early years of the Second Empire (the amount required as caution money was raised
74 Policing Public Opinion in the French Revolution: The Culture of Calumny and the Problem of Free
Speech (Oxford, 2009), 10.
75 Benjamin Constant, Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments (Indianapolis, 2003), 152.
Constant was mistaken about the date: the edicts were passed in 1757.
76 See Gilbert Chinard, Jefferson et les Idéologues d’après sa correspondance inédite (Baltimore,
1925), 31–96.
77 Alexis de Tocqueville, ‘Lettres sur la situation intérieure de la France’, Œuvres complètes (1985),
iii/2. 112. The French press, Tocqueville contended, had more power than its American opposite
number. This was because it was concentrated in one place––Paris––and in fewer hands.
18
Introduction: Revolution and the Republic
in 1852).78 They were not relaxed with the advent of the Third Republic. Writing
in 1873, the historian Edgar Quinet could comment that ‘[t]he condition of the
writer is worse in France than in any other place in Europe: the law treats him as a
suspect and surrounds him with mistrust and traps’.79 It was only in 1881 that
controls over the publication of books and newspapers were completely removed.
This new-found freedom, when combined with reduced production costs,
improved distribution methods, and higher levels of literacy, encouraged a flour-
ishing daily and periodical press, but this in turn brought a press that was both
corrupt and controlled by financial interests.80 Press restrictions were reimposed
in the 1890s (in response to violence by anarchist groups) whilst the 1881 Act
was suspended in 1940 with the fall of France and the beginning of the Vichy
regime. In 1944 a set of ordinances banned any papers that had appeared under
the German occupation and sought to protect the press from what were seen as
dangerous commercial interests. This attempt to preserve the press from monopoly
control was achieved at the expense of heavy reliance upon state subsidy. News-
paper sales per head of the population in France were lower than in any other
industrialized western European country, except Italy. Moreover, at the height of
the Algerian conflict in the late 1950s the State sought systematically to intimidate
editors and journalists through the confiscation of their publications.
State control and censorship of the opera and the theatre––activities suspected of
engendering unruly behaviour and of encouraging the expression of public opin-
ion––were finally abolished only in 1907. If, in the eighteenth century, the cause
célèbre was the production of Beaumarchais’s La Folle Journée, ou le Mariage de
Figaro, for her part, Sheryl Kroen has shown how the staging of Molière’s anti-
clerical Tartuffe became a source of popular demonstration against the religious
policies of both Church and State during the Restoration and how, as a conse-
quence, its performance was frequently banned by the authorities (as indeed it had
been during the reign of Louis XIV).81 To that extent, calls for aesthetic purity,
often justified in terms of art for art’s sake, were frequently a reflection and product
of political repression. After the Second World War radio and television broadcast-
ing were a state monopoly. A powerful, and at times heavily interventionist,
Ministry of Information oversaw the content of radio and television programmes,
thereby ensuring that broadcasters could not forget that, in President Pompidou’s
words, they were ‘the voice of France’. Only in the 1980s did the State begin to
loosen its grip.
Likewise the State––especially in the period between the Restoration and the
1848 Revolution––kept a watchful eye over what was taught in universities and did
not hesitate to remove troublesome academics when necessary. Both François
78 Jules Simon commented of the laws operating under the Second Empire that ‘it would be easy to
show that [they] give to the administration the means to kill whatever paper they wish with extreme
ease’: La Liberté politique (1871), 208.
79 Edgar Quinet, La République, conditions de la régénération de la France (1873), 120.
80 See Christophe Charle, Le Siècle de la presse (2004).
81 Sheryl Kroen, Politics and Theatre: The Crisis of Legitimacy in Restoration France, 1815–1830
(Berkeley, Calif., 2000).
Introduction: Revolution and the Republic
19
Guizot and Jules Michelet were to fall victim to this practice. More oppressive still,
the State resorted to imprisonment of those writers taken to be its opponents. In
1832 this fate was to befall two leaders of the Saint-Simonian movement, Prosper
Enfantin and Michel Chevalier, and later afflicted Félicité de Lamennais, Alexis de
Tocqueville, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and many others in the nineteenth century.
Charles Maurras, the principal ideologue of the monarchist movement in the
twentieth century, was imprisoned for his support for the Vichy regime. Many
other writers were subject to the arbitrary exactions of the post-Second World War
épuration. The State also upon occasion exacted the death penalty: Condorcet in
the eighteenth century and Robert Brasillach in the twentieth century being two of
the unfortunate victims.82
But both the pre- and post-1789 French State has had more in its armoury than
these formal instruments of control. It could ennoble. It could accord prestige. It could
grant favours. After the Revolution, in other words, patronage was modified rather
than abolished. For example, the young (and then monarchist) Victor Hugo received a
modest annual stipend from Louis XVIII,83 whilst after 1830 Chateaubriand lived
off a sizeable pension provided by the exiled Bourbon monarch. Sainte-Beuve,
Alexandre Dumas, Alfred de Musset, and many others received sinecures from the
July Monarchy. Others, more numerous but more humble in aspiration, were
prepared to accept employments from the State that were largely honorary and
entailed few formal time-consuming duties. As Philip Mansel has commented, ‘inside
many French writers there was a courtier struggling to get out’.84
Moreover, the great academic and literary institutions of the State, first created
under the ancien régime and later reformed and enhanced under the First Empire
and subsequent Republics, lost none of their power to seduce. Alexis de Tocqueville
was by no means alone in devoting considerable time and energy to securing
election to the Académie des Sciences morales et politiques and the Académie
Française, nor in seeking to block the election of his rivals. Even in death––as has
been the case with Voltaire, Rousseau, Condorcet, Victor Hugo, Émile Zola, André
Malraux, and, most recently, Alexandre Dumas––the State, with all the symbolic
authority at its disposal, can honour its writers by moving their remains to the
hallowed site of the Panthéon. Lesser mortals can be offered one of the many
honorific titles of distinction and recognition that the Republic, as much as any
other of France’s regimes, has used, in the words of Olivier Ihl, as a ‘systematic
instrument of governance’.85 From Rousseau to Georges Sorel, from Paul Nizan
to the
writers of today’s Le Monde diplomatique, there has been no shortage of
commentators who have accused their fellows of undue subservience to the State.
82 Condorcet committed suicide before the day of his execution.
83 The son of a Bonapartist general, Hugo effectively became official poet to the royal court: see
Graham Robb, Victor Hugo (London, 1997).
84 Philip Mansel, Paris between Empires 1814–1852 (London, 2001), 311.
85 Olivier Ihl, ‘Emulation through Decoration: A Science of Government?’, in Sudhir Hazareesingh
(ed.), The Jacobin Legacy in Modern France (Oxford, 2002), 158–82. For a more extensive discussion
see Olivier Ihl, Le Mérite et la République: Essai sur la société des émules (2007).
20
Introduction: Revolution and the Republic
If Voltaire provided the first clear definition of the philosophe, he also illustrated
another structural dimension of French intellectual life: banished from Paris, his
career can be read as a sustained attempt to return to the capital. With the decline of
the court in Versailles, the scene became, and still is, Paris, producing a geographical
concentration of intellectual life which retains the capacity to bedazzle the foreign
visitor.86 In 1734 Marivaux felt able to comment that ‘Paris is the world; the rest of
the earth is nothing but its suburbs.’87 Accordingly, as Dena Goodman has observed:
‘over the course of the eighteenth century, aspiring young men of letters would
pour into Paris from the provinces’.88 This is a view confirmed by Madame de Staël.
‘[A]s those who are endowed with intellect feel the need to exert it’, she wrote, ‘so all
who had any talent made their way immediately to the capital in the hope of
obtaining employment.’89 Accordingly, ‘le désert français’,90 the barren and sleepy
world beyond Paris’s ancient city walls, has had as its corollary the unrealistic hopes
and frustrations suffered by generations of aspiring intellectuals from the provinces
who, like Balzac’s ‘great man in embryo’, the poet Lucien Chardon of Les Illusions
perdues, have scrambled for success and recognition in the metropolis.
Paris was also the capital of print.91 Publishing and consuming most of the
nation’s book output, its libraries drew in scholars and the curious whilst its theatres
and its concert halls attracted huge crowds. Paris’s population was substantially
more literate than elsewhere in the country. It was also more cosmopolitan, drawing
in exiles and visitors from all over Europe and America and (later) from Africa and
Asia.92 Rebuilt and embellished by the mid-nineteenth-century urban transforma-
tion masterminded by the Baron Haussmann, Paris was to be not merely the capital
of France but the city of modernity and the metropolis of the civilized world.93
Moreover, the city of Baudelaire’s flâneur itself became the subject of literary and
artistic exploration and myth.
For all the loss of universal pretensions, little has changed over the last two
hundred years or more. In Paris are still to be found all the great institutions of
French intellectual life, its foremost educational establishments, its great museums,
the major publishing houses, the daily and periodical press, and, not unimportantly,
the centres of political and administrative power.94 ‘Centralisation’, Jean-Paul Sartre
86 See Patrice Higonnet, Paris, Capital of the World (Cambridge, Mass., 2002); Colin Jones, Paris,
Biography of a City (London: 2004); Andrew Hussey, Paris: The Hidden City (London, 2006) and
Graham Robb, Parisians (London, 2010).
87 Quoted in Jones, Paris, Biography, 204.
88 Goodman, Republic of Letters, 24.
89 Germaine de Staël, Considérations sur la Révolution française (1983), 415.
90 This phrase is associated with Jean-François Gravier’s Paris et le désert français (1947).
91 Mansel, Paris between Empires, 307–28, refers to Paris as the ‘City of Ink’.
92 See Lloyd S. Kramer, Threshold of a New World: Intellectuals and the Exile Experience in Paris,
1830–1848 (Ithaca, NY, 1988).
93 As part of the plan to showcase Paris as a world capital, four international exhibitions were held in
1855, 1867, 1878, and 1889. The last received over 32 million visitors.
94 Further evidence of the dominance of Paris and the surrounding region is provided by the size of
its population. As Graham Robb recounts, in 1801 more people lived in Paris than in the next six
biggest cities combined. By 1886 the figure has risen to the next sixteen cities combined: see The
Discovery of France (London, 2007), 3–18.
Introduction: Revolution and the Republic
21
wrote, describing the situation of the writer in 1947, ‘has grouped us all in Paris.’95
A ‘busy American’ or ‘trained cyclist’, he added, could meet all the people he needed
to know in twenty-four hours. Nowhere has this been truer than in the field of
education. Here, as the work of Jean-François Sirinelli has revealed, the picture has
been, and still is, one of a small and self-contained intellectual elite.96
If Dena Goodman makes the point that, in the eighteenth century, young men
of letters flocked to the capital, she also comments that they ‘were in no hurry to
leave Paris’. In later years this proved less to be the case, as we must not forget the
numerous voyages undertaken voluntarily by French writers to such countries as
Italy, Germany, England, Russia/the Soviet Union,97 America,98 the Orient, and,
more recently, Maoist China and Castro’s Cuba. But Goodman’s observation
contains more than a grain of truth. When Simone de Beauvoir visited New
York for the first time in January 1947, for example, she was shocked to discover
that she could love another city as much as she loved Paris.99
The fact is, however, that quite frequently France’s turbulent political history
gave her writers no choice but to leave the capital. An astonishing number of the
authors cited in this book spent either a small or a significant part of their careers
in exile. If, as the example of Voltaire illustrates,100 this was the case under the
ancien régime, it was equally true during the period of the Revolution and the First
Empire. Joseph de Maistre, sharing the enforced exile of many royalist sympathi-
sers, wrote most of his diatribes against the Revolution in St Petersburg, whilst
Madame de Staël, after years of involuntary travel across Europe, published her
influential De l’Allemagne in London. It was also true of the Second Empire, when
important exiles included Edgar Quinet, Jules Michelet, Jules Barni, Louis Blanc,
and, most famously, Victor Hugo, who, like Chateaubriand before him, sought
refuge in the Channel Islands. The experience was repeated under the Vichy
regime, when Raymond Aron and Simone Weil followed General de Gaulle to
London and others, such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Georges Bernanos, found
a safer haven in the United States101 or further afield in Latin America. The July
Monarchy forced Étienne Cabet into exile and even the Third Republic drove
Émile Zola abroad as he sought to avoid imprisonment after the publication of
his open letter denouncing the miscarriage of justice involving Captain Alfred
Dreyfus.102 As Madame de Staël commented, ‘
the fear of such an exile was
95 Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature? (London, 1967), 125.
96 Génération intellectuelle: Khâgneux et Normaliens dans l’entre-deux guerres (1988).
97 See in particular Astolphe de Custine’s La Russie en 1839 (1843).
98 See Durand Echeverria, Mirage in the West: A History of the French Image of America (Princeton,
NJ, 1957).
99 Simone de Beauvoir, L’Amérique au jour le jour (1997), 104.
100 See Ian Davidson, Voltaire in Exile: The Last Years, 1753–78 (London, 2005).
101 See Jeffrey Mehlman, Emigré New York: French Intellectuals in Wartime Manhattan, 1940–44
(Baltimore, 2000) and Emmanuelle Loyer, Paris à New York: Intellectuels et artistes français en exil
1940–1947 (2005).
102 See Lloyd S. Kramer, ‘S’exiler’, in Duclert and Prochasson, Dictionnaire critique de la République
(2002), 1042–50.
22
Introduction: Revolution and the Republic
sufficient to reduce all the inhabitants of the principal city of the empire to
slavery’.103
Parisian dominance has taken another important form. Prior to, and immedi-
ately after, the Revolution, the linguistic map of France was immensely complex,
constituting a rich mosaic of languages and dialects, many such as Breton and
Alsatian quite distinct from French.104 As Daniel Roche comments: ‘in the eigh-
teenth century, learned people began to think of these dialects and patois in terms
of Parisian linguistic superiority: these impure tongues spoken by peasants and
others threatened the purity of Paris’.105 What occurred, following the policies
introduced during the Revolution and after intended to silence these diverse
tongues,106 was the progressive triumph of the capital, with the result that France
became increasingly characterized by linguistic homogeneity. By the end of the
nineteenth century, the schoolteachers of the Third Republic, the so-called ‘black
hussars’, had ensured that few, if any, linguistic barriers stood in the way of the
circulation of (Parisian) ideas. As a consequence, the defence of France’s indigenous
languages, as with the cause of regionalism more generally, was until recently largely
consigned to the advocates of Catholic and monarchical reaction.107
Moreover, this provides a clue to the important cleavages that were to inform
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