History and the French Left, 1830–1981

The Historical Journal http://journals.cambridge.org/HIS Additional services for The Historical Journal: Email alerts: Click here Subscriptions: Click here Commercial reprints: Click here Terms of use : Click here History and the French Left, 1830–1981 Robert Tombs The Historical Journal / Volume 31 / Issue 03 / September 1988, pp 733 - 744 DOI: 10.1017/S0018246X00023591, Published online: 11 February 2009 Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0018246X00023591 How to cite this article: Robert Tombs (1988). History and the French Left, 1830–1981. The Historical Journal, 31, pp 733-744 doi:10.1017/S0018246X00023591 Request Permissions : Click here Downloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/HIS, IP address: 138.251.14.35 on 13 Mar 2015 u _ I F The Historical Journal, 31, 3 (1988), pp. 733-744 Printed in Great Britain Marxism and the French Left. Studies on Labour and Politics in France, 1830-ig8i. By Tony Judt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Pp. ix + 338. £25. The Contentious French. By Charles Tilly. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986. Pp. ix + 456. £21.25. T I La Fievre hexagonale. Les grandes crises politiques, i8yi-ig68. I I _ I M I I 1I f By Michel Winock. Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1986. Pp. 428. 160 francs. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Rise of French Republican Socialism. By K. Steven Vincent. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Pp. viii + 320. £40. Armies of the Poor. Determinants of Working-Class Participation in the Parisian Insurrection of June 1848. By Mark Traugott. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1985. Pp. xix + 293. £30.30 cloth; £10.80 paper. The Working People of Paris, iflji-1914. By Lenard R. Berlanstein. Baltimore, Maryland: The John Hopkins University Press, 1985. Pp. xvii+274. £23.05. Armaments and Politics in France on the Eve of the First World War. The Introduction of Three- Year Conscription, lgij-igi^. 1984. Pp. 307. By Gerd Krumeich. Leamington Spa: Berg Publishers, At least since the Restoration, politics and history have been bedfellows in France. Innumerable politicians have written history; innumerable historians have pronounced on politics. A few, from Guizot to de Gaulle, made a success of the dual enterprise; and even those whose accomplishments proved more modest often found the exercise beneficial in more ways than one. Nothing could be more natural in a country whose modern political history stems from a single dramatic event, the Revolution. As Dr judt remarks, France is ' above all the first European nation to have been constructed f around a self-consciously revolutionary doctrine' (p. 6). Consequently, its political thought and political loyalties have turned on the interpretation and evocation of the Revolution. Where historical analysis has so frequently been a political weapon, Gallic variations on the whig theme prevailed: the modern history of France was the history I of the struggles and triumphs of the Revolution. Once its historic potential was fulfilled, < history would have reached its goal. Though the point at which this end should be deemed to have been reached remained in contention, the basic assumption was as i typical of the liberals in the 1830s and 1840s and of the republicans in the 1870s and I 1880s as of the marxists subsequently, who emerged from and then came to dominate I this whig tradition1. What mattered in modern French history was whatever Sf contributed to the 'long march of the French Left' towards 'les lendemains qui I chantent'. If Yet in the last ten or so years, the intellectual, and perhaps even more important the I moral and emotional, foundations of this historical and political consensus have crumbled. Injudt's characteristically trenchant words, we are now at the 'tail end of marxism as a living idea' (p. 18). This affects not just the intelligentsia narrowly 1 A point made by Pierre Rosenvallon in Le Moment Guizot (Paris, 1985). J ( 733 734 HISTORICAL JOURNAL defined, but politicians, journalists, the interested public - what we might call the V and Monde-reading or Apostrophe-watching classes. The reasons are several, and fairly % des] obvious. First is disillusionment with the USSR and other examples of'le socialisme I an: re'el' (and consequently with the French Communist Party, always at least as much 'a 1 ofi l'Est' as 'a gauche'): Czechoslavakia, May '68, Poland, Afghanistan and the works of ft g aI Solzhenitsyn proved a devastating combination. Then came the rough experience of I be< government after 1981, and in particular failure to solve the economic crisis. Judt g in remarks (p. 237) that 'Everyone in France knew the worst thing that could happen to I of the Left was to come to power under almost any conceivable circumstances' - a view ••"• we hard to square with the scenes of public rejoicing that greeted Mitterand's victory. B Sii Certainly, the Left lost more of its illusions, which some might think healthy. Finally, | mi the evolution of the blue-collar electorate, the growth of a new middle class who may have their hearts on the Left but whose wallets are attracted by privatization, I Pi completed the eclipse of the Communist Party and the consolidation of a non-Marxist js. a\ middle-class Socialist Party which has taken as its themes economic modernization and I ai old-style republicanism - Marianne, La Patrie, the Marseillaise and Les Droits de | T l'Homme. The socialist weekly Le Nouvel Observateur now regularly carries a glossy I ai supplement on the trendier aspects of business, and most socialists seemed willing to accept President Mitterand's moderate policy of'cohabitation' with the Right. Judt concludes that there is 'no longer any credible language in which to be 'Left' in I c modern France' (p. 300). \ h Although this recent collapse of the traditional political and ideological assumptions I of the Left is dealt with by Judt only in his last chapters, it seems to be his intellectual starting point, as it must be for this article. Historians, for obvious reasons, have been closely involved with these developments, and as marxism has receded, a new political history has reasserted the importance of politics as more than simply the reflexion of socio-economic conflict. Resemblance to the Peterhouse 'high politics' school ends there, however, for it is not elites but collective identity, memory, and myth that have ^ attracted attention, with the realization that in post-revolutionary France it is the I political drama that has created common symbols of identity that in England might be | f. provided by, let us say, the countryside, cricket or the Royal Family.2 So far, the effects of all this turmoil have emerged most clearly in revisionist works on the Revolution. Led by the pugnacious Francois Furet, several historians - many Socialist, some ex-Communist, all influenced by Annales, drawing (we might think a little belatedly) on the seminal non-French works of the last thirty years (Cobban's Social Interpretation was published recently in French with an introduction by Furet) and also on the classic liberal historians of the first half of the nineteenth century - have set I out to demolish the marxist orthodoxy. The relevance for our present purposes of the i eclipse of marxism and the revision of the 'revolutionary catechism'3 are their I consequences for the interpretation of post-revolutionary French history, and in particular that of the Left. If marxist whiggism has gone, what is taking its place? So far, not very much. One can hear in eminent French academic circles lamentation that no important book or these d'etat on the nineteenth century has appeared in this decade. (These strictures do not, of course, apply to works published abroad for the simple reason that French academics are generally unaware of their existence.) French scholars, they fear, have lost their way and are merely marking time by endlessly filling 'gaps'. Sometimes, there is regression to republican whiggism reminiscent of the 1880s, I 1 2 3 See most notably Pierre Nora (ed.), Lieux de me'moire, vol. 1: La Republique (Paris, 1984). Francois Furet, Interpreting the French revolution (Cambridge, 1981). I ! REVIEW ARTICLES 735 he and at the same time a revival of counter-revolutionary polemic a la Taine. Judt calls ly t desperately for a ' Ranke-like antidote'; to be sure, there has been appearing recently ne an impressively voluminous narrative political history of France by a most eminent set 'a of authors4, but I am not sure whether the enterprise is meant to be daringly avantof ¥ garde or comfortably conservative. Such are the confusions of revisionism. There have of I been a few brave single-handed attempts to reinterpret the familiar story, for example dt W in their different ways by David Pinkney, who argues for the pre-eminent importance to I of the 1840s in modern French history, or Odile Rudelle, who sees the fundamental :w -•" weakness of government after 1870 as due to the sectarianism of Republicans.5 y. I Similarly, Tilly, Winock and Judt are all, also in very different ways, seeking a new y, • meaning in modern French history. ly » As the titles of their books indicate, all are concerned with political struggle. n, I Professor Tilly's, however, is not new in the way that both the others are: Judt is st !? avowedly searching for a new ' demythologized' history (p. 113); Winock is looking for id I an explanation different from that of the marxist 'long march' for the crises of the ie tf Third Republic. Tilly is giving a familiar account, familiar especially (except for its iy I admirable chronological sweep) to those acquainted with his earlier work. Professor to jf Tilly has exerted marked influence on a school of North American scholars who have it I followed him in his interest in analysing and classifying (in a characteristic terminology) in I collective action and conflict, and who have made a noteworthy contribution to French » history. The present book contains more - much more - of the same. It is a huge is I historical effort, long, handsomely produced and disarmingly self-indulgent; how il y many of us must wish that we could merit such accommodating publishers! It contains n I a wealth of maps and illustrations old and new, diagrams and tables, picturesque il J* descriptions, quotations in prose and verse, the whole bound together by a racy rf I conversational style: Is I e I M I A subway rider elbows his way out of the blue, rubber-tired train at the Hotel de Ville station. He climbs the littered stairs, blinks his way into the sunshine and exhaust fumes of a summer noon, and stands at the edge of a square half again as large as a football field. >e m I And so on for a page (p. 41), plus photograph. Non-contemporary descriptions are 9 similarly copious, and a large cast of characters make brief appearances. In short, it has I some of the characteristics of a coffee-table book. This is no condemnation; doubtless I many readers will enjoy vivid details that a hard-pressed and blase reviewer can find . i excessive. In the context of this article, what is important is the interpretation of the j I four centuries of history that Tilly gives. He is not just following a sub-plot - 'collective ,t I violence'- but presents his particular approach through 'contention' (struggle Sf between any two groups in society) as a particularly illuminating view of what was I really happening at the grass roots. Here, he gives a vast amount of information and • much sensible comment on a mass of incidents from the decapitation and I dismemberment of Jean de Lescun in 1622 to violent attacks on lorry loads of British . I pork sausages in 1984. Giving structure to all this is a simple idea: that what has been M happening in France over the last four centuries is the growth of the state and 'the I concentration of capital... the proletarianization of the labour force... a sharpening E 1 polarization between capital and labor' (p. 397). In about 1850, these developments, ' ' § I i I * Karl F. Werner, Jean Favier et al., Histoire de France (Paris, 1985-). Odile Rudelle, La Re'publique absolue: Aux origines de Vinslabilite constitulimnelle de la France republicaine, i8yo-i88g (Paris, 1982); David H. Pinkney, Decisive years in France, 1840-1847 (Princeton, 1986). 5 736 HISTORICAL JOURNAL he argues, brought about major and permanent changes in the 'repertoire of• S! contention'. There could not be a clearer contrast, as will be seen, with Judt and I cl Winock, who argue that the characteristics of modern French history are shaped by f tl politics, not by socio-economic forces. In a way, perhaps, Tilly is not talking about the | same thing. Although he is writing about France, he is not writing about specifically •? 1 French matters. Rather, he is writing about the manifestations in France of I tl developments he believes common to all 'Western nations' (p. 394). There is nothing* n to suggest that France has had a unique or even unusual history. In his own words- • e and it could not be better put - he wants to 'smooth out time and ignore the quirks of ff- e French history' (p. 6). Judt's approach could not be more different. His history is political and uniquely French. It is a fallacy, he argues, that changes in the 'economic fabric' explain politics, and that the 'manifested formal behaviour' of the Left is linked to '"real" social content' (pp. 26-7). For French workers shared no common socio-economic experience that could explain the history of the French Left (nor, we might add, any specifically French socio-economic experience that could account for its differences from that of other countries): no struggle of the artisan class, no 'linear...proletarianization' (p. 37), but great variations in wages, unemployment, food prices and status. The 'true proletariat' were often women, and the men who dominated the labour movement and political action were mostly 'marginal' to developments that are usually thought to be vital in the development of class consciousness (pp. 46, 51). The history of the Left, therefore, is a political history, to be more precise, ' a response to the political history of France' (p. 51). Judt's account is in part familiar: the crucial importance of 1830, with its hopes and disappointments; developing social concerns fitting into a political vision of salvation through a democratic and social republic; and the ' absolutely central' experience of the Second Republic. But he sees 1848 as 'an end, not a beginning' (p. 80), because it wrecked and divided the workers' movement and widened the gulf with bourgeois republicans. He lays stress on the Empire as having 'unequalled importance' in the making of the French working-class movement (p. 84). This, he argues, is because the Empire, by permitting purely economic workers' activities (co-operatives, strikes) while repressing political activities, strengthened a defensive and even 'reactionary', trade-union-type tendency, or politically apathetic Proudhonism, and thus sowed the seeds both of syndicalism and of the split between marxists and reformists (p. 84). The Paris Commune and its bloody repression, then the emergence of a parliamentary republic, further complicated the issues facing the Left: this was the 'unique inheritance', the 'determining element in French labour history', creating the conditions of 'internal exile...deep class resentment combined with political frustration, which has ever since characterized the French working-class movement, even in its rare moments of optimism' (pp. 96-7). There could be no progressive alliance of workers and radicals, for the republic was now associated with treason and repression; if workers were of course nominally republican, that did not mean much (p. 97). Marxism, far from being an alien import, fitted in here very well. Parliamentary socialism faced the insoluble problem of being a revolutionary party operating within a parliamentary republic, a republic 'which had only the most tenuous of holds upon the loyalty and imagination' of the working class; yet that class had ' no particular teleological aspirations at all' (pp. m - 1 3 ) . The Left has thus been burdened until the present day with an uneasy conscience born of the distance between its rhetoric and its reality. After 1920, that reality saw the REVIEW ARTICLES t SFIO becoming more like the Radical party - southern, small town, lower-middleclass, dependent on the traditional electoral strongholds of the old Left: the party that the SFIO before 1914 had not yet become, but which it was 'on its way to becoming' (p. 134). More surprising, the Communist Party was going down the same road (p. 154), though it also had the support of the working-class Paris suburbs to give it at least the appearance of being the proletarian party. The black comedy of post-war French marxism he deals with mordantly; Sartre, Althusser et al. are tossed and gored to great effect. Their stubborn fidelity to marxism, he concludes, helped to legitimize the enslavement of eastern Europe (p. 237), while the Left's nostalgia for the revolution that never came led it (it sometimes still does) to a frequently undiscnminating fascination with Third World revolutionary movements (and indeed those in Europe, outside French borders) and a corresponding neglect of boring practical politics at home hence the disillusion after 1981. This summary ofJudt's argument - which scarcely does justice to the densely argued and wide-ranging original - is not, I hope, too great a travesty. Your reviewer was uncomfortably aware (in spite of the excitement, even wit, with which Judt succeeds in infusing theoretical debate which from many another pen would be arid) that he did not belong to the inner circle of cognoscenti to which the book often seems to be addressed. Moreover, it is rather uneven, as if different chapters were written at different times, even perhaps for different purposes; and the proof-reading, especially in the French passages, is imperfect (tdtonnant once amusingly becomes tetonnant). The later chapters, dealing with the period after 1920, are more familiar, and more finished; the sections on the nineteenth century are more challenging, but also less worked out. If I have understood Judt's new history of the Left even half correctly, there are problems and inconsistencies which ought to provide matter for fruitful debate, for this is an important book which deserves to be widely discussed. One I shall mention in passing. He argues that an enduring problem of the Left was 'the peculiarly French disjuncture between the socialist movement and its wider national constituency' (p. 159). However, he seems to believe that in the nineteenth century this disjuncture was between a leadership willing to subscribe to a parliamentary republicanism to which the masses had little loyalty, whereas in the twentieth century, it was between a leadership (in both SFIO and PCF) that clung tightly to a hollow marxist revolutionary theory and only belatedly realized that 'anything short of a full commitment in practice to electoral politics... was political suicide' (p. 159). I am left wondering how this could be so. For Winock, the historical problem is the unique political instability of modern France. He has the straightforward project of looking at what happened in eight major political crises: (the Commune; 16 May 1877; the Boulanger crisis; the Dreyfus affair; 6 February 1934; 10 July 1940; 13 May 1958; and May 1968). He gives a concise and lucid narrative of each (particularly good on May '68), and at the end draws some judicious conclusions, which are interesting to compare with those of Judt and Tilly. Apart from the Paris Commune, he asserts, all show the primal of the ideological over the social; although ideological conflicts may be a very partial sublimation of social conflicts, in all these cases the class struggle is 'secondary, even marginal' (p. 367). The Boulanger crisis he sees as a turning point: thereafter, the socialists, the workers' movement and finally the Communist Party came to defend not only the 'bourgeois Republic', but the parliamentary system as such. The two issues around which these ideological crises crystallized were Catholicism and nationalism, two symbols of an old order to which an intransigent minority, prey to a ' heritage' of fear and passion HISTORICAL JOURNAL stemming ultimately from the Revolution, clung. The other element of instability was that the Left asserted an exclusive right to govern (cf. Rudelle), but was too weak and divided to do so except when the Republic itself was clearly threatened. In short, crises after 1871 were typically dual crises of disputed legitimacy and of weak authority. Not until 1981 was crisis-free 'alternance' on the British model able to happen. The question that I propose to discuss at some length, and which stems from considerations outlined above, is that of the relation of socialism and the working class with the Republic, both in theory and practice. Here I shall bring in the other four works to be considered, by Vincent, Traugott, Berlanstein and Krumeich. Judt's position on this question is clear, as mentioned above: after the 'treason' ofJune 1848 and the represson of 1871, 'internal exile' and 'deep class resentment' divided the working class from the republican tradition, except in the most superficial way. Now, this would certainly have been a logical outcome of events, but was it what actually happened? Or did the republican tradition, against all the odds, maintain its attractions not only to the moderate wing of socialist politicians, but to the working class generally? K. Steven Vincent's thorough and thoughtful 'intellectual biography' of Proudhon throws light on one aspect of the question. It attempts to look afresh at Proudhon's ideas, not through the marxist, anarchist or indeed reactionary spectacles through which they have often been scrutinized, but in the political and social context in which he developed them. Vincent stresses three fundamental themes: moralism, republicanism and associationism, which were basic to Proudhon's thought and also linked him to otherwise diverse socialist thinkers of his time. He stresses (as does Judt) that socialism was not born of the workers' movement, but was one reaction of intellectuals to the 'chaos' and amorality of post-revolutionary society. Proudhon, not only like Saint-Simon or Fourier, but also like Bonald or Chateaubriand, was seeking the basis for a society refounded on shared moral values. For Proudhon and his co-religionists - for early socialism in France was imbued with religious imagery, as Vincent notes and as a recent book has thoroughly documented* - industrial capitalism was not only ugly and dirty but also demoralizing. If socialism was 'a moral doctrine first', with economic theorizing simply a means to the end, it was a republican doctrine second, and a republicanism based on the classical tradition of Aristotle via Montesquieu: the republic was characterized by virtue. This republican moralism tended to replace the Christian underpinning of socialism as the socialists - Proudhon and Blanqui the first among them - lost faith and hope not only in Catholicism but in all religion. Proudhon, calling himself an 'anti-theist', proclaimed that 'true virtue... is to fight against religion and against God' (p. n o ) . Vincent's third element, associationism, provided the economic and social means to the moral and republican end. Vincent, following Sewell', suggests that the traditions of French labour - to which Proudhon was exposed during his years in Lyons contributed much to the reflexions of the theorists. There survived, from the corporations of the old regime and the journeymen's compagnonnages, through the mutual aid societies of the Restoration and July Monarchy (which were tolerated, even encouraged, by the state), a tradition of local organization, corporate solidarity and self help. Variations on this theme provided the main substance of French socialist thinking 6 Edward Berenson, Populist religion and left-wing politics in France, 1830-1852 (Princeton, 1984). 7 William H. Sewell, Work and revolution in France: the language of labour from the old regime to 1848 (Cambridge, 1980). REVIEW ARTICLES 739 for most of the nineteenth century, and Vincent makes a creditable (if not always wholly convincing) effort to make out Proudhon's voluminous writings to be both intelligible and consistent. At one point this leads him to the loyal but not very meaningful cri de coeur that 'this is not to suggest that such arrangements were not possible of implementation. I think they were' (p. 179). Associationist ideas - which for Proudhon involved providing capital to workers in order to universalize property - tended to blur class divisions in a society in which the line between workers and employers was in any case usually narrow. Producers' associations were not very different in practice from small business partnerships, and were criticized by some socialists in the 1860s as providing betterment only for the lucky few; evidence for one of the few industrial co-operatives set up under the Paris Commune shows that it fitted snugly into the existing capitalist system.8 Although several historians have argued strongly that social mobility was steadily becoming harder and more precarious for workers trying to set up on their own, the aspiration to do so had certainly not died. Berlanstein points out that many socialist militants in Paris in the late nineteenth century looked forward to setting up in business without any feeling of inconsistency; and many small employers were leading trade unionists (p. 87). Certainly, Proudhon's writings in the 1840s, 50s and 60s stress the role in the socialist transformation of society of'working members of the bourgoisie', as opposed to the 'idle' (les oisifs), whom he like Saint-Simon regarded as the social enemy. Such ideas were the staple diet of the Communards in 1871. In short, partly because of Proudhon's great influence as writer, deputy during the Second Republic, and chief intellectual inspiration of French socialist leaders during the Second Empire (when as Judt points out apolitical social reformism was tolerated); and partly because Proudhon was propagating widely held beliefs and aspirations, the core of moralism, republicanism and associationism continued to be central to French socialism throughout the nineteenth century. Malon, Brousse, Vaillant and Allemane, Vincent argues, all owed something to Proudhon. Above all, Jaures and Blum shared his vision of socialism within the French humanist and republican tradition, and his rejection of economic determinism, authoritariansim and class conflict: in Blum's words, 'Socialism is a morality - a religion almost - as much as a doctrine' (p. 231). As Vincent concludes, surely correctly (pace Judt), French socialism was given its distinctive form above all by ' the vitality... the potency of the republican tradition' to IS n If S (P- 23')Winock argues, as noted above, that until 1871, political crises in France were often social conflicts; only from 1877 did they become ideological. It is not clearly explained why this should be so, and it is not self-evident why the ideological heritage of the Revolution should operate more strongly after a greater lapse of time. He underestimates, I think, the ideological and political elements at work even during the more overtly social conflicts of June 1848 and March - May 1871. On this point, Professor Traugott's study of the June Days of 1848 and their background is relevant. The armies of the poor is an important and original re-examination of one of the best known tragedies of the nineteenth century. A thorough monograph, it is also suitable as an introduction for students, not least for its lively narrative and clear summary of the historiographical debate surrounding these events. Traugott looks at the origins, composition and history not just of one, but of both the 'armies of the poor' that fought in June: the National Workshops, which provided the initiators and the backbone of 8 Robert Tombs, 'Harbingers or entrepreneurs? A workers' cooperative during the Paris Commune', Historical Journal, xxvn, 4 (1984), 969-77. 740 HISTORICAL JOURNAL the revolt, and the Garde Mobile, whose men fought hardest to crush it. Several attempts have been made ever since the events themselves to explain this apparent paradox. Most famously, Marx characterized the Mobiles as the Lumpenproletariat, the rootless, unintegrated and corrupted cast-ofTs of the other classes. Most recently before Traugott, Caspard9 argued that age was the key: the Mobiles were younger, and therefore less integrated and more subject to unemployment and thence to resentment of their elders. Traugott's analysis, however, shows that there was no difference in the composition of the two bodies that could account for their contrasting behaviour. Moreover, they had parallel histories: both were founded by the new republican government after the February revolution to mop up unemployment and provide the government with reliable forces in case of conflict (hence the military organization of the workshops). Subsequently, both were considered quasi-political bodies (like the clubs or the Luxembourg commission), both caused alarm to conservatives for their revolutionary potential, but both remained loyal to the republican government which had established them and supported them. Both, therefore, largely avoided involvement in the demonstrations and journees organized by the dissident Left. This changed when the government, under severe financial and political pressure from conservatives, abruptly began to run down the workshops, and dismissed their director, who was followed by many of the senior leaders. This pushed the workshop members belatedly into seeking links with the extreme Left and eventually, of course, led to the June revolt, in which about 10-15,000 rebels took to arms, of whom some 5-8,000 were workshop m e n - a small minority of the total membership of nearly 120,000. be be on N: b« va Traugott's argument so far is interesting and convincing, using new material and careful statistical computations as well as classic sources. Also, he writes fluently, and his modest apology for sociological jargon is rarely necessary. Not all his conclusions are equally convincing, however. The 'strong form' of the class hypothesis, according to which class determines 'a specific social stance', is clearly wrong, he says, in that both Garde Mobile and rebels were working class (p. 175). But he seems perilously close to concluding that the June Days were therefore not a class conflict at all. For a moment he seems to forget that the battle was not primarily between the rebels and the Garde Mobile, but between the rebels and the Constituent Assembly, and the mood of the latter was certainly one of class struggle, to the point of paranoia: The spirit of insurrection circulated from one end to the other of this immense [working] class... as the blood does in the body; itfilledthe quarters where there was nofighting,as well as those which served as the scene of battle; it had penetrated into our houses, around, above, below us. The very places where we thought ourselves the masters swarmed with domestic enemies.10 It may be that conservatives, because of their fear of the republic itself, conditioned by ever-present memories of the Terror, were more attuned to the idea of total class war, and that many workers, because of their optimistic republican sympathies, were less inclined to think in such apocalyptic terms. Traugott points out that the Paris working class was divided between loyalty to, and disillusionment with, the republic, as shown by election results as well as the behaviour of the National Workshop members between February and June. He is certainly right that in too much historical writing ' the links 9 Pierre Caspard, 'Aspects de la lutte des classes en 1848: le recrutement de la garde nationale mobile', Revue Historique, DXI (July-September 1974), 81-106. 10 The Recollections of Alexis de Tocqueville, ed. J. P. Mayer (London, 1948), p. 168. [ I 1 1 L REVIEW ARTICLES on ey he th i). le ry :d le le y y g (1 a • 1 I 6 I & I W I 1 I f I I between underlying structural conditions [i.e. socio-economic ones] and their behavioural consequences are assumed rather than demonstrated', and that class is only a potential influence, while political organization - in this case, club, trade union, National Workshop, Garde Mobile or Garde Nationale - is often the decisive factor in behaviour. In 1848 the influence of class, even in Paris, was clearly still 'potential' and malleable, with loyalty to the Republic a buffer. Even the Paris Commune, referred to by Winock, Judt and Berlanstein as an event apart, the social struggle par excellence, was above all a battle to defend the republic - a democratic and socially radical republic, but not a class republic - against royalist reaction. Both the measures and the language of class warfare (at least in the Marxist sense of proletariat and bourgoisie) were absent. The Manifesto of the Central Committee of the Twenty Arrondissements called for credit and capital for the 'producer', so as to end class conflict and civil war, while the two most popular Communard newspapers, Le Cri du Peuple and Le Pere Duchene, reiterated that 'the working bourgeoisie and the heroic proletariat' had been united by the revolution which had removed their common oppressors, the parasitic imperial state and the church. That most famous of all Communard texts, the Internationale, refers to the conflict of 'producteurs' and 'oisifs', not of labour and capital.11 If anything, the Commune is a less plausible class war than the June Days, though in 1871 as in 1848 the counterrevolutionaries were much more ready to see it as such than were the revolutionaries. William Serman's excellent recent history of the Commune significantly stresses the Republican nature of the popular struggle: •* _• I I, Car que demandaient-ils au fond? La Republique et la victoire sur l'envahisseur, du pain et un toit pour tous, la justice et la solidarity sociales, la reconnaissance de leurs droits et de leur dignity, et, couronnant le tout, la liberte.12 I » I » Winock is surely wrong to exclude 1871 from his list of crises in which social conflict was sublimated into, and dominated by, ideology. Professor Berlanstein's fascinating survey of Paris workers in the years between the Commune and the First World War is most welcome. It is extraordinary how neglected the political and social history of Paris is. On the period before 1871 there are the distinguished theses or monographs of Chevalier, Daumard and Gaillard, and recently the massive but uneven Nouvelk histoire de Paris (which has now reached 1873). On the later period there are a number of French articles and monographs, notably by Brunet on Saint-Denis and Jacquemet on Belleville; some works on urbanism; and an important recent book by Nord on shopkeepers. But there is no broad synthesis of economic, social and political developments, least of all for the later nineteenth century. Here, even fundamental research is non-existent or practically unobtainable: those interested in something as basic as election results have to try to consult an unpublished thesis of the University of Dakar13, while often useful work done for the maitrise is lost to human ken in the uncharted basements of Paris university libraries. This neglect may be in part a reaction against a supposedly excessive stress on Parisian happenings in French historiography; it may also be because Anglo-Saxon researchers 11 For some discussion of this point see Robert Tombs, 'Paris and the rural hordes: an exploration of myth and reality in the French civil war of 1871', Historical Journal, xxix, 4 (1986), 795-808. 1! William Serman, La Commune de Paris (i8yi) (Paris, 1986). 13 Louis Giard, 'Les elections a Paris sous la Hie Republique' (doctorat de troisieme cycle de sociologie, Universite de Dakar, 1966-8). 742 HISTORICAL JOURNAL usually seek a more manageable (and sometimes sunnier) area for their few months in the archives, whereas most young French scholars are forced to spend their best thesis-writing years in provincial exile. Whatever the reason for the neglect, it is now considerably repaired. Berlanstein's book is not only an indispensable work of reference, but also an excellent read. It is a fairly concise book - unusually, one was left regretting it was not longer - and the author points out that there are areas (for example domestic servants) with which he does not deal. The topics he does cover are the composition of the population, living standards, work,' off-the-job life', and politics and protest. < The overall impression is of a great diversity (as Judt stressed) which simple labels such as 'artisan' or 'proletarian' obscure. Outside the traditional craft industries concentrated in the old city, there existed in the suburbs a wide range of semi-skilled and highly skilled jobs within factory production, as well, of course, as the white-collar and service occupations that accompanied them. Moreover, different occupations, not only the ancient' artisan' crafts, had developed their own strategies for what in Britain would be called restrictive practices. For most of the century these were successful, and remained partially effective even under the harsh pressure of foreign competition at the turn of the century, when campaigns for productivity were met with bitter and often violent resistance. Although the author stresses the poverty and uncertainty of working-class life, his data sometimes appear less pessimistic than his comments, especially if one thinks of descriptions of Belleville or the Maison Blanche a generation earlier (or indeed, of life in high-rise suburbs in the 1980s). Louis Chevalier has remarked that the years before the First World War were the golden age of the Paris working-class community, and in some ways Berlanstein substantiates this. Culturally, for example, this was certainly not a time of impoverishment: drink was less of a scourge than formerly, while even in the factory suburb of Saint-Denis by the 1880s there were concerts, twenty dance halls, a circus, music halls, an amusement park and a large theatre. Most were attended by whole families. Berlanstein makes the interesting comment that local socialists encouraged these developments, and there were no calls for distinctive proletarian culture. Similarly in politics, class did not draw firm lines. Berlanstein notes the 'profound attachment to the Radicals' o f the mass of Parisian craftsmen' (p. 153). Dissatisfaction with them during the economic slump of the 1880s was not reflected in the vote. The Boulangist movement and the industrial troubles of the late 1880s broke the Radicals' dominance, as is well known; but Berlanstein points out that subsequently the Socialists were 'less dominant' than the Radicals had been, and less than half the workers voted for them. The Socialists suffered 'reverses', frequently losing ground back to the Radicals (p. 159). Relations at the grass roots between workers, socialism and the republican tradition (represented above all in the late nineteenth century by Radicalism) are an important problem that dearly needs attention. Judt, as noted above, stresses the political alienation of the workers and the insignificance of their republicanism; Tilly, in the older manner, declares that class conflict and proletarianization were the basic realities. Winock argues that ideology and republican loyalism prevailed. Berlanstein, without making generalizations, gives evidence that tends to support the Winock view, at least by indicating that political alienation and class consciousness were not the realities of everyday life. Far from being repelled by the reformism of many socialist politicians, workers in the industrial suburbs and even in Belleville itself 'rewarded REVIEW ARTICLES as I I I n I J ! > 743 moderation and practicality' at election time, and were willing to vote for Radicals if they seemed more effective (p. 160). Workers stood in elections as Radicals; on the other hand, Radical employers won workers' votes. Berlanstein concludes that 'a very significant minority' of workers 'lacked class consciousness' (p. 165). Among the possible reasons he suggests are the anticlericalism of the Left, repellant to migrants from Catholic regions (though this would of course distance them from 'priest-eating' Radicalism at least as much as from class-conscious socialism); the attractions of populist nationalism; and simply that socialism had not made a universal impact. But given that Radicalism at its peak had made an impact, it seems clear (again pacejudt) that among Parisian workers the attractions of'Republican defence' were powerful. Republican defence also meant, in certain circumstances, national defence, and this is the important subject on which Dr Krumeich turns a powerful lens. The basic facts - the bitter resistance by the Left to the reimposition of three-year military service in 1913, the antiwar campaign, conservative fears of mass resistance in case of war, the outbreak of hostilities, and the apparent volte face of the Left in accepting a patriotic Union Sacre'e - are well known. Krumeich identifies three different theories that have been adduced to explain them. First, a 'polarization' theory: the use of nationalism, armaments and finally war by the ruling elite to distract attention and prevent revolution. Second, a more subtle variant, a 'decadence' theory: the growth of class divisions makes the label' Left' meaningless; the Radical party is thus threatened with disintegration; the Right uses the Three-Year Law and the whole issue of national defence to accelerate that disintegration; and finally the Union Sacre'e is a class alliance of the Right and the bourgeois fragment of the Left. And third, a n ' integration' theory: that behind the effervescence of political debate lay a basic consensus which included even the socialists. Something like the first two theories would, of course, fit in with the views of Judt or Tilly. This may, indeed, have been what Krumeich himself was expecting to find, for he remarks that his intention was to analyse French foreign policy in the way Fischer did that of Germany. This led him into an ambitious and successful attempt to provide an integrated account of foreign and domestic politics by scrutinizing not only orthodox sources for high politics (such as Poincare's diaries) but also the vast range of parliamentary debates, party tactics, cabinet decisions, newspapers and elections during 1913 and 1914. This brings him to reject the first two theories summarized above as simply not fitting the facts. Instead, perhaps to his surprise, he finds in the French case the Primat der Aussenpolitik: conservatives and centrists were not using national defence to manipulate domestic policies, but really were afraid of a German threat. And the domestic significance of his findings leads him to endorse the third theory, that of'integration'. He emphasizes that there was a consensus over the need for national defence, and disagreement only over means. The difficulty was that the government felt unable to admit the real (diplomatic and strategic) reasons for the Three-Year Law, and thus created mistrust, especially on the Left, where many feared that the Right was indeed trying to use the issue to create a wider nationalist-conservative alliance. However, in reality, the Right, rather than trying to polarize politics, were willing to make concessions, including income tax, to obtain agreement. On the Left, the antimilitarist campaign of the syndicalists fizzled out due to lack of support, failing to carry a rank and file basically committed to defence of the Republic and the nation. Far from disintegrating under the pressures of class conflict, the Radicals maintained their ideological dominance centred on defence of the Republic; revitalized their organ- 744 HISTORICAL JOURNAL | T Pi ization in 1913 - 'a new and impressive phenomenon'; and put together an agreed compromise by which the Three-Year Law would be regarded indefinitely as temporary, with income tax as the quid pro quo. This was the basis of the predominantly Radical Viviani government in 1914. As for the SFIO, although they attacked the Three Year Law, they agreed on the obligation of national defence and for the most part held to the electoral alliance with the Radicals in 1914. It is impossible to do justice in a short space to the exhaustive documentation with which Krumeich's argument is sustained, and he cannot but carry conviction at the domestic level: this must stand as the definitive account of politics in the crucial prewar years. In foreign policy, there are still question marks. He makes it clear that the French Right were not warmongering, and if Poincare did contribute to the war crisis it was through miscalculation of Russian intentions: he feared that the Russians were going to give in to German pressure and render the Franco-Russian treaty valueless, thus undermining their joint security. So, Krumeich suggests, Poincare may have encouraged them dangerously in the other direction (though he notes that he has not been able to check the Russian evidence). It is more likely, however, that the Russians - and even more so the Austrians and Germans - were not giving any weight to French views when taking their hasty and fateful decisions in July 1914, and so Poincare's actions were irrelevant. If one can, in conclusion, consider the diverse works discussed here as tending towards a rethinking of the meaning of the history of the French Left, they appear to direct attention back towards the old and superficially familiar theme of the growth and durability of republicanism. While studies such as those of Nora et al. mentioned above, or of Agulhon14 have taken a novel approach by examining the symbols of Republicanism, its political history seemed, until very recently at least, to be regarded as 'classee': the standard work generally referred to dates from 1928.15 Later generations of historians concentrated on socialism and communism. But if, as suggested above, in this post-marxist age French socialism has come to appear no more than an occasionally dissident sub-section of a republican tradition stretching from Ledru-Rollin to Mitterand, the time may be ripe to look at aspects of that tradition that remain opaque or mysterious. Rudelle has pointed to one important problem: that the weaknesses and failures of the Third and Fourth Republics may have been caused by a sectarianism inherent in the Republican tradition itself, and her investigations, which end in 1889, are certainly worth pursuing. Another problem is the extent to which workers remain attached to Republican ideas even after 1871, as social conflict was 'sublimated' (to use Winock's term) into ideology. The difficulty of reconciling Judt's view of working-class alienation with Berlanstein's evidence of weak attachment to socialism or Krumeich's evidence of a consensus on Republican defence, illustrates sufficiently how much remains obscure. As recent studies of working-class Liberalism and of the emergence of the Labour Party in England show, many treasures may lie buried in apparently well worked fields. 8T J O H N ' S C O L L E G E , CAMBRIDGE ROBERT TOMBS 14 Maurice Agulhon, Marianne into battle (Cambridge, 1981). 16 Georges Weill, Histoire du parti re'publicain en France, 1814-1870 (Paris, 1928). ( i t