Paradoxically, most politically conscious workers, while suspicious of the
motives of the bourgeois republicans, continued to vote for radical electoral candidates like Gambetta. The desire for working-class political autonomy was very much a minority phenomenon. In 1864, when three worker candidates –
Blanc, Coutant and Tolain – had stood for election in Paris in support of social reform, they had been bitterly attacked by established republican politicians and accused of being Bonapartists. They obtained 342, 11 and 500 votes, respectively.
Clearly, working-class milirants still lacked political authority within their own 49
class. It was to middle-class politicians that workers looked to satisfy their aspirations for greater equality and dignity. Far more widespread than adherence to any ideological position in the working-class quarters of Paris was a diffuse sense of injustice which could certainly awaken sympathy for demands for revolutionary change among the large crowds attending political meetings during 1869–70.
Speakers who denounced the bourgeoisie for ‘living off the sweat of the people’ as vampires devouring ‘those who work’ and who condemned those who had
‘assassinated’ the people in June 1848 and the despotism established by the ‘crime of December 1851’, were warmly applauded. Many speakers looked forward to an imminent revolution which would allow a settling of accounts and ‘the
emancipation of the workers’. Nevertheless, it is difficult to judge to what degree this hostility towards employers and a repressive government, evident in the strike 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 the right. In practice, it proved difficult for the administration to dominate an impoverished peasantry which had been alienated by the efforts of largely absentee landowners to restrict traditional rights of usage in the forests – a vital part of traditional pastoral farming systems (Vigreux 1987). In a variety of situations, the rural population might therefore be attracted to the republican cause.
Surprisingly, republican militants made relatively little effort to appeal
specifically to the rural population, although of course it made up a majority of the electorate. Newspapers like the
Rappel de la Provence
(1869) – with its low price and short and simply written articles designed to appeal to the practical concerns of 52
the habitués of the
chambrées
of the Var – were rare. In attempting to appeal to peasants
,
republicans developed programmes similar to, but in many respects les
s
radical than, those of the
démoc-socs
in 1849. The condemnation of wasteful government expenditure and high taxes was retained and attacks on the regime’s military adventures and the growing burden of conscription were added.
Significantly, the more radical promise of cheap credit to allow peasants to purchase land had all but disappeared. Nevertheless, on this basis republicans were able to attract some support, especially in those areas in which a republican tradition had previously been established during the Second Republic or before, although on this occasion in the south-east rather than the centre and south-west, and nowhere on the same scale. Indeed, in some areas support seems to have melted away in the intervening years. In the Limousin, most notably, continued hostility towards traditional elites was combined now with support for the ‘Emperor of the Peasants and Masons’ who had brought prosperity to the countryside and work for those who depended on temporary migration to the burgeoning building sites of Paris and Lyon. In departments as diverse as the Basses-Alpes and Gers which had experienced large-scale insurrections in resistance to the coup d’état in 1851, the official candidates would be re-elected easily in 1869.Virtually the whole south-west in fact appears to have been won over to the regime. In a large number of departments there was almost no mass support for the opposition. Pessimistically, the liberal Prévost-Paradol described the regime as ‘an Imperial ruralocracy’ based upon ‘rural imbecility and provincial bestiality’, a view shared by the republican Allain-Targé who stressed the need for the future republic to educate the ‘thirty-five million brutes who compose the Nation to the rank of active citizens’.
Republicans habitually explained election defeat in terms of pressure from the administration, traditional elites and the clergy, combined with the sheer ignorance and susceptibility of the rural masses. It rarely seems to have been admitted that support for the Empire might represent a rational decision in favour of a regime which had brought order and prosperity. This option was reinforced by the
conservative propaganda which sought to re-create the threat from the so-called
partageux
, the communists who supposedly intended to seize the land. In the Paris basin, the west, north and much of the south-west, socially dominant landowners and large farmers, supported by the clergy, stimulated these fears. Thus, in the village of Moux in the Morvan, the mayor reminded the electorate that to vote for a republican candidate meant ‘a vote for revolution, for the red flag, for the guillotine’.
53
Establishment of the liberal Empire
If the regime had retained the bulk of its rural support, the results of the 1869
elections nevertheless revealed the accelerating deterioration in its position and the growing risk of isolation. A total of 116 deputies drawn from both the opposition and government liberals combined to demand a ministry responsible to the
Corps
législatif
. Concessions urgently needed to be made if support for the regime among the social and political elites was to be maintained. It was therefore decided by the Emperor that parliament should be allowed much wider rights in the questioning of ministers and control of the budget. As a result, effective administration would depend in future on the ability of ministers to secure the approval of a majority of deputies, although constitutionally they would continue to remain responsible to the Emperor alone. The
Journal de Roubaix
(4 January 1870) was only one of the many opposition newspapers to report with glee that ‘the Empire of 2 December no longer exists’. These concessions were followed by a protracted effort to create a government anxious to promote reconciliation. This was eventually formed on 2
January and headed by the former moderate republican Emile Ollivier. It would enjoy both the confidence of the Emperor and support from a parliamentary
majority composed of adherents and recent liberal critics of the dynasty, including Guizot (the former Orleanist prime minister) and his erstwhile critics Barrot and Thiers. The latter, along with many liberals, might remain dissatisfied because of the retention of considerable personal, prerogative power by the Emperor
(including the right to appeal by dissolution of parliament or plebiscite directly to the electorate), but conservative and liberal deputies were anxious to ensure that the achievement of their objective of exerting closer control over government policy did not excessively weaken the executive’s ability to counter what was perceived to be the growing threat of revolution. The Party of Order of the Second Republic was already being re-established.
The early measures of the new Ollivier ministry were intended to satisfy its liberal critics. They included the final abandonment of the system of official candidature (23 February 1870), the dismissal of Haussmann (who had done so much to transform the centre of Paris) in order to appease conservative financial interests as well as that of the education minister, Duruy, to pacify the clerical critics of this advocate of secular instruction, together with plans for an enquiry into the impact of customs legislation. It was believed that this would represent the first step in a return to economic protectionism. Some of the most distinctive policies of the 54