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Not the Radical republic: liberal ideology and central blandishment in France, 1901–1914*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Donald G. Wileman
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Abstract

Madeleine Rebérioux was right to wonder whether France was truly a ‘Radical republic’ in the years between the Dreyfus affair and the Great War. Archives only opened or explored since Rebérioux published in 1975, and the re-interpretation of older newspaper sources, show that control of the Third Republic was still hotly contested in those years. The Radicals tried to build a republic in their own image, but in a situation where left and right were closely balanced, they were almost always foiled. Crucial to this process was a politically republican but socially conservative centre – best typified by the A.R.D. The A.R.D. wanted a Third Republic frankly favourable to the interests of big business. Since it held the parliamentary balance of power between the left and a right only partly republican, it generally got its way. Statistical sources also support this interpretation.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 37 , Issue 3 , September 1994 , pp. 593 - 614
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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References

1 Rebérioux, Madeleine, La République Radicale? (Paris, 1975)Google Scholar. Originally volume II of the Nouvelle Histoire de la France contemporaine, it has also been re-issued in English translation as half of The Third Republic from its origins to the Great War, trans. Foster, J. R. (Cambridge, 1984)Google Scholar along with J.-M. Mayeur's volume on the first years of the Republic.

2 See e.g. Nicolet, Claude, Le Radicalisme (Paris, 1961)Google Scholar. For a summary of and a reply to attempts to trivialize the Radicals and their achievements from the end of the Second Empire to c. 1902, see Auspitz, Katherine, The radical bourgeoisie (Cambridge, 1982), esp. p. 166.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Chastenet, Jacques, who wrote the Histoire de la Troisiéme République (7 vols Paris, 1952–1963)Google Scholar, sat for the Bonnefous, A.R.D. Georges, who wrote most of the Histoire Politique de la Troisième République (7 vols Paris, 1959–1967)Google Scholar was both an M.P. and a vice-president of the Republican Federation (a party which united the survivors of Royalism and Bonapartism with former Centrists who had evolved to the right over the Dreyfus affair).

4 See for example Young, Robert J., Power and pleasure: Louis Barthou and the French Third Republic (Montréal and Kingston, 1991).Google Scholar

5 Since submission of this article, the author has begun work on a book about the A.R.D. and the Third Republic, 1901–47.

6 Alain, , Éléments d'une doctrine radicate (Paris, 1925)Google Scholar was often cited by eminent thinkers such as François Goguel. See Larmour, Peter J., The French Radical party in the 1930s (Stanford, 1964)Google Scholar, for Alain's unimportance, and Mach, Susan Rovi, ‘French radical ideology, 1906–1914: The audience, the medium, the message’ (unpublished D.Phil, dissertation, Bryn Mawr, 1980)Google Scholar on solidarisme. Radical delegates seem in fact to have been consistently more advanced than the average of their elected members in the chamber of deputies. Accounts of the annual Radical congresses in either Le Temps or La Dépêche de Toulouse are especially useful, as they tended to report what happened, rather than what official Radical party accounts wished to stress. This article approaches its subject from the perspectives of parties and individuals. Compare it with the work of Elwitt, Lebovics and Nord – who all use more or less subtle versions of social class as their unit of analysis: Elwitt, Sanford, The Third Republic defended: bourgeois reform in France, 1880–1914 (Baton Rouge, 1986)Google Scholar; Nord, Philip, ‘Social defence and conservative regeneration: the National Revival 1900–14’Google Scholar in Tombs, Robert, Nationhood and nationalism in France: from Boulangism to the Great War, 1889–1918 (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), pp. 210–28Google Scholar, and Lebovics, Herman, The alliance of iron and wheat in the French Third Republic, 1860–1914 (Baton Rouge, 1988)Google Scholar. These authors (like Robert Young – though he operates from the opposite side of the barricades) tend to draw the lines of battle between a politicized working class and a (perhaps strategically) reformist bourgeois governing class. This article instead treats the socialist and Radical parties as having had contending (and occasionally allied) projects for reform; A.R.D.-style modérés (including Barthou) as the opponents (until the mid-1930s) of all social reform significant enough to be noticeable in the context of the times; and syndicalists, other workers, and still other voters as particularly important bits of the context in which the politicians operated. Noises from offstage, perhaps, but important noises – coming from the audience. This is actually quite close to the implicit opinion of Stone, Judith F., The search for social peace: reform legislation in France, 1890–1914 (New York, 1985)Google Scholar – though Stone's reflexes sympathize with the S.F.I.O., as Young's do now with the modérés. To be fair, this author admits a strong sympathy for the Rad-soc militants of the period. He insists on believing that all the scholars involved are at least striving for balance, and that history is well served by their arguments and evidence, however partisan they may occasionally become.

7 Wiskemann, Elizabeth in her Europe of the dictators, 1919–45 (New York, 1966), p. 105Google Scholar. For Reynaud's actual activities see his speech to the 1927 congress of the A.R.D. in the Flandin papers (Fonds Flandin), DON 313357, manuscripts room, Bibliothèque Nationale (hereafter BN), box 91, and Archives of the Former Département of the Seine, D.3M2Article 13, folder ‘Éléctions législatives de 1928, Documents géneéraux’.

8 Chambre des députés, rapport fait au nom de la commission chargée de réunir et de publier les programmes électoraux des candidats aux élection législatives du 16 Novembre 1919, p. 2215.Google Scholar

9 Lachapelle, Georges, Elections législatives … résultats officiels (Paris, volumes for 1910, 1914, 1919, 1928, 1932, 1936)Google Scholar (vol. for 1910 with P. G. LaChesnais).

10 See the overly disingenuous: Lachapelle, G., La représentation proportionnelle des partis politiques (pref.: A. Carnot) (Paris, 1913)Google Scholar. What may be the only remaining copy of this pamphlet is in the collection of the French Centre national du gret, grand écurie du roy 1101 78011 Versailles, pièce 784.

11 According to Le Temps (which – as its name implied – tried to be the Times of France), Independent Socialists like Alexandre Millerand, Aristide Briand and René Viviani were far less dangerous than the more progressive of the Unified Radicals – people like Camille Pelletan and Ferdinand Buisson, who walked ‘arm in arm with Jaurès’. Indeed, the Radical party was a ‘mastodon’, and its members were ‘poltroons’ who ‘talk Radical and think Socialist’. Le Temps, 25 Jul. and 10 Oct. 1909. Le Temps, in the words of the later socialist leader Léon Blum, was ‘not a glass house’. It kept its connections with the right–centre and with political power as dark as it could, but the connections were there. André Tardieu – who wrote Le Temps' foreign policy leaders in those days when Chancellor Bülow of Germany called the paper an independent Great Power – became a victorious Alliance candidate in 1914, and its acclaimed leader in the elections of 1932. In 1935 Prime Minister Flandin, by then leader of the A.R.D., was using the editor of Le Temps as an extra channel of communications to both Mussolini and the Pope. Chastenet to Flandin, 9 Apr. 1934, in Flandin papers, Box 66, ‘présidence du conseil’, orange folder: ‘notes pour nouveau président du conseil’.

12 Le Temps, 15–20 Oct. 1913, and 31 Jul. 1914.

13 See, particularly, two underestimated theses done for Mayer, Arno J.: Sumler, David E., ‘Polarization in French politics, 1908–14’ (unpublished D.Phil, dissertation, Princeton, 1969), esp. p. 186Google Scholar and Chapman, Geoffrey W., ‘Decision for war: the domestic political context of French diplomacy, 1911–14’ (unpublished D.Phil, dissertation, Princeton, 1971), p. 30Google Scholar; see also Davidson, Kerr, ‘The French Socialist party and parliamentary efforts to secure social reform’ (unpublished D.Phil, dissertation, Tulane University, 1970)Google Scholar. For arguments against their Fritz Fischer-esque view that French domestic politics would have come to apocalypse had not W.W. I intervened, see yet another Mayer supervisee: Calhoun, Arthur Fryar, ‘The politics of internal order: French government and revolutionary labour 1898–1914’ (2 vols, unpublished D.Phil, dissertation, Princeton University, 1973)Google Scholar, and my own ‘L'Alliance républicaine démocratique, the dead centre of French politics, 1901–47’ (unpublished D.Phil, dissertation, York University (Toronto), 1988).Google Scholar

14 Laffere, deputy and spokesman for the new Unified Radical caucus, interviewed in Le Parlement et l'Opinion no. 12, 10 June 1914.

15 The label was coined by Henri Rochefort (who before his Boulangist period was among the reddest of the red), in the first issue of Les Droits de l'Homme, 16 May 1877. It was a sarcastic reply to the insistence of moderate republicans that they favoured reforms and an amnesty for exiled members of the Paris Commune – but only when these projects became ‘opportune’. See also Duroselle, , La France et les français, 1900–14 (2 vols. Paris, 1972), I, 208, 212–15Google Scholar; Bousquet-Melou, Jean, Louis Barthou et la circonscription d'Oloron (Paris, 1972), p. 94Google Scholar; Kayser, Jacques, Les grandes batailles du Radicalism 1820–1901 (Paris, 1962), pp. 265–7.Google Scholar

16 See esp. Sorlin, Pierre, Waldeck Rousseau (Paris, 1966).Google Scholar

17 Chastenet, Histoire de la Troisième République, III, 217–18, 22–-5.

18 Le Matin, 3 Apr. 1902. Pelletan's article appears as a close paraphrase instead of as a quotation because this newspaper is now only available in tightly bound volumes, and some of Pelletan's words disappear irretrievably into the bindings.

19 Chastenet, IV, 18.

20 The preamble of the Alliance's first constitution (written by Pallu de la Barrière – the editor of its first newspaper Le Paysan de France) took up one and a half of its three pages. It read in part: ‘The Republican and Democratic Alliance is an organization having as its goal the grouping of those Republicans who, be it in Parliament or in the country, reject collectivist utopias and internationalist hypocrisies, but who, sincerely democratic, are very decided to undertake all the necessary reforms, inspiring themselves above all by the great law of social justice which is invoked on all subjects and which, in fact, is currently thrown aside and trampled upon with such ease… [The Alliance bases itself on being] that great Republican party, of which Waldeck-Rousseau spoke at Toulouse.’ This is taken from the earliest copy extant, dated 8 Aug. 1907 for the benefit of the prefecture of police. Copy in A.R.D. papers, BN, manuscrits, Don 37260, box 1.

21 Le Temps, 1 Mar. and 6 May 1902.

22 Duroselle, , La France, 1, 265Google Scholar; Revillon, Tony, Camille Pelletan (Paris, 1930), pp. 181–2Google Scholar. Both Radicals and socialists proved unreceptive to a later Alliance suggestion that a further reduction in the term of military service could be achieved by forcing all candidates for civil service jobs to serve longer with the colours than anyone else.

23 Le Temps, 14–20 (esp. 17) Jan. 1913.

24 Poincaré and editorial comment in La Dépêche de Toulouse, 13 May 1901; Deschanel on Government reform in Le Temps, 8 Apr. 1902 and Le Matin, 7 Apr. 1902. Compare the latter edition of Le Temps with the account of Barthou's doings in de Loménie, Emmanuel Beau, Les responsabilités des dynasties bourgeoises (5 vols. Paris, 1954–1973), II, 344–5.Google Scholar

25 This is one of the conclusions in Siegfried, André's Tableau politique de la France de l'ouest (Paris, 1913)Google Scholar. Siegfried's father Jules was a modéré and eventually a member of the A.R.D. André ran as an unsuccessful A.R.D. candidate in 1910. His books are permeated with the views and attitudes of moderate Republican conservatism. Their claim to being dispassionate science is silly. Still, Siegfried was one of the few men brave enough to delve into the impossible turf of French elections before 1910, and his Alliance connection – once known – can be taken to have given him a certain amount of insight into the way centre-right French politics worked. See also his Souvenirs de la IIIe république (Paris, 1946).Google Scholar

26 Arnal, Oscar L., Ambivalent alliance: the Catholic Church and the Action Française (Pittsburgh, 1985), p. 12Google Scholar. See also Thomson, David, Democracy in France (Oxford, 1958 edn), esp. pp. 72 and 103.Google Scholar

27 For example, ibid. pp. 130, 176.

28 Bousquet-Melou, , Barthou…, pp. 120–1, 132–3, 171–3, 176.Google Scholar

29 See Waldeck-Rousseau's own protest in the Journal officiel, sénat, 20 Nov. 1903; Le Temps, e.g. 25–30 Jul. 1903.

30 See e.g. Stearns, Peter M., Revolutionary syndicalism and French labour: a cause without rebels (New Brunswick, N.J., 1971).Google Scholar

31 E.g. Le Temps, 8 and 20 Oct. 1903.

32 For further background see Vindé, François, L'Affaire des Fiches… (Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1989).Google Scholar

33 E.g. Goldberg, Harvey, The life of Jean Jaurès (Madison, 1962), pp. 294, 297, 332–3Google Scholar. He in turn quotes Daniel Halévy's La république des comités – with approval.

34 Beau de Loménie, II, 331.

35 For the data see Le Temps, 17 Nov. 1904, and Kaplan, Mark Ira, ‘The Radical party and the army in France 1899–1905’, unpublished dissertation, City University of New York (1976)Google Scholar, and Ralston, David, The army of the republic (Cambridge, Mass., 1967)Google Scholar – but note that my conclusions are not theirs.

36 Le Paysan de France, 16 June 1901.Google Scholar

37 See for example Elwitt, Sanford, The making of the French Third Republic (Baton Rouge, 1975).Google Scholar

38 Bousquet-Melou, , Barthou, p. 252.Google Scholar

39 No author cited, L'Œuvre de l'alliance républuame démocratique, part I. Copy at the École des Mines, in Paris cat. Prof. 56713 H. 3; Le Paysan de France, 6 Jan. 1901.

40 Revillion, , Pelletan, pp. 168–73.Google Scholar

41 Goldberg, , Jaurès, pp. 294, 297, 332–3.Google Scholar

42 Le Temps, 23 Jan. and II Feb. 1905.

43 Division figures from the 1902 Journal officiel, chambre des députés, p. 1841Google Scholar, and the 1905 Journal officiel, chambre des députeés, p. 53.Google Scholar

44 La Dêpêche de Toulouse, 3 and 6 May 1906.

45 The Radical party issued a list of 13 A.R.D. candidates which it particularly wished Radical voters to support on the second ballot. This was more than the A.R.D. did. La Dépêche de Toulouse, 10 May 1906.

46 La Dépêche de Toulouse, 8 and 10 May 1906.

47 Le Temps, 11 July 1906, 15 Feb. 1908.

48 Le Temps, 12 and 15 Mar. 1906.

49 Le Petit Temps, 15 June 1909 (Le Petit Temps was a quarter-page format supplement irregularly included in Le Temps. The A.C.R.P.F. microfilms include it).

50 Beau de Loménie, Responsabilités, II, 371.

51 Bredin, , Joseph Caillaux (Paris, 1980), p. 77Google Scholar; Le Temps, any issue in Aug. 1906, 15 Oct. 1906, and Le Petit Temps, 15 Feb. 1907.

52 Siegfried, Ouest, pp. 191–3; Le Temps, 2 Mar., 27 May 1901, 23 Jan., 11 Feb. 1905. This explanation of the Périgueux speech is based on Sumler, esp. pp. 13, 33, 52–3; and Chapman, esp. pp. 80–1. The two scholars differ mostly on the dates at which they begin analysis of the ‘conservative resurgence’. See also Duroselle, La France I, 345. For contemporary coverage and the speech itself see Le Temps, 20 Mar. 1911 and 10 Oct. 1909, and La Dépêche de Toulouse, 15 Apr. 1910.

53 Périgueux (in the Dordogne) was one of the places to which A.R.D. stalwart Henry Chéron took Briand to speak. Suarez, Georges, Briand (5 vols. Paris, 1938–1941), I, 215–21Google Scholar. The A.R.D. already held one of the Périgueux' two constituencies. It would win the other from a Progressiste in 1910.

54 Sumler, p. 59. Later repeats of the Périgueux speech tended to be made from platforms Briand shared with people like the bagman Alfred Mascuraud – who provided a counterpoint to Briand's noble chords by speaking ominously of ‘the right of the worker to work despite the strike-mongers’. Le Temps, 15 Oct. 1910.

55 Martin, Benjamin Franklin, Count Albert de Mun, paladin of the Third Republic (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1978), pp. 236–7Google Scholar. Le Temps, 6 Apr. 1910.

56 Revillon, Tony, Pelletan, pp. 185–7.Google Scholar

57 This was particularly true in a repeat of the Périgueux speech which Briand made at St. Chamond, on 10 Apr. 1910 – which is to say 15 days before the elections – Bonnefous, 1, 180.

58 Duroselle, J.-B., La France, 1, 361.Google Scholar

59 Lachapelle, , L'Alliance démocratique (Paris, 1935), p. 30.Google Scholar

60 Le Temps, 2 & 3 Apr., 23 and 25 June 1911.

61 Le Temps, 1 July 1911.