Children of the Revolution by Robert Gildea

Author:Robert Gildea
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780141918525
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2009-06-04T20:00:00+00:00

BETWEEN REPUBLICAN

CONCENTRATION AND APAISEMENT

The Dreyfus Affair split the political class that had been plastering over its differences in the 1890s in order to deal with the threat of socialism and anarchism. The renewed threat to the parliamentary Republic, even to the Republic itself, provoked a throwback to republican concentration in defence of the regime that had characterized the 1870s and 1880s. The rhetoric of the French Revolution was once more in the air: Aulard’s Political History of the Revolution, which saw it as the inevitable victory of national sovereignty, appeared in 1901. The dominant party until 1940 was the Republican, Radical and Radical-Socialist Party, founded in 1901 as a party that ‘rallies all the sons of Revolution, whatever their differences, against all the partisans of counter-revolution’.79 These Radicals were constantly alert to the militarist and clerical threat from the right that had manifested itself during the Dreyfus Affair, but they had no truck with socialism and were resolute defenders of private property. They represented France’s petites gens – small businessmen, artisans and shopkeepers, small farmers, the salaried lower-middle class of government employees, instituteurs, post office workers, the employees of banks, insurance firms and railway companies, very much the ‘nouvelles couches sociales’ whose advent Gambetta had proclaimed in 1874. These had their ‘hearts on the left and pockets on the right’, subscribing to the principles of 1789 and hostile to monopoly capitalism but believing that people should make their way by hard work, saving and education. They were led by small-town and rural notables: doctors, lawyers, teachers and businessmen, who nurtured the single-member constituencies by obtaining concessions and favours from the government: new schools, roads and branch lines, jobs and scholarships in the public gift, exemption from military service or legal proceedings.80 The increase in deputies’ allowances to 15,000 francs in 1906 made it possible for less wealthy men to envisage a parliamentary career. In the Palais Bourbon, those they might disagree with politically belonged to the same ‘république des camarades’, who ‘sit on benches that touch, receive their constituents and mistresses in the same salons, use the same offices, the same library, the same headed paper and the same café’.81 Between 1906 and 1913 the president of the Republic, Armand Fallières, with his white beard and taste for good living, symbolized a period of pacification after political struggle in what became known as ‘the Republic of Monsieur Fallières’.82

The threat from the right was in fact squarely dealt with. Those who had conspired against the army were punished, although the officer corps had not been fully republicanized and was still a stronghold of Catholic and conservative opinion. The Catholic Church, in particular certain teaching congregations, was dealt with by eliminating it from the education system. Although the Church remained powerful in society it ceased to be a political threat. In 1902 Albert de Mun founded a Catholic party, the Action Libérale Populaire, but it was not on the same scale as the German Centre Party or the Italian Partito Popolare. Like

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