CHAPTER XI - The French Republic

Summary

It is impossible to understand the following pages if it is not first realised that the French in 1871 were dominated by memories of the peculiarly eventful three-quarters of a century since 1789. The peasants, who remained by far the largest social group, only slowly absorbed new ideas. They still feared the re-establishment of an aristocratic and clerical regime that would reimpose feudal dues and tithes on them; conversely, they had acquired a very acute sense of their property rights and, particularly since 1848, it had become easy to rouse in them an irrational fear of ‘the Reds’ or the partageux (redistributionists), by whom they meant the politically more advanced town-dwellers who would come and take away their land or at least their savings (kept in the famous woollen stockings). Undoubtedly the landed nobility, still very important in certain regions, and the upper middle class did not dream of challenging, yet again, either the freedoms proclaimed in 1789 or even the civil equality consecrated by the Code Napoléon; but they remembered with dread the Terror of 1793–4, the rising which brought in the July Monarchy, the February Revolution of 1848 and the rising of June 1848. They consequently refused all compromise with the new ideas and the popular aspirations of the nouvelles couches, in which they were incapable of seeing anything other than purely destructive forces. As for the convinced republicans (industrial workers, artisans, and many in commerce and the liberal professions), their ideal was 1793: the Constitution of the Year One, which had provided for a very liberal, very democratic, very decentralised regime, but also the supremacy of the convention and the great committees ; in other words an all-powerful assembly acknowledging no limit to its power.