The Hypocrisy of Justice in the Belle Epoque

Introduction

INTRODUCTION France's Third Republic was born in 1870during the lost Franco-Prussian Warand was the eighth changein the governmental structure since 1789. Theconstitution was the shortest and most ambiguousinFrench history and consequently the most lasting. It was a conservative republic a republicbecause the monarchistswereunableto decideamong three pretenders;conservative because theJacobin traditions hadbeen discredited—aggressive nationalism by the defeat in war, economic egalitarianism by the crushing of the Paris Communein 1871. The society of the Republicwas a stalemate. Political freedom would be the opium of the masses, for whom there was little opportunity to rise in the rigid social structure of family, correct schools, and old-boy networks . "Bourgeois"was acompliment, "arriviste"an insult. The very slow expansion of the economyand the long period of deflation in the i88os and 18905 prevented the growth of a working-class consciousness and increased the importance of rentier wealth and of the mentality that went withit. Peasants and artisansbelieved that the modern world would not overtake them and maintained their patterns of life and deference unchanged. Faced with no necessity ever to work, the scions of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy could become leisured dilettantes, pursuing politics as a pastime or adopting a literary or artistic culture. It was not difficult to do both: Maurice Barres, Charles Maurras, and Charles Peguy, among others, provided RogerMartin 2 The Hypocrisy of Justice in the Belle Epoque du Card with the example for his Jean Barois, in which politicalaction becomes founding a criticaljournal.1 France, so goes the epigram, is a nation ofcalm people governed by overwrought politicians. For most of the country, politics were local politics, the struggle for dominance by powerfulfamilies whose rivalries went back many years and who adopted the colors of nationalissues only for effect. Affairs of state were mysterious to the average Frenchman in the late nineteenth century, and politicians in Pariswere to be mistrusted. From Paris, the view was equally extreme: only in France is everything outside the capital considered the provinces. Government was carried on by career bureaucratsbecause the politics of the Third Republic were more drama than action. The theater was the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, a legislature that so often turned out the premier and his cabinet thatbetween 1870and 1914no ministry lasted longer than three years, and most toppled in less than twelve months. Looking on benignly was an impotent chief of state, the president of the Republic. During the first forty years of the Republic , the office was occupied by eight men, each one the inferior of his predecessor: Adolphe Thiers (1871-1873), a former royalist turned founder ofthe Republic, who was deposed by the monarchists he had betrayed; Marshal Patrice de MacMahon (1873-1879), the military leader with the fewest defeats, who resigned under pressure after unsuccessfully trying to influencethe composition of the legislature;Jules Gr6vy (1879-1887), last trulya leader in 1848, who resigned in disgrace after ordering the police to destroy the evidence for influence-peddlingagainst his son-in-law; Francois Sadi-Carnot (1887-1894), elected because his grandfather had organized revolutionary victories ninety years before, and assassinated by a crazed Italian anarchist; Jean Casimir -Perier (1894-1895), a millionaire businessman who promised law and order but became bored and impatient enough to resign after six months; Felix Faure (1895-1899), whose virile appearance was his greatest asset and who died in the armsofhis mistress ofheart failure; i. The best politicalnarrative is Denis W. Brogan, TheDevelopment of Modem France, 1870-1939 (London, 1940). For the nature of society,bourgeoisandpeasant,see Stanley Hoffman et al., In Search of France (Cambridge, Mass., 1963); and Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (Stanford, 1976), and "Inheritance and Dilettantism: The Politics of Maurice Barres," Historical Reflections, II (Summer, 1975), 109-31. Introduction 3 Emile Loubet (1899-1906), elected largely because he had been ableto hush up the Panama Canal scandal in 1894; Armand Fallieres (19061913 ), who was little more than a peasant made good.2 With this leadership, the single unchanging feature ofThird Republic politics was the pork barrel. Grevy's son-in-law Daniel Wilson and the Panama Canal scandal were the most obviousexamples, but there were recurrent raids on the publictreasury and the national welfare by all of those with influence. Large landowners and peasants alike put off the day of rationalization and reckoning with world competition through hefty tariffs. Industrialists hid their inefficiencies in similar...