Napoleon III and the French Second Empire (10 page)

Furthermore, most of those who did accept the label felt obliged to distance themselves from the administration as well as to announce their support for the further extension of political liberties. The administration was certainly active in the election campaign, but far more discretely than ever before. Most prefects encouraged their candidates to become more self-reliant by establishing their own electoral committees and newspapers. This election, with its mass circulation newspapers of all political hues and its public meetings, was fought in an entirely different atmosphere from its predecessors. Moreover, in large part due to political uncertainty, the economic situation had remained depressed since 1865. The

results were a severe blow to the regime. If they are compared with the results of previous elections the rise of opposition and the deterioration of the government’s position become clear (see Table 4.1).

In total, 216 government supporters were elected, of whom only 180 were

official candidates and 98 were government liberals whose views differed little from those of opposition liberals. The precipitant decline in support for the government among the local elites who provided the vast majority of election candidates meant that it was now often forced to support men who appeared to be the least-bad alternative. Seventy-eight declared opponents of the regime were 44

Table 4. 1
Legislative election results

Votes for

Votes for

Registered voters

government

opposition

Abstentions

1852

9, 836, 000

5, 248, 000

810, 000

3, 613, 000

1857

9, 490, 000

5, 471, 000

665, 000

3, 372, 000

1863

9, 938, 000

5, 308, 000

1, 954, 000

2, 714, 000

1869

10, 417, 000

4, 438, 000

3, 355, 000

2, 291, 000

elected (49 liberals and 29 republicans), and although of these only the more radical republicans appear to have been irrevocably opposed to the Empire as such, for the government, controlling the
Corps législatif
clearly was going to be extremely difficult. The results in Paris in particular had exceeded all opposition hopes, with 234, 000 votes for their candidates against 77, 000 for official candidates and 76, 500 abstentions. It was the success of the republican

candidates in the capital and the mass demonstrations of hostility to the regime which followed, on successive nights between 9 and 12 June, which especially impressed contemporaries. Crowds demonstrated by singing the banned

Marseillaise
, shouting
Vive la République
and smashing windows, and inevitably clashed with the police and cavalry called out to restore order. Some 500 arrests were made.

The rise of Republicanism

These developments, together with the belief that the final collapse of the imperial regime was inevitable and possibly their own political sympathies, have led many historians to exaggerate the strength of republican opposition. The results of the 1869 elections, if they say something about the support for avowed republicans, also suggest that there were definite limits to this. Moreover, it is not enough to explain these limits in terms of electoral manipulation by the regime or the political ignorance of the rural population – another old favourite. The precise nature of support for republicanism and the impact this might have had on wider political relationships need to be examined. The 1860s certainly had seen a considerable recovery from the depths of the early 1850s. With liberalisation, more of the 45

militants of 1848 had reentered the fray. Even though their ranks had been

considerably depleted by death, men whose reputations had been made during the struggles of the Second Republic like Bianchi and Testelain in Lille, and often too the family members who shared their reputations, continued to assume key

leadership roles. In Lille in 1870, one-third of the militants considered by the police to be dangerous were of the generation of 1848, and their influence was

substantially greater than this proportion would suggest. The social tension generated in rapidly developing industrial centres perhaps explains the militancy of many Lille political activists. In most provincial centres, as in Dijon, moderate bourgeois leaders, often from the professions and belonging to masonic lodges, appear to have dominated republican politics, although more radical and less solidly middle-class elements were pressing them hard by 1869. Apparently, this was a national trend and can be seen in the challenge to moderates of the older generation like Jules Favre, Hippolyte Carnot and Ernest Picard – men who had retained the vague religiosity of 1848 and who condemned violence and class conflict – coming from younger radicals like Gambetta, Allain-Targé and Vermorel whose formative experiences had been different and who were far more aggressive in their hostility to the regime, in their anti-clericalism and their demands for a measure of social reform.

The activities of these political leaders, from around 1863, were designed to restore their influence among former republican militants, as a prelude to the extension of organisation and agitation among the previously largely uninvolved younger generations. Much of the activity was localised and directed at winning urban municipal power. This was easier than might appear at first glance. The constituencies for municipal elections generally differed from those for general elections, in that their boundaries had not been drawn in order to submerge the suspect urban electorate in a mass of rural voters. Thus, it was possible to win control or establish a significant presence on a substantial number of town councils and use this as a base for wider political activity. At Auch (Gers) in 1865, two barristers, two notaries, a solicitor, a doctor, a merchant, a landowner and a banker were elected as republicans (Palmade 1961: 93). Republicans gained control of the Toulouse city council in 1866, and although the council was dissolved and replaced by a nominated commission after a period of tense relations with the local prefect, even this outcome had considerable propaganda value. However, success was not without its problems. Thus, it soon became clear that there was a very real danger that opposition might be moderated or even turned into collaboration once

councillors had been integrated into the broader administrative system. Practical 46

problem solving replaced political combat. The process of gaining republican converts could also be frustratingly slow – inevitably so given that past experience of repression made many potential sympathisers cautious. Nevertheless, a growing awareness of what was possible developed, particularly once the 1868 laws had enlarged the scope for legal political activity. As we have seen, this increased participation in opposition politics, particularly in Paris, was sufficient to cause a crisis of confidence in the future stability of the regime.

The organisational basis for republican activity, as it slowly developed, took much the same forms as in 1848, with the establishment of
ad hoc
electoral committees, made up mainly of professionals and businessmen, to select and then support candidates. These were frequently associated with local newspapers which performed crucial coordinating functions and with the politicisation of a complex of voluntary associations ranging from the predominantly lower and middle-class masonic lodges and
cercles
, the artisanal mutual aid societies to the more popular cafés and popular drinking clubs – the
chambrées
. During the electoral campaigns of 1869–70, these informal structures were supplemented by the organisation of specifically political meetings. There was a trend, moreover, as interest in public affairs intensified for temporary, informal and leisure organisations to become more political and permanent. Nationally, the republican ‘party’ suffered until 1868 from the lack of an obvious leader, although visits by peripatetic opposition deputies like Simon, Pelletan or Favre helped to establish some sort of national coordination and encouraged local groups to feel that they were part of a larger movement. In that year, however, Gambetta achieved fame through his

condemnation of the regime in highly publicised speeches made while serving as a defence lawyer in a series of political trials. In 1869, standing for election at Belleville, a working class district of Paris, and significantly against the veteran moderate republican Carnot, his programme with its vague promises of social reform was taken up by most of the republican press. This confirmed his

ascendancy.

The forms and content of republican propaganda inevitably changed in

response to political liberalisation. They became less dependent upon the illegal distribution of tracts and upon the oral circulation of information, although both remained important, and more upon the newspaper press. The diffusion of

propaganda was made much easier. Numerous provincial newspapers were

established – even if they frequently disappeared because of lack of support and financial difficulties. Moreover, the Parisian press circulated far more widely throughout France due to the railways. It now included such overtly revolutionary 47

newspapers as Rochefort’s
La Lanterne
(May 1868) and its successor
La
Marseillaise
(December 1869), Delescluze’s
Le Réveil
(‘The Awakening’ – July 1868) and Victor Hugo’s
Le Rappel
(‘The Reminder’). One feature of their attacks on the regime was condemnation of its origins in a
coup d’état.
Republicans were able to use the ammunition provided by the journalist Eugene Ténot whose

damning accounts of the brutality involved – in
Paris en décembre
and
La Province
en décembre
– attracted widespread interest. Such a regime, according to the
Indépendent du Midi
(1 January 1869), might accord ‘
liberties
but never genuine
liberté
’. In contrast, a republican alternative was presented based upon interpretations of the
Declarations of the Rights of Man
, revised since the 1840s to take account of manhood suffrage and the need for social reform.

Another feature of this propaganda was its often virulent anti-clericalism: an outpouring of the hatred accumulated in reaction to two decades of militant and politically reactionary clericalism. This was one of the themes of the well-attended public meetings organised in the popular quarters of Paris. In these, and in spite of the obligatory presence of a police
commissaire
, all the doctrines of the clubs of 1848 were re-iterated. Yet, although it was the most extreme revolutionary

meetings and newspapers which made the greatest impression on public opinion, most republican papers and gatherings were more moderate. They desperately

sought to avoid identification with the threat of violent revolution. Instead, they pressed for continued political reform, confident that the free working of a system of manhood suffrage must inevitably lead to eventual electoral victory. Beyond this, they held out hope of social justice. In this respect, radicals like Gambetta promised tax reductions following cuts in wasteful government expenditure, the introduction of free and secular primary education and, in even vaguer terms, an improvement in the lot of the poor. It was these particular proposals which distinguished them from both the moderate republicans and socialists. Writing early in 1870, Gambetta typified a determination to attract support from all social groups and to avoid social conflict:

we must re-state . . . that for us the victory of democracy with its free institutions means security and prosperity for material interests, everybody’s rights

guaranteed, respect for property, protection of the legitimate and basic rights of labourers, the raising up morally and materially of the lower classes, but without compromising the posi tion of those favoured by wealth and talent. . . . Our single goal is to bring forth justice and social peace.

(Gambetta,
Indépendent du Midi
, 19 May 1869)

48

Most bourgeois republicans, even if aware of the need to promise social reform in order to win over the mass electorate, remained totally committed to the interests of private property and a liberal economic system. Furthermore, they were

desperately anxious not to frighten the large numbers of small property owners, artisans and peasants. Their fundamental commitment was to ‘progress without revolution’.

Although there was considerable overlap between radicals and socialists, the former appear to have been less committed to social reform than their predecessors, the
démoc-socs
of 1849–51. Moreover, they were always afraid of losing control over the urban masses who provided them with the bulk of their popular support.

Ideologically, the lines of division between radicals and socialists were clearer than they had been during the Second Republic. There were few disciples of utopian socialism left by the late 1860s, although among artisans cooperative aspirations remained influential. In Paris, the most prominent spokesmen for a complex of revolutionary and socialist ideas were the disciples, mostly intellectuals and students, of Louis-Auguste Blanqui (‘Blanquists’), proponents of a violent seizure of power by revolutionary secret societies, together with the far less extreme and largely working-class members of the Workers’ International. The latter was founded in London in 1864 and initially tolerated by a government which

welcomed its moderation and mutualism. Toleration wore thin when, in 1867, its members sought to support strikers and became involved in political

demonstrations. Reports which grossly exaggerated its membership increased

official alarm. In reality, with a nominal membership of around 30, 000 nationally at its peak early in 1870, its influence was limited outside Paris, Lyon, Rouen and Marseille (Rougerie 1964: 112). Its main impact was to add to conservative and to moderate republican fears of a red revolution, already heightened by the virulence of the left’s propaganda and especially by the ways in which this was reported in the conservative press.