I wrote this paper for a French history class, and since I know there are numerous French citizens and Francophiles here, I'd like to know what you think of my arguments and whether you think this is at all compatible with your own understanding of French history.
My sources were: the journals of the Goncourt brothers, a collection of documents from the Dreyfus affair, Bloch's memoirs of war, Poincaré's war message and a collection of war journalism and correspondence by female writers.
Vers la revanche: Political Culture and the National Struggle
As news of the surrender of French armies reached Paris on October 31 1870 and mobs appeared to tear down the nation’s republican government in favor of a radical socialist alternative, the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt wondered at the apocalypse that was unfolding before their eyes. “Civil war, with starvation and bombardment, is that what tomorrow holds in store for us?” (Goncourt 178), the brothers wrote. On that same day, they wrote of two horrifying words, symbolizing the lasting trauma with which war and internal division had burdened the national consciousness: Finis Franciae; the end of France. As France turned upon internal enemies for compromising the integrity of the nation and turned away from the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity which had been foundational to the French identity, it pursued atonement for its humiliation through revenge. The period of French history between the Franco-Prussian War and the end of World War I was not marked by open warfare between Germany and France, however, but by a struggle for lost national glory incompatible with right or reason.
While news of France’s military defeat at Sedan and surrender to Prussia at Metz certainly dispirited the French people, the siege of Paris and foreign occupation of French land amounted to a profound national humiliation. No Parisian, poor or wealthy, could escape the scarcity, anxiety and moral outrage that the events of 1870 and 1871 inspired in the besieged – all suffered the same indignities together, as Frenchmen. “Shells are exploding every few minutes along the railway line and people cross our boulevard on their hands and feet” (Goncourt 183), the Goncourt brothers reported on January 26, 1871. The great cultural treasures of France were pulled from the walls of the Louvre, rolled up and shipped out of the city in a “humiliating spectacle” (Goncourt 168). The memory of a prosperous people reduced to the abjection of carving up for food even the exotic animals that had entertained the masses at the zoo and felling for firewood the trees that had once shaded their cosmopolitan boulevards could not easily be forgotten or forgiven. It was enough to make the Goncourt brothers lament, “God loves the Prussians” (Goncourt 174).
But why, to use the Goncourts’ language, did God love the Prussians and withdraw his favor from the French? In attempting to explain how France had descended from prosperity to starvation in a matter of months, one of the Goncourts’ colleagues declares over dinner, “Yes, gentlemen, the Germans are a superior race!” (Goncourt 170), incomparable to the French in their ability to make war with the deadly precision of modern technology. Another proposes that “Catholicism cretinizes the individual…whereas Protestantism develops the mental faculties” (Goncourt 171). Perhaps the Protestant ethic of proving one’s virtue through achievement had produced a more industrious nation, home to “the toughest of soldiers, the wiliest of diplomats, the craftiest of bankers” (Goncourt 179). Or perhaps France’s defeat could not be explained by the supposed merits of a servile, brutish people, as a third colleague, du Meslin, claimed. The implication of difference across the nations, regardless of the truth, was that France “must be on [its] guard against that race, which arouses in us the idea of childlike innocence” (Goncourt 179) and against any internal forces which might seek to aid that nation.
But the cause of France’s national decline was seen to be not entirely external. The civil war that erupted in late March of 1871 exposed a fundamental conflict over the national destiny and forced Frenchmen to decide which of the two were more worthy of exaltation: a pride in one’s national identity that might run contrary to the dictates of reason, or a devotion to liberty and equality that might not be constrained by the borders of nations. The Goncourt brothers, for instance, referred to the establishment of the Paris Commune as if it were motivated by a malicious, international design for revolution and complete social change. “What is happening is nothing less than the conquest of France by the worker and the reduction to slavery under his rule of the noble, the bourgeois and the peasant” (Goncourt 185), they wrote. In their eyes, the resistance to the forces of the Thiers government among the masses appeared to be more staunch and passionate than had been the resistance to the Prussian siege. “The idea of the motherland is dying” (Goncourt 185), they lamented. “The International’s doctrines of indifference to nationality have penetrated the masses” (Goncourt 185), and if permitted to succeed, the proletarians of Paris might cease to think of themselves foremost as French; but rather as members of a worldwide class locked in a struggle with their bourgeois oppressors. If the nation could not resolve its internal crisis of identity in favor of nationalism, the Goncourts feared, it would lead to government by the indoctrinated mob, by “those who have no interest whatever in [society’s] order, stability or preservation” (Goncourt 185).
But as influential as revolutionary socialism was to millions of Frenchmen, still more so was hatred of “la Boche” and of the nation that had so painfully violated France’s national integrity. Indeed, the degradation and imprisonment on Devil’s Island of Alfred Dreyfus represented the apparent partial achievement of la revanche: by virtue of a public triumph over supposed internal enemies, France seemingly rendered itself united as a nation. Léon Daudet, depicting in 1895 the symbolic military ritual through which France proposed to atone for its defeat and division, wrote: “A single faith remains genuine and sincere: that which safeguards our race, our language, the blood of our blood, and which brings us together in solidarity…The wretch was not French. He plotted our disaster, but his crime has exalted us” (Burns 53). The fact that the case against Dreyfus was entirely fabricated and motivated by a hatred for Jews was entirely irrelevant. Nationalism did not seek to justify itself through appeals to reason and universal truth; in Daudet’s words, “the idea of the fatherland is so deep-seated and so proud that it can be strengthened by its antithesis, by the assaults directed against it” (Burns 53), even if those assaults are mere illusions conjured up to inflame passions and inspire hatred.
To defend itself against enemies of the nation, external and internal, France placed its trust in the military. But the military proved itself insular and reactionary in the Dreyfus affair, coming to an unjust verdict on Dreyfus alleged crime due to the supremacy of discipline and obedience within that institution. “It is a crime to worship the sabre as a modern god”, to give unconditional deference to military authority under the pretext of patriotism, “when all of human science is laboring to hasten the triumph of truth and justice”, contended Emile Zola. (Burns 100) His great rhetorical broadside of 1898, “J’Accuse!”, laid out the irrational methods and aims of the nationalist and anti-Semitic crowd in these sentences choked with rage: “What an accumulation of madness, stupidity, unbridled imagination, low police tactics, inquisitorial and tyrannical methods this handful of officers have got away with! They have crushed the nation under their boots, stuffing its calls for truth and justice down its throat on the fallacious and sacrilegious pretext that they are acting for the good of the country!” (Burns 100). If Dreyfus’ degradation and conviction symbolized “the public spirit freed from anarchist servitude” (Burns 123), in the words of Charles Maurras, and had placed its trust not in revolutionary mobs but in an institution devoted to the unconditional protection of France and the French, it had accordingly abandoned, through the pursuit of vengeance, the respect for human rights and justice that had been the glory of the nation.
