Children of the Revolution

by Robert Gildea

  While lawyers from humbler backgrounds might finish up as professors in law faculties, the plum posts in the grands corps such as the Cour de Cassation, Cour des Comptes or the Inspection des Finances, an elite body of public service accountants who went on to run the Ministry of Finances or the private offices of ministers, were colonized by lawyers whose families enjoyed hereditary wealth as well as political influence. In 1900 the Cour des Comptes recruited 27 per cent of its members from landowning, banking or business circles, and 31 per cent from administrative dynasties and political families, whereas 40 per cent of professors in law faculties came from the petite bourgeoisie.78 The father of Joseph Caillaux, for example, had been minister in the Moral Order regime and was brought up in Versailles with a son of a Moral Order foreign minister, the second Duc de Decazes. Educated at the Jesuit college on the rue des Postes in Paris and at the Law Faculty, he became an inspect-eur des finances in 1888, deputy of the Sarthe as a republican in 1898 and minister of finance in 1899. Caillaux’s wealthy background gave him leverage into the republican mandarinate, and his jettisoning of royalist for republican ideas enabled him to become a minister.

  A UNITED ELITE

  There was a danger, under the Third Republic, that the republican official and political elite would remain divided from the royalist or Bonapartist social elite, dangerously compromising stability. In fact, while politically sensitive posts such as prefectures were reserved for genuine republicans, other posts, notably in the diplomatic corps and the army, could still be accessed by those uneasy in the Republic, and over a long career they were inclined to rally to it. Pierre de Margerie, educated by the Jesuits at Lille and at Lille’s new Catholic University, where his father was dean, was reluctant to take an oath to the Republic before sitting the examination for the Quai d’Orsay, until his father explained to him that it meant only that he would not conspire against the regime. In 1891–8 he was secretary to Paul Cambon when the latter was ambassador at Constantinople, and he became convinced that the Republic could satisfactorily defend French interests. He helped to further a career that took him to Madrid, Bangkok and Peking by marrying the daughter of the assistant mayor of Marseille, Amédée Rostand, and becoming the brother-in-law of the writer Edmond Rostand.79 The army, which was held to be a bastion of royalist and Bonapartist power, became less of an aristocratic caste: 38 per cent of divisional generals were noble in 1876, but only 19 per cent in 1901.80 At the time of the Dreyfus Affair there was still a fear that Catholic and conservative officers, recruited from the Jesuit college in the rue des Postes, were capable of conspiring against the Republic, but after the Affair care was taken to promote republican generals such as Joffre. Just as important for the coherence of the ruling class was the possibility of marriage between the republican official and political class on the one hand and the older families who controlled the economic and social capital of the country on the other. In 1859 for example, Cécile Anspach, daughter of a high official in the Cour de Cassation, married Gustave de Rothschild of the great banking family. A generation later, in 1895, the aspiring politician of modest means Louis Barthou married Alice Mayer, whose father was a successful businessman with large investments in railways, utilities and Paris property as well as being on the conseil général of Seine-et-Oise, setting him on course to become prime minister.81

  ‘It is difficult to dispel the excessive love the French have of fonctionnarisme,’ commented Bérenger in 1901. ‘We lack industrialists, agriculturalists and colonists while administrative offices are battled over furiously.’82 In fact, other pathways were opening to ambitious young people in the world of industry, commerce and banking. The first industrial revolution, based on textiles, coal, iron and railways, which was losing momentum in the 1870s, was supplemented at the end of the nineteenth century by a ‘second industrial revolution’ based on steel, engineering, chemicals and electricity. The family firm, which had dominated for so long in the nineteenth century, was overtaken by the joint-stock company, in which the ownership of shareholders was separated from the running of the business by trained and salaried managers. The growing dependence of industry on advanced science and technology increased the demand for ingénieurs, graduates from the archipelago of grandes écoles which paralleled the traditional university faculties, heralded in 1880 as the ‘kings of the epoch’.83

  The most prestigious of these schools, the École Polytechnique, for a long time regarded itself as too exclusive to provide graduates for industry. Its alumni moved into the army, into high civil service posts such as the Inspection des Finances, and via supplementary training in the École des Mines and École des Ponts et Chaussées, into services developing the country’s infrastructure. Only from the 1890s did substantial numbers of graduates from the Polytechnique go into industry, to work on such ambitious projects as the development of electrical grids to light Paris and to power the metro.84 Less prestigious but more effective as far as industry was concerned was the École Centrale de Commerce et de l’Industrie. Gustave Eiffel, the son of a military administrator, whose mother made the family fortune by supplying coal to iron-furnaces in the Haute-Marne, went to Centrale only because he failed the examination for Polytechnique. He worked for the Chemin de Fer de l’Ouest and then set up his own engineering firm at Levallois-Perret outside Paris in 1866, building bridges and viaducts for railways, providing the steel frame for the Statue of Liberty, and for the Paris Exhibition of 1889 building the tower that bore his name.85 At the turn of the century the French tyre and car industry was essentially developed by graduates of Centrale. Armand Peugeot, trained at Centrale, switched the family business in Montbéliard from making springs for the watchmaking industry to making bicycles in 1886 and cars in 1896.86 André Michelin, another Centralien, and his brother Édouard, who had a law degree, took over a failing family firm in Clermont-Ferrand and hit success with the manufacture of the detachable pneumatic tyre in 1891, with which they won the Paris–Brest cycle race that year, and were employing 5,000 workers by 1914.87 Ironically, one of the greatest car manufacturers, Louis Renault, failed the examination to Centrale. He refused to follow his father, a Paris draper and button-seller, developing models in the garden of the family’s out-of-town property at Boulogne-Billancourt. In 1898 he and his two brothers each put 30,000 francs capital into a car factory, expanding the old-fashioned way by ploughing back profits, winning contracts to provide taxis for the Paris and London markets in 1909, and became the biggest French car manufacturer, employing 4,440 workers in 1914.88

  Family firms still existed but the largest of them drew heavily on outside finance and their heads were very much part of the French economic and social elite. Henri Schneider of Le Creusot moved into arms manufacture in 1875 and aspired to become the French Krupp. His business interlocked closely with that of de Wendel, sharing the same bankers, Demachy-Sellière, and dominating the Comité des Forges steel cartel. When much of the de Wendel empire found itself annexed by Germany, Schneider helped to develop a French site for the de Wendel business at Jouef in French Lorraine. Socially, Schneider behaved less like a steel magnate and more like a grand seigneur. He acquired a château in the Sologne, which was prized hunting country, and, using the shooting to develop contacts with aristocratic neighbours and business partners, married his son Eugène II and four daughters into aristocratic families.89

  Finance was traditionally closer to the aristocracy than was heavy industry. It was less tarnished by grime, and gained cachet from lending money to governments and the social elite. After the economic recession of 1882 which brought down a number of banks, Henri Germain, founder of the Crédit Lyonnais, decided to cease investment in industry, concentrating on the property market, insurance, public utilities and lending to home and foreign governments.90 This aristocratic sheen did not mean that it was impossible for ordinary people to make a successful career in banking. Émile Mercet, whose parents were both in domestic service and who had no formal qualification, became an employee at t
he Crédit Lyonnais, charged with founding its Constantinople branch in 1876, heading its St Petersburg branch from 1879 to 1881, and finishing as president of the Comptoir d’Escompte in 1904.91 In other ways, though, banking circles were growing closer to the nobility. The family strategy of the Rothschilds, for most of the nineteenth century, had been characterized by endogamy, with cousins marrying cousins. At the end of the century, however, their practice was to marry out. In 1878 Marguerite de Rothschild, for example, became the second wife of the Duc de Gramont, Napoleon III’s ill-fated foreign minister of 1870, and hosted immense society balls at their house in the rue de Chaillot.92

  By the same token, the French aristocracy became less choosy about new wealth, and keen to make alliances with the super-rich from finance and industry. This tendency was encouraged by the fall in land values and land rents that followed the agricultural depression of the late 1870s and 1880s. Landed families now invested more of their resources in banks, railways, insurance companies and even industry, and to protect their investments accepted places on the boards of directors of large companies and trusts. The president of the Suez Canal Company was the Prince d’Arenberg, and in 1914 five of the seven directors of the Comité des Forges were noble. At the same time the reconciliation of many noble families with the Republic through the Ralliement meant that the divisive influence of the French Revolution, which had turned the nobility of the Faubourg Saint-Germain into a caste, became attenuated. Aristocratic families married their daughters into money as never before, promoting a plutocratic super-elite that was both noble and grand bourgeois, part landed and part monied. The Catholic and royalist aristocrat Albert de Mun married each of his daughters into a wine family and at the turn of the century American heiresses were all the rage. In 1893 Winaretta Singer, heiress to the sewing-machine fortune, married Prince Edmond de Polignac, son of the last minister of Charles X, while in 1895 Anna Gould married Boni de Castellane only to divorce him in 1906 and marry his cousin, the Prince de Talleyrand-Périgord. And while under the Third Republic the nobility forfeited political influence, having no more than 5 per cent of ministerial appointments in 1879–1914, their profile in the Chamber of Deputies falling from 23 per cent to 9, they remained the rulers of society. Aristocratic hostesses of the Faubourg Saint-Germain held the best salons to which every aspiring politician or artist sought admission. One of the most brilliant was hosted by the Comtesse Élisabeth de Greffulhe, known to Proust as the cousin of his friend Robert de Montesquiou, the model for the Duchesse de Guermantes in la recherche du temps perdu.93

  French economy and society demonstrated a number of weaknesses before 1914. Agriculture faced the challenges of glut and depression, and saw its strongest sons and daughters leave for a better life in the cities. Industrial development was held up by the prevalence of the family firm, but in large-scale industry class conflict was rife. Those who secured secondary education competed for jobs in the professions and public sector, fuelling fears of déclassement and fonctionnarisme. On the positive side, however, were many factors which contributed to a high degree of social cohesion in pre-war France. The proportion of those working in agriculture remained high in comparative European terms and private property was widely disseminated in the form of farms, shops and workshops. There was a high degree of mobility both geographical and social together with a widening of the petite bourgeoisie which defused class conflict, and in any case workers tended to be organized on local rather than occupational lines. State-building and the development of education offered wide possibilities for employment in the public sector, but the growth of managerial capitalism created opportunities in the private sector also. Finally, the French elite was increasingly interconnected, both in terms of land, finance and industry, and between the republican political and official elite and the non-republican social elite. The apaisement that was apparent in politics in the Belle Époque was thus also reflected in the social order.

  12

  Secularization and Religious Revival

  SIN AND REPARATION

  The events of 1870–71 dealt a triple blow to the Catholic Church. First, the few French forces protecting the pope in Rome since 1849 were withdrawn to fight the Prussians, and in September 1870 Rome was occupied by the Piedmontese army to complete the work of Italian unification. An elite of French Catholics such as the Vendean volunteers led by Athanase-Charles-Marie de Charette de la Contrie fought to defend the Holy City until instructed by Pius IX to lay down their arms, then returned to France where they fought in the Army of the Loire with volunteers of western France, taking part in the charge at Patay near Orléans on 3 December.1 Second, France, regarded by Catholics as the eldest daughter of the Church, was defeated by Prussia, which for Catholics was seen as the incarnation of both the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment, since Voltaire had been ‘trumpeter and adviser’ to Frederick the Great. It was divine justice, according to Louis Veuillot, writing in L’Univers, that France should be punished for its sins against God – the Enlightenment and the Revolution – by the power that represented ‘the sins of Europe’.2 Lastly, the Paris Commune, which sacked churches, murdered the archbishop of Paris and other clergy, and set fire to the city, was for Catholics such as Veuillot who remained in the capital until the end of April 1871 the apocalyptic culmination of the atheistic revolution that had shaken France since 1789. Only the restoration of the pope to his Temporal Power and the restoration of Henry V to the French throne could save the situation for Veuillot and his readers.3

  Catholics argued that France had been punished for its revolt against God. The only way it could redeem itself and recover God’s protection was to undergo a process of reparation to expiate its sins. The period of so-called Moral Order in the early 1870s, when France indeed came within a whisker of royalist restoration, was a period of intense Catholic activity to bring France back to the fold. To begin with, there was a boom in the pilgrimage movement, sponsored by the Assumptionist fathers of the Père d’Alzon. A national pilgrimage movement was orchestrated by d’Alzon’s disciples, Père François Picard and Père Vincent de Paul Bailly, who had set up an Assumptionist house in Paris and had been hunted during the Commune. These harnessed the support of aristocratic ladies such as Madame de la Rochefoucauld, grouped in Notre-Dame de Salut, and of a new congregation of nuns, the Petites Soeurs de l’Assomption, who accompanied the pilgrim trains. In 1872 they organized a pilgrimage to La Salette in the French Alps, where a weeping Virgin prophesying disaster had appeared in 1847, followed by one to Lourdes in 1873. Other pilgrimages headed by the conservative nobility and royalist deputies went in June 1873 to Paray-le-Monial in Burgundy, where Marguerite-Marie Alacoque had received divine instruction in 1689 to have France put under the protection of the Sacred Heart, and to Chartres, where Mary’s veil was said to be kept and the cult was devoted to the pregnant Virgin.4 That same summer the royalist-dominated National Assembly approved a request from the archbishop of Paris that a site at Montmartre, high point of the Paris Commune, should be acquired in order to build a ‘church of the national vow to the Sacred Heart of Jesus’. A provisional chapel was blessed there in 1876, and 500,000–600,000 pilgrims per year over the next thirty years bought cartes du Sacré Coeur divided into bricks, a full card representing a donation of 127 francs, raising 60 per cent of the total of 40 million francs that the basilica of Sacré Coeur ultimately cost.5 An equestrian statue of Joan of Arc by the sculptor Frémiet was unveiled on the place des Pyramides off the rue de Rivoli in 1874, on the site where she had been wounded during the Anglo-Burgundian siege of Paris, marking a new stage in the cult of the heroine who was venerated for liberating French soil from foreign occupation and restoring France to the Church.6 During this period, finally, a huge effort was made by the Church to extend its grip on national education. The control of girls’ education by nuns reached a peak in 1878, when the number of those in female congregations, which had been 66,000 in 1850, rose to 135,000. In 1875 the National Assembly pas
sed a law permitting Catholic universities, although their students still had to take their degrees in state faculties, and Catholic universities were opened in Angers and Lille, the former funded by the Catholic nobility, and the latter by the Catholic employers of the textile industry.7

  THE REPUBLICAN OFFENSIVE

  The renewed grip of the Catholic Church on the education and social life of the country was seen by republicans as a massive threat. Loyalty to the Papacy, evidenced by campaigns in Catholic quarters to demand the restitution of the Papal States to the pope, was seen to undermine loyalty to France. The Syllabus of Errors published by Pius IX in 1864 delivered a frontal attack on modern ideas of liberalism, democracy and nationalism. The Church, moreover, was seen to have supported reactionary regimes, the monarchy or the Empire, and always to have attacked the Republic. The failure of the two previous republics was felt very much to have been the work of the Church. It was intolerable that religious congregations should be free to undermine the Republic, that schools maintained by municipalities, departments and the state should so often be staffed by teaching brothers and nuns, inculcating Catholic thought and prejudices. The education of citizens for the Republic required that state education should be dispensed by lay teachers and that religious education be eliminated from the classroom. The programme of the republicans, the generation of 1830 that acquired power in the late 1870s, was clear, but their rhetoric was always sharper than their bite. Republicans were fully aware that much of the French population was more likely to accept the Republic if it were allowed to practise its own faith; it was entirely possible to be both republican and Catholic. Therefore, while there were always republicans of anticlerical and freethinking disposition demanding more and more extreme measures against the Church, republicans in power were generally keen to maintain some kind of working relationship between Church and state in order to retain the loyalty of the Catholic majority.