Mouret, however, bears little resemblance to the store’s actual founders, Aristide and Marguerite Boucicaut. Coming from modest backgrounds and deeply rooted in the traditional bourgeoisie populaire, they firmly believed that their business preserved the values of their origins, despite its many innovations. In its publications – advertisements, catalogues, circulars, and agendas (day-books that encouraged customers to associate events in their lives with goings-on in the store) – the Bon Marché presented itself as an upholder of communal values, a defender of morality and virtue, and even as a great family, animated by a spirit of mutual regard and devoted to the proper formation of its members. Its paternalism was especially visible in the common life it created for its employees, who ate together (men and women in separate dining-rooms), enjoyed medical care provided by the firm, benefitted from a profit-sharing pension fund, participated in large numbers in a company savings bank paying 6 percent interest on deposits, and joined in cultural activities (the store was known for its regular concerts). The impetus for some of these policies may have come from Marguerite, an illegitimate daughter of peasants who came to Paris as a laundress and who retained a devout sense of moral and personal responsibility. Although there is little direct information about her participation in the store’s day-to-day operation, its character as a kind of extended family was strongly highlighted in her will, which bequeathed a remarkable 13 million francs to the store’s employees, “those who are my devoted collaborators, whatever rank they may occupy in this great House which my husband and I have, with them, brought to this present level of esteem and prosperity.” These sentiments in part reflected her Catholic sensibility, but the store was no bastion of conservative opinion. Its rival the Grands Magasins du Louvre had close ties to the Bonapartist regime, but Boucicaut was closer to the left, contributing to a subscription for the Venetian patriot Daniel Manin in the 1860s and lending his delivery wagons to the Ligue Republicaine de Paris at the time of the Commune to evacuate people in Neuilly who were being attacked by the government in Versailles.34
The Bon Marché’s historian Michael Miller is surely right to emphasize that the store wove together features of nineteenth-century bourgeois life often thought to be at odds: “The Bon Marché was a machine, but it was also a family; it was change but it was also tradition; and there was no clearcut distinction between one sphere and the other … In Bon Marché imagery the family traditions of the French business community had not only survived, but had become transformed into the central ingredient of a mass bureaucratic market.” Such a portrait served the Boucicauts (and later their successors) as a defense against critics to be sure, but this does not mean that it was artificially constructed for such a purpose. It expressed the Boucicauts’ own sense of who they were, and it clearly struck a chord with both customers and the wider public; its constancy “was symptomatic of the power that such an image held over the collective bourgeois mind,” no less at the end of the century than before.35
We can clarify something about the modern mode of experience the new commerce fostered by taking a brief critical look at a notion put forward by Richard Sennett in his often-cited book The Fall of Public Man. In his view the new stores deprived buyers of the active involvement with sellers they had enjoyed earlier because they eliminated the bargaining that took place in small shops: by instituting marked and fixed prices, he maintains, the big stores imposed passivity on buyers, making them socially more flaccid and withdrawn. Inviting as such a suggestion may appear, Zola helps us to understand how much it leaves out, when he depicts women in search of goods as arming themselves with knowledge about various items and the different prices at which they were being offered around town, through advertisements and discussions with their friends. The new commerce did not make shoppers more passive, it replaced one kind of active involvement with another, shifting the ground where it operated. As with many other aspects of modern life, this ground was one where personal interactions increasingly took take place in conjunction with mediated exchanges involving wider networks of activity and information.
Politics in post-1850 France: teleocracy or republic
This same style of social existence would come to be the ground of modern politics in France just as in England, opening up the more abstract space that would be filled by nationally organized parties. But this outcome was slower to arrive there, and came about in ways strongly marked by the country’s earlier history. In order for it to take place, provincial forms of life long marked by an “introverted” character much like the one Jeanne Gaillard describes for pre-Haussmann Paris would have to undergo a transformation toward “extroverted” ones in ways comparable to what she describes for the capital.
In the century after 1780, France passed through a number and variety of different regimes that finds no parallel in any other European country: the Old Regime monarchy, the constitutional kingdom of 1791, the First Republic of 1792, the Jacobin regime and the more moderate Directory that followed, the Napoleonic Empire of 1801, the restored Bourbon regime of 1815, the July Monarchy of 1830, the Second Republic of 1848, the Second Empire of 1852–70, the bloodily repressed Commune of 1871, before arriving at the Third Republic. Each constituted a separate model for the country and the state, so that in combination they provided a range of what Maurice Agulhon calls competing “legitimacies,” that is, fundamental claims to organize national life and politics on a particular basis: as a monarchy ruled by a Bourbon, or Orleanist, or Bonapartist prince, as a revolutionary republic along lines given by the examples of 1792–94 or 1871, or a moderate one of the sort attempted between 1795 and 1798 and again between 1848 and 1851. Thus the issues at the center of French politics could not develop around the relatively simple question of who would be included inside an already settled political system that preoccupied the British: more fundamental divisions had to be faced at the same time.
At least as significant as their diversity is the point that each of these projected ways of establishing political life – with the exception of the last – bore features of the character we have described as “teleocratic.” That is, each one, whether seeking the rule of a particular monarchical family thought to embody something essential about the nation, or the revolutionary tradition that aimed to impose a new form on it, sought to order politics by virtue of some quality or principle regarded as both more fundamental and more exalted than any that might either motivate the everyday interactions of citizens or subjects or emerge out of them; from such a perspective, any flow of political resources not in accord with whichever of these pre-established goals or values was enshrined as the state’s directing rationale had to appear as illegitimate. There was, however, one state form that did not seek to give political life this sort of transcendent direction, but rather to establish the state as a field on which opposed principles and interests might interact and compete, but without any one casting out the others. This was the form that Agulhon calls “liberal republicanism,” whose aim in constitutional terms (whatever the personal goals of particular individuals or groups who associated themselves with it) was simply to ground political life on the rule of law, putting this goal above “every claimed legitimacy, even of the popular sort.”36
The persistence of these alternatives gave a special quality to liberalism in France. As a doctrine or political current liberalism had a certain independent existence, but the uncertainty about the basic form of the state meant that it was also subject to being drawn into one or another of the competing legitimacies, so that before 1870 liberal identities were often hybrid: there were liberal Legitimists (the name given to supporters of the Bourbons), liberal Orleanists, liberal Bonapartists, and liberal republicans (conservatives and even radicals were subject to the same pulls). All these species of liberals were on the scene in the 1870s, but the camp of liberal republicans came to assume a special kind of importance. Many people, bourgeois among them, hoped for some kind of monarchical restoration, but rivalry between the three candidat
e houses and their followers both ruled out cooperation between them and weakened the ability of any single one to impose itself. In this situation, liberals who had formerly espoused one or another monarchical alternative moved toward the republican camp, a shift exemplified by Adolphe Thiers. Thiers had been an Orleanist in his youth, albeit a pragmatic one who valued the liberal civic order he thought the family represented more than monarchy itself. He had accepted the Second Republic in 1848 once it was clear there was no alternative to it, and in a debate of 1850 gave voice to a phrase that would often be repeated: “the Republic … is of all governments that which divides us least.” He meant that it was a ground where none of the competing teleocratic legitimacies could squeeze out other alternatives. He still feared that a republic might provide the ground for populist claims that would lead to division and conflict, but the thorough suppression of the Commune in 1871 led him to believe that the state was unlikely to fall into the hands of radicals, making a republic, with its ability to accommodate the various competing factions, the best frame for orderly government; thus he moved, if not always steadily, toward supporting it.37
Thiers’s evolution was highly personal, but in a general way it reflected developments that were nudging the country as a whole along the same path. To be sure, people strongly committed to traditional forms of society and the state were just for this reason deeply hostile to the republican project, and as its realization seemed more and more likely they would work to undermine or overthrow the regime – by inventing new styles of conservative politics, through the agency of a charismatic authoritarian figure in the Boulanger crisis of the end of the 1880s, and through nationalist and anti-Semitic campaigns in the Dreyfus Affair a decade later. On the other side workers’ groups too would present their claims as socially and morally superior to the “neutral” liberal principle of the rule of law. But in the end enough people in all these camps would follow Thiers’s lead and come to see the republic based simply on the rule of law as the best and most realistic framework within which to realize whatever they could of their diverse political goals. Only as they did, would modern parties emerge to occupy the political stage in France.
Bourgeois France and modern democracy
One precondition for this development was that liberalism had to clarify and in part alter its relationship to democracy. The issue confronted liberals everywhere, but it took on greater relief in France from the country’s revolutionary history, which gave liberal politics a closer and yet more problematic relationship to popular action than elsewhere. In 1789 and later, as Agulhon observes, “the liberal revolution was able to triumph only thanks to its historical connection with an urban (and notably Parisian) petit peuple that was the bearer of broader social aspirations than was liberalism by itself.”38 In July of 1830 and February of 1848 the moment of closeness between liberal and popular forces was followed by one dominated by fear and shrinking back, since the same implicit collaboration that brought moderate liberals to power opened the way to violence and disorder, threatening the stability they sought. The challenge this pattern presented, and the way it was met, would have much to do with the manner in which the republic won out over the alternatives to it in the mid 1870s.
To see how this occurred, we need to recall that the memories and fears of revolutionary violence that helped push prominent French liberals to the right in the early part of the century contributed to the determination of those who established and dominated the “Bourgeois Monarchy” to set and keep the bar for voting very high (considerably above the level established by the English Parliamentary Reform of 1832). Significantly, these arrangements excluded not just workers or le peuple, but many people with a good claim to be considered bourgeois as well. The fact that people such as Guizot thought political stability required this exclusion is one reason why, in France as in Germany, the turn to universal male suffrage did not come about through gradual extension, as in England, but at the initiative of a politician who believed that elections on this basis, inside an essentially authoritarian regime, could be harvested for anti-liberal purposes. Once he abolished the Second Republic and made himself emperor in 1852, Louis-Napoleon gave the vote to all adult men, but until the 1860s elections were chiefly plebiscites, offering only a choice of “yes” or “no” on his person or policies; even after voters were allowed greater power, the government put much energy into manipulating the results. All the same, as a number of writers have pointed out, the Second Empire accustomed the country to voting, and to universal suffrage, so that when the regime fell in 1870 (at a moment of significant franchise extensions in both England and Germany), no politician was willing to take the risks involved in abolishing it.39
This did not mean that everyone, even among liberals, was ready to give free rein to electoral politics on such a basis. In the 1870s a number of prominent figures, among them Hippolyte Taine and Ernst Renan, proposed schemes aimed at limiting popular influence and power, either by having voters choose intermediate commissions or panels that would actually designate the members of governing bodies, or by establishing an upper chamber with legislative authority and a certain number of hereditary seats, on the English model. Some still trusted in the old-fashioned virtues of rural and small-town Frenchmen, but others (Renan among them) thought that the modernizing efforts and impact of the Bonapartist regime – railroad building, urban construction, industrial expansion, and the lessened influence of the Church and traditional elites – had led to a moral decline, based on the weakening of old communal ties and the spread of a more individualistic and self-centered ethos. Thus it was not only the longstanding worries that universal suffrage would give the propertyless power to seize the possessions of those better-off that prompted efforts to put restraints on voting, but also anxieties about the effects of modernizing social relations. It is in this light that the role played by Léon Gambetta in defeating the attempts at monarchist restoration and establishing the Republic on a clear republican basis takes on high significance.
The grandson of a poor Italian fisherman and son of a small grocer, Gambetta came to prominence through utilizing the French educational system as a pathway to social ascension, a classic pattern he shared with other Third Republic luminaries, including Alfred Dreyfus and Émile Durkheim. In 1860s Paris he became known as one of a number of young lawyers who emerged as republican opponents of the Empire. His electoral program as a candidate for the National Assembly from the working-class Parisian suburb of Belleville in 1868 involved anti-militarism, separation of Church and state, freedom of the press and association, and universal education. At the crucial moment of the attempt by conservatives led by Marshall McMahon to effect a monarchist restoration in May of 1877, it was Gambetta who animated the campaign that led to a republican victory and what became known as the “end of the notables,” demonstrating the ability of national politicians to appeal over the heads of local luminaries to the mass of voters drawn more tightly into national life by newspapers, railroads, and the telegraph. Like Renan, Gambetta was highly aware of the effects of Bonaparte’s policies on national and especially provincial life, but he reacted to them in precisely the opposite way. As François Furet put it, “Renan’s regrets were Gambetta’s optimism. The republican leader loved the new France which he sensed emerging from the progress of social wealth and enlightenment.” It was this positive judgment that stood behind his declaration in a well-known speech that “I believe in the republican future of the provinces and the rural areas. All it takes is a little time and the wider spread of education.”40
Gambetta’s belief that developments already under way by the 1870s were creating a more solid basis for French democracy is supported by recent historians. Sudhir Hazareesingh has argued that the Second Empire saw the emergence of a new sense of citizenship, based on a widespread desire to draw people into national issues through the mediation of local ones, a vision shared in different ways by conservatives, liberals, and Bonapartists, but leading toward a level
of involvement that pointed in a republican direction. Regular and more freely contested elections, especially in the 1860s (the government ceased interfering with organized local political groups in this decade), along with the better circulation of newspapers had a role in this transformation as well. Philip Nord has traced the efforts republicans expended in the same period to create support for democratic institutions by working within masonic, academic, religious, and commercial organizations, the building blocks of a new civil society.41 These developments ran parallel to those that were creating a thickening tissue of economic relations, joining people in various regions together in an increasingly tightly knit web. It was to this more interconnected and thus less “introverted” France that Gambetta sought to appeal. In addition to the formerly more isolated rural population, his vision encompassed the petit-bourgeois and popular elements he famously called “new social strata” (nouvelles couches sociales); they were not a new section of French society, however, but an old one given new features by the changing world around them. Both groups had been put outside the pays légal by the liberal doctrinaires of the 1830s and 1840s, with their suffrage restrictions, and it was partly to reduce their influence that Taine and Renan conceived complex mechanisms of voting in the early 1870s.
Gambetta had emerged from these sections of society himself, and he based his case for their “republican future” on his confidence in the educative virtues of the structures and networks that were drawing them into national life. His France, as both his Marxist critics and his liberal defenders have noted, was in important ways a bourgeois France, but in a different sense than under the July Monarchy: instead of drawing a line between the well-off businesspeople and landowners who together formed the category of notables on the one hand, and those traditionally labeled le peuple on the other, it specifically sought to bring together large sections of both. Furet characterizes Gambetta’s France as the bourgeois and petit-bourgeois France of 1789, but transformed by new conditions of work and education, so that the same meritocratic grounds on which Guizot and his friends had excluded large sections of the pays réel could be taken to warrant their inclusion instead. Because Gambetta’s electoral campaign of May, 1877 could appeal to this transformed peuple, as a kind of substitute for the Parisian populace that had long been at once the support and the Achilles heel of earlier republican efforts, he was able to defeat the defenders of Old Regime social and political relations through electoral means, and without recourse to struggles likely to turn violent.42
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