by Abbé Grégoire alone: yet as an alleged regicide, he was banned from the public arena. Lonely voices, such as Abbé Giudicelli’s, would follow suit, using their firsthand knowledge of the slave trade to denounce its unethical nature. Until 1831, though, a mood of indifference seems to have reigned in France, punctuated by nationalist outbursts, as pressures for abolition were coming from England in the wake of its own abolition (1807) and its military victory. The Bourbon Restoration (1814/1815–1830) and the July Monarchy (1830–1848) delayed the implementation of the structural reforms needed for abolition, in an effort to preserve the interests of colonial trade investors and professionals who, in turn, presented themselves as the only agents of economic recovery. As a result, from 1815 to 1831, 729 French voyages imported an estimated 80,000 Africans into the Antilles, Guyana, and Réunion (Bergès 2007). Those stalling tactics, analyzed in details by Serge Daget (1971) and Yvan Debbasch (1961), began in 1814 with a five-year moratorium granted to France to start its process of abolition. Official declarations, such as an 1817 royal ordinance, announced the confiscation of any French ship importing slaves in French colonies, the guilty captain’s suspension from the navy’s rosters, and the employment of liberated Africans in colonial public works. Almost nothing came of this, as the Ministry of the Navy and Colonies had little interest in its enforcement. Surveillance operations on the French coasts for suspected slave ships were launched, but slave trading was not made a crime in itself, and sanctions were easy to elude. A patrol, established in 1818, had trouble locating slave ships near Senegal, Martinique, or Guadeloupe. Baron Portal, a former shipowner from Bordeaux and director of the colonies, and who ended his career as a peer of France and manager of the Banque de Bordeaux, was appointed as the head of the Navy Ministry, where his abolitionist accomplishments were unsurprisingly negligible. In the 1820s, abolitionism turned more vocal. Joseph Elzéar Morenas, a former botanist in Senegal and the author of a Précis historique de la traite des Noirs (1838), which 265

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features the first statistics on French slave trading, twice brought abolitionist petitions to the national assembly: both were noted and rejected. As credible reports demonstrated that the slave trade was still flourishing, England increased its pressure on the French government. Abolitionism joined up with activist political liberalism in the person of Benjamin Constant, part of an abolitionist dynasty that included Necker, his daughter (and Constant’s lover) Germaine de Staël, her son Auguste, and her statesman son-in-law the duc de Broglie. In one famed intervention, Constant revealed that the Rôdeur from Le Havre had thrown overboard thirty-nine slaves blinded by disease; and that the Jeune-Estelle had disposed of its slaves by locking them into barrels thrown to the sea in order to avoid an anti-slavery squadron – two cases reminiscent of the infamous Zong. As shares in the triangular trade could easily be had, seemingly unbeknown to the government, in the local stock market of ports such as Bordeaux, the duc de Broglie emerged as the spokesman of abolitionism. In his 154-page-long speech to the Chambre des Pairs, he noted that “[a]broad, the French slave trade is presented as an elaborate form of Terror” (Daget 1971, 43). In this changed climate, the Société pour la Morale Chrétienne, a gathering of liberal opponents to the regime that included Guizot and the duc d’Orléans, began its work in 1821. A French abolitionist movement was born, since the Société had the means to launch large campaigns and sponsored a literary prize contest, the equivalent of the poetry contest launched on the topic of the slave trade by the Académie française in 1823 (Debbasch 1961). These contests, meant to raise public awareness and collect archives and statistics on the trade, revealed, for instance, that in an 18-month span, 444 slave ships flying a French flag carried away 106,000 Africans from the Biafra coast (Daget 1971). Other institutions, the press, and the Chambre des députés, notably, began showing some interest for the cause. Abolitionist petitions were sent by merchants from various regions of France, with the exception of Nantes and Bordeaux, where a code of silence around the clandestine slave trade remained unbroken. In fact, when the government seized suspicious ships in 1826, Nantes saw riots break out among artisans and workers employed in manufactures: as producers or suppliers of slave trade–related goods, they were petits porteurs, forced to accept part of their income in the form of small shares in slave-trade businesses (Debbasch 1961). New official steps were taken: a general mobilization of the Navy against slave traders was declared in 1823, and in 1827, fines were decreed against slave-trading shipowners and crew, but these were negligible compared to the potential profits. Embarrassing reports from a variety of sources on French slave trading continued to pile up, but it was only after the Revolution of 1830 that the government of Jacques Lafitte, including several members of Morale Chrétienne, produced the third and more radical abolitionist law on March 4, 1831: it listed a series of sanctions for perpetrators on each side of the infamous triangle, which included imprisonment and hard labor, a seven-year indenture contract for liberated Africans, and the nomination of sworn-in civil servants in the colonies to effectively oversee the local aspects of the process. The abolition of slavery would take another 17 years, punctuated by mild reforms, such as the Mackau laws that granted slaves the right to a minimal instruction and to purchase their own freedom. In 1846, King Louis-Philippe abolished slavery in the royal domains of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Mayotte. Petition campaigns in 1844 and 1847 gathered thousands of signatures in working-class milieux and beyond. But only another revolution in 1848, and the example of Victor Schoelcher, saw dilatory measures finally stop. Schoelcher had made himself an expert on the subject of slavery and a committed advocate of 266

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immediate abolition, having taken part as a young man in a literary contest organized by Morale Chrétienne. An indefatigable traveler, he visited all the Caribbean islands, Egypt, and West Africa to assess the effects of slavery; singlehandedly put abolition on the agenda of scientific congresses in France; and used his affiliation with the newspaper La Réforme to attack pro-slavery interests (Drescher 1991). He was in Senegal at the beginning of 1848 and, on his return in March, convinced the provisional government to prepare an emancipation decree without delay, as well as appointing him Deputy-Secretary of State in charge of the colonies and all measures concerning the abolition of slavery. The abolition law, signed on April 27, 1848, was theoretically applicable in June: while slaves in Martinique rose to claim immediately their right to freedom, Guadeloupe was informed of the law in May, Guyana in August, and Réunion in December. The following year, elected president Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte took the decision to compensate planters for their losses. Remarkably, France is the only nation to have abolished slavery twice. Once abolished, slavery and its effects quickly fell out of the national conversation. Under the Second Empire from 1852 and the subsequent Third Republic from 1870, new forms of imperialist project consolidated opinion around the anticipated civilizing and abolitionist effects of the French conquest. Other European powers subscribed to the same logic: at the 1884–1885 Berlin Conference, a resolution calling for the suppression of the slave trade was proposed for inclusion in the treaty. The first scholarly works on French slavery and trade began to appear around 1890, producing notably substantial work on ports (Bergès 2007). In the 1930s, anticolonial writers in the Négritude movement distinguished themselves by re-reading slavery and resistance through a pan-African lens. The transfer of Schoelcher’s ashes to the Pantheon in 1949 at the initiative of Gaston Monnerville, then Secretary of State for the colonies, can be seen as a complementary homage to abolitionism and its champions. In more recent years, growing impatience from activists, who felt that the official attention lavished on Schoelcher had overshadowed the actions taken by enslaved people for their own liberation, led to both the destruction of two statues of him in Martinique in May 2020 and a disinformation campaign challenging his radical engagement against slavery and for human rights. French participation in the Atlantic slavery system was prolonged, multi-vectorial, and highly profitable. From the first decades of the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century, state-sponsored and state-protected trade in African people encouraged French private and public (proto) capitalist ventures, which resulted in wealth accumulation and paved the way for the metropole’s industrialization and future colonial projects. Particularly advantageous for insurance and credit banks, the triangular trade strengthened the Banque de France and afforded long-term social mobility to shipowners’ families (Coquery-Vidrovitch 2018). For three centuries, French slaving interests operated in complex relations of collaboration and competition with African, American, and European polities. In spite of the mercantilist zeitgeist, France and the rest of Europe developed a relation of co-dependence in the Atlantic economy: resources from all of Europe were invested in the French ports, and conversely, France redistributed colonial commodities throughout the continent: the sugar economy of the islands was “an epicenter of colonial Europe,” notes Coquery-Vidrovitch (2018, 142) – at least until 1850. If in Africa coastal elites kept control over their land – which prompted David Eltis to state that “the slave trade was a symptom of African strength, not weakness” (2000, 149) – enslavement and deportation resulted in an unfathomable loss of African lives in wars, en route to the coasts and on slave ships. This tragedy’s lingering effects on historically vulnerable populations of France and the Francophone world have 267

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yet to be comprehensively assessed. Miller suggests, for instance, that past Atlantic dynamics survived abolitions, independence, and “departmentalizations” – an allusion to Guyana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Réunion’s residual colonial status until 1946 and their acquisition of democratic local institutions, delayed until 1982. In the same vein, former Justice Minister Christiane Taubira sees “France overseas run[ning] up against the vestiges of the colonial Exclusif, which links the former colonies to former metropoles, from South to North, without facilitating contacts with neighbouring countries, without the possibility of regional contacts” (Miller 2007, 4 and 25). The most pernicious legacy of slavery by far is racism. The invention of race – a term that did not exist in its current sense prior to the sixteenth century and whose categories (at least that of whiteness) were fabricated around 1673 “to build a social and judicial order” (Régent 2013, 65) in both the colonies and the metropole – enabled a convenient, though tautological, discourse of legitimation to gain traction. Enhanced by religious and climatic considerations, this discourse presented African victims as predestined to, deserving of, and redeemed by their enslavement. Racial thinking, as an attempt to deprive Africans of their full humanity by turning them into “pièces d’Inde” or “nègres,” was buttressed by nineteenth-century pseudo-science in preparation for the colonial onslaught. Today, racial thinking is still responsible, in France and elsewhere, for open or latent discriminatory practices in daily encounters or in institutional settings that target North and sub-Saharan Africans, as well as people of African descent. As a result, the latter’s access to resources, opportunities, and services may be reduced, their freedoms curtailed by frequent or lengthy experiences of exclusion or imprisonment, and their lives shortened by inadequate health care or violent encounters, notably with the police. In this context, the resonance in France of the “Black Lives Matter” movement was unsurprising. Protracted institutional silence around the legacy of the slave trade, slavery, and its counterpart, colonization, has undoubtedly caused some of France’s contemporary social fractures. As a new awareness of the French colonial past has arisen in the public sphere, some called for the preservation of social cohesion and the cultivation of a shared memory as a priority. Yet frustration continued mounting over the continued suppression of information on colonial history, the prominence given to abolition over the experience of slavery, and the lack of critical reflection on the intersection of citizenship and racism. However, the state and various associations have made powerful gestures to acknowledge the French transatlantic past. Early examples include the 1971 inauguration of the Maison de la Négritude et des droits de l’homme in Champagney and the 1985 Colloque de Nantes that launched Les Anneaux de la mémoire, an association whose charge is to disseminate information on slave trade and slavery through public events and publications. The commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the 1848 abolition, designed by Daniel Maximin at the request of President Jacques Chirac, was a watershed event: while the official speech of Lionel Jospin, a high-ranking member of the government, borrowed concepts and figures “from the anticolonialist and nationalist movements overseas,” a silent march was organized by Caribbean activists who refused to embrace Maximin’s model of a citizenship enhanced by the blending spirit of métissage (Michel 2019, 71–101). The “Taubira law,” identifying slave trade and slavery as a crime against humanity, passed on May 10, 2001, was a clear milestone in the historiography of the French dimension of Atlantic slavery. The law proposed a reassessment of these phenomena in school curricula and research programs and the appointment of a Committee for the Memory of Slavery, whose members chose May  10 as a national day of remembrance for the slave 268

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trade, slavery, and abolition. It nonetheless remained politically contested. In an attempt to undermine this “memorial law,” considered by some as an infringement on freedom of speech, or a mandate for non-Afrodescendants to “repent,” the fourth article of the February 23, 2005 law called for school curricula to acknowledge the positive aspects of French colonization: in response, Aimé Césaire cancelled his talk with President Nicolas Sarkozy in Martinique. The Taubira law was again in the limelight later that year, when Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, author of a 2004 work on the global history of the slave trade, was threatened with legal action over alleged denialism. Christiane Taubira herself has identified the May 10, 2001, law as a moral and symbolic reparation for a damage that is irreparable. The law generated numerous other reparatory initiatives, immaterial and material. In 2005, President Jacques Chirac bypassed the bicentennial of Austerlitz to honor instead Louis Delgrès and Toussaint Louverture with a plaque in the Panthéon, “an indirect indictment of Napoleon’s Atlantic policies” (Girard 2022). Material culture has been the focus of President Emmanuel Macron’s reparatory efforts: women’s resistance against slavery has been honored through several monuments dedicated, for instance, to the Guadeloupean “Mulâtresse Solitude.” The city of La Rochelle commissioned a statue of Toussaint Louverture from the Senegalese sculptor Ousmane Sow, who, at its 2015 inauguration, declared: “Toussaint Louverture is in the right place. La Rochelle is courageous enough to face its past. As a black man, I am proud of Toussaint Louverture’s history. I  do not believe in atonements (repentances) but people have to be informed” (Lalouette 2021, 145–46). The 2022 nomination of Pap Ndiaye as the minister of national education and the youth, which breaks with the tradition of underrepresentation of people of African descent in decision-making positions, could also be seen as a form of reparation. Financial reparations, however, do not seem to be an object of official debates: in 2016, the Parliament repealed without compensation the 1825 ordinance by which Charles X demanded from Haiti monetary damages for ex-planters – a clear example of “neocolonialism through debt,” according to French economist Thomas Piketty (Apuzzo et al. 2022). The conversation in France on the legacy of slavery and colonization in the last two decades needs to be also situated in the context of the UNESCO project Routes of Enslaved Peoples and the UN “Decade for People of African Descent” (2015–2024). Its importance is reflected in the 2020 resolution adopted by the European Parliament that makes slavery a crime against humanity, and December 2 the European Day of Commemoration of the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Far from being a distraction from contemporary political issues of substance, these difficult but necessary debates around a still-understudied tragedy contribute powerfully to peace-building and democracy. They open the possibility for France to reimagine itself as a postcolonial, creatively inclusive nation. At stake are the articulations of citizenship with diversity and anti-racism, history with memory, and France with the (Black) Atlantic.

References Alpers, Edward A. 1970. “The French Slave Trade in East Africa (1721–1810).” Cahiers d’Études africaines 10 (37): 80–124. Apuzzo, Matt, Constant Méheut, Selam Gebrekidan, and Catherine Porter. 2022–05–20. “How a French Bank Captured Haiti.” The New York Times. Banks, Kenneth. 2007. “Financiers, Factors, and French Proprietary Companies in West Africa, 1673–1713.” In Constructing Early Modern Empires, edited by Louis Roper and Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, II. Brill, 79–116. https://doi.org/10.1163/ej.9789004156760.i-425.17.

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Sylvie Kandé Bergès, Louis 2007. “Guide des sources de la traite négrière, de l’esclavage et de leurs abolitions [Texte imprimé]/établi sous la direction de Claire Sibille, . . .; avec le concours des Services d’archives publics; [publié par la Direction des archives de France] La Documentation française.” www.archivespor taleurope.net/advanced-search/search-in-archives/results-(archives)/?&repositoryCode=FR-SIAF& levelName=archdesc&t=sg&recordId=FRDAF_esclavage001. Biondi, Jean-Pierre. 1987. Saint-Louis du Sénégal. Mémoires d’un métissage. Paris: Denoël. Boulle, Pierre H. 2009. “Slave and Other Non-white Children in Late-Eighteen-Century France.” In Children in Slavery through the Ages, edited by Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph Miller, 169–86. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Cottias, Myriam, ed. 1998. D’une abolition l’autre. Anthologie raisonnée de textes consacrés à la seconde abolition de l’esclavage dans les colonies françaises. Paris: Agone. Coquery-Vidrovitch, Catherine. 2018. Les routes de l’esclavage. Histoire des traites africaines, VIeXXe siècle. Paris: Albin Michel/Arte. Covo, Manuel. 2014. “L’Assemblée constituante face à l’Exclusif colonial.” In Les colonies, la Révolution française, la loi, edited by Frédéric Régent, Jean-François Niort, and Pierre Serna, 69–89. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pur.50673. Crouzet, François. 1964. “Wars, Blockades, and Economic Change in Europe, 1792–1815.” The Journal of Economic History 24 (4): 567–88. doi: 10.1017/S0022050700061271. Daget, Serge. 1971. “L’abolition de la traite des Noirs en France de 1814 à 1831.” Cahiers d’études africaines 11 (41): 14–58. https://doi.org/10.3406/cea.1971.2811. Debbasch Yvan. 1961. “Poésie et traite, l’opinion française sur le commerce négrier au début du XIXe siècle.” In Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer, tome 48, n°172–173, troisième et quatrième trimestres, 311–52. https://doi.org/10.3406/outre.1961.1338. Deveau, Jean-Michel. 1994. La France au temps des négriers. Paris: France-Empire. Drescher, Seymour. 1991. “British Way, French Way: Opinion Building and Revolution in the Second French Slave Emancipation.”  The American Historical Review  96 (3): 709–34. https://doi. org/10.2307/2162428. Eltis, David. 1999. The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database. www.slavevoyages.org. ———. 2000. The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eltis, David, and David Richardson. 2010. Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gardey, Philippe. “Périple du navire négrier bordelais.” Le Patriote octobre 1788- février 1791. https://slideplayer.fr/slide/1307358/. Geggus, David. 2001. “The French Slave Trade: An Overview.” The William and Mary Quarterly, 58 (1): 119–38. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Giovannetti-Singh, Gianamar. 2022. “Racial Capitalism in Voltaire’s Enlightenment.” History Workshop Journal 94: 22–41. https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbac025. Girard, Philippe R. 2022. “Napoléon Bonaparte and the Atlantic World.” Oxford Bibliographies. Accessed August 12, 2022. doi:10.1093/OBO/9780199730414-0317. Glissant, Édouard. 1997. The Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Inikori, Joseph I. 2020. “Atlantic Slavery and the Rise of the Capitalist Global Economy.” Current Anthropology 61 (Supplement 22): 159–71. Jones, Hilary. 2013. The Métis of Senegal. Urban Life and Politics in French West Africa. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Lalouette, Jacqueline. 2021. Les statues de la discorde. Paris: Passés composés. Lambert, E. 2015. L’intervention des habitants de Champagney pour l’abolition de l’esclavage des Noirs dans leur cahier de doléances (1789). Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe (172): 117–24. https://doi.org/10.7202/1035306ar. Lovejoy, Paul. 1991. Transformations in Slavery. A History of Slavery in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maneuvrier, Christophe. 2018. “De Honfleur au Cap-Vert. Retour sur le voyage de Georges Bissipat dit ‘le Grec’ de 1483.” Annales de Normandie 1, 68è année, 45–54. https://doi.org/10.3917/ annor.681.0045.

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Development of French Dimension of the Atlantic Slavery System Michel, Johann. 2019. Devenir descendant d’esclave. Enquête sur les régimes mémoriels. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes. Miller, Christopher, L. 2007. The French Atlantic Triangle. Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Moitt, Bernard. 2001. Women and Slavery in the French Antilles. 1635–1848. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Pluchon, Pierre. 1980. La route des esclaves. Négriers et bois d’ébène au XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Hachette. Polderman, Marie Polderman, M. 2010. “L’esclavage en Guyane française sous l’Ancien. Régime: sources, repères et éléments d’analyse. Quelques aspects du champ de la question.” In Les traites et les esclavages: Perspectives historiques et contemporaines, edited by Myriam Cottias, 53–66. Karthala. https://doi.org/10.3917/kart.cotti.2010.01.0053. Rediker, Marcus. 2007. The Slave Ship. A Human History. New York: Viking. Régent, Frédéric. 2013. “La fabrication des Blancs dans les colonies françaises.” In De quelle couleur sont les blancs: Des “petits Blancs” des colonies au “racisme anti-Blancs”, edited by Sylvie Laurent, 65–75. La Découverte. https://doi.org/10.3917/dec.lecle.2013.02.0065. Rushforth, Brett. 2014. Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France. Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press. ———. 2016. “Slavery in the French Atlantic World.” In obo in Atlantic History. Accessed February  28, 2023. www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199730414/obo-97801 99730414-0270.xml. Saunier, Éric. 2010. La traite des noirs et l’esclavage du siècle des Lumières au temps des abolitions. CREA. https://www.metropole-rouen-normandie.fr/sites/default/files/publication/2018/FH40.pdf. Shumway, Rebecca. 2011. “Fanteland in the Atlantic World.” The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade 52: 53–87. Boydell & Brewer. htpp://jstor.org/stable/10.7722/j.ctt1x72ng.8. Sinou, Alain. 1993. Comptoirs et villes coloniales du Sénégal. Saint-Louis, Gorée, Dakar. Paris: Karthala. Thiaw, Ibrahima, and Deborah L. Mack. 2020. “Atlantic Slavery and the Making of the Modern World: Experiences, Representations, and Legacies. An Introduction to Supplement.” Current Anthropology 61 (Supplement 22): 145–58. Vissière, Isabelle, and Jean-Louis Vissière. 1982. La traite des noirs au siècle des lumières (Témoignages de négriers). Paris: Éditions A.M. Métailié.

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25 FRENCH INDIA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY Gregory Mole

In 1664, France’s minister of finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, announced the establishment of the Compagnie des indes orientales (French East India Company), a Crown-sponsored corporation tasked with trading and settling in the Indian Ocean. Colbert threw the full weight of the absolutist state behind this endeavor. He hired propagandists to generate interest in the Company, casting it as “an infallible means of creating abundance” (Charpentier 1665). He pleaded, flattered, and – when all else failed – coerced prominent members of society into buying stock. He even convinced the king, Louis XIV, to deliver the Company’s inaugural address, where the monarch reminded investors yet to meet their payment obligations that “his memory was too good to forget them” (Kaepplin 1967). The centerpiece to Colbert’s plans to reform the French economy, the Company became a site of frenetic lobbying and political energy. Yet for all this fanfare, the corporation was unable to survive its chief patron, who died in 1683. Soon after Colbert’s passing, the Company declared bankruptcy. Its commercial rights would eventually be ceded to a collective of private merchants from St. Malo. The dramatic rise – and abrupt collapse – of the Company did little to distinguish it from past French endeavors in the Indian Ocean. Since the early seventeenth century, both state officials and private merchants had tried and failed to establish a presence in the region. Yet Colbert’s efforts also marked the beginning of a new pattern of French engagement there. Over the next century, France varied between moments of deep commitment to the East Indies, followed by long intervals of neglect. As the Indian Ocean swung from a focal point of French colonial strategy to a marginal colonial theater, and back again, Colbert’s company would be resurrected, abandoned, and resurrected anew. Such tumult did not escape the scrutiny of Enlightenment-era commentators. From Voltaire and Diderot to the abbé Raynal, India and the Indian Ocean served as both a source of curiosity and a locus of anxiety. A staging ground for old regime ambitions of global empire, it cast into relief the deficiencies and flawed assumptions at the heart of France’s absolutist system. This chapter explores the vertiginous history of French settlement and trade in the Indian Ocean, from the early days of Colbert’s Company to the French Revolution. It examines the fluid and often precarious nature of this colonial experience while also considering

DOI: 10.4324/9780367808471-26

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its broader historiographical implications. Formerly confined to the borders of Europe, the history of eighteenth-century France has become strikingly global. From St. Domingue and Louisiana to the vast reaches of New France, colonies once seen as peripheral have since become indispensable to understanding both the collapse of France’s monarchy and the Revolution. Yet this “global” turn has been mostly an Atlantic one (Dubois 2004; Ghachem 2012; Vidal 2014). France’s ambitions in the Indian Ocean, meanwhile, remain understudied – relegated to the margins of eighteenth-century imperial politics. Exploring French experiences in this region, I argue, not only expands the context in which we study old regime and revolutionary history; it also permits a firsthand view into the radical possibilities generated by a contested, incomplete, and according to many historians, “failed” imperial experiment (Marsh 2009). A colonial regime that consistently outpaced the imagination of its planners, the Company pushed the French throughout the eighteenth century to reconsider both the purpose and implications of their overseas empire.

Early Years French enterprise in the Indian Ocean was often state-run, financed and supported by the monarchy. Yet it also proved resolutely personal, reflecting the idiosyncrasies and agendas of influential administrators. Consider the stamp Colbert put on his Company. While the finance minister had little grounding in the commercial realities of the Indian Ocean, he had a clear model in mind for his corporation: the Dutch East India Company (VOC), then the dominant force in Asian trade. Trade with the East Indies promised a bevy of desirable goods, from teas and calicoes to pepper and silk. Without a French presence in the region, however, old regime merchants had to buy these commodities from Dutch and English middlemen – at a considerable markup. Interested more in the ends, commercial prosperity, than in the means of obtaining them, Colbert simply copied the practices and policies of the VOC (Haudrère 2005; Horn 2015). Informed by the mercantilist theories of the day, which saw resources as finite and state regulation as key to economic success, the finance minister relied on imitation rather than innovation to undercut France’s competitors. Even with royal support, however, the challenges of transplanting an institutional model developed by the commercially oriented Dutch Republic to an agrarian, absolutist France proved difficult to overcome. Coerced by the state into the purchase of Company stock, investors bought only the minimum number of shares thought necessary to placate Colbert. French merchants also kept their distance from the enterprise, seeing it more as an expression of royal fiat than an opportunity for entrepreneurship. Their absence saddled the corporation with a deficit in commercial expertise (Clark 2007). Competition and hostility in the Indian Ocean added to the Company’s problems. Eager to contend with the Dutch, French officials envisioned Madagascar, home since 1642 to the struggling French settlement of Fort-Dauphin, as a springboard for their overseas ambitions. Here they hoped to create a trading hub that would overshadow the VOC’s entrepôt in Batavia. An energetic recruitment effort for this project began soon after the Company’s establishment. Advertisements extolling the virtues of the Madagascar settlement lined the faubourgs of Paris, while the state dispatched commissioners to the United Provinces to enlist Dutch merchants and sailors. Hoping to create a vital and self-sustaining commercial settlement, the Company enlisted mostly French artisans and tradesmen for the colony (Kaepplin 1967).

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The Madagascar expedition departed France in 1665, carrying 279 settlers to FortDauphin. Here colonists confronted the harsh realities of establishing and maintaining an Indian Ocean settlement, as the Company’s promises of quick financial gains evaporated before them. While resistance from the indigenous Malagasy population depleted the colony’s manpower, disease, famine, and a lack of coordinated leadership stretched morale to the breaking point (Kaepplin 1967). Successive resupply attempts did little to resolve this precarious situation. In 1671, with Fort-Dauphin on the verge of collapse, the Company abandoned its Madagascar scheme altogether. The Company fared no better in India, another region prioritized by state planners. The French arrived on the subcontinent as latecomers, with the Dutch and English already firmly established in several coastal enclaves. On September 4, 1666, French envoys secured a fi ­ rman, or royal mandate, from the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb granting them rights to trade alongside these rivals in the busy northwestern port of Surat (Ames 1996). As in Madagascar, the Company imitated the commercial and diplomatic strategies of its competitors – to little avail. With the Dutch and English well entrenched in the markets of Surat, French merchants struggled to carve out a foothold. A cumbersome and rigid administration added to their burden. With their entrepôt in Batavia, the Dutch were able to respond quickly to changing conditions in the Indian Ocean. The French, meanwhile, had to consult with officials in Paris before adjusting policy in Asia. Factoring in delays caused by the monsoon season, voyages to and from Europe took nearly two years. As a result, French traders in India struggled to respond in a timely fashion to local challenges or opportunities. The Company’s one major success in the seventeenth century – establishing a settlement on the southeastern coast of India at Pondichéry – resulted more from the accidents of indigenous patronage than planning in France. The Company received the territory for this settlement from the Sultan of Bijapur, who hoped to exploit the French presence in the region to build up his own commercial power (Agmon 2017; Manning 1996). For the next decade, Colbert’s underfinanced Company teetered precariously on the edge of insolvency, using the proceeds from the single load of cargo it could afford each year to finance its next annual voyage to Asia. This uncertain situation did little to improve perceptions of the Company within the French court, especially after Colbert’s death robbed the corporation of his patronage. Despite efforts by the finance minister’s son to stave off disaster, the Crown liquidated the Company in 1684. It eventually decided to lease the corporation’s Indian monopoly to Malouin traders in 1706. This development, however, did not spell the end of state-sponsored forays into the Indian Ocean. Rather, Colbert’s Company closely anticipated the nature and limitations of future French interventions in the region. Over the next century, France’s interests here ebbed and flowed based on the support of influential patrons. And while the Indian Ocean remained an alluring target for French ambitions, the old regime would struggle to find the resources and political will needed to realize them.

The Company Reborn France spent most of the 30  years after Colbert’s death at war. Debts mounted, famine ensued, hardships multiplied. The Indian trade, under the control of private merchants, became an afterthought. After Louis XIV died in 1715, he was succeeded by a regency government eager to restore France’s finances. Petitioners known as donneur d’avis flooded the royal council with proposals for reform; their ideas ranged from the practical to the 274

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fanciful, from minor adjustments to existing policies to an overhaul of the absolutist system more generally (Crowston 2013). It was during this hectic period of petitioning and debate that French India once more came to the attention of Crown officials. In 1715, John Law appeared before the regency government with a controversial banking scheme. A Scottish gambler and financial theorist, Law spent years traveling from court to court in search of a patron. His idea, radical for the time, was to create a centralized state bank which would replace metal coins with paper currency and alleviate the Crown’s finances by converting its debts into low-interest stock obligations. Although the Crown initially rejected Law’s proposal, it decided to sanction his scheme a year later after a second round of lobbying by the Scotsman. Thus returned the long-defunct Indies Company to the forefront of the public imagination. Law envisioned the resurgent Company as the linchpin of his plan for fiscal regeneration. Corporate stock would provide the medium of exchange, as investors bought paper shares with metal coins. Once sufficiently circulated, these notes would become France’s new currency. To facilitate this process, Law wrested control of the Indian trade from the St. Malo merchants. He then combined this monopoly with existing French commercial privileges in the Caribbean, Mediterranean, and North America, creating a global trading institution that he rebranded as the Mississippi Company. Law concerned himself less with the realities of colonial commerce than with the lobbying power he derived from supporting it. The Scotsman gave free rein to his imagination in his effort to bolster the value of Company stock, painting vivid pictures of gold-strewn hillsides in Louisiana and caches of luxury goods awaiting export from India (Earl J. Hamilton Papers; Murphy 1997; Orain 2018). Such claims whetted the French appetite for investment, and shares skyrocketed 2,400% in value by 1720 (Balen 2002). Observing these successes through the jaundiced eye of international competition, the British embarked on a similar scheme of economic reform, consolidating its debts through the ill-fated South Sea Company. Both stories ended badly. While Law’s claims drove up the value of Company stock, they also created a bubble that nearly destroyed the French economy. By 1721, the treasury was once again in ruin. Private fortunes evaporated; riots ensued. Law took advantage of the chaos to flee France altogether. The regency, meanwhile, found itself in a precarious position. The collapse of Law’s schemes had sparked outcries across absolutist society. But it had also eliminated much of the regime’s debts by converting them into near-worthless Company stock (Adams 2005; Kaiser 1991). Seeking to assuage an outraged public without forfeiting their newfound solvency. Crown officials pursued a cautious path to reform. They reviewed petitions from investors and rooted out corrupt administrators, giving real thought to dissolving the Company (Haudrère 2005). In the end, the government decided to keep the corporation afloat, though in significantly reduced form. Privileges were peeled away one by one: authority over St. Domingue in 1721, exclusive commercial rights along the Barbary Coast in 1726. In 1731, the monarchy downsized the corporation once again, assuming control over Louisiana in exchange for a low-interest loan.

Colonial Disjuncture How did Company operatives in the Indian Ocean fare during this time of scandal, retrenchment, and public outrage? Distance from France provided some layer of insulation. But it also created conflict over precedence and authority. By the 1720s, Company employees had expanded their influence beyond Pondichéry – now their administrative 275

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capital – to other parts of India. Chandernagor, in the northwestern province of Bengal, became their most profitable settlement. The newly conquered colony of Mahé, on India’s western coast, supplied a windfall of pepper. Yanon and Karikal, acquired through negotiation in 1730s, rounded out the five major Company settlements – all of them coastal enclaves surrounded by large indigenous regimes. While employees in India were by no means unaffected by changes to the Company’s ownership and outlook in France, the fallout from Law’s schemes was less disruptive in India than in Europe. Here the same influential families, with roots going all the way back to the initial Colbert experiment, dominated the Company’s administration. Here the problems that had plagued French traders for decades – disputes with indigenous laborers, an inability to secure local credit – continued to loom large (Agmon 2014). Since the time of Colbert, France’s efforts on the subcontinent had centered on trade rather than settlement. The Company consequently dispatched only small allotments of Frenchmen to its various Indian outposts, mostly soldiers and merchants from maritime regions such as Brittany. At its peak in the 1740s, Pondichéry – the largest Company town – numbered less than 2,000 Europeans. Its indigenous population, by contrast, neared 100,000 (Manning 1996). Company employees enjoyed only limited control over the diverse non-European community of laborers, merchants, and moneylenders who inhabited their settlements, a confessional mélange of Muslims, Hindus, Roman Catholics, and Armenian Christians (Agmon 2017). The Company’s position vis-à-vis other powers in India proved similarly tenuous and ill-defined. As latecomers to the subcontinent, the Company struggled to tap into the most lucrative markets there, especially outside of Chandernagor (Manning 1996). The expectations of officials in France, meanwhile, proved increasingly out of step with commercial realities in the Indian Ocean. Above all else, even profits, administrators in the metropole favored order, hierarchy, and predictability. Shareholders received yearly dividends based on the sale of tobacco, a popular commodity imported from the English, rather than the Company’s actual commercial performance. Much decried by critics of the Company, who believed it removed the incentive to expand overseas trade, this arrangement grew out of the aftermath of the Law fiasco. In exchange for the corporation shouldering some of the debt created by the Scotsman’s bubble, the monarchy compensated shareholders by using the tobacco excise to guarantee regular dividend payments (Haudrère 2005; Dibadji 2011). This compromise kept investors financially secure but also relatively powerless. They were treated more like holders of municipal bonds or government debt than active participants in Company affairs. Power rested instead in the hands of the controller general and a council of eight directors. The latter varied in terms of both quality and commitment. A number had experience in India, with family members serving there still; others secured their office through favor, treating the position as a sinecure. What brought them together was the desire to avoid costly entanglements abroad – and any resulting breakdowns in the Company’s chain of authority. Merchants in India, by contrast, sought to bring the Company more in line with the rhythms of regional politics and commerce. They pressed metropolitan officials to allow them to supplement their commercial obligations to France by pursuing private trading opportunities in the Indian Ocean. Doing so, they insisted, would improve the Company’s reputation among indigenous moneylenders. The directorate in France viewed these requests with suspicion, fearing they would foster corruption among overseas personnel (Manning 1996). Such misgivings were not unique to the French; rather, they were endemic 276

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to early modern trading corporations, captured in figures such as the British “nabob”: the colonial official made rich through peculation in India (Dirks 2008). In the case of the Company, fears of corruption inspired a vacillating approach to private commerce, which the directors frequently permitted one year and prohibited the next. Whatever the official stance of metropolitan officials, distance made the timely enforcement of regulations all but impossible (Erickson 2014). Private trade was undertaken regardless of the Company’s position on it. This widening gap between colonial and metropolitan interests was by no means distinctive to French India. From the humid plantations of St. Domingue to the snowy fields of Canada, settlers skirted inconvenient regulations to advance local interests (Dawdy 2008). Several factors, however, set France’s efforts in the Indian Ocean apart from these other colonial ventures. First, whereas the king presided directly over most of the old regime empire, he relied on the Company to govern on his behalf in India. Although Company and Crown overlapped in theory, they did not always align in practice. Directors, shareholders, and colonial administrators constituted interest groups whose goals at times differed from those of the king. Second, conditions in the Indian Ocean varied considerably from those in the French Atlantic. Colonists in the Caribbean exercised near-total authority over the plantation complex, employing harsh labor regimes, invidious racial codes, and a virtual monopoly on violence to solidify their power (Ghachem 2012). Employees in India, by contrast, were subject to multiple masters – not only to administrators in Europe, but also to indigenous governors, merchants, and power brokers. These circumstances constrained the Company’s power while also creating opportunities that were unavailable in the French Atlantic.

War Conditions in India reached a new level of volatility in the 1740s when the War of the Austrian Succession drew in both France and the United Kingdom. While conflict posed new threats to the Company’s settlements, it also inspired creative attempts to rethink and reform France’s approach to India. Hoping to avoid the fighting, Company officials sought to secure a neutrality pact with the British. Their efforts, though, came to naught. By 1744, British men-of-war were prowling the sea-lanes around the Bay of Bengal, severing the Company’s lifeline to France. “Could it be any clearer,” wrote Pondichéry’s council in 1746, “that we have been abandoned by Europe?” (Correspondance du Conseil Supérieur de Pondichéry et de la Compagnie 1746). Panic, however, soon gave way to new opportunities. With the help of a fleet from the Company’s outpost on Île-de-France (modern-day Mauritius), the Company launched an ambitious night attack against Madras, the main British settlement in southeast India. The British surrendered three days later, in September 1746. Unfortunately for the French, victory brought only temporary relief, and long-simmering tensions between the governors of Pondichéry and Île-de-France – Joseph-François Dupleix and Bertrand François Mahé de la Bourdonnais, respectively – soon came to head. Both claimed credit for the victory; both claimed administrative precedence in Madras after its surrender (Crepin 1922; Malleson 1921). Their wrangling nearly came to blows, until a cyclone forced la Bourdonnais to abandon the city in order to save his fleet. Dupleix spent the next few years annexing Madras to Company territory, pleading with indigenous merchants to transfer their assets to Pondichéry. Yet developments in Europe ultimately frustrated these efforts. Eager to 277

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secure an end to the war and to regain settlements lost to Britain in Canada, the Crown returned Madras to British control in 1748. While short-lived, the Company’s gains during the War of the Austrian Succession mark a watershed moment for French experiences on the subcontinent. Frustrated by the loss of Madras – and enticed by the gains made through force of arms – Dupleix embarked on a plan to alter French fortunes in India. He first courted claimants to the thrones of two local kingdoms, Arcot and Hyderabad, each of them mired in a succession crisis. Concluding treaties with both aspirants, Dupleix then lent them soldiers, money, and weapons in exchange for territorial gifts, some granted to him directly. The governor justified these interventions by arguing they would anchor the Company on a solid base of indigenous power, securing it both local prestige and a windfall of subventions and tax payments (Manning 1996; Mole 2015). Events unfolded at a dizzying pace, far too quickly for the Crown to respond. By the time news of Dupleix’s schemes reached Europe in 1751, his claimants were securely in power, and the Company’s sphere of influence extended across much of southern and central India. As with the conquest of Madras, Dupleix’s gains proved temporary. Yet they sparked controversies that would endure long after his tenure on the subcontinent had ended. Fearful that France’s gains would undermine their power in the region, the British hurled themselves into the conflicts over Hyderabad and Arcot, backing their own set of claimants. Civil war raged across southeastern India, erasing Dupleix’s gains. By 1753, the French-backed pretenders were both dead (although the successor to the previous French-supported claimant in Hyderabad also allied with France). A year later, in response to the growing outcry of Company shareholders, Dupleix was recalled to France and drummed out of service. He spent the next few years engaged in lawsuits with the corporation, hoping to recoup the expenses he incurred while on campaign. The governor died penniless in 1763, his vision of an Indian empire unrealized.

Collapse By 1756, the French found themselves engaged in a new conflict: the Seven Years’ War. A global affair with disastrous consequences for France, this war spilled out from Europe to engulf the Caribbean, North America, and the subcontinent. Before the smoke had even cleared from Dupleix’s campaigns, the Company was thus once more under arms against the British. Old acrimonies simmered and then exploded. Eager to bring its colonial officials under control in the wake of the Dupleix’s defiant policymaking, the directorate sent a handpicked candidate, the comte de Lally, to India with a far-reaching mandate in 1757. A veteran soldier with a reputation for stubbornness, Lally was appointed head of all troops in India – both Crown and Company soldiers. He was also tasked with bringing Company officials back in line with metropolitan policy. Both efforts proved calamitous. Despite some early successes against the British, Lally’s campaign soon collapsed under the weight of insufficient supplies. Company settlements fell in quick succession. By the summer of 1760, only Pondichéry remained, surrounded and under siege. Strained at the best of times, Lally’s relationship with Company leaders in Pondichéry soon turned venomous. The general accused these officials of hoarding food while his soldiers starved; lacking any semblance of adequate provisions, Pondichéry’s employees, in turn, denounced the general as a tyrant. With little hope for relief, Lally finally surrendered the city in January of 1761. Resentment over his behavior only grew 278

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after Company employees were repatriated to France (Baugh 2011; Mole 2021). In 1766, at the behest of several Pondichéry notables and their friends at court, the king put Lally on trial for trumped-up charges of treason, executing him soon after. Defeat in India prompted a range of reactions in France. Long relegated to the margins of the corporation’s administration, shareholders exploited the confusion caused by Dupleix to expand their authority, emerging as a central voice in Company affairs. Enlightenment philosophes, too, turned their attention to the controversial military theater in India. Their observations were rarely flattering. The abbé Raynal, whose multivolume Histoire des deux Indes catalogued the atrocities of European imperialism, described the corporation as corrupt and mismanaged. Voltaire, a Company investor, struck a similarly mordant note. Advocates of fiscal reform, meanwhile, denounced the corporation as an impediment to the rationalization of old regime finances. In both ideological and practical terms, the Company’s position proved increasingly untenable during the 1760s. Its finances were in ruins; its settlements, restored to France by the Treaty of Paris, now circumscribed in territory and influence. Attempts by shareholders to shed costs encountered resistance by the royal ministry, which had become increasingly sympathetic to the principles of free trade. A vicious letter-writing campaign ensued, during which shareholders cast themselves as patriots under attack by a despotic monarchy, while the Crown slowly pulled back its commitment to the Company (Terjanian 2012; Margerison 2006). This conflict came to a head in the summer of 1769, when the monarchy officially dissolved the Company and opened India up to private trade. Gone, in a sweep of royal fiat, was the institution that had dominated France’s affairs on the subcontinent for over a century. Yet even though their influence on local affairs waned as that of the British waxed, the French settlements in India remained active commercial enclaves. For royal officials, meanwhile, the East Indies assumed an increasingly prominent place in the French political imagination, becoming a focal point for plans to restore the old regime to a position of global influence. Consider the efforts of the duc de Choiseul, France’s foreign minister in the 1760s. He hoped to create an indigenous alliance system on the subcontinent to undercut British power there, folding India into his grand “revenge” schemes against the United Kingdom. Former Company generals like the duc de Bussy, who remained an influential figure in Hyderabad after the dismissal of Dupleix, pursued a similar strategy against the British. He sought to form an alliance between the French and the Marathas – a confederacy of Hindu princes in central India (Margerison 2015). Such plans received renewed attention when war broke out against the British during the American Revolutionary War, but they did not materialize into any lasting diplomatic arrangements. Interest in the Company, meanwhile, diminished but not completely drowned out by the din of free trade advocacy in France, led to the creation of a new state-supported joint-stock corporation in 1785. Spearheaded by Alexandre de Calonne, the controller general, this corporation restricted itself solely to trade. It faced immediate obstacles, however, which kept it from achieving even this limited mandate. While speculators in Paris undercut the value of Company stock, opposition from the Comte de Vergennes – France’s foreign minister – eroded state support for the project (Nussbaum 1933). The Revolution finished the Company off, its campaign against old regime privilege leading to the revocation of the corporation’s monopoly in 1790. As in other parts of the French colonial world, news of the French Revolution reached India slowly, spread as much through rumor and gossip as it was through official channels of communication. And as in France itself, revolutionary change quickly fell to factionalism. 279

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Infighting rent the administrations of Chandernagor and Mahé, dividing these colonies and Pondichéry. British propagandists were quick to denounce such developments, seeing in them the rippling effects of the revolutionary chaos unfolding in Europe (Jasanoff 2005). Concerted action soon took the place of vitriol. Britain declared war against France in 1793, once more isolating and attacking France’s Indian colonies; by the end of that year, all five were in British hands, to be restored only after the defeat of Napoleon. French efforts to undermine Britain continued nonetheless into the next century. While privateers in the Indian Ocean harassed British shipping, an alliance with the southwestern Indian kingdom of Mysore threatened their settlements on the subcontinent. Yet the British again proved resilient, holding off both threats while consolidating their hold over the region during the first decades of the 1800s.

Conclusion On the surface, France’s experiences in India seem to fit the general pattern of competition between Britain and France in the eighteenth century, ending in triumph for the former and defeat for the latter. This dichotomous narrative of success and failure continues to shape much of the scholarship on French India, as historians focus on determining why and how France’s efforts there foundered. Such debates offer valuable insights into the consequences of early modern European globalization. Yet they also reveal problematic assumptions about the nature of colonial power in the eighteenth century. First, they rely on the premise – based on modern notions of undifferentiated state power – that France’s goals in India were ever clear-cut or consistent, the product of a coherent political will rather than the caprices of a patrimonial regime. Hindsight has given a direction to French policy that was often unapparent at that time, obscuring its inconsistencies and improvisational character. Second, these debates often downplay the role indigenous patronage and politics played in deciding the fate of European companies in India. France’s struggles on the subcontinent were always part of a larger story, often lost in the rush to determine when and why its colonial experiments went wrong. Kingdoms such as Hyderabad and Arcot were not simply bit players in the grand drama of early modern European imperialism, nor were the indigenous power brokers who inhabited Company settlements subalterns lacking agency. Instead, they were active participants in the French colonial project, twisting and reshaping it to suit their own needs. Speculation over why the French “failed” in India underscores the challenges of colonial settlement and trade in the eighteenth century. But in taking for granted that the subcontinent was ever a place where France could or should have inserted itself, it also casts into relief blind spots and misplaced assumptions that can limit the study of empire more generally.

References Adams, Julia. 2005. The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Agmon, Danna. 2014. “Striking Pondichéry: Religious Disputes and French Authority in an Indian Colony of the Ancien Régime.” French Historical Studies 37 (3): 437–67. ———. 2017. A Colonial Affair: Commerce, Conversion, and Scandal in French India. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Ames, Glenn. 1996. Colbert, Mercantilism, and the French Quest for Asian Trade. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press.

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French India in the Eighteenth Century Balen, Malcolm. 2002. A Very English Deceit: The Secret History of the South Sea Bubble and the First Great Financial Scandal. London: Fourth Estate. Baugh, Daniel. 2011. The Global Seven Year’s War: Britain and France in a Great Power Contest. Harlow: Pearson. Charpentier, François. 1665. Relation de l’établissement de la Compagnie française pour le commerce des Indes orientales. Paris. Clark, Henry. 2007. Compass of Society: Commerce and Absolutism in Old-Regime France. Plymouth: Lexington. Crepin, Pierre. 1922. Mahé de la Bourdonnais, Gouverneur Général des iles des France et de Bourbon (1699–1753). Paris: Éditions Leroux. Crowston, Clare. 2013. Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France. Durham: Duke University Press. Dawdy, Shannon Lee. 2008. Building the Devil’s Empire: French Colonial New Orleans. Chicago. University of Chicago Press. Dibadji, Reza. 2011. “Compagnie des Indes: Governance and Bailout.” In Origins of Shareholder Advocacy, edited by Jonathan Koppell, 169–86. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Dirks, Nicolas. 2008. The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Dubois, Laurent. 2004. A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Earl J. Hamilton Papers. Rubenstein Library. Museo Civico Correr, Codice Cicona. 3046/20, fol.13. Erickson, Emily. 2014. Between Monopoly and Free Trade: The English East India Company, 1600– 1757. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ghachem, Malick. 2012. The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haudrère, Philippe. 2005. La Compagnie française des Indes au XIIIe siècle, Volumes 1 and 2. Paris: Les Indes Savantes. Horn, Jeff. 2015. Economic Development in Early Modern France: The Privilege of Liberty, 1650– 1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jasanoff, Maya. 2005. Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750–1850. New York: Vintage. Kaepplin, Paul. 1967. La Compagnie des Indes Orientales et François Martin: Étude sur l’histoire du commerce et des établissements Français dans l’Inde sous Louis XIV (1664–1719). New York: Burt Franklin. Kaiser, Thomas. 1991. “Money, Despotism, and Public Opinion in Early Eighteenth-Century France: John Law and the Debate on Royal Credit.” The Journal of Modern History 63 (1): 1–28. Malleson, G. B. 1921. Dupleix and the Struggle for India by the European Nations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Manning, Catherine. 1996. Fortunes à faire: The French Trade in Asia, 1719–1748. London: Routledge. Margerison, Kenneth. 2006. “The Shareholders’ Revolt at the Compagnie des Indes: Commerce and Political Culture in Old Regime France.” French History 20 (1): 25–51. ———. 2015. “French Visions of Empire: Contesting British Power in India after the Seven Years’ War.” English Historical Review 130 (544): 583–612. Marsh, Kate. 2009. India in the French Imagination. London: Pickering & Chatto. Mole, Gregory. 2015. “L’Economie Politique de Joseph Dupleix: le commerce, l’autorité, et la deuxième guerre carnatique, 1751–1754.” Outre-Mers, Revue d’histoire 103 (388–389): 81–98. ———. 2021. “Incriminating Empire: Treason, Patriotism, and the Fall of French India.” French Historical Studies 44 (1): 27–57. Murphy, Antoin. 1997. John Law: Economic Theorist and Policy-Maker. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nussbaum, Frederick. 1933. “The Formation of the New East India Company of Calonne.” The American Historical Review 38 (3): 475–97.

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26 EXPLORATION AND ENLIGHTENMENT IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE Eric F. Johnson Over the course of the eighteenth century, the French government commissioned several maritime expeditions to parts of the world then unknown to Europeans. These voyages coincided (and competed) with the expeditions of other European powers, such as the English and the Dutch. Modern historians refer to this period as the “Age of Exploration” and distinguish it from the “Age of Discovery” that began with Columbus and the opening of the Atlantic World. The Age of Exploration is closely tied to the Scientific Revolution and French Enlightenment. On one hand, new methods and technologies in shipbuilding, navigation, and health made these longer voyages more feasible than they had been before. On the other hand, the results of these voyages advanced Enlightenment science and stimulated philosophical debate through new knowledge about the natural world and the diversity of the people who inhabited it. Ship crews began to include astronomers, naturalists, and artists with specific instructions to collect information and specimens to be circulated in publications, cabinets of curiosity, and botanical gardens. Considering the enormous expense of these voyages, the addition of crew members who did not contribute to the operation of the ship suggests a change in the priorities of overseas exploration that is part of the development of modern science.

The Origins of Eighteenth-Century French Exploration France did not participate in the earlier Age of Discovery as intensively as its rivals in Britain and Spain did. Over the two centuries that followed Columbus’s first voyage, French foreign policy was focused on the continent and the Mediterranean. Domestic crises, such as the Wars of Religion over the sixteenth century or the Fronde in the 1640s, also drew attention and resources away from global expansion. During brief interludes of peace and domestic stability, France sent explorers to North America. Jacques Cartier’s voyage to the Gulf of St. Lawrence occurred during a truce with the Hapsburgs in 1534, while Samuel Champlain’s extensive voyages in modern Quebec took place in the gap between the Wars of Religion and the French entry into the Thirty Years’ War. French success in global expansion remained minor compared to other European powers. By the early eighteenth century, the French had settled only around 60,000 people in North America compared to over 1 million English colonists (Hubert et al. 2000) 283

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One region of the world still unknown to Europeans in the eighteenth century was the Pacific. Nominal Spanish sovereignty of the Pacific went back to the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, yet Spain had taken little advantage of this exclusive access during its heyday. Ferdinand Magellan’s famous voyage around the globe in 1519–1522 established the distances involved in crossing the Pacific but also confirmed that it was not a viable route for trade with Southeast Asia. Pedro Fernandes de Queirós and Luis Vas de Torres explored the Pacific around the western coast of the Americas in 1606 and 1610, respectively, after which Spanish “probing” of the ocean was discontinued in favor of a maritime policy that protected its already-established trade routes (Howes 1990, 7). By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Pacific remained almost entirely unexplored by Europeans. This was particularly the case for the Southern Pacific below the equator, where the enormous distances and prevailing currents posed challenges to the endurance of ships and their crews far beyond those of Atlantic travel. The shortest distance across the Pacific between California and Japan is about 4,500 miles, 1,500 miles more than the typical transatlantic crossing. But the overall span of the Pacific could be as much as 12,000 miles between modern-day Colombia and Indonesia (Hansen 2000, 22–23). With these extended travel times came the increased risk of illness among crews, and particularly of scurvy, a range of potentially fatal symptoms caused by the vitamin deficiencies in the typical foods that were preserved for long ocean journeys. However, advancements in dietary health in the eighteenth century included some of the first clinical trials in scientific history, showing that certain preservable foods contained nutrients that could prevent the disease. (Lamb 2016) The challenges of distance were compounded by the ocean currents, which prevented sailing vessels from making a direct crossing. The North Pacific Gyre is a current that runs clockwise in the Pacific between the Arctic and the equator. In order to sail with the current from North America to China, one must first travel south to find the westerly current and then back northward to reach Southern China from the bottom of the Gyre. The South Pacific is dominated by a counterclockwise current called the South Equatorial Gyre, which travels westward toward Australia. In between there is the Equatorial Countercurrent, which runs eastward roughly between the northern coast of New Guinea and Central America. The fact that so little was known about the South Pacific made it a tempting target for European explorers in the eighteenth century. Traditional Western geography still drew on the ancient author Ptolemy, whose second-century work had divided the known world into three continents – Europe, Asia, and Africa – that were surrounded by a global ocean (Grafton 1992). This model was no longer tenable after Columbus’s discoveries, but other parts of the Ptolemaic system endured, such as his theory of a symmetry of landmasses between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Because the known sizes of South America and sub-Saharan Africa were far below the combined size of Eurasia, North Africa, and North America, it was felt there should be an undiscovered landmass south of the equator to compensate. Geographers also speculated that this landmass could possess mineral wealth matching what Spain had found in the Americas. Cartographers named this undiscovered world Terra Australis (Latin for “Southern Land”). French enthusiasm for exploring the Southern Hemisphere can be traced to the 1663 publication of Abbé Jean Paulmier’s Mémoires touchant l’établissement d’une mission chrestienne dans le troisième monde. This recounted the supposed history of a Norman

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captain named Binot Paulmier de Gonneville, who, in 1503, was sailing near Cape of Good Hope, South Africa, when he was blown off course. He eventually landed on an uncharted island of abundance, the “third world” of the narrative’s title, where he was welcomed by its peaceful inhabitants. After a six-month stay to rest and repair his ship, Gonneville returned to France with one of the native inhabitants from the island: from whom Paulmier, writing more than a century and a half later, claimed descent. Modern historians tend to categorize Paulmier’s memoir as a work of fiction, perhaps based on an inaccurate description of Madagascar. We know from surviving records that Gonneville was a real historical figure, and that his ship had been boarded by English privateers who took his journal, charts, and any other evidence that could have corroborated his account. But Paulmier’s account appeared at a time of renewed enthusiasm for the unknown parts of the globe and for their utopian potential. Uncharted regions had long inspired and haunted the European imagination, from the first-century Roman author Pliny the Elder’s Historia Naturalis to the fourteenth-century Travels of Sir John de Mandeville. These accounts contained descriptions of bizarre “monstrous races” that lived beyond the fringes of the known world that influenced medieval maps and the anticipation of what Europeans would see when they finally travelled there (Kline 2012). During the Renaissance, the open ocean became a backdrop for visions of ideal societies that were based on humanist principles, notably Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626). No longer imagined as physically monstrous, the peoples who inhabited these islands instead differed morally from contemporary Europeans and represented the possibilities the authors saw for progress. In the early eighteenth century, the South Pacific was a backdrop for new fictions, such as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). These English works, translated within a few years, quickly became popular among French readers. Much like More’s Utopia, these stories were moral critiques of European civilization with exotic and fantastical settings that acted as a foil to European social and political norms. However, while More’s ideal world was based on Christian Humanism (his Utopians were Christian), these newer works found value in the complete absence of Western norms. Defoe placed particular emphasis on the concept of the “noble savage,” in which living far from the civilization of the Old World in a condition closer to nature makes one more innocent and virtuous. This tension between nature and a Eurocentric vision of “civilization” was already evident in accounts of European encounters with Native Americans, but it became an even more important theme in the eighteenth century, as Enlightened philosophers turned their efforts toward improving the human condition. These possibilities arose at a moment when France was geopolitically primed to turn more attention to overseas expansion. The wars of the later decades of Louis XIV’s reign (1643–1715) had resulted in an exhausted balance of power in Europe, while the Spanish Empire had declined to the extent that it could no longer assert its traditional claims over the oceans. Spanish power had begun to wane during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), and the extension of conflict with France for a further decade had intensified the decline. The 1659 Franco-Spanish Treaty of the Pyrenees established a dynastic alliance between the two monarchies, with Spain clearly the inferior partner. By the end of the century, England and the Dutch Republic were already encroaching on the Spanish Pacific, adding a renewed urgency for the French to establish their own presence there (West-Sooby 2013, 20).

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France Enters the Age of Exploration The first French voyage of exploration into the southern seas was led by Jean Baptiste Charles Bouvet de Lozier in 1738–1739. Bouvet was sent by the French East India Company to locate “Gonneville’s Land,” in the hope Paulmier’s account was correct. If Gonneville had indeed reached an unknown land in the early sixteenth century, France would have the strongest claim to it, against other European powers. Even if it did not contain vast riches, its presumed location had the potential to give France a strategic advantage in the Indian Ocean, at a time when the competition for overseas bases was heating up. Bouvet attempted to retrace Gonneville’s voyage by sailing near the Antarctic Circle in the South Atlantic. He discovered a few uninhabited islands and many icebergs, but no sign of what Paulmier had described. He was forced to return the following year when his crew began taking ill. Despite his failure to locate Gonneville’s Land, Bouvet’s findings fed into the speculation that there was indeed an undiscovered continent in the higher southern latitudes. According to scientific thinking of the time, sea ice only occurred when land was nearby, and the icebergs Bouvet encountered occurred at lower latitudes (that is, further from the pole) than in the Northern Hemisphere. Today we understand that this is caused by currents of warm water that run through the North Atlantic, preventing sea ice forming, but eighteenthcentury scientists interpreted Bouvet’s findings as evidence of a significant landmass near where he sailed (West-Sooby 2013, 58–59). This was taken as fact for several decades, with newly produced maps marking this undiscovered continent as Terra Australis Incognita. The most significant example of this was Charles de Brosses’s Histoire des navigations aux Terres australes, published in 1756. There were two other notable efforts to locate Gonneville’s land. In 1770, Lieutenant Yves-Joseph de Kerguelen-Trémarec was sent on a mission to Tahiti, with a search for Terra Australis Incognita included as an objective en route. The following year, Marc-Joseph Marion du Fresne, a privateer for the French East India Company, set out on a similar mission that ended with his murder by indigenous Tasmanians in 1772. By this time, European geographers were beginning to understand that while the southern oceans were not completely devoid of land, Ptolemy’s model of symmetrical continents was not correct.

Scientific Exploration: The Geodesic Mission of 1736 Meanwhile, a parallel strand of more purely scientific endeavor had developed. The Geodesic Mission was commissioned by the French Academy of Sciences to determine the exact shape of the Earth. It was led by Pierre Louis Maupertuis (1698–1759), a prominent academician and mathematical thinker, and also an early advocate of Newtonian mechanics, which predicted that the Earth’s centrifugal motion should cause it to bulge at the equator. Jacques Cassini (1677–1756), from the important French Italian family of astronomers, led the opposition to Maupertuis’s theory. His model was influenced by Descartes and held that the diameter of the Earth was greater from pole to pole. To resolve this great question, Maupertuis created two teams. One was sent to Spanish Ecuador, and the other – led by Maupertuis himself – travelled to the Arctic Circle in Lapland (modern Finland). Each took precise measurements of the arc of meridian using a pendulum to determine the roundness of the Earth’s surface at their location. These findings were compared to already-established values for the arc of meridian at Paris. With one team at the equator, another near the 286

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North Pole, and Paris being roughly in between at 48 degrees latitude, the data gathered could determine if and where the Earth bulged. The mission ultimately proved Maupertuis’s model – and Newtonian physics – to be the correct one, which spurred a major shift in modern scientific thought. His success won him memberships in all the scientific academies in Europe, allowing him to continue his work on other important contributions to eighteenth-century science, such as the principle of least action and his observations on early genetics. The Geodesic Mission had important implications that went far beyond determining the Earth’s shape. Newton’s Principia Mathematica was published in 1687, yet his ideas had not yet gained traction in France, where the native genius René Descartes remained in favor (Shank 2008). Over the course of the eighteenth century, Newton’s mechanical model of nature opened new directions in the other sciences, most importantly chemistry and biology. Newton’s work was critical to the French Enlightenment as a whole because it helped “demystify” the universe by removing the need for supernatural forces to explain its motion. The traditional view that divine actions were the “prime mover” of all reality was replaced with mechanical principles and physical laws of nature that could be understood with human reason. This, in turn, changed the role of God in the universe, from the active ultimate source of all motion and change to a kind of mechanic who built the universe but left it to operate on its own. This “watchmaker analogy” was the basis of Enlightenment deism, whereby God became a more distant presence from human society and behavior than in traditional Christian theology. If God did not directly operate in the workings of nature, then human history and the social order could also be understood without the need for divine intervention. Global exploration made this even more evident, as Europeans encountered foreign civilizations that functioned perfectly well – some philosophes would argue even better – without a basis in Christian morality. In addition to confirming Newtonian mechanics, the Geodesic Mission revealed other potential benefits to state-sponsored exploration. The team in Ecuador was the first to document the tapping of rubber, a substance that later became critical for the machinery of modern industry, as well as the cinchona tree that produces quinine, an anti-malarial compound that ultimately made it safer for Europeans to explore and conquer the tropics. They observed the eruption of the Cotopaxi volcano in the Andes and recorded ethnographic data that contributed to the early development of anthropology and archaeology. The success of the mission fed into a growing public enthusiasm for travel and a curiosity about the exotic cultures that the French Académie des Sciences capitalized on to campaign for more voyages. By the middle decades of the eighteenth century, Paris was growing into a capital of science and learning for audiences that went beyond the traditional intellectual elite (Belhoste 2019). The expansion of commerce in the eighteenth century generated a “consumer revolution,” whereby more people gained access to commodities from distant sources, such as sugar, chocolate, tea, and coffee. Part of the enjoyment of these items was their novelty and how they connected the consumer public with exotic places. With rising literacy in France, especially in urban areas, an expanding reading public fueled new markets for literate and artistic culture. Accounts of travel to distant places (both fictitious and real) became a popular genre for a reading public both among the elite and expanding across the middling ranks of society (Kommers 1988). The exotic was becoming fashionable, most evident in the huge demand for Chinoiserie: art and design based on European impressions of the Chinese style (Porter 2002). The century saw the appearance of the 287

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musée, where a paying public could encounter exotic artifacts and specimens collected from across the globe (Lynn 1999). The cosmopolitan outlook where, in the words of Diderot, learned men were “strangers nowhere in the world” is at the heart of the Enlightenment. (Jacob 2006)

Bougainville and the Tahitians The most celebrated eighteenth-century French voyage was led by Louis Antoine, Comte de Bougainville. Between 1766 and 1769, he accomplished the first French circumnavigation of the globe, publishing a best-selling account in 1771. The Académie des Sciences had been lobbying for a follow-up to Bouvet’s southern expedition ever since his return in 1739; however, the War of Austrian Succession (1740–1748) and the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) delayed new voyages of exploration. Ironically, these wars provided part of the impetus for Bougainville’s voyage. The Seven Years’ War had cost France its colonies in North America and India. This blow to French prestige and overseas trade had made Louis XV very unpopular, and the voyage was meant in part to restore his public image. The general scope of these wars, with extensive campaigns in overseas colonies in addition to the European continent, had also reinforced the strategic importance of seagoing and colonial capabilities for rival European powers (Baugh 2011). Further urgency for France came from British moves to consolidate the gains from victory. In June 1764, Commodore John Byron commanded HMS Dolphin on a voyage to circumnavigate the globe and search the South Pacific for the Terra Australis Incognito. Soon after its return in 1766, the Dolphin set out again under the command of Samuel Wallis. French policymakers determined on the need to establish their own foothold in the South Pacific. Bougainville was an ideal figure to lead this expedition. He was a hero of the Seven Years’ War, seeing action at the capture of Fort Oswego in 1756 and the Battle of Fort Henry in 1757 before being wounded during the defense of Fort Carillon that same year. He frequently travelled across the Atlantic on supply runs, where he learned navigation. After French forces were defeated in North America, he returned to France under terms that forbade him from serving in arms against the British for the rest of the war. He transitioned into diplomacy and was part of the team that negotiated the Treaty of Paris that brought peace in 1763. After the war, he was part of an effort to colonize the Iles Malouines (Falkland Islands), where he settled over 100 French Canadians at his own expense. However, this colony threatened relations with Spain, who feared that it could be used as a base to attack its South American empire, and he was ordered to abandon the venture. The islands were the first stop of his new voyage, where he formally ceded them to Spain, after which the exploration part of his mission began, but he had pledged to “render to my motherland in the southern hemisphere what she no longer has in the northern” (WestSooby 2013, 21). Bougainville’s was the first French voyage to combine the search for uncharted lands with acquisition of detailed information about the flora, fauna, and people of the unknown world. His crew included the astronomer Pierre-Antoine Véron (1736–1770), whose observations of longitude provided the most precise measurements of the Pacific to date, and an up-and-coming botanist named Philibert Commerçon (1727–1773). The inclusion of Commerçon showed the growing influence in European science of the Swedish naturalist Carl

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Linnaeus, whose system of classifying biological organisms was becoming the standard for Western biology. His Systema Naturae had been published in 1736, but it was his Species Plantarum, published in 1753, that made his classification system the modern standard. Linnaeus’s students, who came to be known as his “apostles,” were sent across the world to collect specimens and classify the plant life they encountered (Gribin and Gribin 2009). Commerçon was not formally one of these apostles, but he had corresponded with Linnaeus and received encouragement from him to pursue his work. After completing his diplomatic assignment in the Falklands, Bougainville passed via Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America into the South Pacific. It was in South America that Commerçon recorded a thorny vine with deep-pink flowers, giving it the genus name Bougainvillea. Bougainville’s ships crossed the Pacific to the Polynesian Islands, where they made landfall in Tahiti, Samoa, and the Solomon Islands (naming the largest of these islands after Bougainville himself). From there he sailed north of New Guinea into the southern Indian Ocean. He returned to France on March 16, 1769, carrying a Tahitian native named Ahutoru. Although it did not accomplish much in terms of adding to France’s overseas territories, the voyage was viewed as a tremendous success. Only seven of the initial crew of 340 were lost, an extraordinarily low number for that time that can be attributed to new medical practices and logistical techniques (Salmond 2011, 90). Bougainville became a national hero in France, later serving with distinction as a naval captain in the American War of Independence, surviving the French Revolution to serve as a member of the scientific Board of Longitude after 1795, and as a senator under Napoleon. When he died in 1811, he was one of very few non-military figures from the Ancien Régime to be interred in the Panthéon during the Napoleonic Empire. The voyage of Bougainville, especially his observations on the Tahitians, became a great sensation in France in the decades before the Revolution. The writings of JeanJacques Rousseau, among others, had already popularized the ideal of the “noble savage” in the French imagination, and the Tahitians – especially with Bougainville’s somewhat-­ exaggerated description of them – confirmed this romanticized ideal (Kahn 2003, 309–10). Ahutoru, the Tahitian who returned with Bougainville to France, became a sensation in Parisian society, although he quickly became homesick. His unhappiness in France would have further confirmed the French sense of disillusionment with their own society and the virtues of living in a state of nature. In 1771, Bougainville paid for Ahutoru’s passage back to Tahiti, although he died of smallpox during the voyage. The mythical perception of the Tahitians, which focused particularly on a sensationalized understanding of their culture’s sexual morals, remained prominent in French culture into the twentieth century. At the height of the Enlightenment, it was part of anti-clerical criticism of the influence of Catholic morality in French society. In 1772, Denis Diderot (1713–1784) wrote his Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, ou dialogue entre A et B sur l’inconvénient d’attacher des idées morales à certaines actions physiques qui n’en comportent pas (Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville, or a dialogue between A and B on the problems with attaching moral ideas to certain physical actions that have none). In it he portrayed the French, with their acquisitiveness and lust, as a danger to a pristine Tahitian society that was free from violence and greed. In one episode of Diderot’s account, the ship chaplain is invited to dine at a chieftain’s house. After the meal, the host offers his guest his choice of women in the household – including his wife and daughters – to spend the night with (Bougainville had also portrayed

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the sexual generosity of the Tahitians). As the chaplain tried to explain how his religion forbade him to enjoy the intimacy of women, the chieftain exclaimed: I don’t know who your great workman [i.e., God] is, but I am very happy that he never spoke to our forefathers and I hope that he never speaks to our children, for if he does, he may tell them some of the same foolishness, and they may be foolish enough to believe it. (Diderot 1956, 199) In a testament to the radical nature of these ideas, Diderot’s text, originally written as a sort of extended book review of Bougainville’s account, was not actually published until 1796, long after the author’s death, and in a very different atmosphere of post-revolutionary intellectual freedom.

Conclusion: The End of the Ancien Régime After the great success of Bougainville’s voyage, and in light of the successful voyages that James Cook made for England in the 1770s, France launched an even more ambitious exploration in 1785. This was led by François de Galaup, the Comte de Lapérouse, who had accompanied Bougainville almost two decades before. The number of scientists on the mission was expanded and included a geologist, a botanist, a physicist, and several naturalists and illustrators, to identify and document new discoveries. Hoping to build upon what Cook had already charted, Lapérouse landed in Chile and Hawaii before travelling up the West Coast of North America to Alaska. He crossed the Pacific to Macau and the Philippines, then sailed north past Japan to Russian settlements in eastern Siberia, before travelling south to Australia, spending over a month at the newly founded British Botany Bay colony. After departing from New South Wales in early March 1788, he and his crew disappeared without a trace somewhere near the Solomon Islands. This lost voyage haunted the public imagination for years to follow, and on the day of his execution in January 1793, Louis XVI is said to have asked his jailer if there had been any news of Lapérouse. The collapse of the Ancien Régime and the chaos of the Revolution did not pause French exploration of the South Pacific. From 1790 to 1791, Captain Étienne Marchand led a second circumnavigation of the globe aboard the Solide. From 1791 to 1794, La Recherche and L’Ésperance travelled to the South Pacific to search for the lost Lapérouse expedition and to explore the region. Louis XVI was still king of France when they left, and when they returned, the king had been executed and France had been a republic for nearly two years. After Napoleon formed the Consulate in 1799, he sent Nicolas Baudin on another search for Lapérouse in the Géographie and Naturaliste. Baudin’s crew included an unprecedented 24 astronomers, artists, and natural scientists. After the fall of Napoleon, the restored Bourbon monarchy commissioned several new voyages to the South Pacific, partly as a means for building support for their troubled regime. In 1817, Louis-Claude de Saulces de Freycinet, a veteran of Baudin’s 1799 voyage, set out from Toulon to circumnavigate the globe in the Uranie. He was followed by Luis-Isidore Dupperrey in 1822, in 1824 by Hyacinth de Bougainville, the son of Louis Antoine de Bougainville, and in 1826 by Jules Dumont d’Urville. This tradition continued into the 1840s, when France declared a protectorate over Tahiti and began to build the territorial claims in the region it still holds. 290

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The French Age of Exploration was a convergence of social and cultural changes in the Age of Enlightenment. On one hand, it was part of the long-term background of conflict and competition among European states that continued into the Age of Imperialism and the nineteenth-century scramble for colonies, resources, and markets for European-­ manufactured goods. On the other hand, these voyages represent the spirit of the Enlightenment with its focus on using knowledge and reason to improve the human condition. Ultimately, the legacy of the Age of Exploration is mixed. These discoveries made important contributions to the modern sciences, but the cost to the indigenous people of South Pacific and postcolonial Europe is still evident today (Jolly, Tcherkézoff, and Tryon 2009). And you, leader of these brigands who obey you. Take your vessel swiftly from our shores. We are innocent and happy, and you can only spoil our happiness. We follow the pure instinct of nature, and you have tried to efface her imprint from our hearts. Here all things are for all, and you have preached to us I know not what distinctions between mine and thine. “The Old Man’s Farewell,” in Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville, by Denis Diderot

References Australian Association for Maritime History. 2017. “A Brief Chronology of the French Exploration of Australia.” The Great Circle 39 (2): 1–7. Baugh, Daniel. 2011. The Global Seven Years War, 1754–1763: Britain and France in a Great Power Contest. New York: Routledge and Taylor & Francis Group. Belhoste, Bruno. 2019. Paris Savant: Capital of Science in the Age of Enlightenment. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Diderot, Denis. 1956. Rameau’s Nephew and Other Works. Translated by Jacques Barzun and Ralph H. Bowen. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. Donath, Christian R. 2016. “An Empire of Eros: Colonizing Through Desire in Diderot’s ‘Supplement to Bougainville’s ‘Voyage.’ ” History of Political Thought 37 (1): 127–51. Grafton, Anthony. 1992. New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Gribin, John, and Mary Gribin. 2009. Flower Hunters. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hansen, Valerie. 2000. The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World – and Globalization Began. New York: Charles Scribner and Sons. Howes, Derek. 1990. Background to Discovery: Pacific Exploration from Dampier to Cook. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Hubert, et al. 2000. “The Population of the St-Lawrence Valley, 1608–1760.” In Michael R. Haines and Richard H. Steckel (eds.), A Population History of North America, 99–142. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jacob, Margaret. 2006. Strangers Nowhere in the World: The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. Jolly, Margaret, Serge Tcherkézoff, and Darrel Tryon, eds. 2009 Oceanic Encounters: Exchange, Desire, Violence. Canberra Australia: The Australian National University Press. Kahn, Miriam. 2003. “Tahiti: The Ripples of a Myth on the Shores of the Imagination.” History & Anthropology 14 (4): 307–26. Kline, Naomi. 2012. Maps of Medieval Thought: The Hereford Paradigm Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press. Kommers, J. 1988. “The Significance of 18th-Century Literature About the Pacific for the Development of Travel Literature.” Bijdragen Tot de Taal-, Land- En Volkenkunde 144 (4): 478–93.

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Eric F. Johnson Kury, Lorelai. 1998. “Les Instructions de Voyage Dans Les Expéditions Scientifiques Françaises (1750–1830).” Revue d’histoire Des Sciences 51 (1): 65–91. Lamb, Jonathan. 2016 Scurvy: The Disease of Discovery. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lynn, Michael R. 1999. “Enlightenment in the Public Sphere: The Musée de Monsieur and Scientific Culture in Late-Eighteenth-Century Paris.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 32 (4): 463–76. Parsons, Christopher M., and Kathleen S. Murphy. 2012. “Ecosystems under Sail: Specimen Transport in the Eighteenth-Century French and British Atlantics.” Early American Studies 10 (3): 503–39. Porter, David L. 2002. “Monstrous Beauty: Eighteenth-Century Fashion and the Aesthetics of the Chinese Taste.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 35 (3): 395–411. Salmond, Anne. 2011. Aphrodite’s Island, 90, 118–19. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sewell, William H. 2010 “The Empire of Fashion and the Rise of Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France.” Past & Present 206: 81–120. Shank, J. B. 2008. The Newton Wars and the Beginning of the French Enlightenment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Voltaire. 1999. Candide, or Optimism. Translated by Daniel Gordon. New York: Bedford St. Martins. West-Sooby, John. 2013. Discovery and Empire: The French in the South Seas. South Australia: University of Adelaide Press.

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27 ENLIGHTENMENT AND THE SUPERNATURAL Popular Religious Practice in the Eighteenth Century Angela C. Haas On May 27, 1694, the relics of Saint Geneviève, the patron saint of Paris, were lifted from their resting place, marched ceremoniously from the abbey to the cathedral of Notre-Dame, and placed on the altar, where a mass was sung in her honor. The people of Paris beseeched the saint to end the drought, which had caused food scarcity throughout the region. On the return journey to the abbey of Saint Geneviève, their prayers were reportedly answered in the form of a miracle: it began to rain (Williams 2016). Nearly a century later, in December 1793, Saint Geneviève’s relics were again removed from their resting place. This time her reliquary was sent to the mint to be melted down and repurposed for the French nation. While some expected such a disturbance of a saint’s relics to invoke divine retribution, Le Moniteur Universel happily and sarcastically reported that they had moved the relics “with much tranquility, and without miracles” (Réímpression de l’ancien Moniteur 1858–1863, 65). Amid a revolutionary dechristianization campaign, the saint now found herself at the center of a postmortem trial. Condemned for several crimes, including “participating in the propagation of error,” her remains were burned and tossed into the river Seine (Quoted in Sluhovsky 1998, 207–8). On one level, the contrast between these two events displays the shift in fortunes in certain aspects of Catholic tradition, particularly those linked to the supernatural, experienced in eighteenth-century France. Many came to view certain practices, especially attempts to invoke divine aid through ritual, with skepticism, and even disdain. And yet this rejection of the supernatural, which manifested itself most clearly during the most radical stage of the French Revolution, is only one part of the story. As revolutionaries tore saints’ relics from the reliquaries, they attracted not only iconoclasts but also pious pillagers who hoped to save (perhaps even abscond with) these precious objects. This chapter sheds light on the variety of roles that the supernatural played in eighteenthcentury France, with a special focus on those aspects of popular Catholic practice tied to divine intervention. It examines the experiences and attitudes of three groups: the clergy, the philosophes, and the average laity, with a particular focus on those laypeople who possibly read but left few written records. The eighteenth century in France has often been associated with the rise of anticlericalism and skepticism toward religious, especially Catholic, tradition. This view is not wholly 293

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unwarranted, but it stems largely from a focus on the writings of Enlightenment philosophers, the philosophes, who railed against the deleterious effects of superstition and intolerance. Traditional studies of the Enlightenment viewed it as a largely unified philosophical movement consisting of an elite coterie of famous authors, especially those associated with the famous compendium of Enlightenment knowledge, the Encyclopédie. Although scholars now stress that critiques of religion fell on a spectrum and that some took an interest in mysticism and the occult, it remains clear that most philosophes’ attitudes toward the supernatural were skeptical, bordering on hostile (Israel 2006; Edelstein and Edmondson 2010). It was this critical stance that helped shape government policy during the French Revolution. The attacks of the philosophes joined a chorus of other critics, placing the clergy and religious apologists on the defensive as they sought to shield Church traditions and retain the faith of the laity. The clergy’s approach to the supernatural elements of Catholic practice was not entirely reactive, however. From the turn of the century, Catholic scholars, bishops, and others strived to refine popular religious practices associated with the supernatural. Recently, historians of the French Enlightenment have given more attention to the ideas and writings of the clergy and religious apologists. Some have focused on a “counterEnlightenment,” an intellectual cohort that fought to preserve, among other traditions, a belief in the miraculous (McMahon 2001). Others have incorporated religious discourses into the Enlightenment itself, stressing that elements of the inquiring, critical temperament of the Enlightenment can also be found among religious thinkers and members of the Catholic clergy (Burson 2019). As this chapter will show, the clergy sought to refine the belief system of the laity and craft a more enlightened form of Catholicism, even while stressing the active role of supernatural forces on earth. While some scholars have focused on the exchange of ideas between philosophes and other elite figures of the period, others have striven to understand the degree to which Enlightenment debates disseminated among the wider French population. Cultural studies of the period show that the people of eighteenth-century France experienced the Enlightenment not only through the writings of philosophes but also through more accessible printed works, such as pamphlets, and through active participation (Darnton 1995; Bond 2021). Nor did one have to be literate to have access to the exchange of new and controversial ideas, as information also spread by word of mouth in public and private spaces. Rather than viewing the Enlightenment as a purely intellectual movement led by an elite coterie of philosophes, scholars have begun to understand the Enlightenment as a cultural space in which people from diverse social backgrounds encountered and exchanged a range of ideas. While some members of the laity read and were influenced by the writings of the philosophes, many more were exposed to controversy over the authenticity of miracles and sacred relics through sermons, pamphlets, and plays. Viewing the eighteenth century through the lenses of both Enlightenment debate and religious experience reveals the diversity of perspectives toward the supernatural during this period. Quantitative studies of the period suggest that the religious sensibilities of some were shifting away from “exterior” forms of religious devotion, such as the veneration of saints’ relics. And yet despite the clergy’s attempts to marginalize these devotions and the philosophes’ attempts to eradicate them, the miraculous elements of Catholic tradition and practice remained central to the daily lives of a substantial portion of the French population.

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Religious Reform and Religious Controversy Clerical attitudes toward the supernatural in eighteenth-century France might seem contradictory to modern readers. Catholic theologians, such as Dom Augustin Calmet (1672– 1757), could conclude that most reported sightings of ghosts and vampires were fables, while confirming that angels could intervene at will on earth and speculating that goblins “seem . . . to be of a middle nature between good and evil angels” (quoted in Cameron 2010, 290). The supernatural was central to Catholic doctrine, which confirmed the power of invisible forces and the possibility of divine intervention on earth. The French clergy aimed both to defend the doctrines of the Church rooted in history and tradition and to preserve the faith of the laity. Defenders of the faith nevertheless took a critical stance toward aspects of Catholic practice related to the supernatural, aiming to eradicate superstition and shield the Church from accusations of fraud. It was a combination of skepticism and aversion to scandal that first drove scholars within the Church to call for a reassessment of Church histories and hagiographies. While maintaining that miracles confirmed the truth of revelation and the divine ordination of the Catholic Church, many Catholic scholars also insisted that the time had come to eradicate dubious tales of supernatural events from the histories of saints, tales that had long fueled criticism from Protestants and skeptics. Adrien Baillet (1649–1706), an ordained priest and scholar, feared that most miracles reported since the tenth or eleventh century were the invention of monks and priests who carried saints’ relics from village to village “to extract money from the piety of simple, credulous people” (1701, viii). While seldom directly calling the Church’s judgment into question, critical Catholic scholars attempted to erase certain dubious events from the historical record, including extraordinary miracles and unlikely movements of relics. By the turn of the eighteenth century, scholars such as the Carmelite Honoré de Sainte-Marie (1651–1729) could rejoice that “poorly regulated zeal for miracles and the honor of the saints dwindle each day, and we have begun to stand guard against imposture, false zeal, and excessive credulity” (1713, 30). Protestants and skeptics had long challenged the authenticity of many saints’ relics, which, according to Catholic tradition, could serve as conduits for divine intervention. It was only at the turn of the eighteenth century, however, that widespread reconsiderations arose from within the Catholic Church itself. Notable scholars, such as the priest and historian Louis-Sébastien Le Nain de Tillemont (1637–1698), began to question the literary traditions according to which Lazarus and his sisters travelled to France, thereby placing into doubt the relics of Lazarus in Autun, Mary Magdalene in Aix-en-Provence, and Martha in Tarascon. In the wake of these criticisms, Church authorities had the relics of Mary Magdalene and Lazarus re-examined. In the eighteenth century, verification processes intensified considerably. Detailed investigation of human remains, funerary objects, engravings, stones, and other objects required a wide range of experts, including surgeons, jewelers, goldsmiths, lapidaries, and linguists. Many feared the implications of investigating the authenticity of ancient relics. Some members of the clergy insisted that it was best to leave these relics in place, rather than run the risk of disturbing the faith of laypeople. Benedictine scholar Jean Mabillon, for example, insisted that the removal of ancient relics, however inauthentic, could “cause detrimental changes and bad impressions in the mind of the faithful who are accustomed to this veneration. This [would] lead them to doubt everything, and to have almost no faith

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in true relics” (1700, 33). Some questioned the importance of authenticity, believing that inspiring pious devotion and good behavior among the laity was paramount. During the French Revolution, several priests at the church that held the Holy Shroud of Besançon confessed that they never believed the relic to be authentic, one noting that he had learned some 25 years prior of its inauthenticity after reading Baillet’s work, but that the people were attached to it, so they allowed devotions to continue (Procès-verbal du pretendu suaire de Jesus 1794). Many feared that the removal of inauthentic relics would lead to scandal, a disruption of popular devotion and piety, and potentially to unbelief. Evidence from the period suggests that the removal of relics with a long tradition of popular veneration could, indeed, cause considerable controversy. In 1563, the Council of Trent granted the power to verify or debunk miracles, relics, and sacred objects to local bishops. Some took this job quite seriously, despite considerable opposition. In 1707, the bishop of Châlons ordered that the alleged Holy Umbilical Cord of Christ be removed from public veneration upon discovering that the reliquary contained only a handful of gravel. Despite its obvious inauthenticity, parishioners demanded its return, drawing up a petition in which they insisted that the relic had to be authentic because it regularly worked miracles (McManners 1998, vol. 2). Some reformer bishops even faced violent resistance. In 1721, a bishop’s concern over the authenticity of a local patron saint’s relics led him to be chased off by a mob and have the windows of his carriage broken (McManners 1998, vol. 1). The creation of new pilgrimage sites could also be controversial, illustrating the conflicts over popular enthusiasm for the miraculous that could accompany these types of devotions. For example, when Esprit Fléchier (1632–1710), bishop of Nîmes, gave permission to a local shepherd to erect a cross, he quickly came to regret it. Devotees of the cross declared it to have miraculous properties, and the shepherd who erected it to be a saint and prophet deserving of veneration in his own right. In a pastoral letter to his diocese, the bishop noted that the people had been “swept up by a taste for pious novelty” and that “the marvels that are publicized there gave rise to such rumors and uncertain reasoning” that he felt it necessary to clarify that the cross did not have divine properties (Fléchier 1706, 101, 104). Maintaining tradition while eliminating superstitious beliefs and practices was a careful balancing act, but most clergy agreed that there was less risk in debunking the authenticity of newly introduced relics. Mabillon, for example, argued that any newly introduced relic ought to have evident proofs of authenticity, noting that “[t]here are no shifts in the minds of the faithful to fear, if one does not approve the cult, because they are not yet accustomed to the veneration of these relics” (1700, 32). When sacred relics began to flood into France from the Roman catacombs, Mabillion grew suspicious and demanded proof of their authenticity. After concluding that the methods the excavators used to discern the body of a martyr were questionable at best, he accused “avaricious ecclesiastics” of committing “pious frauds” and fabricating hagiographies for these “unknown saints” (Mabillon 1698, 5). The response to Mabillon’s work was mixed. While some praised him as enlightened, others accused him of maliciously besmerching the Church. As the case of relics suggests, even the most enlightened clergy were generally inclined to accept traditional devotions but hesitant to condone new ones. This trend can also be found in debates over miracles. Although the Church continued to maintain that God could intervene in human affairs in the form of miracles, from the middle of the seventeenth century, the Church grew much more hesitant to verify them. Requirements for the verification of miracles increased considerably, as inquiries came to focus on attempts to debunk the miracle by means of natural explanation (Vidal 2007). In theory, only the truest miracles 296

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would survive the process, which included a vigorous investigation of the history of illness and recovery as well as witness testimony. Especially under the leadership of Pope Benedict XIV, the Church’s canonization processes, which involved proofs for miracles worked by the candidate for sainthood, grew stricter as the involvement of medical expertise in the process was formalized (Duffin 2009). In France, this hesitancy toward verifying miracles was further complicated by the partisan ends to which they were often used. Especially from the late 1720s on, Jansenists – an unorthodox faction of Catholics whose theological and political positions were deemed heresy by both Church and state – reported hundreds of healing miracles, which were often accompanied by bodily convulsions, miracles they claimed were proof that God supported their cause. Enemies of the Jansenists hurled accusations of fraud, while the Jansenists accused their opponents of covering up the evidence for these miracles and thus denying the will of God (McManners 1998, vol. 2). Although some priests and a few bishops supported these miracles, many clerics grew wary of reports of miracles during this period, as they feared being accused of either heresy or credulity. When one Madame Gardet was healed of her ailments at the Corpus Christi procession in 1778, the 12 witness testimonies supporting her miracle were rendered dubious by the fact that the prior leading the procession refused to do the same. Although the prior had encouraged Gardet to seek miraculous healing from the Eucharist at the procession, he insisted that she could only do so “[o]n the condition that this will not bring about any embarrassment,” and he required that she return home with her crutches “whether [she was] healed or not” (Relation de la maladie 1778, 14). Controversies over supernatural phenomena shaped clerical attitudes toward some Catholic traditions, especially those that were unlikely to withstand the scrutiny of a growing body of critics.

The Philosophes Attack the Supernatural The Church sought to maintain traditions linked to the supernatural, while eradicating superstitious abuses of those traditions, that is, any misguided practices thought to bring about divine intervention. By contrast, French philosophes came to define “superstition” much more broadly, using the term to denote any misguided belief or practice that could not be substantiated with empirical evidence (Cameron 2010). Where the philosophes most clearly departed from the Church was in their willingness to attack the supernatural elements of Catholic orthodoxy, especially the cult of saints and miracles. The philosophes’ attitudes toward the supernatural were shaped by both ideology and experience. Prominent strands of Enlightenment thought, such as deism and materialism, attacked the supernatural on philosophical grounds. The philosophes were equally influenced by historical events and contemporary controversies, which led them to associate reported supernatural events with clerical fraud, popular credulity, and fanatical partisanship. Enlightenment philosophy, narrowly defined, stressed rationality, empiricism, and the supremacy of the natural order. Although the French philosophes lacked a unified approach to religious matters, two significant strands of Enlightenment thought rejected the belief in the supernatural outright. For materialists, who believed that all phenomena could be explained by the motion and properties of matter, there was no space for non-natural events. Deists, who believed in a distant God, similarly had difficulty finding space for unpredictable supernatural events in their conception of an orderly, predictable universe with immutable natural laws. As a violation of mathematical, immutable, and eternal laws, 297

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a miracle was, in the words of Voltaire, “a contradiction in terms” (1901, Vol. 7, 402). As an all-knowing, all-powerful being, God created the universe as well as he possibly could and had no need for correction. Many agreed with Voltaire in his insistence that it was “absurd to believe in miracles; it is, in fact, dishonoring the divinity” (1901, Vol. 7, 404). While some arguments against Catholic doctrines stemmed from philosophical logic, most Enlightenment criticisms of miracles and miracle-working relics were based on historical developments, contemporary experience, or some combination of the two. One opinion nearly universally held by philosophes and clergy alike was that “the people,” a term broadly applied to most urban laborers and peasants, could be easily misled due to their naturally credulous dispositions. Louis de Jaucourt claimed that “[t]he people are superstitious and it is through superstition that one enchains them” (Encyclopédie, vol. 14, 89), a statement often repeated almost verbatim by others, including Voltaire (1901, Vol. 9, 79), and later by French revolutionaries. Philosophes generally agreed that it was ignorant common people, especially abundant in the countryside, who were most likely to be convinced of the truth of supernatural events. D’Holbach applied this logic to the miracles of Jesus, noting that he had converted people with his miracles in Galilee, but not in Jerusalem, since “[t]o see miracles it requires a simplicity that is found much less commonly in a capital city than in the countryside” (1770, 150). He claimed that “[i]t is thus not marvelous that Jesus very quickly found supporters for himself, especially among a demographic that is very easy to seduce in all countries” (d’Holbach 1770, 337). It was this purported inclination to marvels that made the common people vulnerable to the designs of those who sought to control and exploit them. Of all those who might seek to exploit popular credulity, philosophes generally believed that it was the clergy who stood to benefit most. For example, they pointed to the financial benefits of housing sacred relics to make the case that the practice of invoking the aid of saints stemmed from clerical deceit. In the Encyclopédie article “relics,” Jaucourt explained that early Christians venerated the bodies of saints as a sign of respect, but that before long relics became so valuable to the superstitious populace, who believed they could work miracles, that they gave birth to avarice. The clergy wanted these relics, real or fake, because as they began to work miracles, they “became a magnet that attracted riches from every direction to the churches where these miracles took place” (Encyclopédie, vol. 14, 89). While Jaucourt praised those within the Church, such as Mabillon, who had attempted to expose some of these “pious frauds,” he also noted that such work was highly criticized, that abuses continued in his own time, and that people ought to stop “being dupes to the avarice of ecclesiastics” (Encyclopédie, vol. 14, 89). Accusations of clerical fraud, or “priestcraft,” permeated the writings of the philosophes, providing a basis of explanation for a wide range of reported supernatural events. While greed drove some acts of deception, the philosophes held, partisanship drove others. Within Catholic tradition, miracles had long acted as signs of divine will and favor. In theory, a well-timed and verified miracle could settle theological or political disputes. For the philosophes, that many miracles were often alleged to support the position of those reporting them was inherently suspect. The swell of Jansenist miracles that began in 1727 at the cemetery of Saint Médard in Paris and the debates that followed seemed to confirm the connection between competing religious factions and reports of miracles. Many philosophes, including Voltaire, Diderot, d’Alembert, and Helvétius, claimed to have been witness to these reported supernatural events (Israel 2006). They universally condemned them as frauds, trumped up by a persecuted religious minority to gain popular support for 298

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their views. D’Holbach wrote of these events that he “saw all of Paris run to see miracles, healings, convulsions” that were “obvious frauds” conjured up by the Jansenists “in order to support their party, which they qualified as the cause of God” (1770, 337–38). Diderot witnessed one reported miracle, concluding that the healed person was a “swindler,” the amazed crowd was full of “idiotic people,” and that “all those who saw miracles in that place, had already been well resolved to see some” (1746, 113–15). He reinforced the link between miracles and partisanship, claiming that anytime someone presents a dogma that contradicts the dominant religion of a region, “one justifies their missions with miracles” and only partisans of that mission attest to them (Diderot 1746, 75). Rousseau’s Savoyard vicar in Émile facetiously maintained that “it would be the greatest miracle if there were no miracles wherever there were persecuted fanatics” (2009, 578). The Jansenist miracles both shaped and reinforced the philosophes’ criticism of supernatural events. They seemed to confirm that supernatural events were frauds conjured up by a faction that stood to benefit from attracting gullible devotees. The principal evidence used to authenticate miracles during this period was witness testimony. Philosophes tended to disregard any witness testimony that supported miracles as being corrupted by partisanship, superstition, or the imagination and demanded empirical proofs. For orthodox clergy, at least in theory, witnesses could confirm the occurrence of any number of divine or diabolical interventions, ranging from miraculous cures to demonic possessions to the raising of the dead in the form of vampires. Enlightenment critics, by contrast, tended to argue that no amount of witness testimony could confirm an event that broke natural law. And yet some caution should be taken in viewing the Enlightenment and its proponents as champions of scientific reasoning. Few philosophes attempted systematically to disprove reports of supernatural phenomena, instead relying on satire and ridicule to make their case against what they saw as the vulgar belief system of the masses (Cameron 2010). Furthermore, scientific investigation and claims to scientific authority during this period were not devoid of subjectivity but rather were shaped by prejudices regarding social status, professional affiliation, and gender. Historians of eighteenth-century France now recognize that far from being eradicated through philosophical and scientific debate, wonder and the supernatural remained an integral part of eighteenth-century thought (Fleming 2013; Boon Cuillé 2020).

The Supernatural in Print and Practice In the eighteenth century, French Catholics were exposed to more criticisms of and controversies over the supernatural than ever before. As discerning clergy sought to reform the beliefs and practices of the laity, they also exposed them to the possibility of fraud. Many clergy feared – and many philosophes hoped – that scandal would lead to skepticism toward the mysteries of the faith. It remains unclear, however, to what degree such doubt actually arose. While the attitudes of Church authorities and Enlightenment critics can be discerned from their writings and other records, those of the average layperson, most of whom left few records of their opinions, are trickier to discern. Authorities of both Church and state left scattered records of the behaviors of laypeople, which gives some indication of their attitudes toward the supernatural. Attitudes can also be discerned from reading habits, even if it is not possible to discern exactly how readers interpreted what they read. The evidence that exists suggests that although there was a detectable shift away from religious 299

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practices associated with invocation of the divine among some social groups, these practices remained an integral part of the faith for many. Some assessment of the belief patterns, or at least interests, of literates can be discerned from book production and sales. Between 1720 and 1780, the proportion of works printed in Paris that covered religious subjects dropped from 35% to 10%. However, there are indications that this trend was not representative of all parts of France. Regional studies suggest that religious reading material made up some 70% of booksellers’ inventories in some regions (Roche 1998; Suire 2011). Hagiographies (lives of saints) remained extremely popular throughout the century, especially among artisans and domestic servants (Suire 2011). Although from the middle of the century, almanacs began to focus less on supernatural events and divination and more on practical scientific and medical advice, they continued to be filled with a wide range of oddities, monsters, and reports of unusually long pregnancies (Roche 1998). Historians have documented the reading public’s keen interest in marvels and the supernatural, an interest that seemed to increase in the closing decades of the Ancien Régime. While some texts undoubtedly took an uncritical approach to the marvelous and miraculous, much of the material to which readers had access exposed them to criticism of or debates over supernatural events. Many of the most biting criticisms of the supernatural could be found in the writings of the philosophes. D’Holbach’s Critical History of Jesus Christ, Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary, and the collected works of Rousseau were among the “forbidden best-sellers” of pre-Revolutionary France (Darnton 1995). Shorter works, such as pamphlets or the illegally published Jansenist newspaper, the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, which were teeming with information about recently reported miracles and their detractors, had an even broader readership (Maire 1998). The events surrounding the Jansenist miracles – which reached their height in the early 1730s but continued to be reported and publicized until the French Revolution – were highly controversial and placed a swathe of evidence for and against reports of miracles before the reading public through theological treatises, pastoral letters, newspapers, pamphlets, plays, images, and other printed material. Underscoring the broad reach of plays mocking the miracles, an editor for The Hague’s Journal littéraire wrote that “[s]erious and austere books are only read by a small number of people, who still are not all knowledgeable enough to judge them, but these plays are read by women and by all kinds of people” (Journal littéraire 1733, 194). News of these events and the controversy surrounding them also spread by word of mouth through song, sermons, and gossip. From early in the century, doubts over the authenticity of local relics also reached the ears of the laity, leading some, like the bishop of Amiens, to forbid the people of his diocese to read pamphlet literature that might place “some doubt about [the authenticity of local relics] in people’s minds” (Sabatier 1715, 4). Despite the rising tide of religious skepticism and controversy in the eighteenth century, regional studies suggest that religious practice in France was more uniform than ever. Aside from the larger towns, nearly everyone took Easter communion until at least the 1770s, and attendance at mass was higher than ever (McManners 1998, Vol. 2; Roche 1998). Both were the result of centuries of efforts by the clergy to enforce religious conformity, although they were not necessarily indications of deeply held religious belief and may stem largely from social expectation. Quantitative regional studies reveal other patterns that point to religious change, including increases both in contraceptive practices and in premarital or illegitimate births, alongside declines in religious vocations, membership in religious confraternities, requests for postmortem baroque rituals, and religious language 300

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in wills. Although these trends varied by social group, gender, and region, they suggest that the religious sensibilities of a considerable portion of the French population were changing (Vovelle 1978). Scholars have debated what these trends indicate about religious belief as such, making divergent claims that these trends indicate a gradual “dechristianization,” “interiorization,” or “laicization” of piety (Vovelle 1978; McManners 1998, Vol. 2). Some trends, such as language in last wills and testaments, provide insight into what the laity was thinking about the supernatural. For example, the rising popularity of terms such as “Supreme Being” in place of “God” or “Christ” seems to indicate a trend toward deism. Similarly, between the turn of the eighteenth century and the French Revolution, the percentage of wills that referenced saints fell from 48% to 8%, which seems to indicate a waning belief in their power as divine intercessors (Suire 2011). Still, the practices of venerating relics and going on pilgrimage to sacred shrines continued throughout the eighteenth century in France, albeit in smaller numbers and with fewer elite visitors (Tingle 2020). Most places continued to have their own local pilgrimage sites and shrines, and new pilgrimage sites continued to be built (McManners 1998, Vol. 2). Processions of relics continued as well, even in the worldly capital. Although the elaborate processions in honor of Paris’s Saint Geneviève ceased after 1726, this was largely the product of royal usurpation of the cult, as invocations of the saint became more private and focused on the well-being of the king (Sluhovsky 1998; Williams 2016). Louis-Sébastien Mercier commented in the 1780s that popular devotion to the saint remained strong and that common people often visited her “to ask her to heal them of all kinds of fevers” (quoted in Williams 2016, 343). Although the number of religious processions, feast day celebrations, and other religious events associated with the invocation of saints declined, especially in the second half of the century, resistance to the removal of saints’ relics during the French Revolution suggests that many continued to view them as sacred fonts of divine intervention (Baciocchi and Julia 2009). In times when saints’ relics were removed from churches, the local population reacted in divergent ways. For example, in December 1793, when the relics of Saint Anthelme were pulled from their reliquary in Belley, eyewitness accounts reported that some of his remains were “removed by pious people, and others carried away forcibly by the profaners” (Clermont 1820, 153).

Conclusion Throughout the century, French people continued to turn to the supernatural for guidance, health, and emotional comfort. While the Church condoned some of these practices, others were increasingly viewed as at best distractions, at worst superstitions worthy of condemnation. Continuing Catholic Reformation efforts against superstitions considered offensive to God, the French clergy sought to eliminate certain beliefs while controlling orthodox practices, such as the veneration of saints’ relics, to prevent abuses. The goal was to craft a more rational, enlightened form of Catholic practice while preserving traditions considered integral to the faith. The philosophes also called for the elimination of superstitious practices and beliefs, although they applied the term “superstition” much more broadly than did most clergy. Aiming at the very heart of popular religious practice, all aspects of the faith related to the supernatural were vulnerable to attack, although Enlightenment critics were not entirely devoid of their own interest in marvels and mysteries. The diatribes of philosophes and, to a greater degree, disputes between religious factions brought debates over 301

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the supernatural before the reading public. Despite this exposure to controversy and virulent attacks on a wide variety of beliefs and practices, the supernatural aspects of Catholic practice proved remarkably resilient. In the nineteenth century, France saw a resurgence of relic devotions and reports of miracles, showing that a considerable portion of the French population continued to view divine intervention as a viable source of aid (Harris 1999).

References Baciocchi, Stéphane, and Dominique Julia. 2009. “Reliques et Révolution française (1789–1804).” In Reliques modernes: Cultes et usages chrétiens des corps saints des Réformes aux révolutions, edited by Philippe Boutry, Pierre Antoine Fabre, and Dominique Julia, vol. 2, 483–85. Paris: Éditions de l’école des hautes études en sciences sociales. Baillet, Adrien. 1701. Les Vies des Saints Composées sur ce qui nous est resté de plus authentique, & de plus assuré dans leur Histoire: disposées selon l’ordre des Calendriers & des Martyrologes, avec l’Histoire de leur culte, selon qu’il est établi dans l’Eglise Catholique, & l’Histoire des autres Fêtes de l’année. Paris. Bond, Elizabeth. 2021. The Writing Public: Participatory Knowledge Production in Enlightenment and Revolutionary France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Boon Cuillé, Tili. 2020. Divining Nature: Aesthetics of Enchantment in Enlightenment France. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Burson, Jeffrey D. 2019. The Culture of Enlightening: Abbé Claude Yvon and the Entagled Emergence of the Enlightenment. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Cameron, Euan. 2010. Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason, and Religion, 1250–1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clermont, Joseph. 1820. Vie de Saint Anthelme, septième général des Chartrux et évêque de Belley, accompagnée des pièces originales qui constatent l’authenticité des précieuses reliques rendues à la vénération des fidèles. Lyon. Darnton, Robert. 1995. The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France. New York: W. W. Norton. Diderot, Denis. 1746. Pensées Philosophiques. The Hague. Duffin, Jacalyn. 2009. Medical Miracles: Doctors, Saints, and Healing in the Modern World, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Edelstein, Daniel, and Chloe Edmondson, eds. 2010. The Super-Enlightenment: Daring to Know Too Much. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., eds. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert. University of Chicago: ARTFL Encyclopédie Project (Spring 2021 Edition), Robert Morrissey and Glenn Roe (eds). http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu/. Fléchier, Esprit. 1706. “Lettre Pastorale de Monseigneur l’évêque de Nismes, aux Fidèles de son Diocèse, au sujet de la croix de Saint Gervas.” In Oeuvre choisies, Fléchier, edited by Henri Brémond, 1911. Paris: Librairie Bloud. Fleming, John V. 2013. The Dark Side of the Enlightenment: Wizards, Alchemists, and Spiritual Seekers in the Age of Reason. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Harris, Ruth. 1999. Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age. New York: Viking. Holbach, Paul-Henri Thiry Baron d’. 1770. Histoire critique de Jésus-Christ, ou, analyse raisonnée des Evangiles. n.p. Israel, Jonathan. 2006. Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752. New York: Oxford University Press. Journal littéraire de l’année 1733, 1733. Vol. 20. The Hague. Mabillon, Jean. 1698. Lettre d’Eusebe Romain, à Theophile François, sur le culte des saints inconnus. Grenoble. ———. 1700. Lettre d’un Bénédictin à Monseigneur l’Evesque de Blois, touchant le discernement des anciennes Reliques, au sujet d’une Dissertation de Mr. Thiers, contre la sainte Larme de Vendôme. Paris. Maire, Catherine. 1985. Les convulsionnaires de Saint-Médard: miracles, convulsions et prophéties à Paris au XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Éditions Gallimard/Julliard.

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Enlightenment and the Supernatural ———. 1998. De la cause de Dieu à la cause de la Nation: Le jansénisme au XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Éditions Gallimard. McMahon, Darrin. 2001. Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McManners, John. 1998. Church and Society in Eighteenth-Century France. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Procès-verbal de reconnaissance du pretendu suaire de Jesus exposé pendant plusieurs siècles à la vénération du peuple, dans la ci-devant métropole de Besançon, comme une relique précieuse qui s’étoit conservée miraculeusement jusqu’à ce jour. 1794. Paris. Réímpression de l’ancien Moniteur, seule histoire authentique et inaltérée de la révolution française depuis la réunion des Etats-généraux jusqu’au Consulat (May  1789-Nov. 1799) avec des notes explicatives. 1858–63. Edited by A. Ray. Paris. Relation de la maladie de la Dame Gardet, demeurant à Paris, rue Phelippeaux, paroisse S. Nicolasdes-Champs. Et de sa guérison subite, opérée dans l’église du Temple, à la procession du SaintSacrement, le premier dimanche du mois, 6 septembre 1778. n.d., n.p. Roche, Daniel. 1998. France in the Enlightenment. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 2009. Émile, or On Education. Translated by Barbara Foxley. Auckland: Floating Press. Sabatier, Pierre de. 1715. Mandement de Monseigneur l’Illustrissime et Reverendissime Evêque d’Amiens sur l’Ouverture de la Châsse de S. Firmin Confesseur. Amiens. Sainte-Marie, Honoré de. 1713. Reflexions sur les Règles  & sur l’Usage de la critique, Touchant l’histoire de l’Eglise; les Ouvrages des Peres; les Actes des anciens Martyrs; les Vies des Saints; & sur la Methode qu’un Ecrivain a donnée pour faire une Version de la Bible plus exacte, que tout ce qui a paru jusqu’à present. Volume 1. Paris. Sluhovsky, Moshe. 1998. Patroness of Paris: Rituals of Devotion in Early Modern France. Leiden: Brill. Suire, Eric. 2011. Sainteté et lumières: Hagiographie, spiritualité et propagande religieuse dans la France du XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Honoré Champion. Tillemont, Louis-Sébastien Le Nain de. 1732. Mémoires pour servir à l’Histoire Ecclésiastiques des six premiers siècles, justifies par les citations des auteurs originaux. Vol. 2. Brussels. Tingle, Elizabeth C. 2020. Sacred Journeys in the Counter-Reformation: Long Distance Pilgrimage in Northwest Europe. Paris: De Gruyter. Vidal, Fernando. 2007. “Miracles, Science, and Testimony in Post-Tridentine Saint-Making.” Science in Context 20 (3): 481–508. Voltaire. 1901. A Philosophical Dictionary. Edited by Tobias Smollett. Translated by William F. Fleming. 10 vols. Paris: Dumont. Vovelle, Michel. 1978. Piété baroque et déchristianisation en Provence au XVIIIième siècle. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Williams, Hannah. 2016. “Saint Geneviève’s Miracles: Art and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Paris.” French History 30 (3): 322–53.

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28 THE “MASTERPIECE OF THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY” Criminal Justice and the Revolution Julie P. Johnson

Introduction Criminal justice was completely reimagined in France at the end of the eighteenth century when the Revolution encouraged questioning of its age-old institutions. All over the country, people at different levels of society responded with great enthusiasm, telling the king their problems with the judicial processes that were so difficult to navigate, which led to unfair outcomes and in which corruption was endemic. The cahiers de doleances, or lists of grievances, prepared in 1788–1789, also offered solutions: a more accessible system based on clear laws, fair punishments, and more accountable processes, including juries. Demands to overhaul the institutions of justice were almost as common as those relating to abusive taxes and feudal dues (Bodinier 2010, 103). Little more than two years later, the courts and their justices, once regulated by the rules of privilege and venality, were replaced by others determined by and working for the citizen. This chapter briefly considers the problems of old regime justice, the suggestions for change, the new systems and how they fared across the revolutionary decade. The reform of criminal justice from 1789 offers important insights on the mechanics of revolutionary change in general. From the cahiers to the first reforms and beyond, we can get a sense of the extraordinary conviction that unprecedented transformations could be accomplished in a large modern society. Yet as Serge Bianchi has suggested, the vast scale of the achievements – especially the creation of the role of juge de paix (Justice of the Peace), which enabled the working of the new “judicial pyramid” – are still not fully understood today (Bianchi 2003, 36). The lived experience of the French revolutionaries had made clear to them the enormous importance of confronting the tyranny and abuses of the old regime, and we can only regain an understanding of their vision by revisiting the history of the individual liberties they then proposed and how they were implemented. The new judges, and those who elected them, were at that time enthusiastic about the reforms. Paul-Marie-Arnaud de Lavie, a national deputy at that time, described the juge de paix as the “masterpiece of the National Assembly” and “a gift from heaven” (Edelstein 2014, 191). As the first point of contact for citizens with the justice system, there were many of thousands of them elected throughout the country, usually one in each canton (the

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groupings of the communes at the local level of the administrative and judicial pyramid). Although they were not required to have legal training, juges de paix were expected to ensure that the everyday legal rights of citizens were dealt with efficiently and that more complex matters were sent to the higher courts with another set of judges and their juries. Historians Hervé Leuwers (2010), Anthony Crubaugh (2001), Melvyn Edelstein (2014), and Malcolm Crook (1996) have shown how innovative and radical the first judicial reforms were. Citizen judges and juries at various levels took on a range of cases, some involving serious challenges to the state and others reflecting the dynamic circumstances of revolution. In their work, these judicial officials soon, however, encountered a range of problems unanticipated in the elation of change. When internal and external threats grew to catastrophic proportions during the summer of 1793, radical judicial change was again thought necessary to deal with a new spate of conspiratorial crimes against the state. The work of Antoine Boulant (2018) on the evolution of the Revolutionary Tribunal shows some of the tensions that had to be navigated between exercising the law and preserving the principles of justice. Over the following years, legislators continued to modify and change the Revolution’s first attempts at establishing a coherent and workable criminal justice system, until the famous Code Napoléon was instituted in 1804.

Founding Principles The judicial system of the old regime was widely believed to be driven by motives of profit and to be difficult to access for ordinary people. Court officials and judges who bought or inherited their position were suspected of having little empathy or understanding for those who sought real justice. The processes had become so complicated because of the many legal codes in operation throughout France, with some 366 regional codes in place at the time of the Revolution (Oates 1980, 41), and because of the reliance on written “interrogatories” rather than oral witnesses. There was, as a result, little uniformity or certainty in civil or criminal proceedings even in the urban areas, where there was the possibility for criminal redress. In rural areas, seigneurial justice was characterized by the “gouging” of peasants by their overlords, often accompanied by a complete disregard for their protection against crime (Crubaugh 2001, 18, 90–91). The ongoing struggle for power between the king, who was nominally at the head of justice, and the magistrates of the parlements (the appeal courts), who tried to curb his potential despotism, did not advantage people who sought justice but only increased the complexity and ritual of the judicial edifice. The use of torture, inhumane punishments, and the lack of a right to a defense in criminal prosecutions were endemic (Leuwers 2010, 4, 7). From 1788 to 1789, the cahiers routinely criticized the corruption, the expensive written pleadings, the horrendous punishments, and the secret incarcerations which had become so hated (Shapiro and Markoff 1998, 103). Those predominantly bourgeois men of law and reformers who were chosen to present the cahiers to the meeting of the Estates General and who subsequently became part of the National Assembly in 1789, including one Jacques-Guillaume Thouret (formerly a lawyer in the Parlement of Rouen), were especially motivated to ensure the establishment of a fairer and more efficient judicial system because they wanted the end of the absolute power and abuses of the old regime. Many of their ideas became reality after the fortress of the Bastille was tumbled by revolutionary action in July 1789. Although scarcely used as a prison by the 1780s, the Bastille was the most feared destination of victims of royal tyranny. The symbolism of this attack on absolute power 305

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then enabled the foundational work that would profoundly shape the judicial institutions of modern France. Ending judicial abuses was central to the ecstatic abolition of “feudalism” declared on the famous “Night of 4 August.” A  report, presented to the National Assembly by Nicolas Bergasse on August 17, 1789, reiterated the importance of removing the absolutist foundation of the judicial systems of France to ensure the “liberty” that the French Revolution had promised to achieve (Leuwers 2010, 4). Calls to address the wider deficiencies of criminal justice led to the delegation of a committee empowered to work out new procedures. The committee was not, however, merely simplifying the processes which had become so complex because of privilege and lack of coherence. It was also tasked with completely reinventing the hierarchies of the courts to ensure that the nation and its people would become the focus of the work of the judiciary, a change so radical it required substantial rethinking. On November 27, 1790, Adrien Duport presented the broad outline of a project proposing elected judges and juries composed of citizens. Soon after, a criminal code, setting out more humane punishments, was also formulated. Changes to the criminal jurisdiction and its tribunals were the most fundamental of the legal changes and would take more than a year to be put into practice.

Legislative Changes The sweeping away of the principles that had embodied old regime justice began with a number of interim measures in October 1789. Court proceedings were made public, each accused was granted a right of defense, torture was abolished, and reasons had to be given for afflictive or degrading punishment (Oates 1980, 61–62.). On May 3 and 4, 1790, it was decreed that judges would be elected and remunerated by the state. The first procedural laws were set out from August 16 to 24 1790, and they highlighted the new role of juge de paix. He was to be a non-professional, elected official to whom any citizen could initially bring a case to be heard. This role had all the elements of the “practical and the idealistic” that were typical of the National Assembly (Crubaugh 2001, 133). The juge was expected to commence cases at the level of his canton and was envisaged as “a mediating amateur whose paramount qualifications . . . [included] a sense of fairness instead of familiarity with a body of legal knowledge” (Crubaugh 2001, 135). The suppression of the parlements, the hierarchical courts staffed by career lawyers, in September 1790, meant the ambitious project of criminal justice reform – with the local juge de paix at its core – could actually be put in place. The former inquisitorial system of judging was now expected to give way to arbitration between prosecution and defense at the level of the new district and departmental courts to ensure immediate justice for the accused (Boulant 2018, 14–15). The new series of courts established the separation between the administrative and judicial powers that were at the heart of the new system and began to be instituted in early 1791. Gradually, the centrality of the king in legal actions was removed. His special seat, known as the “lit de justice,” which dominated every court of the realm, was purposely left out of the new design of courtrooms from January 1791. Engravings of the proposed court interiors were sent out to the 547 new tribunals established across the nation on January 22, 1791 (Taylor 2013, 434–74). These pronouncements emphasized the “orality” of proceedings. Hearings were to be conducted in front of the public and the accused, which was the opposite of the secret and largely written operations of the old regime courts. Witnesses were now questioned orally before the lay jury, and the performative aspect of the court procedure made of it a type of theater. Judges were seated in a semi-circle before the 306

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accused and his representative, and there was space for an audience to experience the “live spectacle” of criminal justice, which practice would endure into the nineteenth century (Taylor 1993, xix). Substantive changes began with the decrees of January 20 to February 25, 1791, giving civil jurisdiction to the elected juges de paix to quickly settle demands litigated between citizens at the lowest judicial level of the canton (Allen 2005, 21). Decrees issued between July 19 and 22, 1791, extended the powers of these elected juges to begin criminal proceedings either on their own initiative or acting on the complaint of a citizen. They could hear matters in a final way if the penalty was less than 50 livres and at first instance if the penalty increased up to 100 livres. Three or more juges de paix could sit as members of the Tribunal de Police Correctionnelle. This was the first level of the district court jurisdiction and could decide on cases that attracted fines of up to 3,000 livres or two years’ imprisonment (Crubaugh 2001, 138–40). The Tribunal de District could hear appeals and also the preliminary inquiry for other, more serious offences. It was composed of three elected judges. But the decrees of September 16 and 29, 1791, were those that departed most radically from the previous procedure. They included the promulgation of the Code Pénal and the establishment of the higher departmental tribunals (Oates 1980, 65). These included the Tribunal Criminel and the appeal court, the Tribunal de Cassation. Further decrees also enabled the most important, quasi-police function, of arrest and interrogation of suspects and witnesses entrusted to the juge de paix. The juges could issue a summons, known as a mandat d’amener (warrant to appear). They then investigated the facts to determine if the accused had committed a known crime. Matters begun by the juge de paix and which resulted in a mandat d’arrêt (arrest warrant) were sent to the director of the jury, who was chosen from among the judges of the Tribunal de District. He was empowered to draw up an acte d’accusation, setting out the crimes of the accused, which then went before the first jury of eight citizens, who determined if the accused could be criminally judged. The decree of December 29, 1791, conferred upon the juré d’accusation the power to determine whether actions were well commenced, were not abusive or arbitrary. This right was modelled on the “grand jury” of English and American justice. If the jury agreed there was a valid accusation, made out according to the Code Pénal, the proceedings were then sent to the Tribunal Criminel, presided over by a president and two to three judges chosen each three months, and, by turn, from the Tribunal de District. The president was nominated by the electors of the department (for 12 years), and a prosecutor was also elected (for 10 years). The next jury of 12 citizens was known as the juré de jugement. They could interrogate the accused and help debate the arguments of the accused and his defender at this higher level. The judges of the Tribunal Criminelle decided the penalty. By 1792, the multitude of decrees had thus established three levels of criminal courts in the new administrative divisions of France: the cantonal, the district, and the departmental. The king was no longer the “pivot” of the judicial system but had been replaced by an elected magistracy, exercising the will of the people (Leuwers 2010, 4). The most original and crucial roles – the juge de paix and the director of the jury and the juries themselves – were deliberately designed to ensure the liberty of individuals against any potential abuse by authorities or arbitrary denunciations (Berger 2008, 220). They helped forge the independence of criminal justice and the core role played by citizens in the early years. The changes immediately empowered citizens to seek criminal justice and prosecute crimes against their person or, at first, even those committed against the public good by approaching the office of the juge de paix located in their canton. One of the first unknowns was, however, how effective the magistrates would be (Bianchi 2003, 41). 307

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Operation There were many candidates, including former men of law, initially willing and able to take on the new legal roles, despite the lack of privileges now attached to them. A concern to re-establish social order was high among the national deputies who had voted for the positions, but these concerns also happily coincided with the needs of citizens in urban and rural areas who had been denied justice because of the incompatible priorities of old regime justice (Allen 2005, 14, 18). In a comprehensive survey of the juges de paix elected in the Department of L’Eure, it was found that the commitment of the new untrained magistrates elected was at first strong. At the election of 1790, only eight of the juges de paix in 45 cantons of this region had held previous legal positions, and most in the totality of the 54 cantons remained in their positions for the entire two-year tenure (Bodinier 2010, 119). This result would appear to show that electors embraced the conceptual idea of the juge de paix here. Yet as revolutionary politics grew more turbulent, legal cases and acts of individual judges in different regions around France demonstrated a growing ambivalence as to how an acceptable “rule of law” should be upheld. Legal complexities demonstrated that there were still no simple answers to be found even in the most transparent of new laws, and conflict began to emerge about how judicial roles should be exercised in the new jurisdictions. As time went on in the Eure, only half of the juges de paix elected in late 1792 remained in their positions for the required time, necessitating much more frequent elections. Enthusiasm and commitment waned in these most democratic of positions. In the higher tribunals, where training in jurisprudence was obligatory, by contrast, it was noted there had really been “no revolution in the Eure” (Bodinier 2010, 117, 119). In Lyon (the second largest city in France at that time and chef-lieu of the department Rhône-et-Loire), there was also initially a positive reception and strong commitment to the election of magistrates. Although the cantonal elections of 1790 showed a slightly belowaverage participation in relation to municipal elections, there was a high turnout for the election of the juges de paix (Edelstein 2014, 118.). Here, one Jean-Baptiste Pressavin, departmental officer and procureur (solicitor) of the city during 1791, claimed there had been an overwhelmingly positive and effective recognition of the “spirit” of the new laws. He credited the establishment of the Tribunal de Police Correctionnelle with “the maintenance of public order, security and tranquillity of all citizens” (Pressavin 1792, 11). Yet tensions between the different levels of magistrate began to grow, especially after the judicial elections of November 1792. Many of the original juge de paix were re-elected, but a number of more radical judges were also elected, including Antoine-Marie Dodieu, a printer, who actively campaigned to replace “corrupt” aristocratic judges (Riffaterre 1912, 6). Increasingly violent political differences divided the magistrates of the district and the departmental levels. After a so-called “Federalist” uprising ousted the Jacobin municipality on May 29, 1793, those magistrates supportive of the Jacobins were imprisoned. Joseph Chalier, onetime president of the Tribunal de Police Correctionelle, was sent to the guillotine by his successor, Jean-Jacques Ampère, in July of that year (Johnson 2021, 102–10). Nevers, the chef-lieu of the region of Nièvre, also showed a strong initial response to the elections of the new judicial officers, with some 46% of citizens voting for their juges de paix when other regions showed a marked apathy (Edelstein 2014, 195). However, there were ideological tensions within the magistracy and the municipality much earlier than in Lyon. On January 23, 1792, a riot erupted in the city, and “emotions became overheated” after the “scandalous” treatment of the body of an aristocratic woman known as “the 308

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‘Veuve Petit’ by a number of juveniles” (ADN: 22 L 19, 23 L 20). Because she was from a hated rich family, her body had been taken from the coffin, which had sat over the weekend in the Saint-Cyr church, kicked around the streets, and left suspended over a balcony. Five elected municipal officers refused to call out the National Guard as the riot escalated. A refractory priest (one who had refused to take the constitutional oath) was threatened when the body was put back in the coffin, and by the afternoon, the juge de paix Guinaut was called out for a second time to regain civil control. Guinaut was, however, injured in the melée. The court proceedings which followed were directed not at those who had first taken the body or the protestors who had injured Guinaut but at the five elected municipal officers. A popular song of the period suggested it was the “ridiculous and incompetent” actions of the conservative departmental authorities who looked through the distorted “lens of the Ancien Régime” to punish innocent citizens for the turbulence they themselves were responsible for (Complainte sur un arrêté ridicule et méchant du département de la Nièvre au sujet d’une bière, 23 janvier 1792). The elected judge here had displayed a conservatism which suggested an early disconnection with the new philosophy of citizen-led justice and which exacerbated the riot. The Nivernais responded by voting in a much more radical team of judicial and political officials in the November elections, which ensured that by 1793, the town took strong legal action against refractory priests and became a leading supporter of the Jacobins in Paris after the expulsion of the Girondins from the Convention on May 31 (Bossut 1986, 188–91). In Marseille, there was another scenario altogether. The municipal government of Marseille ordered their newly formed National Guard to escort the Tribunal Criminel to their city in August  1792 from the smaller and more “aristocratic” city of Aix-en-Provence, which had been made the chef-lieu of the department. They argued that “[o]nly the district courts, elected by the people . . . had the right to judge the prisoners . . . : ‘No citizen can be removed from his natural judges’ ” (Kennedy 1973, 10–12, 99). The establishment of a Tribunal de District in Marseille coincided with the overthrow of the king (August 10, 1792) and the proclamation of the Republic (September 21, 1792), as well as with the new provisions that the age limit for those eligible for election as juges de paix would be reduced from 30 to 25 and all citizens were now able to vote (Bodinier 2010, 109). The local reorganization of justice went even further when, on October 1, a Popular Tribunal was formed to operate as a forum with the stated aim to provide fair political trials (Kennedy 1973, 112). Tensions, however, continued to grow in the city, and in a dramatic reversal in May 1793, the radical Jacobins were ousted from the municipality, and the city, like Lyon, entered into “Federalist” revolt, seen from Paris as tantamount to counter-revolution. These discrete examples show that in some major regional centers, the question of how the law should be applied in times of revolutionary crisis became violently divisive, and the district courts and the newly elected magistrates were at the heart of the challenges that faced the state. Even a glancing consideration of specific cases in different regions thus suggests that vastly different motivations could influence citizen judges despite the promised uniformity and predictability of the new criminal laws, and these political divisions were expressed very loudly in the judicial system.

The Revolutionary Tribunal While the Code Pénal of September 1791 had granted to the Tribunaux criminels of each department of France the right to sentence to death by beheading those accused of a number 309

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of political crimes, many Jacobin magistrates were of the opinion that their more conservative counterparts were letting enemies of the people evade punishment. By late 1792 and early 1793, the elected members of the National Convention, faced with both internal and external attacks on the revolutionary state, increasingly identified the danger of various converging conspiracies and plots. The expansion of the war to embrace most of the powers of Europe by the spring of 1793 had necessitated a levy of some 300,000 citizens to the army. But internal divisions were also rife. The Vendée region in the northwest of France saw the levies as the final straw after years of aggressive and intrusive policies by urban revolutionaries disconnected from their rural neighbors. By March  1793, the disaffected had launched a guerrilla-style insurrection which gradually coalesced into a Catholic and Royalist army and began to seriously challenge the republican army sent to quell rebellion in the area. The eruption of civil war, combined with the fear of “federalism” – the name given to the uprisings in cities like Lyon, Marseille, and Toulon when they challenged what they believed was a growing “anarchy” in Paris – made the possibility of external invasion all the more frightening (Hanson 2003, 103). In more solidly “patriotic” regions, one of the fears of the citizen-soldiers who had to leave their villages and families was that there was little protection for the vulnerable against the hoarders and speculators and the conspirators who they believed were still plotting to end the Revolution (Boulant 2018, 34). The need for a more centralized and coherent approach to counter-revolutionary acts thus gradually became evident. A vote of the Convention on March  10, 1793, added an exceptional court to the structures of the criminal court system, which would take over responsibility for a wide range of counter-revolutionary crimes. The new court, the Tribunal révolutionnaire, was exceptional in the sense that it was created to deal with the special crises of early 1793. However, most deputies argued that it should still be governed by the principles already in place for the other criminal tribunals. Judges, juries, and public audiences remained central to its operation, although some deputies, including Jean-Jacques Cambacérès, argued that juries could be dispensed with (Boulant 2018, 19, 34). The court remained an integral part of the criminal jurisdiction already in operation. For the first several months of the operation of the Tribunal révolutionnaire, there was a “respect for the judicial form,” which included the questioning of the accused before a public audience, the appearance of witnesses, and the assistance of a defense counsel for the accused. The sheer number of matters referred from the provinces, however, meant that these procedures soon became unsustainable, and the time to run a hearing began to be radically cut short (Boulant 2018, 103). A further vote in the National Convention on 22 prairial an II (June 10, 1794) was a significant turning point when a decree was issued that halted many of the new judicial rights and safeguards of those who came before the courts accused of planning harm to the republic. In support of this decree, Georges Couthon declared that whereas criminal cases brought against individual accused could have the “luxury” of adhering to formalities and, where “even a certain partiality in favour of the accused” could be accommodated the same latitude, could not be extended to the crimes of conspirators against the Republic: “A Revolution like ours invites a succession of conspiracies, because it is the war of tyranny against liberty, of crime against virtue.” The conspirators, he said, should be sentenced to death. Prior interrogations and witnesses should be suppressed as superfluous; there should only be direct questioning before the jury and no defenses entertained. These measures shocked those deputies who still believed in the primacy of adhering to judicial forms, but 310

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Robiespierre stood up to join him in denouncing “the shackles that still impeded national justice” (Boulant 2018, 178–80). The changes then led directly to the brief period of “paroxysme” from June 10 to July 27, 1794, when, of the 1,703 accused who appeared before the Tribunal révolutionnaire, 1,366 were condemned to death, 336 acquitted. Four times as many people were judged each week from June to July, as had been between October 1793 and June 1794 (Boulant 2018, 185). Even so, the statistics show that in the earlier period between April 1793 and June 1794, more than half the accused brought before the Tribunal révolutionnaire were acquitted or given a penalty other than death (Boulant 2018, 198–99). Yet in spite of the temporary efficacy of the Tribunal révolutionnaire and the attempts to maintain the integrity of judicial processes within it, the fundamental division between the administrative and judicial powers of the state that had been the essence of the new systems of justice was challenged both in Paris and in the regions where federalism was found to be active and where other exceptional tribunals had to be set up as a result.

Directory to the Consulate Robespierre and 21 others found to be enemies of the state by the Convention on 10 ­Thermidor (July 28, 1794) were brought to the Tribunal révolutionnaire on July 29 in a 30-minute hearing to establish their identities. They were executed the same afternoon. Thereafter, the functions of the court were suspended, and its judges were also arrested. Hundreds of accused were let out of prison, and the rights of all accused were re-established in a new exceptional court (Boulant 2018, 207–17). Paradoxically, however, the need for special tribunals empowering the army and the police to practice exceptional justice was increasingly accepted by the ensuing Directory government to deal with continuing internal and external threats to the Republic. A blueprint for what has been termed a “security state” gradually developed (Brown 2015, 343, 356). The democratic institutions of the jury and the role of the juge de paix were whittled down as central control was wrested back by authorities. The deficits of the revolutionary system of criminal justice were, at this time, also being debated among the magistrates themselves in light of some of the problems that had been experienced throughout the country, where criminality appeared to be increasing. The pretrial juré d’accusation was subject to criticism for its tendency to be indulgent toward accused persons. Jurors were widely believed to be in danger of being intimidated by criminals and, because of their lack of legal training, unable to understand complex points of law. Professional magistrates began using various stratagems to avoid jury trials, usually sending matters to the Police correctionelle, where there were none (Donovan 1999, 381– 82). According to a commentator at that time, the juré d’accusation, as a result, became nothing more than a “posturing dummy (mannequin ridicule),” and cases were increasingly directed to the judges of the Police correctionelle (Berger 2008, 225). In 1795, a number of decrees were legislated which began to further chip away at the pre-trial guarantees of accused and to effectively reverse the citizen-centered focus of the original judicial reforms. This effectively led to a situation where the director of the jury was given greater individual authority and did not have to present an acte d’accusation, or oral testimony, in matters before the district courts and the jury. Meanwhile, a committee led by Cambacérès continued to progress the project for a uniform civil code to make the different legal codes throughout France conform, as had been 311

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done for the criminal law by the Code Pénal in 1791. His plan for such a code submitted in August 1793 had some 719 articles which incorporated the many decrees that had been enacted since 1789, but after some consideration by the deputies, it was considered too complicated (Oates 1980, 44–45). A more streamlined draft was prepared in September 1794, and a workable outline in June 1796 which resulted in some new legislation enacted by the Council of Five Hundred. This would be later used by those who drafted the definitive codes of law which became known as the “Code Napoléon.” As well as the Code Civil of 1804, there was a Code de Commerce (1807), and a Code d’instruction criminelle (1808) also promulgated (Oates 1980, 46, 48). Changes of the Napoleonic period, especially those encapsulated in the Code of Criminal Procedure (d’instruction criminelle), severely curtailed the jury system and reintroduced many of the former pre-trial procedures, effectively tightening up what had become de facto state control of proceedings in the various criminal courts. Although Napoleon did not completely abandon the jury system and the Code Pénal of 1810 remained essentially the same as that legislated in 1791, he made sure that he appointed the judges and that the juries were selected by prefects (Donovan 2010, 41–42). A new role of juge d’instruction was instituted with broader powers of investigation and interrogation at the pre-trial stage, which was no longer required to be conducted before an audience. The juré de jugement was retained at the trial stage, and the jurors continued to ensure a higher rate of acquittals than at the level of the Tribunal correctionnel. These developments led to more and more cases being arbitrarily sent to the tribunal, where they were decided by magistrates alone, ensuring “an uneasy compromise between the inquisitorial and accusatory systems” continuing into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Donovan 1999, 383–86).

Conclusion So what did criminal justice look like by the end of the revolutionary decade? Where legal process had once been dominated by venal officeholders and characterized by expensive written pleadings, horrendous punishments, and even secret incarcerations, it was, from 1789 to 1792, transformed by new provisions concerning elected judges, a uniform penal code, the establishment of juries composed of citizens, and more humane punishments. Electors had especially high hopes for the most promising role of the citizen magistrate known as the juge de paix. These core principles of criminal justice, however, had to withstand other dynamic changes of revolutionary justice through the turbulent years of 1793–1794 and the administrative requirements of the state from the time of the Directory in 1794–1795. The independent roles of the juge de paix, the director of the jury, and the juries themselves became increasingly constrained as the state acquired more control over judicial procedure. The streamlined codifications of Napoleon in 1804 validated these ad hoc arrangements. Long celebrated for their value in making the law clear to all, the Napoleonic Codes were thus also accompanied by the loss of some fundamental freedoms which had been so prized by the legislators of 1791. With the re-integration of the judicial and administrative powers of the state, the citizen had gradually been evicted from the center of the judicial edifice. While Napoleon continues to this day to get the credit for his codes and the changes that resonated in other states in Europe, a closer study of the revolutionary decade shows that the extensive rights and guarantees to criminal justice had their genesis in the even more transformative impulses of the earliest days of the Revolution. 312

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Bibliography Archival Sources Archives départementales du Nievre (ADN): 22 L 19, 23 L 20. Archives départementales du Rhône (ADL): 39 L: Tribunal criminel du Rhône; 41 L: Tribunaux correctionnels: 41 L 6 (1791), 41 L 7 (1792), 41 L 8 (1793).

Primary Sources “Complainte sur un arrêté ridicule et méchant du département de la Nièvre au sujet d’une bière, 23 janvier 1792.” Gallica.bnf.fr. Accessed January 4, 2020. Duport, Adrien. “Projet de Loi sur La Police de Sureté, La Justice criminelle, et l’institution des jurés´ 29.9.1791.” Presented in the name of the Comité de Constitution et de Jurisprudence Criminelle in Fonds Fontaine, Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, 1 F 31314. Pressavin, Jean-Baptiste. 1792. “Rapport fait au Conseil de District de Lyon 1792.” In Divers écrits de Lyon sur la Révolution. Canberra: National Library of Australia.

Secondary Sources Allen, Robert. 2005. Les Tribunaux Criminels Sous la Révolution et l’Empire 1792–1811. Translated by James Steven Bryant. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Berger, Emmanuelle. 2008. La Justice Pénale Sous la Révolution: Les Enjeux d’un Modèle Judiciare. Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Bianchi, Serge. 2003. “La Justice de Paix Pendant le Révolution. Acquis et perspectives in J.-G.” In Une Justice de Proximité: La Justice de Paix 1790–1958, edited by Affaire Petit, 36–52. Paris: PUF. Bodinier, Bernard. 2010. “Des Juges-Citoyens aux Notables du Consulat: Les Juges de Paix de l’Eure Pendant la Révolution Française.” Annales Historiques de la Révolution 2: 103–32. Bossut, Nicole. 1986. “Aux Origins de la Dé Christianisation de la Nièvre: Fouché, Chaumette ou les Jacobines Nivernais?” Annales Historique de la Révolution Française 261 (1): 181–202. Boulant, Antoine. 2018. Le Tribunal Révolutionnaire: Punir les Ennemis du Peuple. Paris. Perrin. Brown, Howard  G.  2015.  “The New Security State.”  In  A Companion to the French Revolution, edited by Peter McPhee, 343–58. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing. Connor, Clifford. 2012. Jean-Paul Marat: Tribune of the French Revolution. London: Plutobooks. Crook, Malcolm. 1996. Elections in the French Revolution: An Apprenticeship in Democracy, 1789– 1799. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press. Crubaugh, Anthony. 2001. Balancing the Scales of Justice: Local Courts and Rural Society in Southwest France, 1750–1800. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Donovan, J. M. 1999. “Magistrates and Juries in France: 1791–1952.” French Historical Studies 22 (3) (Summer). https://doi.org/10.2307/286713. Donovan, James.  2010. Juries and the Transformation of Criminal Justice in France in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, 23–48. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Edelstein, Melvin. 2014. The French Revolution and the Birth of Electoral Democracy. Farnham, Surrey, UK: Burlington, Ashgate. Godfrey, James Logan.  1951. Revolutionary Justice: A  Study of the Organization, Personnel, and Procedure of the Paris Tribunal 1793–1795. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Hanson, Paul R. 2003. The Jacobin Republic Under Fire: The Federalist Revolt in the French Revolution. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. ———. 2020. The Candle and the Guillotine: Revolution and Justice in Lyon 1789–93. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Johnson, Julie  P.  2018. “ ‘The law must never be a game for fair and upright men in a Republic’: Revolutionary Justice in Lyon 1792–3.” French History 32 (2) (May 25): 182–202. https://doi. org/10.1093/fh/cry010. ———. 2021. “The Shocking Case of the ‘Affaire Petit’: Nevers and the Revolution.” French History and Civilization. papers of the George Rudé Society 10.

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Julie P. Johnson Kennedy, Michael. 1973. The Jacobin Club of Marseilles, 1790–1794. London: Cornell University Press. Leuwers, Hervé. 2010. La Justice dans la France Moderne: Du Roi de Justice à la Justice de la Nation 1498–1792. Paris: Ellipses. ———, ed. 2015. A Companion to the French Revolution. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing. McPhee, Peter. 2002. The French Revolution 1789–1799. New York: Oxford University Press. Oates, Jack Lawson. 1980. “ ‘The Influence of the French Revolution on Legal and Judicial Reform’, M.A.” Dissertion. Simon Fraser University, February. Riffaterre, Camille. 1912. Le  Mouvement  Antijacobin  et  Antiparisien  à  Lyon  et  dans  le  Rhône-etLoire en 1793, 29 Mai 2015 Août. Lyon: A. Rey. Schechter, Ronald. 2018. A Genealogy of Terror in Eighteenth Century France. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Scott, William. 1973. Terror and Repression in Revolutionary Marseilles. London and Basingstoke: The MacMillan Press. Shapiro, Gilbert, and John  Markoff.  1998. Revolutionary Demands. A  Content Analysis of the Cahiers de Doléances of 1789. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Steinberg, Ronen.  2013. “Transitional Justice in the Age of the French Revolution.”  International Journal of Transitional Justice 7 (2): 267–85. https://doi.org/10.1093/ijtj/ijt007. Taylor, Katherine Fischer. 1993. In The Theater of Criminal Justice: The Palais de Justice in Second Empire Paris. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———.  2013.  “Geometries of Power.”  Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians  72 (4):  434–74. https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2013.72.4.434. Woloch, Isser. 1994. The New Regime Transformation of the French Civic Order, 1789–1820. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

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29 PERFORMANCE IN PARIS, 1789–1815 Setting the Stage for Regime Change and Cultural Revision Dane Stalcup Introduction On July 11, 1789, an agitated crowd gathered outside the Académie Royale de Musique, Paris’s Opera house, demanding that the famous institution shut down operations. They then entered the theatre and “requisitioned all theatrical props resembling weapons or arms” (Homans 2010, 106). Three days later, on July 14, Parisians stormed the Bastille, a fortress holding several prisoners and real weaponry. Revolution gripped Paris and, shortly after, the nation. Unsatisfied and weary residents became players on the national stage. Such dramatic ruptures and upheavals would mark France throughout the century to come. The symbolic act of seizing stage props not only foreshadowed the storming of the Bastille and a century of cultural revision and revolution; it also presaged ruptures in theatre, opera, and ballet. Such rupture was especially intense between 1789 and 1815, when France morphed from monarchy to republic, to empire, and back to monarchy. During this period of heightened social evolution, the subject matter, style, and organization of performing arts, as well as audience reactions, reflected rapidly shifting tastes and politics. Moreover, reforms in the performing arts echoed France’s evolving relationship with the rest of the world, and particularly Europe. From the 1800 birth of melodrama to an opera ballet to celebrate the birth of Napoleon’s son, French theater, opera, and dance mirrored a historical era defined by revolution, industrial advancement, institutional reorganization, and imperialism. A bond between history and performance, between reality and representation on a stage, thus formed. Across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, theater was a fundamentally significant form of public media. It “engag[ed] the attention of every class of people” and “impinged on the national life at every level” (Hemmings 1994, 1). This bond between actors onstage and actors in history strengthened as democratized forms of theater, like melodrama, became more common on the boulevards outside of Paris. Even in elite theaters, such as the Opera, historical events played out onstage. With a steady increase in social mobility and even higher demands for entertainment in an evolving economy, audience members, too, took part in the theatrical experience, and not just as customers. To be seen by other theatergoers became as vital to the experience as performance itself. And in certain contexts, audience 315

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members participated in spectacle. This resonance between culture, politics, and performance was never more evident than in the years of the French Revolution (1789–1799). Recent events became theatrical subjects, and the people joined performers in a revolutionary theater, suggesting that the very meaning of theater is bound to “historical context” (Marchand 2008, 220).

History Staged: Revolutionary Theater As early as July 1789, a play depicting the storming of the Bastille was staged in Paris. Its anonymous author began a trend. In September of that year, The Festival of the Grenadier, or the Return of the Bastille appeared, as did The Storming of the Bastille in October. Such productions “were performed for the public’s delight and edification” because they “commemorated the Revolution’s achievements and founding acts” (Feilla 2013, 93). This new genre – the fête révolutionnaire – introduced a form of mixed-media spectacle to audiences, who witnessed and participated in re-enactments of historical events, singing patriotic songs or acting as members of the mobs that stormed the Bastille. These participatory events took place all over Paris, from the streets to the capital’s grandest theaters. The Storming of the Bastille, or Liberty Won was produced at the nation’s most prestigious house of classical theater, the Comédie Française. Even the Paris Opera “became a staging ground for revolutionary festivals” (Homans 2010, 111). One such production was the 1792 Offering to Liberty, a collaboration between the noted neoclassical painter Jacques-Louis David, the composer François-Joseph Gossec, and dancer and choreographer Pierre Gardel, who led the Paris Opera ballet, Europe’s finest dance company at that time. Yet “these patriotic productions” were not necessarily “operas in any of the known forms” (Josephs 1989, 982); they were experiments in performance, just as, from 1792, France’s newly formed Republic was an experiment in politics. As France’s monarchical system momentarily dissolved, so too did the “dramatic illusion” at the Opera, “as an entire audience joined the artists and sang in unison,” forming a “musical emblem of national security.” During these first years of the Revolution, “the Nation became conscious of itself” at the theater (Gengembre 2009, 314). The act of attending a performance, but also being part of it, became a form of patriotism in which the people, “united in political combat” (Perazzolo 2015, 55), collectively celebrated the overturning of a monarchical system that privileged few. With this patriotic unity in mind, a public health committee decreed in 1793 that the Comédie Française offer republican tragedies three times a week (Bourdin 2012, 8). This “pedagogical vision” considered every theater a “school of virtues” (Gengembre 2009, 314). The consumption of performance was now one’s civic duty, which included learning republican values. Yet despite these shifts in perception of theater’s value, France did not suddenly erase its entire theatrical heritage, for “the world of theatre, as the rest of society, is inscribed in a continuum” (Bourdin 2012, 4), with one convention undoubtedly informing the next. As such, some repertory from before 1789 continued to enjoy success at the Comédie Française, especially the works of Molière, Jean Racine, and Voltaire (Bourdin 2012, 4–5), which had been standard fare for some time. When the great actor Talma appeared in 1789 in Voltaire’s 1730 Brutus, based on the founder of the Roman republic, he broke tradition by wearing a realistic toga and no wig, as opposed to the stuffier noble person’s costume that was expected before the Revolution. His appearance in realistic but classically inspired attire announced the adaptation of traditional theater to newer times. While 316

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leading an “aesthetic revolution, [Talma] admirably understood how to play revolutionary politics” (Frantz 1992, 21). Though most of the older repertory at the Opera failed to meet new, patriotic criteria and remained offstage, works by the composers Christoph Willibald Gluck and Jean-Philippe Rameau were still presented. Even “as Louis XVI was listening to his condemnation to the guillotine, the Opera was presenting Gluck’s Iphigenia in Tauris” (Josephs 1989, 979), a 1779 work based on a Greek tragedy from over 2,000 years earlier. (Ironically, Gluck was Marie Antoinette’s music teacher in Vienna before she moved to France.) The popularity of such neoclassical works would continue throughout the First French Empire and beyond. Gardel’s 1790 neoclassical ballets Telemachus and Psyche saw immediate success and were both performed hundreds of times over the next 30  years. These works, somewhat like Gluck’s operas, made a lasting impression because of the way they mix “older habits with new forms” (Homans 2010, 109), suggesting, again, that performance history operates on a continuum. Moreover, Gardel’s ballets of the era did well because they presented “a pleasing picture of antiquity” and “a didactic dramatic action” (Chapman 1987, 6). As these ballets did not rely on words, the risk of offending patriotic sentiments was lessened. Still, most newer works of the Revolution years, like the multiple renditions of the storming of the Bastille, did not have lasting success. Because the subject matter for Revolutionary operatic works – current politics – shifted at such a fast pace, public sentiment also changed just as quickly. Audiences, therefore, saw little lasting interest in these new works. Between 1790 and 1800, at least 50 operatic works of “revolutionary inspiration” premiered; yet none of them lived beyond the historical circumstances “that were the sources of their creation” (Josephs 1989, 980). In addition to all this, much of the older operatic repertory, apart from outliers such as Gluck, were “abandoned as offending Revolutionary principles” (Guest 2002, 54). What is more, the sheer cost of opera and its history of elitism and ties to the monarchy held it back. It therefore stagnated in France during the Revolution. It was ballet that kept the Paris Opera afloat during these years. (Historically, the two shared the same building, stage, orchestra, and crew, among other things, partly because French tradition required opera to include ballet.) With the successes of Gardel’s ballets from this time, the Paris Opera avoided closure. Ballet, traditionally subservient to opera, gained new energy and focus. Despite the heavily censored, self-conscious, and careful performances put on at the Paris Opera and the Comédie Française during the turmoil of the revolutionary decade, ballet experienced a forward-looking evolution that would eventually lead to its current form. It also helped that the military genius Napoleon Bonaparte, who took over the French Republic as its first consul in 1799, liked ballet. Regardless of such an intense period of government suppression and a struggling economy during the Revolution, new entertainments such as those along the boulevards, elaborate gardens, and especially balls began to flourish, and people of different economic status and politics increasingly mixed in the decade before 1800. Part of their participation in these newfound thrills included a return to fashion as a kind of performance, a vestige of pre-revolutionary nobility. Two notable examples include Madame Tallien, who reputedly attended the Opera “stark naked under a tiger skin,” or Napoleon’s future first wife, Joséphine de Beauharnais, who “wore a dress sewn of real rose petals (and nothing else)” (Homans 2010, 115). Paris’s appetite for prerevolutionary indulgence remained steadfast among the ruling class but also began to grow among ordinary people. What is more, everyday French citizens, their expectations not limited to art forms originally tailored for aristocratic audiences, increasingly shaped new trajectories the arts were taking. 317

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Scene Changes: The Boulevard du Temple and the Rise of Melodrama Potential audience members from across social strata had an expanding taste for novel forms of entertainment. Amid this dynamic atmosphere, French culture witnessed the birth of a “new era” in theater that emphasized the “production of works destined for an increasingly large and heterogeneous public” (Le Hir 1989, 15). A new focal point of theater was situated to the northeast of Paris’s center. There, along the Boulevard du Temple, away from grand, historic institutions, a group of theaters had enjoyed a fair amount of autonomy since the 1760s. Initially offering the kinds of informal entertainments long associated with travelling fairs, these boulevard theaters were not permitted to perform the same works as those produced in the official theaters in the center of the city. Yet these new theaters were immensely popular. This “bustling quarter” was paved in 1772 and soon became a “permanent site of festivity” and “theatrical performances” (Sorba 2016, 53). While the Opera or the Comédie Française was forced to produce patriotic theatrical experiences during the Revolution, establishments in this zone, such as Théâtre de la Gaîté, “tacitly excused the need to toe the ideological line” and “avoided all plays of revolutionary” themes (Hemmings 1994, 97). The geographical and social distinction of these houses thus afforded them a kind of freedom that the elite theaters lacked. In this new entertainment district, both the poor and, increasingly, the rich enjoyed diversions like a wax museum, restaurants that offered music, and even roller coasters (Sorba 2016, 54). Inside theaters there, audiences saw “farces, pantomimes and acrobatic displays” (Hemmings 1994, 97). These establishments could perform more or less what they wished, as long as it did not interfere with the official patriotic goings-on at the state theaters in Paris’ center. Yet the productions on the Boulevard du Temple would come to uphold the republican values of community and moral good in their own interesting ways. This was no doubt due to the ingenuity of artists and producers who created forms of spectacle that not only appealed to non-elite members of society but also represented them onstage. A 1791 law, known as the Chapelier law, for its creator, established free enterprise in all sectors, including theaters. It also granted performers freedoms to work where they chose and allowed any private company to open a theater, thus “introducing .  .  . unrestricted competition between the official theaters and those on the boulevards” (Sorba 2016, 55). The law thus dismantled a regulatory system that had once privileged only select theaters and select kinds of performance. This liberty of content coincided with an increase in the number of theaters in Paris, which rose from around 10 to 35 between 1789 and 1792 (Gengembre 2009, 313). It was a time of innovation, careful political calculation, and democratization in the theater industry, much like in the new Republic itself. However, innovations in theater did not mean that theater owners and operators had it easy. Competition was intense on the Boulevard du Temple, which, in turn, augmented the struggles of the formerly privileged state theaters like the Opera. As the public increasingly demanded novelty in the entertainment they sought, a theater’s success one day might be a banality the next. For the individual artist or entrepreneur, the struggle for economic gain was real. Yet a spirit of egalitarianism, guaranteed for now by the promises of the Revolution, rose in tandem with such capitalistic worries. This, mingled with the contemporary notion that attending a performance could shape audience members into honorable contributors to society, made the theater a site of modern values, a place where the hallmark of liberal democracy might flourish. The marriage of financial success and the spread 318

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of virtuous republican sentiment would soon reach its theatrical height in 1800 with the advent of the melodrama. A natural next step forward in a society attempting to veer away from arbitrary authority, melodrama ensured that “the fight between good and evil” (Le Hir 1989, 16) took center stage in the education – and entertainment – of a citizenry poised to make its own history. Nearly ten months after Napoleon become first consul, this new era of theater began on September 2, 1800, as “petits bourgeois, artisans, and some day laborers, intermingled with a number of more elegantly turned-out members” of Parisian society formed a queue in front of the Ambigu-Comique theater on the Boulevard du Temple “for the première of a new play” (Brooks 1989, 602). It was René-Charles Guilbert de Pixerécourt’s Cœlina, or the Child of Mystery. The three-act play features music, dialogue, pantomime, elaborate staging – all of which became standard aspects of melodrama (the term meaning, literally, “a play with music”). Its plot, at once overly complex but typical of the new genre, centers on the virtuous orphaned Cœlina and her plan to marry Stéphany, her guardian’s son. When the villainous Truguelin attempts to interfere and to kill the man who is secretly Cœlina’s father, the young heroine reveals his treachery. Once her legitimacy is established and the truth is revealed, Cœlina inherits her fortune and marries Stéphany. As opposed to classical French theater, which showcased kings or gods and poetic, intellectual language (spectacle crafted for the highly educated and often aristocratic), Cœlina and Pixerécourt’s other plays “represent[ed] the democratization of morality” (Brooks 1984, 44) through clear language, symbolism, and characters reminiscent of everyday people. Such characters “most often belong to a democratic universe” and “believe in merit rather than privilege, and the fraternity of good.” These values, echoing the spirit that motivated the Revolution, would be the core of Napoleon’s proclaimed social philosophy, despite the bloody means by which he sustained his rule. Moreover, the clarity at the heart of Cœlina – the obvious distinction between good and evil, between community and self-interest – reflected the legal system that Napoleon established as first consul, and then as emperor starting in 1804. The suggestion at the end of the play that the vile Truguelin meet his fate as the law sees fit “reveals how thoroughly trusted Napoleon’s new Civil Code [would] become” (Hoeveler 2003, 56). As Napoleon streamlined legal codes, artists like Pixerécourt, but also LouisCharles Caigniez or Victor Brahain Ducange, streamlined theater’s purpose for a people understood as largely uneducated, but good, by making the stakes of virtuous citizenship absolutely clear. Melodrama’s clarity was attained through a number of innovations, all of which emphasized easy recognition of the moral dilemma at hand. Stage design was crucial. Designers like Louis Daguerre, who later became the father of photography, “used scenery, gaslight, transparencies, and trapdoors in a newly spectacular way” (Brooks 1989, 606). Such dramatic, often realistic visuals helped audiences understand what was going on onstage, as did emotionally arousing musical accompaniment. Along these lines, actors relied on their bodies, and not just their voices, to evoke an obvious message. This “expressive acting style” relied on “gesture in lieu of spoken word,” resulting in a “comparatively realistic and representational performing style” (McCormick 1993, 159) that countered the “restricted gesture” and “formalities” of classical French theater (Brooks 1989, 606). While old-guard theater – spectacle with nobility in mind – was, for the moment, falling out of fashion, this is not to say that the philosophical ideals that characterized early melodrama were necessarily progressive. Pixerécourt’s focus on innocence and community, not to mention authoritative father figures, or Ducange’s emphasis on the tight-knit family was 319

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hardly avant-garde. Melodrama’s core content was somewhat conservative, partly because it provided lessons in goodness that had previously been the function of religion. Since the Revolution, the Catholic Church had lost much of its authority in France, especially because of its close ties to the royal family. Melodrama helped, in part, fill this void. As such, it fulfilled the notion that theater was a “school of every virtue” (Gengembre 2009, 314). Though France had momentarily rid itself of royal authority and the ancient feudal system that held it in place, commonplace social concerns, such as marriage and family duty, remained cornerstones of society. However, it was the manner by which the artists of the Boulevard du Temple introduced such virtuous ideas to the public – the very means of creating theater – that veered from tradition. This novel method of spectacle, plus the crucial inclusion of throngs of everyday people in the boulevard audiences, made melodrama a modern art form. Even as France again morphed into another kind of monarchy during the Empire, melodrama gripped audiences and overtook the arts. Moreover, some of the most famous nineteenth-century French performers were products of the boulevard theaters, such a Marie Duval or Frédérick Lemaître, “who with his gestures alone could elicit gasps of horror from the audience” (Brooks 1989, 607). These actors would go on to become leading figures in Romantic theater, which eclipsed melodrama, starting in 1830. Yet for a time, along the Boulevard du Temple, “a veritable factory of sentiment” produced “hundreds of texts and thousands of productions . . . in a process of unceasing creation in which novelty was at a premium” (Sorba 2016, 58). Melodrama delighted Parisian audiences of any social ranks, but especially those whose access to the performing arts had previously been limited. However, the genre was not beloved by all. One journalist claimed that “melodrama corrupts the taste of those who regularly see it” (Ricord 1811, 20). Unfortunately, this negative opinion was shared by France’s newest leading player: Napoleon.

Imperial Order: Napoleon and the State Theaters Napoleon Bonaparte’s meteoric rise from junior army officer to effectively monarchical ruler in the course of the 1790s has few parallels, and the dramatic remainder of his reign would leave long-lasting marks on global history. Though to a much lesser degree of significance, his involvement in French theater was profound. For his rise to ultimate sovereignty – emperor – entailed an ongoing and highly theatrical display of authority. After establishing the First French Empire in May of 1804, he crowned himself that December in a grand ceremony in the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris. After he donned a crown of golden laurels, he placed another golden crown resembling that of Charlemagne, who had ruled a thousand years prior, on the head of his wife, Joséphine de Beauharnais, the same woman who had previously worn a gown of rose petals to the Opera. The event was immortalized by oversized paintings by the neoclassical artist Jacques Louis David, a frequent designer of the revolutionary festivals of the previous decade. Napoleon designed his empire based on ancient models, including Rome and Egypt, though parallels between his absolute authority and that of the royal system the Revolution abolished were also quite evident. Throughout his reign until 1814, and then for another hundred days in 1815, he “took up the most sumptuous and cultish monarchical rituals, enacting them with a panache to rival any king” (Homans 2010, 118). When Joséphine failed to produce a male heir, Napoleon divorced her to marry a Habsburg, Marie-Louise, great-niece of queen Marie Antoinette herself. Still, many in France believed that Napoleon would 320

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not only uphold the values of the Revolution but also stabilize the nation and perhaps even ensure its prosperity. To celebrate his coronation, “deliberately military” displays and events “designed to publish abroad France’s claim to be the cultural center of the civilised world” were planned (Guest 2002, 157). At the Opera, Pierre Gardel conceived of a neoclassical ballet, Achilles on Skyros, with music by Luigi Cherubini. A frequent theatrical subject, the story centers on the Greek hero Achilles, who eventually helped the Greeks defeat Troy during the Trojan War. Gardel’s rendition of the story, a clear allegory for Napoleon’s military prowess, was “unmistakably a call to arms” (Chapman 1987, 12). Although Napoleon had brought peace after almost a decade of war in 1801, France had, since 1803, been at war once again with Great Britain. Napoleon and his Grande armée would fight various combinations of Britain, Russia, Austria, and Prussia, among others, almost continuously in the years ahead. Ever efficient and organized, turning the modernized bureaucracy of the Republic to his autocratic purposes, the emperor managed to control his wars abroad and establish order in various industries at home with precision, including the theater industry. Exactly a year after Napoleon’s coronation, on December  2, 1805, he defeated the Russian and Austrian forces at Austerlitz, his most memorable victory. To celebrate this feat, the artists at the Opera organized a laudatory spectacle under Gardel’s guidance for early 1806. For the occasion, the auditorium, filled to capacity, was “decorated with masses of laurel,” which was also distributed to attendees, which included Parisians of the very highest rank. Huge crowds assembled outside of the building “in the hope to catch a glimpse of Napoleon when his carriage and escort passed.” He entered the auditorium “to deafening cheers as the audience rose to their feet, dipping their [laurels] in homage” (Guest 2002, 206). The performance that followed, A Fête to Celebrate the Victories, included praiseful choruses, processions, and a number of dances that showcased the significant talents of the Opera ballet. The event was not unlike the patriotic spectacles during the Revolution. It was reported that such explicit praise annoyed Napoleon, though this exaggerated modesty might itself have been a form of propaganda. He nevertheless understood the political advantages of the grand spectacle in which the Paris Opera specialized: artistic perfection performed with high ceremonial pomp in a lavish setting, drawing the attention of the world’s elite. For the remainder of the Empire, “as during the Revolution, the Opéra was pressed into staging propaganda works, especially to mark Napoleon’s military victories” (Giroud 2010, 107). To assure this kind of spectacular propaganda, and to guarantee his strict, centralized authority, the emperor expended significant energy rebuilding the renown of Paris’s four official state theaters: the Opera, the OpéraComique, the Comédie Française, and the Odéon, all at the expense of the thriving entertainments of the boulevard. And after another dramatic victory for France, this time in Jena against Prussia, Napoleon “finally made up his mind to take action against . . . the minor theatres and in defense of those that enjoyed his favour” (Hemmings 1994, 116). For Napoleon “had scant respect for private enterprise theatres” (110). Thus, from 1806, the emperor set out to re-establish the privileges once afforded to official state theaters, which included significant financial subventions and exclusive rights to certain kinds of entertainment. This would come at the expense of the popular theaters, the number of which dwindled in 1807, when Napoleon issued a decree that “limit[ed] the scope and freedoms of 321

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commercial theatres, devastated the Boulevard scene, leaving only four theatres there: the Gaîté, the Ambigu-Comique, Vaudeville, and Variétés” (Sorba 2016, 58). These changes were not just a matter of imperial taste. His primary objection was, as he claimed, “the poor quality of the boulevard theatre, which he clearly felt did not contribute to the glory of the Empire” (McCormick 1993, 167). In fact, the emperor reportedly said that “the Comédie Française is the glory of the nation; the great Opera is simply its vanity” (Brifaut 1921, 109). Indeed, the Comédie Française is still a focal point of French theater today (the same can be said of the Paris Opera too). As before and during the Revolution, the Comédie Française produced the kind of measured, academic, verse-oriented theater that was the very opposite of the exaggerated, easily understood theater that melodrama represented. It is no surprise, then, that Napoleon “promoted a certain revival of neo-classical tragedy” (McCormick 1993, 164) at the Comédie Française. The actor Talma, already powerful during the Revolution, led this neoclassical revival. Moreover, Napoleon “compared his own career to that of Talma,” whose rise to glory “imposed the image of French domination abroad” (Gengembre 2009, 327). Leading actresses at the Comédie Française, including Mademoiselle Raucourt and Joséphine Duchesnois, also enjoyed the attention of Napoleon and the wider public. Yet Napoleon understood that the Opera was the center of politicized spectacle during his Empire, hence his efforts to re-establish the kind of order and artistic perfection that the house had somewhat lost before and during the Revolution. Not only was it a site of propaganda and pageantry; it also played a strategic role in Napoleon’s surveillance of and control over the population. The Opera’s “nearly two thousand seats were occupied at once by high imperial society and by the masses, who received free tickets” on Sundays. “This diverse public” was “an exact copy of Parisian society” and, as such, served through its reactions as a laboratory to “inform authorities” of public opinion (Chaillou 2004, 34–36). Police were placed throughout the Opera and other theaters in town. This effort to control the theatergoing public, and the greater public they represented, matched Napoleon’s extensive censorship. Each theater could only produce works that met the approval of the emperor or his ministers. As such, operas, plays, and ballets that evoked Napoleon and his army’s heroism through classical themes were the standard fare in state theaters. Spontini’s 1807 neoclassical opera La Vestale or Persuis’s ballet The Return of Ulysses enjoyed much success at the Opera; each had met close scrutiny from the censors. Audiences loved dancers like Émilie Biggotini or the soprano Alexandre-Caroline Branchu. In spite of, or because of, Napoleon’s strict control, it was a triumphant period at the Paris Opera. Poets, dancers, singers, or composers attempted to “outdo each other’s flattery” (Mongrédien 1996, 58) as they vied for Napoleon’s favor. One grand attempt at such flattery, and another example of spectacle created to celebrate current events, entailed a new opera ballet, based on mythic themes, to mark the birth of Napoleon’s son in March 1811. Created within 15 days of its commission, The Triumph of the Month of March even included an “identical” replica of the crib “that the city of Paris had offered to the heir to the throne” (Chaillou 2010, 95). But such grandiose spectacle cost Napoleon’s government a lot of money. In the same year, he issued another decree, requiring all private theaters, “and in fact every kind of entertainment for which the public had to pay admission,” to give “a certain portion of their profits” to the Opera (Hemmings 1994, 109). This decree was a reminder to the theater community, including its vast public, that each time one paid for entertainment, they were also paying a small portion toward state propaganda and Napoleon’s glory – or perhaps his vanity. 322

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Conclusion By 1813, Napoleon’s military successes were waning, as was public opinion of him at home. On March 31, 1814, Paris was surrendered to approaching troops from Austria and Prussia, who were united with Russia and Britain against Napoleon. Just two days before, “an enraptured, if distracted audience applauded” the ballet Paul et Virginie at the Opera “as though little else in the world mattered” (Guest 2002, 367). Soon after, Napoleon was forced to abdicate and was exiled to Elba. Foreign armies marched in array through the streets of Paris, and on April 1, the tsar and Prussian king attended the Opera. Within weeks, the surviving Bourbon heir, Louis XVIII, took the throne, signaling a reversal of the Revolution. However, Napoleon, ever the leading actor of Europe’s vast political stage, orchestrated a coup and, for 100 days in 1815, again served as France’s emperor, until defeated at Waterloo. Again exiled, this time to Saint-Helena, Napoleon would not return to French soil until his body was placed inside the dome at Les Invalides in 1840 in an utterly regal pageant. Despite the end of Napoleon’s dramatic tenure as France’s leader, the Bourbon Restoration “did not end the well-established practice of using opera to spread political views” (Mongrédien 1996, 62). And this is because opera, as with all arts, is inherently tied to politics and history. Whether a simple melodrama focused on an innocent country village or a grand affair coupling ballet and opera on mythological themes, theater is indivisible from real, lived society. Theater and life heighten each other, especially in periods of upheaval. Yet at times, reality even eclipses the drama of the arts, as much of French history, and particularly the years between 1789 and 1815, suggest.

Works Cited Bourdin, Philippe. 2012. “Théâtre et révolutions.” Théâtres et révolutions, special issue of Annales historiques de la Révolution française 367: 3–15. Brifaut, Charles. 1921. Souvenirs d’un Académicien. Edited by Augustin Cabanès. Paris: Albin Michel. Brooks, Peter. 1984. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. New York: Columbia. ———. 1989. “1800: Guilbert de Pixerécourt Produces Cœlina, ou l’enfant du mystère: The Melodramatic Imagination.” In A New History of French Literature, edited by Denis Hollier, 602–8. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Chaillou, David. 2004. Napoléon et l’Opéra: La politique sur la scene, 1810–1815. Paris: Fayard. ———. 2010. “A  la gloire de l’Empereur: L’Opéra de Paris sous Napoléon 1er.” Napoleonica. La Revue 7: 88–105. Chapman, John V. 1987. “Forgotten Giant: Pierre Gardel.” Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 5 (1): 3–20. Feilla, Cecilia. 2013. The Sentimental Theater of the French Revolution. London: Taylor and Francis. Frantz, Pierre. 1992. “Les Tréteaux de la Révolution (1789–1815).” In Le Théâtre en France: 2 De la Révolution à nos jours, edited by Jacqueline de Jomaron, 9–36. Paris: Armand Colin. Gengembre, Gérard. 2009. “Entre héritage classique et mutations: le théâtre de la Révolution.” Le Théâtre en France, edited by Alain Viala, 311–20. Paris: P.U.F. Giroud, Vincent. 2010. French Opera: A Short History. New Haven, CT: Yale. Guest, Ivor. 2002. Ballet under Napoleon. Alton: Dance Books. Hemmings, F. W. J. 1994. Theatre and State in France, 1760–1905. Cambridge: Cambridge. Hoeveler, Diane Long. 2003. “The Temple of Morality: Thomas Holcroft and the Swerve of Melodrama.” European Romantic Review 14 (1): 49–63. Homans, Jennifer. 2010. Apollo’s Angels: A Brief History of Ballet. London: Granta Books. Josephs, Herbert. 1989. “Opera during the Revolution: Lyric Drama in Political Theatre.” 1789 1889–1989, special issue of The French Review 62 (6): 975–84.

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Dane Stalcup Le Hir, Marie-Pierre. 1989. “La Représentation de la famille dans le mélodrame du début du dix neuvième siècle: de Pixerécourt à Ducange.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 18 (1/2): 15–24. Marchand, Sophie. 2008. “Pour une approche culturelle du répertoire révolutionnaire: la lorgnette anecdotique.” Le Théâtre sous la Révolution: Politique du repertoire (1789 1799), edited by Martial Poirson, 213–23. Paris: Desjonquères. McCormick, John. 1993. Popular Theatres in Nineteenth Century France. New York: Routledge. Mongrédien, Jean. 1996. French Music from the Enlightenment to Romanticism. Translated by Sylvain Frémaux. Portland, OR: Amadeus. Perazzolo, Paola. 2015. “La Dramatisation de la prise de la Bastille pendant la Révolution: représentations et révisions.” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 367: 49–68. Ricord, Alexandre. 1811. Quelques réflexions sur l’art théâtral. Paris: Chez Pillet. Sorba, Carlotta. 2016. “Melodrama in Post-Revolutionary Europe: The Genealogy and Diffusion of a ‘Popular’ Theatrical Genre and Experience, 1780–1830.” In Leisure Cultures in Urban Europe, c. 1700–1870: A Transnational Perspective, edited by Peter Borsay and Jan Hein, 49–71. Manchester: Manchester.

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30 FUGITIVES FROM FRANCE Huguenot Refugees, Revolutionary Émigrés, and the Origins of Modern Exile Kelly Summers

Immigration ranks among the most contentious issues in contemporary politics. At pivotal junctures in France’s absolutist and revolutionary past, however, the state concerned itself more with departures than arrivals. Attempts to ban emigration in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries proved ineffectual and even counter-productive, spawning two categories of exile that endure to this day. The refugee was a product of the suppression of the kingdom’s Protestant (or Huguenot) minority in the 1680s, whereas the émigré was born of the great revolution that began in 1789. Each diaspora comprised high-profile minorities who took up arms against France in the pay of foreign powers, along with masses of civilians fleeing some combination of state persecution, popular violence, and marauding soldiers; only the small minority of clergy among them was formally expelled. Both migrations raised fundamental questions about how to balance an individual’s right to the intertwined freedoms of conscience and movement against the need for national unity in times of crisis. And yet, but for a few notable exceptions – Michelet in 1860 and, more recently, Van Ruymbeke (2006) and Pestel (2019) – France’s “original generation of émigrés” (Jainchill 2013, 69) and their revolutionary successors are rarely treated as analogous phenomena. Huguenots tend to be grouped with Spanish Jews and English Puritans as the last religious exiles of the early modern era. Émigrés, meanwhile, are placed alongside Jacobites and British Empire loyalists at the vanguard of a new type of political exile born of revolution (Jasanoff 2010). Resisting their traditional uncoupling, this overview of the Huguenot and émigré diasporas examines their shared origins in the conflict between a centralizing state intent on policing its populace’s beliefs and movements, on the one hand, and the global reverberations of the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution, on the other. After tracing the evolution of such freighted terms as fugitive, refugee, deserter, and émigré, the chapter concludes by examining the juxtaposition of the two groups in revolutionary debates over the right to leave and return to one’s country, which partially explains their divergent historical treatments to this day.

Refugees from Absolutism As detailed by Elizabeth C. Tingle in her contribution to this volume, the version of Protestantism developed by the French-born theologian Jean Calvin (1509–1564) spread rapidly 325

DOI: 10.4324/9780367808471-31

Kelly Summers

from his Swiss refuge across continental Europe, the British Isles, and later, the American colonies. As a result, the Reformed tradition was, from its inception, particularly attuned to the relationship between the freedoms of movement and conscience (even while closely policing the purity of belief in areas under its control, like Geneva). In France, Catholicism, which dated back a millennium to the Merovingian king Clovis, was tightly integrated into the social and political hierarchy. Its clergy, who comprised the First Estate in the old Regime’s society of orders, referred dismissively to Calvinism as the Religion prétendue reformée (RPR), or “supposedly reformed religion.” Huguenot, an epithet of murky etymology that RPR members appropriated from their critics, was used interchangeably with Calvinist and Protestant (Gray 1983). After the community’s dispersal in the late seventeenth century, however, Huguenot was typically reserved for members of the diaspora. Calvin initially encouraged converts to join him in Geneva. But as their numbers swelled back in France, he sent missionaries to seed new congregations, which proliferated in the “Calvinist crescent” that ran from Poitou to Dauphiné. The strongholds of La Rochelle, Montauban, and Nîmes functioned as virtual Huguenot republics, and some bi-­ confessional communities managed to coexist peacefully (Luria 2005). Peaking at roughly 10% of the French population, Calvinism made the deepest inroads among merchants and artisans, though the RPR also attracted a contingent of rogue bishops and impressive numbers of nobles (Benedict 2002). Just 40 years into the Protestant Reformation, in fact, “it seemed as though the momentum of the Calvinist movement might carry everything before it, monarchy and all” (Van Kley 1996, 15–16). Then came the French Wars of Religion (1562–1598), a bloody internecine conflict fueled as much by dynastic rivalries as theology. Catholic and Protestant militants alike resorted to kidnappings, assassinations, and expulsions in an attempt to police communal boundaries. In 1572, the monarchy’s attempt to model a fairly moderate version of Catholicism was sullied by the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, which claimed the lives of approximately 5,000 Protestants across Paris and the provinces while emboldening the most radical elements of the Catholic League. Having accepted aid from France’s Protestant enemies over the course of the wars, Huguenot “schismatics” continued to inspire unease, especially in the Catholic stronghold of Paris (Diefendorf 1991). Henri of Navarre’s conversion to Catholicism in 1593 dashed Huguenots’ hopes of putting one of their own on the throne, but once crowned, Henri IV did not abandon his former co-religionists. In 1598, the Edict of Nantes confirmed Catholicism as France’s official religion while extending key military and civil protections to its Protestant minority. The Edict brought decades of domestic strife to an end by inaugurating an era of tenuous religious coexistence, though for his efforts, “good King Henry” was assassinated by a Catholic fanatic in 1610.

From Coexistence to Exodus As elaborated in Darryl Dee’s overview of this period, tensions flared periodically during the reign of Louis XIII (1610–1643), but it was not until the second half of the seventeenth century that the Edict of Nantes came under sustained attack. Louis XIV’s “absolutist” project, which aimed to concentrate secular power at Versailles, had a significant religious dimension. His theologians scoured Scripture to justify the royal centralization of power as the sacred prerogative of God’s lieutenant on earth. According to the tenets of divine-right monarchy, the Huguenots’ mere existence challenged the king’s authority 326

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as the realm’s spiritual guarantor, and their foreign alliances and political aspirations were treasonous. Spain had simply expelled its Jewish and Morisco heretics in the late fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries, but a mass exodus was not the solution Louis XIV envisioned for his Calvinist subjects. He dangled the benefits of voluntary conversion before members of the Huguenot elite, like the maréchal de Turenne, whose abjuration demoralized Protestants who had counted on his protection (Rosa 1994). For rank-and-file Huguenots, Louis XIV favored coercion, and restricting their mobility proved key. In 1669, in an attempt to assert both confessional and commercial control, Louis XIV forbade his subjects from leaving France. Although in theory all nationals were expected to return within six months or risk imprisonment, loss of citizenship, and even death, the policy was clearly aimed at restive Protestants (Heuer 2005). The state began curtailing Huguenots’ economic opportunities (barring them from professional guilds, for example), obstructing their rituals, shuttering their temples and academies, and barring Catholic servants from their employ. In 1681, authorities deployed the notorious dragonnades, military units that Protestant families were forced to billet in their homes. These “booted missionaries” commandeered Huguenots’ beds and pantries, burned books, and harassed their hosts until they conceded the merits of Catholicism. The Oxford English Dictionary links the first use of the term “refugee” to this tactic, which spurred growing numbers of Huguenots to seek sanctuary across the English Channel (Hintermaier 2000). On October 25, 1685, as a new wave of dragonnades set out to “harvest souls,” the Edict of Fontainebleau nullified Henri IV’s measures of tolerance by rescinding the Edict of Nantes. The revocation, as it soon became known, claimed that the protections granted by Louis XIV’s “grandfather of glorious memory” had become an “obsolete” obstacle to domestic harmony. It went on to assert that the “better and greater part of [the King’s] subjects of the R.P.R. have [either] embraced the Catholic Church” or were on the brink of doing so.1 If decades of persecution had compelled many conversions, Huguenots still represented a solid 5% of the population. The revocation targeted these million or so holdouts by expelling non-compliant pastors from the realm while ordering their congregations to stay and renounce Protestantism. This marked a clear violation of the beneficium emigrandi – the right to emigrate that the international peace accords signed at Augsburg (1555) and Westphalia (1648) had extended to religious minorities (Labrousse 1985). The revocation also ordered the demolition of Calvinist temples and banned public worship. It imposed fines and lengthy stints in the galleys on intractable or “relapsed” men and interned women in convents. Would-be emigrants risked property forfeiture, imprisonment, and even execution; informants received a cut of the seized assets. Children whose parents refused to have them baptized by a priest could be re-homed with Catholic families or boarded at church schools with dismal mortality rates (Lougee 2016). The revocation left the Huguenots with three stark choices: abjure their faith, practice it covertly in “the Desert,” or flee abroad. Most converted or at least outwardly conformed with Catholic practice. But the policy’s architects misjudged the pliability of those who still professed Protestantism in spite of everything they had endured and whose identity as God’s chosen people was now burnished by the specter of their very own exodus. Approximately 180,000 opted to become “religionnaires fugitifs” rather than comply with the revocation (Benedict 2002). Their names were compiled on provincial Listes des fugitifs, so called to underscore the illicit nature of their flight from the “one true faith” and the laws of the king divinely mandated to protect it. 327

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Emigration represented a dramatic act of resistance not only for escapees but also for those left behind, whom authorities hesitated to provoke into leaving once the precedent had been set (Garrioch 2014). By design, the hardest-hit constituency was the Calvinist clergy, approximately 80% of whom emigrated (Butler 1983). About a thousand Huguenot officers, and ten times that number of rank-and-file soldiers, decamped to form regiments in foreign armies (Childs 2007). Several hundred fought to install William of Orange on the English throne in 1688, which only confirmed Catholic suspicions about their true loyalties (Shaw 2015). Discerning the motives behind individual decisions to convert or emigrate is difficult. Autobiographical accounts are rife with “selective inclusions and exclusions” (Lougee 2016, 2). Especially for elites, conversion often secured substantial material and political rewards, though the decision was also informed by deeply held doctrinal and ideological convictions. Similarly, complex religious, financial, political, and familial motives drove the Huguenots who opted to leave. Generations, siblings, and spouses were split over the life-altering decision. Protestants living in regions with a large Catholic majority, and those with access to frontier crossings or ports, were most likely to leave (Van Ruymbeke 2006). A modest number emigrated only to return home in the months and years after the Revocation, some with official sanction and others covertly. Outside France, Huguenots settled in two main clusters: one centered on Geneva, Frankfurt, and the Low Countries, and an Atlantic one based in London, which served as both a transit point and a religious, cultural, and business hub for the merchants and artisans who congregated in Soho and Spitalfields (Gwynn 2018). The proliferation of pro-Huguenot pamphlets and charitable initiatives helped unite England’s feuding Protestant sects after the accession of James II, Charles II’s Catholic brother. Any hope that Louis XIV would bow to military and diplomatic pressure faded by the late 1690s, when Huguenots began to transform themselves from hastily assimilated refugees into fully integrated immigrants (Yardeni 2016). With the British and Dutch eager to recruit Protestant settlers to their distant colonies, some Huguenots re-migrated as far afield as South Africa, Suriname, and Nova Scotia (Stanwood 2020). Ultimately, the Huguenots’ global dispersal cemented the association between the Reformed Church and the intertwined rights to conscience and mobility that dated back to Calvinism’s founding.

Rehabilitating the Huguenots Louis XIV insisted on the righteousness of confessional purity until his death in 1715. Protestants remaining in France did so discreetly, even as enlightened circles came to view the revocation as a badge of national shame. This shift was fostered by a vibrant diasporic “opposition press” based in the Low Countries and England, which churned out pamphlets extolling the merits of mixed government, intellectual skepticism, and religious toleration that steadily corroded the foundations of sacral absolutism (Jainchill 2013, 59, 68). By the mid-eighteenth century, Enlightenment philosophes railed against the persecution of both Protestants, like the wrongfully executed Jean Calas, and the Catholic reformers known as Jansenists, whom royal authorities accused of Calvinist leanings. In the Encyclopédie – the enlightened compendium itself inspired by the writings of the Rotterdam-based Huguenot Pierre Bayle – Diderot’s entry on “refugees” denounced the “blind and rash zeal” of the “enemies of all freedom of thought” behind the revocation, an act of short-sighted fanaticism that he estimated had cost the nation “close to a million industrious men.”2 Voltaire 328

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pointed to the multiple faiths represented at the London stock exchange to argue that a plurality of religions led to cooperation and mutual profit (Kors 2003). This new spirit of tolerance was not limited to intellectuals. Even in Catholic Paris, where the revocation had been cheered, a majority of the population supported freedom of conscience by the late eighteenth century (Garrioch 2014). Eager to distance itself from a policy that had come to epitomize Louis Quatorzian despotism, the monarchy itself began to soften. Despite rumblings from the Church, Louis XVI twice entrusted France’s perilous finances to the Swiss banker Jacques Necker, although his Protestantism barred him from the Royal Council. In 1787, Louis XVI’s Edict of Toleration (also known as the Edict of Versailles) granted basic civil protections to Protestants, though they were still denied the right to public worship.

Recalling the Huguenots When the French Revolution broke out in 1789, the extension of conscience and mobility rights helped define the new regime against the old (Summers 2015). Led by Protestant deputies like Rabaut Saint-Etienne, France’s first National Assembly went far beyond Louis XVI’s tepid concessions to enshrine freedom of conscience in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in August 1789. Protestants were granted equal civil status a few months later, and in December 1790, the Constituent Assembly encouraged “French natives” whose families had been “expatriated for religious reasons” to return to their ancestral homeland. Known as the rappel des religionnaires fugitifs, the recall repurposed the pejorative “fugitive” by treating France’s exiled Protestants as refugees who had been forced to flee despotic persecution. The best-known beneficiary of the 1790 law of return was the Swiss-born Benjamin Constant, who acquired both citizenship and an estate his family had forfeited during the Wars of Religion. He went on to become one of his reclaimed nation’s most influential liberal theorists (Jainchill 2013). Constant’s seamless reintegration was unusual, however, and the tens of thousands of grateful returnees the government anticipated never materialized. Many logistical barriers existed after generations abroad, and the compensation process was onerous. Ultimately, only a few hundred families acted on the invitation to return – mainly from the diaspora’s cosmopolitan elite, and sometimes only decades after the Revolution, when the political situation had stabilized. But the government’s conciliatory overtures nonetheless represented a sincere attempt to right one of the old regime’s most notorious wrongs. The recall also aimed to re-capture some of the storied industriousness of France’s lost artisans and merchants. It was, finally, a bold act of political alchemy that transformed a long-suspect group of religious schismatics into model “secular citizens” who could be trusted to operate as “Frenchm[e]n first” and “Protestant[s] second.” Revolutionaries were inclined to view the victims of absolutist intolerance as natural allies, even as counter-revolutionary thinkers continued to treat Calvinists as inherently fractious (Banks 2017, 18, 2014, 125).

Émigrés from Revolution The Constituent Assembly championed freedom of movement as a worthy ideal that conferred tangible benefits on the revolutionary nation. As France’s lost Protestants were invited back, its “parasitical” elites – ultra-royalists committed to restoring their ancient privileges – were encouraged to move in the opposite direction. Many revolutionaries welcomed the so-called “light-hearted” (joyeuse) emigration of indignant nobles after the fall 329

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of the Bastille and the abolition of feudalism in the summer of 1789. Despite real anxieties about aristocratic and foreign plots and the erosion of the nation’s population, expertise, and currency, the general consensus was that the fewer the powerful reactionaries in France, the better (Doyle 2009). The first 18 months of the Revolution thus saw no attempt to halt the flow abroad, and those who left were viewed as unwelcome relics of a bygone era rather than existential threats. The term émigré came into use in the early 1790s to distinguish those who hoped their sojourns abroad would be temporary from permanent emigrants (Mostefai 2019). The new, laboriously composed Constitution invoked the 1789 Declaration to “guarantee to every man the liberty of going, or remaining, or departing” as a “natural and civil right,” thereby obviating the need for passports. But before the Constitution went into effect in September 1791, two royal departures – one successful, the other an infamous failure – doomed the French experiment with open borders. Both flights were motivated at least in part by revolutionary religious reforms. A century after the revocation, Catholic priests, rather than Protestant ministers, found themselves at odds with the government. Roughly half rejected the new Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which nationalized Church property and transformed them into civil servants. Unwilling to break their vow to the pope, refractory priests went into hiding, emigrated, or were deported. In January 1791, the monarchist Cazalès accused his fellow deputies of hypocrisy for condemning the persecution of Huguenots only to “reduce Catholics to the same state of misery and persecution.” He warned, moreover, that the expulsion of refractory priests would force their supporters “into the deserts of their persecuted ministers.”3 Cazalès’s prediction that Catholic traditionalists would follow the Huguenots’ path abroad was realized the following month when the king’s aunts set off on pilgrimage to the Vatican. This snub to France’s constitutional church, which their defenders cast as a prerogative of religious freedom, sparked a fierce debate at the Jacobin club, though no change of policy (Boroumand 2000). The death blow to the ideal of unrestricted movement was delivered that June when the royal family was seized in the town of Varennes en route to the kingdom’s eastern frontier. In a statement he left behind, the king claimed he had been forced to flee to secure a future “when a Constitution that he has freely accepted ensures that our holy religion will be respected.” He also condoned the emigration of otherwiseloyal subjects who were “forced to expatriate themselves” for fear of their lives or properties (Dwyer and McPhee 2002, 52). The Varennes conspiracy cast a treasonous pall over all cross-border travel. The reinstated king further enflamed the crisis when he vetoed the Assembly’s first attempts to penalize emigration in November 1791, earning him the contemptuous moniker “king of the émigrés.” The defection of thousands of French officers to the counter-revolutionary forces then congregating along the Rhine further amplified the drumbeat of war. The perception that aristocrats were plotting with foreign powers to restore the old regime helped goad France into war against Austria in the spring of 1792. The émigrés thus became part of a larger explicitly military conflict, and deputies decreed that any who took up arms against their homeland would be treated as clear-cut rebels, subject to summary execution. The transformation of the right to move freely into a crime against the nation accelerated from this point. Increasingly, simply absenting oneself from the nation was said to violate a core civic duty: residency during a national emergency. Some deputies were hesitant to encroach upon mobility rights they had only just enshrined. In October 1791, the philosophe-turned-politician Condorcet, for example, had warned against lumping what he called “rebels” and “refugees” together, given their distinct reasons for leaving: 330

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“vanity” as opposed to legitimate “fear.” But others argued that motive and circumstance were irrelevant when the patrie was in danger. As France debated the merits of conscription, moreover, emigration became a form of desertion that deprived the nation-at-arms of both citizen-soldiers and republican mothers to repopulate their ranks (Boroumand 2000). Back in 1670, Louis XIV’s Criminal Code conferred civil death on “absent” subjects; in 1793, the case for an across-the-board criminalization of absence also won the revolutionary debate. That spring, a sprawling Émigré Code condemned the tens of thousands of men and women whose names appeared on the government’s General List of Émigrés to civil death, perpetual banishment, and the seizure of their property as biens nationaux. Whether armed “rebels” or unarmed “deserters,” those caught back in France were denied the right to either trial by jury or appeal and were to be put to death within 24 hours.4 The problem with this categorical proscription was that the flow abroad had begun to “democrati[ze]” as the Revolution radicalized, altering the diaspora’s social and political make-up and ultimately tripling its size (Greer 1951, 35). In September 1792, the founding of the Republic coincided with the massacre of more than a thousand priests, nobles, and common criminals in Parisian prisons, sending a wave of moderate revolutionaries and apolitical commoners abroad. The emigration continued to diversify with the escalation of the revolutionary wars and the onset of Terror. Ultimately, roughly a quarter of the prerevolutionary clergy – about 30,000 – were either deported for rejecting the Civil Constitution or left of their own volition; all were later assimilated as émigrés under revolutionary law. Many were elderly and entirely reliant on the charitable support of their Protestant hosts. The 145,000-strong revolutionary diaspora also included about 20,000 peasants, 15,000 women, and 20,000 Saint Dominguan planters fleeing a massive slave rebellion in France’s lucrative colony, sometimes with their slaves in tow (Greer 1951; Meadows 2000). Unlike the tight-knit Huguenot diaspora, the emigration grew increasingly fragmented. It included not only monarchists – themselves riven into absolutist and constitutional camps – but also purged republicans, refugees from federalist hotspots and shifting frontier zones, and those caught abroad while pursuing business, education, or medical treatment. Yet the most reactionary émigrés, who had left early to support and, in many cases, fight for the counter-revolution alongside France’s enemies, continued to cast a disproportionate shadow over the diaspora as a whole. As a result, the Republic’s emigration policy was framed with aristocratic counter-revolutionaries in mind (Boffa 1989). Huguenots and émigrés were now defined against each other. The National Convention rejected any equivalence between émigrés escaping pillaging armies and Terrorist reprisals and the Protestants who had fled Louis XIV’s dragonnades. According to the logic of the radical Revolution, émigrés – regardless of when or why they left – were fugitives from justice, the polar opposite of Huguenot refugees, who had fled injustice.

A Selective Thaw The Thermidorian coup d’état that overthrew Robespierre and ended the Terror in July 1794 was met with euphoria throughout France’s émigré diaspora. But although more than half of émigrés were commoners and many had fled the very Terrorist excesses the Thermidorians rushed to disavow, the new Émigré Code (November 15, 1794) and Constitution of Year III (August 22, 1795) continued to conflate the diaspora in all its diversity with the treacherous actions of its high-profile minority. The thwarted invasion of Brittany in mid-1795 by émigré–British forces ensured that the armed counter-revolution continued 331

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to dominate perceptions of the diaspora as a whole. As a result, émigrés were pointedly excluded from the Thermidorians’ otherwise-capacious amnesty for “crimes relating to the Revolution” (October 26, 1795), which were downgraded to mere “errors” born of “excessive” but, in the frenzy of Revolution, understandable ardor or fear. Intent and circumstance mattered when it came to adjudicating the actions of repentant terrorists, but not émigrés. The newly installed Directory thus inherited an inflexible emigration policy, which it applied in increasingly haphazard ways as homesick émigrés began to flood back into France. This underground return strained police resources and tested authorities’ resolve to apply the harsh letter of the law. Complicating matters was the fact that thousands of residents had been erroneously or maliciously counted as absent and were now stuck in limbo. Appeals to be removed from the General List of Émigrés clogged the courts. The cumbersome bureaucracy could not keep up with demand, and as many memoirs attest, the process was mired in corruption.5 Rather than dismantle the Émigré Code to treat armed and unarmed emigration as qualitatively different acts, the government granted a series of time-sensitive pardons for select women, laborers, deserters willing to re-enlist, and victims of military invasions and Terrorist excesses (Brown 2010). Not satisfied with piecemeal concessions, emigration reformers sought to reclassify a sizable subset of émigrés as blameless refugees. To do so, they borrowed from the campaign that had secured Huguenots a contrite invitation home in 1790. Unarmed émigrés thus became fugitifs and refugiés. In a 1795 essay, Pierre-Louis Roederer a moderate deputy in the Constituent Assembly who spent the Terror in hiding, deployed fugitif the way Huguenot apologists had: to denote an individual fleeing persecution rather than justice. The émigrés’ self-described “champion,” the Monarchien Trophime-Gérard Lally-Tolendal, used the plight of the diaspora’s least-threatening members – women and children, who could neither vote nor fight – as a wedge to chip away at the militarized equation of absence with desertion (Summers 2015). Another prong of the campaign to decriminalize unarmed emigration focused on when individuals left, which was another way of getting at why they did so. Roederer, for example, argued it would not simply be “just” but “advantageous” to permit the return of those who fled after the prison massacres in September 1792 and never bore arms against their country. He argued that these “proven friends of liberty . . . [and] peace” would help restore the Revolution’s liberal values (Margerison 1983, 120). The Spanish-born revolutionary José Marchena – who had fled the Inquisition in his homeland only to run afoul of the Jacobins in Paris – concurred that autumn 1792 was pivotal. The September Massacres revealed the state to be unable or unwilling to uphold its end of the social pact: the security of its citizens. Like Huguenots, then, revolutionary fugitifs-cum-refugiés could justify their departures by invoking not only freedom of conscience but also the right to self-defense. Having been forced into hiding with his fellow Girondins in 1793–1794, Marchena defined refugees as anyone who left between the autumn of 1792 and the 9 Thermidor (July 27, 1794) coup d’état against “Robespierre’s bloody throne,” a rhetorical flourish that conflated absolutist and Terrorist crimes. He appealed to all “enemies of tyranny and of the arbitrary,” using the same terms to describe the Terror that revolutionaries had long used to characterize absolutism. Emigration reform was thus presented as key to salvaging the Revolution’s enlightened origins. In his Thermidorian writings, meanwhile, Benjamin Constant – the aforementioned beneficiary of the Huguenot recall – argued that the orderly return of most unarmed émigrés would stabilize France’s politics and economy (Vincent 332

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2011). Remarkably similar rationales had been advanced over the eighteenth century on behalf of Huguenots who sought to return to their ancestral homeland. Despite recurrent appeals to both principle and pragmatism, the equation of emigration with desertion endured largely intact until May  1802, when Napoleon Bonaparte enacted a General Amnesty to heal what he called the Revolution’s “great wound.” Nullifying the ban on returns included in the Constitution of Year VIII (1799), the amnesty finally factored the question of intent into the emigration equation. It pardoned the diaspora’s “great majority” for being “more misguided than criminal,” while pledging eternal vigilance against the “great guilty” who remained in the counter-revolutionary service of the émigré princes or foreign governments. Provided returnees accept the revolutionary property settlement, submit to a decade of surveillance, and take an oath to the Republic – which was, by this point, inseparable from its first consul, Bonaparte – the General Amnesty permitted all but a thousand hardliners to come home and regularized the status of premature returnees. At the very moment the Concordat and Peace of Amiens deprived royalists of their religious and military allies abroad, the amnesty created a pool of probationary citizens indebted to Bonaparte’s indulgence (Summers 2019). Those excluded from the amnesty held out until 1814–1815, when Louis XVIII limped home from Buckinghamshire to claim the restored throne and shower loyalists who had left early and stayed late with titles and property. Emigration thus shaped the Revolution’s idealistic inception, when deputies briefly experimented with open borders; its radicalization in the wake of Louis XVI’s flight; its Napoleonic usurpation, which was bolstered by an amnesty that left beneficiaries indebted to his largesse; and finally its resolution, when an émigré king ascended the restored throne.

Revocation to Revolution: A Tale of Two Migrations Many parallels can be drawn between Huguenots and émigrés. The diasporas were of comparable size,6 though due to eighteenth-century demographic growth, the postrevocation migration (which claimed about 1% of the French population at that time) was proportionately twice as large as the revolutionary one (van Ruymbeke 2006, 31, n.21). Despite their relatively modest numbers, both migrations had an outsized impact on France, which churned out legislation regulating its citizens’ movements, as well as on their hosts, who developed novel mechanisms to distribute aid and track “aliens.” Huguenots’ exile was emphatically religious, but so too was that of some émigrés – especially, but not only, the clergy – whose concerns the concurrent roll-out of the General Amnesty and Concordat in 1802 were meant to assuage. Members of the two diasporas crossed paths in the same places of refuge. London served as both a vibrant Huguenot hub and the “capital” of the emigration (Carpenter 1999). Bearing notes of credit and letters of introduction, émigrés showed up at Huguenot establishments, where they were at times treated as fellow expatriates and at others shunned as business or confessional rivals (Pestel 2019). Overall, however, in the late seventeenth century, Huguenots had been welcomed abroad because of their faith; a century later, émigrés were received in spite of it (Shaw 2015). Both diasporas included a degree of diversity that belies stubborn socio-economic and ideological stereotypes, whether of the industrious Protestant or aristocratic conspirator. Each included a conspicuous subset who fought France in league with its foreign enemies, as well as an unarmed majority fleeing threats to their freedom of conscience, property, 333

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and at times, very lives. In fact, the waves of émigrés who left from mid-1792 onward had more in common with Huguenot fugitifs and modern-day displaced populations than the armed counter-revolutionaries with whom they were lumped by the Émigré Code and, until fairly recently, in scholarship. However technically voluntary their migrations, members of both groups would amply satisfy the United Nations’ criteria for refugees spurred to leave home by a “well-founded fear of . . . persecut[ion] for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion” (Carpenter 2017, 90, n.12). The provisions governing their respective returns, however, underscore an enduring distinction between Huguenots and émigrés. If the former had been recalled in 1790 as hapless victims of absolutist intolerance, most of the latter were pardoned, but by no means exonerated, in 1802. Huguenot descendants warranted an act of national “atonement” (Banks 2017, 18), while émigrés merited only a “disdainful gesture of clemency,” as per the amnesty’s architect, Bonaparte (Summers 2019, 168). As the targets of religious persecution, the Huguenots were offered compensation along with an official apology, which President Mitterrand reiterated in 1985; to mark the revocation’s bicentennial, the postal service even released a commemorative stamp proclaiming modern France’s commitment to “Tolerance, Pluralism, Brotherhood” (Fletcher 1992). In contrast, émigrés, even the most pitiable refugees among them, have only ever received conditional absolution for their political transgressions. By bridging the internal and external threats facing the Revolution, the émigré functioned as a malleable, all-purpose villain: a reductive caricature of a complex phenomenon, but one that persists in scholarship. Beyond their divergent rates of return – the vast majority of émigrés were home by 1802, whereas only a negligible number of Huguenot descendants were ever repatriated – perhaps the most notable difference between the two migrations is how they have been remembered. In the nineteenth century, the Huguenots’ self-image as martyrs for the faith and exemplary immigrants was disseminated in ethnonationalist histories commissioned by commemorative societies. Michelet’s 1860 Histoire de France cast them as natural republicans who lost everything due to their noble “horror for lying.” The Huguenots have since inspired a vast and nuanced body of scholarship on everything from their internal theological disputes, viticultural techniques, and marriage patterns to their political thought, creative output, exilic networks, and role in European imperialism.7 As the field matured, it has moved far beyond simplistic narratives of heroism or victimhood. In contrast, the term émigré retains a pejorative and even treasonous taint in the French Revolutionary context, as evidenced by Jean-Paul Sartre’s description of Vichy collaborators as “interior émigrés” (Judaken 2006, 118). Despite ample proof that émigrés’ backgrounds, politics, and actions abroad varied widely, French historians tend to use the term like the revolutionaries did: as shorthand for aristocratic reactionaries deservedly punished for betraying their homeland. But after long functioning as a partisan litmus test in revolutionary studies or a branch of noble family history, the emigration has, in the past two decades, matured as a topic of serious scholarly inquiry.8 The circular migration of both the “real” émigrés who left to foment counter-revolution abroad and the refugees who fled terror is a vital part of the French Revolution’s “global turn,” and it complements recent work on the transnational and transatlantic movement of ideas, people, language, and goods.9 In promising ways, then, émigré studies have borrowed a page from the more established Huguenot field, which is, at its best, committed to “learning how to remember with complexity” (Lougee 2016, 2). 334

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Notes 1 For a translated version of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), see https://sourcebooks. fordham.edu/mod/1685revocation.asp, which is taken from J. H. Robinson, Readings in European History, vol. 2 (Boston: Ginn, 1906): 180–183. 2 The University of Michigan’s digital encyclopedia project is an invaluable research tool, especially for those who do not read French. Denis Diderot (attributed), “Refugees” (1765), in The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project (Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2009), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0001.317 (accessed 7 June 2022). 3 Cazalès, Réimpression de l’ancien Moniteur, tome 7, ed. Léonard Gallois (Paris: Plon frères, 1847): 237–238. Translation my own. 4 Many of the key analyses of revolutionary emigration’s legal and political dimensions are available only in French. They include Marcel Ragon, “La Législation sur les émigrés, 1789–1825,” thèse pour le doctorat (faculté de droit), Université de Paris (Paris: A. Rousseau, 1904); Anne Simonin, Le Déshonneur dans la République: Une histoire de l’indignité, 1791–1958 (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 2008); and Karine Rance, “L’historiographie de l’émigration,” in Les noblesses françaises dans l’Europe de la Révolution, ed. Philippe Bourdin, 355–368 (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2010). 5 See, for example, the colourful memoir penned by the Marquise de La Tour du Pin, whose emigration took her from a dairy farm in upstate New York to Switzerland and London. Upon returning to Paris to procure a residency certificate proving she had never left, she found the bureaucrats responsible for processing émigrés’ “necessary lies” to be quite conciliatory – provided “one took care not to arrive empty-handed.” Henriette Lucie Dillion La Tour du Pin Gouvernet, Memoirs: Laughing and Dancing Our Way to the Precipice, trans. Felice Harcourt (London: Harvill Press, 1999), 344. 6 A comparison of the incomplete and error-ridden sources with which historians of both diasporas have had to contend suggests that émigrés fell slightly short in raw numbers. Though counts have varied widely since 1685, it is now thought that between 150,000 and 200,000 Huguenots left after the revocation (Jainchill 2013, 57). Meanwhile, the best estimates derived from the General List of Émigrés and 1825 “émigrés’ billion” indemnity records suggest that between 130,000 and 160,000 French left during the Revolution; some of the variability relates to whether colonial departures are included (Greer 1951; Boffa 1989, 325; Meadows 2000). 7 Collections that reflect the field’s range include Jane McKee and Randolph Vigne, eds., The Huguenots: France, Exile, and Diaspora (Toronto: Sussex University Press, 2013); Raymond A. Mentzer and Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, eds., A Companion to the Huguenots (Leiden: Brill, 2016); and Vivienne Larminie, ed., Huguenot Networks, 1560–1780: The Interactions and Impact of a Protestant Minority in Europe (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2018). 8 Émigré studies, as they currently exist, are indebted to the foundational work of Kirsty Carpenter and Philip Mansel, eds., The French Émigrés in Europe and the Struggle against Revolution, 1791–1814 (London: Macmillan, 1999), and Simon Burrows, French Exile Journalism and European Politics, 1792–1814 (Wood Ridge: Royal Historical Society, 2000). Recent contributions include Carpenter, “Emigration in Politics and Imaginations,” in The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution, ed. David Andress, 330–345 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Laure Philip and Juliette Reboul, eds., French Emigrants in Revolutionised Europe: Connected Histories and Memories (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2019); Reboul, French Emigration to Great Britain in Response to the French Revolution (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Friedemann Pestel, “The Colors of Exile in the Age of Revolutions: New Perspectives for French Émigré Studies,” Yearbook of Transnational History, vol. 4, ed. Thomas Adam, 27–68 (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2021); and Kelly Summers, “A Cross-Channel Marriage in Limbo: Alexandre d’Arblay, Frances Burney, and the Risks of Revolutionary Migration,” Age of Revolutions (Jan. 2021), https://ageofrevolutions.com/2021/01/25/a-cross-channel-marriage-inlimbo-alexandre-darblay-frances-burney-and-the-risks-of-revolutionary-migration/. 9 See, for example, Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2011); Janet Polasky, Revolutions Without Borders: The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015); Renaud Morieux,

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Kelly Summers The Channel: England, France and the Construction of a Maritime Border in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); and Matthijs Lok, Friedemann Pestel, and Juliette Reboul, eds., Cosmopolitan Conservatisms: Fighting Revolution in Transnational (Leiden: Brill, 2021).

References Banks, Bryan. 2014. “Progressive Protestants: Representations and Remembrance in France, 1685– 1815.” PhD dissertation. Florida State University. ———. 2017. “The Huguenot Diaspora and the Politics of Religion in Revolutionary France.”  In Freedom and Faith: The French Revolution and Religion in Global Perspective, edited by Bryan A. Banks and Erica Johnson, 3–24. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Benedict, Philip. 2002. Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A  Social History of Calvinism. New Haven: Yale University Press. Boffa, Mossima. 1989. “Émigrés.” In A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, edited by François Furet and Mona Ozouf, translated by Arthur Goldhammer, 346–59. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Boroumand, Ladan. 2000. “Emigration and the Rights of Man: French Revolutionary Legislators Equivocate.” The Journal of Modern History 72 (1) (March): 67–108. Brown, Howard. 2010. “Robespierre’s Tail: The Possibilities of Justice after the Terror.” Canadian Journal of History XLV (Winter): 503–35. Butler, Jon. 1983. The Huguenots in America: A Refugee People in New World Society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Carpenter, Kirsty. 1999. Refugees of the French Revolution: The Émigrés in London, 1792–1802. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2017. “Secularization by Stealth? Émigrés in Great Britain during the French Revolution.” In Freedom and Faith: The French Revolution and Religion in Global Perspective, edited by Bryan A. Banks and Erica Johnson, 73–96. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Childs, John. 2007. “Huguenots and Huguenot Regiments in the British Army, 1660-1702: ‘Cometh the Moment, Cometh the Men’.” In War, Religion and Service, edited by David Glozier and Matthew Onneking, 30–46. London: Routledge. Diefendorf, Barbara. 1991. Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Doyle, William. 2009. Aristocracy and its Enemies in the Age of Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dwyer, Philip, and Peter McPhee, eds. 2002. “The King’s Proclamation on his Flight from Paris, 21 June 1791.” In The French Revolution and Napoleon: A Sourcebook, 51–52. London: Routledge. Fletcher, John. 1992. “The Huguenot Diaspora.” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 2 (2) (Fall): 251–60. Garrioch, David. 2014. The Huguenots of Paris and the Coming of Religious Freedom, 1685–1789. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gray, Janet G. 1983. “The Origin of the Word Huguenot.” The Sixteenth Century Journal 14 (3): 349–59. Greer, Donald. 1951. The Incidence of the Emigration during the French Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Gwynn, Robin. 2018. The Huguenots in Later Stuart Britain, II, Settlement, Churches, and the Role of London. Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press. Heuer, Jennifer N. 2005. The Family and the Nation: Gender and Citizenship in Revolutionary France, 1789–1830. Cornell: Cornell University Press. Hintermaier, John M. 2000. “The First Modern Refugees? Charity, Entitlement, and Persuasion in the Huguenot Immigration of the 1680s.” Albion 32 (3) (August): 429–49. Jainchill, Andrew. 2013. “1685 and the French Revolution.” In The French Revolution in Global Perspective, edited by Suzanne Desan, Lynn Hunt, and William Nelson, 57–72. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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Fugitives from France Jasanoff, Maya. 2010. “Revolutionary Exiles: The American Loyalist and French Émigré Diasporas.” In The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760–1840, edited by David Armitage, 37–58. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Judaken, Jonathan. 2006. Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question: Anti-Antisemitism and the Politics of the French Intellectual. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Kors, Alan. 2003. “The Enlightenment and Toleration.” In Toleration and Religious Identity: The Edict of Nantes and its Implications in France, Britain and Ireland, edited by Ruth Whelan and Carol Baxter, 199–209. Portland: Four Courts Press. Labrousse, Elisabeth. 1985. “Calvinism in France, 1598–1685.” In International Calvinism 15411715, edited by Menna Prestwich. New York: Oxford University Press. Lally-Tolendal, Trophime-Gérard de. 1797. Defense of the French Emigrants, Addressed to the People of France. Translated by John Gifford. London: T.N. Lonchar. Lougee, Carolyn Chappell. 2016. Facing the Revocation: Huguenot Families, Faith, and the King’s Will. New York: Oxford University Press. Luria, Keith. 2005. Sacred Boundaries: Religious Coexistence and Conflict in Early-Modern France. Washington: Catholic University of America Press. Margerison, Kenneth. 1983. “P.-L. Roederer: Political Thought and Practice during the French Revolution.” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 73 (1): 1–166. Meadows, Darrell R. 2000. “Engineering Exiles: Social Networks and the French Atlantic Community, 1789–1809.” French Historical Studies 23 (1): 76–102. Moustefai, Ourida. 2019. “Exile, Displacement and Citizenship: Émigrés from the French Revolution to the 21st Century.” In Teaching Representations of the French Revolution, edited by Julia Douthwaite Vigoni, Antoinette Sol, and Catriona Seth, 275–84. New York: Publications of the Modern Language Association. Pestel, Friedemann. 2019. “The Age of Emigrations: French Émigrés and Global Entanglements of Political Exile.” In French Emigrants in Revolutionised Europe: Connected Histories and Memories, edited by Juliette Reboul and Laure Philip, 204–31. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Rosa, Susan. 1994. “ ‘Il était possible aussi que cette conversion fût sincère’: Turenne’s Conversion in Context.” French Historical Studies 18 (3): 632–66. Shaw, Caroline. 2015. Britannia’s Embrace: Modern Humanitarianism and the Imperial Origins of Refugee Relief. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stanwood, Owen. 2020. The Global Refuge: Huguenots in an Age of Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Summers, Kelly. 2015. “The Great Return: Reintegrating Émigrés in Revolutionary France, 1789– 1802.” PhD dissertation. Stanford University. http://purl.stanford.edu/qw295hf2062. ———. 2019. “Healing the Republic’s ‘Great Wound’: Emigration Reform and the Path to a General Amnesty, 1799–1802.” In French Emigrants in Revolutionised Europe: Connected Histories and Memories, edited by Laure Philip and Juliette Reboul, 235–55. London: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27435-1_11. Van Kley, Dale. 1996. The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to the Civil Constitution, 1560–1791. New Haven: Yale. Van Ruymbeke, Bertrand. 2006. “Refugiés or Émigrés? Early Modern French Migrations to British North America and the United States, c. 1680–1820.” Itinerario XXX (2): 11–32. Vincent, K. Stephen. 2011. Benjamin Constant and the Birth of French Liberalism. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Yardeni, Myriam. 2016. “Assimilation and Integration.” In A Companion to the Huguenots, edited by Raymond A. Mentzer and Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, 273–90. Leiden: Brill.

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31 THE FRENCH CAMPAIGN IN EGYPT (1798–1801) Evgeniya Prusskaya

Introduction Hardly any other short-term colonial campaign has attracted as much attention among researchers and the general public as the Egyptian campaign of Napoleon Bonaparte. This interest has been determined by several factors. It was the first large military defeat suffered by Napoleon Bonaparte, even if this reversal did little to hinder Napoleon’s political career. Secondly, the campaign, which was part military conquest and part scientific exploration, re-opened ancient Egypt to Europe. Consistent with this development, the campaign marked one of the first significant encounters between Europe and the Islamic world of the Middle East since the Crusades. Finally, the campaign inaugurated a new era of colonial expansion and explicit rivalry between France and Great Britain in the region that lasted until the end of Europe’s colonial history. Given these multiple factors, there is no shortage of works on the subject, including a rich scholarly historiography, published sources, and even popular accounts. There are studies dedicated to the political and military aspects of the campaign, to the relationship between the inhabitants of Egypt and the French (Beaucour 1988; Brégeon 1991; Bret 1998; Cole 2007; Raymond 1998; Dykstra 1998; Boudon 2018), scientific aspects of the campaign (Godlewska 1988; Laissus 1998), the origins of the invasion (Laurens 1987), and the rediscovery of the ancient Egypt (Beaucour, Laissus, and Orgogozo 1989). The most comprehensive account of the campaign in general remains the work of Henry Laurens (Laurens, Gillispie, Golvin and Traunecker 1989). Considering the extent of this scholarship, interpretations of the Egyptian campaign have inevitably changed over time (Colla 2003; Ghazi 2008; Hunsdon 2013). Broadly, researchers have raised important questions regarding whether and to what extent the French invasion influenced the course of Egyptian history, a subject which itself frames a series of debates on the significance of the expedition. Accounts from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries tend to be influenced by Eurocentric and Orientalist outlooks that see the French expedition as a watershed moment in Egyptian history. This interpretation was based upon common assumptions of French cultural superiority and depicts France as bringing progressive ideas to a backward Egyptian society. Egyptian nationalist writing

DOI: 10.4324/9780367808471-32

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considered that the French intrusion led to an Egyptian national revival and the modernizing initiatives of Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha, who could come to power in the aftermath of the French evacuation. Since the second half of the twentieth century, revisionist scholarship has been less inclined to favor these narratives, asserting that Egyptian modernity was the result of social and economic developments occurring within the country, not foreign invasion, and challenging the notion of Egyptian backwardness on the eve of the French campaign. The bicentenary of the expedition in 1998 provoked a tumultuous discussion among intellectuals, with some questioning whether the event should be commemorated at all. As both Egyptian and European authors argued, the campaign was a colonial invasion, making its commemoration awkward for a sovereign Egyptian nation (Colla 2003, 1044, 1047). The advent of postcolonial theory in the last decades of the twentieth century has also contributed to the development of these debates and offered new interpretations surrounding the campaign. Scholars have tended to see the French undertaking as an ambiguous colonial encounter, noting that the relationship between the French and inhabitants of Egypt was complicated and transcended strict dichotomies of “occupier” and “occupied.” Even the issue of what to call the military campaign – an “expedition,” “occupation,” or “invasion” – has been a point of controversy among experts. This is not to imply that these designations are, in general, mutually exclusive; the expedition was organized to invade Egypt and led to the three-year occupation of the country. In addition to scholarly works on the topic, there are a plethora of published sources relevant to Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt. Most of them are of French origin, while the accounts left by accounts in Arabic authors are more limited. Nevertheless, they are significant in showing opposing views on the campaign, the most important among them being the works of ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarty and Niqula al-Turk.

To the Orient Plans for the invasion of Egypt appeared long before Napoleon Bonaparte’s rise to power. In the seventeenth century, the German scholar Gottfried Leibniz proposed an invasion of the rich Ottoman province to Louis XIV, a suggestion which appeared reckless at that time. By the later eighteenth century, as European powers became increasingly aware of the declining power of the Ottoman Empire, the subject of invading Egypt was once again put on the table, despite the fact that the Ottoman Empire was a traditional ally of France. It was believed that Egypt, situated at the crossroads of lucrative trade routes, could provide adequate compensation for the French colonies lost during the Seven Years’ War (1756– 1763), which left Britain master in North America and Asia. Ottoman imperial power was nominal in Egypt, and real control was in the hands of the Mamluk warriors who ruled the country as a quasi-autonomous state. Mamluk infighting and power struggles had taken a severe toll on the economic and military strength of Egypt, making it appear easy prey for France. The French Revolution of the late eighteenth century brought new emphasis to the Egyptian question. After Napoleon Bonaparte’s victorious Italian campaign of 1796–1797, the Ionian islands off the west coast of Greece were occupied by France, opening the way to the Eastern Mediterranean. Following this achievement, the French minister of foreign affairs Charles Talleyrand and Napoleon Bonaparte agreed that the next goal should be Egypt. Taking the province would not only secure a new colony for France but could also deliver 339

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a blow to the interests of France’s imperial rival, Britain. Given Egypt’s strategic geographic location, it was not unthinkable that Egypt could serve as a base for launching an invasion into India, where Britain was currently securing its hold over the principalities on the Asian subcontinent. Aside from these strategic and political motivations, the French invasion was encouraged by intellectual factors as well. During the Enlightenment, Europeans had developed a sense of their “civilization” and placed their faith in the superiority of Europe’s enlightened culture in comparison to the “despotic Orient” (Laurens 2004, 33–37). These outlooks became the intellectual basis for European colonial expansion. Napoleon did not hide his stated desires to bring the Enlightenment to a supposed backward Muslim world, and it became a basis of the French civilizing mission in the East. To this end, the expedition corps included not only military personnel but also a team of savants charged with studying and exploring Egypt. The Directory agreed to this exotic project on March 5, 1798, and by May 19, a hastily gathered French corps of 38,000 men, the new Army of the Orient, was ready to set sail. Only the commanding officers knew the destination of the expedition. The rest of the army only learned of it once at sea. On their way to Alexandria that June, the French landed on Malta and conquered the island. As soon as the British learned of this, their fleet under the command of Horatio Nelson sailed from Sicily to the Eastern Mediterranean in order to catch the French. On June 28, the British fleet arrived in Egypt ahead of the French. Finding no enemy in Egypt, the British proceed to search for the French in the Mediterranean. Meanwhile, the Army of the Orient landed in Egypt at Abuqir Bay near Alexandria in the beginning of July 1798. They took Alexandria on July 2 after a seven-hour siege. A proclamation in Arabic was distributed among the inhabitants of Egypt declaring that the French were “sincere Muslims” who had come to Egypt with an order to overthrow the despotic Mamluk rule and restore the power of the Ottoman sultan. Napoleon declared: I came to you only to restore your rights from the hand of the oppressors. I am more of a servant of God – may He be praised and exalted– than the Mamluks, and I venerate His Prophet and the great Koran. (al-Jabarti 1994, 5) To win over the local population, he promised to involve the most talented residents of Egypt in the country’s administration. From Alexandria the French troops moved to Cairo in two columns through Rosetta and Damanhur. On the march toward the capital, soldiers suffered from heat and lack of provisions, but the skirmishes with Mamluk forces along the way demonstrated the military advantage held by the French. In the decisive battle near Imbaba (known as the Battle of the Pyramids) on July 21, the Mamluks were completely defeated. Their leaders fled, with Ibrahim-bey heading to Syria and Murad-bey retreating with his troops south into Upper Egypt. With Cairo now undefended, the intellectual elite of the city – the religious leaders of the oldest Egyptian university and mosque al-Azhar, or ‘ulama’ – carried out negotiations with the French. Napoleon promised to respect the property of the inhabitants and their religion. On July 22, the French entered the city, and Cairo now became a permanent French base in the country. Napoleon decided to preserve the traditional administrative structure in place. He summoned a diwan – a council of the nobles – in which the ‘ulama’ of al-Azhar were invited along with the French. The Egyptian Christians also became members of the diwan, marking a significant shift, since under Ottoman rule they had always been excluded from the 340

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government. The new diwan was created by Napoleon with the aim of legitimizing French rule in the country. All the decisions made by the body were pushed through by the French and in their interests. The ‘ulama’ tried to mediate between the French and the inhabitants of Egypt, but they found themselves powerless under the new regime. To consolidate power in the other areas of the country, Napoleon dispatched a team of French generals, with Kléber heading to Alexandria, Generals Vial and Menou sent to control the Delta, and General Desaix sent to Upper Egypt to negotiate with the Mamluks. With these arrangements in place, it appeared the French were now in possession of Egypt. However, as soon as the British discovered the French landing, they returned to the country and, in the naval battle at Abuqir Bay, absolutely destroyed the French fleet on August 1. This was the start of a series of catastrophes for the Army of the Orient, which was now bottled up in Egypt by the British fleet. Making matters worse, in early September, the Ottoman Empire declared war on France, joining the Second Coalition together with Great Britain and Russia and preparing to liberate Egypt from its French invaders.

Resistance and Failure From the moment the French first set foot in Egypt, they encountered resistance from the local population. Despite promises by the invaders to respect Islam and local traditions, the inhabitants of Egypt were skeptical. The fleeing Mamluks circulated letters encouraging locals to rebel and wage war against the French. In Cairo and Alexandria, they organized secret networks to mobilize support on the ground. Within a short period, the situation deteriorated. In Alexandria, the French tried to collaborate with the influential notable Muhammad Kuraim, a descendant of the prophet Muhammad, and thus a venerated individual among Egyptians. However, General Kléber suspected him of inciting the murder of French soldiers and ordered his arrest. When Kuraim’s secret correspondence with Murad-bey was discovered, Kuraim was publicly executed in Cairo. This harsh punishment inflicted on an eminent figure brought widespread condemnation from Cairenes. Meanwhile, the conquest of the Delta was stalling. French forces met resistance from the city dwellers, the peasant fellahs, and nomadic Bedouin groups (Cole 2007). In August–September 1798, mass antiFrench movements broke out in Mansura and Damietta. In September, the northeastern part of the Delta rebelled under the leadership of the local influential sheikh, Hassan Tubar, followed in October by the city of Tanta. Rebel forces were unorganized and posed little military challenge to the regular French troops. Yet despite the victories achieved by the French, their position in the Delta remained unstable, requiring that their flying columns remain in the region permanently. The most damaging uprising occurred in Cairo, which erupted in revolt on October  21–22. The uprising was provoked by the heavy property taxes imposed on inhabitants, but the underlying motivations ran much deeper. The inhabitants of Egypt were widely dissatisfied with the occupation and refused to live under infidel rule. While Napoleon had insisted he was entering Egypt at the behest of the Ottoman sultan, confirmation from Istanbul never came. The agitation of the Mamluks and the insurrections in the Delta, as well as the execution of Muhammad Kuraim, all had an effect. Rebellion broke out spontaneously. It was leaderless and primarily led by poor Cairenes who rallied behind anti-Christian slogans and pillaged the home of Christian and Muslim residents alike. Only a small part of the ‘ulama’ supported the rebels, while some sheiks dissuaded the inhabitants of their quarters from participating in the insurrection. The 341

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rebels lacked arms, making the revolt easy to suppress. Many participants were arrested or killed, while the French began large-scale violent repressions against the Cairenes (Clarke 2020). The al-Azhar mosque, considered to be the center of the rebellion, was pillaged by French forces. The Cairo uprising showed how unstable the position of the French in Egypt actually was. Even with Cairo pacified, resistance in the other parts of Egypt continued. Rebels in the Delta remained in arms for much of the year, compelling the French to increase its military pressure on the region. In the winter of 1798–1799, Napoleon inaugurated a new military campaign, this time looking to Palestine, where he anticipated an oncoming attack from Ottoman forces. Some 13,000 French troops were dispatched with expectations of local support, especially among Syrian Christians. However, this failed to materialize, dooming the campaign. After taking al-Arish in February and Jaffa in March of 1799, the French faced a new challenge – the outbreak of plague in the army. On March 20, the French lay siege to Acre, the fortress where Ahmad-pasha al-Djazzar (“the Butcher”), governor of Sidon and Damascus, resided. Though they made several assaults on the fortress, their efforts were futile. While French troops defeated an Ottoman army of 35,000 men coming from Damascus in the battle of Mount Tabor, Napoleon had to eventually abandon Acre and return to Egypt with his depleted forces. While war had raged in Syria, local revolts had continued. General Charles Dugua, Napoleon’s replacement while on campaign, was forced onto the defensive in the Delta. In early summer 1799, the region was calmed, but in July, a new threat appeared as an Ottoman army of 15,000–18,000 landed in Abuqir with the support of the British. Although outmanned, the French managed to pull off a victory against the Ottomans, but it would be Napoleon’s last battle in Egypt. Learning about the strained political situation in France from the British, he secretly left Egypt with a small group of supporters on August 22, with aspirations of playing a role in politics back in Paris. General Kléber, the new commander-in-chief of the Army of the Orient, was surprised to learn of his appointment by Napoleon. His orders instructed him to hold Egypt and not evacuate the troops at least until May 1800, if the situation had not changed (La Jonquière 2003, V, 593–606). Kléber, however, was conscious of the very hard conditions confronting French forces in Egypt: demoralized soldiers longing for home, lack of money for supplies and equipment, the blockade enforced by the British, and the threat of attacks by Ottoman forces. Given these factors, Kléber decided to conclude a peace treaty with the Ottomans and evacuate the army. After negotiations with the Ottomans and the mediation of the British, the al-Arish convention was signed on January 23, 1800. Under its provisions, the French were to leave Egypt in three months on Ottoman vessels. While the Ottoman army moved toward Cairo, the French prepared themselves for the evacuation, removing their equipment and troops from Upper Egypt and Cairo. Yet on March  10, General Kléber learned that the commander of the British fleet in the Mediterranean, Lord Keith, intended to treat the French forces as prisoners of war. Kléber considered the armistice broken, and the French confronted the Ottomans near Matariya (Battle of Heliopolis) on March 20, 1800. Although Ottomans forces outnumber the French army of 13,000 by 4 to 1, they were defeated. Concurrent with this fighting, a second wave of revolt broke out in Cairo and the Delta, which lasted a month (March 20–April 21) and united the Ottomans, the Mamluks, and the local inhabitants against the French. As before, the revolt was accompanied by antiChristian slogans and pillage. The rebels were disorganized and inconsistent in their aims,

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leading to the restoration of French control over the city. The punishment of the rebels in the Bulaq, a suburb of Cairo which was captured first, was demonstratively severe. As the witness Niqula el-Turk wrote, “it was a time of great trouble and terrible events, accounts of which could make the mountains tremble and the hair of the young turn grey” (el-Turk 1839, 205). Following the insurrection and its suppression, many rebels were arrested, and a heavy indemnity was imposed upon the Cairenes. Further north, Kléber was forced to re-invade the Delta to restore control. These bloody battles contrasted with events in Upper Egypt, where the French secured a peace agreement with the Mamluk leader Murad-bey, who became an independent ruler of Upper Egypt and a vassal of France (Abul-Magd 2012, 339–40). In spite of this victory, the Army of the Orient was confronting a losing situation. In June 1800, this appeared confirmed when General Kléber was assassinated by the Syrian Sulayman al-Halabi. His successor, General Jacques Menou, was to be the last commander-in-chief of the Army of the Orient. His plan was to hold Egypt and establish there a permanent French colony, and to this end, he initiated reforms in the tax system and central administration. Married to a Muslim woman and a convert to Islam (though the sincerity of this transformation was doubted by the Egyptian population), Menou hoped to win over the support of the Egyptian ‘ulama’ and forge an ally in the region. The problem, however, was, he did not command absolute authority within the French army. Many soldiers and officers were disappointed with his refusal to engage in negotiations with the Ottomans, and they recognized that his colonial project would most likely delay their return back home. Menou was also disliked by the generals and by the Egyptian natives, who suffered from heavy taxation, summary arrests, and other oppressive actions. As tension arose in the French military, Britain was making plans to permanently oust the French from Egypt. In March 1801, a 15,000-man army under General Ralph Abercromby landed at Abuqir just as the Ottomans were pressing in from Syria. On March 21, in a battle on the site of the ancient Canopus, the French forces under Menou were completely defeated and cut off in Alexandria. The British army moved toward Cairo together with the Ottoman corps, while additional British forces from India landed at the Red Sea port of Quseyr in early June. On June 27, Cairo’s commander General Belliard surrendered to the British–Ottoman troops after receiving a guarantee that French forces would be able to leave Egypt on British vessels. Murad-bey, who was moving from Upper Egypt to support the French, died of plague on the way. Menou was the last to surrender in Alexandria on August 30, and in October, the last French forces left Egypt. The Oriental campaign, started by General Bonaparte, was officially concluded.

French Egypt? In the midst of the dramatic battles that made up the French campaign, it is important to realize that the invasion of Egypt became the first French colonial project in North Africa in the modern period, and the first modern encounter between Europe and the Islamic world. The relationship of the French to the inhabitants of Egypt during this three-year period was ambiguous, in terms of both the struggles and interactions that occurred. Daily contact and communication were nothing short of culture shock for both sides. The French were affected not only by a foreign climate, diseases, and other hardships encountered during the campaign, which drove some to suicide, but also by the cultural

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environment they found in Egypt. As one of the participants of the expedition, Captain Rozis, wrote to his friend: We inhabit a country with which we are all dissatisfied. If the troops had but known what it was, before they left France, they would have preferred death a thousand times to the misery to which they now find themselves reduced. (Copies of Original Letters, II, 217–218) Arriving in Alexandria, they were astonished by the appearance of the city, which was completely alien to European notions of urban design. The unusual architecture of houses and mosques, minarets with bellowing muezzins, narrow streets, men in long robes, and veiled women all produced an effect on the imagination. The local food and the drinks also seemed strange to the French. Even the capital of the country, Cairo, did not meet their expectations compared with European capitals (Morand 1998, 73). After taking Cairo, the French reorganized the al-Azbakiya quarter as their primary residence, where they tried to construct a more familiar European environment complete with cafés and even a theater. The behavior of the French was often a point of tension with the local community, who found the occupiers insolent and irreverent. Even Christian residents, sharing the same worldview as the Muslims (Philipp 1990, 140), did not approve of such lifestyles. As one Christian, Niqula al-Turk, wrote: “The women went out shamelessly with the French. Cairo became like Paris; there was wine and other alcoholic beverages everywhere and the other things of which our Lord does not approve” (El-Turk, 204). It was not surprising, therefore, that the French presence in Egypt encouraged the resistance of the Muslim majority, who came to view the occupiers as new Crusaders. The French worked to draw Egyptian Christians into administration and a new military corps. This broke with the established religious balance in Egypt and provoked the anti-Christian pogroms that occurred during the rebellions. Nevertheless, some ambiguities were evident in Muslim attitudes toward the French invaders. Murad-bey, clearly pursuing his own political ambitions for power, became a French deputy in Upper Egypt in 1800. Some local sheiks preferred a fragile peace to outward conflict and behaved accordingly. Unarmed city dwellers and the ‘ulama’ of alAzhar were compelled to interact with the French in order to facilitate their own life and survive, even if they might not share French views and values. Al-Jabarti, who was insulted by the French behavior in Egypt and expressed indignation at their religious demagogy, participated in the French diwan and was struck by French scientific knowledge, which he admitted was advanced (al-Jabarti 1994, 57). Despite these details, however, the French occupation was broadly interpreted as an infidel incursion and an invasion in the lands of Islam, justifying resistance. The French, on the other hand, attributed resistance to “Muslim fanaticism” and blamed religious mentalities for many of the troubles they encountered. They viewed both Egyptian Muslims and Christians as a backward and barbaric “oriental people.” Identifying with the principles of Enlightenment thought, the French considered themselves to be agents of “civilization” who had come to Egypt to spread reason and educate the natives through their superior culture. While the French had come to Egypt under the banners of the French Revolution, they had little intention of spreading values of liberté and égalité in Egypt. Already in the first months of Egypt’s invasion, Napoleon instructed his general Zayonchek that “[i] t is necessary you treat the Turks with the greatest severity; every day here [in Cairo] I chop off three heads and have them carried across Cairo: this is the only way to subjugate these 344

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people” (Bonaparte 2005, II, 222). The French presence in Egypt was clearly based upon violence. The everyday interaction between the French and the inhabitants of Egypt showed the chasm in their lifestyle, values, and worldview, which played its own role in the failure of the French colonial project in Egypt. If the military and political results of the Egyptian campaign were both deplorable and abortive, the scientific dimension of the invasion had more enduring consequences. From the preparation of the campaign in March 1798, a Commission of Sciences and Arts had been formed. It consisted of an interdisciplinary team of savants specializing in engineering, mineralogy, architecture, medicine, and the arts. Their aim was to explore different aspect of Egypt, including its geography, anthropology, medical conditions, and ancient heritage. In addition to making scholarly observations, the engineers helped the army in erecting constructions and building the bases that would sustain the French presence in the region. On August 22, 1798, the Institute of Egypt was established in Cairo with the aims of studying the country, spreading “enlightenment,” and counseling the government on various subjects. It consisted of four sections: mathematics, physics, political economy, and sciences and arts, with each possessing 12 members, drawn from the most prominent members of the Commission of Sciences and Arts. The Institute had its own journal, the Décade égyptienne, where the studies of Institute members were published. The library of the Institute was public, and the ‘ulama’ were known to visit it. On certain occasions, French scientists demonstrated different chemical experiments to them in an effort to convince them of the marvels of modern European science. The results of the research conducted by the savants were prepared and published in the multivolume “Description of Egypt” (1809–1829) only after the French evacuated Egypt. It elicited a great interest among scientists as well as the general French public, especially due to its treatment of ancient Egypt. Members of the Commission for Sciences and Arts carefully depicted and sketched the monuments of ancient Egyptian civilization and recorded the hieroglyphs that covered them. Prior to this, travels to Upper Egypt were quite rare. The French scientists who worked in the region made its monuments known to Europe. The most renowned artifact, a stele inscribed with Egyptian hieroglyphs and an accompanying demotic script in Greek, was discovered near Rosetta in 1799. Upon its discovery, experts already supposed that the stele, now known as the Rosetta Stone, could provide the key to depicting hieroglyphs, which were unknown to Europeans at that time. In addition to this famous discovery, French savants retrieved a number of ancient Egyptian artifacts, papyrus scrolls, sarcophagus, and monument and brought them to Europe. These objects stimulated the study of Egyptology in the nineteenth century and are typically credited with the rediscovery of ancient Egypt following the deciphering of the hieroglyphs by Jean-François Champollion in 1822.

Conclusion The French occupation brought little to Egypt and its inhabitants except for disaster and distress. However, the invasion had an enduring legacy for both the Middle East and North Africa. The Anglo-French rivalry sparked during the Egyptian campaign would open a new era of colonial penetration and conflict as both powers attempted to exert a more prominent influence in the region. The French would use their experience in Egypt to frame the invasion of a new colony in 1830, Algeria. By the First World War, all of North Africa would be reduced to various states of colonial dependency under the European powers. 345

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The French campaign shattered the power of the Mamluks, and in 1811, Muhammad Ali, an Ottoman governor (wali) of Egypt, defeated them definitively and set up an Egyptian dynasty of his own. He would take an active role in modernizing Egypt in the years ahead, making it into an expansionist power in the region for half a century. Muhammad ‘Ali maintained close cultural relations with France during his reign and invited French experts to come to Egypt and assist in his modernizing programs. The main aim of the French expedition – to weaken the British position in Asia – remained unachieved by the end of the campaign. If anything, Britain emerged stronger in the wake of the Egyptian expedition and subsequent Napoleonic Wars. While a failure, the Egyptian campaign did little to impede the career of Napoleon Bonaparte, who would go on to crown himself leader of a revolutionary French Empire in 1804. Culturally, the scientific results of the expedition and the wave of “Egyptomania” that washed over Europe would have a lasting impact, serving to romanticize the campaign in the popular imagination and encourage a brand of Orientalist scholarship and discourse that would feed into future colonial exploits in the coming years.

Bibliography Abul-Magd, Zeinab. 2012. “A Crisis of Images: The French, Jihad, and the Plague in Upper Egypt, 1798–1801.” Journal of World History 23 (2) (June): 315–43. Al-Jabarti, ‘Abd al-Rahman. 1975. Al-Jabarti’s Chronicle of the First seven Months of the French Occupation of Egypt. Muharram – Rajab 1213, 15 June – December 1798. Edited and translated by Shmuel Moreh. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Al-Jabarti, ‘Abd ar-Rahman. 1994. ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti’s History of Egypt. ‘Aja’ib al-Athar fi ‘l-Tarajim wa ‘l-Akhbar. Edited by Thomas Philipp and Moshe Perlmann. Vol. 3. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. ———. 1998. Mazhar al-taqdis bi-zaval dawlat al-Faransis. Cairo: Maktabat al-Adab. Beaucour, Fernand Émile. 1988. L’expédition de Bonaparte en Egypte (1798–1801), aspects politique et militaire. Paris: Centre d’études napoléoniennes. Beaucour, Fernand Émile, Yves Laissus, and Chantal Orgogozo. 1989. La Découverte de l’Egypte. Paris: Flammarion. Bonaparte, Napoléon. 2005. Correspondence générale, vol. 2, La campagne d’Egypte et l’avènement 1798–1799. Paris: Fayard. Boudon, Jacques Olibier. 2018. La campagne d’Égypte. Paris: Belin. Brégeon, Jean-Joël. 1991. L’Égypte française au jour le jour: 1798–1801. Paris: Perrin. Bret, Patrice. 1998. L’Égypte au temps de l’expédition de Bonaparte: 1798–1801. Paris: Hachette. Clarke, Joseph. 2020. “A ‘Theatre of Bloody Carnage’. The Revolt of Cairo and Revolutionary Violence.” In A Global History of Early Modern Violence, edited by E. Charters, M. Houllemare, and P. Wilson, 218–33. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Cole, Juan. 2007. Napoleon’s Egypt. Invading the Middle East. New York-Basingstoke: Palrgave Macmillan. Colla, Elliot. 2003. “Non, non! Si, si!: Commemorating the French Occupation of Egypt (1798– 1801).” MLN 118 (4): 1043–69. Copies of Original Letters from the Army of General Bonaparte in Egypt, Intercepted by the Fleet Under the Command of Admiral Lord Nelson. 1798–1799. V. 1–3. London: printed for G. Wright, opposite Old Bond street, Piccadilly. Darrell, Dykstra. 1998. “The French occupation of Egypt, 1798–1801.” In Cambridge History of Egypt, edited by M. V. Daly, 113–38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. De Meulenaere, Philippe. 1993. Bibliographie raisonnée des témoignages de l’expédition d’Égypte (1798–1801). Paris: F. et R. Chamonal, livres anciens et moderns. El-Turk, Niqula. 1839. Histoire de l’expédition française en Égypte, publiée et traduite par Alexis Desgranges. Paris: Impr. Royale.

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The French Campaign in Egypt (1798–1801) Ghazi, Emad Abou. 2008. “L’expédition française dans les écrits des historians égyptiens du XXe siècle: implaictions politiques de l’historiographie.” In Bonaparte et L’Egypte: feu et lumières, publié sous la direction de Jean-Marcel Humbert, 129–34. Paris: Institut du Monde Arabe. Godlewska, Anne. 1988. The Napoleonic Survey of Egypt: A Masterpiece of Cartographic Compilation and Early Nineteenth-Century Fieldwork. North York, Canada: B.V. Gutsell, Winters College, York University. Hunsdon, Jaimee. 2013. The French Occupation: A Historiographical View a Thesis Submitted to Arab and Islamic Civilizations. Cairo: American University in Cairo. La Jonquière, Clement. 2003. L’Expédition d’Égypte (1798–1801), nouvelle èdition sous la direction de Jacques Garnier. Paris: Teissèdre. V. 1–5. First published 1899–1907. Laissus, Yves. 1998. L’Égypte, une aventure savante: avec Bonaparte, Kléber, Menou, 1798–1801. Paris: Le Grand livre du mois. Laurens, Henry. 1987. Les Origines intellectuelles de l’expédition d’Égypte: l’orientalisme islamisant en France, 1698–1798. Istanbul and Paris: Editions Isis. ———. 2004. Orientales I. Autour de l’expédition d’ Égypte. Paris: CNRS. Laurens, Henry, Charles Gillispie, Jean-Claude Golvin, and Claude Traunecker. 1989. L’expédition d’Egypte, 1798–1801. Paris: Armand Colin. Marsot, Afaf Lutfi Al-Sayyid. 1990. “A Comparative Study of Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti and Niqula al-Turk.” In Eighteenth Century Egypt: The Arabic Manuscript Sources, edited by Daniel Crecelius, 115–26. Los Angeles: Regina books. Morand, Charles. 1998. Lettres sur l’expédition d’Égypte: de l’Italie à la prise du Caire; suivies de son Carnet de route de chef de brigade: de Rome à Assouan. 1798–1799, editée et traduite par le comte Morand. Paris: La Vouivre. Philipp, Thomas. 1990. “The French and the French Revolution in the al-Jabarti.” In Eighteenth Century Egypt: The Arabic Manuscript Sources, edited by Daniel Crecelius, 127–40. Los Angeles: Regina books. Prusskaya,  Evgeniya. 2015. “Arab Chronicles as a Source for Studying Bonaparte’s Expedition to Egypt.” Napoleonica. La Revue, 2015/3 (No 24), 48–60. www.cairn.info/revue-napoleonica-la-revue2015-3-page-48.htm. Raymond, André. 1998. Égyptiens et Français au Caire: 1798–1801. Le Caire: Institut français d’archéologie orientale. Reybaud, Louis. 1830–1834. Histoire scientifique et militaire de l’expédition française en Égypte. Napoleon in Egypt, ed. by Irene A. Bierman. 2003. Paris: Gagniard, Ithaca press. Turc, Nicolas. 1950. Chronique d’Egypte 1798–1804. Editée et traduite par Gaston Wiet. Le Caire: Imprimerie de l’Institut Francais d’Archéologie Orientale. Weyergang, Margarethe Elise. 1985. Niqula al-Turk as a Source on the French Occupation of Egypt. Thesis for the Master of Arts Degree. Cairo: American University in Cairo.

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32 MONARCHY, MEMORY, AND THE CHAPELLE EXPIATOIRE Gemma Betros

The Chapelle expiatoire, situated off the busy Boulevard Haussmann in Paris’s eighth arrondissement, is a monument to the fallen monarchy of the French Revolution and the nineteenth-century struggle for the control of France’s history. Expiatoire refers to expiation, the “reparation of a crime or a sin through an act of sacrifice” (Steinberg 2019a, 495). Begun in 1816 and completed in 1826, the chapel was constructed at the cemetery where Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were buried following their execution, a site that came to include hundreds of others condemned to death at the guillotine during the Terror of 1793–1794. The men and women buried there came from a social and political cross section of French society. Those charged with counter-revolution, for example, might lie just meters from some of the Revolution’s most vocal exponents, who could, in turn, represent ferociously opposed political factions. Yet the monument’s creation, and on such contested ground, signaled more than the triumph of the restored Bourbon monarchy. The Chapelle expiatoire is one of France’s least-known and most poorly understood historic monuments. As nineteenth-century France lurched between monarchy, empire, and republic, the site featured often in discussions of history and national memory, highlighting the role of the king’s execution in defining political identities and evoking the enduring conundrum of reconciling the achievements of the Revolution with its violence and trauma. But historians long avoided writing about the chapel, perhaps wary of appearing aligned with the values associated with its creation. Only recently have scholars interested in questions of politics, emotions, death, and memory (Clarke 2007; Fureix 2002, 2009, 2012; Legacey 2019; Steinberg 2019a, 2019b) begun to examine the monument’s role in France’s efforts to come to terms with both the French Revolution and the divisions of postrevolutionary society. This chapter examines the Chapelle expiatoire from its beginnings to the present. The site’s early history and transformation into a funerary monument emphasize the political imperatives behind its construction, while its role in nineteenth-century political debate displays how the chapel’s association with monarchy became an affront to republicans, culminating in calls for its demolition. Investigating the monument’s history in this way provides new insights into how the ruptures brought by the French Revolution resounded throughout nineteenthcentury politics, and France’s ongoing attempt to live with and narrate its revolutionary past. DOI: 10.4324/9780367808471-33

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The Site The Chapelle expiatoire stands on the site of the Madeleine cemetery, created in 1722 in a then semi-rural position to the northwest of Paris’s center, amid growing awareness of the health implications of burying corpses in densely populated areas (Legacey 2019). Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were linked with the Madeleine cemetery even before their deaths. On May 30, 1770 – at the very location of their future execution – panic had broken out in the crowds watching the fireworks held to celebrate their wedding: 133 people died, with some unidentified victims buried at the Madeleine. Also buried there were many of the Swiss guards killed at the palace of the Tuileries on August 10, 1792, as the French monarchy was brought down by insurrection: another association that would later seem to contemporaries to have presaged the monarchs’ end. The revolutionary law of November 2, 1789, transferred all property of the Catholic Church, including cemeteries, to the nation. Although the Madeleine cemetery was still used for parish burials, from late 1792, it was also used for the bodies of some 500 of the 1,119 individuals guillotined at the Place de la Révolution, today’s Place de la Concorde. Transported the short distance by cart, they were piled into pits – helpfully screened by the cemetery’s walls – and covered in quicklime to hasten decomposition. It was a narrow, comparatively small site, and locals soon complained. In the summer of 1793, a petition was presented to the municipality reporting that “the cadaverous and putrefying odour” was “becoming unbearable to neighbouring citizens, and dangerous to the city of Paris” (Fassy 1862, 124). For nineteenth-century historian Jules Michelet, such complaints revealed unease with the turn of revolutionary events: “That which one could not dare say in the name of humanity,” he suggested, “was said in the name of hygiene and public health” (Michelet 1847–53, 7: 412–13). The complaint was dismissed as the work of aristocratic troublemakers trying to create rumors that the plague was spreading through Paris. Already, the cemetery was being used as a political weapon. The many well-known figures buried there further explain this politicization. The deposed king was found guilty of treason and guillotined on January 21, 1793 (Baecque 2003). Announcement of his burial “between those [who died] at the time of his wedding and the Swiss [guards] killed on 10 August” (Tourneux 1894, 123) reminded the public of the deaths his own life had brought about. Marie Antoinette, guillotined on October 16, 1793 (Hardman 2019), was one of several prominent women there, including Charlotte Corday, the 24-year-old who murdered revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat; Madame Du Barry, mistress of King Louis XV; and Olympe de Gouges, known for her 1791 Declaration of the Rights of Woman. The cemetery was also the burial place of Philippe d’Orléans, who had voted for the death of his cousin the king. Members of the moderate faction of the Girondins, guillotined in October  1793, would occupy the same ground as their radical opponents, the Cordeliers, after whose execution in March 1794 the cemetery was closed. The ground, much like its neighbors, could take no more. After closure, the site was decommissioned, subdivided, and sold. Despite the varied political persuasions of those buried there, the cemetery was appropriated by royalists. The most significant purchase was made in 1802 by Pierre-Louis-Ollivier Descloseaux, who lived nearby and had noted where the monarchs were buried. As the cemetery’s new owner, he and his family dedicated themselves to its preservation, raising the height of its walls, marking the king’s and queen’s burial sites with hedges and trees, publishing guides to the cemetery, and welcoming sympathetic visitors. By the time Napoleon Bonaparte 349

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came to power in 1799, it was a place of pilgrimage for the growing cult of Louis XVI (Baecque 2003). The site attracted additional attention through a multivolume work of fiction featuring the royal family, called La cimitière de la Madeleine (The Madeleine Cemetery) (Steinberg 2019b). It proved so popular that in 1801 Police Minister Joseph Fouché banned its completion for fear the novel was “reopening wounds and inflaming heads.” Its author, Jean-Joseph Regnault-Warin, finished it regardless, arguing that the will of the people had created a republic, and that “a few tears or flowers scattered [through] pious pity on the tombs of the deceased royals” were unlikely to endanger its achievements. “Those who cry,” he reasoned, “do not assassinate” (Peuchet 1838, 3: 245–52). Napoleon, once emperor, seemed less certain of such claims. Visitors to the site increased as his own reign faltered. During his return from Russia in 1812, he informed General Caulaincourt of his plans for “a monument that, without hurting the living, preserves the memory of the dead and does so sufficiently in our time of misfortune to remind our children that one does not kill kings nor bury them as mere commoners” (Darnis 1981, 14). When later dictating his memoirs, Napoleon made the loftier claim that he had considered it his responsibility to address the memory of Louis XVI and “cleanse the Nation of the crimes with which a few maniacs and some unfortunate fatalities had sullied it” (Las Cases 1840, 1: 127). The Comte de Provence, Louis XVI’s younger brother, had become king in exile following the death of his imprisoned nephew, Louis XVII, in 1795. He also began contemplating monuments as architects, artists, and members of the public sent him proposals (Fureix 2009). Although never fond of his brother and sister-in-law, he used their deaths to build support (Goujon 2012; Mansel 2005). Like Napoleon, Louis XVIII would face the challenge of how to condemn the executions without further alienating opponents. Louis XVIII returned to France in May 1814 following Napoleon’s abdication and exile to the island of Elba. The Charter of 1814 – a document the Allied Powers insisted upon to promote a stable France and peaceful Europe – attempted to stress the continuities of French history while papering over its recent ruptures (Price 2008). But the Restoration policy of “union and forgetting” (Kroen 1998; Lok 2014; Skuy 2003) was both overly optimistic and at odds with the Catholic Church’s preference for repentance. The king’s execution in particular embodied the difficulties of living with the recent revolutionary past (Fureix 2009). The Restoration initially treated regicide as a symbol of the Revolution’s many crimes against the monarchy and religion, orchestrating what Bertrand Goujon has called “manifestations of collective contrition,” calculated to form part of the process of the (re)legitimization of royal power (Goujon 2012, 59). Ahead of the anniversary of the king’s death, plans were made – seemingly in some haste – to recover the remains of the king and queen on January 21, 1815, and rebury them, following an elaborate funeral procession, at the Basilica of Saint-Denis north of Paris, where French monarchs were traditionally interred. was to play an emblematic role in burying the past while reinforcing the continuity and legitimacy of the monarchy. On January 11, 1815, Louis XVIII purchased the former cemetery from Descloseaux, who was rewarded abundantly for his troubles. Excavation of the royal remains took place in freezing conditions over January  18 and 19, 1815. While the corpse of Marie Antoinette was reportedly identified with the help of an unusually thick layer of quicklime and a pair of aristocratic-looking garters, identifying the remains of Louis XVI proved almost impossible. As intended, though, the process captured the public imagination, as did several 350

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accompanying publications written in the voice of the long-dead king promising forgiveness and reconciliation. Such magnanimity might have been calculated to promote unity but also suggested an attempt to place the public forever in the debt of the restored monarchy (Carpenter 2018). An ordinance of January  19, 1815 next announced the construction of “a funerary monument” to the memory of the king and queen. Another, issued on January 21, 1815, declared the date an annual day of “national mourning” and ordered a service for the king’s soul to be said in every church in France. Its wording – which referred to “the pain that France could not, until now, allow to burst forth” and which “manifests today in a most touching manner in memory of the most horrible murder” (Savornin 1865, 213–15) – suggested a nation united in adjourned grief. Instead, the day caused widespread discontent. Royalists and clergy had expected greater emphasis on penitence, while others, including liberals, Bonapartists, and republicans, felt the reburial at Saint-Denis – which featured a long and uncompromising eulogy – contradicted promises to forget. Amid rumors of a potential uprising, Louis XVIII had absented himself from the event (Larkin 2004). Napoleon Bonaparte’s audacious escape from Elba exploited such discord. His return to power on March 20, 1815, launching the period known as the Hundred Days, again sent Louis XVIII into exile. The king returned after Napoleon’s final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo and, restored for the second time on July 8, 1815, extended plans for the commemoration of the royal family (Folliot 1993). Although these plans appeared crafted to remind the French – and especially Parisians – of the dangers of questioning legitimate authority, the process of constructing the Chapelle expiatoire would expose the deeper political expediencies at play.

The Monument Napoleon’s return, and the speed with which the monarchy had lost control of its troops, had emphasized the dangers of overlooking division in the name of unity. The Second Restoration now banished all physical signs of the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, part of a wider effort to signal a hardened stance (Kroen 1998). Where the procession to Saint-Denis had lay the king’s body to rest, the planned funerary monument would be a permanent reminder to the public of its crimes. But the monarchy, restored for a second time, was performing a delicate balancing act wherein rhetoric and action did not always match intention. The moderate regime led by Louis XVIII quickly recognized that the monarchy’s survival depended on forging its subjects’ loyalty (Tombs 1996). The Hundred Days had, moreover, seen increased opposition to the imposition of national mourning, along with personal allegations concerning Louis XVIII’s own role in his brother’s death. Despite the Catholic Church’s intensified demands for condemnation and retribution, the monarchy consequently began to downplay the crime of regicide (Kroen 1998). Although the annual mass and day of mourning were retained – and with stricter enforcement than in 1815 – they were now explained as an opportunity to remove from the French people the burden of “a crime of which they were never guilty,” a claim that hinted at the questionable legality of previous governments (Darnis 1981, 25). The regime also needed, however, to maintain relations with the Church and build the trust of royalists, especially the extreme royalists known as the “ultras” who, after the Hundred Days, sought violent revenge in the south of France (Tombs 1996). Here, the 351

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language of expiation would prove critical. The theological definition of “Expiation” in Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (1751–1766) explained that for Roman Catholics, sins were expiated through works of penitence. The souls of those who died without fully satisfying divine justice would remain in purgatory after death to expiate what remained of their sins. Royalists had long hoped for the exaction of some form of expiation for the death of the king. As one poem (Vieillard 1815, 3) lamented: Twenty years, and two more, have passed since the crime. Silent tears alone avenge the victim; A memory full of remorse and dismay Follows, without expiation, the murder of a good king; Beset with questions of responsibility and reparation, “expiation” was a concept that risked reigniting conflict. But its use in January 1816 allowed the regime to take the memory of one of the most polarizing events of the French Revolution and gradually reduce its potency. The way was prepared by writer and statesman François-René de Chateaubriand, who, in an impassioned speech advised that “religion alone” could heal the scars of the past. But he added, no “splendid display nor superb mausoleum” was required, only “a few tears, [fasting], an altar, a simple stone engraved with the name of the king.” A windowless chapel, lit from above, would “allow a religious clarity to penetrate” (Moniteur universel January 12, 1816). These details, already suggesting a monument circumspect in design, seemed conceived to soften potential opposition. The subsequent law of January 19, 1816, confirming January 21 as an annual day of national mourning and signed by Louis XVIII, nevertheless declared that: [I]n expiation of the crime of this wretched day, there will be erected, in the name of and at the expense of the nation, in such place that it pleases us to designate, monuments whose type will be settled by us. (Bulletin annoté des lois, décrets et ordonnances 1837.13: 404–5) This official use of the word “expiation” seemed to signal that the nation was, finally, to pay spiritually and financially for its crimes. The planned monuments, by sacralizing certain spaces defiled by the Revolution, were to turn Paris into a “capital of expiation” (Fureix 2002, 25). They included chapels where the royals had been imprisoned, various projects at the enormous new Madeleine church (under construction intermittently since 1763), a monument at the Madeleine cemetery, and statues of members of the royal family, including one of Louis XVI at the site of his execution (Snay 2002). But few of these plans came to fruition. The statue of Louis XVI, in a central and emotionally fraught location, was quickly abandoned. The Madeleine cemetery – enclosed and off a quiet street – would instead become the chief locus of commemoration, and its monument a reflection of the Restoration’s attempt to reassert its authority in a challenging political landscape. The man charged with the task was architect Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine, known for his work for Napoleon with colleague Charles Percier. Their projects included the triumphal arch near the Louvre, planning the ceremonies for Napoleon’s coronation and second marriage to Marie-Louise of Austria, and beginning the construction of a palace for the couple’s son. Despite his past, Fontaine’s expertise and vision for the site made him the 352

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preferred candidate. Although worried that the monument might revive recent animosities, he accepted the post and presented a plaster model of the chapel to the king in May 1816 (Garric 2012). The adjectives used over the years to describe the monument – austere, severe, serene, plain, and cold – are telling. Its design met the dual requirement of distance from the architecture of the recent past, and protection, including for Fontaine himself, against future regime change (Moon 2017). A broad range of chronological and geographical architectural references, including many sketches made during Fontaine’s time in Italy, helped create a monument whose meaning was surprisingly malleable. Neoclassical in structure, romantic in spirit, the site exhibited the project’s central complexity as a memorial to the royals – whose bodies were no longer present – constructed atop the bodies of many others. Fontaine’s “little monument,” as he called it, comprised a series of discrete but interlinked spaces. These included an entry pavilion, a courtyard (whose lawns marked the Revolution’s mass graves), arcades, and as imagined by Chateaubriand, a windowless chapel with light pouring in from the oculus of the central dome above. Two staircases descended to a crypt beneath, where an altar of black marble, illuminated by a round stained-glass window, marked the king’s former grave. Each space offered scope for interpretation. The arcades commemorating the Swiss guards, for example, stood for some as a last cortege to the king but alternatively could be seen to stand for all others buried at the site. The chapel itself was hidden from the entrance and initially had no cross, an addition requested by Louis XVIII. The site’s minimal decoration was similarly ambiguous, encompassing references to royalty (such as the interlinked initials of the king and queen), symbols of the passing of time (winged hourglasses), and poppies, which recalled the deep sleep of death but also referenced the cutting of the heads of tall poppies in Roman legend. Certain constraints vexed the architect. Work on the foundations, which redeployed building material from the abandoned palace for Napoleon’s son, drew a formal complaint about the inevitable disturbing of remains (Fontaine 1987). An inscription with the phrase “rest in eternal sleep” was rejected, ostensibly to avoid offending those who believed in resurrection, but probably also for its association with revolutionary dechristianization. And unlike the privately owned cemetery of Picpus, where another 1,300 revolutionary victims of mostly noble background lay, the recording of individual names was ruled too contentious. The site’s tombstones were, therefore, purely symbolic. Finally, where Chateaubriand had promised – somewhat disingenuously – multiple altars for visitors “to mourn a mother, a brother, a sister, a spouse, indeed all those victims, faithful companions who, for twenty years, had slept near their master in this abandoned cemetery” (Moniteur universel, January 12, 1816), the chapel was to honor only the executed monarchs. It was long assumed that remains from the cemetery were moved to the Paris catacombs, but the 2020 (re)discovery of four ossuaries (boxes for human remains) concealed in the walls of the crypt may indicate Fontaine’s way of recognizing all those buried at the site. The monument’s generic tombstones, stark spaces, and concealed ossuaries lent focus to the chapel’s major artworks. A bas-relief illustrating the transferral of remains to SaintDenis reminded visitors of the restoration of monarchical authority, while statues of the king and queen would add a profound emotional effect. Marie Antoinette was presented kneeling in distress, supported by the figure of “Religion,” who bore the features of the king’s sister Madame Elisabeth, executed in 1794. Louis XVI, also kneeling, was depicted being guided to immortality by an angel. Marie Antoinette’s last letter and the king’s last 353

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testament, engraved on the pedestals beneath, meanwhile expressed the couple’s grace and forgiveness. Funded by the king and queen’s daughter, the Duchesse d’Angoulême, the statues were not installed until the mid-1830s, by which time another revolution had ousted another king. The monument’s cost came to just under 2 million francs. It was, in the end, funded by Louis XVIII himself from the civil list, state money allocated for his private use. If the sum had been considered an investment to placate royalists, any return was hampered by the 1820 assassination of the Duc de Berry, a failed attempt by a Bonapartist to end the Bourbon dynasty, and one that led to the ultras gaining ministerial power. Construction slowed, and the chapel’s consecration on January 21, 1824 was a quiet affair, at least until an ecclesiastical dispute over the ceremony later erupted. Fontaine observed in his diary how little notice the petit monument had, until that point, attracted (Fontaine 1987, 1: 645–56, 659). Louis XVIII died in September 1824 and was succeeded by his conservative and ostentatiously devout brother Charles X, but the new king did not visit the monument until its formal completion on February 23, 1826, and showed minimal interest when he did (Fontaine 1987, 2: 700). In keeping with ultraroyalist expectations, he instead pursued more visible reminders of his brother’s execution, ordering the urgent completion of the statue of Louis XVI with instructions that great activity be seen to be taking place (Fureix 2009). The chapel’s own completion was commemorated with a medal, an example of which is held at the Louvre. It shows France kneeling before Religion, a model of the chapel in hand, and bears the title “Chapelle d’Anjou, 1826,” after the adjoining street. As a project of the previous regime, and with its focus having shifted from regicide, to expiation, to commemoration, the term “expiatoire’ may have suddenly seemed as redundant as the chapel itself.

The Monument Contested Fontaine was rightly worried for the future of his petit monument (Fontaine 1987, 1: 641): the revolutions and uprisings of nineteenth-century France often had implications for Parisian monuments (Stammers 2020). The generations who lived through these upheavals remained divided in their stance toward the French Revolution, its values, and over which version of the past to commemorate (Gildea 1994, 2008). The Chapelle expiatoire came to signify for some all that had been lost with the Revolution and, for others, all that had been lost with the Restoration. From 1870, its association with guilt – whether that of a treasonous king or that imposed upon the republic – saw the monument used to articulate political identity through the interpretation of national memory, as left and right battled for influence, votes, and political legitimacy. When the revolution of July 1830 replaced the unpopular Charles X with his more liberal Orléans cousin Louis-Philippe, symbols of the Bourbon monarchy were attacked throughout Paris. Fontaine gave permission for the chapel’s “very few” fleur-de-lis – sculpted against his wishes and suddenly no longer a national symbol – to be chipped away as a precaution (Fontaine 1987, 2: 883). The site itself was spared, with two tricolor flags later placed at the entry, but as public opinion turned against the new king, it became a tempting point of reference. One caricature that appeared after the republican uprising of June 1832 was labelled the “monument expia-poire,” a play on words referring to the regular portrayal of LouisPhilippe as a pear (“poire”) and hinting at a similar fate ahead (Carpenter 2018, 69–71). Unsurprisingly, the new regime began to distance itself from the expiatory monuments of its predecessors. The planned statue of Louis XVI was again jettisoned, and in 1833, 354

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the law that required mass to be said throughout France on January  21 was abrogated amid growing unwillingness to attend, unless for devotional purposes or to signal political allegiances. By the time the statues of the king and queen were installed in 1834–1835, the site served primarily as a place of private commemoration for the families of those buried there (Garric 2006). Perhaps partly for this reason, damage during the 1848 Revolution was minimal. LouisNapoleon Bonaparte, as president, then emperor, followed his uncle in recognizing the need to acknowledge the executed monarchs. Certain improvements to the chapel were quietly permitted, and Baron Haussmann was charged with redesigning the surrounding garden. Although some regretted the changes, the Square Louis XVI, finished in 1862, became the only Parisian site to bear the name of the former king. The monument seemed to have come to fulfil a purpose that may have been intended all along: memorializing the executions of the king and queen while slowly allowing that memory, and the political discord it provoked, to fade. This changed with the advent of the Third Republic in 1870. The Paris Commune, which seized power from the new republic in 1871, announced on May  6, 1871, that, “considering the building known under the name of the Chapelle expiatoire of Louis XVI is a permanent insult to the First Revolution, and a perpetual protestation of the reaction against the justice of the People,” it was to be destroyed (Darnis 1981, 49). The Commune itself was destroyed within weeks, with captured Communards apparently made to kneel “in expiation” when passing the chapel (Merriman 2014, 221), but the idea of the monument as an insult to the French Revolution took hold. The radical Left attempted on multiple occasions to have the chapel dismantled, starting with a proposal in the Chamber of Deputies in 1882. The conservative republican government, which was reluctant to upset the Church and its supporters, declined to take the matter further, although when the chaplain who said mass there died in 1883, he was not replaced (the last Bourbon pretender to the throne, who had funded the position, having died earlier that year). Calls for demolition also came from elected representatives to the municipal and departmental councils of Paris, as well as from citizens such as Marc Bonnefoy, an infantry captain, poet, and vocal petitioner on the matter. Debates about the site used its history both to brandish political identity – those who voted in favor of demolition tended to represent Paris’s working-class districts (Fiori 2012) – and, in the case of the municipal and departmental councils, to try to wrest autonomy from the more conservative state. Proposing the chapel’s demolition at a meeting of the General Council of the Seine in December 1883, Alfred Lamouroux – who later founded a commission dedicated to the preservation of Paris’s heritage – argued that it had been “constructed in hatred of the French Revolution” and constituted “a stain” on the National Convention’s verdict at the king’s trial in 1793, especially in light of the evidence that had since emerged confirming the king’s guilt. He thought that, while it was perfectly just to respect monuments of monarchical origin that “recalled glorious memories and taught .  .  . the history of our country by bronze or marble,” it was “strange to leave standing a so-called expiatory chapel,” which had been “erected as an insult” to an Assembly that had repelled France’s enemies and bequeathed it such “immortal creations,” Debate centered on the legality of the National Convention’s role in the king’s death, but the vote was in favor of demolition, with the site earmarked as a future station for the new metropolitan railway (Journal des Débats, December 13, 1883). As no steps were taken toward demolition, the proposal was raised again, including at a meeting of the municipal council in 1887 where Edgar Monteil – another guardian 355

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of Paris’s built heritage (as he reminded those present) – presented a petition from Marc Bonnefoy (Bulletin municipal, April 23, 1887). The monument, Monteil contended, was “a slap on the cheek of Republican Paris.” The whole episode of the king’s execution, he continued, might have been best forgotten were it not for historians whose role “had been to create legends and make us accept them” in a manner similar to kings who imposed “humiliations like the Chapelle expiatoire” upon people. The debate that followed was as lively as it was vituperative. Accusations of iconoclasm and fanaticism were flung between conservatives and republicans alike as they argued over how to commemorate the past. One speaker claimed that “when the memories of history” bothered republicans, they wanted the monuments consecrating them destroyed, but those memories that pleased them they wanted “glorified in buildings or statues.” Another questioned why humiliation for republicans should be privileged over “a pious memory” for monarchists and conservatives who, despite supporting the Revolution, could not express solidarity with or glorify its excesses. Others still asked: Why not demolish the basilica of Sacre-Coeur, or even the statues of all heroes who preceded the Revolution? Name changes were also suggested: perhaps the “Tomb of Louis XVI” (rejected because his body lay elsewhere) or (facetiously) the “Tomb of the monarchy”? But the proposed demolition was again dropped. Investigations had shown – not for the first time – that the city of Paris owned only part of the site. The rest, having been funded by the civil list, was now the property of the state, which would have to agree to cede or sell the land, but which showed no inclination to do so (Bulletin municipal, April 23, 1887). With the approach of the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris, and the centenary of the French Revolution, the future of the Chapelle expiatoire was raised again, including by Marc Bonnefoy. Millions, he argued, would be coming to Paris to celebrate the Revolution: he feared that this “sombre monument” would “signal to these foreigners the Republic’s weakness.” The Parisian municipal council agreed that “the celebration of the Centenary could make little sense with the monument in place.” But with legislative elections ahead, and ongoing pressure from the right in the wake of the Boulanger Affair, the six months of centenary celebrations passed without action, leading Bonnefoy to snipe at the republic’s “politics of appeasement” (Bonnefoy 1890, 18–21). Those who contested the monument’s destruction either accused the Third Republic of attempting to purge France of everything that was not republican (De Witt 1887) or, more persuasively, drew attention to its architectural importance. While some, like politician Jules Joffrin, thought it “a very ugly monument” (Bulletin municipal, April 23, 1887), Charles Garnier, architect of Paris’s renowned Opera house, deemed it “a true masterpiece,” writing that he would consider its demolition “a real act of vandalism” (quoted in Garric 2006, 2–3). The chapel had long had supporters abroad, too. Visitors described it in their letters and memoirs, while newspapers from Mexico to Australia reported on its anniversary masses and, crucially, who attended. By the twentieth century, though, journalists and guidebooks more often lamented the site’s neglect. One English correspondent visiting in 1913 referred to it “as the saddest spot in Paris,” wondering “how much the people on the Boulevard a few yards away know or care about it all” (Advertiser [Adelaide], February 13, 1913). Arguments for the site’s preservation on historic and artistic grounds slowly shifted the debate, rendering the monument apolitical as supporters sought to inscribe it in French heritage. A particularly influential article of 1899 argued for its historical, cultural, and architectural value (Fiori 2012). Its future continued to be debated for political gain, notably in February 1910, when socialists, ahead of that year’s legislative elections, again decried 356

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the monument as an insult to the memory of the French Revolution (Darnis 1981). But on July 22, 1914, with war approaching, the Chapelle expiatoire – together with a long list of churches – was granted the title of historic monument. During the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the site experienced what one guidebook (appropriately) described as “a long purgatory” (Garric 2006, 20). Through social media, the Chapelle expiatoire has again become a focal point for supporters of the monarchy, with the division it continues to inspire visible on its Facebook page: alongside comments like “Vive le roi!” might appear others lauding Louis XVI’s execution as the Revolution’s greatest achievement. But as a space for exhibitions, concerts, and even weddings, the chapel increasingly functions less as a political site than one of general historical interest and shared heritage. The history of the Chapelle expiatoire reveals a political monument presented as a commemorative and religious one. Although the site performed an important role in staging the return of the Restoration as it attempted to navigate the divided France it had inherited, it also, inevitably, became a symbol of that division. Attitudes to and experiences of the French Revolution differed widely, and the story of the Revolution memorialized at the site, despite Fontaine’s efforts to accommodate multiple pasts and a mutable future, represented only a select version of France’s history that came under attack as the political maneuverings of the late nineteenth century fought to shape national memory. The contested history of the Chapelle expiatoire is best displayed at its entry. Beneath the lengthy inscription that once provided the only indication of what lay within are faint traces of another, “LIBERTE EGALITE FRATERNITE,” dating from July 14, 1880, when all national property was required to bear the motto. Here, and throughout the site – from its repurposed foundations to the bones secreted within its crypt, to the traces of regime change still visible upon its walls – the Chapelle expiatoire bears the physical signs of the tussle between left and right that divided France from the moment those labels emerged in the French Revolution. The monument is now, as ever, a palimpsest of France’s modern history, reminding us that the stories nations tell about themselves – through choices about what to glorify, what to forget, and why – often reinforce the contesting political and social identities they repeatedly seek to unite.

Works Cited Advertiser [Adelaide]. 1913. “Saddest spot in Paris.” February 13, 1913. Baecque, Antoine de. 2003. Glory and Terror. Seven Deaths Under the French Revolution. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. New York and London: Routledge. Bonnefoy, Marc. 1890. Sur la Démolition projetée de la Chapelle Expiatoire élevée rue d’Anjou, à Paris, en mémoire de la mort de Louis XVI. Paris: Léon Vanier. Bulletin annoté des lois, décrets et ordonnances depuis le mois de juin 1789 jusqu’au mois d’août 1830. 1837, 20 vols. Paris: Paul Dupont. Bulletin municipal officiel de la Ville de Paris. 1887. “Démolition de la Chapelle Expiatoire.” April 23, 1887. Carpenter, Scott. 2018 [2009]. Aesthetics of Fraudulence in Nineteenth-Century France. London and New York: Routledge. Clarke, Joseph. 2007. Commemorating the Dead in Revolutionary France: Revolution and Remembrance, 1789–1799. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Darnis, Jean-Marie. 1981. Les monuments expiatoires du supplice de Louis XVI et de Marie-­ Antoinette sous l’Empire et la Restauration, 1812–1830. Paris: J.-M. Darnis. Fassy, Paul. 1862. Les catacombes de Paris, ou projet de fonder une chapelle funéraire à l’entrée des catacombes. Paris. Gaume frères et J. Duprey.

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Gemma Betros Fiori, Ruth. 2012. L’invention du vieux Paris: Naissance d’une conscience patrimoniale dans la capitale. Wavre: Mardaga. Folliot, Frank. 1993. “Les monuments dynastiques et expiatoires.” In La famille royale à Paris: De l’histoire à la légende, edited by Anne Forray-Carlier, Jacques Hamann, François Macé de Lépinal et al., 97–108. Paris: Paris-Musées. Fontaine, Pierre-François-Léonard. 1987. Journal: 1799–1853. 2 vols. Paris: École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts; Institut français d’architecture; Société de l’histoire de l’art français. Fureix, Emmanuel. 2002. “La ville coupable. L’effacement des traces de la capitale révolutionnaire dans le Paris de la Restauration, 1814–1830.” In Capitales culturelles, capitales symboliques: Paris et les expériences européennes (XVIIIe-XXe siècles), edited by Christophe Charle and Daniel Roche, 25–43. Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne. ———. 2009. La France des Larmes. Deuils politiques à l’âge romantique. Seyssel: Champ Vallon. ———. 2012. “Expier le régicide: un deuil conflictuels sous la Restauration.” In L’Union du Trône et de l’Autel? Politique et religion sous la Restauration, edited by Matthieu Brejon de Lavergnée and Olivier Tort, 105–18. Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne. Garric, Jean-Philippe. 2006. La Chapelle expiatoire. Paris: Editions du patrimoine, Centre des monuments nationaux. ———. 2012. Percier et Fontaine: Les architectes de Napoléon. Paris: Belin. Gildea, Robert. 1994. The Past in French History. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 2008. Children of the Revolution. The French, 1799–1914. London: Allen Lane. Goujon, Bertrand. 2012. Monarchies postrévolutionnaires, 1814–1848. Paris: Seuil. Hardman, John. 2019. Marie-Antoinette. The Making of a French Queen. New Haven: Yale University Press. Journal des Débats. 1883. “Conseil général de la Seine. Séance du 12 décembre.” December 13, 1883. Kroen, Sheryl T. 1998. “Revolutionizing Religious Politics during the Restoration.” French Historical Studies 21 (1): 27–53. https://doi.org/10.2307/286925. Larkin, T. Lawrence. 2004. “Louis XVIII’s Cult[ural] Politics, 1815–1820.” Aurora 5: 28–55. Las Cases, Comte de. 1840. Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène ou se trouve consigné, jour par jour, ce qu’a dit et fait Napoléon durant dix-huit mois. 2 vols. Paris: Magen et Comon. Legacey, Erin-Marie. 2019. Making Space for the Dead: Catacombs, Cemeteries, and the Reimagining of Paris, 1780–1830. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lok, Matthijs. 2014. “ ‘Un oubli total du passé?’ The Political and Social Construction of Silence in Restoration Europe (1813–1830).” History  & Memory 26 (2): 40–75. https://doi.org/10.2979/ histmemo.26.2.40. Mansel, Philip. 2005. Louis XVIII. London: John Murray. Marrinan, Michael. 2009. Romantic Paris: Histories of a Cultural Landscape, 1800–1850. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Merriman, John. 2014. Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune. New York, NY: Basic Books. Michelet, Jules. 1847–53. Histoire de la Révolution française. 7 vols. Paris: Chamerot. Moniteur universel. 1816. “Opinion de M. le vicomte de Chateaubriand, sur la résolution de la chambre des députés relative au deuil général du 21 janvier.” January 12, 1816. Moon, Iris. 2017. The Architecture of Percier and Fontaine and the Struggle for Sovereignty in Revolutionary France. London and New York: Routledge. Peuchet, Jacques. 1838. Mémoires tirés des Archives de la police de Paris. 6 vols. Paris: A. Levavasseur et Cie. Price, Munro. 2008. The Perilous Crown. France Between Revolutions. London: Pan Books. Savornin, Abbé. 1865. Notice historique sur les faits et particularités qui se rattachent à la chapelle expiatoire de Louis XVI et de la reine Marie-Antoinette d’après documents officiels pleins d’émouvantes révélations. Paris: Chez A. Vaton. Skuy, David. 2003. Assassination, Politics, and Miracles: France and the Royalist Reaction of 1820. Montreal and Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Snay, Cheryl K. 2002. “Drawings for an Unexecuted Monument to Louis XVI.” The Burlington Magazine 133 (1189): 222–25. www.jstor.org/stable/889489. Stammers, Tom. 2020. The Purchase of the Past: Collecting Culture in post-Revolutionary Paris, c. 1790–1890. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

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33 OVERVIEW: 1815–1905 An Era of Tumult and Change Venita Datta

The era that begins with the Bourbon Restoration in 1815 and culminates in the 1905 separation of church and state and the first Moroccan crisis, which led to deteriorating relations between France and Germany and signaled the beginning of the pre–World War I period, certainly merits the label “tumultuous.” During these 90 years, marked by political upheaval and great social and cultural change, the French experimented with a number of regimes, among them a constitutional monarchy, an empire, and two republics. French leaders abolished slavery in the colonies and established universal manhood suffrage – both in 1848. Although the vote for women would take almost 100 years more to attain, the feminist movement in France made considerable strides during these years. Later in the century, in the wake of a humiliating defeat at the hands of a newly unified Germany in 1870 and a civil war the following year, the Third Republic (1870–1940) succeeded in converting a majority of the French people to republicanism. These years were also marked by the expansion of France’s overseas empire. Equally important, the nineteenth century witnessed industrialization and urbanization, leading to the rise of a working class, the transformation of Paris into an international capital, and the emergence of mass culture. The roots of modern French society lie in this period, such that writer Charles Péguy could observe in 1913 that the world had changed more in the preceding 30 years than since the time of Jesus Christ.

The Restoration The year 1815 was momentous; a year earlier, in the wake of Napoleon’s defeat, Louis XVIII, the younger brother of Louis XVI, had ascended the throne. Yet this Bourbon “Restoration” was not a return to the France of the Ancien Régime. A  number of changes brought about during the Revolution and the Empire were permanent. First and foremost was the nod to some kind of parliamentary system: the king proclaimed a pseudo-constitution known as the Charter, which, although it recognized the principle of divine monarchy, also made provisions for a bicameral legislature. Second, lands seized from the Catholic Church were not restored. While the Bourbon monarchs may have desired a closer a relationship with the Church, the latter no longer had a privileged relationship with the monarchy DOI: 10.4324/9780367808471-34

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and instead retained its status as the religion of the majority of the French people, as outlined by Napoleon’s 1801 Concordat. Third, hereditary privileges were not re-established. Finally, a centralized bureaucracy, whose construction had been begun by the revolutionaries and was enshrined in the Napoleonic Code of 1804, had become a permanent fixture in national life. A number of the new king’s decisions, however, alienated former Napoleonic soldiers, many of whom were retired at half-pay, while returning émigrés’ positions in the army were restored. So little loved was the regime that contemporaries showed no inclination to defend it when Napoleon returned to France from exile in Elba in March 1815. The adventure of Napoleon’s 100 days ended abruptly with his loss at Waterloo, and Louis XVIII was restored to the throne by the European coalition that had opposed Napoleon. Louis XVIII reigned until his death in 1824, when his younger brother, a devout Catholic, ascended the throne as Charles X. During these years of the Restoration, moderate monarchist groups alternated with more right-wing ones, the latter known as the ultras. After Charles X called for elections in 1830, which returned a majority hostile to him, he and his ministers passed a series of ordinances dissolving the Chamber of Deputies and altering the electoral system to prevent members of the wealthy bourgeoisie from voting. Demonstrations broke out, developing into the insurrection known as “les trois glorieuses,” the three glorious days, which led to the definitive fall of the Bourbons and the accession to the throne of LouisPhilippe d’Orléans, a member of the younger branch of the royal family. Louis-Philippe replaced the Bourbon white banner with the revolutionary tricolor and took on the title of king of the French rather than of France, committing himself to the ideal of a constitutional monarchy and the principle of national sovereignty. The July 1830 Revolution gave birth to the “bourgeois monarchy,” not only because the upper ranks of the bourgeoisie acceded to political and economic power, but also because the king, who conducted himself like a wealthy bourgeois, was concerned with the preservation of the family and property. The franchise was limited to the wealthiest classes, and a motto of the time, propagated by Prime Minister François Guizot in response to complaints from the rising middle and poorer classes about this exclusion, was “enrichissez-vous” (“get wealthy”). The years of the July Monarchy witnessed the beginnings of industrialization and urbanization and thus led to a profound transformation of the French economy and of French society. This period saw the growth of newspapers, facilitated by the mechanization of presses and the expansion of the railway to distribute them, as well as the rise of reading rooms, public lectures, and public concert series, which brought cultural products to increasingly larger numbers of people (Hahn 2009). Some of these educated members of the bourgeoisie sought greater political participation and were frustrated by the repressive measures aimed at tamping down political opposition. The lackluster nature of the regime was best illustrated by the return in 1840 of Napoleon’s remains from Saint-Helena; a more marked contrast could not have been made.

The Revolution of 1848 Karl Marx famously described the Revolution of 1848 as two revolutions, one more moderate, in February, and the other more radical, in June, castigating the bourgeois republicans for their hypocrisy and bad faith in repressing the workers’ revolt in June. The story of 1848 is, of course, more complicated. In part, the Revolution of 1848 was the result of 361

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an economic downturn, which served to exacerbate the unpopularity of a regime viewed as repressive and corrupt. Ironically, the bourgeois monarchy, while it had encouraged members of the bourgeoisie to expand their wealth, nevertheless, increasingly limited their political participation. In the second half of 1847, opposition groups began organizing a series of paying banquets to express their views (evading the laws making political clubs illegal). At the beginning of the following year, a group of workers followed suit, organizing banquets in the working-class districts of Paris. The government promptly declared these banquets illegal, leading to protests that culminated in the resignation of Prime Minister Guizot. Shortly thereafter, soldiers shot into a crowd, killing several protesters, sparking a popular uprising that resulted in the abdication of King Louis-Philippe on February 24. A survivor of the violence of the 1790s, the king was not inclined to prolong hostilities. On the same day as the king’s abdication, a provisional government was formed, composed of both moderate republicans, such as the poet Alphonse de Lamartine, and socialist republicans like Louis Blanc. The provisional government proclaimed its republican principles, but not a republic, until elections could be held in April. Only in May was the Republic officially declared, although the majority of those elected were conservative. In spring 1848, increasing tensions pitted moderate republicans, seeking to defend property rights and maintain stability, against more radical elements, allied with the working classes. When the conservative Assembly pressured the Executive Commission, which had succeeded the provisional government, to close the National Workshops, set up to provide relief to unemployed workers, widespread protests took place, leading to a clash between the workers and the government. This new insurrection, known as the June Days, was brutally crushed by General Godfrey de Cavignac, who was then appointed Head of State by the Assembly. Although the regime was officially a republic, its policies would become increasingly conservative. While the 1848 Revolution gave birth to the shortest-lived of the French republics, the changes it effected were long-standing. Not only was the Revolution part of a wave of revolutions in Europe; it also established the principle of universal manhood suffrage, eliminated the death penalty for political crimes, and abolished slavery definitively (abolished first in 1794, it had been re-established by Napoleon in 1802). Furthermore, it witnessed important feminist and socialist movements, which also laid claim to the Republican tradition. Indeed, feminists writing in La Voix des femmes drew parallels between women’s condition and that of slaves (Offen 1999, 152–53). In the wake of the June Days, women’s demands for equality were ignored or rejected. Nevertheless, despite its lack of success in passing legislation, the French feminist movement in 1848 was both the most advanced and the most experienced of the Western feminist movements (Moses 1984, 149).

The Second Empire The 1848 Revolution also represented the first time that the French experimented with an American-style presidential system. This experience (following the rise of the first Napoleon) brought his nephew Louis-Napoleon to power and led eventually to the Second Empire and would teach future French republicans to fear the “man on horseback.” Louis-Napoleon was elected president of the Second Republic in December 1848, having traded shamelessly on his family name with the new mass electorate. Three years later, on December 2, 1851, the anniversary of his uncle’s decisive victory at Austerlitz, Louis-Napoleon effected a coup 362

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d’état. Louis-Napoleon established the Second Empire the following year in 1852, dubbing himself Napoleon III (Napoleon’s son and heir, “Napoleon II,” had died in 1832). The 1850s witnessed an economic boom; while the government did not directly control the economy, it encouraged private capital and the development of the banking system to promote growth, both in the railroad industry and in the renovation of Paris. Napoleon III, along with his chief architect Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, prefect of the Seine, transformed Paris, truly making it the “capital of the nineteenth century,” as critic Walter Benjamin later dubbed it. Industrialization and a new transport system brought countless new workers from the provinces seeking employment to the capital, leading to overcrowding. Paris’s population had exploded from 786,000 to over a million between 1831 and 1851 and continued to soar (Horne 2004, 232). Most of the poor lived in dingy, overcrowded hovels. Paris was a series of little villages in which travel from east to west or north to south was difficult due to a lack of central arteries. The city was plunged in darkness at night and was dirty and insalubrious, with waste thrown into the Seine, leading to cholera epidemics, the worst of which in 1832 killed more than 18,000 Parisians, mostly in poor areas (Horne 2004, 218). Napoleon III sought to create a world-class city that would rival London on the international stage. His desire to embellish Paris was also linked to political and economic motives, which meant moving poor people out into the outer arrondissements/districts. Paris had led three revolutions in living memory. Building the grand boulevards made it both easier to bring in troops and artillery to fight rebels and harder to erect barricades. Napoleon and Haussmann built an axis from the place de la Nation on the east side to the Etoile on the west, also building the avenues around the Etoile. They constructed a north–south axis with the Boulevard Sebastapol, which cuts through the Ile de la Cité and becomes the boulevard Saint-Michel on the left bank. A further range of grand boulevards circled the city center, now moved farther west, among them the eponymous boulevard Haussmann. Paris also witnessed the multiplication of green spaces; a sewer system was built, although it was not finished until the early twentieth century, at which time the metro was also constructed; 32,000 gas lamps replaced 15,000 oil lanterns, and by 1878, electric lights supplanted the gas streetlamps (Horne 2004, 236). Finally, Napoleon and Haussmann also authorized the construction of the uniform buildings associated with Paris today on the new wide tree-lined boulevards. One of the crowning achievements of the plan was the construction of the Opéra Garnier, which became part of the neighborhood associated with the new Paris and a destination for entertainment and shopping. The boulevards, which housed department stores, newspaper offices, theaters, and cafés, gave rise to a burgeoning boulevard culture, attracting visitors from all over France and around the world, as the overwhelmingly successful World’s Fairs hosted in Paris in 1855, 1867, 1889, and 1900 attested. Furthermore, Haussmannization doubled the area of Paris through the annexation of outlying areas, thus increasing the population by 1/2 million inhabitants. By 1870, the population stood at 2 million, and by 1914, 3 million. The consequences of Haussmannization were thus of great import, especially the gentrification that pushed the poor increasingly toward the outskirts of the city. Indeed, it was these workers, feeling cheated and excluded by and from the beautiful new city, who participated in the civil war known as the Commune, in the wake of the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, and the collapse of the Second Empire. In contrast with the spectacular growth of Paris, life in the countryside, where more than half of the French population still made its living from agriculture in 1870, remained relatively unchanged. 363

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Nevertheless, the 1848 law establishing universal manhood suffrage, along with school reforms passed under the July Monarchy and the Second Empire, and the arrival of the railroad were slowly contributing to the increased integration of the countryside into the life of the nation, a process which would be accelerated by developments under the Third Republic in the 1870s and 1880s.

The Franco-Prussian War and the Commune When Mark Twain visited Paris in 1867, he was much impressed by the modernity of Haussmannized Paris, and the Universal Exhibition held there that year to celebrate the achievements of Napoleon III and his empire. Three years later, this glittering world would come tumbling down when Napoleon III was maneuvered by Prussian chancellor Bismarck into declaring war – a conflict that would result in the fall of the Second Empire, on September 4, 1870, after a decisive loss at the Battle of Sedan on the eastern border. The same day, the Third Republic was declared in Paris. Soon thereafter, on September 19, 1870, the Prussians besieged Paris, forcing a French surrender and armistice signed on January 28. The armistice allowed the French to elect new leaders to decide the fate of France – to end the war or continue it. These elections returned 400 monarchists and only some 200 republicans. Moreover, this vote overwhelmingly confirmed a desire for peace. Accordingly, the new government, essentially a republic in name only, signed a treaty with Prussia, giving up the two provinces of Alsace and Lorraine and paying a hefty indemnity. The new French government alienated many Parisians, not only by capitulating to the Germans when many of them had wanted to continue fighting, but also by moving the capital to Versailles, traditionally associated with absolute monarchy. Furthermore, the Versailles government set in motion a series of events leading to civil war. When it attempted to disarm the poorer sections of the city, notably Montmartre, which had raised money for cannons by public subscription, a skirmish broke out, killing combatants on both sides. Instead of negotiating with the rebels, the leader of the Versailles government, Adolphe Thiers, who had been part of the liberal opposition to the Second Empire, besieged Paris once again. The city’s “Commune,” initially declared in a festive atmosphere of radical liberation, was destroyed in nine weeks of a bloody civil war.1 The Communards’ name was a reference to the Commune of Paris, which, in 1792, under the leadership of GeorgesJacques Danton, had pushed back the Austrian invaders. In part, the Commune was a manifestation of the exclusion from the newly Haussmannized Paris of the working-class population of the city. A disparate group of individuals, the Communards demanded free education for all, workers’ rights, and women’s rights.2 Some contemporaries’ fears of such change coalesced into the legend of the “pétroleuses,” revolutionary women who were held responsible for the destruction of public buildings by arson (Gullickson 1996). Recent work by feminist historians illustrates how key women Communard leaders linked their ideas with those of the feminists of the 1848 Revolution and also shaped the feminisms of the fin de siècle (Eichner 2004). The destruction of key monuments in Paris was partly due to a Communard scorchedearth policy. As the Versailles troops made incursions into the city, the Communards set the Tuileries palace, a symbol of royal power, on fire, as well as the Hôtel de Ville, which dated from the Middle Ages. The last major battle of the Commune, which took place at the Père Lachaise cemetery, ended in the execution of Communards by the Versailles troops against the wall of the cemetery on May 28, 1871. This event has marked the collective memory of 364

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the Left; even today, Communists and Socialists make pilgrimages in May to lay wreaths and flowers on the site.

Third Republic Although the Commune ended in a victory for conservative forces and a defeat for the extreme Left, moderate republicans did eventually take over the Third Republic, assuming control in both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate. Historians have described the moderate policies of these republicans as the “republican synthesis,” which involved protectionism of French agriculture, and a weak executive (Hoffmann 1963). By 1879, what historians have called a “silent revolution,” had taken place, with the conversion of most of the French population, especially in the countryside, to republicanism. In power, republicans passed a variety of laws aimed at uniting and secularizing the country. They integrated the countryside into national life, in part, through a building program of railways, canals, and roads known as the Freycinet Plan (1878). They also passed a series of laws named for the minister of public instruction (and later prime minister) Jules Ferry, establishing free primary school education, making it both mandatory and secular. These initiatives further integrated the countryside into the nation by facilitating the circulation of people and goods, among them newspapers, read by an increasingly literate public.3 The program of secularization also manifested itself in the education of young girls and women; in 1880, the Camille Sée law established secular lycées for girls, although an identical secondary program for girls and boys was not instituted until 1924. While the republican legislators were more interested in wresting control of the education of women from the Catholic Church than in promoting women’s careers, the law had some unexpected consequences (Macmillan 2000, 145). The number of women enrolled in secondary schools rose from 4,377 in 1885 to 13,000 in 1900 (Sowerwine 2009, 36), and those taking the baccalaureate went from 1,148 in 1905 to 2,547 in 1914 (Macmillan 2000, 145). These years also witnessed the first modest numbers of women doctors and lawyers. Along with civic education, French was established as the compulsory language in schools, in order to impose a sense of national identity on peasants, for whom French had been a foreign language during much of the nineteenth century. Finally, the institution of universal compulsory military service brought young men of all social classes together and also required them to speak French. In his now-classic work, historian Eugen Weber details the processes by which these reforms turned “peasants into Frenchmen” by the eve of the First World War (Weber 1976).4 The year 1879 also witnessed the restoration of the revolutionary La Marseillaise as the national anthem, and the adoption the following year of July 14 as a national holiday. Furthermore, in 1884, the republicans re-established divorce, which had been illegal from 1816 to 1884, and although the reasons for divorce were limited, the republican legislators eliminated the provision from the Napoleonic Code which had distinguished between male and female adultery. An 1880 amnesty of the former Communards revitalized the working-class movement when its leaders came back to France after exile abroad. The labor movement, although vibrant – the 1893 elections led to the arrival of some 50 socialists in the Chamber of Deputies – was splintered. It included five different socialist parties (until the unification of the Socialists in 1905); an anarchist movement, which frightened Parisians in 1890s, when a few stray followers set off bombs in the very heart of bourgeois Paris; and a syndicalist movement, which eschewed political parties in favor of trade union mobilization. 365

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These divisions meant that fewer pieces of social legislation targeted at improving working conditions and workers’ lives were passed in France than in other major countries, where more unified movements had formed. The conservative nature of the Republic and a preference for rural interests meant that workers were among the forgotten members of the republican synthesis. Working-class living conditions were only slightly better in 1914 than in 1870. Statistics from the Ministry of Labor in 1889 indicate that a working-class family spent three-quarters of its income on food and the rest on rent (Sowerwine 2009, 70). Although workers had more rights under the Republic than under the empire, including the right to unionize, their working conditions were still abysmal. They worked long hours (in 1874, the National Assembly prohibited the work of children under 13 and limited those aged 13–16 to 12 hours a day, only slightly reduced to 10 hours in 1896) and earned little pay under dangerous conditions: something that drove miners to repeated strike action in the 1880s and 1890s (Sowerwine 2009, 71). An 1892 law eliminated women’s work at night – due to a fear for the infant mortality rate – and reduced the workday for women to 11 hours (further reduced to 10 hours in 1900), as well as for those under 18 (Macmillan 2000, 178; Accampo 1995, 9). Many feminists objected to this legislation, which discriminated against women by limiting their earning capacity and denying them agency, instead implying they needed protection (Stewart 1989; Macmillan 2000, 178). Regardless of such measures, by 1906, 38.9% of the adult female population worked, making up more than a third of the country’s workforce (Macmillan 2000, 161). If the working class was shut out of the republican synthesis, women occupied a paradoxical position; excluded from political participation, the Republic’s gendered ideology nevertheless placed them in their roles as wives and mothers at the very center of the nation. This central role of women was partly the result of demographic anxieties, which plagued the French at this time. Between 1870 and 1911, the French population grew by only 8.6%, while France’s rival Germany’s increased by 60% (Conklin et al. 2011, 76). As feminist scholars have illustrated, the “social question” was also a woman question (Accampo 1995, 10; Offen 2017). Moreover, the new technologies which led to the emergence of Paris as a cultural capital also facilitated women’s access to public life, as did new modes of consumption which integrated them more fully into the life of the nation (Holmes and Tarr 2007, 16–17). The history of feminism (a term coined in the 1890s), along with the history of women, has been examined closely in recent decades, although further progress is needed to fully integrate such histories into the narrative of this period. Feminism, while a minority activity, was very much in the public eye during the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth centuries, even sparking an anti-feminist backlash. In her now-classic article, Karen Offen divides various feminist groups of the time into two categories: familial feminists, who were focused on improving the lot of women as wives and mothers, and individual or integral feminists, who sought equality of opportunity irrespective of sex (Offen 1984, 654). Differences of class as well as an opposition between Catholic and anti-clerical feminists further exacerbated these divisions. Nevertheless, feminist campaigning groups in France counted 20,000–25,000 members in 1901 (Hause and Kenny 1984, 42) and well over 100,000 members by 1914 (Waelti-Walters and Hause 1994, 6; 167). Moreover, at least 11 feminist congresses took place in France between 1878 and 1903 (Holmes and Tarr 2007, 12). While Frenchwomen did not succeed in obtaining the vote (the lower house of parliament, the Chamber of Deputies, voted in favor of the women’s vote in 1919, but the upper house, 366

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the Senate, blocked it, refusing even to discuss the question numerous times), the years preceding World War I were vital for the feminist movement. Not only was it a golden age of the feminist press, but feminists also obtained the right of women to serve as civil witnesses in 1897, established the right of married women to keep their earnings in 1908, and also made possible paternity lawsuits in 1912 (Macmillan 2000, 217; Fuchs 2008). For colonial subjects, as for women, the very rhetoric of republicanism gave them the tools to protest against their exclusion, although these movements were accelerated after World War I. During the late nineteenth century, the French expanded their colonial empire such that on the eve of the First World War, France had the world’s second largest colonial empire after the British. During the years before World War I, the French established protectorates in Tunisia and Morocco, colonized Madagascar, as well as parts of the Congo, and extended their colonization of Vietnam. While colonization was not a majority concern for voters, the colonies were nevertheless very much part of the popular culture of that time, from the human zoos and the colonial villages and exhibits at the World’s Fairs, to songs, literature, art, and advertisements of the period. In recent decades, historians have clearly illustrated that colonization was very much a part of the republican discourse of the time, despite the apparent contradiction between the egalitarian ideals of the Republic and the hierarchy of “races” implied by an empire of colonial subjects (Stovall 2015, 206–7, 2021).5 Indeed, the idea of la mission civilisatrice (“the civilizing mission”) undergirded justifications for colonization, since French colonialists felt that “superior races” had both the right and the duty to “improve” the lot of “inferior races” (Conklin 1997). Other, more prosaic reasons also motivated colonial policy: a desire to maintain a strong role in world affairs and a need both for raw materials and markets for finished goods. The race for colonies led to the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, during which the European powers carved up Africa into spheres of influence, and France secured a near monopoly over the northwestern part of the continent. The persistent tension with Germany in these decades precipitated one of France’s greatest national scandals, the Dreyfus Affair (1894–1906), in which a French Jewish army captain, Alfred Dreyfus, later found innocent, was accused of selling secrets to the Germans. “L’Affaire,” as it became known, was much more than a question of the innocence or guilt of one man. Rather, it became a debate about French national identity, pitting those who promulgated abstract notions of individual rights, truth, and justice, inherited from the Enlightenment ideals of the French Revolution, against those who favored an organic, indeed a racialized, vision of a Catholic and rural France. In 1894, Dreyfus was condemned by a military tribunal to life in prison on Devil’s Island in French Guyana. Later, his supporters, known as Dreyfusards, found out that he had been convicted on the basis of documents neither he nor his lawyer had seen, and moreover, that a number of documents in his file had been fabricated. Dreyfus’s immediate family and friends realized that the real culprit was Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, who then demanded a military trial. Protected by his army superiors, he was acquitted in January 1898. Dreyfusards succeeded in getting a second trial for Dreyfus in 1899, but he was again found guilty – this time with an implausible modification of “extenuating circumstances”– whereupon his family members and friends encouraged him to accept a pardon from the French president. In 1906, the Cour de Cassation, the French Supreme Court, nullified the guilty verdicts, and Dreyfus was rehabilitated and reintegrated into the army. This military and judicial case became an affair of national opinion in 1898, in the wake of Esterhazy’s acquittal, when celebrated writer Emile Zola published an open letter to 367

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French president Félix Faure on the front page of the newspaper L’Aurore on January 13, 1898, accusing various military officials of covering up the crime. Henceforth, writers, artists, journalists, students, professors, and lastly, politicians were obliged to take a stand for or against. Indeed, the Affair divided groups of family and friends, especially among members of the avant-garde, who were the first to engage on both sides of the Affair. These events marked the entry of intellectuals into national life. While the concept of the intellectual was very much in evidence during the years immediately preceding the Affair in avantgarde milieus, it was the Affair that launched the word intellectual, which had heretofore been used as an adjective, as a noun. The intellectual, a product of a modern, democratic, and secular society, thus emerged as a new figure with the right and duty to pronounce on matters of national and international importance (Datta 1999, 1–16, 205–10). The Dreyfus Affair was also the first event of the mass media: in large part, a war of words and images, conducted in the press. Without a free press speaking to a literate public, underpinned by technological advances that facilitated the production and transport of newspapers, an affair of national controversy on this scale would have been unimaginable. Indeed, the period of late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a golden age of the press in France, with the four major newspapers selling 4 million copies daily in 1912 (Charle 2004, 160). Anti-Semitic newspapers played a huge role in the campaign against Dreyfus, foremost among them La libre parole, launched by journalist Edouard Drumont, along with the Catholic press, most notably La Croix, founded by the Assumptionists. The Affair thus also marked the beginning of anti-Semitism as a mass movement, carried on the back of the mass press and mass politics. Before the Affair, anti-Jewish feelings on the Left and the Right were casual and fairly widespread (although it is important to note that Left and Right as we know them were rather amorphous before the Dreyfus Affair, when fault lines hardened). On the left, socialists of various stripes saw Jews as bankers, equating them with the Rothschilds, as exploiters of the working classes, a pattern broken when Jean Jaurès, future leader of the Unified Socialist Party, came to Dreyfus’s defense. On the Right, Jews were seen as the killers of Christ. The originality of Drumont was in taking these different stands of anti-Jewish feeling and amalgamating them into a mass movement, which he promoted through his best-selling book La France juive, published in 1886, and his newspaper, La libre parole, launched in 1892. While Jews were in fact a tiny minority, 75,000 individuals out of a population of 39  million (Hyman 1987, 28), right-wing prejudice had long associated them with the French Revolution, which was considered by many on the right as anathema, as was the new Third Republic, whose leaders saw themselves as the heirs of the first revolutionaries. The new regime promoted new elites, among them Protestants and Jews. Anti-Semitism emerged at this time as a result of changes that frightened those who felt increasingly at odds with the new democratic society, industrialization, and urbanization. Small shopkeepers, who were among the most ardent anti-Semites, feared large businesses, department stores, and factories that could put them out of work. For these individuals, Jews were an easy scapegoat, on whom to heap all their fears about the aspects of modernity they rejected (Marrus 1987, 50). The Dreyfus Affair launched a debate about national identity. On the one hand were anti-Dreyfusards, who cherished traditional hierarchies – the Church and the army – and who felt that these institutions had to be protected at all costs, even if Dreyfus were innocent. They invoked the idea of reason of state, stating that the honor of these institutions had to be protected for the survival of the nation. Many of these anti-Dreyfusards viewed 368

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themselves as nationalists. Nevertheless, their new, integral nationalism, which married modern populist tactics to a traditionalist view of the nation, was xenophobic and racist, as opposed to the “open-ended” patriotism of the Revolution espoused by Dreyfusards, which had its own blind spots.6 The new, integral nationalism had shown itself on the rise in the previous decade, when former minister of war General Boulanger united jingoistic elements of the Left with the authoritarianism of monarchists and Bonapartists on the Right (Girardet 1983, 130; Fuller 2012, 39).7 Boulanger appeared to be a real threat to the Republic, even winning an election in Paris in January 1889. While Boulanger was tricked into leaving the country and died in exile,8 the new nationalism survived him and played an important role in the Dreyfus Affair. On the other side were those like sociologist Emile Durkheim, who countered the antiDreyfusard idea of reason of state by turning the argument on its head, claiming that a nation could not exist without the defense of individual rights. Dreyfusards, who saw themselves as patriots, used the language of the French Revolution – of universalism, human rights, absolute truth, and reason. While these two groups opposed each other, they were not monolithic blocs. Moreover, those on both sides, especially among avant-garde intellectuals, saw themselves as arbiters of national opinion. They also shared fears about their own role as elites in a mass democratic society and feared for French honor and manhood in light not only of the French loss in the Franco-Prussian War and the declining birth rate but also of the entry of increasing numbers of women in national life and the rise of a consumer society (Datta 1999), leading to what historians have dubbed “a crisis of masculinity” (Maugue 1987; Nye 1993, 1998). While the Affair may have ended in the triumph of Dreyfusards, their amorphous coalition did not endure. Divisive echoes in national memory, however, have long persisted. In 2006, historian Vincent Duclert, the author of a monumental biography of Dreyfus, wrote to French president Jacques Chirac, requesting that Dreyfus’s remains be placed in the Pantheon, the burial place of those who have served the nation. Chirac refused, claiming that the real heroes of the Affair, Zola and Jaurès, were already there, thus once again denying Dreyfus his heroic status (Duclert 2006). If the rehabilitation of Alfred Dreyfus in 1906 marked the end of the “Affair” era, so too did other developments, including the unification of the Socialist Party. The SFIO (the Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière) was founded in 1905, uniting the two major branches of the socialist movement. The first, under Jean Jaurès, had come to favor socialist participation in bourgeois governments, while the other, led by Jules Guesde, opposed it. Jaurès, however, due to his role as a key Dreyfusard, emerged as the ascendant leader of the SFIO. The year 1905 also witnessed an event a long time in the making, the separation of church and state, which put an end to the Concordat, the compromise effected by Napoleon in 1801, by which a measure of the papal authority (although not Catholic Church lands), seized by the French revolutionaries, was restored. According to the terms of the Concordat, Catholicism, while no longer the official religion of the country (thereby preserving the liberty of religious minorities – Protestants and Jews), was declared to be the religion of the majority of the French people, but henceforth, the salaries of all religious clerics were to be paid by the state. The role of Catholic congregations during the Dreyfus Affair – especially the Assumptionists – on the side of anti-Dreyfusards led, in part, to the electoral victory of the left-wing Bloc des gauches in 1902, headed by Prime Minister Emile Combes, a fervent anti-clerical. 369

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While the law of 1905 finalized the separation of church and state, earlier legislation paved the way for this final divorce. The 1901 loi des associations had forbidden the formation of religious congregations without the express approval of the state. In 1903, the government expelled over 80 such religious congregations and the following year banned religious orders from teaching, shutting down some 12,000 schools in France (Conklin, Fishman, and Zaretsky 2011, 113). Although the 1905 separation is seen today as a foundational moment for the principle of laicité (secularism, but better translated as laicity) in France, nowhere in the text of the law is the term mentioned. Instead, the law was an attempt to enshrine the principle of religious liberty as well as to establish the neutrality of the state with regard to religion, although some republican politicians must have had the cultural and institutional power of the French Catholic Church, especially its anti-republican activities during the Dreyfus Affair, in mind when passing the law. Indeed, the terms of its application were met with fervent parliamentary debates and much controversy at that time (Boutry and Encrevé 2006, 340). These tensions were soon supplanted by labor agitation and a huge wave of strikes, pitting former members of the Dreyfusard coalition against each other, as workers’ organizations collided with the rule of bourgeois republicans. One such prominent member, Georges Clemenceau, prime minister from 1906 to 1909, was responsible for the ferocious suppression of these strikes. On the international front, other realignments also took place. In 1904, France signed an Entente Cordiale with its imperial rival, the United Kingdom, in which the two countries recognized British hegemony in Egypt and French influence in Morocco. This agreement was only strengthened in 1905 when the Germans, attempting to divide the two allies, challenged the French presence in Morocco. A second Moroccan crisis took place in 1911, when the Germans sent a gunboat to the Moroccan port of Agadir after the French deployed troops in the Moroccan interior. While hostilities were averted – the Germans ­recognized French control over Morocco in return for territory in French Equatorial Africa – these events were clear steps down the road to the First World War and the further transformations that came in its wake.

Notes 1 Historians long put the figure of those killed during “bloody week” at 20,000. Recently, historian Robert Tombs (2012), who had also originally cited the 20,000 figure, has concluded that the number was many fewer, between 6,000 and 7,500. 2 Among the Communards were Jacobins and Blanquists, who favored centralized control, while others saw themselves as Proudhonians, and thus partisans of a decentralized federal tradition. Finally, some Communards were petit bourgeois rather than proletarian. 3 Historian Benedict Anderson has spoken of the “imagined communities” created by the readers of the various newspapers: Anderson, 1991. 4 While his characterization is criticized by some historians as exaggerated, they do not question his basic premise. 5 In White Freedom, Tyler Stovall has illustrated that the idea of freedom was always coded as White: Stovall, 2021. 6 Not only did they continue to impose French on the non-French-speaking inhabitants of the country, but they also excluded colonial subjects (not to mention women) from acceding to full citizenship. 7 Fuller asserts (2012, 11) that while most Nationalists in politics were republican, they and the entire movement were viewed as belonging to the “radical Right.” 8 He committed suicide on the grave of his mistress in 1891.

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References Accampo, Elinor. 1995. “Gender, Social Policy, and the Formation of the Third Republic: An Introduction.” In Gender and the Politics of Social Reform in France, 1871–1914, edited by Elinor Accampo, Rachel G. Fuchs, and Mary Lynn Stewart, 1–27. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso. Boutry, Philippe, and André Encrevé, eds. 2006. Vers la liberté religieuse: La séparation des Eglises et de l’Etat: Actes du colloque organisé à Créteil les 4 et 5 février 2005 par l’Institut Jean-Baptiste Say de l’Université Paris XII-Val-de-Marne. Bordeaux: Editions Bière. Charle, Christophe. 2004. Le Siècle de la Presse. 1830–1939. Paris: Seuil. Conklin, Alice. 1997. Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Conklin, Alice, Sarah Fishman, and Robert Zaretsky. 2011. France and its Empire Since 1870. New York: Oxford University Press. Datta, Venita. 1999. Birth of a National Icon: The Literary Avant-Garde and the Origins of the Intellectual in France. Albany: SUNY Press. Duclert, Vincent. 2006. Alfred Dreyfus: L’honneur d’un patriote. Paris: Fayard. Eichner, Carolyn. 2004. Surmounting the Barricades: Women in the Paris Commune. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. Fuchs, Rachel G. 2008. Contested Paternity: Constructing Families in Modern France. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University. Fuller, Robert Lynn. 2012. The Origins of the French Nationalist Movement, 1886–1914. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Girardet, Raoul. 1983. Le Nationalisme français. Paris: Seuil. Gullickson, Gay. 1996. Unruly Women of Paris: Images of the Commune. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hahn, H. Hazel. 2009. Scenes of Parisian Modernity: Culture and Consumption in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan. Hause, Steven C., and Anne R. Kenney. 1984. Women’s Suffrage and Social Politics in the French Third Republic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hoffmann, Stanley. 1963. “The Republican Synthesis.” In In Search of France, edited by Stanley Hoffmann, Charles Kindleberger, Laurence Wylie, Jesse R. Pitts, Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, and François Goguel, 3–20. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Holmes Diana, and Carrie Tarr. 2007. “New Republic, New Women: Feminism and Modernity at the Belle Époque.” In A ‘Belle Époque’? Women in French Society and Culture, 1890–1914, edited by Diana Holmes and Carrie Tarr, 11–22. New York: Berghahn Books. Horne, Alistair. 2004. Seven Ages of Paris. New York: Vintage Books. Hyman, Paula L. 1987. “The French Jewish Community from Emancipation to the Dreyfus Affair.” In The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth and Justice, edited by Norman Kleeblatt, 25–49. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Marrus, Michael R. 1987. “Popular Anti-Semitism.” In The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth and Justice, edited by Norman L. Kleeblatt, 50–61. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Maugue, Annelise. 1987. L’Identité masculine en crise au tournant du siècle: 1871–1914. Paris: Rivages. McMillan, James F. 2000. France and Women, 1789–1914: Gender, Society and Politics. New York: Routledge. Moses, Claire Goldberg. 1984. French Feminism in the 19th Century. Albany: SUNY Press. Nye, Robert A. 1993 (1998). Masculinity and Male Honor Codes in Modern France. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Offen, Karen. 1984. “Depopulation, Nationalism and Feminism in Fin-de-siècle France.” The American Historical Review 89 (3): 648–76. ———. 1999. “Women and the Question of ‘Universal Suffrage: A Transatlantic Comparison of Feminist Rhetoric.” NWSA Journal 11 (1): 150–77.

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Venita Datta ———. 2017. The Woman Question in France: 1400–1870. New York: Cambridge University Press. Sowerwine, Charles. 2009. France Since 1870: Culture, Society and the Making of the Republic. 2nd ed. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Stewart, Mary Lynn. 1989. Women, Work and the French State: Labour Protection and Social Patriarchy: 1879–1919. Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Stovall, Tyler. 2015. Transnational France: The Modern History of a Universal Nation. New York: Routledge. ———. 2021. White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tombs, Robert. 2012. “How Bloody Was la Semaine Sanglante of 1871? A Revision.” The Historical Journal 55 (3): 679–704. Waelti Walters, Jennifer, and Steven Hause, eds. 1994. Feminisms of the Belle Époque: A Historical and Literary Anthology. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Weber, Eugen. 1976. Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France 1870–1914. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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34 MEMORY OF LOST EMPIRE Annette Chapman-Adisho

France built its first colonial empire between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Although beginning modestly and with a few false starts, by the late seventeenth century, France had colonial claims in Canada, the Caribbean, West Africa, the Indian Ocean, and India. As quickly as France’s early modern colonial expansion peaked, it began to decline. The first losses came in 1713 at the conclusion of the War of Spanish Succession, when France ceded Hudson Bay, Newfoundland, and Acadia to Britain. Despite these concessions, French territorial claims, though not France’s settler population, in North America continued to dwarf the small British colonies clinging to the continent’s eastern shore. It was, however, at the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 that France’s first colonial empire largely disintegrated. Louis XV’s government sacrificed Canada’s fur trade, settlers, and expansive Native American alliances to retain France’s sugar-producing colonies in the Caribbean. In North America, France also lost the Louisiana territory, a vast terrain stretching from the Ohio River Valley to the Rocky Mountains and from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes. Additionally, the conflict put a halt to France’s ambition to expand its influence and territory in India. At war’s end, France retained five comptoirs (trading posts) with limited hinterlands: Pondichéry, Karikal, Mahé, Chandernagor, and Yanaon. The final losses came in West Africa, with Britain capturing France’s trading posts in Senegal, including the islands of Gorée and Saint-Louis. Tropes of loss figure large in how the French have understood their colonial expansions and contractions (Marsh and Frith 2011). In the late nineteenth century, colonial enthusiasts loosely linked as a parti colonial, used the loss of India, Canada, and St. Domingue (Haiti) to bolster their calls for renewed French expansion. This article will examine France’s first colonial empire and its losses not as the French conquered and colonized but as they and francophone societies have returned to these early efforts through history and memory. Memory of empire is a contested topic in France, with memory wars pitting the ideal of republican universalism against calls to integrate colonial and immigrant histories into the national narrative (Chabal 2015). Much of the attention in these disputes has been on Algeria and Muslim immigration to France. For France’s first colonial empire, the most contested arena of memory is slavery (Aldrich 2004; Vergès 2008). This article focuses on three instances of memory work that reflect significantly on France’s seventeenth- and eighteenth-century 373

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empire: the memorialization and commemoration of abolition and slavery, Acadian Canadians’ construction and revision of communal memories, and the Third Republic’s use of this early empire to advance new imperial initiatives. Through each of these, we see French efforts, in the Antilles and the metropole, as well as in a francophone population long separated from France, to define the place and meaning of this lost empire for a later age.

Remembering Abolition and Enslavement in the French Atlantic The most contested arena of memory for France’s first colonial empire is slavery. In 1848, following the revolution that overthrew the July Monarchy, France permanently abolished slavery from its empire. This was the second time France had abolished slavery; the first occurred in 1794 during the French Revolution. Napoleon reversed this first abolition eight years later when he sent troops to the Caribbean to reinstate slavery. In 1998, to mark the 150th anniversary of the permanent abolition of slavery in France’s empire, the French state planned a series of events beginning with a speech by President Jacques Chirac. Celebrating the 1848 decree, Chirac held up one figure for special praise, Victor Schoelcher. A  journalist, Schoelcher became a tireless advocate for emancipation in the 1840s. After the 1848 Revolution, he joined France’s provisional government as undersecretary of state for the navy and colonies and presided over the Commission for the Abolition of Slavery that drafted the general abolition decree of April 27, 1848. Schoelcher pushed for immediate abolition, a stance long advocated by Cyrille Bissette, a Black abolitionist with whom he had a very public falling-out from 1842. Bissette, more frustrated in his efforts to join the provisional government’s anti-slavery initiatives, has, nonetheless, been judged “probably the most important figure in French anti-slavery under the July Monarchy” (Jennings 2000). Schoelcher’s notoriety and political connections enabled him to overcome the gradualist approach of most French abolitionists and the obstruction of French colons (Jennings 2000). Martinique and Guadeloupe elected Schoelcher to represent them in the National Assembly. He accepted the seat for Martinique, thus clearing the way for Louisy Mathieu, a formerly enslaved man, to represent Guadeloupe. In Chirac’s account, behind the emancipation decree and the efforts of Schoelcher stood the French Revolution and the Enlightenment. Abolition was a demonstration of a universal French legacy of freedom (Reinhardt 2005). French Antilleans rejected Chirac’s focus on Schoelcher and the emancipation decree, countering with a narrative of commemoration that looked not at slavery’s end but at the two centuries of enslavement and resistance to it in the French Caribbean. Alfred MarieJeanne, president of the Regional Council of Martinique and the Martinique Independence Movement, declared: We do not celebrate the abolition of slavery. We commemorate the anti-slavery insurrection. There is a difference. The Negroes did not wait for a divine liberator from metropolitan France to lead the revolt. The slaves conquered their freedom on their own. (Reinhardt 2005) Oruno D. Lara, a Guadeloupean historian, argued the abolition movement in the Caribbean began as early as the 1760s and that the metropolitan French commemorations ignored these efforts as they focused on the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. 374

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Countering the metropolitan narrative, French Antilleans erected memorials in 1998 and the years following to commemorate and interpret the history of slavery and freedom on their islands. The memorials to abolition constructed in Martinique and Guadeloupe differ significantly from those found in Europe and North America. Memorial sculptures of slaves in Martinique and Guadeloupe depict them as dignified people who freed themselves as opposed to powerless individuals receiving freedom from a White benefactor (whether Schoelcher in France or President Abraham Lincoln in the United States of America).1 The memorials also highlight the resistance of maroons, enslaved individuals who escaped and established free settlements in the highlands of the French Caribbean colonies. Finally, in Guadeloupe, the memorials celebrate the heroism of individuals, especially those active in resisting Napoleon’s 1802 proclamation reinstating slavery (Reinhardt 2005). Napoleon’s effort was ultimately successful in Guadeloupe, though not in St. Domingue, where a revolution established the independent state of Haiti. Martinique, held by the British from 1794 until the peace of Amiens in 1802, never enjoyed France’s first abolition of slavery. Among the French Antillean memorials is the imposing sculpture Anse Caffard situated at the southernmost tip of Martinique. Commissioned by the city of Diamont, Anse Caffard was created by sculptor Laurent Valère and installed in 1998. It consists of 15 concrete statues, 2 and 1/2 meters in height, each weighing 4 tons. Arranged in a triangle, the figures face the ocean. White, the traditional color of sepulcher in the Caribbean, they commemorate 300 slaves who died chained together when the ship carrying them capsized a short distance off the coast from the memorial site on April 8, 1830, as well as all the “unknown victims of the slave trade.” The figures face the direction of the Gulf of Guinea, from which many of Martinique’s enslaved originated. Inscribed on the first figure is the epitaph “memory and fraternity” (Reinhardt 2005). In Guadeloupe, memorials have focused on the struggle against Napoleon’s effort to reinstate slavery. Regional and municipal councils have commissioned sculptures to heroes of this struggle, such as Louis Delgrès, who led a force against the French and chose suicide with several hundred of his followers rather than re-enslavement; or the Mulâtresse Solitude, legendary member of a rebel band that resisted the French, ransacked and burned plantations, and took White colonists prisoner. Solitude was captured and condemned to death, but her sentence was delayed to allow her to deliver her child. In May 1999, the government of Abymes, a suburb of Guadeloupe’s capital, Pointe-à-Pitre, with neighboring suburbs, erected a sculpture of Solitude created by Jacky Poulier. Today, she stands large with child, hands on hips, staring resolutely across the roundabout of the Boulevard of Heroes (Dubois 2006). Following the criticism of the 1998 commemorations of the abolition of slavery, the French National Assembly took further action to address the history of slavery in the French Empire. In 2001, the assembly passed the Taubira law designating the transatlantic slave trade a crime against humanity and defining its victims as both Africans and indigenous populations. Critics noted that the act fell short when compared to the 1990 Gayssot law on the Holocaust. The Taubira law did not identify the parties responsible for the crime, nor did it address the issue of reparations (Fleming 2012). The law was named after its parliamentary champion, Christiana Taubira, at that time deputy for French Guyana, and later France’s minister of justice (2012–2016). The French National Assembly was not the first to address the nation’s history of slavery. Since the 1980s, French museums have progressively engaged France’s Atlantic history, including its history of slavery. One of the first major exhibits on the slave trade was Les 375

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Anneaux de la Mémoire (Rings of Memory). Invoking through its title the shackles used by slave traders, the exhibit attracted strong public interest, running from December 1992 to May 1994. Les Anneaux is a striking example of the interplay of memory and history. Created by three community groups in Nantes, the exhibit broke the long silencing of Nantes’s role as a slave trading port. Slave trading was important to Nantes’s eighteenth-century economic growth, with 45% of French slave-trading voyages sailing from the city (Aldrich 2004). The Musée d’Aquitaine in Bordeaux demonstrates the role French museums have played in remembering and interpreting the history of French slavery. In 2009, the museum opened new permanent galleries dedicated to the city’s eighteenth-century history. Like Nantes, Bordeaux was an important eighteenth-century colonial port. In structuring its new galleries, the museum built upon two earlier temporary exhibits, Bordeaux, le rhum et les Antilles (1981) and Regards sur les Antilles (2000). It also considered the approaches to slavery and the slave trade taken by the Liverpool International Museum of Slavery and the Musée d’histoire de Nantes. Liverpool has the distinction of being the Atlantic port from which the largest number of slave-trading vessels sailed. In constructing its museum, the city sought to incorporate diverse voices from across its population and to include communal memories of the slave trade and its legacy. The result is a museum that respects community emotion, presents the history of the slave trade, and memorializes those caught up in it. In contrast, the Musée d’histoire de Nantes organized its exhibition more traditionally, placing evidence of the slave trade in chronologically arranged galleries devoted to the city’s history. For the Musée d’Aquitaine, the way forward was to adopt a middle path that used a historical approach to arrange the galleries but included within each questions about heritage and the continuing consequences of the slave trade and enslavement. The museum also sought to decenter the conversation by including the voices of the enslaved and by examining the contributions to abolition of slave revolts in the Antilles. In addition, the galleries present the city’s eighteenth-century African and gens de couleur (people of color) communities. Over 4,000 individuals of African descent lived in Bordeaux across the eighteenth century, arriving not from Africa but from the Antilles. Some were free, and some were enslaved. François Hubert (2013), director and head curator of the museum, argues that the efforts by French museums to discuss the slave trade and slavery, as well as the public interest in these topics, have made them enjeux de mémoire (sites of memory) in the sense discussed by Pierre Nora in his multivolume study, Les lieux de mémoire, translated as Rethinking France (2001–2010). Beginning with Schoelcher, Solitude, and French memories of the slave trade, slavery, and abolition challenge the historical periodization that brings the first colonial empire to an end in 1763 and demonstrates the difficulty of overlaying French colonial history onto French metropolitan history. Developments in colonization and imperialism do not neatly coincide with metropolitan politics. For France’s first colonial empire, slavery and abolition are among the most contested histories and sites of memory both in the metropolitan and overseas departments (Aldrich 2004).

Remembering Acadia and French Beginnings in North America In L’Acadie pour quasiment rien (Acadia for almost nothing) (1973), Antonine Maillet informs the reader, “I  will not lecture you on history, fortunate nations do not have any.” Maillet’s bon mot barely veils the importance history has played in Acadian identity. 376

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A Francophone minority in Canada’s Atlantic Provinces as well as a diaspora spread across North America, the Antilles, and France, Acadians have turned to history and historians to build and sustain their community identity (LeBlanc 2017). Acadia was France’s first permanent settlement in North America and predated ­England’s Jamestown and the French settlement at Quebec. In 1603, Henri IV granted Pierre Dugua de Mons, a protestant merchant, a monopoly on the fur trade in North America between the 40th and 46th degrees latitude, an area known to the French as Acadia, a corruption of Arcadia, an idyllic province in Ancient Greece celebrated by Virgil. Eighty years before Dugua, Giovanni da Verrazzano, an Italian sailing for François I, explored the North American coast and christened it Arcadia, finding in it Virgil’s pastoral idyll (Daigle 1995). For a century following Dugua’s landing, Acadians found themselves in the crosshairs of French and British ambitions in the Atlantic. Passing between the two states several times, they finally became and remained British subjects in 1713. When asked to swear an oath of allegiance to the British Crown, the Acadians demurred, having seen imperial powers come and go. After some delay, they agreed to a conditional oath that declared their neutrality with respect to both France and Britain. Finally successful in holding Acadia, the British began to encourage Anglophone settlement. Across the first half of the eighteenth century, increasing numbers of English settlers came to Nova Scotia, as the British called the territory. With renewed conflict between Britain and France in the War of Austrian Succession (1740–1747) and the Seven Years’ War (1754–1763), English patience with the Acadian position as “French neutrals” wore thin. In 1755, Lieutenant Governor Charles Lawrence, aided by Massachusetts’s governor, William Shirley, conducted a military operation to remove the Acadians. Scattering and dividing communities and families, the British and colonial ships carried approximately 7,000 Acadians southward, depositing them in Britain’s North American colonies (Hodson 2012). Many died in the process of removal and exile. Others fled to French-held Île-Royale and Île Saint-Jean (today Cape Breton and Prince Edward Islands) and la Nouvelle France (Quebec). Yet others escaped deportation by hiding in the region of Acadia. Known to Acadians as le Grand Dérangement (the Great Upheaval), the 1755 deportation became the founding trauma for la nouvelle Acadie. The arrests and deportations of Acadians continued until the end of the Seven Years’ War. Following the war, the British permitted Acadians to return, provided they swore an oath of allegiance and settled in small groups. The great majority of the returned Acadians merely came out of hiding, having never left the region. A few exiles made their way back to Acadie over the next decade (Rudin 2009). Acadia had changed; the former French towns, villages, and fields had new occupants, the Planters, who came from New England. Twenty years later, at the conclusion of the American Revolution, loyalists, both free and the formerly enslaved, joined the Planters, further swelling the English-speaking population. The Acadians rebuilt their communities in the eastern and northern regions of New Brunswick; small and scattered, with few schools and only missionary priests until the 1840s, La nouvelle Acadie was an insular society focused on family, parish, and a rural way of life (LeBlanc 2017). In the 1860s, Acadians in the Atlantic Provinces began to expand their horizons and communal ambitions through new institutions and stronger public advocacy. This Acadian consciousness-raising came in the context of the Canadian Confederation talks that began in 1864 and culminated in 1867 with the union of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec, and Ontario as the Dominion of Canada. It also occurred within the broad development of nationalist sentiment in the nineteenth century. The Acadians organized francophone 377

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colleges, hospitals, and newspapers. They called for French textbooks, francophone teachers, a francophone bishop, and bilingual publication of legislative debates. Beginning in 1881, the Acadians of the Atlantic Provinces held a national convention and chose a national holiday, August 15, the Feast of the Assumption. In subsequent gatherings, held at irregular intervals until 1908, conventions selected a flag, an anthem, an insignia, and a motto (Thériault 1995). This period of creative, nationalist activity is known as the Acadian Renaissance. Across the twentieth century, the deportation, the Acadian Renaissance, and the original settlement of Acadia have played roles in Acadians’ collective memory. Grand Pré (Great Meadow) is located along the southern shore of the Minas Basin of Nova Scotia. In 2012, the Landscape of Grand Pré became Canada’s sixteenth UNESCO World Heritage Site for its system of dikes and aboiteau (a wooden sluice system) built by the Acadians in the seventeenth century and maintained by the Planters and others who followed them. Through this system, Acadians claimed fields from the sea along the coastline of the Bay of Fundy. For Acadians, Grand Pré serves as a principal lieu de mémoire, marking their beginnings in tragedy. On September 5, 1755, at the church of St. Charles de Grand Pré, John Winslow, lieutenant-colonel of the Massachusetts’s Bay regiment, read the order deporting Acadians from Nova Scotia. Once allowed to return, Acadians reestablished their communities across the Bay of Fundy in New Brunswick and maintained a studied deference to the historical sensitivities of their English-speaking compatriots. In the mid-nineteenth century, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem Evangéline (1847) ignited public interest in the Acadian story and made Grand Pré a destination for American tourists. Evangéline tells the fictional story of a young Acadian couple separated in the deportation. Wandering across America in her exile, Evangéline is always one reported sighting behind her love, Gabriel. Eventually, she settles in Philadelphia and becomes a Sister of Mercy, visiting the sick and dying. There she finds Gabriel just in time for him to die in her arms. The image of a faithful, long-suffering Evangéline became a trope for the Acadians. History had dealt them a hard hand, but they persevered, silent, stoic, and united in their suffering. In the early twentieth century, the site of Grand Pré was developed beyond Longfellow’s fictional narrative as a memorial to the Acadian experience. The Acadien société nationale de l’Assomption built a memorial church in 1922. The following year, it unveiled a statue of Our Lady of Assumption, the patron saint of Acadians, and in 1924, it erected an iron cross, la croix de l’embarquement (the Embarkation Cross). In 1930, on the 175th anniversary of the deportation, the society opened a museum inside the church, completing the remaking of Grand Pré into a commemorative site (Rudin 2009). Who should control the public memory of the Acadian deportation? A striking aspect of the 175th commemoration was the participation of the Acadian diaspora. Dubbed “le mir­ ngland, acle acadien” by L’Evangéline, an Acadian daily newspaper, they came from New E Quebec, and Louisiana. Among these diasporic pilgrims was a delegation of 40 young women dressed in Evangéline costumes representing the Acadian communities of Louisiana (Rudin 2009). In 1955, the 200th anniversary featured regional events across the year in New Brunswick’s Acadian communities. Further, with the 1955 commemoration, a change occurred in the public discussion of the deportation. No longer were Acadians just long-suffering Evangélines; they were also a people who had faced trials and survived. In a speech to the Kiwanis Club in Montreal, Guy Frégault, a young Québécois historian, branded the deportation a war crime and argued that if the French had won the Seven Years’ War, there might 378

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have been trials comparable to Nuremburg, a bold statement in the decade after World War II. Le Madawaska, a French-language newspaper in Edmundston, New Brunswick, published the full text of Frégault’s address (Rudin 2009). Two substantial anniversaries for Acadians occurred in 2004 and 2005, first the 400th anniversary of Dugua’s settlement on Île Sainte-Croix, and second the 250th anniversary of the deportation. The early origins of the Acadian community had never been an emphasis for either the Acadian residents in the Atlantic Provinces or the Acadian diaspora. The 1755 deportation had marked the traumatic beginning of their national narrative. However, with the approach of the 400th anniversary of Dugua’s settlement, Acadian leaders in New Brunswick, especially at the University of Moncton’s Centre d’études acadiennes, began to embrace the early seventeenth-century origins of Acadia as a way to tourner la page from the trauma of 1755. No longer would Acadians find their origins in disaster; instead, returning to Dugua, they could now claim their place as modern people at the forefront of North American exploration and settlement. Despite high hopes, the effort to establish a new founding myth for the Acadians largely failed. Celebrations in Acadian communities continued to focus on the deportation and anniversaries related to the Acadian Renaissance (Rudin 2009). One controversy that marked planning for the 250th commemoration of the deportation was the issue of a British apology. Among the first to call for an apology was Louisiana attorney and Acadian Warren Perrin. In 1990, Perrin petitioned the British government to apologize for the deportation, provocatively accusing the British of genocide (Rudin 2009). Eleven years after Perrin’s petition, Stéphane Bergeron, a Bloc Québécois deputy with Acadian heritage, again raised the issue with a motion (M-241) that called on the Canadian government to seek an official apology for the harm suffered by the Acadian people in the deportation. The request was for a statement not unlike the apology issued by the British Crown in 1995 to the Māori people of New Zealand. As part of the Acadian diaspora, both Perrin and Bergeron were more assertive on the issue of an apology than were Acadians in the Atlantic Provinces. Initially, Acadian leaders in New Brunswick opposed Bergeron’s motion, seeing it as part of a Quebec separatist agenda. The Société nationale de l’Acadie (SNA) eventually declared their support of M-241 and appointed a committee to facilitate a discussion of it within the Acadian community. In the end, the motion failed (Belkhodja 2005). It then became a matter not of state but of civil society, as the SNA requested the apology from Elizabeth II through the good offices of Canada’s governor general, Adrienne Clarkson (Belkhodja 2005). The royal proclamation issued in September 2003 lacked any feature of an apology. The Crown acknowledged “the historical facts and the trials and the suffering experienced by the Acadian people” (Rudin 2009). For Acadians, founding settlers of French North America, the memory of France’s early modern empire is defined by loss and continuity. Residing for three centuries under English rule, they remain French. Ejected from their land, they re-established their community in diaspora and then in the region of Acadia. Remembering and forgetting, to borrow Ronald Rudin’s bon mot, they continue, a francophone fragment of a lost empire.

Remembering Les Vieilles Colonies In the last decades of the nineteenth century, France, along with other European states, the United States, and Japan, engaged in a global land grab that historians call New Imperialism. It was in the midst of building this empire that various French began to invoke the 379

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memory of France’s early modern colonial empire. Small pieces of this first empire, les vieilles colonies (the old colonies), remained in French control. France held as well some significant territories gained earlier in the nineteenth century, most prominently Algeria. For some, colonial expansion promised to restore the nation after the loss of Alsace and Lorraine at the end of the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71); for others, it was a distraction from domestic divisions between royalists and republicans. Léon Deschamps, a committed republican and colonial enthusiast, wrote several histories of France’s first colonial empire. In his 1891 Histoire de la question coloniale en France, Deschamps argued that the French were natural and successful colonizers. In fact, according to Deschamps, France’s genius for empire reached its zenith during the French Revolution, when the constituent assembly began to assimilate the colonies politically and economically into France. The national convention’s abolition of slavery in 1794 finished this work. In making this argument, Deschamps identified France’s Third Republic with its First Republic; however, he glossed over a significant difference. Unlike the French revolutionaries, the Third Republic did not extend citizenship to its colonized subjects; instead, it carefully avoiding doing so (Carroll 2018). Deschamps noted that since 1871, France had added 1,700,000 square kilometers of territory. This colonial growth, he argued, “was not government caprice. . .it was a work of faith and perseverance, ‘an investment in the long term’ ” (1891). Deschamps’ position was clear: France not only could be an Imperial Republic but, as one, it would also be a better colonizer. The Third Republic’s memory of France’s first colonial empire served its imperial efforts. One arena for this memory work was the field of colonial history; a second was the colonial expositions that displayed and celebrated empire, the largest of these being the Exposition coloniale international de Paris held in 1931. During the early Third Republic, the field of colonial history emerged and professionalized, as did institutions to prepare colonial personnel. Initially, a variety of individuals wrote colonial history, including military officers, colonial administrators, and missionaries. From the 1880s, the Sorbonne offered colonial history as a continuing education course. By the 1920s, new types of institutions, including provincial colonial institutes and business schools, began to teach colonial history. It also moved into the curriculum of the Naval Academy, the Collège libre des sciences sociales, the École nationale des langues orientales vivantes, the École colonial, and the Collège de France. Other indications of the professionalization of colonial history were the development of colonial archives and the awarding of doctoral degrees. From 1869 to 1936, French universities awarded 20 doctorates in colonial history, most for studies focused on the old regime colonies in Canada, India, and the Antilles (Singaravélou 2010). Colonial administrators played a critical role in developing the field of colonial history. Some wrote accounts of the societies they governed, while others worked to organize archives. In the years before World War I, they established historical societies both in the colonies and in metropolitan France. The largest of these was the Société d’histoire de colonies françaises, formed in 1912 by Alfred Martineau, the governor of Pondichéry. The society published a journal that initially focused on France’s eighteenth-century empire, especially its American and Indian Ocean colonies. In 1921, the colonial governments had their crowning achievement when they gained a chair of colonial history at the Collège de France and placed in it one of their own, Alfred Martineau. Martineau’s annual courses at the Collège focused on France’s eighteenth-century ambitions in India, and especially the career of Governor Dupleix (Singaravélou 2010). 380

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Martineau was a key figure in the scholarly activities related to the 1931 Exposition coloniale internationale de Paris, organizing the first international congress on colonial history and, with Gabriel Hanotaux, editing a six-volume history of French colonialism. Hanotaux, professor at l’École nationale des chartes, had a long investment in France’s colonial expansion. Coming of age in the years following France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, he saw history as a patriotic work, writing, “Having seen the war of 1870, I suffered with the nation’s defeat and I sought instinctively the laws of its greatness” (Grupp 1971). For Hanotaux, the French needed to demonstrate their vitality and capability; colonial conquests offered them the opportunity to do so. Significantly, Hanotaux served as minister of foreign affairs from 1894 to 1898, during the Third Republic’s expansion in Africa and Asia. Both Martineau and Hanotaux saw in France’s early modern empire a foundation for the nation’s imperial pursuits. While Martineau focused on Dupleix, Hanotaux looked to the career of Cardinal Richelieu, arguing that he had pursued colonial expansion to balance Spanish power. For Hanotaux, France was the bearer of civilization, the cultivator of Christianity, and the guarantor of Europe’s stability. Unlike other colonial enthusiasts, Hanotaux did not find economic arguments for colonization compelling. He likened colonies to children and, in a favorite metaphor, asked, “[W]hat mother calculates a return from her children?” (Grupp 1971) The Exposition coloniale internationale de Paris in 1931 was an event almost 20 years in the making. First proposed in 1913, its realization was interrupted by World War I and then by various governmental delays. When it was finally held, it followed one in 1930 that marked the 100th anniversary of the French conquest of Algiers. The two events have been characterized as an apotheosis of France’s second colonial empire and the apogee of the idea of its civilizing mission, thus making them for some a lieu de mémoire for the Third Republic. Charles-Robert Ageron (1984) explored this claim in his article on the 1931 colonial exposition in the first volume of Pierre Nora’s study of memory and French national identity, Les lieux de mémoires. Ageron concluded that the 1931 exposition was actually the beneficiary of a nostalgia for empire that followed the First World War. For Ageron, the Third Republic’s true imperial lieu de mémoire came in 1946, when France’s colonies began to become departments and their populations French citizens; citizenship represented true homage to the republic’s ideals. Even if one does not take the 1931 colonial exposition as a lieu de mémoire, it is a good point to consider the position of les vieilles colonies in this celebration of a France that circled the globe. The Exposition coloniale international followed in a tradition that stretched back to the colonial section in the Exposition universelle of 1855. Colonial expositions provided a platform to celebrate France as an empire builder. By the interwar period, they also provided opportunities for imperialism’s opponents. In response to the 1931 exposition, colonial detractors organized a counter-exposition, La vérité sur les colonies, that highlighted the mistreatment of the colonial people working at the exposition (Bollenot 2019). With the 1931 colonial exposition, organizers promised visitors “a tour of the world in a day.” Creating this world tour, however, resulted in a chaotic colonial geography. Pavilions to Somalia, Oceana, French India, New Caledonia, Guyana, Martinique, Réunion, and Guadeloupe stood aligned on the avenue des colonies, which culminated at a replica of the Angkor Wat temple, centerpiece of the Indochina display. Anne McClintock has called this jumble of colonies “anachronistic space” (Morton 2000). Presented as a collection of colonial fragments, the pavilions appeared, Patricia Morton argues, as a “procession of 381

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cultural treasures, spoils brought from the colonies to celebrate the victors’ triumph.” For Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Réunion, three colonies dating from France’s first colonial empire, the exhibition built pavilions in art deco or classical style, the metropolitan architecture underscoring a perception of these colonies as assimilated into Greater France. The Réunion pavilion was modeled on a colonial residence that had imitated the Petit Trianon. Although the exposition’s organizers hoped the event would strengthen support for empire, its contemporary impact was negligible, being greatest among schoolchildren. French politicians and the adult public expressed little interest in it (Ageron 1984; Morton 2000). France’s empire has come under severe critique since the post-war era of decolonization. Aimé Césaire, poet, politician, and author from Martinique, as well as a founder of the négritude movement, provided a critical assessment of French colonization from the mid1950s. Following the Second World War, Césaire advocated for Martinique to move from colony to overseas department and opposed calls for independence. In 1956, he announced his break with the ideal of assimilation in his address to the First International Congress of Negro Writers and Artists. Colonization, Césaire argued, broke the momentum of the conquered cultures and, at the same time, worked systematically to prevent their adoption of the colonizers’ civilization. This resulted in cultural anarchy with the indigenous culture dissolved, and in its place “a hodgepodge of features of different origin, overlapping one another without harmonizing” (Césaire 2010). Only through freedom and confidence could a people adopt and adapt foreign elements into their culture. In more recent decades, French scholars engaged with postcolonial studies have argued that France’s colonial and postcolonial history must be incorporated into the national narrative, and that only by grappling with this heritage will France understand the challenges facing it in the twenty-first century (Bancel, Blanchard, and Lemaire 2005). Françoise Vergès (2008) notes that recent histories and museum exhibits on slavery and abolition have given voice to slave traders, their descendants, and their cities but have continued to marginalize the enslaved, whose history remains fragmentary, preserved in oral tradition, poems, and songs, but not in the archives used to write these new histories. The refusal to acknowledge and integrate the history of slavery and the slave trade into the national narrative is, in her view, an impoverishment of France’s memory. In a 2018 debate at the Musée nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration, Pierre Nora and Benjamin Stora discussed the place of colonial memory in France’s national consciousness. Nora argued that colonial memory is complex and multilayered, and yet “colonialism” threatens to become aligned with all that is bad. “Today, under the word ‘colonialism,’ we are inclined not to perceive the immensity of the historic adventure, its phenomenal diversity which modified all parties.” Stora reflected on the dispossession involved in the continued absence of a serious reckoning with colonial history. Descendants of the formerly colonized find themselves, “men without a name . . . who have been dispossessed of a history by the colonial intermediary” (Nora, Stora, and Lacroix 2021). Remembering the lost empire of early modern France engages the past and the present. The history of slavery and abolition commands the attention of an increasing number of French men and women in both the metropole and the overseas departments – historians and museologists among them. Acadia’s story, a francophone fragment cast from its origins to the vagaries of history, offers a unique perspective on the role of memory in sustaining and even creating a community. For the Third Republic, France’s early modern expansion served to support an imperial republic that, like its predecessor, remains a contested legacy of varied lineage. 382

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Note 1 An example of the memorial sculptures to abolition in the United States is the Emancipation Group, depicting a freed slave kneeling at the feet of Abraham Lincoln. Until the summer of 2020, this sculpture was displayed in the Boston Commons. Following the Black Lives Matter protests that summer, the Boston Art Commission voted to remove the Emancipation Group. Jeremy C. Fox and Meghan E. Irons, “Boston to remove controversial monument depicting Lincoln standing over freed slave,” The Boston Globe, June 30, 2020.

References Ageron, Charles-Robert 1984. “L’Exposition coloniale de 1931.” In La République, vol. 1, Les lieux de mémoire, edited by Pierre Nora, 561–91. Paris: Gallimard. Aldrich, Robert. 2004. Vestiges of the Colonial Empire in France. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bancel, Nicolas, Pascal Blanchard, and Sandrine Lemaire. 2005. La fracture coloniale: la société française au prisme de l’héritage colonial. Paris: Éditions La Découverte. Belkhodja, Chedly. 2005. “L’Acadie: Une mémoire réaménagée de la reconnaissance au recommencement.” In Le devoir de mémoire et les politiques du pardon, edited by Micheline Labelle, Rachad Antonius, and Georges Leroux, 213–28. Sante-Foy, Québec: Presses de l’Université de Québec. Bollenot, Vincent. 2019. “ ‘Ne visitez pas l’exposition coloniale!’ La campagne contre l’exposition coloniale international de 1931, un moment anti-impérialiste.” French Colonial History 18: 69–99. Carroll, Christina. 2018. “Republican Imperialism: Narrating the History of ‘Empire’ in France, 1885–1900.” French Politics, Culture & Society 36 (3): 118–42. Césaire, Aimé. 2010. “Culture and Colonialism,” translated by Brent Hayes Edwards. 28, no. 2 Social Text (Summer): 127–44. Chabal, Emile. 2015. A Divided Republic: Nation, State and Citizenship in Contemporary France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Daigle, Jean. 1995. “Acadia from 1604–1763: A Historical Synthesis.” In Acadia of the Maritimes: Thematic Studies from the Beginning to the Present, edited by Jean Daigle, 1–43. Translated by Sally Ross. Moncton, New Brunswick: Chaire d’études acadiennes, Université de Moncton. Deschamps, Léon. 1891. Histoire de la question coloniale en France. Paris: Librairie Plon. Dubois, Laurent. 2006. “Solitude’s Statue: Confronting the Past in the French Caribbean.” OutreMers 93 (350–351): 27–38. https://doi.org/10.3406/outre.2006.4187. Fleming, Crystal M. 2012. “White Cruelty or Republican Sins? Competing Frames of Stigma Reversal in French Commemorations of Slavery.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 35 (3): 488–505. Grupp, Peter. 1971. “Gabriel Hanotaux. Le personage et ses idées sur l’expansion coloniale.” Revue française d’histoire d’outremer 58 (213): 383–406. Hodson, Christopher. 2012. The Acadian Diaspora: An Eighteenth-Century History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hubert, François. 2013. “Un exemple de commemoration critique: comment exposer l’esclavage dans un musée gran-public. Le cas du Musée d’Aquitanie.” In Cent ans d’Histoire des Outre-Mers, 591–607. Paris: Société française d’histoire des outre-mers. Jennings, Lawrence C. 2000. French Anti-Slavery: The Movement for the Abolition of Slavery in France, 1802–1848. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. LeBlanc, Phyllis, E. 2017. “Le role social des Historiens de l’Acadie.” Revue de l’Université de Moncton 48 (2): 129–45. Marsh, Kate, and Nicola Frith, eds. 2011. France’s Lost Empires: Fragmentation, Nostalgia, and la fracture colonial. Edited by Kate Marsh and Nicola Frith, 1–13. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Morton, Patricia A. 2000. Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Representation at the 1931 Colonial Exposition, Paris. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Nora, Pierre. 2001–2010. Rethinking France. Les lieux de mémoire. Translated by Mary Trouille, under the direction of Pierre Nora and David P. Jordan. 4 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nora, Pierre, Benjamin Stora, and Alexis Lacroix. 2021. Mémoires colonials. Montrouge: Bayard Éditions.

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35 FRANCE AND ALGERIA, 1830–1870 Gavin Murray-Miller

In June 1830, French forces landed at Sidi Ferruch, a town just west of Algiers on the North African coast. Military action had come following a series of diplomatic disputes with the Dey of Algiers over unpaid French debts dating back to the 1790s. Within weeks of the invasion, Dey Hussein ben Hassan’s regency government had collapsed, and a French military occupation was underway. “Algeria,” as the French-occupied territory soon became known, was deemed a French colony and a “land forever French,” according to King Louis Philippe in 1834. What began as a punitive military expedition had, within four years, come to mark a decisive turning point in the history of both France and North Africa. From 1830 until the French evacuation in 1962, Algeria would be a centerpiece of France’s global colonial empire and, indeed, play a pivotal role in the making of the modern French colonial state. Be that as it may, Algeria did display various characteristics that made it unique when compared with other overseas domains of the French Empire. Its proximity to the metropole – a mere 30-hour boat ride separated Marseille and Algiers at mid-century – permitted the state to take a more active role in managing colonization and colonial affairs. The colony’s sizeable settler population, numbering over 244,000 by 1872, nurtured strong economic, social, and emotional ties to the European mainland, providing a pillar of support for French rule on the ground. Prior to the establishment of the Third Republic in 1870, Algeria possessed an ambiguous status vis-à-vis the metropole. It was often subject to national and colonial discourses at the same time, generating debates over whether Algeria was a colonial appendage of the metropole or an extension of the nation across the Mediterranean Sea. Algeria’s large and primarily Muslim native population complicated such questions and gave rise to anxieties regarding the colony’s “French” status and identity. Between 1830 and 1870, French politicians and administrators persistently grappled with the so-called “Algerian question,” a blanket term encompassing a series of issues regarding the administrative, social, and cultural links between metropole and colony. In this respect, the “Algerian question” constituted a debate on the nature of the empire itself as France endeavored to reconstruct its global imperial status in the nineteenth century (Todd 2011). Histories of French colonialism have traditionally interpreted Algeria as the start of renewed French imperialism in the post-revolutionary period. Following the loss of much 385

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of its American empire in the eighteenth century, France slowly built a new colonial empire over the next century containing large swaths of African and Asian territory. While scholars have made categorical and qualitative distinctions between a First French Empire centered on the Atlantic and the rise of the Third Republic’s Afro-Asian empire a century later, the idea of a sharp chronological break tends to obscure the continuities and gradual developments that occurred over the course of the nineteenth century (Marsh and Frith 2011). Beginning with the short-lived Napoleonic expedition to Egypt between 1798 and 1800, North Africa would come to play a key role in reshaping the imperial formations and practices of earlier regimes, gradually redefining ideas of imperial governance and policy in the process (Coller 2010). Commanders in the Armée d’Afrique were not immune to the “cult” of Napoleon that grew up during the years of the July Monarchy. During the 1830s and 1840s, French politicians and imperial ideologues increasingly came to espouse the rhetoric of a new “civilizing mission” in Africa, painting the Algerian conquest in patriotic and nationalist terms that harked back to the period of revolutionary and Napoleonic empirebuilding. Critics presented Algeria as a space for a “modern” brand of colonization distinct from the mercantilism, slave labor, and plantation agriculture that had forged France’s previous Atlantic empire. Algeria was imagined as a settler colony where free laborers and farmers would found a “New France” on the shores of Africa and demonstrate a more humane style of imperialism consistent with the values of the French Revolution (Laurens 1990; Sessions 2011, 130–31). These ideological considerations fed into perceptions of the French “civilizing mission” and the strategies employed by colonial administrators when it came to governing native populations. As officials acquired a more comprehensive knowledge of North Africans through ethnographic surveys, they speculated on how supposedly “modern” Europeans were expected to relate to “primitive” natives living in tribal communities and beholden to religious authorities. These questions, rooted in fundamentally racist assumptions about non-European peoples, inaugurated debates over whether France should “assimilate” nonEuropean peoples to Western values and social practices or whether it should outline a model of “association” providing for a modus vivendi that would gradually improve native societies but allow them to remain culturally distinct. These questions touched upon a range of issues extending from education and language policies in the colony to whether and in what measure Algerian Muslims should be subject to French law (Abi-Mershed 2010; Lorcin 1995, 71–94). No consensus emerged on the state’s native policy during the formative period of 1830–1870, and frequently this irresolution provoked divisions between French administrators and settlers that destabilized colonial society. In a broader perspective, the debate over “assimilation” or “association” would provide a template for questions of French colonial policymaking well into the twentieth century and consistently inform how colonial ideologues conceptualized France’s “civilizing” role in the world (Conklin 1997).

Conquest and Colonization During the first decade of the conquest, French policy in Algeria remained indecisive in terms of both goals and strategy. There was little agreement on what France sought to achieve through the occupation. Should it content itself with controlling the coastal cities and ports? Should the military push inland to exert control over the vast Algerian interior? Or should France leave North Africa altogether, as some critics suggested? Following the collapse of the regency in 1830, large sections of the country were in the hands of 386

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tribal leaders and local power holders. The July Monarchy took a cautious approach at first, endorsing a policy of “restricted occupation” that slowly secured main cities along the coast. While French forces managed to suppress isolated pockets of resistance within the Tell littoral along the Mediterranean coast, it would take over a decade to conquer the hinterland, where the Sufi resistance leader ‘Abd al-Qādir held power. Drawing support from the neighboring Moroccan sultanate, ‘Abd al-Qādir established an independent emirate that, at its height, extended over roughly two-thirds of Algeria and persistently frustrated French efforts to push inland (McDougall 2017, 58–73). Abandoning the policy of “restricted occupation” for one of “total conquest” by 1840, the military set out to destroy local economies and drive native populations into submission. Colonial warfare encouraged and even normalized violent and destructive policies, including burning crops, confiscating livestock, and mercilessly pursuing those believed to be combatants (Gallois 2013; Brower 2009). “I believe that the rules of war authorize us to ravage the country,” Alexis de Tocqueville claimed in 1841, defending the brutality that French forces inflicted on Algerian communities (Tocqueville 2003, 114). It is estimated that approximately 825,000 Algerians died between 1830 and 1875 as a result of war and military operations, prompting some scholars to insist the First Algerian War was genocidal in its nature and intent (Kiernan 2007, 364–74; Gallois 2013, 69–88). France had little knowledge of the terrain and populations of the region prior to the invasion. Just as with Napoleonic Egypt, therefore, the government authorized a scientific commission for the exploration and study of Algeria. Experts were ordered to survey the land and people and provide maps for the military. Savants and military officials alike were particularly fascinated by the Roman ruins scattered across North Africa and drew broad parallels between the “civilizing” work being undertaken by France and the former glories of the Roman Empire. As the military commander and governor general, the Comte Valée professed: “I do not want to ravage this land already so devastated. . . . I want to remake Roman Africa” (Ageron 2005, 36). Such aspirations anticipated state-sponsored public works projects, improvements in agriculture, and urban redevelopment as France reintroduced “civilization” to the region. Claims that France was inheriting the mantle of the Roman Empire were more than simply rhetorical flourishes or dreams of grandeur. Emphasizing North Africa’s classical and “Latin” heritage made the French occupation appear natural and legitimated France’s long-term presence in the region. France was not conquering a people, military officials claimed; it was reviving civilization in a region degraded by centuries of ignorance and neglect (Effros 2018; Lorcin 2002). By 1848, large sections of the Tell and interior had been brought under French control and the resistance crushed. It would take nearly another decade before the military subjugated the mountainous region of Kabylia, effectively bringing major combat operations to an end. Slowly, massive displays of force and the destruction perpetrated by the military gave way to conditions of “low-intensity warfare” as Algerian natives learned to live under a colonial regime (McDougall 2017, 85). By mid-century, Algeria was firmly in France’s grip, but it hardly resembled a “French Algeria,” or L’Algérie Française, as colonial ideologues liked to boast. Achieving this goal required more than just military force. It required people, administration, and above all, time. Although Algeria was a military colony until 1870, militarized rule did not preclude European settlement. Almost from the start of the occupation, Algeria was imagined as a settler colony. General Thomas-Robert Bugeaud, governor general of Algeria from 1841 to 1847, famously claimed that France would conquer Algeria “by sword and plow,” entailing 387

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military penetration followed by agricultural settlement on a vast scale. Under the July Monarchy, the government sponsored a series of propaganda campaigns aimed at drawing settlers (colons) to the colony. The state offered concessions and transport for competent agricultural workers willing to emigrate and even employed pamphlet writers to advertise the region and make it attractive to prospective colonists (Sessions 2011, 219–49). A second strategy used to lure settlers from the metropole focused on giving Algeria a more pronounced French character. Beginning in the mid-1840s, settlements and towns were given names identical to French villages, such as Colmar and Épinal, while colonists coming from the same areas or regions were settled together, if possible. This form of colonization, which became increasingly popular under the Second Empire, was intended to foster a sense of community among colons and recreate French localities – the pays – in Algeria. Ultimately, these policies were designed to establish a social and cultural link between patrie and colony (Dodman 2011, 117–78). State-sponsored colonization sometimes served more direct political goals as well. Between 1848 and 1851, some 12,000 French laborers were transferred to North Africa under the Second Republic, in addition to radical workers and republican insurgents exiled by Louis-Napoleon after the Bonapartist coup (Heffernan 1989; Sessions 2015). While idealized hopes of transforming political prisoners and urban workers into productive colonial farmers proved largely elusive, this influx did expand the European population and brought a number of radicals and journalists to Algeria who would participate in Algerian political life over the 1850s and 1860s. Up until 1860, the majority of settlers were of varying European nationalities, primarily Italian, Spanish, and Maltese immigrants (Prochaska 1990, 124). The colonial administration remained suspicious of the loyalties of these non-French settlers, remarking on their tendency to “group together” and revert to their “primitive instincts” (Smith 1996, 37). Efforts at French community-building were ambitious at times but illuminated a troubling fact: “French” Algeria was more ideological fiction than reality. By the late 1850s, the European population consisted of nearly 190,000 inhabitants, of which just over 100,000 were French. These numbers paled in comparison to a native population of over 2 million. Immigration rates from the metropole remained low, revealing the unsettling fact that the French possessed little interest in leaving Europe for Africa (Desmaze 1859, 5–19). French and European settlers continued to remain a small minority in the midst of an imposing Muslim majority. As late as 1870, a colonial newspaper lamented the dearth of French settlers found in the colony, remarking, “[U]nfortunately after forty years of occupation the inhabitants of the metropole have not shown themselves prepared to flock to Algeria en masse” (Delimone 1870). For those French that did leave the metropole or who grew up in the colony, there came to exist a particular idea of L’Algérie Française which captured the imagination. They desired a French Algeria assimilated to the metropole and intimately connected politically, socially, and culturally to the French nation across the Mediterranean. In 1848, the Second Republic gave support to this ambition when it recognized the three Algerian provinces of Algiers, Constantine, and Oran as de jure French departments. The colony was granted the right to elect deputies to the National Assembly and participate in national politics. This policy of integration (rattachement) with the metropole bolstered the hopes of colonists for a more substantial union with metropolitan France. As one colon reminded his overseas compatriots in the newspaper Akhbar on April 6, 1848: “Frenchmen of the mother country and Frenchmen of Algeria, we are the same people!” A decade later, the colon journalist Clément Duvernois reiterated this point, contending, “Algeria is not a colony. Nobody has 388

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considered it such for a long time” (Duvernois 1858, p. 239). This growing sense of colon nationalism set the stage for ensuing struggles between civilian and military power in the colony. Colonists bristled at being subjected to military authority and complained about their lack of political rights under the militarized regime. They demanded equality with their compatriots in France, stressing ideas of citizenship and full inclusion in the national community. As long as the “regime of the sabre” ruled Algeria, colonists could not be considered truly French and would constantly remain outside the nation, colons argued. In their desire to create a “French” Algeria, colonists presented themselves as conduits for French and European culture in Africa. In the cities and settlements, they attempted to lead European lifestyles which they expected natives to emulate. They ran French schools with European curriculums; they organized sporting and social clubs and printed newspapers in French, Spanish, and Italian that were read at cafés run by colonists. Government public works projects assisted in this process, transforming sections of cities like Algiers and Constantine into European neighborhoods complete with wide boulevards, shopping districts, public parks, and Parisian-inspired buildings (Çelik 1997). These urban amenities gave Algerian cities a French stamp and sought to accommodate an incoming population “dreaming of Alsace and Normandy under the palm trees,” as the playwright Ernest Feydeau quipped (Feydeau 2003, 149). Consequently, Algerian natives were increasingly relegated to small urban enclaves like the Casbah or pushed out of cities altogether. “Not being able to do away with the Algerians,” the artist and travel writer Eugène Fromentin observed in the early 1850s, “we’ve left them with only just enough space to live in up on the belvedere of the old pirates” (Fromentin 1999, 12). Here was another impediment to the realization of a French Algeria: the natives. If colons resented military oversight, they also expressed antipathy for an indigenous Algerian population faithful to Islam and accused of being “barbaric” and stuck in its ways. The indigène was a persistent reminder that Algeria had not always been French, that its “Oriental” heritage and character remained just below the patina of Europeanization introduced by settlers. More strikingly, the Algerian indigène was a glaring symbol of the inequalities and racial hierarchies that ordered colonial society, aspects which further set Algeria apart from the French metropole.

Native Administration and Colonial Governance Colonialism not only posed crucial questions regarding how to manage a transplant European population in Africa; it also raised issues concerning relations with the indigenous peoples of the region, an issue which provoked a great deal of debate as France consolidated its control over Algeria. Notorious for violent policies against Muslim combatants on the battlefield, Governor General Bugeaud also experimented with the idea of subduing resistance through cooperative efforts. In the 1840s, he set up the Bureaux Arabes (Arab Offices), a special division within the military to serve as a liaison between Muslim notables and the French administration. Through the Bureaux, the military implemented a form of indirect rule that allowed officials to monitor the actions of Arab tribal leaders (Shayks), supervise Muslim judicial and religious institutions, and enforce taxation (Frémeaux 1993, 36–37; Ageron 2005, 71–95). The military was highly suspicious of the Sufi orders and brotherhoods that played a vital role in Algerian religious life. Sufi networks connected localities through affiliated lodges and schools run by specific religious orders, and these networks often transcended local tribal and ethnic lines. Resistance leaders like ’Abd al-Qādir had 389

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instrumentalized these networks, using them to rally soldiers and reinforce calls to jihad against the French. Heavy surveillance of religious orders and coopting prominent Muslim notables became cornerstones of the administration’s native policy, or politique indigène (Trumbull 2009). Special attention was given to native religious institutions. In 1851, the government created a Muslim religious bureaucracy – the culte musulmane – based upon the concordat model in France. Under this arrangement, muftis, imams, and Islamic judges (qadis) became salaried employees of the state, while the government was now responsible for maintaining mosques and Islamic cultural institutions. These bureaucratic structures served to create a particularly “colonial” brand of Islam through which French authorities attempted to command the loyalties of Muslim subjects (Saaidia 2015, 50–68; Christelow 1985). By exercising a measure of indirect control at the local level, these native policies aimed to curb outright resistance and fortify the tenuous présence française in North Africa. A significant number of the personnel staffing the Bureaux Arabes and military administration were recruited from metropolitan institutions, such as the École Polytechnique, where they had been exposed to utopian ideas, especially the philosophy of Henri de SaintSimon. They prescribed to ideas of social engineering and economic management, believing that society could be rationally organized and perfected. It was unsurprising, therefore, that Saint-Simonians took a special interest in Algerian colonization, seeing North Africa as a laboratory in which new social principles could be worked out and applied. With untrammeled faith in France’s “civilizing mission,” officials focused on improving native society and pushing the Arab population along the path of progress (Emerit 1941; Abi-Mershed 2010; Pilbeam 2013, 130–53). Leading this camp was Ismael Urbain, a mixed-race military interpreter who had converted to Islam. Urbain advised against policies of aggressive colonization and cultural assimilation favored by many colons, insisting they would only serve to incite conflict. Rather, in his opinion, it was necessary to “regenerate” Arab nationality and gradually integrate Algerian natives into modern society. In a series of anonymous pamphlets, Urbain called for a new policy oriented toward the creation of a multiethnic Algeria grounded in principles of justice and equity, an “Algeria for the Algerians,” as he put it (Voisin 1861). Colonists naturally scoffed at his suggestions, dubbing Urbain and his allies “Arabophiles.” However, colonists did have reason to fear. By the early 1860s, Urbain had managed to win over Emperor Napoleon III to his platform, casting the future of Algérie Française into doubt (Levallois 2001; Levallois 2012). In an 1863 memo drafted for the governor general, Napoleon III remarked that Algeria was not “a colony strictly speaking” but an “Arab Kingdom.” Leading on from this proposition, the emperor proceeded to sketch a plan for Algerian reform based largely upon Urbain’s ideas, emphasizing, “I am the Emperor of the Arabs just as I am the Emperor of the French.” Under the “Arab Kingdom” policy, natives were promised access to administrative posts and the protection of their religious and cultural identity (Rey-Goldzeiguer 1977). Two years later, the imperial government ruled in favor of conferring French nationality on Algerian Jews and Muslims, a policy that would ostensibly lay the groundwork for the “fusion” of the European and native populations. However, if Algerian Muslims were recognized as French nationals, they were not recognized as rights-bearing citizens. Subject to Sharia law rather than the French civil code, Muslims were not given French citizenship outright and were compelled to apply for it on an individual basis. The condition for citizenship was abandoning one’s Muslim status, effectively making Islam and French citizenship incompatible (Brett 1988, 454–56). The ruling of 1865 had troubling implications for the future. Legislators acknowledged a distinction between Frenchmen and French 390

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citizens, a distinction that made it possible to imagine two different legal and political systems for two separate communities, one composed of European citizens and another composed of Algerian indiènes, a category rife with racial and Islamophobic connotations (Blévis 2001). The conceptual architecture for the French colonial state was coming into place, establishing the context for an exclusionary regime that would permit a minority of European settlers to dominate Algerian society for nearly a century to come. By comparison, the history of Algerian Jews took a different trajectory. Numbering roughly 33,000 in 1870, Jews were a small but not insignificant part of the Algerian population. As indigènes, they were subject to French administrative oversight, but not the Bureaux Arabes. Instead, the system of consistories adapted from the French metropole was applied to Algeria, creating a centrally administered structure with the power to appoint rabbis, distribute funds for schools, and codify religious law (Smith 1996, 39–40). Certain assimilated French Jews in the metropole were eager to assist their fellow coreligionists in North Africa and hoped that the consistories might serve as vehicles for assimilating and attaching Jews to France (Schreier 2007, 87–98). After 1860, the Paris-based lobby L’Alliance Isréalite Universelle (AIU) would similarly take a role in Algeria. Committed to defending the rights of Jews internationally and applying political pressure to alleviate Jewish misery in Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire, the AIU supported the naturalization and assimilation of Algerian Jews as part of its modernization program. The republican Adolphe Crémieux was a founding member of the organization who, with the creation of the Third Republic in 1870, ushered in sweeping legislation that extended full citizenship to Algerian Jews in the three French departments (Roberts 2017, 5–11). While some historians have hailed the Crémieux Decree as the implementation of the “republican pact” in Algeria and the full assimilation of Jews into the French nation, others have remained skeptical. Judeophobia persisted in both France and Algeria after 1870. More critical accounts claim that the Crémieux Decree was designed to drive a wedge between the Algerian population, distinguishing Arabs from Jews in accordance with the dictates of a divisive colonial rule (Haddour 2000, 163–64). These arguments have far-reaching implications that extend beyond nineteenth-century Algeria and touch upon issues of “Arab antiSemitism” and Arab–Jewish relations central to contemporary Middle East politics. Yet in the context of French Algeria, 1870 clearly marked a watershed moment in the evolution of the colonial regime that would persist for nearly another century.

Conclusion At the Universal Exposition held in Paris in 1855, the French government anticipated familiarizing citizens and visitors alike with the “civilizing” work being carried out by France in its imperial domains. The organizers allocated a certain number of stalls to the French colonies featuring placards with information and a few choice colonial products on display. The small size of the exhibit and the dry presentation failed, however, to capture the public’s imagination in the end. Taking this lesson to heart, the government made certain not to repeat the same mistake during the next Universal Exhibition staged in the French capital over a decade later. In 1867, colonial displays were designed to grab spectators’ attention with living dioramas featuring North African craftworkers, jewelers from French Soudan, and African dancers. In this virtual mise-en-scène of France’s colonial world, Algeria was presented as a model colony transformed by France’s “civilizing” influence. The contrast between the lackluster exhibition of 1855 and the spectacle of 1867 was a telling indication 391

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of the changes that had occurred in the interval. The French state was coming to think of and represent itself as a modern colonial empire, at the center of which stood Algeria (Lemaire, Blanchanrd, and Bancel 2008, 97–109). A colonial mindset just as much as a new colonial culture was taking shape. The period of colonial conquest and consolidation between 1830 and 1870 in Algeria marked a transitional moment in the development of French imperialism and imperial ideology. Military and civilian authorities certainly drew upon former experiences of empirebuilding as they tackled the “Algerian question,” but they also elaborated new goals and practices in the process that paved the way for the République coloniale of the late nineteenth century. In the coming years, notions of colonial modernization and exploitation (mise en valeur) and spreading French “civilization” became ideological staples of a republican brand of imperialism that would be adapted to Tunisia, Indochina, and vast swaths of Equatorial Africa. As for Algeria, by the establishment of the Third Republic in 1870, many of the key features of the colonial regime were already in place. Most explicit were the divisions and legal categories that defined the particular contours of French colonial society. In Algeria, a vocal European settler population with a strongly nationalist ideology coexisted alongside a large Arab–Berber Muslim population subject to state surveillance and a special legal regime formalized under the Code de l’Indigénat of 1881. As was already evident by the 1860s, the state increasingly found itself serving as an arbitrator between two opposing and unequal communities. Over the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, metropolitan policymakers would wrestle with how to balance colon demands for dominance against native demands for rights and equality, a situation that ultimately proved untenable. In the end, it would take a violent militarized conflict and the realization of Algerian independence to settle many of the tensions inherent within the French colonial system as the “Second” French Empire inaugurated after 1830 gave way to a new understanding of a “postcolonial” French nation-state.

Works Cited Abi-Mershed, O. 2010. Apostles of Modernity: Saint-Simonians and The Civilizing Mission in Algeria. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Ageron, C. R. 2005. De l’Algérie “française” à l’Algérie algérienne. Paris: Bouchene. Blévis, L. 2001. “Les avatars de la citoyenneté en Algérie colonial ou les paradoxes d’une categorisation.” Droit et Société 48: 557–80. Brett, M. 1988. “Legislating for Inequality in Algeria: The Senatus-Consulte of 14 July 1865.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 51 (3): 440–61. Brower, B. C. 2009. A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahar, 1844–1902. New York: Columbia University Press. Çelik, Z. 1997. Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers Under French Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press. Christelow, A. 1985. Muslim Law Courts and the French Colonial State in Algeria. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Coller, I. 2010. Arab France: Islam and the Making of Modern Europe, 1798–1831. Berkeley: University of California Press. Conklin, A. L. 1997. A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Delimone. 1870. “De l’immigration européenne et de la naturalisation.” Akhbar, April 3. Desmaze, C. 1859. Rapports à son Excellence le Ministre de l’Intérieur sur l’émigration. Paris: Imprimerie impériale.

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France and Algeria, 1830–1870 Dodman, T. 2011. “Un pays pour la colonie: mourir de nostalgie en Algérie française, 1830–1880.” Annales, histoire, sciences sociales 3: 743–84. Duvernois, C. 1858. L’Algérie: Ce qu’elle est, ce qu’elle doit être. Algiers: Dubos Frères. Effros, B. 2018. Incidental Archaeologists: French Officers and the Rediscovery of Roman North Africa. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Emerit, M. 1941. Les Saint-Simoniens en Algèrie. Paris: Faculté des Lettres d’Alger. Feydeau, E. 2003. Alger: Étude. Paris: Editions Bouchene. Frémeaux, J. 1993. Les bureaux arabes dans l’Algérie de la conquête. Paris: Donoël. Fromentin, E. 1999. Between Sea and Sahara: An Algerian Journal. Translated by Blake Robinson. Athens: Ohio University Press. Gallois, W. 2013a. A History of Violence in the Early Algerian Colony. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2013b. “Genocide in Nineteenth-Century Algeria.” Journal of Genocide Research 15 (1): 69–88. Haddour, A. 2000. Colonial Myths: History and Narrative. Manchester: Manchester University Pres. Heffernan. M. J 1989. “The Parisian Poor and the Colonization of Algeria During the Second Republic.” French History 3 (4): 377–403. Kiernan, B. 2007. Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur. New Haven: Yale University Press. Laurens, H. 1990. Le Royaume impossible: la France et la genèse du monde arabe. Paris: Armand Colin. Lemaire, S., P. Blanchanrd, and N. Bancel. 2008. Culture Coloniale en France de la Révolution Française à nos jours. Paris: CNRS Editions. Levallois, M. 2001. Ismaÿl Urbain: Une autre conquête de l’Algérie. Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose. ———. 2012. Ismaÿl Urbain: Royaume arabe ou Algérie franco-musulmane? Paris: Riveneuve. Lorcin, P. M. E. 1995. Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice, and Race in Colonial Algeria. London: I. B. Tauris. ———. 2002. “Rome and France in Africa: Recovering Colonial Algeria’s Latin Past.” French Historical Studies 25 (2): 295–329. Marsh, K., and N. Frith. 2011. France’s Lost Empires: Fragmentation, Nostalgia, and la Fracture Coloniale. Lanham: Lexington Books. McDougall, J. 2017. A History of Algeria. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pilbeam, P. 2013. Saint-Simonians in Nineteenth-Century France: From Free Love to Algeria. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Prochaska, D. 1990. Making Algeria French: Colonization in Bône, 1870–1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rey-Goldzeiguer, A. 1977. Le Royaume Arabe: La politique algérienne de Napoléon III, 1861–1870. Algiers: Société Nationale d’Editions et de Diffusion. Roberts, S. B. 2017. Citizenship and Antisemitisim in French Colonial Algeria, 1870–1962. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Saaidia, O. 2015. Algérie colonial. Musulams et chrétiens: le contrôle de l’État, 1830–1914. Paris: CNRS Edition. Schreier, J. 2007. “Napoleon’s Long Shadow: Morality, Civilization, and Jews in France and Algeria, 1808–1870.” French Historical Studies 30 (1): 77–103. Sessions, J. E. 2011. By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. 2015. “Colonizing Revolutionary Politics: Algeria and the Revolution of 1848.” French Culture, Politics, and Society 33 (1): 75–95. Smith, A. 1996. “Citizenship in the Colony: Naturalization Law and Legal Assimilation in 19th Century Algeria.” Polar 11 (1): 33–49. Tocqueville, A. 2003. Sur l’Algérie. Edited by Seloua Luste Boulbina. Paris: Flammarion. Todd, D. 2011. “A French Imperial Meridian, 1814–1870.” Past and Present 210: 155–86. Trumbull III, G. R. 2009. An Empire of Facts: Colonial Power, Cultural Knowledge, and Islam in Algeria, 1870–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Voisin, G. [Urbain, I.]. 1861. L’Algérie pour les algériens. Paris: Michel Lévy.

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36 ENVIRONMENT AND TECHNOLOGY IN GLOBAL FRANCE, 1763–1914 Andrew Denning

For the French, the century and a half between the 1763 Treaty of Paris, which ended France’s global Seven Years’ War with Great Britain, and the first shots of a new World War in 1914 were defined by remarkable political instability. France whipsawed between three republics, two empires, and two discontinuous monarchical regimes. Similarly, in contrast with the continuous (if shifting) global power of the British Empire, France’s overseas engagements were in flux. The French ceded all territorial holdings in mainland North America as part of the 1763 settlement with the British, ending over two centuries of colonization there, and when Napoleon’s imperial adventurism on the European continent flamed out for the first time in 1814, France’s first colonial empire was abeyant. Remarkably, over the next century, France created its formidable second colonial empire, which would last until Algeria gained its independence in 1962. As early as 1900, it was the third largest empire in the world by territory (behind Great Britain and Russia) and the fifth largest by population (behind China, Great Britain, Russia, and the United States). At the turn of the century, metropolitan France (“the Hexagon”) comprised 250,000 square kilometers of territory and 39 million residents; its overseas empire – which included French Guiana, one-third of the African continent, and Indochina – added a further 11  million square kilometers of territory and 50 million colonial subjects. As the preceding figures suggest, France’s import as a great power was indexed to its overseas activity, regardless of which political regime reigned. Although French global influence ebbed and flowed between 1763 and 1914, that assertion of the French right to rule overseas (save for the forced postNapoleonic detachment from 1814 to 1830) is a continuity in modern French history. Central to this global orientation was the French engagement with the material world and, in particular, French claims to use scientific knowledge and technologies to overcome environmental challenges and improve the human condition, thereby creating progress and spreading a particularly French model of civilization. French claims to master nature through science and technology arose out of material and idealistic motivations. On the one hand, fighting disease, building infrastructure, and expanding scientific knowledge would provide material benefits by rendering overseas territories and populations governable, making administration more reliable and efficient, and expanding the profit margins of colonial economic schemes. On the other hand, French claims to bring nature to heel DOI: 10.4324/9780367808471-37

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in their empire, the vast majority of which lay within the forbidding climates and environments of the tropics, became a defining tenet and a constituent mission of French civilization. In these circular terms, the French engagement with colonial environments was both a means of extending French political and economic power and the very justification for overseas colonialism (Adas 1989; Headrick 2010). The connection between mastering nature and deploying scientific knowledge and technology in colonial territories proved so strong, in fact, that the French often pursued largescale development projects without any rational assessment of the political and economic dividends they would accrue. Such projects, furthermore, had major effects in metropolitan France itself. Imperial exchange was never a one-way street, and much of what the French learned in Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific shaped projects and policies within the Hexagon (Pritchard 2012). Indeed, historians have long noted that French efforts at state centralization in this time period were akin to the colonization of rural France, and many of the officials who undertook projects in the Hexagon cut their teeth in the colonies (Weber 1976). The French engagement with science, technology, and the environment connected the metropole to the colony and civilizing ideology to imperial practice, making this envirotechnical nexus a motor in the history of global France, a political constant within this era of rapid and often disorienting change. French imperial practice had long been shaped by environmental factors. Since the French first created settlements in what is now Canada in the sixteenth century, the cultivation and improvement of the land served as both a project to root a “New France” in the soil of the Americas and also a claim to stewardship and rehabilitation that justified the expropriation of lands from indigenous peoples (Parsons 2018; Hodson and Rushforth 2010). Similarly, French claims in the Caribbean centered on the development of tropical crops, particularly sugar. The physically intense nature of the labor, ideas about European unsuitability for tropical climes, and the sheer volume of labor required to make sugar production profitable encouraged the development of massive plantations and necessitated, in planters’ minds, slave labor. Caribbean environments and French desires for sugar therefore led the French to insert themselves into the West African slave trade, and by the mid-eighteenth century, 500,000 slaves inhabited the French Caribbean and 600 French ships plied the Atlantic to trade sugar, slaves, and manufactures. The Caribbean was the focus of French overseas activity, but the French also claimed island outposts in the Indian Ocean (the Seychelles, Reunion, Mauritius) to control that region’s trade in sugar and spices. As in the Caribbean, the labor economy of this trade led the French to practice slavery on a wide scale. Although the French had outposts across the globe in this era, their empire appears stunted and rather underdeveloped in comparison with their British rivals. In many areas of the world, they allowed the Spanish, British, and Dutch to invest time and resources, then sponsored pirates to seize their rivals’ bounty. This parasitic model of colonialism served them well in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. By the Seven Years’ War of 1756–1763, however, the French were caught between their desire to dominate the European continent and their global competition with the British for supremacy. At its core, this conflict was a colonial war over resource monopolies, with the British wishing to absorb France’s fur trade in the North American Great Lakes region and the fisheries trade in the North Atlantic. Beyond the ignominy of being forced to cede North American lands to the British after centuries of colonial jurisdiction, this war over the control of global resources led the French to pursue a spate of anti-British actions (notably, their support in the following decades for colonial revolutionaries against the British Crown in America), 395

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which shattered the French state’s economic model and led to cascading financial crises. Consequent attempts to extract new taxes from intransigent noble and church representatives culminated in the French Revolution of 1789. In these late years of the French first colonial empire, the environment not only shaped economic development and geopolitical maneuvering but also dictated colonial outcomes. After 1763, the jewel of France’s overseas empire was the slave-based sugar colony of St. Domingue (Haiti). As the complex society of slaves, free Blacks, mixed-race planters, and White colonists sought to come to terms with the meaning of “liberty, equality, fraternity” in the Caribbean, slaves rebelled against the French colonial government from 1791 to 1794, when France officially abolished slavery. Many freed slaves then switched their allegiance to the French to fend off Britain’s invasion and occupation of St. Domingue, which lasted from 1793 to 1798. And after a few years of semi-autonomy, the former rebels fought off Napoleon Bonaparte’s attempted reassertion of metropolitan control from 1802 to 1804, when Haiti proclaimed its independence. Throughout these conflicts, anti-colonial forces used the environment as a weapon. They deployed guerilla tactics and knowledge of the landscape to pin their various European adversaries to the lowland plains and ports of the colony during the fever season (circa June to December). There, higher population density and standing water allowed disease to run rampant through European troops lacking in herd immunity. For example, from 1793 to 1798, the British suffered a catastrophic casualty rate approaching 65%, the vast majority of whom died not in battle but from endemic diseases, such as yellow fever and malaria. In 1802–1803, some 80–85% of French troops died, most of whom succumbed to yellow fever (McNeill 2010). French difficulties taming the environments and peoples of the Caribbean led Napoleon to abandon his interest in the Americas, selling Louisiana (regained from Spain in 1800) to the United States in 1803 and withdrawing French troops from St. Domingue in 1804. With Napoleon’s focus trained on European hegemony, France’s colonial empire was at a low ebb. Nevertheless, the French remained globally engaged through their participation in the heterogenous, multinational cultural movement that was the Enlightenment. The French Enlightenment had a strong politico-cultural thread that argued against religious superstition and tyranny, as represented by thinkers such as Voltaire and Montesquieu. But the French Enlightenment also translated the practices and ideals developed during the Scientific Revolution to the realm of human experience, with a particular interest in science and the natural order of the universe. Indeed, the political and religious claims of French Enlightenment thinkers found their inspiration in the scientific realm. Enlightened claims to systematize knowledge in rational, taxonomic terms and render it useful were set out in Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s ambitious, groundbreaking Encyclopédie (published 1751–1766). As later encapsulated by the Marquis de Condorcet, such knowledge allowed for the “indefinite perfectibility” of mankind through the mastery of “the facts of nature,” which would eventually eliminate disease and increase the productivity of the land through the combination of scientific knowledge and the “mechanical arts” (i.e., technology) (Caritat 1796). The universalism of the Enlightenment (scientific laws were objectively true, regardless of who discovered them or where or to whom they were applied) and its utopian belief in mankind’s self-improvement became an impetus for empire and, in the nineteenth century, the credo of France’s secular civilizing mission. Simultaneously, French philosophers and scientists invented distinctions of “race” and elaborated arbitrary hierarchies among European colonists and the world’s colonized peoples, deploying them as justifications for French intervention. In short, the Enlightenment provided the material 396

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means to expand across the globe, the missionary zeal to do so, and a humanitarian justification for the seizure of foreign lands and the forced tutelage of non-French peoples. Within this abstract, universalist worldview, the world beyond the Hexagon became both the subject of French designs and a source of new knowledge and practices. After a fallow colonial period that began in 1814, the French re-engaged in colonialism and launched their second colonial empire with the invasion of Algeria in 1830. More than one Frenchman described the colonies as a “laboratory” for the development of French science, and applied sciences, such as agronomy, forestry, and tropical medicine, became central to French colonial endeavors by engaging in research and development (Osborne 2014). For example, as the French fell victim to malaria in the coastal Algerian port of Bône (modern Annaba) in the 1830s, a French doctor experimented with the use of quinine to treat the disease. Quinine prophylaxis became official policy in Algeria by 1836, requiring massive supplies of the compound, derived from the bark of the South American cinchona tree. The Natural History Museum in Paris acquired cinchona seeds from British explorer Hugh Algernon Weddell, and botanists worked to acclimate the plant to Europe and then to produce it in large quantities (Headrick 2010). The settlement of Frenchmen across the globe and the knowledge and practices of colonial medicine both emerged from French colonial engagements and permitted further colonial initiatives. With the fear of malaria exorcised, entire swaths of tropical territory were now within French reach. French scientists and colonial officials participated in international networks that created the knowledge necessary to advance imperial projects. The Swiss-born French doctor Alexandre Yersin isolated the plague bacillus in 1894 (the eponymous Yersinia pestis) following an outbreak in British Hong Kong; his colleague Paul-Louis Simond identified rats as the vector of the plague, following an outbreak in British Bombay (modern Mumbai) in 1897 (Vann and Clarke 2019). Yersin’s research lay at the basis of countless colonial projects in French Indochina in the 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century. He conducted research at the Pasteur Institute in Nha Trang to make rubber trees more conducive to plantation agriculture in the colony and collected climatological and elevation data to determine the ideal location for a mountain sanatorium to serve French soldiers and administrators (Aso 2009; Jennings 2011). As Yersin’s peripatetic career demonstrates, the French Empire drove the pursuit of knowledge in a wide range of scientific and medical fields, while the knowledge accrued in those fields informed imperial (and metropolitan) projects ranging from urban development to agronomy to public health programs. A paradox lay at the center of the Enlightenment–empire connection. The Enlightenment posited universal sciences and universal humanity, but the application of France’s Enlightenment-inspired civilizing mission created colonial difference – the distinction of races and cultures, and the differentiation of climates and environments. The enlightened project of producing taxonomies of knowledge created hierarchies of value. Such analytical lenses classified the deserts of North Africa and the tropical zones of sub-Saharan Africa and Indochina in particularly harsh terms. Compared to the temperate climate of France, French scientists described the tropics and sub-tropical North Africa as deficient environments with oppressive climates, defined by sweltering heat and either excessive or inadequate rainfall. They distinguished the healthy, moral climate of France and its aesthetically pleasing landscapes from the pathological nature of tropics, the overwhelming fecundity of which, they argued, produced lethargic, stunted societies. French anxieties about the physical and moral effects of the tropics stimulated medical research and also came to define French ideas of race, which transformed from fluid and changeable in the early nineteenth 397

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century to fixed by the century’s end. Worries about the relationship between environment, health, and disease produced an expansive idea of the tropics, one that spread far beyond the scientific definition of the areas of the Earth between 23 degrees latitude north and south of the equator to include the Mediterranean coast of Algeria and Tunisia (Jennings 2006). Because French North Africa was dangerous to French settlers and administrators, it had to be “tropical.” When Alexis de Tocqueville visited in Algeria in 1841, he described the country as at once desiccated and desolate. He argued that environmental and social factors conspired to render the country poor, but that the Mediterranean climate and landscape shared between North Africa and southern France would allow French genius to transform the desert into a verdant garden (de Tocqueville 2001 [1841]). French scientists fabricated knowledge of North Africa from their misreading of ancient Greek and Roman texts that described the southern rim of the Mediterranean Sea as the agriculturally productive “granary of Rome,” arguing that Ottoman tyranny had squandered the natural fertility of the land. The French misunderstood highly adapted Arab animal husbandry as misuse of the land through overgrazing and uncivilized nomadism, which they essentialized to define Arabs as a race separate from Europeans. Similarly, they interpreted Algerians’ deliberate burning of brush and timber to control pests and fertilize the soil as wasteful destruction (Davis 2007). Because the French viewed people and land as inseparable, the pacification of Algeria in the 1830s and 1840s undertaken by Thomas Bugeaud (who became governor general of Algeria in 1840) focused on severing the Algerian tie to the land. French troops practiced scorched-earth warfare, burning crops, slaughtering livestock, and enforcing ordinances that prohibited non-French from engaging in agriculture. As the French viewed it, Algerian intransigence was the natural product of their pathological stewardship of the North African landscape, and Bugeaud sought to discontinue the relationship between fallen lands and dangerous peoples (Sessions 2011). The “scientific” interpretation that Algerians wasted the land came to justify French conquest, the expropriation of land from indigenous communities, and France’s brand of settler colonialism. The French used settlers to transition French rule in Algeria from conquest to development, pursuing a romanticized vision of smallholding French farmers working the land to civilize it, while extending French visions of individual liberty (for more on the particulars of settler colonialism in Algeria, see Gavin Murray-Miller’s chapter in this volume). The familiar environment and climate of Algeria’s coastal regions made it an ideal site for French settlement. The French vision for Algeria would have the colony produce wheat, olive oil, and wine in vast quantities to serve French consumers. In Algeria, the development of the land through labor justified individual European settlers’ ownership of the land; in the aggregate, the development of the land in line with modern commercial agricultural practice would substantiate French claims to Algeria more generally (Sessions 2011). As in other global empires, the erroneous French belief that Algerians rapaciously denuded the environment of all resources justified French seizure and management of the land in the name of conservation. North African timber resources were a particular target of such measures, as the French understood forests as a definitively “Latin” characteristic of North Africa, and one that was endangered by “Arab” mismanagement. The conservationist environmentalism practiced by the French, in fact, became a pretext for the dispossession of native lands and injected French state surveillance and draconian administrative regulations into Algeria (Duffy 2018; Ford 2016). Whether used to improve agricultural productivity or to engage in environmental protection, the French claim to sole possession of scientific 398

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and environmental knowledge brought lands and peoples under French control and transformed non-French subjects into wards of the metropole in a paternalistic system. French colonial practice in this era followed an established pattern. First, the invasion and conquest of a region (Algeria, 1830–1847; Indochina, 1850s–1860s), where the French used medical prophylaxes; contemporary transportation and communications technologies, such as steamships and telegraphy; and superiority in firepower to overwhelm opposition. After leveraging these technological advantages, they turned their attention from so-called pacification to development. Technology again led the way, but whereas the conquest phase focused on controlling people, the development phase used technology to master environments. Projects of environmental and technological development were particularly central to the French Third Republic (1870–1940), which promulgated the paradigm of France’s unique “civilizing mission.” This mission mixed the material development of landscapes with the moral development of colonial peoples. In practice, the French deemed the latter impossible without the former. At the center of this mission was the concept of mastery – of nature, of body, of society, of self – which together would liberate individuals and societies from tyranny and lead to the efflorescence of the French model of civilization. This mission was nakedly paternalist, and nowhere more so than in the area of technology, in which French masters would guide colonial apprentices (Conklin 1997). Such projects were not the invention of the Third Republic. When General Napoleon Bonaparte attacked Egypt on the order of the Directory in 1798, he brought 54,000 men, 400 ships, and 150 savants – men of letters who included scientists, scholars, and engineers – to collect information about Egyptian culture and history. In practice, the short-lived French military occupation used such knowledge to recast the human relationship to nature in Egypt. Their zeal for rational governance led them to improve local infrastructures and public services through projects such as the purification of Nile River water for drinking and the installation of streetlights (Said 2004). This enigmatic mixture of forced military occupation and enlightened, humanist development foreshadowed the more systemic and ambitious civilizing mission of the Third Republic. The construction of charismatic, spectacular infrastructure became a major claim to France’s global imperial power in the nineteenth century, with varying degrees of success. The Suez Canal, constructed from 1859 to 1869 by the French diplomat-entrepreneur Ferdinand de Lesseps’s Suez Canal Company, transformed global shipping by connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea. Just over a decade later, De Lesseps sought to recreate the glory of Suez by constructing a sea-level canal in Panama to connect the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Digging began in 1882, and nearly 20,000 laborers (mostly West Indians) were employed by 1884. The combination of Panama’s tropical environment, the pooling of water made possible by the massive digging operations, and a new epidemiological pool without exposure to tropical disease made for ruin, with an annual death rate of 24% among employees of the French company. The catastrophic mortality, low morale, and investor panic led the de Lesseps-led Panama Canal Company to abandon operations in 1889, with only 40% of the canal excavated (McNeill 2010). Once again, the hubris of French plans to control the environment through science and technology failed due to the environment itself. Nevertheless, infrastructure projects remained central to French imperial endeavors in the Third Republic because they promised economic development, improved administrative efficiency, and the realization of the civilizing mission simultaneously. Such projects were often more ambitious and potentially transformative than they could be back in 399

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metropolitan France: precisely because in the colonies potential harm to subjugated populations troubled policymakers less than that to French citizens, landowners, and investors in the Hexagon (with the associated political fallout). As a result, experiments, mistakes, and successes forged at great human cost in this colonial “laboratory” made it a site of innovation and knowledge production that, once perfected, could be used in France in refined, proven form (Pritchard 2012). Colonial infrastructure projects followed a defined script, and French activity in Cochinchina (modern southern Vietnam; incorporated into French Indochina in 1887) is illustrative. After 1879, the military government of Cochinchina was replaced with a civilian administration, which immediately turned its attention to public works projects to realize the civilizing mission. Before such projects could be pursued, the authorities recognized that they needed more accurate information about the land and its peoples. Early efforts thus focused on creating and ordering knowledge in a rational, enlightened mode and comprised land surveys, sounding river depths, measuring tidal fluctuations, and charting water flow in the riparian landscape of tropical Cochinchina. Such projects emerged from the French experience with pacification in the region, when anti-French forces transformed the swamps of the Mekong Delta into a guerilla landscape and besieged French troops. French technological superiority, in the form of heavy gunboats, proved a liability in the sandy, shallow Mekong. The ebbs and flows of the river, which was subject to tidal pulses from the South China Sea, frustrated French attempts to fix their power in settlements, forts, and infrastructures. After their hard-won pacification, French officials focused on transforming the landscape to allow French military and transportation technologies to operate freely. They plotted a grid of canals, complemented by land-based roads and railways, to allow the productive circulation of French commerce and administrative officials (Biggs 2010). By transforming the swampy, shifting landscape of the Mekong into a settled environment shaped by enduring French infrastructures, the French sought to anchor their version of capitalist, imperial civilization in Southeast Asia. The civilizing imperial vision reached its zenith (or nadir) in colonial urban development. French urbanism was a defining feature of the nineteenth century, and Baron Haussmann’s transformation of Paris into a city of boulevards, sewers, and capital made the city a physical manifestation of French definitions of civilization and modernity (Harvey 2003). It should come as no surprise, then, that the construction of glittering colonial cities undergirded French claims to power from Dakar to Hanoi. Fundamentally, colonial urban development demonstrated French claims to manage nature through scientific knowledge and technological development. They transformed the spaces of everyday life by introducing new materials (concrete, glass, steel) and subterranean infrastructures (plumbing, sewage) in pursuit of the modern, rational principles of health, circulation, and visibility. Modern colonial cities not only were meant to improve the experience of everyday life (especially for Frenchmen) but also sought to render colonial societies governable, allowing the French to control crowds, manage insurrection, and eliminate disease. In the process, colonial urban developments, while putatively universally accessible, organized spaces by function. In colonial cities, spaces were segregated particularly by race, and unequal access to modern technological amenities perpetuated division and hierarchy. Colonized peoples found themselves encircled by expansive French developments, which produced the very disorders – overcrowding, disease, slums – that they claimed to eliminate (Cooper 2000; Wright 1987).

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When Paul Doumer became governor general of Indochina in 1897, he quickly announced his intention to move the imperial capital from southern Saigon (Cochinchina) to northern Hanoi (Tonkin). He continued the creative destruction of his predecessors in Hanoi, razing cultural and religious sites and hemming Vietnamese and Chinese into a dense native quarter bordered by a spacious French residential district and a separate administrative district. Hanoi lay in the floodplain of the Red River, and before French arrival, its residents worked around seasonal flooding. The colonizers sought instead to master the river, building drainage and flood control infrastructure. Despite the ever-present French universalist claims, the outcomes reflected racial inequality; the French sections of the city were dry and welldrained, while the native quarter suffered sewer backups that allowed floods of dangerous waste to enter into Vietnamese homes and businesses. Mundane infrastructure served French needs, while spectacular constructions, from palatial administrative buildings to wide boulevards and impressive bridges, manifested French power. The mile-long Doumer Bridge over the Red River, completed in 1902, encapsulates the paradox of colonial development. Its length and steel construction made the bridge a potent symbol of French prestige on par with the Eiffel Tower. In practice, the usefulness of the bridge was limited: it was too narrow to hold more than one set of train tracks. Like the sewers, the bridge served French material needs and demonstrated French status, while doing little to improve the lot of colonized subjects. Indeed, the French form of technological progress could produce disorder where order was supposed to prevail. French sewers in Hanoi created an ecological niche where the rats that hosted the plague bacillus multiplied, leading to a destructive series of plague outbreaks between 1902 and 1908 (Vann 2007; Vann and Clarke 2019). Officials in Dakar, Senegal, pursued similar projects. The French dredged the harbor and constructed breakwaters to transform the city into a major Atlantic port in the last years of the nineteenth century. The French designated Dakar as the capital of the federation of French West Africa in 1902, and like Hanoi, it became an emblem of the French civilizing mission. Quickly, however, as Dakar grew from a small town into a major city, malaria and yellow fever, the scourge of other tropical port cities in West Africa, decimated the population. The colonial officials, armed with modern scientific knowledge, recognized that both diseases were tied to mosquitos that thrived in standing water. Unfortunately, colonial officials vigorously policed Africans’ access to clean drinking water from French-dug wells, leading to the storage of open water jugs in the home and the further transmission of disease by mosquitos. The racially defined, unequal system of water distribution spread disease in Dakar. Like Hanoi, the administrators reacted with large-scale sewer and sanitation projects to control nature, and as in Indochina, these projects largely focused on European neighborhoods, furthering the racial segregation of the city. When the plague appeared in Dakar in 1914, the colonial administration forcibly removed 5,000 African residents (out of a total of 20,000) from the city, settling them in a segregated camp far from the city that lacked health codes, building regulations, sewage, and piped water. A  heavily policed cordon sanitaire half a mile wide separated the “infected” neighborhood from Dakar proper (Headrick 1988). Later, beginning in the early 1910s, Resident-General Hubert Lyautey of Morocco would follow examples from Hanoi and Dakar in his creation of the administrative capital of Rabat, which was defined by an urban apartheid regime of spacious European neighborhoods with modern infrastructure and a cramped Arab-Berber medina, separated by a wide strip of green space (Abu-Lughod 1980). As all these examples demonstrate, concerns about health and French claims to apply scientific knowledge to colonized environments produced strict racial segregation 401

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in the colonies. The material developments that typified the civilizing mission created and perpetuated the social distinction and racist practice that defied claims to enlightened universalism. The French experience of World War I  confirmed that as much as they claimed that their colonial subjects needed them to bring the fruits of civilization, France depended on colonial manpower to fight in the trenches and work in French factories, as well as colonial resources to keep the French economy humming in an age of total war. In response, the interwar period saw the amplification of the tendencies and contradictions of the 1763–1914 period, as the French pursued a comprehensive program of colonial development (mise en valeur), which focused heavily on technological and infrastructural developments (ports, roads, airfields, sewers) to master nature. While designed to improve French economic returns and the lives of colonial subjects simultaneously, this interwar program further exacerbated racial difference and unequal outcomes. French-built infrastructures remain one of the most lasting and visible legacies of France’s expansive global empire. The French claim to master nature through technology and science underscores the promise and the failures of the civilizing mission. Indeed, French-focused development rooted French visions of modernity from West Africa to Southeast Asia but also highlighted their strategic allocation of modern infrastructures to serve white European population centers, demonstrating that French development produced – and indeed depended upon – African and Asian underdevelopment. The connection between technology and civilization maintained its widespread appeal, however. When the French Martinican poet and politician Aimé Césaire critiqued French colonialism after World War II, he envisioned a bright future for once-colonized French subjects, in which national independence, combined with socialism and modern technology, would deliver the progress and development that the French promised but could not deliver (Césaire 2000 [1950]). Even as decolonization began in the years after World War II, the French definition of civilization, with its stress on mastering nature through technology, maintained its sway across much of the former French Empire.

References Abu-Lughod, Janet L. 1980. Rabat: Urban Apartheid in Morocco. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Adas, Michael. 1989. Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Aso, Michitake. 2009. “The Scientist, the Governor, and the Planter: The Political Economy of Agricultural Knowledge in Indochina During the Creation of a ‘Science of Rubber,’ 1900-1940.” East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal 3: 231–56. Biggs, David. 2010. Quagmire: Nation-Building and Nature in the Mekong Delta. Seattle: University of Washington Press. de Caritat, Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas, Marquis de Condorcet. 1796. Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind (translated). Philadelphia: M. Carey. Césaire, Aimé. 2000 [1950]. Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press. Conklin, Alice L. 1997. A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Cooper, Nicola. 2000. “Urban Planning and Architecture in Colonial Indochina.” French Cultural Studies 11: 75–99. Davis, Diana. 2007. Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. De Tocqueville, Alexis. 2001 [1841]. “Essay on Algeria.” In Writings on Empire and Slavery, edited and translated by Jennifer Pitts, 101–58. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Environment and Technology in Global France, 1763–1914 Duffy, Andrea E. 2018. “Civilizing through Cork: Conservationism and la Mission Civilisatrice in French Colonial Algeria.” Environmental History 23: 270–92. Ford, Caroline. 2016. Natural Interests: The Contest over Environment in Modern France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harvey, David. 2003. Paris, Capital of Modernity. New York: Routledge. Headrick, Daniel T. 1988. The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850–1940. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2010. Power Over Peoples: Technology, Environments, and Western Imperialism, 1400 to the Present. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hodson, Christopher and Brett Rushforth. 2010. “Absolutely Atlantic: Colonialism and the Early Modern French State in Recent Historiography.” History Compass 8: 101–17. Jennings, Eric T. 2006 Curing the Colonizers: Hydrotherapy, Climatology, and French Colonial Spas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2011. Imperial Heights: Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. McNeill, J. R. 2010. Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914. New York: Cambridge University Press. Osborne, Michael. 2014. The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Parsons, Christopher M. 2018. A Not-So-New-World: Empire and Environment in French Colonial North Africa. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Pritchard, Sara B. 2012. “From Hydroimperialism to Hydrocapitalism: ‘French’ Hydraulics in France, North Africa, and Beyond.” Social Studies of Science 42: 591–615. Said, Edward. 2004. “Orientalism: The Cultural Consequences of the French Occupation with Egypt.” In Napoleon in Egypt, edited by Abd al-Rahman Al-Jabarti, 169–80. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers. Sessions, Jennifer. 2011. By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Vann, Michael. 2007. “Building Colonial Whiteness on the Red River: Race, Power, and Urbanism in Paul Doumer’s Hanoi, 1897–1902.” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 33: 277–304. Vann, Michael, and Liz Clarke. 2019. The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam. New York: Oxford University Press. Weber, Eugen. 1976. Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Wright, Gwendolyn. 1987. “Tradition in the Service of Modernity: Architecture and Urbanism in French Colonial Policy, 1900–1930.” Journal of Modern History 59: 291–316.

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37 THE FRENCH PERIODICAL PRESS, 1815–1905 Ross F. Collins

Introduction The press in France dates to the beginnings of periodical journalism, with Théophraste Renaudot’s La Gazette in 1631. This was actually the earliest long-running newspaper in the world, predating the well-known London Gazette that sprang up during the plague year of 1665–1666. But influences and development of French journalism evolved so differently from those of other countries that by the nineteenth century, the genre became dramatically at variance in style and content from contemporaries. Before the Revolution, the old regime so tightly controlled French journalism that, in effect, the press served as celebratory mouthpiece of the Crown. Competing newspapers from abroad smuggled into the country, such as the Gazette de Leyde, did offer crosscurrents to the official press. But the monarchy indirectly influenced even this journalism and so, in effect, during the old regime, L’êtat est la presse. Close control of journalism from the monarchy encouraged growth of a separate non-political sort of press in pre-revolutionary France. As Bond (2021) investigated, these Affiches grouped advertisements for services, commodities, and real estate with space for letters to the editor, an early idea of a public sphere. While this style of consumer-oriented journalism declined after the Revolution, advertising sheets were still a popular product throughout the country during much of the nineteenth century. The French press and succeeding governments remained in a tight relationship well into the twentieth century. But the relationship was antagonistic more often than affectionate, dominated by encouragement, appeasement, bickering, punishment and often, mutual destruction. The Revolution of 1789 shattered the mold of state censorship and produced a veritable tidal wave of new journalism. Similar booms would recur throughout the nineteenth century, as well as similar recurrences of harsh press controls. A  tortuous zigzag between freedom and control over the press during the Revolution left many journalists who influenced successive regimes either jailed or dead. While the bloody excess ended in 1794 and journalists were hardly ever executed anymore, they were often jailed or exiled. That tradition also extended through nearly another century. Revolutionary journalism was exciting, possibly powerful, often profitable, and definitely dangerous.

DOI: 10.4324/9780367808471-38

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Most historians of the French Revolution acknowledge the power of influential French journalists to both shape the significance of events and to report them to a larger public. They became a link between public and their representatives at a time when few French could vote (Popkin 1990). Journalism in Paris emerged as an avenue not only to influence French public opinion as well as opinions of its representatives but also to actually offer an entry from press to political power. That also continued throughout the next century. The Napoleonic regime further contributed to the nineteenth century’s model of press activity. The emperor understood the power of journalism and propaganda as few before him did, setting up newspapers in conquered territories as early as 1797 and later establishing the Bulletin de la Grande Armée to celebrate his victories. But he was hardly a friend of press freedom. Censorship once again became the norm, and to assure unstinting loyalty from Paris journalism, he set up a wide variety of controls that authorities would revisit for three-quarters of a century.

The Restoration (1815–1830) Napoleon’s final defeat after the “Hundred Days” seemed to encourage many in France to yearn for a period of stability fondly thought to have existed with the old regime. Louis XVIII, heir to the Bourbon monarchy, returned from exile to restore peace and order. However, while the Restoration resembled the old regime, it was not the same. The king was limited by charter and an elected parliament. Those who could vote comprised a tiny minority of France’s 30 million population, just 100,000. This group paid high taxes and so were presumed to support a conservative government. The press generally grew during the Revolutionary period as a way for competing groups to assert power and influence. It also grew as a way to make money, as a popular newspaper could be lucrative. Most newspapers during this period, however, did not follow the idea of news as an effort to inform its readers about everyday events. The concept of newspapers in France as, in effect, mouthpieces of rival political groups became the standard for almost the next century, a way to influence a growing number of readers as a quasi-political party. For the Restoration government, this meant that opposition resided mostly within journalism. Opposition and popular opinion threatened the Bourbon monarchy. A group of journalism’s power-brokers met on July 5, 1815, to consider laws regarding the press under Restoration. Le Journal des Débats, a survivor of 1789, campaigned for a free press. Not surprisingly, the Crown had no interest in returning to a multiplicity of voices that might threaten the throne and so instead pursued a variety of controls that came to define the genre. Author and journalist Benjamin Constant warned that the tight control would, in effect, make the government responsible for everything that appeared in newspapers, thus exaggerating their importance. He was correct, although his admonition did not change the approach of succeeding governments (Collins 2007). Only with the beginning of the Third Republic did the government fully understand the instability that rigid press control encouraged. Press strictures, some dating to the old regime, others to Napoleon, and others a Restoration government creation, fell into three areas: administrative, financial, and legal. The idea that the government could actually censor newspapers, that is, send a team to remove offending material, was only one way to control, and in France a blunt way at that. More effective were a variety of controls that served to hobble the press. Some French ideas, notably the avertissement system, became a popular technique for repressive regimes elsewhere. 405

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Of several approaches to controlling the press, administrative controls tried to silence journalists most directly by censorship and threat. Prior censorship returned with the Restoration, a system familiar to most who presume this is what it means to control the press. Government censors examine newspaper columns before printing, requiring removal of any material authorities deem objectionable. This most detested system lasted from 1814 until 1822. At that time, parliament declared that it could return only in times of grave emergency (Feyel 1999). And while it did return for short periods, it did not return for any length of time until the First World War’s draconian restrictions put an end to press freedom. A more subtle control was “permission to publish.” One of the oldest forms of administrative controls over periodicals, this dated to the old regime. Aspiring editors or proprietors were required to state their intention to a government official, who would evaluate and decide if the entrepreneur was acceptable. This authorisation préalable served as, in effect, a government censorship tool, because the permission would have to be renewed at regular intervals. Newspapers displeasing to the government would not be accorded a renewal. The much-despised rule lasted until 1819, when the liberal Martignac government replaced it with a requirement to notify the government, but also a stipulation that the government could not deny a proprietor the right to publish. It was the conservative Polignac government’s attempt to return the rule in 1830 that precipitated revolution (Feyel 1999). A new administrative system of warnings (avertissements) that, in effect, made journalists self-censors appeared during the Restoration, but was not fully appreciated for its utility until the Second Empire and then employed enthusiastically by the government of Napoleon III. Instead of prior censorship, the government would respond to an offense with a warning. A second offense would mean a temporary shutdown of the publication. A third offense would evoke permanent suppression. This less labor-intensive approach encouraged obedience by vague threat always at the back of a journalist’s mind. It disappeared with the liberalization of the law toward the end of the Second Empire. Financial controls, in theory, allowed publication. But in practice, it became difficult, as newspapers hoping to publish needed to have access to anything from a considerable sum of money to a small fortune. They fell into three categories. Firstly, postal fees were used to manipulate a newspaper’s costs. Governments could require that subscriptions be handled only through the mail. Private delivery systems or criers who hawked individual issues on the streets would be prohibited. The cost of mailing a newspaper could be adjusted as necessary to punish more liberal newspapers likely to offend the government, while secretly supporting more conservative papers with subventions. The Restoration government also established a stamp-tax on each issue printed, ostensibly as a way to help pay for Napoleonic war reparations. In 1818, it became permanent. It was raised or lowered as authorities saw fit, at one point reaching 6 centimes per issue during the Restoration. This not only served to reduce the financial strength of newspapers but also, as newspapers passed on the cost to subscribers, assured that only the wealthy could afford a subscription. It was presumed that the wealthy also were most likely to be conservative supporters of the government. The most direct financial burden was the caution system, requiring proprietors to keep a sum of money on deposit with the government. Forcing newspapers to make a substantial financial commitment beyond the publication itself could ensure that only the rich – and presumably more conservative – would be able to launch a periodical. As well, it could serve to assure that the newspaper would carefully avoid offending authorities. In theory, 406

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the money would be returned should the publication cease business. In practice, it likely would not be, because should the newspaper publish any offensive material, the fine would be removed from the deposit. The deposit, now no longer at required level, would have to be immediately topped up. This meant a succession of press offenses would drain resources, so quickly forcing the newspaper out of business. It was this system, becoming most severe in its requirement of 24,000 francs during the June Days (1848), that led Félicité de Lamennais to remark on seeing his newspaper close, “You need money, a lot of money, to have the right to free speech. Silence to the poor” (Charle, 80). The third arm of state control was the system of press offenses (délits de presse) defined in law. Legal controls over the press spelled out specifically, or sometimes deliberately unspecifically, what newspapers could not write. The 1789 Declaration of Rights, Article 11, guaranteed free speech with the exception of “abuses of this liberty” as determined by law. What constituted “abuses”? That became a debate for numerous later governments. The Restoration government declared that “seditious writing” would be punishable, but what was seditious could be vague. Other offenses might include writing against the Catholic Church, disturbing public order, and questioning the king’s authority or the stability of state institutions (Bellanger et al. 1969). The length and detail of such lists waxed and waned with successive governments across the century, at one point including simple “bad faith.” Journalists convicted of a press offense could be fined, jailed, or both. This might suggest the control was as effective as the avertissement (warning), but convictions depended on circumstances. Governments that required a trial by magistrate saw more convictions, as a government official would generally be more strict. Trial by jury saw fewer convictions, as the public generally showed more leniency. More liberal governments allowed jury trials for press offenses. They appeared at the beginning of both the 1830 and 1848 governments. But the “June Days” of 1848 provoked a return to magistrate trials, ending with the coup d’état of 1851 and a return to stringent press controls. A relaxation of press control returned the jury trial system in 1867 (Feyel 1999). The harsh regime of press control during the Restoration sought to doom the press to small circulations and a small role in society. Circulations, indeed, were low. The most important Paris dailies during this period, such as Le Constitutionnel, printed just 3,000 copies in 1816. By 1831, this reached 23,000, but the tirage of other important dailies was lower. Le Journal des Débats circulated 12,600; Le Quotidienne, 6,500. They were rare and expensive, 80 francs a year, subscription only, payable in advance. The average Frenchman (as women seldom read newspapers during this time) would need to work 421 hours to afford a subscription (Charle 2004). Literacy in 1832 was less than 50%, and travel to the provinces was slow. Editors saw no point in trying to report daily events; the approach instead was to interpret them, and to comment on them. This was the presse d’opinion, a dominant feature of French journalism that remained a force until the Great War. While small in circulation, it was not true that the press was small in reach. Dating from the old regime, reading rooms offered the opportunity at a low price (sometimes as low as five centimes) to read a spectrum of Paris press. They became so popular during the Restoration that, often, patrons needed to reserve a place in advance. Reading rooms spread to most larger cities, and although literacy rates were not high, often those who could read newspapers aloud to others. The guarantee was that each edition would be read by many, strengthening journalism power beyond apparent circulation numbers. It can be argued that influence of relatively uncommon and high-priced newspaper gave the 407

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press far more power than later, when high-circulation, low-priced newspapers competed for readers. Worth noting as well, in comparison with the influential British press, French circulations were not dramatically low; the important newspapers of the era grew until, by 1825, Le Constitutionnel circulated 16,000, and Le Journal des Débats 15,000, while the London Times circulated 10,000 (Bellanger et al. 1969). Controls on the Restoration press were relaxed in 1819 with the Lois de Serre. Censorship disappeared, as did prior authorization to publish. However, an innovation among the constellation of press controls appeared, the caution deposit. Need for serious money to finance a newspaper drove Paris journalism to stronger ties with commerce that lasted until the Second World War. Le Constitutionnel, the most important political newspaper during the Restoration, was founded in 1817 with shares of stock at 3,000 francs each. Investors expected a profit, and often, despite the controls, newspaper publishing did pay off. But the possibility of maintaining a relatively prosperous publication despite government constraints dimmed in 1827. A  conservative government tightened controls over jointstock companies supporting newspapers. In addition, the stamp tax in 1828 ballooned to 10 centimes per issue (Feyel 1999). Increasingly desperate publishers searched for a source of funds from a source long-established in Anglo-Saxon countries but long-disdained in France: advertising. Traditionally, French journalists distrusted advertising, a suspicion dating to Revolutionary times. Part of this was elitism; journalists considered it disreputable. The ostensible purpose of the original presse d’opinion was not to make a profit (though they often actually did). It was to educate and to project influence. Separate publications were available for advertisers, and a few newspapers accepted occasional ads gratis as a public service. But taxes and postal fees now reached to half the cost of publishing, and subscriptions could be raised only so much. The government actually encouraged newspapers to try advertising, possibly because space given over to commercial concerns would leave less room for political polemics. Le Consitutionnel and Le Journal des Débats in 1825 together gave over less than 1% of space to advertising. In 1828, they announced that as a public utility, they would now accept it. Advertising proved reasonably popular (Bellanger et al. 1969) but still was less than one-fifth of the newspaper, compared to a time when the Anglo-Saxon press devoted full pages to advertising. French distrust of advertising never did actually dissipate. Limited ability to attract advertising was at the core of the Third Republic press’s presumed corruption. In 1830, the archconservative Polignac government decided to bring back the requirement for permission to publish and enforce renewal of it at intervals of three months. Strong opposition from the liberal press culminated in a decision to refuse obedience to a law journalists deemed illegitimate. Future politician Adolphe Thiers, who co-founded Le National with historian François-Auguste Mignet and editor Armand Carrel, decided in July to produce a defiant protest signed by 44 journalists and proprietors. Police raided offices of Le National and Le Temps; workers took to the barricades, animated by the liberal press that, in effect, prepared the ground for revolution (Bellanger et al. 1969).

The July Monarchy (1830–1848) Most great innovations of French journalism had beginnings in the Orleanist July Monarchy, though the regime lasted not even a generation. The French penny press (presse à 408

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5 or 10 centimes) grew out of this period to become the world’s dominant press by circulation. Sketches published as engravings reached a high level of sophistication. The serialized novel became a rage that produced famous authors still read today, and famous characters who have migrated to film and television. Faits divers, a chronicle of crime and gossip that defies English translation, grew from popular to sometimes national obsession. The press expanded to reach new audiences of all political tastes, as well as women, and specialized publications for professions. The world’s first news agency appeared in Paris. In recognition of the role the press had played in establishing the new government, in August  1830, all journalists were freed from threat of fines and prison, and freedom to publish was affirmed. Periodicals again grew: Paris circulation rose from 61,000 total daily in 1830 to more than 81,000 in early March 1841, with left-leaning newspapers growing most quickly (Bellanger et  al. 1969). It would not last. The spirit of French journalistic entrepreneurialism was soon defeated by repeated waves of state control (Popkin 2002). The accession of Louis Philippe attracted instant opposition, this time not only from the liberal republican press but also from the royalist press that contested the legitimacy of the “citizen king’s” rule. In 1830, controls were reduced, but the king was still beyond criticism. Press offenses (délits de presse) not only remained but also grew to be the monarchy’s favorite weapon against offending journalists. Particularly famous for their offences in this period were a new wave of satirical caricaturists, often producing brilliantly designed and engraved visual pieces in a matter of hours, long before photography (invented 1839) could be directly published (end of the century). André Gill and Honoré Daumier (the latter saw time in Sainte-Pélagie prison for his satire) produced wood engravings suitable for framing, but often not suitable to Louis Philippe, their frequent satiric target. When, at the end of 1831, satirical publisher and artist Charles Philipon began a craze for depicting the king as a pear (Le poire, French slang for buffoon), the law requiring prior permission to publish returned, while fines and prison terms again beat down Paris journalism. In a final blow to press freedom, the government responded to an 1835 attempted assassination of the king with a new round of press controls. Prior censorship was applied to caricatures so loathed by the monarchy, while the caution deposit was raised to 10,000 francs. Between 1830 and 1841, courts in Paris pronounced 244 condemnations for press offenses (Feyel 1999) and many hundreds of thousands of francs in fines. In this apparently inauspicious time, Emile de Girardin decided to try something new. Born in Paris, the journalist and entrepreneur had already established several successful publications, but this time his ambitions targeted daily journalism for a growing population of people who could read, and an extended franchise allowing more males to vote. He launched in 1836 La Presse. Its central attraction was its price. While the serious presse d’opinion sold at 80 francs a year, Girardin’s newspaper sold at 40, filling the void with advertising. His was the first French newspaper to rely primarily on advertising as a way to pay for publishing, and to aim at a mass audience instead of elites. The approach had been tried successfully three years before in the United States (Benjamin Day’s The New York Sun). La Presse, however, would add features distinctive to France, most famously the serialized novel (feuilleton). Fiction had been part of the literature colporteurs peddled around the country since the 1700s, but serious French journalists thought it, along with aggressive campaigns to attract advertisers, was beneath their dignity. A large segment of French readers disagreed. Girardin began with La Vieille Fille by a famous author, Honoré de Balzac. While literary critics 409

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such as Charles Augustin Saint-Beuve disparaged the project as “industrial literature,” within a few years it grew to such popularity that no major author wanted to be left out of the lucrative game. Eugène Sue became leader of the genre. Famous authors contributed. Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers were originally published as serialized novels (Jeanneney 2001). Girardin’s La Presse was actually not as successful as a competitor, with Armand Ducaq’s Le Siècle, possibly because Girardin was non-political at a time when readers preferred newspapers with a political slant, and Le Siècle established itself clearly as center-left. But Girardin’s detractors among the now old-style journalism were particularly annoyed that he had the audacity to sell his newspaper twice, once to readers and once to advertisers. An obvious loser to this new formula was what had been the most important newspaper of the 1830 revolution, Le National. The 36-year-old Armand Carrel, the now-prestigious editor of Le National, disparaged 34-year-old Girardin for pandering to profit at the expense of thoughtful opinion and dignified debate. Girardin’s equally offensive response led to a duel. The two met in July 1836 in the Bois de Vincennes with pistols. Girardin was left with a leg injury that troubled him the rest of his life, but Carrel, hit in the stomach, died two days later. This outcome shocked Paris, but while critics continued to assail Girardin’s formula for its purportedly vulgar and banal material, his commercial success threatened the existence of the old-style elite political press (Jeanneney 2001). Most newspapers were compelled to reduce their subscription prices to compete, expand their advertising, and add a serialized novel, even the most traditional of old titles. But French distrust of newspaper advertising remained. While it continued to grow, even by the 1860s, it did not reach above 30% of revenue, even for the popular titles, and rarely paid for more than 25% of production costs (Feyel 1999). Nevertheless, technical innovations during this period that made mass-produced newspapers possible showed a dynamically growing journalism in France that is sometimes forgotten in studies focusing mostly on press revolutions of the United States and Britain. As press historian Pierre Albert noted, “[i]t was in France that were born the formulas and often the techniques of the modern press” (Albert 1968, 79). One of those that became of enormous importance to global journalism, the news agency, began in Paris. It is somewhat ironic that Charles Havas launched an agency devoted to global news collection at a time when Paris press was still quite provincial, the presse d’opinion focusing primarily on domestic politics in its assumed role as political power brokers. Havas, who had been a banker with no journalism experience, decided at age 50 to draw on his facility for languages by launching a translation service in 1832. From merely translating, Havas began to collect overseas news as a service to Paris press and, in 1835, opened the world’s first news agency with correspondents in important capitals. For fast stock market news, he relied on a team of carrier pigeons in London and Brussels (Jeanneney 2001). Former Havas associates P. J. Reuter and Bernhard Wolff left to establish agencies in London and Berlin. Havas still exists today as a marketing and advertising agency, reflecting its second role as intermediary between newspapers and businesses to buy and sell advertising space.

The Second Republic and the Second Empire Growing discontent with monarchist rule exploded into revolt in February  1848. Louis Philippe abdicated, and again it was the journalists who filled the vacuum to set up a 410

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provisional government. Le National, the dominant liberal voice behind the 1830 Revolution, again assumed a lead role, along with the newer La Réforme, farther to the Left and strongly in favor of a republic. Staff from both newspaper offices took posts in the newly established Second Republic and again moved to sweep away press controls. For a third time, after 1789 and 1830, with the pressure cooker of press control gone, an effervescent journalism poured forth on all political sides, sold cheaply by the issue. About 450 titles appeared, many ephemeral (Charle 2004). A new press developed with the Second Republic, one built around personalities and a proletariat. Alphonse de Lamartine of Le Bien Public became the chief of the first provisional government, a rare example of a poet-politician. Victor Hugo’s L’Evénement appeared in August, while Dumas edited La France Nouvelle. And from the Far Left, the quarante-huitard press gave voice to radical Left workers’ groups. Balzac had presciently observed five years earlier: “Opinion is made in Paris, and it is made with ink and paper” (as cited in Collins 2007, 91). Again, the flowering of new titles did not last. In fear that the provisional government was falling back to conservatism, Paris radical groups turned to insurrection. Louis-Eugène Cavaignac, inspiration behind the moderate republican newspaper Le Crédit, as minister of war, gained dictatorial power to put down the rebellion. The ensuing “June Days” battles left a shocking 10,000 people killed and injured, and thousands more deported to Algeria. Cavaignac’s military government, in another shock, actually arrested the country’s most prominent journalist, Emile Girardin. Cavaignac had close ties to Le National, Girardin’s nemesis. Ensuing elections under now-universal male suffrage advanced Louis-Napoleon as president. But despite his pursuit of a populist image, the rule of the “Prince President” saw many of the old strictures on the press restored, in an attempt to silence political extremes of Right and Left. Subsequent laws in 1849 and 1850 returned the stamp tax and enormous caution deposit. The Republic ended in December 1851 as Louis-Napoleon, at odds with growing liberalism in the National Assembly, overthrew the constitution in a coup d’état and went on to restore the empire a year later. As Napoleon III, he responded to press liberalism as had his more-famous uncle. Severe repression during the first years of the Second Empire again reduced Paris titles to just a few. Hugo’s two sons were imprisoned for their writing, and Hugo himself, who strongly opposed the coup, self-exiled to Britain. The warning system (avertisemment) proved a nimble and effective way to encourage self-censorship, and beyond that, fines and prison sentences rained down on all shades of journalists. As heavy tax burdens did not, however, extend to non-political journalism, the Second Empire proved to be a fertile ground for growth of artistic and literary publications. Reading between the lines sometimes could produce political comment, and a growing literate public enjoyed a diversion from serious political material of the journaux d’opinion (Bellanger et al. 1969). Le Figaro was established as a non-political weekly in 1854, and daily in 1856, by Hippolyte de Villemessant, becoming political in 1867. It is the only title that has survived a century and a half of French journalistic drama. This harsh regime of press control, however, had become thoroughly out of sync with growing industrialization. The public instruction law of 1833 had, by this time, produced a high level of literacy, and industrial techniques made it possible to print and distribute more quickly. Cylinder presses such as the Hoe (1845) could print 8,000 to 9,000 pages an hour (Bellanger et al. 1969). Moïse Millaud bought Girardin’s now old-fashioned La Presse, decided to close the title and restart something new for this generation of readers. 411

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On February  1, 1863, he launched Le Petit Journal. La Presse had been cheap (10 centimes), but Le Petit Journal was as cheap as possible, 5 centimes. Millaud relied on advertising from a growing new concept in retail, the department store. He organized a network of sales kiosks at busy train stations. To save money, he reduced the size, so it was called “petit.” And to escape the taxes, he kept his paper non-political, a journal d’information. In two years, he had amassed a readership of 259,000, higher than all other Paris dailies together (Charle 2004). Le Petit Journal’s formula showed little interest in ponderous politics or literary sparkle. Instead, it appealed to a public interested in popular diversion. The faits divers were expanded and sometimes grew to dominate coverage, particularly murders. In 1869, when Jean-Baptiste Troppmann was arrested for murdering a French family, Le Petit Journal’s sensationalized coverage attracted thousands, to the point that on the day of Troppmann’s execution, the newspaper doubled its circulation, selling more than half a million copies. Millaud said he could have sold even more if his presses had worked faster (Jeanneney 2001). The new presse d’information format became so successful that it was widely copied. It grew as the empire became more and more liberal, shedding more and more controls on the press. On March  9, 1868, authorities dropped most press controls and lowered taxes. Another explosion of new titles followed, though fines and terms in the “journalists’ prison” of Sainte-Pélagie continued.

The Third Republic Defeat in the Franco-Prussian War ended the empire and put republicans back in control of a provisional government. Adolphe Thiers, a founder of Le National that helped establish the July Monarchy, was back in power. After the peace, his government moved to Versailles, when Paris came under control of radicals. The Paris Commune was established March 18, 1871, supported by extreme Left journalists, but opposed by more moderate newspapers that fled to Versailles with the government. In Paris, Le Cri du Peuple of Jules Vallès appeared in March to exhort militants to the movement, and other titles sprang up in support. More conservative titles were persecuted, belying suggestion the radicals preferred a free press. In the horrifying May repression, Marshal Patrice MacMahon’s army killed an estimated 20,000 Communards, including J. B. Millière, editor of La Commune, who was executed at the Pantheon crying, “Vive l’humanité” (Collins 2007). Whether the conservative Versailles newspapers can be blamed for fanning hatred and so encouraging more brutal suppression is still a matter of historical debate. A fragile republic faced formidable opposition. Marshal MacMahon, monarchist by inclination, became president in 1873, while a wartime “state of siege” law remained in force, with a spectrum of harsh press controls. Renewed prohibition on street sales in particular weakened the presse d’information, as it was the base for most of their circulation. In 1876, the state of siege ended and street sales returned. But press harassment persisted. After MacMahon dissolved parliament in the crisis of May 16, 1877, his government tried to produce a royalist majority for the upcoming election by aggressively harassing the republican press with fines and suspensions, while encouraging Far Right newspapers. It failed. Republicans won the electoral argument that monarchists could not create a stable government. Léon Gambetta’s La République Française became the country’s influential journal d’opinion, arguing for a moderate republic. With the election of Jules Grévy as president, 412

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a government with many deputies and ministers closely tied to journalism had been established. That would continue to be the case until the First World War. Third Republic leaders revolved between newspapers and ministries; it became essential for politicians of every tendency to associate with a supportive newspaper. Georges Clemenceau is remembered for the power he wielded through journalism across nearly a half century. Most familiar is his publication of Zola’s “J’Accuse” in L’Aurore during the Dreyfus Affair, and his L’homme enchaîné during the First World War. As a parliamentary commission debated press law beginning in 1878, Clemenceau argued against the temptation for republicans to control the opposition royalist press. “The republic lives on liberty,” he said. “It could die of repression, as have all the governments which have preceded it and that counted on a repressive system to protect them” (as cited in Evano 2003, 59). The eventual new Press Law of 1881 swept away the entire apparatus of press repression, leaving only a few regulations addressing libel. It compared with the United States as the world’s most liberal press regime. Eugène Pelletan (Le Bien Public) in the Senate said a free press was the Republic’s promise to a country of universal suffrage. Ringing endorsements hid more calculating designs. It had become clear that rigorously controlled journalism became more powerful by its rarity. If every shade of voice was encouraged to launch a publication, the cacophony could well cancel the power of any individual voice. As the press became a business based on the forces of a free market and not political subvention, each of those voices faced a financial struggle for survival against enormous competition. Journalism became an industrial product, perishable like bread and marketed like chocolate. Once again, the daily press exploded into dozens of new titles. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the majority of Paris dailies sold for 5 centimes. Many of them could survive on low circulations. Of 60 dailies in Paris, 39 sold fewer than 5,000, 25 fewer than 500 (Jeanneney 2001). At the other end of the market, the “four greats” dominated circulation, each with over 1 million: Le Petit Journal, Le Journal, Le Matin, and Le Petit Parisien. The last one under powerful proprietor Jean Dupuy boasted the world’s highest circulation at that time, 1.5 million. Together the four represented two-thirds of daily circulation in Paris and the provinces. Advertising grew but was splintered among so many publications. The struggle for individual titles to stay in business by their capitalist wits led to what was later familiarly called “the abominable venality of the French press” (Eveno 2003, 57). Clearly, many newspapers, particularly the financial press, can be accused of accepting bribes and secret subventions. Advertising did not strictly separate itself from editorial copy, as had become the case in Britain and the United States. An “inspired article” could endorse a product without disclosing payment from a sponsor, a bit like today’s social media “influencers.” However, one careful study of press corruption during this period indicates that it was not as pervasive as presumed. Much of the bribes and subventions actually were paid advertisements (Evano 2003). Third Republic journalism became among the world’s most innovative and successful. It also could be among the world’s most despicable and greedy in its level of attacks on individuals, sensationalism, and corruption. It maintained close ties to political leaders through the Great War, and although the old-style presse d’opinion waned in circulation, it still commanded considerable influence in government. But the dynamism came to an end in August  1914: the state of siege law returned harsh censorship not seen since the Restoration, and the subsequent uncritical pro-war coverage, later dismissed as brainwashing 413

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bourrage de crâne by many journalists early in the war, encouraged a more critical readership after (Collins 1992). The golden age of the French press had come to an end.

References Albert, P. 1968. La presse. Series que sais-je? Paris: PUF. Bellanger, C., J. Godechot, P. Guiral, and F. Terrou. 1969. Histoire générale de la presse française, tome II: de 1815 à 1871. Paris: PUF. Bond, E. A. 2021. The Writing Public. Participatory Knowledge Production in Enlightenment and Revolutionary France. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Charle, C. 2004. Le siècle de la presse 1830–1939. Paris: Seuil. Collins, R. F. 1992. “The Development of Censorship in World War I France.” Journalism Monographs 131. ———. 2007. “Traitorous Collaboration. The Press in France.” In The Rise of Western Journalism, 1815–1914, edited by R. F. Collins and E. M. Palmegiano. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Evano, P. 2003. L’argent de la presse française des années 1820 à nos jours. Paris: Éditions du CTHS. Feyel, G. 1999. La presse en France des origines à 1944. Paris: Ellipses. Jeanneney, J-N. 2001. Une histoire des médias. Des origines à nos jours. Paris: Seuil. Popkin, J. D. 1990. Revolutionary News. The press in France 1789–1799. Durham and London: Duke University Press. ———. 2002. Press, revolution, and social identities in France, 1830–1835. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press.

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38 FROM DICTATOR TO DEMOCRAT? THE “BLACK LEGEND” OF LOUIS-NAPOLEON AND SUBSEQUENT HISTORICAL REVISIONISM W. Jack Rhoden Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of the “great” Napoleon, leader of two failed coup attempts, former prisoner and exile, returned to France as an elected member of the Constituent Assembly following the 1848 Revolution. His landslide victory in the presidential election later that year inspired many journalistic works that attempted to frame LouisNapoleon as, variously, a puppet of conservative interests, a utopian socialist, a corrupt charlatan, a fool, a dangerous demagogue, a defender of order in the face of “Red Terror,” or a committed patriot seeking to build upon his uncle’s legacy. This is not an exhaustive list; President Louis-Napoleon posed as, and was initially represented as, all things to all men, which was important, as virtually all men had been granted the right to vote in 1848. On December  2, 1851, the president led a successful coup d’état and, a year later, announced the replacement of the Second Republic with a second Bonapartist empire, which ultimately collapsed during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. He had been the first president elected by universal male suffrage and instituted an authoritarian regime which nonetheless retained voting rights and underwent economic and political liberalization over time. These events forced contemporaries to debate the relationship between democracy and dictatorship, question the personality and ideology of Louis-Napoleon, and locate the proper place of the Second Republic and Empire in French history. Historians remain interested in Louis-Napoleon’s rise and rule for what it says about the potential for mass democracy to produce and empower such figures, and where such regimes fit in the narrative of “modern” history.

The “Black Legend” in Nineteenth-Century France Karl Marx’s writings on France and Louis-Napoleon were cited frequently in the twentieth century as prophetic analyses that depicted the French leader as a lifeless caricature whose very existence marked a parodic repetition of history (Marx 1937, 1969). However, for the

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mid-nineteenth-century public, it was the works of Victor Hugo, produced in the wake of the coup d’état, that provided the blueprint for the “black legend” of Louis-Napoleon: a corrupt, brutal dictator with no laudable qualities whose very existence was an insult to his great-uncle and the glories of revolutionary France (Hugo 1885, 1888, 1909). For Hugo, the original sin of the Second Empire was the coup. This was a crime against the Constitution that Louis-Napoleon had sworn to protect and a crime against a vision of historical progress that should lead inevitably to a liberal, republican settlement: it represented a blockage that would have to be overwhelmed by a torrent of revolution. Hugo depicted Louis-Napoleon’s actions and rule as an anomaly, his barbarism marking him out as a “man of another age” (Hugo 1909, 27). Louis-Napoleon was subjected to a series of attacks upon his personality and appearance that would be repeated as fact in scholarship for a century afterward: he was weak, uninspiring, dull-eyed, with a small forehead and large nose, slow-moving and slow-thinking, possessing none of his uncle’s traits of genius or heroism; he was timid and indecisive, yet cunning and vicious. Hugo likened him to all kinds of animals, from a hyena to a parrot, but perhaps most significant was the racist comparison of Louis-Napoleon to a host of non-European despots, including the frequently caricatured Faustin Soulouque of Haiti, to symbolize the allegedly lower moral, racial, and civilizational scale this Bonaparte operated on. How did such a man manage to stem the flow of progressive history? Here Hugo established the “black legend” as a theory of causation: an unholy alliance opposed to modernity united behind Louis-Napoleon. His voters were drawn from the stupid, degenerate, and dangerous sections of society: ignorant peasants, hypocritical Catholics, corrupt officeholders, and selfish stockholders. They fell for scaremongering about the “Reds” and looked to Louis-Napoleon as a savior of society out of greed and idiocy. Hugo also indulged in anti-Semitic attacks upon the bankers who financed Louis-Napoleon’s bribery of the French people. This combination of political prophecy, historical causation, and character assassination shaped subsequent republican analyses of Louis-Napoleon’s rise and regime. It itemized the crimes committed, offered hope of future retribution, underlined the righteousness of opposition, and most importantly, just as the Second Empire was being established, Hugo’s work framed it as an absurdity that God and the flow of modern history (for they were one and the same in Hugo’s writings) would sweep away in due course. This “black legend” was further developed during the more liberalized atmosphere of the mid- to late 1860s. Future prime minister of the Third Republic, Jules Ferry, found fame denouncing the prefect of Paris, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, for extensive corruption. This charge drew upon a key theme of Hugo’s attacks upon the decadent, criminal associates of Louis-Napoleon. Another figure who would go on to play a significant role in the Third Republic, Leon Gambetta, launched his political career in 1869 with a legal defense of those who sought to commemorate the death of Victor Baudin – a republican martyr of the coup, named directly in Hugo’s work (Hugo 1888, 195). The 1860s saw the rise of a new generation of scholars, including Eugène Ténot (1868, 1869) and Taxile Delord (1869–75), whose antipathies provided a new academic backbone for the “black legend,” which was subsequently spread after 1870 with government support via the Société d’Instruction Républicaine (Hazareesingh 1999). This “tyranny of republicans” (Sowerwine 2009, 214) produced teleological works of history for the masses that drew a direct line from Louis-Napoleon’s coup in 1851 to defeat in 1870. Thus, Victor Hugo’s splenetic vision became enshrined in academic scholarship and the “popular imagination” (Guérard 1955, 3) of France during the Third Republic. 416

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British and German Responses In Britain and Germany, the French republican “black legend” had less purchase. Foreign secretary Lord Palmerston lost his job for conveying British approval of the coup without consulting the Queen, but for him and his successors, notably the 3rd Earl of Malmesbury, the Second Republic’s demise and replacement with a Bonapartist regime offered hope for an improved trading relationship and greater diplomatic cooperation. Pragmatic acceptance did not amount to admiration for Louis-Napoleon, but many British commentators looking back on the revolutionary upheaval of the past few years deemed authoritarian measures to be necessary. Writers like Walter Bagehot (1966) defended the installation of a French Caesar in this manner as an essential measure for a populace that was incapable of the kind of political maturity the British apparently displayed. Other voices, most notably in The Times and Punch, concurred with this low opinion of the French but were steadfast in their denunciation of Louis-Napoleon as a demagogue who wielded universal male suffrage as a weapon against constitutional government. He was, in their view, a dangerous dictator who displayed no conservative or liberal inclinations, only a deeply held ambition for personal gain (Parry 2001). At times these charged views aligned with the French “black legend,” as when A. W. Kinglake devoted an entire chapter of his epic The Invasion of the Crimea to rehashing and expanding upon the claims of French republicans, often without evidence (1877). Indeed, Kinglake’s work established an English-language “black legend,” presenting Louis-Napoleon as an Asiatic despot who fabricated the Crimean War to divide England from Russia. However, the influence of these attacks was blunted in Britain by the likes of Bagehot and Blanchard Jerrold, whose multivolume Life of Napoleon III (1874–1882) sought to correct the “disastrous” influence of Kinglake on perceptions of the Second Empire. Nevertheless, Louis-Napoleon’s style of government was used more often than not as a warning in Britain. After the fall of the Second Empire, prominent liberal opponents of Benjamin Disraeli labelled his “new imperialism” and patriotic appeals to the newly enfranchised as Caesarist in nature, recalling the unprincipled demagoguery of the French emperor (Parry 2001). As with Hugo’s attacks, anti-Semitism was evident in these charges against Disraeli (Davis 1996). In the German states, writings on Louis-Napoleon took a more conceptual approach. An early French analysis, Auguste Romieu’s L’Ère des Césars, was translated into German before the coup, urging an authoritarian solution to problems inherent in industrializing, democratizing societies. The following year, Constantin Frantz authored one of the most influential German-language analyses of modern Caesarism. It mirrored Romieu’s and many British assessments by concluding that the executive bypassing of “liberal parliamentary vacillation” in 1851 was necessary for France (McDaniel 2018, 320). However, this was presented as a cautionary tale for Germans, who sought to institute mass suffrage and liberal constitutions themselves, lest they invoke similarly dictatorial figures. The rise of Otto von Bismarck sparked further interest among German writers who analyzed the propensity for certain conditions to give rise to modern Caesars. Many recognized that whilst Louis-Napoleon represented “corruption in every shape and form” (Baehr 2017, 83), he was a very modern tyrant who thrived in the political and social turmoil of the mid-nineteenth century. Authors recognized that Louis-Napoleon and his ilk were able to promise stability amid the collapse of monarchies and the centralizing, alienating forces of nationalism and democracy. 417

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Pioneering historians and sociologists, such as Friedrich Naumann, Friedrich Meinecke, Heinrich von Treitschke, and Max Weber, used the example of Louis-Napoleon to offer structural explanations for a German Caesarism and imperialism that they explicitly condemned (Mitchell 1977). They broadly agreed with Frantz’s analysis and English-language accounts that a plebiscitary dictator was sadly necessary for the French, but bemoaned the inability of Germany to avoid what Weber dubbed “bad Caesarism” (Baehr 2017, 46). Suggestions of dictatorial inevitability in the age of mass democracy were challenged by reference to the United States and UK, who seemingly harnessed the demagogic, irrational power of the voters and preserved liberalism within a parliamentary system.

Louis-Napoleon as a Proto-Fascist In the 1930s, Frantz’s writings were reprinted and reclaimed by the Nazi Party as a prophetic defense of the need to ditch parliaments to craft a strong empire (McDaniel 2018). The aim of this Nazi distortion of Frantz’s thesis was to transform Louis-Napoleon into a proto-fascist. This was paralleled by some American and British historians and journalists making the same claims as a warning from history (Rosenfeld 2018). The need to find antecedents for the rise of Mussolini and Hitler was strong, and the ultimate demise of LouisNapoleon offered comfort to enemies of fascism before 1945 and a degree of confirmation bias immediately afterward. None were more explicit or outspoken in making this connection than J. Salwyn Schapiro, who combined traditions of criticism from France, Britain, and Germany to produce the academic nadir of “black legend” scholarship (Schapiro 1949). French republican depictions of Louis-Napoleon as a bloodthirsty tyrant, German writings on modern Caesarism, and British attacks upon the Second Empire’s authoritarianism served to demonstrate how Louis-Napoleon’s rise, like that of fascist leaders, was dependent upon mass democracy, manipulated by propaganda and state-organized censorship. In short, for Schapiro, the Second Empire provided a “historic preview of the fascist state” (1949, ix). It was at this point that Marx’s now-famous analysis entered wider circulation. Schapiro used the language of Marx to dismiss Louis-Napoleon as “a caricature of the great Napoleon” (1949, 316) and combined this with a structural explanation for his rise via manipulative offerings of socialistic protections to the masses while promising, with support from the “moneyed class,” to protect the nation from the ravages of actual socialism (1949, 317). Only from this perspective can we understand the assertion, otherwise ahistorical and without merit, that Louis-Napoleon was a “national socialist” (Hoffman 1943, 117). In France, explicit accusations of proto-fascism were less common. René Rémond’s analysis (1969) placed Bonapartism firmly on the political “Right,” but any significant development of “fascism” in France was ascribed to foreign ideas imported long after Louis-Napoleon’s death. This absolution of a French role in fascism’s origins was challenged by Zeev Sternhell (1987), but there remain no legitimate historical reasons to label Louis-Napoleon a proto-fascist in any meaningful sense. The worst excesses of “black legend” scholarship ceased to have a significant impact on scholarship soon after 1945. Instead, there was a sustained effort at revising these narratives and reintegrating Louis-Napoleon and his empire into a progressive, modernizing narrative of French history rather than an anomaly, interlude, or fascist prelude.

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Revisionism Sympathetic accounts of Louis-Napoleon’s rise, rule, and even legacy had been written since the 1850s but struggled to gain leverage in unsympathetic contexts. Pride of place among these went to Louis-Napoleon’s own writings. It became a trope to label him a riddle, a sphinx, or a “man of mystery” (Taylor 1963, 115), but few other nineteenthcentury rulers published more of their ideas (Bonaparte 1869). The emperor and several of his major collaborators, such as Charlemagne de Maupas (1884) and the Duc de Morny (1925), produced works attempting to explain and excuse the regime, and yet it was Hugo and Marx that endured in the scholarly and popular imagination of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Similarly, political figures such as Emile Ollivier (1895–1918) wrote extensively on the liberal transformation of the Second Empire, defending its reforms and foreign policy decisions. Their views were echoed by writers in Britain such as Jerrold, Bagehot, and Albert Vandam (1897), who praised the free-trading instincts of the emperor, his support for national self-determination, and even his political insight and trustworthiness. However, the tone of wider scholarship only began to change in the first half of the twentieth century as historians utilized firsthand accounts to demonstrate that the emperor had, in fact, enjoyed considerable popular support and was broadly motivated by a desire to enhance the welfare of the masses. The most influential and explicit in their revisionist aims were F. A. Simpson and Albert Guérard. Simpson (1923) attempted to demonstrate the political and economic modernity displayed by the emperor and his regime. Guérard focused his works on the simple idea that Louis-Napoleon was not the “sinister caricature” (1955, 3) of legend. In Guérard’s view, 80 years of misinformation had served to hide or completely misrepresent some basic facts. There was a contemporary urgency in understanding the place of Louis-Napoleon at the gateway to a modern era that began with agrarian aristocracies and ended with industrial mass democracies. For Guérard, Louis-Napoleon was at the heart of it all, the very opposite of the aberration he had been depicted as for so long. Revisionist historians who followed Simpson and Guérard sought to integrate LouisNapoleon and the Second Empire into a progressive narrative, no longer as merely enemies of republicanism, democracy, liberalism, and socialism. Post-war discussion of the collapse of the Third Republic in 1940 and the 1958 replacement of the Fourth Republic with the Gaullist Fifth Republic (in circumstances very like a coup d’état) provided a clear impetus for revisiting some of the assumptions around the rise of Louis-Napoleon. There could be little doubt that de Gaulle and his regime were part of a narrative of French modernization, and whilst he could be accused of many things, de Gaulle was not a fascist. As T. A. B. Corley noted at that time, “the parallels between the General and the Emperor are striking” (1961, x). The areas most impacted by this revisionism were the economic transformations of the Second Empire, Louis-Napoleon’s personality, and his political ideology, including foreign policy, where the heaviest and most sustained attacks of the past 80 years had been focused.

The Economic History of Empire, Revised Grudging acceptance that the Second Empire brought economic and social benefits had long been tempered by the view that these came at the expense of repression or were

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overshadowed by corruption. After 1945, in an age of planned industrial democracies, the Second Empire’s marshalling of finance capital and state power to boost industrial output, infrastructure, and trade volumes could be easily reimagined as a forerunner of socialdemocratic economics. In the context of France’s post-war Trente Glorieuses, the economic development of the 1850s and 1860s was credited to decisions taken by the regime, in particular expansion of credit; construction of railway, port, and road networks; as well as investments in urban infrastructure and agricultural modernization (Caron 1979). Furthermore, the Second Empire engaged in state interventionism, where market individualism was judged to have failed, and recognized trade unions. In this way, as a bourgeois regime that demonstrated prescient economic and social welfare policies, the Second Empire found a place in socialist-inflected narratives of French modernization (Magraw 1983). For many revisionists, the most stark evidence of the regime’s economic modernity was the “Haussmannization” of Paris, a series of state-backed subsidies and loan schemes which enabled the prefect Haussmann to level and rebuild swathes of the capital. David H. Pinkney’s influential work underlined the astonishing costs of this endeavor but also judged it to be a “large item of credit” (1958, 211) in the empire’s win/loss column. Pinkney viewed “Haussmannization” as evidence of Louis-Napoleon’s creativity and judged accusations of rampant corruption to have been given too much credence by scholars raised on the “black legend.” Decades of building projects brought cleaner water, street lighting, railway stations, grand boulevards and parks lined with new apartment buildings, department stores, theaters, the Paris Opera, the modernization of the central markets of Les Halles, and the expansion of the Louvre, along with the completion of Eugène Viollet-le-Duc’s Notre Dame renovations. This led revisionist scholars to credit Louis-Napoleon for laying the foundations of Paris’s cultural dominance in the second half of the century, placing the Second Empire at the core of modern French history.

Louis-Napoleon, Revised As part of this historiographical trend, there was a clear move to relativize and reject some of the more extreme character assassinations of Louis-Napoleon that had flourished since 1848. A raft of biographical studies were produced that actively challenged the image of him as a cold, weak, vengeful, and tyrannical figure. Accounts indicated that Louis-­Napoleon was generally well-liked by those who knew him personally, and this was supported by wider evidence of “softness, a generosity of spirit, [and] a humanitarianism” (Williams 1971, 23). Post-war biographers transformed him into a “warm-hearted” “dreamer” (Palm 1948, 174) who inspired loyalty and sought to improve the lot of the masses, forgive his enemies, and generally avoid war and bloodshed. They painted a picture of “the most humane of dictators” (Gooch 1960, 5), one whose actions as ruler were frequently less bloody than the actions of those who preceded and succeeded him. There was a danger here in moving from a “black legend” to a “white legend” of LouisNapoleon. Nevertheless, post-war texts, on the whole, offered more plausible explanations for Louis-Napoleon’s personality rooted in his actual words and deeds. Generations of writers had previously asserted his hopeless stupidity and indecision, ascribing his rise to blind luck, the power of his name, the idiocy of the masses, and the destructive scheming of politicians in the Second Republic. Yet he was also deemed a treacherous, bloodthirsty plotter who manipulated and dominated the French for two decades before single-handedly losing a war to Germany. Revisionist texts identified Louis-Napoleon’s apparent “simplicity – if 420

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not stupidity” (Palm 1948, 21) as a calculated maneuver that allowed the public to project their hopes onto him; this fooled his enemies, like Hugo and Adolphe Thiers, into underestimating him. Louis-Napoleon displayed “political calculation” (Smith 1996, 8), shaped his own public image, and was capable of moments of humanity and brutality as the situation required. This analysis was crucial in moving away from the image of a sphinxlike monster and unlocking important insights into the political ideology and legacy of Louis-Napoleon and the Second Empire.

The Ideology of Empire, Revised The key contribution of revisionist scholarship to our understanding of Louis-Napoleon and the Second Empire was recognition of his lasting impact on the historical development of liberal democracy, viewing his rule as peculiarly modern, not a dam against progress or an authoritarian anomaly. This reinterpretation rested on the creation of a new periodization of the empire as one of two political halves: first bad, then good. The “bad” first decade to around 1860 was identified as the period of authoritarian empire. Elements of the “black legend” rang true in these years: the violent coup, censorship, and a constitution that permitted no serious opposition. There was capitalistic modernization, but the regime and its key figures were authoritarian in tendency and action. Even so, Howard C. Payne concluded that the level of repression in this decade “embodied historical continuity” (1966, 280) more than a totalitarian departure. Revisionist historians identified 1859–1860 as a turning point toward the “good” decade (Williams 1954). This was signposted by increased recognition of parliamentary opposition, relaxation of censorship, and the embrace of free-market economic policies, especially the Cobden–Chevalier Treaty with Britain. The shift to competitive elections allowed Theodore Zeldin and subsequent historians to note that “unlike the empire of Napoleon I, the Second Empire did become more liberal as the years went by” (Thody 1989, 5). It was reconciled with a liberal, republican narrative of French history and recast as a period of apprenticeship when the French learned how to use universal suffrage. Zeldin’s work (1958, 1963) was crucial in returning scholarly attention to this move toward a “liberal empire.” It marked the redemption of Émile Ollivier, written back into narratives of French history, alongside Louis-Napoleon, as a reformer for his construction of the new “liberal” constitution, secured with a plebiscite victory in 1870. This was held up as evidence that Louis-Napoleon had managed to reinvent the regime and retain the support of a good proportion of the country’s male voters for over 20 years of rule (Ménager 1988). He was politically popular, the “undisputed master of a new political game” (Truesdell 1997, 3), involving the manipulation of the mass press and mass suffrage. The denouement of the “good” empire was the Franco-Prussian War, military defeat, and Parisian revolution. This debacle had been the focal point, along with the coup, for the “black legend,” but the new political landscape of the post-war era and successful efforts to integrate other elements of Louis-Napoleon’s record opened it to re-evaluation. Despite a recognition that the Second Empire indulged in several disastrous overseas adventures, the notion of Louis-Napoleon as an unpredictable and inept warmonger was challenged and partially overhauled. Kinglake’s accusation that his plotting caused the Crimean War was completely debunked; Brison D. Gooch (1956) noted that the diplomatic evidence available suggested a reluctance to place French troops on the ground in the Near East. Conversely, in the Italian peninsula, where Louis-Napoleon’s plotting with nationalists was 421

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clearly evidenced, revisionists identified a principled foreign policy. Building on the work of Robert Sencourt (1933), it was noted that Louis-Napoleon’s guiding lights were popular sovereignty, natural frontiers, and respect for nationalities in Europe. His unwillingness to pursue the Crimean and Italian campaigns for too long and efforts to convene peace conferences of European powers were now presented by historians as a genuine effort to enact his vision of a Europe of nations whose wisdom could finally be appreciated in the second half of the twentieth century (Corley 1961). This revised view of Louis-Napoleon, the good European, was applied to his dealings with Prussia. His sympathy for Germans’ right to self-determination meant that the threat of Prussia was recognized too late, and efforts to forge an Anglo-French alliance in 1866 were rebuffed (Mosse 1958). In this revised history, the British only had themselves to blame, rejecting an alliance of huge economic and political value that Louis-Napoleon had consistently advocated since his earliest statement of political beliefs, the 1839 Idées napoléoniennes (Bonaparte 1840). The decision to declare war on Prussia in 1870, long the prime example of Louis-­ Napoleon’s incapacity and even his physical degeneracy (Williams 1971), was also revised in light of new research into the liberal empire and Prussian machinations. The new Constitution moved decision-making beyond the emperor and made the wider regime more responsive to public opinion. New studies of the road to war (Howard 1961) noted that that Parisian press and opposition politicians were clamoring for a hard line with Prussia on the question of the Hohenzollern candidature for the Spanish throne. Louis-Napoleon was opposed to war without first securing alliances, yet diplomatic failure and the need to show public strength forced the hand of the regime. Some post-war works even blamed Empress Eugenie for pressing her physically ailing husband into a war that promised to secure the future of the dynasty. If this was questionable, it was established beyond all doubt that Bismarck’s embellishment of the Ems telegram was a calculated move to spark a war (Case 1954). This revised history positioned Louis-Napoleon as dupe of the Machiavellian Bismarck, led astray by his ministers, his wife, politicians, and the press. It was a far cry from the impression of a tyrannical warmonger and aligned with other revisionist interpretations that portrayed his foreign policy as a “tragedy of good intentions” (Williams 1954).

New Interpretations Histories of Louis-Napoleon, revisionist or otherwise, almost exclusively focused on the “Hexagon” and Europe, neglecting the colonial nature of his Second Empire. When this topic was occasionally analyzed (Barker 1976), the tendency was to consider the varied overseas activities either as having little significance or as a bridge to the more sustained republican colonization of the Third Republic. However, as Algeria has recently become a key focal point for historians of France, new works have begun to examine the Second Empire’s colonial role (Sessions 2016). Of particular interest is Louis-Napoleon’s decision in the 1860s to depart from the settlerdriven assimilationist model for Algeria and pronounce an “Arab kingdom” in which he, as emperor, would arbitrate between separate but equal religious and ethnic groups in the region. This vision contrasted sharply with subsequent secularist and universalist colonial policies of the Third Republic (Murray-Miller 2018). Beyond Algeria, David Todd has argued that, far from existing as a mere prefix to French activity under the Third Republic, Louis-Napoleon embraced an “imperialism of free 422

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trade” approach that represented “the most determined attempt to restore French global power since the War of American Independence” (2011, 177). This interpretation opens up avenues for comparative analysis, especially in the overlap between Louis-Napoleon’s “Arab kingdom” and Disraeli’s “British Raj” model for India. It also challenges attempts to integrate the Second Empire into a broadly republican narrative of modern French history, by presenting the colonial policies of Louis-Napoleon as a “path not taken” (Andrews and Sessions 2015, 7). This new approach to colonial history has allowed Pamela Pilbeam (2015) and Todd to highlight the intellectual and practical contribution of former Saint-Simonians, such as Michel Chevalier and Thomas Urbain, to the Second Empire. These figures advocated an interventionist, free-trading, technology-led, non-secular, utopian imperialism that LouisNapoleon’s regime partly embraced. Their vision of a French role in “raising up” other peoples and cultures rested on a fundamentally different conception of French imperialism than that offered by republicans in the late nineteenth century. This other imperialism, consisting of romantic, transformational infrastructure projects, military interventionism, and debates around the most effective political management of culturally and ethnically diverse societies, is clearly worthy of further study. Breaking free of the tendency to see the Second Empire as first a “gap” and then as an apprenticeship to the Third Republic has also sparked renewed interest in the political history of the regime. This includes a willingness to recognize the originality and dynamism of a regime that was one of the first to manage universal male suffrage and the rise of mass society in an industrializing nation-state. Central to this approach was the work of Sudhir Hazareesingh (1998, 2004) exploring the empire’s creativity in its liberalization and decentralization of political power to manage the demands of a changing society. Even more important was the renewed focus Hazareesingh brought to the electoral record of Louis-Napoleon. He identified “two simple historical truths” (2004, 131) that have to be asserted to gain an understanding of the significance of Louis-Napoleon in French political history: the Second Republic restricted universal male suffrage, and the coup d’état restored it. This presented an open challenge to the idea that the Second Empire represented a temporary dictatorial scaffold for a more modern, more stable democratic republican system. To Hazareesingh, it is clear that Louis-Napoleon’s regime was not destined to be dismantled and was no more a mess of contradictions than any other that faced a similar confluence of economic, social, and political conditions. Historians in the last 25 years have utilized this revelation to reflect upon the ways in which corruption, censorship, propaganda, populism, plebiscites, demagoguery, neglect for the rule of law, utopianism, romanticism, and authoritarianism have all been at the heart of mass democracy from its beginnings in the Second Republic (Truesdell 1997; Anceau 2008; Gunn 2008; Cuchet and Milbach 2012; Rogachevsky 2013; O’Brien 2015; Villette 2015; Guyver 2016; Lagoueyte 2016). The study of Louis-Napoleon’s rule reveals that they are a feature, not a bug, of democratic practice in nation-states. It offers a strong and clear historical base from which to challenge and move beyond assumptions, derived from modernization theory, which hold that regimes which display these elements are flawed, contradictory, and temporary, destined to be replaced with something “better.” Most critical commentators who were first to analyze the rise of Louis-Napoleon were infected by a mistrust, misunderstanding, or outright dislike of the masses, who, in the middle of the nineteenth century, were largely peasants, assumed to be in need of “civilization.” Their specific conclusions about Louis-Napoleon have been revised, but the only 423

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chance to move beyond a modernization theory rooted in these missteps is to return to the electoral history of the Second Republic and Second Empire afresh. Who voted, how they voted, what they voted for, and why? Studies like those of Malcolm Crook (2015a, 2015b) build on the pioneering work of Zeldin and Hazareesingh to shine a light on the supposed mystery of Louis-Napoleon’s popularity. This can help us produce comparative analyses to confront the popularity of authoritarian democrats in our own era without the comfort blanket of modernization theory to deceive us. To study Louis-Napoleon and the Second Empire now is an opportunity to engage in the dismantling of a highly partial historical narrative, tied to wrongheaded ideas of the nature of history. Under Louis-Napoleon, the defeat or marginalization of “liberal” republicanism was a very real possibility even whilst many of the conditions of “modernization” were being fulfilled. Many of the elements in Louis-Napoleon’s rise that Hugo found so perplexing remain perplexing to us: Why do republics fail? Why do the corrupt, the selfish, the violent, the seemingly talentless prosper? Now we recognize they do, and there is no historically derived model suggesting that they will cease to do so in future; it is beholden upon historians to look beyond the comforting myths present in many historical accounts and question why the Louis-Napoleons and Second Empires of this world are still with us.

References Anceau, Éric. 2008. Napoléon III: Un Saint-Simon à Cheval. Paris: Éditions Tallandier. Andrews, Naomi  J., and Jennifer  E.  Sessions. 2015. “: The Politics of Empire in Postrevolutionary France.” French Politics, Culture & Society 33 (1): 1–10. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26378214. https://doi.org/10.3167/fpcs.2015.330101. Baehr, Peter. 2017. Caesarism, Charisma and Fate: Historical Sources and Modern Resonances in the Work of Max Weber. London: Routledge. Bagehot, Walter. 1966. “Letters on the French Coup d’état of 1851 (1852).” In Bagehot’s Historical Essays, edited by Norman Saint John-Stevas. New York: New York University Press. Barker, Nancy  N.  1976. “Monarchy in Mexico: Harebrained Scheme or Well-Considered Prospect?” Journal of Modern History 48 (1): 51–68. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1877749. https://doi. org/10.1086/241394. Bonaparte, Louis-Napoleon. 1840. Des Idées Napoléoniennes: On the Opinions and Policy of Napoleon. London: Henry Colburn. ———. 1869. Œuvres de Napoléon III. Paris: Plon. Caron, François. 1979. “An Economic History of Modern France.”  In Translator Barbara Bray. London: Meuthen & Co. Ltd. Case, Lynn M. 1954. French Opinion on War and Diplomacy During the Second Empire. New York: Octagon Books. Corley, T. A. B. 1961. Democratic Despot: A Life of Napoleon III. London: Barrie and Rockliff. Crook, Malcolm. 2015a. “Universal Suffrage as Counter-Revolution? Electoral Mobilisation Under the Second Republic in France, 1848–1851.” Journal of Historical Sociology 28 (1): 49–66. https:// doi.org/10.1111/johs.12035. ———. 2015b. “Protest Voting: The Revolutionary Origins of Annotated Ballot Papers Cast in French Plebiscites, 1851–1870.” French History 29 (3): 349–69. https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/crv007. Cuchet, Guillaume, and Sylvain Milbach. 2012. “The Great Fear of 1852.” French History 26 (3): 297–324. https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/crs009. Davis, R. W.  1996. “Disraeli, the Rothschilds, and Anti-Semitism.”  Jewish History  10 (2): 9–19. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01650958. de Maupas, Charlemagne-Emile. 1884. The Story of the Coup d’état. Translated by Albert Vandam. New York: D. Appleton and Co. de Morny, Duc. 1925. “La Genèse d’un Coup d’état: Mémoire du Duc de Morny Publié par Son PetitFils.” Revue des Deux Mondes XXX: 512–34.

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“Black Legend” of Louis-Napoleon and Historical Revisionism Delord, Taxile. 1869–75. Histoire du Second Empire (1848–1870). Paris: G. Bailliere. Guérard, Albert. 1955. Napoleon III: A Great Life in Brief. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Gooch, Brison D. 1956. “A Century of Historiography on the Origins of the Crimean War.” American Historical Review 62 (1): 33–58. https://doi.org/10.2307/1848511. ———. 1960. The Second Empire. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Gunn, J. A. W. 2008. “French Republicans and the Suffrage: The Birth of the Doctrine of False Consciousness.” French History 22 (1): 28–50. https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/crm069. Guyver, Christopher. 2016. Second French Republic, 1848–1852: A Political Interpretation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hazareesingh, Sudhir. 1998. From Subject to Citizen: The Second Empire and the Emergence of French Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1999. “The Société d’Instruction Républicaine and the Propagation of Civic Republicanism in Provincial and Rural France, 1870–1877.” Journal of Modern History 71 (2): 271–307. https:// doi.org/10.1086/235248. ———. 2004. “Bonapartism as the Progenitor of Democracy: The Paradoxical Case of the French Second Empire.” In Dictatorship in History and Theory: Bonapartism, Caesarism, and Totalitarianism, edited by Peter Baehr, and Melvin Richter: 129–52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hoffman, Ross. 1943. “Reviewed Work: Napoleon III: An Interpretation by Albert Guérard.” French Review 17 (2) (December): 117–19. http://www.jstor.org/stable/380575. Howard, Michael. 1961. The Franco-Prussian War: The German Invasion of France, 1870–1871. London: Methuen. Hugo, Victor. 1885. Les Chatiments. Paris: Édition Nationale. ———. 1888. History of a Crime (Deposition of a Witness). New York: Thomas Y. Cromwell and Co. ———. 1909. Napoleon the Little. Boston: Little, Brown and Co. Jerrold, Blanchard. 1874–82. The Life of Napoleon III: Derived from State Records, from Unpublished  Family  Correspondence and from Personal  Testimony in Four  Volumes. London: Longmans, Green and Co. Kinglake, A. W. 1877. The Invasion of the Crimea: Its Origin and an Account of Its Progress down to the Death of Lord Raglan. Vol. I. London: William Blackwood & Sons. Lagoueyte, Patrick. 2016. Le Coup d’État du 2 Décembre 1851. Paris: CNRS Éditions. Magraw, Roger. 1983. France 1814–1915: The Bourgeois Century. London: Fontana Press. Marx, Karl. 1937. “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” Works of Marx & Engels 1852. Last modified 2006. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/index.htm. McDaniel, Iain. 2018. “Constantin Frantz and the Intellectual History of Bonapartism and Caesarism: A Reassessment.” Intellectual History Review 28 (2): 317–38. https://doi.org/10.1080/1749 6977.2017.1361218. Ménager, Bernard. 1988. Les Napoléon du People. Paris: Aubier. Mitchell, Allan. 1977. “Bonapartism as a Model for Bismarckian Politics.” Journal of Modern History 49 (2): 181–99. https://doi.org/10.1086/241560. Mosse, W. E. 1958. The European Powers and the German Question, 1848–71, with Special Reference to England and Russia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Murray-Miller, Gavin. 2018. “Bonapartism in Algeria.” French History 32 (2): 249–70. https://doi. org/10.1093/fh/cry005. O’Brien, Laura. 2015. The Republican Line: Caricature and French Republican Identity, 1830–52. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ollivier, Émile. 1895–1918. L’Empire Libéral: Études, Récits, Souvenirs. Paris. Palm, Franklin Charles. 1948. England and Napoleon III: A Study of the Rise of a Utopian Dictator. Durham, NC: Durham University Press. Parry, J. P. 2001. “The Impact of Napoleon III on British Politics, 1851–1880.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 11 (December): 147–75. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3679418. https://doi. org/10.1017/S0080440101000081. Payne, Howard C. 1966. The Police State of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, 1851–1860. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Pilbeam, Pamela M. 2015. Saint-Simonians in Nineteenth-Century France. From Free Love to Algeria. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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W. Jack Rhoden Pinkney, David H. 1958. Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rémond, René. 1969. The Right Wing in France: From 1815 to de Gaulle. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Rogachevsky, Neil. 2013. “Are Plebiscites Constitutional? A Disputed Question in the Plebiscite Campaign of 1870.” French History 27 (2): 249–70. https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/crt006. Rosenfeld, Gavriel D. 2018. “Who Was ‘Hitler’ Before Hitler? Historical Analogies and the Struggle to Understand Nazism, 1930–1945.” Central European History 51 (2): 249–81. https://doi. org/10.1017/S0008938918000420. Schapiro, J. 1949. “Salwyn.” In Liberalism and Challenge of Fascism: Social Forces in England and France (1815–1870). Toronto: McGraw-Hill. Sencourt, Robert. 1933. The Modern Emperor. London: Ernest Benn Ltd. Sessions, Jennifer E. 2016. By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Simpson, F. A. 1923. Louis Napoleon and the Recovery of France, 1848–1856. London: Longmans, Green and Co. Smith, William  H. C.  1996. Second Empire and Commune: France, 1848–1871. Harlow, Essex: Longman. Sowerwine, Charles. 2009. “The Origins of Republican Discourse, 1885–1914.”  French History & Civilization Seminar Papers vol. 2 https://h-france.net/rude/vol2/sowerwine2/: 210–7. Sternhell, Zeev. 1987. Ni Droite, ni Gauche: L’Idéologie  Fasciste en France. Bruxelles: Éditions Complexe. Taylor, A. J. P. 1963. “The Man of December (1952).” In Napoleon III: Man of Destiny, Enlightened Statesman or Proto-fascist?  edited by  Brison  D.  Gooch,  vols.  115–19. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Ténot, Eugène. 1868. La Province en Décembre 1851. Paris: Le Chevalier. ———. 1869. Paris en Décembre 1851: Étude Historique sur le Coup d’état. Paris: Le Chevalier. Thody, Philip. 1989. French Caesarism from Napoleon I to Charles de Gaulle. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Todd, David. 2011. “A  French Imperial Meridian, 1814–1870.”  Past  &  Present  210 (1): 155–86. https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtq063. Truesdell, Matthew. 1997. Spectacular Politics: Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte and the Fête Impériale, 1849–1870. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vandam, Albert D. 1897. Undercurrents of the Second Empire: Notes and Recollections. London: William Heinemann. Villette, Vincent. 2015. “The Urn and the Rumour: False  Information  About  Electoral  Fraud as a Means of Discrediting Mass Suffrage in the Department of the Seine, 1848–49.” French History 29 (3): 328–48. https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/crv003. Williams, Roger. 1954. “Louis Napoleon: A Tragedy of Good Intentions.” History Today 4 (4): 219– 26. http://www.historytoday.com/archive/louis-napol%C3%A9on-tragedy-good-intentions. ———. 1971. The Mortal Napoleon III. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zeldin, Theodore. 1958. The Political System of Napoleon III. London: Macmillan and Co. ———. 1963. Emile Ollivier and the Liberal Empire of Napoleon III. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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39 SOCIALISM UP TO THE FIRST WORLD WAR Eric Brandom

Socialism emerged in France as a response, on the one hand, to the dissolutions and reconstitutions of the Revolution and, on the other, to the individualism of the early liberals. It worked in the space between the proletariat – both as a political subject or claim and the extremely diverse population of actual working people – and the Republic – both as imagined, remembered, deferred ideal, and a really existing form of state. In so doing, socialism helped constitute both. Framing the subject in this way gives a certain unity to the period up to the ruptures of the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution.

Socialism Before 1848 The years after Napoleon saw the sharpening of what was called the social question, a response to dramatic changes in the fabric of French life and the bundle of anxieties that went along with them. The 1820s–1840s were a period of rapid urbanization, with Paris growing especially quickly from under 600,000 people in 1815 to roughly a million by 1850, as well as the striking development of “mono-industrial factory cities” such as Le Creusot or Roubaix (McPhee 2003, 129). This meant urban poverty, the misery that, paradoxically, seemed to derive from a life spent working. There were many responses to this problem, and socialism emerged as a particular set of positions, not always well-defined, in the broader field. Socialists before 1848 were not mere caricatures, unconcerned with the real world, although some of their appeal comes from the extraordinary richness of the utopian imagination of these decades. Many of them engaged in the practical and longterm work of organization, association, and education that would be needed to build a new world. What did a socialist believe, as that word itself was being invented around 1830? On questions of religion, of rights, of revolution, of class, of violence, there was no agreement. Socialists might be atheists or ardent believers in the divinity of Jesus. Socialists might argue that the rights won in 1789 needed to be expanded into the social realm, or that rights talk was all bunk. What united them was a desire to respond to the ills of the emerging social order of markets and property in a transformative way. Many turned away from politics as such, which we can understand in part as a result of the successful suppression of 427

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revolutionary radicalism. Perhaps property needed radically to be reformed and rendered social. Perhaps workers needed simply to unify themselves. Perhaps the chaos of the market was at fault and it needed to be organized, regularized, so that the workers could live working and would not need to die fighting (as in the famous slogan of the Lyon silk workers of the 1830s). By and large – although not universally – socialists in this period were prodemocratic and wanted the franchise extended. Perhaps the central theorist of early French socialism was Henri de Saint-Simon, although socialism was only one among the possible interpretations of his thought. The last 25 years of his life he devoted to developing a theory of history, science, and morality that would allow the nineteenth century to be “inventive and constructive” in its philosophy, in contrast to the eighteenth century’s “critical and revolutionary” tendencies (Jennings 2011, 347). Key to his thinking was a distinction between those engaged in productive labor, the industriels, and those who were not, the oisifs. The question of morality was central for Saint-Simon, and at the very end of his life, he pivoted from the idea that morality should be the preserve of scientists to a reconstruction of Christianity. As this might suggest, there was no consistent program in his writings, even if there was a powerful through-line of salvation through material development (Carlisle 1987). Saint-Simon did not arrive at a critique of property as such and fundamentally mistrusted, even rejected, democracy, understood as popular participation in political decision-making. The subsequent history of his followers, the Saint-Simonians, was one of schisms and, paradoxically, both increasing isolation and eventual importance. The technocratic legacy of Saint-Simon would have enormous, if subtle, influence later on in the century, not least in the ambitions of the French colonial empire. In the years just before 1848, Charles Fourier’s disciples were ascendant among those in the middle classes with an interest in socialism (Beecher 1990; Pilbeam 2000). Fourier, like Saint-Simon, drew clearly on the heritage of the eighteenth century, developing a principle of universal attraction as a law for social science in parallel with Newton’s law of gravity. Fourier’s more outlandish predictions have tended to draw the most attention, for instance, that development would eventually yield humans with prehensile tails, or that it might be possible to arrange things so that no one has to do work they do not find enjoyable. Fourier provided an acute critique of the irrationalities and cruelties of the commercial world of his time. He also inspired concrete projects for change that were never contained within the walls of the phalanstères, the semi-monastic communities that, he believed, would be the fundamental social and economic units of the future. Most influential with working people was Etienne Cabet, who was also the first to call himself a communist. Cabet’s followers were called “icarians,” because much of his doctrine was expressed in the form of a utopian novel, Voyage to Icaria. Such theoretical contributions sat alongside material traditions of workers’ corporate organization (Sewell 1980), despite challenges to them from the insistence of 1789’s revolutionaries on individualist market relations (Reddy 1987). Through the 1840s, compagnonnage organizations and other mutual aid systems long in use by laboring people were an inspiration for socialists – although arguments continue as to the continuity of their social meaning across the Revolution (Truant 1995). These issues in social history, and especially in the history of labor conflict, are related also to arguments over how to understand the nature of capitalist development in France (Lafrance 2019). Jonathan Beecher has influentially described the period before 1848 as dominated by “romantic socialism” (Beecher 2001). He includes within this category a range of writers 428

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and activists, both Fourierists and Saint-Simonians. Taken on their own terms, what were these socialists trying to do? For Beecher, “their ideas were presented as a remedy for the collapse of community rather than for any specifically economic problem” (2001, 2). The new society they wished to build would be based on “cooperation rather than competition, on solidarity rather than egoism” – harmony rather than class conflict. Drawing on eighteenth-century ideas about progress and the collective good, they were neither atheists nor materialists – although they nonetheless remained committed to the idea of science. Indeed, as Jonathan Tresch has written, the Saint-Simonian religiosity of the 1830s “was a radiant, consequential point of fusion between romantic-era aesthetics and the engineering sciences of the mechanical age, giving a mythical depth to the practical task of industrialization” (Tresch 2012, 194). The early 1840s saw a flowering of socialist writing. Books like Louis Blanc’s Organization of Labor and Flora Tristan’s The Worker’s Union, from 1839 and 1843, respectively, are emblematic of the moment. Blanc, a young journalist with legal training, put forward a plan to organize labor through the state. He conceived of this very much as a continuation of the Revolution. By organizing labor, both bodies and minds could be saved from the degradations of impoverishment, materially freed, and therefore morally improved. The state would function as an agent of salutary competition for private industry. Competition would be abolished through competition. Here was the best-known articulation of “the right to work” that would struggle for practical expression in the Second Republic. For Tristan, whose Franco-Peruvian background and broad travel experience gave her an unusual perspective, the goal was to unify the workers apart from the state, but also across different professions. Two francs a year from each worker, she calculated, would be enough to create a powerful mass organization with real influence on the state administration. Certainly, Tristan’s was a more democratic vision, and a more radical break from the existing order, in that she insisted on the inclusion of women on an equal footing with men (Tristan 2007). Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who educated himself while working as a compositor in a printshop, also began to publish in these years. He would emerge as a special antagonist for the bourgeoisie, an anarchist intent on expropriation; his slogan – “property is theft” – was taken as threat rather than analysis. He was also an advocate for certain concrete reform proposals, for instance, around banking, and is emblematic of the entanglement of republican and socialist thought in the period (Vincent 1984). Socialists such as Blanc, Tristan, and Proudhon were divided in many ways. Was the ideal for a new associative society to be found in the natural complementarity between men and women’s roles? Or did socialism mean also the emancipation of women from precisely that condition? And if so, what concretely did that emancipation entail? Fourier wanted to educate boys and girls in the same way, for instance, while the Saint-Simonians in 1831 split on the issue around Enfantin, whose vision was complementarist rather than more strictly egalitarian (Pilbeam 2000, 59). And then there was the question of how to make change. The followers of Fourier and Saint-Simon sought the peaceful reconstruction of society. Other socialists remained committed to the insurrectionary tradition. In 1839, for instance, August Blanqui seized the Paris Hôtel de Ville with 500 men – and held it for several days (Willard 1978, 32). In these years, socialism was not clearly differentiated from the “social republic,” the idea of which motivated the practical reforms of 1848. The basic notion, long familiar to the Republican tradition, was that “true liberty could only exist in a society where citizens were more or less equal” (Stovall 2007, 92). The social republic did not imply the abolition 429

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of private property, yet it was close to socialism in its view of short-term change and its political constituencies.

The Second Republic and Empire In 1848, in a period of significant economic distress, popular insurrection brought about a republic (see Datta in this volume). That revolutionary sequence began with victories for socialism and the social republic carried largely by the Parisian crowd. The provisional government installed in February included socialists such as Louis Blanc. They remained in the minority, however, and the limits of what even universal manhood suffrage might achieve were soon apparent. From a liberal perspective, Alexis de Tocqueville, after the events, asked, “[W]ill socialism continue to be shrouded by the contempt in which the socialists of 1848 are so rightly held?” (Tocqueville 2016, 54). New prospects for socialism came with new occlusions, illusions, and confusions. In considering how to manage emancipation of the approximately 270,000 enslaved people in the French Caribbean, for instance, socialists distinguished themselves from liberals by arguing presciently that legal freedom was not enough, that the imposition of a competitive wage-labor system in place of chattel slavery was not to be regarded as a desirable outcome (Andrews 2013). Yet it was also true that the new socialist humanitarianism – the two terms were born together – was entirely compatible with the settler colonialist project that animated the rebuilding of the French Empire, especially in Algeria (Andrews 2020). After the arrival of universal suffrage, the most important single element of the Second Republic from the perspective of the history of socialism is the Luxembourg commission – charged by the provisional government with resolving the social question. Here experiments inspired by the right to work are best remembered and infamous, especially the national workshops in which, at least in theory, anyone who wanted it would be provided with paying and socially useful work (Bouchet 2019). The commission had many other proposals, including ideas such as direct loans to certain kinds of worker-owned enterprises. It represented important elements of the practical reformism of the previous generation of socialists – in defeat, its memory was scorned by both conservatives and, later, Marxist interpreters (Pilbeam 2000). The subsequent June Days uprising of Parisian workers’ districts and its suppression established a much stronger connection between socialism and the politics of class conflict than had previously existed. Socialism, its critics continuously asserted, was about expropriation, with the satanic or ridiculous image of Proudhon haunting the bourgeoisie (O’Brien 2015). Was socialism, indeed, committed to class conflict? Or to social harmony? Did commitment to the Republic mean that one had to work not only for one class but also for the whole of the people? August Blanqui, a central figure in these decades, never entirely gave up on the language of republicanism as revolution but rejected “democrat” as a term obscuring the nature of socialism as essentially the party of the proletariat (Blanqui 2018). While such questions remained undecided in theory, in practice, the democ-soc proto-party, having brought together the Left for elections in later 1848 and 1849, played a powerful role in bringing the Republic and socialism into the countryside, despite ultimate defeat (Berenson 1984). The Revolutions of 1830 and 1848 had both been resolved against the workers and in favor of the bourgeoisie. From 1848 through the 1871 Commune, for a whole generation, socialists met defeat after defeat in the political realm. The Second Empire was a period 430

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of sustained economic development, altering the terrain and constituencies of socialism. Napoleon III attempted at once to suppress and to coopt the labor movement. In this environment, where little could be done politically, Proudhon’s anarchism and economism were attractive for working-class organizers. Meanwhile, the modernizing dictatorship of the Second Empire pushed forward projects that were not foreign to certain Saint-Simonian socialist ideas from earlier in the century, for instance, the Suez Canal, or even the dramatic remaking of the streets of Paris under the Baron Haussmann. The 1860s saw a liberal turn in the Second Empire, including an attempt to draw in the more politically active members of the working class, for instance, the 1864 law permitting strike actions (within limits). After the experience of authoritarian growth under Napoleon III and the extraordinary destruction visited upon the revolutionaries of the Paris Commune, there could no longer be any real question of simply letting the state be – and under the Third Republic, pursuit of state power through electoral victory became the dominant position. Clearer tactical and strategic disagreements began to appear, marking the lines between left wing republicans, revolutionaries, and socialists.

Socialism in Democracy In its usual telling, the history of socialism in the early Third Republic begins with the blood and dust of the repression of the Commune. It traces how the scattered, bickering elements of socialist political organizations slowly grew in size and connection to the hugely diverse working classes of France, which operated at different levels of class consciousness and solidarity. Tempered by the crises of the Republic – especially the temptations of Boulanger and post-Dreyfusard ministerialism – socialism finally finds unity through Jean Jaurès and within the Second International in the form of the Section française de l’internationale ouvrière (SFIO) in 1905. Fatally compromised by the war, this socialist party split at Tours in 1920, resulting in the socialist/communist opposition that would shape the Left internationally for much of the remainder of the twentieth century. More recent scholars have seen things in a less-schematic way, drawing attention, for instance, to the reformist tendency, which provides a continuity of impulse and ideology that is not connected so clearly to class formation and is always more comfortable in the government (Wright 2017). The fundamental problem of this period was how to reconcile the idea of specifically working-class politics with democracy and the Republic as it really existed. Thus, from the 1880s on, socialism confronted democracy not only as a feature of social relations but also in its modern representative form as the very shape of the political landscape. Concern with education, revolution, and with the proper forms of worker organization did not disappear but rather were transformed in the context of the republican state. How to integrate the Commune into the history of socialism? The working people of Paris made the Commune, and if it cannot be said to have been from the first motivated exclusively by socialist ideas, socialists nonetheless claimed it (Eichner 2004). Despite the deaths, despite the mass of deportations, even the workers’ movement saw real continuities from the 1860s to the later 1870s (Rebérioux 1974, 139), as did the self-consciously socialist tradition. Perhaps it is best to see the Commune as an “extraordinary episode” and “an interruption in a longer intellectual trajectory” (Nicholls 2019, 12) rather than a turning point internal to either socialism or the revolutionary tradition. Certainly, the experience of the Commune shaped the thinking of key leaders in subsequent decades. Jean Allemane, 431

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for instance, was an authentic Communard, who remained an important force in socialist politics up through the First World War, and a comrade of Jaurès. If there is continuity in terms of worker demands and organizing strategies, the rest of the political terrain had been radically transformed by the année terrible of 1870/1871. After the period of “moral order” and the global economic crisis of 1873, the Republic was firmly established by the later 1870s. As economic growth brought new possibilities for worker demands, the attitude of socialism toward the Republic became a newly concrete problem. For one thing, the Republic sought in various ways to integrate the working classes into Republican citizenship – but on terms set by the “bourgeois” republic. In a famous 1872 speech addressing the rise of a “new social stratum” through democracy, Léon Gambetta spoke of “this world of labor to which the future belongs” (Prochasson and Wieviorka 2014, 13). The labor movement was also a distinct institutional force alongside – and sometimes against – political socialism. In 1884, Waldeck-Rousseau, no socialist himself, oversaw the legal recognition of syndicats (trade unions) with the intention of bringing the laboring classes into the Republic. Fifteen years later, the Millerand ministry had the same goal. In October 1879, French socialists met in Marseille for one of the congresses that are a special form of the period. Among the speakers was Hubertine Auclert, who sought to convince the assembled socialists that they should support women’s suffrage. She castigated the assembled delegates for their inconsistency: how could socialists object that women are too likely to be misled by priests but still allow priests themselves to vote? More generally, Auclert asked that socialists, in this era of social reform, have confidence in those “who want reforms because it is they on whom abuses weigh most heavily – proletarians and women” (Prochasson and Wievorka 2014, 45). As Joan Scott writes, Auclert’s larger point was that the disenfranchisement of women was tied to the depoliticization of the social question.  And since women were equated symbolically with the social (as vulnerable, dependent, in need of care), she insisted that women’s rights were ultimately about popular sovereignty – about the right of the social to represent itself. (Scott 1996, 99) In part through sheer force of personality, Auclert succeeded at the 1879 conference in passing a resolution in favor of full civic equality – a position later iterations of socialist parties would drop (Sowerwine 2008). Socialists were quite aware of France’s imperial nature already earlier in the century. One effect of repression after the Commune, however, was to bring imperial subjects and socialists into direct, although hardly unmediated, contact. Louise Michel was one of very few Communards who, in her exile to New Caledonia, was able to see the indigenous Kanak as people with whom she shared a common enemy in struggle against the French state. In this, she demonstrated just how trapped in ideologies of white supremacy many other Communard exiles were (Eichner 2019), although a few others, including Allemane, also refused on principle to collaborate against the Kanak. Metropolitan socialist acceptance of imperialism, to the degree that it did not simply replicate racial or civilizational justifications common in Republican circles, was predicated on the material benefits of that empire for laboring French people. Some publications, such

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as the long-running Revue socialiste, were open and straightforward about their patriotic imperialism. French socialism was far from being unambiguously anti-imperial or antiracist, yet it did offer a framework within which, for instance, African-descended people in the Caribbean could articulate demands on the national stage. Socialism and even Marxism began to emerge as political forces in the Antilles from the 1880s. The Dreyfus Affair, beginning in 1898, was a key moment in relations between socialism and the Republic. A decade or more earlier, it was not clear to all socialists that in a crisis they ought necessarily to be on the side of the Republic. Some Blanquistes in particular cast their lot with Boulanger’s quasi-coup attempt in 1888/89, later a serious blow to their credibility. And in the early moments of the Affair, both the Allemanistes and the Marxist Parti ouvrier français (POF) were initially unwilling to become involved in what seemed to be a question of justice for a wealthy military officer. Yet soon nearly all socialists came around to Jaurès’s point of view: injustice was, in all cases, a matter of importance for socialists, even if the victim was a military officer, bourgeois, and Jewish. Despite initial confusion, authoritarian nationalist commitment to Dreyfus’s guilt and to antisemitism went a long way to determining the socialist position. Indeed, the Dreyfus Affair was decisive in committing socialism, at least in France, fundamentally to anti-anti-Semitism. The Affair echoed through the next decades, and socialists continued to argue about their mutual roles in it, and its implications regarding the integration of socialism within republicanism – with Jaurès and Jules Guesde in open debate for instance in 1900. The near miss of Boulanger and the wrenching combat of the Dreyfus Affair seem, in retrospect, to be experiences that demonstrated the true nature of socialism: democratic and legal. Some at that time dissented. In different ways, both the POF and the Revolutionary Syndicalists rejected this conclusion, although the former in the end joined the SFIO and committed themselves to parliamentary action (Stuart 2002). When, during the 1890s, socialism entered electoral politics and, more broadly, the national scene, labor conflict and socialist success at the polls were intimately connected. Strikes in industrial centers, such as Carmaux and Roubaix, resulted in the election of socialists and even workers to municipal office. Indeed, at Carmaux, a worker was elected mayor and was promptly fired from his job, triggering a new round of strikes and subsequent socialist victories. In Lille, the socialist candidate had won less than 9% of the vote in 1889. Following the famous May 1 “fusillade” at Fourmies (nine dead, including two children), Paul Lafargue – son-in-law to Karl Marx – was elected from prison with 30% of the vote, the first Marxist to enter the Chamber (Rebérioux 1974, 163; Derfler 1998). France remained a largely rural country. Wider electoral success at the national level would not be possible for socialists without some support from the countryside – witness the electoral catastrophe of 1848. According to Marxist theory, agricultural property ought to be concentrating into larger and larger holdings, but this was not happening in France. Indeed, it was a disputed question in this period whether such concentration was really taking place even in the industrial field. If theoretical clarity was never attained, it did prove possible – through a program of concrete reforms aimed especially at agricultural laborers and the most impoverished landowners – to win elections. Jaurès, for instance, was elected at Carmaux with peasant as well as urban voters. The relative success of socialism in the countryside was perhaps enabled by the limits of republican inclusion. As social citizenship was extended through mechanisms like work accident insurance, agricultural laborers found themselves excluded, as were the colonial workforce (Heath 2014, 118).

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In the later nineteenth century, arguments over the relationship between democracy, in the sense of universal suffrage, and social revolution exercised and divided revolutionaries in many contexts. Yet the problems of electoralism were posed much more sharply in France than elsewhere. In 1896, socialists lost seats in Paris because too many socialist candidates had split the vote. For the Marxists, ideological clarity was supposed to lead to unity and less-destructive personal competition. Yet perhaps unity could also come from compromise, for instance, in the extraordinary oratory of Jaurès, whose energetic idealism dominated parliamentary socialism in this period. The careers of Alexandre Millerand and Aristide Briand, on the other hand, are examples of a bourgeois professional beginning at the far left and passing by means of electoral campaigning and doctrinal flexibility into the inner circles of Republican power. Such figures were never lacking and were arguably a result of what was, after all, perhaps the freest and most democratic electoral system in Europe. Against the relative openness of the establishment to well-groomed and pleasant bourgeois “radical socialists,” there was the rapid but unstable growth of the revolutionary syndicalists who, on principle, refused all participation in electoral politics. The Second International in 1889 was the institutional expression of newly solid international socialist networks and forms of sociability. Since at that moment and through the 1890s there was no overarching organization in France, it often was at international events that French socialists of different persuasions could best meet and debate. It was in the wake of the international meeting in Amsterdam that, after several false starts and partial successes, in 1905 French socialists achieved something like unity with the founding of the SFIO. Organized in a federative way, the SFIO left significant leeway to its locals and sections. The next years were a period of growth in electoral terms for socialists and were dominated by three great debates: between the perspectives of reform and of revolution, over relationship between party and syndicat, and concerning the apparently inevitable arrival of war (Willard 1978, 95–101). Most distinctively French was the split between political socialism and the labor movement. In Germany, the Social Democrats maintained close connections to large labor unions. In France, not so. The POF had always believed that labor organizations should be subordinate to political ones, that the revolution would be centrally directed. At a national conference of the Confédération générale du travail (CGT), a group gathering together many unions, POF representatives proposed creating a formal link between the SFIO and the CGT. The proposal was overwhelmingly defeated, and in response, the CGT’s “Charte d’Amiens” enshrined as a guiding principle the organizational separation of the party and the unions. The CGT’s goal was to construct new institutions by and for workers that would eventually take control of production. The means would be direct workplace actions and the general strike. Polarization of French socialism in the early twentieth century between an integrationist electoralism and a separationist workerism left a great deal out. The rich heritage of socialist feminism from earlier in the nineteenth century was placed largely in the background because women did not have the vote, because of residual doubts shared with many Republicans about their likely electoral reliability, and also because of the basically patriarchal attitude of the CGT. The SFIO was open to women, but although Frenchwomen worked and, indeed, went out on strike, relatively few of them became socialists (Tilburg 2019; Sowerwine 2008). Socialism had arrived on the national stage, but at the cost of an impoverishment of its political imagination.

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Conclusion The impulse to see the arrival of war in 1914 as a test or a revelation of truth should be resisted. Yet the war did reveal something about the period that came before. Could patriotism be disentangled from war? Jaurès tried, and his 1911 Armée nouvelle stands as a monument of pre-war socialism (Kurz 2014). Still, antiwar and internationalist socialism was difficult to sustain. Vaillant, the old Communard, maintained that “faced with aggression, socialists will do their whole duty, for the country, for the Republic, for the revolution.” For the Marxist Jules Guesde, “the universal revolution . . . will be made to the cry of the Gallic rooster” (Willard 1978, 103). On the basis of antimilitarist socialist propaganda, the French high command had calculated that refusals of the mobilization order might be as high as 13%. In the event, socialists and labor militants responded at the same high positive rates as everyone else (Ducoulombier 2008). The SFIO had been officially pacifist and internationalist, but faced with the rapidly unfolding crisis of July 1914 and with a war of national defense, there could be no question of massive resistance – especially since the SPD was not proposing any such thing. Already in 1913, Viviani, Briand, and Millerand had constituted a left-leaning government. The first wartime cabinet, constituted in August, still managed by this trio of opportunists, with Millerand in the ministry of war, also included other socialists: Marcel Sembat as minister of public works, Guesde as minister without portfolio, and Albert Thomas as an undersecretary of artillery and armaments. Far from effectively acting against war, organized socialism strove to grease its wheels. This would be experienced by many militants, especially in the wake of the extraordinary casualties of the first weeks, as betrayal. Worse than war was war badly conducted. When refusals and mutinies did arrive in 1917, despite attempts on the part of later leftists and especially of conservatives to paint them as the result of socialist agitation, they had their own independent dynamic. The war brought a realignment at the political level, muting the cleavage between the SFIO and the CGT and posing a new set of problems for socialists. And the war forced changes in the working class itself. War production threw resources into metallurgy and chemical plants, for instance, while other industries simply collapsed. Peace in the factories was purchased, in part, by government concessions to the syndicats. Stovall has argued that the very confusion and friability of the immediate post-war moment solicited a reimagining and ideological consolidation of the working class (Stovall 2015). At Tours in 1920, the SFIO split between an “old house” defended by Léon Blum and those who wished to join Lenin’s Third International. The next year, the labor unions of the newly reconstituted working class went through a similar schism. Thus, the social and political landscape had shifted in profound ways across the years of war and of revolutions in distant lands so that socialists – now distinct from communists – had to define themselves and their role anew. As we have seen, socialism in France was never a unified phenomenon, never something that could be seen coherently from a single perspective. Across the nineteenth century, it was a function, an alternative, an insurgent demand – both an everyday practice and a dream of the stars.

Bibliography Andrews, Naomi J. 2013. “Breaking the Ties: French Romantic Socialism and the Critique of Liberal Slave Emancipation.” The Journal of Modern History 85, no. 3 (2013): 489–527. ———. 2020. “The Romantic Socialist Origins of Humanitarianism.” Modern Intellectual History 17 (3) (September): 737–68. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244318000550.

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Eric Brandom Beecher, Jonathan. 1990. Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His World. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ———. 2001. Victor Considerant and the Rise and Fall of French Romantic Socialism. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Berenson, Edward. 1984. Populist Religion and Left-Wing Politics in France, 1830–1852. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Blanqui, Louis Auguste.  2018. The Blanqui Reader.  Edited by  Peter  Hallward and Philippe  Le Goff, translated by Mitchell Abidor. London: Verso. Bouchet, Thomas. 2019. “Socialist Vicissitudes on the Right to Work in France, 1848–1851.” French History 33 (4) (December 31): 572–86. Carlisle, Robert B. 1987. The Proffered Crown: Saint-Simonianism and the Doctrine of Hope. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Derfler, Leslie. 1998. Paul Lafargue and the Flowering of French Socialism, 1882–1911. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ducoulombier, Romain. 2008. “Les Socialistes devant la guerre et la scission (1914–1920): Conférence Jaurès 2008.” Cahiers Jaurès 189 (3): 33–55. Eichner, Carolyn J. 2004. Surmounting the Barricades: Women in the Paris Commune. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———.  2019.  “Language of Imperialism, Language of Liberation: Louise  Michel and the KanakFrench Colonial Encounter.” Feminist Studies 45 (2–3): 377–408. Heath, Elizabeth.  2014. Wine, Sugar, and the Making of Modern France: Global Economic Crisis and the Racialization of French Citizenship, 1870–1910. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jennings, Jeremy. 2011. Revolution and the Republic: A History of Political Thought in France Since the Eighteenth-Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kurtz, Geoffrey. 2014. Jean Jaurès: The Inner Life of Social Democracy. University Park, PA: Penn State Press. Lafrance, Xavier. 2019. The Making of Capitalism in France: Class Structures, Economic Development, the State and the Formation of the French Working Class, 1750–1914. Leiden: Brill. McPhee, Peter.  2003. A Social History of France 1780–1914.  2nd ed.  Basingstoke, Hampshire: ­Palgrave Macmillan. Nicholls, Julia.  2019. Revolutionary Thought After the Paris Commune, 1871–1885. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Brien, Laura. 2015. The Republican Line: Caricature and French Republican Identity, 1830–52. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Pilbeam, Pamela. 2000. French Socialists Before Marx: Workers, Women and the Social Question in France. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Prochasson, Christophe, and Olivier  Wieviorka. 2014. France du XXe  siècle. Documents d’histoire. Paris: Points. Rebérioux, Madeleine. 1974. “Le Socialisme Français de 1871–1914.” In Histoire générale du socialisme (2): De 1875 à 1918, edited by Jacques Droz, 133–237. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Reddy, William M. 1987. The Rise of Market Culture: The Textile Trade and French Society, 1750– 1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scott, Joan Wallach. 1996. Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sewell, William. 1980. Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sowerwine, Charles.  2008. Sisters or Citizens? Women and Socialism in France  Since  1876. 1st ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stovall, Tyler. 2007. “The Myth of the Liberatory Republic and the Political Culture of Freedom in Imperial France.” Yale French Studies 111: 89–103. ———. 2015. Paris and the Spirit of 1919: Consumer Struggles, Transnationalism and Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stuart, Robert.  2002. Marxism at Work: Ideology, Class and French Socialism During the Third Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tilburg, Patricia. 2019. Working Girls: Sex, Taste, and Reform in the Parisian Garment Trades, 1880–1919. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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40 FRENCH EMPIRE IN THE ASIAPACIFIC REGION, C. 1800–1914 Véronique Dorbe-Larcade

The territories that France had claimed in the Pacific region by the end of the nineteenth century were far-flung and diverse. In Southeast Asia, they included present-day Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, bundled together in colonial terms as “Indochina.” These were part of a wider region of ancient and intense circulations and exchanges, where powerful centralized states prevailed, massively resorting to archives and legal or regulatory written documents and thus home to a culture of “literati.” Out into the Pacific Ocean, France claimed an enormous region, including present-day French Polynesia, along with New Caledonia, as well as Wallis and Futuna (Dorigny et  al. 2015). Pacific island societies had developed distinct from each other and completely apart from the rest of the planet until the late eighteenth century, relying solely on oral tradition. Wildly differing, these scattered and mismatched peripheries of French influence merit collective examination from global history perspectives. Their attachment to France occurred according to procedures and under circumstances that created similarities between them. Imperial interchanges, of military personnel, deportees, and others, bound them together. The human consequences of these events are long-lasting and still have an impact today.

How to Name the Territories and the People Concerned Indochina is an emphatically colonial construction, used mostly in opposition to the “nationalist” term of Vietnam. Its further division by French administration between Cochinchina (Far South), Annam (central coastal regions), Laos–Cambodia (in the hinterland), and Tonkin (Far North) ignored local Ky (or boundaries) and inner differences. Meanwhile, the names of Wallis and Futuna, as well as the New Hebrides and New Caledonia, derived from British exploration in the South Pacific, much more effective at imposing its understanding than the French. In a wider sense, labels like Polynesia (and Melanesia) are European geographical terms infused with nineteenth-century biases and prejudices. Within Polynesia can be identified five archipelagos from north to south: the Marquesas Islands, then the Tuamotu Islands to the West, and to the East the Gambier Islands, the Society Islands composed of the Windward Islands (with Tahiti to the east) and the Leeward Islands (to the West), and the Austral archipelago. Since first European contact, the beauty and hospitality DOI: 10.4324/9780367808471-41

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of Polynesians (and especially Tahitians) had been lauded. In contrast, the Melanesians living in New Caledonia, the neighboring Loyalty Islands, and the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) were presented as “ugly,” savage, and cruel. The term “Kanak” originates from a Polynesian (Hawaiian) word, “kanaka,” meaning “human being.” Throughout the nineteenth century, this word was used in European languages to describe Melanesians from New Guinea to New Caledonia. The word Canaque became insulting and racist, especially in twentieth-century German. In New Caledonia, the terms “indigenous” and “Melanesian” gradually replaced it, and eventually, a positive reappropriation of the term “Kanak” occurred, highlighting the assertion of the original inhabitants’ identity.

Early Steps Toward Oceanic Empire As Eric Johnson’s contribution to this volume highlights, French attempts to penetrate the Pacific region, displacing Spain and in rivalry with Britain, had a long and not particularly successful history before 1800. Within the Asian sphere, seeking to rival the Dutch in Java and British interest in the Malay Peninsula, in 1787, Louis XVI of France and the king of Cochinchina entered an agreement securing naval support and trade advantages, as well as, for France, possession of Touron (Hoi nan) and Poulo Condor islands, as potential naval and trading bases on the South China Sea. The era of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815) saw further French expeditions, such as Captain Marchand’s campaign in the Marquesas Islands in 1791–1792 and Nicolas Baudin’s 1800–1803 expedition to Australia. Poorly supported, as the French authorities did not consider them a priority, such expeditions continued French awareness of the region: geography texts identified part of Australia’s southern coasts as “Terre Napoléon” throughout the coming century (Douglas 2014). In these circumstances, Great Britain – more constantly and more massively involved than France could afford to be – was the main protagonist of the contact between Europeans and Oceanians (Desan and Hunt 2013). This was prolonged and further heightened by the arrival of the first Christian missionaries in Tahiti on March 5, 1797, under the auspices of the London Missionary Society. They were a handful of English-speaking Protestants who were forced to adapt to Tahitian society as much as it eventually adapted to them by adopting Christianity. During these decades of upheaval in Europe, Catholic missionaries in Annam also faced a stark reaction from the local authorities against their teachings.

Invention of an Empire: From the 1820s to the 1880s The fall of Napoleon in 1815 left France inward-looking and unable to compete in the global imperial arena, at least in the short term. Very few French nationals were present in the Southern Pacific, and those that were lacked any mandate or formal status and were generally disreputable. Recently charted and explored, the region offered many soughtafter natural resources for adventurers and daring entrepreneurs. The discovery of sandalwood forests turned the Marquesas Islands and New Caledonia into an attractive spot for merchants looking for profitable trade in China, where sandalwood incense was in great demand for ritual purposes (Thomas 2012; Newell 2010). The demand for superior-quality oil to lubricate the machinery of the Industrial Revolution, as well as to provide spermaceti candles for the burgeoning populations of Europe and North America, resulted in the development of whaling in Polynesian waters (Armitage and Bashford 2014). 439

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Economic competition was paralleled by accelerating political and religious interference, both in Indochina and in the South Pacific. Catholic missionaries continued to stir hostility in Vietnam. In New Zealand especially, as French whaling was thriving, competition soared between Catholic and Protestant missionaries. A group of Picpusian Catholic Fathers, expelled from Hawaii, settled in one of Polynesia’s easternmost archipelagos, in the Gambier Islands. There they had remarkable success in creating theocratic rule similar to the famous Jesuits’ “reductions” in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Paraguay (Dartigues, Guillemin and Merle 2008). In the following decades, a new generation of French explorers was at work around the world and across the Pacific Ocean specifically. The dispatch of disciplined naval officers with extensive scientific backgrounds, such as Louis Isidore Duperrey, commanding La Coquille in 1822–1825, or Jules Dumont d’Urville, commanding the voyages of the Astrolabe (1826–1829, 1837–1840), clearly demonstrated how strategic these expeditions were for the French government and foreshadowed the major part assumed by the French Navy and navy officers in the years to come, in Indochina as well as in the Pacific (Douglas 2014). The July Monarchy of King Louis-Philippe, 1830–1848, played a key role in this development. As with its promotion and extension of the conquest of Algeria, begun in the last months of the pre-1830 monarchy, a wider reconstruction of French exterior grandeur was useful for interior stabilization in a nation still rocked by post-revolutionary conflict. Britain remained the great rival, but in these decades, tensions eased, with Lord Palmerston and Lord Aberdeen, in charge of foreign affairs, inclined to appeasement in French–British relationships. Commander Abel Dupetit-Thouars’s agenda in 1842, in retaliation for the British takeover of New Zealand (Waitangi Treaty of 1840), illustrated what the change implied. This treaty, which became the foundation of European–Māori relations under British dominance, had a short-term context of Māori distrust of French activity and prevented French Catholic missionaries, active around French whaling stations, from gaining influence at the expense of British Protestant missionaries. Consequently, Dupetit-Thouars proclaimed the annexation of the Marquesas Islands to the French colonial empire, overtly supporting Catholic efforts there. He had already spotted the place – favored by whalers to weigh anchor – during a previous survey voyage across the Pacific. On his own initiative, and without any instructions from Paris, he then rushed to set up a French protectorate on Tahiti and the other islands currently under the rule of Queen Pomare IV. Resorting to open threats of force, placing the capital, Papeete, under the guns of his squadron, he succeeded, with some of the local merchants’ support, in this power grab. International war briefly loomed over abuse suffered by the British consul (who also not coincidentally was a Protestant missionary), but the British government chose to turn a blind eye to the French implementation of a protectorate limiting Pomare’s power in 1842–1843. An internal war broke out, nevertheless: la “Guerre franco-tahitienne” (French Tahitian War) from 1844 to 1846. This required significant engagement from France to support Queen Pomare’s opponents toward final victory, the queen having failed to gain countervailing British support. The brutal French intrusion in Tahitian affairs did not go without criticism, and in 1847, an international arbitration committee produced the “Jarnac Convention” (or “Convention anglo-française”), which acknowledged that the eastern part of the Society Islands (Tahiti) was under French authority but conversely decided to neutralize the western part of the same archipelago, where British (and all nonFrench) ships might sail and trade while escaping French regulation and taxation. Ra’iatea 440

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Island thus became a more attractive “duty-free” harbor for the American merchant navy than Papeete. A similar will-to-power balance between France and Great Britain showed up in the “Far East.” Since Great Britain had acquired a strong position in China after the First Opium War (1839–1842), France, in 1847, sought to claim the same advantages. To assert French ambitions in the area, two French warships destroyed coastal defenses and Vietnamese naval vessels in Tourane (Da Nang) (Kiernan 2017). While Polynesia had come first in the demonstration of French will to power in this period, it did not remain the focus of Paris’s attention for long. During the Second Empire (1850–1870) and the early Third Republic (1870–1914), gaining access to China represented a major global concern, causing French governments to concentrate forces and investments there rather than on the Pacific outposts. The Marquesas islands offered the most striking evidence of the situation. After the 1842 annexation and tragic clashes between natives and the troops left in garrison, the Marquesas were deprived of any administrative or military presence. Significantly, the French flag had been entrusted to the Catholic missionaries who remained in place. French authority was purely theoretical. The French attack on the Annam Empire, launched in 1858, resulted in the capture of Saigon (February 1859). Although on a much larger scale, it bore similarities with the French takeover in Polynesia. Endangered Catholic missionaries were an excuse for military operations, and initiatives taken by navy officers called for both use of force and manipulation. Following the initial assault, the wider French conquest took place in three stages. In the 1860s, the six provinces “ceded” to France in the South (Cochinchina) were declared a colony under naval administration. They were backed by the protectorate enforced on Cambodia, to the detriment of Annam by 1863. The Philastre Treaty (March 1874) defined relations between French Cochinchina and the Vietnamese Empire, which was placed under a de facto protectorate. The 1883 French offensive on Tonkin provided an opportunity to formalize this (Patenôte Treaty, June 1884). This led to a Franco-Chinese war (June 1884– June 1885), at the end of which (Treaty of T’ien-tsin) China abandoned its claims to suzerainty in the area and France achieved a dominant position. Finally, by 1893, under the threat of French warships, the Siamese Kingdom was obliged to accept a French protectorate over Laos (Klein 2013). Across the Pacific, Tahiti’s Queen Pomare IV reigned until 1877 under French protection, but her successor, her son King Pomare V, was pushed into abdicating and formally ceding his rights to France in 1880. Establishment of a French protectorate over the Wallis and Futuna Islands in 1887, on the other hand, seems to have lacked any deliberate plan. An initial appeal by the local authorities for the establishment of such a status, in 1842, had remained unheeded. In this small territory, converted to the Catholic faith after the violent martyrdom of Father Pierre Chanel in 1841, it was virtually through these clerics alone that a French presence was achieved. New Caledonia’s situation is also exceptional in several respects to the French colonial empire (Bancel, Blanchard, and Vergès 2007). Associated with the Loyalty Islands archipelago, this territory had, since the early nineteenth century, been home to the santaliers (sandalwood traders) and whalers and a place of conflict between Catholic and Protestant missionaries. Its integration (as a colony, on September 24, 1853) into the French Empire illustrates the conquering foreign policy of the Second Empire, materialized further through the creation of the port city of Noumea. New Caledonia was soon dedicated to serving as a penal colony: an imitation of British New South Wales, as well as an alternative to the insalubrious Cayenne in South America, 441

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and more satisfactory than the Marquesas Islands, which had formerly been contemplated for this purpose. The first convicts’ convoy arrived on January 5, 1864. They were classified into three categories: the “transported,” or common criminals and delinquents; the “relegates,” who were repeat offenders; and lastly, the “deportees,” political convicts. At the end of their sentence, these convicts were offered the possibility of staying on the island as settlers and granted a piece of land. The “Caldoche” (European origin) population of today’s New Caledonia is partly descended from them. The limited success of this system led the governor, Paul Feillet, in 1895, to put an end to “penal colonization” by encouraging the immigration of farmers from metropolitan France (the “Feillet colonists”). New Caledonia thus became a settlement colony. To achieve this, the native population was dispossessed of the best plots of land. The French state had already proclaimed itself, by two declarations – in 1855 and 1862 – the owner of all the land. Admittedly, the January 22, 1868, decree left a (mediocre) part of New Caledonia’s land to the “Canaques” in the form of domains called “tribes,” but guarantees against further land confiscations remained rather theoretical.

Balance Sheet of Conquest, c. 1880 As in other regions of France’s growing colonial empire, the indigénat system applied in New Caledonia reduced non-Europeans to second-class citizens, inferior in their rights and opportunities. The very existence of such a system posed a challenge to French egalitarian republican values, especially since 1881–1882, while the Third Republic in France was promoting and enforcing the motto “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité,” then engraved on the façade of the newly installed “secular, free and obligatory” primary schools all over the country. The French colonial administration in Tahiti appeared more prone to equality than were local notables and authorities, who did not want the indigénat to be reconsidered (Merle and Muckle 2019). Rule in Tahiti posed a particular problem, as the major European presence was of English speakers and use and command of the French language was rare. Though she could write and express herself fluently in English, Queen Pomare IV needed an interpreter to talk to French officials. Anglophone missionaries had learned local languages before offering education in English, commercial relations were particularly active with Australia, and linguistic familiarity went hand in hand with a keen Anglophile feeling. For the French authorities, after the end of the Franco-Tahitian War, the development of a French-speaking education system was a political necessity to consolidate and perpetuate the Protectorate by reversing this trend. However, in the absence of a body of state-directed teachers (nonexistent before the 1886 Goblet law), they could only rely on Catholic missionary congregations to run schools and other educational establishments. These Catholic clerics were confronted with a population that remained mostly faithful to Protestant teachings and therefore held a rather-limited audience (Newbury 1986). Meanwhile, in Indochina, French authorities attempted to wage a “cultural revolution” to strengthen their grasp on the country. On the one hand, this meant shaking the grip of traditional scholarly elites: changing from ideograms to the Latin alphabet (chữ quốc ngữ) to write in Vietnamese represented the most outstanding illustration of this policy (Tréglodé 2018). However, instead of toppling the ancient administrative hierarchy, French authorities continued to work through it while creating an underclass of local colonial civil servants necessary to administration but often frustrated in their ambitions (Goscha 2016). 442

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In these years, the farthest colonies of the empire had a limited appeal for the metropolitan French population. Nonetheless, colonial interests came to be defended by a pressure group: the “French Colonial Union,” founded in 1894, whose discretion – it had only a few members – was inversely proportional to its strong power of influence. Colonial affairs only very occasionally became an element of overt debate in French politics, and those “colonials” were a mixed bag of shady individuals and exceptional personalities. Three characters illustrate this. The first is Jules Ferry, a well-known and celebrated Republican politician and the mastermind of the French school system. Twice prime minister, he faced the end of his political career on March 30, 1885, because of the “Lang Son Disaster,” a military retreat and strategic defeat in Tonkin that presaged a humiliating end to the Franco-Chinese War of 1884–1885. The announcement of a French military setback unleashed the opposition. Ferry was reproached with having sent French soldiers to their deaths far from home, both in Tonkin and elsewhere, sacrificing them for the illusion of future profits. Beyond the minister’s person, French colonial expansion supporters were henceforth discredited – and for almost a decade. While Ferry’s motives may have been spotless, those of others were undeniably less so. The second illustrative character is Jean-Baptiste Dutrou-Bornier (1834–1876), an enterprising adventurer who made himself a so-called “king” on Easter Island. A former sea captain and trader, he operated between Chile and the Polynesian islands and finally settled on Easter Island in 1867, after his failed management of his Tahiti plantation. He transformed the island into a sort of large sheep ranch. To do this, he confiscated the land that used to belong to a disorganized local population decimated by epidemics. To the great displeasure of the missionaries and the bishop of Papeete, he enslaved Pascuans to work on the estates belonging to his associate in Tahiti, John Brander. He died suddenly under very dubious circumstances before he could secure, in the name of the Pascuan “queen” he had married, the establishment of a French protectorate on Easter Island, which had 900 inhabitants upon his arrival and only 130 upon his death. Quite different was the career of a third character, Jacques-Jules Garnier (1839–1904). He was an engineer who promoted nickel mining exploitation in New Caledonia (and not related to Francis Garnier, a French officer and explorer, connected with France’s takeover in Tonkin). A specialist in mineralogy, Jacques-Jules Garnier arrived in New Caledonia in 1863. The discovery he made there of the presence of a new nickel ore (Garnierite) marked a turning point in the island’s economic history. Above all, he founded a company, later called Société Le Nickel (SLN), which launched the island into an industrial activity still of great importance to the inhabitants today. From 1880 onward, the French possessions in the Pacific were grouped together in a single administrative framework, that of the “Etablissements Français d’Océanie” (or EFO), whose artificial character was obvious, due to the many discrepancies existing between New Caledonia, Wallis and Futuna, and the Polynesian “French” Islands, as noted earlier. Indochina, the “Pearl of the French Colonial Empire,” presented a striking contrast in comparison to the seclusion, if not dereliction and underdevelopment, of French Polynesia specifically. The subsidized production of copra (coconut oil) intensified and became systematized by the turn of the twentieth century. Harmful to local food crops and landscapes, the output of these plantations nonetheless never reached a quality meeting the international standards. However, French Indochina did sustain a reputation as a major rice producer, and the development of rubber plantations, as global demand 443

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increased, was a definite success. Moreover, in Tonkin, the colony had a genuine mining and manufacturing industry. Such success was not universal. Annam, which was far from the major trade flows and was handicapped by more difficult geographical and climatic conditions, did not enjoy the same prosperity. However, as a whole, the colony’s dynamism provided the basis for the creation of a commercial and banking industrial apparatus that still matters in French capitalism today, with the Indosuez group, for example. The quality of work of Paul Doumer, governor general of Indochina from 1897 to 1902, inspired in part by the British Indian Civil Service, was certainly important for the colony. Establishing systems of rule over the population was especially vital, as there were very few French people in Indochina, whether they were colonists, civil servants, or soldiers. At the beginning of the twentieth century, in Saigon, where the European population was the densest, they accounted for only 0.35% of the total. In Polynesia, meanwhile, Europeans were also a very small minority and more of a random selection than a privileged elite. Regardless of what France represented concretely from political, administrative, and economic standpoints in the Far East and in the Pacific, these two spaces were the object of a persistent imaginative over-investment in both politics and culture, one not without an erotic dimension. The painter Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) devoted the last part of his life and work to Tahiti. Writers such as Pierre Loti (1850–1923), author of Le Mariage de Loti (Rarahu), a love story set in Tahiti (1880), and Victor Segalen (1878–1919), who wrote Les immémoriaux (1907), recounting the decline of the ancient Polynesian culture, had been naval officers, familiar with both Indochina and Polynesia from their service. Loti also wrote Trois journées de guerre en Annam (1883), an unflinching journalistic account of colonial warfare (Matsuda 2004).

Anticolonial Dynamics The progression of conflicts in France’s Pacific possessions through the nineteenth century shows how imperialism developed as an antagonist to local people’s situations and wishes. The Franco-Tahitian War of 1844–1846 took much of its character from French intrusive alignment with one side of a pre-existing factional struggle, and its end was marked by the innovative use of French prestige to promote new notables within Tahitian politics. However, because it was triggered by the plundering of land caused by the stationing of French troops, it is not entirely unrelated to the great 1878 “Canaque” revolt in New Caledonia, led by Chief Atai. Land expropriation of Kanaks in favor of French colonists was the major cause of this striking outburst of violence. It resulted in the death of a thousand Melanesians (nearly 5% of the total population) and 200 Europeans, putting a stop to European immigration to New Caledonia for 20 years. The motivations of Teraupo’o, the leader of the Leeward Islands War (1888–1897), were complex and probably not only political, but he became, and remains so today, a reference figure of nationalism in French Polynesia. He sustained almost a decade of armed resistance, appearing as a real challenge for the Papeete authorities who, after 1885 and the transformation of the protectorate into a colony, intended to unify, under France’s authority, the former Pomare kingdom’s various components. This implied questioning the Jarnac Convention and the commercially advantageous status of the island of Ra’iatea, which was the setting for this sedition. A full-scale military campaign by the French was required to

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end this struggle, with the defeat of Teraupo’o, during the battle of Tevaiota, on January 3, 1897 (Conte 2019). In Vietnam, meanwhile, refusal of the French order was continuous and intense, carried on particularly by the Can Vuong (“King’s party”) movement, mixing piracy and guerrilla warfare waged against colonial rule in Tonkin. Began in July 1885 and lasting ten years, it was led by the young emperor Hàm Nghi at the behest of the regent Tôn Thất Thuyết. The movement brought together literati and common people and gave rise to a ferocious repression that left 40,000 dead. Hàm Nghi was captured and exiled to Algeria in 1888, but another guerrilla movement arose, also inspired by the literati. Led by Phan Dinh Phung in the center and Hoang Hoa Tham, known as “Marshal Tham,” in Tonkin, the seriousness of the incidents it caused in Hanoi, Annam, and Cochinchina alarmed French opinion. This led eventually, with the appointment of Albert Sarraut as governor general in 1912, to a policy of educational “reform” that, in practice, was intended to destroy Vietnamese resistance by training them from childhood to think like the French (Barjot and Klein 2017). The displays of hostility and acts of violence just mentioned are the result of particular circumstances and specific local socio-economic and political situations. However, because they fundamentally exist in reaction to colonial power, they have some commonalities. Above all, even though they were defeated, their repression led to the paradoxical creation of homogeneity in a fundamentally disparate French Empire. Meetings took place, not only between rebellious colonies, but also between rebellious colonized people and opponents to the Paris power establishment. The depth of the links created and their long-term consequences are yet to be assessed. Some cases have the quality of legend. Reputedly, Louise Michel, deported heroine of the defeated Paris Commune of 1871, met “Canaque” leader Atai in New Caledonia. She offered him her red scarf, a badge of high political meaning, a token of convergence in their mutual struggles. Nguyen Van Cam, also known as Ký Dông, was a Vietnamese insurgent against French rule deported to Polynesia. He had been preceded by the scholar Nguyễn Văn Tường, who died in Tahiti in 1886. Ký Dông was exiled in 1898–1899 to Hiva Oa Island in the Marquesas, where he met the famous painter Paul Gauguin. The latter had finally settled there at the very end of his existence, after taking a stand against Governor Lacascade’s military action to repress the Leeward Islands’ uprising in January 1897. Clearly, repression unwillingly created connection on a large scale, if not unity between various distant dissenters to French colonization. In the last years of the century, New Caledonia (District of Bourail) housed defeated rebels from Kabylia in Algeria. The defeated Leeward islands rebel Teraupo’o was exiled to Noumea at the same time, while his last supporters were deported to the Marquesas (Ua Huka Island). The very existence of these rebellions and the conditions of their crackdown had consequences that still echo today. Chief Atai’s decapitated and mummified skull was held as a war trophy after the “Canaques” insurgents’ defeat in 1878. After an emotional lawsuit and media coverage, it was returned to his Kanak descendants in August 2014 and brought back from France to New Caledonia as a token of reconciliation between the two nations, willing to start a new partnership (Muckle 2007). In Tahiti, there clearly prevailed an unsettled memory regarding the Franco-Tahitian War with two separate and distant monuments, one for the French soldiers killed in action, in the Uranie cemetery in Papeete, and the other one in the independentist stronghold of Fa’a’a.

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Shifts in the Global Context By the end of the nineteenth century, a new balance of power was established in Europe, and as usual, these ongoing conflicts were transposed to the colonial realm. For France, Great Britain was no longer the major problem. After losing the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 and the resulting imperative for “Revanche” (revenge), newly unified Germany was henceforth the major enemy. The agreement reached by Paris and London on the New Hebrides gave a clear indication of that change. Around 1890, French settlers there had come to outnumber the early British ones, creating a potential clash over sovereignty. However, in the face of expanding German interest in the region (they had taken control of northeastern New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, as well as a swath of smaller territories since the mid-1880s), Britain and France preferred to implement shared control on the archipelago, taking the form of a “Commission navale mixte” (1887–1906) then of a “Condominium,” which lasted until 1980. As a consequence, the population underwent an original but all-too-complicated and unsatisfactory system of double institutions and rotating authority (Denoon 1997 [2004]). By 1914, the opening of the Panama Canal and the increased activity of “Compagnie des Messageries Maritimes” (a state-subsided shipping firm providing regular “lines” combining trade, passenger transport, and postal services) contributed to reducing the distance and communication challenges between France and its farthest colonies. This complemented the increasing incorporation of the colonies into the supply of industrial raw materials and labor. Growing technological advances in artillery and armor plating caused rising demand for nickel. Similarly, exotic staples such as coffee or chocolate were more commonplace than ever before everywhere in Europe. Traffic to Europe from the Pacific area (where such productions are plentiful) was bound to intensify with terrible human consequences. The need for manpower in New Caledonia’s nickel mines and the New Hebrides’s cocoa and coffee plantations generated a particular flow of people from Vietnam. Constraint and misery marked their condition, and like many intra-imperial migrants since the “abolition” of slavery, they were very far from being free. The first of these Indochinese who arrived in New Caledonia in 1891 are clear evidence of this: they were, for the most part, convicts from the penal colony in the Poulo Condor (Côn Son) island. From 1895 to the 1930s, another type of recruitment was implemented on a five-year contract basis, renewable once. This “commitment” mainly attracted Tonkinese from the Red River delta in North Vietnam, an overpopulated area where famine was rife. These “engagés” (indentured workers) were subjected to the second-class legal status of the indigénat and routinely confined to their barracks. Above all, they could not break their contract and were thus “hindered,” which is implied by the term they applied to themselves, “Chân Đăng.” As their names were deemed too difficult to pronounce by local officials, they were given a registration number to replace it, including in official documents. Another group from impoverished villages in southern China were recruited for the short-lived Atimaono or “Terre Eugénie” cotton plantation created in Tahiti around 1862, on Scottish-born colonist William Stewart’s initiative. They were the ancestors of a Chinese community in French Polynesia still present today.

Conclusion: Limitations and Paradoxes of Empire On the eve of the First World War, the French colonial empire in the Far East and the Pacific was far from an object of pride and satisfaction for some of its own executives and

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managers. Yet the alarms they gave or the claims they expressed remained unheard or even cost them their positions. As far back as the 1890s, Henri Mager, a senior civil servant who had also visited Tonkin, denounced in vain the shortcomings and errors of French colonial rule in Tahiti. In the same period, colonial governor Lanessan’s politics (1891–1894), considered as pro-Vietnamese, stirred hatred and hostility among French military and colonists and resulted in his dismissal. Around such individual figures, the wider situation of the population was deeply problematic. Standards of living under colonial rule showed disturbing patterns. In Indochina, a growing impoverishment was obviously underway. Polynesia was suffering an ongoing health emergency, dramatically exemplified by a terrible demographic drop in the Marquesas Islands. A colonial medicine inspired by Pasteur, practiced by the navy’s physicians and pharmacists, and more particularly dedicated to the study of tropical pathologies and to the development of vaccines, was particularly high on the agenda in Indochina. It was led by Alexandre Yersin (1863–1943), well-known for his discovery of the plague bacillus (Goscha 2016). His career and research testify to the shortcomings of Indochina’s health service, both for practitioners and patients. The Vaimiti Colonial Hospital’s situation in Papeete was similarly bleak in the late nineteenth century. In addition to lack of means, the local population was distrustful of the care (and medication) provided by the doctors who practiced there, preferring to use the services of the Tahitian “Tahua,” traditional healers, such as the famous Tiurai (Conte 2019). In the French colonial empire as a whole, the First World War was a turning point. This was true also of its most distant settlements, those in the Far East and the Pacific. What happened on that occasion is commensurate with the diversity, complexity, and contradictions that characterize them. Following on from a troubled past, individual and collective behaviors opened up a future of untold possibilities in relations with the metropolis. The shelling of Papeete (September 22, 1914) by a German war fleet brought about, among the Polynesian population, a very new feeling of solidarity with France. This reaction was in sharp contrast to a later response of New Caledonia’s Kanaks. Although individuals from Tahiti and surrounding islands joined to fight in the “Bataillon mixte du Pacifique” (Mixed Battalion of the Pacific), the Kanaks rose up in 1917 against conscription (Bensa, Kacué Goromoedo, and Muckle 2015). To what extent is each attitude a harbinger of actual future developments? Ho Chi Minh – the future leader of the anticolonial Vietnamese during the Indochina War – had moved through the USA, Britain, and France, where he worked among the Indochinese manpower drafted during the First World War, and by 1919 was ready to demand a hearing at the Versailles peace conference. One he did not get, propelling a further engagement with revolutionary resistance in the future.

References Armitage, David, and Alison Bashford. 2014. Pacific Histories, Ocean, Land, People. London: Palgrave Mcmillan. Bancel, Nicolas, Pascal Blanchard, and Françoise Vergès. 2007. La colonisation française. Toulouse: Milan. Barjot, Dominique, and Jean François Klein. 2017. De l’Indochine Coloniale au Viêt Nam Actuel. Paris: Académie des Sciences d’Outre-Mer- Magellan &Compagnie. Bensa, Alban, Yvon Kacué Goromoedo, and Adrian Muckle. 2015. Les Sanglots de l’Aigle Pêcheur. Toulouse: Anacharsis. Conte, Eric, ed. 2019. Une histoire de Tahiti. Papeete: Au Vent des iles-Tahiti.

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Véronique Dorbe-Larcade Dartigues, Laurent, Alain Guillemin and Isabelle Merle. 2008. “Histoire des missions en Asie et dans le Pacifique.” In Missionnaires chrétiens. Asie et Pacifique XIXe-XXe siècle, edited by Françoise Douaire-Marsaudon Françoise, 7–18. Paris: Mémoires/Histoire, Autrement. www.cairn.info/– 9782746710795-page-7.htm. Denoon, Donald, ed. 1997 [2004]. The Cambridge History of the Pacific Islanders. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Desan, Susan, and Lynn Hunt, eds. 2013. The French Revolution in Global Perspective. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Douglas, Bronwen. 2014. Science, Voyages and Encounters in Oceania 1511–1850. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Dorigny, Marcel,  Jean-François  Klein, Jean-Pierre  Peyroulou, Pierre  Singaravelou, and MarieAlbane de Suremain. 2015. Grand Atlas des Empires Coloniaux. Des Premières Colonisations aux Décolonisations XVe-XXIes. Paris: Autrement. Goscha, Christopher E. 2016. Vietnam: A New History. New York: Basic Books. Kiernan, Ben. 2017. Viet Nam: A  History from Earliest Times to the Present. Oxford: Oxford ­University Press. Klein, Jean-François,  ed.  2013. “Cambodia: Colonial Encounters/Cambodge: Rencontres  Coloniales” Siksācakr, Journal of the Center for Khmer Studies: 13–14. Matsuda, Matt  K.  2004.  Empire of Love: Histories of France and the Pacific. Oxford: Oxford ­University Press. Merle, Isabelle, and Adrian Muckle. 2019. L’Indigénat. Genèses dans l’Empire Français, Pratiques en Nouvelle Calédonie. Paris: CNRS Éditions. Mohamed-Gaillard, Sarah. 2016. Histoire de l’Océanie. Paris: Colin University Press. Muckle, Adrian. 2007. “Tropes of (Mis)Understanding: Imagining Shared Destinies in New ­Caledonia, 1853–1998.”  Journal de la Société des Océanistes  124 (1). www.cairn.info/revue-journal-­de-lasociete-des-oceanistes-2007-1-page-11.htm. Newbury, Colin. 1986. Tahiti Nui: Change and Survival in French Polynesia, 1767–1945. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Newell, Jennifer. 2010. Trading Nature: Tahitians, Europeans and Ecological Exchange. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Salmond, Anne. 2009. Aphrodite’s Island, the European Discovery of Tahiti. Berkeley: University of California Press. Thomas, Nicholas. 2012. Islanders – The Pacific in the Age of Empire. New Haven: Yale University Press. Tréglodé, Benoît. 2018. Histoire du Viêt Nam de la Colonisation à Nos Jours. Paris: Editions de la Sorbonne.

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41 IMPERIAL VARIATION Administration and Citizenship in France’s Colonies Megan Brown

Historians have long puzzled over the tensions between French ideals of universalism and human rights on the one hand and realities of discriminatory legal pluralism and inequality on the other. This is nowhere more apparent than in the French Empire, where laws applied unevenly to certain populations, creating a persistent divorce between citizenship and nationality and determining the types of encounters a person might have with the state. Legal pluralism – based on racial and religious grounds – operated throughout France’s colonies, despite claims to universalist ideology stemming from the Enlightenment and touted by republican governments. An account of the variety of administrative practices and the fitful history of citizenship rights in the empire reveals the ways in which French officials used law to preserve power. Yet it also shows how people in the colonies exploited small openings in the law to push for equality and their rights as citizens of France. France’s legal pluralism and race-based rights can be traced to its histories of slavery and colonialism. Dating back to a fourteenth-century ordinance by Louis X, enslaved people who touched metropolitan French soil were said to be manumitted. Officials by the eighteenth century followed this principle loosely at best, but it is nonetheless demonstrative of the differentiated rights between metropole and colony. Freedom would come haltingly to enslaved people in France’s colonies. The National Convention abolished slavery in 1794 (16 Pluviôse, Year 2), only to have Napoleon re-impose it in 1802. While the profitable slave colony of Saint-Domingue cemented abolition through a successful war of independence, resulting in the independent nation of Haiti in 1804, legal slavery endured in France’s remaining colonies until 1848. Perceptions of economic need, namely, the significance of chattel labor, and the fear of free people of color engaging in civic life led to further legal distinctions that enshrined racialized difference in the laws of the colonies and the metropole (Fick 2007). Indeed, the 1814 constitutional charter proclaimed, “The colonies shall be governed by particular laws and regulations,” drawing a line between a metropolitan legal regime and the laws governing the empire (Peabody 2015, 23–24). While categories of race at this time were not bolstered by “scientific” explanations, French assertions of cultural and biological difference justified unequal and deeply racist practice. Understandings and definitions of race would change over time, but the outcomes of inequality and injustice persisted (Peabody and Stovall 2003). 449

DOI: 10.4324/9780367808471-42

Megan Brown

Before the liberation and re-enslavement of the late eighteenth century, the French Antilles were a site of complex political and cultural hierarchies, including free people of color, some of whom were wealthy or even slave owners. As this population grew in prestige and embraced some of the trappings of elite, European-style culture, they represented “a genuine dread [véritable hantise] for authorities” and for white colonists eager to cement their own distinct, privileged status (Hajjat 2011). At the heart of white French fears was assimilation, a term that would dominate colonial debates in the late nineteenth century but that can be traced to much earlier roots. Assimilation can denote both acculturation and legal rights, with the former sometimes used as a litmus test for whether the latter is deserved. Free people of color in Saint-Domingue and elsewhere embraced French cultural practices and exercised rights as political subjects of the French king. Increasingly interested in hardening racial lines and facing pressure from white planters with similar concerns, French authorities introduced more repressive regulations that stripped free people of color of their rights to legal protection and self-expression. The piecemeal denial of rights to free people of color is emblematic of the increasingly racialized idea of French identity, in which officials attempted to code “citizen” as “white.” Yet as will be discussed later in this chapter, the very existence of children born of relationships between white citizens and people of color (free or enslaved) complicated how officials enforced legal distinctions. Despite the growing association of whiteness with rights, some Black Africans did receive citizenship rights under French law in the years after the Revolution. In the Four Communes of Senegal, a long-standing French colony, residents (known as originaires) gained French voting rights in 1848 under the Second Republic. Distinctions in rights continued, notably in the legal categorization of French, “mulatto,” and Senegalese, understood as mutually exclusive statuses (Idowu 1969). Outside of the Four Communes, other Senegalese people would not be considered citizens, leading to complex understandings of Senegalese identity into the twentieth century. Even military service did not secure rights; from 1935 to 1949, citizenship was conferred to no more than 16 people per year outside of the Four Communes. Further still, citizenship did not necessarily pass from parent to child. Children born outside of the Four Communes were denied citizenship even if their father was a citizen. Metropolitan jurists posited distinctions between citoyenneté, which the originaires could claim, and nationalité, which “could be refused for almost everyone,” allowing the French administration to practice “indirect segregation” and affirm a mutable and limited definition of “universal” (Coquery-Vidrovitch 2001, 290 and 304–5). Beyond racialized distinctions of rights, the gendering of citizenship further undercut French pretensions to universalism. Women in the metropole would not receive voting rights until the end of World War II, nearly a century after the Second Republic introduced universal male suffrage in 1848. The expansion of metropolitan citizenship rights to all men in 1848 was but one innovation of the new regime. The short-lived Second Republic also introduced major changes to the administration of the colonies and the rights of people living there. The Constitution of November 4 declared the colonies to be an “integral” part of France’s territory. In practice, this meant territorial assimilation, notably in Algeria, whose northern region was divided into départements and arrondissements, like the metropole. Months prior, in March 1848, a decree extended the vote to newly freed people in the Antilles and Réunion, but acquired rights did not necessarily translate into representation. Guadeloupe elected its first Black deputy, Hégésippe Jean Légitumus, only in 1898. The island’s sugar elites and his metropolitan critics subverted his tenure. By mobilizing racist tropes against him, they undermined 450

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his position as Guadeloupe’s representative and institutionalized the political exclusion of Guadeloupeans in general, normalizing discourse that overtly linked citizenship with whiteness (Heath 2019). Elsewhere in the empire, rights were short-lived or incomplete. The 1848 extension of voting rights theoretically extended to men in the French Establishments in India, but the law was abrogated there the following year. Despite the abolition of slavery in law, the practice continued in French West Africa until the 1870s, and forced labor practices such as the corvée continued until after World War II. If the ascent of free people of color in the Antilles concerned officials in the eighteenth century, their anxiety only increased in the late nineteenth century, by which point France’s empire was the second largest in the world. Officials and scholars in the metropole and colonies debated how best to govern the populations under French rule. Two major strands of thought dominated these debates: assimilation and association. Assimilation, as discussed earlier, could denote acculturation (including language, education, and religion) or legal rights for an individual. It also could apply to territory; Algeria’s land was assimilated to metropolitan law in 1848, while its population did not receive full French citizenship until 1958. Assimilation had long roots in France, visible in attempts at francisation, in a cultural and linguistic, not civic, sense, in seventeenth-century Quebec and tied to the Enlightenment notion of the universal man (Belmessous 2005). The administrative policy of assimilation focused chiefly on applying a single set of laws in the colonies and metropole. As a 1900 book on French colonial administration put it, “Assimilation, by giving the colonies institutions analogous to those of metropolitan France, little by little removes the distances which separate the diverse parts of French territory and finally realizes their intimate union through the application of common legislation” (Betts 1961, 8). Association, in contrast, emphasized and encouraged difference in administration and cultural practice. Influenced by the political theorist Saint-Simon, some officials in Algeria argued that only a separate politique indigène (native policy) could respect local traditions and shield local people from the rule of the increasingly powerful settler population. Others, like scientist and social psychologist Gustave Le Bon, did little to sugarcoat his disdain for non-white French subjects, viewing association as less about protecting or respecting native peoples and more about maintaining the natural order of White supremacy. He warned in 1889 that with assimilation, the French were inviting “the unanimous cry of the natives . . . Algeria for the Arabs!, just as India for the Hindus! is the password of all the natives of India who have received an English education” (Deming Lewis 1962, 138–39). In highly racist terms, Le Bon went on to question the mental capacity of overseas populations who might be allowed to vote, even as his warning of calls for independence betrayed his real fear that access to rights and education would upend the colonial order of things. Even assimilationists advocated limitations. In a rejoinder to Le Bon, Antillean-born senator Alexandre Isaac argued that education would “establish between them and the colonizers a community of language and interests,” with the caveat that he made a distinction between assimilable colonies and those which are not suited to assimilation. . . . By assimilation I mean a situation in which the French citizens of a colony enjoy all the legal guarantees accorded to the French of the metropolis. Thus, rather than being committed to universalism, proponents of assimilation had flexible interpretations of where and how the policy might be applied, rendering them more akin to associationists than is often acknowledged (Deming Lewis 1962, 142). By the eve of World 451

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War I, moreover, assimilation began to look outmoded. Jules Harmand, a colonial administrator, called association “realistic and intelligent,” striving not “to achieve an equality forever impossible, but rather . . . to establish a certain equivalence” (Betts 1961, 122). Men like Le Bon and Harmand could debate the goals of administration in theory, but in practice, the extension and denial of citizenship rights and France’s patchwork legal regime invited exploitation and fomented dissent. To better understand the variety of ways in which people in the colonies experienced and interacted with the administration, it is important to highlight three legal concepts that were at turns intertwined or at odds: citizen, indigène, and personal status. Citizenship, as we have already seen, was extended to some people in the colonies, although they did not necessarily actually enjoy the same rights – particularly of voting and representation – that metropolitan men did. Indigène, or Indigenous person, served as a legal category of people governed by the punitive indigénat regime, which will be discussed later. People living under the category of an indigène subject lacked political rights and had little recourse in the face of the demands of French authorities. Statut personnel (personal status) typically denoted an individual’s affiliation with a religious sect and the concomitant expectation that this person would rely on that sect’s legal codes, rather than French law. Historians have emphasized the dangers of assuming that the French categorization of a person’s religion was an accurate representation of their actual belief or identity, but here I will use the term “Muslim” because it was the administrative label commonly applied by the state to denote an Indigenous person’s distinct status, particularly in Algeria (Shepard 2006). In Algeria, citizenship was extended to select populations, increasingly marginalizing the Muslim majority as most others were afforded political rights. The 1865 sénatus-consulte (an act voted by the Senate that operated as law) allowed Muslim and – until 1870 – Jewish Algerians to relinquish their state-defined personal status and request French citizenship. The language of the act codified Algerian Muslims as subjects and emphasized the “incompatibility and incommensurability” between French civil law and native (Muslim) law (Surkis 2019, 90). Few chose to renounce their personal status, and of those who did, only a fraction actually succeeded in gaining French citizenship. In the half-century from 1865 to 1915, 2,396 Algerian Muslims became French through naturalization, most having demonstrated their “assimilability” through military service or civil service careers (Weil 2008). Just as a European’s conversion to Islam did not confer on them Muslim personal status, conversion to Catholicism did not guarantee the right to shed Muslim personal status, resulting in what Judith Surkis (2019, 185) dubs “jus sanguinis with a religious name.” Jus sanguinis, or citizenship based on one’s parentage, contrasts with jus soli, meaning, citizenship based on the location of one’s birth. French authorities augmented the French population of Algeria and hardened the distinction between “citizen” and “Muslim” by extending citizenship rights to other peoples. The Jews of the colonized northern départements, who included ethnic Berbers, descendants of refugees from the Spanish Inquisition, and more recent arrivals from Western Europe and the Russian Empire, gained citizenship under the 1870 Crémieux Decree. While Algerian Jews saw their rights stripped under the Vichy regime, overall their status as citizens served French claims about who was assimilable (Weil 2008). Authorities made clear that Muslims were not. In another bid to grow the French population – and marginalize other European powers that might claim a stake in Algerian affairs – French authorities progressively extended citizenship rights to settlers of European origin. In 1887, the Third Republic introduced double jus soli, meaning, that if an individual and one of their parents were born 452

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in France, inclusive of Algeria, that individual was a French citizen (provided the parent did not hold Muslim personal status). In 1889, another law mandated jus soli for the White population of Algeria, extending French citizenship to the offspring of its European-born residents. The French state now had more men to draft into the army and a greater moral authority to protect its citizens from Algerian “Muslims.” Muslim personal status, French officials insisted, preserved beloved practices incommensurate with French norms, such as “repudiation” divorce. These claims had a long life; even under the Fourth Republic, administrators fretted over how French civil status could be squared with polygamy (Cooper 2014). In Senegal, however, the originaires could hold both Muslim personal status and French citizenship. Similarly, in the French Establishments in India, an individual could become a naturalized French citizen while maintaining his personal status. In nineteenth-century Algeria, administrators held up Muslim personal status as the reason that nearly all men should be denied French citizenship. The extension of citizenship would pose an acute threat to the racial hierarchy of Algeria, home to a large settler population. Opponents of extending rights to Algerians mobilized the specter of polygamy to stoke French fears and fascination with an Orientalized version of Muslim sexuality. Surkis (2019, 4–6) contends that in Algeria, “French promises to preserve local gender order worked in tandem with a concerted campaign to strip Algerians of their land. . . . More than just a symbol of Muslim difference, family law became an instrument of colonial rule.” Indigenous legal “rights,” in practice meaning a highly prejudicial regime, became a justification for the cleavage between French citizenship and French nationality, although the distinction between the two underscored tensions in French colonial law. The very status of indigène can thus be understood as “nothing but the antithesis of citizen” (Blévis 2001, 572–73). Sex, historians of empire have long contended, provoked acute anxieties in colonial administrations. In particular, children of mixed parentage, known as métis, appeared to threaten the racial order. Although sexual unions between French men and local women established important families in parts of Senegal, dating to the seventeenth century, by the late nineteenth century, French officials no longer looked kindly on such unions. In French West Africa, French fathers legally recognized their métis offspring at extraordinarily low rates, and officials became concerned for the welfare and education of these children, in no small part because they feared the disruptive potential of “disaffected” people with French blood (White 1999; Duke Bryant 2017). Métis children presented a legal conundrum for the French officials, who hoped to categorize the residents of the colonies neatly as either citizens or subjects (Badji 2011). As Emmanuelle Saada (2012, 6) argues, this exposed “deep tensions in the practices by which nationality was defined – tensions that were largely invisible in the metropolitan context.” Indeed, when the métis of Indochina secured citizenship, it was through a law that “granted” it, rather than a pronouncement acknowledging that legally speaking, such a right could or should have been extended to them all along. Being denied or losing the status of citizen held consequences beyond voting rights or access to French education or civil service posts. To be an indigène meant being subject to the indigénat, a regime of extreme differentiation first codified in Algeria in 1881. At its core was a penal regime, targeting French colonial subjects by introducing punishable infractions, for which only they were legally culpable. While traditionally historians have suggested that the indigénat originated in Algeria and was then exported to other colonies, recent work has challenged that telling. Sylvie Thénault (2017) suggests that the indigénat of Cochinchina was the basis for the wider law, blended with an exemplary, but locally 453

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adaptable, list of infractions from Algeria. The use of the Algerian case in discussions about applying the indigénat elsewhere should instead be understood as a rhetorical legitimation of established administrative, judicial, and penal norms. Local administrators could now act as both judge and prosecutor, leaving little protection from land grabs or forced labor (Cooper 2018). The indigénat, Gregory Mann (2009, 334) argues, was a “legal cover, however scant, for colonial coercion until after the Second World War, . . . perhaps the most important element of the administrative tool kit.” In New Caledonia, infractions included being outside of one’s arrondissement without authorization, practicing sorcery, nudity, being in a bar, and using fire for land clearing (Merle 2002). Punishments included collective fines and deportation. Such punitive and discriminatory laws invited resistance, as shown, for example, in an uprising against the capitation tax in interwar Dahomey, but French officials retaliated by amplifying the punishments set out by the regime. The French state abolished the indigénat in 1946, although the practice of forced labor was slow to end (Mann 2009). A lack of citizenship rights did not mean a lack of obligation to the metropolitan “motherland.” France relied heavily on colonial troops and laborers during wartime, and the World Wars created some openings for representatives of the colonies to push for rights, even as French labor and military service exploited colonial subjects. Senegalese-born Blaise Diagne, the first Black African elected to the Chamber of Deputies, made significant efforts to recruit African men to fight in the trenches. He shepherded through a 1916 law declaring that residents and descendants of the Four Communes “are and remain French citizens,” introducing an ambiguity about whether they were now subject to the French Civil Code or had to abandon their personal status (Kopytoff 2015). The influence exerted by Diagne and other powerful évolués (a term denoting educated men in the colonies, literally “evolved”) disconcerted colonial officials fearful of losing their clout. Administrators in French West Africa began to turn to local chiefs to “civilize” rural populations. Their focus on chiefs’ hierarchical authority would help undercut the push for political equality from representatives like Diagne, whose effort colonial administrator Martial Merlin called “as imprudent as it is utopian” (Conklin 1997, 191). As officials in West Africa pushed against Diagne and his compatriots, moves to extend rights to assimilated men elsewhere in the empire floundered. Most famously, the abortive 1936 Blum-Viollette law would have granted roughly 24,000 Muslim Algerians the right to French citizenship without revoking their ability to claim personal status (and thus operate within both French and customary legal regimes) but was met with outrage from Algeria’s settler population and fell in the Senate. When the Second World War came, the French state once again relied on the empire. This time, the heroism of its colonial troops was credited with helping to liberate France and restore republican order. This fact was not lost on White metropolitan citizens or on overseas representatives. The latter moved swiftly to secure their populations more rights while French goodwill remained high. In February 1944, the governor general of the French East Africa, Félix Éboué (born in French Guiana), forwarded a decree creating a category of notable évolués, a select group of colonial elites who could take part in the French administration of overseas holdings (Genova 2004). Also in 1944, Charles de Gaulle extended to the island of Martinique the possibility of départementalisation. It, along with Guadeloupe, French Guiana, and Réunion, became overseas departments (DOM) in 1946. One of the deputies who introduced the law, the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, declared that with this change, the French Parliament would guarantee that “the principle of assimilation should be the rule and derogation the exception” (Nesbitt 2007, 33). Metropolitan law applied 454

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in the DOM, which would be administered by the Ministry of the Interior. Meanwhile, overseas territories (TOM) replaced colonies, now overseen by the rechristened Ministry of Overseas France. The post-war era witnessed vast changes in France’s citizenship regime. On May 7, 1946, the French National Assembly passed a law introduced by Senegalese deputy Lamine Guèye declaring that “all overseas residents” held “the quality of citizen.” This law, in theory, extended citizenship and equal voting rights to 60 million individuals, but pushback fixated on whether “quality of citizen” meant actual citizenship. The law was immediately held in abeyance, preventing newly enfranchised people from participating in the first election, in which they were theoretically eligible to vote. By 1953, the French government declared that two categories of citizenship existed: French and French Union, as the empire was renamed under the constitution of the Fourth Republic. French citizens were citizens of the French Union, but the reverse was not true, preventing overseas populations from voting in metropolitan elections and cementing the practice of separate electoral colleges. The discriminatory nature of the double college was hotly debated in the National Assembly and the Conseil de la République, but those who voiced concerns and anger about its blatant inequality were outvoted (Cooper 2014). French officials after World War II expected that they would remain at the administrative helm of the empire, albeit differently than before. Despite long wars of independence fought by anti-imperial nationalists in Indochina (1946–1954) and Algeria (1954–1962), administrators pushed for reform in, rather than the relinquishing of, overseas holdings. Responding to the war in Algeria, the French state progressively opened more public-sector jobs to Algerian men, with a quota system that undermined claims to “color-blind” French universalism. Meanwhile, some overseas representatives harnessed the administrative changes to push for autonomy while maintaining a legal relationship with France. Federalism, advocated by Ivorian Félix Houphouët-Boigny, or confederalism, advocated by Senegalese Léopold Senghor, offered alternatives to independence that would invite, in the eyes of their proponents, true equality between all people in the French Union (Cooper 2014). Gary Wilder (2015, 241) argues that by envisioning futures beyond a model of national independence, thinkers like Senghor and Césaire planned to “remake the global order,” emphasizing the distinction between liberation and freedom and forwarding a future that was at once pragmatic and utopian. Real legislative change appeared to usher in some of the federative ideas advocated by representatives of the French Union. One of the most critical reforms was the 1956 loicadre (framework law) Defferre, named for the then-minister of overseas France, which decreed universal suffrage in a single college and decentralized the power of the metropole, in part by giving authority to territorial assemblies. Although some historians have interpreted the law’s inception as a deliberate step toward independence, it is more accurate to understand it as a way to win African elites to the French side in the midst of anti-colonial struggles. A French Union Assembly representative declared it would “demonstrate in the eyes of the world, and above all to Africans, that France makes no distinction among her children” (Cooper 2014, 231). Despite reforms meant to extend a gradual equality to the French Union, political realities soon shifted the trajectory of its future. In 1958, an attempted coup d’état in response to the Algerian War ushered in the fall of the Fourth Republic and the rise of Charles de Gaulle as the president of the Fifth. The French Union became the French Community after debates about whether the constitution should invite federation, confederation, or 455

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independence. Universal suffrage was guaranteed, and Africans voted in the referendum to approve the new constitution. Only Guinean voters rejected the constitution. Their newly independent state suffered de Gaulle’s wrath for that decision. By 1959, various members of the French Community had begun to push for clarity about what whether the Community comprised one or many nationalities. Independence was also floated as an option, and in the course of the following year, nearly all of France’s remaining African holdings, with the major exception of Algeria, became independent states. This rapid wave of independence across most of France’s African colonies, along with the Belgian Congo, Nigeria, and elsewhere, led to 1960 being dubbed the Year of Africa. The independence agreements of 1960 and the 1962 Evian Accords that preceded Algeria’s independence included stipulations that protected the right of former French Union citizens to enjoy free circulation of labor in France. In 1974, the oil crisis led the French government to halt new foreign labor migration, in what Frederick Cooper (2014, 442) calls the moment when “the people of former French Africa who had obtained or were seeking jobs in France had become immigrants.” In the decades since, the presence of the offspring of those earlier migrants, as well as newer arrivals, has renewed old debates and provoked new anxieties about who deserves the rights of French citizenship. Changes to migration laws led to a population known as the sans-papiers, or people “without documents,” many of whom hail from former sites of the French Empire and who have advocated for their rights for decades. It also includes increasingly punitive regulations governing nationality, such as the 1993 law limiting double jus soli to individuals born in France before 1994 who had a parent born in a French colonial territory before its independence (with the exception of Algerian parents, who were instead subject to a five-year residency requirement). That same law stipulated that applicants claiming French citizenship demonstrate “a manifestation of desire” to be French, despite having lived in France for their entire lives (Weil 2008). The history of French citizenship is a history of partial rights regimes, ambiguous rules, and uneven application, all of which undercut French claims of universalism. Intertwined with the inclusions, exclusions, and legal pluralism is a history of racism and racial differentiation, in which citizenship often stood as a sign of whiteness, despite official rhetoric claiming otherwise. Even today, the distinction between nationality and citizenship remains fraught and racialized, and questions of assimilation dominate debates about people whose families originated in the former empire (Saada 2017). The citizenship and subjecthood regimes and the complexity of legal administrative status that defined the colonial period have echoes and ramifications in our present. French naturalization procedure, for example, assesses “cultural assimilation,” which allows for coded racialized determinations of who is worthy of citizenship (Mazouz 2019). As the descendants of French Union citizens battle for equal political rights and cultural acceptance in metropolitan France, today over 2 million French citizens live outside the metropole in collectivités and pays d’outre-mer (as the TOM were renamed in 2003). French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Réunion remain DOM (now DROM – departments and regions of overseas France), and Mayotte now bears that status. New Caledonia is a special collectivity whose population voted by referendum in 2018 to remain a part of France, despite a decades-old independence campaign (Trépied 2013). Overseas collectivities include French Polynesia and Saint Pierre and Miquelon. As in the past, French law still remains pluralistic. For example, until it became a department in 2011, residents of majority-Muslim Mayotte held a personal status derived from Islamic and Malagasy/ East African customary law, in which Muslim judges (qadis) were civil servants. Legal 456

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pluralism, in part related to religious custom, exists within the metropole, too, notably in Alsace-Moselle. In 1996, then–Socialist Party secretary Lionel Jospin came to the defense of the French national soccer team, which two years later would go on to win the World Cup. Criticism from the Right, notably Jean Marie Le Pen and Alain Finkielkraut, hinged on the backgrounds of the players, many of whom traced their backgrounds to overseas France, including New Caledonia, French Guiana, and in the case of Marseille-born star Zinedine Zidane, Algeria. Challenging Le Pen and others, Jospin declared that the places from which the players hailed were a “part of France, broadly defined [au sens large].” Despite his well-intentioned declaration, Jospin’s remarks suggested that there was also a France, narrowly defined, which presumably should be understood as white and metropolitan (Thompson 2015, 102–3). This chapter has demonstrated that France, and Frenchness, have been broadly defined since the inception of France’s colonial empire. The variety of administrative practices, rights regimes, and versions of citizenship and subjecthood lay bare the complex interplay of universalist ideology and discriminatory reality that pervaded the French Empire and continues to shape the lives of citizens and non-citizens today.

References Badji, Mamadou. 2011. “Le statut juridique des enfants métis nés en Afrique occidentale française de parents inconnus.” Revue juridique de l’Ouest 24 (3): 349–79. Belmessous, Saliha. 2005. “Assimilation and Racialism in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century French Colonial Policy.” The American Historical Review 110 (2): 322–49. Betts, Raymond F. 1961. Assimilation and Association in French Colonial Theory, 1890–1914. New York: Columbia University Press. Blévis, Laure. 2001. “Les avatars de la citoyenneté́ en Algérie coloniale ou les paradoxes d’une catégorisation.” Droit et société 48 (2): 557–81. Conklin, Alice L. 1997. A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Cooper, Frederick. 2014. Citizenship between Empire and Nation:  Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2018. Citizenship, Inequality, and Difference: Historical Perspectives. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Coquery-Vidrovitch, Catherine. 2001. “Nationalité et citoyenneté en Afrique occidentale français: Originaires et citoyens dans le Sénégal colonial.” The Journal of African History 42 (2): 285–305. Deming Lewis, Martin. 1962. “One Hundred Million Frenchmen: The ‘Assimilation’ Theory in French Colonial Policy.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 4 (2): 129–53. Duke Bryant, Kelly. 2017. “French Fathers and Their ‘Indigenous Children’: Interracial Families in Colonial Senegal, 1900–1915.” Journal of Family History 42 (3): 308–25. Fick, Carolyn E. 2007. “The Haitian Revolution and the Limits of Freedom: Defining Citizenship in the Revolutionary Era.” Social History 32 (4): 394–414. Genova, James E. 2004. “Constructing Identity in Post-War France: Citizenship, Nationality, and the Lamine Guèye Law, 1946–1953.” The International History Review 26 (1): 56–79. Hajjat, Abdellali. 2011. “Généalogie du concept d’assimilation. Une comparaison franco-­britannique.” Astérion 8 (July). https://doi.org/10.4000/asterion.2079. Heath, Elizabeth. 2019. “ ‘The Black Race’s Dreyfus Affair’: Hégésippe Jean Légitimus and the Dissimilation of Colonial Guadeloupe.” French Historical Studies 42 (2): 261–94. Idowu, H. Oludare. 1969. “Assimilation in 19th Century Senegal.” Cahiers d’études africaines 9 (34): 194–218. Kopytoff, Larissa. 2015. “French Citizens and Muslim Law: The Tensions of Citizenship in Early Twentieth-Century Senegal.” In The Meaning of Citizenship, edited by Richard Marback and Marc W. Kruman, 320–37. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

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Megan Brown Mann, Gregory. 2009. “What Was the Indigénat? The ‘Empire of Law in French West Africa.” The Journal of African History 50 (3): 331–53. Mazouz, Sarah. 2019. “The Value of Nation: Bureaucratic Practices and the Lived Experience in the French Naturalization Process.” French Politics, Culture & Society 37 (1): 139–61. Merle, Isabelle. 2002. “Retour sur le régime de l’indigénat: Genèse et contradictions des principes répressifs dans l’empire français.” French Politics, Culture & Society 20 (2): 77–97. Nesbitt, Nick. 2007. “Departmentalization and the Logic of Decolonization.” L’Esprit Créateur 47 (1): 32–43. Peabody, Sue. 2015. “Freedom Papers Hidden in His Shoe: Navigating Emancipation across Imperial Boundaries.” French Politics, Culture & Society 33 (1): 11–32. Peabody, Sue, and Tyler Stovall, eds. 2003. The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France. Durham: Duke University Press. Saada, Emmanuelle. 2012. Empire’s Children: Race, Filiation and Citizenship in the French Colonies. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2017. “Nationalité et citoyenneté en situation coloniale et post-coloniale.” Pouvoirs 160: 113–24. Shepard,  Todd. 2006. The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Surkis, Judith. 2019. Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830–1930. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Thénault, Sylvie. 2017. “L’indigénat dans l’Empire français: Algérie/Cochinchine, une double matrice.” Monde(s). Histoire, Espaces, Relations 12 (2): 21–40. Thompson, Christopher S. 2015. “From Black-Blanc-Beur to Black-Black-Black? ‘L’Affaire des Quotas’ and the Shattered ‘Image of 1998’ in Twenty-First-Century France.” French Politics, Culture & Society 33 (1): 101–21. Trépied, Benoît. 2013. “La décolonisation sans l’indépendance? Sortir du colonial en NouvelleCalédonie (1946–1975).” Genèses. Sciences sociales et histoire 91 (2): 7–27. Weil, Patrick. 2008. How to Be French: Nationality in the Making since 1789. Translated by Catherine Porter. Durham: Duke University Press. White, Owen. 1999. Children of the French Empire: Miscegenation and Colonial Society in French West Africa, 1895–1960. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilder, Gary. 2015. Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World. Durham: Duke University Press.

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42 OVERVIEW: TWO FRANCES AT WAR AND PEACE The Stories of a Nation and its People, 1905–1958 Jessica Wardhaugh A young woman bars the entrance to a Breton school with her own body, resolutely facing the soldiers who come to enact the secularizing laws of 1901; a Jewish shop owner finds his windows smashed after an anti-Dreyfusard street brawl in Marseille. A socialist is shot dead by his Far Right neighbor in Martigues in 1937 following a political discussion; a mother cradles her baby while marched through the jeering, jubilant crowds of Chartres in August 1944, her head shaved by members of the Resistance. Anxious pieds noirs clamor “vive de Gaulle” in Algiers in May 1958, only to find that the General grants Algerian independence and leaves fighters for Algérie française with nowhere to go. For these – and for so many others – the opposition between “two Frances” locked in evolving but insoluble conflict has been real and inescapable: a matter of life and death. The defining characteristics of these “two Frances” have necessarily changed over time. Sometimes, the rival communities have been identified as Catholic and republican, traditionalist and modernizing; sometimes as Dreyfusard and anti-Dreyfusard, Left and Right; sometimes as collaborators and resisters, or supporters and opponents of the “civilizing mission.” For many contemporaries and historians, however, their antagonism remains immutable: a source of crisis and a premise for personal triumph and tragedy. Dreyfusard Joseph Reinach characterized these opponents as “two mentalities; two Frances” in 1903; Christian democrat deputy Auguste Champetier de Ribes described “two Frances, ready to tear each other apart” in 1936.1 Following the Second World War, Charles de Gaulle sought to bring these enemies together, stemming their “Gallic propensity to divisions and quarrels” (de Gaulle 1970b, 5–11) with his own vision of France and of himself, and hopeful that partisan strife might be transcended through the consensual acknowledgment of executive and state authority. Yet despite de Gaulle’s return to power in 1958, one man’s narrative could not necessarily resolve the disputed stories of the French people. As historian Michel Winock insists, poetically, if not literally, “consensus is not a French word” (Winock 2009, 10). Whether this portrait of two Frances at war and peace does full justice to the stories of a nation and its people remains a crucial – and controversial – question. What if these binary distinctions were not only deeply felt but also debatable, shifting, and sometimes irrelevant? To begin with, this picture of two Frances leaves little space for those who reached out across apparently rigid boundaries. Equally, insisting on binary distinctions misses 459

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the extent to which opponents have borrowed from each other, whether ideologically or rhetorically, in their search for similar spaces and supporters. Assumptions about workingclass allegiance to the Left can obscure the analysis of more popular support for the Right, for instance, or the study of a rhetorical anti-elitism that crosses political boundaries. Finally, a focus on irreconcilable enemies also obscures the ways in which political, social, and religious opponents may seek to resolve similar problems, rather than remaining in a state of stalemate or checkmate, or sinking into decadence. If, as historians, we remain preoccupied with partisan conflict or narratives of decline, then we are liable to miss key developments cutting across political and social divisions. The multiple intersecting narratives of experiences of war and loss, for example, or the patterns of reconstruction or consumerism, the gendered dimension of political culture, or the perception of individual agency at times of crisis. This chapter first sets up some of the binary oppositions that have structured historical narratives of the period: Church and state, Left and Right, collaboration and resistance, defenders and detractors of the French Empire. In so doing, it singles out moments of conflict to suggest how passionate, defining, and destructive these battles could be. Drawing on more recent historiographical trends, the second section then questions and nuances these narratives and distinctions. Here the focus is on ambiguity and creativity, on challenges to teleology and periodization, and on the adoption of innovative frameworks of analysis shaped by gender, identity, memory, and subjectivity. Finally, the chapter suggests new ways in which we might seek to understand the history – and stories – of France and the French in the years 1905–1958.

Two Frances at War and Peace There are powerful reasons that discrete conflicts are often elided into a grander narrative of two Frances at war and peace. First, each conflict is experienced against personal or collective memories of earlier antagonisms, with their particular scars and legacies. Second, the transformation of a complex and many-layered experience into a binary opposition can be personally and politically convincing – and convenient. France is, indeed, especially prey to “memory wars” in which individuals and groups compete to determine the significance of foundational events, such as the French Revolution of 1789, the Vichy regime, or May 1968 (Eldridge 2016, 3–4), as other chapters in this handbook similarly make clear. The formal separation of Church and state, voted into law in July 1905, is a salient example of how the antagonism between “two Frances” could be superimposed onto existing templates. Both Catholics and secularizing republicans experienced this twentieth-century conflict as influenced by the Revolution that had “divided the French into two irreconcilable camps” (Gildea 2009, 1). In particular, they relived battles of the First Republic of 1792, when the failure of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy had been followed by radical deChristianization and the imprisonment, exile, and execution of priests, monks, and nuns, while the Republic experimented with its own forms of civic morality. For ardent partisans of the Third Republic, the laws of the 1880s that established free, secular primary education and diminished the educational role of the Church formed part of a longer-term project of republican citizenship. For many Catholics, this attack on the social and political status and influence of the Church was also linked to a longer history, in which republics tended to favor secularization and religious minorities (such as Jews and Protestants), whereas monarchies and empires remained more sympathetic to the Catholic Church. Though many 460

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Catholics would rally to the Third Republic in time, not least with the encouragement of Pope Leo XIII in the 1890s, others persisted in considering the regime godless and unrepresentative. “Worse than dynamite,” surmised the popular Catholic newspaper La Croix on December 11, 1893, in the midst of anarchist terrorism. Personal memories and political continuities likewise shaped the relationship between Left and Right from the 1900s through the 1920s and 1930s, notwithstanding the dramatic caesura of the First World War. The material and mental impact of the war on France and the French was devastating. Of 8 million soldiers mobilized, 1.3 million were killed, and a further 2.8 million wounded, 1 million of these at least twice. More than 1,000 towns were destroyed, and 3,500 seriously damaged. Agricultural production in 1919 was 45% lower than in 1913, and pre-war levels of industrial production would not be matched until 1924. Yet despite the Union sacrée that had encouraged a patriotic truce between political enemies, and despite the profound material and emotional damage of the war, returning soldiers found that many pre-war deputies and politicians were apparently continuing as before. Small wonder that some would demand a specific political role for veterans and question whether the “gerontocratic” parliamentary system of the Third Republic effectively represented the needs and sacrifices of its citizens. Political formations, sympathies, and stories in the interwar period thus borrowed from earlier narratives, even as they were also influenced by new developments across Europe. When the Ruhr crisis precipitated the collapse of the conservative Bloc National government in 1924, legislative elections brought to power a left-wing coalition of two parties established at the time of the Dreyfus Affair: the Radicals (Parti Républicain Radical et Radical-Socialiste), founded in 1901, and the Socialist Party (Section française de l’internationale ouvrière), founded in 1905. The Radical Party championed the defense of the secular republic; the Socialist Party championed France’s revolutionary tradition, despite internal disputes over how and when this would be fulfilled. In the 1930s, memories of earlier battles – including those between Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards – were deliberately revived in the opposition between the Left and the Right. Reacting to the violent riot outside the Chamber of Deputies on February 6, 1934, widely portrayed as a failed fascist coup, the Left coalesced into an anti-fascist Popular Front movement with powerful grassroots support (Jackson 1988; see also Mattie Fitch’s chapter in this volume). On July 14, 1935, this movement brought together radicals, socialists, and communists to inflect a traditional celebration with a contemporary tone. In the morning, delegates from across the country crowded into Paris’s Buffalo Stadium to listen to key speakers, including the Hungarian-born Jewish activist Victor Basch. Basch was president not only of the Comité de Rassemblement Populaire that had coordinated the Popular Front event but also of the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, re-founded at the time of the Dreyfus Affair. By a strange coincidence, the funeral of Alfred Dreyfus would take place in the cemetery of Montparnasse that very afternoon. For the Parisians of 1935, Basch painted a vivid picture of their ancestors, who had united to storm the Bastille in 1789. Now, he argued, the people of Paris should unite once again, this time to demolish the contemporary “Bastilles” of fascism, poverty, economic and financial assemblies, and war.2 The following year, the Popular Front came to power through the elections of April – May with Léon Blum as France’s first Socialist and Jewish prime minister (Président du Conseil): a man for whom the Dreyfus Affair had been a formative political influence. Yet though this victory brought enthusiasm and excitement on the Left – as well as the largest wave of strikes that France had ever known – it ignited suspicion, fear, and panic on the 461

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Right. When the new government was presented to the Chamber of Deputies, Xavier Vallat (later Commissioner for Jewish Affairs under the Vichy regime) complained vociferously that the “old Gallo-Roman” country of France was now to be ruled by a “subtle Talmudist.” In a resolute rejoinder, the President of the Chamber insisted, “[F]or my part I know neither Jews, as you say, nor Protestants, nor Catholics, but only Frenchmen” (Journal officiel, June 7, 1936). Continuities were equally strong on the right. The Dreyfus Affair had witnessed the creation and reinforcement of anti-parliamentary, nationalistic, and anti-Semitic leagues: the Ligue des Patriotes, for example, alongside the Ligue Antisémitique, the Ligue de la Patrie Française, and the neo-royalist Action Française. Not only did some of these leagues remain active in the interwar period, but they were also joined by new movements similarly opposed to liberal democracy and searching for authoritarian leadership. Reacting against the left-wing Cartel des Gauches in 1924, Pierre Taittinger – whose childhood heroes had been Napoleon and Joan of Arc – created the Jeunesses Patriotes, youth section of the Ligue des Patriotes founded in 1882. In summer 1924, Antoine Rédier established the Légion, which also included a women-only section, and toured France lecturing on the dangers of communism. Meanwhile, Georges Valois, former member of Action Française, founded the Faisceau in explicit admiration of Italian fascism (Passmore 2013, 234–61). In the 1930s, these leagues were paralleled and, in some cases, overtaken by other movements: the Francistes, the Solidarité Française, and the Parti Populaire Français (Wardhaugh 2009; Kalman and Kennedy 2014; Millington 2020). Largest of all was Colonel de la Rocque’s Parti Social Français, with membership surpassing the combined total of the Socialist and Communist Parties. Originally a veterans’ organization, La Rocque’s party would enlarge to enlist men, women, and children in its efforts to “reconcile France against democracy” (Kennedy 2007), seemingly continuing the right-wing campaigns of the fin-de-siècle. Mobilizing one France against another could, moreover, prove an effective means of justifying political action and amassing support – as both Vichy France and the Resistance would discover. When France fell to Nazi Germany with excruciating swiftness in May–June 1940, there was an immediate backlash against the Third Republic, not only in the ranks of its long-term enemies but also in the soul-searching of convinced democrats.3 On June 16, Prime Minister Paul Reynaud resigned; on June 22, his replacement, Marshal Philippe Pétain, signed an armistice agreement with Germany that would slice France into occupied and unoccupied zones and necessitate hefty payments to the Nazi occupiers. With the country in chaos, roads overflowing with fearful populations fleeing Hitler by car and on foot while bombarded from the air, deputies and senators voted full powers to Pétain on July 10 to revise the republican constitution. Pétain immediately suspended parliament and accumulated executive, legislative, and judiciary power in himself, establishing his new regime in the spa town of Vichy in the Massif Central. For Pétain and his associates, the defeat was an opportunity to incriminate the parliamentary republic – blamed particularly for the strikes and 40-hour working week that had, it was assumed, dangerously weakened France’s military production and capacity. But it was also an opportunity to build a new France: to undertake a “National Revolution” that would sweep away parliamentary democracy, Jewish and masonic influence, and re-establish the country on the basis of work, family, and fatherland (Travail, Famille, Patrie), prioritizing the collective over the individual – and the individualism that had supposedly led to decadence and defeat. On August  15, Pétain insisted that there could be “no possible neutrality between truth and falsehood, good and evil, health and sickness, 462

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order and disorder, France and anti-France.”4 The first anti-Semitic legislation was passed in October  1940, long before German authorities demanded French complicity in their Final Solution. Although Pétain’s Vichy France won initial support, its eventual failure even to shield the French population from the extreme demands of German occupation strengthened the argument that the “real” France remained elsewhere. In 1940, resistance was at best a daring hope – the broadcast of a general in London exile that “French resistance must not and will not be extinguished” (de Gaulle 1970a, 5); the insane bravado of a Parisian cyclist closing in on a German vehicle so as to affix a flyer proclaiming “We’re for de Gaulle” on the back.5 However, “Work, family, fatherland” sounded hollow when “work” included 40,000 volunteers and 650,000 conscripts dispatched to labor in Germany through the Relève and the Service du Travail obligatoire; when family life was undermined by the absence of 1,850,000 POWs – many of whom would be absent for five years (Diamond 2013, 4) – and national unity was shattered by informers and persecution. By 1945, some 40,000 hostages and resisters had been executed, and a further 60,000 deported to concentration camps for “Gaullism, Marxism, or hostility to the regime.” Between 2,000 and 3,000 Jews had died in camps on French soil, and a further 75,000 had been deported, of whom only 3% survived (Marrus and Paxton 1995, 343 and 363). By 1943, the official ration amounted to 1,200 calories a day, a mere half of average pre-war consumption. In contrast, and notwithstanding internal divisions, the organized Resistance could offer plans for both liberation and renewal. By June 1943, resistance leaders and politicians of the Third Republic had joined in a Comité Français de Libération Nationale committed to restoring democracy. De Gaulle, determined that the Free French should play a significant role in the military liberation of France, took pains to emphasize the role of the French in freeing themselves, downplaying Allied intervention. Speaking on the balcony of the town hall in liberated Paris on August 25, 1944, he insisted that Paris had been liberated “by itself, by its people, with the support of the armies of France” (de Gaulle 1970a, 92), strengthening the myth of la France résistante – the idea that the majority of the French had always remained resisters at heart. It is said that the victors write history; but de Gaulle wrote history whether he was victorious or not. Despite resigning as head of the provisional government of the French Republic in January 1946, he continued throughout the Fourth Republic to develop his theories of unity against partisan division – whether in speeches, in mass meetings, or in his crossparty organization, the Rassemblement du Peuple Français. De Gaulle also took advantage of partisan division to return to power in 1958. By this point, the question of Algeria was fracturing the French along new fault lines. Algeria remained a legally constituted part of France, yet the refusal of the French state to dialogue with independence movements – and the use of torture to suppress them – created violent instability in Algeria and fierce controversy in metropolitan France. In a strategic response to a violent and volatile situation, de Gaulle suggested to pieds noirs in Algeria that he sympathized with their position, while presenting his return to power to Prime Minister Pierre Pflimlin as a means of avoiding both military dictatorship in Algeria and communist insurrection in metropolitan France (Horne 2011, Ch. 12). On June 1, de Gaulle received full powers to draft a new constitution for what would become the Fifth Republic. On September 16, he proposed a “peace of the brave” with the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale: prelude to another Gaullist rewriting of history in which Algerian self-determination would become both successful and inevitable (Shepard 2006). 463

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In his grand narratives for France and the French, de Gaulle created stories that intersected with some of the contemporary and historical theories about “two Frances” at war and peace. Common to the rhetoric of many political and religious groups, for example, was the idea that the “real” France – Catholic, republican, working-class, Vichy France, or la France résistante – was not represented by current French institutions and practices, which therefore required radical revision. This was a rhetoric to which de Gaulle contributed. Other theories, meanwhile, developed in different directions. More specific to left-wing political militants and historians, for instance, has been the emphasis on a binary conflict between French democracy and fascism. Indeed, many post-war historians have reproduced theories developed on the Left in the 1930s: namely, that French democracy was vulnerable to a “fascist conspiracy” of what Le Populaire described on March 10, 1938, as an “armed revolt against republican institutions by the terrorists of the CSAR [Comité Secret d’Action Révolutionnaire], financed by the occult forces of big business, and in certain liaison with international fascism.” An almost-identical argument was developed in the indictment at Pétain’s trial in 1945.6 In historical accounts, both Francophone and Anglophone scholars have continued to depict a struggle between a Left “defending democracy” and a Right sympathetic to fascism, in which parallels are drawn between 1936 and 1944 and between the social and economic elite who rejoiced at the “agony” of the Popular Front in 1938 and those who welcomed the Vichy regime in 1940 (Rossel 1976; Jackson 1988). Why did the ongoing battles between “two Frances” not result in more durable victory or resolution? For de Gaulle, the answer lay in a persistent reluctance to accept the authority of the executive and the state. Historians, however, have tended rather to apportion blame to the “stalemate society” associated with the Third Republic. Borrowing a rhetoric of decadence common during the Third Republic itself, scholars have depicted a regime undermined not so much by political conspiracies on the Left or the Right as by social and economic inertia: a “pact with tradition that delayed modernization and produced objective dysfunctions in the system” (Passmore 2013, 153). Only after 1945 could the “gradual liquidation” of this stalemate society allow a new France to take shape economically and – for a Gaullist historian such as Stanley Hoffmann – to achieve greater political stability through the institutions of the Fifth Republic (Hoffmann 1974).

Ambiguity, Creativity, Complexity: The Stories of a Nation and Its People These stories of “two Frances” at war and peace in 1905–1958 matter because they shaped the ways in which the French thought about themselves and their history – and ultimately the ways in which they lived and died. Yet these are not the only stories that structure the experiences and memories of this particular period. Both for the French themselves and also for non-French historians, those “not readily identifiable with a particular camp” (Gildea 2002, 12), there are ways of seeing beyond neatly defined divisions to areas of ambiguity, creativity, and complexity. While more immediate histories of the years 1905–1958 often played up binary distinctions, later – and especially Anglophone – studies have paid more attention to ambiguities. They have, for example, emphasized symbiotic relationships between groups traditionally perceived as antagonistic, if not mutually exclusive. In the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair, triumphant Dreyfusards such as Joseph Reinach penned its history as the victory of truth, justice, and individual rights over intolerance, anti-Semitism, royalism, militarism, Catholicism, and anti-republicanism. Yet as Ruth Harris has argued, “the two blocs were never 464

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as monolithic as is usually supposed”: the Left could be as emotional or irrational as the Right, and Reinach’s history appealed not because it was diligently factual but because it read “like a novel” (Harris 2010, 7, 167). The image of an early twentieth-century struggle between religion and modernity has been similarly complicated by recent work on the political and social mobilization of French Catholics and by a series of sensitive studies exploring the place of religion in the experience and commemoration of the First World War. When Raymond Poincaré coined the term “Sacred Union” to draw former opponents into a wartime truce, he did not anticipate that by the end of August 1914, his desk would be piled high with requests to redesign the tricolor to incorporate the Sacred Heart. Meanwhile, clergy conscripted to fight on the front lines sometimes formed strong bonds with fellow soldiers regardless of religious belief (May 2018). In one particularly renowned example of wartime ecumenism, Rabbi Abraham Bloch from Lyon offered a crucifix to a dying Catholic soldier before spending his own final moments in the care of a Jesuit priest. Post-war mourners found Joan of Arc a powerful symbol of both piety and patriotism, while Catholic commemorations elided the sacrifice of France’s 8 million soldiers with the sufferings of Christ (Audoin-Rouzeau 2003, 162). Some historians have seen these relationships as prefiguring a dynamic and creative interplay between Catholicism and the modern world in the interwar years, even a kind of “Jazz Age Catholicism” (Schloesser 2005). Convergence in ideology or experience, strategic borrowings between adversaries, contests in which opponents battled for some of the same supporters and spaces – these, too, have been the focus of more recent studies of Left and Right in interwar France. To be sure, controversy persists over whether “fascism” (however defined) existed or indeed originated in France (Dobry 2005; Millington 2012, 2020), or whether the French were essentially “immune” to fascism on account of their deep-rooted attachment to republican democracy (Rémond 1954). Yet historians of the Popular Front period have also begun to nuance the supposedly binary struggle between democracy and fascism by exploring the “double mobilization” of the masses by both Left and Right. As rival political formations battled to reimagine the relationship between politics and the people both within and outside parliamentary politics, they borrowed each other’s strategies and spaces (Wardhaugh 2009; Scales 2016). The Right held film evenings in the working-class suburbs of Paris’s “red belt”; the Left acclaimed Joan of Arc and even the military parade of July 14. In the 1936 elections, paid holidays – which would be inaugurated by the Popular Front – featured on the manifesto of the right-wing Croix de Feu, which also demanded a “family vote” and the gradual introduction of female suffrage at municipal, departmental, and national levels. Meanwhile, the manifesto of the Communist Party foregrounded themes of work, family, and fatherland, paradoxically anticipating the programs of the Vichy regime. More multifaceted still has been the re-evaluation of war and occupation, collaboration, and resistance in 1940–1945. By the 1970s, the Gaullist myth of la France résistante had become subject to serious challenge. Cults of resistance heroes such as Jean Moulin and Raymond Aubrac were undermined; Robert Paxton’s Vichy France: Old Guard, New Order (1972) and Marcel Ophuls’s 1969 film Le Chagrin et la pitié suggested a nation of collaborators rather than resisters. In 1981, Robert Paxton and Michael Marrus went further still in tracing Vichy’s complicity in the Holocaust; in 1995, President Jacques Chirac acknowledged this as the collective responsibility of the French people. Moving away from myths of the “good French” or “bad French,” historians of the 1990s such as Pierre Laborie and Philippe Burrin explored grayer areas of Franco-German “accommodation” or, as in the case of Dominique Veillon, focused on the “poor” French, whose experiences 465

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of war and occupation were primarily a battle for day-to-day survival (Jackson 2001, 1–20; Gildea 2002, 6–8). These “poor” or “ordinary” French could, indeed, be extraordinarily resourceful in their daily lives, as recent studies have revealed (Diamond 2013; Dodd and Lees 2018). Others, meanwhile, have focused on the memory of Vichy and occupation, tracing its psychological evolution as a response to trauma (Rousso 1987) or exploring the boundary crossings between collaboration and resistance in terms of ideology and practice (Austin and Kedward 1985). Even sympathetic histories of the Resistance now challenge the earlier determinism of la France résistante. “One is not born a resister,” cautions Guillaume Piketty, borrowing strategically from Simone de Beauvoir’s famous statement, “but becomes one without realizing it” (Piketty 2009, xxviii). While contemporary approaches to the French experience continue to highlight the fragility and complexity of resistance narratives (Douzou 2019), newer territory is explored in studies from the perspective of the “ordinary Germans” who negotiated their roles as “ground-level occupiers” in a foreign land (Torrie 2018, 9). While probing binary distinctions, recent histories of France in 1905–1958 have also challenged long-standing assumptions about “stalemate” or decadence by highlighting creativity and initiative, both political and cultural. The debate over the political role of the people in the interwar period has, for example, been reframed as an attempt to rethink and perhaps even revitalize democracy, rather than simply undermine it (Wardhaugh 2009). Street politics involved both women and children – who were not part of the electorate – in active citizenship, while the creative fusion between politics, culture, and leisure brought innovation on both Right and Left. With the flourishing of cultural history, especially the history of discourse and representations, historians have explored how photography, radio, theater, music, and film attracted and represented the masses as the citizen people (Ory 1994; Scales 2016; Wardhaugh 2009, 2017). Alongside studies of popular and mass culture, histories of this period also continue to highlight the political engagement of writers and intellectuals (Drake 2005) and to debate questions of agency and possibility in times of crisis (Wardhaugh 2015). This emphasis on culture and creativity echoes a wider current of reappraisal in European history in 1914–1945, which resists the depiction of the earlier twentieth century as a “one-way street into the abyss” and seeks instead to show how “both ‘darker’ and ‘lighter’ elements in Europe’s history were capable of evolving simultaneously” (Gerwarth 2007: 3). A similar concern to challenge teleological narratives characterizes studies of economic modernization, Europeanization, and decolonization in the immediate post-war period. The theories of “decadence” that have so often framed the analysis of the Third Republic were, as Jackie Clarke and Kevin Passmore have discussed, determined not only by political considerations but also by convictions developed during the economic miracle of the post-war years (Clarke 2004; Passmore 2013, 153). The years 1944–1974 are traditionally termed the “trente glorieuses”: the years in which France accomplished an economic miracle and became a modern consumer society. Viewed from this post-war perspective, the pre-war period was often understood as a time of stagnation on a supposedly linear path toward consumer capitalism and economic growth. Even post-war movements of economic protest such as Poujadism were therefore considered reactionary rather than more ambiguously situated between the Left and Right. Yet France’s transition to a managed economy can be traced back to the 1930s rather than the 1950s, while the role of “modernizers” was already evident during the First World War (Kuisel 1981). Meanwhile, the very assumption 466

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that France should follow a particular path to modernization has also been challenged, given that a two-dimensional track of progress and regression allows no space for social and especially class conflict, for individuals or movements skeptical of the individualist consumer as a final or inevitable goal (Clarke 2004; Passmore 2013). Similarly, recent studies of Europeanization have increasingly emphasized the variety and complexity of interwar internationalisms (Reijnen and Rensen 2014), rather than positing a linear or teleological progression toward the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951, or the Treaty of Rome in 1957. Teleological understandings of decolonization have been subject to equal criticism – indeed, some studies deliberately unravel the intertwined rhetoric that draws together economic modernization and colonialism as a single “modernizing mission.” De Gaulle’s volte-face to depict Algerian independence as inevitable has been explored as part of what Todd Shepard describes as “the invention of decolonization” by bureaucrats, politicians, and journalists – a narrative that necessarily obscured alternative “colonial futures” (Shepard 2006; Jeppesen and Smith 2017). Recent historiography highlights unexpected continuities through the bitter violence of the Algerian War – whether in the experiences of Algerian women or in Catholic activism (Vince 2015; Nowinski 2013). It also reveals the “kaleidoscope of splintered memories” of those who lived through the events and yet could find no official narrative to match their own (Eldridge 2016: 8). Empires could, of course, continue in the mind long after the process of decolonization might appear to be complete (Gildea 2019). Revisiting teleological assumptions can challenge the customary periodization of French history. So too can the more contemporary focus on questions of identity. Paradoxically, historians since the 1980s have increasingly echoed criticisms of the universalist republican model already voiced by radical Right and Left in the earlier twentieth century: namely, that its idea of an abstract, interchangeable citizen takes no account of the communities to which individuals also belong. Shifting the focus of inquiry from political change or economic modernization to the solidarities of class, gender, and ethnicity reshapes the writing of history in ways that can sometimes be deeply personal. Renée Poznanski, for example, chose to study the Jewish Resistance because the “ghost of the Shoah” had “decimated our entire family and shaped our everyday lives”; Henry Rousso, meanwhile, denied that his Jewish identity had determined his interest in Vichy (Bragança and Louwagie 2018, 267–68 and 90). With or without this personal dimension, studies of gender and ethnicity can illuminate political paradoxes or unexpected continuities across chronological boundaries. Sally Charnow’s study of the playwright and poet Edmond Fleg reveals, for example, a “cultural Judaism” offsetting the more familiar anti-Semitism of interwar France (Charnow 2013). Historians of gender have explored the fusion between the gender traditions of Right and Left in the interwar imagination of the “new man,” while studies of female enfranchisement in 1944 have questioned why political and social liberation did not coincide (Read 2014; Ricciardi Colvin 2017). Others, meanwhile, have looked beyond enfranchisement to the practice of “social citizenship” both before and after 1944 (Barton and Hopkins 2019). Clearly, the concept of “two Frances” still shapes the writing of French history from 1905 to 1958, even if now more commonly as a counterfoil to the ambiguities, creativity, and complex identities that take precedence in contemporary accounts. Few historians would deny the instinctive, powerful realities of social, political, and religious antagonism. Yet as we retreat in time from those who lived through and described at first hand the years 1905–1958, so are we able to identify some of the porosity between their more rigid 467

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boundaries. The passage of time also allows us to re-evaluate theories and frameworks of analysis. It encourages us to challenge linear narratives of democratic inevitability or economic modernization, or to reimagine political and social history through the lens of individual identity. Our vision of the past will, moreover, continue to evolve as we investigate new pathways of inquiry and understanding. What will future historians reveal of the porous boundaries between politics, culture, and daily life? Which factors will they judge as influencing individual choice and agency? How will they bring the emotional regimes of private lives into public focus? What, for instance, would de Gaulle look like in a textbook that downplayed his public persona in order to focus on his relationship with his Down’s syndrome daughter Anne, for whom he danced and put on pantomimes, and whose love gave him the strength to keep fighting? Certainly, there are many faces of these two – and innumerable – Frances waiting to be more fully discovered.

Notes 1 Martin Johnson, The Dreyfus Affair. Honour and Politics in the Belle Époque (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 99; “Réunion du Parti Démocrate Populaire”, P.P. 17 décembre 1936, Archives de la Préfecture de Police, Le-Pré-Saint-Gervais, Ba 1975. 2 “P.P. 14 juillet 1935”, Archives Nationales, Pierrefitte, F7 13305. 3 Marc Bloch, L’Étrange Défaite (Paris: Éditions Franc-Tireur, 1946), 163. 4 Philippe Pétain, “La Réforme de l’éducation nationale.” [15 August 1940], Actes et Écrits (Paris: Flammarion, 1970), 486. 5 Agnès Humbert, Notre guerre. Journal de Résistance, 1940–45 [1946] (Paris: Points, 2010), 50. 6 Le Procès du Maréchal Pétain, compte rendu sténographique (Paris: Albin Michel, 1945), 24–6.

References Audoin-Rouzeau, Stéphane, Annette Becker, and Leonard Smith. 2003. France and the Great War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Austin, Roger, and Roderick Kedward, eds. 1985. Vichy France and the Resistance: Culture and Ideology. London: Croom Helm. Barton, Nimisha, and Richard S. Hopkins, eds. 2019. Practiced Citizenship: Women, Gender, and the State in Modern France. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Bragança, Manuel, and Fransiska Louwagie, eds. 2018. Ego-histories of France and the Second World War: Writing Vichy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Charnow, Sally. 2013. “Imagining a New Jerusalem: Edmond Fleg and Interwar French Ecumenism.” French History 27 (4): 557–78. https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/crt088. Clarke, Jackie. 2004. “France, America and the Metanarrative of Modernisation: From Post-War Social Science to the New Culturalism.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 8 (4): 365–77. https://doi.org/10.1080/10260210410001733379. de Gaulle, Charles, 1970a. Discours et messages. Vol. 1. Pendant la Guerre, juin 1940–janvier 1946. Paris: Plon. ———. 1970b, Discours et messages. Vol. 2. Dans l’Attente, février 1946–avril 1958. Paris: Plon. Diamond, Hanna. 2013. Women and the Second World War in France. Choices and Constraints. Abingdon: Routledge. Dobry, Michel. 2005. “February 1934 and the discovery of French Society’s Allergy to the ‘Fascist Revolution’.” In France in the Era of Fascism. Essays on the French Authoritarian Right, edited by Brian Jenkins, 129–51. Oxford: Berghahn. Dodd, Lindsay, and David Lees, eds. 2018. Vichy France and Everyday Life: Confronting the Challenges of Wartime, 1939–1945. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Douzou, Laurent. 2019. “A Perilous History: A Historiographical Essay on the French Resistance.” Contemporary European History 28 (1): 96–106. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0960777318000619.

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Two Frances at War and Peace Drake, David. 2005. French Intellectuals and Politics from the Dreyfus Affair to the Occupation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Eldridge, Claire. 2016. From Empire to Exile. History and Memory within the pied-noir and harki communities, 1962–2012. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Gildea, Robert. 2002. Marianne in Chains. In Search of the German Occupation, 1940–45. London: Pan Macmillan. ———. 2009. Children of the Revolution: The French, 1799–1914. London: Penguin. ———. 2019. Empires of the Mind: The Colonial Past and the Politics of the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gerwarth, Robert, ed. 2007. Twisted Paths: Europe, 1914–45. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harris, Ruth. 2010. The Man on Devil’s Island. Alfred Dreyfus and the Affair that Divided France. London: Allen Lane. Hoffmann, Stanley. 1974. Decline or Renewal? France since the 1930s. New York: Viking Press. Horne, Alistair. 2011. A Savage War of Peace. Algeria, 1954–62. New York: New York Review Books. Jackson, Julian. 1988. The Popular Front in France: Defending Democracy 1934–38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2001. France. The Dark Years, 1940–44. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jeppesen, Chris, and Andrew Smith, eds. 2017. Britain, France, and the Decolonization of Africa: Future Imperfect? London: UCL Press. Kalman, Samuel, and Sean Kennedy, eds. 2014. The French Right between the Wars: Political and Intellectual Movements from Conservatism to Fascism. New York: Berghahn. Kennedy, Sean. 2007. Reconciling France against Democracy. The Croix de Feu and the Parti Social Français, 1927–1945. Montreal: Mc-Gill/Queen’s University Press. Kuisel, Richard. 1981. Capitalism and the State in Modern France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marrus, Michael, and Robert Paxton. 1995. [1981]. Vichy France and the Jews Stanford: Stanford University Press. May, Anita Rasi. 2018. Patriot Priests: French Catholic Clergy and National Identity in World War I. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Millington, Chris. 2012. From Victory to Vichy: Veterans in Inter-War France. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ———. 2020. A History of Fascism in France, from the First World War to the National Front. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Nowinski, Sheila. 2013. “French Catholic activism in Algeria between Colonization and Development, 1930–65.” French History 27 (3): 371–93. https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/crt054. Ory, Pascal. 1994. La Belle Illusion: culture et politique sous le signe du Front populaire. Paris: Plon. Passmore, Kevin. 2013. The Right in France from the Third Republic to Vichy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Paxton, Robert. 1972. Vichy France. Old Guard, New Order. New York: Knopf. Piketty, Guillaume. 2009. Français en Résistance. Carnets de guerre, correspondances, journaux personnels. Paris: Robert Laffont. Read, Geoff. 2014. The Republic of Men. Gender and the Political Parties in Interwar France. Baton Rouge: Lousiana State University Press. Reijnen, C., and M. Rensen, eds. 2014. European Encounters. Intellectual Exchange and the Rethinking of Europe 1914–1945. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Rémond, René. 1954. La Droite en France: de 1815 à nos jours. Paris: Aubier. Ricciardi Colvin, Kelly. 2017. Gender and French Identity after the Second World War, 1944–54. Engendering Frenchness. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Rossel, André. 1976. Été 36.100 jours du Front Populaire. Paris: Courtille. Rousso, Henry. 1987. Le Syndrome de Vichy de 1944 à nos jours. Paris: Seuil. Scales, Rebecca P. 2016. Radio and the Politics of Sound in Interwar France, 1921–1939. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schloesser, Stephen. 2005. Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919–1933. Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press.

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43 OVERVIEW: BETWEEN GAULLISM AND GLOBALIZATION Opening Up the Fifth Republic, 1958–20201 Andrew WM Smith The Fifth Republic is often summarized rather simply as an overtly presidential system reflecting the personality and politics of its founder, Charles de Gaulle. But beyond de Gaulle, the character of the Fifth Republic was shaped by processes of European integration, decolonization, and globalization, all of which altered the context of power, the conduct of French politics, and the way in which a succession of presidents engaged with the world beyond the metropole. Rather than pursuing a static model of Gaullist statecraft, presidents that followed de Gaulle variously interpreted and innovated on his vision, moving toward wider reconfigurations of French interests in global markets and geopolitics. France’s relationship to the increasing interconnection and interdependency of “Americanled globalization” (Kuisel 2012, 389) and its defense of French cultural and social exceptions have shaped domestic policy and international relations. The tensions of engagement have been plain, and the reluctance to accept wholesale the vicissitudes of “Anglo-Saxon” models or of untrammeled European integration has been an illustration of why “managed globalization” emerged in the French context as a shield for national sovereignty (Gordon and Meunier 2001, 98). Charting the contingent ways in which the Fifth Republic has responded to domestic and international pressures over half a century helps explain how it has been shaped both by the legacy of the general and the evolving challenges of its era.

Gaullist Revolutions, 1958–1968 The general’s political re-emergence in 1958 was one which appeared to confirm his Cassandra-like qualities, honed by interwar warnings about mechanized warfare and the failings he diagnosed at the Fourth Republic’s inception (Atkin 2005, 38). Returning after a decade in the wings, he “wanted to come back on his terms: to break the system, not enter it” (Jackson 2019, 473). De Gaulle believed that only a strong state could overcome what he saw as the natural disunity of the French people to help them realize their collective potential. As president, he therefore sought to lead France, as he said, to “embrace her era” in terms of modernization, but also to nurture the country’s unique “vital forces” (Jackson 2019, 570–71, 646).

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Bloody war in Algeria created the conditions for de Gaulle’s political reprise. On May 13, 1958, the government in Algiers was overthrown by a self-proclaimed Committee of Public Safety consisting of disgruntled army officers and European settlers opposed to any semblance of peacemaking with Algerian anti-imperialists. They demanded the investiture of de Gaulle and – as Paris held off agreeing to their demands – increased the pressure with the realistic threat of a military coup. De Gaulle, in turn, played up the threat while dissociating himself from it. In a masterstroke of contemporary Gaullist mythmaking, this meant the new regime, despite “its origins on the streets of Algiers, explicitly defined itself against them” (Anderson 2018, 306). As explored more fully in Sibylle Duhautois’s overview chapter, the end of France’s wider empire radically altered the direction of French politics by reconfiguring the conception of both its polity and its parity in world affairs. The general’s return was cast as a return to order, and executive authority was a strong indicator of how that order would be enforced. In its early life, the new Republic appeared founded on the strength of “an elected monarch in all but name” (Stovall 2015, 403). A strengthened executive was designed to avoid the governmental instabilities of the Third and Fourth Republics, surmounting the largely ceremonial aspect the presidency had acquired in those regimes. The new Constitution drafted by Michel Debré provided for an empowered president to serve a seven-year term, elected at first by an electoral college and then, after the 1962 referendum, directly by the French people. The four referenda between 1958 and 1962 created a direct conduit of popular authority behind the office of the president. This built on de Gaulle’s legacy as the man of June 18, 1940, and the figurehead of wartime resistance in France, rising above the squabbles of party politics to speak to a nation united by ideals. National consensus was ever hard to find, though it was embodied in the legacy of celebrated resistor Jean Moulin, whose ashes were transferred to the Panthéon in 1964. As noted by Kedward, “the choice of Moulin and the Panthéon extended the resistance and republican legitimacy of both de Gaulle and the Fifth Republic” (Kedward 2005, 391). In international diplomacy, de Gaulle practiced the self-same irascibility he had honed while sustaining resistance from London, but also the same prescience. His vision equated France’s continued great power status with the need to remain at the forefront of an evolving international system. This was perhaps foremost in his 1961 commitment to an independent French nuclear deterrent (as explored in Roxanne Panchasi’s chapter) and also in the 1966 announcement of France’s withdrawal from NATO’s integrated command structure. Although France had been a founder member of NATO in 1949, the travails of the Fourth Republic (especially in relation to decolonization) had seen it become the “ ‘sick man’ of the Atlantic Alliance” (Bozo 2014, 380). De Gaulle’s withdrawal from NATO, therefore, was the result of a longer process which had begun with the advent of the Fifth Republic and bespoke a desire to protect French standing, offer resistance to prevailing Anglo-Saxon hegemony in the international order, and reinvent French power. The state had no monopoly on reinvention, however: after ten years of Gaullism which had “offered limited opportunities for the expression of legitimate political protest,” the Republic was tested by generalized mobilization in the streets and inventive, new social and political challenges to state power (Jackson 2011, 7). Passionate and picturesque protests in the Latin Quarter combined with the stolid reality of strike days to edge the country closer to revolution in 1968 than many had thought possible. As explored in Ben Mercer’s chapter, the ’68 years were about more than Parisian students, with a general strike emphasizing the extent of this political revolution. This radicalism widened cracks already made 472

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by a wave of agricultural protest in 1961, a mass miner’s strike which forced government concessions on pay in 1963, and the closely fought 1965 presidential election (Chapman 2018, 302).

Reform and Resistance, 1969–1981 After a decade of Gaullist rule, the Fifth Republic had not remade France, nor had the general stamped himself upon its structures so indelibly that they could not be challenged from the streets; still, following his death in 1970, the Republic he had built had to work through his legacy. The immediate post-Gaullist future was set out at a meeting of the “barons” of the Gaullist Party on April 28, 1969, with Georges Pompidou nominated as successor and guarantor of the general’s legacy (Cole 2005, 29). Pompidou faced a key challenge when his first prime minister, Jacques Chaban-Delmas, proposed a “new society” which promoted better dialogue between industry, public services, and the state. In tangible terms, this meant a loosening of state control over television, reforms to higher education, and the establishment of a minimum wage (Evans and Godin 2014, 166–67). Crucially, these plans overstepped the prime minister’s remit and outshone the president, so Pompidou sacked his prime minster. This also established a continuing trend of multiple prime ministers being “worn out” during the course of a Fifth Republic presidency (Agulhon 1995, 435). Styling himself “Director of France Incorporated,” Pompidou presided like a Gaullist CEO over future plans to commit France to Europe, improve industrial competitiveness, and ensure social cohesion through better communications and clearer social relations (Conklin, Fishman, and Zaretsky 2015, 316). However, Pompidou’s unexpected death from leukemia in April  1974 led to an early presidential election and upheaval among the Gaullist ranks. The young former finance minister Valéry Giscard d’Estaing trumped Chaban-Delmas in the first round of the election before facing off against the socialist François Mitterrand in the second. Giscard stood on a promise of change without risk, as opposed to the continuity leadership of Pompidou. In this context, France found a role in Europe that transformed its outlook, settling into the part of medium-sized power and moving beyond Gaullist conservatism to open the country to the world. However, the need to navigate two oil shocks during his presidency (one immediately following the 1973 Yom Kippur War and OPEC embargo, and the other in 1979 following the Iranian Revolution) limited Giscard’s room for maneuver as France was struck by rocketing energy costs. This enshrined a developing nuclear policy at the heart of French energy generation, offering a technological and political salve to enduring national anxieties at the end of the trente glorieuses – the 30 years of economic progress which had followed the Liberation (Maclean 2003, 108; Hecht 2009, 91–129; Bess 2003, 28–33). New problems encouraged new solutions, and Giscard’s closeness to German chancellor Helmut Schmidt was the basis on which the European Council created the European Monetary System (EMS). This was, in part, intended to instill the process of European integration with fiscal discipline in the hopes of deepening relationships; Giscard’s critics declared it an “Anglo-Saxon” creation more fitting to England or Germany (Conklin, Fishman, and Zaretsky 2015, 314–15). The president’s haughty air and faltering ability to combat international downturns saw a decline in his domestic popularity and increasing lampooning in the press, signaling, ultimately, that in his pursuit of openness, Giscard “lacked the means for his political ambitions” (Cole 2005, 32). 473

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Below the level of the state, challenges from the Left and the development of broad social movements with international and transnational links shook the Republic’s institutions. At Larzac, Plogoff, the Lip factory in Besançon, and beyond, organized social movements translated the message of 1968 into a more generalized rebuke, first to the Gaullist conservatism of Pompidou’s reign, and thereafter to Giscardien austerity. The ’68 years were thus broader and lasted longer than 1968 itself, connecting movements of immigrant workers, anti-imperialism, third world humanitarianism, and many other causes in their radical sweep (Ross 2002, 8–12). Even in the Pompidou years, “a new and dynamic anti-racist movement” had grown in part from the prominent rent strikes by immigrant workers in 1970 (Gordon 2012, 89–119, 149). Social change was also possible within political structures, and measures to realize Giscardien liberalization began with the reduction of the voting age to 18 from 21 in 1974. The “Loi Veil,” named after Simone Veil, who championed it, was passed in January 1975, offering a “social and consequently humane” update on the trend of French natalist policy since the 1920s by legalizing abortion (Agulhon 1995, 443–44). Feminist activism followed throughout 1975, with the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (MLF) capitalizing on years of campaigning to decry continuing sexism and misogyny in French society. Yet Françoise Giroud’s fêted appointment by Giscard as secretary of state for the condition of women was subsequently dubbed “a public relations exercise,” and lack of resources starved her secretariat of any real agency to change French society (Holmes and Long 2019, 50). Giscard’s liberalism, it seemed, had its limits. Wider social activism also revealed some of the failings in the Socialist Party (Section française de l’​Internationale ouvrière, SFIO), not least its inflexibility and historic complicity in France’s colonial project. The limits of reform, combined with new forms of resistance, necessitated changes in political opposition. It was reborn in a new form in 1971, as the renamed Parti Socialiste (PS), and built a common platform for the Left behind the leadership of François Mitterrand (Chabal 2020, 93–94). As the 1970s moved on, Mitterrand’s openness to forming political alliances bore fruit. He first negotiated an accommodation with the Communist Party, then absorbed the most active “New Left” impulses of the Parti Socialiste Unifié (PSU) and its leader, Michel Rocard, into the structures of the PS. While this re-energized Left narrowly failed to defeat Giscard in the 1978 election, the structures and alliances formed in the process mapped out a distinct challenge to that vision of liberal openness.

The Limits of Globalization, 1981–1995 Mitterrand was elected in 1981 by leading a campaign which implied promises of dramatic change. His campaign cast these reforms as a “quiet force,” even if many elites and right-wing voters feared the revolutionary potential of a socialist in the Elysée palace (Bantigny 2013, 16–21). Nonetheless, with communists appointed to ministerial posts, trade unions momentarily tamed, and the Right divided in defeat, Mitterrand’s first years in office embodied unbridled hope for national reform. Policies like lowering the retirement age and shortening the working week were all therefore seen as part of his declared “rupture with capitalism.” Mitterrand was neither Robespierre nor Lenin, however, and as economic ill winds blew across global markets, his reformist zeal chilled (Short 2014, 361–65, 371– 73). The Socialist Party’s shift toward a more technocratic, depoliticized form of economic policy was confirmed after its early “state of grace” ended along with its first year in the presidency in June 1982 (Cole 1994, 68–70). 474

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The image of Mitterrand as a hopeful champion leading a national charge against the logic of the markets proved illusory. Beset by the need to devalue the franc within the EMS for the second time, Mitterrand was presented with two options by March 1983: to leave the EMS and follow protectionist policies, or to commit to Europe and remain within the EMS (Clift 2005, 139–40). Mitterrand, who had tended to represent the Socialist Party’s pro-integrationist wing since 1971, chose to commit (Drake 1994, 34–39). Over time, the French turn to austerity became a model for wider European engagement with global trade and economic liberalization, from the Single European Act to the Maastricht Treaty. This developing pattern was entrenched as the weight and balance of European structures were fundamentally altered by the Fall of the Berlin Wall and German Unification, signaling the beginning of the end of the Cold War. The Maastricht Treaty of 1992 was a moment which crystallized Mitterrand’s cautious engagement with the European project. He sought to demonstrate French leadership in Europe, but wider domestic worries about sovereignty and the impact of European “bureaucratic intrusions” led to a very cautious endorsement of the treaty in a popular referendum which seemed to sketch out the limits of globalization (Lewis-Beck and Morey 2007, 85–86). Perhaps the most significant reforms of this septennat (in a constitutional sense) were the decentralization laws of 1981–1982, championed by the socialist mayor of Marseille, Gaston Defferre. These involved the creation of 22 regions, each with its own directly elected regional council (Evans and Godin 2014, 181). This was a shift from the centralized policies of the past, and the Socialist Party’s reforms were an “affirmation of the droit à la difference: the right of French people to express their regional, ethnic, and linguistic differences” (Conklin, Fishman, and Zaretsky 2015, 345; Martigny 2016, 159–204). Challenges to the sober order of state republicanism had gathered pace since Giscard’s term of office, with a string of social movements championing those differences. Mitterrand would ultimately disappoint many on the Left. In 1984, the scandal around the bombing in New Zealand of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior by French secret services, to protect the security of French nuclear testing in Polynesia, shone a light on dirty deeds committed in service of French state power. Less explosive but more calculating was Mitterrand’s introduction of proportional representation in the 1986 legislative elections to divide the center-right at the expense of empowering the extreme Right Front National Party. Cohabitation followed from 1986 to 1988, as results forced Mitterrand to appoint Jacques Chirac – the leader of the center-right Rassemblement pour la République (RPR) – as prime minister, pitting government and president at ideological odds. This tension existed within Mitterrand’s person, too, and he was always shadowed by youthful association with the Right, as notably recalled in journalist Pierre Péan’s 1994 exposé (Péan 1994) and further fueled by his continued practice of laying wreaths on the grave of Vichy head of state Phillipe Pétain and his refusal to apologize for Vichy’s crimes (Short 2014, 554–55). There were other reactionary moments, such as the headscarf affair of 1989, when three schoolgirls were expelled from a class for refusing to remove their coverings. The ensuing political debate ended in compromise (they could wear them on school grounds, though not during class), but the political furor it created underlined tensions in French society around assimilation and immigration, couched in the republican language of laïcité (Wallach Scott 2007, 21–26). The debate re-emerged in 1994, when “ostentatious” signs of religious affiliation were prohibited in schools by Minister of Education Francois Bayrou and a similar debate around laïcité, individual freedoms, and assimilation convulsed the public sphere (Wallach Scott 2007, 26–29). These debates represented tensions in the definition 475

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of republican values and reflected attempts by social movements and communities to reimagine French republicanism in pursuit of its egalitarian promises (Chabal 2020, 141). This impulse was likewise apparent in discussions of parité in the 1990s – attempting to make equal the number of women on electoral lists and in elected office – when the binary division of the sexes was transposed onto the individual as a way of reimagining “the universalism of a singular abstract individual” (Clift 2008, 396; Wallach Scott 2007, 2). Debates around republican values showed how France’s engagement with the wider world was testing the universalist foundations of the French republicanism.

Finding a Role: 1995–2007 Reckoning with a world in transition from its Cold War fixities, Jacques Chirac’s tenure as president can be characterized by the idea of “managed globalization,” in which France adapted and accommodated prevailing trends of the globalized world on her own terms. His election campaign played on his profound concern for la fracture sociale and the pilgrimages to the countryside that (at least symbolically) brought him into contact with France’s “left-behinds.” Lampooned and then fêted as a lover of apples, his “Compagnons! Mangez des pommes!” as heard on  Les Guignols de l’info  soon became a recognizable trope, just as much as his widely mocked mendacity. His charismatic, personable style underpinned a candidacy promising “a leftish programme before polling day and applying conservative policies afterwards, justifying the deception with a ritual invocation of cruel economic necessity” (Knapp 1997, 332–35). The expansion of privatization was a strong indication of this tendency, and Chirac, who led an energetic wave of privatization between 1986 and 1988 as prime minister, continued this as president (Gordon and Meunier 2001, 21–22). This was part of a continuing drive to “modernise our institutions,” according to Chirac, who also championed a referendum in 2000 which shortened the presidential term to five years. In this quest for the modern, he acknowledged that globalization was “inescapable, inevitable,” whilst also presenting “great dangers” in need of “control” (“Intervention télévisée” 2000). The limits of globalization were further delineated by the vast protest wave of 1995 in response to Prime Minister Alain Juppé’s proposed social reforms. The French state’s reaction to the “external constraints” of globalization, hemmed in by the voice of the streets, informed the policy of “managed globalization,” positing that a prominent role in defining the rules of greater market integration would ultimately yield greater French influence on those rules (Abdelal and Meunier 2010, 355). In Europe, Chirac thus balanced national benefits and supranational burdens, trumpeting enhancements to French prestige while treating expansion and deeper integration as onerous necessities (for example, in leading negotiations of the Common Agricultural Policy, which balanced agricultural production across member states). Despite closer German relations, Chirac’s tenure exhibited a turbulent approach to European integration. Despite the introduction of the Euro as a common currency in 1999, when the president put a proposed European constitution to a referendum in 2005, the electorate dismissed it despite his strong support. National resistance to prevailing international headwinds resurfaced in 2003 when Chirac threatened to use France’s veto in the UN – a signal of Franco-German resistance to military intervention in Iraq (despite support from the UK, Spain, and Italy). This was an echo of Gaullist independent foreign policy, ensuring France continued to be perceived as “a reluctant ally in the Western liberal-democratic camp” – neither pacifist nor anti-American 476

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(Erforth 2020, 12). Chirac exercised independent control of foreign policy as a marker of French sovereignty, in exactly the way it was designed as a reserved power for the president of the Fifth Republic. However, in a sign of shifting geo-political contexts, he showed willingness to court multilateralism to defend French strategic interests (with a more multilateralist approach to the murky legacy of Franco-African policies emerging after the international community criticized French inaction during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda). During this period, legacies of France’s empire lingered, and debates around migration drew attention both to social inequalities and the social conservatism of Chirac’s presidency. The World Cup victory in 1998 had created a vision of a victorious French national team that was “black-blanc-beur,” providing an aspirational focus for an inclusive and diverse national identity (Dubois 2010, 160–64). But positivity around that victory masked ongoing tensions. In March 2004, a law banned conspicuous religious symbols in schools, showing that earlier compromises had not held. Similarly, discussions of social exclusion were coded with religious and racial legacies of France’s empire and a diverse population of post-imperial citizens who did not make the national football team. Riots broke out across French cities in response to the death of two boys fleeing police, Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré, in October and November 2005. In response, the state granted itself extraordinary powers using emergency legislation drafted in response to the Algerian War, and Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy dubbed the protesters “racailles” (rabble) and promised to hose the streets clean (Conklin, Fishman, and Zaretsky 2015, 388). Legacies of the Fifth Republic’s founding re-emerged in its political landscape with the extreme Right Front National, whose ties to settler colonialism in Algeria were clear from its foundation in 1972. Under its leader, the negationist Jean-Marie Le Pen, it became a mainstay at the extreme of France’s political spectrum throughout the 1980s, and their vision of a closed Republic (where anti-immigration rhetoric was shot through with racist dog-whistling) bit back against France’s openness and diversity while troubling the republican and bipartisan consensus of the Fifth Republic. This appeal did not arise from elsewhere, and the prejudice (both submerged and overt) which dogged the presidential run-off election between Chirac and Le Pen in 2002 was not dissolved or assuaged by the establishment’s victory. In 2002 (Jean-Marie’s daughter) Marine Le Pen attempted to modernize, rejuvenate, and intellectualize the party’s image by altering its rhetoric to focus on “national priorities” as a coded means of promoting nativism. This language of social exclusion and national preference helped distort debates around France’s imperial legacy, far beyond the extreme Right. Subsequent discussions around the “Law of February 23, 2005,” which sought to highlight “positive” aspects of French colonization, illuminated ongoing legacies of empire as well as contemporary inequalities (Citron 2014, 411). These debates made clear that the electoral landscape would change as Chirac’s term ended amid popular cries of “dix ans, ça suffit” (ten years is enough), another echo of the general’s decline (Conklin, Fishman, and Zaretsky 2015, 386–87).

Openness? 2007–Today The creation of the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) in 2002 was designed to unite the center-right around Chirac, helping tie together liberal and traditionalist tendencies to avoid the internecine fighting that had beset its electoral prospects (Rispin 2019, 384). This was the vehicle for Sarkozy’s electoral pitch of “revitalizing and unifying a drained and divided nation” (Conklin, Fishman, and Zaretsky 2015, 389). As France’s first president 477

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born after the Second World War, he had a campaign literature that made a great deal of his belief in “reshaping the presidency” (Cole 2012, 319). The constitutional reforms of 2008 therefore altered the balance between executive and legislature by making the president “more than ever a super prime minister and partisan leader” (Grossman and Sauger 2009, 435). Sarkozy repeatedly broke with tradition, offering both a jarringly public personal style and a model of “hyper-presidency” which placed the president and the Elysée at the center of policymaking and political appointments (Cole 2012, 315). Amid this personal blitz, Sarkozy’s presidency “set an increasingly right-wing, populist course” as it progressed (Knapp 2014, 475). For all the celebrity accoutrements of the “bling-bling” president (Cole 2012, 312), Sarkozy also led a normalization of France’s international relations. This rolled back on the Gaullist stance of aloof association with NATO which his predecessors had maintained (Bozo 2014, 380–83). Likewise, as president of the European Council, Sarkozy played an important role in the wake of the 2008 financial crash by navigating a “crisis management” presidency and building strong interventionist relationships both with the UK and German chancellor Angela Merkel as a marker of the “Franco-German couple” at the heart of Europe (Cole 2012, 318–19). This pervading sense of crisis was a feature of the 2012 presidential election, with Francois Hollande making great play of Sarkozy’s personal and policy failings and casting the vote as “a referendum on Sarkozy” (Kuhn 2014, 438). In some ways, Hollande was an “accidental president,” fortunate in the campaign that socialist front-runners had fallen by the wayside and engaging in a process which focused more on the frailties of his opponent than his own virtues (Cole, Meunier, and Tiberj 2013, 11–13). Yet Hollande was also an “unlucky president,” and the Eurozone economic crisis saw his options limited and popularity plummet (Kuhn 2014, 440–41). European engagement came, in many ways, to define Hollande’s presidency. As he took the reins in 2012, the term “Président normal” was intended as a compliment, recognizing the offbeat note that the unglamorous but witty Hollande struck in contrast to his predecessor (Conklin, Fishman, and Zaretsky 2015, 392). Ambitious plans to check the progress of “global financial capitalism” by the “re-imagining and renegotiation of the Eurozone’s architecture” floundered mere weeks after his election, however, as European partners cooled on his vision (Clift and McDaniel 2017, 406–7). Throughout his tenure, Hollande failed to control his own party and faced criticism from within and without, hemmed in at the end of his tenure by an increasingly strident Left and the meteoric rise of Emmanuel Macron in the political center. Failure either to introduce planned reforms to employment legislation or to sufficiently tackle unemployment left the Hollande presidency representative of “a wider malaise of social democracy in current global capitalism” (Milner 2017, 440). Discourses of cultural insecurity plagued Hollande’s presidency, juxtaposing the economic “winners and losers of globalisation” and conservative reactions to “cultural change” often coded in the language of ethnic and religious division (Rispin 2019, 386). These issues became acute in the wake of the shootings at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket in Paris in January 2015, provoking a global solidarity movement defending free speech and secularism as foundational virtues of the French Republic. The UMP sought to claim these values and this language of security, identity, and secularism for the center-right, renaming the party Les Républicains at its congress in May 2015. This discourse would intensify in November of that same year, when a series of attacks in public venues in Paris killed 130 people, and on Bastille Day 478

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in 2016, an attack in Nice killed 84 people (Evans and Ivaldi 2018, 112–14). The state of emergency declared in response to these attacks, which granted sweeping powers to security forces for 12 days, was consistently renewed and eventually lasted 719 days. This was a legacy of the Fifth Republic’s foundation in crisis, both in its contingent adaptation to evolving political issues and its recourse to authoritarian tools which could be reactivated in response to threats. Combining an open neo-liberal offer with a patriotic restatement of French values, Macron’s meteoric rise seemed to signal a national re-engagement with globalization couched in the language of republicanism. His run-off campaign against Marine Le Pen on the extreme Right set two candidates from outside established mainstream party structures in competition: “pitting Macron’s vision of an open and internationally integrated society against Le Pen’s claims on national sovereignty, protectionism and closure of France’s national borders to external threats” (Evans and Ivaldi 2018, 178). Despite express enthusiasm for European integration and globalization, Macron also courted symbols of Gaullist legitimacy, notably seeking the endorsement of Daniel Cordier (Jean Moulin’s wartime aide-de-camp and peacetime biographer), as well as riding down the Champs Elysées in a military vehicle for his inauguration and posing with the general’s Mémoires de Guerre in his presidential portrait. Resistance to Macronisme found social and political voice in the Gilets Jaunes movement which emerged in November 2018. Protesters marshalled cultural insecurity as an anti-elitist force, and gilets jaunes protests predominated in the “diagonal du vide .  .  . the least populated rural and semi-urban regions characterised as having an ageing population and weakening economic growth rates” (Royall 2020, 106). The protesters’ generalized demands for a referendum d’initative citoyen (Citizen’s initiative referendum) – which would grant the general population a means to trigger national decision-making processes – were ill-fated, but they nonetheless represented a desire for greater popular sovereignty within the structures of the Fifth Republic. In response, Macron inaugurated a “Grand National Debate,” setting popular sovereignty in dialogue with cultural insecurity. “We must state clearly,” he said in July  2018, “that the real frontier which divides Europe today is that between progressives and nationalists” (Macron 2018). Macron viewed the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union as exemplary of these very trends and symbolic of a wider crisis facing Europe. France’s role in this altered European polity shows the tension between a desire for a strong nation-state with an exceptional national culture and the articulation of an outward-facing, progressive vision of expansive European liberalism and deeper integration. For his part, Macron framed adhesion in historic terms. His aim, he claims, is emphatically not “to adapt France to globalization” (Le Monde 2020). Instead, his program, displaying both “the liberal and the pragmatic, the modernizer and the manager,” has been compared by Sudhir Hazareesingh to “a sort of synthesis between Pierre Mendès-France and Jacques Chaban-Delmas” (Wieder 2020). Both were men whose visions were altered by the realities of governance, the former’s “modernization” by the myriad contradictions of France’s senescent empire, and the latter in his doomed effort to design a progressive route through France’s “société bloquée.” In addressing crises of cultural insecurity alongside desires for popular sovereignty, Macron was seeking “a chance to show Europe shaping globalization in France’s image,” combining Gaullist talk of strategic economy with an outward-facing, progressive liberal offer (Hall 2021). 479

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Conclusion In 2020, dubbed “the year of de Gaulle,” the French Republic chose to “celebrate the spirit of Resistance, the spirit of the Republic, and the spirit of the Nation embodied by the figure of the General” (“2020, année de Gaulle” 2020). National celebrations faltered in the wake of a global pandemic, however, and the annual June 18 commemoration, the day of de Gaulle’s famous “call” to arms in 1940, saw the French confined to their homes by an enforced national lockdown. Such a dramatic extension of state power in response to new threats emerging in a globalized world was perhaps an ironically apt way to mark the general’s enduring legacy. The experience of France’s Fifth Republic has been one of cautious and adaptive alternance in its engagement with globalization, never as simple as moving from Gaullism to globalization, nor radiance to reclusiveness. Instead, contrasting attitudes to openness and French engagement with the outside world have been moderated by a consistent commitment to cultural and social exceptionalism. Indeed, globalization was never as effectively “managed” as Fifth Republic politicians liked to claim, yet nor was the Republic always able to move as far beyond its Gaullist origins as some imagined it might. Pompidou’s “CEO” presidency and Giscard’s tinkering were early expressions of this adaptive trend, while Mitterrand’s attempt to unify the left and cause a “rupture” with capitalism indicated the limits for offering resistance. Nevertheless, in both Chirac’s charismatic, independent streak and the wave of privatization over which he presided, there was a sense of how France could manage the forces of globalization. France’s twenty-firstcentury presidents have struggled with these same dilemmas, with the election of Emmanuel Macron seeming to represent a symbol of this tension rather than a solution. Yet in a way, this variance is itself characteristic of the Fifth Republic. As Ben Clift notes, “it is not presidential dominance, but rather the constitutional interpretive flexibility and the contingency of Fifth Republic power relations which are the key continuities” (Clift 2008, 386). In this sense, the development of interpretive space between managed globalization and market integration, as suggested by Macron’s “adaptation,” is the terrain on which French grandeur and politico-economic engagement with the world rests.

Note 1 I would like to thank Ludivine Broch, Emile Chabal, Charlotte Faucher, and Hugo Frey for their generous guidance and invaluable comments on this piece as it has taken shape.

References “2020, année de Gaulle.” Élysee website, May  16, 2020. Accessed July  20, 2020. www.elysee.fr/ emmanuel-macron/2020/05/16/2020-annee-de-gaulle. Abdelal, Rawi, and Meunier, Sophie. 2010. “Managed Globalization: Doctrine, Practice and Promise.” Journal of European Public Policy 17 (3): 350–67. Agulhon, Maurice. 1995. The French Republic 1879–1992. Oxford: Blackwell. Anderson, Grey. 2018. La guerre civile en France, 1958–1962: Du coup d’État gaulliste à la fin de l’OAS. Paris: La Fabrique. Atkin, Nicholas. 2005. The Fifth French Republic. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bantigny, Ludivine. 2013. La France à l’heure du monde: de 1981 à nos jours. Paris: Seuil. Bess, Michael. 2003. The Light Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960–2000. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Between Gaullism and Globalization Bozo, Frédéric. 2014. “Explaining France’s NATO ‘normalisation’ under Nicolas Sarkozy. 2007–2012).” Journal of Transatlantic Studies 12 (4): 379–91. Chabal, Emile. 2020. France. London: Polity. Chapman, Herrick. 2018. France’s Long Reconstruction: In Search of the Modern Republic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Citron, Suzanne. 2014. “The Impossible Revision of France’s History. 1968–2006).” In Colonial Culture in France since the Revolution, edited by Pascal Blanchard, Sandrine Lemaire, Nicolas Bancel, and Dominic Thomas, 411–19. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Clift, Ben. 2005. French Socialism in a Global Era: The Political Economy of the New Social Democracy. London: Continuum. ———. 2008. “The Fifth Republic at Fifty: The Changing Face of French Politics and Political Economy.” Modern & Contemporary France 16 (4): 383–98. Clift, Ben, and Sean McDaniel. 2017. “Is This Crisis of French Socialism Different? Hollande, the Rise of Macron, and the Reconfiguration of the Left in the 2017 Presidential and Parliamentary Elections.” Modern & Contemporary France 25 (4): 403–15. Cole, Alistair. 1994. “A House Divided: Socialism à la française.” In France during the Socialist Years, edited by Gino Raymond, 64–89. Aldershot: Dartmouth. ———. 2005. French Politics and Society. Harlow: Pearson. ———. 2012. “The Fast Presidency? Nicolas Sarkozy and the political institutions of the Fifth Republic.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 16 (3): 311–21. Cole, A., S. Meunier, and V. Tiberj. 2013. “From Sarkozy to Hollande: The New Normal?” In Developments in French Politics 5, edited by A. Cole, S. Meunier, and V. Tiberj, 1–18. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Conklin, Alice L., Sarah Fishman, and Robert Zaretsky. 2015.  France and Its Empire Since 1870. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Drake, Helen. 1994. “François Mitterrand, France and European Integration.” In France during the Socialist Years, edited by Gino Raymond, 32–63. Aldershot: Dartmouth. Dubois, Laurent. 2010. Soccer Empire: The Word Cup and the Future of France. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. “Emmanuel Macron: les défis de la fin du quinquennat.” Le Monde July  14, 2020. Accessed July  20, 2020. www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2020/07/14/macron-les-defis-de-la-fin-du-quinquen nat_6046181_3232.html. Erforth, Benedikt. 2020. Contemporary French Security Policy in Africa: On Ideas and Wars. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Evans, Jocelyn, and Gilles Ivaldi. 2018. The 2012 French Presidential Elections. A Political Reformation? Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Evans, Martin, and Emmanuel Godin. 2014. France since 1815. Abingdon: Routledge. Gordon, Daniel. 2012. Immigrants and Intellectuals: May ’68 and the Rise of Anti-Racism in France. Pontypool: Merlin. Gordon, Philip, and Meunier, Sophie. 2001. The French Challenge: Adapting to Globalization. Washington: Brookings Institute. Grossman, Emiliano, and Nicolas Sauger. 2009. “The End of Ambiguity? Presidents versus Parties or the Four Phases of the Fifth Republic”, West European Politics 32 (2): 423–37. Hall, Ben. 2021. “Macron lacks reformist zeal for replay of duel with Le Pen.” Financial Times, March 15, 2021. Hecht, Gabrielle. 2009. The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Holmes, Diana, and Long, Imogen. 2019. “1975: The Year of Women.” In Making Waves: French Feminisms and Their Legacies 1975–2015, edited by Margaret Atack, Alison S. Fell, Diana Holmes, and Imogen Long, 33–50. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. “Intervention télévisée de M. Jacques Chirac.” Élysee website, July 14, 2000. Accessed June 23, 2021. www.elysee.fr/jacques-chirac/2000/07/14/intervention-televisee-de-m-jacques-chirac-presi dent-de-la-republique-a-tf1-france-2-et-fr3-le-14-juillet-2000-sur-le-referendum-sur-le-quin quennat-la-reforme-du-statut-de-la-corse-laffaire-des-faux-electeurs-a-paris-la-cohabitationlaction-go.

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44 HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF FRENCH IMPERIALISM FROM 1914 Sibylle Duhautois

On the eve of the First World War, the French Empire stretched over four continents and 10 million square kilometers, from the Indochinese Union to French Guiana (Aldrich 1996). It encompassed 45 to 50 million people, some French citizens, many more French subjects, and a few foreign subjects, the latter two categories being referred to as the indigènes (Saada 2012, 2017). Only the British Empire was then larger and more populated. The French Empire shared with the British a patchwork and heterogeneous nature. Algeria, for example, conquered from 1830, had been developed as a settlement colony. This means that the French population was encouraged to settle there quite massively. In addition to French people, many immigrants from the rest of Europe settled in the colony during the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century. By 1914, more than 750,000 Europeans were living in the colony. Administratively, the northern part of Algeria was then considered as a part of France, as it was divided in three departments. The southern part of Algeria, which was larger but far less-populated, had, on the contrary, a specific administrative status. It was administered by the army and divided into four “southern territories.” Most of the other colonial territories had a specific administrative status as colonies. France directly administered them, but contrary to Algeria, they were not politically assimilated to the metropolitan system. Very few Europeans lived there. Most of the French people living in the colonies were working directly or indirectly with its administration. Among the oldest French colonies were the small overseas territories conquered as early as the seventeenth century, notably legacies of the era of slavery, such as French Guiana, Réunion, and Martinique. The other French colonies, located in Africa and Asia, were mostly conquered between the second half of the nineteenth century and the very beginning of the twentieth century. These newer territories were gathered in larger administrative units. Thus, French West Africa was created in 1895, and French Equatorial Africa was created in 1910. The Indochinese Union, created in 1887, brought together territories with different statuses: one colony, French Cochinchina (in the South of current Vietnam), four protectorates (Annam, Tonkin, Cambodia, and Laos), and one small territory, the Guangzhouwan, which had been ceded by China to France as a lease for 99 years. Protectorates were territories that 483

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kept their own governing institutions as well as most of their laws but that ceded part of their sovereignty to France. In particular, they gave away the control of foreign relations, defense, and external trade. In 1914, in addition to its Asian protectorates, France also had two protectorates in the Maghreb: Tunisia (since 1881) and Morocco (since 1912). In those territories, the French needed to negotiate some of their decisions with actors whose control of the local institutions gave some leverage to impose specific reforms, unwanted by the colonial administration (Perrier 2019). Recent research has shown that the administrative control over these numerous territories was very strong in some specific places, such as big cities and the oldest colonies (the French West Indies in particular). Emmanuel Blanchard, Quentin Deluermoz, and Joël Glasman call these well-controlled territories “dominance islets” (Blanchard, Deluermoz, and Glasman 2011). On the contrary, vast areas of the French Empire remained poorly controlled by a distant administrator. This is true especially in rural areas, where the population rarely met representatives of the French colonial power. In the years before the First World War, efforts were being made to better train civilian administrators, who gradually replaced military officers at the head of recently “pacified” territories (Le Cour Grandmaison 2009). An increasing number of these civilian administrators were graduates from the Ecole coloniale created in 1889 in order to equip its students with the theoretical and practical tools required to run a colony. Looking at these administrative careers also shows that French imperialism was having a “feedback effect” on the trajectories of people from Metropolitan France. Vanina Profizi (2011) thus showed how the Corsican people found a new way to take part in a national history from which they were until then marginalized by massively engaging in the colonial adventure. The means that were used by the French colonial administrators in order to impose their power and, in particular, the use of violence against indigenous people have been discussed and debated by historians. Many of them have tried to understand where colonial violence came from and what its daily usage said about the imperial system. Gregory Mann has showed that colonial violence could not be explained by the sole existence of the régime de l’indigénat, the set of laws that created a legal hierarchy between French citizens and the local inhabitants of the French colonies, whose status was considered inferior (Mann 2009). He shows that violence originated much more from a daily practice of power that did not respect written rules than from decisions by the metropolitan administration. Thus, local administrators often used corporal punishments instead of applying the legal penalties set down. Raphaëlle Branche explains that the specificity of colonial violence is to be found not in its intensity but in its nature (Branche 2001). She shows that the colonial violence comes from a long-term legitimacy deficit of the colonial administration. Colonial violence was not only physical. The French colonial system was also based on a symbolic violence that was expressed, in particular, through the physical separation between the dominant and dominated groups. Odile Georg and Xavier Huetz de Lemps have shown how a hygienist discourse was used to justify the creation of European neighborhoods high up on plateaus, while indigenous districts were lower down (Goerg and Huetz de Lemps 2012). Rivers could also be the physical element that separated the European city from the indigenous one. The hierarchy between the two parts of the colonial cities was made visible and actively enforced. Access to the White neighborhoods was often forbidden to the local inhabitants, except for those who worked as domestic servants for European families or as civil servants for the colonial administration. 484

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The narrative around this physical separation was increasingly based on the idea that European people and indigenous people should remain separated as much as possible in order to avoid a contact that was deemed harmful. According to many Europeans who lived in the colonies, the tropical climate in itself could cause degeneration. In order to avoid such a tragic development, French people who lived in the colonies frequently practiced hydrotherapy in the mountains. Nonetheless, this physical and symbolic separation between Europeans and indigenous people was limited and could be more or less important, varying on the colonies. Recent research shows the importance of various encounter zones between French people or culture and colonized people. For instance, Malcolm Théoleyre (Théoleyre 2016) shows that, in colonial Algiers, musical practice was a means to create and tighten ties between the French and the Algerian communities and that this purpose was supported by public authorities. In 1914, when the First World War started, using the colonial army on European battlefields was a very new idea. It had gained momentum only after Lieutenant-Colonel Mangin had published a book called La Force Noire (“The Black Force”) in 1910 (Ndiaye 2013). Mangin advocated for the use of African soldiers from French colonies for future European conflicts. He claimed that Africans were strong, brave, and less prone to feel pain than the Europeans. The resort to African soldiers was vividly debated in the Parliament, but when the war began, it was decided to extend conscription to Africa. At the end of 1916, 40,000 African soldiers were enlisted in the French army. The recruitment was often forced, which triggered some rebellions. These difficulties led to a temporary interruption of the African conscription. In November 1917, the recruitment of African soldiers resumed. Blaise Diagne, a political leader from Senegal, then helped the French government by taking a trip around French Africa and encouraging Africans to enlist in the French army. His discourse was focused on the idea that taking part in the same war as French citizens would lead to obtaining the same rights for Africans. When they arrived in Europe, African soldiers were first trained in the South of France and then brought to the battlefields. They took part in most of the big battles, such as Verdun in 1916 and the Chemin des Dames in 1917. At the end of the war, one African soldier out of six had died. This is comparable to the French soldiers’ mortality rate, but while the French soldiers died mostly during the first years of the war, the African soldiers died massively in 1917 and 1918 because, once their training completed, they were often placed on the front lines. The French government explained that decision by the necessity to “spare French blood.” While this colonial participation in the First World War did not lead to Africans obtaining more rights, let alone French citizenship, it did change the relationship between French people and their colonized subjects and their mutual perceptions. On the French side, meeting the African soldiers and seeing them fight for France radically changed the French people’s minds on Africans. While they used to picture the colonial subjects as frightening primitive people, they now considered them as nice, benevolent, but also simple-minded people. This image of the “noble savage” was soon utilized in commercial communication for exotic products. Racism was still present, but a new kind of familiarity with the people living in the colonies had stemmed from the common fights. On the African side, the First World War was a revealing experience that put an end to what was then called the “White man myth.” Until then, African people were encouraged to believe that the White men were somewhat superior to themselves, stronger, maybe smarter, better organized. This positive image was carefully protected by the French colonial 485

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administration through propaganda and through the choice of healthy young officers to be sent as colonial administrators. The experience of war in Europe allowed the African soldiers to witness acts of bravery, but also cowardice, baseness, and weak, sometimes mutilated French bodies. In his memoirs, Amadou Hampâté Bâ describes the shock of this revelation and how it affected the colonized people’s compliance to the imperial system. After their return from the war, the colonial soldiers spread the word, and the colonial hierarchy seemed a lot less justified than it was before. They also felt disillusioned, as their efforts did not translate into any major change in the colonial relationship. The acknowledgment of their military efforts and the sacrifice of their lives were indeed mainly symbolic with the erection of a Monument to the Heroes of the Black Army in Reims, in 1924. From a geopolitical point of view, the interwar period was a flourishing period for French imperialism with a territorial extension. As a result of the Treaty of Versailles signed in June 1919, Germany and the Ottoman Empire had lost their rights over the territories that they had colonized. The newly created League of Nations gave those territories to the victorious imperial powers as League of Nations mandates. This new legal status prevented the annexation of those territories by their new rulers, who were supposed to guide native peoples toward “civilization.” Thus, Lebanon, Syria, a part of Cameroon, and a part of Togo were added to the French colonial empire. From a mere territorial point of view, the French Empire had thus reached its climax at the beginning of the 1920s. It spread over 12 million square kilometers and contained 65 million inhabitants. But the interwar period was also a moment of questioning. Faced with growing criticism, both in the colonies and in the metropolitan center, the empire had to be defended. Its supporters worked hard to reassert the merits of colonization and to prevent any weakening of the French control over the colonized peoples and territories. In the colonies, legal and cultural strategies were implemented to strengthen the distinction between the dominating group and the dominated one. Any movement to blur the lines between French citizens and indigenous people was fought, especially in the private sphere. Thus, Frenchwomen were encouraged to follow their husbands to the colonies to prevent isolated male officials from entering relationships with non-White women. The success of this policy is epitomized by the expression used by the journalist Albert Londres to describe the French society that he observed in the 1920s in French Africa: “a colony with hair curlers.” French families mostly lived according to their own customs, in their own neighborhoods, and did not interact much with the indigenous population. In the same vein, from 1928 on, several decrees were taken in order to provide a legal framework to the lives of mixed-race children and to decide on who was allowed to get French citizenship and who was not (Saada 2017). In order to better control its colonial territories, the French imperial administration also tried to invent new ways to govern some of its colonies. The French Empire is often described as practicing a very direct authority over its subjects with the ideological objective of assimilation, whereas the British Empire would govern in a more indirect way, allowing some indigenous notables to make many decisions at the local level. The reality was much more complex than that. The objective of assimilation – spreading French culture in the French Empire until the colonized people were “ready” to get French citizenship – was never really pursued. The school programs taught in the French colonies, for instance, were different from the ones used in metropolitan schools. As far as administration is concerned, the interwar period was a time for experiments, especially in the new parts of the empire, that is, the League of Nations mandates. In Togo, from 1922, the French governor Auguste 486

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Bonnecarrère conducted an attempt at governing according to an indirect ruling system, establishing “notable councils” whose prerogatives were extended after two years of proper functioning (Obuibé Bassa 2011). In Metropolitan France, the legitimacy of French imperialism was reasserted through new efforts of colonial propaganda. This strategy culminated in 1931 with the opening of a major colonial exhibition in the Bois de Vincennes in Paris. Eight million visitors could thus learn about the jewels of the French Empire: luxury products, local cultural artifacts, and even native people from the colonies. Everything was done to impress the French people so that they would come to the natural conclusion that it was worth continuing to have colonies and to exploit their economic resources as well as their cultural prestige. One of the main attractions was a life-size reconstruction of the Angkor Wat temple. This work took up 5,000 square meters and was illuminated at nightfall. Logistical efforts were made to bring as many visitors as possible to the exhibition: the metro line 8 was extended to get there, and 8 kilometers of new pathways were created in the Bois de Vincennes. The exhibition aimed both at showing the good work that colonial administrators were conducting in overseas territories and at depicting the significant distance that still separated French civilization from the more primitive cultures of its colonial subjects. The latter was particularly important in the context of post-war disillusionment. In French West Africa, where Blaise Diagne had spoken of gaining equal rights and where colonial soldiers expected to obtain French citizenship en masse, the protest against colonial rule was then using the French rhetoric of mission civilisatrice (the mission to civilize) against France. They argued that they had proved in many ways their capacity to assimilate French culture and to evolve, which should grant them equal rights with French citizens (Conklin 1997). In response to that, France had to show that being a full French citizen was a very difficult goal to achieve and that most of the Africans were nowhere near it. Thus, the path to naturalization got steeper in 1932, when the decrees of 1912 and 1918 were revised. The main change was that naturalization would now be granted to whole families instead of an individual. This meant that to be naturalized, someone had to prove that each and every member of his extended family was culturally French. In particular, all the children had to be provided with a French education. The hypocrisy of this ambivalent colonial discourse was denounced both by growing protest movements in the colonies and by anti-colonialist activists in France. While the colonial exhibition of 1931 was flourishing, communists and surrealists jointly organized an anti-colonial exhibition, which was inaugurated in September  1931 and lasted until February  1932. This alternative exhibition displayed some artwork created by the local inhabitants of the French colonies, thus showing the richness and the variety of those cultures and proving that they didn’t need any French intervention. However, the main goal of the organizers was to reveal “the truth about the colonies,” which they did by presenting pictures, caricatures, and statistics that highlighted the abuses of the French colonial power and showed that French imperialism was centered on the economic exploitation of the colonies’ resources (Ruscio 2009). The anticolonial exhibition was visited by less than 5,000 people. Most French people and French political parties still supported colonization at the beginning of the 1930s. Yet communist criticism of French imperialism was one of the forces that were challenging the integrity and the durability of the French Empire during the interwar period. Another blow to the French imperial system came from its own contradictions. In addition to the broken promises of the First World War, new hopes of acquiring the same rights 487

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as French citizens stemmed from the introduction of industrial work in African colonies during the interwar period. Frederick Cooper argues that, by practicing the same kind of work as Metropolitan French workers, indigenous workers gained further legitimacy to ask for the same legal status (Cooper 1996). Moreover, industrial work created an environment that facilitated anticolonial political organization and introduced new ways to protest, such as strikes. Yet the French Empire did not collapse until the end of the Second World War. France’s defeat at the hands of German troops in June 1940 immediately led to a division of the empire between those who obeyed the new Vichy regime and those who rallied around General de Gaulle and entered into resistance. One of the first colonial administrators to do so was Félix Eboué, governor of Chad. His allegiance to Charles de Gaulle reinforced the legitimacy of Free France, to which it provided a territory and a base where soldiers could be trained (Létang 2019). It is important to note that joining Free France implied an act of disobedience that was highly uncommon in the colonial order and that it happened in a somewhat-erratic way: the rallying of Chad was announced to Vichy by a simple telegram, while that of Cameroon, the following day, was the result of a takeover by 24 men armed with 17 pistols borrowed from the British (Jennings 2015). On the other side, most of the French colonies ruled by pro-Vichy governors experienced a unique situation, as they were governed by the Vichy regime without German interference (Cantier and Jennings 2004). The conservative and discriminatory policies implemented by Vichy in Metropolitan France were exported – sometimes even anticipated – in these colonies. The concrete modalities of population control varied significantly across the empire, but everywhere, 1940 was a major break. According to Eric Jennings, the fact that Vichy governed the empire in a racist and antiSemitic way even though no German was present in those territories clearly shows that neither Hitler’s pressure nor the will to protect French people against the Nazis could be the only reasons that explained Pétain’s decisions (Jennings 2001). The Vichy regime appears to be genuinely based on several forms of discrimination and, particularly, on anti-Semitism. The control that Vichy exercised over some parts of the French Empire was frequently used by the Vichy regime in its propaganda in order to regain a prestige that had been lost in 1940 with the French defeat. Though most of the colonies were initially obedient toward Vichy France, they progressively joined de Gaulle’s fight against the Axis powers. By the middle of 1943, all the French Empire except for French Indochina had entered the resistance. This exception can be explained by the specific situation of Asia: Japan was expanding its influence over the region, and the Vichy regime collaborated so tightly with the Imperial Japanese Army that, as early as 1941, Japanese troops were stationed in French Indochina. In March 1945, the Japanese army took control over Indochina. Japan then officially declared Viêt Nam, Cambodia, and Laos independent but actually exerted a strong influence on them by making them members of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, a group of Asian countries controlled by Japan with varying degrees of intensity. In August 1945, the surrender of Japan suddenly left a power vacuum that was soon utilized by the communist pro-independence activists of the Viet Minh. On September 2, 1945, Hô Chi Minh, leader of the Viet Minh, proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam as an independent state. France tried to re-establish its control over its former colonial territories, but the negotiations that it had opened with the Viet Minh failed, which led to the opening of the First Indochina War (1946–1954). This conflict was concluded with the defeat of the 488

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French army and the end of French Indochina. Cambodia and Laos became independent countries, while Viet Nam was divided between a communist North and an anti-communist South. In the context of the Cold War, those tensions led to the Vietnam War (1955–1975). In other parts of the French Empire, the aftermath of the Second World War brought a desire for independence that was harshly repressed (we can think of the Sétif massacres in May–June 1945 or the crisis that began in Syria at the same time). If France then manages to formally re-establish its control over most of its colonial empire, the experience of the Second World War, even more than the broken promises of the First World War, had strongly undermined the foundations of the French imperial control over its colonies. The colonial relationship had to be reinvented. Thus, the French Union was created in 1946. This new political entity put an end to the legal distinction between French citizens and French subjects. The French Union officially gathered equal people living together in a unique political system. In reality, France kept most of its prerogatives, and the former colonies were represented in institutions that had only limited powers. The new situation was judged unsatisfactory by most of the anticolonial and nationalist movements that had been created or that had gained a bigger audience after the war. The strongest tensions emerged in Algeria. France’s oldest colony being the home of more than 1 million Europeans, the metropolitan government wasn’t ready to consider accepting Algeria’s independence. In 1954, Algerian nationalists decided to start using violence to promote their cause. On the night of November 1, the National Liberation Front, the main Algerian nationalist movement at that time, attacked several Europeans and Algerians who supported the French colonial rule. This event is regarded as the start of the decolonization war known as the Algerian War, even though, at that time, France did not use the word “war,” as the government preferred to use the phrase “law enforcement.” The war lasted until 1962 and was marked by the use of torture by the French army and the recourse to terrorist violence on both sides. As time went by, most of the French metropolitan population got more and more convinced that Algerian independence was the only valid solution to the conflict. A major turning point was the attempt at a military coup in Algiers in favor of French Algeria in 1958 and de Gaulle’s subsequent return to power. Initially opposed to Algeria’s full independence, Charles de Gaulle ultimately proposed the solution of organizing a referendum on the self-determination of Algeria. He also started negotiations with the National Liberation Front. As the concept of self-determination had been approved by a majority of voters in 1961, and as an agreement had been found with the National Liberation Front (the Evian Accords) in February 1962, a referendum was organized in Algeria about the independence of the country, which was massively chosen by the voters. In the rest of Africa, the decolonization process was much more peaceful. In 1958, faced with growing anticolonial protests, and unwilling to deal with new armed conflicts, Charles de Gaulle tried, yet again, to propose a new kind of union between France and its empire, the French Community. All the former French colonies accepted this new status, except French Guinea, which voted in favor of its complete independence. But the French community did not last long: in 1960, most of the members from sub-Saharan Africa became autonomous states, and the French government accepted their independence. This did not, however, put an end to all relations between France and the African continent. The former imperial power maintains close economic ties with its former colonies, epitomized by the persistence of the CFA franc, a currency created in the colonial era and still in use in 14 countries (although it is due to be replaced by the eco by 2027 in eight of them). The dark, 489

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“postcolonial” side of this continued relation is often described through the term “Françafrique,” a notion used to denounce the French interference in several African issues. The French imperial era that reached an end at the beginning of the 1960s also left some very conflicted traces in the collective memory (Stora 2007). The Algerian War in particular created many different narratives that are difficult to reconcile. The issue of torture and whether or not it was the official policy of the French state is at the center of heated debates. Benjamin Stora (2004) identified four groups of people who have a particular interest in the history of Algeria and who are prone to forget a specific part of this history while favoring a narrative coherent with what they personally and collectively went through: the French soldiers who were sent to fight in Algeria, the “pieds noirs” (the French people who lived in Algeria at that time), the “Harkis” (the Algerian people who supported a French Algeria), and the Algerian immigrants in France. During the last three decades, the number of academic works dealing with the Algerian War and its memory has strongly increased. This paves the way for a more scientific and more serene approach to this difficult episode of the French past, but the Algerian War is still a painful element of the French collective memory. More generally, the meaning of colonization, the motivations of French imperialists, and the reality of the relationships between France and its colonized people are also a topic that generates debates outside the circle of historians. In 2005, the French defense minister Michèle Alliot-Marie presented a law that included an article which introduced in the school curricula a mention of the “positive role of the French presence overseas.” This created a political and societal debate over the reality of the so-called “positive role” of French colonialism. The protest against the article also stemmed from the idea that the government was trying to impose an official version of history. Many historians mobilized against the law. The Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika publicly criticized a law that he deemed close to denial of imperialist crimes. The article also triggered many protests in the French Caribbean that were once part of the French colonial empire. The French government finally suppressed the article, and the school programs do not include such a narrative. On the contrary, studying the issue of contentious memories is now part of the school curricula in the last year of French high school.

References Aldrich, Robert. 1996. Greater France: A History of French Overseas Expansion. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Blanchard, E., Q. Deluermoz, and J. Glasman. 2011. “La professionnalisation policière en situation coloniale: détour conceptuel et explorations historiographiques.” Crime, histoire  & sociétés 15 (2): 33–53. Branche, Raphaëlle. 2001. La torture et l’armée pendant la guerre d’Algérie (1954–1962). Paris: Gallimard. Cantier, Jacques, and Jennings, Éric. 2004. L’Empire colonial sous Vichy. Paris: Éditions Odile Jacob. Conklin, Alice. 1997. A Mission to Civilize. The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1939. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Cooper, Frederick. 1996. Decolonization and African Society. The labor question in French and British Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goerg, O., and Huetz de Lemps X. 2012. La ville coloniale XVe-XXe siècle. Paris: Points. Jennings, Eric. 2001. Vichy in the Tropics. Petain’s National Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe and Indochina, 1940–1944. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2015. Free French Africa in World War II: The African Resistance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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History and Historiography of French Imperialism from 1914 Le Cour Grandmaison, Olivier. 2009. La République impériale, Politique et racisme d’État. Paris: Fayard. Létang, Géraud. 2019. Mirages d’une rébellion. Être français libre au Tchad (1940–1943). Paris: Sciences Po. Mann, Gregory. 2009. “What was the Indigenat? The ‘Empire of Law’ in French West Africa.” Journal of African history (November): 331–53. Ndiaye, Pap. 2013. “Les coloniaux ont-ils été moins bien traités?” L’histoire (collections n°61, December). Obuibé, Bassa Komla. 2011. “Les conseils des notables au Togo. Du mandate à la tutelle (1922–1958): tribunes d’expression d’une future opposition.” Outre-Mers, Revue d’histoire (370–371): 83–98. Perrier, Antoine. 2019. La liberté des protégés: souverains, ministres et serviteurs des monarchies marocaine et tunisienne sous protectorat français (1881–1956). Paris: Sciences Po. Profizi, Vanina. 2011. “Les fonctionnaires d’origine corse en AOF (1900–1920). Approche prosopographique de l’identité régionale en contexte colonial.” Outre-Mers. Revue d’histoire: 370–71. Ruscio, Alain. 2009. “Contre l’Exposition coloniale de 1931 (Paris-Vincennes): des voix fermes, mais bien isolées. Aperçus.” Aden (1): 104–11. Saada, Emmanuelle. 2012. Empire’s Children. Race, Filiation, and Citizenship in French Colonies, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ———. 2017. “Nationalité et citoyenneté en situation coloniale et post-coloniale.” Pouvoirs (160): 113–24. Stora, Benjamin. 2004. Algeria, 1830–2000: A Short History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. 2007. La guerre des mémoires: la France face à son passé colonial (entretiens avec T. Leclère). Paris: Editions de l’Aube. Théoleyre, Malcolm. 2016. Arab Music, French folklore? Music, Politics and Musician Communities in Contact in Algiers during the Colonial Period (1862–1962). Paris: Sciences Po.

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45 FRENCH FEMINISMS Patriarchy, Populationism, and Progress, 1870–1950 Nimisha Barton

In France, nearly a century separated universal male suffrage (1848) from universal female suffrage (1944). Consequently, the French movement for women’s rights is often compared unfavorably to the suffrage movements to be found elsewhere, especially Great Britain and the United States. Many British and US feminists engaged in hunger strikes, deliberate acts of violence against public property, and other dramatic public gestures to draw attention to their movement, thus achieving suffrage in 1918 and 1920, respectively. By contrast, the tactics of French feminists seemed milder, their success much delayed. Scholars now point to feminist effervescence in France before 1914 as well as the impressive associational activity of women in the 1920s and 1930s as critical for priming the terrain for women’s eventual enfranchisement after the Second World War. Moreover, if we expand the focus beyond suffrage, French feminists’ activities encompassed a wide array of causes – from the right to vote, the right to education, and the right to work and equal pay to the abolition of prostitution, the emancipation of married women, and the protection of motherhood. Given the intense populationist political and social climate of Third Republican France (1870–1940), however, support for the women’s movement always positioned women as mothers and caretakers for children and families. Broadly speaking, populationism refers to the notion that a state’s power, wealth, and influence depend on the quantity and quality of its population. Due to both a real and perceived “crisis of depopulation” that put France at a decided disadvantage should war consume Europe, nineteenth- and twentieth-century French contemporaries ferociously pursued a wide array of legislation to increase the number of births (pronatalism) and shore up the welfare of families (familialism). The strength of populationism, pronatalism, and familialism in Third Republican France significantly shaped the climate in which French feminists could and would formulate their demands. Varieties of French feminism were thus firmly rooted in considerations of motherhood and population politics until such things began to recede from the public mind in the 1960s and 1970s, a historical moment that, not coincidentally, witnessed the rise of the modern women’s rights movement. This chapter starts with a brief overview of key concepts in feminist studies before describing the historical context for the development of French feminisms. It discusses major goals, actors, and tactics of feminist movements, demonstrating that, though female DOI: 10.4324/9780367808471-46

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suffrage did not come quickly due to the politics of populationism, traditional gender and sexual roles did accelerate the development of a robust social welfare state that protected women as mothers. Along the way, it is attentive to two seeming contradictions. First, although women in France did not gain suffrage until 1944, and thus were not full citizens, they nevertheless practiced the civil and social rights of citizenship (Barton and Hopkins 2019). Second, it highlights how some women, then as now, participated in and even contributed to their own oppression, upholding patriarchy because of deeply held convictions about women’s proper role in the family and society. In France, populationism, traditional gender roles, and the politics of motherhood created the context in which feminists of all stripes articulated their various demands (Offen 1984; Bard 1995). Their wins – and there were some – had to be argued for in this context. A first point of reference is to recognize French society in this period, like most societies throughout history, as a patriarchy. Patriarchy refers to three interrelated phenomena: first, the ecclesiastic power of men recognized as Christian leaders; second, the legal powers of a husband or father over his wife, children, and other dependents, sometimes also called paternalism; and third, the ideology, systems, and structures that promote male-centered structures of privilege. Throughout this chapter, the term will primarily denote a general system through which women have been and are subordinated to men. Of note, patriarchy is not a shorthand for “men” in general. Indeed, women have also participated in patriarchy. According to scholar Judith Bennet, “[t]here is no doubt . . . that the oppression of women can have endured so long and in so many places only thanks, in part, to women’s collusion in the oppression of women” (2006, 55, 10). Broadly speaking, feminism concerns itself with “women’s relative disadvantage vis-àvis men” (Bennet 2006, 10). It encompasses “the ideas that advocate the emancipation of women, the movements that have attempted to realize it, and the individuals who support this goal” (Offen 2000, 19). French feminism was a varied set of movements that sought to transform women’s status through the acquisition of political, social, and economic rights in a patriarchal society. Historical varieties of feminism typically fall into one of two categories. Individualist feminism “posits the individual, irrespective of sex or gender, as the basic unit” of society. It is more common in Anglo-American feminisms. Its proponents favor arguments based in radical equality, claiming that women are equal to men, which is why they deserve the same rights as men. By contrast, relational feminism, also called familial feminism, is “a gender-based but egalitarian vision of sociosexual organization” that centers “the primacy of a companionate, nonhierarchical, male-female couple as the basic unit of society” (Offen 2000, 21–22). Paradoxically to some, its advocates use equality-indifference arguments, claiming that women have unique feminine virtues to offer the body politic, and that as a result they deserve the same rights as men (Scott 1996). In France, relational/familial feminism almost exclusively held sway during this period because of the unique politics of the historical moment. Even before the arrival of feminism in the late nineteenth century, the so-called “woman question” had absorbed the French elite. It referred to arguments both for and against the change in women’s position relative to that of men and had spanned political discourse from Right to Left, drawing both reactionary and revolutionary opinions since the late Middle Ages. From roughly 1400 to 1700, these debates turned around everything from the perceived importance of women’s influence over men to perceptions of women’s intellect and educational potential. While feminist questions were by no means new when the French 493

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Revolution erupted in 1789, feminist demands for emancipation and full citizenship were repeatedly dismissed throughout the revolutionary period and into the nineteenth century (Offen 2017b). Indeed, some have argued that French citizenship, and French republicanism more largely, was gendered male from the start, leaving little room for citoyennes, or female citizens, to ever stake their claim in the male realm of politics and state (Sowerwine 2010; Gaspard, Servan-Schreiber, and Le Gall 1992). Though the dawn of the democratic Third Republic brought with it the promise of universal female suffrage, the vote for women would not come to pass until after the Second World War, for several reasons. Firstly, the Third Republic was declared in the midst of military defeat, revolution, and civil war. Against this turbulent background, the men who governed saw women on both the Left and Right as potential threats to the new republic. During the radical and short-lived Paris Commune (March to May 1871), Parisian workingwomen participated in large numbers, rising up as militants and pressing for equal pay, the right to divorce, and girls’ education, among other things. In the bloody last week of their standoff with the state, rumors circulated that these communardes, deemed unnatural and dangerous lower-class women, had set fire to Paris to prevent the city from falling into the hands of the government. The gossip spread, giving rise to the post-Commune myth of les pétroleuses – destructive, out-of-control, radical left-wing women who, like socialists decades later, threatened to derail the fragile new republic (Gullickson 1996; Stone 1985). Meanwhile, secular republicans and Radicals, assailed on the right by conservatives and Catholic monarchists, worried about extending the vote to wealthy, bourgeois women in the first decade of the republic. They considered many of these women to be under the spell of anti-republican priests. As Judith Stone has written, “the reality of many women’s continued commitment to the church and the prominent position of women in stridently clerical and antirepublican organizations supplied justification for Radicals’ hesitation and resistance” (Stone 1995, 54). Indeed, girls’ compulsory education, which came quickly with the passage of the Jules Ferry laws in 1882, was less about meeting women’s demands for the right to education and more about combatting what republicans saw as the destructive force of clericalism. They sought to indoctrinate French citizens with the secular tenets of the new republic (Accampo 1995, 27). For women, education was to make them better “republican mothers.” Thus, male politicians on both the Left and the Right claimed to have reason to fear the female vote. Significantly, populationism also explains the late arrival of female suffrage and the contours of French feminist movements. In the late nineteenth century and throughout much of the twentieth century, France experienced the demographic transition that is now considered typical of so-called modern and developed states. At that time, however, it caused considerable fear and dismay among contemporaries. In 1890, mortality rates in France exceeded birth rates for the first time; this would happen six more times before the start of the Great War. Indeed, during WWI, the French male population was literally decimated, losing 10% of its numbers. Because many French contemporaries viewed depopulation (perhaps rightly) as a national catastrophe, populationism gained adherents from across the political spectrum, from the Catholic right to the Communist left. In such a politically divisive age, it was one of the few consensual terrains during the Third Republic. As a result of the demographic crisis, motherhood became not just a private matter but a public responsibility, a gendered obligation of citizenship incumbent upon all women. A climate of rigid gender roles and a strong culture of republican motherhood shaped nearly all articulations of feminism in France during this period (Offen 1984; Bard 1995; Schneider 1990; Offen 2017a). 494

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Although often derided as a foreign import by contemporaries, the term féministe was first coined by French suffragist Hubertine Auclert in 1882 in the pages of La Citoyenne, a feminist journal. Auclert used the word to describe herself and her struggle to obtain rights on par with Third Republican men. The term migrated to Great Britain, and by 1900, it cropped up in Belgium, Spain, Italy, Germany, Greece, and Russia, eventually finding its way also to Argentina, Cuba, and the United States (Offen 2000, 19). Throughout the 1890s, féminisme was increasingly used interchangeably with the “le movement féminin.” The total number of men and women who might self-describe as feminists hovered between 200,000 and 300,000. Although elite educated women who comprised the majority of self-described feminists at the turn of the century had no presence in political milieus except, perhaps, through their male family members, like Auclert earlier, they could be found in a large and vibrant fin-de-siècle feminist press. Indeed, journalist and former actress Marguerite Durand famously staffed her daily, La Fronde, entirely with women (Reynolds 1996, 173; Offen 2000, 182–85; Roberts 2002). Fin-de-siècle feminists, educated and often unmarried, had been born between the late 1840s and mid-1860s. Their ideas about women’s emancipation had percolated under the authoritarian conditions of Louis-Napoleon’s Second Empire and the rocky first few decades of the newly minted Third Republic. By the 1890s, French society had grown painfully aware of their presence and treated them obsessively in the French popular press. La femme nouvelle, or the New Woman, was one widely circulated caricature. According to these renditions, she was “satirized as sport-playing, cigar-smoking, marriage hating, and physically unattractive to boot” (Offen 2000, 176, 188–89). In other words, the New Woman embodied “a modernist ideal of womanhood, pioneered by cultural radicals, and representing economic and sexual freedom.” In reality, however, the New Woman was a “strictly bohemian, avant garde phenomenon confined to the eccentric fringes of societies where her style of life served as a critique of Victorian bourgeois culture” (Roberts 1994, 19–20). After the First World War, a new generation of feminists who had received a compulsory republican education thanks to the Ferry laws rose to the fore. From then on, the women’s movement was no longer comprised of elite women but also included middle-class professionals, such as teachers, lawyers, journalists, doctors, and social workers (Bard 1995, 11, 28). Though they still could not join political parties, they did gather in mixed associations with middle-class men. As such, the interwar period witnessed a high point of Frenchwomen’s political activism. Women ran some 144 national political organizations, 33 of which were concerned with suffrage and related causes. Through these interwar political organizations, many middleclass Frenchwomen integrated into the male political culture of the Third Republic (Nord 1995). Of course, in the 1920s, their efforts were complicated by the acute sense of gender anxiety and cultural despair brought on by the catastrophic human losses of the war. The immediate post-WWI era thus gave rise to a new specter of the modern woman, la garçonne, or the “girl-boy.” Like the New Woman, she was independent, had lax morals, and refused to wear a corset. Unlike the New Woman, she was no fringe character, however; she could very well be the girl next door (Roberts 1994, 2002). As they entered the world of mixed political associations, interwar feminists learned how to politick like Third Republican men. They cultivated the skills of minute-taking, public speaking and oratory, and organizational leadership (Reynolds 1994, 173–74). Though they were excluded from mainstream political life – including electoral meetings 495

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and assembly debates – they learned to mimic the ways of male extra-parliamentary movements working outside the political system. Interwar feminists engaged in activities like distributing pamphlets to Senate leaders, leading poster campaigns throughout Paris, and renting buses plastered with feminist banners to drive around the capital and raise awareness for their cause. They also engaged in silent demonstrations and other symbolic actions. While these activities were far from incendiary, scholar Sîan Reynolds remarks, “these small acts of rebellion, regular and frequent, were carried out against a steady background of well-behaved lectures, meetings, and handing out of tracts, mostly centred in Paris, but taking places in provincial towns as well.” Consequently, it is likely that the “cumulative force” of such efforts was “considerable” (Reynolds 1996, 176–78). The interwar associational activities of French feminists also serve as a reminder that, despite the fact that women lacked the vote, at least middle- and upper-class Frenchwomen were afforded a wide berth in civil society that allowed them to make a political impact. French feminisms can be divided into three main strains: radical, moderate, and conservative. Radical feminism was a small, avant-garde, left-wing movement that was not solely focused on suffrage but rather with the achievement of total equality between the sexes, which would require a fair amount of sexual upheaval (Bard 1995, 22; Reynolds 1996, 218). Radical feminists were closely associated with neo-Malthusianism, a fringe birth control movement in France that drew adherents mainly from anarchist groups and some socialists. As scholar Elinor Accampo makes clear, for neo-Malthusians, “effective birth control and the rationalizations for it allowed women to see themselves as individuals rather than as mothers alone and also provided a basis for them to resist Third Republic proclamations about women’s nature from the left.” While it did not dispense entirely with the notion of republican motherhood, radical feminism did provide “an alternative image of motherhood” to women in France, one rooted in a conception of woman as individual (Accampo 1995, 24–25). Neo-Malthusian feminist Nelly Roussel provides a case in point. A  married Catholic mother of three, Roussel emerged as a powerful public speaker for the movement in the early 1900s. She sought the complete revision of French laws governing marriage, even going so far as to propose a “birth strike” against the patriarchal state and its populationist schemes in the 1890s. In a letter published in the feminist newspaper La Fronde in 1904, Roussel wrote: Doesn’t it seem to you, ladies, that our repopulators consider woman a bit too much like a sort of machine for producing cannon fodder, which must work without a break until it is completely worn out. . . . Such a conception of their sublime rule cannot but disgust all conscious mothers! Feminism should be proclaim above all else “liberty for motherhood,” the first, the most sacred, and nevertheless – what an inconceivable aberration – the least discussed and the least respected of liberties. (Offen 2000, 241) As you can see, she did not reject motherhood altogether; rather, she sought to use women’s reproductive powers for their own gain in a standoff against the male state (Bard 1995, 209–12; Accampo 2006). Socialist feminists also found a home in radical feminism. On the whole, socialist men and the male-led Socialist Party that coalesced in 1904 saw women’s suffrage and the feminist movement as a distraction from the greater class war. They often derided the movement 496

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as “bourgeois,” though socialist feminists’ demands were anything but. In the late 1890s, the Fédération française des sociétés féministes echoed the potent language of the French Revolution when they deposited a “Cahier des doléances féminines,” or list of female grievances, at town halls throughout France. Adherents demanded the right to work, equal pay for equal work, and social assistance for those who could not work, as well as the immediate opening of all educational institutions to both sexes and women’s inclusion in governmental affairs, among other things. Socialist feminists saw no contradiction between socialism and feminism. As Aline Valette, member of the Parti Ouvrier Français and socialist feminist, put it, “[t]he feminist movement . . . is a revolutionary movement; the emancipation of women its goal, itself a revolution” (Offen 2000, 202). While radical feminists were an active bunch, most feminists ascribed to a more moderate feminism which predominated in Third Republican France. For example, the reigning feminist organization, the Conseil national des femmes françaises, grouped together over 30 societies. It drew from the republican elite and was spurned by both radical and Catholic feminists. Theirs was a reformist, pragmatic coalition that saw suffrage as one among many other causes. Their program, which sought the gradual improvement of women’s condition, was most concentrated on securing legal reforms, such as property rights. They were as concerned about women’s rights as they were about women’s obligations to the family and the nation. They advocated for laws and policies that would increase the birth rate (Bard 1995, 22, 28). Often secular and republican, moderate feminists also took advantage of the patriarchal environment of the populationist Third Republic, using arguments about republican motherhood to expand women’s participation in the public sphere and support imperial nation-state building efforts (Offen 1984; Boittin 2010, chap. 6). For them, “motherhood became a political strategy for feminist activism” (Offen 2000, 239). More traditional women seeking to expand women’s rights found themselves drawn to conservative feminism, which, in France, took the form of Christian or Catholic feminism. As was the case in other women’s Catholic associations, their activism was rooted in a worldview that saw women’s contribution to the public sphere as uniquely feminine, and women as singularly capable of healing the divisions wrought by class tensions and a world at war. Conservative feminists battled patriarchy on two fronts: the church and the state. In 1891, Pope Leo X issued the Rerum Novarum, a papal encyclical which, among other things, staunchly defended the male breadwinner ideal, arguing that women should not do the same work as men because they were predisposed to housework and motherhood. In response, Marie Maugeret, writing for the newspaper Le Féminisme chrétien, insisted that feminism could fit squarely within the Catholic tradition. Feminism was “a cause that belongs to no one part of humanity more than another, but to the entire society and to all humanity” (Offen 2000, 197). This strain of Christian feminism was loath to tackle issues like marriage and sexuality that their more secular sisters discussed, but its adherents were very interested in women’s education, married women’s right to participation in social action, and employment issues affecting single women. There were, of course, a great many other feminist causes that drew followers from all the aforementioned camps. Most feminists combatted the social ills of their day, including depopulation, but also prostitution, venereal disease, poverty, and alcoholism. Though their approaches were, of course, quite different, social issues nevertheless served to unite many women against common foes. Indeed, Jean Pedersen has argued that belle-époque women wrote a number of “activist social novels” conveying progressive social ideals, which helped activate the empathy of educated, middle-class women and allow them to 497

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identify with women across class lines (J. E. Pedersen 2019). Of course, not all women involved in these struggles identified as feminists, but they campaigned against these social problems because they recognized the special toll they took on women. Still, feminists were more likely to address these problems by focusing on the impact on families as opposed to women, emphasizing obligations over rights, the collective over the individual (Reynolds 1996, 171; Bard 1995, 60–71). Between the wars, many feminists also campaigned on behalf of the nascent pacifist movement. Even before 1914, there had been feminist activism around the defense of peace, democracy, and freedom. In 1919, the Paris peace conference took place alongside an international women’s congress (Reynolds 1996, 183). After WWI, pacifism exploded onto the international scene for movement of women throughout Europe and the United States. Among Frenchwomen, the League of Nations provided an avenue to reconcile both the fight for peace and the fight for women’s rights. Though they were excluded from parliamentary politics in France, Geneva and the international League of Nations provided “a political platform denied at home” (Reynolds, 186). In the late 1930s context of renewed militarism and aggressive warmongering throughout Europe, French feminists found themselves once more drawn to the international movement for peace. French feminists were involved in other international causes as well. For example, some Frenchwomen campaigned to end the so-called White slave trade, or international sex trafficking. Once more, interwar associational life in pursuit of this cause offered what scholar Eliza Ferguson has deemed a “vast field of women’s civic engagement” that also served as “a training ground for eventual participation in politics” (Ferguson 2019, 158). Of course, not all women’s movements were liberatory in orientation. Many White Frenchwomen supported the cause of French imperialism because they sought to help colonized women escape from their “presumed inferior status.” White Frenchwomen who discussed, debated, and participated in empire-building often imagined themselves as saviors to degraded Black and Brown colonial female subjects (Boittin 2010, chap. 6). While a small group of Frenchwomen did fashion anti-imperial stances rooted in their feminist politics, they were few and far between and often relied still on hierarchical racial ideologies that positioned colonial subjects as benighted peoples in need of uplift (Eichner 2022). This problematic dynamic between White French feminists on the one hand and women of color from the formerly colonized world on the other would shape conversations about the universality of White French feminism in the decades to come (Mohanty 2003; Vergès, chap. 5). Indeed, the expansion of women’s roles in French society did not automatically translate into feminist struggle. As in Great Britain, quite a few antifeminist women’s movements emerged in France during these years; in other words, they were not interested in the fight against patriarchy and worked in many ways to support it. As Judith Stone has demonstrated, in the late nineteenth century, “[a]nti-Dreyfusards, nationalists, clericals, and the traditional monarchist Right mobilized bourgeois women into an antirepublican political force despite their disenfranchisement.” Moreover, “Catholic women’s commitment to the church and a religiously dominated culture, coupled with their social and political isolation from republican politics, easily convinced some among them of the need to defend actively their beliefs and lifestyles against the attacks of anticlericals.” For some women on the Right during the early Third Republic, “antirepublicanism became a woman’s cause” (Stone 1995, 53). Moreover, some interwar Catholic women would join anti-republican philanthropic leagues and social action associations focused on child and family welfare. Take, for example, the Ecole des Parents, founded in 1929 by social Catholic Marguerite Lebrun. 498

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In addition to attracting a wide array of conservative Catholic women, the Ecole also drew from among the period’s most well-known far-right-wing politicians and pronatalists. As Cheryl Koos has argued, interwar associational life could thus offer “culturally and politically acceptable vehicles for women’s social and political activism.” At the same time, Koos claims that “women also used and advanced acceptable notions of gender to expand their own personal scope of influence in these networks and state structures in concrete ways while reinforcing their own exclusion from formal participation in politics” (Koos 2019, 191. Indeed, throughout Europe, some women became quite involved with Far Right and fascist movements during the interwar years (Passmore 2003). In the end, it is worth asking whether and to what extent feminists further cemented traditional gender hierarchies and reinforced women’s structural marginalization. To pose the question thusly is to remind ourselves that familial feminism and republican motherhood could prove a fragile basis for women’s participation in democracy. It also serves as a reminder that Frenchwomen themselves could – indeed, did – contribute to their own patriarchal oppression and that of other women, both in France and beyond the metropole. What did familial feminism rooted in republican motherhood achieve in terms of expanding women’s political, civil, economic, and social rights during the Third Republic? Due to the turmoil attending the Republic’s founding, women’s own varied attitudes toward the Republic and, above all, the strength of populationism and the rigidity of gender roles under the Third Republic, the most important political right – the right to suffrage – remained out of reach until after the Second World War. Moreover, though women achieved some civil rights, they came only gradually. For instance, divorce became legal in 1884, single and separated women achieved full legal status in 1893, women could be witnesses in law courts from 1897, and women gained control over their own wages in 1907. Still, rights were rarely accorded to women as individuals, but rather as mothers. For instance, in the interest of lowering infant mortality, a coalition of early Third Republic social Catholics and secular socialists increasingly restricted women’s right to work: articles of the child labor law of 1874 prohibited girls younger than 21 from working at night and prohibited girls and women from working in mines, pits, and quarries; the law of 1892 extended restrictions on night work to all women and limited their workday to 11 hours, then 10 hours according to the law of 1900; and the law of April 23, 1919, brought the workday to 8  hours for both men and women, but women alone were prohibited from engaging in dangerous trades. While it is easy to tell a tale of prohibition and restriction in the domain of political and economic rights, from another angle, women in France succeeded in securing a great many social rights rooted in supporting women as mothers and caretakers. Indeed, populationist politics prompted the enactment of supportive measures for mothers in the workplace that we might now consider progressive. For instance, the maternity laws of 1909 guaranteed mothers their jobs back after a voluntary leave. The maternity laws of 1913 gave pregnant women the right to optional leave four weeks prior to the birth of their baby and provided a four-week maternity leave after the birth. During WWI, when Frenchwomen went to work in munitions factories, the government issued the law of August 5, 1917, mandating that all establishments employing over 100 women had to provide nursing rooms for their female employees. It also ensured that nursing mothers received extra breaks morning and afternoon to feed their infants. Late nineteenth- and twentieth-century population politics also led to the state’s steady erosion of paternalism within the family, previously enshrined in the Napoleonic Code. The 499

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law of November 16, 1912, for example, allowed any unmarried mother the right to establish paternity legally and seek economic support from the father of their child. By granting unwed mothers the right to formulate paternity suits, the law chipped away at male sexual irresponsibility and also protected seduced women from being duped by ill-intentioned men. The Law of February 7, 1924, modified by the Law of April 3, 1928, allowed wives to file abandonment claims against deserting husbands as well as to pursue them for failing to provide financially for their children via alimentary pensions. Finally, the family allowance policy of 1932 forced more employers to provide bonus pay for (male) workers with children. What’s more, the additional funds were released directly to wives, who, despite not being formal citizens, were considered more trustworthy than their unruly menfolk. Significantly, while several of these measures were reserved for the lawfully wed, many also sought to provide for widows and unwed mothers, including the significant numbers of European immigrant women who migrated to France during this period. This more expansive definition of who counted as a family was, in many ways, unique to France and demonstrates just how inclusive the French welfare state could be during this period (Pedersen 1993; Fuchs 1995; Nord 1994; Fuchs 2008; Barton 2020). While social legislation like the aforementioned built up a strong social safety net for mothers, children, and families that is enviable even among many of today’s industrialized nation-states, politicians rarely considered women as individuals but as mothers, or potential mothers, who just needed a push in the right direction. Those who refused the gendered obligations of republican motherhood to the French state were punished. The 1920 law outlawing abortion reveals this state logic and is a reminder of the limits of what familial feminism could accomplish. The laws of 1920 meted out harsh punishment to those women who sought abortions as well as the doctors who helped them. It also forbade “propaganda” advertising for birth control. The 1920 law was compounded by the law of 1923, which redirected cases of abortion and infanticide to magistrate courts in order to increase convictions (Le Naour and Valenti 2003). During the interwar years, then, France was both the most punitive reproductive regime and the most supportive welfare state, especially for mothers, children, and families, in all of Europe. By WWII and the Vichy years, much of the interwar feminist leadership faded from political view. If they were Jewish, they had gone into hiding or were deported. This is not to say that women were inactive during the war years. Many were involved in wartime resistance. But even these résistantes tended to be younger women who had been involved in their teenage years and in their 20s with left-wing interwar political clubs and associations. Though few would have characterized their wartime resistance work as “feminist,” many former résistantes would later serve in an official leadership capacity after suffrage was won in 1944. Several were elected to parliamentary seats in National Assemblies. Overall, however, there was little continuity between interwar feminists who led the women’s movement and this first generation of female political leaders who emerged after the war (Reynolds 1996, 216–17). From the perspective of post-war state leaders, feminism was simply not a priority, compared to reconstruction and national healing (Greenwald 2018, 23). Ultimately, the decision to “give” women the right to vote was made in 1944 by a handful of people who would lead the provisional government. There is no record of open opposition to the passage of female suffrage, suggesting it was broadly welcomed, perhaps even considered obvious and inevitable. As Sîan Reynolds has put it, “the argument had largely been won during the long-term war of attrition before 1939” (1996, 219). Although a major milestone in 500

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women’s history, most feminist scholars agree that suffrage “did not greatly change the political face of France” and “did not in itself lead to immediate change in women’s lives.” Indeed, some Frenchwomen in Toulouse remarked that “they did not find voting a very liberating experience” (Reynolds 1996, 220). As such, the more durable, long-term impact of feminist campaigns prior to 1944 appear to have been the legislative coups described earlier, achieved during the Third Republic that had very little to do with suffrage. It would take decades for a new generation of feminists to lead the next massive campaign for women’s rights in France. Come the 1960s and 1970s, the abatement of populationist sentiment that had been a marked feature of Third Republican, Vichy, Liberation, and Fourth Republican political cultures helped them in their quest (Robcis 2013, chap. 4; Nord 2010). The slow dissipation of populationism thus removed one major obstacle to the ongoing feminist struggle against patriarchy in modern France.

Bibliography Accampo, Elinor A. 1995. “Gender, Social Policy, and the Formation of the Third Republic: An Introduction.” In Gender and the Politics of Social Reform in France, 1870–1914, 1–27. Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 2006. Blessed Motherhood, Bitter Fruit: Nelly Roussel and the Politics of Female Pain in Third Republic France. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Bard, Christine. 1995. Les filles de Marianne: histoire des féminismes 1914–1940. Paris: Fayard. Barton, Nimisha. 2020. Reproductive Citizens: Gender, Immigration, and the State in Modern France, 1880–1945. Cornell University Press. Barton, Nimisha, and Richard S. Hopkins. 2019. Practiced Citizenship: Women, Gender, and the State in Modern France. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Bennett, Judith M. 2006. History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Boittin, Jennifer Anne. 2010. Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Eichner, Carolyn. 2022. Feminism’s Empire. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Ferguson, Eliza. 2019. “French Girls Are the Most Desired: Organizing Against the White Slave Trade in the Belle Epoque.” In Practiced Citizenship: Women, Gender, and the State in Modern France, 157–88. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Fuchs, Rachel Ginnis. 1995. “France in a Comparative Perspective.” In Gender and the Politics of Social Reform in France, 1870–1914, 157–87. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 2008. Contested Paternity: Constructing Families in Modern France. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Gaspard, Françoise, Claude Servan-Schreiber, and Anne Le Gall. 1992. Au pouvoir, citoyennes!: liberté, égalité, parité. Paris: Seuil. Greenwald, Lisa. 2018. Daughters of 1968: Redefining French Feminism and the Women’s Liberation Movement. Book Collections on Project MUSE. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Gullickson, Gay L. 1996. Unruly Women of Paris: Images of the Commune. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Koos, Cheryl. 2019. “Vérine, the Ecole Des Parents, and the Politics of Gender, Reaction, and the Family.” In Practiced Citizenship: Women, Gender, and the State in Modern France, 157–88. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Le Naour, Jean-Yves, and Catherine Valenti. 2003. Histoire de l’avortement : XIXe-XXe siècle. Paris: Seuil. Mohanty, Chandra T. 2003. Feminisms without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Nord, Philip G. 1994. “The Welfare State in France, 1870–1914.” French Historical Studies 18 (3): 821–38.

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Nimisha Barton ———. 1995. The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2010. France’s New Deal: From the Thirties to the Postwar Era. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Offen, Karen. 1984. “Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism in Fin-de-Siècle France.” American Historical Review 89 (3): 648–76. ———. 2000. European Feminisms, 1700–1950: A Political History. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2017a. Debating the Woman Question in the French Third Republic, 1870–1920. New Studies in European History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2017b. The Woman Question in France, 1400–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316946367. Passmore, Kevin, ed. 2003. Women, Gender, and Fascism in Europe, 1919–45. New Brunswick, NJ: Manchester University Press. Pedersen, Jean Elizabeth. 2019. “Illustrations as Good as Any Slides: Activist Social Novels and the French Search for Social Reform, 1880–1914.” In Practiced Citizenship: Women, Gender, and the State in Modern France, 127–56. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Pedersen, Susan. 1993. Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reynolds, Sîan. 1996. France Between the Wars. London: Routledge. Robcis, Camille. 2013. The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis and the Family in France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Roberts, Mary Louise. 1994. Civilization Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2002. Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-De-Siècle France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schneider, William H. 1990. Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in ­Twentieth-Century France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scott, Joan Wallach. 1996. Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Sowerwine, Charles. 2010. “Revising the Sexual Contract: Women’s Citizenship and Republicanism in France, 1789–1944.” In Confronting Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle France: Bodies, Minds, and Gender. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Stone, Judith. 1985. The Search for Social Peace: Reform Legislation in France, 1890–1914. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 1995. “The Republican Brotherhood: Gender and Ideology.” In Gender and the Politics of Social Reform in France, 1870–1914, 28–58. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Vergès, Françoise. 2020. The Wombs of Women: Race, Capital, Feminism. Translated by Kaiama L. Glover. Theory in Forms. Durham: Duke University Press.

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46 QUEERING FRANCE SINCE THE BELLE ÉPOQUE Between Emancipation and Repression Tamara Chaplin

France, and especially its capital, Paris, has long been understood as a hotbed for libertines. In the eighteenth century, individuals like the Marquis de Sade (whose pornographic novels gave rise to the term “sadism”), the Chevalier/Chevalière d’Éon (a diplomat at the court of Louis XV who presented alternately as male and female), and Queen Marie Antoinette (whose purported lesbian assignations were used to discredit her) helped forge this stereotype. The National Constituent Assembly’s decision to decriminalize sodomy in 1791 during the French Revolution furthered the perception that France was tolerant toward non-normative sexual behaviors. The fact that France celebrates a pantheon of French, British, and American writers who harbored homosexual desires – from Apollinaire, André Gide, Colette, Marcel Proust, and Michel Foucault to Oscar Wilde, Natalie Clifford Barney, and Gertrude Stein – also bolsters this view. And yet from the Ancien Régime to the present, people who have engaged in same-sex activities in France have been the targets of persecution and prejudice. Indeed, the positive impact of the eighteenth-century legalization of sodomy on homosexuality was attenuated in fact: into the twentieth century, the French police prosecuted same-sex desire under the rubrics of sexual assault, incitement to debauchery, and public indecency, carefully documenting “suspect” behavior in meticulously collated files. The threat of arrest and denunciation has ensured that if homosexual relations between consenting adults in private have technically not been illegal in France since 1791, to this day same-sex desire has nonetheless been oppressed by other means. But the history of queer sexualities in France also demonstrates that such persecution did not ultimately block legal advances for LGBTQ people – although these have come at a cost. Nor has it prevented the emergence of vibrant homosexual subcultures and spaces.

The Belle Époque: Inventing the Homosexual In the peaceful, prosperous decades between 1870 and the first World War now known as the Belle Époque, public and private venues emerged throughout France where those seeking others of the same sex could meet, socialize, and form romantic and erotic bonds. The French public came to understand the people who frequented these spaces not merely as practicing non-normative sexual or gender behaviors but as embodying sexual types. The 503

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Hungarian Karoly Maria Kertbeny is thought to have invented the term “homosexual” in 1869 to refer to this new form of sexual subjectivity. Thus, whereas “the sodomite,” in Michel Foucault’s oft-quoted formulation, “had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species” (Foucault 1980, 42–44). The German psychiatrist Carl Westphal developed the category of “contrary sexual instinct” to explain this aberration. In his conceptualization (also promoted by the German jurist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs), homosexual desire was largely a product of gender inversion: a lesbian was thought to be a man trapped in a woman’s body, whereas a pederast was a woman trapped in a man’s.1 Homosexuality was thus more than just same-sex desire. The female invert, for example, was presumed to exhibit masculine characteristics in dress, stance, and behavioral preferences. Such explanations were not without critics. The French poet Marc André Raffalovich later coined the term “unisexual” to express his belief that homosexuals were not gender dysphoric and were attracted to those whose bodies (and psyches) were like, and not unlike their own. Much of the sapphic literature produced in France in the early twentieth century, which idealized the feminine, also ran in this vein. But was homosexuality a product of heredity and biology, or a moral failing? In his 1885 doctoral dissertation (published the year prior to Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s monumental Psychopathia Sexualis), Julien Chevalier concluded that the answer depended on the case at hand. “The love of an individual for another individual of the same sex,” he wrote, can be either “native” (hereditary), “secondary” (the product of an anatomical deformity, like “hermaphroditism”), “acquired” (resulting from personal weakness and social temptation), or some combination of the three (Chevalier 1885). In the first two instances, homosexuality was envisioned as a medical problem; in the last, it was seen as a vice. But whether innate or immoral, it was always considered deviant. In the aftermath of the disastrous Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, French attitudes toward homosexuality and lesbianism were inseparable from Third Republic fears about depopulation and national decline. Rocked by political and economic crises, Catholics and Republicans alike emphasized the importance of marriage, family, masculinity, education, and public health (see Nimisha Barton’s contribution to this volume). As a nonreproductive woman, “the lesbian” became a particular source of concern: Adolphe Belot’s Mademoiselle Giraud, Ma Femme (1870), about a husband’s devastating marriage to his lesbian wife, saw 45 editions in 15 years (Schultz 2014, 65). Novelists Emile Zola and Guy de Maupassant also wrote about the lesbian in lurid terms. Following the liberalization of the press in 1881, a wealth of previously censored publications flooded the public sphere. Pseudo-scientific manuals circulated widely, like La perversion sexuelle (1903), one of over 120 published by a prolific medical charlatan known variously as Dr. Caufeynon, Dr. Fauconney, Dr. Eynon, Dr. X, and Dr. Jaf. Popular interest in medical and literary discourses on homosexuality and the development of sartorial codes linked to gender performance facilitated recognition among like-minded individuals and fostered the growth of homosexual communities in the French public sphere. In the late nineteenth century, restaurants catering to lesbian desires like Le Rat Mort (the Dead Rat – a slang term for lesbian) and La Souris (dubbed “a stud farm for dykes”) proliferated, particularly in Paris in the neighborhoods around Pigalle and Montmartre (Virmaître 1900, cited in Choquette 2015, 3). By 1900, the spectacle of two women “groping one another” in public establishments had become so common, according to journalist and cabaret manager Charles Virmaître, that “no one makes a fuss” (Virmaître 1900, 219–20). By 1904, the term homosexuelle as a designation for women who desired women 504

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had entered the illustrated Larousse dictionary. Meanwhile, men seeking men congregated in 12 bathhouses, 44 bars and cafés, 30 hotels, 9 brothels, 2 massage parlors, and 10 dance halls spread throughout Paris, especially on the eastern end of the Champs Elysées (Revenin 2005, 30–32, 60–64). Port cities like Marseille, Brest, and Toulon became known as homosexual haunts due to the constant turnover of young male sailors who cruised the waterfronts, seeking an evening’s distraction while ashore. When the American heiress Natalie Clifford Barney, a woman noted for her tempestuous love affairs with the French courtesan Liane de Pougy and the British poet Renée Vivien, established her salon on the Left Bank’s Rue Jacob in 1909 – thus founding a veritable temple to Sappho (the Greek poet of lesbian love) – Paris became a magnet for women with same-sex desires. The year 1909 also saw the publication of Akademos, an elite French journal that, although short-lived, was the first to treat homosexuality neither as pathology nor vice, but as a positive personal choice. Public opinion, however, remained largely homophobic. That same year, the hotel manager and known homosexual Pierre Renard was accused without proof of assassinating his employer. When Renard’s sexual orientation was used as justification for judging him guilty, the writer André Gide purportedly stated, “The Renard trial makes me sick” (Gide in Lucien 2014, 67). Gide’s decision to write Corydon, a literary apologia for homosexual desire between men and boys (first published in full in 1924), is often linked to his reaction to this event. On the one hand, throughout France the growth of what Guy Debord would later term “the society of the spectacle,” epitomized by the urban entertainment districts with their fancy opera houses, avant-garde cabarets, noisy brasseries, and bustling dancehalls, contributed to the commodification of desire. On the other, as Andrew Ross argues, public space was increasingly organized around a logic of acceptable and unacceptable sexualities, with (heterosexual) prostitution regulated by the state and isolated to maisons de tolerance (legal brothels), where the girls were forbidden to sleep in the same beds for fear that they would engage in “deviant” acts with one another (Ross 2019). Male homosexuals were likewise closely surveilled. In Paris, vice squads policed the banks of the Seine, the Palais Royal, and the Tuileries gardens, spying on the urinals (known as “vespasiennes” or “pissotières”) where men went to engage in sex with one another. Those who defied gender norms were also suspect. Since 1805, women had required a permission de travestissement, or “pants permit,” to wear trousers in public. (Though rarely enforced after 1930, that ordinance was not abrogated until 2013.) The problem was not so much the practice of same-sex or non-normative gender behaviors that bothered authorities; they were concerned rather with whether, where, and how these became visible in the public sphere.

The Great War: Sodom and Gomorrah on the Front Lines If the Great War temporarily shuttered the entertainment districts where queer life thrived, for some it offered new opportunities. Soldiers from the metropole met soldiers from the colonies, and same-sex, cross-class, and interracial intimacies bloomed in the grievously violent, emotionally turbulent environments on the front lines. While officially discouraged, men and women who were either single or far from their spouses and partners found emotional and sexual solace in homosocial spaces on both the home front and the battlefront. Not all these liaisons ended well. Christian Gury claims that Robert d’Humières, a friend of Marcel Proust’s deployed with the Zouaves in the British Army (who inspired the character of Saint Loup in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past), preferred to die in combat 505

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rather than be court-martialed following the revelation of his sexual relationship with a fellow soldier (Gury 2020). The war’s unique circumstances also had a powerful impact on women’s lives. The young Suzy Solidor (soon to be a celebrated cabaret singer) obtained a driver’s license at 15, donned military dress, and began working for the ambulance corps, transporting wounded soldiers across northwestern France. While she claimed that nothing untoward occurred at that time, Solidor later recalled the thrill of combing another female driver’s heavy curls (Solidor 1936, 12). Solidor’s lesbian desires drove her to Paris after the war, opening a path to her first full-fledged same-sex relationship and to her subsequent singing career.

The Interwar Years: Sapphic Cabarets and Magic Cities Like other major cities – Berlin, London, and New York, but also Shanghai and Amsterdam – interwar Paris became a center of sexual emancipation and gender play. The breathtaking pace of social and economic change blurred traditional boundaries, leading to impassioned public debates about the proper roles for men and women in French society. In this new post-war world, which historian Mary-Louise Roberts has memorably christened a “civilization without sexes,” male bodies had been damaged and male psyches emasculated by the war’s horrors (Roberts 1994). Although denied the right to vote, women – who had single-handedly supported themselves and their families by taking on male jobs in factories and businesses during four long years of conflict – were emboldened. In response, on July 31, 1920, the French legislature passed some of Western Europe’s harshest laws against abortion and contraception, in an attempt to rein in female behavior and ensure that it was redirected toward producing new citizens for the beleaguered nation. All too often, such efforts were in vain. In the title of his best-selling 1922 novel La Garçonne (The Tomboy), Victor Margueritte popularized a term for the youthful, liberated modern woman who smoked, shortened her skirts, abandoned her corsets, cropped her hair, and slept indiscriminately with men and women alike. With over a million copies sold, translated into 12 languages, and made into films in 1923, 1936 (with Suzy Solidor playing the lesbian), and 1957 (with Solidor’s protegé Colette Mars in the same role), this wild morality tale of a young woman cheated on by her fiancé who leaves him for an affair with a lesbian only to return to him in the end, incarnated the new spirit of gender fluidity and sexual abandon. Thus, if by the end of the Belle Époque homosexual identity was increasingly seen as “fixed” in France, heterosexual identity was not yet considered its stable opposite, especially in urban environments. By the early 1930s, as the rise of Nazism in Germany clamped down on the (mostly male) homosexual freedoms visible during the Weimar Republic, Paris became a haven for homosexual life. Spaces where men gathered did not necessarily multiply, but they shifted to districts where nightlife was previously dedicated either to lesbians or heterosexuals, like Montmartre, Pigalle, and Montparnasse (Jackson 2009, 31). Meanwhile, women’s venues mushroomed in these same neighborhoods, in part because these businesses also appealed to the (purportedly heterosexual) “modern woman,” now sowing her wild oats. To the distress of many and the excitement of others, these subcultural gathering places were sites of sexual, class, and racial transgression. The colonial fascination with race and the popularity of performers like the African American Josephine Baker (who seduced the French wearing nothing more than a skirt fashioned from bananas) ensured, according to one 1928 exposé, that nary a Parisian brothel nor a sapphic cabaret “was complete without its Negress” (Choisy 1928, 38). 506

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Despite a Parisian prefectural ordinance dating from 1910 forbidding the practice, men danced together in bars near the Bastille on the rue de Lappe, in Montmartre, and near the Porte des Lilas. The artist Hélène Azenour met her first girlfriend, Flavie, at the Bal de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève, a popular Left Bank dance hall frequented by Ernest Hemingway, where female orchestras attired in black tuxedos called “smokings” performed for men and women of diverse social classes, orientations, and races. From 1922 to 1940 (excepting 1934, when it was cancelled in response to right-wing anti-parliamentarian riots), festive drag balls were held twice yearly at the Salle Wagram and at an enormous skating-rink-cumdance-hall east of the Eiffel Tower called the Magic City. The police mostly turned a blind eye to the thousands of cross-dressed men and some women who attended the balls in outrageous attire. It was also during the interwar years that over 20 sapphic cabarets – entertainment venues for women interested in other women – opened in Paris and its environs. These included the celebrated venues Le Monocle (1932, first run by the Corsican former circus acrobat Lulu de Montmartre and iconized by the Hungarian photographer Brassaï), Le Fétiche (launched in 1926 under the direction of the widow Madame Moune), and Suzy Solidor’s La Vie Parisienne (1933). Staffed by women known as “entraîneuses,” many of whom were required to cross-dress and who were charged with selling alcohol to and dancing with the female clientele, these spaces played a special role in France in modeling the sexual schema that we now call butch-femme (Chaplin 2021). Lulu, Moune, and Solidor became pillars of lesbian nightlife; all operated clubs that remained open through the 1960s, although Solidor’s was relocated in that decade to the Côte d’Azur. In interwar Paris, a vibrant lesbian subculture also flourished in the Anglophone expatriate community around Natalie Barney, Djuna Barnes, Thelma Wood, and Sylvia Beach (who, with her French partner, Adrienne Monnier, opened the famed Shakespeare and Company bookstore and promoted aspiring writers like Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce). It was largely due to the impact of these influential women and the Frenchwomen they ran with that the early twentieth century is seen as a sapphic golden age in France. Notwithstanding the separation of church and state in 1905, Catholicism, patriarchy, and pronatalism nevertheless shaped French attitudes toward homosexuality and lesbianism, and many people either suppressed same-sex desires or pursued them with difficulty. The contrast between the experiences of those who had both the confidence and financial means to frequent queer venues and those who did not could be extreme. Importantly, while queer subcultures – especially women’s – expanded radically during the 1920s and 1930s, as queer visibility increased, the divisions between sexual practices and sexual identities hardened under the relentless pressure of social sanction.

World War II to 1968: Homosexuality in the Shadows? It is frequently presumed that World War II brought this era of relative tolerance toward same-sex desire in France to an end, forcing homosexuals – especially male – even deeper into the shadows under threat of not just persecution but deportation and extermination as well. And yet, although, as Arnaud Boulligny has noted, during the Second World War 87 cases premised on homosexuality were prosecuted and 27 men deported from areas under complete German control (such as the annexed region of Alsace-Moselle), most French homosexuals managed to traverse the conflict much as did heterosexuals, sometimes suffering and sometimes profiting from the unique, if difficult, circumstances that prevailed 507

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(Boulligny 2018, 116). In 1942, the collaborationist Vichy government passed an ordinance outlawing all homosexual acts by or with people under the age of 21 (later lowered to 18). Heterosexuality, in contrast, was legal at 13 (later raised to 15). This focus on protecting youth from the dangers of “aberrant” sexualities reflected Vichy’s conservative pro-family agenda, encapsulated in its tripartite motto “Work, Family, Fatherland.” As was the case in the decades after the Franco-Prussian War, “inverts” – whether weak, emasculated, effeminate males or sterile, hypermasculine females – were blamed for French defeat. Many known homosexuals were nevertheless either tolerated or flew below the radar during the Vichy years. Such was the case for the fascist writer and journalist Robert Brasillach, executed during the post-war purges not for his presumed sexual orientation – although it was used to cast aspersions on his character – but for treason. Suzy Solidor’s cabaret was popular among German soldiers from the Wehrmacht; she received exceptional permission from the German high command to keep her cabaret open after curfew. After the war (although she claimed innocence), Solidor was charged with collaboration and convicted of the criminal offense of national indignity. Others, like the artist Claude Cahun (born Lucy Schwob) and her partner Marcel Moore (born Suzanne Malherbe), who lived on the tiny island of Jersey throughout the war, resisted the occupying German forces by planting subversive messages on cars, in mailboxes, and even in German soldiers’ pockets. Both women were caught, sentenced to death, and imprisoned by the Nazis for their actions. To their great good fortune, the liberation of Jersey in 1945 saved their lives. Determined at war’s end that France make “twelve million beautiful babies” to recover and repopulate, de Gaulle’s provisional government extended the Vichy regime’s discriminatory anti-homosexual legislation (Jackson 2009, 43). Women finally gained the right to vote in 1944, but misogyny surged as the country sought moral redemption for Vichy’s sins. In a direct attempt to enforce gender norms and promote heterosexuality, police surveillance increased in arenas where same-sex desire flourished; special attention was paid to men in the military and to women working in the sapphic cabarets. Homophobia also troubled Jean Thibault’s Futur (1952–1955), a magazine whose “primary preoccupation” was male homosexuality and which, despite its own misogynistic leanings, sought to denounce French sexual puritanism. The 1949 youth protection law kept the publication out of the hands of minors and off newsstands. Ongoing legal challenges plagued the magazine (it was charged with offending public morals) and its owner (who was briefly imprisoned under the 1945 law forbidding homosexual acts with minors). Thibault shut Futur down after just three years, revealing that sexual emancipation was not yet the order of the day. But contrary to both popular and scholarly claims that queer life was extinguished during the immediate post-war period and only exploded into the public sphere following the student revolutions of 1968, these years were not characterized uniquely by repression. The former seminarian André Baudry began preaching the respectability of same-sex desire in the late 1940s (Jackson 2009). This charismatic but conservative leader founded the homophile review Arcadie in 1954 (it lasted until 1982) and created the first French homosexual association, Clespala, in 1956. Attracting mostly men, the association (which, like its founder, eschewed political militancy and preached a politics of discretion) was headquartered in Paris, where it hosted clandestine gay dances weekly. The circulation of Arcadie helped Baudry develop a following, and satellite groups were soon constituted in the provinces. In Paris, businesses catering to gay men and a mixed clientele opened in the district around St. Germain des-Près on the Left Bank, with bars like Le Fiacre set cheek by jowl against those frequented by the fashionable bohemian and existentialist crowd. East 508

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of Pigalle, one could meet Arab men at movie houses like Le Luxour. Despite the dangers, urinals continued to hold pride of place as cruising spots. Frede, a tall woman with catshaped eyes elegantly dressed in masculine suit jackets (who was Marlene Dietrich’s shortterm lover and long-standing friend), ran the fancy Le Carroll’s Club from 1948 to 1960 on the Rue Ponthieu in the swank neighborhood by the Champs Elysées, with her “wife,” an American bombshell named Miki, at her side. In addition to its female regulars, Le Carroll’s catered to celebrities from Rita Hayworth and Marlon Brando to Brigitte Bardot, Simone Signoret, and Yves Montand. It also had an outpost in Cap Ferrat in the south of France and forged Frede’s reputation as “the most famous lesbian in the world” (Chaplin 2024). When Le Carroll’s closed, Frede took over Solidor’s first Parisian cabaret on the Rue Sainte Anne (which had since changed hands), running it as a discothèque until 1970. Meanwhile, the musical variety show, which became a staple of state television in the early 1950s, brought nonnormative gender performances and same-sex desire to the airwaves – sometimes inadvertently. French TV broadcast the comedic performances of drag artists and impersonators like Charpini, Jacques Dufilho, and Claude Vega (all of whom parodied femininity) and the song stylings of queer female cabaret artists like Suzy Solidor, Colette Mars, Dany Dauberson, Mick Micheyl, Gribouille (a young woman with a masculine aspect whose glorious voice was silenced when she committed suicide at the age of 26 in 1968), and Nicole Louvier, who, according to Baudry’s journal Arcadie, “sings of homophile love, that of Lesbos.”2 Along with films like Jacqueline Audry’s Olivia (1951) and La Garçonne (1957, after the 1922 novel), these broadcasts and the songs they popularized called the dominance of the heterosexual paradigm into question by caricaturing and challenging normative notions of masculinity, femininity, and sexual desire (Chaplin 2024; Gonnard and Lebovici 2017). These programs thus brought new sexual and gender possibilities not only into living rooms throughout the Hexagon but also to the nations next door and the colonies beyond. And yet when not comedic, many of these performances were intentionally discreet, visible mainly to those already capable of reading the codes they contained. Given the rampant homophobia of the time (evident in both civil society, law, and medicine), such discretion is understandable. By way of example, on July 18, 1960, the French National Assembly passed the Mirguet Amendment declaring homosexuality to be a “fléau social” or “social scourge” – along with alcoholism, tuberculosis, and prostitution – and doubling penalties for public indecency when it concerned same-sex behavior. In 1968, France adopted the World Health Organization’s classification of homosexuality as a mental illness.3 But then things changed.

Queers in Revolt: The Politicization of Lesbian and Gay Identities The French version of the 1969 Stonewall riots that launched gay liberation in the United States occurred in 1971 when women from the newly formed Mouvement de libération de la femme (MLF, or Women’s Liberation Movement) joined with female homosexuals from Arcadie and stormed the stage of Menie Grégoire’s live radio broadcast on “Homosexuality, that Painful Problem.” The riot that followed is now understood as one of the founding acts of the Front homosexuel d’action révolutionnaire (FHAR, or Homosexual Revolutionary Action Front, 1971–1974). Both the MLF and the FHAR were the children of May ’68, the civil uprising against capitalism, imperialism, the war in Vietnam, consumerism, sexual repression, educational entrenchment, and institutionalized bureaucracy that brought over 10 million people into the streets and nearly took down the French government (see Ben Mercer’s contribution to this volume). If women’s oppression during the May revolution 509

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motivated feminism, heterosexism motivated gay and lesbian rights. Indeed, according to Michael Sibalis, May ’68 served as “nothing less than the ‘Pink Bang’ ” (Sibalis 2013, 1). Influenced by Maoists, Marxists, and student revolutionaries on the radical Left, the FHAR sought to remake the world. The FHAR would not have materialized if not for the actions of the MLF’s female homosexual militants, including Monique Wittig, Christine Delphy, and Antoinette Fouque. Rejecting the conciliatory conservatism of Arcadie, the FHAR demanded the subversion of the hetero-patriarchal state and denounced homophobia and male chauvinism on the Left. The FHAR disrupted meetings of the French Communist Party and protested at the International Congress of Sexology in Sanremo, Italy. They produced militant newspapers, like Antinorm and the Fléau Social (the title of which mocked the Mirguet Amendment). After the FHAR was taken over by men (key among them Guy Hocquenghem, a beautiful young man with a halo of dark curls who became the gay rights movement’s unofficial leader), their raucous political meetings at the École des Beaux-Arts quickly devolved into sites for cruising, and the lesbians departed in disgust. The latter then joined lesbians from the MLF in the newly formed Gouines Rouges (Red Dykes, 1971–1973), the first specifically lesbian group in France. The police closed down the FHAR’s meetings in February  1974, and shortly thereafter, it disbanded. Its early political spirit was soon resuscitated, however, and queer militancy rapidly expanded on a national level via the Groupes de libération homosexuelle (GLH, or Homosexual Liberation Groups, 1974–1979), via a diverse profusion of lesbian groups, and later via the Comité d’urgence anti-répression homosexuelle (CUARH, or Emergency Committee Against Homosexual Repression, 1979–1987). The story of gay and lesbian liberation in France is one that oscillates between mixed gender cooperation and gender separatism. To women’s dismay, men frequently dominated the scene, but not exclusively so. In fact, recent scholarship shows that by the 1980s, lesbian associations, cafés, bookstores, gatherings, and vacation spots were proliferating throughout France, giving the lie to Scott Gunther’s claim that “French gay movements were almost exclusively male” at this time (Chaplin 2024; Gunther 2009, 4). If men outnumbered women in mixed activist associations like the CUARH, organizations like the Groupe de lesbiennes (founded in Lyon in 1976) and, later, Toulouse’s Bagdam Cafée [sic] (1988–1999) were resolutely women-only. And while commercial sectors like the so-called “Gay Marais” in Paris were (and continue to be) home to far more venues catering to male clientele, on the Left Bank, Elula Perrin’s celebrated Katmandou discothèque (1969–1989) welcomed a female crowd. Although militant lesbians sometimes disdained “bar lesbians” (many of whom embraced what some considered outmoded butch/femme roles), women like Elula (also a popular author with a vibrant media presence) nevertheless helped increase public awareness of female same-sex desire. Most French gay and lesbian rights initiatives were premised on a politics of visibility: this imperative rendered the development of modern queer subjectivities inextricable from the development of militant tactics aimed to attract maximal media coverage (like Pride parades – the first of which was held in 1977), as well as the mastery, creation, and deployment of multiple media technologies. By the 1980s, queer audiences and activists had established a presence on the Minitel (an early incarnation of the Internet), on the radio (on the pirate radio station Fréquence Gaie, launched in 1981), in film festivals (like the lesbian-feminist Quand les lesbiennes se font du cinéma, established in 1989 by Cineffable and still active), and in numerous self-produced journals and magazines. The 510

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latter of these were epitomized by the long-running success of Gai Pied (1979–1992) and Lesbia Magazine (1982–2012), which targeted male and female readers, respectively. Despite shorter publication histories, even the more radical of these journals reached international audiences. Quand les femmes s’aiment, for example (co-produced by lesbians in Paris and Lyon between 1978 and 1980), had readers from the USA, South Africa, Canada, Germany, Italy, Tunisia, Great Britain, and Scandinavia in addition to France – a fact that indicates the widespread hunger for queer information and community (Chaplin 2024). Following the election of François Mitterrand’s socialist government in 1981, the discriminatory age of consent law first established under Vichy was abolished. Social acceptance, however, did not necessarily keep pace with legal change. Marginalized by many feminists who, in gaining institutional recognition and rights, were abandoning activism, conflicts between the French women’s movement, radical lesbians (like Monique Wittig), and lesbian feminists (like Christine Delphy) fractured militant solidarity in 1980, heightening tensions between those women who sought integration into French society and those women who rejected the patriarchal power structures it incarnated. The resultant arguments fueled an explosion of lesbian activism across France. The Archives recherches cultures lesbiennes (ARCL), established by Claudie Lesselier in 1983 and now housed at the Maison de femmes de Paris (Paris Women’s Center), continues to document this rich history. By the early eighties, AIDs began to devastate gay male communities around the world. Frédéric Martel has controversially argued that in their reluctance to attract attention, French men were slow to promote safe sex, thus speeding the advance of the virus (Martel 2000). Elizabeth Lebovici claims, in contrast, that the queer community, male and female, stepped up to protect and care for their own, forging new bonds between activism and artistic practice in the process (Lebovici 2017). French TV coverage of the AIDs crisis, however, pathologized male homosexuality as deviant and diseased. Its portrayals were countered by positive media depictions of female homosexuality, which (in response to rising divorce and custody cases) was newly construed in devoted, maternal terms.4 Take for example the episode dedicated to lesbian motherhood on France Culture’s 1988 radio broadcast, “Les enfants du désir” (The Children of Desire).5 While the show acknowledges the marginal nature of this form of filiation, the story is both heteronormalized and romanticized: even lesbian couples desire babies, these women wanted one, they found a willing father, he is present in their baby’s life, and the child is welladjusted and happy. The mediatic focus on lesbian maternal domesticity may ultimately have facilitated support for the passage of the Civil Solidarity Pact (known as the PACS) legalizing civil unions between couples regardless of gender in 1999. Despite ferocious resistance from Catholic conservatives and proponents of the radical Right, this support ultimately culminated in the legalization of gay and lesbian marriage in 2013.

From Liberation to Normalization? Queering the Margins While LGBTQ populations now exercise greater freedoms in France than ever before – granting homosexuals access to marriage, adoption, inheritance, and (for women, since 2021) medically assisted reproduction, and prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity – these advances have nonetheless come at a cost. Although the pursuit of certain traditional behaviors – the desire to marry, to raise children, etc. – has 511

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garnered queers increasing support in liberal circles, the needle has not moved much for those whose sexual practices and gender representations fall outside heteronormative models. The virulence of the conservative backlash against the fight to legalize homosexual marriage in France (a normative practice if ever there was one) also demonstrates that, hetero-liberal support notwithstanding, the roots of homophobia run deep. Its persistence is revelatory of the intransigence of conservative patriarchal, religious, and republican universalist attitudes toward the family, gender, national identity, and race, in modern French society (Perreau 2016). There is little doubt that social acceptance of individuals like members of the anti-authoritarian Gazolines (an informal spin-off from the FHAR spearheaded by trans queers like Hélène Hazera) who danced through the streets in the 1970s screaming “Bite! Bite!” (“Cock! Cock!”) while excitedly mocking the bourgeoisie, has gained little ground. The situation for French queers issued from immigration (particularly from the Maghreb, where culture and religion often denounce homosexual desire) remains dire (Amari 2018; Chaumont 2009). And yet for many, especially White French homosexuals, the extension of greater legal and civil rights and social tolerance has made a world of difference. Unfortunately, such advances have not necessarily bolstered solidarity between Whites and people of color within queer communities. Support by some gay White men – like politician Sébastien Chenu, a French gay rights advocate – of the Islamophobic (not to mention homophobic) Far Right party now known as the National Rally (which earned a disturbing 41.5% of the vote in the final round of the 2022 presidential elections) both baffles the mind and testifies to that effect. And of course, even in its most liberal, anti-racist incarnations, French heteronormative “tolerance” often relegates queer desire to private life. Moreover, as the controversy in France over the “Me Too” movement demonstrated, traditional beliefs about what has been called “gender complementarity” also run deep in French culture, discouraging non-normative performances of femininity and masculinity. The unfortunate persistence of heterosexism, homophobia, and racism in France consequently suggests that same-sex desire remains on the ramparts, and that the fight to love whom and how one chooses is far from over.

Notes 1 On the history of sexology, see Arnold I. Davidson, The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). 2 Jeannine Allain, “Chansons interdites de Nicole Louvier,” Arcadie. Revue littéraire et scientifique, no. 54 (June  1958), accessed June  24, 2019, http://culture-et-debats.over-blog.com/article-chan sons-interdites-de-nicole-louvier-par-jeannine-allain-116611513.html. 3 France rejected this classification in 1981. The World Health Organization did not discard this definition until 1990. 4 See “Manifestation contre le procès d’une mère homosexuelle,” JT FR3 Rhône Alpes, FR3/France 3, April  24, 1982, Fonds INA; “Interview de l’avocat d’un couple d’homosexuelles,” Télé Pays de Loire, Fr3/France 3, February 20, 1982, Fonds INA; “Femmes homosexuelles,” TF1 Dernière, TF1, April 19, 1983, Fonds INA; “Couple homosexual,” Antenne 2 Midi, A2/France 2, May 4, 1983, Fonds INA; “Couple d’homosexuelles en procès à Nantes,” Télé Pays de Loire, FR3/France 3, October  6, 1983, Fonds INA; “Jugement du procès intenté par les homosexuelles Nadia et Annie,” Télé Pays de Loire, FR3/France 3, December 1, 1983, Fond s INA; “Procès homosexuelles contre la sécurité sociale à Nantes,” Soir 3, FR3/France 3, January 19, 1984, Fonds INA; “Nicole et Armelle” on Antenne 2 Midi, A2/France 2, 18 mars 1982. 5 “Enfants du désir, les Nouvelles filiations: histoire: Papa, maman, kiki: quatrième et dernière partie,” Nuits magnétiques, France Culture, April 15, 1988, Fonds INA.

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Bibliography Amari, Salima.  2018. Lesbiennes de l’Immigration. Construction de Soi et Relations  Familiales. Vulaines-sur-Seine: Éditions du Croquant. Auxiètre, Jean-Michel.  2020. L’Homosexualité au Front  Durant la Grande Guerre: Le Témoinage Dérangeant du Caporal Moret. Paris: Éditions l’Harmattan. Boulligny, Arnaud. 2018. “La Déportation de France pour Motif d’Homosexualité: Une ‘Fameuse Légende’?” In Les Homosexuel le.s en France: du bûcher aux camps de la mort, 99–117. Paris: Éditions Tirésias-Michel Reynaud. Chaplin, Tamara.  2021.  “ ‘A Woman Dressed Like a Man’: Gender Trouble at the Sapphic Cabaret, Paris 1930–1960.”  French Historical Studies  44  (4) (Fall): 711–48. https://doi. org/10.1215/00161071-9248727. ———. 2024. Becoming Lesbian: A  Queer History of Modern France.  Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Chaumont, Franck. 2009. Homo-Ghetto. Gays et Lesbiennes dans les Cités: Les Clandestins de la République. Paris: Le Cherche Midi. Chevalier, Julien. 1885. De l’Inversion de l’Instinct  Sexuel au Point de Vue  Médico-Légal. Lyon: Imprimerie Nouvelle. Choisy, Maryse. 1928. Un mois Chez Les Filles. Paris: Plon. Choquette, Leslie. 2015. “Gay Paree: The Origins of Lesbian and Gay Commercial Culture in the French Third Republic.” Contemporary French Civilization 41 (1): 1–24. https://doi.org/10.3828/ cfc.2016.1. Foucault, Michel. 1980. “The History of Sexuality.” Translator Robert Hurley. New York: Random House 1: An Introduction. Gonnard, Catherine, and Elisabeth Lebovici. 2017. Inventer son genre dans le langage de la television. GLAD! [En ligne]. Accessed April 26, 2017. http://www.revue-glad.org/209. Gunther, Scott. 2009. The Elastic Closet: A History of Homosexuality in France, 1942-Present. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gury, Christian. 2020. L’Honneur Retrouvé d’un Officier Homosexual en 1915. Paris: Éditions Kimé. Jackson, Julian. 2009. Living in Arcadia: Homosexuality, Politics, and Morality in France from the Liberation to AIDS. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Latimer, Tirza True. 2005. Women Together, Women Apart: Portraits of Lesbian Paris. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Lebovici, Elisabeth. 2017. Ce Que le Sida M’A Fait. Paris: JPR. Lestrade, Didier. 2012. Pourquoi les Gays Sont Passes à Droite. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Lucien, Mirande. 2014. “Les Deux Premières Revues Homosexuelles de Langue Française: Akademos (1909) et Inversions/l’Amitié (1924–1925).” Revue des Revues 1: 64–83. https://doi.org/10.3917/ rdr.051.0064. Martel, Frédéric. 2000. “The Pink and the Black: Homosexuals in France Since 1968.” Jane Marie. Perreau, Bruno. 2016. Queer Theory: The French Response. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Revenin, Régis.  2005. Homosexualité et Prostitution Masculines à Paris, 1870–1918.  Paris: L’Harmattan. Roberts, Mary Louise. 1994. Civilization Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ross, Andrew Israel. 2019. Public City/Public Sex. Homosexuality, Prostitution, and Urban Culture in Nineteenth Century Paris. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Schultz, Gretchen. 2014. Sapphic Fathers: Discourses of Same-Sex Desire from Nineteenth Century France. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Sibalis, Michael. 2013. “Autumn.” Accessed April 4, 2021. https://journals.openedition.org/gss/3009. “Mai 1968: Le Comité d’Action Pédérastique Révolutionnaire Occupe la Sorbonne.” Genre, Sexualité & Société 10 (10). https://doi.org/10.4000/gss.3009. Solidor, Suzy. 1936. “Suzy Solider Révèle Son Étrange Destin de Femme sans Homme.” Confessions 1 (November 26): 11–14. [Fonds Suzy Solider, Musée Renoir]. Cagnes-sur-Mer. Tamagne, Florence. 2004. A History of Homosexuality in Europe: Berlin, London, Paris, 1919–1939, Volumes I and II. New York: Algora Publishing. Virmaître, Charles. 1900. Paris-Impur. Paris: A. Charles Libraire.

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47 RECONSTRUCTING FRENCH RELATIONS IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC AFTER WORLD WAR I Kirsty Carpenter and Alistair Watts

“En vérité, une culture ne meurt que de sa propre faiblesse.” (Malraux)

The French inability to stamp its dominance on the new world of the après guerre Pacific (including New Zealand) shaped the development of the twentieth century. From the early to mid-nineteenth century, the British and French competed to take ownership of the Pacific islands before settling for an uneasy entente. The region was divided using boundaries that suited the colonizing powers, with only secondary consideration given to geography and the existing indigenous nations’ borders.1 Rather than resulting from French failure, British acquisition of the larger portion of the colonies was driven by local suspicions of foreigners and a nostalgic attachment to British culture. Distance and communication played into this relationship, while reporting in the local press displayed national biases. In the New Zealand case, this attachment to British tradition helped stave off independent foreign policymaking for several decades. Key questions remain: Why did the French influence not grow and consolidate in the 1920s, when there was a willingness on the part of France to engage in the Pacific? Why did British control continue unchallenged despite exploitation of the area during WWI? And what made the leaders of the Pacific world so suspicious of the French and their new plans for les antipodes? New Zealand sent 80,000 troops to fight alongside the British and their Allies in France, and over 10,000 of them died there and remained buried on French soil. A significant number of Melanesians (1,107) and Europeans (1,006) from French Polynesia also fought in WWI, “including at Gallipoli,” alongside troops from Australia and New Zealand, with 456 killed. This created a bond nurtured on the Somme and at Passchendaele, but it was complex and riven with war guilt and anger against a distant, alien country. What New Zealand knew of France in this period was filtered through a British lens. The French were understood as deeply foreign, their language associated with the elite of nineteenth-century Europe, and there were only a few French nationals on the spot in New Zealand (well under 1% of the population) to challenge any impressions about what the French might or might not think. By the time news of exceptional events in France, such as the Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s, reached the southern edge of the Pacific, it became diffused into different media (including DOI: 10.4324/9780367808471-48

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commercial advertising) that collectively reinforced arguments for avoiding the French and their Catholicism. Dreyfus was “a funny little hero,” and his treatment at the hands of the French government, while despicable, hardly stirred the New Zealand public to sympathy. But the event was so stereotypically French that it was used to grab the attention of the local reader in a sensationalist way – and irrespective of any direct link between the affair and the product. In this capacity, it was adapted to advertise Flora soap and other commodity items in the local newspapers (“Poor Dreyfus would not have suffered so acutely while in prison had he been able to know the comfort of C.T.C Tea,” Feilding Star, 28 August 1799), and this also showed how disaffected the New Zealand public were by French imperial grandeur as opposed to French fashion chic. The Affair had the effect of exposing the French bureaucracy for the social-seeking hierarchy that it was and, for New Zealanders, reinforced the virtue of association with the steadfast British Crown. The New Zealand Herald described the Pacific south of the equator as a “British sea,” owing to the fact that “two-thirds of Britain’s population (including Canadians and Australians) looked out over the Pacific Ocean.” That it was worthy of defending became a self-sustaining argument – possession could be partially rationalized by wartime experience, showing that the respective empires would provide resources, including manpower, to the parent nation, providing their security was assured. And the pre–World War I alliance with Japan meant Britain did not have to sustain a significant defensive presence in the Pacific while France was freed of any immediate threat to her interests in Indochina. The net effect was that the two allies’ could concentrate their joint military effort in the Northern Hemisphere. By 1918, the rationale for territorial possessions in the South Pacific and elsewhere had evolved via tenuous logic into a concept of empire associated with religious conversion and civilizing local populations, and France had acquired a considerable foothold in the area. Rivalry and suspicion in the Pacific between nations, empires, and monarchs was nothing new, for in the absence of a treaty or agreement, the European powers tended to assume that colonial competition resulted in winners and losers. The wartime coalition between France and Britain was, in that context, only a temporary convenience between the two otherwise long-term Pacific adversaries. Both powers saw the wartime opportunities to seize Germany’s Pacific territories, but New Zealand and Australia were geographically best-placed to take advantage – as New Zealand’s acquisition of Western Samoa demonstrated. This left the French confronting the nascent imperial ambitions of her former allies New Zealand and Australia, backed by the apparent power of the British imperial world. And the British thus reverted to viewing the French as an ongoing threat to Britain’s regional authority and global colonial ascendancy. Any direct relationship between the antipodean dominions and France risked the breakdown of imperial political and economic connections, on which the financial fortunes of New Zealand and the other British satellites depended. Moreover, the English language predominated, while France and the French-speaking territories were restricted to narrowly defined geographies. As a result, the South Pacific became a politically contested space where the contradictions of international diplomacy made themselves clearly visible through territorial and religious squabbles. The competing claims of the Western powers led to a replication in the Pacific of tensions in Europe, while the realities of the twentieth century and the need for post-war reform were ignored due to the rose-tinted misrepresentation of the Pacific as a tropical idyll. This idealized Pacific owed much to the reports, paintings, and semi-fictional accounts produced by the European explorers and adventurers who originally visited the Southern 515

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Hemisphere. Their descriptions were read and interpreted by administrators and politicians who regulated the settlement and colonization process from a distant vantage point using racial attitudes and opinions shaped by cultural events and experiences in Europe. Few who assumed responsibility for these new lands had any sense of their geography or environmental realities. The adverse social consequences of colonial and imperial acquisition/ assimilation were often dismissed, while the impact on Pacific peoples who were classed as inferior in civilization were treated as insignificant. As the First World War drew to a close, the French tried to extend their influence in the Pacific by dispatching a goodwill trade and diplomatic mission led by the retired general Pau and general secretary André Siegfried. The mission toured Australasia, making the case for retaining and building on support that France had received from the British Dominions during the war. Soldiers from the British Pacific had travelled from their homes to the most distant geographic location on the globe, where they had suffered considerable losses in lives and economic resources as they assisted France to defeat Germany. As well as encouraging public support for the French post-war strategy of punishing then hobbling Germany economically and militarily, the mission advocated establishing direct trade between France, Australia, and New Zealand – particularly for the supply of raw wool. Such a policy would not only deny those supplies to Germany but also create direct economic ties with France. While the economic gains and logistical efficiencies of the French proposal appeared beneficial to the Dominions, such a plan would bypass the United Kingdom. This posed a direct threat to Australasia’s special place within the greater British nation as well as to French colonial interests. According to “The economic relations between France and New Zealand: report of the French Mission to New Zealand, December 1918-January 1919,” the New Zealanders, in particular, could not bring themselves to participate in a scheme that would undermine the central role of Great Britain as the empire’s trading hub, since to do so would undermine their self-image of a little Britain in the South Pacific. As Felicity Barnes has written: “This long attachment to London has become a familiar part of New Zealand culture, so natural that it was rarely critically examined.” James Belich offers a detailed discussion of the primacy of a sense of Britishness as a source of national identity in the Pacific Dominions, exemplified by a dependence on trade. This overrode the pre-war liberalism that viewed the removal of restrictive commercial practices in favor of free trade as a civilizing force that would create interdependence and therefore be a disincentive to national barriers and conflict. These ideas were challenged by the war when the (arguably successful) use of cartels and trusts to provide essential services (e.g., shipping) and goods (e.g., coal) suggested an alternative to free trade. Although restricting trade would damage the British free-trade economic model, it could instead foster intra-empire goodwill and political harmony while minimizing an infusion of foreign culture. Above all, intra-empire trade supported the case for Britain defending the sea routes from Australasia to the Northern Hemisphere. Even in the conciliatory atmosphere of the war’s end, overturning the antipodean tradition of an anti-French disposition by downgrading the British trade link was distasteful. At Versailles, in place of Woodrow Wilson’s ideal of a League of Nations peacefully resolving inter-government differences between disarmed nations, the pre-existing Great Power positions reasserted themselves. These, and the ideas they were based on, had to be reconciled with the reality of resurgent nationalism and resentment between the war’s winners and losers as they related to territorial possessions. Moreover, under the Reinsurance Treaty negotiated alongside the Versailles Peace Treaty, the USA and Britain had given 516

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France guarantees of security. In the event, the US Senate did not ratify the Treaty, thus freeing Britain to also opt out, and the “guarantees” given to France were worthless. French policy was driven by fear, while Germany was still economically powerful and ahead of France in the demographic race. Notwithstanding claims of benign intervention, the underlying belief of the Western powers was that the world’s resources were limited, that living space was needed for the growing European populations, and that the undeveloped territories of the South Pacific and their peoples were resources available for exploitation. There were some voices of principled objection, and the Peace Conference attempted to accommodate these through a series of ill-conceived territorial compromises using the mandate system, but this was little more than a formula for legitimizing empire creation. Rather than being – as was claimed – a means of extending the assumed benefits of civilization, the mandate system entrenched and extended the empires of the great powers and their allies. The time-honored French rival – Germany – was seriously humiliated through territorial losses, such as the reassignment of German Western Samoa to New Zealand. As the left-wing French newspaper L’Humanité said when reporting on the 1919 Paris peace conference and the allocation of mandates: [T]he great colonial states will keep their overseas possessions, which they will continue to exploit according to the savage methods of capitalist colonialism. . . . This is the first act of the Peace Law! During the previous day, German colonies of the Pacific (New Guinea, etc.) were claimed by the British Dominions of Australia and New Zealand. And on the German colonies: We must take advantage of the presence in Paris . . . of the British Dominions representatives to resolve the issue of settlements . . . that the Allies share like thieves. It was in this resurrected atmosphere of empire-building that the traditional animosity between the British and the French in the Pacific re-emerged, having proven sufficiently resilient to survive the entente cordiale, the resulting wartime alliance and post-war French offers of trade and friendship. Explicitly anti-French celebrations, such as the invented tradition of Trafalgar Day, were revived. Despite the appalling loss of life, New Zealand and Australia had their rewards in ex-German territory or French acquiescence for their own colonial ambitions. Consequently, by July 5, 1922, Le Figaro was describing the Pacific region as a “battlefield of global dominance,” within which the French territory of Tahiti was the key location, a vital refueling station strategically, and indeed “providentially” located between South America, China, and Japan. In a similar way, agricultural production and primary extractive industries such as mineral mining justified territorial acquisition/colonization. As one post-war reward, New Zealand was given joint responsibility along with Australia and Great Britain for Nauru Island under a League of Nations Mandate. Nauru was the closest and richest source of guano, the essential fertilizer required to render the phosphatedeficient soils of Australia and New Zealand productive under a European agricultural husbandry regime. This arrangement had the agreement of France and could be considered as compensation to Australia and New Zealand for economic war losses. There was, however, an element of self-interest for France, since if New Zealand and Australia became 517

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more productive, they would have additional agricultural produce to export to Britain and Europe. A mutual interest in defending sea access to the Northern Hemisphere export markets would perhaps then be extended to an interest in maintaining any significant European export destinations – such as France. Hence, re-arrangement of territorial interests in the Pacific could potentially benefit France if the British Dominions were willing to bypass Britain as a trading hub, while Britain would help defend them, in part through investments, such as the development of the Singapore naval port. Existing French territories worried that agricultural exports to France from the British Pacific dominions would pose a threat by removing the rationale for retention of French territorial acquisitions (i.e., selfsufficiency for Greater France in primary produce and mineral wealth). And there was no compelling economic justification for such a policy, for as Le Figaro noted on March 4, 1928: No great nation can henceforth, without consenting to a veritable degradation, become indifferent to what is going on in these distant countries. The spirit of enterprise and the foresight of the Frenchmen of the past have given us in this vast ocean observation points of exceptional value, both by the richness of their soil and by the importance of their strategic situation. We are, however, far from deriving any profit or advantage from it. In other words, in order to retain the territory and make a case for its ongoing support, a justification had to be invented. France, in common with other colonizing nations, justified her territorial possessions by producing unwanted products at an uneconomic cost in an ill-suited environment, sometimes relying on imported labor. There were even suggestions of developing wool production in the tropics, and for exporting food normally grown in temperate climates using new refrigeration techniques. Neither of these initiatives made any economic or agronomic sense, but they did provide a reason to encourage the emigration of French colonists with appropriate skills while developing a sense of purpose by giving the colony a place in the French economy. When Le Figaro published lengthy articles justifying the French presence in the New Hebrides, it therefore gave the obligatory praise to the natural beauty and resources of the Pacific, yet it struggled to find a purpose for their possession. Le Figaro described burning of the “parasitic (presumably native) vegetation” in order to plant exotic crops. Corn, cotton, maize, sugarcane, cocoa, and vanilla could all be grown, while cotton plantations would “render useless the costly purchases abroad.” Finding workers for the new plantations was also a problem. British Presbyterians were blamed by Le Figaro for “divert(ing) the natives from our plantations,” thus necessitating the recruitment of “Annamite” (i.e., Vietnamese or Laotian) indentured workers. The possibility that the local population may have been passively resisting the clearing of native vegetation to grow exotic crops on their land was not considered. Thus, the local French Pacific colonial interests had their own reasons – aside from any direct threat – for discouraging greater cooperation between the British Pacific territories and France. The South Pacific lapsed into an uneasy coexistence between British and French interests, while the two greatest Pacific-based powers – Japan and the United States – were arguably bypassed. Yet despite their mutual distrust, Britain and France still had to cooperate, because they shared governance of the New Hebrides by way of an unusual compromise arrangement that pre-dated the war. The condominium (as it was known) divided the New 518

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Hebrides between two parallel but separate authorities, each of which mirrored the laws, customs, and culture of their respective parent states. There were thus two formulas in use to occupy and pacify one nation. New Zealand and Australia (as the dominant British countries in the Pacific) saw the existence of this jointly governed territory in what they deemed to be their regional backyard as an affront. During debates on the matter in the New Zealand Parliament, France was referred to as a “foreign power,” and this was further exacerbated by British acceptance of the arrangement. The pact might have been tolerated politically but for the activism of the Presbyterian Church in Australia and New Zealand that had made missionary work and religious conversion in the New Hebrides a defining project. There were various attempts in both New Zealand and Australia to motivate their respective governments to persuade Britain to dislodge the French, not just because they were French, but also because their presence provided support and comfort to religious missions attempting to convert the indigenous inhabitants to Catholicism. This assumed that conversion would lead the locals to become French, while conversely, conversion to Presbyterian or other Protestant faiths was synonymous with becoming British (or at least to not becoming French). It would have been no surprise, and perhaps a mutually satisfactory outcome, when New Zealand declined an invitation to exhibit at the 1927 Paris International Colonial Exhibition. A public display of New Zealand’s wares alongside an implicit offer to trade would have exposed the obvious logic of direct trade within the South Pacific as well as between Britain and France. Conversely, such concerns suited New Zealand and Australian observers, who hoped that direct British financial aid, defense, and trade support would continue indefinitely. The Great Depression disrupted what appeared to be an apparently logical extension of these trends. Although there was now an urgent need for additional export markets facilitated by free trade, for both Australia and New Zealand, protectionism and the different climatic and food consumption patterns meant there was little interest in developing trade with mainland France (with the notable exception of wool) or between Australasia and the adjacent French and British Pacific territories. Although by 1935 the population of Australia had risen to 6.8 million, Australia’s gross exports had decreased in value since 1926 from £146 million to £135 million, of which exports to France were an insignificant £6.4 million. (Exports to Germany were an even less significant £2.4 million.) In 1935–1936, Australian exports to New Caledonia (the only French Pacific territory identified as such) were worth just £218,460, while the New Hebrides total was £87,359. Other Pacific Islands (including foreign, that is, non-British, as well as British territories) collectively accounted for just £2,180,727. (Australian Overseas Imports and Excise Revenue for the Year 1935–36.) New Zealand and Australia might have accepted a secular French presence in the Pacific as a necessity for an allied global power. Even an active Catholic mission in the region might have been overlooked due to the fact that New Zealand’s wartime deputy prime minister Sir Joseph Ward was a Catholic, and Australia, like New Zealand, had a significant minority population of Irish Catholic descent. It was the combination of French rule and Catholic evangelizing that was too much for supporters of the New Hebridean Presbyterian mission to accept. During the Versailles negotiations, the British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour had told the New Zealand prime minister William Massey that the New Hebrides had nothing to do with the peace negotiations. Consequently, New Zealand and Australia were prevented from having any say in the post-war policy in their own hemisphere on a matter they considered crucial and within their sphere of influence. 519

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During the 1921 British Imperial Conference, New Zealand prime minister Massey suggested a territorial exchange to facilitate the removal of the French from the New Hebrides. This was a typical inter-empire solution under which a so-called developed nation attempted to reconcile differences with another by using a third or even fourth party or nation far removed from the original issue as token of trade. Little or no consideration was given to the consequences for the original inhabitants and their traditional governance structures when such arrangements were proposed. In this case, it suited neither the British nor the French to bicker over the New Hebrides, and so the matter was left in abeyance. Massey later claimed that attempts at a territorial exchange to rectify the situation failed because – so he claimed – the French “simply would not look at it.” This overlooked the obvious rebuttal from the French point of view that New Zealand and Australia were similarly intransigent. The illogical isolation between geographically adjacent but competitive colonies and territories was perpetuated by communications being directed through the respective governing empire’s bureaucracy. This not only maintained several degrees of official separation but also inhibited day-to-day contact that might have led to closer liaison at a regional level. Thus, New Zealand’s messages to nearby foreign colonies were directed via the British government to the relevant power. In cases where secrecy was not of concern, these official exchanges were printed and became part of the public record. Although the Marquesas Islands are 5,500 kilometres from New Zealand, while London and Paris are 18,500 kilometres or roughly three times as far, when New Zealand felt it would be mutually beneficial to establish a weather observation point in the French Marquesas Islands, the governor general of New Zealand had to send a dispatch destined for Paris, via the British secretary of state for dominion affairs in London on behalf of the elected New Zealand government. It was three months before the British secretary of state was able to tell the New Zealand governor general that all was agreed. There had obviously been some informal direct communication (with “M. Clavel, of the Hydrographic Office at Nukahiwa”), and the local French scientist was prepared to cooperate, so it was diplomatic protocol alone that required the involvement of the formal inter-government channel. As the New Zealand governor general’s website notes, “New Zealand ceased to be a colony, and became a Dominion in 1907 within the British Empire. Dominion status, however, was more a change of name, and did not make New Zealand any more independent from Britain.” When the Panama Canal was opened in 1914, many in Europe believed that the vast Pacific Ocean and its territories were the future frontier for the European nations and a further reason for possession. Le comité de l’Océanie française was one organization advocating a continued and intensified French presence in the Pacific for this reason. Despite this, the French remained a powerful indirect influence on politics at the transnational, as well as in the Pacific, even if only to drive the young British nations further into the protective grip of Great Britain, or, in the case of New Zealand, to stave off independent foreign policymaking for decades. Although neither the British nor the French models of empire proved sustainable in the long run, in the short term, the empire became of itself a matter of national pride and virility because of this perceived addition to the stature of the parent state. The defining difference was in governance, for – unlike the British – the French were not attempting to establish self-governed territories but rather to make their territories contiguous extensions of France itself. Once considerable resources had been expended in acquiring, defending, and in many cases, subduing the native owners and occupants, withdrawal or abandoning a colony was seen as a sign of international weakness 520

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and domestic political impotence. Even when any rational economic reason for continuing with empire-based possession had long gone, a stubborn will to retain the overseas territories persisted. The strong domestic support that developed in the respective possessing nations was encouraged by those who were profiting from the empire, and then sustained by appeals to national pride alongside any practical reasons – no matter how tenuous – to secure and hold territories in strategic locations. There was to be no ambiguity in the status of the French South Pacific satellite territories, which were regarded as an indisputably essential part of France, regardless of the geographic realities, and if France had her way, destined to remain so in perpetuity. In the Pacific, distances were further exacerbated by communication protocols that restricted interaction, even as electronic technology was enhancing communications and mechanical advances were exponentially improving transportation. Even if New Zealand had been able to preside directly over an inter-Pacific trade, conflicting Franco-British colonial influences would have been too great to allow such an intra-empire trade to flourish in the region. The overwhelming dissimilarities between the respective cultures and governance arrangements of the French and the British embedded differences in the Pacific that geographic proximity could not overcome and that remained until after World War II.

Note 1 Robert Aldrich, The French Presence in the South Pacific, 1842–1940 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990); “European Expansion in the Island Pacific: A  Historiographical Review,” in The French and the Pacific World, 17th-19th Centuries: Explorations, Migrations and Cultural Exchanges, ed. Annick Foucrier, The Pacific World: Lands, Peoples and History of the Pacific, 1500–1900 (Aldershot, Hampshire, England Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005).

Bibliography Albrecht-Carrié, René. 1960. France, Europe and the Two World Wars. Etdues D’histoire Economique, Politique Et Sociale. Edited by Jacques Freymond and Jacques L’Huillier. Geneve: Librairie E. Dorz. Aldrich, Robert. 1989. “Le Lobby Colonial De L’océanie Française.” Outre-Mers. Revue d’histoire: 143–56. ———. 1990. The French Presence in the South Pacific, 1842–1940. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2005. “European Expansion in the Island Pacific: A Historiographical Review.” In The French and the Pacific World, 17th-19th Centuries: Explorations, Migrations and Cultural Exchanges, edited by Annick Foucrier. The Pacific World: Lands, Peoples and History of the Pacific, 1500– 1900, 87–102. Aldershot, Hampshire, England Burlington, VT: Ashgate. “Australian Statistics of Oversea Imports and Exports and Customs and Excise Revenue for the Year 1935–36.” Edited by Commonwealth Statistician, 594–99, 612, 13. Canberra, Australia: Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics. Barnes, Felicity. 2012. New Zealand’s London: A Colony and Its Metropolis. Auckland, NZ: Auckland University Press. Belich, James. 2011. Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939. Oxford: Oxford Scholarship Online. Bernay, Henri. 1928. “Une Situation Paradoxale: La France Aux Nouvelles-Hébrides.” Le Figaro, March 4. Blosseville, Jules de. 1986. A Proposal for a Penal Colony in New Zealand. Translated by Martin L. Purdy. Bilingual, French/English/ed. Canberra: A.N.U. “Conference of Prime Ministers and Representatives of the United Kingdom, the Dominions, and India (Summary of Proceedings and Documents of the), Held in June, July, and August, 1921, at London: Appendix to the Journals of the House of Representatives, 1921.”

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Kirsty Carpenter and Alistair Watts Crouzet, François. 1990. Britain Ascendant: Comparative Studies in Franco-British Economic History. Paris: Editions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme. “Despatches to the Secretary of State for the Colonies from the Governor-General. Appendix to the Journals of the House of Representatives, 1925 Session.” Dwyer, Jacqueline. 2015. “Ahead of Their Time: The French Economic Mission to Australia 1918.” The French Australian Review (59) Australian Summer: 30–53. Fisher, Denise. 2013a. “The French Pacific Presence to World War Ii.” In France in the South Pacific. Power and Politics, 13–46. Canberra: ANU Press. ———. 2013b. “Power and Politics.” In France in the South Pacific. Canberra: ANU Press. Foucrier, A. 2005. The French and the Pacific World, 17th-19th Centuries: Explorations, Migrations, and Cultural Exchanges. London: Ashgate. Gorman, D. 2005. “Liberal Internationalism, the League of Nations Union, and the Mandates System.” [In English]. Canadian Journal of History 40 (3) (January 1): 449–77. Grant, Kevin, Philippa Levine, and Frank Trentmann, eds. 2007. Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire and Transnationalism, C. 1880–1950. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Griffiths, John. 2014. Imperial Culture in Antipodean Cities, 1880–1939. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Howarth, D. A. 1983. Tahiti: A Paradise Lost. London: Harvill Press. Kent, John. 1992. The Internationalization of Colonialism: Britain, France, and Black Africa, 1939– 1956. Oxford Studies in African Affairs. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Koudelka, Jan. 2018. “Age of Empires – Balancing Imperial Commitments Between the First and Second World Wars.” The Forge. https://theforge.defence.gov.au/sites/g/files/net6096/f/jan_koudelka_ age_of_empires_-_balancing_imperial_commitments_between_the_first_and_second_world_ wars.pdf. Kray, Richard. 2007. “Caging the Prussian Dragon: New Zealand and the Paris Peace Conference 1919.” In New Zealand’s Great War: New Zealand, the Allies and the First World War, edited by John Crawford and I. C. McGibbon, 123–41. Auckland, NZ: Exisle Pub. “A La Conférence: La Discussion Sur Les Colonies Allemandes on a Parlé De La Société Des Nations.” L’Humanitie, January 29, 1919. “Le Tripot Du Pacifique.” Le Figaro, July 5, 1922. Lentin, Antony. 1997. “ ‘Une Aberration Inexplicable?’ Clemenceau and the Abortive Anglo-French Guarantee Treaty of 1919.” Diplomacy & Statecraft 8 (2): 31–49. “Les Colonies Allemandes.” L’Humanitie, June 26, 1919. Malraux, A. 1926. La Tentation De L’occident. Les Cahiers Rouges. Paris: B. Grasset. Marks, Sally. 2013. “Mistakes and Myths: The Allies, Germany, and the Versailles Treaty, 1918– 1921.” The Journal of Modern History 85 (3): 632–59. New Zealand Government. 2015. The Governor-General. Wellington: New Zealand Government. “New Zealand Parliamentary Debates V.205: 21st Parliament: 3rd Session.” 1924. Pitts, Jennifer. 2006. A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Williams, Maslyn, and Barrie Macdonald. 1985. The Phosphateers: A History of the British Phosphate Commissioners and the Christmas Island Phosphate Commission. Carlton: Melbourne ­University Press. “Wool.” Le Figaro Economic Supplement, April 19, 1926.

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48 THE POPULAR FRONT AND FRANCE’S TWENTIETH CENTURY Mattie Fitch

Historical developments rarely align with the neat numerical divisions of the calendar. Scholars of Europe’s past make do with accepted short-hands for this inconvenient reality, describing, for example, the “long nineteenth century,” extending from the French Revolution to the outbreak of the First World War, and a “short” twentieth century, from there to 1989 and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. France’s twentieth century may be even shorter: during the 1930s, the fight between left-wing and right-wing forces for the future of France was a watershed for changes that characterized the subsequent decades. The Popular Front, a widespread antifascist movement uniting a broad coalition of leftwing activists, marked that moment of transformation. Though it collapsed in 1938 after only four years, the antifascist movement launched developments that would define the rest of the twentieth century. In a country where urban dwellers had only just begun to outnumber rural inhabitants, the Popular Front triggered innovations in the political, social, and cultural realms. As part of antifascist mobilization and the radical right-wing crusades to which it responded, France witnessed attempts to democratize access to cultural resources, the expanded influence of workers in politics, and the rise of modern political ideologies, such as communism and xenophobic nationalism, which became mass movements in the 1930s. The catalyst for antifascist mobilization in France during the Popular Front was an analogous rallying of right-wing militants. The French people were bitterly divided, fighting what some historians characterize as an undeclared civil war (Lebovics 1994; Rousso 1994). A growing number of French people embraced radical right-wing ideas: aggressive nationalism, the need for an all-powerful leader, and vigilance against a long list of enemies. Right-wing groups vilified communists, freemasons, republicans, Jews, and immigrants as forces of corruption weakening and dividing the nation. Fascists in other European countries served as a model in France – one to emulate for many on the Right, and one to fear for those on the Left. Following on the marching heels of his black-shirted thugs, Mussolini established himself as fascist dictator of Italy in 1922. Fascists promised to bring order during a time of uncertainty following the First World War. They gained supporters among conservatives and the middle classes, who feared a communist revolution (a real possibility after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917), 523

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by promising to crush the communist menace. Fascists simultaneously contributed to the atmosphere of fear, sowing chaos by fomenting violence in the streets. Like Mussolini, Hitler and the Nazis, who came to power in Germany in 1933, offered a potent narrative combining national victimization with national supremacy. The unflinching will of the leader and the unshakable unity of the people would achieve the nation’s destined greatness. This outcome would follow victory in a war that would cleanse and strengthen the national community. In France, paramilitary “leagues” adopted fascist principles and tactics – military-style uniforms and formations, obedience to a forceful male leader, and violent rhetoric. With names such as the Cross of Fire, Fasces, Young Patriots, and French Solidarity, they promised the revival of a “true” France (Soucy 1997; Kennedy 2007; Campbell 2015). The largest of these, the Cross of Fire, was founded in 1928 as a veterans organization, reaching 400,000 members by 1936 after expanding to recruit women and younger men. Arguing for the strengthening of France physically and racially, groups like the Cross of Fire advocated for physical education and eugenics: “We must make men and women solid and robust. We must give to France this physically strong race” that was “distinctively French” and had “made our fatherland what it is.” Historians have long debated the nature, origins, and strength of fascism in France. While Zeev Sternhell has asserted that French fascism has its roots in nineteenth-century developments on the Left and Right, others argue that fascism in France resulted from a “mass mobilization on the Right” following the First World War, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, and the Great Depression (Sternhell 1996; Kennedy 2007). Some scholars have resisted applying the fascist label to French groups at all, though most have characterized some of the right-wing French groups as undeniably fascist (Soucy 1997). The paramilitary leagues were the extreme wing of a much broader array of right-wing discontents. Members of the middle and upper classes feared the consequences of a communist revolution, but anger at the perceived weakness of the French Republic cut across classes. Colonel François de la Rocque, the charismatic leader of the Cross of Fire, attracted decorated veterans, university students, and Catholic women to his image of “a stern but paternalistic commander.” Governmental instability and political scandals that many read through an anti-Semitic lens exacerbated dissatisfaction with French democracy. Though scholars dispute how much the incapacity of the French Republic reflected reality, rightwing detractors denounced a degenerate political establishment. As 1934 opened, a scheme for financial fraud that involved government ministers and deputies ended in the death of the swindler Alexandre Stavisky under suspicious circumstances (Passmore 2014). Frustration with the status quo formed the backbone of an insurrection in Paris on February  6, 1934, that served as the catalyst for the Popular Front’s formation. Tens of thousands of protesters, including the paramilitary leagues and veterans organizations, converged in the center of the city. An uprising featuring attacks (some in military formation) on the national Chamber of Deputies left 14 people dead and almost 1,500 wounded. How to understand this night of violence is still under discussion (Millington 2018). Some historians question whether the offensive really represented a threat to French democracy, though more recently others have argued that this downplays the influence of street violence in French politics. Protesters’ initial intentions varied, but the rioters’ anti-republican sentiment was clear. The French police repelled the February assault, but the French Left interpreted it as a failed fascist coup that had almost overthrown the republic. Facing a fascist threat at 524

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home and abroad, an antifascist groundswell erupted in communities across France, as huge numbers of ordinary people proclaimed their dedication to liberty. Though French left-wing activists had organized in response to Italian fascism in the 1920s, that mobilization had proven small and short-lived. In 1934, by contrast, workers, intellectuals, and leftists from many political and social backgrounds marched in the streets. In Marseille, which witnessed France’s second largest demonstration, as many as 100,000 people filled La Canebière, the main street leading to France’s largest port. In a phrase adapted from the trenches of the Great War, fascism “would not pass;” the French people, arm in arm, would bar the route. After marching, they organized, forming community associations that brought together antifascists of all political stripes. The Popular Front alliance included the main left-wing parties, the communists, socialists, and republicans, plus a multitude of groups, such as the League of the Rights of Man, a long-standing and influential civil liberties organization, and the Vigilance Committee of Antifascist Intellectuals, a group that formed to defend democracy after the February 6 scare (Jackson 1988). The antifascist groundswell that began in 1934 continued into 1935. Activists organized massive demonstrations on Bastille Day, the national holiday commemorating the French Revolution. Participants in the marches and mass meetings embraced French national symbols. They carried placards emblazoned with images of philosophe Denis Diderot, Jacobin Maximilien Robespierre, and novelist Victor Hugo. Antifascists viewed these heroes as proof that antifascism was rooted deep in the country’s history. On the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille in 1789, speakers urged the French people to emulate their predecessors and “retake the great revolutionary tradition.” The organizers reminded their audience that the “People of France” had “revealed Liberty to the world” in 1789. As the revolutionaries of bygone days had attacked the Bastille of absolutism and privilege, the unified French people of 1935 must again rise to defeat the new Bastilles of fascism, inequality, and poverty. In Rouen, Bastille Day demonstrations in 1936 featured children in the red Phrygian caps of the sans-culottes, banners proclaiming “Destruction of All Bastilles,” and the singing of the “Marseillaise.” References to the Revolution could also imply physical violence. One of Rouen’s marchers carried a 50-centimeter puppet hanging from a gallows and bearing the words, “In ’89 to fight against the mercenaries, there was the gallows. Let those of ’36 take note.” The year 1934 began “years of violent Franco-French conflict,” as clashes between right-wing and left-wing activists escalated over time (Millington 2018; Passmore 2014). Antifascist unity arose organically on the local level, but political parties were slower to embrace the movement and keen to preserve their independent identities and platforms. Hostility and suspicion divided the moderate republican Radical Party from the sectarian Communist Party. Following the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and the establishment of a communist regime in the Soviet Union, communists in France pushed for a proletarian revolution among workers in France. Communist aggression alienated middle-class republicans, who feared the consequences of a proletarian revolution and a communist regime. Prior to the Popular Front, communists viewed capitalism as the primary enemy, not fascism. Accordingly, they denounced the reformist Socialist Party as “social fascists” (Julliard 2012). According to communist taunts, socialists supported the domination of the bourgeoisie just as fascists did. However, fascism proved to be a significant danger to the workers’ movement, demonstrated by Hitler’s defeat of the Communist and Socialist Parties in Germany when he rose to power in 1933. In response, the leaders of the Soviet Union and the Communist 525

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International organization changed tactics. Subsequently, communists in France adopted the so-called Popular Front strategy of broad left-wing cooperation against the ascendant radical Right (Brower 1968). Much of the conversation among historians about the Popular Front has concerned the French Communist Party. How much did the Popular Front movement arise from grassroots mobilization, and to what extent was the strategy imposed from Moscow? Were French Communists national antifascist leaders or tools of Stalin (Vigreux 2016)? The Cold War, when the repressive Soviet and East German regimes claimed the antifascist mantle for defeating Nazi Germany, complicated this debate. However, historians are increasingly recognizing the diversity within antifascism, which included many different participants and combined republican and socialist political cultures (Vergnon 2009). In the 1930s, uncertainty about the motivations of French Communists heightened suspicions when they proposed joining forces with reformists and middle-class republicans. Nevertheless, after extended negotiations, in 1935, the Radicals and Socialists agreed to join a Popular Front alliance with the Communists, adopting a slogan of “Bread, Peace, and Liberty.” This official coalition reflected the cooperation that already existed among antifascists on the ground. The coalition was put to the test in national elections in spring 1936. The Popular Front electoral strategy allowed one antifascist contender to face the right-wing opponent without splitting the antifascist vote by party. It worked: the 1936 elections were a triumphant success for the antifascist movement. Left-wing writer Tristan Rémy published a poem in June 1936 celebrating the victory, evoking workers who “stand guard with fists high,” a symbol of united resolve. He described neighborhoods where “fascism will not pass” was marked “in chalk on the walls . . . in charcoal on the sidewalks . . . on posters with enormous letters.” The Popular Front won with 45.94% against 35.88% for the Right, and the Socialist Party received the most votes of any party with 16.92%. Léon Blum formed an antifascist government including socialists and radicals with communist support (Greene 1969). From the right-wing point of view, Blum’s leadership would drive the country to ruin. Blum, who was both Jewish and a socialist, was a particular focus for right-wing vitriol. French anti-Semitism since the time of the Dreyfus Affair at the turn of the century contrasted “true” Frenchmen (defined as tied to the national soil and devoted to work and traditional values) with supposedly cosmopolitan Jews who belonged nowhere and lived by exploiting others. Anti-Semites used metaphors of disease to describe the presence of Jews in France as an “infection” afflicting the nation. During the 1930s, vicious slurs and caricatures appeared in the right-wing press and in popular literature, such as the writings of First World War veteran Louis-Ferdinand Céline. He published two anti-Semitic pamphlets in 1937 and 1938, characterized by an “obsessive denunciation of a [sexualized] Jewish threat corrupting bodies, the nation, and French civilization.” The first in particular proved a “huge .  .  . commercial success” (Sanos 2013). Rhetorical and visual violence against Jews bled into physical assaults: Léon Blum himself had suffered a severe beating in February 1936 at the hands of radical right-wing thugs. The engagement of so many people in political battles stemmed from the conditions created in France by the economic crisis of the 1930s. Though the Great Depression began with the US stock market crash in 1929, the rippling economic impact only struck France several years later. However, its effects were considerable, increasing the economic vulnerability of the middle and working classes (Nord 2010). The Depression and the erosion of support for moderate political parties caused an identity crisis for the Radical Party. Founded in 526

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the nineteenth century, radicals traditionally fought for center-left causes, especially those associated with the Republic. In the twentieth century, many workers migrated to other parties, and the Radical Party’s middle-class constituency became increasingly conservative in the face of economic instability. As a result, the party’s future was unclear, especially as support for the radical Right grew. A split developed between left-wing radicals, who urged participation in the Popular Front, and right-wing members, who resisted cooperation with communists. Jean Zay, an energetic young radical who served as the Popular Front minister in charge of national cultural life, feared the consequences if “[they] let the adversaries of the Republic take on the appearance of innovators and the republicans that of old conservatives.” For workers also, the economic crisis meant hardship and uncertainty. Unemployment and other effects of the Depression compounded the miseries of factory labor. Work had become increasingly regimented due to an American import known as Taylorism, “scientifically” squeezing more work out of workers’ time. The triumph of the Popular Front in 1936 and the antifascist mobilization of workers since 1934 spurred hundreds of thousands to seize a hopeful moment when change seemed possible. Riding high from the electoral victory, 12,142 spontaneous strikes encompassing 2 million strikers demanding social reforms erupted across France in June 1936, taking the novel form of workplace occupations. Sitdown strikes overturned the industrial order: by occupying their workplace, workers controlled a space where normally their every movement was regulated. Factory floors became stages for theatrical productions, songs, and dances, though the sense of freedom was always balanced by an undercurrent of tension (Prost 2002). The month after Rémy’s Popular Front poem appeared, the same publication carried another one celebrating the strikes: I slept in my factory / comrades, this is not a dream / we have slept in our factory / we have guarded our machines / comrades, here is the day / it is really the red flag that I see up there / the red flag above the factory is not a dream. Fearing the strikes would push the already-suspicious radicals out of the coalition, socialist, communist, and union leaders urged an end to the confrontation. Though the pace slowed, labor disputes continued through the decade. Some commentators afterward criticized what they viewed as the betrayal of the strikes’ revolutionary potential by left-wing leaders. Historians, however, have emphasized the moderation of the strikers’ demands, which involved improvements to the lives of workers rather than an attempt to establish socialism in France. The strikes marked French workers’ triumphant entrance onto the national stage as a political force. The extent of the strikes and the willingness of the Popular Front government to mediate negotiations between workers and employers resulted in the Matignon Accords. This agreement formalized concessions by employers to workers, including wage increases and collective contracts. Most importantly for the Popular Front’s legacy, they were followed by the passage of laws establishing a 40-hour workweek and two weeks of paid vacation a year. Workers had won leisure time. One of the lasting images of the Popular Front is that of working-class families enjoying the beaches of France for the first time. A newly established Undersecretary of State for the Organization of Sport and Leisure, a post enthusiastically filled by socialist Léo Lagrange, arranged reduced-fare railway tickets for workers so they could travel. Youth hostels, which advocates lauded as promoting fraternity, joy, and healthful outdoor excursions, provided affordable accommodation. Though Popular 527

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Front members viewed this leisure time in strictly antifascist terms, it mirrored the workers’ holidays provided by fascist mass leisure organizations, such as the Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro in Fascist Italy and the “Strength through Joy” organization for Aryan Germans. Leisure activities formed part of a widespread antifascist cultural movement that intertwined with other expressions of Popular Front commitment, such as voting, striking, or demonstrating. Antifascism became part of a democratic mass culture (Vergnon 2009). Many intellectuals had marched with workers since the beginning of antifascist advancement in the early 1930s, and now that workers had acquired leisure time, their role took on added importance. Upon assuming the mantle of Popular Front government leader, Blum (himself a writer) appointed Jean Zay, the young republican innovator, as Minister of National Education and Fine Arts. Only 31 at the time, Zay redefined the role of government in national cultural life. He attempted to open cultural institutions to all citizens, regardless of class. In this goal, he collaborated with many antifascist cultural organizations, especially the Communist Maisons de la Culture (Cultural Centers) and the Socialist Mai 36 (May ’36) (Ory 2016). The motto of Mai 36 proclaimed the right of “culture for all, and not just for some.” The Maison de la Culture viewed intellectuals and workers as equal participants. They emphasized the need for workers themselves to create cultural forms and content that spoke to their experiences and aspirations. Cultural organizing brought together a diverse group of exuberant collaborators, and the multitude of events they coordinated encompassed a vast array of media. Ciné-Liberté, one Popular Front cultural group, promoted antifascist film and, under the direction of eminent auteur Jean Renoir, produced La Marseillaise, which depicted the French Revolution from the view of ordinary people. Others included music groups organized by trade unions and an organization arranging visits to Paris’s museums, including the Louvre, which instituted longer opening hours and lower ticket prices. Activists believed that events celebrating French values, such as liberty, equality, and fraternity (the motto of the French Revolution), would instill antifascist commitment in participants. Antifascist culture could further antifascist mobilization, especially of workers. It could also support the unity of the diverse coalition. Finding shared cultural symbols could bring together antifascists of many social and political backgrounds. Artists, poets, and musicians relied on national symbols drawn from France’s revolutionary heritage for antifascist content because these could speak to radicals as well as communists, middleclass republicans and working-class socialists. Artists constructed a unified antifascist identity built on the concept of the “French people.” According to writer André Chamson, the French people constituted “the true guardians of the future of the French Nation.” In Paris, the most celebrated example of antifascist culture was a theatrical revival of revered left-wing playwright Romain Rolland’s Quatorze Juillet, celebrating popular action in the French Revolution. Zay’s Ministry helped fund the production, and ticket prices were kept deliberately low in the interest of financial accessibility, contributing to packed houses. Prominent composers of the era collaborated to write the score (Fulcher 2005). Georges Auric wrote a “[parody] of an aristocratic gavotte” for the introduction of the first act, a scene set in the garden of the Royal Palace in Paris, which expressed “the nascent activity of the people . . . the worried murmur of the crowd.” Arthur Honegger composed the prelude of the third act, leading up to the key moment of the taking of the fortress, in which “hummed choruses reinforced the impression of choking and suffering contained in this Bastille.” Other artists contributed as well, including Pablo Picasso, who painted the curtain, featuring a Minotaur dressed as a harlequin and another fighting a young man 528

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(apparently a reference to the French Revolution, though the connection is obscure). The play was performed by around 30 professional actors and 150 workers. The production finished with a “people’s festival,” in which the performers came down from the stage to sing and dance among the audience. In one of the Popular Front’s high points, the audience members got to their feet, raised their fists in the antifascist salute, and sang “La Marseillaise” (the French anthem) and the “International” (the workers’ anthem) along with the actors. Popular Front cultural efforts also flourished outside of Paris. Jean Zay increased government funding for theaters throughout France. The Maisons de la Culture association formed branches in many communities, including in Algeria and Tunisia. The interest in French national traditions contributed to enthusiasm among leftist artists for folklore and local cultures (Peer 1998). The Marseille Maison de la Culture was the first to open outside of Paris, and its monthly bulletin published poems written by one of its members, Jòrgi Reboul, in Provençal, the traditional language of Provence. He also founded the local youth hostel as a celebration of regional identity, featuring Provençal cuisine, colors, housewares, and even songs. Antifascists also embraced art from outside France. The Bordeaux Maison de la Culture produced Soviet and Spanish theater, two countries on the forefront of antifascism (Winter 2006). They performed Maxim Gorky’s Egor Bulychov and Federico García Lorca’s Blood Wedding in 1938. The Communists of the Maison de la Culture considered the Soviet Union to be the primary antifascist power and viewed Gorky as the preeminent Soviet writer. The antifascist credentials of the Spanish Republic were cemented by its desperate fight against General Franco’s military coup, launched in 1936. Franco’s outlook combined conservative and fascist elements, and his forces received aid from Hitler and Mussolini; the Soviet Union provided assistance to the beleaguered Republic. Lorca led one of the Republic’s antifascist theater troupes until his assassination at the hands of Franco’s rebels. Antifascists in France viewed the cause of the Spanish Republic as an urgent and noble crusade against fascism, sending supplies and even traveling to Spain to fight. However, the conflict also heighted the atmosphere of confrontation between proponents and opponents of the Popular Front in France. Some have questioned how successful the project of bringing workers into French cultural life was, noting the theoretical character of events and the sometimes lackluster response of the working-class audience (Scales 2016). Despite the desire of antifascist artists to be inclusive, cultural production within the Popular Front, in fact, exhibited considerable differences among the many associated groups, especially relating to goals and outlook. The communists of the Maisons de la Culture, though they advocated the antifascist unity of the French people, continued simultaneously to promote the future proletarian revolution that would bring about a socialist society (and the ultimate defeat of fascism). The Marseille Maison, for example, believed that the regional traditions they embraced “are in perfect accord with the revolutionary principles” of communism. Jean Zay, on the other hand, viewed his promotion of antifascist culture as an obligation the Republic owed to its citizens. In a 1937 speech, he insisted that “a democracy” had the “particular duty to develop the interior life” of its citizens. Socialist artists disagreed among themselves, with some arguing that the Left’s embrace of nationalist symbols had led them to forget their true cause – workers’ emancipation. The confusion lay in the concept of the “French people” (Dell 2007). Whom did this group include? Everyone? Only mobilized antifascists? Only workers? The preoccupation with this category encompassed not just the Left but the Right as well. Organizations as 529

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diverse politically as the Cross of Fire and the Maisons de la Culture claimed to speak for “the people,” aiming to mobilize them for their cause and the particular vision of France it entailed. As historians have increasingly demonstrated, groups on the Left and the Right embraced the same tactics and imagery. Despite the polarization of the era, the Popular Front and the paramilitary leagues resembled rivals contesting the same territory (Wardhaugh 2009). In another example, communist and Catholic groups both sought to mobilize French youth by addressing their particular needs (Whitney 2009). The diversity of the Popular Front did not extend just to class differences. Recently, scholars have emphasized the participation of a very broad group of activists in Popular Front mobilization. This has aligned with an appreciation of antifascism as a phenomenon that extends beyond a political commitment. For example, various French, Jewish, immigrant, and leftist identities overlapped within antifascism and the Popular Front (Underwood 2022). Anticolonial activists in Paris combined their struggles against imperial domination with antifascism and anticapitalism, helping shape the Popular Front’s colonial policy. Here also the movement’s significance is ambiguous. In a colonial setting such as Algeria, antifascism aligned uncomfortably with anti-imperialism, a context also complicated by anti-Muslim and antiSemitic sentiments (Drew 2014). Like the Popular Front’s colonial policy, which remained more aspirational than real, its record on women’s emancipation was lackluster. Images of antifascist crowds reveal the importance of the mobilization of women during the 1930s (and many mobilized for right-wing causes as well). Frenchwomen were on “the front lines” of relief work for the Spanish Republic, appealing to women as mothers through groups such as the World Organization of Women against War and Fascism and the Welcome Committee for Spanish Children. The Communist Party created the Union of Young Women of France in 1936 along with its other new antifascist organizations, and it boasted 19,411 members by the end of 1937. The group viewed the communist woman as “a future wife and mother” in addition to an activist and organized “fashion shows and cooking and sewing classes” to appeal to her interests. Though Blum appointed three women to ministerial roles for the first time, women in France still did not receive the right to vote, nor were they granted labor or social rights. This was due largely to the resistance of radicals and the acquiescence of other coalition members who feared alienating moderates (Jacquemond 2016). The divisions within the Socialist Party over its cultural program stemmed from longstanding uncertainty about the nature of the socialist revolution it promoted. As a result, socialists disagreed about the best response to fascism and, in particular, how to reconcile pacifism and antifascism. Following the First World War, many socialists viewed pacifism as their primary duty. The rise of aggressive fascist powers such as Nazi Germany, however, led other activists to urge France to arm itself for a military contest between fascism and antifascism that many viewed as increasingly inevitable. The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), precipitated by Franco’s military coup against the Spanish Republic, raised the stakes. While Franco relied on significant military support from the fascist powers of Europe, the Spanish Republic ran desperately low on supplies. Despite his personal sympathies and the calls of many French antifascists for France to aid the republican cause, Blum followed the demands of France’s British allies for a policy of non-intervention. This decision ultimately spelled victory for Franco. The dispute over Spain split the Socialist Party and also sowed division between Socialists and Communists, who advocated an armed response to fascist aggression. Defining antifascism narrowly as a willingness to combat fascism militarily, some historians emphasize the failures of French antifascism between the wars (Seidman 2018). 530

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In addition to disagreements between leftists and moderates over fiscal and social policy, which were heightened by the continuing economic crisis, the international situation contributed to the collapse of the Popular Front in 1938. Though the antifascist movement continued into 1939, by 1938 the alliance ceased to exist. The Munich Agreement in September that solidified British and French appeasement of Hitler’s aggression and a failed general strike in November precipitated the end of the Popular Front. Right-wing politicians adopted the stance of “better Hitler than Blum,” preferring cooperation with France’s fascist neighbor to the leadership of figures supposedly in thrall to the Soviet Union. Some historians have also focused on the figure of Blum, criticizing his policies and, in particular, his failure to intervene in Spain. Others highlight the difficulties of balancing such a diverse coalition and the impossible decisions he faced (Berstein 2006). The substantial mobilization across society during the Popular Front years and the innovative solutions mustered to address overwhelming modern problems produced a lasting impact in France. The Popular Front, and the radical right-wing groups to which it responded, catalyzed many new developments. The impact of the 1930s was, in fact, so deep that both the collaborationist Vichy state and the new government arising after the Liberation – opposing sides in a French civil war – sought to emulate the experiments of the Popular Front (Ory 2016). Though the economic crisis eroded gains made by workers during the largest strike wave in French history, from that moment on, workers were a sizable force in politics. In many ways, the social and cultural momentum of the Popular Front led to the upheavals of 1968. In that turbulent year, social mobilization was again closely linked to cultural dynamism. The local mobilization without which the Popular Front would not have existed also made a mark on policies of the following years. The attitude of the French state toward leisure during the twentieth century owes much to the antifascist movement, as government policy aimed to reach into and empower local communities. Even where the Popular Front itself failed to gain as much ground as expected during the hopeful antifascist moment of 1935–1937, it precipitated later successes. The political engagement of women during the Popular Front laid the groundwork for their political emancipation after the war, and the experiences of the antifascist movement contributed to the successful campaigns for decolonization that characterized the post-war period (Jacquemond 2016). The fractures undermining the Popular Front themselves produced new political ideologies that would exemplify subsequent decades, such as Christian democracy, which arose from the splintering of the Radical Party. Indeed, historians should now move beyond debating the Popular Front’s successes and failures and focus on the way it connected with many different identities. Antifascism embraced and combined multiple French traditions, which explains why it promoted the unity of the Left while also exacerbating national division. The 1930s pitted against one another incompatible visions of France, and the resulting strife launched France into the turbulent twentieth century.

Bibliography Berstein, Serge. 2006. Léon Blum. Paris: Fayard. Brower, Daniel. 1968. The New Jacobins: The French Communist Party and the Popular Front. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Campbell, Caroline. 2015. Political Belief in France, 1927–1945: Gender, Empire, and Fascism in the Croix de feu and Parti social français. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

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Mattie Fitch Dell, Simon. 2007. The Image of the Popular Front: The Masses and the Media in Interwar France. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Drew, Allison. 2014. We Are No Longer in France: Communists in Colonial Algeria. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Fulcher, Jane. 2005. Composer as Intellectual: Music and Ideology in France, 1914–1940. New York: Oxford University Press. Greene, Nathanael. 1969. Crisis and Decline: The French Socialist Party in the Popular Front Era. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Jackson, Julian. 1988. The Popular Front in France: Defending Democracy, 1934–38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jacquemond, Louis-Pascal. 2016. L’Espoir brisé: 1936, les femmes et le Front populaire. Paris: Belin. Julliard, Jacques. 2012. Les Gauches Françaises, 1762–2012: Histoire, politique, et imaginaire. Paris: Flammarion. Kennedy, Sean. 2007. Reconciling France Against Democracy: The Croix de Feu and the Parti Social Français, 1927–1945. Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Lebovics, Herman. 1994. True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900–1945. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Millington, Chris. 2018. Fighting for France: Violence in Interwar French Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nord, Philip. 2010. France’s New Deal: From the Thirties to the Liberation. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ory, Pascal. 2016. La belle illusion: culture et politique sous le signe du Front populaire, 1935–1938. Paris: CNRS Editions. Passmore, Kevin. 2014. “Crowd Psychology, Anti-Southern Prejudice, and Constitutional Reform in 1930s France: The Stavisky Affair and the Riots of 6 February  1934.” In The French Right Between the Wars: Political and Intellectual Movements from Conservatism to Fascism, edited by Samuel Kalman and Sean Kennedy, 25–47. New York: Berghahn Books. Peer, Shanny. 1998. France on Display: Peasants, Provincials, and Folklore in the 1937 Paris World’s Fair. Albany: State University of New York Press. Prost, Antoine. 2002. “The Strikes of 1936: The Occupation of Factories and the Decline of Deference.” In Republican Identities in War and Peace, 311–38. Oxford: Berg. Rousso, Henry. 1994. The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sanos, Sandrine. 2013. The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism, and Gender in 1930s France. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Scales, Rebecca. 2016. Radio and the Politics of Sound in Interwar France, 1921–39. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seidman, Michael. 2018. Transatlantic Antifascisms: From the Spanish Civil War to the End of World War II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Soucy, Robert. 1997. French Fascism: The Second Wave, 1933–1939. New Haven: Yale University Press. Sternhell, Zeev. 1996. Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Underwood, Nick. 2022. Yiddish Paris: Staging Nation and Community in Interwar France. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Vergnon, Gilles. 2009. L’antifascisme en France de Mussolini à Le Pen. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Vigreux, Jean. 2016. Histoire du Front populaire: L’échappée belle. Paris: Tallandier. Wardhaugh, Jessica. 2009. In Pursuit of the People: Political Culture in France, 1934–39. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Whitney, Susan B. 2009. Mobilizing Youth: Communists and Catholics in Interwar France. Durham: Duke University Press. Winter, J. M. 2006. “1937: Illuminations.” In Dreams of Peace and Freedom: Utopian Moments in the Twentieth Century, 75–98. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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49 THE BRAZZAVILLE CONFERENCE AND THE FUTURE OF FRENCH COLONIALISM IN AFRICA Danielle Porter Sanchez Historians and scholars of French colonialism and Africa frequently cite the Brazzaville Conference of 1944 as an important moment of reckoning for France, as administrators formally met to discuss the future of French colonialism in Africa. However, such mentions are often confined to basic facts: no Africans were present, forced labor was a major concern, and culturally assimilated Africans, the évolués, were designated to have a larger future role in French institutions (Cooper 2002, 40–41; Adekunle 2002, 205; Crowder 1968, 500–1; Jennings 2015). This chapter explores the intricacies of the Brazzaville Conference and its implications in French, French colonial, and African histories and examines the geopolitical climate that led to the decision to organize a colonial conference, key discussions during the summit, the ways Africans engaged with the conference, and global responses to the gathering. The Brazzaville Conference emerged out of the larger context of the Second World War. Toward the end of the long process of launching the Free France/France Combattante movement, gaining international legitimacy, and recovering colonial territories from Vichy France, Charles de Gaulle, loyalist French politicians, and colonial administrators found themselves in a fraught conversation about the continuation of France’s empire. By 1943, politicians and administrators were fervently engaged in public and private conversations on the future of France’s relationships with her colonies. R. von Albertini argues that external pressure from other global power, uprisings elsewhere in the French Empire, and frustrations with wartime labor policies in French Africa chipped away at France’s strength, which ultimately led to a moment of reckoning and the need for an open discussion of the future of French colonialism in Africa (Von Albertini 1971, 364). While de Gaulle recognized the contributions of France’s colonies to the war effort and understood that a “new definition of the relationships between empire and the metropole” was necessary, France’s moral debt to her African colonies was not the main driving force behind the conference: the wartime contributions of the empire did not guarantee restorative justice or meaningful colonial reform in the immediate future (Lévy 1988, 26–27). The French Empire did not exist within a vacuum, and the theme of imperialism dominated conversations among political leaders around the world. While the Allied war aims set out in the Atlantic Charter agreed upon by Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt 533

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in August 1941 did not explicitly extend the tenet of freedom from imperialism to populations under Allied colonial rule, Africans quickly latched on to the statement of such goals, which Free France formally adopted on September 24, 1941. British and French administrators and politicians throughout the world quickly clarified that the Atlantic Charter did not pertain to their colonies; instead, it was a rebuke of German and Italian imperialism and fascism (Jacobs 2014, 298). Nonetheless, pressure from the Anglophone powers heavily influenced France’s decision to hold a formal conference to discuss the future of French colonialism in Africa and thus “face the challenge of the Atlantic Charter through a demonstration of the liberal and democratic spirit in the colonial domain” (Ageron 1988, 30). The relationship between France and North Africa, specifically Algeria, also intensified conversations about the future of France and the French Empire. The continued role of France in Algeria vexed administrators, French settlers, Algerians, and political parties during the early 1940s. In fact, Geoffroy de Courcel, an administrator in France’s provisional government with extensive wartime experience in North Africa, posited it was possible that Charles de Gaulle, president of the French Committee of National Liberation (CFLN), which was based out of Algiers in 1943, was afraid that changes in colonial structures in French Equatorial Africa (FEA) and French West Africa (FWA) could drive North Africans to demand reform in the protectorate system that could lead to independence (De Courcel 1988, 13). He also noted that French settlers, concerned by rumored changes, were considering severing ties between France and Algeria to create a segregationist system comparable to South Africa, an idea that de Gaulle believed would not be dignified by France (De Courcel 1988, 13). Events in Indochina further complicated matters. Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin discussed the future of France and its empire during the November 1943 Tehran Conference, in which Stalin argued that Indochina should not return to the French colonial ruling system and noted that the Japanese at least gave minimal liberties to its wartime imperial holdings. Roosevelt stated that Indochina had only regressed after 100 years of French rule (Foreign Relations 1961, 485). Such a rebuke by two major world leaders certainly influenced the way that de Gaulle approached colonial policy decisions in 1943. In the weeks preceding the Brazzaville Conference, de Gaulle attempted to assuage tensions in Algeria and Indochina. He announced the expansion of rights for Algerian elites, including French citizenship, voting rights, and representation in the French Assemblies. He also issued the Declaration on Indochina, which enhanced social services like education and offered greater opportunities for employment (after a future liberation from the Japanese). According to Dorothy White, the 1943 Declaration “accorded greater liberty to the Indochinese people in line with their own traditions” (White 1976, 56). These decisions occurred after years of organizing, work, and protests in Algeria and Indochina, including Ferhat Abbas’s 1943 “Manifesto of the Algerian People,” which starkly demanded equality and the right to self-determination (Derrick 2005, 100).

The Conference Begins: Conservative Approaches to a New Colonial Climate The opening convocation of the Brazzaville Conference symbolically coincided with the unveiling of a statue that honored Savorgnan de Brazza, the Italian explorer who traipsed Central Africa in the 1870s and 1880s, crafted and secured treaties for France in the region, built a station for France on the Congo River that developed into the city of Brazzaville, and eventually became the governor of French Congo from 1886 to 1897 (Conférence Africaine 534

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Française 1945, 9). The decision to honor the “founder” of Brazzaville and the colonial state of French Congo during the 1944 colonial conference was telling: France’s colonial past would be firmly entrenched in its present and future, and the monument was a visual marker of this reality. The composition of the decision-makers at the Brazzaville Conference reflected the conservative approach to colonial reform in Africa. René Pleven, the president of the conference and the commissioner for the colonies in the French Committee of National Liberation (CFLN), did not invite any African representatives to participate in the colonial summit. Félix Eboué, the Guianese Governor General of French Equatorial Africa (AEF), and Michel Raphael  Saller were the sole people of African descent who participated in the conference, on the basis of their high rank in the colonial administration, not their origins. For the most part, decision-makers were governors and administrators in French Africa. Forty additional participants attended the conference in a consultative capacity, including 22 functionaries who served as “colonial experts”; 9 individuals from the Assemblée Consultative Provisoire, the French Assembly that represented the Allied-aligned resistance movements, political parties, and territories under the leadership of the CFLN, 6 observers from the administrations in Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco; and the heads of the Brazzaville and Cameroon Chambers of Commerce (Conférence Africaine Française 1945, 10–14). Officials led commissions tasked with addressing social customs and labor, economic affairs, administrative reforms, education, public health, personnel, and customs duties. While Charles de Gaulle stressed the significance of Africa during the war in his opening address, the conference’s approach to colonial reform was quite limited. Immediate equality and the right to self-determination for Africans were not topics of conversation for participants. Rather, conference participants had the difficult task of expressing a need for change while also stifling concrete steps to bring about drastic reforms. De Gaulle even stated in his opening address that the French nation had to be the one to proceed with imperial reforms and that France “will decide in her sovereignty,” which meant that official reforms could not even happen until after the total liberation of France. The most pressing issue of the conference was the organization of the French Empire. Administrators like Laurentie and Eboué recognized that a future of autonomy was inextricably bound to French ideas of progress and evolution. Participants thought a colonial system that offered more opportunities for Africans in local and regional administrations could eventually lead to greater African control over their respective lands; however, they also believed that this scaffolded process was in the very early stages in French Africa (Ageron 1988, 35). Thus, French colonial administrators and politicians debated potential governing and representative structures for their colonies in somewhat-abstract terms, ranging from complete metropolitan control to a flexible representation system that reflected the diversity of individual African colonies (Ageron 1988, 35–36). Independence from colonial rule was not an option that participants considered, and administrators emphasized “the eventual formation, even in the distant future, of self-­ governments in the colonies is to be ruled out” (Conférence Africaine Française 1945, 32). Participants acknowledged the role of the colonies in the ongoing wartime effort and noted that the colonies should be represented in a future assembly that would eventually write a new French constitution, but they skirted any specific suggestions on the form of future structures (Conférence Africaine Française 1945, 33). Despite the promising tone of the Conference’s recommendation, as a purely consultative body, it could not point directly toward a future of increased political rights for Africans in France’s colonies. 535

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Still, participants in the Brazzaville Conference did discuss potential forms of representation for elite Africans. Officials claimed there was a need to create “ways of political expression” that allow Africans to “lean on both European and African sides” (Conférence Africaine Française 1945, 35). They recommended that regional and subdivision councils, including notable “natives,” should replace current consultative organizations, and that these new entities would use the support of local “existing traditional institutions” (Conférence Africaine Française 1945, 35). Furthermore, participants encouraged the creation of representative assemblies that would consist of both African and European members. Both bodies would depend upon elections, which officials argued should be by universal suffrage when and where possible (Conférence Africaine Française 1945, 35). In contrast to the councils, assemblies would have more “deliberative” power, and they would consider pressing issues like budgets and legislation in their respective colonies. Governors, however, retained the power to appoint European and African members to assemblies, which ultimately undermined the notion of representative participation in colonial politics (Conférence Africaine Française 1945, 35). Perhaps the most pressing concerns outside of representation were race, labor, and leadership in French Africa. Conference participants emphasized the necessity of progressively reserving positions for African locals, or indigènes, and eventually ensuring diverse representation in colonial leadership positions, allegedly on the basis of equality through “equal competence” and “equal compensation” (Conférence Africaine Française 1945, 37). However, systemic barriers that would have prevented Africans from accessing this proposed “equality” were not addressed. While closing their eyes to the major systemic issues that plagued French colonial politics, some administrators believed it was essential to research methods to evolve the masses toward the alleged goal of assimilation and political participation. Ultimately, participants recommended maintaining a place for traditional political institutions, the continued role of the administration in controlling the functioning of these institutions, and their “evolution toward the rapid accession of natives to political responsibility” (Conférence Africaine Française 1945, 40). Administrators grappled with the role of such traditional institutions while seeing local customs as social issues that needed to be addressed. Participants in the conference weighed in on dowry practices, consent of women in marriages, monogamy, and divorce. Officials ultimately acknowledged that “the black family represents an element of stability in the social order” and that “it would be imprudent to infringe upon it” (Conférence Africaine Française 1945, 41). Yet they also recommended introducing “the notion of the freedom of marriage which clearly means the freedom of women” (Conférence Africaine Française 1945, 41). Similarly, officials recommended that local authorities should intervene in dowry practices, consent, polygyny, and “marriage fraud” in an effort to strengthen women’s rights (Conférence Africaine Française 1945, 41). Officials were particularly concerned with polygyny, which they labelled the “scourge of Black Africa” (Conférence Africaine Française 1945, 41). Their vague discussions of consent and polygyny did not capture nuances and diversity among African societies and reflected racist tropes that heavily influenced colonial politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. French colonial administrators consistently debated and tried to alter conjugal and marital relationship practices in Africa from the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century (Jean-Baptiste 2011; Zimmerman 2020). More decisively, officials recommended that “the progressive suppression of the ordinary penalties of the indigénat must be assured after the end of the wartime hostilities” 536

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(Conférence Africaine Française 1945, 43). Cutting down on the indigénat, the abusive and prejudiced penal code adopted by the French in Africa from the late nineteenth century, offered the potential of a brighter future. However, the phrasing of the suggestion reminds us that administrators were not interested in relinquishing the power of the indigénat quite yet. Indigénat penalties served a continuing role in forcing compliance from populations uninterested in following orders from the French in their daily lives. To tackle such alienation, conference participants noted the necessity of “adequate education” that would bolster “progress in the moral and material order of native populations” (Conférence Africaine Française 1945, 43). The proposed educational system would have both intellectual and practical educational offerings, to give the masses “the recipe of a more productive, healthy, and better life,” and to provide a “secure and rapid” elevation of African professionals in the colonies (Conférence Africaine Française 1945, 43). As a result, participants recommended opening professional schools, “higher primary schools,” and establishments of specialized education, all of which would be “necessary for the formation of native elites who must be called to fulfill more and more jobs in commerce, industry, and administration” (Conférence Africaine Française 1945, 44). Yet participants did not think that African voices should contribute to the development of these educational systems, particularly in setting educational priorities and outcomes. Labor was a major concern for participants in the Brazzaville Conference. Administrators noted that there “was not a unanimous opinion to affirm the absolute superiority of the freedom of labor: a maximum delay of five years will be assigned to local authorities for its reestablishment” (Conférence Africaine Française 1945, 45). In a context where conscription to forced labor was normalized, officials framed their weighing of the future of labor and workers’ rights around a single question: “How to reconcile the necessity of functioning and developing existing and future agricultural exploitation, mining, forestry work, and actual or eventual industries with the double obligation of maintaining the good order of native society and assuring repopulation?” (Conférence Africaine Française 1945, 44). This question reveals the tensions between the prioritization of output and the potential for more humane working conditions in French Africa. Administrators argued that free labor could not truly exist until there was sensible relief in the moral and material condition of work . . . the increase of salaries, the organization of apprenticeships, and the development of professional training with the education of the responsibility that it carries, the way of being drawn toward work and satisfying their dignity and needs. (Conférence Africaine Française 1945, 44) The solution to the issue of balancing labor demands with humane working conditions came in the form of a recommendation for a two-pronged system that would ideally expand workers’ rights while also securing cheap and obligatory labor in France’s African colonies. The official proceedings detail the necessity of an eight-hour workday, weekly days of rest, the institution of retirement savings, and protection of religious freedom for Christians, Muslims, and “fetichistes” (Conférence Africaine Française 1945, 45–46). At the same time, officials also proposed the institution of mandatory labor for 20- to 21-yearold “natives” (Conférence Africaine Française 1945, 45). The only possible exemptions administrators proposed were for people who were already participating in the military or

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individuals who could prove that they had worked for a private employer for at least 18 months (Conférence Africaine Française 1945, 45). Little came of the Conference’s more progressive suggestions, and labor issues became increasingly fraught in the late 1940s and early 1950s. African workers participated in widespread strikes, demanding better working conditions and equal pay and benefits with French workers (Cooper 1996, 225–71). By the 1950s, it became clear that France had no interest in such equalization, arguing that the African colonies could finance the cost of those campaigns themselves. This raises the question of why French officials in 1944 were proposing improved salaries and workers’ rights if they were not actually interested in paying for or instituting these changes. French rhetoric surrounding working conditions emerged from the contest between Free France (or France Combattante) and Vichy France. After the Fall of France and the establishment of Afrique Française Libre, propaganda from both sides sought to delegitimize and destabilize the other while downplaying their own violent abuses in their colonies. From the outset of the Brazzaville Conference, both de Gaulle and Governor General Félix Eboué recognized the necessity of outwardly acknowledging the role of the colonies in the war effort, inspiring loyalty to France, and showing that they were thinking about the future of the French Empire. In this context, it is impossible to take their recommendations to improve working conditions as anything more than propaganda, especially when coupled with the suggestions for revised forms of forced labor.

Beyond the Conference Hall: Engaging with the Brazzaville Conference in Local, Regional, and Global Contexts In the decades that followed the Brazzaville Conference, a myth emerged that transformed a seemingly lackluster conference into a miraculous turning point in French colonial politics. Jacques Marseille emphasizes the conference’s ideological struggle between “principles of Jacobin assimilation” and “a free federation where metropole and possessions would be associated on equal footing” and also critiques the lackluster outcome of the conference: the birth of “a blurry program, general on the sanitary and educational plans, timid on economic and political plans, and maintaining for five years the SOT (forced labor) in the colony” (Marseille 1987, 109–10). In addition to noting the impotence of the conference, Marseille also dives into the creation of the myth of the Brazzaville Conference as a powerful moment of change: It was not until 1958 that the myth of Brazzaville actually arose, the myth of a conference which would have announced the death of the former colonial regime, the myth of a man who understood before others the meaning of necessary evolutions, the myth of “the man of Brazzaville.” (Marseille 1987, 109) Unlike Marseille, Paul Isoart argues that the “Gaullian myth of Brazzaville” emerged in 1984, when the Comité paritaire Afrique-Caraïbes-Pacifique-Communauté économique européene (ACP-CEE) declared that Charles de Gaulle was vocally in favor of decolonization at the 1944 Brazzaville Conference (Isoart 1988, 79). Isoart debunks the Gaullian myth of Brazzaville by painstakingly recreating debates that occurred during the colonial conference. Recognizing that de Gaulle conceived of the Brazzaville Conference as a place 538

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to discuss evolution and “structural imperial reform,” Isoart insists that the main question we must ask is what that tangibly meant for people living in French colonial Africa (Isoart 1988, 81). The Conference’s general program faced a crucial contradiction between the desire for France to “exercise political power with precision and rigor in all of the land of its empire” and allowing the colonies to have plenty of flexibility in administrative and economic matters (Isoart 1988, 83). Isoart contends that much of the shortcomings of the Brazzaville Conference stem from these contradictions. While Isoart and Marseille’s arguments about the “myth” of the Brazzaville Conference certainly reflect the shortcomings of the summit, it is also worth considering the ways the Brazzaville Conference did empower Africans to advocate for reform in the years that followed. The event led to a flurry of formal and informal conversations about the future. While Africans could not formally participate in the Brazzaville Conference, Zan Semi-Bi argues that Senegalese évolués were well-informed and closely followed the conference by listening to radio broadcasts and reading reports in the Paris-Dakar newspaper (Semi-Bi 1988, 241). Thus, many in FWA came to feel that the conference had an impact on the rise of nationalism in the region (Semi-Bi 1988, 243). African intellectuals internalized the historical moment in ways that extended beyond the lukewarm official outcomes; some perceived the conference as an apology for colonialism, while others saw it as a push for tangible changes in colonial policies. For example, Semi-Bi discusses Joseph Anoma, who “attributed to the Brazzaville Conference a decisive role in the creation in Côte d’Ivoire in 1944, of an African agricultural trade union” through the suppression of forced labor (Semi-Bi 1988, 243). Almost a decade before Michel-Rolph Trouillot wrote his widely acclaimed opus, Silencing the Past, Congolese historian Elikia M’Bokolo delved into the categories of historical silences during the Brazzaville Conference: 1. [T]he largest portion- those who knew nothing about it and were to learn only the stereotyped version popularized beginning in August 1958. 2. [T]he silence of those who, well informed of the event, refused to talk about it because nowhere did they see the change that they pretended to inaugurate; this was the case for the Lari for whom, before and after Brazzaville, the colonial regime reduced to pure and simple repression. 3. [T]he silence of those who knew of the event, but no longer saw the importance of it either because they were overwhelmed by the course of events, or because they themselves were occupied with other priorities. (M’Bokolo 1988, 251) M’Bokolo’s acknowledgment of the silences surrounding African voices is significant because it grapples with the complexities of life before, during, and after the Brazzaville Conference. Their silences were not simply because of ignorance, as some would believe; rather, these silences were deep and multifaceted, caused by indoctrination, disbelief, skepticism, and the violence of daily life in AEF. Still, a few Africans were able to present their ideas to participants in the Brazzaville Conference. The French Ministry of Colonies released a volume, Conférence Africaine Française: Brazzaville, 30 Janvier 1944–8 Février 1944, shortly after the conclusion of the conference, including essays written by évolués that Félix Eboué had presented to participants. While some of their essays addressed issues like gender equality in educational 539

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environments (Cercle des Evolués 1945b) and the need for stronger research and understandings of local practices and customs (Cercle des Evolués 1945a), their most important contributions were musings on citizenship and African societies. The Cercle des Evolués of Brazzaville wrote a nuanced essay that focused on assimilation and “citizenship of empire” that could offer rights that were in line with France’s approach to metropolitan civil and political rights for its citizens. As the Cercle pondered the future, they saw the juxtaposition of autonomy and assimilation as the critical question facing France and Africa. They noted that instead of “complete emancipation by autonomy, the elite of French Equatorial Africa are for free integration into the colonizing people through assimilation” (Cercle des Evolués 1945c, 97). The Cercle, a cadre of socially prominent urban évolués, thus made the case for a one-directional assimilation, with Africans working to achieve the aspirational summit of French culture and modernity while casting off their own cultural histories and practices. While this may seem to contradict another essay they wrote that argued that administrators should respect local customs, the authors were in conversation with Eboué and supported his idea of a bifurcated system, aiming to produce educated African elites while also emphasizing the importance and value of traditional cultures and authorities for others (Eboué 1943, 39–66). The Cercle advocated for the extension of expanded rights to Africans by outlining a two-step program that would ideally benefit everyone in the French Empire. The first step toward expanded rights focused on offering “citizenship of empire” to Africans in France’s colonies, which would offer them the same “civil and political rights as French citizens in Europe, but their political rights would be exclusively limited to the colonies” (Cercle des Evolués 1945c, 97). The Cercle immediately undermined the power of its initial proposition by creating a caveat: assimilation would be a prerequisite for this new category of citizenship. While they acknowledged that all French people had citizenship rights and that the same standards should exist in people in France’s colonies, the Cercle posited that the “diversity of the degree of evolution of populations in France’s colonies” necessitated the limitation of these rights outside of metropolitan France. (Cercle des Evolués 1945c, 97–98). The Cercle’s argument for “citizenship of empire” for assimilated Africans was not entirely surprising or original; rather, it was an outgrowth of racist ideologies of progress, modernity, and civilization that justified European conquest and the creation, maintenance, and expansion of colonial rule in Africa. Yet the Cercle’s ideology was noteworthy because of their seemingly incongruent insistence for both cultural sensitivity and “citizenship of empire” through the process of assimilation, which was strikingly similar to Eboué’s proposals in the early 1940s. Moreover, “citizenship of empire” was not the end goal for the Cercle des Evolués. They also argued that the next step should be full French citizenship that would extend beyond the colonies. The Cercle noted that this was something that would only be granted to “particularly deserving individuals” (Cercle des Evolués 1945c, 98). Jean-Rémy Ayouné also grappled with the meaning of civilization in his essay. Ayouné juxtaposed “more advanced civilizations” that were constantly improving and other “embryonic societies”; the relationships between advanced and embryonic societies led to Ayouné’s assertion of the need for colonization, which he defined as “the act by which man seeks to establish vital equilibrium between all groups forming humanity” (Ayouné 1945, 91). Ayouné’s understanding of civilization relied on racist tropes he peddled in his own voice as an évolué, ignoring the sophisticated histories of African civilizations, societies, 540

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and cultures. While Ayouné presented three different ranks of societies that Europeans encountered in Africa – the “backwards” societies with “no neatly defined institutions”; the lands that had “a draft of civilization . . . but not sufficient enough to classify it among the civilized countries”; and societies that “already possesses all of the institutions which characterize the civilized countries” – he did not include a category that referenced any African societies that met the standard of civilization set by Western powers (Ayouné 1945, 92). Each of Ayouné’s categories required substantial and sustained colonial intervention, which ultimately bolstered arguments against greater autonomy among participants at the Brazzaville Conference. Perhaps most troubling, Ayouné never considered why the region was still in the early stages of “progress” after decades of French rule. Ayouné argued for the “integral extension in Africa of Western civilization,” but did not interrogate the ways that Western “civilization” had already asserted itself in Africa through state-sponsored labor abuses, genocide, land exploitation, environmental degradation, sexual violence, and more (Ayouné 1945, 92–93). Similar to Ayouné, Fily Dabo Sissoko, a well-known writer and political leader in French Soudan before and after independence, believed that civilized nations had the responsibility to colonize less-civilized societies (Sissoko 1945, 98). Sissoko engaged with writings by Waldeck-Rousseau, Izoulet, and Ousmane Socé, in addition to FWA colonial administrative reports to ultimately argue something very different from the Cercle and Ayouné: uniformly forcing French culture on Africans would end in failure because it would lead to “intellectual hybridization” (Sissoko 1945, 105). Sissoko’s intervention reflected his belief in the importance of certain aspects of African history and cultures: Africans needed to be stakeholders and active agents in their own evolution, and that “Blacks [should] stay Black,” while Europeans should work to evolve Africans according to “their own Black line of evolution” (Sissoko 1945, 105). The strongest connection between each of these essays can be found in what they do not say: that immediate independence was necessary. The Cercle, Ayouné, and Sissoko argued for a continued place for France in Africa, although each of their detailed visions of that shared future varied significantly. While their respective critiques of assimilation, adaptation, and association differed, Brazzaville’s Cercle, Ayouné, and Sissoko were all members of an elite class who collaborated with the colonial state and had the resources, skills, and positions in colonial society to be able to share their views with influential figures like Félix Eboué. Their educational backgrounds, wealth, and gender offered privileges that laborers, market women, and others could not access. Thus, the sole African voices “present” at the Brazzaville Conference were not only limited to pre-selected essays but also confined to the stodgy male class of évolués who wanted to maintain and expand their privilege in their households, communities, colonial society, and the French world. Their writings tell us a great deal about their beliefs and desires for the future, but also the nature of reform that Félix Eboué felt comfortable sharing at the Brazzaville Conference with other colonial administrators and stakeholders in 1944. In the global context, the conservative nature of these ideas stood in sharp contrast to ideas presented most notably by African nationalists at the Manchester Pan-African Congress in 1945 (Padmore 1972). Félix Eboué died on May 17, 1944, a few months after the Brazzaville Conference concluded. Intellectuals, journalists, and political leaders from around the world weighed in on his legacy, particularly because of international interest surrounding the Brazzaville Conference. The Council on African Affairs issued a press release that detailed correspondence between its chairman, Paul Robeson, and Charles de Gaulle. Robeson and de Gaulle 541

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discussed the legacy of both Eboué and the Conference itself. Robeson’s initial telegram to de Gaulle lauded the “progressive measures and outlook for the French colonies” which have taken shape under the free French administration, and declared, “We look to France to play a prominent role in the fulfillment of the democratic aims of the United Nations with respect to the colonial people of Africa and other areas.”1 In response to Robeson’s telegram, de Gaulle proclaimed, “Our aim and objective is to establish these peoples within a federated system of the new France. The Brazzaville Conference marked the first step in that direction. Liberated France will be the France of liberty.”2 In 1945, Léopold Sédar Senghor wrote an article in Le Phare de Dahomey, a political newspaper based out of Cotonou, that detailed the lack of political progress in France’s African colonies. Senghor argued that the governors who participated in the Brazzaville Conference asked for more independence for the colonies, and “[i]n leaving Brazzaville, the governors received instructions recommending to them to not wait for the vote of the new French constitution to proceed with reforms in the spirit of the conference” (Senghor 1945, 1). Senghor’s claim here reflects ambiguity surrounding the conference despite the official line that its outcomes were merely non-binding recommendations. Nevertheless, Senghor applauded the governor general of Madagascar and Félix Éboué for doing their “best,” while administrators and governors in AOF and Togo made no political reform efforts. In 1945, a select number of Africans gained the right to vote in elections, and approximately 20 Africans earned seats in the French legislature (Cooper 2002, 41). In this capacity, Amadou Lamine-Guèye, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and others travelled to Paris and pushed for meaningful changes, including the immediate abolition of forced labor and ending the distinction between citoyen and sujet, a significant feat that would ultimately offer Africans greater legal protections, which they were able to push through the French legislature in 1946. Growing labor movements in FWA, especially in Dakar in 1946, led to major strikes that called for increased wages and better benefits. The labor movement continued to grow in the late 1940s and early 1950s as African workers and civil servants pushed for equality (Cooper 1996, 225–322). The Brazzaville Conference did not officially sanction the emergence of African debates about colonial reform or strikes in post-war Dakar, but it unofficially launched a new era of thinking about francophone Africa’s future, which meant something different to each person living in France’s African colonies. One may easily debunk the “myth” of the Brazzaville Conference, but the impact on the ways that many Africans imagined a new future after 1944 is much harder to discredit. Even though the administrators that participated in the Brazzaville Conference asserted that self-governance was not an option in the near or distant future, Guinea-Conakry received independence in 1958, and more francophone African nations gained independence in the 1960s. While administrators emphasized the consultative nature of the conference and the legalities surrounding colonial reform that connected the metropole to individual colonies, the short period of time between 1944 and 1960, the Year of Africa, reminds us of rapid post-war political, social, and economic transformations in Africa that paved the way to independence.

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Notes 1 “De Gaulle Answers Greeting; Lauds Governor Eboué,” July 13, 1944. ANOM GGAEF 5D187. Sept 5, 147. 2 “De Gaulle Answers Greeting; Lauds Governor Eboué,” July 13, 1944. ANOM GGAEF 5D187.

References Adekunle, Julius. 2002. “Social and Religious Changes.” In Africa, Volume 4. The End of Colonial Rule: Nationalism and Decolonization, edited by Toyin Falola, 185–209. Durham: Carolina Academic Press. Ageron, Charles-Robert. 1988. “La préparation de la conférence de Brazzaville et ses enseignements.” In Institut Charles de Gaulle/Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent, Brazzaville, Janvier-Février 1944: Aux sources de la décolonisation, 29–41. Paris: Plon. Ayouné, Jean-Rémy. 1945. “Occidentalisme et Africanisme.” In Conférence Africaine Française: Brazzaville, 30 Janvier 1944–8 Février 1944, 89–97. Paris: Ministère des Colonies. Cercle, des Evolués. 1945a. “Des coutumes.” In Conférence Africaine Française: Brazzaville, 30 Janvier 1944–8 Février 1944, 88–89. Paris: Ministère des Colonies. ———. 1945b. “Evolution des femmes.” In Conférence Africaine Française: Brazzaville, 30 Janvier 1944–8 Février 1944, 88. Paris: Ministère des Colonies. ———. 1945c. “Statuts.” In Conférence Africaine Française: Brazzaville, 30 Janvier 1944–8 Février 1944, 97–98. Paris: Ministère des Colonies. Conférence Africaine Française: Brazzaville, 30 Janvier 1944–8 Février 1944. 1945. Paris: Ministère des Colonies. Cooper, Frederick. 1996. Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2002. Africa Since 1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crowder, Michael. 1968. West Africa Under Colonial Rule. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. De Courcel, Geoffroy. 1988. “Allocution d’ouverture.” In Institut Charles de Gaulle/Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent, Brazzaville, Janvier-Février 1944: Aux sources de la décolonisation, 11–16. Paris: Plon. Derrick, Jonathan. 2005. “Algeria: Nationalism and Reform.” In Encyclopedia of African History, Volume 1, edited by Kevin Shillington, 99–101. New York: Taylor and Francis. Eboué, Félix. 1943. “Memorandum on Native Policy.” Sudan Notes and Records 25 (2): 39–66. www.jstor.org/stable/41716476. Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers, The Conferences at Cairo and Tehran, 1943. 1961. Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office. Isoart, Paul. 1988. “Les aspects politiques, constitutionnels et administratifs des recommandations.” In Institut Charles de Gaulle/Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent, Brazzaville, Janvier-Février 1944: Aux sources de la décolonisation, 79–96. Paris: Plon. Jacobs, Nancy. 2014. African History Through Sources: Volume 1, Colonial Contexts and Everyday Experiences, c. 1850–1946. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jean-Baptiste, Rachel. 2011. “ ‘Miss Eurafrica’: Men Women’s Sexuality, and Métis Identity in Late Colonial French Africa, 1945–1960.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 20 (3) (September): 568–93. Jennings, Eric. 2015. Free French Africa in World War II: The African Resistance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lévy, Claude. 1988. “Les origins de la Conférence de Brazzaville, le context et la decision.” In Institut Charles de Gaulle/Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent, Brazzaville, Janvier-Février 1944: Aux sources de la décolonisation, 21–29. Paris: Plon. Marseille, Jacques. 1987. “Le conférence de Brazzaville et son mythe.” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire 16 (October–December): 109–10. M’bokolo, Elikia.1988. “La reception des principes de Brazzaville par les populations Africaines en AEF.” In Institut Charles de Gaulle/Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent, Brazzaville, JanvierFévrier 1944: Aux sources de la décolonisation, 246–252. Paris: Plon.

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50 THE ATOMIC REPUBLIC Nuclear France Since 1958 Roxanne Panchasi

The history of the French Fifth Republic has been crowded with nuclear reactions. In both civilian and military contexts, the fission and fusion of chemical elements (uranium, plutonium, hydrogen) have generated enormous amounts of energy, sometimes with profoundly harmful results. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, more than 70% of France’s electricity was derived from nuclear power (the highest percentage of any country), and France had accumulated one of the largest nuclear weapons arsenals in the world. This chapter provides an overview of France in the nuclear age from 1958 to the present. Deeply imbricated from the end of the Second World War, the nation’s civilian and military nuclear programs have shaped, and been affected by, the economic, political, military, and cultural transformations of the post-1945 era. Debates about France’s nuclear history, including concerns about energy, disarmament, and the legacies of the nation’s nuclear weapons experiments in empire, continue to play significant roles in contemporary French politics and culture. Well before the Fifth Republic’s inauguration in 1958, France had established itself as an important international center of nuclear scientific knowledge. From the late nineteenth century, figures like Henri Becquerel, Marie Sklodowska-Curie, and Pierre Curie had made crucial discoveries in the study of radioactivity, going on to share the Nobel Prize in physics for their work in 1903. The Curies, their daughter Irène, and her husband, Frédéric JoliotCurie, built upon these early foundations, taking on the leadership of L’Institut du Radium (now part of the Institut Curie), founded in Paris in 1909. The Curies made important contributions to the fields of medicine, geology, and chemistry over a period of decades, including the discovery of two new radioactive elements: polonium and radium. Working with physicist Lew Kowarski, Joliot-Curie also conducted experiments in nuclear fission just before the Second World War, a key step toward provoking and sustaining the chain reactions necessary for the generation of nuclear power and the production of nuclear weapons (Weart 1979; Mongin 2011). After the outbreak of war in Europe in September 1939, some French scientists focused on finding nuclear energy solutions for the nation at arms. Others like Kowarski, Hans von Halban, and Bertrand Goldschmidt joined teams in Britain, the United States, and Canada, pursuing military applications, including the “Manhattan Project” to develop the 545

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first atomic bomb. On August 6 and 9, 1945, the United States deployed two of these new weapons of mass destruction in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with devastating consequences for both Japanese cities. Wartime defeat, the years of German occupation, and internal division after 1940 had slowed France’s development in the nuclear realm, but the end of the Second World War marked the beginning of a new atomic era (Weart 1979; Goldschmidt 1990). France’s nuclear program was a privileged field in the “struggle to define Frenchness in the postwar world” (Hecht 1998, 3). A key pathway to France’s reinvigoration as a global power, atomic energy became a locus for the interchange of technology and politics and the reimagination of national “radiance” in an era of imperial decline. In October 1945, just over two months after the U.S. nuclear attacks on Japan, General Charles de Gaulle, then head of the provisional government of the French Republic, advised by Raoul Dautry, the French Minister of Reconstruction and Urban Development, created the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), a body dedicated to nuclear research and innovation in the areas of science, medicine, industry, and national defense. De Gaulle, Dautry, and others were convinced that becoming a nuclear power could help France address the challenges of national recovery and reconstruction by aiding in the rebuilding of the economy, rendering the nation energy self-sufficient, and reestablishing its strength and standing in the international arena (Scheinman 1965; Hecht 1998; Mongin 2011). In its first years, the CEA, under Frédéric Joliot-Curie’s direction, made important strides leading to the activation of Zoé, the first French heavy water reactor, in 1948. These initial advances also resulted in the first French production of plutonium-239, an isotope derived from the fission of uranium that can be used in nuclear reactors and weapons. Committed to the application of nuclear knowledge toward peaceful ends only, Joliot-Curie, a member of the French Communist Party (PCF) who had participated actively in the French Resistance during the war, refused at every turn the idea that the CEA move forward with military applications. Joliot-Curie’s political affiliations and public opposition to the bomb, which included signing the “Stockholm Appeal” for nuclear disarmament launched by the World Peace Council, led to his dismissal as head of the CEA in 1950 (Hecht 1998; Pinault 2000). Joliot-Curie was not alone in his resistance. Beyond its rejection by French communists and some socialists, the project to build a “French” bomb was not uniformly embraced by the wider French population in the years after 1945 (Hecht 1998). For some, the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki informed their stance on nuclear science and weapons. Throughout the Fourth Republic, French intellectuals, writers, filmmakers, and artists expressed different forms of unease about the atomic age across media and genres, from print journalism to literature, film, and painting (Pace 1991; Schimmel 2012; Jacobson 2021). The massive budget a nuclear weapons program required at its different stages was also the subject of debate. Some military and political leaders objected to the idea of directing so much in the way of energy and resources toward weapons that, following the logic of deterrence, would ideally never be used. From this perspective, conventional weapons and well-trained personnel were what France needed most to defend against anti-colonial resistance and the other, non-nuclear military threats of the post war era (Mongin 2011; Vaisse 1992). By 1952, there were two reactors capable of producing plutonium in France, and the National Assembly voted in favor of the “Gaillard Plan,” named for the Fourth Republic politician Félix Gaillard. This first five-year outline for the future of nuclear energy included the construction of new reactors, beginning with Marcoule in the south. It also proposed a path forward for the exploitation of domestic sources of uranium needed to supply these 546

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sites and did not rule out definitively the possibility of military applications in the future. Working with Éléctricité de France (EDF), the CEA mapped out a scheme for the use of the megawatts of power that would be generated by French reactors in the years ahead. Throughout this same period, decisions about reactor design and construction, including their capacity for producing weapons-grade plutonium, laid the foundations for the eventual development of a French bomb. While official pronouncements and policies regarding the production of weapons emerged only later, the civilian and the military were interwoven from the initial stages of the nuclear program (Hecht 1998; Bess 2003). In France, the ambition to establish an independent nuclear force de frappe (strike force) as a deterrent was a strategy for the future, driven both by reactions to present conditions and by the specter of the military alignments and exclusions of the past. All three of the nation’s major allies coming out of the Second World War had established their own nuclear weapons programs from the mid-1940s through the early 1950s. The United States had, of course, developed, experimented with, and deployed its own bombs during the war itself. The Soviet Union successfully detonated its first bomb in 1949, and Britain joined the “atomic club” as its third member in 1952. Those allies had denied France a seat at the table during the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences, crucial negotiations about the post war world order in 1945. The Fourth Republic’s leaders were determined not to be kept out of this new and powerful Cold War clique. A lack of cooperation from the United States and Britain, who were unwilling to share nuclear scientific knowledge and resources with France, exacerbated a French sense of isolation, feeding doubts about support from these allies in the event of a future nuclear threat. In the years ahead, France collaborated in different ways with other states, including Israel, South Africa, and India, exchanging research, resources, and technologies (Pinkus 2002; Konieczna 2020; Sakar 2020). The 1949 creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) did little to assuage French anxieties, particularly once West Germany joined in 1955. As U.S.–Soviet tensions deepened, the French political and military leadership became increasingly concerned about the possibility that they might be drawn into a conflict between these emergent “superpowers.” The way forward in the new global order seemed to depend on France becoming a nuclear weapons power in its own right. The Fourth Republic’s prime ministers, from Pierre Mendès-France to Félix Gaillard, pushed forward with military applications from the mid1950s, with the support of key military and political figures like Charles Ailleret, Paul Ely, and Pierre Guillaumat (Mongin 2011). Major conflicts and changes throughout the French Empire during this same period, including violent wars of decolonization in Southeast Asia and North Africa, nourished a growing French commitment to nuclear weapons as a security and defense strategy. Given France’s decisive defeat by the forces of the Vietnamese independence movement in 1954 (following an unsuccessful appeal to the United States for support) and the eruption of the Algerian Revolution that same year, the nation’s grandeur, and its status as a global power, seemed under threat on multiple fronts. The international crisis that followed Egyptian president Abdel Nasser’s 1956 nationalization of the Suez Canal, a major strategic and trade route dominated by European powers since its completion in 1869, only heightened fears about France’s reliance upon its traditional allies. Having invaded the Sinai Peninsula with the intention of regaining control of the canal and toppling Nasser’s government, Israel, Britain, and France had been pressured by the United States, the Soviet Union, and other member states of the United Nations to withdraw their troops by 1957. The 547

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experience fueled France’s desire to guarantee its energy autonomy and military security in the years ahead (Mendl 1970; Mongin 2011). By the time of Charles de Gaulle’s dramatic return to French politics in 1958, the Algerian War of Independence was in its fourth year, and the leadership of the Fourth Republic had made clear its intentions to begin experimenting with its first nuclear weapons in the Algerian Sahara in early 1960. While no political figure would be more notably associated with France’s bomb and the force de frappe than de Gaulle himself, the groundwork for the nation’s nuclear weapons program had been laid before “the General” became the Fifth Republic’s first president. The selection of the Sahara as a proving ground, a choice also made by Fourth Republic strategists, was influenced by several factors. While an apparently safe distance from Paris and other large, populated metropolitan centers, the desert site’s relative proximity to Europe made the transport of scientific and military equipment and personnel more feasible when compared with alternative, Pacific imperial locations the French state and military considered at that time. Located near the village of Reggane, more than 1,500 kilometers southwest of Algiers, the purpose-built Saharan Center for Military Experimentation (CSEM) included an airport, access roads, and a firing range, as well as the scientific research and housing facilities necessary to the operation of a nuclear weapons site in the remote region (Regnault 2003). France’s decision to proceed with its nuclear weapons program in Algeria came at a complicated time in the histories of both the Cold War and global imperialism. By the late 1950s, the three existing members of the “atomic club,” the United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain, were already engaged in negotiations regarding a controlled ban on nuclear weapons testing, what eventually became the Partial Test Ban Treaty (PTBT) of 1963 (Higuchi 2020). Britain and the United States were far from enthusiastic about France’s developing force de frappe but did not consistently or publicly oppose French plans, to avoid antagonizing their NATO ally (O’Driscoll 2009). From France’s perspective, the site of CSEM and the surrounding region in the Sahara were French territory, as were the departments of Algeria that had been legally and administratively part of France since the mid-nineteenth century. Whether or not France should detonate bombs in the Sahara was, therefore, a wholly domestic matter, not up for deliberation by other states. From the perspective of the Global South, including leaders in Morocco, Tunisia, Ghana, India, and other countries that were, by this time, independent members of the UN, the Sahara was contested Algerian and African territory under French colonial domination. As important African figures such as Ghana’s president Kwame Nkrumah argued, exploding nuclear bombs in the Sahara was continuous with the broader French refusal of Algerian and other forms of African sovereignty. A form of “nuclear imperialism” and neo-colonialism, France’s nuclear weapons program in the Sahara was only the latest chapter in the long history of the European exploitation of Africa. Sovereignty, security, and even peace did not mean the same things to the different participants in these debates about which states should have nuclear weapons and where those states could or should conduct the detonations (referred to benignly as “tests”) of those weapons (Allman 2008; Skinner 2015; Panchasi 2019). Colonial and postcolonial exploitation also played important roles in France’s growing uranium mining and milling activities. Histories of nuclear energy and weapons tend to focus on those nations that produce nuclear power and maintain arsenals. The nuclear past and present read differently, however, if we think, as historian Gabrielle Hecht has suggested, in terms of a more holistic nuclearity, considering raw materials and resources, stages of production, and the global market for nuclear energy and weapons technology 548

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dominated by countries like France (Hecht 2012). Domestic sources of uranium could not meet France’s ambitious plans as a nuclear power, and extraction in former and continuing sites of empire increased significantly in this period. Almost all of France’s African colonies had achieved independence by 1960 – Morocco (1956), Tunisia (1956), Guinea (1958), followed by Cameroon, Senegal, Mali, Chad, and several others in 1960. In the wake of formal political control, new relationships and imbalances of power developed around resource extraction, labor, and trade. Emergent states such Gabon, Madagascar, and Niger, where the French had located significant uranium deposits, became vital participants in the growth of nuclear reactor and weapons technologies, sites of nuclearity playing significant (if historically neglected) roles in the environmental, financial, geopolitical, and strategic history of the “atomic” age (Hecht 2012; Adamson 2020). On February 13, 1960, France exploded Gerboise bleue (Blue Jerboa), a bomb with a blast yield of 75 kilotons, four times larger than the one the United States detonated over Hiroshima. “Hurray for France!” exclaimed President de Gaulle upon hearing news of this first successful nuclear blast that had made his country the fourth member of the “atomic club.” After Gerboise bleue came Gerboise blanche (White Jerboa) on April 1, 1960, and Gerboise rouge (Red Jerboa) on December 27, 1960. Blue, white, red – a series reproducing with its codenames the tricolor of the nation’s flag dating back to the French Revolution of 1789, the banner of all five of the republics in France’s long and complicated political, social, and cultural history. Gerboise verte (Green Jerboa), detonated on April 25, 1961, was the fourth and last of these aerial explosions contaminating the landscape and atmosphere, exposing French veterans and Algerian civilians in the area to significant amounts of radiation. The Sahara was not as empty as French and other imperial powers had regularly implied, and entire communities had been insufficiently warned about, let alone properly protected against, the harms of these explosions. The radiation given off by these bombs spread across the region in different directions as winds carried their toxicity well beyond political borders into other parts of northern and sub-Saharan Africa and across the Mediterranean into southern Europe (Collin and Bouveret 2020, 16). Following these initial atmospheric detonations, the French shifted their program of nuclear weapons experimentation in Algeria underground and southeast to In Ekker and the Hoggar mountains. A further 13 detonations took place at the new Oasis Military Test Centre (CEMO) from November 1961 to February 1966, straddling the end of the Algerian War. During the initial stages of negotiation of the Evian Accords outlining terms for an eventual peace, the French insisted that the Sahara was a distinct territory that should remain French, even in the event of Algerian independence. This stance was, of course, tied up with the strategic and economic value of France’s military sites in the region, as well as the presence of major oil deposits in the desert. The extension of France’s military presence in the Sahara after 1962 was one of the compromises made by the provisional government of the Algerian Republic (GPRA) at the end of the war (Sèbe 2010). Signed in March 1962, the Evian Accords featured a clause granting France the right to maintain key military sites, including its nuclear sites, in the Sahara for a further five years. Until this point, France had conducted its nuclear bomb detonations during a violent ongoing struggle for national independence the French state would not officially recognize as a war until 1999. Twelve of the underground detonations at CEMO happened on the other side of these accords (the majority exploded after Algeria’s independence in July 1962). The most dramatic of these was Béryl, an underground detonation on May  1, 1962, during which radioactive material escaped the purpose-built chamber intended to contain it. Another detonation, on 549

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March 30, 1963, code-named Améthyste, also resulted in a containment failure (this one less severe than Béryl). Both the aerial and underground sites of the 17 bomb detonations that took place in Algeria from 1960 to 1966 continue to pose dangers in terms of the longterm effects of the radioactivity they released and the radioactive waste (building materials, equipment, etc.) the French authorities buried in the desert upon their departure (Collin and Bouveret 2020). Well before France’s final nuclear explosion in the Sahara in 1966, preparations for a shift to its colonized atolls in the Pacific were already underway. While the Pacific had long been considered a viable option for a future when detonations in proximity to populated areas might be restricted by treaties and bans, the political situation in Algeria made the move necessary. From Aldébaran, the first bomb (of 28 kilotons) exploded in July 1966, to a final series in 1995–1996, the French conducted 193 nuclear detonations above and beneath the atolls of Moruroa and Fangataufa. More than 40 of these were atmospheric detonations that exposed personnel and civilians throughout the region to radiation levels the French state and military played down at the time, and in the decades that followed (Lewis 2005; Moruroa Files n.d.; Philippe and Statius 2021). The architects of the French force de frappe and policy of nuclear dissuasion did not intend for France’s eventual nuclear arsenal to rival that of either the United States or the Soviet Union, powers whose capacity for global destruction many times over reached absurd levels in the decades after 1945. The point of France’s weapons program, eventually including hundreds of nuclear warheads supported by air and naval forces, was to pose a credible, if relatively minor, threat. The hope was that this force would ensure France’s defense against a future nuclear attack from another nuclear-armed state, as well as any political or other pressures that might follow from that possibility. President de Gaulle himself summed up this strategic calculation and its preventative spirit of deterrence in 1964: [I]n seven or eight years, we will have the means to kill 80 million Russians. It’s a fact! And one does not attack people who can kill 80 million of your fellow citizens. Even if one can kill 300 million French people, if there were 300 million French people. (Peyrefitte 2002, 654) This said, it is important to remember that bluster and rhetoric were not always equivalent to actual military strength. What, in hindsight, might appear a determined strategy involved many stages of development. The successful detonation of an atomic bomb in Algeria in 1960 did not immediately result in an arsenal or render France a credible nuclear threat on a global scale. Furthermore, the history of the force de frappe should not be understood as the realization of a clear strategic plan from either 1945 or 1958 or 1960. There were technological and other contingencies along the way (Pelopidas and Philippe 2020). As France moved forward with its policy of dissuasion, eventually developing a functional nuclear arsenal, the nation became increasingly dependent on nuclear power as its principal energy source. The program of French reactor design and construction intensified into the 1970s in response to global shifts in energy supplies and politics. The oil crises of that decade helped inspire the 1974 Messmer Plan (named for Prime Minister Pierre Messmer) to generate France’s power from nuclear sources in the future, rather than remain dependent on (disproportionately external) fossil fuel markets that could not be anticipated or controlled. The plan established a program for the building of 80 nuclear power plants by the mid-1980s. While the plan’s projections would not be realized completely, 550

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by the early twenty-first century, several dozen nuclear reactors were functioning throughout France. In addition to its own high dependency on nuclear power, France became the world’s largest exporter of electricity and the country most identified with the commitment to nuclear energy in the global field (Bess 2003). From its inception, the French nuclear program, in both civilian and military incarnations, inspired a range of protest, at home and internationally. Scientists like Fréderic JoliotCurie had opposed nuclear weapons from the outset. International opposition to France’s program of nuclear weapons came from nations in the Global South, becoming a key concern for the pan-African movement and European, North American, and African political activists working in solidarity through the 1950s and 1960s (Intondi 2015; Skinner 2015). As France’s weapons program moved to the Pacific, energetic protests emerged that were connected to the anti-colonial, peace, and environmental movements in the region and further afield. The work of Greenpeace, a group that formed in Vancouver, Canada, in the early 1970s, going on to become the largest environmental organization in the world, played an especially important role in opposing, and even disrupting, the French nuclear weapons program in the Pacific. Greenpeace’s various campaigns and direct-action tactics drew international attention to the harmful effects of nuclear power, weapons, and testing, particularly on Indigenous communities and ecosystems. The most spectacular episode in the battle between Greenpeace and France as a nuclear power came in July 1985, when agents of the General Directorate for External Security (DGSE), France’s foreign intelligence agency, sabotaged the Rainbow Warrior, Greenpeace’s flagship vessel, in New Zealand’s Auckland Harbour. Killing photographer Fernando Pereira, the bombing the DGSE orchestrated also damaged the ship irreparably. The ensuing national and international controversy and investigation led to the arrest and imprisonment of the French agents responsible, the resignation of French defense minister Charles Hernu, and the payment of millions of dollars in reparations by the French government to Pereira’s family, Greenpeace, and the government of New Zealand (Robie 2015). The history of protest against nuclear power and weapons within France has been complicated since 1945. In the early years of the CEA, some French voices spoke out against nuclear energy and weapons. But over time, the majority of the French population tended to support nuclear policies that seemed to promote the nation’s strength and autonomy. For many French citizens, energy independence and the force de frappe came to represent stability and security in a world of evolving economic, political, and military uncertainties. A growing dependence on nuclear power shaped the French economy and politics – from energy costs to employment to corporate interests – in ways that stifled the emergence in France of large-scale, consistent national opposition to the technology in its different forms. Objections to nuclear weapons in the immediate post war years gave way to more generalized support for policies of dissuasion that emphasized security and independence. Positions on these issues did not always align with traditional divisions between political Left and Right in France. The history of the anti-nuclear movement in France was also connected to the vicissitudes of environmentalism as a broader movement during the post war period. It was not until the 1970s that such a movement, including an eventual French Green Party (established in 1984) really took off in France, and even then, never with the same intensity as in other contexts, such as Germany (Bess 2003; Tompkins 2016). The 1986 Chernobyl disaster in then-Soviet Ukraine was a watershed moment in popular and state perceptions of the risks associated with nuclear power in France, as elsewhere, but the stakes were higher in France, given its historical commitments to the technology. 551

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Activism against France’s nuclear weapons policies and program had intensified over time, in the aftermath of the 1985 Rainbow Warrior Affair, and then again in 1995, when President Jacques Chirac made the controversial decision to resume nuclear detonations in the Pacific for a period of several months (Bess 2003). Agitation by veterans and civilians who had been exposed to radiation from France’s multiple bomb detonations also contributed to an awareness of nuclear risk and the effects of the program on the bodies and ecosystems it contaminated. Groups like the Association of Veterans of Nuclear Tests in the Algerian Sahara, and in Polynesia, and their Families (AVEN), and key researcher/activists like the late Bruno Barillot, lobbied for the opening of pertinent archives. Plagued by serious health concerns, including different forms of cancer, respiratory diseases, and birth anomalies, veterans and their descendants have mobilized to obtain acknowledgment from the French state and compensation for the tens of thousands of people harmed by French acts and policies over decades in North Africa and the Pacific. The 2010 Morin Law, outlining a program of compensation for victims, was a first step, but victims’ advocates remain dissatisfied given its limitations. These include a restrictive list of eligible illnesses and a heavy burden of proof on victims that has made it virtually impossible for many people to submit any sort of claim, let alone see appropriate levels of compensation for all they have endured (Barillot 2003; Collin and Bouveret 2020). Into the twenty-first century, France’s status as both a civilian and military nuclear power remains contested in different ways. Since the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami that caused a disastrous meltdown at the Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Fukushima, Japan, resulting in a massive release of radioactive contamination, concerns about the safety and decommissioning of existing plants, the building of new sites, and the overall future of French energy policy have become more frequent subjects of political debate. This led, in 2015, to a National Assembly decision to reduce France’s dependence on nuclear power by 50% by 2025. In 2018, President Emmanuel Macron postponed that target date to 2035. In 2022, Macron reversed this plan, pledging to build multiple new reactors. While nuclear power does not appear on the way out in France any time soon, questions about its health and environmental impact, whether the technology can be safely updated, let alone replaced entirely, as well as the costs on various fronts to the state and to individual citizens, remain. Since becoming a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) in 1992, France has maintained its nuclear arsenal, including one of the largest stockpiles of warheads after the United States, Russia, and China. The 210 nuclear weapons France exploded in the air and underground in Algeria and the atolls of the Pacific from 1960 to 1996 have not exhausted their potential for harm in terms of their long-term health and environmental consequences. Access to archives, the management of radioactive waste at and surrounding former firing sites, and the lingering physical and psychological effects on the lives of civilians, French veterans, and their descendants are deeply contentious issues. The work of disclosure, acknowledgment, and reparation remains unfinished. In 2020, President Macron commissioned historian Benjamin Stora to complete a report on French and Algerian memory and the relationship between these two states with such a difficult and violent colonial past. Stora’s overview and recommendations, submitted in early 2021, attempted to address the legacies of the nuclear bomb detonations of the early 1960s, including the release of archival documents and maps, as well as compensation for victims and their families. One of several outstanding areas of dispute between the French and Algerian states, this history continues to resonate politically decades later. Activists and academics, like Barillot, have worked tirelessly for justice for victims. Authors and filmmakers 552

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have, over the past decade and more, generated remarkable works of memory and history with a view to increasing public awareness and effecting change in the present. The Tuareg poet Hawad; French and Algerian novelists Christophe Bataille, Victor Malo Selva, and Djamel Mati; as well as filmmakers Larbi Benchiha, Djamel Ouahed, and Elisabeth Leuvrey (working in collaboration with photographer Bruno Hadjih), among others, have created a powerful range of cultural and political responses to this complicated and painful past in France and Algeria (Panchasi 2021). For the inhabitants of Mā’ohi Nui (known colonially as “French Polynesia”), nuclear weapons detonated decades ago continue to shape the lives of those exposed to their harms at that time, as well as members of their families and communities across generations. France’s nuclear imperialism remains a persistent cultural and political theme in the region (Pfersmann 2021). This history also plays an important role in the contemporary resistance to colonialism and the movement for independence from France (Philippe and Statius 2021). In the decades since the Fifth Republic was founded, nuclear technology has been a constant thread running throughout and connecting French political, military, economic, and cultural history. From the reactors that have transformed French landscapes and livelihoods to representations of nuclear energy, weapons, and war in French philosophy, literature, and film, the nuclear age has profoundly shaped the Fifth Republic from its origins, even as that Republic has fully embraced its challenges and possibilities. The history of France as a nuclear power since 1958 has been at once material and symbolic; local, national, and global; divisive and unifying; generative and destructive.

Bibliography Adamson, Michael. 2020. “Nuclear Reach: Uranium Prospections and the Global Ambitions of the French Nuclear Program, 1945–1965.” Cold War History 21 (3): 319–36. Allman, Jean. 2008. “Nuclear Imperialism and the Pan-African Struggle for Peace and Freedom: Ghana, 1959–1962.” Souls 10 (2): 83–102. Barillot, Bruno. 2003. Les irradiés de la République. Brussels: GRIP-Edition Complexe. Bess, Michael. 2003. The Light Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960–2000. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cohen, Samy. 1994. “France, Civil-Military Relations, and Nuclear Weapons.” Security Studies 4 (1): 153–79. Collin, Jean Marie, and Patrice Bouveret. 2020. Radioactivity Under the Sand: The Waste from French Nuclear Test Sites in Algeria. Berlin: Heinrich Boll Foundation. Accessed March 28, 2002. www.boell.de/en/2020/07/08/radioactivity-under-the-sand. Goldschmidt, Bertrand. 1990. Atomic Rivals. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Hecht, Gabrielle. 1998. The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity After World War II. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. ———. 2012. Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Higuchi, Toshihiro. 2020. Political Fallout: Nuclear Weapons Testing and the Making of a Global Environmental Crisis. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Intondi, Vincent. 2015., African Americans Against the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Colonialism, and the Black Freedom Movement. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Jacobson, Brian R. 2021. “French Cinema vs the Bomb: Atomic Science and a War of Images Circa 1950.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 42 (2): 191–218. Konieczna, Anna. 2020. “Nuclear Twins: French-South African Strategic Cooperation (1964–1979).” Cold War Studies 21 (3): 283–300. Lewis, Ben. 2005. Blowing Up Paradise. First Run/Icarus Films. Mendl, Wolf. 1970. Deterrence and Persuasion: French Nuclear Armament in the Context of National Policy, 1945–1969. New York: Praeger.

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Roxanne Panchasi Mongin, Dominique. 2011. “Genèse de l’armement nucléaire français.” Revue historique des armées 262: 9–19. Moruroa Files: Investigation into French Nuclear Tests in the Pacific. n.d. Accessed March 28, 2022. https://moruroa-files.org/en/investigation/moruroa-files. O’Driscoll, Mervyn. 2009. “Explosive Challenge: Diplomatic Triangles, the United Nations, and the Problem of French Nuclear Testing, 1959–1960.” Journal of Cold War Studies 11 (1): 28–56. Pace, David. 1991. “Old Wine, New Bottles: Atomic Energy and the Ideology of Science in Postwar France.” French Historical Studies 17 (1): 38–61. Panchasi, Roxanne. 2019. “ ‘No Hiroshima in Africa’: The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara.” History of the Present 9 (1): 84–112. ———. 2021. “Radiation Affects: Three Novels About French Nuclear Imperialism in Algeria.” Fiction and Film for Scholars of France 11 (2). Accessed March 28, 2022. https://h-france.net/fffh/ reviews/radiation-affects-three-novels-about-french-nuclear-imperialism-in-algeria/. Pelopidas, Benôit, and Sébastien Philippe. 2020. “Unfit for Purpose: Reassessing the Development and Deployment of French Nuclear Weapons, 1956–1974.” Cold War History 21 (3): 243–60. Peyrefitte, Alain. 2002. C’était de Gaulle. Paris: Gallimard. Pfersmann, Andréas. 2021. La littérature irradiée: Les éssais nucléaires en Polynésie française au prisme de l’écriture. Marseille: La courte chelle-Editions Transit. Philippe, Sébastien, and Tomas Statius. 2021. Toxique: Enquête sur les essais nucléaires français en Polynésie. Paris: Presses universitaires de France and Disclose. Pinault, Michel. 2000. Frédéric Joliot-Curie. Paris: Odile Jacob. Pinkus, Binyamin. 2002. “Atomic Power to Israel’s Rescue: French-Israeli Nuclear Cooperation, 1949–1957.” Israel Studies 7 (1): 104–38. Regnault, Jean-Marc. 2003. “France’s Search for Nuclear Test Sites, 1957–1963.” Journal of Military History 67 (4): 1223–48. Robie, David. 2015. Eyes of Fire. 5th ed. Auckland: Little Island Press. Sakar, Jayita. 2020. “From the Dependable to the Demanding Partner: The Renegotiation of French Nuclear Cooperation with India, 1974–1980.” Cold War Studies 21 (3): 301–18. Scheinman, Lawrence. 1965. Atomic Energy Policy in France under the Fourth Republic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Schimmel, Paul. 2012. Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void, 1949–1962. New York: Rizzoli. Sèbe, Berny. 2010. “In the Shadow of the Algerian War: The United States and the Common Organisation of Saharan Regions (OCRS), 1957–1962.” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 8 (2): 303–22. Skinner, Rob. 2015. “Bombs and Border Crossings: Peace Activist Networks and the Post-colonial State in Africa 1959–62.” Journal of Contemporary History 50 (3): 418–38. Tompkins, Andrew. 2016. Better Active Than Radioactive!: Anti-Nuclear Protests in 1970s France and West Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vaïsse, Maurice. 1992. “Le choix atomique de la France (1945–1958).” Persée 36 (1): 29. Weart, Spencer. 1979. Scientists in Power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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51 YOUNG PEOPLE AND YOUTH CULTURE, 1958–1968 Susan B. Whitney

In La France d’hier (Yesterday’s France), the sociologist Jean-Pierre Le Goff’s autobiographical history of French adolescent life in the 1950s and 1960s, Le Goff illustrates how everyday life and age relations were recast as France modernized during the late 1950s and 1960s. In Le Goff’s Normandy, agriculture industrialized, traditional dances and customs were reborn as folklore, a nuclear waste facility rose up on the coast, and urban areas were remade for the automobile and tourism. Le Havre, 80% destroyed during the war, appeared to young Jean-Pierre a city out of science fiction or a Hollywood movie. Even cafés adapted to keep current with the times. Names such as “Atomic Café” replaced “Au Bon Coin,” and pinball machines and jukeboxes were brought in to attract young customers (Le Goff 2019, 143–56). Le Goff’s family home was similarly transformed by the arrival of central heating, a water heater, and a slew of new appliances, including a washing machine, refrigerator, freezer, television, and electric coffee grinder. But it was the family’s small Teppaz record player that introduced 12-year-old Jean-Pierre to the era’s new music, rock ‘n’ roll, and to its young French star, Johnny Hallyday. Hallyday’s music, Le Goff writes, wiped away the banality and boredom of everyday life and unleashed a world of possibilities. The music was a revelation (Le Goff 2019, 196). Le Goff quickly became a fan of Salut les copains, the radio show that introduced the new music to French teenagers. Le Goff’s account of his adolescent milieu and experiences provides an excellent starting point for considering youth’s position in France during the first decade of the Fifth Republic. Those young citizens who, like Le Goff, were born in the years following the Second World War came of age as France hurtled toward modernity. They became the first generation with little experience of a more traditional France – or of the deprivations and humiliations of the Second World War. They attended school longer than their parents had, and they lived in a world teeming with consumer goods. Many newly available products were designed for, and marketed to, the young, and their consumption and use heightened generational divides. Thanks to the transistor radio, whose sales soared in the late 1950s and early 1960s, young people could listen to music recorded by musicians their own age, and they could do so anywhere – at the beach, in their rooms, or in army barracks during military service. 555

DOI: 10.4324/9780367808471-52

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By the early 1960s, astute observers were beginning to recognize that French young people had their own distinct culture, one based in age-specific music, fashions, and modes of expression and interaction. The sociologist Edgar Morin argued in Le Monde in July 1963 that the young should be considered an age-based class, or an age class. Morin highlighted the consumer power of adolescents, whom he termed “décagénaires,” inhabiting the phase of life known as “le teen-age” (Morin 1963). Historians have concurred with the broad lines of Morin’s assessment. Mass youth culture had arrived in France, and it reflected transnational developments, especially those originating in the United States, while retaining distinctly French accents. This chapter surveys the late 1950s and 1960s from the vantage point of youth. It spotlights adult anxieties over youth behaviors, while also probing young people’s relationships to culture, consumption, education, and politics. As a youth culture anchored in music and consumerism took shape in France during the early 1960s, the idea of youthfulness was harnessed to sell a variety of products, and young people symbolized the new consumer society. Yet young people’s daily lives and professional horizons continued to be shaped by their social class, gender, race, and religion, as well as by their location in either urban or rural France. When young people politicized later in the 1960s, these differences remained relevant. The prominence of youth in French society, culture, and politics during the late 1950s and 1960s was connected to their number. France experienced a sharp increase in the birth rate during the years following the Second World War. Although France was not alone in experiencing a “baby boom” after 1945, the rise in the birth rate was more pronounced in France than in neighboring countries (Sauvy 1959, 91). The “baby boom” also had special significance because of the turnabout in French demographic fortunes it represented (Fishman 2017, 133). After decades of anxiety over low birth rates, France was suddenly awash in babies. The surge in births spurred economic growth and the emergence of a consumer society because members of the baby boom generation required schools and their families needed housing (Sauvy 1959, 116–23; Stovall 2002, 33). As the economy expanded and the state assumed a greater share of social costs, families were able to direct more of their income beyond the basic necessities of life. During the second half of the 1950s, households expanded their expenditures on household appliances of the type that arrived in Le Goff’s home (Kuisel 1993, 105). According to L’Express magazine, the amount spent on household appliances came close to doubling between 1955 and 1957 (Rudolph 2020, 141). Families’ new affluence allowed members of the baby boom generation to become consumers in their own right upon reaching adolescence. Cultural industries, including popular music, emerged to target the large bloc of adolescent consumers, whose numbers Morin estimated at 7 million in 1963 (Morin 1963). That there were so many young people encouraged scrutiny by adults. By the late 1950s, when the post-war generation began to reach adolescence, young people became the subject of considerable attention (Bantigny 2007, 27–30). Social scientists, whose stature was newly ascendant in France, studied youth. A new generation of American-influenced pollsters polled youth. Print journalists from across the political spectrum wrote stories about youth, while photojournalists photographed young people. Television hosts and documentarians interrogated the young on their likes, dislikes, fears, and aspirations. Filmmakers focused feature films on young people. Some of these films, such as Michel Carné’s 1958 film Les Tricheurs and François Truffaut’s 1959 film 400 coups, found critical and box 556

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office success. The much-debated Les Tricheurs, which portrayed pleasure-seeking youth in Paris, became the top grossing film of 1958–1959 (Jobs 2007, 276). Even Charles de Gaulle, who returned to power in his late 60s with the establishment of the Fifth Republic in 1958, appeared intent on making the young more important to state policy. Within months, de Gaulle’s government established the High Commission for Youth and Sport, which spearheaded a number of initiatives directed toward the young. Such were the times that Le Monde declared in December 1960, “[W]e are living in the century of youth.” The focus on young people definitively established youth (la jeunesse) as a social category and the young (les jeunes) as a social group (Bantigny 2007, 33). But youth remained an ill-defined social category, as there was little agreement as to when it began or ended (Bantigny 2007; Jobs 2007). In some prominent studies, such as that undertaken by L’Express in 1957, “youth” extended all the way until the age of 30. Yet 30 was a full ten years after young men began their mandatory military service, a rite of passage that had long marked the unofficial end of youth and the beginning of adulthood for French males. During the late 1950s and very early 1960s, military service provided a particularly abrupt initiation into adulthood because conscripts were sent to wage France’s brutal, unacknowledged, and ultimately unsuccessful war against Algerian independence. The average age of soldiers fighting the Algerian War was considerably younger than during the war in Indochina, which had ended in French defeat in 1954, and the experience left many French conscripts traumatized (see Bantigny 2007, chapter 12). Conscripts’ experiences in Algeria contributed to a widespread sense that French young people were troubled. Words such as “problem,” “crisis,” and “sickness” were frequently associated with the young (De Baecque 2019, 36). Youth had come into its own as a social category, but it was primarily understood by adults as a social problem (Bantigny 2007, 11) Yet it was the juvenile delinquent, not the conscript, who featured most prominently in prevailing youth-as-problem discourses. Imagined as male, the juvenile delinquent was not a new figure in France. The social dislocations of the Second World War had brought worrisome increases in juvenile crime (see Fishman 2002). Reforming the juvenile justice system, established in 1912, became part of the effort to remake France after the Liberation. A law passed by the provisional government in February 1945 shifted emphasis away from punishing young offenders toward re-educating and rehabilitating them through observation, diagnosis, and treatment (Fishman 2002, 2017; Jobs 2007; Revenin 2015; Blanchard and Gardet 2017). In institutions such as the Centre d’observation publique de l’Éducation surveillée de Paris (COPES), studied by Régis Revenin, young offenders between the ages of 13 and 19 were observed and evaluated by teams of educators, psychologists, and social workers. The young miscreants were weighed, measured, and subjected to a battery of medical and psychological tests. As has so often been the case with modern reform efforts, the professionals doing the observing generally came from different class and racial backgrounds than those being observed. French-born adolescents from the classes populaires and adolescents of Algerian descent were overrepresented among the incarcerated (Revenin 2015). Concerns over juvenile delinquency intensified over the course of the 1950s, expanding well beyond social service professionals to include journalists, academics, and cultural commentators. It has been an axiom of youth history that anxieties about youth behavior often reveal as much about adult attitudes as they do about young people’s actual conduct. This was certainly the case in the late 1950s, reflecting a society in the throes of rapid, destabilizing change (Bantigny 2007, 19). Still, young people were breaking the law in higher numbers. Ministry of justice statistics indicated that, after steady declines in the number of 557

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minors tried between 1945 and 1954, these numbers rose by 9% between 1954 and 1956 and by 38% between 1958 and 1960 (Bantigny 2007, 135). Increases in juvenile crime were only part of the story, however. Journalists played an important role in creating what cultural historian Antoine de Baecque has termed a “great fear of youth” (de Baecque 2019, 40) and what other historians have described as a moral panic (Blanchard and Gardet 2017, 136). This was evident during the summer of 1959, when two incidents focused the generalized discourse on juvenile delinquency around the figure of the “blouson noir,” the stereotypically black-leather-jacketed working-class male youth. In the first incident, in Paris’s 15th arrondissement, members of two youth gangs faced off in normally peaceful Saint Lambert Square in late July. Although the two sides stopped short of brawling, attacks on neighborhood pedestrians and property followed soon thereafter. Twenty-seven young people were brought in by police. The next month, in the seaside town of Bandol, on the Cote d’Azur, a band of roughly 50 youths armed with clubs and bicycle chains was reported to have attacked tourists, seriously injuring three and leaving 15 others less gravely injured (Le Monde, July 25, 1959). These incidents, along with similar ones elsewhere in France, inaugurated an avalanche of media coverage of youth gangs and their misdeeds. The popular magazine Détective dedicated five consecutive covers to the topic. Much of the coverage was sensationalistic, some of it downright fraudulent. On July 31, Le Monde reported that, for the third time in three days, photojournalists had been discovered asking young people to stage fake fights which could then be photographed and passed off as genuine. Some youth were sent home to fetch their black leather jackets in order to inhabit the role being imagined and created by photojournalists. High Commissioner for Youth and Sport Maurice Herzog complained about the sensational nature of blouson noir coverage and promised government action against journalists who engaged in such practices. Journalists were not alone in contemplating juvenile delinquency for what it said about the state of French youth and French society. As Emile Copfermann pointed out in his classic 1962 study, attempts to assess the broader significance of the blousons noirs were both diverse and dramatic. Some writers argued that they were forerunners of a complete collapse of Western values or a reflection of the moral crisis of a secularized world, while others believed that they were the vanguard of the barbarism that nuclear war threatened to bring (Copferman 2003, 33. Other observers, including Youth High Commissioner Herzog, worried that working-class French youth were imitating the expressions of teen rebellion on view in mid-1950s American movies, especially those featuring James Dean and Marlon Brando. Although it is difficult to know how many young people adopted mannerisms seen on-screen, historians have argued that French young people, like their counterparts elsewhere, had been picking up fashions and behaviors from movies since the early days of the cinema (Whitney 2009, 92). During the 1950s, young people went to the movies more than any other age group. In Paris, those aged 14 to 24 constituted 43% of movie audiences. Hollywood films were especially popular (De Baecque 2019, 74). For all adults’ hysteria over gangs and the blousons noirs, police statistics demonstrated that youth crimes were seldom violent and that young people were rarely organized into gangs. Young men charged with breaking the law hailed mainly from poor neighborhoods, and their most common crime was theft. Scooters and motorcycles proved the most common items taken. For historian Sarah Fishman, the fact that young men were no longer stealing cash, food, and bicycles, as they had during the war, but were now pilfering more

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expensive consumer goods, such as scooters and motorcycles, testified to the rising levels of affluence in post-war France (Fishman 2017, 91–92). Journalists’ fixation on the blousons noirs during the late 1950s and early 1960s obscured the most significant development affecting French young people, the emergence of a mass youth culture based in age-specific music, fashions, and modes of expression and interaction. Rock ‘n’ roll lay at the heart of the new youth culture, and it was interpreted differently by adults and young people. Teenagers quickly became ardent fans, but adults saw little difference between rock ‘n’ roll musicians and the blousons noirs (Tamagne 2018). Some performers, including the British rocker Vince Taylor, wore black leather jackets and cultivated bad-boy personas. Rock concerts themselves sometimes erupted into violence. On two occasions at the Palais des Sports in 1961, scenes of violence and vandalism broke out that were attributed to blousons noirs. At one Vince Taylor concert, 2,000 seats were broken and 14 policemen and many more young people were injured. Even the usually measured Le Monde reported that the latest incident was another example of the “collective hysteria” brought on by rock music. Journalists and other adult observers were especially alarmed by youth behavior during a free concert at the place de la Nation on June 22, 1963 (see Tamagne 2018). Sponsored by the radio program Salut les copains, the concert attracted 150,000 young people to a square unprepared for their arrival. During the concert, tree branches were broken by fans climbing trees in hopes of getting a better view, cars and cafés were damaged, a press kiosk was pillaged, scooters and cars were stolen, and a young woman was reported to have been raped. Twenty-nine adolescents were arrested (Tamagne 2018, 4). The night’s events received prominent, outraged coverage. Journalists compared the young crowd to a hurricane, a cyclone, and a devasting tidal wave (Tamagne 2018, 4). Reporters commented on the “fanaticism” and “collective madness” on display, with one in Le Figaro comparing the behavior of fans to that of Nazis at a Hitler rally. For historian Florence Tamagne, who analyzed the night’s depiction by French media, the coverage represented a veritable moral panic (2018, 4). Tamagne highlighted the class prejudice evident in the coverage. Many of the concertgoers hailed from nearby working-class areas in the 11th, 12th, and 20th arrondissements, or from the even less-well-off eastern suburbs further from central Paris (Tamagne 2018). Fans were sometimes likened to the mentally handicapped and psychologically troubled (Tamagne 2018, 7). Writing in Le Monde, the sociologist Edgar Morin stood apart by attempting to analyze the larger phenomenon of “le public rock” in a sober, dispassionate fashion. For historians, the international youth culture made visible by the concert was anchored more in commerce and Americanophilia than in juvenile delinquency. The main force in introducing rock ‘n’ roll to French teenagers was the concert’s sponsor, Salut les copains, which began broadcasting on the new, private, commercial radio station, Europe n° 1, in 1959. At a time when only one in eight French households owned televisions, ownership of radios was much higher, around 80%. During the late 1950s, moreover, sales of small inexpensive portable transistor radios rose sharply, especially among young people. By 1961, there were 2.2 million transistor radios in France; 40% of young people owned one (Blanchet and Gardet 2017, 131; Sohn 2001, 68). Radio, not television, thus became the primary conduit of rock ‘n’ roll in France, and the cheap, portable transistor allowed young people to listen to the music of their choice, in locations of their choice. For the acclaimed writer Annie Ernaux, a teenager in the late 1950s, “[t]he joy of the transistor was of an

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unknown species. One could be alone but not alone, and have at one’s command the noise and diversity of the world” (2017, 72–73). Salut les copains quickly became the radio program of choice for French teenagers. Created by 30-something jazz afficionados and promoters Frank Ténot and Daniel Filipacchi, Salut les copains was dedicated to broadcasting rock to a teen audience. With Filipacchi as host and mastermind, the show quickly developed a format and style well suited to its adolescent audience. Taking his cue from American radio, Filipacchi mixed music, informal interviews with performers, advertisements, and contests. The show also had a catchy jingle. Filipacchi, in his early 30s, hired 15-year-old Michel Brillié, who had dropped by Europe n° 1’s Paris studio one day after school, as a part-time host of the six-day-a-week, 5pm to 7pm program. There was nothing like Salut les copains on staid, state-controlled French radio, and the program quickly became wildly popular among teenagers. By the end of the show’s first year, nearly half of France’s teenagers were tuning in (Briggs 2015, 27), including, as we saw in the introduction, Jean-Pierre Le Goff. Central to Filipacchi’s vision was the notion that listeners and performers were united in an age-specific community anchored in music, friendship, and fun. Performers were not presented as stars, but rather as copains, pals, buddies, or mates. The fact that the biggest stars of this pioneering generation of French rock musicians were overwhelmingly teenagers themselves helped sustain the fantasy. Because the era’s top performers often shot to stardom and wealth from modest beginnings, adolescents could dream that rock music might similarly propel them to fame and fortune. A  14-year-old girl articulated a widely held desire when she admitted, “My dream is to become a singer like Sheila, Françoise Hardy, etc.” (Sohn 2001, 26). Although many of the most popular rock songs of the early 1960s were French translations of American or British hits, some were anchored directly in French adolescent life. Sheila’s bouncy L’école est finie (1963) celebrated the end of the school year and the arrival of summer, while Sciences Po student Françoise Hardy’s more melancholy ballad, Tous les garçons et les filles (1962), described the loneliness of not finding love when those around had. These and other songs were popularized not just on the radio and in concerts but also by the scopitone, a French jukebox equipped with a small screen. The 16-millimeter films of performers such as Sheila and Hardy offer glimpses of early 1960s French teen culture. Adolescent boys and girls dance the latest dances, aim bumper cars at each other, or soar above Paris on Ferris wheels. In the summer of 1962, Filipacchi expanded the influence of Salut les copains by introducing a magazine by the same name. It quickly became an important disseminator of youthful styles, leisure activities, and social practices to French teenagers. Besides reviewing records, profiling and interviewing performers, publishing in-house charts for French and international music, and providing concert schedules, Salut les copains ran articles on teen fashions, jobs and careers for young people, and age-specific leisure activities. Go-karting was presented as the teen alternative to driving a car at a time when the automobile and speed figured prominently in the French cultural imaginary (see Ross 1996, Chapter  1). Being helmeted and behind the wheel of a go-kart, the magazine insisted in August 1963, approximated racing an automobile. Teen drivers were encouraged to see themselves as “heroes in an adventure known as Speed.” The magazine’s advertisements introduced readers to age-specific products, clothes, pastimes, and training courses. Neither politics nor world affairs rated much coverage.

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To translate the radio program’s on-air vibe and sensibility, Filipacchi recruited 22-yearold Jean-Marie Périer to be the magazine’s principal photographer. Périer, previously Filipacchi’s assistant at the established news magazine Paris-Match, was encouraged to take photographs that might annoy parents – and that could be torn out and hung on readers’ bedroom walls (Varrod and Royer 2010). Mostly, Périer photographed the first generation of young French rock stars – at home, at work, on holiday, or simply having fun. The style was relaxed, the tone light. The seemingly endless stories on Hallyday and Sylvie Vartan, as well as on other top young stars, such as Sheila and Hardy, celebrated their achievements while also stressing their ordinariness and membership in the copain community. The eightpage, lavishly illustrated story on Vartan in the magazine’s first issue explained, “Sylvie acts like you, she works, she has fun, she reads magazines and she tries to look her best for the least amount of money.” In one photograph, Vartan is pictured wearing capri pants that she was said to have fashioned out of an old pair of her brother’s jeans. The American influences in the Salut les copains orbit were striking. Many of the most popular performers, including Johnny Hallyday, Eddy Mitchell, Dick Rivers, and Sheila, performed under faux American stage names, while many of the early hits were French covers of American songs. In 1961, Hallyday introduced the twist to France by recording a French version of Chet Baker’s “Let’s Twist Again.” Hallyday sometimes recorded in English to complete the effect, as in the 1962 album Johnny Hallyday Sings America’s Rockin’ Hits. Elvis Presley was revered by Hallyday and other performers. One Salut les copains article, “Le Match Johnny Elvis,” portrayed Hallyday as the French incarnation of Elvis through side-by-side photographs of Elvis and Johnny dressed in identical blue pajamas and posed in exactly the same way. In early 1960s copain culture, American singers, bands, and reference points played an outsize role in singers’ imaginations. Reflecting on this moment in a 2010 documentary, one performer explained that America represented the future, the things that France did not have. Another noted, “[W]e wanted to become American. It was that simple” (Varrod and Royer 2010). The blending of music and commerce in copain culture reflected influences drawn from American consumer capitalism. Overseeing inexperienced young artists, managers shaped artists and careers in often crassly commercial ways. The singer Sheila was born when a producer renamed the 16-year-old Annie Chancel to capitalize on the popularity of the American song “Sheila.” Chancel was instructed on what to wear and how to style her hair (Weiner 2001, 148). One band was renamed Les Chaussettes Noirs (the Black Socks) to link the group to a sock brand. Anyone who purchased three pairs of black Stemm socks received a free ticket to see the group in concert (Weiner, 147). Young stars endorsed products such as jeans and Vespas in the pages of Salut les copains. To connect readers to individual products, ads often featured contests in which readers competed to describe a product’s virtues. In one contest, authors of the 250 best descriptions of the corduroy used in Vartan’s jumper won a special-edition Vartan record. American products helped shape the practices and behaviors of French youth. Clearasil, advertised in Salut les copains as the number-1-selling brand in the USA, helped transform acne into a teen affliction in France during the 1960s (Sohn 2001, 76). The copain culture promoted by Salut les copains was resolutely mixed sex and relatively egalitarian. This added to the generational challenge the new music represented in a country where girls and boys continued to attend single-sex secondary schools during the 1960s (see Rogers 2004). Girl singers like Vartan, Hardy, and Sheila shared the spotlight with

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male performers, becoming huge stars in their own right. Vartan became the second biggest youth star, after Hallyday, in early 1960s France. When the Beatles played their first Paris concert in 1964, the year the band achieved international stardom and launched the “British invasion,” Vartan shared top billing. Within the pages of Salut les copains, female stars and other teenage girls were depicted engaging in activities that would have been off-limits to girls before the Second World War. They performed and recorded music, wore jeans and other youthfully androgynous clothes, and zipped around in go-karts or on Vespas. For the first time, generation was being understood in a gender-inclusive way in France (Weiner 2001, 150–51). This did not mean that gender difference had vanished. Male rockers behaved in ways not accessible to female singers. They played electric guitars, wore leather jackets, and challenged sexual norms and expectations. Early French male rock stars, such as Hallyday, moved their legs and hips in what were considered sexually provocative ways, as Elvis Presley and others had done before them (Briggs 2012, 525). Female singers, on the other hand, demonstrated what Jonathyne Briggs has termed “a paradoxical mix of youthful sexuality and traditional attitudes towards sex” (Briggs 2012, 526). Vartan is a case in point. She was frequently sexualized in ways that attracted male listeners and sold products. Yet she still dressed more conservatively and moved with less abandon than her male counterparts. The translated lyrics of songs by Vartan and other top female performers muted the sexually risqué elements in ways that those sung by men did not (Briggs 2012). In interviews, Vartan highlighted her desire for marriage and a family. When Vartan and Hallyday married in a traditional Catholic ceremony in April 1965, Vartan’s choice of an elaborate dress and veil suggested girlish innocence. Salut les copains and the culture it chronicled and promoted became wildly popular. By 1964, the magazine’s circulation reached 1  million. According to historian Anne-Marie Sohn, roughly two-thirds of the 14–20 age group in France were reading Salut les copains (2001, 82). Those trying to attract teenagers to long-established youth movements took note. The Young Communists, which had existed since 1920, embraced copain culture in an effort to appeal anew to French youth. In late April 1963, the organization’s leadership discontinued the flagship newspaper, L’Avant-Garde (The Vanguard), founded in 1920, and launched a newspaper-cum-magazine, Nous les garçons et les filles (We Boys and Girls), patterned on Salut les copains (Roubaud-Quashie 2020, 421). Its covers, which frequently featured stars such as Hallyday and Vartan, resembled those of Salut les copains. As Young Communists recognized, the old, class-based political ideologies and practices of the pre–World War II era held diminishing appeal among young people by the 1960s. Commonalities of taste, interest, attitude, and activity transcended long-standing political, class, and gender divides among youth. They also separated the young from their parents. Responding to the 1966 survey carried out by the High Commission for Youth and Sport, the young inhabitants of L’Huisserie, a village in the Mayenne, articulated what it meant to be young in the mid-1960s. “We are conscious,” they wrote, “of belonging to a world apart, one having its own language, tastes, aspirations, in opposition to the world of adults. We are conscious of being a force. There are 10 million young people like us.” The respondents went on to note that youth shared the same problems, saw the same films, danced the same dances, listened to the same records, and had the same lifestyles and tastes (Sohn 2001, 11). Yet youth was not always the unified category or identity that these young people claimed. Differences rooted in both social class and political and religious background continued to 562

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structure possibilities and outlooks. The popularity of Salut les copains declined as one moved up the socioeconomic ladder (Sohn 2001, 92). Jazz, which had been broadly popular among young people during the 1920s and 1930s, became a more rarefied pastime of male students, including Le Goff, during the 1950s and 1960s (McGregor 2016). And although secondary and postsecondary education became increasingly available to students from diverse backgrounds during the 1960s, social class continued to play an important role in determining access and completion rates (Pavard 2018, 24). Contemporary sociologists detailed the challenges faced by less-well-off students in secondary schools and universities (Bantigny 2018, 25), and differences in opportunity and educational outcomes were keenly felt by students from working-class families (Sohn 2001, 20–26). In their 1964 study Les Héritiers (The Inheritors), sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron calculated that the child of a worker had a 1.4% chance of continuing on to university, whereas the child of a senior executive (cadre supérieur) had a 58.5% likelihood (Sohn 2001, 21). A study by Noëlle Bisseret, a sociologist at the University of Paris at Nanterre, quantified the impact of paid employment on students’ ability to complete their education (Bantigny 2018, 25). Student leaders latched on to these and other texts. Les Héritiers, which was adapted for the stage in 1968 (Bantigny 2018, 25), became the bible of student leaders in 1968 (Zancarini-Fournel and Delacroix 2014, 362). Although early 1960s youth culture was largely apolitical, young people and youth culture became increasingly politicized and anti-establishment after 1965 (Pavard 2018, 19). Transnational circuits of left political thought linked French students to their counterparts elsewhere. Opposition to the American war in Vietnam became a rallying point for global youth, and students took inspiration from a new generation of socialist leaders in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. In France, lycées and universities, which strained to keep pace with sharply accelerating enrolments, nourished radical critiques and discontent. At the Nanterre campus, which opened in 1964 and experienced important student protests in the early months of 1968, 11,000 students lived in alienating conditions adjacent to slums. Young workers aged 25 and under faced high unemployment rates in many industries and stood out in the strike movements of 1967 and 1968, sometimes earning the wrath of local officials (Bantigny 2018, 35). All signs pointed to an explosion of generational discontent.

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Susan B. Whitney Fishman, Sarah. 2017. From Vichy to the Sexual Revolution: Gender and Family Life in Postwar France. New York: Oxford University Press. Grosdemouge, Jean-Marc. 1999. “Un Mouvement Musical et Social: les Yé-Yés: La Jeunesse Française à travers Salut les copains et Nous les Garçons et les Filles, 1962–1969.” Mémoire de maitrise, Université de Paris X-Nanterre. Jobs, Richard Ivan. 2007. Riding the New Wave: Youth and the Rejuvenation of France After the Second World War. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kuisel, Richard. 1993. Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Le Goff, Jean-Pierre. 2019. La France d’hier: Récit d’un monde adolescent des années 1950 à Mai 68. Paris: Flammarion. McGregor, Vihlen. 2016. Jazz and Postwar French Identity: Improvising the Nation. Lanham, Boulder, New York and London: Lexington Books. Morin, Edgar. 1963. “Une nouvelle classe d’age.” Le Monde, July 6. Pavard, Bibia. 2018. Mai 68. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Revenin, Régis. 2015. Une histoire des garçons et des filles: Amour, genre, sexualité dans la France d’après-guerre. Paris: Éditions Vendémiaire. Rogers, Rebecca, ed. 2004. La mixité dans l’éducation: Enjeux passés et presents. Paris: ENS Éditions. Ross, Kristin. 1996. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press. Roubaud-Quashie, Guillaume. 2020. “Les jeunes communistes en France (1944-fin des années 1970). Les mutations d’une expérience politique en milieu juvéniles et populaires.” Thèse pour le doctorat en histoire. Université Paris-1 Panthéon Sorbonne. Rudolph, Nicole C. 2020. At Home in Postwar France: Modern Mass Housing and the Right to Comfort. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Sauvy, Alfred. 1959. La montée des jeunes. Paris: Calmann-Lévy. Sohn, Anne-Marie. 2001. Âge tendre et tête de bois: Histoire des jeunes des années 1960. Paris: Hachette Littératures. Stovall, Tyler E. 2002. France since the Second World War. Harlow: Longman. Tamagne, Florence. 2018. “La ‘Nuit de la Nation’: culture jeune, rock’n’roll et panique morale dans la France des années 1960.” Criminocorpus. https://journals.openedition.org/criminocorpus/4481. Varrod, Didier, and Michel Royer. 2010. Yéyé Révolution. Documentary film. Weiner, Susan. 2001. Enfants Terribles: Youth and Femininity in the Mass Media in France, 1945– 1968. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Whitney, Susan B. 2009. Mobilizing Youth: Communists and Catholics in Interwar France. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Zancarini-Fournel, Michelle, and Christian Delacroix. 2014. La France du temps present, 1945– 2005. Paris: Éditions Belin.

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52 SUSTAINING THE NATION A Gastronomic Reading of Contemporary France Jennifer L. Holm

French gastronomy – from the field to the plate – tells the story of French society and culture. In France, gastronomy is a powerful tool of national self-fashioning. Food and eating offer metaphors for exemplifying and alleviating fears arising from national anxiety. The control of food, its production, and its procurement provide concrete and direct interventions in culture, politics, and the economy. Gastronomy is a source of national pride, a symbol of French exceptionalism. It links the French people to each other across time through recipes and practices. It also brings people together around an imaginary national table. Consistently, throughout history, gastronomy has proven particularly useful in reminding the French of their past and orienting them toward the future. The rapid and profound societal and economic changes that mark the Fifth Republic have caused the French, more than ever before, to turn to food to sustain themselves and their nation. The word gastronomy has different connotations in English and French. To the American or British diner, gastronomy might imply haute cuisine and fine dining, thanks to ageold efforts on the part of the French to mark their culture generally as a superior model. In France, gastronomy is a broad term. It encompasses the micro- and macro-level ways in which we procure, cook, and eat foods, with whom and where we eat, and the social mores that dictate behavior and interaction while cooking and eating. Agriculture is also a part of gastronomy, especially when concerning small-scale producers and artisanal, heritagelinked products (Brillat-Savarin 1982, 62–63; Csergo 2016, 46–48). When speaking of agriculture and gastronomy, the untranslatable term terroir is often used. The word suggests the coming together of man and earth. It insists on unique tastes and products resulting from exceptional blends of traditional culinary and agricultural savoir faire, climate, geography, and soil. Conjuring up an image of roots and necessitating the transmission of knowledge over a long history, terroir is linked to French heritage, tradition, beliefs of cultural uniqueness, and national identity. The diversity of terroir and regional culinary traditions within France is a point of national pride that unites the nation and represents French exceptionalism. Understanding French gastronomy means understanding France and the French. Food stands for France, and France for food – not just in the eyes of Frenchmen, but in the eyes of foreigners as well (Drouard 2010). France is the birthplace of haute cuisine, the restaurant 565

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critic, the modern restaurant, and many culinary techniques (Spang 2000; Trubek 2000). The French language provides much of the vocabulary for culinary professions and gastronomic discourse. Food itself is also a language, a system of communication capable of conveying values, political beliefs, economic standing, heritage, identity, and community membership (Barthes 1961). To borrow an adage from Frenchman Jean Anthelme BrillatSavarin, a central figure in the development of modern gastronomy: “Tell me what you eat, I will tell you who you are” (1982, 19). Now clichéd on account of its common repetition, there are, nevertheless, many truths to this statement, especially in a nation in which food is central to conceptions of the self. In France, private and public actors have, time and again throughout history, and with increasing frequency during the Fifth Republic, used food to rally the nation around common causes, protect peasant and rural life, bridge the gap between the rural and the urban, and elevate the nation on the international stage. Since the 1990s, official food-related discourse has come to align food consumption with productive citizenship and a common tradition-bound heritage. Consequently, food has become a central element in many of the political, economic, and cultural debates in which the nation engages and provides a useful lens through which to view and understand France and the French. One simple and perhaps surprising example of this is the development of the Indice Jambon-beurre, or the Ham and Cheese Index, which uses the cost of this beloved sandwich in towns and cities around the nation to measure consumer buying power, a figure that receives more attention in France than does price inflation, which is commonly indexed in the United States and United Kingdom.

Fields of Change Agriculture and the figure of the peasant have long been at the heart of the French nation and ideas of Frenchness (Rogers 2000, 62). Today, France is the world’s second largest agricultural economy after the United States. This position was hard won during the birth of the Fifth Republic and the remaking of the nation after the Second World War. Agriculture became the dominant arm in rebuilding the post-war economy because it simultaneously attacked several problems: feeding the French population, achieving food security and independence, restoring the land, and achieving economic and political power on the global stage. With the birth of the Fifth Republic, Charles de Gaulle’s government set to reforming the nation’s agricultural model to position itself for competitive large-scale production and economic success. What followed was a “silent revolution” (Débatisse 1963). The government oversaw and directed a complete restructuring of the agricultural sector that would ultimately result in the simultaneous decline of the small farmer and growth of agricultural output while fundamentally altering French geography and society. Before the Second World War, land was divided piecemeal and haphazardly among over 2 million small farmers. This was the result of partible inheritance laws that stemmed from post-1789 efforts to make inheritance more equitable. These small parcels of land had to be farmed by hand, as machinery was too large and often too expensive for use. Such inefficiencies became increasingly limiting and undesirable. Policies such as remembrement that redistributed land among farmers to create larger, more cohesive farmable plots, and aménagement du territoire, a sort of regional planning focused on efficient and systematic use of the national map, literally refigured French geography. 566

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Remembrement came through a series of laws between 1960 and 1962 that drove small inefficient farmers off the land through indemnity schemes and mechanisms that benefitted young entrepreneurial farmers. As a result, the average size of French farms nearly doubled in the first 30 years of the Fifth Republic (Gildea 2002, 104–6, 126). The push for productivity and the shift to industrial agriculture greased the wheels of remembrement as many small-scale farmers were unable to keep up with production quotas and costs. Mechanization was expensive. So too were the seeds and pesticides that industrialized agriculture necessitated. Additionally, crop prices remained relatively low. The government wanted to tame the cost of food to allow other sectors of the economy to grow and to encourage consumer spending. While many people in France were benefitting from the growing economy of the Trente Glorieuses (1945–1975), farmers felt left behind, toiling for a nation with little reward. As a consequence of these changes and often overwhelming financial pressures, the rate of attrition in farming was stunning. France experienced a rural exodus, with over 40,000 farms disappearing nearly every year from the 1950s to the 1970s (Bivar 2018, 1). By 1990, France had lost nearly half of the 2 million farmers that took to the land after the war. These dispossessed farmers would move to urban areas and take on new lives, initiating “la fin des paysans,” the end of the peasantry (Mendras 1967). Throughout the Fifth Republic, agricultural concerns have been at the forefront of nearly all French trade negotiations, and France is one of the most protectionist nations when it comes to agricultural trade. In order to help stem the economic difficulties farmers faced in the late 1950s, France supported the development of a common market within the European Union while insisting it include a common agricultural policy (CAP). The CAP would guarantee market prices, subsidize production, and impose a preference for European agricultural products within the EU. The French government believed their nation was especially poised to take advantage of newly opened markets and financial assistance that the CAP ensured. The CAP has undergone numerous transformations over time; however, it did not turn out to be the panacea necessary to stave off economic ruin for thousands of farmers, even though it has proven lucrative for some (Bivar 2018). Food tariffs are a reactionary touchstone in France because they strike the nation’s economic and cultural heart. The French view tariffs on foods such as foie gras and Roquefort cheese as both attempts to strongarm the French government and attacks on French heritage, especially when they are levied by the United States (Desoucey 2016). In 1999, José Bové, a sheep farmer in the Larzac, where Roquefort is produced, drew attention to the impact of American agricultural tariffs and escalating trade disputes when he and his compatriots destroyed a McDonald’s, a symbol of US influence, in Millau. Bové’s protest reinforced the conviction among the French population that tariffs on crops and food disproportionately hurt small farmers and struck at the heart of the French economy. This incident also shed light on the perceived detrimental influence of American culture via globalization and the dilution of unique, traditional cultures (Bové and Dufour 2001; Rogers 2000, 50). Into the twenty-first century, dramatic drops in crop prices, production quotas, and continued consolidation of the global industrial food complex have continued to result in the loss of rural life. The downward trend in small-scale and family farming that began in the 1960s continues to persist today. Even so, the farmer and rural life do still play an integral role in shaping the nation. They carry significant political weight and are recipients of increased attention thanks to anxieties about capitalism, food safety, climate change, and loss of identity – a matter to which we will return. 567

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Sating the National Hunger Trends in food consumption are indicative of societal mores and contemporary value systems. Consequently, shifts in modes of eating align with larger societal shifts. French foodways changed significantly during the Trente Glorieuses. The rationing, food shortages, and need to go without that marked France during the Second World War persisted into the early 1950s, causing the nation to crave a return to pre-war normalcy. As the Trentre Glorieuses progressed, the nation’s economy flourished and the middle class boomed. The domestic kitchen perhaps best represents the rapidly growing middle class and economic growth of the post-war years. Before the war, few homes had kitchen appliances. As consumer purchasing power increased among the middle class during the Trente Glorieuses, so did quality of life at home. Electric stoves and ovens, toasters, washing machines, and refrigerators represented technological progress, economic advancement, and the dream of a clean, modern life (Ross 1995, 98, 102). They also reinforced the job of the French housewife, a role the government promoted in the 1950s and 1960s to help grow the population and put men back to work. By conquering her kitchen and nourishing her family, aided and supported by the benefits of technological progress, the French housewife would nourish the national body (Duchen 1991). Often, these women and others in their social class turned, quite appropriately, to cuisine bourgeoise, a style of cooking composed predominantly of gratins, root vegetables, and rich cuts of meat served with thick sauces. This cuisine includes recipes such as boeuf bourguignon and blanquette de veau – recipes that marked upper-class dining in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and that compose the backbone of the French culinary repertoire as it has developed and flourished over the past 200 years (Drouard 2010, 58–59, 103–4). Preparing and consuming cuisine bourgeoise inserted consumers into a long heritage of Frenchness while also signaling cultural distinction and economic power. Economic growth, however, was not equal. As the middle class grew, so did economic inequality. Evidences of social disparities and their effects on consumption are readily apparent in Jacques Tati’s 1958 film Mon Oncle and François Truffaut’s film of the following year, Les 400 coups (The 400 Blows), both set in and around contemporary Paris. In Truffaut’s film, a young schoolboy, Antoine Doinel, shares a dark, cramped Paris apartment with his mother and stepfather. We see him shoving coal into an oven to warm the apartment, eating simple meals dominated by bread, and moving through a cramped space dedicated to food preparation. Antoine’s busy working mother, who has little time to cook and shop, is a testament to the growing number of women who entered the workforce in the 1950s and 1960s and the new challenges they faced. By contrast, Tati’s film highlights upper-middle-class Madame Arpel, who revels in her pristine, airy home. Eminently proud of her kitchen – an immaculate white space in which all her new appliances are sterile and technologically otherworldly – Madame Arpel explains that the appliances “communicate” with each other in their assistance with dinner preparation (Tati 1958). The conflux of varying needs and desires in an increasingly diverse French society, spurred by a reduction in the amount of time spent sourcing, preparing, and sharing food, led to the birth of the supermarket and the modern food industry. In 1949, Édouard Leclerc opened France’s first modern grocery store in Landernau. In 1960, the first Carrefour supermarket opened in Annecy, paving the way to Carrefour’s invention of the hypermarché, one of the most important innovations in modern retailing. Rather than 568

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source dinner from a variety of specialty shops, such as bakeries and fishmongers, a onestop shop was ideal for both the modern working woman and the bourgeois housewife. Supermarkets provided customers with the plethora of choice they came to expect in the new age of consumption. To fill growing supermarkets and respond to consumer wishes for quick meals and convenience foods, the food industry provided a new and diverse range of products that were portable, pre-prepared or easy to prepare, shelf-stable, and increasingly cheap. In turn, albeit quite slowly, the French diet began to change: frozen replaced fresh, store-bought replaced homemade, and quick replaced quality (Poulain 2013). Following some 30 years of slow change, the resultant new shopping landscape came to define anxieties about globalization and the dissolution of culture, permeating French society in the 1990s and into the twenty-first century. For example, the supermarket’s destruction of les petits commerces, small specialty businesses that sustained community life across France, is a persistent feature in discussions about the loss of community and traditional ways of life in the Hexagon. Nevertheless, France today is home to the highest density of supermarkets per capita in the world. The 1960s and 1970s witnessed profound changes across nearly every major cultural field in France. Indicative of this shift, in the 1960s, some young chefs began to move away from strict interpretations of cuisine bourgeoise emblematic of an older generation and outdated, unchanging values. Rich, heavy recipes symbolized a consumption-obsessed nation glutting itself. By cooking lighter, simpler, fresher dishes, these chefs responded to changing desires and values in French society, namely, the turn to environmentalism, the search for truth and simplicity, the drive to innovate and engage in new creative forms, and the quest for refinement and quality. In 1973, food critics Henri Gault and Christian Millau termed this approach nouvelle cuisine (Drouard 2010, 104–7). The term situated this new way of cooking among other cultural shifts that arose in the years leading up to May 1968, including the nouveau roman, nouvelle vague, nouvelle critique, and nouveau théâtre. All these “new” movements were meant to challenge the status quo, which was based on increasingly archaic, traditional values into which the nation fell after the Second World War. Unlike shifts in other cultural domains, however, nouvelle cuisine was not truly new. It neither presented a repertoire of new recipes nor democratized French haute cuisine. Indeed, many chefs leading the movement, such as the Troisgros brothers and Michel Guérard, ran restaurant enterprises far beyond the financial reach of most consumers. Much of nouvelle cuisine was based off old recipes that chefs lightened by eliminating sauces, reducing portion sizes, or varying cooking techniques. Even today, very little has changed in French gastronomy from 100 years ago. Although it was a woman, Eugénie Brazier, who trained many of the great French chefs of the post-war years and who was the first person to be awarded one of the highest culinary honors – six Michelin stars across two restaurants – the culinary world in France and elsewhere remains largely masculine. French gastronomy is also still largely bound to practices, systems, and rules that chef August Escoffier codified in the early twentieth century. To become a Meilleur Ouvrier de France, achieving the highest distinction for artisanal workers, for instance, one must precisely not push the boundaries of what is new. Rather, chefs must perfect complicated and sometimes obscure specialties that date to centuries past. Furthermore, given the embeddedness of gastronomy in France and the importance of tradition and history in this cultural form, it has been slow to adapt new ingredients and cooking methods, including those of immigrant populations whose heritage influences French daily life. 569

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Consuming Frenchness The turn of the twenty-first century was a period of great anxiety for the French. Stemming from real and perceived problems and disfunction in politics, the economy, education, environment, social programs, and workforce, a growing sense of malaise enveloped the nation. The French were also fearful of globalization and its leveling effect on culture and society. Examples of these fears manifested themselves at the dinner table. A  succession of food safety scares caused the French people to become ever more wary of the global marketplace and the industrial food complex (Kuisel 2012, 181–82). At the same time, there were growing concerns about the health effects of chemicals and pesticides used in industrial farming and pushed by multinational corporations. To help assuage these fears, the French people took a greater interest in all things food. Cooking shows dominated primetime television. Films, novels, and bandes dessinées harnessed gastronomy to frame narratives. In short, the nation was bingeing on food, and it was not just any food that the French craved; they wanted traditional and local food. Urban consumers began seeking out place-based foods, and small-scale producers, les petits commerces, once again became popular, especially among the young and middle class, and the Le Fooding movement highlighting young chefs who pushed traditional culinary boundaries was born (Demossier 2003). Consumers sought to voice their opposition to the industrial food complex, support alternative agricultural methods, and express an ethically minded value system through what they ate. “Going local,” therefore, is not simply a counter measure to globalization, it is a way of protecting national heritage, ensuring the survival of society’s backbone, and reaffirming one’s Frenchness. In France, the paysan is perceived as a guarantor of deep-seated cultural values and traditions that are believed to form the bedrock of French civilization and identity (Rogers 2000). Though farmers represent only a small portion of the French population, they remain an economically and politically important constituency because of their symbolic cultural value. Consequently, threats to rural life and traditions produce deepseated anxieties among the national population. In 2018, when the government passed the EGalim law (“Etats Généraux de l’alimentation,” or the French National Food Conference), meant to ensure fair pricing and increased market access for farmers, it called upon the nation to pay more for their groceries to ensure the health and viability of the paysan and rural life. Local, regional, and national politicians have increasingly aimed to protect French gastronomic heritage both defensively and as an economic opportunity, especially in rural areas facing economic decline. Part of a wider heritagization movement occurring at the turn of the twenty-first century, there has been a widespread push to protect, promote, and transmit French gastronomy both within and outside of the nation (Heinich 2009). The French government’s first sustained gastronomic heritagization effort came in the form of the Inventaire du patrimoine culinaire de la France. Commissioned in 1985, 20 volumes detail the culinary practices and place-based foods of individual regions and overseas departments, with the goal of protecting traditional savoir faire and ensuring its transmission to future generations. Similarly, the national government initiated the first annual Semaine du Goût (Taste Week) in 1990 to facilitate transmission of culinary practices and values among the general population through various educational experiences. A proliferation of local festivals dedicated to specific foods, wines, and culinary practices has similar goals. Small-scale heritagization efforts have been aimed at protecting foods and practices, 570

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such as persillé de Tarentaise cheese and foie gras production (Desoucey 2016; Denoyer 2019). Likewise, culinary brotherhoods, confréries, have proliferated in the name of preserving endangered recipes and ingredients. On a larger scale, the national government promotes local and national culinary heritage during the annual Fête de la gastronomie (Celebration of Gastronomy), launched in 2011. At the international level, France has engaged in successful campaigns to protect foods and culinary institutions within the UNESCO framework, most notably with the placement of the “gastronomic meal of the French” on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage List in 2010. In 2015, the Bordeaux and Champagne geographic regions and their accompanying wine-making traditions gained placement on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Other gastrodiplomatic efforts, all dating since 2010 and supported by the national government, include the development of both a National Food Program and the global Goût de France dinners. These programs are designed to instruct the national and international public as well as bolster economic activity with an emphasis on tourism. France is the world’s largest tourist destination, in part due to its gastronomic offerings. The French government consistently seeks to grow this economic sector to maintain this perceived form of cultural dominance and soft power. Taken together, these initiatives indicate a form of gastronomic nation branding. Furthermore, the fact that these efforts have been maintained across several political administrations representing different political ideologies is a testament to gastronomy as a reliable and permanent tool in national projects, whether they be aimed at affirming France’s presence on the global stage or shaping national identity.

Sitting at the National Table Two decades into the twenty-first century, the link between citizenship and gastronomy has come to the fore in France. For example, various culinary actors argue for conscientious consumption. Chefs such as Olivier Roellinger (2019) and Alain Ducasse (2017) have tied locavorism to citizenship by calling on the national populace to seek out and support agroecology and organic agriculture. By doing so, they argue, citizens can help curb global warming, create a food system capable of feeding a growing global population, and protect small French farmers and the traditions they uphold. The COVID-19 pandemic amplified these objectives. Facing the crise sanitaire, or public health crisis, the French turned toward local produce through farm shares and buying directly from producers at an increased rate. Reinforcing consumption as a civic act, the government stepped in to facilitate interactions between consumers and local producers by creating a “Frais et local” (“Fresh and Local”) guide. During the pandemic, many French people also stepped in to help farmers with harvests, and others began their own vegetable gardens. Early surveys suggest that consumers intend to continue these modes of consumption as they now more directly understand and appreciate the benefits of these alternative modes of consumption. Regrettably, as much as food brings people together, it can also highlight differences, functioning as a tool of discrimination and distinction. Politicians use food as a framing device in debates and discussions about what it means to be French. A major concern in France in the opening decades of the twenty-first century has been the immigrant population and their perceived lack of assimilation into the national body. As the creation of a culturally homogenous nation and the integration of immigrants has been increasingly seen as a failure, the role of culture in the expression of national identity has become more important (Bertossi 2012, 427–29). This is certainly the case for gastronomy. UNESCO’s 571

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consecration of the gastronomic meal of the French hardened and enabled this discourse. The official application documents for this status align a specific mode of eating with participation in and belonging to the French nation; to partake in the gastronomic meal is to demonstrate Frenchness. The form of the gastronomic meal and the heritage-bound narrative that sustains it silence the voices of immigrant populations in France through its leveling and erasure of difference. By defining a national gastronomy, food and eating become weaponized forms of culture. Political actors, especially those of the right and extreme right, have begun to use food to discriminate against immigrant groups and identify them as “other.” Though a complete list of acts of gastronomic racism is too long to enumerate here, it is worth noting a few of the most significant discriminatory uses of food in twenty-first-century France. Marine Le Pen of the Front National Party (FN) pushed pork meat and the question of halal – meaning permissible and adhering to Islamic standards of production or animal slaughter – into the mainstream during her 2012 presidential candidacy. Attempting to play on anxieties about Islam and North African immigration, she falsely claimed that all meat bought and sold in Paris was halal and that non-Muslim consumers were being conned. Not long after, locally elected officials began barring kebab shops within town centers because, according to Robert Ménard, mayor of Béziers, an FN stronghold in France’s south, they “are a threat to the historical image and identity of the city” (cited in Sciolino 2014). These restaurants are commonly and mistakenly associated with North African and Muslim cultures, which French political discourse frequently conflates. Similar acts have occurred throughout France, resulting in kebab shops and other minority-owned businesses being pushed to the peripheries of towns and cities, literalizing the marginalization of minority communities in France. More broadly, France has operationalized its national policy of secularization (laïcité) by refusing to accommodate religious food requirements in national institutions, especially schools. Through the nationalized school system, school lunches teach and transmit a normative way of eating based on distinct cultural practices and precluding any form of dietary restrictions, thus creating “gastro-citizens” and enforcing a form of cultural homogeneity that is essential to French national identity (Moffat and Gendron 2019). Of note is that these acts of gastronomic racism are exclusively aimed at France’s Muslim population. Gastronomy has been the subject of unceasingly growing interest throughout the Fifth Republic. It is a salient and powerful cultural force. Looking to the future, it remains to be seen how and if France will be able to integrate foreign flavors into its cuisine just as it remains to be seen how and if France might envisage itself as a truly diverse nation. On another front, given France’s agricultural might, the nation is poised to be a global leader in the food-based challenges that lie ahead, including the fight against climate change, global food security, and the need to feed a rapidly growing global population.

Bibliography Barthes, Roland. 1961. “Pour une psycho-sociologie de l’alimentation contemporaine.” Annales: Economies, sociétés, civilisations 16 (5): 977–86. Bertossi, Christophe. 2012. “The Performativity of Colour Blindness: Race, Politics and Immigrant Integration in France, 1980–2012.” Patterns of Prejudice 46 (5): 427–44. Bivar, Venus. 2018. Organic Resistance: The Struggle Over Industrial Farming in Postwar France. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

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Sustaining the Nation Bové, José, and François Dufour. 2001. Le monde n’est pas une marchandise: Les paysans contre la malbouffe. Paris: La Découverte. Brillat-Savarin, Jean Anthelme. 1982. La physiologie du gout. 1825. Paris: Editions Flammarion. Csergo, Julia. 2016. La gastronomie est-elle une marchandise culturelle comme une autre? Paris: Menu Fretin. Débatisse, Michel. 1963. La révolution silencieuse: Le combat des paysans. Paris: Calmann-Lévy. Demossier, Marion. 2003. “Rural France in Europe: New Challenges.” Modern  & Contemporary France 11 (3): 265–78. Desoucey, Michaela. 2016. Contested Tastes: Foie Gras and the Politics of Food. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Drouard, Alain. 2010. Le Mythe Gastronomique Français. Paris: CNRS Éditions. Ducasse, Alain, and Christian Regouby. 2017. Manger est un acte citoyen. Paris: Les liens qui libèrent. Duchen, Claire. 1991. “Occupation Housewife: The Domestic Ideal in 1950s France.” French Cultural Studies 2 (4): 1–11. Dunoyer, Christiane. 2019. “Le processus de patrimonialisation d’un petit fromage de montagne, le persillé de Tarentaise.” In Situ: Revue des patrimoines (41). http://journals.openedition.org/ insitu/25224; DOI: 10.4000/insitu.25224. Gildea, Robert. 2002. France Since 1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heinich, Nathalie. 2009. La fabrique du patrimoine: De la cathédrale à la petite cuillère. Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences et de l’homme. Kuisel, Richard F. 2012. The French Way: How France Embraced and Rejected American Values and Power. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mendras, Henri. 1967. La fin des paysans: Innovations et changements dans l’agriculture française. Paris: S.E.D.E.I.S. Moffat, Tina, and Danielle Gendron. 2019. “Cooking Up the ‘Gastro-citizen’ Through School Meal Programs in France and Japan.” Food, Culture, and Society 22 (1): 63–77. Poulain, Jean-Pierre. 2013. Sociologies de l’alimentation: Les mangeurs et l’espace social alimentaire. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Roellinger, Olivier. 2019. Pour une révolution délicieuse. Paris: Fayard. Rogers, Susan Carol. 2000. “Farming Visions: Agriculture in French Culture.” French Politics, Culture & Society 18 (1): 50–70. Ross, Kristen. 1995. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Sciolino, Elaine. 2014. “French Politics Served in a Pita.” New York Times, December 23, sec. D1. Spang, Rebecca L. 2000. The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tati, Jacques. 1958. Mon oncle. Paris: Gaumont. Trubek, Amy B. 2000. Haute Cuisine: How the French Invented the Culinary Profession. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Truffaut, François. 2003. Les Quatre Cents Coups: The 400 Blows. 1958. New York: Criterion Collection.

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53 THE YEAR OF THE EVENTS 1968 Ben Mercer

The year of 1968 looms over the latter half of twentieth-century French history, a center from which a web of historical narratives are spun, or a vacuum that swallows all historical developments from the decades before and after. The signifier ’68 stands for a bewildering variety of events, well beyond those of the year itself. The term can refer narrowly to the month of May 1968 in France – symbolized by student protest and the general strike. Yet it can also mean the May–June period, recognizing that the ferment did not end in May and incorporating the June elections that returned a Gaullist majority. Globally, the year has multiple connotations – from the Vietnam War (in particular, the Tet Offensive), the Prague Spring and its repression, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the victory of Richard Nixon in the United States, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The year 1968 can be as long as it is wide. For some, ’68 – as a moment of radical protest and Far Left activism – endured well into the 1970s. For others, the logical terminus has been 1981, the election of François Mitterrand as president and the advent of a left-wing government that included the French Communist Party. If ’68 can be extended forward to the 1980s, it can also be cast back to span an entire era that begins with the conclusion of the Algerian War in 1962, or the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. This chapter recounts the “May events,” places them in the ’68 years that stretched before and after, and analyzes how they have been interpreted and remembered.

The May Events May ’68 stands at the center of these significations. A year of student revolt – against university reform and the Vietnam War, for sexual and political freedoms – had culminated in the occupation of the administrative tower at the campus of Nanterre in late March. The 22nd March Movement that emerged grouped together a number of radical political groups in a non-hierarchical movement practicing direct democracy and confrontational protest. On May 3, 1968, the police entered the Sorbonne to arrest some 300 militants, gathered to support Nanterre students facing disciplinary procedures. They clashed violently with protesters, and the university was closed amid riots and the arrest of student DOI: 10.4324/9780367808471-54

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leaders. Protest escalated in response, gathering support first from the teachers union. Some 15,000 demonstrated on May 6 and 8, and once again police repression mobilized solidarity. On May  10, 1968, students occupied the Latin Quarter. The ensuing night of violence – “the night of the barricades,” with 367 wounded and 180 cars damaged (Zancarini-Fournel 2008b, 214) – was reported live on radio, generating further support, and led to a one-day strike by all the major unions on May 13 – the tenth anniversary of the coup attempt in Algiers that had led to de Gaulle’s presidency. “Ten years, that’s enough,” ran the slogan, as between 200,000 (for the police) and a million (for the organizers) demonstrated in Paris. De Gaulle left for a state visit to Romania, but the strike movement spread. Factories were occupied as some 7 million strikers, trailing behind them the union leadership, embarked on an ongoing strike. Demands varied: an end to temporary contracts, salaries equal to other factories, fewer work hours, an end to layoffs, freedom in the factory, the abolition of gendered salary gaps, and sometimes “workers control.” Occupations put into practice one version of workers’ control, whether demanded or not. The length of the strike and its breadth, across both public and private sector, were remarkable. In the universities, occupied by their students, assemblies debated the co-management of the university between students and professors. De Gaulle’s abrupt return on May  19 failed to stem the strike movement. Imposing restrictions on TV to limit favorable coverage of protest, the government also temporarily withdrew the right to broadcast on frequencies that had allowed reporters to report demonstrations live. Yet de Gaulle’s proposal on May 24 of a referendum to provide either a mandate for “renewal” or his resignation failed to generate any interest. In Paris, unions conducted an authorized march, and students unauthorized ones, a part of which went on to set fire to the Stock Exchange. The prime minister, Georges Pompidou, brought together unions, the employers’ association, and government for negotiations at the rue de Grenelle, the location of the Ministry for Social Affairs. That meeting ended with proposals to increase the minimum wage by 35%, reduce regular work hours for those working more than 45 hours per week, raise salaries by 7%, and provide guarantees for union activities. However, key demands – the abrogation of social security ordinances that had increased sickness insurance contributions and restricted benefits, a sliding scale for salaries to keep pace with inflation, and payment for days on strike – were largely ignored. Renault workers at Boulogne-Billancourt famously booed these proposals on May 27. Amid the apparent vacuum of power, the socialist François Mitterrand declared his candidature for the presidency in the now-expected elections, and the Communist Party organized a large, disciplined demonstration. But as Michelle Zancarini Fournel noted, “the government, the army, the police, and the prefects held firm,” while demonstrators did not take arms or invade buildings (Zancarini-Fournel 2008b, 251). Instead, on May 29, de Gaulle once again left France, this time to visit French troops in Baden-Baden (Jackson 2018). Returning the next day, he addressed the nation by radio, dissolved the National Assembly, and called general elections. Around 400,000 marched down the Champs-Elysées in Paris to demonstrated their support – the largest demonstration of May – and the government broke the pickets at petrol stations to ensure the return of the weekend. A vacuum of state power thus marks May ’68 – an absence at times literal in the case of de Gaulle and Pompidou but more fundamentally characterized by government impotence 575

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in the face of student protest and the general strike, broad press and public sympathy with protesters and the visceral sense that power lay in the streets. In the space vacated by power bloomed a thousand plans for reform and revolution of daily life, the university, and the workplace. The suspension of existing social relations facilitated what Michel de Certeau called the “seizure of speech,” built on the radical disempowerment of traditional and bureaucratic authorities, and expressed not just in worker or student assemblies but also mundane conversations between individuals who normally had nothing to say to each other, forming an intoxicating experience of the apparent superficiality of the social order (De Certeau 1997). This experience of May ’68 was thus utterly incommensurate with the ultimate “return to order.”

The 68 Years This narrative of May, narrowly focused on Paris, only partially captures the events of 1968. For while the Parisian story was punctuated by nights and acts of violence (at least seven deaths and almost 2,000 wounded among the forces of order), elsewhere occupations and demonstrations were often peaceful (Zancarini-Fournel 2008b, 215). Furthermore, much of what occurred in 1968 can be discerned in the years prior: the rise of gauchisme (a revolutionary, Far Left alternative to orthodox communism), the critique of consumerism, a new politics of gender, student unrest, novel forms of protest, confrontations with police, even student–worker solidarity can all be found, if searched for, before May 1968. What stands out about May is the scale and fusion of the revolts and the way prior reformist currents became quickly overshadowed by the specter of revolution. French historians, particularly Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, have deployed the concept of the ’68 years to expand the horizon beyond May (Dreyfus-Armand et al. 2000). When did 1968 begin in this account? The end of the Algerian War in 1962 provides the key date, closing the era of France’s wars of decolonization. Thereafter, politics revolved increasingly around different ideas of modernity – Gaullist, socialist, Catholic – the last of these incarnated in the Second Vatican Council, also in 1962. A long period of economic growth, the expansion of tertiary education (where numbers doubled between 1962 and 1968), and the rise of consumerism marked the 1960s. “Youth” appeared as a distinct category, as did the question of the “modernization” of gender roles. The challenge to authority and paternalism, in the workplace, in the family, in the university, and in politics more generally, appeared in multiple reformist and modernizing projects. Social conflict and transformation thus marked the entire 1960s, albeit in a less-spectacular and less-confrontational mode than in and after 1968. From 1961, the movement for family planning demanded access to contraception. Student protest, important during the Algerian War around 1960, declined thereafter, leading some to diagnose the contemporary student as depoliticized or apathetic. Yet protest escalated particularly with Education Minister Christian Fouchet’s attempt to modernize the university system, widely seen as archaic and overcrowded. Fouchet proposed selection at entry to university and new degree structures, including shorter professional degrees. Further protests emerged over sexual liberation, teaching practices, and freedom of speech. The commencement of the aerial bombardment of North Vietnam in early 1965, continuing a war France had lost, served to focus gauchiste activity. Neither reformist nor revolutionary currents passed through 1968 unmarked. In the crucible of 1968, some drowned, some found an audience, and some metamorphosed into something new. 576

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The Long ’68 When did May ’68 end? Certainly not in May. The slogan “ce n’est qu’un début” (this is just a start) made of 1968 an event in search of an ending. Neither strikes nor confrontations between police and protesters ended because the weekend returned. Some strikes won deals better than Grenelle. Some ended only after police occupation. But the sympathy of the press and population was no longer certain. The government dissolved a wide variety of political groups and made thousands of preventative arrests. In the June elections, with 80% turnout (slightly lower than 1967), the Gaullists won an absolute majority. Yet the energies and aspirations of 1968 could hardly be confined to electoral politics, and 1968 reverberated through the following months and years. Despite the conservatism of the new chamber, the National Assembly passed reforms to the university that promised “participation” and autonomy, adopting reformist ideas in circulation before and during May 1968 and abandoning any attempt to introduce selection at entry to university (beyond the need to pass the baccalauréat school-leaving exam). The old faculties were abolished, the power of professors diminished, and new universities that emerged were granted a degree of pedagogical autonomy from the Ministry of National Education. For students, the reforms emphasized ongoing assessment instead of the traditional end-of-year examinations and offered representation on university councils (Reynolds 2011, 90–99). Just over 50% of students voted in the first elections for these (boycotted by the most radical), but participation declined rapidly thereafter. The government also opened the Experimental University Centre of Vincennes, which admitted students without the baccalauréat. Vincennes “is for troublemakers [emmerdeurs],” said de Gaulle (Cohen 2010, 211). The enduring nature of this reorganization of the French university system led Chris Reynolds to argue the reformers of 1968 had a greater impact than the revolutionaries (Reynolds 2011, 90). While some of the university reforms disappointed more quickly than others, this was undoubtedly one sector in which 1968 was a new beginning. The Far Left emerged invigorated from 1968, even if the numbers of gauchistes ultimately remained small. Deeply divided between different tendencies – anarchist, Maoist, Trotskyist, as well as different fractions within those ideologies – gauchistes moved between the two poles of the conquest of power and cultural revolution, although as Isabelle Sommier has argued, the theoretical division between “gauchisme politique” and “gauchisme culturel” was far from clear in practice (Sommier 2008, 296). Trotskyists viewed 1968 as a revolutionary rehearsal, as 1905 was in Russia for 1917, and aimed to build a revolutionary party. Maoists, by contrast, who had dismissed the student revolt early on as counter-revolutionary, quickly recanted and, after May, sought to “serve the people” in the factories or on the land, hoping to spark a mass movement among the people rather than build a party. The Gauche Prolétarienne, although only ever a couple of thousand members, became the most significant and influential group, going to the people and promoting exemplary acts of violence, including sabotage and kidnappings, and included a clandestine armed wing, the Nouvelle résistance populaire. But the Gauche Prolétarienne dissolved itself in 1973, confronted by its failures, while Trotskyist presidential candidates never gained more than a few percent of the vote, nowhere near the 43% first-round votes that the mainstream socialist candidate François Mitterrand won in 1974. Without disappearing entirely, the high tide of gauchisme ebbed after 1974. For some observers, 1968 heralded the return of the working class as the agent of historical change. Indeed, the size of the industrial workforce continued to grow until 1975, 577

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marked by decentralization, feminization (22% in 1975) and the use of immigrant labor (19% in 1975) (Vigna 2008, 320). May 1968 broke the “Fordist compromise” of higher productivity for higher wages (Vigna 2007, 327). There ensued, as Xavier Vigna has argued, a 12-year wave of insubordination in the factories across France, notable for its scale and duration, for the use of illegal tactics (occupations, sabotage, sequestration of management), and for the prominence of women and immigrants, who moved from participants to leaders (Vigna 2007, 89). This was a movement committed not so much to political revolution or better pay as a profound transformation of the organization of work in the factories. In the celebrated case of the Lip watch factory in Besançon, workers responded to mass layoffs by occupying the factory, seizing its stock, continuing operations, and selling the product. For many, Lip incarnated the idea of democratic self-management, or autogestion, even if for the skilled workers themselves, it initially embodied the idea of “a firm with no layoffs, no dismantling and no loss of benefits” (Reid 2018, 9). The struggle at Larzac, where sheep farmers contested the expansion of a military base, again deployed consciously non-violent (but often illegal) tactics: occupation of farms sold to the army, tractor convoys, demonstrations in the tens of thousands. The Larzac farmers could ultimately claim success when the Mitterrand government cancelled the expansion in 1981. The workers at Lip temporarily averted layoffs in 1974 but faced difficult economic circumstances and enduring hostility from the French government. The future president Valéry Giscard D’Estaing insisted that Lip workers “must be punished. They must be and remain unemployed. They are going to infect the whole social body” (Reid 2018, 246). Lip appears in retrospect as “the last national expression of workers as the creators of a new world,” an ending, rather than a beginning (Reid 2018, 11). The year 1968 also marked the beginning of a new politics of immigrants. The ’68 years were also the “immigrant years,” as Daniel Gordon has argued (Gordon 2012, 11). Immigrant workers – often from southern Europe – played a role in the May–June events but were invisible at Grenelle. Of the 49.65  million residents in France in 1968, there were some 2.6 million immigrants: 607,000 Spanish, 572,000 Italians, 474,000 Algerians, and 296,000 Portuguese (Vigna 2008). Some 68% of the immigrant population were workers; 15% of workers were immigrants. In June, the French government, in addition to expelling radicals and immigrants, imposed a limit of 1,000 Algerians per month allowed to enter France to work, where no limit previously existed (Gordon 2012, 91). In 1974, a moratorium was placed on further migrant workers. Some gauchistes took up the idea of the immigrant workers as the new revolutionary actor. An autonomous immigrant workers movement emerged in the wake of 1968, firmly placing anti-racism and the politics of immigration on the agenda of the Left. These years ended, Gordon has argued, not so much in 1981 but in 1983, “the year that immigration became a political football for the Right, the FN [the National Front] achieved its first breakthrough, and the Mitterrand government adopted a more punitive approach to immigration” (Gordon 2012, 216). Women’s social and bodily autonomy had been on the agenda before 1968 in reforms reluctantly approved and narrowly framed, not recognizing either the principle of equality or the right to choose. The 1965 reform of the civil code granted wives control over their own assets, but the husband remained head of the household, decided where the family lived, and could oppose his wife’s employment (Duchen 1994). The Neuwirth Law of December 1967 allowed the contraceptive pill via prescription, but advertising remained illegal, minors required written parental authorization, and the cost was not reimbursed by social security. Gender equality was not a primary concern of the revolts of 1968, despite 578

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the emphasis on sexual freedom. The gendered division of speech and actions in student assemblies, occupations, street clashes, and leadership positions nonetheless provided an important spur to feminism. “We did the cooking, made the sandwiches, looked after the guys. . . . We were the revolutionaries’ maids,” one feminist later remembered (Sibalis 2009, 236). The feminist movements that emerged by 1970 proclaimed a break with previous reformist organizations – in one instance claiming a “year zero” – as well as with the male revolutionaries, for whom gender was a secondary, suspect, and probably reformist priority. Feminist movements thus drew on key features of the ’68 years: a focus on immediate, revolutionary change rather than piecemeal “reformist” struggles, the rejection of traditional representative organization, and radical tactics of provocation and transgression. Feminism took further than most 68ers or gauchistes the critique of the division between public and private, to locate the political in the personal. Consciousness-raising in all-female groups emerged as a key practice to negate the resistance of male revolutionaries and facilitate a female seizure of speech so markedly absent in ’68. When asked to leave a large femaleonly meeting at Vincennes in 1970, some men refused and resorted to shouting, “Power lies at the tip of the phallus!” (Greenwald 2018, 115). The sexual pleasure celebrated in 1968 had been primarily male and heterosexual: “your sexual revolution is not ours,” pointedly argued militants of the Women’s Liberation Movement in 1971 (Bourg 2009, 92). The same year, the Front Homosexuel d’Action Révolutionnaire formed, although it, too, was marked by “ambient misogyny” (Sibalis 2009, 243). While much of the Far Left abandoned mainstream politics, “bourgeois legality,” and reformist campaigns in the wake of 1968, the women’s liberation movement retained a connection to legislative campaigns despite the overarching revolutionary goals of the destruction of patriarchy. The struggle for abortion rights moved to the forefront of the agenda after the April 1971 manifesto in Le Nouvel Observateur of 373 women (including celebrities) who declared to have had an abortion (inviting prosecution that did not follow). A trial of a minor and her mother at Bobigny of December 1972 further exposed the abortion law as reflecting neither contemporary practice nor public opinion. In the Loi Veil of November 1974, abortion was legalized (initially only for five years). The same year, contraception was reimbursed by social security. Another trial in 1978 demonstrated the need for legal reform on rape, which was defined in law only in 1980, while homosexuality was decriminalized in 1982. Once again, the Mitterrand presidency marked a new era, one marked by semi-institutionalized feminism, the flagging of radical struggles, and even the proclamation of postfeminism.

Interpreting 1968 Interpreting May was in full swing by June. Early understandings sought to identify the novelty and portent of May as augury of things to come. The sociologist Alain Touraine identified a new social movement and “new class struggle” that “opposed techno-bureaucrats to professionals” (Touraine 1998, 29) who fought over “the power to decide, influence and manipulate and not just any more the appropriation of profit” (Touraine 1998, 11). The sociologist Edgar Morin diagnosed 1968 as the “eruption of youth as a sociopolitical force” who anticipated in the student commune a new society “where imagination must reign and not sad bureaucracy, where not just economic exploitation but the hierarchical root of domination must be extirpated” (Morin, Lefort, and Castoriadis 2008, 32). 579

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Raymond Aron, by contrast, dismissed the students as engaging in “psychodrama” (Aron 1968, 35), a juvenile revolt against the consumer society from which they benefited but which offered no meaning or value beyond material prosperity and technological progress, demonstrating the “fragility of the modern order” (Aron 1968, 15). While these interpretations focused on the student revolt, others saw 1968 as the return of the industrial working class. By 1972, Touraine admitted that workers, now more militant than any other sector of society, could not be considered to have been bypassed. Later interpretations have also sought either to demythologize 1968 or rescue its radical promise. In the former category, Michael Seidman’s The Imaginary Revolution dismissed the grandiose claims for ’68, an event significant only in the power attributed to it, which fills “a void in French social consciousness” (Seidman 2004, 282). For Seidman, the events of 1968 testified to a long-term growth of tolerance and, more particularly, “demonstrated the power of the centralized state and the attractions of a consumer society that had effectively smothered revolution” (Seidman 2004, 282). In this perspective, 1968 is subordinated to a narrative of long-term, liberal progress. By contrast, Kristen Ross’s May ’68 and its Afterlives (2002) evoked a world historical event: “the largest mass movement in French history, the biggest strike in the history of the French workers’ movement, and the only ‘general’ insurrection the overdeveloped world has known since World War II” (Ross 2002, 4). For Ross, the “central idea of May ’68” was “the union of intellectual contestation with workers’ struggle.” This was the “true threat to the forces of order, the reason for their panic” (Ross 2002, 74). This version, in which the liberal mythology of cultural revolt and progress has smothered the politics of 1968, risks replacing one myth by another. French historiography, meanwhile, has elaborated a multifaceted, kaleidoscopic ’68  years that neither reduces ’68 to long-term processes nor derives all consequences from 1968. Boris Gobille, in particular, has made the argument that 1968 must be read less in terms of causes or consequences but as an event that revealed “the arbitrariness of the norms that govern and regulate the social order .  .  . the critical movement of May– June 1968 worked to delegitimise that which presented itself and was perceived until then as legitimate” (Gobille 2008, 21). The emblematic product of French historiography on 1968 is the large, multi-author volume that attempts to convey the breadth, complexity, and contradictions of the era in a polyphonic mode that borders on cacophony (Artières and Zancarini-Fournel 2008; Damamme et al. 2008). Indeed, one conclusion may be that the narratives of cultural modernization, liberalization, or revolution are simply inadequate to grasp the contingency and diversity of these years. The most cogent arguments – such as Xavier Vigna’s analysis of workers’ revolt in the 68 years – take a more coherent object of analysis than “1968” itself.

Remembering 1968 The events of 1968 have proven remarkably durable in public memory, the object of persistent commemoration and frequently evoked as a key moment of contemporary history, whether for good or for ill. This section considers the public uses made of 1968 by its protagonists, politicians, and the general public. While the first two groups heatedly debate the meanings of ’68, the broader population has formed a consensus on a positive but innocuous ’68 (Reynolds 2011). The memory of 1968 is often told as a story of depoliticization, one in which the “opponents” of May (at times including former protagonists) have colluded to eviscerate 580

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the events’ revolutionary political charge in favor of a benign cultural rebellion – “a mellow, sympathetic, poetic ‘youth revolt’ and lifestyle reform” (Ross 2002, 12). Historians have not been immune to this framework of May ’68 for and against, dead or alive. Thus, Boris Gobille wrote in 2008 of the “aspect of May that remains most threatening and the one least easy for opponents of May to neutralize and exploit for their own ends” (Gobille 2011, 42). Undoubtedly, cultural interpretations of 68 are dominant in public memory. Former protagonists draw a balance sheet of political failure but cultural success, ignore the political context of the 1960s to emphasize generational and cultural rebellion, or reinvent ’68 as less a political event (or revolution) than one of individual liberation and consumerism. In part, this reflects how the memory of 1968 has mutated to remain meaningful in very different circumstances to the late 1960s. In the 1970s, the struggles of 1968 appeared to continue, even when, as evident with feminists or immigrants, the revolt was as much against the experience of 1968 as the attempt to perpetuate it. However, the weakening of Far Left ideologies after the mid-1970s, the arrival of Mitterrand in power in 1981, the collapse of communism, and the relative decline of working-class politics inaugurated a new era in which the present differed markedly to the political context of 1968. It was in this context that the image of a generational, cultural revolt cohered fully around the twentieth anniversary (Hamon and Rotman 1987–1988). From this perspective, Daniel Cohn-Bendit’s 2008 declaration that ’68 is over was somewhat belated. Although outbursts of protest or activism regularly revive the specter of May 1968, the events have more easily served a variety of contemporary cultural meanings rather than for political history after the 1970s. Commercialization has smoothed this transformation. Already in July 1968, L’Express observed that “May is selling well” (De Certeau 1997, 41). A ready market exists for memoirs of and myth-making around 1968, surging regularly each decade. At its most commercial, “1968” conveys the whiff of middle-class youth rebellion and revolution, shorn of most political import. The image of a White male middle-class student throwing a paving stone is invoked as the symbol of rebellion, at the expense of strikes or police brutality, immigrant workers or women. The violence of the act evaporates: all emphasis is on the act of throwing of the paving stone, not where it lands or what provoked it (Gordon 2010, 69–70). Favored graffiti substitute for the events – “all power to the imagination” but not “CRS = SS” (that equated French riot police with the elite Nazi paramilitary). The general strike and images or events outside Paris serve commercial imperatives less well. As a marketable event, ’68 embodies a vague affirmation of youth rebellion. The commercialization of ’68 has nonetheless not made the events palatable to official memory. State institutions and political parties have largely ignored the events, much more reluctant to embrace the memory of 1968 than the market. This reflects in part the protest movements’ deep suspicion of party politics. In general, ’68 has proven an event easier to caricature and demonize for the Right than to mobilize for inspiration in progressive mainstream politics. Nicolas Sarkozy made the most explicit attempt to mobilize the memory of ’68 in the presidential election of 2007, which he declared a choice to perpetuate or “liquidate once and for all” the heritage of May ’68, described as introducing a corrosive cynicism which destroyed traditional morality and education and undermined state authority (Sarkozy 2007). However superficial that interpretation, it reaffirmed the idea that ’68 was a powerful cultural event. The accession of prominent 68ers, such as Bernard Kouchner, to government led to either bland pronouncements that ’68 had arrived in, or been betrayed for, power. However, the relatively smooth upward trajectory of various 581

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well-educated upper-middle-class males from leading figures of ’68 to national leadership is hardly surprising and must be contrasted to the numerous less-famous individuals whose long-term activism and political radicalism, as Julie Pagis has shown, came at the cost of social mobility, personal difficulties, and a difficult reintegration into mainstream society once the revolutionary horizon had dimmed (Pagis 2018). The heated debates about the heritage of May ’68 conducted by politicians, intellectuals, or ex-68ers barely resonate in the broader public. In a 2018 survey conducted for Le Nouveau Magazine Littéraire, 78% evaluated the events as beneficial for French society. While anchored more firmly on the Left, the positive evaluation prevailed across the political spectrum (Harris Interactive 2018). Nor is this broad embrace especially recent: a decade earlier, some 73% of 18- to 40-year-olds evaluated the events favorably. In 2018, there was near-unanimity – 87% – in viewing May ’68 as an event that “called into question an outdated social model.” To the broader public, May ’68 marks the advent of modern society. Sarkozy-style denunciations, therefore, have a small, if loyal and invested, audience. The same can be said for the revolutionary 1968. May ’68 thus appears to the public as the origin myth for the contemporary world, the event on which contemporary concerns can be projected. In 2018, 93% had heard of it, and 83% proclaimed to know precisely what it was about. Such an important event must no doubt have had consequences and ushered in a new era. As far back as 1998, a survey of 18- to 30-year-olds conducted for L’Express identified the key values of 1968 as “the defence of minority rights” (77%), “sexual liberty” (76%), and equality between men and women (75%), “three post-68 concerns if ever there were any,” as Jean-Pierre Rioux noted (Rioux 2008, 14). Notably, these were the values for which survey respondents argued they would themselves engage in political activism. Respondents saw May ’68 as reflecting their own concerns and era, rather than a product of a distinct historical period. The broad and rather bland consensus around May  1968 as a moment of cultural modernization simply cannot do justice to the multitude of personal experiences of the events themselves or to the depth of the challenge to culture and politics in 1968 – not merely an updating of archaic social codes but a radical challenge to authority in class, gender, and social relations. Nonetheless, some prominent 68ers have embraced the popular view. Daniel Cohn-Bendit’s apotheosis as the archetypal 68er (“Dany the Red,” who became a Green politician) relies on his perennial ability to see himself projected in the consensus (Mercer 2019). But not all who participated in 1968 see themselves as belonging to a 68er generation. As Julie Pagis has shown in her analysis of life stories of activists, those most likely to see themselves as a generation were those who were students at that time (Pagis 2018, 215). Such people viewed the events through a prism of personal emancipation (as well as political revolt). For those who worked already, or were already politicized, the events marked a less-important moment in their personal trajectory and held a signification that was primarily political. In that sense, the public memory of 1968 has been captured by the 68ers – those for whom it was a formative personal experience on the threshold of adulthood. The memory of 1968 has thus been marked by a broad public consensus around a progressive mythology. Yet even this image retained enough charge to be the subject of aggressive attacks, and however many times ’68 is declared to be over, there remains an audience for whom 1968 is the key not to the contemporary world but its overthrow.

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Bibliography Aron, Raymond. 1968. La révolution introuvable. Réflexions sur les événements de Mai. Paris: Fayard Artières, Philippe, and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, eds. 2008. 68: Une histoire collective 1962–1981. Paris: La Découverte. Bourg, Julian. 2009. “ ‘Your Sexual Revolution Is Not Ours,’: French Feminist ‘Moralism’ and the Limits of Desire.” In Gender and Sexuality in 1968: Transformative Politics in the Cultural Imagination, edited by Lessie Jo Frazier and Deborah Cohen, 85–114. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Cohen, Paul. 2010. “Happy Birthday Vincennes! The University of Paris-8 Turns Forty.” History Workshop Journal 69: 206–24, 211. Damamme, Dominique, Boris Gobille, Frédérique Matonti, and Bernard Pudal, eds. 2008. Mai-Juin 68. Paris: Editions de l’Atelier. De Certeau, Michel. 1997. The Capture of Speech and Other Political Writings. Translated by Tom Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dreyfus-Armand, Geneviève, Robert Frank, Marie-Françoise Lévy, and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, eds. 2000. Les Années 68. Le temps de la contestation. Bruxelles: Editions Complexe. Duchen, Claire. 1994. Women’s Rights and Women’s Lives in France, 1944–1968. London and New York: Routledge. Gildea, Robert, James Mark, and Annette Warring, eds. 2013. Europe’s 1968: Voices of Revolt. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gobille, Boris. 2008. “Mai-Juin 68: crise du consentement et ruptures d’allégeance.” In Mai-Juin 68, edited by Dominique Damamme, Boris Gobille, Frédérique Matonti and Bernard Pudal, 15–31. Paris: Editions de l’Atelier. Gobille, Boris. 2011. “Exploitation, Alienation and the Social Division of Labour in the May-June Movement in France.” In May 68: Rethinking France’s Last Revolution, edited by Julian Jackson, Anna-Louise Milne and James S. Williams, 34–46. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gordon, Daniel A. 2010. “Memories of 1968 in France: Reflections on the 40th Anniversary.” In Memories of 1968: International Perspectives, edited by Ingo Cornils and Sarah Waters, 49–78 Oxford: Peter Lang. ———. 2012. Immigrants & Intellectuals: May ’68 and the Rise of Anti-Racism in France. Pontypool: Merlin Press. Greenwald, Lisa. 2018. Daughters of 1968: Redefining French Feminism and the Women’s Liberation Movement. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Hamon, Hervé, and Patrick Rotman. 1987–1988. Génération. 2 vols. Paris: Seuil. Harris Interactive. 2018. “50 ans après mai 1968, quel héritage? Une étude Harris Interactive pour le Nouveau magazine littéraire.” https://harris-interactive.fr/opinion_polls/50-ans-apres-mai-1968quel-heritage/. Jackson, Julian. 2010. “The Mystery of May 1968.” French Historical Studies 33 (4): 625–53. ———. 2018. De Gaulle. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Jackson, Julian, Anna-Louise Milne, and James S. Williams, eds. 2011. May 68: Rethinking France’s Last Revolution. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mercer, Ben. 2019. “The Six 68s of Daniel Cohn-Bendit.” French History and Civilization 8: 189–204. Morin, Edgar, Claude Lefort, and Cornelius Castoriadis. 2008. Mai 68: La Brèche suivi de Vingt Ans Après. Paris: Fayard. Pagis, Julie. 2018. May ’68: Shaping Political Generations. Translated by Katharine Throssell. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Reid, Donald. 2018. Opening the Gates: The Lip Affair, 1968–1981. Verso: London and New York. Reynolds, Chris. 2011. Memories of May ’68: France’s Convenient Consensus. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Rioux, Jean-Pierre. 2008. “L’événement-mémoire: Quarante ans de commémorations.” Le débat 149: 4–19. Ross, Kristen. 2002. May ’68 and Its Afterlives. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Sarkozy, Nicolas. 2007. “Déclaration de M. Nicolas Sarkozy, président de l’UMP et candidat à l’élection présidentielle, sur le bilan de quatre mois de campagne électorale, le rappel des valeurs qui sont les siennes, en opposition notamment à celles de mai 1968, et son appel

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Ben Mercer aux électeurs du centre pour le second tour, Paris le 29 avril 2007.” www.vie-publique.fr/ discours/166575-declaration-de-m-nicolas-sarkozy-president-de-lump-et-candidat-lel. Seidman, Michael. 2004. The Imaginary Revolution: Parisian Students and Workers in 1968. New York: Berghahn. Sibalis, Michael. 2009. “The Spirit of May ’68 and the Origins of the Gay Liberation Movement in France.” In Gender and Sexuality in 1968: Transformative Politics in the Cultural Imagination, edited by Lessie Jo Frazier and Deborah Cohen, 235–54. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Sommier, Isabelle. 2008. “Les gauchismes.” In Mai-Juin 68, edited by Dominique Damamme, Boris Gobille, Frédérique Matonti and Bernard Pudal, 295–305. Paris: Editions de l’Atelier. Touraine, Alain. 1998. Le Mouvement de mai ou le communisme utopique. Paris: Fayard. Vigna, Xavier. 2007. L’insubordination ouvrière dans les années 68: essai d’histoire politique des usines. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes. ———. 2008. “Une émancipation des invisibles? Les ouvriers immigrés dans les grèves de mai-juin 68.” In Histoire politique des immigrations (post)coloniales: France, 1920–2008, edited by Ahmed Boubeker and Abdellali Hajjat, 85–94. Paris: Editions Amsterdam. ———. 2011. “Beyond Tradition: The Strikes of May-June 1968.” In May 68: Rethinking France’s Last Revolution, edited by Julian Jackson, Anna-Louise Milne, and James S. Williams, 47–57. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Zancarini-Fournel, Michelle. 2008. Le Moment 68: une histoire contestée. Paris: Seuil. ———. 2008b. “L’épicentre.” In 68: Une histoire collective 1962–1981, edited by Philippe Artières and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, 209–69. Paris: La Découverte.

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54 THE ALGERIAN DIASPORA IN FRANCE Álvaro Luna-Dubois

The Algerian diaspora in France is said to be the longest-running and largest diaspora in the country. People of Algerian ancestry in France are tied both to a historical migration tracing back to the nineteenth century, only a few years behind the Italian migration (1860–1970) (Blanchard 2018, 5), and also to a contemporary migration that begins during the French–Algerian War (1954–1962) and continues to unfold in the twenty-first century. Algerian migration to France is demarcated from European migration in significant ways relating to Algeria’s status as a former colonial department, colonial religious discrimination in access to citizenship, and the heritage of the war of decolonization. The Algerian diaspora also differs from other colonial and postcolonial migrations due to specific citizenship and residence laws during the colonial period and in post-independence binational agreements. It is important to note that there is no clear-cut definition of what constitutes the Algerian diaspora in France. Tied to contemporary French political culture rejecting community labels, identity markers such as “the Algerian community in France” are relatively rare in French media and political culture. People identifying with Algerian heritage in France may themselves use numerous identifiers, from national or regional terms, such as “French,” “Algerian,” “Franco-Algerian,” “Maghrebi” (referring to the North African region), or “Franco-Maghrebi”; ethnic labels, such as “Arab” or “Kabyle”; and also broader religious labels, such as “Muslim.” Other labels are directly linked to the colonial categories of “Algerian Jew,” “pied noir” (former European settlers), and “harki” (former Muslim soldiers of the French army during the French–Algerian War). The diversity of identifiers demonstrates the cultural plurality of the Algerian diaspora. The descendants of those possessing the colonial status of “Muslims of France,” the most populous group of French Algeria, are predominantly socialized as Algerians or Franco-Algerians in France. Some historians employ the term “Algerian immigrants” to refer to the diaspora, but it may exclude their descendants, while others may use terms such as “French of Algerian origin” to only center on their descendants born in France. This chapter opts to employ the term “Algerian diaspora in France” broadly in an attempt to be flexible in describing the personal, historical, and sociocultural development of the diverse Algerian population and heritage in France irrespective of their generation or citizenship 585

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status, covering both individuals born in France as well those who arrived to the Hexagon through different migration waves and patterns, ranging from labor migration to political refugee migration, forced migration, education, family reunification, among other factors.

Early Algerian Presence in France Prior to 1912 Circulation in France of people born in the territory known today as Algeria has been recorded as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century in the cities of Paris and Marseilles. This precolonial migration was low-scale and generally referred to as “Oriental migration,” with little distinction between Algerian Muslims and Jews (Blanchard 2018, 10). Immigrants from the then-Algerian Regency (part of the Ottoman Empire since the early sixteenth century) were racially and religiously diverse; some came from urban multilingual elites to travel or complete their studies, while others came as sailors, merchants, diplomats, prostitutes, and former slaves (Blanchard 2018, 9; Christelow 2012, 9). Records also note the existence of Algerian Jews seeking refuge in France following an uprising against the Dey of Algiers in 1806, which led to reprisals against the Jewish minority (Coller 2011, 66). Following the French invasion of Algeria in 1830, international mobility from Algeria to France developed new patterns. The colonial conflict and massive land confiscations led to the formal annexation of Algeria as a department in 1848 and brought internal demographic changes in a territory whose inhabitants heavily relied on local agriculture (Blanchard 2018, 12). As a result of the regime change, the Algerian population saw an increased migration to neighboring Arab countries as well as from rural to urban areas. A  minor labor migration to France from the Northern Tamazight-speaking region of Kabylia began in the 1890s (Christelow 2012, 12). During the colonial period, the French viewed the Kabylian minority more favorably than the Arab majority (MacMaster 1997, 44). Other early colonial migrations from Algeria to France included prisoners from the resistance condemned to forced labor in the penal territories of far-flung New Caledonia and Guiana. Most of these forced migrants were never able to return to Algeria (Christelow 2012, 20). The creation of the tirailleurs algériens infantry unit in 1842 made possible the circulation of Algerian soldiers in global French armed conflicts, and from 1863, some units were posted in Paris on a regular basis (Christelow 2012, 77). As France consolidated its control of Algeria, in 1870, the Crémieux Decree granted Algerian Jews French citizenship, a change that would allow their free circulation in metropolitan France (Lejman 2014, 252). As for those with the legal category of “Algerian Muslims,” they remained French colonial subjects, requiring permits to enter and move around metropolitan France. From 1865 until 1947, French laws made a distinction between nationality and citizenship. Algerian Muslims held French nationality but could only claim rights of French citizenship by abjuring their previous status as persons governed under Islamic law. During the entire colonial period, only a very minimal number did so, attesting to the importance of religion and law in Muslim Algerian culture (Reestman 1999, 19). In contrast, during the nineteenth century, European immigrants could acquire citizenship upon three years of residence in France (including French Algeria), and in 1889, a law naturalized the children of European citizens at the age of 21 (Roberts 2017, 53). Overall, the early colonial period only saw a relatively small number of Algerian Muslims circulating in France, in stark contrast to the large-scale European colonial migration to Algeria. 586

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Early Twentieth Century and the World Wars (1912–1945) It was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that Algerian migration to France began to accelerate, as France began to be seen as a place of opportunities for higher salaries and escape from colonial hierarchies (Blanchard 2018, 28). Migration remained predominantly male, seasonal, urban, and limited primarily to Kabylian soldiers and laborers. Algerian laborers of the early twentieth century turned to a variety of activities in urban regions of France, including Marseilles’s plant oil and soap factories and docks; mines and metallurgic industries of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region; and the Parisian Say sugar refinery, the Omnibus company, and subway construction (Stora 1992, 13). More individual forms of employment, such as coach drivers and taxi cleaners, were also common activities in the immigrant community (Blanchard 2018, 27). A major development contributing to Algerian migration to France also came through the compulsory military conscription of Algerian Muslims introduced in 1912 as international tensions rose. With the outbreak of the First World War (1914–1918), the Ministry of Labour continued the recruitment of Algerian soldiers as well as shifting labor contracts to military duties or in weapon production. During the Great War, some 78,056 Algerians have been definitively recorded as colonial laborers, mostly working in munition factories, supply offices, transportation, gas factories, mines, highway services, and levelling work (Stora 1992, 14). At the end of the war, many of these Muslim laborers and soldiers were forcibly removed to Algeria, leaving an undocumented diaspora in France only in the thousands (Stora 1992, 16). Yet, this halt was only temporary. Algerian labor migration rose again after a 1920 decree allowing free circulation of colonial subjects to France in preference to European “foreigners” (Blanchard 2018, 32). It is in this period that Algerians began to settle more extensively in the Parisian peripheries, where most of their industrial jobs were located. Laborers lived primarily at hotels, café-hotel networks, and other forms of temporary housing, and many would continue to live in such conditions until the late twentieth century (Stora 1992, 18). Although in the 1920s Algerians roughly represented about 3% of labor migration dominated by Italian and Polish migration, it soon became seen as socially and politically problematic (Blanchard 2018, 31). In 1924, the high numbers of Algerians labor emigrants in France alarmed colonial authorities, who imposed labor contracts, obligatory medical visits, and identity cards for entry to France (Stora 1992, 17). Additional fees, having a financial guarantor, and a good criminal record were also added in 1926 and 1928 (Blanchard 2018, 35). These restrictions brought about a rise in undocumented migration that soon prompted deportations of indigènes sans papiers (“undocumented natives”) (Blanchard 2018, 36). The rise of a more permanent Algerian population in France brought new practices of Franco-Algerian cultural development. In Paris, communist and anti-colonial publications that addressed Maghrebi migrant experiences, and especially those of Algerians, began to circulate. The first anti-colonial group, l’Étoile nord-africaine (“North-African Star”), was formed in 1926 by the Algerian immigrant leader Messali Hadj. Although it was dissolved by the French government in 1929, it paved the way for future organizations and publications within the diaspora. Laborer and political migration continued into the 1940s, and many immigrants joined anticolonial groups, such as the “étoilistes” and “ouélamistes.” Other cultural landmarks include the inauguration in 1926 of the Great Mosque of Paris, 587

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which was promoted as a national project to thank colonial Muslim soldiers. Its first Imam was the Algerian-born Abdelkader Mesli. This followed the Franco-Muslim Avicenne Hospital, which opened in 1935 along with the exclusively Muslim cemetery of Bobigny in 1937. At the outbreak of World War II (1939–1945), four North African divisions were already present in France. Algerian soldiers, alongside with their Tunisian and Moroccan counterparts, fought as part of the colonial African Troops in European battles, including Monte Cassino, Flanders, the Rhine, Italy, and the liberation of Marseilles. Labor migration during the war was low, controlled by the military, and suspended from 1942 to 1945 (Stora 1992, 78–79). The Algerian Jewish diaspora, which began as political, family, and economic migration during the beginning of the twentieth century, was particularly targeted during the war, and at least 1,500 victims of the Holocaust and Vichy internment camps combined are recorded from this community (Blanchard 2018, 49). As with many groups in France, Franco-Algerians have been associated with both members of the resistance and collaboration with the Nazi regime. Independentist groups such as the CARNA (Comité d’action révolutionaire nord-africain) showed support for German forces, with the hope of gaining North African independence, and fought against the resistance. On the other hand, Algerian soldiers continued to enroll in the resistance forces, and the independentist leader Messali Hadj discouraged alliances with Germany (Blanchard 2018, 53). The role of Muslim Algerians as resistant and collaborators remains a site of historical debate, especially regarding the protection and denunciation of Jewish citizens, emphasizing the turbulent atmosphere of political allegiances for the Algerian diaspora during the war.

Nine Years of Change (1945–1954) For the Algerian diaspora, the years following World War II were a period of high political engagement, circulating around independentist movements, and ultimately leading to the French–Algerian War (1954–1962). Rising levels of migration from Algeria to France also saw a shift from seasonal to permanent settlements, reflecting the rapid expansion of the post-war French economy and its heavy dependence on migrant labor. Although the de Gaulle administration created in 1945 the Office national d’immigration – the only public institution controlling foreign labor recruitment and family reunification – most Algerian labor migration at that time was undocumented (Blanchard 2018, 76). Records of Muslim Algerian immigration note major increases of Algerian entries to France and very few departures (Stora 1992, 94). Algerian laborers were especially prominent in the automobile industry from the 1950s to the 1970s. The Algerian diaspora also saw a major demographic change as Arab-speaking Algerians from the regions of Oran, Constantine, and Southern territories began to counterbalance the former Kabylian migrant majority (Stora 1992, 94). They continued to concentrate in the industrial hubs of Paris, Lyons, and Nord-Pas-de-Calais areas, as well as in the Moselle region (Stora 1992, 95). In 1947, a new law granted citizenship rights to Algerians living in metropolitan France, regardless of their religion. Men obtained voting rights that year, albeit at a different electoral college (the Algerian assembly), while Algerian women in France did not acquire the right to vote until 1958 (André & Tomlinson 2016, 96). These changes in continental France contrasted sharply with the persistent conditions in French Algeria, where education was still segregated and access to the vote was limited. Toward the 1950s, unemployment 588

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began to rise in the diaspora, as did trade union activity and interest in independentist movements (Blanchard 2018, 77). Events in Algeria, starting from the 1945 nationalist riots and massacres led by the French state in the Algerian cities Sétif and Guelma, intensified discontent with French colonial rule in the diaspora. Anticolonial publications such as l’Étoile algérienne and l’Algérie Libre were widely distributed in France.

The French–Algerian War in France (1954–1962) Algerian nationalist movements expanded throughout the 1950s in the Algerian diaspora. Initially, the community in France largely supported Messali Hadj’s party, the Mouvement National Algérien, founded in 1954. But from November  1954, the emerging Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), which led the conflict in Algeria, began to gain leadership in the immigrant community through various actions which included the execution of leaders of rival parties living in France (Stora 1992, 211). It is estimated that about 8,000 Algerians died in internecine violence in French cities between 1956 and 1962 (Stora 1985, 81). The FLN chapter of the Parisian region imposed a “revolutionary tax” on Algerian workers in France to fund the war, noting their key role in sustaining the struggle. Although thousands of Algerians living in France left to fight in Algeria (Blanchard 2018, 65), the period of 1954–1962 also saw a very large rise in Algerian migration to France: Algerian Muslims doubled their population from 211,000 to 350,000, in addition to the 1  million French citizens – mainly pied-noirs and Algerian Jews – who permanently left Algeria at the end of the conflict (Savarese 2006, 457). Two major conflicts marked the memory of the war in the Algerian diaspora in France. At the peak of the conflict, on October 17, 1961, there was a mass demonstration by some 30,000 Algerians in Paris against a curfew imposed on them, and against colonial rule in Algeria. This was repressed by the police with shocking violence and covered up by the authorities for many years afterward. The official 1998 report of the French government, based solely on police data, lists 30 to 50 Algerian deaths, but other estimates go as high as 325 killed, many by drowning in the Seine, thousands of injured, and hundreds of deportations to Algeria (House and MacMaster 2006, 161). On February 8, 1962, a second Parisian demonstration led by trade unionists against fascism and the OAS, a French nationalist underground organization fighting Algerian independentists in French Algeria and in France, led to nine deaths and at least a hundred wounded (Stora 1992, 388). This event is known today as the Charonne massacre. Barely weeks later, the French government of Charles de Gaulle agreed on a peace deal with the FLN, the Évian Accords, subsequently ratified by huge majorities in referendums in both France and Algeria.

Post-Independence: The Building of a New Diaspora (1962–1974) The aftermath of the Accords brought different crises among the Algerian diaspora in France. Politically, the former leader Messali Hadj remained exiled in France and continued his movement until his death in 1973. The FLN revolutionary tax was formally removed shortly after the end of the war, although irregularities were reported in the community (Stora 1992, 395). Two articles of the Accords concerned “Algerian nationals residing in France,” granting them the same rights to French citizens (apart from voting rights) as well as free circulation between the two countries (Stora 1992, 399). The agreements also established two categories of Algerians: those already with French citizenship were listed 589

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as “Algerians with common civil status” (statut civil de droit commun), and the rest had a local civil status (statut civil de droit local). The first remained French citizens regardless of their residence, and the latter had to declare French nationality in France by January 1963 (Maamri 2016, 218). Acquiring French citizenship was not always an easy decision for many Algerian nationals. Some Algerian nationalists associated French nationality with the harkis, who were deemed traitors in Algeria (Khellil 2004, 37). It is estimated that about 21,000 harkis and their families migrated to France by the end of the war (Bessaguet 2002, 162). Unable to contemplate return, many were housed in transitory camps, often in poor conditions (Crapanzano 2011, 136). Pied noirs immigrated extensively to France following independence: in September 1962 alone, the Algerian community grew by 46,000, which now included entire families migrating primarily to Paris and other urban centers (Stora 1992, 400). Problems posed by uncontrolled migration were recognized in 1964, when the French Ministry of Labor and the Algerian Ministry of Social Affairs agreed to limit migration with attention to labor availability in Algeria and labor needs in France, and by requiring housing arrangements in France to be made prior to migrating. France had a long-standing housing crisis, aggravated during the world wars, that forced many locals and immigrants to find unusual housing arrangements (Blanchard 2018, 99–102). These included makeshift dwellings in shantytown networks, which at the Parisian periphery extended to some 400 hectares by this time (Silverstein 2004, 89). In 1968, a further Franco-Algerian agreement limited free circulation and gave Algerian nationals eligibility to apply for ten-year residence permits allowing them to work in their chosen labor activity – an option not given to most immigrants (Khellil 2004, 34). Nationality laws continued to evolve in this period. In 1973, France granted French citizenship to the children of Algerian parents living in France at their time of birth. Children whose parents were born in France (now including those born in Algeria before 1962) were also automatically French if born in France. In the same year, the Algerian president Boumedienne suspended Algerian emigration, and in 1974, France, as most European countries, suspended all migration. When migration resumed, family reunification became a more pronounced element (Stora 1992, 403), ending the predominantly male migration of previous decades and affirming their permanent settlement in France.

Forging New Diasporic Identities (1975–1990s) Although family reunification and citizenship laws of the 1970s increased citizenship and consolidation among the group, Franco-Algerians at the end of the twentieth century faced socio-economic challenges as a marginalized ethnic minority group of postcolonial France. The revision in 1985 of the Franco-Algerian agreements of 1968 reduced some of the previous privileges, limiting Algerian residence permits to five years. During the 1970s and 1980s, French authorities systematically conducted immigration controls and deportations (Derderian 2004, 22). Xenophobic threats and racist attacks by unorganized groups particularly against people of North African origin also increased during this period (Benson 2013, 240). Simultaneously, the political arena of the late 1970s and 1980s witnessed the rise of Far Right political parties which often framed Algerian immigration as a political and social problem. In particular, the Front National emerged as a direct byproduct the French–Algerian War drawing major support from pied-noirs, harkis, and OAS circles (McCormack 2011, 1137). 590

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By the late 1970s, the children of Algerian immigrants of previous decades were now young adults who began to be identified in mass media as “Beurs” (back slang for Arab, which included by extension other North African identities). This generation detached from previous political agendas centered on trade unions or Algerian nationalism and focused instead on matters concerning ethnic diversity, discrimination, and migration in France. Publications such as Sans Frontières (1979–1985) were co-founded by Franco-Algerian youth and centered on the immigrant experience in France. The tense sociopolitical climate of ethnic conflict during the early 1980s, in addition to perceived discrimination in the workforce and housing, prompted a series of protests led especially by Franco-Algerian youth. In particular, the 1983 March for Equality and Against Racism – dubbed by the French media as “the Beurs’ March” – emerged in reaction to incidences of police violence at the outskirts of Lyon and was a nationwide pacific demonstration. Although many of the leaders were of Algerian descent and part of Franco-Maghrebi youth organizations, it is important to note that this antiracist movement was multicultural and did not focus on a specific ethnic group. Their key demands were to improve the residency card system for foreign workers, to develop more severe punishments for racially motivated crimes, and to consider voting rights for foreigners living in France (Derderian 2004, 29). It is estimated that about 100,000 demonstrators participated in the march events that showcased music by Algerian musicians based in France, such as Rachid Taha, and a delegation was received by President François Mitterrand at the Elysée Palace. The period of Franco-Maghrebi minority youth activism was closely related to the emergence of the Beur cultural movement, which foregrounded literature, music, film, theater, and radio stations from the community. Franco-Algerian authors such Azouz Begag, Farida Belghoul, Mehdi Charef, and Tassadit Imache depicted in their literary works everyday life of Franco-Algerians at marginalized public housing estates (HLM) or in the French shantytowns of the 1960s. In the 1980s and 1990s, works by authors such as politically engaged Didier Daeninckx or Algerian-born Leïla Sebbar began to address topics such as the 1961 massacre or the French–Algerian War, which were still largely unexplored in mainstream discourse. In the 1990s as well, Algerian-born authors such as Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous, who came to the spotlight in the 1960s along with Albert Camus, began to explore in their works their childhood in Algeria. These interests in the recent past echoed the work of French historians, especially that of Algerian-born Benjamin Stora, who, during the 1980s and 1990s, extensively explored historical events surrounding the colonial period and the French–Algerian War. It must be noted that it was not until 1999 that the Jacques Chirac administration officially called the French–Algerian War a war, as opposed to its former designation of the “Algerian events.” The Algerian diaspora also saw the emergence of a Kabyle cultural movement that began since the 1970s. It advocated for the recognition of Tamazight language in France and Algeria and protested the compulsory Arabization of independent Algeria. In Paris, youth associations such as the Berber Culture Association were formed to study and disseminate Kabylian culture and language. Such groups closely followed the Kabyle uprisings in Algeria, which in the 1980s became known as “the Berber Spring.” Awareness and promotion of Kabylian culture remain strong in parts of the Algerian diaspora in France to this day. Algeria entered a civil war from 1992 to 2002, which resulted in an estimated 100,000 deaths and prompted a humanitarian crisis of refugee and economic migration especially to France (Silverstein 2004, 75). In 1995, a series of bombings in the Paris metro and the city of Lyon was attributed to the Algerian Armed Islamist Group in an alleged retaliation 591

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for French government involvement in the armed conflict. In response, French authorities carried counterterrorist measures that specifically targeted Algerians and their descendants, as well as other North Africans and French Muslims, regardless of their national origin, including increased policing of the deprived outer suburbs (the banlieue), interrogations of suspected terrorists, and racial profiling in identity checks at train and metro stations (Silverstein 2004, 2).

The Algerian Diaspora at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century Since the turn of the twenty-first century, French people have grown more aware of the diversity of their population and demographic changes brought about by migration, especially from Algeria. The 1998 FIFA World Cup is often referenced as a moment in which French popular culture embraced multiculturalism as part of the national identity. The national team’s ethnic diversity was widely highlighted, including the popular player Zinédine Zidane, whose parents migrated from Algeria to France. Yet while media echoed the optimistic catchphrase “Black-Black-Beur” to describe French society, concurrent moments of controversy surrounded the Algerian diaspora, including Zidane’s public waving of both French and Algerian flags, or an incident where groups of French nationals of Maghrebi descent booed the French national anthem during the first friendly soccer match between France and Algeria in 2002. Such events have been argued to point toward the development of new identity constructions where Algerian identifiers can be combined with the French national identity. Shifts have been identified in the discourse on Algerian migration to France. While immigration is still presented as an issue in social and political culture, contemporary discourse on French-born ethnic minorities tends to center more on the themes of diversity and integration. This connects to a shift in media and political rhetoric, from associating the social issues of deprived areas with the Beur label, to the broader identity of “generation de cité” (Blanchard 2018) that, albeit racialized, no longer isolates the Algerian minority. This is not to say that Franco-Algerians have surpassed the challenges and discrimination of previous decades. Studies continue to point to an uneven socio-economic development of the community: in 2017, the unemployment rate of Algerian-born residents in France was three times higher than the national average (Ministère de l’Intérieur 2017), and a 2010 national survey noted that 48% of Algerian descendants in France reported having experienced racial discrimination in the last 12 months (TeO 2010). Another social shift concerning the Algerian diaspora in the twenty-first century is the resurgence of the identifier “Muslim of France” as a political, social, and public marker of identity among Muslim Franco-Algerians and Algerian nationals living in France. At the same time, there has been a rise of discrimination on overtly religious rather than ethnoracial grounds (Blanchard 2018, 108). Both as a claim and as a prejudice, Islam thus has become a more potent marker of identity than in previous decades. The end of the Algerian civil war in 2002 brought unprecedented contact between France and Algeria that has reinforced personal, social, and political bonds between the diaspora and family members in Algeria. Summer travel from France to Algeria, popularized as “vacances au bled” (country holidays), is ever more common in the diaspora than in previous decades (Blanchard 2018, 107). Binational careers and identities have also emerged: for example, there are French-born and French-trained soccer players in the Algerian national team, and French-born filmmaker Rachid Bouchareb has represented Algeria at the Academy Awards. The Algerian National Assembly includes a multi-member 592

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overseas constituency to represent the Algerian diaspora in France (Benzenine 2019, 64). Political engagement among different generations of the diaspora drew some 10,000 demonstrators to the streets of Paris in 2019 in the context of the Algerian political crisis known as the Hirak movement. The new century has continued the interest by social scientists and the media in recovering the memory of the French–Algerian War, which has also gained political currency among the Algerian diaspora and mainstream political culture. In 2001, a plaque was unveiled by the Parisian mayor Bertrand Delanoë to honor the victims of the 1961 massacre. On the anniversary of the massacre, people from the diaspora continue to gather every year at this site. In 2001, Jacques Chirac declared September 15 as a day to commemorate the harkis. In 2007, the Sarkozy administration met a harki delegation at the Elysée Palace, and in 2012, he recognized the government’s responsibility for “abandoning” the harkis in France in addition to referring to the “mistakes and crimes” of French colonial rule during a trip to Algeria. President François Hollande denounced in 2012 the colonial rule in Algeria and officially recognized the October 17 massacre. France’s first president born after the French–Algerian War, Emmanuel Macron, has made substantial progress on addressing the memory of the war, including in 2017 calling the French colonization of Algeria a “crime against humanity”, recognizing in 2018 the torture of dissident Maurice Audin during the French–Algerian War, the same year distributing the Legion of Honor to a group of harkis, in 2021 commissioning historian Benjamin Stora to deliver a report on the memory of colonization and the French–Algerian War in contemporary France, and the following year recognizing massacres of pied-noirs by Algerian independence supporters. The significance of such acknowledgments to the diaspora can be judged against the decades of deliberate silence by previous administrations of Left and Right. The visibility of French people of Algerian descent has, in the first decades of the ­twentieth-first century, expanded to the realms of politics, literature, and popular culture. In 2005, Azouz Begag became the first cabinet minister of Algerian ancestry (Minister of Equal Opportunities), followed by Fadela Amara (Secretary of State for Urban Policies, 2007), Rachida Dati (Minister of Justice, 2007; Mayor of the 7th Arrondissement of Paris, 2008; mayoral candidate of the city of Paris, 2020), and Samia Ghali (Senator for Bouchesdu-Rhône, 2008–2020). The spokesperson of the radical Left political party les Indigènes de la République is the Algerian-born activist Houria Bouteldja. In 2022, Éric Zemmour, the son of Algerian Jews, founded the Far Right party Reconquête. The cultural scene has witnessed new generations of Franco-Algerian writers, including Faïza Guène, Omar Benlaâla, Rachid Djaïdani, Alice Zeniter, Fatima Daas; filmmakers such as Yamina Benguigi and Rachid Bouchareb; and visual artists such as Katia Kameli, Bruno Boudjelal, and Zineb Sedira, who represented France at the 2022 Venice Biennale. The presence of FrancoAlgerians in popular culture and sports from the first decades of the twenty-first century is also noteworthy and includes soccer players, such as Karim Benzema, Nabil Fekir, and Killian Mbapé; comedians, such as Dany Boon and Kev Adams; actors, such as Isabelle Adjani, Abdelhafid Metalsi, Sodiane Zermani, and Kad Merad; and musicians, such as Amel Bent, Sinik, Sheryfa Luna, Fadel, and Médine.

Conclusion The history of the Algerian diaspora in France is rooted in colonial history, the cultural legacy of the French–Algerian War, and the course of the contemporary Algerian state 593

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founded in 1962. At various moments of the colonial period, the diaspora was confronted with state discrimination regarding access to citizenship. In the postcolonial period, Algerian immigration has enjoyed a different status from other non-EU immigrants, reflecting the French–Algerian agreements of 1968. Algerian immigrants and their descendants in postcolonial France have been targets of xenophobia, Islamophobia, and right-wing discourse, presenting Algerian immigration as an issue, especially during the years following Algerian Independence. The ethnoracial and religious identifiers of “Arab” or “Muslim,” both markers from the colonial period, remain as potent identity labels among the community, although recent developments, such as Kabyle nationalism and, to a lesser extent, Jewish Algerian and pied-noir narratives, challenge conventional understandings of French inhabitants of Algerian heritage. France remains the leading destination of migrating Algerian nationals. Their contributions to the broad sweep of French history and cultural development, as well as their challenges, attest to the long-lasting and complex historical and cultural relationship that exists between the two countries. In 2018, it was estimated that there were 842,000 Algerian immigrants living in France, and that a further 1,152,000 French nationals identify as of Algerian descent (INSEE 2019, 171). Algerians remain the largest category of foreign-born residents as well as of immigrants’ descendants in France, and the latter figure only includes those with a parent born outside France, so is a distinct undercounting. What is clear, nonetheless, is that the Algerian diaspora is a key actor in the daily chronicles of French life, especially in the major urban areas and the southern regions of France.

References Allan, Christelow. 2012. Algerians Without Borders: The Making of a Global Frontier Society. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. André, Marc, and Helen  Tomlinson.  2016.  “Algerian Women: What Kind of Citizenship (1930s–1960s)?” Clio. Women. Gender & History 43: 95–117. Benson, Rodney.  2013.  Shaping Immigration News: A  French-American Comparison.  New York: Cambridge University Press. Benzenine, Belkacem. 2019. “Le Vote de la Communauté Algérienne à l’Étranger: Quels Enjeux pour les Partis Politiques?” Revue Internationale de Politique Comparée 26: 57–81. Bessaguet, Michel. 2002. “1954–2002: Le Long Chemin des Harkis’.” Geo: 156–68. Blanchard, Emmanuel. 2018. Histoire de l’Immigration Algérienne en France. Paris: La découverte. Coller, Ian.  2011. Arab  France: Islam and the Making of Modern Europe, 1798–1831. Berkeley: University of California Press. de l’Intérieur, Ministère.  “ ‘L’Immigration  En  France.”  Données du Recensement 2017′.  Accesed November  22, 2021. http://www.immigration.interieur.gouv.fr/Info-ressources/Actualites/ Focus/L-immigration-en-France-donnees-du-recensement-2017. Derderian, Richard  L.  2004.  North Africans in Contemporary France: Becoming Visible. Palgrave Macmillan. House, Jim, and Neil MacMaster. 2006. Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror, and Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Khellil, Mohand. 2004. Maghrébins de France: De 1960 à Nos Jours: La Naissance d’une Communauté. Toulouse: Privat. Lejman, Michael. 2014. “Unrequited Loyalty: The Harkis in Postcolonial France.” Studia Historica Gedanensia 5 (1): 250–67. Maamri, Malika Rebai. 2016. The State of Algeria: The Politics of a Postcolonial Legacy. London: I.B.Tauris. MacMaster, Neil. 1997. Colonial Migrants and Racism: Algerians in France, 1900–1962. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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The Algerian Diaspora in France McCormack, Jo.  2011.  “Social Memories in (Post) Colonial  France: Remembering the FrancoAlgerian War.” Journal of Social History 44 (4): 1129–38.https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh.2011.0048. Reestman, Jan Herman. 1999. “Citizenship and Nationality: The Case of (Post-) Colonial France and Europe.” Irish review 24 (24): 18–30. Roberts, Sophie B. 2017. Citizenship and Antisemitism in French Colonial Algeria, 1870–1962. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Savarese, Eric. 2006. “After the Algerian War: Reconstructing Identity Among the Pieds-Noirs’.” International Social Science Journal 58 (189): 457–66. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2451.2007.00644.x. Silverstein, Paul. 2004. Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race and Nation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Stora, Benjamin. 1985. “Avant la Deuxième Génération: Le Militantisme Algérien en France (1926– 1954).” Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales 1 (2): 69–93. https://doi.org/10.3406/ remi.1985.981. ———. 1992. Ils Venaient d’Algérie: L’Immigration Algérienne en France 1912–1992. Paris: Fayard. TeO. 2010. Trajectoires et Origines: Enquête sur la Diversité des Populations en France. Paris: Institut National d’Études Démographiques. Vincent, Crapanzano. 2011. “The Harkis: The Wound That Never Heals.” Chicago London. University of Chicago Press.

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55 FRENCH MUSEUMS IN THE  FIFTH REPUBLIC Déborah Dubald

The Louvre Pyramid, which stands in the Cour Napoléon of the former royal palace, is an iconic museum entrance in the heart of Paris. The grand, lean megastructure of glass and iron, designed by the Chinese American architect Ieoh Ming Pei, was a notable addition to the architectural complex during its momentous renovation under François Mitterrand’s (1981–1988, 1988–1995) first presidential term. On March 4, 1988, French television journalists swarmed into the Louvre to catch a glimpse of the presidential inauguration of the renovated museum. A modernist statement, the Pyramid did not meet unanimous approval. It was still under construction, dusty and unprotected from the late-winter cold, but as a new election loomed just weeks later, it was crucial for Mitterrand to promote what he regarded as the keystone of his first term’s cultural policy. What would become “the greatest museum in the world,” Mitterrand then told reporters, was the result of his effort to provide a place for “the French to reconnect with their history, their art, and their past” (“Inauguration de la Pyramide du Louvre” 1988); it was to serve the imagined needs of a national community. The Louvre, both topped by and encapsulated in the pyramid, offers an interesting summary of the place museums have occupied in French political and social spaces since 1958 and the creation of the Fifth Republic. A museum is a venue for the exhibition, conservation, and study of collections which may comprise artistic, ethnographic, scientific, or more generally historical artifacts. The term refers to a place, a collection, and an institution. Museums form a rich and diverse landscape which has expanded considerably since the mid-twentieth century. A constant amid these changes has been the special role museums have played in the French political sphere as privileged instruments for the construction of the modern state through the promotion of heritage. The significance of museums extends beyond their role in exhibiting or mediating culture. It would be a mistake to ignore the “subjective realities of museum provision” and “continue to imagine museums as neutral, authoritative and trustworthy” (Knell et al. 2011, 4). How museums function as stages for “the performance of the myth of nationhood” must be acknowledged and re-evaluated. This chapter addresses the political and social implications of museums, as well as their uses by state institutions and successive presidents. Following sections examining the changing role of museums in society in the

DOI: 10.4324/9780367808471-56

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second half of the twentieth century, it offers a case study of issues surrounding the conception and inception of a postcolonial museum.

State and Presidential Uses of Museums The development of museums in France has been closely intertwined with the state’s cultural policy. In particular, the creation of the Ministry of Cultural Affairs was decisive in granting cultural policies national significance, but also in legitimizing a strong state and presidential ascendency in all things cultural. The Ministry was established by decree on July 24, 1959, following Charles de Gaulle’s (1959–1969) decision to unify the governance of cultural institutions (Ballé, Poulot, and Mazoyer 2004, 123). Appointing a minister in charge of cultural policy made sense in a system of government inclined to centralize and concentrate decision-making in the hands of the executive (Poirrier 2006, 136). This, in turn, led throughout the Fifth Republic to an intensification of the state’s direct intervention in the management of museums, through legislative action and the attribution of public subsidies (Ballé, Poulot, and Mazoyer 2004, 120). Accordingly, museums have become central to successive governments’ cultural policies. The policy conducted by André Malraux, the first minister of cultural affairs and himself a noted public intellectual, broke with tradition in many regards.1 The separation of cultural affairs from the Ministry of Public Instruction redefined approaches to art, now independent from pedagogy. Malraux’s policy also favored a pluridisciplinary approach, where artistic displays would stand side by side with theatrical performances and film societies in the iconic maisons de la culture (i.e., local cultural centers). Shifting away from an elitist approach inherited from an old humanist tradition, the democratization of access to culture was Malraux’s response to the necessity of bringing French society together after the many crises of war, reconstruction, and decolonization of the 1940s and 1950s, which had eroded national unity (Lebovics 1999). Malraux was, however, careful not to bind state policy and the arts too closely, to avoid comparisons with totalitarian states, especially the USSR (Lebovics 1999). The objective was to maintain the credibility and legitimacy of the artistic world while preserving its independence. For example, the Fondation Maeght, a private foundation in the small town of Saint-Paul-de-Vence in the hinterland of Nice, was created with the Ministry’s support and granted official recognition as an institution of public interest. A peripheral, state-backed, but also privately run and autonomous museum of modern art, the Fondation reflects the ambivalent attitude of the French state when it comes to the control of the arts and heritage, in spite of its strong centralizing bent. The Gaullist era ended in the revolutionary atmosphere of May 1968, and Malraux left office alongside de Gaulle in 1969. While Malraux had been given considerable freedom to implement his policy, the following two presidents, Georges Pompidou (1969–1974) and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (1974–1981), both left a strong individual mark on the delineation of museum projects. Both inclined to modernize the country, they continued to assert the role of the state in museums, but their styles were different. Known as a contemporary art connoisseur and collector, Pompidou settled on the construction of a center for contemporary art in downtown Paris. An insalubrious fourth arrondissement block of houses was taken down to make space for the Centre Pompidou, designed by star architects Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers to stand in sharp contrast with the surrounding urban landscape,

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with colorful external pipes, escalators, and a metal structure, sparking heated debates on modernist architecture in the heart of Paris. Giscard opted for a more classicist proposition with the Orsay Museum, dedicated to nineteenth-century art. The creation of this museum was provided for by the programmatic law of 1978, which also reaffirmed the regulatory and financial bases of the museums’ public mission of exhibition and conservation (Ballé, Poulot, and Mazoyer 2004, 128). Housed in a former railway station, the museum was planned alongside two other cultural facilities, the Institut du Monde Arabe and the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie. Paris thus continued to be the main hub for cultural investment, a dominant model that exacerbated inequalities between the capital and the “provinces.” Orsay was officially inaugurated in 1986, during Mitterrand’s first term. His 14-year presidency marked an important turn for museums, which became icons of state cultural policy, entrusted to flamboyant Minister of Culture Jack Lang.2 The Lang years saw a leap in the funding of cultural policies in France: between 1982 and 1993, the cultural budget more than doubled, from 6 to 13.5 billion francs (Poirrier 2006, 161–62). Meanwhile, the state’s prominent role in the governance of cultural affairs was reinforced. Political backing also came in the form of a policy of “great works,” resulting in the appearance of many new sites in Paris: notably, in addition to the renovated Louvre, a new opera house was built at the Bastille to the east of the city, and the Great Arch of La Défense extended the line of monuments from the Louvre via the Arc de Triomphe beyond the city’s boundaries to the west. As part of this policy, a National Centre for French Comics (“bande dessinée”), centered on a museum, was built in Angoulême. The founding collection featured original artworks deposited since 1974 at the city’s municipal museum on the occasion of the annual festival of French comics. The circumstances of this museum’s creation are noteworthy, as the acknowledgment of the Ministry of Culture and subsequent presidential support gave considerable momentum to a local and somewhat-incidental collection. It also reflected an attempt to move away from considering certain forms of art as minor, such as comics, photography, or pop music. This transition from cultural democratization (“culture for everyone”) into cultural democracy (“everyone’s culture and for everyone”) was a cornerstone of Lang’s action (Poirrier 2006, 169). But what certainly best represents Mitterrand’s action in the field of museums is the renovation of the Louvre and the construction of the Great Pyramid. The controversial project, sometimes referred to as an antidemocratic “act of state” by critics, gave Mitterrand a place within a very long history of French rulers, alongside the princes who once used the galleries to expose their art riches, but it was also intended as a gesture of regeneration of a republican symbol. Opened during the French Revolution, the Louvre was the birthplace of the “revolutionary invention of patrimoine,” a term that refers to a material or immaterial ensemble of artifacts and monuments used to place the present society in a political and national genealogy, thereby legitimizing it (Poulot 2001, 3–8). Mitterrand became part of the history of this eminently symbolic place through this appropriation and re-contextualization of a former royal palace and of artifacts inherited from the Ancien Régime. During the French Revolution, the Louvre had served to give a physical expression of how the very identity of the French people, embodied by the monuments, was to be regenerated by art, a role symbolically reclaimed by Mitterrand. The president publicly recalled his part in the selection of the project for the Louvre as a grave, dizzying decision. He was well aware, he said, of how this would commit him and the French people “for centuries” (‘Inauguration de la Pyramide du Louvre’ 1988). 598

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Mitterrand actively emphasized the crucial role of collections, heritage, and museum in presidential governance and contributed to a formulation of the presidential role as torchbearer of culture. Museum policies are thus, to some extent, the cultural materialization of the strong presidential regime characterizing the Fifth Republic and the continuation of the long-standing tradition of state sponsorship of the arts.

The Democratizing Uses of Museums The late twentieth century did not only see museums take a more and more political dimension; they also became places that increasingly resonated with economic and social issues. In 1990, the umbrella organization of the Réunion des Musées Nationaux (RMN) was turned into a public structure with a commercial and industrial vocation (Poirrier 2006, 168), and its missions changed. Originally conceived to monitor and coordinate the acquisitions of national museums, it was now meant to provide technical and financial support for exhibitions, to promote the collections of the French museums, but also to deal with merchandising and branding activities, such as the management of the photographic database of collections. This “commercial turn” (Poulot 2001, 168) was conceived as a means of diversifying paths of access to culture. This shift also resulted from an effort by museum professionals to move away from statist frameworks and to rethink their work in terms of interpretation. Additionally, the period was characterized by changing attitudes toward museums in society, with a growing emphasis on museums as places that shed light on society itself, and as places of social diversity. Since the 1960s, the number of museum visitors has grown considerably, from an annual 5 million to 12 million in 1992 (Poulot 2001, 174). Between 1973 and 2008, visiting numbers among 15- to 24-year-olds remained fairly stable, with around 45% reporting having visited a museum or an exhibition in the year prior to the survey. A sharp increase was, on the other hand, observed within the senior population: in 1973, only 22% of respondents aged 60 and over had visited a museum or an exhibition in the past year, compared to 32% in 2008. In terms of class, the numbers remained stable: over 70% of the surveyed upper class visited a museum within the past year, while a mere 30% of surveyed working-class respondents did (Donnat 2011, 26–27). The development of mass tourism has also led to growing flows of international visitors. In 2018, the Louvre Museum sold over 10 million entrance tickets, making it the most visited cultural site in France, far ahead of other Parisian museums, such as the Centre Pompidou, Orsay, and the National Museum of Natural History (which totaled around 3 million admissions each). Meanwhile, in France and elsewhere, museum visitors have long been an object of interest for the social sciences, fueling a critical approach which has sought to denounce the bourgeois and elitist culture of art. Bourdieu’s still-influential The Love of Art (1969, translated in 1991) showed the role played by museums in social reproduction and was widely interpreted as a denunciation of museums as places where the elite confiscates culture and tries to dictate its meaning. In the late twentieth century, this state of affairs was deemed incompatible with a modern democracy (Poulot 2001, 173). Both professional and international organizations, such as ICOM (International Council of Museums), and academics have since paid greater attention to the social role of museums (Hooper-Greenhill 1992; Bennett 1995) and stressed the importance of visitors and their experiences. A significant development in museology has been the creation of ecomuseums. This new type of museum emerged during the ICOM conference of 1971, held in the French city of 599

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Grenoble. It holistically designated a place of preservation, interpretation, and management of material and immaterial heritage, such as local traditions (Davis 2011). In this environmental approach to heritage, traditions and ecosystems can be seen as cultural heritage as well. Ecomuseums flourished in France in the 1970s and 1980s: by 1990, there were around 250 such organizations, ranging from technical museums, like the Musée de l’automobile or Cité du train in Mulhouse, to an open-air museum of traditional Alsatian village architecture in the nearby town of Ungersheim, or ecomuseums of urban culture like that of Fresnes. Two of the key players of ecomuseums were the Frenchmen Hugues de Varine, then director of ICOM, and Georges-Henri Rivière.3 They participated in the genesis of the ecomuseum of Creusot-Montceau-les-Mines, located in an area that had been severely hit by deindustrialization, which became a point of reference for future developments. The project was initiated by private collector Marcel Évrard, with support from the mayor, in an attempt to safeguard, protect, and promote the “remains” (Debary 2004) of the mining industry, which included its social and physical landscapes. These aims were complicated by the requirements of top museum institutions and the expectations of the local communities. The original effort to preserve the industrial environment was made difficult by the impossibility of applying a classical model of conservation, owing to the disappearance of much of its material traces and the impossibility of housing the immaterial in a building. This was an opportunity for Varine to call for a “decolonised museum” and for “liberating the people from objects” (Debary 2004, 126), a liberal stance that echoed the broader context of civil rights protest and cultural change of the 1970s. This case of a shift from industrial history to museum exhibits is a striking example of how museums were now perceived as having the ability to appropriate local heritage – the community was at the center of the project through the participation of the local authorities, and authorship was transferred to the museum visitors (Poulot 2008, 178). Science museums, too, sought to offer a contribution to contemporary debates and embraced their roles as knowledge-shaping places. This was an opportunity to map out new museologies and approaches to ageing natural history collections. Beyond the renovation of the Grande Galerie de l’Évolution at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, there was an intent to promote the museum as a place of critical thinking and of social transaction between objects and visitors to co-construct a scientific culture. The thought-provoking, immersive staging, relying on a high-tech array of lights, sounds, and displays, was designed to raise questions among the public on evolution and biodiversity, the extinction of species, and humankind’s role in the living world. This interactive method, which also hinges on the aestheticization of the natural world, has been used in most renovations of natural history museums since then, as in the cases of La Rochelle, Toulouse, Orléans, and Strasbourg. Likewise, the new Musée de l’Homme, which reopened in 2015, promoted a sense of public engagement and a reflection on the relations between nature and human societies, albeit with one glaring omission: while the permanent exhibition considers environmental breakdown and cultural globalization, the staging and discourse are mostly gender-blind, as the unchanged name of the museum suggests (Lebovics and Boëtsch 2018, 107). The role of museums and culture in sparking conversations about sociopolitical issues is patent in war museums. The war museums of Verdun (inaugurated 1967), Caen (1988), and Péronne (1992) are museums of the history of the First and Second World Wars which aim at tackling war cultures and encompassing social challenges rather than celebrating military exploits. Peace and pacifism are front and center in Caen’s narrative. In Péronne, 600

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the conflict’s international dimension and the shared suffering of societies across borders are emphasized. Like natural history museums, they draw on the work of scientific experts and have extensively publicized the support of eminent historians, such as François Béderida (Caen) and Jean-Jacques Becker (Péronne). Rather than merely venues for exhibitions, museums have become resource centers that shape societies’ representations of the past (Sherman 1995, 53). The increasing expectation that museums should challenge society in turn raises the acute question of their responsibility in terms of moral authority (Knell et al. 2011, 3–4).

The Colonial Past and Postcolonial Society in Museums In the French postcolonial and global context, museums have become places of choice for tackling questions of memory, as exemplified by war museums. The concept of identity has been challenged by global movements, information and communication technologies, tourism, and long-term migration, sparking fears that it could become obsolete (Aldrich 2006, 167). There are various reasons for the rise of the expectation that museums should actively contribute to mending society since the 2000s (Macdonald 2013, 1). The French republican national narrative has long promoted the idea of France as a place of universal liberty, welcoming all equally (Noiriel 1996). Since the 1990s and 2000s, however, in the context of an enduring economic crisis, and amid growing concerns over the integration of the North African diaspora in particular, the French society and political spheres have been shaken by questions mémorielles or “history wars” (Aldrich 2006). In a way, the French attitude to museums is representative of a broader “European memory complex,” as European societies fear losing their foothold in the past and become obsessed “with the disappearance of collective memory and its preservation” (Macdonald 2013, 1). In this respect, turning material and immaterial heritage over to museums for preservation purposes makes them “sites of memory” (“lieux de mémoire”), that is, places where a collective memory crystallizes (Macdonald 2013, 10–26). The Louvre, in Nora’s authoritative work Realms of Memory, is a “site of memory” that mirrors, contains, and preserves elements of French identity (Nora and Kritzman 1996). The book convincingly explains how visiting some prominent museums functions as a new civic ritual, commemorating shared aspects of culture and memory. However, Nora’s argument has also been criticized for removing colonial and postcolonial elements from the national discourse, and for romanticizing memory as “real” and dismissing history as sterile and unsuited to capturing the full range of the past, such as the variety of experiences of war (Achille, Forsdick, and Moudileno 2020). In the wake of Realms of Memory, “critical history” has been accused of destroying “true memory” (Sherman 1995, 49–50) and of triggering a rat race over whose account of the past is the truest (Macdonald 2013, 13–14). In this context, an institution addressing the interrelated themes of immigration and colonialism has, for a long time, been perceived as an “impossible museum” (Aldrich 2011). Such a site would be caught between fulfilling the mission of safeguarding the collective memory in the form of “three-dimensional identity stories for the public” and trying to meet expectations of a reconfigured museum space, open to a more inclusive and conversational approach, steering clear of monocultural readings of society (Macdonald 2013, 165–70). Characterized by euphemization and missed opportunities, the discourse on French colonial memory in museums reflects much of the uneasiness caused by this topic in France (Lotem 2021, 13–14). The idea of such a museum emerged with decolonization. 601

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In the 1990s, attempts were made to dust off exhibits inherited from the colonial era, which had lost their meaning after the fall of the empire in the 1960s. In practice, colonial museums lost financial support, visitors, and public interest. There were, however, attempts to adapt: the former Musée des arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie (MAAO) addressed the colonial heritage with notable temporary exhibitions, such as the Kanak art exhibition in the 1990s and the “Kannibals et Vahinés” exhibition about Western stereotypes on Oceania. Years later, Atlantic coast museums also attempted to deal with their heritage by exploring slavery and abolitionism, as in the recent Musée du Nouveau Monde in La Rochelle, or the Musée de la Compagnie des Indes in Lorient (Aldrich 2011). In addition to individual initiatives, in response to the thirst for answers on immigration, several museum projects were commissioned in the 2000s, many of them upon presidential initiative. The central government has remained a key player in overseeing the museumification of migrant and colonial heritage. The first in this line of projects, the Musée du Quai Branly (MQB), bringing together major collections of non-Western art and artifacts, which opened in 2006 on President Jacques Chirac’s (1995–2002, 2002–2007) initiative, is seen by many as a failed attempt, as it eschews any form of historical and ethnographic contextualization (Lebovics 2014). Meanwhile, a new museum of Mediterranean cultures, the MUCEM (2013), sprang up in Marseilles from the old collections of the ethnographic Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires (Ford 2010). The Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration (CNHI) is a crucial example of the difficulties of addressing the “colonial fracture” (Bancel, Blanchard, and Lemaire 2005). Also initiated by Chirac, the CNHI was spearheaded by Jacques Toubon, an experienced senior civil servant and politician. Finding a suitable building was an urgent challenge: this is a typically crucial matter in the history of museums in that it shapes and constrains museum exhibits. Before the museum opened, the matter of the building itself raised major concerns. The location of the Palais de la Porte Dorée (formerly MAAO) was problematic: too far to the east compared to most other Parisian museums and, as such, likely to be regarded as a materialization of the marginalization of the theme of immigration. The history of the building itself, a remainder of the 1931 colonial exhibition complex, was controversial. Every single public meeting about the project saw audience members question this problematic choice. Housing a museum on the history of immigration in a former colonial building was a paradoxical move that the project’s leaders did not question. Rather, they saw this architectural option as a “natural fit,” and Toubon even initially denied that the building had once served as the palace of the colonies and went at great lengths to argue that the building was, in fact, ideal (Stevens 2009). Its euphemistic name itself, Palais de la Porte Dorée, with its reference to gold and avoidance of colonial terminology, continues to “attest to a French incapacity to name the things touching upon this past” (Jarrassé 2007) and reflects the sense that the country’s colonial heritage is being ignored and denied (Stevens 2009). Theses lines about the former Cité Nationale de l’Immigration are not concerned with the rebranded Musée de l’Histoire de l’Immigration and its latest permanent display which opened in 2023, as this chapter was going to press. The much-delayed formal inauguration of the CNHI in 2014 by President François Hollande (2012–2017), seven years after it opened to the public in 2007, is further evidence of the ambivalent attitude of state representatives toward France’s colonial memory. The tumultuous history of the aborted Musée de l’Histoire de la France et de l’Algérie (MHFA), initially planned in Montpellier in 2012 and suddenly abandoned a couple of years later in spite of the commitment of a scientific board and diplomatic representatives, is yet another example of 602

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the difficulty of dealing with a sensitive Algerian colonial memory. It also further exemplifies the entanglement of memory and political agendas and the strong political engagement indispensable to the foundation of museums as public spaces of knowledge about colonialism. Museums in postcolonial overseas locations, like the Centre Tjibaou in New Caledonia and the Pointe-à-Pitre Memorial ACTe in Guadeloupe, may offer more possibilities. The Centre Tjibaou was named after a central figure of the Kanak independence movement, Jean-Marie Tjibaou, whose assassination in 1989 made the political situation in New Caledonia explosive. President Mitterrand sensed the urgency of the case and had the government issue a decree for the foundation of the center in just four months. An instrument of pacification and of empowerment, the Centre Tjibaou was not about converting an older collection; it was meant to acknowledge a diverse and changing society by documenting the Kanak identity and culture in a way that avoided being static (Ford 2010, 630–35). The advent of Guadeloupe’s Memorial ACTe, a name coined after the idea of active memory of slavery, was certainly facilitated by its Caribbean location and specific administrative regulations. While it was classically inaugurated by a president in 2015 (Hollande), it remains a peculiar creation compared to other Fifth Republic museums. Both the administration and narratives on display are the result of local community choices. The project benefitted from unprecedented investment for cultural facilities in Guadeloupe, inspired unusually momentous architecture, escaped the sinuous paths of the centralized decisionmaking processes, but also elaborated an original museography. The choice was made to focus on the theme of the suffering of slavery, instead of adopting an abolitionist perspective, which could always be suspected of reflecting a dominant narrative arguing that the Europeans and colonists eventually freed the enslaved people, negating the agency and empowerment of the Caribbean societies (Viala 2020). In recent years, museums have faced new challenges. The place of ethnographic collections, in particular, in French museums has been questioned. Since the 1970s, looted countries have made requests for restitutions, through ICOM or UNESCO. Their demands have been systematically ignored, when not actively delegitimized, by France and other European countries. Some exceptions that attracted media coverage, such as the restitution of the remains of Sartjie Baartman in 2002 and of the Kanak leader Atai in 2014, revealed a new openness on the specific question of human remains. But when the Beninese government demanded the restitution of the zoomorphic statues and royal insignia stolen from the Abomey palace by the French in 1892, the French government merely invoked French property law and the inalienability of museum collections. However, the very idea of displaying others’ history in national collections has been increasingly criticized. How can a universalist narrative on others’ heritage draw on the exhibition of colonial war spoils, these “sad trophies” from colonial wars (Arzel and Foliard 2020)? Is a genuinely “universal” history being told when French museums write the history of former colonies, control those narratives, and produce essentialized stereotypes? The idea of restitution is not new. It appeared, for instance, in the 1982 Querrien report commissioned by Mitterrand. It clearly formulates the museums’ responsibility to “restitute” heritage to the communities as the pillar of “social memory.” Yet these considerations were thought not to apply to nations dispossessed from their art and heritage. In Sarr and Savoy’s groundbreaking report on the restitutions requested by President Emmanuel Macron (2017–2022, 2022–), those annexations are shown to be the direct result of colonialism and violence. The undue appropriation of heritage now needs to be faced and documented to elaborate a new ethics of museums. But most importantly, the report insists on 603

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the necessity to respect a universal right to heritage, of which formerly colonized societies have been deprived (Sarr and Savoy 2018). While the Sarr-Savoy report does contain unprecedented proposals, it suffers from a few blind spots: the unquestioned reliance on systematic digitization as a way to guarantee ubiquitous access to collections is naive, considering the complex legal implications of this approach. By focusing almost exclusively on ethnographic collections, the decolonizing of natural history collections and scientific heritage, also acquired in complex, entangled contexts, remains an open question in France: unlike in other countries, notably Germany, where many research programs have been launched to document natural collections. The report also leaves out artifacts from Egyptian and Algerian collections, on the grounds that they are special cases to be treated independently. Likewise, Asian colonies are ignored. At the time of writing, the Beninese zoomorphic statues no longer greet visitors at the Quai Branly. In November 2021, they were repatriated to Benin with another 20 or so looted artworks. The presidential gesture that allowed the restitution signals that the issue of colonial restitution is now taken seriously and addressed – albeit unresolved. The opening of the “the decades of restitution” (Hicks 2020) in the 2020s promises that debates on the uses of museum collections and displays will undoubtedly continue to be fueled in the years to come.

Notes André Malraux (1901–1976) was a French intellectual and politician. 1 2 Jack Lang (1939–) held a variety of governmental positions from 1981 to 2002. He was Minister of Cultural Affairs from 1981 to 1986 and from 1988 to 1993. 3 Georges-Henri Rivière (1897–1985) was a specialist of ethnographic museology and the creator and director of the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires in Paris.

References Achille, Etienne, Charles Forsdick, and Lydie Moudileno, eds. 2020. Postcolonial Realms of Memory: Sites and Symbols in Modern France. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Aldrich, Robert. 2006. “Colonial Past, Post-Colonial Present History Wars French-Style.” History Australia 3 (1): 14.1–14.10. https://doi.org/10.2104/ha060014. ———. 2011. “Le musée colonial impossible.” In Culture post-coloniale (1961–2006): traces et mémoires coloniales en France, edited by Pascal Blanchard and Nicolas Bancel, 83–101. Paris: Autrement. Arzel, Lancelot, and Daniel Foliard. 2020. “Tristes trophées.” Monde(s) 17 (1): 9–31. https://doi.org/ 10.3917/mond1.201.0009. Ballé, Catherine, Dominique Poulot, and Marie-Annick Mazoyer. 2004. Musées en Europe: une mutation inachevée. Paris: La Documentation française. Bancel, Nicolas, Pascal Blanchard, and Sandrine Lemaire, eds. 2005. La fracture coloniale: la société française au prisme de ̉l’héritage colonial. Paris: La Découverte. Bennett, Tony. 1995. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London: Routledge. Davis, Peter. 2011. Ecomuseums: A Sense of Place. London and New York: Continuum. Debary, Octave. 2004. “Deindustrialization and Museumification: From Exhibited Memory to Forgotten History.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 595: 122– 33. www.jstor.org/stable/4127614. Donnat, Olivier. 2011. “Pratiques culturelles, 1973–2008.” Culture études 7: 1–36. https://doi.org/ 10.3917/cule.117.0001. Ford, Caroline. 2010. “Museums after Empire in Metropolitan and Overseas France.” The Journal of Modern History 82 (3): 625–61. https://doi.org/10.1086/654828.

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French Museums in the Fifth Republic Hicks, Dan. 2020. The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution. London: Pluto Press. Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean. 1992. Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge. London and New York: Routledge. “Inauguration de la Pyramide du Louvre.” 1988. Midi 2. Paris: Antenne 2. INA. https://fresques.ina.fr/ mitterrand/fiche-media/Mitter00155/inauguration-de-la-pyramide-du-louvre.html. Jarrassé, Dominique. 2007. “The Former Palace of the Colonies: The Burden of Heritage.” Museum International 59 (1–2): 56–65. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0033.2007.00595.x. Knell, Simon J., Peter Aronsson, Arne Bugge Amundsen, Amy Jane Barnes, Stuart Burch, Jennifer Carter, Sarah A. Hughes, and Allan Kirwan, eds. 2011. National Museums: New Studies from around the World. New York: Routledge. Lebovics, Herman. 1999. Mona Lisa’s Escort: André Malraux and the Reinvention of French Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 2014. “The Future of the Nation Foretold in Its Museums.” French Cultural Studies 25 (3/4): 290–98. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957155814534145. Lebovics, Herman, and Gilles Boëtsch. 2018. “Biology and Culture at the Reinvented Musée de l’Homme.” French Cultural Studies 29 (2): 95–119. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957155818755609. Lotem, Itay. 2021. The Memory of Colonialism in Britain and France: The Sins of Silence. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/ 10.1007/978-3-030-63719-4. Macdonald, Sharon. 2013. Memorylands: Heritage and Identity in Europe Today. London and New York: Routledge. Noiriel, Gérard. 1996. The French Melting Pot: Immigration, Citizenship, and National Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nora, Pierre, and Lawrence D. Kritzman. 1996. Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past. New York: Columbia University Press. Poirrier, Philippe. 2006. L’État et la culture en France au XXe siècle. Paris: Le Livre de Poche. Poulot, Dominique. 2001. Patrimoine et musées: l’institution de la culture. Paris: Hachette. ———. 2008. Une histoire des musées de France: XVIIIe-XXe siècle. Paris: La Découverte. Sarr, Felwine, and Bénédicte Savoy. 2018. Rapport sur la restitution du patrimoine culturel africain. Vers une nouvelle éthique relationnelle. Paris: Ministère de la Culture. www.vie-publique.fr/sites/ default/files/rapport/pdf/194000291.pdf. Sherman, Daniel J. 1995. “Objects of Memory: History and Narrative in French War Museums.” French Historical Studies 19 (1): 49. https://doi.org/10.2307/286899. Stevens, Mary. 2009. “Still the Family Secret? The Representation of Colonialism in the Cité Nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration.” African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal 2 (2): 245–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/17528630902981373. Viala, Fabienne. 2020. “The Memorial ACTe.” In Postcolonial Realms of Memory: Sites and Symbols in Modern France, edited by Etienne Achille, Charles Forsdick, and Lydie Moudileno, 186–94. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

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56 ERASING RACE IN FRANCE Social Consequences of Political Idealism Daniel N. Maroun

Studying the trajectory of the term race from the 1950s to the present provides unique insights into the French socio-cultural psyche and how the French navigate a pluralistic, multi-ethnic society that is the result of their former colonial empire. This chapter addresses France’s effort to suppress the term race from juridical reality in the hopes of reinforcing a universalist model. It will also unpack the complex issues that have arisen from denying the impact that social theories of race have had on minority populations in France. From the 1950s, France’s decolonial period was distinctly attached to the idea of qualifying race. Attempts at defining the word and justifying its existence have been, and remain, inherently political: such a definition directly affects individuals of color in France, legitimizing or illegitimating their existence, their struggle, their subjectivity vis-à-vis French culture. The particular idea of race that concerns us in this context is embedded in a specific legal and political history. The post-war constitutions of the French Fourth and Fifth Republics assured citizens of equal rights no matter their ethnic roots, religion, or race. Studying how race operates in France in the contemporary world forces a confrontation between the idealism of equality for all and the praxis of discrimination in an increasingly “racially” heterogeneous society. The historical permutations of race in France have particular contours because the country possesses a robust universalist tradition that pervades its culture and politics. French modern political history embodies a tenacious republican ideology that often overlooks the ways in which racially discriminatory practices can result from a strong assimilationist and conformist social philosophy. In a general sense, race is a muddy term lacking scientific credibility, which makes its legal presence all the more problematic for certain politicians. It is a term, however, that carries massive social power because of how it has “inveigled” populations into assuming race can easily categorize differences between populations, most notably physical differences (Banton 2000, 51). Therefore, conceptualizing race across this period offers a rich example of transnational identities converging upon a homogenous society that has not considered the possibility of a visible “other” being considered French: a history that, once unpacked, unveils the constant struggle between the hegemonic rule of universalism and the need for recognition of communitarian-based identities. Emerging out of the Second World War as a “liberated” suffering nation while simultaneously reluctant DOI: 10.4324/9780367808471-57

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to end its colonial project and presence, France, in the decades after the 1950s, wrestled with the consequences of such contradictions. While anti-racist movements have continued to grow in France, highlighting the presence and rights of minoritized populations, ideas of “race” have had a complex role in transformations of cultural understanding about who is French and what Frenchness is and should be.

Post-War Immigration Patterns to France Eager to rebuild its infrastructure, France, in the years that followed the Second World War, encouraged an influx of labor from former colonial territories in North Africa and Southeast Asia. This fact, coupled with the ongoing decolonial efforts that took place in the first and second decades following the World War II, changed the socio-ethnic landscape of the Hexagon quite quickly. The inflow of Vietnamese and Algerian migrants to France set the stage for a skirmish between universalist political practice and historical racist ideologies. Defeat by Vietnamese nationalist forces in 1954 led to a French military withdrawal from the region, accompanied by the exodus of many in the local population associated with the colonial regime. Historians estimate that the Vietnamese immigration to France grew to around 30,000 inhabitants in the period between Vietnamese independence (1954) and the end of the Vietnam War (1975). Unsurprisingly, this number proceeded to double – to an estimated 60,329 by 1990 (Gubry 2000, 295). In the same year as Vietnam declared its independence, Algeria launched its own struggle for sovereignty against colonial occupation. The seven-year war fueled resentment in both directions but emboldened racist ideologies that positioned Algerians as a lesser civilization (Stora 2003, 8–9). With the war culminating in 1962, ending in Algeria’s independence, a complex decolonial process ensued.1 Up to 300,000 Algerians were already resident in metropolitan France in the mid-1950s, as entire nuclear families were immigrating to the country and attempting to integrate into the working class (Stora 1992, 367). These figures grew dramatically in the next two decades: census data from 1975 shows that the number of Algerian immigrants living in France had topped 700,000. These years encapsulate a rapid shift in French demographics, a shift that rendered race visible as the composition of the population morphed.2

The Malleability of Race Race is a social polemic in France because of how malleable the concept is, regulating certain bodies and populations in different manners. “The plasticity of race” (Peabody and Stovall 2003, 2) becomes clear when one discovers how the definitions and permutations of this concept have fluctuated throughout France’s complex history, in particular during the decolonial periods after 1950. Peabody and Stovall highlight longer-term shifts, noting that, up to the nineteenth century, religion, social class, and location were stronger markers of inclusion and exclusion than any racialized boundary. Race as a delimiting agent of who belongs and does not is a phenomenon of colonialism and empire. During the early twentieth century, one of the most salient developments in racial othering was the homogenization of national education both within the Hexagon and its colonies. This standardization established a concept of who was French and who was not, positing the colonial individual as a non-French “other.” The emblematic phrase of French nationalism “Our ancestors the Gauls” became a cornerstone to unifying French identity against the influx of immigration 607

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from former colonial territories. An influx that generated an “unexperienced degree of cultural and ethnic pluralism” (Peabody and Stovall 2003, 3), a cultural pluralism that France and its citizens are still navigating and debating to this very day. The malleability of race allows it to be used as an exclusionary tool, creating socio-cultural hierarchies of dominant and dominated while simultaneously creating generational accessibility barriers that limit wealth and privilege and subsequently proliferate systemically racist ideologies. Conversely, the malleability of what race means has allowed it to become a form of resistance against these cultural issues. It allows racialized individuals – those singled out by the assumptions of racial thinking as being “different” from the norm of whiteness – to coalesce around a shared identity and combat a prevailing cultural narrative. Their resistance is key to diversifying the cultural reality of France and challenging our “understandings of republicanism and how this ideology fits (or does not fit) the socio-cultural realities of the early twenty-first century” (Achille, Forsdick, and Moudileno 2020, 2). From being conceptualized as a biological truth, race is increasingly understood as a (false) social theory that divides populations based on a set of physical attributes. While race may not biologically exist, it does socially as a regime of power (Mazouz 2020, 28), and the increasing hybridization of France motivates Black, Arab, and Asian citizens to rethink how they dialogue with the demands of republicanism, their own ethnic heritage, and the reality of their social status. French sociologist Colette Guillaumin asserts that while race might not be “empirically valid” (Guillaumin 1981, 64), that does not make it any less “empirically effective.” Genetic science may agree that there is no biological truth to race, but that does not affect the social reality of how race establishes hierarchies in society that endure today. In what follows, by exploring some exemplary historical moments that span the decades since 1950, I hope to paint a better picture of how the cultural dialogue that occurs surrounding race is not just a matter of French prejudice but rather an institutionalized political ideology. French universalism seeks to erase and force racialized others to forgo their past, but this has only resulted in a renewed spirit of particularism that demands French social politics respond to the pluralism of society rather than sacrifice it for social homogeneity.

Political and Legal Realities of Race Ratified on October 4, 1958, the constitutional text of France’s Fifth Republic places race at the forefront of political debate, asserting that the Republic will “ensure the equality of all citizens before the law, without distinction of origin, race or religion” (France. Constitution de 1958). Remarkably, the existence of this claim is itself a historical mystery. This sentence did not appear in the draft of July 29, 1958, that both de Gaulle and the minister of justice, Michel Debré, oversaw and accepted. The Conseil consultatif constitutionnel, comprised of 39 parliamentary members, never debated the inclusion of race in the Constitution during its meetings from July 29 to August 14, 1958. The proposed draft continued through committee work, including the nation’s highest consultative body, the Conseil d’État, on August 28, 1958. There is no documentation regarding a debate on the inclusion of the word race at this point. The political process continued with a meeting of the Conseil des ministres (the governing cabinet) on September 3, 1958, to approve and adopt a final version of this Constitution. Unexpectedly, the text that emerged from their meeting contained the mention of race earlier. The work of the Conseil des ministres remains classified, and no record indicates who made the suggestion and, ultimately, secured the addition (Borella 1992). 608

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We know that mention of race in this context has a historical precedent, as the Constitution of 1946 contained in its preamble the statement that “the people of France proclaim anew that each human being, without distinction of race, religion or creed, possesses sacred and inalienable rights” (France. Constitution 1946). This reference is without a doubt linked to a strong condemnation of Nazi ideology that France was purposefully eager to reject. Race, however, has no legal definition; the Constitution does not explain what it means when it employs the term. Nonetheless, the use of the term at such a juridical level should be interpreted as recognition of the need for equality in the face of discriminatory practices. The Constitution of 1946 was understood to be conceived “in opposition to any type of inequality imposed on people” (Kastoryano 2004, 67). The inclusion of this term in the Constitution has not, however, saved it from severe scrutiny from French sociologists, anthropologists, and philosophers over the years. There have been multiple attempts to suppress the term, often by those underscoring its lack of biological validity. What critics fail to address is that while race may not scientifically exist, racism does. Discriminatory acts against populations grouped by physical traits and geographic region are still prevalent, and thus it is paramount to safeguard the social application of race considering how individuals act upon it. The notion of race constructs an imaginary othered body that individuals perceive as made up of a “hereditary substance and genealogical structure” (Balibar 1992, 249), where somatic traits delimit individual belonging. Political attempts to erase race from French legal documents, in particular, the 1958 Constitution, ignore the social reality of how race plays out in French sociocultural spheres. The term has driven numerous political debates, moving slowly closer to the official suppression of the word from the Constitution. The twenty-first century appears to have accelerated debates that undermine the legitimacy of race as a legally protected term. During the first decade, four proposals were submitted to the National Assembly in 2002–2004, but none succeeded. On December 21, 2007, socialist Victorin Lurel submitted another proposal that would remove race from the Constitution. Its inclusion was cited as “dangerous” and undermining of French republican tradition that denies natural differences between citizens (Lurel 2007). The proposed law did not pass, but that did not stop the political dialogue. Spanning almost 20 years, the debates focus primarily on three types of justification for the constitutional amendment: an ontological argument that underscores that race cannot be included in law because race does not exist; a historical argument that highlights how race belongs to a now-obsolete “discursive system” that no longer echoes contemporaneity; and finally, a gestural argument which mentions that the boldest anti-racist action France can take is to remove race from legal and juridical realities (Bessone 2021, 367). The 2012 presidential election placed both race and marriage equality at the center of social discussion. The concept of race was under attack from a majority of center-left parties: François Hollande of Parti socialiste, Francois Bayrou of Modem, Jean-Luc Mélenchon of Front de gauche (at the time), and Eva Joly of les Écologistes. Incumbent president Nicholas Sarkozy, from the center-right, opposed removing race from the Constitution, as politicians of the Right had traditionally done. On the campaign trail, François Hollande went so far as to state, “There is no place for race in the Republic” (Hollande 2012), assuring French citizens that he would ask the assembly to remove the word from the Fifth Republic’s Constitution once elected. After the presidential elections, in 2013, Alfred Marie-Jeanne reopened the political debate, proposing an amendment to remove race from 609

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the Constitution, but also from use in all legislation, citing a long history of center-left politics that wants to recognize ancestry (“origine”) over race (Marie-Jeanne 2013). Unsurprisingly, on July 12, 2018, the Assemblée nationale voted to symbolically remove race from the Constitution, replacing it with “origine.” This vote was a part of a larger constitutional revision bill authorized by French president Emmanuel Macron in early July 2018, which ultimately failed to become law. The delay did not stop the debate on the legal representation of this term: in 2021, centrist François Jolivet of La Répubique en Marche (LREM) submitted a proposal (No. 4332) to modify the first article of the Constitution by removing the word race. His proposal did not include a replacement for the term. This lengthy series of efforts to remove race from the French Constitution can be interpreted as both racist and anti-racist. No matter the outcome, it begs the question of how France will continue to deal with systemic issues that disproportionately affect populations whose ancestry draws from former colonial regions – as well, indeed, as those diverse populations in and from regions beyond Europe that remain part of the French Republic today, from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific. In particular, the efforts to erase race must also confront the cultural impact where intersections of ethnic identity and national citizens have collided in tumultuous social events. As sociologist Sarah Mazouz explains, banishing the word “race” or suppressing its use in legal documents will not solve racial problems in France (Mazouz 2020, 23); rather, it will ensure that social problems that stem from social theories about race will persist.

Hybridization and Pluralism: Religion as Race While the French government has a history of debating how to reconcile race and republicanism, French society has tried to find ways to deal with cultural hybridization. Since the 1950s, the concept of race has served as a catalyst for various social movements and events that have shed light on the realities of conflict between the racialized individual and homogenizing effects of French universalism. One such was the “March for equality and against racism,” a series of anti-racist protests that took place between October  15 and December 3, 1983. This mobilization sought to bring attention to the police violence that Maghrebi youth were subjected to, as well as an increasing wave of racist violence that targeted the North African populations. Most notable among this violence was the murder of 10-year-old Toufik Ouanes, shot by his neighbor on July 9, 1983; and of Habib Grimizi, stabbed and thrown off a train on November  14, 1983, by a group of white military recruits. These protests sought to create a national dialogue about the place in French society of an individual born from immigration. They responded to a history of individuals being racialized, being perceived as others, and being categorized based on their physical attributes and countries of origin and stressed the degree to which race operated as a catalyst for violent action against individuals of color. The “March for equality and against racism” serves as an example of race being made public, where discriminatory practices target certain populations, and racialized individuals and communities are forced to react.3 It emphasizes to what degree legislating race out of juridical spaces does not dissuade racially motivated actions against these populations but would potentially render racially motivated violence invisible. Another notable development for the historical examination of race from this period was the way in which the media popularized the term “Beur.” The term stems from a verlan (back slang) expression for Arab that came into use in the greater Parisian area during the 610

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1980s by children of Maghrebi immigrants. This term, used by the Maghrebi population to define themselves, was quickly co-opted by media and political discourse, becoming an identity-based attribution (Hajjat 2013, 154). “Beur” no longer meant Arab; it represented a purgatorial identity that was neither French (i.e., white) nor immigrant. By co-opting the phrase and imposing an identity on Maghrebi youths, popular discourse further divided the Arab population, suggesting there was a “good Beur” that should be juxtaposed against the migrant worker. The oscillation between these identity traits constructed an opposition between a perceived “good” Beur who could assimilate and the “bad” Muslim immigrant worker who could not. It is in this manner that anti-Muslim or anti-Islam sentiments in France started to foment among anti-separatists, who viewed Muslim practices of female veiling – the hijab – as a rejection of Frenchness, pitting the postcolonial subject against itself: the acceptable integrated colonial individual versus the non-integrated Muslim. Similar to anti-Semitism toward Jewish populations in France during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, religion through the practice of Islam was now being racialized in so much as religion, race, and ethnicity all amalgamate into some sort of threat toward a supposed indivisible Republic. In practice, a scholarly approach to race and its absence of real foundation became increasingly insignificant to the blending of racial and religious prejudices growing in the wider culture. Race and religion become somewhat interchangeable in the French setting due to the influx of former colonial populations who were perceived as, and to an extent demonstrated, being heavily religious in ways alien to French identity. Islam served as a leitmotif for French racial “othering” before and during the colonial era, its belief system being constantly positioned against the hegemony of a Christian cultural empire, and these issues have persisted. Religion and race collide when one examines the French reaction to the Islamic veil – the covering of the hair (and sometimes face) by girls and women prescribed in a variety of traditions. Referred to in French as the foulard or headscarf, this notable religious symbol ignited a significant and ongoing clash between France’s secular ideology and religious practice. It began with three middle school students who attended class wearing their veil in October of 1989. Laïcité, France’s constitutional principle that separates religion and the state, relies on the division between public and private life, with state schools in particular understood as primarily public and secular spaces. Viewed in its own terms, France’s secularist principle does not seek to erase the practice of religion; rather, laïcité is a political principle of “positive neutrality” that respects all religions and recognizes the religious pluralism of society, but within the confines of private realms (Messner 2005, 56). The issue many had with the wearing of an Islamic headscarf was how it could be seen as an act of proselytism in a nonsecular space. The French perceive the headscarf as an act of rebellion, incompatible with laïcité and republicanism. In accordance with French political and cultural tradition, religion is considered a private matter, but education a public realm; therefore, French sociopolitics maintains that religion cannot enter the educational sphere.4 Such distinctions rely on agreement on the meaning of all the underlying concepts of public, private, secular, and religious, which had originally been formulated to separate the institutions of the Republic from the continuing cultural power of the Catholic Church. The three students in 1989, Leila, Fatima, and Samira (two of whom were Moroccan, and the other Tunisian), were asked to remove their veils, but they refused, stating that their religion obliged the wearing of the Islamic scarf 611

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for female adherents. From this collision of positions, a massive social and political debate about the Islamic veil unfolded. A debate, however, that centered solely on North Africans, because religion was now being used as a placeholder for race. Consequently, there existed a certain perception among certain French political and cultural intellectuals that permitting Muslim students to wear the Islamic scarf was an approbation of Islam in the Republican educational system – that Islam and, by extension, its racialized adherents were being legitimized in a way that undermined the foundations of the Republic. A teenage girl wearing the veil posed a threat to the social order, because the veil is a physical symbol of an anti-integrationist position that contradicts French universalist views on equality, particularly in public. Some have argued that part of the reason this issue is so controversial is that the dominant class feels betrayed when a woman born to immigrant parents, instead of adopting French customs, chooses to practice Islam, wear a hijab, and regularly attend prayer services at the mosque (Hajjat 2013, 155). Out of an ongoing belief that secularist republican values are superior and that colonized and postcolonial populations should evolve toward them, the veil becomes a symbol of the failure of the French integrationist model, but the blame for this is placed not on any limitations of the model but on the recalcitrant religion and, by extension, “race” – the Arab populations that practice Islam. The hijab makes Islam all the more public, and part of the reason it continues to be a remarkable source of political and cultural scandal is how it shifts Arab identity away from immigrant toward solely Muslim (Bowen 2007, 66) – reifying how religion supplants race in this case. As John R. Bowen points out, banning the scarf does nothing to address the severe issues of integration in French society (Bowen 2007, 1) but rather imposes French cultural hegemony on the colonial or ethnic “other.” Assimilation becomes a one-way street “require[ing] too little of those who drink wine and wear berets, and too much of those who prefer tea and headscarves” (Bowen 2007, 247). The visibility that Muslims demand by wearing their headscarves publicly (including in public schools) rejects older cultural notions of Frenchness that are linked to laïcité. Bowen argues that the visibility of the Islamic scarf should not be seen as a rejection of the “political and legal framework of the Republic” (Bowen 2007, 249) but rather as an expression of its very freedoms. Indeed, in the original affair, the three students had the suspension imposed by their headteacher overturned by Minister of Education Lionel Jospin, a ruling subsequently upheld by the courts. Ironically, the very act of freely practicing religion is protected by French law, including some of the same laws thought to have been violated by the aforementioned students. The “March for equality” and the Islamic headscarf controversy are cultural events that demonstrate how contemporary racism in France is no longer based on the assumption of an “inequality” between races (Diallo 2011, 42) – a hierarchy that posited white Europeans above their colonial subjects. Rather, contemporary racism relies on the assumption of an incompatibility between certain minority cultural practices and those of the majority culture as a whole. The banlieue riots of 2005 are good examples of this incompatibility. Rioting was depicted as a banlieue behavior, not a French one. Burning cars, looting markets – these actions, commentators declared, are a part of their culture, the banlieusard, residents of France’s lower-income suburban areas who are of colonial descent. French political scientist Hélène Carrère d’Encausse is a public example of this discourse. She went on Russian television NFT to explain that this violent behavior is “normal” because these people come directly from their “African villages.” Her language not only scaffolds a superiority/inferiority complex in that African villages are positioned against the French city, 612

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but her language also pushes an ideology of incompatibility because these residences are still “African,” not “French” (Diallo 2011, 43; Sciolino 2005). The discourse of incompatibility is a practical way to avoid discussion on the social causes of systemic injustices against racialized populations because it designates that these populations are simply unassimilable – that they will never be French. Since the last large wave of immigration in the 1980s, there is no doubt that France is “multicultural, multiracial, and multiconfessional” (Kastoryano 2004, 67), but that does not mean that these community-based identities coexist on an equal footing with the dominant universalist dialogue that has saturated twentieth-century French sociopolitics.

Race and the Future of French Republicanism France purports to maintain that society and its individuals cannot (officially) see “color” or race. This sort of color-blindness suggests that the political and social history that were inherited from racist practice have no social effectivity today (Mazouz 2020, 80). But this stance only serves to deny the social reality of individuals who are subjected to racism, racial profiling, or any set of discriminatory practices. Can we really escape race and racism? Scholars Julien Suaudeau and Mame-Fatou Niang boldly claim not, but that should not stop individuals from welcoming different points of view into their own world vision (2022, 101). The social reaction to race continues to develop in France as anti-racist movements coalesce, hoping to intertwine republicanism and race-based identities. With police violence gaining more and more attention after the controversial deaths of Adama Traoré in 2016 and Cédric Chouviat in 2020,5 French society is being called to confront their discriminatory and prejudiced actions that target minority “races.”6 In the face of such continuing well-documented actions, French universalism continues to demand that citizens surrender their personal identities, associations, or attachments to establish an ideal relationship with a government that, in turn, supposedly treats its citizens as equals. But this theory is self-evidently false, and thus arguably dangerous, as it negates the social reality of how systemic racism affects minority populations in France. A notional commitment to equality does not compensate for the obstacles that Blacks, Arabs, and Asians face in France – obstacles that exist solely because of the social application of racism that endures. Universalism serves not only as “an endless exoneration of the Republic” but also as a mechanism to erase or obscure “those who are opposed to it” (Suaudeau and Niang 2022, 45). This political principle therefore becomes an oppressive tool that seeks to mitigate the impact of colonial prejudice, a prejudice that persists through different forms of institutional and state violence. Let us not forget the first words of Article 1 of the French Constitution, that France shall be an “indivisible Republic,” where its indivisibility stresses that the “national community” is indeed “the only political community, and that culture and identity belong to the private sphere” (Kastoryano 2004, 68). The French desire to erase race thus stems from their desire to always place the national community before any individual community. Former president Nicholas Sarkozy highlighted this sentiment in 2009, writing bluntly in a piece for Le Monde that “[n]ational identity is the antidote to tribalism and communitarianism” (Sarkozy 2009) – Frenchness above all else. In 1952, acclaimed political philosopher Frantz Fanon wrote, “I am the slave not of the ‘idea’ that others have of me but of my own appearance” (2000, 260), alluding to how he can never escape the false ideologies that surround his Blackness, a Blackness that has been inscribed onto his body “like a dye,” a racialization that positions him as the other in 613

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relation to whites and whiteness (Fanon 2000, 257). It is these ideologies that predetermine his reality as a postcolonial individual in France while also denying him the ability to represent himself outside of the racialized gaze. Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks is a reflection on the impacts of colonization and whiteness on Black people that remains relevant to a study of race because of how it provokes individuals of color and whites to confront the potent ways in which systemic racism affects the racialized individual. This confrontation hinges on the admission of a certain oppressive reality that individuals of color face in France. A reality that cannot exist if race is erased or if whiteness and Blackness are treated as abstract hypothetical identities. Fanon reflects: “All of those white men in a group, guns in their hands, cannot be wrong. I am guilty. I do not know of what, but I know that I am no good” (2000, 265), emphasizing that his own self-perception is molded by the effective reality of racism. His quote stresses how race might not be a scientific validity, but it is a social one that codifies existence for the individual of color. France’s tripartite motto becomes hollow when we realize that liberty, equality, and fraternity all come at the expense of a pluralistic society that blossoms through heterogeneity.

Notes 1 For a detailed account of the Algerian diaspora in France, see Álvaro Luna Dubois “The Algerian Diaspora in France” in this volume. 2 Surprisingly, Insee data shows that as of 2021, the Algerian immigrant population stands at 569,000 (Insee 2021), a trend that one can reason is linked to older generations of immigrants naturalizing and newer generations being born in France. 3 In a similar situation, one can consider Massacre du 17 octobre 1961 as another public confrontation between race and Frenchness. Algerians protesting discriminatory curfews imposed upon them by Parisian police forces were shot at and murdered at various places throughout the city at sites of protest, most notable of which is Pont Saint Michel. See Einauldi 1991 for more information about the planned massacre of Algerian protestors in Paris during the Algerian War. 4 Article 17 of the Jules Ferry Laws entrusts that public education to a secular staff. To ensure that all students are treated as equal, it believes religious symbols like veils, signs, and turbans cannot be worn in schools. 5 There are numerous other examples of individuals dying due to excessive police force that was used during some sort of stop or arrest (i.e.: contrôles d’identités, contrôles routiers). Ali Ziri (2009), Wissam El-Yamni (2012), Aboubacar Fofana (2018), Allan Lambin (2019), Olivio Gomes (2020), and Souheil el Khalfaoui (2021) are some of the higher-profile, controversial deaths in which activists have claimed race played a motivating factor in the lethal force police used when apprehending these individuals. 6 In 2016, the Cours de Cassation ruled that French police were indeed overpolicing racial minorities in France through various contrôles d’identités. See Cours de Cassation 9 November 2016 ruling.

Bibliography Achille, Etienne, Charles Forsdick, and Lydie Moudileno, eds. 2020. Postcolonial Realms of Memory: Sites and Symbols in Modern France. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Balibar, Étienne. 1992. “Le Mot Race N’Est Pas ‘de Trop’ dans la Constitution Française.” Mots 33 (1): 241–56. https://doi.org/10.3406/mots.1992.1757. Banton, Michael. 2000. “The Idiom of Race.” In Theories of Race and Racism, edited by Les Back and John Solomos, 51–64. New York: Routledge. Bessone, Magali. 2021. “Analyser la Suppression du Mot ‘Race’ de la Constitution Française avec la Critical Race Theory: un Exercice de Traduction.” Droit & Société N° (2): 367–82. https://doi. org/10.3917/drs1.108.0367.

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57 THE MEMORY POLITICS OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR AT ITS CENTENARY Elizabeth Benjamin

The commemoration of the First World War has been fraught with political tension, spanning two presidencies, and many more missteps. François Hollande’s opening words for the centenary celebrations were criticized by social scientist Stéphane Audoin-Rouzean as “maybe the worst speech given by a French President about the First World War . . ., which is annoying because it was a truly exceptional occasion” (Audoin-Rouzeau 2014). His successor, Emmanuel Macron, was later criticized in 2018 for his attempts to rehabilitate Maréchal Pétain (Laurent 2018), in the wake of revelatory research that suggests that the “great soldier” of the First World War, and great betrayer of the Second, may have suffered from Alzheimer’s by the 1940s (L’Obs 2019). From the outset, then, the centenary of the war was rife with missed opportunities for a productive processing of global trauma. These issues highlight that there exists, even if implicitly, an officially sanctioned memory of the First World War. Though the war was global, its memory remains largely nationbased. France is a key example of this, particularly given the important role of collective memory and commemoration in contemporary French politics, culture, and society (of which the First World War is a key component). But with official, national memory come boundaries, dividing responses into that which is deemed appropriate and that which is unworthy of integration into sanctioned narratives. The comments of Presidents Hollande and Macron, among others, demonstrate how blunders on the part of key political figures conflict with ideals of collective remembering. Through a deeper reassessment of the war’s artifacts at its centenary, we can critique and revitalize aspects and roles that have historically been underplayed or sidelined in this “global” or generalized memory: notably those of minorities, and women, and the hiding of the disabled or impaired. It is in this process of hiding and revalorizing that we can gain the most instructive insight into the ongoing impact of the war in the twenty-first century. This chapter will analyze political and artistic representations of the First World War in France, from those contemporary to the war itself to those from the present day. Bookended with discussion of political speeches that themselves bookended the centenary commemorations in France, the chapter considers artistic responses to the war and its centenary, the classical trope of memory that is the war memorial, and the role of online archives and websites as official representations and curations of historical events. The chapter will DOI: 10.4324/9780367808471-58

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assess artistic forms from film, photography, literature, and sculpture to the art of curation and exhibition. Through analyzing the accepted image of the war, the chapter will assess the out-of-field, that which is left outside of official frameworks, to discuss the politics of the art of remembering. The dominance of national memory in the late twentieth century imposed both a containment and an exclusion of the wider Francophone world, essentially reasserting the power of the mainland despite the contribution of the colonies. The enduring image of the virile male soldier as hero figure has overpowered the role of women in the conflict, as well as seeking to hide the dramatically disfigured and the cognitively wounded. How has the centenary opened up this memory, if at all? The chapter will discuss the extent to which new frameworks of memory have been put into place, as well as the extent to which these can be said to be productive. The chapter emerges from and builds upon the tradition of French cultural memory, particularly the theories of Pierre Nora (ed. 1997), as well as Jan Assmann and John Czaplicka’s work on collective memory (1995). The chapter takes into account the flaws of Nora’s work, namely, the “methodological nationalism on which the conception of [his] project depends” (Achille, Forsdick, and Moudileno 2020, 5), using Etienne Achille et al.’s work on postcolonializing realms of memory (2020). This chapter will approach artifacts pertaining to the First World War through a broader lens of marginalization, using the remaining virtues of Nora’s work – namely, his new framework for thinking the relationship between history and memory in contemporary society – alongside Assmann and Czaplicka and Achille et al., to productively disrupt and re-heterogenize representations of the war at its centenary.

To Commemorate or Not to Commemorate? The onset of the centenary of the First World War brought with it questions and anxieties. Which point of the war should be commemorated? It seemed ethically right to mark the end of the war, perhaps easier because it could be a celebration as well as a commemoration. Equally, it would not have been acceptable not to recognize it officially. But was it appropriate to mark the beginning in the same way? In France, commemoration in its political manifestation took the form of questioning the meaning of the term “to commemorate,” as we can see through the speech of the then president Hollande (see Le Figaro 2014). Notably, Hollande chose to refer to the centenary commemorations as “commemorative cycles” and a “time of memory” and tied the marking of the conflict to the 70th anniversary of the liberation of France. In so doing, he effectively drew together the two wars as a single extended period of fighting, rendering this global conflict more homogeneous than it was in reality, as well as highlighting the culture of remembering particular to France. Nora writes, in his chapter on the “era of commemoration”, that “not a single event since the war can by right be integrated into a unitary national memory” (Nora ed. 1997, 4694). Here we see Hollande attempting to create a single line of historical thought, within what we might call a “unitary national memory.” In his speech, Hollande foregrounds the word “commemorate,” repeating it six times with different definitions. This reiteration was designed for emphasis but can also be seen as an opportunity to investigate different aspects of the idea of remembering: To commemorate is to grasp the strength of previous generations to learn life lessons in those that follow. 617

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To commemorate is to remember that the Republic has gone through terrifying ordeals and has always managed to recover from them. And that she [the Republic] must not be afraid of anything. To commemorate is to know where we come from to better understand what connects us and unites us into a nation. To commemorate is to reinvigorate patriotism, that unites, that gathers, that does not exclude anyone from any walk of life, belief, origin, or skin colour. To commemorate is not only to invoke or convoke the past, it is to send a message of confidence to our country. “Old France,” wrote General de Gaulle, “overwhelmed by history, bruised by wars and revolutions, but restored over the centuries through the art of renewal!” To commemorate is to speak the language of the anonymous. It is to speak of the courage of the Poilu [soldiers of the First World War] who encountered terror at the bottom of the trench, it is to praise the boldness of the free French who joined de Gaulle in June 1940, it is to emphasize the discreet, sometimes anonymous heroism of the Resistant who brought together the Army of Shadows, is to salute the dignity of the Righteous who hid a Jew at the risk of their own life. That’s what “to commemorate” means today. (Le Figaro 2014) Despite garnering criticism, Hollande’s speech brings together a number of instructive aspects. It draws upon the past while insisting on looking forward to the future and moving on from the trauma. Furthermore, Hollande insists on the bringing together of people from all walks of life – though they should be united through a sense of (French) patriotism. Finally, he valorizes non-traditional forms of heroism (“the discreet, sometimes anonymous heroism”), which is often overlooked in traditional memorial of the First World War. At this point of commemoration, this created a positive opening up and even questioning of the enduring representation of the war, and from this base we can begin to examine the potential reflection of these values in centenary activities and artistic impressions.

The Art of Remembering1 An instructive source of representations of the war comes from visual art, given that it literally maintains the image of this conflict. At the centenary, new representations came to light that both reinforced and contradicted traditional representations and memories. For example, the trope of the “unknown soldier” is extremely popular and widespread – particularly in France, where a tomb dedicated to this figure takes pride of place under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. For the event of the centenary, the museum Historial de la Grande Guerre de Péronne amalgamated thousands of portraits of those associated with the war to create its “Unknown Face” – not a soldier, since both male and female faces have been used, both combatants and non-combatants, of multiple nationalities. This work physically brings people together and unites them across nations, but it also erases difference. Fundamentally, and likely because of uneven data distribution, the face still appears White, and male, even though both of these characteristics are slightly softened. Despite this, the way in which the image is composited allows visitors to the exhibition to see and pause on individual faces (even if it is in a slightly callous, swipe-through fashion) 618

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using its touchscreen application. The face will also evolve over time as new portraits are added from the archive. Another area at risk of genericization is the treatment of women in relation to their role during the war. Arguably, the visibility of this group has drastically improved over time, with increasing recognition of the work of nurses near the front and at home, as well as the more general way in which the female population stepped into the place of missing men in the workforce. This goes some way to changing and adapting definitions of heroism in the contemporary age as well as the re-balancing of gendered memory. However, such highlighting is at risk of reinforcing gender tropes, including maintaining women’s marginalization as “helping” rather than making a valuable independent contribution, or indeed improving upon the work of their male counterparts (see, for example, Adie 2014; Robert, Daniel and Thom’s chapters in Wall and Winter eds 2010). This can be seen through the Musée de la Grande Guerre’s exhibition “Women in the Great War” (2017), a series of 18 panels which depict women working as nurses, factory and field workers, as well as militant pacifists who were committed against the war. Here we can see the importance of rendering visible the varying role of women in the First World War (and indeed in any context); nonetheless, this is a mobile exhibition, where the panels can be rented by the week. While this may increase exposure of the information and images that the panels contain, it also trivializes the content relative to other, permanent installations and deprives it of a single enduring home. Physical and mental impairment inflicted during the war has seen great improvement in its representation. The period of 1914–1918 was the first conflict from which badly wounded soldiers returned in such great numbers, challenging their accommodation by society. This group included the “gueules cassées” (literally “broken faces”), those with physical injuries to the face and/or head, who were left with debilitating scars and disfigurations but expected to return to work as normal; they were offered none of the rights to pension or assistance available to those with wounds and disabilities linked to their limbs. Society in 1918 essentially pushed them to one side; they did not fit into the image of heroism promoted by the state. Likewise, those suffering from what was then termed “shell shock” (later re-termed war neurosis and now PTSD) were encouraged to repress their symptoms so as to set a good example; those returning home were often treated as deserters. Many sufferers were subjected to “treatments” that varied from electroshock to emotional shaming (see Crocq and Crocq 2000). Fortunately, representation of both physical and mental debilitating conditions, in terms of both treatment and re-integration, has since improved. This is visible in films such as Emmanuel Courcol’s 2016 film Cessez-le-feu (Ceasefire), in which one of the characters, Marcel, returns from the war mute. The film presents a nuanced treatment of Marcel through which conditions of the time and contemporary understandings of the condition of PTSD are brought together; he is unable to fully reintegrate into society but is able to find a way of communicating again (sign language) and through this provide relief from some of his symptoms. The film does not pretend to resolve the issue of the return of the wounded – indeed, Marcel does not survive the story – but is also not afraid to subtly critique France’s inability to tackle the long-term effects of post-traumatic conditions. Cessez-le-feu also highlights continuing issues of treatment of imperial/colonial subjects, as we can see through the representation of “Africa” in the film. In Courcol’s portrayal of the continent, he drew upon Malian author Hampaté Bâ’s work L’Étrange Destin de Wangrin (The Strange Fate of Wangrin), carried out filming in Burkina Faso and Senegal, 619

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and hired local residents as actors (see Institut Français). Thus, while the film demonstrates issues of the period of the war – the glorification of the French soldier, the treatment of West African cultural artifacts as exotic commodities, as well as the genericization of “West African” rather than detailed depiction of specific (national) cultures – it provides critique of such problems through using authentic resources (texts, inhabitants) to foreground precisely the ambiguous treatment of the role of Francophone nations in the First World War. Many works fail to clarify the extent to which colonial populations were used for fighting in the war, and the level of forced migration involved, with France being the biggest culprit on both counts. Christian Koller notes that “[a]ltogether about 440,000 indigenous soldiers, alongside 140,000 settlers of European descent and 268,000 indigenous war workers were shipped over from Africa to Europe between 1914 and 1918” (2017, 2). Forced recruitment was particularly prominent in West Africa, the zone in which parts of Cessezle-feu are set. The role of African soldiers (whose use as “cannon fodder” is debated) also became stereotyped as natural warriors and thus unable to draw on the Western European “hero figure” model. Nonetheless, some sources acknowledge the distortion of representation of African soldiers for propaganda purposes, for example, Henri Barbusse in his 1916 antiwar novel Le Feu (Under Fire). He satirically describes Moroccan soldiers thus: We look at them and we stay quiet. We don’t call out to them. They are imposing, frightening even. However, these Africans seem happy with their role. They go quite naturally to the frontline. It is their place, and their passing by indicates that an attack will come soon. They are built for the attack. (Barbusse 1916, 48–49) Comparing the contemporary presentation with the historical reality, then, we can see that representations have changed, in that parody – here the deliberate caricaturing of African soldiers as happily and naturally suited for the heaviest fighting – no longer seems to be required in order to perform critiques. Nonetheless, since Cessez-le-feu does not directly engage with the issues that it presents, we might argue that it is no more helpful to the representation of colonial subjects than texts such as Barbusse’s. Robert Aldrich reflects this in his assessment of museums and memorials, noting that there is “little consensus about who or what should be monumentalised and in what form. There are also demands for the ‘decolonisation’ of existing sites, though with discord about what that actually means” (in Achille, Forsdick, and Moudileno 2020, 164–65). These fictional artistic forms can be used together to foreground the problematic nature of “monumentalising” such historical developments in more productive ways. While improvements and evolutions have occurred within artistic memory structures, none has really overcome the disparity created in the original image of the First World War. This can be seen further in the role of symbols of memory, primarily the war memorial.

Substitutes and Symbols War memorials play a prominent role in the landscape and memoryscape of contemporary France. Almost every town or village has its dedicated monument aux morts (monuments to the 1914–1918 dead). Hazareesingh notes that “more than 36,000 public monuments 620

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were built within five years” of 1918 (Hazareesingh 2015, 188). A notable feature of these often imposingly constructed memorials is the way in which individuals are amalgamated into a mass of names. Through the sheer scale of losses, the innovation of individual naming of ordinary soldiers is ironically abstracted into a generic presentation of loss and of collective memory. This feeds into national aspirations for representation of trauma. As Jay Winter writes, “[c]ommemoration was a political act; it could not be neutral, and war memorials carried political messages from the earliest days of the war” (2014, 82). An exception to the quasi-anonymity of the standard monument aux morts are monuments such as Les Fusillés lillois (Lille), which is dedicated to the clandestine wartime resistance network comité Jacquet, who were shot in 1915. The monument features sculptures of the four members of the group – George Maertens, Ernest Deceuninck, Sylvère Verhulst, and Eugène Jacquet – as well as a fifth figure, Léon Trulin, a Belgian intelligence officer also shot by the Germans. This monument does not conform to the uniformity of standard memorials and yet still displays some of the key characteristics of government-sanctioned memory. The fusillés are portrayed as heroes and martyrs, a central trope in French politics that would come into its own in the Second World War, as in Hollande’s 2014 speech. Indeed, the monument was destroyed under the German post-1940 occupation; inhabitants of Lille collected and hid the fragments, permitting its later reconstruction. An area which provides an interesting provocation of memory debates are memorials that have been incorporated into the landscape, or indeed places that possess significance without being marked out as memorials. We can see this in the Tranchée des Baïonnettes and in the 2014 photography project of Jean Richardot, Ça fait partie du paysage (It forms part of the landscape). The former is, theoretically, the site of a regiment of soldiers buried alive in a front-line trench, only the tops of their bayonets protruding from the ground, and the whole having been preserved in a large concrete memorial that encases it. Nonetheless, Winter has pointed out that: The Trench of the Bayonettes is a war memorial of a special kind: a tomb frozen in time and preserved not by, but from art. . . . But there is one irony which must be recognised. The location chosen for commemoration was flat; the place where the bayonets were found was a series of shell craters some 30 metres away. The memorial is, therefore, on an imaginary site of heroism. It is at best adjacent to the place where the men of the 137th regiment died. Thus from the very outset the attempt to preserve the site of memory ‘as it really was’ entailed the creation of myth. (Winter 2014, 102) The case of the Trench shows us how memory is adapted to fit with national myth structures. On the other hand, Richardot’s Ça fait partie demonstrates how original sites are integrated into the contemporary memoryscape – his collection shows battlefields that are now farmland (while preserving the bomb craters), cemeteries sitting alongside roundabouts, and battleground-cum-picnic-sites. Nonetheless, Richardot’s photographs point out that often these sites are so much part of the landscape that we are only abstractly aware of their significance; a memorial website labelled one “Ligny. It forms part of the landscape but is its (hi)story part of our memory?” (14–18 Mission Centenaire 2012). War memorials thus straddle a role of standing out and blending into physical and abstract memory of the conflict. They have sometimes quite literally become part of our 621

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daily landscape and memoryscape but today serve as gentle reminders of a conflict that still resonates. The coming together of historical artifacts and their contemporary re-interpretations can be seen through the proliferation of websites dedicated to conflict and the memory thereof at the centenary of the First World War. The memorial site, or website of memory, provides a contemporary re-curation of historical events, drawing together resources in such a way that the contemporary viewer can browse at their leisure. This is an action that carries the potential for great reward in terms of positive adjustment of perceptions of the war, but with it great risk that this substitute will be as inappropriate as Macron’s or as clumsy as Hollande’s responses at centenary events. Websites in particular can contain the “potentiality of the archive” of a wide range of texts, images, and views, as well as offering the “mode of actuality,” of how a user comes to a selection of the material from their own context. They thus have a particular innovative place within cultural memory and a particular responsibility in ascribing relevance to artifacts and interpretations of events (Assmann and Czaplicka 1995, 130). Two important examples within the French case are Chemins de mémoire (Paths of Memory) (2003, henceforth Chemins) and 14–18 Mission Centenaire (14–18 Centenary Mission) (2012, henceforth Centenaire).2 These sites bring the war into the twenty-first century, but perhaps more importantly (since the Internet is in itself not new and sites about the conflict abound), they cement the importance of digital memory at the centenary. This strong online presence also foregrounds a French portrait of the memory of the First World War, despite the international nature of both the war and the Internet. Websites such as Chemins and Centenaire provide an overview of official representations of memory in France – including gaps and imbalances around what we can define loosely as issues of race and nation, gender and social class, and psychological and physiological impairment. These gaps allow us to follow the agendas, official and otherwise, established in national frameworks of memory. Chemins plays on Pierre Nora’s term “sites of memory” and even uses this concept in its section on memory tourism. The site is not specifically dedicated to the First World War but contains significant reference to the conflict. This is primarily done through “historical articles” and through the memory tourism section’s map function. The map function imposes a choice upon the user to select “in mainland France” or “outside of mainland France,” offering no neutral option and perpetuating the binary of the mainland as dominant and the “rest” as “other.” The historical articles section allows us to see a little more influence of the non-mainland (though then seems to exclude other groups). For example, articles that focus specifically on the war are dedicated to the colonial army, Belgians in France, North African soldiers, New Caledonia, the gueules cassées, Canadians, the marraines de guerre (literally, “godmothers of the war,” women who volunteered as pen pals with soldiers to boost morale), among others. Centenaire – as the name would suggest – was specifically dedicated to the memory of the First World War at its centenary, and the site closed in 2021. This site offered users opportunities to “live,” “discover,” and “understand” the centenary itself, proposing a novel approach to the memory of the war. However, the divisions of “In France”/“In the world” and the section “Around/About the Great War” show that the wider Francophone world is largely still seen as “other” when it comes to the memory of the war. The small amount of nuance that was given to these otherwise-neglected regions came through articles that cast

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off some of the stereotypes attached to them. These include the role of various groups in the First World War: Mauritians, French India, Chinese, “Eastern” soldiers, women at home (to which a dossier is dedicated), pacifist, Chad and the Force Noire, animals in conflict. Thus, while these sites may, on first glance, appear to perpetuate dominant narratives of remembering the war, they do make the effort to include a wide range of groups in their archiving of material. However, while these archives are very valuable in terms of information as well as equality of representation, they may get lost in the novelty of the interactive online resource. An average user is arguably more likely to browse the map function than they are to trawl through the many articles, unless they are seeking a specific topic. This means that at the centenary of the First World War, its memory can be said to have become paradoxically interactive and inaccessible, easily consumed and yet more difficult to engage with. Nora notes that: No era has been so willingly productive of archives as our own, not only in terms of the sheer volume of material that modern society contributes to them, not only in terms of the technical capacities of reproduction and conservation that we have at our disposal, but in terms of our superstition and respect of evidence. (Nora ed. 1997, 31) Like war memorials, which have become part of our daily landscape in the twenty-first century, websites have an important role to play in reminding contemporary users of the multifaceted identities that make up their narratives. It then becomes the responsibility of such websites to incentivize further investigation on the part of the user, and as we have seen through the preceding analysis, this has not yet been done to full success. An increased effort for the physical and the digital to work together might give the required impetus to improve understanding of the legacy of this event that is now beyond living memory. If websites are carriers of responsibility toward cultural memory in its capacity for potentiality and actuality, we might also argue that sites such as Chemins and Centenaire require greater input than they are currently receiving in order to fully contribute to the reflexivity so crucial to cultural memory (Assmann and Czaplicka 1995, 132).

A Culture of Memory At the centenary of the end of the First World War, President Macron arguably had an easier job than Hollande; able to promote a celebration of its end rather than the gravity of its beginning, he could draw upon symbols and events both concretely and abstractly to represent the meaning of the war as a whole, rather than being constrained to reflect upon the sobriety of the outbreak of conflict. His speech reflects this, along with prevailing memory structures and theories. Elements link clearly with our guiding questions on official and less-represented features of French national memory. For example, Macron stated that: We should take a moment to remember the immense parade of combatants, in which soldiers from the metropole and the empire marched with foreign legionaries and others, come from across the world, because for them France represented all that was beautiful in the world. (L’Elysée 2018)

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And furthermore that: Young men from all provinces and overseas, young men came from Africa, the Pacific, the Americas and Asia to die far from their families in villages whose names they did not even know. (L’Elysée 2018) Macron’s speech recognizes both the role and the problematic nature of the constituent nations of the former French Empire. This is particularly clear in his mention that these soldiers came because of France’s global standing, whereas we have seen that they were not always coming voluntarily. While it is admirable and appropriate that Macron chooses to highlight the role of non-mainland fighters for the French cause, he also inadvertently points out their mass anonymity in juxtaposing their non-specific origins with their unnamed place of death. Additionally, while Macron’s speech emphasizes the international nature of conflict – and the “rally of fraternity” that those gathered at the centenary speech effected – he nonetheless concludes his speech with the mainland-centric “Long live France!” (L’Elysée 2018, my emphasis). References to soldiers from the broader Francosphere are also scarce, numbering four within a 2,000-word speech. These are always vague, including those mentioned earlier, as well as the extremely generic reference to “foreigners who died on French soil” (L’Elysée 2018), which could refer to friend or former foe, or anyone in between. Conversely, the French are mentioned 8 times explicitly, and France 16. This problematic referencing is also the case with two of the other groups that we have already discussed: women and those with physical and mental injuries and impairments. Macron’s mention of women amounts to the phrase “there were also admirable women committed alongside the combatants” (L’Elysée 2018, my emphasis), which essentially pitches women as an afterthought or a sidenote. Women are only explicitly referenced three times in total, two of which are identical repetitions, and the latter two refer to contemporary women rather than those involved in the conflict. Equally, he states that “[m]any of those who returned had lost their youth, their ideals, their taste for living. Many were disfigured, blind, amputees. The victorious and the defeated were plunged for a long time into the same grief” (L’Elysée 2018, n.pag.; my emphasis). Again, those with physical and mental impairments are recognized, but as a mass and among what amounts to “all the rest.” More space is dedicated to the scarring of the French landscape than to explicit reference to wounded but surviving individuals. The mentioning, and even highlighting, of these groups marks an improvement on historical representation, but they are not necessarily presented in the light that they deserve. It becomes difficult to reconcile recognition and homogenization, even if we take into account the fact that the more “mainstream” groups are often presented as mass statistics. Assmann and Czaplicka write that: Through its cultural heritage a society becomes visible to itself and to others. Which past becomes evident in that heritage and which values emerge in its identificatory appropriation tells us much about the constitution and tendencies of a society. (Assmann and Czaplicka 1995, 133) Through Macron’s speech, we can see that the “constitution and tendencies” of French society today indicate an increased recognition of a multifaceted cultural heritage, but one 624

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that remains dominated by notions that continue to marginalize groups such as those analyzed in this chapter.

Conclusion Winter wrote that “the Great War brought the search for an appropriate language of loss to the centre of cultural and political life” (2014, 5). At the centenary, it has become apparent that this search is still not complete or sufficient. Nonetheless, the evolution of the representation of the war reveals important developments in societal remembering, many of which can be seen as beneficial to this representation. Joanne Garde-Hansen writes that we often think of firsthand witnesses as the sole keepers of the truth of events (Garde-Hansen 2011, 44); our analysis here has shown that re-thinking the First World War with a century of distance can allow for a re-valuing of marginalized groups for a more just representation of this collective trauma. Through Hollande’s speech that kickstarted the centenary commemorations, we can conclude that a new recognition is coming into play of the detachment of memory at the point of the centenary. Responses we have seen, including the political and the artistic, are often not direct responses to the war but rather to impressions around it (secondary memory). Websites present to us a very obvious, consumable example of this, through their archiving and creation of massive amounts of information, resources, and materials. Evidently, there are risks and rewards associated with this change: perhaps the greatest risk is distortion of facts, events, and memories; nonetheless, the reward to be gained from this is that memory remains relevant to present society and thus continues to be evoked, along with necessary questions about global conflict and its dangers. We have also seen that new types of art are constantly entering into the memory process (notably the “unknown face”), which allow new recognition of groups that were formerly under-represented. New exhibitions also seek to promote this recognition. Although imperfect, they are increasing visibility in ways that undeniably indicate progress. We saw that war memorials, so standard in the contemporary landscape, have started to be recognized precisely for their integration into daily life. This comes with the risk of loss of specific meaning but also brings a gentle, constant reminder in the broader memoryscape. What appears to be left today are questions over the role of memory in contemporary society, concerning the First World War as well as more generally. How do we reconcile the desire to bring together groups and peoples in collective memory with the need to respect the variety and representation of memories of the individual? Today more than ever, we must negotiate a delicate balance between risks of homogenization and those of under- or even over-playing roles of any given group. Alison Landsberg notes that: Memory is not commonly imagined as a site of possibility for progressive politics. More often, memory, particularly in the form of nostalgia, is condemned for its solipsistic nature, for its tendency to draw people into the past instead of the present. (2003, 144) What is instructive about our exploration of the First World War at its centenary is that these representations do not overly pull us into the past. Rather, new ways of remembering are offered that allow a fluid relationship with an event that marked the world indelibly but that is quite distant and abstract to today’s generation. Post-lived memory can be 625

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responsive and interactive and retain relevance precisely because of, and not despite, its new fluid, evolving character.

Notes 1 This section expands upon my work on artistic responses to the First World War (see Benjamin 2021). 2 This website was time-limited and closed in 2021. An archived version can be found through the Internet Archive (see resources list).

Resources 14–18 Mission Centenaire. 2012. Accessed February  14, 2022. https://web.archive.org/ web/20181227114703mp_/http:/centenaire.org/fr Achille, Etienne, Charles Forsdick, and Lydie Moudileno, eds. 2020. Postcolonial Realms of Memory: Sites and Symbols in Modern France. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Adie, Katie. 2014. Fighting on the Home Front: The Legacy of Women in World War One. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Assmann, Jan, and John Czaplicka. 1995. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” New German Critique 65 (Cultural History/Cultural Studies): 125–33. Audoin-Rouzeau, Stéphane. 2014. “Centenaire de 14–18: un historien critique le discours de Hollande.” FranceTVinfo. Accessed February 14, 2022. www.francetvinfo.fr/societe/guerre-de-14-18/ video-centenaire-de-14-18-un-historien-critique-le-discours-de-hollande_742139.html. Barbusse, Henri. 1916. Le Feu. Journal d’une escouade. Paris: Flammarion. Benjamin, Elizabeth. 2021. “The (French) Art of Remembering: Representations of WWI from the Contemporary to the Contemporaneous.” In Artistic Expressions and the Great War, edited by S. Charnow. Peter Lang. Chemins de Mémoire. 2003. Accessed February 14, 2022. http://cheminsdememoire.gouv.fr/. Crocq, Marc-Antoine, and Louis Crocq. 2000. “From Shell Shock and War Neurosis to Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: A  History of Psychotraumatology.” Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience 2 (1): 47–55. Garde-Hansen, Joanne. 2011. Media and Memory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hazareesingh, Sudhir. 2015. How the French Think. London: Allen Lane. Institut Français. n.d. “Ceasefire (“Cessez-le-feu”), by Emmanuel Courcol.” Accessed February 14, 2022. www.institutfrancais.com/en/work/ceasefire-cessez-le-feu-by-emmanuel-courcol. Koller, Christian. 2017. “Colonial Military Participation in Europe (Africa).” International Encyclopedia of the First World War. https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/pdf/1914-1918-Onlinecolonial_military_participation_in_europe_africa-2014–10–08.pdf. Landsberg, Alison. 2003. “Prosthetic Memory: The Ethics and Politics of Memory in an Age of Mass Culture.” In Memory and Popular Film, edited by Paul Grainge. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Laurent, Etienne. 2018. “Qu’a vraiment dit Macron sur le Maréchal Pétain?” L’Express. www. lexpress.fr/actualite/politique/qu-a-vraiment-dit-macron-sur-le-marechal-petain_2046919.html. Le Figaro. 2014. “Le discours de François Hollande pour le centenaire de la première guerre mondiale.” Le Figaro. www.lefigaro.fr/politique/le-scan/2014/04/24/25001-20140424ARTFIG00291-lediscours-de-francois-hollande-pour-le-centenaire-de-la-premiere-guerre-mondiale.php. L’Élysée. 2018. “Discours du Président de la République Emmanuel Macron à la cérémonie internationale du centenaire de l’armistice du 11 novembre 1918 à l’Arc de Triomphe.” L’Élysée. www.elysee.fr/emmanuel-macron/2018/11/12/discours-du-president-de-la-republique-emmanuelmacron-a-la-ceremonie-internationale-du-centenaire-de-larmistice-du-11-novembre-1918-a-larcde-triomphe. L’Obs. 2019. “Pétain malade d’Alzheimer dès le début du régime de Vichy? C’est la thèse d’un gériatre.” NouvelObs. www.nouvelobs.com/histoire/20190322.OBS2273/petain-malade-d-alzheimerdes-le-debut-du-regime-de-vichy-c-est-la-these-d-un-geriatre.html.

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58 FRENCH HISTORICAL WRITING IN THE WAKE OF DECOLONIZATION Timothy Scott Johnson

The period from 1945 to 1980, when the French Empire transformed into the French Union and many overseas territories gained independence, was not simply one of imperial subtraction or transition across imperial horizons. Rather, the concepts, experiences, and expectations at the end of France’s formal empire and the French Union were as much products of empire as they were wholesale rejections of it. Challenges to official imperial narratives were already present in historical writing before decolonization; many of these challenges laid the groundwork for the critique and activism that followed (Dulucq 2009, 5–12). The processes of decolonization and the subsequent re-orientation of French global identity questioned the legitimacy of that imperial historical narrative even further (see Shepard 2007, 55–100). In order to think of the French nation as non-imperial, writers formulated new historical narratives of progress and development to challenge the old ones. The decolonizing world shaped the content and the form of French historical writing in important yet often unexpected and overlooked ways. The political ends of empire opened new spaces for historical research and allowed researchers to pose different sets of historical questions. However, we cannot see this period as one in which all elements of the earlier historical thinking supporting empire were set right, or in which empire’s contradictions were resolved. To reduce the connections between historical writing and decolonization to a single analytic framework or a single trajectory would be far too reductive. Instead, this chapter looks at how the period of post-war decolonization from 1945 to 1980 affected historical writing in France through three tangible vectors. (These three vectors are furthermore not intended to represent an exhaustive accounting of all historical writing, only an illustrative survey.) Decolonization marked the personal and professional lives of practicing and would-be historians. Many historians participated in direct activism and contributed their academic training to engaging third world issues in the public sphere. In turn, these experiences altered historical method and practice in often surprising ways. Finally, the new political contexts opened up during decolonization facilitated shifts in the historical topics covered. Often, these were topics directly dealing with formerly colonized spaces, whose historical agency had been denied by imperial powers. More broadly, the destabilizing of dominant historical narratives opened up a larger space for other formerly marginalized DOI: 10.4324/9780367808471-59

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historical topics, such as the history of women, the history of everyday and lower-class peoples, and cultural history. Few professionally trained historians at the end of empire and in the decades that followed would go as far as Algerian thinker Mohamed Chérif Sahli, when he criticized the dominant narratives of North African history, demanding political decolonization be accompanied by a decolonization of the practice of history.⁠ (Many former imperial subjects and political activists, however, echoed Sahli’s demands.) Sahli noted the ideological work done – consciously or not – by previous historians writing history that was uncritical of sources produced by French colonial officials, adhering to notions of racial, sociological, and geographic determinism. In the case of North Africa, these historical theories and practices actively denied North Africans of historical agency and made the historical record dependent on French narratives and authority. Any corrective would need to “revise the intellectual toolbox, enrich, expand or update existing postulates, notions, definitions, theories, and values in order to express with equal ‘sympathy’ humanity in its totality and diversity. This revision [would happen] through the decolonization of history and sociology” (Sahli 1965, 135). In a truly decolonial vein, history would be about more than simply introducing topics and authors to this point ignored or suppressed. It would entail re-orienting the historical framework implicated in the French civilizing mission and universal empire. To an extent, some historians achieved this high standard in this period, but decolonizing the historical profession in France remained a piecemeal project. In particular, by the 1970s, where most historians were most successful was in placing older imperial teleological thinking and its progressive historical models of development in extreme suspicion and integrating formerly marginalized sources and perspectives into dominant narratives. The always ad hoc nature of received historical training and theory – true as much for our time as others – meant that many saw the role and method of history in a less-radical way than Sahli. Following Michel-Rolph Trouillot, we can see how, in this period, historical scholarship produced new silences along with new narratives while also leaving older silences in place (2015 [1995], 49), as we will see with the particular example of the history of the Haitian Revolution.1 Much historical writing built on older imperial scholarship and within pre-existing institutional frameworks. While some older imperial views and assumptions did disappear, others continued in only slightly modified form.

Political Experience and Historical Praxis To a generation of scholars for whom World War II and the occupation was a childhood experience, decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s, and the Algerian War in particular, provided a new opportunity for collective public engagement and political commitment. Historians signed the many manifestos condemning the actions of the French government during the war. Some of the highest-profile critics of the French military’s use of torture, such as Pierre Vidal-Naquet (a specialist of ancient Greece), Henri Marrou (historical theorist and commentator on Saint Augustine), or André Mandouze (who wrote on ancient Christianity), were historians of the ancient Mediterranean who could invoke deep moral traditions of ancient Greece or early Christianity as a way of condemning contemporary French brutality. For Vidal-Naquet, the standards of the historical profession demanded he hold the French state to account for its actions.2 Historians also brought their specialized knowledge of imperial spaces to bear on antiimperial efforts. Throughout the war in Indochina (1945–1954), orientalists like Paul Mus 629

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argued the problems of imperial rule were endemic to the system and could only be solved by France’s exit (Singaravélou 1999, 174). Some, like Charles-André Julien and CharlesRobert Ageron, combined their own scholarly expertise of North Africa with civic engagement, writing op-eds in newspapers and giving public lectures on Algerian nationalism, political development, and the brutality of colonialism. Jacques Berque, who was the son of an Algerian colonial administrator and who had himself worked for the colonial government in Morocco until the early 1950s, combined his disgust with the French Union in North Africa with his ethnographic expertise. From his position as Chair of Contemporary Islam at the Collège de France, he organized study groups around North African decolonization and gave lectures undermining earlier orientalist historiography (Johnson 2018). In his studies of Western and Central Africa, Marxist activist Jean Suret-Canale built upon Lenin’s theory that imperialism was just another form of capitalist development (Dulucq 2009, 271–72). These metropolitan-based voices complemented anti-imperial voices writing history that challenged French Empire. Scholar activists took from their knowledge of the French imperial world and its claims about history to argue for decolonial spaces. Malagasy activist Jacques Rabemamanjara, speaking at the Second Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in Rome in 1959, adapted Aimé Césaire’s analyses to claim that history allowed for productive “boomerang” reactions against the imperial west (Rabemamanjara 1959, 75).3 Mostefa Lacheraf took to direct political action by joining the Algerian nationalist group the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) while also writing about Algerian political history. While imprisoned by the French state, fellow FLN member and future minister of culture for Algeria, Ahmed Taleb Ibrahimi, took solace in reading Jacques Berque’s revisionist take on North African orientalism. The trend was similar outside of Algeria too. After completing his doctoral studies in history of early modern Senegal in Bordeaux, Abdoulaye Ly joined other Senegalese intellectuals around Léopold Sédar Senghor in forming the core of the independent Senegalese state after 1960. Though soon ostracized and imprisoned as a critic of Senghor’s, Ly held government positions in the latter 1960s before returning to scholarship in the 1970s.4 Other historians-in-training and activists who would later become historians often bridged public commentary on current events with later historical practice. François Furet wrote regular columns for the left-leaning magazine France-Observateur during the Algerian War, writing both commentary on the history of the French Revolution – for which he would become famous in later decades – and commentary on Algeria (Christofferson 2001). The conservative historian Philippe Ariès also wrote commentaries on French history and the Algerian War, appearing in right-wing publications like Pierre Boutang’s journal La Nation française in the late fifties and early sixties. Through these writings, Ariès refashioned his sense of monarchical conservatism to a general suspicion of modernity that would inform his later studies in cultural history (see Hutton 2004). In other cases, the overlap in training and experience was less overt but nonetheless seemed apparent after the fact. Third worldist politics – both the utopian variant that saw decolonizing spaces like African or Asian nations as the wave of the political future and the variant focused on political solidarity with oppressed groups – fed theoretical approaches friendly to examining neglected groups and topics. Pioneers of women’s history in this period, for instance, connected the praxis of anticolonial commitments to sexual politics surrounding the 1968 protest movements and the scholarship produced in their wake. While studying under Ernest Labrousse at the Sorbonne

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in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Michelle Perrot absorbed a post-WWII urgency of connecting history to contemporary politics. When the Algerian War began, she was teaching in Caen, among other politically active historians like Louis Gernet (who had begun his career in ancient history teaching in Algeria) and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. Her support of Algerian independence and her protests of French state torture acted as one of the political complements to her historical research on labor history, which, at least until 1958, coincided with her membership in the French Communist Party. Still, in her view, in the 1950s and 1960s, activism and scholarship were parallel but unconnected worlds. However, by the early 1970s, her contributions to the emerging fields of women’s history allowed her to harmonize hitherto-separate tracks. Many of her earlier associates from the Algerian War re-emerged in this differently formulated historical praxis. For instance, fellow anticolonial activists Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Marc Ferro were co-lecturers for a 1973 year-long seminar Perrot helped organize at Université Paris 7 on the question “Do Women Have a History?” (Perrot 2002, 8, 10, 12–13). Political activism in this period influenced interrogations of Western normative regimes in other ways as well. Decolonization profoundly marked Michel Foucault’s work, despite the criticism that he did not adequately attend to questions of empire. Like many other early-career historians, Foucault taught in extra-metropolitan contexts before gaining his later prestigious appointment to the Collège de France. When the May 1968 student and labor demonstrations broke out in Paris, he was teaching in Tunisia, where parallel student activism focused on the rule of Habib Bourguiba, the first post-imperial president of the country. The 1968 student activism he experienced was not that of Paris but the activism of Tunisia. Foucault’s later interest in the Iranian Revolution in the 1970s went hand in glove with his interest in non-Western normative modes of modern life that could potentially escape the histories of discipline he so influentially explored⁠ (Shepard 2017, 277–80; Afary and Anderson 2005). In the same decade, Foucault’s anti-prison activism in France that matched his histories of madness and mental institutions stemmed in part from his engagement with the anticolonial Black Panther Party in the United States (Heiner 2007). Most recently, Todd Shepard has suggested that even Foucault’s discussions of sodomy in volume 1 of his History of Sexuality were “emblematic” of the way sodomy was a focal point of 1970s debates in France. These debates often hinged on the “sex talk” about Arab men in France after the Algerian War (Shepard 2017, 198–99). The point here, of course, is not that his and other historians’ interests in and experiences with decolonizing spaces didn’t involve other types of Western projections but, rather, that the decolonizing world shaped the content and form of their historical writing.

Questioning Historical Teleologies Already in the 1950s, the main assumptions supporting the meaning of French historical progress embedded in the “civilizing mission” – that Western, and particularly French, historical development provided the telos, or endpoint, to which colonized and so-called developing nations progressed (or not) – had come under serious attack. Many of these critiques came from within scholars working in the fields of ethnography and anthropology, disciplines with deep connections to France’s imperial presence (see Conklin 2013). Among anthropologists and ethnographers, the studies done for UNESCO by Michel Leiris and Claude Lévi-Strauss argued against race-based hierarchies and the assumption that the

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only type of progress that mattered was driven by Western industrial technology and state bureaucratization (Leiris 1951; Lévi-Strauss 1955). Echoes of these conclusions appeared just years later in historiographical analyses from Philippe Ariès and Fernand Braudel. Ariès rejected the nostalgic royalist historical mentality of the monarchist Jacques Bainville along with the too-sure progressivist historical framework of Marxists. What was most important about historical research, for Ariès, was the particularity of a historical subject that strikes the historian by its strangeness. Against the universalisms promoted by contemporary historians, Ariès concluded that history was, by definition, a practice of highlighting particularity, not smoothing over differences into a universalist framework (Hutton 2004, 57–76). Fernand Braudel’s vision for historical practice, meanwhile, although never fully casting aside assumptions of historical progress and development, did challenge histories written around the grand events and singular heroes championed by earlier historians. Rather than argue for a hidden dynamism to non-Western history, by the height of the Algerian War, and in dialog with Lévi-Strauss and Ariès, Braudel emphasized the relative immobility and stasis of Western history over the long durée and insisted on the multiple historical temporalities always at work in a given moment. According to Braudel: The world of 1558, which appeared so gloomy in France, was not born at the beginning of that charmless year. The same with our own troubled year of 1958. Each “current event” brings together movements of different origins, of a different rhythm. (Braudel 1995 [1958], 125) France and the West, in this view, were not the authors of historical progress; they were the subjects of changes largely beyond their control. This is not to suggest that either Ariès or Braudel was a champion of decolonial struggles in the 1950s. In the case of Ariès, at that time, he was convinced Algeria was truly a part of France and should remain so (Hutton 2004). Braudel, despite having firsthand experience of the colonies while teaching in Algiers in the 1920s, remained relatively silent on the ends of the French rule in Africa and Southeast Asia compared to other outspoken Annales contributors like Louis Massignon, Jean Dresch, Madeleine Rebérioux, and Pierre VidalNaquet. If Braudel had a direct influence in criticizing the French Empire, it was through his direction of Annales from 1956, when the journal provided space for the next generation of historians to write counter to earlier imperial narratives (Paligot 2009, 135–36). The work of both Ariès and Braudel, despite their political preferences, nonetheless eroded important imperial ideological assumptions. These early critiques of singular, progressive historical development of the kind championed by supporters of the French Empire opened theoretical space for some of the decolonial perspectives Sahli demanded in 1965. For instance, by the 1970s, Michel de Certeau’s work had made this critique of historical teleology central to his heterological method, seeing Western historical writing as a semiotics coded through relations of otherness: “intelligibility is established through a relation with the other; it moves (or ‘progresses’) by changing what it makes of its ‘other’ – the Indian, the past, the people, the mad, the child, the Third World” (de Certeau 1988 [1975], 3). The Antillean writer Édouard Glissant, too, focused on ways of refashioning the representation of historical connections in order to free them of hierarchy and dominance (see Glissant 2010 [1990]).

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Rewriting the History of Colonialism Some French historians began their careers working and living in the twilight of empire. For others, a more direct experience of the end of empire shaped the orientation of their historical writing. If the intellectual battle over the content and legacy of French imperial rule had begun toward the end of the French Empire, it gained momentum through the decolonial period, with new attention and theoretical innovations in the study of formerly colonized spaces. In select instances, historians’ personal connections to imperial spaces made the examination of empire and getting its history right all the more pressing. Similar phenomena occurred in the profession of French ethnology, where a researcher such as Michel Leiris witnessed the workings of empire firsthand while out in the field and then worked to match his political activism with undoing academic supports of racism. When Charles-André Julien’s Histoire de l’Afrique du Nord (History of North Africa) was published in 1931 – chasing the centennial of France’s invasion of Algeria – it was met with considerable resistance in most quarters of the French academy. Julien spent most of his early life in North Africa, working as a counselor general in Oran in the 1920s while studying history. While not necessarily radical from a twenty-first-century standpoint, the study was so thoroughly critical of the “imperial” dogma of North African orientalism it was panned by then-leading specialists on North African history, and it kept him from earning academic chairs in France through the 1930s and 1940s. In the long term, Julien’s work bridged older historiographies with newer ones. After World War II, Julien headed the influential “Colonies et Empires” series with the Presses Universitaires de France, which published the work of historians more willing to criticize the status quo ante.5 Anticolonial nationalists drew on this work for both inspiration and to weaponize it in public debate. From positions at the University of Rabat in Morocco (1956–1961), the Chair of the History of Colonization at the Sorbonne (1947–1960), and as faculty at the University of Paris (1960–1971), Julien directed subsequent generations of students working on North Africa, such as Charles-Robert Ageron, Jean Ganiage, Jean-Louis Miège, and Annie Rey-Goldzeiguer. A general time lag appears to separate the politically active engagements at the height of French decolonization, from 1954 to 1960, and changes in professional fields. While there were innovators in African, North African, and Middle Eastern histories in the midst of decolonization, many of the most critical evaluations of Western historical hegemony either occurred in spaces tangential to French academic history or were followed through by the generation, gaining prominence in the 1970s. As François Pouillon (2015) has shown, orientalist practice had come under fire in France from Jacques Berque in the late 1950s. But the most thorough and radical critiques of French orientalism came from writers with an outsider status, like Mohamed Chérif Sahli, Anouar Abdel-Malek, and Abdallah Laroui. By the 1970s, new anti-orientalist studies within France emerged at the same time Edward Said launched his anglophone polemic (Pouillon 2015, 3–5). In the case of African studies, Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch (who herself defended her dissertation in African history in 1971) has examined the large proportion of texts focused on historical questions published in the journal Presence Africaine, which was founded in 1947 by anticolonial activists and intellectuals. Despite the prevalence of historical topics in the journal’s pages, very few members of the metropolitan French academy published in the journal. Instead, the journal’s most innovative and influential historical interventions came from

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international contributors and scholar-activists from former colonial spaces. The journal’s international list of contributors was not necessarily unique for an African studies publication of the period – the Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines, Journal of African History, and Journal of Modern African Studies, founded in 1960, 1960, and 1963, respectively, had similar orientations focusing on international exchange and collaboration – but the lack of apparent engagement among French-based professional historians of Africa does appear unique, especially given the long-term importance of the journal. Rather than showing direct connections to academic writing, the journal highlighted voices from former French imperial spaces and the political interventions aiming to present a way of discussing Africa and African history that escaped the problems embedded in imperial historiography. Beyond the contributions published in the journal, the directors of Présence Africaine also published books dealing with African history, art, culture, and society (Coquery-Vidrovitch 1992). As direct imperial control over Africa transformed, historians focused renewed energies on precolonial subject matter. Partly, this was due to challenges to the orthodoxy that there was no history proper for these areas, that all changes in formerly colonized spaces were either cyclical or the product of European intervention. The concerted political movements for decolonization starkly illustrated the inadequacy of this orthodoxy. By the end of the 1950s, though, even specialists like Henri Brunschwicg whose earlier work replicated imperial received wisdom began probing available archives more deeply to challenge these narratives (Hargreaves 1990). The Belgian Africanist Jan Vansina’s study on the use of African oral traditions expanded French scholars’ methodology and source base even further, allowing French historians to show historical change despite absences of Western-style historical records.6 The same interest in precolonial subjects carried through to the history of imperialism as well. While there is perhaps a case to be made that this history was largely ignored or neglected by sectors of the French public after decolonization – partly the result of state policy and school curricula – this was not the case among professional historians. The studies written in the vein of scholars like Julien and Bruschwicg – important and progressive for their time – were largely histories in a traditional model, relying on state archives, often favoring imperial authorities and voices. This norm began to shift, however, by the 1970s. The University of Paris 7 – where Michelle Perrot and other Algerian War activists had landed – was particularly strong in coverage of the history of imperialism in Africa and Asia. The University of Paris’s re-organization in 1971 emerged at the peak of both the United States’ war in Vietnam and Maoist French metropolitan political activism. Students interested in applying the same anticolonial praxis of the previous decades were drawn to China and Vietnam specialist Jean Chesneaux in the Department of Geography and Social Sciences (Edwards 2016, 65–66). Researchers at Paris 7 also produced the Cahiers Jussieu series of edited volumes collecting the results of conferences covering critical interventions in the humanities and social sciences. Among their thematic focuses were ethnology, knowledge production of and in the third world, and historically ­marginalized groups. Despite the new interventions in the history of formerly colonized spaces, a number of surprising blind spots persisted through the early 1980s. While it would be wrong to speak of a colonial or anticolonial amnesia in the francophone decolonial world, professional historians paid very little heed in these years to the deeper history of anticolonialism, particularly with regard to anticolonialism in the French and Haitian Revolutions. Reflecting on the historiography of the Revolution in 1987, Yves Benot, who had begun his historical 634

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career writing on twentieth-century African political ideology, noted the continued weight traditional and parochial histories of the French Revolution carried. From Lamartine to Michelet and Soboul, historians of the Revolution had barely touched on the place of the Saint-Domingue slave uprising and subsequent Haitian Revolution had in the history of the Revolution. Even anticolonial historians like Daniel Guérin, whose 1946 study of the French Revolution argued for its contemporary political relevance, and whose anticolonial activism looked to history for rhetorical support, paid no attention to the place of St. Domingue in the French Revolution or the subsequent Haitian Revolution. When Marxists criticized Guérin’s history of the Revolution, they saw no fault with his treatment, or lack thereof, of Haitian matters. With the exception of Jean Jaurès’s Socialist History of the French Revolution, Benot argued that no major treatment of the Revolution saw the importance of SaintDomingue. Instead, the “inertia of received wisdom” seeing early anticolonial struggles as secondary lasted much longer than one might expect (Benot 1987, 109–17, 117; see also Trouillot 2015 [1995], 101). Despite being translated into French in 1949, C. L. R. James’s landmark study of the Haitian Revolution, Black Jacobins, did not inspire parallel studies among professional French historians. And in his translator’s preface, Pierre Naville made the case for the book’s historical and political urgency explicit: Today nobody in France can fail to be struck by the extraordinary topicality of the racial and social struggles which took place in the Caribbean Sea 150 years ago. . . . That is why his book, although it is primarily a history book, is also a “history lesson” – and a lesson to which we should pay attention. (Naville 2017 [1949], 368) The nearest equivalent was perhaps Aimé Césaire’s 1962 portrait of Toussaint Louverture.7 However, like other historical texts published by Présence Africaine, this was not the product of the established French historical profession. Benot’s observations of St. Domingue/ Haiti could be generalized to what historians now refer to as the global dimensions of the French Revolution. The closest one that came in this vein during this period were Jacques Godechot’s and R. R. Palmer’s early iterations of the “Atlantic Revolutions” model or Jean Descola’s study of South American revolutions, Les libertadors (1957). As this absence of engagement with earlier histories of anticolonialism makes clear, historical writing in the decolonial period was largely defined by the agendas, institutional structures, and lived experiences at the end of empire. The radical decolonial demands made by scholar-activists like Sahli and the contributors to Présence Africaine still stand as critical reference points for reflecting on the differential silences and knowledge produced throughout the decolonial period and whether French historical writing could be said to have been yet fully decolonized, or whether the decolonial projects of the post-war period are the ones pertinent today.

Notes 1 As Stefanos Geroulanos has pointed out in twentieth-century prehistory’s bric-a-brac racist origins, “[c]onfusion is plenitude and agility.” Contradictory and confused origins are often nimble enough to transform into equally confused future iterations. Stefanos Geroulanos, “Polyschematic history at the dusk of colonialism: Internationlism, racism, and science in Henri Breuil and Jan Smuts.” Res. Anthropology and aesthetics. 69/70 (Spring/Autumn 2018), 150.

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Timothy Scott Johnson 2 In particular, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Face à la raison d’État. Un historien dans la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: Éditions la Découverte, 1989). 3 The term, and idea, of an imperial boomerang effect can be attributed to Aimé Césaire earlier, though Rabemananjara did not cite him explicitly in this address (Césaire 2001 [1955], 36). 4 Mohamed Lacheraf, L’algérie: nation et société. Cahiers libres 71–72 (Paris: Maspero, 1965); Ahmed-Taleb Ibrahimi, Lettres de prison, 1957–1961 (Algiers: SNED, 1966); Abdoulaye Ly, La compagnie du Sénégal (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1958 [1955]); Ly, L’État et la production paysanne ou L’État et la Révolution au sénégal, 1957–1958 (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1958). 5 Interestingly, neither Julien nor those junior historians of colonialism whose work he championed had been critical enough of imperial historical frameworks in Sahli’s estimation. While they challenged many of the conclusions of earlier imperial historiography, they accepted too many assumptions about which sources should tell the story of French North Africa, the role climate played in historical possibilities, and the status of political, cultural, and social identities that existed before and during French rule. See Sahli (1965). 6 Henri Brunschwig, La colonisation française, du pacte colonial à la Union française (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1949); Brunschwig, Mythes et réalités de l’impérialisme colonial français, 1871– 1914 (Paris: Amand Colin, 1960); Jan Vansina, De la tradition orale: Essai de méthode historique (Tervuren: Musée Royale de l’Afrique Centrale, 1961). 7 Haiti, and Toussaint Louverture specifically, also figured in Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism (1955) and Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1956). Other writers associated with the négritude movement, like Léon Damas, had connected the Haitian Revolution to contemporary anticolonial projects in their writings in the interwar period too. See Gary Wilder, The French Imperial NationState: Negritude  & Colonial Humanism Between the Two World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

References Afary, Janet, and Kevin Anderson. 2005. Foucault and the Iranian Revolution. Gender and the Seductions of Islamism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Benot, Yves. 1987. La Révolution française et la fin des colonies. Paris: Éditions la découverte. Braudel, Fernand. 1995 [1958]. “History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée.” Translated by Sarah Matthews. In Histories: French Constructions of the Past, edited by Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt, 115–45. New York: The New Press. Césaire, Aimé. 2001 [1995]. Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by Joan Pinkham. New York: NYU Press. Christofferson, Michael S. 2001. “François Furet Between History and Journalism, 1958–65.” French History 15 (4): 421–47. Conklin, Alice. 2013 In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850– 1950. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Coquery-Vidrovitch, Cathérine. 1992. “Présence Africaine: History and Historians of Africa.” In The Surreptitious Speech: Présence Africaine and the Politics of Otherness, 1947–1987, edited by V. Y. Mudimbe, 59–94. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. de Certeau, Michel. 1988 [1975]. The Writing of History. Translated by Tom Conley. New York: Columbia University Press. Dulucq, Sophie. 2009. Écrire l’histoire de l’Afrique à l’époque coloniale (XIXe-XXe siècles). Paris: Éditions Karthala. Edwards, M. Katherine. 2016. Contesting Indochina: French Remembrance Between Decolonization and Cold War. Berkeley: University of California Press. Glissant, Édouard. 2010 [1990]. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Hargreaves, John. 1990. “From Colonisation to Avènement: Henri Brunschwig and the History of Afrique Noire.” Journal of Africal History 31 (3): 347–52. Heiner, Brady Thomas. 2007. “Foucault and the Black Panthers.” City 11: 313–56. Hutton, Patrick. 2004. Philippe Ariès and the Politics of French Cultural History. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

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French Historical Writing in the Wake of Decolonization Johnson, Timothy Scott. 2018. “Europe and North Africa in Jacques Berque’s Historical Sociology.” In North Africa and the Making of Europe: Governance, Institutions, and Culture, edited by Muriam Haleh Davis and Thomas Serres, 113–32. London: Bloomsbury. Leiris, Michel. 1951. Race et civilisation/Race and Culture. Paris: UNESCO. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1955. Race et histoire/Race and History. Paris: UNESCO. Naville, Pierre. 2017 [1949]. “Translator’s Foreword.” Translated by Charles Forsdick. In The Black Jacobins Reader, edited by C. Forsdick and C. Høgsbjerg, 367–81. Durham: Duke University Press. Paligot, Carole Reynaud. 2009. “Les Annales de Lucien Febvre à Fernand Braudel: Entre épopée coloniale et opposition Orient/Occident.” French Historical Studies 32 (1) (Winter): 121–44. Perrot, Michelle, et al. 2002. “Michelle Perrot’s History. Interview with Margaret Maruani and Chantal Rogerat.” Travail, genre et sociétés 2 (8): 5–20. Pouillon, François. 2015. “Orientalism, Dead or Alive? A French History.” Translated by Amy Jacobs. In After Orientalism: Critical Perspectives on Western Agency and Eastern Re-Appropriations, edited by François Pouillon and Jean-Claude Vatin, 3–17. Leiden: Brill. Rabemamanjara, Jacques. 1959. “The Foundations of Our Unity Arising from the Colonial Epoch.” Présence Africaine 24–25. Special Issue: 73–88. Sahli, Mohamed Chérif. 1965. Décoloniser l’histoire: Introduction à l’histoire du Maghreb. Cahiers Libres 77. Paris: Maspero. Shepard, Todd. 2007. The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. 2017. Sex, France & Arab Men, 1962–1979. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Singaravélou, Pierre. 1999. L’École française d’extrême orient ou l’institution des marges (1856– 1956): Essai d’histoire sociale et politique de la science coloniale. Paris: Éditions L’Harmattan. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2015 [1995]. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press.

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INDEX

1968 574 – 582; 68 years concept 576; interpreting 1968 579 – 580; May ’68 574 – 576, 577 – 579; remembering 1968 580 – 582 “Abbeys of Misrule” 174 absolutism 181 – 189, 191 – 199; absolute monarchy and, advent and crisis of 186 – 187; administrative structures and 197 – 199; advent and crisis of 186 – 187; bureaucratic state and, growth of 199; Catholic Church and 236; century of saints and 184 – 185; French society in 1610 and 182 – 184; grandeur and misery in 181 – 182; hardships and 182; Little Ice Age and 185 – 186; Louis XIV and 181, 187 – 189, 193 – 197, 235; networks, from personal to professional 195 – 197; origin of 140; political theory and 151 – 152, 155, 158 – 159; professional secretariat and, growth of 197 – 199; prosecution of war and the goals of the Sun King 194 – 195; refugees from 325 – 328; road to 191 – 193; royal manufactories of 213 – 221; as standard for ideal government 152; theories of 147 Académie Royale des Inscriptions 227, 231 – 232 Acadia and French beginnings in North America, remembering 376 – 379 Acadian Renaissance 378 Afonso I 13 Africa, French colonialism in 533 – 542; see also Brazzaville Conference

Age of Enlightenment see Enlightenment Age of Exploration, French 286 agriculture, French gastronomy and 566 – 567 Alexander VI 112 Alfonso II 104, 162 Alfonso VIII 67 Algeria: conquest and colonization 386 – 389; early presence in France prior to 1912 586; France and, 1830 – 1870 385 – 392; French–Algerian War (1954–1962) 589; Native administration and colonial governance 389 – 391; overview of 385 – 386 Algerian diaspora in France 585 – 594; at beginning of the twenty-first century 592 – 593; early Algerian presence in France prior to 1912 586; early twentieth century and the world wars (1912–1945) 587 – 588; French–Algerian War (1954–1962) 589; new diasporic identities (1975–1990s) 590 – 592; nine years of change (1945–1954) 588 – 589; overview of 585 – 586; post-independence (1962–1974) 589 – 590 Algerian question 385, 392 Algerian War 489 Amara, Fadela 593 Anastasius I 7 Ancien Régime France 159, 258, 289, 309, 360, 503, 598; age of memoirs and 228 – 229; antiquarianism and 230 – 231; end of 290 – 291, 300; “great men” model of history and 224 – 225; historiographers and gloire 225 – 228; making history

638

Index in 224 – 233; nation’s past in 86 – 88; skepticism and 229 – 230; visual histories and 231 – 232; see also absolutism antiquarianism 230 – 231 Aquitaine 32 – 34 Ariès, Philippe 630, 632 Army of the Orient 340 – 341, 342, 343 art patronage 214 – 220 Asia-Pacific region: after World War I 514 – 521; anticolonial dynamics and 444 – 445; conquest, 1880 442 – 444; early steps toward oceanic empire 439; French Empire in 438 – 447; French Pacific exploration 285 – 288; invention of an empire, from 1820s to the 1880s 439 – 442; limitations and paradoxes of Empire and 446 – 447; naming the territories and the people concerned 438 – 439; nuclear power and 545 – 553; shifts in global contexts and 446 Astérix le Gaulois (Goscinny and Uderzo) 93 Atlantic slavery system see slavery Augustus III 71 Baldwin IV 65 Baldwin V 67 Battle of the Pyramids 340 Bayrou, Francois 475 beauty, in festival cultures 173 – 174 Begag, Azouz 593 Belle Époque 503 – 505 Berber Spring 591 Berenguer, Ramon, IV 67 Black Force, The (Mangin) 485 “black legend” of Louis-Napoleon 415 – 424; British and German responses to 417 – 418; in nineteenth-century France 415 – 416 Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas 226 Bonaparte, Louis-Napoleon 390, 406, 411, 415 – 424; “black legend” of 415 – 424; economic history of Empire, revised and 419 – 420; Franco-Prussian War and 364; ideology of Empire, revised 421 – 422; new interpretations of 422 – 424; overview of 415; as a proto-fascist 418; revised 420 – 421; revisionism and 419; Second Empire and 362 – 363, 416, 417, 418, 419, 420 – 424 Bonaparte, Napoleon: General Amnesty and 333; rule of 242 – 243; state theaters and 320 – 322 Boniface VIII 16 Boucheron, Patrick 94 Boulainvilliers, Henri de 86, 87 Boulanger, Georges 369, 431, 433

Boulevard du Temple 318 – 320 Bourbon, Cardinal of 147 – 148 Bourbon monarchy 148 – 149 Bourbon Restoration 265, 323, 360 Braudel, Fernand 632 Brazzaville Conference 533 – 542; beginning of 534 – 538; in local, regional, and global contexts 538 – 542; overview of 533 – 534 Breton War of Succession: Brittany as “French” history, status and 120 – 122; end of the war 127 – 128; family tree of 121; overview of 119 – 120; political alliances and princely autonomy and 123 – 125; power structures and power of the prince and 125 – 127; prince and principalities in 119 – 128; war of the two Jeannes and 122 – 123 Brittany 34 – 36, 120 – 122 Calixtus II, Pope 61 Calvinism 145, 154 – 157, 185, 210, 326 – 329 Canaques 442, 445 Capetian France: court and the church 60 – 62; court as council 58 – 59; early Capetians, 987 – 1180 53 – 62; economic upswing in 16 – 17; French identity in later Middle Ages 74 – 82; Golden Age 15 – 18; intellectual revival in 17 – 18; king and the nobles 58 – 59; marriage 64 – 71; members of king’s household 57 – 58; royal domain, places of residence and 54 – 55; royal family, king and 55 – 56; royal family, king-designate and 56 – 57; royal family, queen and 57; royal power in, asserting 15 – 16 Caribbean, era of slavery in 246 – 255, 374 – 376 Carloman 11 Carlos IV 253 Carolingian dynasty 9 – 12; Francia Occidentalis, birth of 11 – 12; principalities 42 – 50; recreating the empire 10 – 11; strengthening Regnum Francorum 9 – 10 Carrel, Armand 408 Catherine de’ Medici 141, 144, 145, 158, 167, 169, 173, 174, 176, 230 Catholic Church 60 – 62, 151, 236, 320, 327, 349 – 351, 360, 370 Catholicism: conversion to 26 – 27, 182, 188; Council of Trent and 145, 184 – 185, 202, 203, 204, 296; dévots and 185, 204 – 206, 208, 210; Edict of Nantes and 148 – 149, 184 – 185, 186, 188, 192, 209, 326 – 327; Enlightenment and 294 – 302; French Crown and 209 – 211; leaders in 184; mission and 208 – 209; slaves and

639

Index 249; wars of religion and 145 – 148, 326; women and 166 – 167, 185, 365 Catholic Reformation 202 – 211; see also Catholicism century of saints 184 – 185 Chapelain, Jean 226, 227 Chapelier law 318 Chapelle expiatoire 348 – 357; monument 351 – 354; monument contested 354 – 357; overview of 348; site of 349 – 351 Charlemagne 2, 4, 10, 15, 22 – 25, 27, 32 – 33, 59, 62, 74 – 82, 114, 320 Charles III the Simple 11, 12 Charles II the Bald 11, 25, 28, 34, 36 – 38 Charles IV 65, 68, 97, 109 Charles IX 70, 140, 145, 147 Charles Martel 9 – 11 Charles the Great see Charlemagne Charles V 69, 96 – 97, 99 – 100, 104, 125, 142, 163, 165, 169 Charles VI 69, 96, 97, 100, 101, 110 – 111, 114, 133 – 134, 138 Charles VII 69, 96, 97, 101 – 102, 114, 137 Charles VIII 70, 96 – 97, 100, 103 – 104, 111, 112, 114, 130, 132, 137, 141, 155, 162 – 163 Charles X 269, 354, 361 Charter 360 Childebert I 7 – 8 Childebert II 8 Childeric I 7 Childeric III 9 – 10 Chilperic I 7 – 8 Chilperic II 9 Chirac, Jacques 476 – 477 Chlothar I 7 citizenship, French gastronomy and link between 571 – 572 Citron, Suzanne 93 Civil Solidarity Pact 511 Clement V, Pope 109 Clovis I 7, 24 Code Civil of 1804 312 Code Napoléon 312 Code of Criminal Procedure 312 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste 188, 195, 196 – 197, 199, 216 – 220, 226, 227, 231, 247, 259, 272 – 274, 276 colonial trade 237, 247, 260, 265 colonies, administration and citizenship in France’s 449 – 457 Combes, Emile 369 commemoration of war 617 – 618 Commune of Paris, 1871 364 – 365 Compagnie de Saint-Christophe 246, 258

Conan I 56 Conan IV 14 Constans I 6 Cortada, James 195 council, Capetian court and 58 – 59 Council of Cap 251 Council of Clermont 13 Council of Ecclesiastical Affairs 210 Council of Five Hundred 312 Council of Nicaea 7 Council of Port-au-Prince 252 Council of Reims 61 Council of the Seine 355 Council of the Sixteen 147 Council of the United Kingdom 177 Council of Trent 145, 184, 202, 203, 204, 296 Council of Vienne 109 Cremieux Decree 391, 452, 586 criminal justice, French Revolution and 304 – 312; application of law and 308 – 309; Directory to the Consulate and 311 – 312; founding principles and 305 – 306; introduction to 304 – 305; legislative changes and 306 – 307; Tribunal revolutionnaire and 309 – 311 Crusades 107 – 116; chivalry and gender and 114 – 115; contraction and accommodation in fifteenth century 111 – 113; historiography and late medieval themes 113 – 114; holy war and 108; literary culture 115 – 116; overview of 107 – 108; pressures and opportunities in fourteenth century 108 – 111; royal power, kingship, and national interests 114 culture of memory 623 – 625 Dagobert I 15 d’Alembert, Jean le Rond 233, 298, 352, 396 Dati, Rachida 593 de Baecque, Antoine 558 decolonization, French historical writing and 628 – 635; historical teleologies and, questioning 631 – 632; overview of 628 – 629; political experience and historical praxis and 629 – 631; rewriting the history of colonialism and 633 – 635 de Coulanges, Fustel 92 de Gaulle, Charles: as head of the provisional government 463, 546; as president 471 – 473 De la monarchie française (Montlosier) 88 democratizing uses of French museums 599 – 601 de Paris, Geoffroy 80 d’Estaing, Valery Giscard 473, 578, 597

640

Index dévots 185, 204 – 206, 208, 210 Dhondt, Jan 43 Dictionnaire Française (Richelet) 227 Dictionnaire Universelle (Furetière) 225 – 226 Diderot, Denis 233, 238, 272, 288, 289 – 290, 291, 298 – 299, 328, 352, 396, 525 Dreyfus, Alfred 367 – 369, 461, 515 Dreyfus Affair 367 – 370, 413, 433, 461 – 462, 464, 514, 526 Dubos, abbé 87 – 88 Duclert, Vincent 369 du Plessis, Armand Jean see Richelieu, Cardinal Eboué, Félix 539 – 540 Edict of Nantes 148 – 149, 184 – 185, 186, 188, 192, 209, 326 – 327 Edict of Toleration (Edict of Versailles) 329 Edward III 97 – 99, 119, 122, 123, 126 Edward IV 103 Egypt, French campaign in (1798–1801) 338 – 346; Army of the Orient and 340 – 341, 342, 343; introduction to 338 – 339; plans for the invasion of Egypt 339; relationship of the French to the inhabitants of Egypt during 343 – 345; resistance and failure 341 – 343 émigrés 333 – 334 Empire, Second Republic and: economic history of, revised and 419 – 420; ideology of, revised 421 – 422; socialism in 430 – 431 Encyclopédie (Diderot and d’Alembert) 229, 233, 237, 264, 294, 298, 328, 352, 396 Enlightenment 237 – 239, 283 – 291; Bougainville and the Tahitians and 288 – 290; in eighteenth-century France 283 – 291; end of the Ancien Régime and 290 – 291; exploration and 283 – 291; French Age of Exploration and 286; Geodesic Mission of 1736 and 286 – 288; origins of eighteenth-century French exploration and 283 – 285; philosophes and 297 – 299; supernatural and 293 – 302 environment, in Third Republic 394 – 402 Estates General 98 – 99, 103, 135, 145, 147 – 148, 153, 155, 158, 240 – 241, 263, 305 Eugenius III, Pope 61 Evolués 540 Exclusif 247 – 248, 252, 259, 268 familial feminism 493 Federalist uprising 308, 309 feminisms, French, 1870 – 1950 492 – 501 Ferdinand II 162 festival cultures 172 – 178; anti-elite protest and rebellion in 174 – 176; beauty and

conflict in 173 – 174; international festivalgoers in 176 – 177; introduction to 172 – 173; study of French festivals in 177 – 178 festivals see festival cultures feudal mutation 12 Field of Cloth of Gold 164 Fifth Republic 471 – 480 Fishman, Sarah 558 – 559 Fouchet, Christian 576 Fouquet, Nicolas 196, 218 Fourier, Charles 428 – 429 Fourth Republic 419, 453, 455, 463, 471, 472, 501, 546 – 548 Francia Occidentalis 11 – 12 François I 3, 70, 127, 138, 140 – 144, 152, 164 – 165, 168, 170, 203, 214, 219, 258, 377 François II 127, 141, 145 Franco-Prussian War 91, 364 – 365, 369, 380, 412, 415, 421, 446, 504, 508 Franks, international politics and 23 – 26 Fredegar 8 Frederick II 77 Frégault, Guy 378 – 379 French–Algerian War (1954–1962) 585, 588, 589, 590, 591, 593 – 594 French Revolution: criminal justice and 304 – 312; events of 240 – 242 Freycinet Plan 365 Fronde 193 fugitives from France 325 – 334; campaign to decriminalize unarmed emigration 331 – 333; emigres 325, 329 – 334; exodus 326 – 328; refugees from absolutism 325 – 326; see also Huguenots Furetière, Antoine 225 – 226, 227 Gaguin, Robert 112 Gallican liberties 143, 184, 203 Gambetta, Léon 412, 416, 432 Garonne 32 – 34 gastronomy 565 – 572; agriculture and 566 – 567; citizenship and, link between 571 – 572; heritagization movement and 570 – 571; national hunger and 568 – 569; overview of 565 – 566 Gaul 2, 22 – 28 Gaullist Revolutions, 1958 – 1968 471 – 473 gay identities, politicization 509 – 511 Gay Marais 510 gender: chivalry and 114 – 115; complementarity and 512; of enslaved 264; equality in educational environments 540, 541; female suffrage and 432, 465, 492 – 497, 499 – 501; feminisms and 492 – 501;

641

Index homosexual identity and 503 – 505, 506; norms 505, 508; prejudices regarding 299; roles 493, 494, 499, 576; traditions of Right and Left in 467 General Amnesty 333 Geodesic Mission of 1736 286 – 288 Germanic tribes 6 – 7, 86 – 89 Germanists 87, 88 gloire, historiographers and 225 – 228 Goscinny, René 93 grandeur, in absolutist France 181 – 182 “great men” model of history 224 – 225 Great War 505 – 506 “Gregorian” reforms 61 Gregory III, Pope 9 Gregory of Tours 7, 8, 25, 92 Gregory VII, Pope 61 Guizot, François 88 – 89, 361, 362 Habsburg–Valois Wars 162 – 170; managing war 167 – 168; memorializing violence and 168 – 169; networks of faith 166 – 167; overview of 162; peacemaking and 165 – 166; territorial possessions and 163 – 164; visibility at court, of royal women 164 – 165 Havas, Charles 410 Hecht, Gabrielle 548 – 549 Henri I 14, 15, 53, 57, 60, 61, 66 Henri II 14, 66, 70, 140, 141, 142 – 143, 144, 145, 162, 168, 169 Henri III 71, 140, 143, 147 Henri IV 71, 101, 140, 143, 147 – 149, 174, 176, 192, 203, 210, 215 – 216, 219 – 220, 326, 377 Henri V (England) 14, 59, 69 Henri VII (England) 68 Henry VIII 164, 167 heritagization movement 570 – 571 historical writing, decolonization and 628 – 635; historical teleologies and, questioning 631 – 632; overview of 628 – 629; political experience and historical praxis and 629 – 631; rewriting the history of colonialism and 633 – 635 historiographers and gloire 225 – 228 Hoffmann, Stanley 464 Hollande, François 478 Holy Ampulla 7, 15, 55 holy war, Crusades and 108 homosexual haunts 505 homosexuality 503 – 512; see also queer sexualities in France Hubert, François 376 Huguenots 325 – 334; parallels between Huguenots and emigres 333 – 334;

recalling 329 – 330; rehabilitating 328 – 329; worshiping in public 144; see also fugitives from France Huizinga, Johan 173 Hundred Days 351 Hundred Years’ War 2, 68, 70, 96, 98, 100 – 103, 114, 119, 135, 136, 138 immigration patterns to France, post-war 607 imperialism from 1914 483 – 490 India in the eighteenth century 272 – 280; collapse of 278 – 280; colonial disjuncture 275 – 277; Company 274 – 275; early years 273 – 274; overview of 272 – 273; War of the Austrian Succession 277 – 278 Innocent VIII, Pope 104, 112, 163 Innocent XI 107 International Council of Museums (ICOM) 599 international politics, Franks and 23 – 26 Italian Wars 112 Jacquart, Jean 177 Jansenist controversy 210 Jean II 124, 136 Jean III 119, 127 Jean IV 98, 119, 120, 126 Joan of Arc 102, 114, 132, 462, 465 John II 68 – 69, 98, 99, 110 John of Bohemia 68 – 69 Jospin, Lionel 612 June Days 362 Juppé, Alain 476 kingship, concepts of: Crusades and 114; household members of 57 – 58; king-designate 56 – 57; king-designate and 56 – 57; nobles and 58 – 59; in royal family 55 – 56; royal power of, asserting 15 – 16 Knights Templars 16 La Belle Gabrielle 252 La cimitiere de la Madeleine (Regnault-Warin) 350 La Force Noire (Mangin) 485 La garçonne (Margueritte) 506 la Grande Mademoiselle 228 Lang, Jack 598 La Presse 409 – 410, 411 – 412 Lara, Oruno D. 374 La Réforme intellectuelle et morale de la France (Renan) 91 Lavisse, Ernest 92 – 93 Lazarus 285 le Grand Siecle 181

642

Index Le mythe national: L’histoire de France en question (Citron) 93 Leo III 10 Leo IX, Pope 61 Leo X, Pope 143, 203, 497 Leo XIII 461 Le Petit Journal 412, 413 lesbianism 509 – 511; see also queer sexualities in France Les lieux de mémoire (Nora) 93 – 94 les vieilles colonies, remembering 379 – 382 LGBTQ: freedoms 511 – 512; legal advances for 503 Life of Napoleon III (Bagehot and Jerrold) 417 literary culture, Crusades and 115 – 116 Little Ice Age 185 – 186 Lothair II 11 Louis I 10 Louis II 11 Louis III 11 Louis IV 12, 46, 65, 69 Louis IX 16, 67, 77, 80 – 81, 107, 111, 114 Louis VI 13, 14 – 15, 53 – 61 Louis VII 7, 13 – 15, 53, 54, 56, 57, 59, 61, 62, 66, 77, 108, 114 Louis VIII 15, 56, 67, 81 Louis X 80, 96, 97, 134, 449 Louis XI 65, 69, 97, 103, 112, 135, 137, 138, 141, 153, 157 – 158, 163, 258 Louis XII 70, 96, 104, 112, 137, 138, 140 – 142, 152, 162, 163 Louis XIII 70, 149, 181, 186 – 187, 192 – 193, 210, 216, 246, 258, 326 Louis XIV 70, 71, 181, 182, 186, 196 – 197, 209, 224 – 233, 235, 249, 258, 272, 274, 297, 327, 328, 339; personal reign of 187, 188, 189, 193 – 194; prosecution of war and goals of 194 – 195; royal manufactories and 213, 215 – 221; rule of 193 – 195; subjects of 187 – 189 Louis XV 70, 71, 186, 199, 226, 233, 235 – 237, 252, 288, 349, 503 Louis XVI 70, 233, 239 – 240, 290, 317, 329, 348 – 356, 360, 439 Louis XVII 350 Louis XVIII 243, 323, 333, 350 – 354, 360, 361, 405 luxury production: art patronage and royal workshops 214 – 220; introduction to 213 – 214 Mably, abbé 88 MacLean, Simon 38 Macron, Emmanuel 479 Madeleine Cemetery, The (Regnault-Warin) 350 Mahommet et Charlemagne (Pirenne) 22

Manuel II 110 Margueritte, Victor 506 Martinique Independence Movement 374 Maximilian I 162, 163 May ’68 574 – 576, 577 – 579 Mazarin, Jules 187, 210, 216 M’Bokolo, Elikia 539 medieval century of reason 17 medieval themes, historiography and 113 – 114 Mediterranean: trade from, to Northern Emporia 22 – 23 Mehmed II 112 melodrama 318 – 320 memoirs, age of 228 – 229 memory of lost empire 373 – 382; abolition and enslavement in the French Atlantic, remembering 374 – 376; Acadia and French beginnings in North America, remembering 376 – 379; les vieilles colonies, remembering 379 – 382; overview of 373 – 374 memory politics of the World War I 616 – 626; art of remembering war 618 – 619; commemoration of war and 617 – 618; culture of memory and 623 – 625; overview of 616 – 617; substitutes and symbols and 620 – 623 mercantilism 213 – 221; colonial trade and 237, 247, 260, 265; Exclusif and 247 – 248, 252, 259, 268; trade from Mediterranean to Northern Emporia and 22 – 23 Merovingian dynasty 6 – 9 method in the early Third Republic, debates on 90 – 93 “Me Too” movement 512 Michelet, Jules 89 – 90, 349 Mignet, François-Auguste 408 mission, Catholic Reformation and 208 – 209 Mitterrand, François 474 – 476 Monarchomach tracts 146 Monod, Gabriel 91 – 92 Montesquieu, Baron de 87 – 88, 264, 396 Montlosier, Count de 88 Morality on the Council of Basle (Beck) 135 morne des sauters 247 museums in Fifth Republic 596 – 604; colonial past and postcolonial society in 601 – 604; democratizing uses of 599 – 601; overview of 596 – 597; state and presidential uses of 597 – 599 Napoleon see Bonaparte, Napoleon Napoleon III see Bonaparte, Louis-Napoleon national interests, Crusades and 114 National Rally 512

643

Index nationhood and nationalism in French history writing 85 – 94; Ancien Régime France 86 – 88; debates on method in the early Third Republic 90 – 93; Revolution and 88 – 90; “roman national” in the twentieth century 93 – 94 Nine Years’ War 248 noblesse de robe 101, 183 Nora, Pierre 93 – 94 Northmen 31 North Pacific Gyre 284 nuclear power 545 – 553 Odo I 47 Odo II 14 Orleanist July Monarchy (1830–1848) 408 – 411 Otto I 55 Otto II 77 Otto IV 15, 77 parentat 14 Paris: Boulevard du Temple and the rise of melodrama and 318 – 320; introduction to 315 – 316; Napoleon and the state theaters and 320 – 322; performance in, 1789 – 1815 315 – 323; queer sexualities in 506 – 507; revolutionary theater and 316 – 317 Paris Commune 355, 431, 455, 494, 504 Parrott, David 192 Paschal II, Pope 13 paternalism 493, 499, 576 patriarchy 493 peacemaking, royal women and 165 – 166 Pepin II 9 – 10 Pepin III 9 performance: in the fourteenth century 133 – 134; in Paris, 1789 – 1815 315 – 323 periodical press, 1815 – 1905 404 – 414; introduction to 404 – 405; July Monarchy (1830–1848) and 408 – 411; Restoration (1815–1830) and 405 – 408; Second Republic and the Second Empire and 410 – 412; Third Republic and 412 – 414 Perrault, Charles 227 Pétain, Philippe 462 – 463, 464, 475, 488 Petite Académie 227 Petit Lavisse (Lavisse) 92 – 93 Pflimlin, Pierre 463 Philip I 13, 53, 56, 57, 59, 60 – 61, 66, 69 Philip II (Spain) 162, 169, 177 Philip II Augustus 14 – 15, 65, 75, 77, 81 Philip III (Spain) 70

Philip III the Bold 16, 68 Philip IV the Fair 16, 68, 78, 80, 81, 96, 97, 109, 114, 132 – 133, 138 Philippe VI 119, 120, 122, 124 Philip V 80, 96, 97, 101, 109 Philip VI 68, 78, 96 – 98, 100, 109 philosophes 297 – 299; see also Enlightenment Philosophical Dictionary (Voltaire) 300 Pierre II 131 Pippin I 33 – 34 Pippin II 34 Pirenne, Henri 44 Pius II 112 pluralism 610 – 613 politicization of lesbian and gay identities see queer sexualities in France Pomare IV 440 – 442 Pomare V 441 Pompidou, Georges 473 – 474 Popular Front 461, 464, 465, 523 – 531 populationism 492 Prest, Julia 177 prévôtés 55 principalities 42 – 50; in Breton War of Succession 119 – 128; historiography of 43 – 44; institutional and cultural sketches of 47 – 49; overview of 42 – 43; in tenth century 44 – 47 professional secretariat, growth of 197 – 199 propoganda in the fifteenth century, satire and 134 – 137 Protestantism 114 – 147, 188, 204, 210, 239, 325, 327, 329 Protestant Reformation 144 – 145 Protest of Saint Louis 80 proto-fascist, Louis-Napoleon as 418 provisional government of the French Republic 267, 362, 374, 411, 412, 430, 463, 500, 508, 534, 546, 549, 557 queenship: role of the queen 57; studies 97, 123; Valois 97 queer sexualities in France 503 – 512; Belle Époque and 503 – 505; Great War and 505 – 506; interwar Paris and 506 – 507; LGBTQ freedoms and 511 – 512; overview of 503; politicization of lesbian and gay identities 509 – 511; World War II to 1968 and 507 – 509 Qu’est-ce que le tiers-état (Sieyès) 88 Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? (Renan) 91 race 606 – 614; future of French republicanism and 613 – 614; malleability of race and 607 – 608; overview of 606 – 607;

644

Index political and legal realities of 608 – 610; post-war immigration patterns to France 607; religion as race, hybridization and pluralism and 610 – 613; republicanism and 613 – 614; see also slavery Racine, Jean 226, 316 Reccard I 24 Reformation: Catholic Reformation 202 – 204; institutional reform and 206 – 207; Protestant Reformation 144 – 145; theocratic themes in political theory in 151 – 160 regalian rights 48 regicide 147, 265, 350, 351 Regional Council of Martinique 374 Regnum Franciae 12 – 15; new order 12 – 13; royal power in, structuring 14 – 15; world expansion and 13 – 14 Regnum Francorum: birth of 7; divided 7 – 9; recreating 10 – 11; strengthening 9 – 10 religion: Calvinism 145, 154 – 157, 185, 210, 326 – 329; dévots 185, 204 – 206, 208, 210; networks of faith 166 – 167; old and new religious worlds 26 – 28; Protestantism and 114 – 147, 188, 204, 210, 239, 325, 327, 329; as race, hybridization and pluralism and 610 – 613; reform and religious controversy, supernatural and 295 – 297; separation of church and state 360, 369, 460, 507; wars of religion 145 – 148; see also Catholicism Renaissance: monarchy 140 – 144; theocratic themes in political theory in 151 – 160; 12th century Renaissance 17 Renan, Ernest 91 republicanism, race and 613 – 614 Restoration 360 – 361; French periodical press and 405 – 408 Reuter, P. J. 410 revisionism 419 Revolution: of 1789 3, 241, 396, 404, 460, 549; of 1830 266, 354; of 1848 361 – 362; looking at the past through 88 – 90; see also socialism revolutionary theater 316 – 317 Revolutionary Tribunal 309 – 311 Revue historique 91 Reynaud, Paul 462 Richard II 101, 110 Richelet, Pierre 227 Richelieu, Cardinal 181, 186 – 187, 192 – 193, 196, 204, 209, 216, 219, 246, 258, 381 rigorism 210 Robert I 12

Robert II the Pious 14, 53, 55, 56, 57, 60 Roberts, Mary-Louise 506 Roger II 13 Rollo 11, 38 – 39 Roman Empire 2, 4, 6, 10, 21, 22, 24, 27, 42, 77, 88, 176, 182, 230, 387 Romanists 87 “roman national” in the twentieth century 93 – 94 Romantic historiography 89 Ronsard, Pierre de 173 Rosetta Stone 345 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 238, 289, 299, 300 royal domain 53, 54 – 55, 56 Royal Faide 8 royal power, Crusades and 114 Saint-Simon 228 – 229, 390, 428, 429, 451 St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre 176 Salic law 92, 97, 100, 101, 140, 147, 148, 163 Salut les copains 555, 559 – 563 Sarkozy, Nicolas 477 – 478 satire and propaganda in the fifteenth century 134 – 137 satirical theater 130 – 138; overview of 130 – 131; performance in the fourteenth century 133 – 134; public performance and, retracing 131 – 132; satire and propoganda in the fifteenth century 134 – 137; scope and types of satire 132 – 133 Second Empire 362 – 364; collapse of 363, 364, 417; colonization under 388; economic history of 419 – 420; foreign policy of 441; gaining access to China 441; ideology of 421 – 422; Louis-Napoleon and 362 – 363, 416, 417, 418, 419, 420 – 424; Napoleon III and 364, 406, 430 – 431; periodical press and 410 – 412 Second Republic 362, 388, 410 – 412, 415, 417, 420, 423 – 424, 430 – 431, 450 separation of church and state 360, 369, 460, 507 Seven Years’ War 251 – 252, 259, 262, 278, 288, 339, 373, 377 – 379, 394, 395 Sieyès, abbé 88 Sigibert I 24 Silencing the Past (Trouillot) 539 skepticism, in old regime France 229 – 230 slavery: abolition of 252, 255, 263, 266 – 267, 374 – 375, 380, 446, 451; Atlantic slavery system and 257 – 269; Catholic Church and 249; efforts to restore 254; in French Caribbean 246 – 255,

645

Index 374 – 376; resistance to 250 – 255; Vodou and 249 socialism 427 – 435; before 1848 427 – 430; in democracy 431 – 434; overview of 427; in Second Republic and Empire 430 – 431 social question 366, 427, 430, 432 Société des Amis des Noirs 252 Societe Le Nickel (SLN) 443 society in 1610 182 – 184 Sohn, Anne-Marie 562 South Equatorial Gyre 284 state theaters 320 – 322 Stephen I 14 Stephen II, Pope 10 Stora, Benjamin 552, 593 suffrage: female 432, 465, 492 – 497, 499 – 501; universal 413, 421, 430, 434, 455 – 456, 536; universal male 411, 415, 417, 423, 450, 492 Sun King see Louis XIV supernatural: Enlightenment and 293 – 302; overview of 293 – 294; philosophes attack on 297 – 299; in print and practice 299 – 301; religious reform and religious controversy 295 – 297 Tahiti 288 – 290, 438 – 447, 517 Tamagne, Florence 559 Taubira law 268 – 269, 375 Taylorism 527 technology, in Third Republic 394 – 402 territorial possessions, royal women and 163 – 164 Theobald IV 14 theocratic themes in political theory 151 – 160 Theuderic I 7 Thierry, Augustin 89 – 90 Third Republic 365 – 370; Afro-Asian empire and 386; Boulanger and 369, 431, 433; Catholic Church and 460 – 461; citizenship rights and 452 – 453; collapse of 419, 462; colonialism and 380 – 382, 422; Cremieux Decree and 391, 452, 586; debates on method in early 90 – 93; Dreyfus, Alfred and 367 – 369, 461, 515; environmental and technological development in 394 – 402; First World War and 461 – 463; French periodical press and 412 – 414; gaining access to China 441; Gambetta and 416, 432; Paris Commune and 355, 431, 455, 494, 504; republicanism and 360, 365, 367; socialism in 431 – 435; women’s movement and 492 – 501

Tillemont, Louis-Sébastien Le Nain de 285 trade: colonial 237, 247, 260, 265; from Mediterranean to Northern Emporia 22 – 23 tribes 442 Tribunal revolutionnaire 309 – 311 Tribunaux criminels 309 – 310 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph 539 “two Frances” 459 – 468; ambiguity, creativity, complexity in 464 – 468; overview of 459 – 460; at war and peace 460 – 464 Uderzo, Albert 93 ultras 351, 354, 361 Urban II, Pope 13, 107, 108 Urban V, Pope 110 Urban VIII, Pope 211 Valois France, 1328 – 1498 96 – 104; crisis, renewed 100 – 102; overview of 96 – 97; prestige and, restoration of 99 – 100; restoration and consolidation 102 – 104; rise of 97; royalty and, crisis of 97 – 99 Vichy regime 94, 452, 460, 462 – 468, 475, 488, 508, 511, 533, 538 Vikings 31 – 39; Aquitaine and the Garonne 32 – 34; Brittany and the Loire 34 – 36; Seine 36 – 39 visual histories, in old regime France 231 – 232 Voltaire 87, 226, 229, 233, 238, 264, 272, 279, 298, 316, 328 – 329, 396 war: art of remembering 618 – 619; commemoration of 617 – 618; culture of memory and 623 – 625; memorials 620 – 623 War of Breton Succession 98; see also War of the Two Jeannes War of the Austrian Succession 277 – 278 War of the Two Jeannes 98, 122 – 123 wars of religion 145 – 148 Weber, Eugen 365 Werner, Karl-Ferdinand 43 – 44 West, Charles 44 West Francia 2, 32, 38, 39, 55, 64 – 67 White slave trade 498 William III 71 Winock, Michel 459 Wolff, Bernhard 410 woman question 366, 493 women: Habsburg–valois Wars and 162 – 170; managing war 167 – 168; memorializing violence 168 – 169; networks of faith and 166 – 167; peacemaking and 165 – 166; territorial possessions and 163 – 164;

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Index visibility of, at court 164 – 165; see also queenship women’s movement 492 – 501 World War I 461, 465 – 466, 485, 487 – 488; Algerian diaspora in France and 587 – 588; French relations in the South Pacific after 514 – 521; memory politics of 616 – 626

World War II 488 – 489, 494; Algerian diaspora in France and 587 – 588; queer sexualities in France and, to 1968 507 – 509 Yates, Frances A. 173 – 174 young people and youth culture, 1958 – 1968 555 – 563 Zancarini-Fournel, Michelle 576

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