To Be a Citizen: The Political Culture of the Early French Third Republic 9781501727603

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To Be a Citizen

TO BE A CITIZEN The Political Culture of the Early French Third Republic jAMES

R.

LEHNING

Cornell University Press ITHACA AND LONDON

All illustrations from the French periodical L'Illustration are reproduced courtesy of Special Collections, Rare Book Division, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah. Copyright © 2001 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 5 r 2 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 148 50. First published 2001 by Cornell University Press.

Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lehning, James R., b. 1947 To be a citizen : the political culture of the early French Third Republic I James R. Lehning. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN o-8014-3888-8 (cloth: alk. paper) r. France-History-Third Republic, r87o-1940. 2. France-Politics and government-r870-1940. 3· Republicanism-France-History-19th century. I. Title. DC335 .L44 2oor 944·08I-dC2I 2001003160 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetablebased, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. Books that bear the logo of the FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) use paper taken from forests that have been inspected and certified as meeting the highest standards for environmental and social responsibility. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu.

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Contents

Preface

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5 6 7 8 9

An Insecure Republic The Founding Fathers Prefects, Schoolteachers, and Provincial Citizens Taming Paris Women, Workers, and Strikes The Invasion of Foreigners The Exciting Strangeness of Algeria Subversive Suffrage: Boulanger in Paris Epilogue Selected Chronology, I87o-I892 Index

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Preface

Completion of this manuscript in autumn 2000 by a coincidence was counterpointed by the American presidential election. With remarkable precision Al Gore, George W. Bush, and many other Americans reproduced the arguments of many of the subjects of this book, French men and women who lived in the 187os and 188os, expressing the conviction that little squares of paper (or punched cards) provide a unique means of representation. In the following pages, I argue that the attempts by the founding leaders of the Third Republic to establish a political system in which voting by adult males would take precedence over all other forms of expression by citizens meant not only a narrowing of forms of representation in republican political culture but also the marginalization or elimination from the republican political landscape of some claimants to citizenship. But this process was contested, and the qualities of "citizens" therefore became a focal point for the attempts of the Third Republicans to create a stable democracy. This book began in 1989 when, with an extra week on my hands before my return flight from Paris, I decided to read newspaper accounts of the funeral of Leon Gambetta. In the decade since then, I have acquired numerous debts that have allowed me to complete it. The University of Utah supported this project through a series of grants and leaves: University Research Committee grants in 1995 and 1999 allowed research in France; a faculty fellowship in 199 5 provided released time from teaching responsibilities, as did a College of Humanities research assignment in 1996. Friends and colleagues have also provided vital support in my writing of this book. Gay L. Gullickson, Carol Harrison, and Megan Armstrong read versions of the entire manuscript and were helpful in their comments. Discussions of various aspects of this book with Anand Yang, Esther Rashkin, Faith Childress, Eric Hinderaker, Rebecca Horn, Susie Porter, Peter Von Sivers, Laura Mayhall, Judith Stone, Dave Mickelsen, and Ray Gunn also ix

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were helpful. At the last minute Elaine Kruse photocopied materials for me in Paris. John Ackerman and the staff of Cornell University Press have been helpful and supportive throughout the publication process. The members of the Postcolonial Reading Group at the University of Utah listened to a version of chapter 5. Parts of chapter 3 were given as papers at the George Rude Seminar on French History in Melbourne and to the Department of History of the University of Newcastle in 1996. I thank Philip Dwyer for inviting me to make the latter presentation. I have also used, in revised form, material from "Forming Republicans: The Laicization of Schools in the Third Republic" and "Death and the Republic: Political Funerals in the Early Third Republic," both published in the Western Society for French History Proceedings (20 [1993]: 303-14 and 18 [1991]: 367-75), and I thank Barry Rothaus, editor of the Proceedings, for permission to reuse this material. While Duke University Press did not have to grant rights to reuse material in "Gossiping about Gambetta: Contested Memory in the Early Third Republic," published in French Historical Studies (18 [1993]: 237-54), I am grateful to them for promptly pointing out that in the publishing agreement I had retained reuse rights. The notes in the book provide full references to the materials I have used here, and so I have not included a formal bibliography. Administrative correspondence located in the Archives Nationales de France in Paris dealt with the enforcement of the two decrees, the laicization of schools, legislative activities, Boulangism, and the funeral ceremonies for Victor Hugo. The Archives de la Prefecture de Police in Paris, containing reports of police informers and police surveillance, were invaluable in providing information on major political figures of the era, and reconstructing the events discussed in Chapter 4, the strikes and popular movements examined in Chapter 5, and the Boulangist movement. The microfilm newspaper collection in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France was an important source, as was the collection of materials on Jules Ferry's inquiry into Algerian affairs in the Bibliotheque Municipale de SaintDie (Vosges). The Bibliotheque de la Sorbonne allowed me to read the original typescript of Jacques Nere's thesis on the Boulangist movement. I am grateful to the staffs of all of these institutions, who invariably welcomed me and shared their expertise. The rare book department of the Marriott Library of the University of Utah helped prepare the illustrations, and, as always, Linda Burns and the interlibrary loan department of the library made it possible for me to do a significant amount of work in Salt Lake City. Joan Wallach Scott has, in this as in my previous work, been supportive in every possible way; her vision of history and her friendship continue to make being an historian more than just a job. Finally, my book is dedicated to my daughter Amanda, whose own interest in history and writing has reminded me that I have been most fortunate to be able to devote my energies to re-creating the past. jAMES R. LEHNING Salt Lake City

To Be a Citizen

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An Insecure Republic

I The French Third Republic was founded in September 1870 in the ashes of the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. It was from the start a controversial and contested regime. The founders of the Republic were opposed by monarchists who favored a restoration of either the Bourbon or the Orleanist lines of the royal family, and by Bonapartists who wished to revive the empire. 1 The firmest boundaries of republicanism established differences with these groups, and their defeat in the 187os opened the way to consolidation of institutions based on universal manhood suffrage. These institutions represented the triumph of the Republic, for when the Third Republicans spoke about republican politics they spoke about voting and about the rights and institutions that were necessary to make voting effective.2 They attempted to force all political activity through universal manhood suffrage, the "little paper" that was, in Leon Gambetta's words, the Republic itsel£. 3 But there was more to republican politics than opposition to monarchists 1 On monarchism, see Robert Locke, French Legitimists and the Politics of Moral Order in the Early Third Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974); on Bonapartism, John Rothney, Bonapartism after Sedan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969). 2 Claude Nicolet, I: idee republicaine en France (r789-I924) (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), r83-28o; Pierre Rosanvallon, Le sacre du citoyen (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 341-92; Judith Stone, Sons of the Revolution: Radical Democrats in France, r862-r9r4 (Baton Rouge: Lousiana State University Press, 1996), 129-48; Philip Nord, "The Party of Conciliation and the Paris Commune," French Historical Studies 15 (1987): r-35; Antoine Prost and Christian Rosenzveig, "LaChambre des Deputes (r88r-r885), Analyse factorielle des scrutins," Revue FranftZise de Science Politique, 1971, 5-5o; and "Vevolution politique des deputes (r882-r884)," Revue FranftZise de Science Politique, 1973, 701-28. 3 Leon Gambetta, "Discours de Belleville, 23 avril r875," in Joseph Reinach, ed., Discours et p/aidoyers politiques de M. Gambetta (Paris: G. Charpentier, r881-r885), 4:319; Le Rappel, r February 1875.

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To Be a Citizen

and Bonapartists and devotion to universal manhood suffrage. Once in power the Republic's supporters faced problems that stemmed from the difficulties raised by the operation of this kind of political system, problems that marked the history of the Republic from its founding. 4 Republicanism itself was not a consistent ideology that could be drawn on to resolve political differences, but rather a collection of differing positions that generated tensions and conflicts within the republican camp itself and contributed to the instability of the Republic. Republicans disagreed on issues such as the speed with which republican reforms should be implemented, the relationship between the state and the Catholic Church, social policies, colonialism, and even the proper institutions for the Republic. Disagreements about participation and its meaning were central to the history of the first several decades of the Third Republic. In these years the Third Republicans searched for their own solution to the principal question of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European political history, the accommodation of mass participation in politics. While mainstream republicans tried to construct a Republic around the specific act of voting by male citizens, other republicans found this exclusionary and emphasized other aspects of the legacy of the first two French Republics. Within republican circles, forms of political activity such as public meetings, journalism, strikes, parades, memorial ceremonies, and even riots continued to be claimed as legitimate parts of the republican tradition, and groups other than male citizens claimed the right to participate in politics. The Republic therefore included both a central point focused on universal manhood suffrage, seeing the citizen as voter, and other positions that suggested alternative participants and different forms of participation. This disparate collection of perspectives on republican politics raised several important questions. What should republican politics be? What distinguishes a republican system from a monarchist or imperial system? What kinds of people get to participate in republican politics? What role should elites play in the Republic? What groups do people belong to in a Republic? What means are available to individuals and groups to allow them to participate in republican politics? And what are the limits of acceptable political behavior in the Republic? Founding a Republic meant finding answers 4 Andre Siegfried, Tableau politique de Ia France de /'Ouest sous Ia Troisieme Republique (Paris: A. Colin, 1913); Jean-Marie Mayeur, La vie politique sous Ia Troisieme Republique (Paris: Seuil, 1984); Franc;ois Goguel, La politique des partis sous Ia IIIe Republique (Paris: Le Seuil, 1958); Odile Rudelle, La Republique absolue, I87o-r889 (Paris: Publications de Ia Sorbonne, 1986); Leo Hamon, Les opportunistes: Les debuts de Ia Republique aux republicains (Paris: Editions de Ia maison des sciences de l'homme, 1986); Stanley Hoffman, In Search of France (New York: Harper and Row, 1965); Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976); Maurice Agulhon, Marianne au combat (Paris: Flammarion, 1979); and Marianne au pouvoir (Paris: Flammarion, 1989); Philip Nord, The Republican Moment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 19 9 5); Sanford Elwitt, The Third Republic Defended (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986).

An Insecure Republic

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to these questions. Consolidating that Republic meant convincing French men and women to accept these answers. As Jules Grevy, Leon Gambetta, Jules Ferry, and their fellow republicans found, these were not easy tasks. Even after the demise of monarchism and Bonapartism as serious threats to the Republic, contention continued over the nature of the Republic itself. This book will focus on the meaning of republican politics and participation through an examination of republican political culture in the first two decades of the Republic. While social scientists and historians frequently refer to political culture, it is nevertheless a difficult concept to pin down. The term has been used to describe narrowly the intellectual and ideological aspects of political behavior. Sidney Verba, for example, defined it as "the system of empirical beliefs, expressive symbols, and values which defines the situation in which political action takes place." 5 While not explicitly invoking the term, recent works on political history have also suggested the significance of cultural aspects of politics. J. G. A. Pocock's studies of political thought emphasize the play of the language of politics rather than canonical texts in political philosophy. Marxists typically view ideologies such as nineteenth-century liberalism or socialism as the cultural superstructure of class relations, and the labor history inspired by E. P. Thompson emphasizes the relationship between material conditions and cultural superstructure in the formation of classes. The "bourgeois public sphere" described by Jiirgen Habermas focuses attention on cultural institutions such as the salons and newspapers of late eighteenth-century France. 6 For historians in particular, political culture is a concept that justifies expanding analyses of political attitudes beyond intellectual history, including political actions as well as the "mood, metaphors, values, and style" of 5 Lucien Pye and Sidney Verba, eds., Political Culture and Political Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 513· See also Murray Edelman, The Symbolic Uses of Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964), and Constructing the Political Spectacle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963); Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, eds., The Civic Culture Revisited: An Analytic Study (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980). 6 J. G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time (New York: Atheneum, 1971). For older Marxist approaches see Edouard Dolleans, Histoire du mouvement ouvrier (Paris: A. Colin, 1936, 1967); Maurice Dommanget, Blanqui (Paris: Librairie de I:Humanite, 1924); and Arthur Lehning, From Buonarroti to Bakunin: Studies in International Socialism (Leiden: Brill, 1970). More recently, see E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Random House, 1964); Chantal Mouffe, "Hegemony and New Political Subjects: Toward a New Concept of Democracy," 89-101, and Stuart Hall, "The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism among the Theorists," 3 5-57 both in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988). Jiirgen Habermas conceptualized the public sphere in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989; German original 1962). For refinements of Habermas' arguments, see the essays in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1992).

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political attitudes.7 Increasingly it has played an important role in revisions of major historical events, a way of emphasizing the active role of discourses in determining social action in contrast to their passive or residual roles described in earlier formulations. In his introduction to a collection of essays entitled The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, Keith Michael Baker formally defined political culture as "the set of discourses and practices" about the activities through which individuals and groups articulate, negotiate, implement, and enforce the completing claims that they made on each other. James Vernon and Patrick Joyce have employed it in similar ways in their works on reform in nineteenth-century British politics. 8 These works suggest that a version of political culture which will help illuminate the history of the early Third Republic needs to emphasize three different but related aspects of this history. First, we must recognize that political culture is discursive: there were implicit understandings of how the Republic was supposed to work, expressed not only through institutional and constitutional arrangements but also in cultural representations of and discourses about the Republic. 9 A discursive version of political culture broadens the meaning of politics, emphasizing that discourses about republican politics were significant elements of the political system, forming a part of power relationships and guiding individuals as they participated in those relationships. It also suggests that these discourses were unstable, inconsistent, and constantly being renegotiated. A second important aspect of political culture concerns the arena within which political activity takes place, civil society. Particularly significant to modern French history, this concept follows Alexis de Tocqueville's description of nineteenth-century American politics and his criticism of French politics at that time. For Tocqueville and recent students such as Robert Putnam, the idea of civil society emphasizes the importance of voluntary 7 Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 2. See also Jean H. Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983). 8 Keith Michael Baker, ed., The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, Volume I: The Political Culture of the Old Regime (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1987), xii. James Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study of English Political Culture, c. I8IJ-I867 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Patrick Joyce, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). See also Ronald P. Formisano, "The Concept of Political Culture," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 3 r (2oor): 393-426; Alain Corbin, Noelle Gerome, and Danielle Tartakowsky, eds., Les usages politiques des fetes aux XIXe-XXe siecles (Paris: Publications de Ia Sorbonne, 1994); and Maurice Agulhon, ed., Cultures et folklores republicains (Paris: Editions du Comite des travaux historiques et scientifiques, 199 5 ). 9 See Michel Foucault, The Discourse on Language in The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. Rupert Swyer (New York: Pantheon, 1972). See also Richard Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in NineteenthCentury France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 198 5).

An Insecure Republic [ 5 assoctatwns independent of the state as a basis for democratic political activity. But it can focus attention as well on the ways in which individuals are grouped together, the relationship of these groups to the state, and the range of cultural practices available to groups and to individuals to make their influence felt. 10 In conjunction with the discursive version of politics already mentioned, the idea of civil society argues that participation must be viewed in terms of not only political practices such as voting that determine who is to control the state but also the representational practices that contest the use of power. Finally, we should recognize that discourses about the Republic and republican civil society created specific identities that could be adopted by political actors, drawing on gender, class, religion, race, and other apparent characteristics of individuals and groups. An analysis of political culture needs to be as concerned with the interplay of these cultural identities as with the institutions in which they are employed. 11 In early Third Republican France one of the most important of these identities was that of citizen, the cultural identity of the individuals in civil society who participated in republican politics. But republican versions of citizenship were contested: the mainstream republican concept, which saw voting as the primary political activity in the Republic, attempted to define other identities such as worker, woman, man, Catholic, Jew, peasant, immigrant, and colonial subject as subordinate to and different from citizen. Others, however, insisted on the central importance of one or more of these other identities in their own version of the republican citizen. This conceptualization of political culture extends the questions posed earlier about the nature of republican politics to include both institutions and representations of republican politics. Both were significant at this time of transition from a political system based on elite politics to one founded on mass participation. This transition meant for many republicans organizing political participation through representative institutions, political parties, and voting. 12 From the perspective of the republican elites, popular 10 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America trans. George Lawrence (New York: Knopf, 1994), 513-24; Robert Putnam, "Bowling Alone," The Journal of Democracy 6 (1995): 65-78; Charles Taylor, "Modes of Civil Society," Public Culture 3 (1990): ro2-rr9; Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 227-239; Carol E. Harrison, The Bourgeois Citizen in Nineteenth-Century France: Gender, Sociability, and the Uses of Emulation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). The collapse of the East European peoples' democracies in 1989 has spurred interest in the civil society that provided a basis for attacks on those regimes. See, for example, Karen Dawisha and Bruce Parrott, eds., The Consolidation of Democracy in EastCentral Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 11 See William E. Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); and Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996). 12 See Nord, Republican Moment, and Matthew Truesdell, Spectacular Politics: LouisNapoleon Bonaparte and the Fete Imperiale (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

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participation in politics would no longer be viewed as potentially violent and disorderly but rather a basis of order, security, and stability. But these forms of participation meant the elimination or marginalization of longstanding practices of republican politics, and many other republicans pressed for a Republic that incorporated other parts of the republican legacy. The Third Republicans therefore had to defeat the enemies of the Republic on the Left and Right in elections and parliamentary votes. They also had to resolve contests about different versions of the Republic, about the organization of the civil society in which republican politics took place, and about who could be a citizen and participate in that politics. This resolution was attempted in the formulation of republican institutions and policies. But it also forced the reconstruction and renegotiation of the forms of civil society, the meaning of citizenship, and the discourses that represented and justified those elements of republican political culture.

II The Revolution of 1789, the Republic of 1793, and the political development of France during the nineteenth century left several legacies for the Third Republicans. Different institutional forms of the Republic had been adopted. There also were multiple possible forms of participation contained in this tradition. And both republican institutions and the participation they created were invested with a utopian belief in the ability of the Republic to change the world. The Revolutionary aim of creating active participants in public affairs in the place of the passive subjects of the Ancien Regime therefore involved both institutional and cultural change. Constant undercurrents in constitutional debates in the revolutionary assemblies were the questions not only of who should be participants in French government and through what institutions they should participate but also of how to make people be true republican citizens and of what to do about those who refused to act accordingly. 13 The revolutionaries and their heirs found that these apparently simple questions masked a series of consequences about membership in and exclusion from the polity, consequences that were less often worked out theoretically than on the ground, in the press of events, and often in contradiction to republican ideologies. 13 Daniel Gordon, Citizens without Sovereignty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); William H. Sewell Jr., "Le citoyen/la citoyenne: Activity, Passivity, and the Revolutionary Concept of Citizenship," 105-23, in Colin Lucas, ed., The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, Volume 2: The Political Culture of the French Revolution (New York: Pergamon Press, 1988); Fran