Napoleon III and the French Second Empire, Roger Price [black books to read .TXT] 📗

waves of the late 1860s, was translated into a desire for revolutionary change. In general, it seems that, although many among the younger generations of worker militants rejected the utopian socialism of their fathers’ generation in favour of collectivism and syndicalism, the widespread desire for social reform was

successfully channelled by republican politicians into a vague reformism redolent of February 1848.

The republican movement, united in opposition to the Empire and on the

principle of popular sovereignty, was otherwise bitterly divided over questions of personality, tactics and principle. For most of its leaders, winning over and then retaining mass support was the major objective. Socialism was seen as a threat to this and to the liberal economic and social principles to which both moderate and radical politicians alike subscribed. They rejected forcefully what they regarded as the extremist propaganda of the left, which by its re-creation of the ‘red spectre’

threatened to frighten the electorate and to alienate in particular the property-owning lower middle classes and peasants. In addition, they were afraid that it would provoke a repressive government response. Moderate republicans like

Favre, Carnot, Simon and Picard, accustomed to working within the institutions of the Second Empire, seem to have been willing to rely entirely upon legal,

parliamentary methods of securing concessions into the indefinite future, insisting upon their commitment to social order and arousing suspicion that they too, like Ollivier and Darimon, might eventually rally to the regime. These hommes de 1848, who had failed once already, were criticised by younger men like Gambetta, Spuller, Allain-Targé and Vermorel. The latter also opposed the violent rhetoric of revolutionaries such as the influential journalist Rochefort, and future leaders of 50

the Paris Commune in 1871 such as the Blanquist Raoul Rigault and the neo-

Jacobin Delescluze, both committed to the organisation of a revolutionary coup.

Relationships between these republican factions were extremely poor and in the 1869 elections in Paris and Lyon, republicans would stand against each other for election.

Support for the republicans cannot be defined easily. It was present in all social groups, but was particularly strong in urban centres, in both the major cities and numerous small towns like Beaune, Gevrey or Nolay in the Côte d’Or, for example, where little groups of activists had been at work since the 1830s. In part, it was the product of the continuing competition for local power between established elites and up-and-coming bourgeois groups. In the industrial centres of Reims and Saint-Etienne, this occurred between the old-established merchant capitalists and the more enterprising among the new manufacturers and members of the liberal

professions. These men were prepared to finance newspapers, organise

committees, select candidates from within their own ranks and offer leadership, and generally to encourage the diffusion of democratic ideas through the network of workshops, cafés and mutual aid societies. Urban workers also increasingly came to support republican electoral candidates. Even if every manifestation of discontent, such as the strike waves of 1869–70, should not necessarily be taken to represent opposition to the regime, as opposed to support for professional demands or a protest against the rising cost of living, support for republicanism tended to be generated by such conflict which frequently brought strikers up against the legal and military representatives of the regime. Although living standards undoubtedly had improved for most workers during the late 1850s and 1860s, they remained more aware of cramped and often squalid housing, rising rents, and constant insecurity of employment, with even the most highly skilled conscious of the intensifying threat to their craft skills and status as industrial mechanisation and the re-organisation of work processes continued. Perceptions matter far more than realities in determining political behaviour.

The rural vote

The rural population as a whole was much less likely to vote for republican candidates. Any exercise in historical political sociology is, however, difficult.

Generalisations are hazardous in the extreme. A complex of factors ensured that particular regions adopted one form of political identity or another. These included 51

existing social relationships, the products of daily social intercourse, as well as the formative influence of memories of past conflict during the ancien régime and the revolution, and more recently during the Second Republic. The development of regular and intensifying links with urban centres and especially with the artisans and professional men resident in the small market centres, as well as factors such as levels of literacy, the forms of habitat structure and established patterns of popular sociability, were other relevant factors facilitating or obstructing the diffusion of ideas and political organisation. The regions of northern France with the most advanced agriculture, prosperous farms and social systems closely

controlled by large-scale commercial and mainly tenant farmers, and from which the most disaffected could migrate with relative ease, tended to support official candidates. In the east, in the Côte d’Or studied in such detail by Lévêque (1983), both the Châtillonais (a society dominated by peasant landowners and where social tension was limited) and the Brionnais (in which large landowners in close alliance with the clergy were dominant) voted for the regime. In contrast, it was the areas of vine cultivation and of predominantly cereal-producing plains around Châlons and Dijon – open societies engaged in commerce, subject to the alcohol tax and

intensifying competitive pressures and especially susceptible to outside influences

– which provided substantial support for republicans. Indeed, this usually appears to have been found in areas in which commercial farming and rural manufacture coexisted as well as in places of passage, in the east of Côte d’Or, the south of Doubs, Northern Jura, along the Rhône-Saône corridor and in the coastal regions of Provence and Languedoc and in the Garonne valley. In all these places, strong republican minorities existed by 1869. In the Limousin, cantons susceptible to Parisian influence because of the practice of migratory labour began to record 20–

30 per cent support for republican candidates (Corbin 1975). In the central Morvan, republican ideas re-surfaced in areas isolated by poor communications and

dispersed habitat which might have been expected to have remained loyal to