Modern France and The World

Modern France and the World
Modern France and the World provides an engaging global history of the
key events of modern France and its empire. It moves beyond the traditional
political narrative of the development of the French Republican nation-state
to offer both national and international perspectives of its evolution.
The volume illustrates the integral exchanges that have taken place
between France and the modern world, from global trade in the eighteenth
century to the impact of postcolonial immigration and globalization on
French identity and on France’s diverse population. It includes the voices
of women, colonized populations, and those who both embraced and
challenged the spread of French ideas and values around the globe. Drawing
on methodologies of social, cultural, and gender history, this textbook
integrates a wide range of analytical tools to entice readers to engage more
deeply in France’s dynamic global history.
By presenting the history of France and its global engagements from the
mid-seventeenth century to the present, this volume is an essential resource
for all students who study the history, politics, and culture of modern France.
Darcie Fontaine is a historian of the modern French empire, focusing on

North Africa, and is the author of Decolonizing Christianity: Religion and
the End of Empire in France and Algeria (2016).
Countries in the Modern World
Available titles:

Darcie Fontaine
Darcie Fontaine
First published 2023
by Routledge
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Fontaine, Darcie, 1980– author.
Title: Modern France and the world / Darcie Fontaine.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, [2023] |
Series: Countries in the modern world | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022041981 (print) | LCCN 2022041982 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: France—History—1789– | France—Foreign relations.
Classification: LCC DC110 .F668 2023 (print) | LCC DC110 (ebook) |
DDC 944—dc23/eng/20220902
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022041981
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022041982
ISBN: 978-1-138-84617-3 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-84618-0 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-36876-2 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/b23310
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents Contents
List of Figuresvii
List of Mapsix
Prefacex
Acknowledgmentsxii
1 Globalizing France in the Era of Enlightenment 1
2 Radical Revolutions and Rights of Man 21
3 The Napoleonic Empire 48
4 Restoration and the Liberal Order 70
5 Social and Political Revolutions 86
6 New Imperial Designs: The Second Empire 105
7 The Imperial Third Republic 131
8 The Fin de Siècle and Its Discontents 156
9 Global France at War, 1914–1919 175
10 Illusions of Peace, 1920–1939 193
11 War and Occupation, 1939–1944 212
12 Postwar Reconstruction and Imperial

Deconstruction, 1944–1962 235
vi Contents
13 The Politics of Grandeur: The Fifth Republic
in a New Europe 259
14 Globalized France 278
Conclusion: The Legacy of Empire in

Twenty-First-Century France 305
Index310
Figures Figures
1.1 1665 engraving of a sugar plantation in the Antilles,

Library of Congress, Illus. in F2001.R62 (Rare Book RR) 10
2.1 1804 engraving by Pierre Gabriel Berthault depicting
the Tennis Court Oath, Library of Congress, LOT 6874, no. 1 25
2.2 “General revolt of the Negroes. Massacre of the whites,”
frontispiece to ca. 1815 book titled Saint-Domingue,
or History of Its Revolutions, Library Company of
Philadelphia 32
2.3 1805 portrait of Toussaint Louverture by Marcus
Rainsford, John Carter Brown Library, record 06847–1 38
2.4 Anonymous print depicting Louis XVI being led to the
guillotine at the time of his execution, January 21, 1793,
Library of Congress, LOT 10484 39
3.1 Napoleon at the Battle of the Pyramids, July 21, 1798,
by Antoine-Jean Gros (painter) and Philippe Gros
(engraver), Library of Congress, Popular Graphic
Arts Division 53
6.1 Photograph by Charles Marville of urban renewal
in nineteenth-century Paris, State Library
of Victoria, Australia 112
6.2 “Les Grands magasins de la ville de Saint-Denis—L’entrée
monumentale,” Drawing by MM. Ringel
and Ferdinandus, 1881, CC0 Paris Musées/Musée
Carnavalet—Histoire de Paris 115
7.1 Anonymous photograph of the barricade on the Chaussée
Ménilmontant, March 18, 1871, CC0 Paris Musées/Musée
Carnavalet—Histoire de Paris 137
8.1 Louis-Émile Durandelle, Exposition universelle de 1889/
État d’avancement, November 23, 1888, Albumen silver
print, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles 169
viii Figures
9.1 Poster promoting the 1915 “Journée du Poilu,”
by Lucien Jonas, State Library of Victoria, Australia 180
9.2 Photograph of tirailleurs sénégalais at Douaumont
from L’Illustration, no. 3906, 12 January 1918,
Wikimedia Commons 184
10.1 1926 photograph of Josephine Baker by Walery, CC0
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution 203
11.1 Vichy propaganda poster promoting the National
Revolution, by R. Vachet, c. 1940–1942, via Wikimedia
Commons 217
12.1 A French Foreign Legionnaire during a sweep through
communist-held areas in the Red River Delta, between
Haiphong and Hanoi. Behind the Legionnaire is a U.S.
gifted tank, ca. 1954, NARA RG 306: Records of
the U.S. Information Agency 248
12.2 French troops seal off Algiers’ casbah, May 27, 1956,
prior to a surprise 18-hour raid during the “Battle of
Algiers”, AP Photo. 251
13.1 Photograph by Monique Hervo of the bidonville La
Folie in Nanterre, a suburb west of Paris, 1964–1965,
©Monique Hervo/“Collection La contemporaine”
LC_HER_02N_B01 263
13.2 May ’68 screenprint poster developed at the Atelier
populaire, using the phrase “L’État c’est moi” (I am the
state) of the absolutist king Louis XIV in connection with
both French president Charles de Gaulle and the workers
and students fighting for power, Victoria University
Library (Toronto), Paris Posters 273
14.1 HLM called Bellefontaine in Toulouse, photo in public
domain, via Wikimedia Commons 286
Maps Running Head Right-hand: Maps
1.1 Map of the French overseas empire before 1763 2

3.1 Europe Under Napoleon (1812) 67
7.1 Map of the Second French Empire, 1880–1914 150
10.1 Map of the French Empire after 1914 194
11.1 Occupation Zones of France during World War II 214
12.1 Map of French decolonization, 1945–1962 255
Preface Preface
France emerged as a truly global power in the seventeenth and early eight-
eenth centuries when it expanded its empire into the Atlantic World and
South Asia. In the following centuries, its intellectual inf luence developed
through the spread of the French Enlightenment and revolutionary ideals
across the world. Imperial conquest shaped French foreign policy through-
out the nineteenth century, from the Napoleonic Wars to the Scramble for
Africa. By the turn of the twentieth century, France controlled the land and
peoples of much of north, west, and central Africa as well as the Southeast
Asian colony it called Indochina and islands in the Caribbean, South Pacific,
and Indian Ocean. Algeria, the urbanized northern tier of which was legally
annexed as French départements in 1848, became a major settler colony for
French and other Mediterranean populations. These colonies played essen-
tial roles in both world wars, providing resources, labor, and even soldiers
that kept the French af loat. The wars of decolonization that broke down
these empires then dramatically restructured the post-World War II political
landscape in France. Traces of empire have lingered long after decoloniza-
tion. In recent years, debates about French identity have grown increasingly
tense, especially around issues of racism, postcolonial immigration, and
ethno-religious discrimination.
Until very recently, a textbook covering the history of modern France
would have limited its coverage almost entirely to events that took place
within the borders of what we call metropolitan France, the country in west-
ern Europe. With the exceptions of the two world wars, and perhaps a
discussion of how the Algerian War of Independence led to the collapse of
the French Fourth Republic in 1958, there would probably be little analysis
of France’s role as a global power since the seventeenth century or the key
role that its overseas empire played in French economic, political, and social
thought in the modern era. Yet the approach to the study of French history
(what we call the historiography of France) has transformed dramatically
over the past two decades. It is now almost impossible for us to study mod-
ern France without also considering how it has been shaped by empire,
slavery, settler colonialism, and the global movement of people, goods, and
ideas since the seventeenth century.
Preface xi
This book tells the story of modern France, its empire, and its global
engagements from the seventeenth century to the present. Drawing on the
most up-to-date scholarship in French and French colonial history but also
African history, Middle Eastern history, Southeast Asian history, and the
history of slavery and the Atlantic World, it illustrates the integral exchanges
that have taken place between France and the modern world. Its focus spans
the intellectual conversations in the era of Enlightenment to the impact
of postcolonial immigration and globalization on French identity and on
France’s diverse population. This book also aims to tell the stories of those
who are not always represented in textbooks because they are not powerful
men in government or industry. It draws on important scholarship in what
we call social history, or the history of everyday life, as well as important
studies of social movements and ideas that have run counter to standard
narratives. It explores the history of women and men who challenged the
status quo as well as those who led the political parties and movements that
governed and those who sought to transform the systems they lived under,
whether through reform or through revolution. It also draws on a wide
body of research in literary studies, film studies, and cultural studies to ana-
lyze how artists, writers, filmmakers, and intellectuals from across France
and its empire responded to the world around them.
This book is organized into 14 chronological chapters, beginning with
Louis XIV’s reign in the seventeenth century, and ends with a concluding
essay that explores the legacy of empire and globalization in France in the
twenty-first century. France is a country that has long-fascinated scholars,
tourists, and even its political enemies, and the chapters that follow share
the story of a truly dynamic country and its peoples. Yet by its very nature,
a textbook cannot cover every event, historical figure, or idea that shaped
France and its empire during the modern era. Fortunately, everything dis-
cussed in this book has been analyzed in much greater depth by scholars
who have done tremendous amounts of textual, archival, and, in some
cases, on-the-ground fieldwork and oral history research on their topics of
expertise. However, my hope is that this book will provide an enticing intro-
duction for you into the history of France, its empire, and its global interac-
tions that will spur you on to further research and study in the field. I wish
you une bonne lecture!
Acknowledgments Running Head Right-hand: Acknowledgments
Numerous friends, colleagues, and students have contributed significant

time and effort to this book. I wish to thank Bonnie Smith for her initial (and
unf lagging) encouragement to undertake this massive project. My USF col-
leagues Brian Connolly, Julia Irwin, and Steve Prince have provided moral
support and helped me obtain financial support to complete this book. Tami
Davis and Theresa Lewis have been the best administrative support anyone
could wish for. Numerous USF students provided research support over the
years, including Brittany Merritt, Sydney Jordan, Alyssa Culp, Taryn Leap,
and Christopher Ogando. Geoff Martin helped me trim and streamline the
manuscript with his amazing editorial skills, while John Wyatt Greenlee
made most of the fantastic maps. A giant thank you to my Routledge editor
Eve Setch, who has been tremendously patient with my interminable delays,
and to her editorial assistants, who have been cheerful and helpful through
the many years I have worked on this book. Thank you as well to the anony-
mous reader who provided many helpful suggestions for revision.
I also wish to thank Sandrine Sanos, Thomas Serres, and Muriam Haleh
Davis for their unf lagging support, great ideas, and professional expertise;
Muriam gets additional thanks for letting me crash on her couch in Mar-
seille for several weeks as I was completing the initial manuscript. Most
importantly, I wish to thank my husband Aaron and family, who lived with
me and this book through hurricanes, professional dramas, and medical
crises, including my father’s slow decline as a result of dementia. Before his
diagnosis, we were in a race to complete our books, and sadly this book
represents the completion of a major project for me but also reminds me of
our great loss. Finally, thanks to my dogs, Gromit and Tegan, for being the
best friends and playmates a historian could ask for.
1 Globalizing France in the
Era of Enlightenment Globalizing France in the Era of Enlightenment
Introduction
Smuggling contraband goods such as tobacco from North America or tex-
tiles from India was serious business in eighteenth-century France. Gangs of
smugglers operated on the borders of France, Switzerland, and Italy, sneaking
goods into France to avoid discovery and taxation by the French state. One
of the most successful smugglers, Louis Mandrin, became a mythical figure in
France, a character akin to Robin Hood, a bandit who fought for the benefit
of the people. Yet the real-life Mandrin, who was born in 1725 and tortured
and executed for his crimes in 1755, was but one piece in a network of trad-
ers, traffickers, and consumers that stretched across the entire globe.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Europeans invested
enormous resources in the expansion of overseas trade and colonial settle-
ments. The resulting globalization of trade then led to a consumer revolu-
tion in Europe between 1650 and 1800, as new material goods, including
textiles, tobacco, coffee, tea, sugar, and spices, entered Europe. Early on
elites gained access to new luxury goods, but by the end of the eighteenth
century, even the lower classes had access to a wider range of consumer
products. Tobacco, in particular, was in high demand, as were calico cotton
textiles from India.
France’s position in the global economy and its relationship to its overseas
empire transformed between 1600 and 1800. By the end of the eighteenth
century, the Caribbean plantation systems, notably the profitable sugar
plantations of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), provided essential rev-
enue for the French state. In numerous wars over the course of the eight-
eenth century, the European powers fought to obtain each other’s colonial
holdings, following economic and political theories that framed one coun-
try’s gain as another’s loss. These colonial wars were fought not just over
issues of economic power but of national prestige, which played out far
from Europe’s capital cities.
Additionally, the circulation of peoples, goods, and ideas enabled by the
rise of globalization and consumerism challenged some of the key social
and political structures of pre-revolutionary France, an era known as the
DOI: 10.4324/b23310-1
2 Globalizing France in the Era of Enlightenment
Map 1.1 Map of the French overseas empire before 1763.
ancien régime (old regime). For more than a century before the French
Revolution in 1789, intellectuals, scientists, and political theorists, among
others, had been challenging the traditional political, social, and religious
structures of French society in a movement known as the Enlightenment.
Their ideas circulated throughout Europe and across the Atlantic Ocean
and were discussed in private salons and coffeehouses while patrons con-
sumed the products that global trade brought to their shores. The globaliz-
ing momentum of the eighteenth century set the stage for the collapse of the
absolutist monarchy and the revolutionary events of the 1780s and 1790s.
The Ancien Régime

Before the French Revolution, France was a monarchy ruled by a series
of kings who claimed the throne based on the rights of heredity and the
grace of God, under the principle of the divine right of kings. Years of
struggle between the monarchy and Protestant and Catholic nobility,
beginning with the French Wars of Religion (1562–1598), peaked during
a seventeenth-century conf lict known as the Fronde (1648–1653). Louis
XIV—the Sun King—came to power in 1643 at the age of five. His mother
Anne of Austria ruled as regent with the guidance of the prime minister,
Cardinal Mazarin, who angered French nobles by raising taxes and plac-
ing financial pressure on elites to raise money for the state. Eventually, a
Globalizing France in the Era of Enlightenment 3
group of powerful nobles who controlled the parlements (royal appeals
courts) rebelled. In the face of impending civil war, Louis and his mother
f led. Once he regained control over the nobles, Louis XIV strengthened
the power of the monarchy, and his form of rule became known as abso-
lutism, a system under which all state power emanated from the person
of the king. To reinforce his power, he established an elaborate system of
court ritual in which nobles vied for special privileges and access to the
king by participating in ceremonies and ritualized etiquette at the opulent
palace of Versailles, outside of Paris. The architecture and art of Versailles,
as well as the theatricality of daily life there, were designed to symbolize
the power of the king and enhance his prestige to his audience of French
nobles and foreign visitors.
The French nobility’s claim to special privileges, both within the court and
outside it, was supported by a social and economic structure known as the
Society of Orders, dating from the medieval period. In the ancien régime, an
individual’s status in the social order was determined by which social group—
or order—they belonged to, which then determined the types of economic,
social, and political privileges each individual or group was accorded as well
as the types of duties and taxes they owed to the crown. The central structure
of this hierarchy was known as the Three Estates: the First Estate was the
clergy, who responded to the spiritual needs of the king and his subjects; the
Second Estate was the nobility, who traditionally led the defense of the king-
dom; and the Third Estate were the commoners, who comprised 97 percent
of the king’s subjects and who contributed to the nation through their labor.
One of the main privileges that both the First and Second Estates claimed was
exemption from direct taxes on their land and income and from the corvée, a
labor tax performed primarily by peasants.
The power of the church, like that of the nobility, was dependent on the
king, who was head of the Gallican (French) church. Under an agreement
with the pope, the French king had broad control over Catholic affairs in
France, including the right to appoint bishops and cardinals to positions
throughout France. One of the most profound conf licts of early modern
France had been the Wars of Religion, which drew Roman Catholics and
Protestant Calvinists (Huguenots), into years of conf lict that led to the death
of millions from war, disease, and famine. The wars ended in 1598 when the
Protestant king Henry IV converted to Catholicism and issued the Edict of
Nantes, which granted civil rights and freedom of conscience to Protestants.
Nearly a hundred years later, in 1685, Louis XIV revoked the edict, lead-
ing to the persecution and exile of between 150,000 and 200,000 French
Protestants. Many f led to the Netherlands and Prussia, forming a diaspora
that openly challenged the legitimacy of the French absolutist monarchy.
Despite the crown’s support for Catholicism, not all Catholics found favor
with the king. While the Jesuits were strong defenders of royal absolutism, a
theological movement called Jansenism, whose teachings appeared to Louis
XIV as overtly Protestant in nature, found itself under direct attack from
the crown. Jansenists continued to challenge the monarchy well into the
eighteenth century in spite of the king’s attempts to destroy their movement.
To further strengthen his power, Louis XIV centralized all bureaucratic
authority under himself. A system of administrators, called intendants, was
responsible for carrying out his orders across the kingdom. He also further
limited the power of three institutions that challenged monarchical author-
ity, including the Estates-General, a representative body summoned periodi-
cally by French monarchs to authorize tax increases, and the Assembly of
Notables, an advisory body handpicked by the king at moments of national
crisis. The third and most powerful of these institutions were the 13 parle-
ments, or high courts of law. The Parlement of Paris was the largest and
most powerful, its jurisdiction covering nearly half the country. Any royal
edicts were not official until they were registered by the parlements, which
could withhold their assent by formulating a remonstrance if they believed
that the king’s edict contravened the laws of the state. In the wake of the
Fronde, Louis XIV attempted to limit the power of the parlements to issue
remonstrances. However, after his death in 1715, the parlements regained
their power to protest monarchical edicts.
During the War of Spanish Succession (1701–1713), England and Aus-
tria went to war with France and Spain to prevent Louis XIV from placing
his grandson on the throne of Spain. When the French won, Louis uni-
fied the French and Spanish monarchies under the Bourbon dynasty. This
outcome, settled by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, allowed France to gain
access to Spanish colonies and trade in the New World, including significant
amounts of gold and silver bullion. The crown’s financial advisors and those
engaged in commerce immediately sought to enhance state and individual
wealth through investments in global trade and overseas colonial expan-
sion. However, the war had strained France’s treasury to the limits, in large
part because the French army, with 400,000 soldiers, had become the larg-
est in Europe.
By Louis XIV’s death in 1715, France was in economic crisis. The succes-
sion had not gone smoothly. Louis’s great-grandson, Louis XV, succeeded
him, although he was only 5 years old, while Louis XIV’s nephew, the Duke
of Orléans, acted as regent. The duke reversed course on several of Louis
XIV’s policies, devolving more power into the hands of the parlements and
attempting to give some nobles more say in political affairs. But one pro-
ject he undertook had disastrous financial implications. Attempting to raise
money for the treasury, the duke gave John Law, a Scottish financier, the
approval to create a state bank. Due to the low supply of gold and silver,
the bank issued paper money as credit, which was guaranteed by stocks in
new trading companies Law was developing in the French territory of the
Mississippi Valley in North America. However, speculation, known as the
“Mississippi Bubble,” quickly overwhelmed the bank, as people sought to
cash in their shares for nonexistent coins. In 1720, the bank crashed, leaving
France in even more dire economic straits.
Another means that French monarchs had developed to raise money iron-
ically destabilized the very social and political hierarchies they sought to
maintain. Known as venality, this practice involved selling noble offices and
titles to wealthy members of the Third Estate. In theory, one was born into
nobility, and membership in that estate, along with the endowed privileges
(and duties), passed down to one’s children. When members of the Third
Estate purchased a venal office, the position became inheritable after either
20 years or a generation of service. By 1789, there were more than 70,000
venal offices in France, and 300,000 French subjects relied on these posi-
tions for their livelihood or status. During times of war or financial distress,
monarchs exploited this system and could reverse the sale of offices and
reimburse the office holders when the financial climate improved. Yet the
entire system undermined the supposedly natural hierarchies of the social
order; by the end of the eighteenth century, two-thirds of French noble fami-
lies could be considered “new” nobles, having obtained this status after
1700.
Under the ancien régime, the privileges of the clergy and the nobility were
tied not only to their relationship to the king but also to their wealth and
property. The Catholic Church made the vast majority of its income from
its rural and urban land holdings and the tithe, a percentage of goods or
money that French subjects paid directly to the church. While the amount
of property the nobility owned—primarily manorial estates—varied widely,
nobles typically gained income from the division of these estates into small
agricultural parcels, which they rented to peasant farmers, who then paid a
variety of taxes and seigneurial dues. Most peasant land holdings were small
plots (often less than a single hectare), and peasants were deeply burdened
by taxes and dues, but their land was usually inheritable and passed down
through families, which was uncommon in Europe. While some peasants
could afford to live on the cultivation of their land, most took on other jobs,
as servants or day-laborers or skilled artisans. Typically, all members of a
peasant family participated in the family economy; men cultivated fields or
worked as craftsmen, while women often engaged in textile piecework such
as spinning or weaving alongside their normal household labor.
Manufacturing, especially the textile trade, also grew significantly over
the course of the eighteenth century, which expanded the commercial econ-
omy. Members of the urban lower classes often worked as skilled artisans,
organized in guilds. The textile guilds notably included women workers,
who could be found at all levels of the French labor force. Although women
were considered minors typically until the age of 25 or until they married,
they could own property and worked in a wide range of trades. Addition-
ally, there were many female heads of households, including aristocratic
widows and wives of soldiers or men who travelled abroad to trade or work
in the colonies. Women also joined convents, where they had greater con-
trol over their time and labor as well as the disposition of their money and
property.
Peasants were subjected to numerous forms of taxation. They paid mano-
rial dues in the form of labor and gave part of their crops in kind to their
landlords. They might also have paid tolls to access the village market, the
grain mill, or the wine press. Additionally, they were taxed by the state via
a land tax known as the taille and the corvée (labor tax) as well as taxes
on salt, alcohol, or tobacco. They were also sometimes fined for failures to
pay. This system of tax collection was incredibly unpopular because the
collection of customs and indirect taxes was privately outsourced to “tax
farmers,” whose armed guards collaborated directly with tax courts and vio-
lently repressed smugglers. Peasants and those working in the underground
economy often found this system arbitrary and brutal, particularly when
the nobility benefited visibly from privileges such as sole access to hunt-
ing rights and exemption from these same taxes that enriched them. Peas-
ant revolts occurred frequently, especially against tax collection, although
drought-ruined harvests and rising food prices also led to peasant unrest.
Epidemics of diseases such as typhus and typhoid fever were also a concern,
particularly for those with few resources, and led some peasants to move to
cities in search of aid.
French cities grew significantly during the eighteenth century (around
48 percent), largely due to the economic recovery during the 1720s and
1730s and the enormous expansion in foreign trade between 1730 and
the late 1770s. Unsurprisingly, the major port cities (Nantes, Bordeaux,
Marseille) expanded due to this growth in the colonial trade, while Paris
became the second-largest city in Europe. By the mid-1700s, the growing
merchant class and emerging bourgeoisie (property-owning middle class)
owned a significant amount of property in France and they further fueled
the consumer revolution by purchasing and showcasing luxury clothing and
housewares, many of which were newly imported into France. While this
signaled improved living conditions for many in France, others saw it as
an unsettling of the social order. The conspicuous consumption of luxury
goods had formerly signaled the elite status of the nobility, but now wealthy
members of the Third Estate could dress in luxurious clothing and live in
vast houses filled with fine furniture and art objects like any member of the
First or Second Estate. The status and livelihood of this emerging bourgeoi-
sie, however, were increasingly dependent on France’s global trade, colonial
settlements, and slave plantations across the French empire, especially in the
Atlantic world.
Trade, Settlement, and Slavery in the Indian Ocean,

New France, and the Caribbean
French trade in the Indian Ocean began in the sixteenth century, with trad-
ers seeking spices that were particularly valued for medicinal purposes. In
1664, Louis XIV’s minister Jean Baptiste-Colbert approved the creation of
the French East India Company, modeled on British and Dutch joint stock
companies, with the Sun King as primary stockholder. Colbert was a strong
proponent of mercantilism, the economic theory that dominated Europe
between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Mercantilists proposed that
a state’s political and economic power was tied to its trade balance; thus,
a strong state should export more goods than it imported. Additionally,
the accumulation of gold and silver through trade was perceived as essen-
tial since these commodities (unlike others) were supposedly finite. Over-
seas colonies that could act as trading ports and export markets were also
viewed as imperative. Accordingly, the 50-year charter for the French East
India Company gave the company a monopoly on French Indian Ocean
trade. It also allowed the company to claim judicial authority over French
territories in the Indian Ocean and to grant land concessions in Madagascar
and the neighboring islands of Île Bourbon (present-day Réunion) and Île
de France (present-day Mauritius). Like the British East India Company,
the French Company negotiated directly with Mughal and local authorities
for access to trading sites and began establishing trading posts at strategic
coastal locations across the South Asian subcontinent.
From its Indian trading ports, the French purchased spices like cloves,
nutmeg, and pepper along with sugar, indigo, and minerals. The greatest
demand was for textiles, however, and French ships brought bright silks
and calicoes back to Europe. Merchants also purchased Indian textiles to
trade with African elites in exchange for ivory and enslaved people. When
the company collapsed after Louis XIV’s reign, it merged with the Company
of the West in 1719 to form the Compagnie des Indes (the India Company).
This new company formed a global trading network covering territory
from East Asia to the Atlantic World, bringing silk, tea, lacquered goods,
and porcelain from China, spices from present-day Malaysia, and coffee
from Yemen, among other luxury commodities. During the eighteenth cen-
tury, European traders—particularly the French and Portuguese—bought
enslaved people from India and sold them in the French colonies. The vast
majority of those enslaved on the Indian subcontinent were peasant women
and children. The French trading enclave of Pondichéry, on the southeastern
coast of India, served as the French administrative center in India. It also
housed a number of Catholic missionary orders since the propagation of
Christianity was written into the charter of the Compagnie des Indes.
Converting the “savage” heathens of North America to Christianity was
also one of the oft-stated motives the French gave for their colonization of
the territory known as La Nouvelle France (New France). Early on, however,
this was just a pretext to gain access to territory in the so-called New World
controlled primarily by Spain and Portugal. Louis XIV also claimed that
French colonization of North America was necessary to block the spread of
British power on the continent and prevent British incursion into Mexico.
Although the first French explorers arrived off the coast of North America
in 1524, the French only set about creating settlements of missionaries and
fur traders in Acadia (present-day Maine, Nova Scotia, and parts of eastern
Quebec) and the St. Lawrence valley of Canada in the 1600s. New France
was France’s largest overseas colony although the French lost Acadia to
Britain under the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. The colony sup-
plied fish, furs, and some botanical products, like ginseng, but in contrast
to the sugar colonies of the Caribbean, it did not produce much wealth for
France. Montreal, founded in 1642 as a missionary settlement, functioned
as a rendezvous point for the interior fur trade. By 1750, there were more
than 60,000 European residents in the Canadian regions of New France,
mostly residing in Montreal and along the St. Lawrence valley. The French
also built a commercial settlement at Detroit in the 1670s, which eventually
became a military garrison. From there, French missionaries and settlers
began making their way down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico,
creating rural settlements in Illinois (beginning with Peoria in 1673) and
claiming the territory of Louisiana in 1682.
In 1632, Cardinal Richelieu awarded the Jesuit Order an exclusive pat-
ent to convert the Indigenous peoples of New France to Christianity, a
task the Jesuits found much more challenging than anticipated. The 1627
charter of the Company of New France had also sought to draw the
Micmacs and Hurons, Iroquois and Algonquins, among others, into the
French community by giving them the rights of all natural-born French-
men upon conversion to the Roman Catholic faith. Additionally, in 1639,
the Ursuline order of nuns, under the leadership of Marie de l’Incarnation,
signed an agreement with the Jesuits that allowed the nuns to set up a
convent in Quebec City, including a school for young Indigenous girls.
Despite their efforts, however, Catholic missionaries found the Indigenous
population generally resistant to conversion. Those who did convert typi-
cally did so only after the disintegration of their communities through
military defeats and disease.
French relations with Indigenous people in New France during the seven-
teenth century have sometimes been described as paternalistic, assimilation-
ist, less confrontational than those of British settlers and Native Americans,
and more humane than the Caribbean sugar colonies. These observations
tend to be based on the fact that because there were many fewer French set-
tlers than Indigenous peoples in New France, settlers were forced to adapt
to Indigenous cultures and economies for their own survival while some
Indigenous groups may have benefited from European goods and protec-
tion. Additionally, the French viewed Indigenous people as “savages” who
could be uplifted by their contact with French culture and Christianity. To
this end, the Catholic Church and French state initially sanctioned French-
Indigenous intermarriage in French North America, while prohibiting it in
other overseas colonies. Indigenous women who married Frenchmen were
frequently subjected to processes of “Frenchification,” which included
wearing European dress and baptizing their children as Catholics. Yet facets
of this relationship were far less benign than this description might suggest.
The behaviors and performance of Indigenous women’s “Frenchness” were
constantly scrutinized for evidence of their (in)ability to overcome their skin
color, which ultimately defined their difference and inferiority.
The system of slavery further illuminates the complex and shifting catego-
ries of racial difference that emerged during France’s early colonial empire.
The French attitude toward slavery changed over time, depending on who
was enslaved and where. Prior to European arrival, Indigenous nations had
taken captives during conf lict and brought them into their societies in a
variety of roles. Some Frenchmen had themselves become captives and were
bound into alliances of kinship with Indigenous nations, for example. Other
Frenchmen also found that they might receive an enslaved Native American
through trade and negotiation, whose role could entail working as a domes-
tic servant, a translator, or even a diplomatic agent between the French and
various Indigenous societies. While enslaved Indigenous people could func-
tion as commodities of trade, alliances, and war, their enslavement was not
necessarily permanent, meaning they could potentially gain release and their
status was not inherited. Although French settlers and even missionaries
readily engaged in the Indigenous slave trade, they did not necessarily view
Indigenous slavery in New France as natural or inevitable, which distin-
guished these practices from chattel slavery, which was developing at the
same time in the Caribbean. These practices in North America would later
evolve, however, as plantation slavery in the Caribbean and the importa-
tion of enslaved Africans into North America transformed both French legal
approaches to slavery and local understandings of who could be enslaved
and under what conditions.
After two centuries of Spanish and Portuguese dominance in the southern
Atlantic region, in the 1600s, the Dutch, British, and French also began to
seek settlements and trade routes in the area. Colonizing Caribbean islands,
they built plantations for cash crops such as coffee, cotton, tobacco, and
sugar. Beginning in 1620, the French began officially colonizing Martinique
and Guadeloupe, while French buccaneers set up their own settlements on
Tortuga Island, and pirates established bases and farms on the western side
of Hispaniola, which became the profitable colony of Saint-Domingue.
Until the mid-seventeenth century, French indentured laborers and enslaved
Indigenous laborers mostly cultivated easily farmed crops like tobacco in
the Caribbean; however, the use of these labor pools receded during the
seventeenth century with the shift to sugar cultivation, which was more
lucrative but required substantially more demanding physical labor. This
led to the importation of enslaved African labor to the French Caribbean.
The plantation economy of Saint-Domingue became increasingly impor-
tant for France; by 1750, Saint-Domingue was the world’s largest sugar
exporter, and sugar imports into France were typically re-exported to other
European countries, greatly enriching the merchant classes of port cities
such as La Rochelle, Bordeaux, and Nantes. As on Martinique and Gua-
deloupe, enslaved Africans made up the vast majority of Saint-Domingue’s
population, despite 5–10 percent of the enslaved population dying every
Figure 1.1 1665 engraving of a sugar plantation in the Antilles, Library of Congress,

Illus. in F2001.R62 (Rare Book RR).
year from disease, malnutrition, and overwork. Sugar plantations were

large, often comprising 200–300 enslaved Africans. Meanwhile, the families
of many French plantation owners remained in France, and hired managers
frequently oversaw their plantations and enslaved labor. As such, the white
population of the island tended to be creoles, the term used to describe
Europeans born in the colonies.
The French justified enslaving Africans in the seventeenth century by
claiming that the practice was already an element of war among African
nations, and thus the slave trade was legal between sovereign nations.
Beginning in 1664, Louis XIV gave the Compagnie des Indes Occidentales
(the French West India Company) and its successors (the Senegal Company
and the Guinea Company) the exclusive charter to negotiate treaties with
“Negro Kings” to purchase and transport enslaved Africans to France’s col-
onies. In 1685, Louis XIV issued a royal decree, the Code Noir, establish-
ing the regulations governing the practice of slavery and relations between
slaveholders and the enslaved in France’s Caribbean colonies. It was later
adapted to French colonies in North America.
The Code Noir made overseers responsible for “maintaining” their cap-
tives, limited the types of punishments they could mete out, and claimed
to protect enslaved populations from abusive slaveholders. The Code also
required the Christianization of African captives under the doctrines of
the Catholic Church and prohibited slaveholders from separating families.
But there was very little oversight of its implementation in the colonies.
Instead, violence was the primary means through which slaveholders
controlled their enslaved populations in the Caribbean and in Louisiana,
where in 1719 enslaved Africans began working on tobacco and indigo
plantations. Enslaved people were forbidden from carrying guns, knives,
or menacing objects and were violently punished for any number of infrac-
tions. Legally defined as property, enslaved Africans could be inherited
and their enslaved status transferred from mother to child. This ensured
that if a child had a French father and an enslaved African mother, the
child’s status replicated the mother’s. Enslaved women were subject to
rape by their white slaveholders, as sexual violence was yet another tool of
coercion. It was also common for white colonists to take enslaved African
women as mistresses, sometimes developing long-term relationships that
produced mixed-race (métis) children, who occasionally gained their free-
dom from their white fathers. This happened with enough frequency that
a significant population of free people of color (known as gens de couleur)
had developed in colonies like Saint-Domingue by the end of the eight-
eenth century, which had an important impact on the racial hierarchies of
the plantation colonies.
Under the Code Noir, free people of color had been granted the same
“rights, privileges, and immunities” as freeborn persons, and many held
prominent positions within the society of Saint-Domingue; indeed, several
hundred of them were, themselves, slaveholding planters and merchants
who owned indigo or coffee plantations. Free men of color also participated
in the colony’s security regime, joining a police force called the maréchaussée
after 1730. Free people of color often intermarried with the local white
population in the colony and were treated much like white French citi-
zens. However, over the course of the eighteenth century, “men of African
descent” were singled out in an increasing number of laws that limited their
access to rights and privileges of white French men.
Communities of gens de couleur also emerged in the Louisiana terri-
tory beginning in the early eighteenth century, some coming from diverse
locations in the Atlantic world, others escaping slavery in North America.
They were often attracted to the limited rights they could obtain under the
Code Noir, which was introduced into Louisiana in 1724. They were soon
outnumbered, however, by an inf lux of enslaved Africans (nearly 6,000
were imported between 1719 and 1731) brought directly from Africa to
work on plantations and do other forms of hard physical labor, includ-
ing building the infrastructure of New Orleans. The French continued
to use Indigenous labor as well, and many Africans moved easily among
Indigenous societies in the area, sometimes marrying into them, prompt-
ing French officials to become concerned about African-Indigenous alli-
ances against the French. The Natchez revolt saw this alliance come to
fruition. After numerous conf licts over French land seizures, the Indig-
enous Natchez attacked French settlements in 1729, killing more than
200 French colonists but sparing the lives of the enslaved Africans, who
escaped to freedom, some settling with the Natchez. Racial categories
that had emerged in the Caribbean began to shape French colonial policy
toward Indigenous slavery in New France. At the beginning of the eight-
eenth century, French officials now opposed intermarriage between French
and Indigenous people in New France, even banning the practice in the
Louisiana territory in 1735. This became less urgent, however, with the
outbreak of the Seven Years’ War in 1756.
Growing conf lict and rivalries between the French and British over colo-
nial boundaries and trade led to the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) and the
resulting loss of most of France’s North American colonies. The war was
fought in North America, India, the West Indies, and central Europe, draw-
ing much of Europe into the fighting through defensive alliances that pit-
ted Great Britain and Prussia against France, Austria, Russia, and Sweden.
British naval superiority ultimately defeated the French, and in the Treaty of
Paris (1763), the French ceded their territory in North America (including
Canada and Louisiana) to Britain. France was allowed to retain five trading
posts in India (Pondichéry, Chandernagor, Yanoan, Karikal, and Mahé),
although it could only maintain basic military support there. France was
also allowed to keep its Caribbean territories, its most important sources of
colonial wealth.
Race and Slavery in the French Empire

Throughout the eighteenth century, French merchants and the French state
became increasingly dependent on the wealth created by colonial trade and
the system of slavery across the empire. Conf licts began to emerge, how-
ever, between planters and French authorities. The planters chafed under the
economic restrictions placed upon them by the crown, specifically a system
called the Exclusif, which forced them to trade only with French merchants
and ships; they also resented the limitations on importing enslaved peoples
into France. This latter issue arose when colonists sought to bring their
enslaved workers back to France to use as domestic servants. Between the
mid-sixteenth and the late eighteenth century, it was commonly held that
slavery could not exist on French soil due to the incompatibility of slavery
and natural law, and in fact, multiple enslaved people arriving in France
had successfully sued for their freedom. Even Louis XIV agreed that slavery
should not be allowed in France. Yet, as more and more enslaved peoples
arrived in France over the course of the eighteenth century, the principle
shifted, as did the definition of who could be enslaved and who was allowed
into metropolitan France.
A key element of the French aversion to slavery in the sixteenth century
was the widespread fear of white French enslavement by Barbary pirates
operating in the Mediterranean off the coast of Algiers. Tens of thousands
of Frenchmen and women had been enslaved, and popular captivity nar-
ratives depicted the horrors suffered by enslaved Christians under Muslim
masters. French intellectual arguments and legal treatises sought to rec-
oncile the economic rationale for slavery abroad and the free soil doc-
trine at home. The Edict of 1716, published just after Louis XIV’s death,
for example, laid out three possible conditions under which slaveholders
could legally bring their enslaved laborers to France without them being
automatically freed (religious instruction, the learning of a trade, or serv-
ing their “masters” as domestic servants during the overseas voyage); it
also prohibited the sale or trade of enslaved people within France and
made slaveholders responsible for keeping and feeding the enslaved while
in France. Slaveholders were among the most forceful proponents of such
laws because they hoped to reap the benefits of the status that this form of
property conveyed in the metropole. The Parlement of Paris had failed to
register this edict, however, so certain areas under its jurisdiction refused
to enforce it; as such, some enslaved people were automatically freed upon
their arrival in France.
Although it is impossible to know how many enslaved Africans or
free Blacks had made their way to France during the eighteenth century,
records indicate that as many as 4,000–5,000 had passed through (the
real number is likely much greater, as many slaveholders simply did not
register their enslaved laborers). As enslaved people increasingly sued for
their freedom once in France, notably in the 1760s and 1770s, the gov-
ernment implemented legislation aiming to stem the tide of new arrivals.
The increasing presence of mixed-race families, with complex inherit-
ance problems, also began threatening the social order. The consequence
was that French law began to use race as a category to distinguish who
could have access to the full rights of French subjects and began shift-
ing free people of color into categories previously reserved solely for
enslaved peoples. Thus, both enslaved and free people of color in France
often found themselves caught in a state between slavery and freedom,
with their status determined more by the intimate and specific circum-
stances of their relations to slaveholders and their communities than by
edicts from the crown.
A 1762 ordinance mandated that all French residents declare all people
of color living within their households, regardless of their enslaved or free
status. This made race the operative category that determined their legal-
ity. Furthermore, in 1776 a revised proposal used language such as “the
race of negroes” instead of the word “slave” and clearly sought to prevent
Blacks from entering France while placing under surveillance those who
were already there. To this end, the Edict of 1777 banned the entry not of
“enslaved people” but all new arrivals of “blacks, mulattoes, and people of
color” into France, and it instituted penalties for those already in France
who failed to register with the state.1 This shift illustrates a key intellec-
tual transformation taking place in France during the Enlightenment, which
blurred the distinctions that had been drawn between enslaved Africans and
free Blacks.
The Enlightenment in France and Beyond
The circulation of plants, animals, peoples, goods, capital, and ideas that
had enabled the expansion of the first French empire also facilitated the
growth of an intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment. Although
the Enlightenment spread throughout Europe and North America, begin-
ning in the mid-1750s, France—and particularly the city of Paris—became
the vibrant center of intellectual and scientific production and debate. The
French Enlightenment was built around social ties, as thinkers gathered in
private salons, Freemason lodges, universities, and royal academies to dis-
cuss new ideas or their latest publications. But it was also made possible by
the proliferation of new print technologies, like pamphlets, newspapers, and
encyclopedias as well as more traditional books and letters, which enabled
the spread of this new knowledge to a wider audience. The improved com-
munication infrastructure of postal services and global transportation net-
works physically circulated these ideas—and many Enlightenment thinkers
themselves—across local and national boundaries.
The key writers and thinkers of the French Enlightenment have come to
be known as philosophes, although they were not necessarily philosophers.
They were more like the public intellectuals of our contemporary period.
They described their intellectual community as the Republic of Letters, a
concept that referred to this world of thinkers and writers that transcended
national borders. In the earlier phase of the Enlightenment, they commonly
held positions within the Royal Academy of Sciences or the Académie fran-
çaise. Some held positions in the University of Paris, which transmitted
scientific and philosophical knowledge to French elites. However, by the
mid-1700s, their public debates shifted into Freemason lodges and salons
in private homes.
Previous generations of historians have depicted the Enlightenment as
a unified pan-European enterprise in which mostly white male intellectu-
als brought an unruly set of political, religious, and scientific systems into
rational order and established the intellectual foundations for Western secu-
lar modernity. However, historians now tend to interpret the Enlightenment
as much more contradictory and diverse (in terms of both its geography and
its participants). Some historians have identified distinctions between “radi-
cal” and fringe Enlightenment thinkers, who challenged the very bases of
the social and political order, and more mainstream Enlightenment figures,
who retained close ties to the monarchy, Catholic Church, and nobility.
However, these categories are not quite so straightforward, as patronage
networks shifted over time, as did the understanding of what was radical.
Enlightenment philosophes investigated a wide variety of topics: science
and mathematics, the nature of history and the function of government,
education, and family life. They sought to apply reason and rational expla-
nations to better understand the workings of ideas and subjects that had
previously been explained as supernatural phenomena or as governed by
a natural and unchanging godly order, directed by a king. The Enlighten-
ment is thus often described as a revolutionary shift toward a seculariza-
tion of knowledge and social organization. The mid-eighteenth century
saw the publication of several of the most inf luential texts of the French
Enlightenment, including Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws (1748), the
Comte de Buffon’s Histoire naturelle (1749), and the prospectus to Jean le
Rond d’Alembert and Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie (1750), each of which
challenged some fundamental element of previous human knowledge.
D’Alembert described this period as a mid-century awakening of reason, as
philosophes sought to subject the values and structures of society to critique.
Although most Enlightenment philosophes could gain access to royal per-
missions for their texts and treatises to be printed, censorship bodies could
still prevent the publication of texts deemed overly critical of the monar-
chy, the church, or popular Enlightenment figures. Censorship became more
common after the 1750s, when an assassination attempt convinced Louis
XV that Enlightenment authors were putting dangerous ideas into the pub-
lic sphere. Most famously, the state revoked the printing privilege for the
massive multi-authored Encyclopédie in 1759. Although its editor Diderot
could be considered a “radical” philosophe, many of the contributors to the
Encyclopédie, including Voltaire, were firmly in the mainstream. Concerns
over censorship were one reason why some philosophes cultivated alliances
with powerful figures, who could protect their interests and broker their
access to wider audiences.
Certain philosophes sought to avoid directly challenging authorities in
power, couching their critiques in the form of fictional narratives or episto-
lary novels. Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721) took the form of letters
between two fictional Persian noblemen who were traveling through France
and critiquing its society and institutions. Montesquieu embedded a clear
critique of Louis XIV’s absolutism and compared Christianity and Islam,
with a resulting critical commentary on Jansenism. His text The Spirit of the
Laws (1748) was a much more direct work of political theory that became
inf luential across the Atlantic World, mainly because of its discussions of
the idea of a separation of powers. In a comparable trajectory, Voltaire
(the pen name of François-Marie Arouet) satirically critiqued the Catho-
lic Church and secular political authorities in his 1759 novel Candide but
then turned to more direct criticisms of what he viewed as the injustices of
French politics and society, notably religious intolerance and the imbalance
of power within the society of orders. Yet Voltaire disparaged democracy as
rule by the mob, espousing an enlightened absolutist monarchy as the best
form of government.
One of the key questions of Enlightenment thought was how a society
could function best. The philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau, known for his
generally pessimistic analyses of the relationship between the individual and
society, argued that civilization—especially the corrosive effects of luxury—
had corrupted humanity. Instead, the ideal situation was a “state of nature”
in which humans could reconnect with their authentic selves and achieve
human liberty. Building on the idea of the social contract introduced by
English philosopher John Locke, Rousseau argued in his most well-known
work, The Social Contract (1762), that individuals cannot survive solely
on their own and that society depends on the co-operation of others. The
source of law and order should emerge from the collective will of the peo-
ple and then apply to all. Rousseau’s works critiqued not only the absolut-
ist monarchy and the social hierarchies of the ancien régime but also the
Enlightenment project itself through his rejection of civil society.
The idea of sociability, or human interactions that translated into
“higher” civilization and intellectual discourse, enabled French philosophes
to critique both “inferior” foreign cultures and elements of French society,
politics, and culture that inhibited a well-ordered society. Christianity, with
its pre-Enlightenment precepts about human behavior and morality, had
provided one of the main organizing frameworks of French social relations.
Enlightenment thinkers, however, contributed to a secularization of social
behaviors through their attempts to identify theories and practices of socia-
bility that would encourage virtuous behavior and deter harmful, immoral
behaviors. Ironically, Rousseau was notorious for his anti-social behaviors,
including deserting his five children in foundling homes in order to have
the freedom to write his famous treatises on the proper conduct of educa-
tion (Emile) and sentimental family life (La Nouvelle Héloïse). Yet it was
through domestic family life that Enlightenment thinkers envisioned a new
mode of virtuous sociability and sentimental attachment, which permeated
their writings and public behaviors.
Additionally, Enlightenment salons, the most important of which were
run by women, became one of the central spaces in which new French prac-
tices of civility were cultivated. Salonnières, like Marie-Thérèse Geoffrin,
Julie de Lespinasse, and Suzanne Necker (the wife of Louis XVI’s finance
minister Jacques Necker and mother of Germaine de Staël, the promi-
nent post-revolutionary intellectual), formalized the rituals of the salon by
organizing the scheduled events in their homes. This typically featured a
social meal, preceded or followed by a talk or discussion on the work of
an artist or a man of letters, and a mix of attendees. They also worked
to create harmony among potentially discordant and unruly philosophical
debates. Meeting weekly, the men and women in attendance were expected
to become adept at the art of conversation and intellectual exchange, com-
ing together, ideally, in a democratic space to discuss and debate ideas. As
a woman, the salonnière was believed to be without an ego and skilled at
the diplomacy needed to bring brilliant men with strong personalities as
equals into the discussion. The best salonnières were also skilled at politics
and used their connections to facilitate access to more powerful patrons for
those philosophes that they deemed worthy.
Of course, French philosophes had fundamental disagreements over ques-
tions like the nature of divinity, whether nature alone directs the universe,
or the extent to which commerce and the pursuit of property had led to
the destruction of the self. However, the collective intellectual engagement
in these debates, whether in person, through correspondence, or in print
was a singular achievement. Collaborative endeavors like the Encyclopédie
illustrate one such exceptional aspect of the Enlightenment republic of let-
ters. The 17 volumes of text and 11 volumes of illustration plates of the
Encyclopédie contained 74,000 articles written by more than 130 different
contributors, including notable entries by Diderot (who wrote several thou-
sand of the articles in addition to editing the text), the Baron d’Holbach on
science and religion, Rousseau on political theory, and Voltaire on litera-
ture, history, and philosophy.
Scholars have noted that the Enlightenment effort to define and classify
the natural and scientific world became central to emerging discussions
about race, which also shaped broader European discourses on racial slav-
ery by the mid-eighteenth century. The Comte de Buffon’s Histoire naturelle,
for example, created a hierarchical mapping of humankind, which claimed
that Africans were fundamentally suited to slavery. This human classifi-
cation movement is also visible in the Encyclopédie, where the entry for
Nègre defines Black people as a “new species of mankind.” Meanwhile, the
first American edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica from 1798 applied
negative physical and personality characteristics to the “Negroes,” describ-
ing them as an “unhappy race” with notorious vices, including “idleness,
treachery, revenge, cruelty, impudence, stealing, lying, profanity, debauch-
ery, nastiness, and intemperance.”2 By contrast, the Abbé Raynal’s multi-
volume Histoire des deux Indes, first printed in the 1770s, documented the
injustices of slavery in the European conquest for overseas empire. The text
was suppressed by Louis XVI in 1781 and Raynal f led into exile.
Even if only a small fraction of the French population ever visited a salon
or read texts like the Encyclopédie, growing numbers of people throughout
France and the Atlantic world began engaging with Enlightenment ideas
by the late eighteenth century. Moving well beyond the wealthy urban
elites and members of both the First and Second Estates who had access to
political and economic power, these ideas spread quickly beyond Paris into
provincial cities and towns and across national borders. Movements for
political reform arose from within the monarchy, and there was growing
public enthusiasm and support for events like the American Revolution,
which drew much of its ideological basis from Enlightenment thought. The
numerous critiques of the ancien régime were hitting their marks.
Challenges to Absolutism
Attempts to reform the political, social, and economic systems of the abso-
lutist monarchy began in earnest in the second half of the eighteenth century.
The advisors to Louis XV (r. 1715–1774) recognized that France needed
more revenue to maintain the country’s domestic obligations and global
prestige. Absolutism was already an unstable system due to its internal con-
tradictions, including the sale of venal offices and the new wealth and class
instability created by global trade. Additionally, specific policies and prac-
tices of the monarchy, the church, and the nobility had come under direct
fire from a variety of sources, including colonial planters and merchants
unhappy with trade policies and Enlightenment thinkers who critiqued the
political and economic systems of both church and state.
Economic issues were central to these reform movements in the decades
before the French Revolution. Despite complaints that French subjects were
overtaxed, the French actually paid lower taxes than the British. The prob-
lem was incompetent and outdated modes of taxation that were tied to the
complex privileges of the Society of Orders and a decentralized method of
tax collection that enabled local tax collectors to keep much of the revenue
rather than forwarding it on to the crown. Additionally, without a national
bank, the government was forced to seek high-interest loans from interna-
tional lenders to pay for its expensive foreign wars; by the 1780s, the French
state was paying more than half its tax revenues toward the interest on its
loans.
The Physiocrats, a group of Enlightenment thinkers, provided much
of the intellectual basis for government-led attempts at economic reform
beginning in the 1750s. They argued that the French economy was over-
reliant on the colonial and global trading system, specifically the mercantil-
ist mode of thought that enforced trade restrictions and tariffs and which
forced France to engage in systemic warfare to maintain its position within
the global trade and power hierarchy. The extractive practices developed in
the colonies had been imported back to Europe, Physiocrats argued, which
led to the overtaxing of citizens and discouraged productive enterprises and
investment in France itself. They reasoned instead that French soil was the
best guarantee of economic prosperity and that the state should support free
markets, the free circulation of goods, the abolition of guild restrictions,
and the abolition of tax privileges in favor of a single land tax, which would
entail the abolition of the entire system of orders.
Physiocrats pushed hard for government reforms, but they frequently met
popular opposition. In the 1760s, the government abolished restrictions on
grain sales, hoping to encourage production in France and expand its tax
base through the export of grain. However, bad harvests led to food short-
ages within France and made export impossible. After Louis XV’s death, his
son Louis XVI’s Physiocratic finance minister Turgot attempted to deregu-
late the grain trade again in 1774, which led to rising prices in the cities
and the so-called Flour War in 1775. Turgot then tried to abolish the urban
guilds in 1776, arguing that they restricted trade competition of manufac-
tured goods. This set off massive protests among guild members as well as
resistance from the parlements. Ultimately, Turgot backed down.
Reforming the systems of global trade and colonial imports and exports
was especially complex to negotiate. The Physiocratic arguments about the
weaknesses of the French commercial economy had a clear impact, notably
through comparisons to the British who had significantly greater shipping
capacity and vaster export markets in North America. Yet, for all the argu-
ments in favor of strengthening agricultural and manufacturing production
capacity within France, the fact remained that sugar production and exports
from Saint-Domingue remained one of France’s central sources of revenue.
Crucially, these colonial imports were deeply embedded in the consump-
tion patterns of eighteenth-century Frenchmen and women, whether legal
or contraband. While port merchants had gained extensive wealth from
policies like the Exclusif, which had expanded trading privileges for the
West Indies to French merchants in port cities, planters and merchants in
the colonies chafed at their restrictions on free trade. In 1784, this policy
was modified, mostly in response to the American Revolution, when neutral
ships had supplied French colonies, and strict trade regulations were never
reimposed afterward.
In the process of attempting these economic reforms, the absolutist gov-
ernment also instituted political and social reforms, including the suppres-
sion of religious orders (notably the Jesuit order) that had come into conf lict
with various French authorities. Some reforms were more progressive, how-
ever, including the extension of civil rights to Protestants in 1787 and edicts
that sought to improve the treatment of enslaved laborers in 1784 and
1785. Although these reforms came from the crown, they were often the
result of public debates and the promotion of ministers who were steeped in
Enlightenment thought.
The widespread public support for the American Revolution (1776–
1783) indicates a key milestone in the French population’s views on
political reform. French involvement came about when the Americans
sent their representative Benjamin Franklin, an Enlightenment thinker
of some renown and a popular figure in Paris, to ask for support in the
war against their common enemy, the British. After seeing early British
losses, the French finally agreed in 1778 to send arms and ammunition,
troops, and naval support to back the American cause. In the aftermath
of American independence, French commentators circulated the new
constitution and enthusiastically admired its vision of individual rights
and liberty, concepts that took on their own meaning in France. Yet
despite the momentum for change, reform in France would be anything
but simple.
Notes
1 Sue Peabody, “There Are No Slaves in France”: The Political Culture of Race
and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996),
116–117.
2 Reprinted in Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, ed. Race and the Enlightenment:
A Reader (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1997), 91–94.
Suggestions for Further Reading
Agmon, Danna. A Colonial Affair: Commerce, Conversion, and Scandal in French
India. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017.
Coleman, Charly. The Virtues of Abandon: An Anti-Individualist History of the
French Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014.
Edelstein, Dan. The Enlightenment: A Genealogy. Chicago, IL: University of Chi-
cago Press, 2010.
Goodman, Dena. The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlight-
enment. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996.
Kwass, Michael. Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Under-
ground. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.
Palmer, Jennifer. Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic. Phila-
delphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.
Peabody, Sue. “There Are No Slaves in France”: The Political Culture of Race and
Slavery in the Ancien Régime. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1996.
2 Radical Revolutions
and Rights of Man Radical Revolutions and Rights of Man
Introduction
In the early twentieth century, the Baroness Emma Orczy, an exiled Hun-
garian aristocrat living in London, wrote a play and a series of popular
novels set during the French Revolution. The stories followed the adven-
tures of the Scarlet Pimpernel, a fictional character who heroically res-
cued French aristocrats from the guillotine. Alongside real and fictional
European aristocrats like the Baroness Orczy and the Scarlet Pimpernel,
many in Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries came to
regard the guillotine as the ultimate symbol of the French Revolution,
and specifically, the destructive consequences of a society that allowed
tradition to be overthrown and the unruly masses to take charge. In
the eyes of its opponents, the French Revolution set a dangerous prec-
edent that needed to be reined in before its radical inf luence spread. This
view was most clearly articulated in the Irish political theorist Edmund
Burke’s 1790 political treatise Ref lections on the Revolution in France,
which would come to define the nineteenth-century ideology known as
conservatism. Burke criticized French revolutionaries for destroying
the ancien régime in favor of a government based on abstract princi-
ples, arguing it could only end in chaos and disaster. So-called rational
Enlightenment principles, he claimed, ignored the complexities of human
nature because societies needed tradition and custom to maintain order.
Later, he and others specifically blamed “radical Jacobinism” for its ten-
dencies toward moral corruption and dissent from the traditional Euro-
pean order.
But while the European monarchies watched the events of the French
Revolution in horror, numerous groups across the world took inspiration
from its radical transformations. Democratic reform movements emerged
across the Atlantic world during this same period, illustrating that the
French Revolution did not happen in isolation. In fact, several of these
reform efforts were already in progress before the French Revolution
broke out in 1789, including the Dutch “Patriot” Revolt of the 1780s
and the Belgian uprising for independence against Habsburg rule in 1789.
DOI: 10.4324/b23310-2
22 Radical Revolutions and Rights of Man
Additionally, the American Revolution, which began in 1776, had pro-
vided much of the rhetorical inspiration for the initial “liberal” move-
ments in France. But one of the most shocking and successful insurrections
occurred in the French sugar colonies of the Caribbean. The revolts of the
enslaved populations of Saint-Domingue and neighboring islands, which
we often refer to as the Haitian Revolution, unfolded in the midst of the
revolutionary events taking place in France in the 1790s. These events
led to the eventual abolition of slavery in the French empire and shaped
France’s diplomatic and military conf licts with Britain, Spain, and the
United States well into the Napoleonic period.
Responding to Enlightenment critiques of absolutist monarchy, oppres-
sive and inefficient taxation structures, and, for a small minority, the cruel
system of plantation slavery in the Caribbean, French elites in the Third
Estate, including the nobility and clergy, initially sought to reform these
practices rather than completely abolish them. The events that took place
in the summer of 1789 were the convergence of several groups’ long-term
demands for reform in the midst of a major economic crisis. But the con-
sequent twists, turns, and reversals of the French and Haitian revolutions
occurred organically as new crises and demands emerged from among dif-
ferent populations. The origins and consequences of the French Revolution
remain the subject of ongoing historical scrutiny and debate. Yet historians
now identify multiple, intertwined revolutions happening in parallel, often
directly affecting each other, rather than distinct revolutions with a singular
cause.
The “liberal revolution” of the early years resulted in the creation of
the National Assembly, the first constitution, and the institution of a
liberal order based around individual rights and liberties. During this
phase of the revolution, bourgeois elites of the Third Estate overturned
the ancien régime system of privileges that had denied them access to the
political sphere. Yet these reforms did not meet the demands of workers
and peasants. Radicalized urban workers also wanted political repre-
sentation and economic support while rural peasants in certain regions
strongly resented the National Assembly’s secularization policies, which
set up ideological conf licts that eventually turned violent. Using popu-
lar demonstrations and sometimes violence, the workers of Paris took
to the streets to convince politicians and the king of the seriousness of
their demands. Meanwhile, in the French Caribbean, free Blacks used
the new rhetoric of the “liberal revolution” to argue for access to equal
rights. When those efforts proved largely unsuccessful, some joined the
radical revolution brewing among the enslaved who fought for freedom
through a violent war against both white and Black slaveholders. Not
every revolutionary effort survived, and most achieved only partial suc-
cesses, some of which were subsequently undermined or destroyed. In
the end, however, France, its empire, and the entire world were dramati-
cally transformed by this revolutionary decade.
Radical Revolutions and Rights of Man 23
The Economic and Political Crises of the 1780s
Beginning in the mid-1780s, France faced a dramatic economic crisis. Due
to the outstanding debts the government owed on loans used to finance its
involvement in the American Revolution, France risked impending bankruptcy
in 1786. Coming to the throne in the era of enlightened absolutism, Louis XVI
(r. 1774–1791) initially viewed himself as a sovereign with reformist tendencies.
Facing this fiscal crisis, the king and his ministers agreed that bankruptcy must
be avoided at all costs. This left tax reform as the only option.
There was widespread suspicion in France, however, about the monar-
chy’s dishonesty regarding the country’s financial situation. A pamphlet war
between Louis XVI’s two finance ministers, Swiss banker Jacques Necker (in
office from 1776–1781 and later from 1788–1789) and his successor Charles
Alexandre de Calonne (1783–1787), only intensified public mistrust of the
monarchy. In early 1787, Calonne convinced Louis XVI to convoke the
Assembly of Notables to reform the tax system. Rather than agreeing to his
reforms, however, the assembly dismissed the financial crisis and refused to
act. Frustrated by the assembly’s inaction, Calonne commissioned a widely
distributed pamphlet, blaming the crisis on the nobility’s refusal to give up its
monetary privileges. After refusing to accept any reforms, the assembly was
dismissed in May 1788, and that same month, the king also abolished the
parlements, which set off protests across France against the king’s despotism.
While crown propaganda laid the blame at the feet of a luxuriant, privi-
leged, and selfish nobility, the broader population increasingly feared Louis
XVI’s potential for despotism and doubted his loyalty to the nation. For
instance, there were suspicions that the queen, Marie-Antoinette—the sister
of the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II—was drawing the French
king’s loyalty toward Austria. Beginning soon after her arrival in France,
Marie-Antoinette was viciously satirized in numerous pamphlets that
attacked her morality and often contained explicit pornographic language
and imagery. The “foreign” queen was incredibly unpopular and her sup-
posed sexual immorality was viewed as a dangerous inf luence on the king.
In the infamous Diamond Necklace Affair of 1785, the queen was falsely
implicated in an elaborate con involving the former French ambassador to
Austria, who had tried to bribe his way back into the queen’s good graces
with the gift of a valuable diamond necklace. This immediately followed
Louis XVI’s decision to back Joseph II in an international affair against
the Dutch, a historic French ally. Only when Louis XVI agreed to call the
Estates-General in the spring of 1789 did tensions begin to calm.
The Estates-General of 1789

The summoning of the Estates-General generated a new crisis for the mon-
archy, specifically over how it was to function. Traditionally, each estate
elected representatives to the Estates-General, and each estate would meet
separately, with each estate receiving one vote. This system clearly favored
the interests of the First and Second Estates (clergy and nobility), who typi-
cally voted together to protect their collective privileges. When the Parle-
ment of Paris decreed that the upcoming Estates-General meeting would
proceed according to the traditional format, many in the Third Estate, rep-
resenting 97 percent of the population, were greatly upset by the patent
inequities of this system. More than 1,500 pamphlets debating these issues
f looded the country between May and December 1788. The most inf luen-
tial pamphlet, What Is the Third Estate?, was written by Abbé Emmanuel
Sieyès, a bourgeois priest who argued that the Third Estate did all the useful
work of the nation. He claimed,
If the privileged order should be abolished, the nation would be nothing

less, but something more. Therefore, what is the Third Estate? Eve-
rything; but an everything shackled and oppressed. What would it be
without the privileged order? Everything, but an everything free and
f lourishing.1
Sieyès argued for a single chamber at the Estates-General so that the

concerns of the Third Estate could be heard by all. Others suggested the
number of deputies of the Third Estate be doubled. Even more radical
was the proposition that rather than one vote per order there should
be one vote per deputy, with the number of Third Estate deputies dou-
ble that of the other orders. Under considerable pressure, the king and
his council announced in late December 1788 that the deputies for the
Third Estate would be doubled, but they refused to change the voting
procedure.
In the spring of 1789, the French population elected their deputies to
the Estates-General, which was to be held in May, despite a lack of clarity
about the meeting procedures. The open assembly voting process and the
eligibility requirements meant that most of those who were elected as depu-
ties of the Third Estate were wealthy men of property, such as lawyers or
government officials, who could afford to take time away from their jobs to
attend the assembly. Urban merchants and wealthy businessmen, describing
themselves as an essential “Fourth Estate,” unsuccessfully sought their own
category of representation.
In advance of the Estates-General, each local assembly was tasked
with drawing up a list of grievances, known as cahiers de doléances,
which their deputies would offer to the king. All members of the Third
Estate who were born or naturalized French, over the age of 25, with a
stable residence and whose names appeared on the tax rolls were permit-
ted to participate in their district or parish’s assembly. Despite wide vari-
ation in participation numbers and certain grievances that were specific
to the geographic location and the class or local circumstances of the
population, most peasant villages demanded equality in taxation, the
suppression of indirect taxation, and the abolition of specific seigneurial
dues or tolls.
More than 1,200 deputies traveled to Versailles for the Estates-General
on May 4, 1789. The opening session began with a long-winded account
of the fiscal crisis from Necker, but he offered no suggestions on what the
Estates-General should do to solve it nor any guidance on how discussions
or voting should proceed. Immediately, the Third Estate deputies acted in
solidarity, refusing to begin discussions unless the other two estates agreed
to meet and vote in a common assembly, rather than in separate orders.
When five weeks of negotiations led nowhere, the Third Estate deputies
announced the formation of a single assembly and invited the other orders
to join. After a handful of clergy joined their ranks on June 17, the Third
Estate voted to declare themselves the National Assembly, claiming that
they spoke for the entire nation. The king then called for a special assem-
bly of all three estates to be held on June 23, but the Third Estate deputies
found themselves locked out of their meeting room. Outraged and afraid
that the king was planning to dismantle their assembly, they proceeded to
the largest meeting space that they could find—the indoor tennis court—
and vowed, in the famous “Tennis Court Oath,” not to disband until they
had written a new constitution for France.
Figure 2.1 1804 engraving by Pierre Gabriel Berthault depicting the Tennis Court Oath,
Library of Congress, LOT 6874, no. 1.
Although the king acceded to some limited reforms, he still asserted his
power over the assembly and demanded that the estates vote by order.
He implied that he would simply dissolve the assembly if it disobeyed his
decrees. While many in the nobility and clergy applauded the king’s posi-
tion, several of the more radical deputies of the Third Estate spoke out
defiantly, claiming that the king could not destroy the National Assem-
bly, even with the force of bayonets. On June 25, the majority of the
clergy returned to the assembly, as did some of the nobility. By June 27,
Louis XVI gave in to the pressure and ordered all of the deputies of the
First and Second Estates to join the National Assembly. Immediately, the
body began drafting a constitution, believing they had won their battle
with the king. However, the king had not exactly conceded, for he had
ordered troops to assemble outside of Paris.
The Storming of the Bastille and the Beginning

of Revolution
While the deputies of the Third Estate fought for greater power in Ver-
sailles, large crowds gathered daily in cities and villages to hear reports
of the Estates-General. The revolt of the Third Estate deputies was met
with overwhelming approval from a population that already resented the
nobility. Additionally, the increasing price of bread, which both urban
workers and peasants attributed to wealthy landowners hoarding grain
supplies, led to threats of violence against wealthy elites. Louis XVI’s
intransigence against the Third Estate along with the nobility’s refusal to
join the National Assembly appeared to confirm the popular classes’ sus-
picions about the elites.
In a further antagonizing move, on July 11, the king dismissed Jacques
Necker, who many viewed as a champion of the Third Estate. In response,
smugglers, merchants, traders, artisans, laborers, and the unemployed
around Paris joined forces between July 11 and 14 to sack and destroy
customs posts that surrounded the city. These had been erected just a
few years previously to prevent the f low of contraband wine and tobacco
into the city. Thousands more gathered in the city center, seizing arms
to defend themselves against the army should the king move to quell the
rebellion. At the abbey of Saint-Lazare, Parisians found stocks of grain,
which seemed to confirm suspicions that the nobility was hoarding grain.
Crowds then seized arms and ammunition from the Invalides military hos-
pital and other royal arsenals. But their main target was the Bastille, a
medieval prison in the popular Saint-Antoine neighborhood. Despite hold-
ing only seven prisoners at the time, the Bastille was believed to contain
vast amounts of arms and ammunition, and the imposing edifice was a
symbol of the arbitrary authority of law and order under the “despotic”
ancien régime.
On July 14, 1789, approximately 8,000 Parisians, the vast majority urban
workers, stormed the Bastille fortress. When they forced their way into the
courtyard, soldiers opened fire, killing around 100 protestors. When a group
of soldiers deserted the king’s troops and turned their cannons on the build-
ing, the commander surrendered. The Parisians freed the prisoners, captured
the building’s weapons, and killed the commander as well as several other
municipal officials. They marched through the streets with the heads of those
killed on pikes, a spectacle that shocked the elite classes. Fearing further
bloodshed, elites among the Third Estate moved to restore order. The commit-
tee of electors who had selected the Parisian deputies to the Estates-General
transformed themselves into an improvised city government, electing a mayor.
They also created a civil militia, which they called the National Guard, under
the leadership of the Marquis de Lafayette, a nobleman and hero of the Amer-
ican Revolution who was sympathetic to democratic reform. The events in
Paris, especially the desertion of soldiers, shocked the king, who realized he
did not have the power to quell the rebellion. He ordered the withdrawal of
his troops and recalled Necker to his post.
Meanwhile, rural French subjects also rebelled in reaction to the news
coming from Versailles and Paris. In this “municipal revolution,” nobles
were forced from their offices after crowds attacked buildings that repre-
sented royal authority. They were replaced by municipal councils of elected
men who were loyal to the new National Assembly. After the storming
of the Bastille, waves of peasant rebellion broke out against the seigneu-
rial regime due to the fear that the king and nobles would take revenge by
seizing crops. This panic, known as the “Great Fear,” led peasants across
France to form militias to protect themselves from potential armed brigands
paid by the nobility. Peasants attacked manorial estates, demanding that
nobles turn over the feudal charters and deeds that legitimized their privi-
leges. While few nobles were killed, the symbolic violence of such a large
and direct peasant attack on noble privilege was deeply unsettling to the
king and the nobility and clergy.
The deputies of the Estates-General were well aware of the social and politi-
cal upheavals taking place around the country, and the peasant unrest spurred
them on to more dramatic rhetorical and political actions than they had
considered just weeks earlier. On the night of August 4, 1789, the National
Assembly (which henceforth called itself the Constituent Assembly) organ-
ized a special session to consider how to abolish some of the seigneurial dues,
which they hoped would quell the rural unrest. Although the initial proposals
were modest, individuals began offering dramatic renunciations of their own
privilege. By the end of the evening, the assembly had abolished tithes, the
corvée, feudal rights, and nearly all of the privileges of the First and Second
Estates that had sustained the feudal order of the ancien régime. Although
many state and indirect tax burdens remained intact, this symbolic disman-
tling of the ancien régime was one of the first significant acts of revolution.
The Liberal Revolution
Immediately after the August 4 meeting, assembly deputies developed a
framework for a constitutional monarchy based on principles of equality
and individual rights, rather than hereditary privileges. On August 26, the
assembly adopted a draft of 17 articles known as the “Declaration of the
Rights of Man and Citizen.” The document’s main author, the Marquis
de Lafayette, worked with American statesman Thomas Jefferson and the
radical aristocrat Honoré Mirabeau on the text. The authors drew inspira-
tion from several key Enlightenment concepts such as natural and universal
rights of all men, the social contract, and a separation of governmental pow-
ers. Yet certain ambiguities in the text also led to significant debates over
who would have access to political rights. The leaders of the early French
Revolution moved to shift sovereignty from the absolutist monarchy to the
people, who would be represented by a legislative body and have individ-
ual rights guaranteed by a written constitution. The assembly consequently
voted to give the king a suspensive, rather than absolute, veto over the con-
stitution. Although the assembly wanted the cooperation of the king, Louis
XVI refused to endorse both the “Declaration of the Rights of Man” and
the plans to restructure the government and social system of France.
The king’s political and economic intransigence signaled to the masses
in Paris that he wouldn’t bow to reform. When a rumor circulated that an
army regiment in Versailles had trampled on the revolutionary symbol of
the tricolor cockade, Parisians decided to act. On October 5, thousands
of women seized arms and two small cannons from the Hôtel de Ville and
marched to Versailles in the company of the National Guard. The crowd
reached Versailles late that night, and violence broke out between the
marchers and palace guards when the women demanded that the king and
his family accompany them back to Paris. The next day, the king agreed.
The royal family made their way slowly to Paris, followed by a powerless
Constituent Assembly, which had watched from the sidelines. The Parisian
women marched noisily alongside, singing revolutionary songs and carrying
the severed heads of royal guards on pikes. As with the storming of the Bas-
tille in July, the events indicated to the Constituent Assembly that through
the threat of violence the masses could exert as much, if not more, political
pressure than the privileged classes. The course of the revolution would pro-
ceed through a constant negotiation of these political pressures.
The two years following these “October Days” are often described as
the “liberal revolution,” when the Constituent Assembly transformed the
“Declaration of the Rights of Man” into a written constitution and wrote
legislation to enact its ideals. The assembly rejected the more conservative,
monarchist proposal, which modeled a new French system on England’s
constitutional monarchy (where the king retained significant power and the
legislature was organized into two houses). Instead, they created a one-house
legislature to be answerable to the general will of the people. In late 1789,
the assembly reorganized the administrative apparatus of the state, creating
new divisions called departments to replace the provinces, and restructuring
municipal administration, abolishing provincial privileges in the process.
Another key principle guiding the legislators was the argument that laws
should apply to all. This led to a massive reform of the judicial system,
beginning in 1790. The assembly also passed laws that made workers’
organizations and strikes illegal and abolished guilds, which they claimed
would support the individual rights of all workers to access employment.
Feeling the harsh material effects of these laws, however, many in the work-
ing classes feared the deputies of the Constituent Assembly were instituting
a “bourgeois revolution,” rather than a truly egalitarian one. Indeed, two
particularly challenging issues further solidified the view that the assembly
was catering to the urban elites of the Third Estate. The first concerned the
relationship between church and state and the second was how to define
citizenship, including who had the right to vote and participate in the politi-
cal process.
At the root of the assembly’s reforms to the Catholic Church was the
widespread belief that the church had mismanaged its accumulated wealth
from the tithe and its massive property holdings. Many believed that the
church had not done its religious and social duty to redistribute this wealth
through its services to the poor, schooling to peasants, and appropriate sala-
ries to parish priests. In November 1789, the assembly voted to confiscate
the property of the Catholic Church. This would enable the state to take
control of poor relief and education while selling church properties to pri-
vate citizens at a profit, which they could use to pay off government debt
and fund the new state social programs.
The Constituent Assembly then abolished monastic orders in 1790—
unless they had a pedagogical or charitable aim—and more controversially,
took direct control of the French Catholic Church. Though many Catho-
lic priests and lay people had long demanded some kind of church reform
(notably ending the tithe), the July 1790 Civil Constitution of the Clergy
emerged as one of the most divisive acts of the revolution. This legislation
was not simply political—it challenged the theological basis of the church’s
authority by shifting the power of the hierarchy from the king and the pope
(and thus from God) to the French legislature. The assembly redrew the
boundaries of Catholic dioceses to match those of its administrative depart-
ments and gave departmental legislative assemblies the power to nominate
bishops and parish priests. Every priest was then required to take an oath of
loyalty to the nation; those who refused (just fewer than half of the priests
in France at the time) were ousted.
The consequences of the assembly’s reforms to the Catholic Church were
dramatic and long term. Many French Catholics, concerned about what
would replace the services that the religious orders had provided, imme-
diately wrote letters and petitions in protest. The civil oath of the clergy
became a particularly divisive symbol of the revolution, notably in rural
France, where many practicing Catholics believed that the assembly’s reforms
had gone too far. As government officials began removing the “refractory
priests” who refused the civil oath—many of whom were incredibly popular
among parishioners—the revolution began to lose legitimacy among much
of the rural Catholic population of France.
The assembly’s approach to the definition of citizenship and access to
political rights was equally controversial. In December 1789, the deputies
of the Constituent Assembly rejected a universal interpretation of the state-
ment that “men are born and remain free in equal in rights,” the first article
of the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.” Instead, they intro-
duced a key distinction in the rights of citizenship based upon the belief that
only white men of property or wealth were consequential enough mem-
bers of society to be endowed with democratic political rights. In the new
constitution, they created the categories of “active” and “passive” citizen-
ship. Active citizens, who were eligible to vote, were defined as adult males
who paid a significant amount of taxes, roughly equivalent to three days of
wages for a working man, a category that comprised approximately half the
adult male population of France at the time. Everyone else was defined as a
passive citizen, which included all women and people of color. The income
qualifications to run for office were much stricter, leaving out even the elite
and educated members of the former Third Estate who did not have sig-
nificant wealth and property. More radically, through the constitution of
1791, the assembly ultimately granted citizenship to the 40,000 Jews living
in France, making it only the second country in the world (after the United
States) to grant its Jewish population civic equality. However, the assembly
was far more conservative in its approach to its free Black population, who
also sought civic equality. In March of 1790, the assembly declared that the
colonies could determine their own voting qualifications, but since white
plantation owners controlled their assemblies, they immediately denied
access to active citizenship for free men of color.
Several groups expressed immediate and vocal discontent with the new
citizenship laws of revolutionary France. Both women and free Blacks did
not hesitate to plead their case before the assembly and in the public sphere.
In 1791, the Parisian playwright and anti-slavery activist Olympe de Gouges
published “The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Cit-
izen.” In this text, she argued that the supposedly universalist “Declara-
tion of the Rights of Man” was exactly the opposite since the constitution
declared women to be excluded from the universal. She further declared
that numerous social institutions, including marriage and education, per-
petually excluded women from public life while family and property laws
further diminished their rights as equal citizens. Throughout the revolution,
the political status of women remained a contentious and unresolved issue.
However, the status of the free Black population in both France and the
Caribbean sugar colonies was transforming dramatically, alongside a much
larger revolt of the enslaved population of Saint-Domingue.
Citizenship, Race, and the Colonies
Although the Constituent Assembly initially focused its reform efforts on
the political and social system of metropolitan France, colonial concerns
were hardly peripheral. In 1789, 15 percent of the deputies directly owned
colonial property and many more had ties to colonial commerce. From the
earliest announcement of the planned Estates-General, colonial planters and
those with interests in the colonies made sure their voices were represented.
Despite their long-standing demands for economic reforms, the white
French planters in the Caribbean generally opposed the liberal reforms of
the assembly, fearing that a universal interpretation of equal rights would
end slavery and destroy the plantation system. They formed organizations
such as the Club Massiac in Paris to monitor the assembly’s reforms and
intervene when necessary. They published pamphlets arguing that the only
way to preserve slavery—and therefore the colonies themselves—was to give
the colonies (i.e., the white planters) full legal autonomy to decide which
French laws should apply in the colonies. In March 1790, white planters
got their way in Paris when the assembly declared that the French constitu-
tion would not apply universally to the colonies; instead, each colony would
elect its own assembly and write its own constitution.
Free men of color, particularly those who were themselves planters, had a
different reaction to the revolutionary changes taking place in France; they
saw in the “Declaration of the Rights of Man” the possibility for access to
equal rights. From the early 1780s, Julien Domingue, a slaveholding free
man of color from Saint-Domingue, and other free men of color had used
petitions to the Colonial Ministry in France and activism among French
supporters to push for access to the same rights as white men. Among these
allies was the Abbé Grégoire, who was also a well-known advocate for
the civil rights of Jews in France, along with inf luential intellectuals and
statesmen such as Lafayette and Condorcet. They were all members of an
organization called the Société des Amis des Noirs (Society of Friends of the
Blacks), which was founded in 1788 and modeled on British and American
slavery abolition movements. However, the Société faced strong opposition
from the Club Massiac, whose members tried to prevent the issue of the
rights of free men of color from being discussed in the assembly.
Events on the ground in the colonies added further fuel to the revolution-
ary fire. While elite white planters saw the revolutionary activities of the
National Assembly as a threat, the poor whites of colonies such as Saint-
Domingue viewed them as inspiration to challenge the economic privileges
of the elite planter class. After winning local elections in 1790, the poor
whites of the town of Saint Marc, for example, abolished French mer-
chants’ high interest rates but actively discriminated against the non-white
population to improve their own situation. Their stance angered nearly
everyone, and French officials shut down the assembly with the assistance
of Black militiamen. In April 1791, poor whites in Port-au-Prince, calling
themselves “patriots,” convinced newly arrived French troops to join
them in a revolt against the government. In the ensuing riot, the patriots
took the city, and the government was forced to move to the town of Cap
Français.
Both free men of color and the enslaved population in the Caribbean also
turned to violence to gain access to rights they had been denied amidst the
liberal revolution. After unsuccessfully lobbying the National Assembly to
give rights to men of color, Vincent Ogé, a wealthy and educated free man
of color and member of the Société des Amis des Noirs, returned to Saint-
Domingue in October 1790 determined to achieve these rights by force. Ogé
gathered an armed militia of free men of color, but they were soon forced
to f lee into Spanish Hispaniola where they were captured and returned to
French authorities. Ogé and 23 compatriots were tortured and publicly exe-
cuted in Le Cap in February 1791.
Faced with violence of both poor whites and free men of color, the
National Assembly sent more troops to Saint-Domingue but also revisited
the issue of rights for free men of color. Members of the Société des Amis
des Noirs convinced the assembly in May 1791 to give full citizenship to
free men of color who owned a sufficient amount of property and whose
parents had both been free. In Saint-Domingue, free men of color were
elated, but poor whites were infuriated. As white colonial elites delayed
putting the law into effect fighting broke out. These conf licts set the stage
for the dramatic revolt of the enslaved population of Saint-Domingue in
August 1791.
Figure 2.2 “General revolt of the Negroes. Massacre of the whites,” frontispiece

to ca. 1815 book titled Saint-Domingue, or History of Its Revolutions,
Library Company of Philadelphia.
As early as July 1789, rumors about the revolution in France had inspired
enslaved populations in the colonies to revolt. In Martinique, enslaved labor-
ers refused to work and demanded their freedom after rumors spread that King
Louis XVI had freed them. Enslaved workers began organizing larger revolts
in Guadeloupe in 1790 and in southern Saint-Domingue in January 1791,
but their leaders were arrested before full revolts broke out. The August 1791
revolt was much larger and well-coordinated. Over several weeks, the small
northern rebellion grew into a massive insurgent army of between 10,000
and 20,000 enslaved men. They killed white plantation owners and destroyed
over 200 sugar plantations and more than a thousand coffee plantations.
When news arrived from Paris that the National Assembly had reversed its
decision to extend citizenship to free men of color, further clashes broke out
between white and Black militias, both of which recruited the enslaved to
fight with them. But as Saint-Domingue erupted into war, French deputies
faced mounting challenges to their own liberal revolution.
The King’s Flight and the Radicalization of the Revolution

In the aftermath of the 1789 Estates-General, political clubs became a highly
inf luential form of political engagement in revolutionary France. These
clubs proliferated across France, bringing together men (and sometimes
women) with likeminded political ideals to discuss ideas and lobby to gain
popular and legislative support for their causes. Historians typically mark
the first one as the Breton Club, which Third Estate deputies from Brittany
formed in May 1789 to strategize over their approach to the Estates-Gen-
eral. In Paris, it became known as the Jacobin Club since it met in a Jacobin
convent. Like most political clubs, it initially consisted of bourgeois men
who could pay the substantial membership fee. Known for their support of
a French republic, the Jacobins grew more radical, gaining provincial and
urban support from poorer sectors of society. After the National Assembly
liberalized the law on the freedom of assembly in November 1790, extend-
ing the right to passive citizens, multiple patriotic clubs sprang up across
France. Some were affiliated with the Parisian Jacobin Club while others
focused on issues specific to women or the urban working classes, such as
the Cordeliers Club. Some cities had counterrevolutionary or royalist clubs,
which sometimes clashed with pro-revolutionary clubs.
The French Revolution also mobilized the popular classes in Paris,
who became known as sans-culottes (a term that described the long pants
worn by working men, unlike the knee breeches worn by aristocrats).
They had played a central role in two key events of 1789 that propelled
the revolution forward—the storming of the Bastille in July and the Octo-
ber Days. Throughout the subsequent months, they also led numerous
popular demonstrations, protesting their political and economic condi-
tions. These protests were often quashed by the authorities, however.
After the suppression of the guild system in 1791, workers engaged in
violent protests, gaining a reputation for rioting that has lingered over
200 years. After 1792 and the onset of the Terror, they became associ-
ated with the radicalization of the revolution and the “mania of the
crowd.” Whether their reputation as violent radicals is merited or not,
the popular classes of Paris forcefully challenged the National Assem-
bly’s “liberal revolution.”
Although Louis XVI lost most of his political power in Septem-
ber 1789, he appeared outwardly willing to adapt to his changing cir-
cumstances, neither publicly opposing the assembly’s direction nor using
his veto to sabotage its legislative work. In February 1790, he even stated
his support for a more efficient and uniform administrative and legal
system. Yet the Civil Constitution of the Clergy pushed Louis XVI over
the edge, eroding any goodwill between him and the assembly. Pressure
on the king to resist the measure emerged from Catholics across France,
and Louis came to believe that he could no longer serve as the head of
the assembly’s envisioned constitutional monarchy. He turned to a more
radical solution: counterrevolution. For months, the king and queen laid
plans to f lee Paris to a more secure location. Their hope was that with
the pressure of either internal counterrevolutionary backing or external
military support—notably from the Habsburgs—the assembly would be
forced to give way to the king’s demands, perhaps even reestablishing
monarchical authority.
The attempted escape, on June 20, 1791, was a disaster. The royal family
planned to f lee north to the fortress town of Montmédy, close to the Aus-
trian Netherlands. Loyal troops had been recruited to escort the royal fam-
ily northward. However, the decision to take the entire family in one heavy
and conspicuous carriage led to delays and numerous stops along the route
for repairs. Consequently, the royal family missed their rendezvous with the
troop escort, and despite being dressed in disguise, they were recognized.
Near the northern border, they were arrested as fugitives and escorted back
to Paris by armed guards. Upon their return, the entire family was confined
to the Tuileries Palace, where they awaited the nation and the assembly’s
judgment.
Louis XVI had left behind a manifesto denouncing the revolution, which,
unfortunately for him, dispelled initial claims that the royal family had
been abducted. More radical members of the assembly (along with their
revolutionary supporters and clubs) argued that France would be better off
without a corrupt monarchy, and much of the population seemed ready
to accept a fully republican government. Yet the more moderate members
of the Constituent Assembly prevailed, arguing in favor of maintaining a
constitutional monarchy. The assembly voted to absolve the king of guilt
for his f light so long as he would swear to uphold the new constitution. In
angry response, Parisian radicals called for a mass demonstration against
the decision on the Champ de Mars. When violence broke out, National
Guard soldiers shot down approximately 60 demonstrators in what became
known as the “massacre of the Champ de Mars.”
After a summer of negotiations, the constitution was presented in Septem-
ber 1791 to the king, who had little choice but to ratify it. The deputies then
returned home, having made themselves ineligible for re-election. A new
batch of deputies, the vast majority members of the former Third Estate,
arrived in Paris in October to begin legislative work. Initially, political net-
works like the Jacobin Club gave the more radical factions within the assem-
bly the upper hand although small factions of royalists campaigned against
the new constitution, urging aristocrats and army officers to emigrate and
take up arms against the revolution. Counterrevolution also burgeoned in
the countryside around refractory priests and devout Catholics (notably
women) who strongly resisted the revolution’s secularization policies. The
atmosphere throughout France remained tense when the assembly voted in
November 1791 to harshly punish refractory priests and to threaten exiled
nobles with the loss of their property and execution if they did not return to
France by the end of 1791. Louis XVI vetoed both of these laws, signaling
to pro-republican deputies and revolutionary supporters that he was still
plotting against the revolution.
The Onset of War, Popular Activism, and Slave Revolt

Immediately following the overthrow of the ancien régime, the deputies of
the nascent representative government began to fear the possibility that the
other European monarchies—notably Austria, Prussia, or England—would
invade. That year, rumors that England was preparing its military for war
along with the departure of waves of aristocrats to England and Prussia as
well as the king’s aborted f light all confirmed widespread fears of a large-
scale European invasion. In response, both monarchists and radical left fac-
tions pushed the French Legislative Assembly to declare war on Austria in
April 1792. Within the Jacobin Club, a faction known as the Girondins,
whose leaders came from the department of the Gironde, claimed that the
war would resolve the threats to the revolution by rooting out counter-
revolutionary forces within France and unifying the country to defeat its
enemies; monarchists hoped the war would destroy the revolution.
The onset of war had several significant consequences. First, an army
had to be recruited while the military was undergoing its own major crisis.
The National Assembly had attempted to reform the entire structure of the
military hierarchy, which was steeped in the privileges of the ancien régime,
to reward and promote soldiers and officers based on merit instead. Officers
in place in 1789, however, had sworn oaths of loyalty to the king and gener-
ally did not feel bound to the revolution. At the same time, many common
soldiers were newly drawn to military and police institutions such as the
National Guard; as such, royal military regiments often faced defections of
common soldiers who were sent to control popular protests. After a series of
mutinies in 1790 and 1791, many officers joined the mass of émigrés f leeing
the country.
When the war with Austria broke out, the government assumed that patri-
otic men between the ages of 16 and 45 would enthusiastically enlist to pro-
tect the revolution. By 1793, however, most departments were failing to reach
their target enlistment numbers, so the Jacobins declared a levée en masse, or
mass conscription, aiming to create a citizen army of 1 million men. With no
time limit set on their length of service, many of these men remained in the
army well into the early 1800s. Initially, army morale was extremely low. The
new revolutionary army was a ragged mix of the ancien régime officer corps,
career soldiers, and new conscripts without military training or discipline. In
February 1793, the entire military structure was overhauled to create a more
unified army, with all men wearing the same uniform and receiving the same
pay. No longer were men tied to regional brigades, fighting for the French
king: now they had a single source of loyalty—the French nation.
With thousands of peasants and workers joining the military, it was grow-
ing increasingly difficult to justify their exclusion from the rights of active
citizenship. Indeed, in the summer of 1792, Parisian sans-culottes had taken
control of much of Paris and on June 20, they invaded the royal palace to
protest the king’s refusal to support the war effort. Rural peasants also pro-
tested new payments that took the place of seigneurial dues. A more radical
revolution was emerging as pro-revolutionary journalists and sans-culottes
began planning to remove the king and create an emergency government
called a National Convention that would take control of the country to
defend France from counterrevolution. Groups of armed volunteer units
called fédérés arrived from all over France to celebrate Bastille Day on
July 14 and assist the Parisian sans-culottes in defending the revolution.
Word spread of the plan, and on July 28, 1792, the Duke of Brunswick,
commander of the allied Prussian and Austrian forces, issued a manifesto
declaring that French civilians would be punished if anyone harmed the royal
family. In response, the radical revolutionaries stormed the Tuileries palace on
August 10. The king and his family escaped and sought refuge with the Legis-
lative Assembly. Left to defend the palace, the family’s Swiss guards waged a
bloody battle with the insurgents and approximately 100 civilians were killed.
In retaliation, the sans-culottes massacred the guards they encountered.
In the aftermath of the violence, the Legislative Assembly voted to dis-
solve their body and hold national elections for a Convention. Through
these actions, they abandoned the Constitution of 1791, disregarding its
citizenship standards and declaring instead that all adult males were eligible
to vote in the upcoming election. They also suspended the king from his
duties and placed him under guard in the Luxembourg Palace. Until the new
Convention deputies arrived in Paris six weeks later, the Legislative Assem-
bly ruled in cooperation with the Commune, a new municipal assembly
in Paris comprised mostly of Jacobin and sans-culotte militants. The most
outspoken deputy at this time, a radical member of the Cordeliers Club
named Georges Danton, became minister of justice. He helped organize an
impromptu Revolutionary Tribunal, which suspended many of the normal
judicial procedures for trials and appeals decreed in the “Declaration of
the Rights of Man” and the defunct constitution. Instead, those deemed
counterrevolutionary traitors by the tribunal were sentenced to death and
immediately executed with a new device known as the guillotine, named
after its inventor, Dr. Guillotin, who, ironically, had invented the beheading
machine to prevent cruel punishments.
Driven by news of French military defeats, particularly the rumor that the
French stronghold of Verdun was about to surrender, the sans-culottes took
over the prisons of Paris, which they believed were holding important coun-
terrevolutionary criminals (typically aristocrats). Setting up their own tri-
bunals, they accused between 1,100 and 1,400 prisoners of conspiring with
the enemy, sentencing them to death. For over two weeks, public executions
occurred across Paris, while the government did nothing to stop them. On
September 20, the day the National Convention met for the first time, news
of the French military victory over the Prussians at Valmy reached Paris.
Two days later, the Convention declared the First French Republic, believ-
ing, in a spirit of optimism, that the country was on the brink of a new era.
Yet in reality, both France and its colony of Saint-Domingue were on the
brink of civil war.
The war with Austria and Prussia undeniably shifted the course of the
French Revolution, but the slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue, which had
only grown since its outbreak in August 1791, also had a significant impact.
The insurgent army consisted of both enslaved men who were born in the
colony and newly arrived Africans. Free Blacks and men of color also par-
ticipated in the rebellion alongside the enslaved, including Toussaint Lou-
verture, the movement’s most famous leader. Enslaved at birth, Louverture
gained his freedom and even used enslaved labor himself to grow coffee on
a leased plantation. Instead of taking advantage of the April 4, 1792, French
law that gave citizenship to all free men of color if they joined the fight
against the slave rebellion, Louverture helped organize the army of enslaved
men against the colonial and free Black militias.
Beginning in late 1791 and continuing through early 1792, the Legisla-
tive Assembly sent representatives to Saint-Domingue to negotiate an end to
the rebellion. After discussions broke down, the French sent troops to the
island in June 1792 to both quash the rebellion and oversee the extension
of citizenship to free men of color (who feared the implementation of the
decree would be blocked by white colonists). Two commissioners charged
with these tasks—Léger Félicité Sonthonax and Étienne Polverel—had ties
to abolitionists in Paris and had publicly supported the rights of free people
of color. White colonists angrily claimed that the French were not playing
fair. Yet even if white colonists felt betrayed by the granting of citizenship to
free men of color, French legislators saw it as an essential way to draw a key
population of allies to their side to finally stamp out the slave rebellion. And
it might have worked had events in Europe not completely transformed the
playing field in the Caribbean.
Figure 2.3 1805 portrait of Toussaint Louverture by Marcus Rainsford, John Carter

Brown Library, record 06847–1.
Civil Strife, Terror, and the Expansion of War

From its origins, the National Convention was divided. Many of the
Parisian deputies belonged to a faction of the Jacobin Club known as the
Montagnards, whose leader, Maximilien Robespierre, openly supported
revolutionary violence and the radical sans-culottes. He described the
events of August 10, when Parisian revolutionaries stormed the Tuileries,
as a triumph. The Girondins, however, were more critical of the violence.
Their leader, Minister of the Interior Jean-Marie Roland, denounced the
Paris Commune and the threat of anarchy. These divisions spilled over into
debates about how to approach the trial and sentencing of the king.
The Convention ultimately voted to conduct the king’s trial themselves, with
the deputies deciding his guilt. The king’s lawyers argued that the Convention
had no legal authority or jurisdiction to judge the king, and Louis spoke in his
own defense, claiming that he had done nothing wrong. Yet evidence of his ties
to aristocratic émigrés and the Austrian government convinced the majority
of the deputies of his guilt in conspiring against the security of the state. More
controversial was the question of the king’s sentence. The most radical Mon-
tagnards argued that the people supported the full abolition of the monarchy
and a death sentence for the king. The Girondins, who had previously helped
remove the king from office, now shifted positions, believing they could control
a weak king better than a radical assembly working for the violent masses; they
also wanted the king’s sentence to be determined by a popular vote. In the end,
however, the Convention voted, with a narrow majority deciding in favor of
execution. On January 21, 1793, Louis XVI was brought from the Tuileries to
the Place de la Concorde in Paris and publicly beheaded by guillotine.
Figure 2.4 Anonymous print depicting Louis XVI being led to the guillotine at the
time of his execution, January 21, 1793, Library of Congress, LOT 10484.
The next month, the National Convention deputies began reviewing the
draft of a new constitution. However, the new constitution, which gave more
power to ministers, who were predominantly Girondins at the time, quickly
fell into disfavor with the Montagnards, who claimed that it failed to guar-
antee political equality. Infighting became increasingly bitter, particularly as
a poor grain harvest in 1792 and the ongoing rebellion in Saint-Domingue
had led to rising bread and sugar prices and popular unrest throughout
France. Despite openly supporting free trade, the Girondins were forced
to compromise, as the Convention passed a law that set maximum wheat
prices and allowed the government to requisition food supplies to reestab-
lish order.
At the same time, the war had begun to turn against France, bringing new
problems to the Girondins. After the victory at Valmy in September 1792,
the French had invaded Belgium and southern Germany. However, France
did not long retain the upper hand, as Britain, the Netherlands, and Spain
joined the allied forces against France in February 1793 and defeated French
troops in Belgium. Additionally, the French lost a potential ally in the United
States. Despite the support of individual figures such as Thomas Jefferson,
American president George Washington decided it was in the interest of the
new United States to remain neutral. Consequently, France was isolated in
a war that was rapidly expanding across the European continent and into
the colonies.
As in the two previous centuries, European conf licts were now fought on
a global scale. Even before Spain declared war on France, Spanish colonial
leaders had been quietly aiding the slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue as
a means to undermine the French. In May 1793, Spanish officials began
giving commissions and uniforms to rebellion leaders and awarding some
of them land and freedom; Toussaint Louverture, for instance, became an
officer in the Spanish army. Simultaneously, the British began blockading
French ships in the Caribbean. At the invitation of white colonists fighting
against the revolution, Britain invaded Saint-Domingue with troops from
British Caribbean colonies. Similar events took place on other French Carib-
bean islands, as white counterrevolutionaries welcomed British support in
overthrowing the revolution and restoring the racial order on the plantation
colonies.
In response to the growing threat of counterrevolution among white plant-
ers in the Caribbean, Sonthonax offered freedom to enslaved rebels who
agreed to join the official revolutionary forces in putting down the revolution’s
enemies. Initially, a few thousand enslaved men took the offer and helped the
French secure the city of Le Cap against the counterrevolutionaries, many
of whom fled for North America. In September and October 1793, Sontho-
nax expanded his offer to all enslaved men, announcing that the families of
anyone who fought for France would be freed. On February 4, 1794, the
National Convention ratified the full abolition of slavery across the French
empire. By this point, the slave rebellion in the French Caribbean and the
influx of white planters into their territory pushed American slaveholders and
government leaders to take positions against the revolution, which they saw
as undermining their own economic and political system.
Mounting internal threats from counterrevolutionaries also challenged
French revolutionaries within the borders of metropolitan France. A small
protest against the army draft in the rural department of the Vendée in
western France in March of 1793 quickly expanded into a massive counter-
revolutionary rebellion. Within weeks, the conf lict threatened to turn into
a full civil war, as Catholic peasants and nobles united to form their own
local army to fight the government troops sent to quash the rebellion. Blam-
ing the rebellion on priests and nobles, revolutionary leaders and troops
were notoriously violent, and as many as 200,000 republicans and 250,000
insurgents were killed in the fighting. The episode demonstrated a growing
divide between rural Catholics, many of whom believed the revolution had
gone too far, and radical Parisian revolutionaries who saw the rural resist-
ance to their reforms (symbolized by “priests and nobles”) as one of the
major threats to the nation’s progress.
In the aftermath of renewed riots against high grain prices that same
spring, the radical Montagnard faction gained the upper hand against the
more moderate Girondins despite strong support in provincial cities. The
Parisian sans-culottes firmly backed the Montagnards, even surrounding the
Convention in May 1793 to demand the deputies accede to their political
will. Frightened Girondin deputies f led to the provinces, leaving the Con-
vention in the hands of the Montagnards, who quickly voted to approve
the 1793 Constitution, which gave all men the right to vote, eliminated
distinctions between active and passive citizens, provided a job and form
of welfare guarantee to all citizens, and created a system of free public edu-
cation. However, with revolts against the radical revolution springing up
across France during the summer of 1793, the deputies voted to delay the
implementation of the constitution until they had overcome these immedi-
ate external and internal political crises.
To assure the emergency functions of the state amidst the fighting, the
Convention created a Committee of Public Safety in April 1793. By Octo-
ber 1793, it had declared itself a “revolutionary government” and inaugu-
rated a series of notorious policies that defined “the Terror” or “the Jacobin
Terror,” as this period of the revolution became known. The committee
enacted several laws and created institutions to repress dissent and purge
those they deemed “unreliable” French citizens; this included the law against
insurgents, which declared that insurgents captured with arms were to be
put to death within 24 hours. The government officially sentenced approxi-
mately 17,000 people to death at revolutionary tribunals across France and
executed over 2,500 by guillotine in Paris, including French queen Marie-
Antoinette in October 1793. Even though the Terror did not touch many
regions of France, as many as 300,000 people, notably aristocrats and
clergy, were imprisoned as enemies of the state between 1793 and 1794.
Some historians describe the government during the period of the Ter-
ror as a dictatorship. Despite being established as a provisional measure of
emergency rule, the Committee of Public Safety became increasingly perma-
nent as it suspended the constitution, prevented elections, and consolidated
its rule in order to maintain the Jacobins’ hold on power against counterrev-
olutionary political forces. Two of the most visible and militant committee
members, Maximilien Robespierre and Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, strongly
advocated the necessity of violence and the suspension of the rule of law
to maintain national unity in the face of the revolution’s hidden enemies.
Consequently, the committee’s methods were largely focused on purges of
their political enemies. First, Girondin leaders and their allies were executed
in the fall of 1793, including Olympe de Gouges. Then, they arrested the
members of the Cordeliers Club, bringing much of the radical sans-culotte
movement under control. Eventually, this tactic came to “devour its [own]
children,” as a Girondin deputy had predicted; in July 1794, several of the
most powerful Jacobin leaders, including Robespierre and Saint-Just, were
overthrown and executed by a faction of the Convention known as the
Thermidorians, after which the violence of the Terror slowly dissipated.
Terror and Revolutionary Culture

When Jacobin leaders initially gained control of the National Convention in
1792, they didn’t just use violent coercion to enforce political unity across
France; they also promoted a set of moral and political values that became
known as the Republic of Virtue. Although virtue was an inf luential Enlight-
enment concept, it gained new currency when Robespierre announced that
popular government could not exist without both virtue and terror; terror
itself was justice, he argued, “an emanation of Virtue.” For the Jacobins,
this meant “civic virtue”—each person’s adherence to the values of democ-
racy and liberty, as demonstrated through public displays of fidelity to the
republic. Throughout the Terror, politicians’ actions and motivations were
carefully scrutinized to determine if they were authentic “men of virtue”
or were engaged in conspiracies against the revolution. Fear and anxiety
reigned in Paris, as any action or phrase could be read as treasonous and
denunciations by so-called friends were common among the political elites.
Yet not every institution or law created during the period of the Terror
was necessarily repressive, and the lower classes of France, notably the sans-
culottes and peasants, gained several benefits. For instance, the Convention
instituted the “law of the General Maximum” in September 1793 enacting
price controls on staple food items like f lour, salt, butter, and meat and
on such things as paper and fabrics. This calmed much of the rising panic
about food prices and shortages. Additionally, the deputies passed laws that
divided common lands and property seized from the Catholic Church into
small, affordable parcels that peasants could eventually purchase.
To access the new benefits of the revolution, one had to perform rituals
of adherence to the principles of revolutionary culture. In October 1793,
revolutionary leaders replaced the Gregorian calendar with a new republi-
can calendar, declaring 1792 as Year I (one). The new calendar sought to
remove all traces of religion or the ancien régime, instead taking inspiration
from nature and the newly created metric system in its design. There were
12 months, with seasonally based names, with each one divided into three
ten-day weeks (known as décades). Officials attempted to extend the metric
system to all systems of measurement, including currency. An attempt to
reform time with the division of the day into hundred-minute hours did not
survive, and the reform was piecemeal across rural France, which broadly
resisted the conversion. More overt and controversial, the secular republic
created a civic religion known as the Cult of the Supreme Being, authorizing
its creation in May 1794. In pursuing a fully de-Christianized France, the
supporters of the movement took over the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris
in November 1793, turning it into a Temple of Reason. They also staged an
elaborate Festival of the Supreme Being in June 1794 (or 20 Prairial Year II,
per the republican calendar) on the Champ de Mars.
To upend the strict social hierarchies of the ancien régime, revolution-
ary leaders encouraged French citizens to address each other informally,
using the terms citoyen and citoyenne (citizen). The Convention replaced all
symbols of monarchy with the motto Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité (Liberty,
Equality, Fraternity), placing it visibly on all public buildings across France.
To demonstrate their revolutionary allegiance, citizens were encouraged to
wear the tricolor cockade on their clothing or dress in the “revolutionary
style.” Some of the most committed revolutionaries even changed their own
names (if they were, for instance, named Louis) or named their children
after revolutionary events, the calendar, or the revolutionary motto (“Con-
stitution,” “Fructidor,” or “Liberté”).
Radical revolutionaries sought to depict the nation as a family and accord-
ingly sought to modernize the family law code to ref lect revolutionary ide-
als. They passed a series of laws in 1792 that abolished primogeniture and
required inheritances to be divided equally among children; they also legal-
ized divorce. Further debates over the family law code raised the possibil-
ity of ending the “despotism” of marital authority, though such dramatic
measures were never enacted. These actions did not necessarily improve
French women’s position in society, however. Women continued to pressure
revolutionary leaders to give them access to political rights, and they partici-
pated actively through their own clubs and in local electoral assemblies. Yet
the tide turned against them in 1793, notably after the execution of Marie-
Antoinette, who embodied the opposite of the republican ideal of virtue.
For the Jacobins, her example further justified restricting women from the
public sphere and constraining women’s social function to their domestic
roles as wives and mothers. Unruly women such as Olympe de Gouges and
the violent Parisian working women of the October Days gave the Jacobins
the excuse to exclude women by banning them from political clubs.
Not all of these cultural transformations occurred under pressure from
revolutionary leaders. From 1789, French peasants and urban working
classes had shown their adherence to the revolution through their own,
notably musical, contributions to the cultural sphere. Numerous patriotic
and popular songs were written and sung during this era. The lyrics of
“Ça ira”—first sung in July 1790 on the Champ de Mars to celebrate the
Festival of Federation—changed over time, ref lecting different moods and
reactions to political events, while “La Marseillaise,” written as a call to
war in 1792, became the anthem of the revolution and the French republic
itself in 1795.
The Thermidorian Reaction and the Directory

In late 1793, the tide of the war turned in favor of the French army, which
was finally forming a coherent military force after the upheavals during the
early revolution. When French armies defeated the Austrians in Belgium in
June 1974, Austrian troops withdrew, ending the imminent threat of foreign
invasion. A faction of the Convention known as the Thermidorians used
the end of this external crisis to overthrow Robespierre and his radical Jac-
obin compatriots. The Thermidorian Reaction, as it became known, led to a
15-month rebellion across France against the Terror and the radical policies
of the Jacobin leadership.
In the first of four phases of the Reaction, Convention deputies began dis-
mantling the political and legal apparatus of the Terror. They strictly limited
the powers of the Committee of Public Safety and the Revolutionary Tribu-
nal. They also repealed the Prairial Laws, which had removed legal protec-
tions for political crimes, and released political prisoners who had not yet
been executed. Responding with vigor to the removal of strict control over
their daily lives, some people began to retaliate against the Jacobins. Young
men, known as the jeunesse dorée (the gilded youth), attacked the Jacobin
Club, which the Convention shut down permanently in November 1794.
With this shift in public opinion against the Jacobins and their political
and social policies, Convention deputies gained enough popular support to
overturn Jacobin-led reforms. In this second phase, the Convention restored
the Girondin deputies who had been purged in 1793. Wanting to encourage
free trade, the deputies eliminated economic policies that had supported the
lower classes, including the general maximum and public workshops. How-
ever, this led to immediate inf lation and skyrocketing bread prices, which
benefited peasants who had grain reserves but proved deadly to many in the
urban working classes. In the spring of 1795, hungry crowds of men and
women from the poor neighborhoods of Paris staged massive demonstra-
tions, descending on the Convention to demand food and the implementa-
tion of the 1793 constitution.
Lacking powerful backers in the Convention, the urban insurgents of
1795 could not replicate the earlier successful sans-culotte protests. Instead,
the Convention violently repressed the demonstration, which shifted the
Reaction into its third phase and closely resembled the tactics of the Jac-
obins. The Convention used the National Guard to remove protestors from
its premises and dispatched armed forces into the poorer neighborhoods
of Paris to destroy the insurgency and summarily execute presumed rebels.
Furthermore, the Convention purged 40 deputies known as the “last Mon-
tagnards” from its ranks. This violent suppression of the sans-culottes and
their political allies signaled the end of the radical revolution. As the sans-
culottes were harassed in the streets of Paris and symbols of the radical revo-
lution were destroyed, the reaction was even more violent in the provinces,
where the “white terror” (in contrast to the “red terror” of 1794) targeted
and killed Jacobin militants.
In the final months of the Convention, deputies attempted to write a new
constitution, one that was much more conservative than any of the earlier
revolutionary constitutions. It no longer guaranteed universal male suffrage,
free speech, or the right to association. Instead, it limited the right to vote
and the right to hold office to the wealthy elite, who would serve in depart-
mental electoral colleges and elect deputies to the legislature. To prevent the
re-emergence of the Terror, they created a five-member Directory that would
collectively hold the powers of an executive branch, and it would be held
in check by the legislature, a new Council of 500, and a smaller Council of
Elders composed of deputies over the age of 40. When another conservative,
counterrevolutionary insurrection arose in October 1795, legislators again
repressed it with military force. This would be the final popular uprising of
the revolution.
When the Directory came to power in October 1795, the legislators
believed that they had both ended the Terror and completed the work of
the revolution. Although the Thermidorians had reputedly reacted against
the Jacobin Terror, they ultimately used many of its same tactics to dis-
mantle the Terror and restore order, including quelling popular revolt with
military force, punishing political enemies through extrajudicial means,
and suppressing freedom of speech and assembly. The settling of scores
between various factions continued well into the 1800s, extending the
impact of the Terror for months and even years after its supposed end in
June 1794.
The Directory established some domestic stability early on, as the violence
of the Terror and the Reaction diminished, a series of good harvests boosted
the economy, and the government staved off the threat of bankruptcy by
writing off two-thirds of the country’s public debt. It also systematized the
tax collection system. However, after several conservative deputies were
elected to the legislature in 1797, the fear of counterrevolutionary activity
led to a coup within the Directory in September 1797 and the establish-
ment of the Second Directory. This body aimed to instill a more militantly
republican culture across France and to root out all counterrevolutionary
activity and royalist rhetoric.
By 1795, France had regained the upper hand in Europe. The Directory
signed peace treaties with Prussia in April and with Spain in July as well
as a commercial and naval treaty with Spain the following year. Addition-
ally, during the French military occupation of the Netherlands in 1795, they
supported the “Batavian revolution,” which established the first in a series
of “sister republics” that expanded the French revolutionary model (in
part by conquest) across Europe. The French annexed Belgium and further
attempted to expand the country’s borders through conquest as the army
moved into the German states and Italy, where the French supported local
movements to create further “sister republics.” As in the Netherlands, the
French demanded that these “liberated” territories pay indemnities to the
French (in part through looted art) to support the costs of military occupa-
tion. This practice was highly unpopular in many of these territories, lead-
ing to anti-French sentiment and uprisings against French occupation.
In its dealings with the United States and its attempts to contain the slave
revolution in Saint-Domingue, however, the Directory was not nearly so
successful. Despite American anxiety over the potential threat of a success-
ful slave revolt to its own system of plantation slavery, U.S. president John
Adams provided support to Toussaint Louverture’s army after the French
foreign minister Talleyrand unsuccessfully attempted to extort American
officials. Even following the abolition of slavery across the French empire,
Louverture’s army continued to fight, becoming more powerful when the
French were unable to send more troops due to the British blockade. By
1798, it seemed the French had almost completely lost control of the island
to their formerly enslaved people. Amidst growing domestic and foreign
crises in 1799, the Directory could no longer maintain control. But a solu-
tion to the political turmoil presented itself when a popular young general,
Napoléon Bonaparte, suddenly reappeared in Paris.
Note
1 Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, “What Is the Third Estate?” Internet History Sour-
cebooks Project, Fordham University, https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/
sieyes.asp (accessed March 8, 2020).

Andress, David, ed. The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2015.
Armitage, David and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds. The Age of Revolutions in Global
Context, 1760–1840. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Daut, Marlene. Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian
Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865. Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press, 2015.
Desan, Suzanne, Lynn Hunt, and William Max Nelson, eds. The French Revolution
in Global Perspective. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013.
Dubois, Laurent. Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution.
Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004.
Heuer, Jennifer Ngaire. The Family and the Nation: Gender and Citizenship in Rev-
olutionary France, 1789–1830. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005.
Sivasundaram, Sujit. Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and
Empire. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2021.
Tackett, Timothy. When the King Took Flight. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2004.
3 The Napoleonic Empire The Napoleonic Empire
Introduction
Few individual figures in French history have made as much of an impres-
sion on Europe and the wider world as Napoleon Bonaparte. The second
son of a minor Corsican nobleman, Napoleon rose through the ranks of
the army to eventually crown himself emperor of France and conquer most
of Europe. He symbolizes both the greatest accomplishments of the French
Revolution and the very dictatorial, monarchical behaviors the revolution
sought to overturn. While Bonaparte’s military exploits on the European
continent typically take center stage in any history of the Napoleonic era,
his campaigns outside of Europe and his political reforms had important
global impacts. Amidst growing conf licts with Britain and the loss of colo-
nial wealth due to the revolution in Saint-Domingue, Napoleon played a
leading role in the calamitous French invasion of Egypt in 1798. After com-
ing to power, he sent French troops to Saint-Domingue to recapture the
island and reinstate slavery; when that campaign failed and the revolution-
aries declared the independence of Haiti (formerly Saint-Domingue), Napo-
leon sold off French territories in North America to U.S. president Thomas
Jefferson.
His visions of empire did not end with defeats overseas, however. Napo-
leon’s greatest conquests were within Europe itself. The Napoleonic Wars
are often described by historians as the first instance of total war—they
directly affected the lives of not just the soldiers on the battlefield but the
men, women, and children at home and in the French occupation and war
zones. The French occupation of central Europe and Italy as well as the
messy Peninsular War in Spain and Portugal had long-lasting consequences
for the politics, culture, and populations of those regions, including their
own overseas empires. The imposition of harsh occupation taxes and con-
scription quotas as well as the rampant French pillaging of cultural heritage
left diverse groups of people across Europe with long-standing grievances
that blossomed into nationalist movements through the nineteenth century.
Yet Napoleon’s most enduring legacy was his political reforms. He ended
the French revolutionary conf lict with the Catholic Church through the
DOI: 10.4324/b23310-3
The Napoleonic Empire 49
Concordat of 1801. Additionally, the legal code that Napoleon put in place
in France beginning in 1804 standardized French civil law and consolidated
several key innovations of French revolutionary reforms, notably those
involving civil and property rights. He introduced educational reforms,
including the creation of secondary schools known as lycées and fashioned a
centralized administrative bureaucracy to standardize a number of complex
state problems, including tax collection and justice. As the French armies
began to conquer territory in Europe, annexing some lands and occupying
others as satellite states, Napoleon introduced these “modernizing” reforms
to those territories. More than a decade of war, however, cost millions of
lives and left Europe in a state of chaotic disarray, a sobering reminder that
whatever its idealisms, the expansion of the French empire was a brutal and
fiercely contested process.
The Rise of Napoleon Bonaparte

Napoleon Bonaparte was born in 1769 on the island of Corsica, whose
elected leader, Pasquale Paoli, had proclaimed its independence from the
Italian republic of Genoa in the 1750s. In 1768, France took over Corsica,
seeking to strengthen French power in the Mediterranean. The Bonaparte
family decided to stay in Ajaccio, the capital city, and take their chances
with the French occupation. The Bonapartes courted favor with the new
military governor, a man named Marbeuf, and secured numerous benefits
for themselves from this association, including recognition as members
of the French nobility. Along with newly Frenchified names, noble titles
ensured the Bonaparte children access to careers that were limited to the
nobility in the ancien régime: the eldest son Joseph went into the church,
and the second son Napoleon went into the military.
Napoleon spent much of his youth at the military preparatory school
in Brienne, France. Although he was an unhappy outsider with a strange
accent, Napoleon excelled in his schooling. His foreignness and low-ranking
family would ordinarily mean that he was destined for a minor officer’s post
in the French army. Yet his work ethic and intelligence were widely noticed.
By the age of 16, he became one of the youngest officers ever appointed to
the artillery. While an artillery officer, Napoleon spent time reading some of
the great works of the French Enlightenment, gaining a particular fondness
for Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He also grew more fervently loyal to the ideal of
an independent Corsican state.
The death of his father brought Napoleon back to Corsica, where he
was living when the revolution broke out in France in 1789. An enthu-
siastic supporter of the revolution, Napoleon, like many Corsican patri-
ots, saw it as an opportunity for the island to regain national sovereignty.
The French National Assembly allowed the exiled leader Pasquale Paoli to
return to Corsica, and the Bonapartes quickly joined his cause. Yet conf licts
quickly emerged between Paoli and the French revolutionaries over French
50 The Napoleonic Empire
anticlericalism. Napoleon and his brother Lucien soon found themselves
in disfavor with Paoli after challenging his authority in both military and
political matters. After Paoli denounced the Bonapartes as traitors in 1793,
the family f led to France.
Leaving Corsica definitively, Napoleon returned to France at the onset of
the Terror. With the assistance of the former Corsican proconsul and Augus-
tin Robespierre (the brother of Maximilien and a Jacobin representative
himself), Napoleon became the artillery chief of the republican army laying
siege to the rebellious city of Toulon, where the British were attempting
to stage an invasion. Napoleon’s political ruthlessness and strategic bril-
liance first became evident here, as he imposed his successful battle plan and
regained the city for the republic, denouncing opponents to the Committee
of Public Safety to get his way. In recompense for his success and notably
heroic actions during the siege, he was promoted to brigadier general at the
age of 24.
Although Napoleon was an excellent military officer, the upheavals of
the revolution explain, in large part, his rapid ascent through the army’s
hierarchy. France was at war from 1792 on, and the abolition of hereditary
privilege sent a significant number of army officers into exile, leaving large
gaps in the country’s military leadership. In the aftermath of the victory at
Toulon, Napoleon produced numerous studies for the Committee of Public
Safety showing that the French military command known as the Army of
Italy had the best chance to defeat Austria. Yet revolutionary politics were
extremely dangerous, and Napoleon’s ties to the Robespierre family meant
that in the aftermath of the Thermidorian Reaction, he was demoted to
staff positions or given unwelcome assignments, like tracking down coun-
terrevolutionary rebels in the Vendée in 1795. Seeking better opportunities,
Napoleon put in for a transfer to the army of the Turkish sultan, only to be
denied, a situation that provoked him to resign.
Yet when the popular insurgency in Paris grew in response to the
August 1795 decrees on new elections to the Convention, revolutionary offi-
cials ordered military leaders, including Napoleon, to subdue the masses.
During the uprising of 5 October (known as 13 Vendémiaire), Napoleon
distinguished himself by using artillery to strategically assault the revolu-
tionaries and put an end to this final uprising. Two weeks later, Napoleon
was promoted to divisional general and commander-in-chief of the Army
of the Interior. He also secured important appointments for his brothers
Joseph and Lucien, a trend that would continue throughout his life.
Napoleon’s 1795 Parisian posting was also personally important, as here
he met and married his first wife, Marie-Josèphe-Rose de Beauharnais, the
widow of an executed revolutionary and the former mistress of both Napo-
leon’s commanding officer Paul Barras and his greatest political and military
rival, Lazare Hoche. Rose, as she was known, was born in Martinique to
an impoverished aristocrat and moved to Paris in 1779 with her first hus-
band. They had two children, Hortense and Eugène, but Rose returned to
Martinique in 1788 after relations with her husband had deteriorated. The
1790 slave uprising, however, sent her back to France, where she became
entangled in revolutionary politics and spent time in prison during the Ter-
ror because of her husband’s political ties to the Jacobins. Upon release, she
became an important social figure due to her ties to Barras and Hoche, and
it was through Barras that Napoleon met Rose, with whom he fell violently
in love. Rose could see the appeal of a rising military star, even if she did
not return his romantic sentiments. Napoleon broke off his attachment to
a young woman in southern France named Desirée Clary (who would later
marry another French officer named Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte and become
queen of Sweden), and convinced Rose, who he called Joséphine, to marry
him in March 1796. He then left immediately to take up command of the
Army of Italy, leaving Joséphine behind in Paris, where she quickly resumed
her normal social life, including romantic affairs with military officers in
her circle. The intensity of Napoleon’s attachment and Joséphine’s apparent
indifference to him concerned government officials who worried that their
best general might abandon his post in pursuit of his “unruly” wife.
Yet Napoleon did not abandon the Italian campaign. Rather, this was
the site of some of his most illustrious military victories. Napoleon’s regi-
ments diverted the relief forces of the Austrian army away from German
territories, where French troops were bogged down. After defeating the
numerically superior Austrian army in several key battles, including Lodi
(May 1796) and Rivoli (January 1797), the Habsburgs sought peace with
France. In the resulting Treaty of Campo Formio of October 1797, France
solidified its territorial gains in Italy and present-day Germany as well as
its annexation of Belgium. Importantly, this victory led to the emergence of
the image of Napoleon as a general who saw his fellow soldiers as brothers,
rejecting the ancien régime military hierarchies in favor of new revolution-
ary ideals of merit, equality, and fraternity. Stories abounded of his fraternal
relationships with his men and his willingness to share the wealth pillaged
from the conquered territories. Napoleon also personally commissioned
portraits of himself commanding the battlefield and founded two separate
French-language newspapers to report, glowingly, of his deeds. Numerous
plays and even an opera were written about the Italian campaign, and the
publicity surrounding his battlefield heroics enabled him to acquire a more
significant political role in France.
The French Invasion of Egypt

After his stunning success in Italy, Napoleon was given command of the
Army of England in early 1798. There was great speculation about how
he would attack Britain, given that he gathered 20,000 troops at Toulon
on the Mediterranean coast. The convoy of ships that set sail on May 19
eventually headed for Egypt, carrying 36,000 soldiers along with thousands
of doctors, engineers, scientists, artists, and classical scholars brought along
for their technical expertise. Several additional ships joined the French f leet
in Corsica and the massive convoy headed first for the island of Malta. After
a 24-hour battle against the Knights of Malta, who had long supported the
enemies of the French revolution, Napoleon took the island. He released
enslaved people of Turkish and Arab origins, recruiting many to work as
interpreters and soldiers. After replenishing their supplies, the French sailed
from Malta with an additional 4,000 men.
The initial idea to attack British imperial power through a conquest of
Egypt came from the new foreign minister of France, Charles Maurice de
Talleyrand-Périgord. A former bishop during the ancien régime and a key
revolutionary of the early period, Talleyrand had escaped into exile during
the Terror. As foreign minister to the Directory, he asserted the strategic
necessity of obtaining a port on the southern shores of the Mediterranean to
fight against the piracy taking down French merchant ships at the behest of
the Ottoman Empire, which governed all of North Africa. Additionally, the
conquest of Egypt would allow France to gain a strategic new colony, whose
wealth and resources could help make up for the loss of Saint-Domingue
while also serving as a base for future attacks on British India. Sending Bon-
aparte to Egypt—away from Paris—also solved a problem for the Directory,
which was concerned about his imperious behavior and political scheming.
The French f leet arrived off the coast of Alexandria on July 1, 1798.
After scaling the city’s walls and overcoming the defenses of its 8,000 citi-
zens, the French declared their victory over a seemingly unimpressed Egyp-
tian population. Yet Napoleon was convinced he could win them over to
his cause and issued a proclamation full of French revolutionary rhetoric
about liberty overcoming tyranny. Printed in nearly incomprehensible Ara-
bic (translated by a French orientalist with the assistance of Maltese aides,
who spoke a different dialect), the pamphlet argued that the French had
similar religious beliefs to Muslims and that they merely sought to liberate
Egyptians from the tyranny of their Ottoman rulers. This rhetoric was met
with apprehension and some ridicule. Egyptian cleric and historian ‘Abd
al-Rahman al-Jabarti wrote a biting commentary on the declaration and the
French invasion, deriding both the form and the content of the declaration
as well as the French belief in the superiority of their civilization.
Leaving a few thousand troops in Alexandria, Bonaparte set out on July 5
with the rest of his infantry, inland toward Cairo in the sweltering heat.
Failing to account for the lack of water in the Nile Valley in the summer, the
army lost a significant number of soldiers to thirst, dehydration, and dysen-
tery. After several days of brutal marches through empty villages, the army
caught sight of the pyramids of Giza on the outskirts of Cairo on July 21
while several small ships arrived to transport artillery, scientists, and the
naval forces up the Nile River to the city.
The Cairenes had fortified the city as much as possible, but French artillery
and infantry tactics overcame their defenses, sending Ottoman troops and
civilians f leeing the city and its environs. On July 24, the French army entered
the city with little resistance. Bonaparte immediately set about creating a
Figure 3.1 Napoleon at the Battle of the Pyramids, July 21, 1798, by Antoine-Jean
Gros (painter) and Philippe Gros (engraver), Library of Congress, Popu-
lar Graphic Arts Division.
French satellite republic based in Cairo and modeled on the annexed French
satellites of Europe. He created a leadership body of local elites chosen from
among the Muslim theologians and jurists of Cairo. Breaking from the revo-
lution’s secularizing tendencies, however, Bonaparte repeatedly emphasized
that he considered Islam a serious and worthy religion and that the French
would respect its teachings and practices. Replicating the work of the revo-
lution, Bonaparte sought to dismantle the “corrupt” and “tyrannical” rule
of Ottoman Beys (who ruled the Ottoman provinces and regencies across
the empire) and Mamluks (the Egyptian military caste that controlled the
province).
Yet Napoleon’s definition of “liberty” did not mean democracy. Despite
the introduction of land reforms, a new court system, hospitals, and other
“civilizing” projects, the Egyptians themselves had very little power.
They were far from convinced by the French efforts, particularly after
Bonaparte taxed the conquered Egyptians heavily to pay the costs of the
occupation and reorganized by force the army and administrative appa-
ratus of the country.
Meanwhile, the legion of scientists, artists, and engineers that Bona-
parte brought to Egypt was put to work once Cairo was secured. Bona-
parte ordered the creation of the Egyptian Institute, whose mission was to
study Egyptian culture and society. Bonaparte saw the Institute as a military
annex that could study and respond to the central issues raised by the occu-
pation, including how to purify water or classify unique f lora and fauna.
But some experts sought instead to introduce French revolutionary concep-
tions of liberty and equality into Egypt. Bonaparte encouraged the “repub-
licanization” of Egyptian society, ordering all Egyptians to wear the French
revolutionary tricolor cockade, claiming that it symbolized the incorpora-
tion of Egypt into France. As in Italy, Bonaparte used spectacle and the
performance of power to assert his authority, organizing an opulent festival
in Cairo to celebrate Year VII of the French Republic and the “liberation” of
Egypt. He commissioned artistic and journalistic renderings of his activities
that were sent back to France to publicize his achievements. However, some
revolutionaries in France grew concerned about reports of brutality against
the Egyptian population and Bonaparte’s “despotic” behavior, which con-
tradicted the narrative that the Egyptians enthusiastically welcomed their
French “liberators.”
In reality, the French faced almost constant resistance to their occupation,
including a popular revolt in Cairo in October 1798 that they brutally sup-
pressed. But their larger problem came from the British navy. British admi-
ral Horatio Nelson had chased the French navy to Alexandria and sank the
French f leet in August 1798. This left no means for the French army to leave
the country and greatly diminished the French republic’s ability to build up
a powerful navy. The initial aims of the expedition—to attack British trade
and power in India—were effectively ruined.
When the Ottoman Turks unexpectedly declared war on the French at the
end of 1798, joining the coalition of European countries (now Austria, Brit-
ain, and Russia) already fighting the French in Europe, Bonaparte invaded
the Ottoman province of Syria. In February 1799, Bonaparte led 13,000
troops up the coast of Palestine toward Jaffa, where they sacked and pillaged
and shot 3,000 soldiers on the beach. In Acre, the French army attempted
to breach the walls of the city, but British naval attacks and sufficient Turk-
ish defenses led to a humiliating defeat and a retreat to Egypt. The British
attempted their own invasion of Egypt with a Turkish army in July 1799,
but the French held them off. Yet it was clear that the French could not hold
on to Egypt forever in these circumstances. With rumors of political unrest
in Paris and a potential for a new role for him in the government, Bonaparte
secretly f led Egypt, arriving back in France in October 1799.
The Coup of 18 Brumaire: Napoleon as First Consul

Napoleon returned to France a hero. His extremely effective public relations
tactics in Italy and Egypt led people to believe that his military campaigns
were enormously successful. Crowds cheered him as he traveled toward
Paris, where he attended banquets in his honor and impatiently awaited a
call-to-action from the Directory. During Bonaparte’s absence, the Direc-
tory had fallen into a state of crisis, faced with the dual threats of invasion
from the strengthened Allied armies and counterrevolution within France.
From the left, a neo-Jacobin movement was calling for a renewed state of
emergency, reminding many of the Terror from which the country had only
recently emerged. Though the threat of invasion had eased in 1799, more
powerful figures in the Directory, notably the Abbé Sieyès, sought to stabi-
lize the government by heading off threats from the left-wing Jacobin and
the right-wing royalist factions.
Sieyès, in collaboration with Talleyrand, wanted a military general with
similar views on government and administrative power to assist them in tak-
ing control of the Directory. Bonaparte was ideal: he had not been directly
implicated in the Directory’s recent infighting; he was popular with the pub-
lic; and he agreed that France should be led by a small, but strong, executive
body. A quickly organized bloodless coup began on November 9, 1799, or
18 Brumaire Year VIII. The plot was complicated and theatrical. The legisla-
ture would dissolve the Directory and the constitution, handing over power
to three interim “consuls.” But first, the legislature was moved from Paris to
Saint-Cloud under army “protection” from the threat of left-wing agitators.
Realizing something was amiss, however, the Jacobin legislators denounced
Bonaparte and his demands as he addressed the assembly and forced him
to retreat into the courtyard with his soldiers, where he collapsed. Real-
izing he needed to act forcefully, Napoleon’s brother Lucien, the president
of the legislature, told the soldiers that his brother’s collapse was due to a
violent attack and attempted assassination by the legislators. The soldiers
stormed the building, throwing out all of the legislators except those who
were in on the plot. The remaining legislators then abolished the Directory
and placed into power three new consuls: Sieyès, Bonaparte, and the abbé’s
co-conspirator Roger Ducos.
Bonaparte quickly took control of the Consulate. At his urging, the gov-
ernment produced a new constitution in a record seven weeks, and it went
into effect on December 1, 1799, although it was not approved by popular
vote until the following April. The new constitution created a Consulate
represented by a three-man body, in which the majority of the power rested
with the First Consul, with the Second and Third Consuls having merely
consultative power. Thus, the Consulate became an executive body that
consolidated nearly all the legislative, administrative, diplomatic, and mili-
tary power of France. A tricameral legislature was little more than window
dressing, while a Council of State made up of advisors chosen by the First
Consul to advise his decisions held significant power.
Despite some evidence of fraud, the plebiscite to approve the new con-
stitution received an overwhelming number of “yes” votes, and Bonaparte
immediately took power as First Consul. He appointed ministers who
helped him consolidate power, including Talleyrand as foreign minister and
Joseph Fouché, who became the notorious minister of police. In a public
address, a member of Bonaparte’s Council justified the new structure as
a means to restore stability and recover from the “excesses” of previous
revolutionary governments. This government would protect the republic, he
claimed, rather than destroy it, ensuring liberty among its peaceful citizens
by eliminating the enemies of the republic.
One of Bonaparte’s initial tasks as First Consul was to secure France
against its external military threats, notably Britain at sea and Austria on
land. Bonaparte made a personal appeal for peace to the leaders of both
countries, offering to return to the terms of the Campo-Formio treaty. How-
ever, since Austria had made significant gains on France’s Italian territory
since Bonaparte’s own victories, his proposals were rejected. As war loomed,
Bonaparte gathered 35,000 soldiers and staged a daring campaign to win
back the Italian territories by invading over the French Alps in May 1800.
Although the armies were evenly matched in the battle of Marengo in mid-
June, the French defeated the Austrians, who signed an armistice, ceding
Genoa and Lombardy to the French. Napoleon rebuilt the satellite republics
of Genoa and Milan and created the “Italian Republic” of the Cisalpine
region. In signing the Treaty of Amiens with Britain in 1802, along with
numerous other negotiated treaties with Spain, Portugal, Russia, the Otto-
man Empire, and the United States, Bonaparte ended the decade-long revo-
lutionary wars.
Meanwhile, Bonaparte was also working to end the French conf lict
with the Catholic Church, a source of domestic and foreign resistance to
the republic. His experience in Egypt had taught him to appreciate and
manipulate the inf luence of religion, rather than to remove it from society
altogether. Bonaparte envisioned a potential settlement with the pope as
a way to undermine Catholic resistance within France and among exter-
nal émigrés and state powers. Although many committed revolutionaries,
including Talleyrand and Fouché, were outraged by Bonaparte’s effort, he
forged ahead. After eight months of secret diplomatic meetings, Napoleon
and Pope Pius VII signed the Concordat in July 1801. The treaty acknowl-
edged that Catholicism was the religion of “the great majority of the French
people,” though not officially a state religion. The greatly reduced Catholic
clergy became civil servants of France, their salaries paid by the state, and
the pope’s power was severely limited in France. The pope also agreed not
to contest the revolution’s expropriation of church property, much of which
had already been sold off.
Domestic Reforms and the Civil Code

Having neutralized significant opposition to the Consulate, Bonaparte set about
enacting reforms to the French economy, state bureaucracy, and education and
legal systems, describing them as “great blocks of granite” that would rebuild
the nation. As with his foreign policy, his domestic reforms aimed for a return
to social stability. The Catholic Concordat achieved much of this, but Bona-
parte also granted amnesty to émigrés who returned to France before Septem-
ber 1802, repatriating hundreds of thousands of talented men for government
and military service.
Yet this social stability came with an authoritarian edge. Despite pro-
claiming his ties to the revolution, Bonaparte claimed ultimate authority
and established a hierarchical regime that privileged male property own-
ers. The result often looked more like the ancien régime than a revolution-
ary democratic republic. In 1802, Bonaparte demanded a new constitution
that made him consul for life, with the power to name his own successor.
The Senate complied, as did the French population, who approved the new
constitution by a large majority (thanks again to some manipulation by
Interior Minister Lucien Bonaparte). Those who opposed the regime were
often caught by Police Minister Fouché’s deep network of spies and inform-
ers. Fouché and Bonaparte also strictly censored the press, allowing only 13
approved newspapers to circulate. Yet this was not entirely a police state.
Despite censorship and surveillance, opponents were not imprisoned or
murdered en masse; critics like the writer Germaine de Staël openly dispar-
aged Bonaparte, and the consequence was political exile from Paris rather
than death or imprisonment.
Bonaparte’s actions as First Consul were generally received with approval
by the French, especially as he quickly stabilized the economy—an essential
task for the government since the treasury was once again empty. A single
stable currency, the Germinal franc, was established and would remain in
place until 1928. Bonaparte also created the Bank of France, which issued
the franc as well as credit for both state and private debt. He left relatively
unchanged the revolutionary reforms of direct taxes but instituted new
indirect taxes, including import duties, which lasted well into the twentieth
century.
Another of Bonaparte’s enduring institutional reforms was the creation
of the appointed office of the prefect, a title taken from ancient Rome, to
administer each department. A sub-prefect then headed each of the 400
arrondissements. Completely reorganizing the French educational system,
Bonaparte created a national network of secondary schools, called lycées,
elite training institutions called grandes écoles, technical academies, such
as the École Polytechnique (the elite engineering academy), and the new
military academy called Saint-Cyr. This reorganization aimed to train men
for state service, and generous scholarships were available for the sons of
military officers and civil servants.
The reform with the greatest global and long-term inf luence, how-
ever, was the revision of the civil code, which was renamed the Code
Napoléon (or Napoleonic Code) in 1807. This revision streamlined a
conf licting set of legal codes from the ancien régime and the revolu-
tionary period, including hundreds of codes based on local customary
laws. The Code Napoléon confirmed several revolutionary principles,
including equality before the law, the right to private property, and the
abolition of noble privileges. It distinguished political citizenship (access
to voting rights) from the quality of “Frenchness,” or membership in
the nation, which would enable someone to have access to civil rights.
The code declared that all children born of a French father, whether
inside France or not, would be French. Additionally, all children born
in France of a foreign father could claim French citizenship at their age
of majority. French women who married foreigners took their husband’s
nationality; if they became widows in France, or returned to France, they
could regain French nationality.
The code also enshrined the revolutionary idea of equal division of an
inherited estate among all children. However, the code was deeply pater-
nalistic in determining who had access to individual and property rights.
Women were subordinated to their husbands and fathers, and could not
enter into legal agreements, including contracts for intellectual rights, with-
out the written consent or active participation of their husbands; this meant
that women could not publish written works in their own names without
permission. The code maintained the right to divorce, but it was much more
challenging for women to divorce their husbands than for men to divorce
their wives.
The new civil code went into effect in 1804 in all territory under French
control. Coinciding with France’s territorial expansion, the Napoleonic
Code spread across Europe and inf luenced legal codes in Latin America and
the United States. It continues to serve as the civil code of France, despite the
gradual reform of many of its more conservative elements.
Imperial Expansion Under Napoleon

In addition to his domestic reforms and international diplomatic and mili-
tary achievements, Bonaparte directed much of his energy into plans for
overseas expansion. His goals included a reestablishment of French power
in Saint-Domingue, the reconquest of previously French-controlled territory
in North America, Egypt, and British India, as well as an expedition to
Australia between 1800 and 1804. After the 1802 Amiens treaty, Bonaparte
appointed his trusted general Charles Decaën as governor of the French
colonies of Mauritius, the newly christened Île Bonaparte (Réunion), and
the French trading posts on the Indian coastline. In September 1803, Decaën
attempted to convince a group of warrior princes in central India known
as the Marathas to rise up in rebellion against the British East India Com-
pany. In retaliation, the British attacked and soundly defeated French troops
as well as the Marathas in the Battle of Assaye in 1803. This effectively
destroyed French hopes of regaining inf luence and overtaking the British
in India.
Equally unsuccessful were French attempts to regain control of Saint-
Domingue. In 1795, the French army secured the allegiance of formerly
enslaved soldiers of Saint-Domingue, who had deserted the Spanish army
after hearing that the National Convention had ratified the abolition of
slavery. Together, they drove the Spanish out of Saint-Domingue under the
military leadership of Toussaint Louverture, who became the top-ranking
French officer in Saint-Domingue in 1797. Louverture then began acting
independently as the leader of Saint-Domingue, even negotiating separate
trade treaties with the British and Americans, both of whom were at war
with France. Despite Louverture’s consolidation of power, the inf luence of
the planter lobby led many in the Caribbean to believe that Napoleon would
attempt to reinstate slavery. Additionally, the end of the revolutionary wars
meant that formerly enslaved men in the Caribbean were no longer needed
as soldiers and were once again viewed solely as sources of labor and poten-
tial wealth for France.
The 1799 French constitution was a particular concern for Louverture
and the formerly enslaved men and women of Saint-Domingue, as it stated
that colonies would be governed by laws different from those of the metro-
pole. In the spring of 1801, without consulting Napoleon or any colonial
authority, Louverture appointed an assembly to create a constitution for
Saint-Domingue. The document reaffirmed the abolition of slavery but
required formerly enslaved people to continue working on their plantations.
It also made Louverture governor-for-life, and declared that all men who
were born on the island “live and die free and French.” It was, thus, not a
declaration of independence.
Napoleon, however, refused to negotiate with Louverture or any formerly
enslaved populations. Instead, he sent his army to suppress rebellions,
reinstate slavery, and consolidate French power in the Caribbean. After
laborers abandoned their plantations in Guadeloupe, fearing they would
be re-enslaved, French general Antoine Richepance brutally hunted down
and killed or deported up to 10,000 men and women from that island. The
French then reinstated slavery on Guadeloupe as well as in French Guiana.
Bonaparte sent a separate expedition to Saint-Domingue in 1802 under the
leadership of his brother-in-law General Leclerc to reinstate French rule and
slavery. Louverture’s army fought the French invasion between February
and May of 1802, but the tide turned against his armies and Louverture
agreed to help Leclerc’s army hunt down plantation laborers who had f led
into the hills. While his assistance to France was seen as a betrayal to some,
Louverture was not viewed by all in Saint-Domingue as a hero or man of the
people, particularly after requiring that former enslaved populations remain
tied to their plantations. The French were still concerned about his inf luence
and potential for betrayal, however, so they arrested him and sent him to
France, where he died in prison in 1803. While Leclerc and his troops con-
tinued hunting guerrilla bands of formerly enslaved men, resistance contin-
ued to grow, and thousands of French soldiers were struck down by yellow
fever, including Leclerc, who died of the disease in November 1802. His
successor was even more vicious, which led to a further increase in resist-
ance against the French.
When news reached Bonaparte of the collapse of the French military
effort in Saint-Domingue, he abruptly decided to abandon the colony and
French territory in North America, believing that without Saint-Domingue,
Louisiana would be worthless. He offered to sell the entire Louisiana ter-
ritory to shocked American diplomats who were in Paris seeking to gain
access or buy the port of New Orleans from the French. This transaction,
known as the Louisiana Purchase, enabled U.S. president Thomas Jeffer-
son to consolidate a large swath of territory in North America into the
new United States.
Meanwhile in Saint-Domingue on January 1, 1804, Louverture’s suc-
cessor, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, declared independence from France and
renamed the territory Haiti, the island’s pre-Columbian name. As the first
“Black republic” in the world, one that immediately became a symbol of
successful slave insurrection, Haiti faced immense challenges to its inde-
pendence. For one, the French never conceded their hold on the island and
sought to isolate Haiti, eventually reclaim the former colony, and prevent
the spread of rebellion to their other Caribbean colonies. This made it
increasingly complicated for both Haitians and foreign powers to negotiate
diplomatic and trade relations with Haiti until well into the 1820s; France
only acknowledged Haitian independence in 1825 (and only under the con-
dition that Haiti paid substantial financial reparations to French planters),
the British, Dutch and Danish in 1826, and the United States in 1862.
The Expansion of the French Empire in Europe:

The Napoleonic Wars
Putting aside the French failures at colonial expansion, Napoleon refocused
his attention toward new conf licts in Europe. The breakdown of peace
between Britain and France in 1803 was triggered by the British occupa-
tion of Malta, which violated the 1802 Amiens treaty. But the British were
also irritated by Bonaparte’s maneuvers in Europe. Two years earlier, the
French had agreed to withdraw from Holland and Switzerland. Instead,
Bonaparte solidified French occupation, appointed himself the “mediator”
of the Helvetic Republic of Switzerland, reorganized territory in the Ger-
man lands of the Holy Roman Empire in 1803, and annexed additional
territory in Italy. Opposing French expansionism, the British declared war
on France in May 1803. Bonaparte responded immediately, amassing more
than 200,000 soldiers on the coast of northern France to launch an invasion
of England across the English Channel. Napoleon ordered the construction
of hundreds of small boats and landing craft to carry the army and also
sent French troops toward the German territories, since the king of England
(George III) was also the Elector of Hanover and a strike there would simul-
taneously challenge British authority.
With another European—and potentially global—war looming, Napo-
leon took the dramatic step of transforming the Consulate into an imperial
regime, naming himself the emperor. Although the constitution of 1802 had
essentially given him the powers of a monarch (he held a lifetime position
as Consul and could choose his successor), Napoleon felt that he needed
a more esteemed official position to engage on equal terms with the other
European monarchies. He knew he could not simply declare himself a king
in the post-revolutionary atmosphere of France, but he wagered that an
emperor, if secured through a plebiscite and new constitution, would not
betray the principles of the revolution. Napoleon I, as he called himself,
declared that he was “Emperor of the French” rather than “Emperor of
France,” a distinction that portrayed his new rank as a duty to the peo-
ple rather than an egocentric grab for power. Though the First French
Empire began in May 1804, Napoleon formalized his accession to the post
of emperor in December 1804 with an elaborate coronation ceremony for
himself and Joséphine at Notre Dame cathedral, in an attempt to replicate
the coronation of the medieval emperor Charlemagne. Even the pope took
part, although Napoleon infamously took the crown from the pope and
placed it on his own head, rather than allowing the pope to perform this
traditional function.
As he had done in Italy and Egypt, Napoleon invested heavily in crafting
his image as emperor. His coronation was reproduced in an elaborate paint-
ing by Jacques-Louis David, while a portrait by Jean-Auguste-Dominique
Ingres depicted a stern-faced Napoleon in sumptuous ermine and velvet
robes on a throne surrounded by the symbols of monarchy. As a de facto
monarch, Napoleon took additional liberties by bestowing noble titles on
his family members and close associates, including Talleyrand and Fouché.
While these new noble titles did not bring with them a reward of ancien
régime privileges, Napoleon’s transformation of the French republic into a
monarchical “empire” outraged his adversaries, including political enemies
across Europe.
One of those who strongly opposed both Napoleon’s coronation and
his invasion of the German lands was Tsar Alexander I of Russia, the co-
guarantor of the Holy Roman Empire. In April 1805, the Russians created
a formal alliance with the British and soon the Austrians joined in what
became the Third Coalition against France. Upon learning of this new coali-
tion force, Napoleon turned his reorganized military, recently christened the
Grande Armée (Grand Army), toward Austria. The Grand Army drew ini-
tially on reserves from France with little combat experience and later from
satellite and occupied territories. However, these restructured combat units
also allowed for greater f lexibility, with distinct, self-contained divisions led
by officers from both the ancien régime officer corps and those promoted up
through the ranks during and after the revolution.
On October 20, 1805, the French crushed the Austrian army at the Bat-
tle of Ulm in southern Germany. However, just one day later, the British
decimated the French navy, sinking more than half their ships in the Battle
of Trafalgar, off the coast of Spain. Though the French f leet had more ships,
the British admiral Lord Horatio Nelson—who died in the battle—had
superior tactics. Lord Nelson’s legendary victory destroyed French hopes of
ever challenging British naval power or its overseas empire in Napoleon’s
lifetime. Napoleon’s greatest military strength was always on land anyway,
and he immediately shifted from the planned invasion of England to the
defeat of the Third Coalition in central Europe.
In mid-November 1805, French troops marched into Vienna and then
moved northward to confront the remaining Austrian troops that had
joined up with the Russian army. On December 2, the armies clashed near
the Czech village of Austerlitz. In one of Napoleon’s most legendary victo-
ries, the defeated Russian army retreated eastward, and the French captured
more than 100 Russian cannons in the process (many of which were melted
down and turned into the victory column in the Place Vendôme in Paris).
The devastated Austrians immediately surrendered, ceding their remaining
Italian territories in the Treaty of Pressburg. This allowed Napoleon to add
Venice to his “Kingdom of Italy,” which he placed under the control of his
stepson Eugène de Beauharnais. Napoleon also forced the Austrian emperor
to give up control of the Holy Roman Empire, effectively ending that politi-
cal configuration. In its place, Napoleon reorganized the German territo-
ries under French control into the Rheinbund, or the Confederation of the
Rhine. This massive shakeup alarmed Prussian leaders, who joined forces
with the British and the Russians in 1806, forming the Fourth Coalition
against France.
The Kingdom of Prussia, under the leadership of Friedrich Wilhelm
III, ordered Napoleon to withdraw west of the Rhine. Instead, Napo-
leon advanced further eastward and confronted the Prussian army in
October 1806 in two battles, at Jena and Auerstadt, soundly defeat-
ing what had previously been the most powerful and successful army
in Europe. The Russians, however, refused to surrender, so Napoleon
chased them further into eastern Europe. In Poland, the French sup-
ported a massive popular uprising against Russian occupation. In
February 1807, the French and Russians met at Eylau in East Prussia,
north of Warsaw, in one of the bloodiest and most horrific battles of
the era, fought in sub-zero temperatures on a frozen battlefield strewn
with corpses. Although the Russians withdrew, it was not a decisive
victory. In June, however, the French defeated the Russians at the Bat-
tle of Friedland, and Tsar Alexander agreed to meet Napoleon and
discuss the terms of a treaty.
In July 1807, Napoleon and Tsar Alexander met on a raft in the Nieman
River, where they signed the Treaty of Tilsit, which carved up Europe into
French and Russian spheres of inf luence. Russia claimed territory in Poland
as well as the right to invade Finland, and the tsar agreed to join Napoleon’s
economic blockade of Britain. The eastern half of Prussia was incorporated
into the new Duchy of Warsaw, an independent Polish territory that Napo-
leon placed under the control of his ally King Frederick Augustus of Saxony.
Prussia’s legendary army was dismantled while Prussians were forced to
live under French occupation and pay heavy indemnities—an intentionally
humiliating situation that stirred up strong popular resentment against the
French occupiers and their leader.
With the armies of Austria, Russia, and Prussia defeated, Napoleon
turned his attention to Britain, his long-standing enemy. An invasion across
the Channel seemed increasingly impossible, so Napoleon devised an eco-
nomic blockade that would cut off Britain’s access to global commerce,
thereby inf licting serious damage to England’s economy and reducing its
military and political strength. Per the Berlin Decree of November 21,
1806, France closed its own ports and those of its allies to British goods.
The British responded with their own blockade of France that also
restricted neutral shipping. Napoleon then banned all trade between Brit-
ain and Europe, in what became known as the “Continental System.” The
entry of Russia into this system meant that the British could be banned
from the Baltic Sea as well.
Despite direct orders from the French, Portugal, which was politically
and economically dependent on Britain, openly refused to join the block-
ade. In retaliation, Napoleon made plans to invade, sending troops through
northern Spain into Portugal in November 1807. The French took control
of Lisbon and forced the Portuguese royal family, a branch of the House of
Bourbon and longtime challengers of Napoleon’s legitimacy, into exile in
Brazil. The Spanish were French allies, but its monarchy were also Bour-
bons, so the French took control of northern Spanish territory in 1808. Plac-
ing the monarchy under house arrest, Napoleon installed his brother Joseph
(previously king of Naples) on the throne of Spain.
The French conquest and occupation of the Iberian peninsula did not
go smoothly. Almost immediately, popular insurrections emerged first in
Madrid and then throughout the Spanish countryside, where revolutionary
juntas directed a guerrilla resistance movement. The Portuguese also rebelled
against the occupation, and French troops in Portugal found themselves
isolated and cut off from their supply lines. To support the insurrection,
the British sent an expeditionary force to Portugal in August 1808, which
rapidly defeated the French troops they encountered. Unlike the troops
directly under Bonaparte’s command in central Europe, the French gener-
als in Spain and Portugal were disorganized and devoted more to pillaging
than defeating their opponents. Because the Spanish guerrilla tactics left
the French unable to distinguish between soldiers and civilians, the French
occupiers frequently committed violent atrocities against Spanish civilians.
As such, the popular opposition to their occupation only strengthened as
news of the French military’s atrocious behavior spread. The Peninsular War
in Spain and Portugal continued until 1814, when the French retreated due
to a lack of supplies and the massive loss of troops to disease and combat.
The British army, which had sent thousands of troops to support the Portu-
guese and Spanish resistance, was hot on their heels.
The French weaknesses in Spain and Portugal had encouraged resist-
ance movements in central Europe as well, resulting in the emergence of the
Fifth Coalition. In 1809, the Austrians rose up against the French but were
defeated in bloody battles at Aspern-Wessling and Wagram in July. The
resulting Treaty of Schönbrunn forced Austria to hand over its remaining
territory in Slovenia and Croatia along with territory in Poland that was
divided between the Duchy of Warsaw and Russia.
More personally significant, Napoleon had acquired a new wife, the teen-
aged Austrian archduchess Marie-Louise. Napoleon and Joséphine’s mar-
riage had broken down irreparably by 1809, in large part due to Napoleon’s
frustration with Joséphine’s inability to produce a male heir. Over the pope’s
protestations, Napoleon obtained a civil divorce from Joséphine in Decem-
ber 1809 that was confirmed by an ecclesiastical court in January 1810.
Initially, he had sought to find a new wife within the Russian court, but
the tsar rejected his overtures. The Austrians, however, had little power to
object. Napoleon married Marie-Louise in April 1810, and she produced
an heir named Napoléon-François-Charles-Joseph within a year. The Bona-
parte dynasty, for the moment, appeared solid. In 1811, the Napoleonic
“Grand Empire” was at its height. Despite the challenges of the Peninsular
War, the French occupied territory across continental Europe that included
more than 44 million people and stretched to the Russian border.
Soldiers and Civilians at War

During Napoleon’s rule, only 52,000 men had volunteered to serve in his
army. Consequently, the French military relied on conscription. In 1798,
France had legislated an annual conscription for all Frenchmen between the
ages of 20 and 25 for a term of five years in peacetime and an unlimited term
of service in wartime. Out of 2.5 million potential French recruits, how-
ever, only 1.5 million became soldiers. For peasants and the poor, losing an
able-bodied son to the army could be a devastating financial blow, so many
attempted to evade conscription. Meanwhile, wealthier conscripts were fre-
quently able to hire replacements whereas others took more drastic steps to
avoid the draft through hasty marriages or self-mutilation. For those unable
to avoid conscription, desertion was one final means of escape, although this
was never an ideal option, particularly when far from home. While the army
provided a foreign adventure for some and an escape from the drudgery of
everyday life for others, many men—young peasants in particular—found
that the experience of leaving home for months, even years, at a time led to
depression and overwhelming homesickness. This particular form of melan-
choly was understood during this period as nostalgia (or le mal du pays),
diagnosed by army doctors as a debilitating medical condition that had the
potential to sweep through the military like an epidemic; its only cure was
repatriation. In addition to conscripted Frenchmen, the Grand Army also
relied on hundreds of thousands of men recruited from the annexed and
occupied territories as well as the satellite states.
Often overlooked, women had also long made up a significant element
of the French army, serving in both official and unofficial capacities as
auxiliaries. Before the French Revolution, thousands of women served as
vivandières, selling food to the troops, working as laundresses, and tak-
ing care of the uniforms of the troops. These women were typically the
wives of soldiers who traveled with the regiment and supplemented the
income of the family by selling food, alcohol, tobacco, or their labor to
the other soldiers. Military posts were allowed to have canteens, and the
French Revolution saw the emergence of a new category of female army
labor, the cantinière, who would procure and sell government supplies
to the troops. Because all cantinières were legally required to be wives of
soldiers, many informal marriages took place, particularly when a soldier
was killed, leaving his widow unprotected. As the French armies spread
throughout Europe, thousands of foreign women also joined the army as
cantinières, notably Spanish women. The children of cantinières were sim-
ilarly brought into the army. Daughters often took the place of their moth-
ers, and sons gained access to official army employment, making them
eligible to receive education, rations, and pay with the understanding that
they enlist at the age of 16.
Napoleon’s armies moved around frequently and covered vast amounts of
territory. Soldiers marched between 10 and 35 miles per day, depending on
urgency. Although the army was supposed to keep its soldiers supplied with
basic necessities, supply lines were frequently broken, so soldiers and camp
provisioners took what they needed from the civilian populations surround-
ing them. In addition to the taxation imposed on occupied territories, civilians
felt the weight of the French occupation most directly through their interac-
tions with the Napoleonic armies. Soldiers were frequently billeted in civilian
homes, a situation over which civilians had no say or control, and although
soldiers might offer an IOU for the supplies they requisitioned, the army often
never paid. In the case of Spain, local supplies were simply pillaged. Civilian
rumors about Napoleonic armies frequently included warnings about French
soldiers’ reputation for rape and harassment of local women.
Napoleonic battles were scenes of organized chaos. Although they were
staged with infantry and cavalry who marched in elaborate and dense for-
mations to attack the enemy, foot soldiers typically marched straight into
artillery fire, leading to massive casualties. Dead and wounded lay on the
battlefield for hours. Often even their comrades would strip dying men
of their weapons or clothes and move on if there was no hope that they
could be saved, leaving their bodies for local civilians to bury later. For
the wounded who could be saved, battlefield medicine was rudimentary,
and surgeons typically amputated severely wounded limbs. Many wounds
turned septic, and disease ran rampant in hospitals and military barracks
as well as among civilian populations. Prisoners of war, meanwhile, faced
a fate that varied depending on who captured them. Some men were held
in prisons with terrible conditions, exposed to reprisals from local civilians,
while others married into local communities and took up normal life among
their captors.
At home in France, civilians avidly followed the army’s campaigns through
published Bulletins de la Grande Armée, which recounted the exploits of the
battlefield and showed maps that allowed the French population to track the
military’s progress around Europe. Public enthusiasm for information about
the war and their desire for visual images of combat sent newspapers and
painters scrambling to find better ways to realistically represent the battlefield
and report back as quickly as possible. One result was the panorama, a newly
developed technology that presented spectators with large, 360-degree paint-
ings that depicted military battles on a greater scale and in more detail than
ever before. Producing heroic images and narratives of the war was a key ele-
ment of the Napoleonic propaganda campaign to maintain civilian support
for the war effort, especially as the war dragged on into its second decade.
The Russian Campaign and the Collapse

of the Grand Empire
1812 proved to be the major turning point for the Napoleonic empire. In
1811, Napoleon had defeated another coalition of armies fighting against
him, secured a dynastic alliance with Austria, and occupied territory across
almost the entirety of continental Europe. However, the Peninsular Wars
had demonstrated clear weaknesses in the military’s command structure,
and the central European battlefields were becoming bloodier and more
chaotic; few remaining officers had multiple campaigns under their belts.
On the home front, the economic stresses of the continental blockade were
also beginning to take their toll. The black market was thriving: coastal
regions profited from clandestinely smuggling in British trade goods, such as
sugar and cotton, while illegally selling French wine, silk, or Russian wheat
to Britain. Napoleon consumed significant time and energy attempting to
prevent traders and governments all over Europe from opening their ports
to the British, which he felt undermined his political authority.
Map 3.1 Europe Under Napoleon (1812).
Russian resistance to the economic blockade of Britain was the catalyst

for Napoleon’s ill-fated invasion of Russia in 1812. The Franco-Russian
alliance had never been solid and the Treaty of Tilsit quickly unraveled.
When the French annexed the Netherlands and northern Germany in 1810
(to further reinforce the continental blockade), one of the tsar’s close rela-
tives was ousted from power; this made the tsar fear that Napoleon would
further expand Poland through the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. Meanwhile,
the blockade seriously threatened the livelihood of Russia’s landowning
elite, who sold their grain to Britain. Consequently, in 1810 the Russians
withdrew from the Continental System, and Alexander slapped high tariffs
on imported goods from the Napoleonic empire.
Napoleon’s response to the tsar was to invade Russia with 600,000 sol-
diers, recruited from across the empire. On June 24, 1812, Napoleon’s
Grand Army crossed the Russian frontier. Knowing how Napoleon pre-
ferred to fight—by meeting on a battlefield with strategic set-pieces that
could be f lexibly maneuvered to encircle the enemy—the Russians instead
retreated into the interior, burning everything in their wake, which forced
the French to struggle through a desolate landscape and extreme summer
heat. Used to living off the resources obtained from occupied lands and
people, the Napoleonic armies instead had to rely on dwindling supply lines.
The French chased the Russian army toward Moscow, finally meeting them
on a battlefield just west of the city on September 7. With 70,000 casualties
in a single day, the battle was one of the deadliest of the Napoleonic Wars.
The Russians withdrew to Moscow, burned it down, and then f led south.
With winter approaching and no visible sign of a Russian surrender, the
French retreated back to France. Completely unprepared for the sub-zero
winter conditions, the onset of disease, and the constant attacks from the
Russian army, the remaining forces were devastated. While Napoleon hur-
ried ahead, escaping back to France, his army struggled along in his wake.
Of the initial 600,000 men in the Grand Army, only a little over 20,000
made it out of Russia alive.
The devastating French defeat catalyzed the resistance against Napoleon.
In June 1813, the Sixth Coalition formed with the armies of Britain, Russia,
Prussia, Spain, Portugal, and Sweden. After Napoleon rejected the Austrian
foreign minister Klemens von Metternich’s attempts to mediate, the Austri-
ans joined as well. Napoleon used forced conscription across the empire to
rebuild his army, but again his troops were soundly defeated. At the three-
day Battle of Leipzig in October 1813, he lost as many as 100,000 men.
Napoleon once again f led back to France to regroup and defend France
itself from a potential invasion. In the spring of 1814, the invasion forces
arrived: the British army marched into southern France, while the Prussian
and Russian armies descended from the north. On April 2, 1814, the French
Senate turned against Napoleon, throwing their support behind a new Bour-
bon monarchy, which would place the brother of Louis XVI on the throne.
With the sounds of the cannons at the gates of Paris, and his former political
allies turned against him, Napoleon abdicated on April 6, 1814, leaving the
country to live in exile on the island of Elba in the Mediterranean Sea.
The Global Consequences of the Napoleonic Empire

Between 1799 and 1814, Napoleon and his collaborators transformed
Europe in ways that had dramatic long-term—and global—consequences.
Within France, Napoleon consolidated certain elements of the French Revo-
lution into a written legal code, notably civil and property rights, while
also building a centralized state bureaucracy with its own social hierarchies
and mechanisms of repression, largely through police surveillance. Through
military conquest and occupation, Napoleon spread his political, legal,
and ideological systems throughout Europe and reordered central Europe’s
political and social systems. The Holy Roman Empire became the Confed-
eration of the Rhine and a reorganized Prussia that adopted (along with
other annexed and occupied territories) the Napoleonic Code and adminis-
trative reforms modeled on the French system. The 1807 Prussian “October
Edict,” for instance, abolished serfdom and transformed military, financial,
and administrative structures. Napoleon also transformed the status of Jews
in occupied territories. He abolished laws that restricted Jews to ghettos and
declared in 1807 that Judaism was an official religion of France, alongside
Catholicism and Protestant faiths, despite ongoing debate about whether
this forced assimilation of French Jews was a positive development for their
community.
Historians estimate the total number of military deaths during the Napo-
leonic Wars at around 3 million, with another 1 million civilian deaths.
Hundreds of thousands of soldiers were also wounded, many returning with
missing limbs and unable to perform manual labor jobs. The French mili-
tary’s notorious occupation tactics gave rise to growing resistance against
the French, including the guerrilla warfare that emerged in the Iberian Pen-
insula. But it also led to the rise of nationalism across central Europe, as
populations in Poland, Italy, and the German states came together in a com-
mon resistance to foreign occupation, and a burgeoning awareness of their
unique languages, histories, and connection to their homeland.
The consequences of the Napoleonic wars spread far beyond the Euro-
pean continent as well. After Napoleon overthrew the Spanish monarchy,
revolutionary movements gained strength in Spain’s former Latin Ameri-
can colonies. Beginning in 1810, uprisings in Argentina, Mexico, and Ven-
ezuela would reverberate across the region for the next several decades. The
conf licts also blew up into the War of 1812 between Britain and the United
States. As the Allied countries negotiated the terms of the post-Napoleonic
settlement in 1814, the world watched to see what would happen to the
country that had launched an extraordinary revolution only 25 years earlier.

Bell, David A. The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as
We Know It. Boston, MA: Houghton Miff lin Harcourt, 2008.
Blaufarb, Rafe and Claudia Liebeskind. Napoleonic Foot Soldiers and Civilians:
A Brief History With Documents. New York, NY: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011.
Broers, Michael, Peter Hicks, and Agustín Guimerá, eds, The Napoleonic Empire
and the New European Political Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Cardoza, Thomas. Intrepid Women: Cantinières and Vivandières of the French
Army. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010.
Cole, Juan. Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East. New York, NY: Palgrave
MacMillan, 2007.
Gaffield, Julia. Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World: Recognition After Revo-
lution. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.
Popkin, Jeremy. You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of
Slavery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
4 Restoration and the Liberal Order Restoration and the Liberal Order
Introduction
Victor Hugo’s acclaimed historical novel Les Misérables begins in 1815
when the main character, Jean Valjean, is released from the notorious
Bagne of Toulon prison, where he was locked up for 19 years for steal-
ing bread to feed his sister’s children. The narrative follows Valjean over
the next 17 years, as he struggles to overcome his criminal past. Valjean
and the numerous iconic characters he encounters—the prostitute Fantine,
her daughter Cosette, and the revolutionary student Marius—embody the
struggles of the French working classes against exploitation at the hands of
both lawless individuals and French representatives of law and order. The
novel’s climactic scenes take place in the underground sewers and on the
barricades constructed in Paris during the “June Rebellion” of 1832, the
coda to a series of events that are known as the Revolution of 1830.
Revolution was not, however, what the political elites of Europe had
hoped would occur in France after the Napoleonic Wars; indeed, they
had done everything in their power to prevent events such as the French
Revolution of 1789–1799 or the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte from ever
taking place again. With Napoleon’s armies defeated, the Allied leaders
of Europe came together in 1814–1815 in diplomatic meetings known as
the Congress of Vienna, where they attempted to restore Europe to its pre-
revolutionary state. The monarchies of Austria, Russia, Prussia, and Eng-
land sought to repress what they saw as the dangerous Enlightenment and
revolutionary ideas that had shaken up the continent. One key element of
this plan was the restoration of France’s monarchy: Louis XVI’s brother
was installed as King Louis XVIII of France. Despite his attempts to create
a constitutional monarchy, Louis XVIII’s reign, and that of his successor
and brother Charles X, did not produce the stability that the Allied leaders
of Europe desperately sought. Instead, two new revolutions broke out in
France in 1830 and 1848.
While conservatives across Europe hoped the stabilizing force of monar-
chy would prevent revolution, liberal ideas about republicanism and democ-
racy could not simply be repressed. A diverse spectrum of liberal dissent to
DOI: 10.4324/b23310-4
Restoration and the Liberal Order 71
the monarchy emerged by the 1820s and increased after Charles X, with his
ultra-royalist and absolutist tendencies, took the throne in 1824. Addition-
ally, a series of economic crises, industrialization, and the implementation
of liberal (laissez-faire) economic theories brought gradual, but significant,
transformations in the economic and social structures of nineteenth-century
France. By the late 1820s, opposition to the monarchy came not just from
the bourgeoisie and political elites but from the rural and urban lower
classes, who sought dramatic improvements to their living and working
conditions. Some were attracted to developing socialist theories of labor
and social organization, while others grew nostalgic for the stability of the
Napoleonic regime. Although the revolution of 1830 failed to achieve per-
manent transformations in the political and social systems of France, lib-
eral and working-class opposition forces developed inf luential ideas and
political projects during this era that would have long-term impacts both in
France and abroad.
The Bourbon Restoration, the Congress of Vienna,

and the Hundred Days
On March 31, 1814, Allied troops of the Sixth Coalition entered Paris under
the leadership of Russian tsar Alexander I, who proclaimed himself the
“liberator” of the French. Witnessing an outpouring of popular enthusiasm
among the Parisians for their so-called liberators, the French foreign minis-
ter Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand convinced the Senate to oust Napoleon.
He abdicated on April 11 and was exiled to the Mediterranean island of
Elba, near Italy. France was now under Allied occupation, a reversal of
fortunes that was especially brutal for civilians in northern France, where
Russian and Prussian troops pillaged villages of resources and burned them
to the ground. Stories of violent assaults, murder, and rape against French
civilians as well as epidemic diseases spread like wildfire.
Despite the invasion’s initial violence, Talleyrand negotiated a surprisingly
generous settlement from the Allied leaders, several of whose countries had
been continuously at war with France for over a decade. The Allies unani-
mously supported the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in France, offer-
ing the throne to Louis XVI’s brother, the 59-year-old Count of Provence.
Henceforth known as Louis XVIII, the new king arrived in France from
England, where he had been living in exile since 1807. Rather than restor-
ing his brother’s absolute monarchy, he agreed to rule under a constitutional
monarchy alongside the remaining nine members of Napoleon’s Senate. On
May 30, 1814, the borders of France were restored to those of 1792. The
Allies initially did not demand financial reparations or indemnities from
France and agreed to remove their occupation troops. France also retained
its overseas colonies, with the exception of Tobago and St. Lucia in the Car-
ibbean and the Île-de-France (present-day Mauritius) in the Indian Ocean.
Additionally, when Allied diplomats gathered in Vienna in September to
72 Restoration and the Liberal Order
negotiate the reorganization of Europe, a French delegation was permitted
to participate.
Gathering at the Congress of Vienna in 1814, European leaders primarily
wanted to prevent future revolutions of the sort that had erupted in France
in 1789 and disrupted the entire European continent for nearly two decades.
Under the leadership of Austrian foreign minister Klemens von Metternich,
an ideology known as conservatism emerged, emphasizing the values of tra-
dition, obedience to political authority, monarchy secured by divine right,
and a rejection of Enlightenment and liberal demands for individual rights.
However, conservative leaders could not simply obliterate the liberal ideas
that had taken root in France and across Europe as a result of Napoleon’s
conquests. The “problem” of revolutionary fervor was a challenge Euro-
pean leaders would face over the next several decades.
Despite some visible changes to the governing system, the Restoration
period saw many continuities from the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras.
Allied leaders demanded that Louis XVIII govern with a new constitution,
which came in the form of the Charter of 1814. It proposed a legislature
modeled on the two English Houses of Parliament. The upper house com-
prised aristocrats appointed by the king, many of whom had gained titles
under Napoleon. The lower house comprised 258 members elected by adult
male taxpayers over the age of 30 who paid at least 300 francs a year in
direct taxes. The eligible electorate was limited to around 110,000 French-
men. Although the parliament held the right to vote on legislation and
approve all new taxes, the king could make emergency decrees and select
his own ministers. Louis XVIII also maintained the administrative and legal
reorganizations put in place by revolutionary leaders and Napoleon, includ-
ing the Napoleonic Civil Code and the Concordat with the Catholic Church.
From the outset, the new French monarchy faced many obstacles. Despite
the French population’s war weariness, Napoleon remained broadly popular,
notably among military veterans. Additionally, Louis XVIII’s early policies,
such as disbanding the army and instituting taxes on alcohol and tobacco,
were extremely unpopular among the lower classes. Within six months of
taking the throne, even the elites were unhappy with the monarchy. Hearing
rumors of the discontent in France and growing tensions at the Congress
of Vienna over conf licting territorial claims, Napoleon saw an opportunity
to reclaim his throne. In late February 1815, he organized his escape from
Elba. In a series of events known as the “Hundred Days,” Napoleon landed
on the coast of southern France on March 1, 1815, and immediately began
marching north toward Paris, gathering loyal troops along the way. Louis
XVIII f led north to Belgium just ahead of Napoleon’s arrival into Paris on
March 20. Although he had the support of a significant swath of the French
population, Napoleon did not easily settle back into his previous role as
emperor. For one thing, he had regained followers in part by promising con-
stitutional reforms. Following through on this promise, he turned over the
responsibility for revising the constitution to the liberal Benjamin Constant.
A new acte additionnel was added to Louis XVIII’s Charter of 1814, which
expanded suffrage rights and freedom of the press. Yet these reforms were
short-lived as the French and Allied armies immediately mobilized for war.
Louis XVIII’s demobilization of the army left Napoleon without a stand-
ing body of troops to deploy against the impending Allied invasion. By early
summer, Napoleon had managed to mobilize nearly 200,000 troops with
another 66,000 in reserve; however, the Allied Seventh Coalition had more
than 800,000 troops committed to the destruction of the Napoleonic armies.
Instead of waiting for the Allies to invade, Napoleon decided to strike first,
before his enemies were fully organized. He sent his newly formed Army
of the North into Belgium in early June, where it met British and Prussian
forces. France got the upper hand in early battles at Quatre Bras and Ligny
(June 15), but the Battle of Waterloo on June 18 led to the decisive defeat
of Napoleon’s army. After retreating back to Paris, where he sought, unsuc-
cessfully, to secure political support for his regime, Napoleon abdicated
again, on June 2. Allied forces entered Paris on July 7, and the next day
restored Louis XVIII to the throne. Without a clear escape route, Napoleon
surrendered to Allied forces on July 15 and was exiled to the remote island
of St. Helena in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, where he died in 1821.
In November 1815, the Allies signed the Treaty of Paris, finally ending the
Napoleonic Wars; in contrast to the previous lenient settlement, the post-
Hundred Days terms were much harsher. The boundaries of France were
reduced to those of 1790, which meant the loss of Savoie and Nice along
with strategic territory along the northern and eastern frontiers with the
Netherlands and the newly organized German Confederation. A total of
150,000 Allied soldiers were stationed on the eastern border of France, at
French government expense, for five years. Their purpose was twofold: to
prevent the possibility of revolution and to ensure that the French govern-
ment paid the 700-million-franc indemnity that the Allied governments now
demanded as punishment for Napoleon’s disastrous final campaign.
More profoundly consequential, the Hundred Days prevented the Res-
toration monarchy from fully gaining a foothold in France, which became
even more politically divided in the aftermath of Waterloo. Following the
final French defeat, parts of the country were in a state of near civil war and
were only pacified once the Allied occupation armies arrived. In southern
France, Bonapartist supporters did battle with ultra-royalist supporters of
the Bourbon monarchy, many of whom were returning émigrés from the
revolutionary period. Meanwhile, like the Thermidorian Reaction of 1795,
the “Second White Terror” violently purged those suspected of ties to the
French Revolution or Napoleon. Officials such as Talleyrand and Fouché
were ousted from their positions along with legislators who were not openly
royalist. Louis XVIII banned any member of the Bonaparte family from
entering or owning property in France, and the ultra-royalist legislature
purged the government and military of tens of thousands of officials with
Bonapartist ties. To the great dismay of the ultra-royalists, the king mostly
abstained from violent reprisals. However, as a warning shot to Napoleonic
military officers, he executed Napoleon’s top general, popularly known as
Marshal Ney, for his participation in the Hundred Days campaign.
Restoration France
Out of these social upheavals and violent political disagreements, three
political blocs formed during the early years of the Restoration. The reac-
tionary conservative and anti-revolutionary ultra-royalists (the ultras) were
led by Louis XVIII’s brother, the Count d’Artois. A more moderate group
were the royalists, who generally supported Louis XVIII and were commit-
ted to the success of his rule under the Charter of 1814. Finally, a much
smaller and diverse group, known as the liberal opposition, pursued the
defense of national sovereignty from various internal threats, including the
ultras and the Catholic Church; over the next decade, they slowly coalesced
into a force of resistance against the Bourbon monarchy.
There were also striking social divisions in Restoration France. The new
electoral law created a political elite based on wealth, rather than nobil-
ity; however, the tensions between ancien régime nobility and Napoleonic
nobles never fully eased. The bourgeois classes who had gained access to
political power during the revolution and Napoleonic eras could still retain
access to the vote with enough income, but many of these individuals—
established merchants, civil servants, and landowners—were committed
to the ideals of liberal republicanism, or, at the very least, constitutional
monarchy. Others, such as the commercial classes in Alsace, had greatly
benefited from economic trade under the empire and were committed to
the return of Bonaparte. The elite division was stark: the ultras saw the
bourgeoisie as a group that had used the revolution to insinuate itself into
power through financial gain and personal ambition; the liberal (and to a
certain extent, the royalist) elements of the bourgeoisie saw the ultras as the
champions of a reactionary, counterrevolutionary conservatism.
For the peasants and urban workers who made up the vast majority of
the population, the challenging economic conditions of the postwar years
overtook other concerns. The demobilization of tens of thousands of sol-
diers oversaturated the employment market. The war had also delayed eco-
nomic growth in key areas of industrial production such as coal, iron, and
cotton, areas in which British industry was expanding much faster. From
1815 to 1818, the French government concentrated its efforts on paying the
Allied war indemnity. Bad harvests in 1816 and 1817 pushed up the price
of bread and other necessities. Protests against bread shortages, high prices,
and unemployment were common early in the Restoration, and the lower
classes came to associate economic downturn with the Bourbon monarchy.
In the first legislative elections in 1815, an ultra-royalist majority was
elected to the Chamber of Deputies. Their obstructionism and reaction-
ary behavior led Louis XVIII (who supported more moderate positions) to
describe them as the “impossible chamber.” The following year, he dissolved
the chamber but not before it enacted a law giving parliament the power
to approve state expenditures. Elections in 1816 produced a more liberal
legislature, dominated by a moderate group of royalists (the doctrinaires),
whose juste milieu political philosophy searched for middle ground between
absolutism and popular democracy. The left wing of the chamber, ranging
from staunch republicans to Bonapartists, remained a small minority due to
the tight restrictions on who was allowed to vote in parliamentary elections.
Over the next few years, the legislature, led by the doctrinaires, enacted
policies to maintain their hold on power and prevent a return of the ultras,
even manipulating voting rules to keep their enemies out of power. While
some new legislation, such as relaxed press censorship, pleased the liberal
opposition, other laws that gave Catholics more access to the educational
system angered anticlerical republicans and liberals. After a Bonapartist
assassinated the ultra-royalist Duke de Berry in 1820, the ultras once again
regained power by claiming that liberals were attempting to foment revolu-
tion. Yet their controversial policies inspired a growing liberal opposition
throughout the 1820s.
The threat of revolutionary violence, however exaggerated, allowed
ultras to convince the king and sympathetic royalists to enact legislation
that re-instituted press censorship laws and enabled the arrest and detain-
ment of anyone suspected of conspiracy against the state without charges
for up to three months. To consolidate their power, the ultras passed the
Law of the Double Vote in June 1820, which gave the wealthiest members
of the electorate two votes for legislative deputies. Beginning in 1821, Prime
Minister Joseph de Villèle’s ultra-royalist government enabled the Catholic
Church to gain even more control over education and numerous bishops
were appointed peers and began to play active roles in government.
In 1823, Villèle intervened militarily in Spain, where a liberal revolt in
1820 had forced their Bourbon king—put in place by the Allies at the Con-
gress of Vienna—to restore a constitutional monarchy. In an attempt to
liberate the king, who was being held prisoner in Madrid, the Spanish ultra-
royalists led a failed coup in 1822. Despite widespread European misgiv-
ings, in April 1823, the French army invaded and, within a few months, had
freed the king and restored the Spanish monarchy. In the glow of his first
major military victory, Villèle called for a general election in the spring of
1824, and the ultra-royalists claimed an almost unanimous victory in the
Chamber of Deputies.
In September 1824, Louis XVIII died, and was succeeded by his brother,
the ultra-royalist Count of Artois, who became King Charles X. Immediately
after, one of the first acts Villèle undertook with the ultra-royalist major-
ity was the passage of a bill that indemnified approximately 700,000 émi-
grés whose land had been seized during the 1789 revolution, at a cost of
630 million francs. Opposition to this law, along with the appointment of
the conservative cleric Mgr Frayssinous as minister of ecclesiastical affairs
and education, helped unite disorganized liberals. Anticlerical feeling grew
stronger with the passage of the Sacrilege Law of 1825, which returned to a
pre-revolutionary metaphoric equation of the body of the king with the body
of Christ, and proposed the death penalty for any profanation of the Host
(a law that was never actually applied). Even more than his brother, Charles
X engaged in ceremonial performances of monarchical glory that linked the
monarchy to the Catholic Church. His coronation in 1825, for example,
took place in the cathedral in Reims, the traditional site of consecration of
French kings. In 1826, he wore a purple mourning robe and kneeled before
the archbishop of Paris while participating in the atonement processions for
Louis XVI during the jubilee of Pope Leo XII, giving rise to rumors that the
king was secretly a Catholic cleric working directly for the pope.
Republican and anticlerical fears about the close relationship between
ultra-royalists, Charles X, and the Catholic Church were not completely
unfounded. Although some of the ultra-royalists simply wanted a return
to the ancien régime and their former privileges, a significant portion
believed that what France needed in the wake of the revolution and Napo-
leonic wars was a full political and intellectual counterrevolution. To
enact this goal, ultra-royalist counterrevolutionaries sought to expand the
inf luence of the church in France. Some of the most inf luential figures
in this movement included Louis de Bonald and Joseph de Maistre, who
had spent the revolution in exile in Switzerland, frequenting the salon of
Germaine de Staël. Like many European conservatives, de Maistre sup-
ported the divine right of kings and claimed that the Terror was the logical
outcome of the Enlightenment. He was a proponent of both monarchy as
the ideal political authority and the pope as the ultimate religious author-
ity, ideas central to nineteenth-century conservative ideology. This strand
of French Catholicism, which strongly supported the clerical authority
(and to a certain extent the political authority) of the pope, is known as
ultramontanism (referring to the pope as the figure “over the mountains”
in Rome). Although a minority of Catholics continued to favor a Galli-
can—or French-centered—church that restricted the authority of the pope,
it slowly lost favor in France as the ultramontanists increasingly gained
ecclesiastical and political power.
During the Bourbon Restoration, French Catholics began to regain signif-
icant inf luence among the French population. Founded in 1816, the Society
of Missions initially engaged in “interior missions” across France to rebuild
Catholicism after the destructive revolutionary decades. Both religious and
lay congregations proliferated, targeting women and students, which greatly
angered anticlerical liberals who resented Catholic inf luence on schools and
education more broadly. The Catholic press made up 12 percent of the
annual production of books in France during the first half of the nineteenth
century, and Catholics were essential to the expanding reach of printed
materials across France through their parish libraries of religious texts and
children’s literature. They also strongly encouraged families to re-engage
in Catholic rites and ceremonies such as the first Communion, which had
fallen out of favor during the revolutionary period.
Unsurprisingly, liberal opposition increased in response to ultra-royalist
power. In 1826, Villèle directed the legislature to pass a bill re-establishing
primogeniture, which outraged liberals along with some royalists. The out-
cry led him to introduce a bill that December to censor the press, but the
bill was withdrawn. Opposition to press censorship united liberals, and they
began printing anti-ultra pamphlets and organizing at banquets in anticipa-
tion of the 1827 legislative elections. When the liberals gained a majority
in those elections, conf licts between the liberal opposition and the ultras
escalated into a constitutional crisis over Charles X’s nomination of the
extreme ultra Jules de Polignac as prime minister in 1829. Liberals sus-
pected a forthcoming ultra-royalist coup against the Charter of 1814, while
the ultras accused liberals of fomenting revolution. Pressed by the ultras to
assert his authority in the name of state security, Charles X used his address
to the 1830 parliamentary session to make several thinly veiled references to
Article 14 of the charter, which would allow him to suspend the Chamber
of Deputies. When liberals responded with a letter signed by 221 depu-
ties claiming that Polignac’s ministry posed a direct threat to liberty and to
the charter, Charles X halted the session and seemed poised to dissolve the
chamber. Instead, two months later, he announced the French military inva-
sion of Ottoman Algeria, a distraction from the domestic drama. In May,
as the French invasion forces embarked from the port of Toulon, Charles
X dissolved the chamber, and Polignac set the date of new legislative elec-
tions in mid-June to coincide with the anticipated victory over the Ottoman
Regency in Algiers.
The Algerian invasion was not Charles X’s first imperial engagement,
however. In 1825, Jean-Pierre Boyer, the president of Haiti, pursued dip-
lomatic recognition of Haitian sovereignty from France by offering to pay
an indemnity to former French planters who had lost property during the
revolution. The negotiations were hostile, with Charles X threatening to
send war ships unless the Haitians conceded to the extreme demand that
they pay 150 million francs over five years and reduce French trade tariffs
by 50 percent. That same year, the new emir of Trarza (in present-day Mau-
ritania) attempted to take over French-controlled territory south of the Sen-
egal River. Charles X sent an expeditionary force to crush the emir’s army
then used the opportunity to expand French territory north along the West
African coast. This further consolidated the Senegal colony, since in 1817
the French had definitively claimed Gorée, an island off the coast of Dakar,
a territory it had traded back and forth with the British since 1677. Algeria,
however, offered an even more fortuitous opportunity for French conquest
and imperial expansion.
The French justified their invasion of Algeria in June 1830 as retalia-
tion for a diplomatic incident in 1827. During a discussion over the lack
of payment by the French government to an Algerian merchant for grain
purchased during the revolution, Hussein, the Ottoman dey (governor) in
Algiers, hit the French consul with a f lyswatter. When the dey refused to
apologize, both sides declared war, and French ships blockaded Algiers for
the next three years. During the ongoing French government debates over
how to effectively punish the Ottoman regent, liberals variously opposed
the blockade or declared it too weak. By the spring of 1830, Charles X and
Polignac saw a military invasion as a means of gaining public support for
the monarchy, reinvigorating the army, and undermining the liberal opposi-
tion in the Chamber of Deputies.
Well before the “f lyswatter incident,” the French already associated Alge-
ria with “Oriental despotism,” and narratives circulated about the Barbary
pirates, trawling the Mediterranean coastlines in search of white Christians
to torture and enslave. But while a number of captured Europeans were
enslaved by Algerian ships, and some were badly treated, the French were
just as likely to take Algerian Muslims captive on galley ships (and also
treat them very badly). Well into the nineteenth century, individuals of a
wide variety of nationalities were trafficked across Europe, North Africa,
and sub-Saharan Africa to provide labor for both Ottomans and Europe-
ans along historic trade and migration routes. For some Christian captives,
enslavement in a wealthy Ottoman home was an improvement over life on a
European galley ship. Some enslaved Christians even worked for European
consuls in Algiers, moving freely through the city. Although slavery systems
around the Mediterranean were vastly different than those of the “New
World” plantations and the chattel slavery that developed there, Black Afri-
cans in North Africa were also relegated to the lowest status in society, even
after gaining freedom from enslavement.
The monarchy claimed that the Bourbon regime offered the most pow-
erful defense of Christian civilization from the forces of despotic Islam
and barbarism abroad, especially in Algeria. Ceremonies, poems, songs,
and newspapers redirected the criticism of tyranny and despotism usually
launched against Charles X toward Hussein Dey in Algiers. French bish-
ops and priests described the invasion as a religious crusade to liberate the
homeland of Saint Augustine of Hippo (born in present-day Souk Ahras,
Algeria to a Berber Christian mother). Yet using this effort at distraction
from domestic crises failed to divert the liberal opposition.
Instead, liberal opposition to the monarchy grew, particularly in urban
areas, which had a higher percentage of voters who worked in commerce
and industry. But it was not solely the voting elites who were discontented.
Despite state repression, liberals (and Bonapartists) had been organizing in
Freemason lodges and in secret societies called charbonnerie. Many of the
members were young men who were born around 1800 and whose experi-
ence of protest was distinctly tied to Napoleon and the mythology of the
1789 revolution. For them, the violence of the unruly masses or the Terror
was abstract, and revolution symbolized liberty from a despotic leader and
political system. The charbonnerie were fairly quiet after a failed insurrection
in 1822, but by the late 1820s, there were stirrings again among oppo-
sition groups, including the military, peasants, and working classes. And
the clearest indication of that opposition was the re-emergence of popular
Bonapartism.
Early in the Restoration, the Bourbon monarchy had tried to erase all
traces of the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. It targeted for removal and
censorship all representations of the revolution: the tricolor f lag and the
Phrygian cap, images of Napoleon and his military exploits, visual repre-
sentations of large-scale Napoleonic battle paintings, busts of the emperor,
coins with his likeness, and songs or plays about his military victories. Yet
this plan backfired. Despite significant popular ambivalence about Napo-
leon after the defeat at Waterloo, artistic representations of French military
victories proliferated during the Restoration period. As a result, the mythol-
ogized personality of Napoleon was greatly enhanced, particularly after his
death. Throughout the Restoration period, Napoleonic paraphernalia, such
as jewelry, scarves, fans, silverware, wood block images, statues, and more
expensive art pieces were frequently on display in homes across all social
classes, notwithstanding the king’s ban.
The Revolution of 1830

In June 1830, ultra-royalists awaited the news of the successful conquest of
Algeria, hoping this would generate an ultra-royalist majority in the Cham-
ber of Deputies in that month’s legislative elections. Huge crowds had gath-
ered at Toulon to watch the f leet of 675 ships of the Army of Africa set
off toward Algiers. The French landed at Sidi Ferruch, 15 miles outside of
Algiers, on June 14 and quickly overcame the Ottoman troops. By July 4,
they had captured Algiers and the dey surrendered the following day, with
word of the victory arriving in Paris on July 9. Meanwhile, the monarchy
learned that liberals had once again won a majority in the legislature. Frus-
trated by this unfavorable result, Charles X announced that, in his interpre-
tation of the Charter of 1814, he understood his duty to secure the order
and happiness of his subjects and not to negotiate with the enemies of the
nation. Two weeks later, he issued the July Ordinances, which suspended
the liberty of the press, dissolved the newly elected Chamber of Deputies,
and reduced the number of deputies in future chambers. He summoned a
new electoral college for September 1830 but reduced the number of eligi-
ble voters, cutting out most of the commercial middle class. The popular
reaction was immediate and forceful and led to an uprising that came to be
known as the “July Days” or the Revolution of 1830.
The prolonged economic depression and instability added additional
force to the public’s angry reaction to the July Ordinances. Both peas-
ants and urban artisans, for example, were already protesting the regime
through localized uprisings against tax collectors. In Paris, a liberal jour-
nalist named Adolphe Thiers from the newspaper Le National organized
a group of nearly 50 journalists who drew up a manifesto denouncing the
regime. Despite their papers being banned, Thiers and several other news-
paper editors agreed to publish it on July 27. The police immediately raided
their offices, seized the printed papers, and shut down the presses. As anti-
royalist demonstrators began gathering in the streets of Paris and building
barricades, Polignac mobilized the army.
Urban barricades were primarily intended to protect insurgents engaged
in violent confrontations with the state, but they also served social and sym-
bolic functions during revolutionary movements. Although they have come
to represent the popular uprisings of nineteenth-century France, barricades
were first used during the sixteenth-century Religious Wars as well as dur-
ing the Fronde and the French Revolution. Barricades across the centuries
shared similar characteristics: they were typically constructed spontaneously
of piled objects such as barrels, carts, paving stones, furniture, and what-
ever else was on hand. In the narrow streets of central Paris, tall barricades
provided both physical and psychological defenses for insurgents, block-
ing military forces from free movement and isolating streets and neighbor-
hoods. They also served to identify lines of solidarity, revealing supporters,
potential recruits, and those who chose to stay away. This was particularly
important in 1830, where the evidence of social and political alignments
was not always immediately clear.
With the insurgency gaining momentum, July 28 marked the turning
point for the revolutionary opposition. Military leaders vastly underesti-
mated the insurgency’s strength and saw a significant number of desertions
from troops who were assigned to put down the rebellion. Crowds of urban
workers joined students, journalists, and shopkeepers as the number of
barricades grew. Together, they battled the military to occupy Paris’s most
important public spaces, including Notre Dame cathedral, the Hôtel de Ville,
and the Louvre palace. While the streets erupted in fighting, a committee of
elite liberals, including members of the Chamber of Deputies, bankers, and
Napoleonic-era military officers, petitioned Charles X to withdraw the July
Ordinances. They urged Maréchal Marmont, head of the Royal Guard, to
intercede with Polignac and the king to end the fighting, but all three were
intransigent.
The fighting continued for a third day. By mid-afternoon on July 29,
insurgents had captured the Hôtel de Ville and royal troops had abandoned
the Tuileries. A few hours later, a self-appointed provisional government
entered the Hôtel de Ville and demanded the abdication of Charles X and
the establishment of a new republic. Liberal members of the Chamber of
Deputies, fearing that the mass insurgency would escalate into an out-of-
control revolution, had gathered at the home of Jacques Lafitte, a liberal
deputy and French banker. Lafitte was campaigning to replace Charles X
with his more liberal cousin, Louis-Philippe, the Duke of Orléans. Hear-
ing that the rebels were organizing to attack his Saint-Cloud chateau, just
west of Paris, Charles X tried to f lee but found all of his palaces already
occupied. Finding himself in a hopeless situation, on August 2, Charles X
offered to place his young grandson, the Duke of Bordeaux, on the throne
and to name Louis-Philippe as regent. Liberals refused and instead installed
Louis-Philippe on the throne. Charles X and his family immediately f led
into exile, first in England, and then in Austria, where he died of cholera in
1836. On August 9, 1830, King Louis-Philippe I was sworn in as “King of
the French” and his reign became known as the July Monarchy.
The July Monarchy and the Liberal Order

The day after Charles X’s abdication, the newly elected liberal parliament
quickly gathered to revise the Charter of 1814 and endorse the new Orlé-
anist king of France. Much like his predecessors, however, Louis-Philippe
faced significant challenges in securing his legitimacy and the loyalty of the
population. Declaring his monarchy to be the expression of the “general
will,” Louis-Philippe adopted the terminology of the juste milieu to describe
his plan to avoid both the despotism of previous monarchs and potential
abuses of republican conceptions of liberty (i.e., the Terror). He vowed to
maintain the principles of individual liberty and popular sovereignty and to
uphold the terms of the revised Constitutional Charter, which suppressed
its more absolutist elements. Voting rights were extended to a slightly larger
pool of individuals who paid at least 200 francs in annual taxes, which
still only equated to less than 1 percent of the population. To be eligible to
hold office, one needed 500 francs in annual income, an economic tier that
fewer than 10,000 citizens could attain in 1830. Royalists and the liberals
who installed Louis-Philippe were satisfied with these reforms, while repub-
licans continued their fight for universal suffrage and the full abolition of
the monarchy.
Initially, Louis-Philippe attempted to rule as a “citizen king” within a
liberal reformist framework. Unlike his aristocratic predecessors, Louis-
Philippe portrayed himself as a “bourgeois” citizen. He walked freely around
Paris, carrying an umbrella (a symbol of bourgeois self-sufficiency), and sent
his numerous sons to the lycée, rather than having them privately tutored.
Since military service was a key component of the Orléanist image, official
portraits depicted the king in his national guard uniform, and the monarchy
promoted his military service in the battles of Valmy and Jemappes in 1792.
Despite a more pacifist approach to foreign policy, Louis-Philippe insisted
that each of his five adult sons receive commissions in the French military
upon reaching adolescence. All five participated in military campaigns
in Algeria during the 1840s, with the second youngest, Henri, the Duke
d’Aumale, participating in the capture of the Algerian military commander
Abd el-Kader in 1843; in 1847, the duke became governor general of Alge-
ria at the age of 25. On a larger scale, the Soult Law of 1832 required every
French male to enter a recruitment lottery at the age of 20 and, if chosen,
to serve in military service for a period of seven years. Louis-Philippe also
retained Napoleonic standards of meritocratic promotion, with two-thirds
of his officer corps coming from men promoted through the ranks. The ben-
efits of secure employment and a pension, which were out of reach for most
peasants or artisans, made military service during this period an attractive
option for many in the lower classes.
Much like the “liberal” phase of the 1789 revolution, the reforms of
the July Monarchy benefited the bourgeoisie above all. Louis-Philippe’s
reforms catered to a growing bourgeois class with liberal inclinations and
strongly negative feelings about the absolutist tendencies of his predeces-
sor. To appease his supporters, in December 1831, Louis-Philippe abolished
the hereditary right to membership in the Chamber of Peers and planned
instead to offer membership in the chamber to individuals after a certain
number of years of public service, though life-peerage came without a pen-
sion. Several other key reforms were inf luential to a wider public. Press
censorship—the catalyst of the July Days—was overturned in Article 7 of
the revised constitutional charter, which stated that the French had the right
to publish their opinions and that censorship would not be reestablished.
The Loi Guizot of 1833 dramatically transformed education and literacy
in France by requiring every commune with more than 500 inhabitants
to have a primary school for boys, who were taught by either a cleric or
state-trained instructor. To achieve that, the government also required every
department to open a teacher’s college and employ inspectors to oversee the
schools. The number of students in primary schools jumped from 850,000
in 1815 to more than 3.5 million in 1848, of whom 40 percent were girls
(mostly taught in Catholic schools).
The July Monarchy also attempted to restore national unity through art
and culture. In the late eighteenth century, French revolutionaries had estab-
lished museums, often with looted art and decorative objects from churches
and aristocratic homes, in an effort to institutionalize a national identity
and define a common “French” heritage. Napoleon had further expanded
this project with the exhibition in the Musée Napoléon (now known as
the Louvre) of works of art looted from across the empire. After the fall
of Napoleon, the French were forced to return more than 5,000 works of
art, but Louis XVIII had reopened the museum in 1816, and his curators
greatly expanded the collections, adding wings for Egyptian and medieval
art. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, new museums and
collections sprang up across France under royal patronage, including the
museum dedicated to French national history at the palace of Versailles,
which Louis-Philippe inaugurated in 1837. Although the creation of the
French national archives had been decreed in 1790, it was only under the
Restoration monarchy that the profession of “archivist” was formalized.
A new institution, called the Ecole des Chartes, was created in 1821 to train
professionals to catalog and inventory French national history. The push
to collect, save, and display French history and patrimony also extended
to monuments and buildings, including churches and aristocratic chateaux
that had been damaged during the 1789–1799 Revolution. This process was
formalized during the July Monarchy after the popular success of Victor
Hugo’s 1832 novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame created a mania for the
gothic style and a popular movement supporting the protection and restora-
tion of French monuments, particularly cathedrals.
Despite his reformist approach, a great many people were dissatisfied
with Louis-Philippe. Ultra-royalists took Louis-Philippe’s attempt to rule as
a “citizen king” as a betrayal of the monarchy. A significant group of them,
known as Legitimists, believed that only a Bourbon monarch (as opposed
to the Orléanist branch of the family) was fit to sit on the throne. Con-
servatives across Europe were likewise horrified by the prospect of a liberal
monarch on the throne of France, particularly when revolts broke out from
Belgium to Poland, with liberals overthrowing what they saw as despotic
monarchies of their own. Only the most conservative fringe of the liberals
was satisfied with the revised Constitutional Charter and Louis-Philippe’s
“reforms.” The liberal unity soon shattered.
Meanwhile, the urban working classes, who had formed the backbone of
the insurgency during the July Days, aimed to capitalize on their success in
ousting the ultra-royalist regime by presenting the new king with demands
of their own, including requests to outlaw machines, to raise wages,
shorten the workday, and to establish uniform tariffs to benefit French
trades. Louis-Philippe was shocked by their demands. It soon became clear
that there was a wide divergence among the population in their under-
standing of the meaning of “liberty” and in their hopes of just how far
the “citizen king” would go in his liberal reforms; socialist Étienne Cabet
would describe what followed the July Days as a révolution escamotée (a
stolen revolution). For some, the revolution did not end with the “three
glorious days” in July.
Due to an intensification of the economic crisis in the aftermath of the
July Days, popular unrest escalated dramatically across France. Ten thou-
sand unemployed workers in Paris demanded help from the government
in the winter of 1830, while peasants in the countryside demanded the
abolition of indirect taxes on wine, salt, and tobacco after a disastrous
harvest. Although liberal economic ministers hoped to avoid intervening
in the economy, the government was obliged to fund relief programs like
municipal employment workshops, which only helped a fraction of those
in need. A conf lict between the government and silk artisans exploded in
Lyon in 1831. During the Restoration, merchants had gained control of the
silk market, setting off a long-standing conf lict between weavers and mer-
chants. After the 1830 revolution, weavers had hoped that the Orléanist
regime would set price tariffs to support their work, and they organized
themselves into a mutual-aid society, complete with their own advocacy
newspaper. When the Lyon prefect and merchants abandoned the weaver’s
fair price agreements in November 1831, the weavers quit working and
took over the city for ten days.
Although the Lyon silkworker uprising posed little threat to the overall
stability of the July Monarchy, it represented a broader trend in organiza-
tion among opposition movements. During the July Days uprising, liberals
had begun forming semi-secret republican clubs, modeled on the charbon-
nerie and the Jacobin Club of the 1790s. In a new approach, however, the
post-1830 clubs recruited members from across the social spectrum, includ-
ing students, peasants, soldiers, and artisans. With the liberalization of press
laws, they wrote and printed newspapers to rally opposition. Since large-
scale opposition movements were still technically illegal, they met in pub-
lic at subscription banquets, which allowed opposition politicians to rally
support and raise funds, or at funerals, where the deceased’s friends gave
lengthy “tributes” and raised funds along the procession route.
French graphic satire had also undergone a revolution after July 1830, due
to the relaxation of censorship laws and the technology of the lithograph,
which enabled artists to mass produce illustrated prints. In November 1830,
Charles Philipon launched La Caricature, a weekly satirical newspaper, and
two years later, a daily paper called Le Charivari and then a weekly broad-
sheet called Le Journal pour rire that produced republican-themed political
caricatures for a mass audience. Artists such as Honoré Daumier satirized
Louis-Philippe and his regime, famously deriding him as the “Pear King”
(the symbol of the pear then became a shorthand for the king and his regime
throughout his entire reign). The biting satire of these caricatures elicited a
strong reaction from the regime, and Philipon was charged with sedition for
his personal attack on the king. After a failed 1835 assassination attempt
on the king was linked to the republican press, the Justice Ministry reestab-
lished censorship of theater and drawings, arguing that dangerous imagery
was inciting popular unrest and violence. Additionally, the word “republic”
could no longer be used in the press. Known as the September Laws, these
new censorship laws effectively muzzled the republican press, which further
fractured the movement already replete with ideologically diverse voices.
Despite its ongoing attempts to repress political dissent, the July Monar-
chy struggled for two decades to convince the French population of its legiti-
macy. Although Louis-Philippe saw himself as a liberal reformer, France
was undergoing economic and social transformations that he and his min-
isters were unprepared to manage, including the consequences of industri-
alization, urbanization, and growing political unrest around economic and
political inequality. It was this failure that led once again to revolution, to
the collapse of the monarchy, and to the establishment of a new republic in
1848.

Alexander, Robert. Re-Writing the French Revolutionary Tradition: Liberal Oppo-
sition and the Fall of the Bourbon Monarchy. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007.
Haynes, Christine. Our Friends the Enemies: The Occupation of France After Napo-
leon. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018.
Hornstein, Katie. Picturing War in France, 1792–1856. New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 2018.
Kroen, Sheryl. Politics and Theater: The Crisis of Legitimacy in Restoration France,
1815–1830. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000.
McDougall, James. A History of Algeria. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Pilbeam, Pamela. The Constitutional Monarchy in France. London: Routledge, 1999.
5 Social and Political Revolutions Social and Political Revolutions
Introduction
In her 1843 book L’Union ouvrière (The Workers’ Union), the Franco-
Peruvian feminist and socialist Flora Tristan (1803–1844) wrote, “the
ignorance of the women of the lower classes has the most dire consequences.
I maintain that the emancipation of the workers is impossible as long as
women remain in that condition of abasement.”1 Like her contemporaries,
Tristan pursued solutions to the “social question,” or the emerging conf licts
related to increasing urbanization and the violent political revolts of an
“industrial” working class that was dissatisfied with its working and living
conditions. These concerns could no longer be brushed aside by political
elites: by 1850, more than 50 percent of the French population was wage-
earning, with 30 percent working in “industrial” or construction jobs.
Bourgeois social reformers often blamed the destitution and misery of
the working classes on their drunkenness and immorality. By contrast,
a wide range of theorists, known collectively as socialists, worked to re-
organize labor relations or founded utopian communities that challenged
post-Enlightenment ideas of private property, social hierarchies, and even
marriage and family structures. While women were enthusiastic participants
in these projects, few socialist or middle-class men took on the emancipa-
tion of women as a political or economic cause, claiming there were greater
battles to fight. Yet figures like Flora Tristan found that women’s rights,
including legal access to divorce and financial independence, were neces-
sarily bound up in the political and economic rights of workers. Forced to
marry a violent man at the age of 17 due to family poverty, Tristan had only
escaped after he shot her in the chest. After two decades of international
travel and close observation of the daily lives of workers in France and Eng-
land, Tristan concluded that the solution was a workers’ union, a collective
of trade laborers that could pressure industry and government for reform.
After she died of typhoid fever in 1844 at the age of 41, Tristan’s work was
swept aside by more prominent socialist theorists. Yet she was a thinker
ahead of her time, and her ideas about women’s rights and unions had a
major impact on workers across the world well into the twentieth century.
DOI: 10.4324/b23310-5
Social and Political Revolutions 87
The French socialists studying the problems caused by industrialization,
urbanization, and capitalism found few allies in the July Monarchy of King
Louis-Philippe. Reigning from 1830 until he was overthrown by Parisian
revolutionaries in 1848, Louis-Philippe saw himself as a modern liberal
reformer and was supported by the elite bourgeoisie. However, his regime
became increasingly conservative through the 1840s, especially in its mili-
tant repression of republican criticism. As the conditions of rural peasants
and urban industrial workers further deteriorated due to economic stagna-
tion in the 1840s, opposition grew stronger. In February 1848, revolution
broke out once again in Paris, leading to Louis-Philippe’s abdication.
The collapse of the July Monarchy led to the establishment of the Second
Republic, heralded by many liberal and republican opponents of monar-
chy. However, it did not last long. A new Bonaparte was waiting in the
wings to claim a return to French imperial grandeur. Although he portrayed
himself as a republican with leftist tendencies, within months of taking
power as president of the Second Republic, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte
attempted to consolidate his power amidst growing voices of dissent. Since
the constitution did not allow for him to run for a second term as president,
he tried to change it through legal means and then, when he was blocked
in the legislature, through a coup in 1851. In less than 40 years, the French
lived through three separate monarchical regimes, two major revolutions,
one republic, and a significant transformation in the social and economic
structures of society.
The Conquest and “Pacification” of Algeria

Upon taking the throne in 1830, Louis-Philippe had to contend with the
aftermath of Charles X’s invasion of Algeria. The liberal press was initially
critical of the monarchy’s attempt to distract the population by overthrow-
ing the Ottoman regency, and it actively condemned the Catholic Church
for its support of the expedition. However, during the July Days, liberals
reclaimed the conquest of Algiers as part of the revolutionary French pro-
ject to liberate both themselves and others from despotism. Whatever the
Bourbon monarchy’s aims for Algeria, liberals saw an opportunity there to
build a productive colony. After the humiliating defeats of the Napoleonic
armies in 1814–1815, the conquest of Algeria provided liberals and the July
Monarchy with a new imperial project to enhance France’s global prestige
and promote the ideology of French civilization.
As with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, French knowledge about
Algeria before 1830 was largely based on orientalist representations and
sources from antiquity. When the Army of Africa arrived in Algiers in
June 1830, it pillaged the city, carrying off more than 43 million francs
in gold and silver. Although the French had guaranteed the safety of the
Algerian population and promised to respect the region’s religion, property,
commerce, and industry in the capitulation treaty, chaos quickly reigned.
88 Social and Political Revolutions
The Ottoman regent Hussein Dey f led into exile, while much of the Otto-
man leadership was deported. Other community leaders, including wealthy
Jewish merchants, attempted to negotiate with the French. It was unclear,
however, who was in charge. Of the 40,000 people living in Algiers at the
time, some 10,000 f led the city to escape the French invasion; while some
remained permanently in exile, others returned to find that the French had
taken over their homes and businesses. Beginning in 1832, General Savary,
the Duke of Rovigo, ordered the modernization of the city, and engineers
began systematically dismantling Ottoman and Islamic structures, including
two cemeteries, to build roads and monuments, which violated the terms of
the capitulation treaty. Notoriously, French officials confiscated the Ketcha-
oua mosque and turned it into the Saint-Philippe cathedral, the future seat
of the archbishops of Algiers.
Outside of Algiers, peasants were more inclined to resist the invaders
than to submit. Viewing the Algerian population as inherently savage and
backward, French military commanders frequently resorted to indiscrimi-
nate violence. General Pierre Boyer, who commanded the region of Oran
beginning in 1831, claimed that violence—“the law of the sword”—was
necessary to pacify the colony. In eastern Algeria, Ahmed Bey of Constan-
tine refused to submit to French authority. French general Bertrand Clauzel
decided to attack the city in November 1836. Launched in the midst of
winter, the disorganized expedition was a disaster, and the French lost half
of their 8,000 troops. Louis-Philippe sought to avenge this calamity and the
1837 siege that ultimately captured Constantine became the most celebrated
battle of the July Monarchy.
The French also encountered strong resistance in western Algeria from
the Emir Abd el-Kader, a young sharif (leader of a saintly Sufi lineage
descended from the Muslim prophet Muhammad). After the collapse of the
Ottoman Regency, Abd el-Kader unified, in some cases by force, most of
the tribes of western Algeria under his rule. In 1834, he signed a treaty with
General Desmichels, the French military commander in Oran who sought
to prove that his region was pacified; as a result, the French military ceded
near total control of the province to Abd el-Kader. French leaders, however,
were unhappy that they had conceded so much sovereignty to the Algerian
leader, and they recalled Desmichels. In 1835, as French politicians directed
military commanders to progressively secure the territory for a more per-
manent French occupation, hostilities broke out again between the French
military and Algerian forces.
General Thomas-Robert Bugeaud, a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars
and a parliamentary deputy who had abandoned his Bonapartist leanings
to fall in line with Louis-Philippe, was tasked with directing the “pacifica-
tion” of Algeria. In 1840, he became the governor general of Algeria. Ini-
tially opposed to the occupation, Bugeaud now declared that the only way
to justify the government’s significant input of resources into the colony
was to engage in the “absolute” domination of Algeria by force. Alexis
de Tocqueville, the writer and aristocrat who toured Algeria in 1841 and
1846, agreed. He wrote extensively on the “Algerian question,” arguing
that the French needed to use whatever violence was necessary to secure
Algeria for French interests. Claiming that the Algerian “Arabs” were
incapable of developing the land for productive agriculture, French leaders
approved the violent tactics of colonial war to remove Algerians from land
that could be prepared for European settlement and farming. Bugeaud
and the French army thus undertook a “total war” against the rebellious
Algerians.
By the mid-1840s, more than 100,000 French soldiers were on the ground
in Algeria. Bugeaud’s famous “f lying columns” of troops, which could be
mobilized quickly and were unencumbered by heavy artillery and baggage
trains, systematically destroyed the agricultural land of Abd el-Kader’s
territory. These scorched earth tactics, known as razzias, included seizing
livestock and burning farms and, when they resisted, slaughtering inhabit-
ants. His lands and subjects devastated from years of warfare, Abd el-Kader
surrendered in 1847 with the understanding that the French would grant
him passage to Alexandria or Acre in the Ottoman Empire. Instead, he was
imprisoned for five years in France. The campaign to conquer Algeria con-
tinued for the next several decades. Only after the conquest of Kabylia in
1857, though, could the French claim full subjugation of the population.
Algerian revolts against their French occupiers broke out periodically, con-
tinuing well into the twentieth century.
From the earliest days of the conquest, artistic representations of French
military activities in Algeria drew analogies to earlier Napoleonic armies.
Senior army officers used the chaos of the colonial theater to train new
recruits in modern warfare, where guerilla tactics made strategy and mobil-
ity more important than heavy armaments and huge numbers of infantry.
As such, popular representations of soldiers “maintaining order” over
the unruly colony of Algeria depicted them as inherently masculine. This
patriotic masculinity was especially appealing to a country still steeped in
the mythology of Bonapartism. Louis-Philippe’s new museum in Versailles
glorified French military victories and included thematic galleries devoted
to the Algerian conquest, such as the siege of Constantine and the defeat
of Abd el-Kader. The French viewing public gazed upon enormous battle
paintings by Horace Vernet, whose works encouraged viewers to celebrate
French military victories in Algeria as evidence of French power and the
king’s successes.
Despite fierce debate among French politicians at first over the purposes
of the French colony in Algeria, within a decade, French officials and even
ordinary citizens began to envision Algeria as a new settler colony. Mean-
while, the July Monarchy faced growing pressure to reimagine a reformed
colonial system. During the first half of the nineteenth century, abolition-
ists across the Atlantic World were calling for the end of slavery and the
slave trade, and Britain’s Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 had abolished
slavery in most of the British Empire. In 1831, the French government
provided free people of color across the empire with full access to all
rights under the Napoleonic Code. That same year, however, Martinique
recorded its peak of more than 86,000 enslaved people. French colonial
reformers felt that many of most problematic aspects of the first colo-
nial empire (notably slavery and economic systems like the Exclusif) could
be overcome in Algeria by settling Europeans on rural farms to model a
post-revolutionary French vision of civic virtue. This would be an “empire
without slaves,” with the non-European population of Algeria providing
cheap labor in the cultivation of what the French imagined was infinitely
fertile land.
With this vision in mind, the government encouraged increasingly com-
plicated schemes for agricultural settlement in Algeria. By 1838, there were
more than 20,000 European settlers and double that number in 1842.
Despite the government’s plans for rural, agricultural settlement, the initial
settlers overwhelmingly moved to Algiers or to other coastal towns, such as
Oran or Bône (the present-day city of Annaba). Furthermore, the agricultural
settlers never adequately modeled French leaders’ visions of productivity and
civic virtue. Many of them were poor emigrants from other Mediterranean
countries such as Italy, Spain, or Malta who came in search of cheap land
and economic opportunities but had little farming experience. Instead, they
opened cafes and bars or sold tobacco. Almost all of the numerous settlement
schemes developed over the subsequent decades failed to achieve the desired
agricultural or population management goals.
Yet European settlement in Algeria had a devastating effect on the Arab
and Berber populations, since the colonial government could only provide
land for settlers through the mass dispossession of Algerian land. Between
1830 and World War I, Algerians lost nearly 11.6 million hectares of farm-
land, pastures, and forests, all of which became French state or private Euro-
pean property. French military officers, steeped in classical sources such as
Pliny the Elder, had envisioned North Africa as the “granary of Rome,”
with vast expanses of forests and abundantly fertile agricultural land.
When that vision failed to become reality, they blamed Arab nomads for
the massive deforestation and desertification, and they used those accusa-
tions to justify practices like “population regroupment.” This entailed vast
land expropriations and the confinement of nomadic peoples to restricted
areas, removing them from their traditional grazing and agricultural lands.
In 1851, the French government created the Bank of Algeria, which pro-
vided low-interest credit to European settlers to start farms and businesses;
meanwhile, Algerians could only access high-interest credit, forcing them
into a state of almost permanent indebtedness for the next hundred years.
Despite the growing number of complications, French intellectual and polit-
ical leaders came to see Algeria as a colony that would help relieve the social
problems of industrialization, urbanization, and social unrest among the
working classes.
Industrialization, Urbanization, and Social Discontent
Even as the landscape of labor transformed in France during the 1830s and
1840s, with more people taking up wage labor, seasonal agriculture work
remained an important employment sector throughout the nineteenth cen-
tury. By mid-century, a growing number of workers labored in the expand-
ing coal mining industry, but the vast majority of industrial workers were
still technically artisans, whose professions were largely organized by centu-
ries-old guild structures. Rather than large factories, most artisans worked
in small- or medium-sized workshops or at home, producing handicrafts and
luxury goods such as tapestries, leather goods, jewelry, or silk (the major
industry of Lyon, whose fabrics were shipped globally). Most French arti-
sanal products—textiles, shoes, furniture, tools, and food—were consumed
locally. However, new technological developments, such as steam engines,
and mechanized looms and sewing machines, allowed for more efficiency
in industrial production. And many of the fastest-growing industrial areas
(particularly in textiles) were not in Paris but in smaller cities with access to
abundant natural resources such as running water, wood, and coal.
In larger French cities, the early “industrial revolution” concentrated
mechanized workshops in popular neighborhoods where thousands of
rural peasants came to live and work after economic downturns and poor
harvests drove them toward urban areas. In Paris, the garment industry
employed some 90,000 workers, although tailors and dressmakers faced
growing competition from the ready-made clothing industry. Up until the
twentieth century, textile manufacturing was the only trade in which small
factories still competed with artisans and rural women who did piecework
at home. A substantial number of artisanal workers in the garment industry
and textile factories were women (up to 40 percent), and an increasing per-
centage were children. During the French Revolution, changes in the legal
structure of production, notably the abolition of corporations and most
price controls, meant that market power had shifted in favor of entrepre-
neurs, who had the right to hire whomever they wanted for whatever wages
they wished. Thus, French artisans of the first half of the nineteenth century
found their status, incomes, and working conditions under constant threat
and insecurity from these liberal economic transformations.
During that same period, the population of Paris nearly doubled, reach-
ing a little over a million people by mid-century. The majority of the rural
peasants arriving in Paris were extremely poor and had difficulty finding
permanent employment. Even artisans in skilled trades found themselves
unemployed, sometimes for lengthy periods, and worked at multiple jobs
to feed their families, including seasonal agriculture. A growing number of
people survived through street trades such as hawking or ragpicking (forag-
ing garbage for resaleable items). In the 1830s, city officials grew alarmed
when they discovered that close to 80 percent of the population was living
in poverty and 10 percent was begging on the streets.
As the negative consequences of urban industrialization became more
visible, government officials, middle-class reformers, and labor theorists all
became preoccupied with finding solutions to the problems at the heart of
the “social question.” These social reformers adopted new tools of analy-
sis, including statistical reports and scientific studies, which were gathered
through on-the-ground surveys and lifestyle studies of the urban popula-
tion. During the Restoration, Paris gained a reputation of being a “sick”
city, and descriptions of its filth and stench appeared in popular fiction,
medical treatises, and chamber of commerce reports. Backed by statistical
“facts” and implicit moral judgment, these descriptions marked Paris as a
city in decay, infested by poor and disreputable people and corrupted by
alarming industrial practices, such as mixed-sex workshops and factories.
The cholera epidemic that struck Paris in March 1832 only confirmed
these pessimistic observations. The first victims of the disease were the poor.
Initially, the perceived immunity of the bourgeois classes appeared to con-
firm their physical and moral superiority over the poor. Numerous treatises
blamed both poverty and disease on urban workers’ natural predilection
for immoral behavior. However, when the disease hit wealthier classes,
panic struck. Generalized anxiety spread widely, focusing on the dangers
of the urban environment and the renewed threat of revolutionary violence
from the masses, who greatly mistrusted the government’s response to the
epidemic.
Indeed, almost immediately after the epidemic’s outbreak in Paris, waves
of popular violence broke out. First, the ragpickers grew angry about the
city’s new trash collection policy following hygienic reports blaming the
epidemic on putrid miasmas emanating from garbage. After four days of
small-scale riots, during which ragpickers destroyed 60 of the city’s new
garbage carts, police arrested more than 200 people. Far worse, however,
were the rumors that someone was purposefully poisoning poor people in
Paris. Building on long-standing associations between epidemic disease and
fears of mass poisoning, the rumors blamed doctors, who were seen as both
upper class and representative of outside authority imposing regulations on
the poor. Rioters attacked cholera hospitals and doctors who they accused
of murder.
On June 1, 1832, cholera claimed the life of General Lamarque, a Napo-
leonic officer and former politician. His opposition to the monarchy’s abso-
lutist tendencies made him popular among Bonapartists and the lower and
middle classes. Despite concerns about unrest, Parisian officials agreed to a
public funeral and street procession. Protestors in the crowd, which num-
bered in the tens of thousands, began shouting slogans attacking Louis-
Philippe, and at one point, gained control of the carriage bearing the coffin,
attempting to reroute it. Shots were fired, and the city erupted into chaos.
By nightfall, fighting had shifted into poor neighborhoods, specifically
those ravaged by cholera around the Faubourg Saint-Martin. Insurgents
once again built barricades and fought off troops with cobblestones. The
climactic scenes of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables take place on these bar-
ricades, where the simmering tensions of the early July Monarchy spilled
over into the streets. As the last insurgents were cornered in the Saint-Merri
neighborhood on June 6, 1832, the “June Rebellion” came to an end. Louis-
Philippe quickly went out into the streets himself to demonstrate that he still
had control of the city.
The government blamed the rebellion on the work of minority extrem-
ists rather than accept a larger, legitimate, movement of political unrest.
Louis-Philippe began distancing himself from any revolutionary move-
ments. Facing increased state repression, opposition groups started organ-
izing themselves more formally. The economic insecurity of the 1820s and
1830s had led workers to organize mutual-aid societies within their trades.
While these built on older traditions of corporate organization, they served
as a precursor to trade unions, providing a form of social insurance in times
of crisis. They also organized wage levels, maintained the rules of the trade,
and launched worker strikes. Taking advantage of the liberalized press laws
after 1830, workers published newspapers and pamphlets in which they
articulated new conceptions of organization and described their corpora-
tions as a form of “association.” For some, this meant solidarity among
workers across trades. A form of class consciousness was emerging.
Following labor unrest among silk workers in Lyon in 1831 and the June
Days in Paris, a new wave of strikes broke out across France in 1833 and
1834. A second revolt among the silk workers of Lyon—the largest in the
city’s history—was viciously repressed by Interior Minister Adolphe Thiers
and led to a new law that drastically restricted the right of association.
Consequently, all of the major workers’ and political associations that had
formed after 1830 were outlawed. Workers in Lyon and Paris revolted once
again, but their movements were quickly crushed, driving the burgeoning
workers’ movements underground until 1839. Yet despite the repression,
workers and social theorists continued to openly discuss the problems of
labor and industrialization, and their new models of labor and social rela-
tions came to be known as socialism.
Socialist Responses to the Social Question

While socialist ideas were not widely discussed in France until the 1840s,
the intellectual origins of these movements and thinkers can be traced back
to the Enlightenment and the 1789 revolution. A wide range of responses to
the “social question” in France fell under the umbrella of socialism. Some
thinkers advocated for a utopian vision of communal ownership of the tools
and profits of labor; others saw possibilities in the state-directed reform
of existing structures. Early French socialism melded liberal republican cri-
tiques of post-revolutionary France’s social and political systems and work-
ers’ attempts to reform the conditions of labor and improve their standard
of living. Very few French socialists of this era advocated for overturning the
entire social and economic system of France; most saw a need for significant
reform of the capitalist system, typically through some form of labor asso-
ciation. Several individuals even suggested that the struggle to improve the
economic situation of workers was necessarily tied to the social and legal
condition of women, whose oppression prevented social harmony. How-
ever, women’s emancipation was typically envisioned within their roles as
wives and mothers, rather than as citizens of France with the same rights to
equal citizenship and equal pay for their labor.
One of the most inf luential socialist thinkers was Henri de Saint-Simon
(1760–1825), a French aristocrat who had endorsed the revolutionary ide-
als of the 1789 revolution and had worked to develop a scientific method
through which to improve society. After training at the newly created École
Polytechnique, he wrote an inf luential treatise in 1803 arguing that France’s
divisive social hierarchies should be replaced with a new social order in
which individuals distinguished themselves through their “industry,” or any
productive activity that harmonized the actions of individuals with the needs
and good of society. Even if individuals labored independently, they should
ideally work together, in his view, toward common goals of public service
and social improvement, rather than self-satisfaction. To Saint-Simon, this
new science-led society would be the culmination of the 1789 revolution,
a vision clearly derived from Enlightenment ideals but modified to fit the
social and political conditions of post-revolutionary France.
Saint-Simon’s ideas remained fairly obscure until they were adopted by
liberal opponents of Charles X in the mid-1820s. The “utopian” strand
of the movement, known as Saint-Simonianism, was led by a charismatic
polytéchnicien named Prosper Enfantin. The Saint-Simonians espoused a
range of reforms that promoted the liberation of working men and women
from the constraints of industrial society. Promoting spiritual liberation as
well as economic and social reform, Saint-Simonians rejected the politically
conservative shift within mainstream French Catholicism during the Resto-
ration. Saint-Simonians described their own movement as a “church” that
provided an alternative to Catholicism by harnessing the impulses of spiritu-
ality and the social organization of Christianity without the entire belief sys-
tem and hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Women were particularly drawn
to the movement’s attentiveness to education and childcare. An early strand
of socialist feminism emerged from this movement, advocating for equality
between men and women, equal access to education, and freedom from
the constraints of traditional marriage through liberalized divorce laws and
communal practices of free love or “experimental” marriage. Saint-Simo-
nian women such as Jeanne Deroin, Claire Bazard, and Pauline Roland,
described themselves as “new women,” sometimes chafing at the expanding
set of rules that Enfantin set on the Saint-Simonian community.
After the movement broke apart in France in 1832, Enfantin and some of
his followers left for Constantinople and then Egypt, spreading their mes-
sage to what they imagined was the less civilized “Orient.” Saint-Simon had
argued in the early nineteenth century that just as contact between the work-
ing classes and the industrial elites would advance all of humanity, so too
would contact with technologically advanced cultures civilize “backward
races.” Thus, Saint-Simonians early on adopted the vision of a “civilizing
mission” for the urban working classes of France and for places like Egypt
and Algeria. In his 1843 treatise on the colonization of Algeria, Enfantin
argued that the task of modernizing Algeria would also benefit France, strip-
ping Algeria of archaic laws and social structures. In Algiers, he participated
in scientific exploration alongside a number of fellow polytéchniciens and
Saint-Simonian disciples. These “scientific experts,” under the leadership of
Enfantin’s disciple Thomas “Ismaÿl” Urbain, came to dominate one of the
most important institutions of colonial Algeria: the Arab Bureaux, which
housed the French military’s specially trained Arabists tasked with reform-
ing and organizing indigenous beliefs and behaviors in order to secure
French rule in Algeria.
A related branch of utopian socialism was known as Fourierism. Like
Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier theorized how a society could achieve social
harmony. For Fourier, the problems of industrial society were rooted in
psychological pressures exerted by bourgeois social constraints such as capi-
talist labor and marriage, which, he argued, violated the laws of nature.
His solution was a properly run community—what he called a “compound
association,” or commune—in which socially liberated humans worked
together in harmony. In his vision, people would function not as wage
laborers, domestic workers, or farmers in the capitalist economic hierar-
chy but as members of a collective who shared communally in the results
of their efforts. Fourier’s imagined communities were known as phalanges
(Phalanxes) in France and inspired the development of utopian communities
across the United States. Like the Saint-Simonians, adherents to Fourierism
advocated for expanded education, particularly for women, and the libera-
tion of women from monogamous marriage and traditional family struc-
tures; as a result, numerous middle-class women converted to the cause.
Not all socialist women of this era adhered to a specific utopian move-
ment, however. The novelist George Sand (the pen name of Aurore Dude-
vant), for instance, was sympathetic to Fourierism and wrote novels
describing unhappy marriages that mirrored her own situation. Without the
right to divorce, she commenced a series of extramarital affairs with well-
known men, including the Polish composer and pianist Frederic Chopin.
She scandalized society by wearing male attire without a permit and openly
smoking tobacco. In her writings, she spoke out in favor of women’s rights
and against the exploitation of the poor and working classes. Despite (or
perhaps because of) her scandalous life, her work was extremely popular
in France and in England, where she was more well known than her male
contemporaries Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac. Similarly, the Franco-
Peruvian socialist writer Flora Tristan drew on the Saint-Simonian emphasis
on scientific approaches as she investigated and reported on the conditions of
workers in England and France in the 1840s. But she also criticized Enfan-
tin’s authoritarian tendencies and viewed Fourier’s approach to the ideal
society as overly scientific. Tristan’s most famous publication, The Work-
ers’ Union (1843), argued that the solution for the working classes was an
association that worked as a union to advance the cause of all workers,
including women. Only with the liberation of women, she argued, would
the condition of men be improved.
This era’s three most important socialist publications all appeared in
1839 and 1840: Étienne Cabet’s Voyage en Icarie (1839), Louis Blanc’s
The Organization of Labor (1839), and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s What Is
Property? (1840). Each work illustrates some of the key French socialist
ideas about the meaning of labor and the organization of society. Cabet is
typically categorized, along with Fourier, as a “utopian” socialist, because
Voyage en Icarie described a utopian commune that would replace capital-
ist production with workers’ cooperatives. However, while Fourier saw the
psychological pressures of modern society as the root of social dysfunction,
Cabet identified the problem as economic inequality. He described himself
as a communist and rooted his utopian community in democratic organiza-
tion, with every member pooling their resources (including property), work-
ing collectively in communal workshops, and sharing equally in the profits.
Cabet’s followers—the Icarians—were drawn largely from traditional arti-
sans, and his newspaper had the largest circulation of any radical leftist
paper in France during the mid-1840s. He became more revolutionary after
he identified the bourgeoisie as the enemy of the workers. In 1846, Cabet
moved to North America to found his model colony, alongside the Welsh
utopian socialist Robert Owen. The initial cooperative project in Texas
ended in disaster, but a small group of colonists regrouped in Nauvoo, Illi-
nois, where they purchased property from the Mormon Church, which was
heading further west.
Like Cabet, Louis Blanc identified the root of working-class misery as
the competitive social and economic system that resulted from capitalist
labor divisions, which, he argued, led to the utter moral and physical pov-
erty of the working classes. Any resolution required a complete reworking
of the labor system. Like Tristan and Cabet, Blanc envisioned democrati-
cally organized associations, which he called “social workshops.” Unique
to Blanc’s plan was his proposal that the state organize and regulate
the workshops, providing the initial credit to start them and preventing pri-
vate industry from undermining profits. In other words, the state would
provide jobs and eliminate capitalist competition. Some workers chafed at
Blanc’s ideas, particularly the suggestion that workers were too ignorant and
morally degraded to effectively regulate their own workshops. However, the
concept of labor associations organized around collective workshops gained
significant support in the 1840s.
Proudhon was also a strong advocate of worker cooperatives; however,
he fundamentally disagreed with Blanc’s argument for government control
of associations. Socialism, he argued, must come from the people, not from
above. Proudhon frequently criticized the “utopian” socialists and believed
that their proposed communal societies would lead to oppression. He con-
demned a right to property that was based on labor, although he main-
tained that possessions (distinguished from property) were acceptable; in
other words, a worker could maintain possession of the tools of her trade
or a farmer could maintain possession of land that he cultivated without
exploiting others and their labor. Proudhon proclaimed himself an anar-
chist, though his ideas caught the eye of the German social theorist Karl
Marx, who lived in Paris between 1843 and 1845. During this period, Marx
spent much of his time engaging with the ideas of French socialists as he
began writing his famous work of political economy, Capital. Yet, Proud-
hon and Marx fundamentally disagreed on the nature of social change.
Whereas Marx and his colleague Friedrich Engels would argue for a politi-
cal as well as an economic revolution, Proudhon would claim that he waged
war against old ideas, rather than old men.
Most French socialists saw the 1789 revolution as a failure for its inabil-
ity to enact social reforms, particularly for the lower classes. Republican
activist Auguste Blanqui, however, drew inspiration from the Jacobin phase
of the revolution. He was specifically inspired by Gracchus Babeuf’s vision
of radical democracy and the abolition of private property. An account of
Babeuf’s involvement in the failed coup against the Directory in 1796 to
replace it with a more egalitarian system known as the Conspiracy of the
Equals had been published in France in 1828 by Philippe Buonarotti, a par-
ticipant in the coup. Buonarotti’s book described the Conspiracy’s plans
upon their accession to power, including a redistribution of wealth, and it
turned Babeuf into an icon for burgeoning socialist movements. After the
1830 Revolution, radical socialists associated with Buonarotti, including
Blanqui, began forming secret societies, which were banned in 1834. Blan-
qui, who proclaimed that universal male suffrage and social equality could
only be achieved through revolution, was a key figure in the failed 1839
workers’ uprising in Paris. He was arrested in its aftermath and spent the
rest of the July Monarchy in prison.
The government and bourgeois commentators on the “social question”
often had little use for socialist ideas and typically thought working-class
misery could be solved through individual efforts among business owners,
charitable institutions, and workers themselves. The specter of a working-
class revolution, however, remained a central anxiety of the middle and
upper classes. Throughout the 1840s, the government instituted increas-
ingly repressive measures against any republican or workers movements
it detected. Yet this repression only served to solidify opposition to the
regime. By the late 1840s, rural and urban protests against economic and
political destitution melded with liberal frustration with the regime, pro-
ducing the fuel that lit the Revolution of 1848, which eventually brought
down the monarchy.
The Revolution of 1848 and the Birth
of the Second Republic
In 1840, François Guizot became prime minister, remaining in this role until
the outbreak of revolution in 1848. Guizot had been a moderate liberal
opponent of Charles X and was strongly attached to the constitutional char-
ter. Devoted to securing the July Monarchy, he adopted more conservative
positions than many of his liberal colleagues and sought to discipline those
who consistently pushed for the expansion of suffrage. Guizot believed that
only the upper middle classes who owned land and property should have
access to the vote. He also promoted liberal (laissez-faire) economic policies,
including the expansion of the railroad system to facilitate trade. Despite
growing leftist criticism about the impoverishment of the urban and rural
working classes, the Guizot government proposed only one reform bill, a
child labor act in 1841 that made it illegal for businesses with more than
ten workers to hire children under eight years of age. Like many liberals of
the time, Guizot believed that poverty was a moral issue, not a structural
problem caused by the capitalist economic system.
A series of bad harvests in the mid-1840s led to an increase in the price
of wheat and other dietary staples, diminishing the scant purchasing power
of the working classes and leading to a food shortage. During the winter
of 1846–1847, rural villagers blocked transports of wheat that the govern-
ment requisitioned to feed starving citizens in the cities. The agricultural
crisis also had a dramatic effect on the industrial economy; without money
available for people to buy goods, the market collapsed, leading to mas-
sive industrial layoffs, a spike in unemployment, and a decrease in wages
for those who kept their jobs (up to 30 percent in some cases). A banking
crisis resulted, as people pulled out their savings, and the stock market
plummeted. Although the government imported Russian wheat to stem
the food crisis, this led to a negative trade balance. Public works projects
were then put on hold and more workers lost their jobs. Workers in the
Saint-Antoine quarter of Paris rioted for three days, while strikes broke
out across industrial sectors in numerous cities. But it was not just the
urban working classes and agricultural workers who were frustrated with
the government.
The bourgeoisie, including small business owners, lawyers, doctors, and
other men of letters who actively sought to participate in French political
life, grew increasingly frustrated by Guizot’s refusal to expand access to
suffrage and the political system. Although large meetings were outlawed
after the 1834 ban on associations, liberal reform groups began organizing
across the country. The renewed banquet campaign of 1847 brought out a
wide swath of local politicians and sympathetic parliamentary deputies who
urged electoral reform to respond to the growing unrest. At working-class
banquets, the most radical voices, including the journalist Alexandre Ledru-
Rollin and socialist Louis Blanc, argued for universal suffrage. Although the
king denounced the banquets, they continued into 1848.
In February 1848, the Paris police ordered the postponement of a ban-
quet organized by Ledru-Rollin’s newspaper La Réforme and a legion of
national guardsmen. When the banquet leaders announced that it would be
preceded by a march of unemployed workers and students, the government
banned it entirely. After a lengthy debate, the organizers decided to cancel
the banquet. Feeling betrayed, the workers and students went ahead with
their march. On February 22, people from across the working-class districts
of Paris met up with students at the Place de la Madeleine and marched to
the royal palace. As they arrived, the marchers were confronted by Marshal
Bugeaud’s troops. Someone fired into the crowd and within hours, Paris had
erupted in insurrection. Once again, barricades went up in the streets.
On February 23, the fighting intensified. However, many of the national
guardsmen refused to turn up for duty. In response to the growing crisis,
Louis-Philippe replaced Guizot with his close associate, Louis-Mathieu
Molé, who proved incapable of resolving the crisis. Overnight on Feb-
ruary 24, the situation worsened as fighting in the streets of Paris had
killed over 50 people and injured 74 more. Louis-Philippe then turned to
Adolphe Thiers, one of the leaders of the liberal opposition, who called off
the army. By late morning on February 24, insurgents overtook the pal-
ace and arrived at the gates of the Tuileries, where the king abdicated the
throne. He f led for the palace of Saint-Cloud and soon left for permanent
exile in England.
While Thiers gathered members of parliament to debate the next steps, a
handful of radical deputies from the banquet movement nominated them-
selves to become a provisional government. The aristocratic poet Alphonse
de Lamartine and the liberal republican scientist François Arago were
joined by several socialist candidates, including Louis Blanc and a mechanic
who represented the workers. The provisional government immediately
declared an end to the constitutional monarchy and the beginning of a new
democratic republic (now known as the Second Republic). They accorded
universal suffrage to all men, abolished censorship, and re-established free-
dom of association and assembly. They also announced new elections for
April 1848, re-adopted the tricolor f lag as the symbol of the nation, opened
the National Guard to all adult male citizens, and abolished the death
penalty. Pressure from Parisian workers and the republican-socialist wing
ensured that the right to labor was acknowledged in the earliest documents
of the new republic. The government also abolished slavery throughout the
French empire in April 1848 after the prominent abolitionist Victor Schoe-
lcher informed Arago, the minister of colonies, that a slave rebellion would
soon erupt if the government did not act. Pressured by the planter lobby,
however, in April 1849, the assembly declared that the colonies of Mar-
tinique, Guadeloupe, Guiana, Réunion, Senegal, and the islands of Nosy
Bé and Sainte-Marie, off the coast of Madagascar, would have to pay an
indemnity of 12 million francs to former slaveholders for the loss of their
human “property.”
The elimination of press controls led to an eruption in newspaper printing
and in clubs and democratic societies, many of which formed to lobby the pro-
visional government for specific political and social reforms. Especially vocal,
workers in Paris pushed the government to respond to the economic crisis and
mass unemployment. Having acknowledged the right to labor, the govern-
ment announced the creation of National Workshops to provide employment
on public works projects. A divide soon emerged between liberal republicans
and radical socialists over this issue, so in compromise, the government agreed
to create a commission to study the issue of labor and propose policy solu-
tions. The resulting Luxembourg Commission, so named since it was held at
the Luxembourg Palace, was led by Louis Blanc and included members of all
of the trades of Paris. Formal trade organizations began to form, with work-
ers presenting their ideas and demands to the commission and participating
collectively in mass demonstrations throughout the spring of 1848, including
one on March 17 that had an estimated 150,000–200,000 working-class par-
ticipants. They demanded the legislative elections be postponed so they could
have more time to organize their electoral campaigns.
Yet despite their growing solidarity, urban workers were unable to enact
a full reform or revolution of the state in their favor, in large part because
they failed to engage with the agricultural laborers. Although radical urban
workers rose up against the July Monarchy and joined in demonstrations
across France, sometimes taking over city halls or destroying factory
machines to protest their labor conditions, the majority of the population
wanted a quick restoration of order. Additionally, the social panic caused
by the February revolution led many elites to pull their money out of the
banks and f lee. In March, the stock market crashed. The new minister of
finance quickly reorganized the banking and credit sector to relieve pres-
sure on French industry and prevent further economic catastrophe. His
solution was to increase direct taxes by 45 percent, a move that angered
rural peasants. Thus, while the more radical republicans in Paris organized
around a program of costly social and economic reforms, both moderates
and conservatives focused on electoral campaigns in the countryside, and
it was their candidates who won resoundingly in the April elections. Find-
ing themselves in the political minority, workers staged a demonstration
in Paris on May 15 ostensibly to support Polish independence. It quickly
degenerated, however, into a failed coup, which the National Assembly
used as an opportunity to suspend the Luxembourg Commission and
arrest its supporters.
In firm control of the National Assembly, conservatives suspended the
National Workshops, which had largely been a failure. Workers had been
confined to digging ditches and projects quickly ran out of funding. The
provisional government had seen the workshops as a temporary project
modeled on social charity, rather than a revolution of labor, as Blanc and
other socialists had advocated. The workers, however, had seen the work-
shops as a symbol of the government’s commitment to their right to labor,
so their elimination appeared as a contractual violation. In angry response,
between 10,000 and 15,000 Parisian workers rose up again in insurrection
in June 1848, many of them armed with weapons they had been issued as
new members of the National Guard. Their revolt was brutally repressed
by more than 100,000 soldiers. Close to 5,000 insurgents—mainly young
industrial workers from the building and metallurgy industries—were killed
or injured in the fighting. Another 12,000 were arrested and imprisoned,
while some 4,000 were deported to Algeria or Guiana.
The June Days, as they became known, resulted in a renewed crackdown
on worker and republican activism, as the conservative deputy, General
Eugène de Cavaignac, who had sanctioned the repression, took charge of
the Provisional Government. Clubs and newspapers were shut down, and
the workers’ movement quietly went underground. Yet critics condemned
Cavaignac’s “barbaric” methods, comparing them to the French army’s vio-
lent conduct in Algeria. In fact, the generals in charge (including Cavaignac
and Bugeaud) were well-known veterans of the Algerian conquest. At the
same time, Cavaignac’s supporters hailed his success in defeating the “sav-
age doctrines” of the insurgents, a perspective that saw French civilization
under threat from the dual enemies of working-class socialist ideology and
“barbarous” Algerians.
Confident that it had the electoral support of the rural masses, the
National Assembly declared that the new president of the republic would
be elected by universal male suffrage in December 1848. However, a new
candidate suddenly appeared on the scene: Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte,
the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte. Despite a lifetime in exile and two
previous, disastrous coup attempts against the constitutional monarchy,
Louis-Napoleon returned to France after Louis-Philippe abdicated in Febru-
ary 1848. Fearful of the foreign Bonaparte’s inf luence, republican leaders
sent him back to London. However, in the June elections, he was elected to
the National Assembly, winning in five departments (as candidates could
run in multiple departments). After taking his place in the National Assem-
bly, Louis-Napoleon announced his candidacy for the presidency, running
against Lamartine, Ledru-Rollin, the conservative general Cavaignac, and
the far-left socialist François-Vincent Raspail. He ran a centrist campaign,
gaining the grudging support of inf luential figures like Adolphe Thiers, who
believed he could control Bonaparte. While he was expected to win the elec-
tion, his margin of victory was shocking. He won nearly 75 percent of the
vote, largely from voters who hoped he could restore order and prosperity
to the country.
Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte and the Second Republic

Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte was elected president of the Second Republic of
France in December 1848, drawing mass support from rural France mainly
because of his name. He was born in Paris in 1808 to Hortense Beauharnais
(daughter of the empress Joséphine from her first marriage), who was unhap-
pily married to Napoleon I’s younger brother Louis; Louis-Napoleon grew
up in exile, trailing his mother around central Europe. Louis-Napoleon was
an unlikely heir to the Bonaparte legacy: Napoleon I’s son by his second
wife lived in the palace of Schönbrunn in Austria, and Louis-Napoleon’s
elder brother Napoleon Louis lived in Italy with his father Louis and his
uncles, all of whom had prior claim to the throne of France. Their return
seemed improbable, however, as neither Louis XVIII nor Charles X was
willing to allow any Bonapartes back into France.
Convinced that Bonapartism was a strong enough force to support the
overthrow of the July Monarchy and restore a Bonaparte to the throne,
Louis-Napoleon began plotting to stage a coup. Once it became clear that his
cousin “Napoleon II” (ill with consumption in Austria) and his uncles were
disinclined to take on such a role, he began plotting on his own behalf. He
developed a political ideology, publishing numerous treatises in the 1830s
on political and military theory. Although he had little practical military
experience, he modeled his ideal society on a mix between the First Empire
and Switzerland, where he had spent much of his time in exile. His first
coup attempt, launched from Strasbourg in October 1836, collapsed within
hours. He launched a second coup attempt from London in 1840, planning
to cross the channel and gather popular support to march on Paris. It fell
apart nearly as quickly, with Louis-Napoleon being rescued from a small
boat while f leeing the French army at Boulogne. After this second attempt,
French authorities put Louis-Napoleon on trial before the Chamber of Peers
and then imprisoned him in a fortress in Picardie for six years. During this
time, he became a symbolic figure to Bonapartists and other opponents of
the July Monarchy, gaining support as a victim of Orléanist repression.
Although he was elected president by a significant majority, Louis-
Napoleon was almost entirely isolated from the elite political classes, most
of whom thought him lazy and unserious. His early presidency was spent
pursuing an active social life and consorting with his British mistress (he was
still unmarried, yet another point against him). Republicans such as Lamar-
tine and conservatives like Cavaignac refused to serve as cabinet ministers
in his government. But Thiers, hoping to secure his own place as the future
president, worked behind the scenes to recommend his favored candidates
for posts. Many politicians were also concerned that Louis-Napoleon might
launch his own coup from within the government to take more direct con-
trol, despite his promises to uphold the constitution and the democratic
republic. For this reason, deputies in the National Assembly refused to hold
new elections after his investiture, only capitulating after the president’s
military forces put down opposition street riots in Paris in January 1849.
The May 1849 elections for the National Assembly highlighted the grow-
ing political divisions in the wake of the 1848 revolution. Bonapartists ral-
lied to the conservative and monarchist factions to defeat the dangerous
threat of socialism; they won the majority of seats (nearly 500 of the 750
total seats). However, radical republicans and socialists still won more than
200 seats, and not just from voters in the cities but from increasingly mili-
tant rural voters. Louis-Napoleon suggested to worried conservatives that
he alone could save French society from political instability.
Louis-Napoleon had an early opportunity to consolidate the support
of French Catholics through foreign policy in Italy, which had endured
its own failed liberal revolution in 1848. From exile in southern Italy, the
pope called on Catholic leaders across Europe to restore the Papal States.
Although Louis-Napoleon was still sympathetic to the cause of Italian
republicans, his desire to secure the support of French Catholics overrode
his liberal nationalist impulses. Louis-Napoleon sent a French force to
Italy in April 1849, hoping to reinstate the pope while also encouraging
him to accept constitutional reforms, thereby appeasing both French and
Italian liberals.
After months of failed negotiations with Italian nationalists and inter-
nal conf lict between conservatives and republicans in France, French troops
invaded Rome in July and put the pope back on the throne, delighting ultra-
montanist French Catholics. When it was clear that Pope Pius IX had no
intention of acceding to liberal reforms, Louis-Napoleon expressed his frus-
tration and ambivalence in a letter, which was leaked to the public. This
provoked the resignation of his ultra-Catholic minister of religion, Mgr Fal-
loux, which led Louis-Napoleon to dismiss his other ministers for lack of
support. Claiming a rising threat of social revolution, liberals and centrist
monarchists aligned themselves with the Catholic Church and passed the
Falloux Law in March 1850, expanding the church’s role in public educa-
tion. They also placed limits on the franchise by creating technicalities that
would disqualify millions of potentially left-leaning voters before the next
presidential elections. Political repression against leftist organizations and
newspapers also increased dramatically throughout 1850.
Louis-Napoleon envisioned his role as an independent voice, one who
could save the nation from potential catastrophe, and went on extensive
tours of the countryside to promote himself in this role. He secretly financed
propaganda through pamphlets and newspapers attacking conservative leg-
islators and fired the monarchist general in charge of the army in Paris. In a
July 1851 vote, he pressed loyal legislators to revise the constitution to allow
him to run for a second term as president but failed to achieve the three-
quarters of the votes necessary to carry the motion. Out of legal options by
the autumn of 1851, Louis-Napoleon saw the only way to remain in power
was to stage a coup and take control of the government.
Note
1 Flora Tristan, “The Workers’ Union,” in Flora Tristan, Utopian Feminist. Her
Travel Diaries and Personal Crusade, eds. Doris and William Beik (Blooming-
ton, IN, and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993), 121.
Aisenberg, Andrew. Contagion: Disease, Government, and the Social Question in
Nineteenth-Century France. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993.
Horn, Jeff. The Path Not Taken: French Industrialization in the Age of Revolution,
1750–1830. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.
Scott, Joan W. Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1988.
Semley, Lorelle. To Be Free and French: Citizenship in France’s Atlantic Empire.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Sessions, Jennifer E. By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011.
Sewell, William. Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor From the
Old Regime to 1848. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
6 New Imperial Designs New Imperial Designs
The Second Empire
Introduction
Émile Zola’s 1873 novel Le Ventre de Paris (The Belly of Paris) begins in a
ditch just outside the walls of Paris in 1858, where an emaciated man named
Florent Quenu lies, nearly dead from exhaustion. Florent escaped from the
prison colony of Devil’s Island, off the coast of French Guiana in South
America, where he had been deported for his participation in the popular
revolt against the coup of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte in December 1851.
A vegetable seller named Madame François rescues him and drives him into
central Paris. The novel traces Florent’s re-entry into the working-class world
of Second Empire Paris, centered around the newly constructed market, Les
Halles, an architectural marvel that stood at the center of the massive reno-
vations of Paris during the 1850s and 1860s undertaken by the emperor
Napoleon III and the Paris prefect Baron Georges Haussmann. Florent is
ill-at-ease in this familiar-yet-new city. Although he finds his brother, who
has opened a successful charcuterie business next to Les Halles, he is not
really at home with his family. Instead, he finds friendship in the wine bar
next door, where a group of men plot a socialist revolution, amid much disa-
greement over what an ideal French state might look like. It is the women
in this story, however, who have the power—fueled by the currency of gos-
sip—and ultimately orchestrate Florent’s downfall. His return has disrupted
the neighborhood’s social order, and nearly everyone denounces him to the
police. The revolutionary plot is exposed, and harmony is restored once
Florent is shipped back to Devil’s Island.
Le Ventre de Paris is the third book of Zola’s 20-novel series that depicted
the lives of various branches of the fictional Rougon-Macquart family
throughout the Second Empire (1851–1870). While the members of the
Rougon branch thrive, becoming respectable and wealthy members of the
bourgeoisie, the Macquarts struggle to survive as peasants, soldiers, and
industrial workers. Each novel depicts a different element of life in France
under the Second Empire, including the inf luence of religion on society (La
Conquête de Plassans, 1874), alcoholism (L’Assommoir, 1877), prostitu-
tion (Nana, 1880), the rise of department stores (Au Bonheur des dames,
DOI: 10.4324/b23310-6
106 New Imperial Designs
1883), a coalminers’ strike (Germinal, 1885), and stock market speculation
(L’Argent, 1891), among many others. Described as a “naturalist” writer
for his realistic depictions of the daily lives and struggles of the working
classes and the rise of the bourgeoisie, Zola also sought to inject his work
with social and political commentary. The “realism” of his stories depicted
a bourgeoisie whose newly attained wealth and status came at the expense
of the lower classes, and he directed plenty of criticism at the regime of
Napoleon III.
After the coup of 1851, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte followed the lead
of his uncle Napoleon I and installed himself as emperor of France, call-
ing himself Napoleon III. But he envisioned himself as a modern reformer.
Much inspired by the industrial and financial successes of Great Britain, he
sought to improve the economic and social condition of France through
the modernization of the economy and the nation’s infrastructure. Although
the entire country saw dramatic changes to its landscape, including the mas-
sive expansion of railroads and the renovation of numerous cities, it was
Paris that endured the most dramatic physical transformations. More than
two decades of urban renewal projects sought, in part, to promote the f low
of capital in the city and curb the revolutionary impulses of the working
classes. As Zola observed, the bourgeoisie gained both wealth and status
during the Second Empire, while republicans and socialists faced ongoing
waves of state repression, and the working classes struggled through their
daily lives.
Following in the footsteps of the rulers before him, Napoleon III sought
to appease his detractors and consolidate his power at home through suc-
cess in foreign wars and the expansion of the French empire. Haunted by
the lingering shadow of the previous Napoleonic empire, especially its dev-
astating collapse, Napoleon III increasingly felt a responsibility to reassert a
French presence on the European and even the global stage. He adamantly
adhered to the principle of popular sovereignty (to a limited extent, at least)
and to the right of nations to decide their own political fates. He sought to
redraw the map of Europe and its global empires to the advantage of the
French while also aiding sympathetic nations. In the end, he never fully suc-
ceeded in any of these endeavors and could not outmaneuver the Prussian
chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who trapped France into war in 1870 in an
attempt to unify the German states. It was this conf lict, the Franco-Prussian
War, that ultimately led to Napoleon III’s downfall, and the collapse of the
Second Empire.
The Coup of 1851 and the Birth of the Second Empire

The coup that transformed President Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte into
Emperor Napoleon III, nicknamed “Operation Rubicon,” was organized
by a small group of advisors close to Louis-Napoleon in late 1851. While
military leaders organized support among the troops, Louis-Napoleon
New Imperial Designs 107
worked to gain the allegiance of the people. First, he announced his inten-
tion to restore universal manhood suffrage with the repeal of the 1850 law
that instituted limits on the vote. He then placed his own men in strate-
gic posts in government, including in the War Ministry and various pre-
fectures. During the night of December 1–2, proclamations were posted
to justify the coup, announcing the state of siege, the dissolution of the
National Assembly, the organization of new elections with universal male
suffrage, and the preparation of a new constitution modeled on that of the
First Empire, subject to a plebiscite. At dawn, some 25,000 soldiers occu-
pied strategic points throughout Paris and a number of potential resistors
were immediately arrested (mainly liberal republicans), and then released
after two days.
Although Louis-Napoleon had counted on broad popular support, the
workers of Paris rallied around the increasingly vocal resistance of high-
profile deputies and liberal intellectuals, including Victor Hugo, Victor
Schoelcher, and Alexis de Tocqueville. Barricades went up in Paris imme-
diately and clashes between troops and workers left more than 200 dead.
Louis-Napoleon was even more shocked at the scale of resistance in the
provinces, where as many as 100,000 people joined a massive wave of
protest that drew on both long-standing local grievances and frustration
at the president’s violation of the constitution. Both the rural and urban
protests were quickly and violently repressed. 32 departments were placed
under martial law until March 1852, and more than 26,000 people were
arrested, 4,000 of them in Paris. Of those arrested, 9,500 were deported
to Algeria, and 239 presumed “leaders” of the insurrection were sent to
the notorious prison colony of Devil’s Island in Guiana. The leaders of
the republican movement were sent into exile, leaving Louis-Napoleon to
establish his new government largely without organized political resist-
ance. On December 20, less than three weeks after the coup, Louis-Napo-
leon held a plebiscite on his claim to power, and his controversial actions
seemed to gain an overwhelming seal of approval, with 7.5 million “yes”
votes to 640,000 “no” votes (along with 1.5 million abstentions). The
results appeared to indicate that the Bonapartist myth, which depicted
Louis-Napoleon as the embodiment of national strength and an ongoing
revolutionary tradition, still held enormous power among the rural and
urban working classes of France.
There was little doubt in anyone’s mind that Louis-Napoleon would
transform the republic into an empire modeled on that of Napoleon I. The
new constitution, which was introduced on January 14, 1852, transferred
important powers to the executive, including the power to make laws, com-
mand the armed forces, declare war, and make alliances and peace treaties.
It declared that “Prince Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte” would hold office for
ten years, rather than the three years dictated by the previous constitution.
Although the lower house was still elected by universal male suffrage, its
only role was to veto, rather than initiate or modify legislation. Until the
legislature came into session, Louis-Napoleon ruled by decree. He began
enacting projects he had long envisioned: the extension of road and railway
networks, the development of telegraph lines, the expansion of harbors and
canals, and the endowment of social programs with funds he acquired by
confiscating Orléanist property. He developed a monarchical image, sur-
rounding himself with a court and demanding he be addressed as “His
Imperial Highness.” He also took to wearing a military uniform bearing the
imperial eagle, a symbol that made its way onto military insignias through-
out the country. On December 2, 1852, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte offi-
cially became Napoleon III, Emperor of France, and installed himself in the
Tuileries palace.
Napoleon III’s initial goal as emperor was to consolidate his authority
and suppress potential resistance. He sought to secure the dynasty by pro-
ducing an heir and married a Spanish noblewoman named Eugénie de Mon-
tijo in February 1853. Although several of the emperor’s advisors criticized
Eugénie’s low social standing and outspoken support of women’s rights, she
secured her position by giving birth to an heir, a son named Eugène Louis,
in 1856. Eugénie was also a devout, ultramontanist Catholic, although this
appears to have had little inf luence on her husband, who privileged French
Catholicism over the Vatican. In the first decade of the empire, Napoleon III
increased the budget for religious affairs by 11 percent, which gave raises to
parish priests and allowed for a massive expansion in church construction.
He also supported the growth of Catholic religious orders (notably female
orders) and church-run schools. Yet Napoleon III’s support for the expan-
sion of Catholic power had its limits, as he maintained financial control over
the church and claimed the right to personally authorize the application of
papal decisions in France.
Napoleon III also believed that it was his duty to expand French inf luence
on the European continent. After his early missteps in Italy during the Sec-
ond Republic, Napoleon III announced his aim to secure peace through
diplomacy, a plan that was tested almost immediately with the outbreak of
the Crimean War in 1853. The Crimean conf lict was the result of a buildup
of long-standing tensions between Russia and Great Britain over the future
of the Ottoman Empire, which was in a state of political turmoil. Seeking
access to the Mediterranean through the Black Sea and the Turkish Straits,
Russia made a claim on the territory as the protector of Orthodox and
Slavic peoples of the Balkans. The British opposed this claim, and in seeking
to protect their own imperial interests (particularly their overland route to
India), sent the British naval f leet to prevent the Russians from occupying
the straits. Napoleon III intervened under the pretext of the long-standing
French convention to protect the Christian population of Palestine.
For Napoleon III, a secondary motive in joining the Crimean conf lict was
the hope that he could gain diplomatic control of Europe. What was initially
envisioned to be a naval war targeting the Russian f leet evolved into a land
war, with armies descending from both sides to capture and protect the port
of Sebastopol. Conditions deteriorated during the winter of 1854–1855:
Cholera, typhus, and dysentery epidemics struck troop encampments along
with horrific weather conditions, including early snow and tornadoes. Dur-
ing the siege of Sebastopol (October 1854–September 1855), the French
army lost more than 95,000 soldiers, 75,000 of those deaths from diseases.
It was only after a regiment of Algerian zouaves led by General MacMahon
captured the Russian defensive stronghold of Malakoff that the allies were
able to take control of Sebastopol on September 10, 1855.
The disastrous news about the suffering of soldiers in Crimea led to a
growing sentiment of popular patriotism in France that supported a more
forceful response to Russia. Napoleon III tried (and failed) numerous times
to go personally to the battlefield to provide moral support to the troops
and to direct field operations himself. Instead, Napoleon and Eugénie went
to England in April 1855, where they were received by Queen Victoria,
cementing a new political alliance between France and Great Britain. The
visit was returned just a few months later, when Victoria and Albert made
a state visit to Paris in August for the Universal Exposition and were fêted
with an ostentatious reception and ball at the Palace of Versailles.
The fall of Sebastopol led the new tsar of Russia, Alexander II, to seek an
end to the conf lict in Crimea. The peace negotiations began in Paris in the
spring of 1856 under the leadership of Napoleon III. The terms of the result-
ing Treaty of Paris brought temporary peace back to Europe. Britain and
France succeeded in their attempt to shore up the strength of the Ottoman
Empire and reduce Russia’s inf luence in Europe and the Mediterranean.
Yet the treaty did little to diminish the growing inf luence of nationalism,
particularly within the Ottoman Empire and in central and eastern Europe.
Just as Napoleon III was resolving the problem of Crimea, a new conf lict
was brewing on the eastern border of France, where the Italian nationalist
Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, had become prime minister of the king-
dom of Piedmont-Sardinia. At a secret meeting in July 1858, Cavour and
Napoleon III, who had long been a booster of Italian self-determination,
agreed to provoke a war to oust the Austrians from northern Italy and
secure the Roman Republic for the pope. In return for its assistance, France
would retake control of the territories of Savoie and Nice.
Napoleon III led an army of 140,000 men over the Alps to assist the
Piedmontese; the French won two notable victories against the Austrians,
despite 10,000 casualties at Solferino. However, Napoleon III betrayed his
Italian allies and signed an armistice with the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph
I, which allowed the Austrians to remain in Italy. Despite the disappoint-
ing loss for Piedmont-Sardinia, the war had unleashed nationalist revolts
throughout Italy. In 1860, Sardinia annexed the central Italian states and
ceded Nice and Savoie to France; these territories officially joined France
through a plebiscite in April 1860. As a consequence of his support for Ital-
ian nationalist aspirations over those of the pope, relations between Napo-
leon III and ultramontanist Catholics in France deteriorated significantly.
Throughout the 1850s, Napoleon III’s regime held almost unanimous
control over the legislature and every major administrative position. The
repression of opposition through censorship laws, the abolition of republi-
can and socialist societies, and even the ban on facial beards for teachers (a
symbol of republicanism) led opposition movements to shift into clandestin-
ity. By the mid-1850s, however, republicans were gaining ground again in
the larger cities, despite the regime’s manipulation of electoral politics. In
January 1858, four Italian republican revolutionaries attempted to assas-
sinate Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie in front of the Paris opera in a
bomb attack. Although the emperor and empress managed to escape, 8 peo-
ple were killed and 156 injured in the attack. In the aftermath, the regime
instituted even more severe repression of republican movements, especially
in southern France. In February 1858, a new security measure known as
the “law of suspects” went into effect, enabling the government to arrest
and sentence without trial anyone already convicted of political crimes. As
a result, more than 400 individuals were arrested and deported to Algeria
with no recourse to justice.
Capitalism, Credit, and the Modernization

of Infrastructure in Paris and Beyond
Once Napoleon III had secured political control of the country, he embarked
on an ambitious project of economic and industrial modernization. The
expansion of railways was central to his modernization plan: between 1851
and 1870, French railways grew from 3,200 km of track to more than
17,000 km, transporting 5 times as many passengers and 10 times as much
merchandise as at the beginning of the Second Empire. This expansion also
led to massive growth in the metallurgy, steel, and construction industries
as well as coal mining. Nevertheless, the textile industry remained largely
artisanal and, in some areas, production even slowed during the Second
Empire. As late as 1870, more than half the working population remained
employed in agriculture, which expanded in certain geographical areas that
had access to mechanized tools and innovative crop techniques. Urbani-
zation continued apace, however, as peasants sought better-paying jobs in
industrializing cities.
Napoleon III sought public-private partnerships to finance the expan-
sion of railroads, canals, and ports. In 1852, he authorized the creation of
the Crédit Mobilier, a bank run by the Jewish Pereire brothers. The Crédit
Mobilier was designed to use the savings of middle-class French investors to
finance infrastructure construction. He also authorized the formation of a
second new bank, the Credit Foncier, which helped finance regime-directed
agricultural modernization and urban renewal projects through the provi-
sion of mortgages and real estate loans.
The most well-known urban renewal project of the Second Empire took
place in Paris. Its guiding force was the prefect of the Seine, a bureaucrat
named Georges Haussmann, who had spent a significant amount of time in
Bordeaux and was enamored with that city’s urban design, particularly its
wide boulevards and functional organization. In Paris, Haussmann sought
to replicate these ideals, and this modernization project became known as
the “Haussmannization of Paris.”
Napoleon III envisioned the transformation of Paris into a capital city
worthy of the modern, industrial nation he sought to fashion—the pulsing
metropolis where railways, roadways, telegraphs, commerce, and industry
would come together. But it should also represent the glory of the state. No
longer would the city be a space of filth, foul odors, and disease; it should
have open spaces, monumental architecture, and space for the free f low
of capital. The first order of business, then, was to cleanse the city of its
insalubrious elements and reconstruct it based on a new map, inspired by
the emperor’s admiration for the city of London. Napoleon III and Hauss-
mann sought to restructure the city according to the modern ideology of
the straight line, in contrast to the cramped medieval streets of “old Paris.”
Inspired by Saint-Simonian and utopian socialist theories, Napoleon III
sought to promote government as a positive force for social improvement.
Haussmann took this directive to heart, but the results of his efforts were
less than egalitarian. The 1850 Insalubrious Dwellings Law allowed the
government to intervene directly in the “insalubrious homes” of the work-
ing classes, and an 1852 prefectoral decree substantially increased Hauss-
mann’s powers to prevent disease and social unrest by regulating not only
public space but private property as well. Controversially, he drew on these
two decrees to claim the right to expropriate property that stood in the way
of his plans to expand streets, construct new public buildings or new hous-
ing, modernize the water and sewer systems, and build public parks.
For more than 20 years, Paris became a massive construction site; over
20,000 buildings were torn down and some 40,000 new ones were built.
In collaboration with Napoleon III and a team of engineers, architects,
hydrologists, artists, and builders, Haussmann undertook renovations in
three waves. The first was called the “great crossroads” and connected a
major east-west artery to a north-south artery, both of which were anchored
by a major monument at each end. Haussmann notoriously demolished the
medieval residential neighborhood on the Ile de la Cité, leaving only the
cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris, the Conciergerie, the Palais de Justice,
and the medieval Sainte-Chapelle church. He extended the parvis in front
of Notre Dame, which had regained popularity following the publication of
Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and he replaced
the demolished residences with the reconstructed Hôtel Dieu public hospi-
tal, a police barracks, and the Tribunal de Commerce.
The second wave, which began in 1858, entailed the construction of mas-
sive boulevards designed to permit the free circulation of traffic in the city
center to the new railway stations. The third wave, which began in 1860,
included the annexation of the suburbs, doubling the surface area of the
Figure 6.1 Photograph by Charles Marville of urban renewal in nineteenth-century Paris,

State Library of Victoria, Australia.
city, and increasing the population of the city by 350,000 people. It also
saw the creation of some of the well-known city parks and fountains. At the
same time, Haussmann oversaw the modernization of the city’s water and
sewer lines, constructing 200 miles of new sewer lines with the intention to
eventually connect them to every building and home in Paris; these plans
remained theoretical for several decades, with the result that much of the
sewage waste of the city was dumped directly into the Seine River.
Haussmann’s controversial expropriation of property led to the forced
displacement of more than 350,000 Parisians, almost all of whom were
poor and working-class individuals, who were pushed outside of the city
where rents were more affordable. Many industrial workshops were also
forced outside the city limits, and new migrants in search of industrial work
went directly to the suburbs that developed distinctively as industrial quar-
ters. Critics of Napoleon III claimed that the emperor sought to control
the masses by dismantling neighborhoods that were prone to insurrection,
especially those in central and eastern Paris where the Canal St. Martin and
the narrow medieval streets had facilitated the construction of barricades.
In addition to transforming infrastructure at street level and below, Hauss-
mannization included the construction of new buildings. The majority of
these were built in fashionable new residential neighborhoods catering to the
bourgeoisie near the redesigned boulevards of western Paris. However, the
administration also spent considerable efforts on the construction of public
buildings, including five new town halls and the expansion or restoration of
six more across the city. The newly constructed main food market, known
as Les Halles, was a centerpiece of the city architect Victor Baltard’s modern
design, with a series of 12 glass and iron pavilions that novelist Émile Zola
described as the “belly of Paris.” The workmen of Paris also constructed
numerous churches, railway stations, schools, and theaters, including the
most famous monument of the Second Empire, the Opéra Garnier.
The desire for a new opera house in Paris long predated the Second Empire.
However, the project quickly evolved into the architectural showpiece of the
city that would come to define the regime of Napoleon III. From the 170
submitted designs, Napoleon III and Haussmann selected the proposal of
the architect Charles Garnier. Garnier’s opera house was the most expensive
building project of the era, costing 33 million francs and taking 14 years to
construct. In contrast to the modern architectural styles of Les Halles and the
railway stations that used materials like glass and iron and demonstrated the
regime’s embrace of science and industry, Garnier built the opera house in a
classical style with excessive flourishes, including the grand escalier, a massive
staircase where the elites of Parisian society gathered to see and be seen.
But how exactly did Haussmann pay for these massive and costly con-
struction projects? Napoleon III was convinced that public works projects
would stimulate the economy and provide jobs, and therefore he could make
good on the failure of the National Workshops and appease the frustrated
working classes. He was also adamant, however, that he would not further
alienate the Parisian bourgeoisie by raising taxes. Therefore, Haussmann
and his colleagues devised two main methods to acquire capital for their
projects: deficit spending (with money borrowed primarily from the Crédit
Foncier) and the octroi, a sales tax on all goods coming into the city of
Paris. With the growing population of Paris, the prefect could count on ris-
ing income from sales taxes on wine and food for both permanent residents
and the increasing numbers of tourists. Taxes on luxury building materials
added even more to the coffers, which led city officials to prioritize per-
mits and governmental support for developers who built luxury apartments
over those who built affordable housing with cheaper materials. Real estate
speculation quickly blew up. In 1870, Haussmann’s debt was estimated to
be more than 1.5 million francs, a sum that was not fully discharged by the
city of Paris until 1929. By the late 1860s, legislators became less tolerant of
Haussmann’s explanations and sought more direct control over his spend-
ing. The problem, though, was that he had created a complicated house of
cards that could not be easily dismantled.
Although Haussmannization was specific to Paris, the fever for urban renewal
soon spread. Few cities in France were untouched by the urge to modernize
some aspects of the urban landscape, particularly in the name of hygiene. These
ideas even made their way across the Mediterranean to Algiers, where, after
1860, colonial officials slowly attempted to transform the city into a modern
urban French port and the architectural expression of Napoleon III’s “Arab
Kingdom.” By the end of the nineteenth century, ideologies of hygiene and
urban renewal had become principles of colonial rule, to the point that the
newly constructed opera house of Hanoi in French Indochina, erected between
1901 and 1911, was modeled on the Opéra Garnier in Paris.
In 1855, France hosted the Universal Exposition in Paris, an event mod-
eled on the 1851 Grand Exposition at the Crystal Palace in London. This
was the opportunity for the emperor to show off the progress of his regime
and the economic, social, and cultural modernization projects he was under-
taking at such a large scale. An enormous Palais de l’Industrie was con-
structed out of iron and glass on a central site between the Champs-Élysées
and the Seine. Between May and October 1855, the fair welcomed more
than 5 million visitors. Although the exposition was financially damaging
for France, it was an overwhelming public relations success: it demonstrated
to the world that France was modern and progressive and could compete
with British industry on the global stage.
Bourgeois Culture
With the expansion of industrial capitalism in France in the 1850s and
1860s, a specifically bourgeois set of norms and behaviors developed,
which emphasized the division of men’s and women’s roles in society. The
haute bourgeoisie distinguished themselves from the classes below them by
removing their wives and daughters from labor outside the home. Bour-
geois domestic manuals began to draw clear distinctions between the pub-
lic sphere—the territory of men, and the domestic sphere—the space for
women. These changes came in the wake of the Second Republic’s refusal to
grant women the right to vote. Prominent republicans such as Jules Michelet
and even radical socialists such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon rehabilitated
earlier arguments made by thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau who had
emphasized differences between the sexes and women’s place in the nation
as mothers, rather than as equal citizens. As such, the role of the ideal bour-
geois woman of the mid-nineteenth century became primarily reproductive.
However, she also had a duty to keep her home beautiful and well ordered,
which meant that in addition to supervising her children and servants, she
spent a great deal of time shopping for clothes and housewares to maintain
the public appearance of her family and her home.
The French bourgeoisie also distinguished themselves from the working
classes and from the aristocracy by their reputation for good taste. While
wealthy aristocrats might have unlimited funds to purchase the most fash-
ionable clothing and home decor, the bourgeoisie saw their own taste as
more discerning and restrained. They bought articles of high quality but
nothing f lashy or pretentious. Tastefulness, they believed, was an extension
of morality: the aristocracy were too prof ligate to be tasteful, and the work-
ing classes too insalubrious and immoral. Understanding the complicated
social codes of fashion and furnishings and procuring these items from the
right vendors at the right price was the task of bourgeois wives—a task that
transformed with the innovation of the department store.
In Paris, during the era of Haussmannization, department stores sprang up
across the city. These new “cathedrals of commerce,” as Zola described them,
sold housewares, clothing and tailor-made suits, shoes, hats, and gloves; they
offered reading rooms for men and lounges for ladies and gave away balloons
and toys to children. The store offered a space for bourgeois women to escape
their homes and socialize with each other. These stores also revolutionized
urban and rural commerce by distributing catalogs of goods across the coun-
try and delivering those goods to the home. Individual stores would under-
cut each other by using publicity and sales to attract more customers. This
put family-owned small shops, such as tailors, umbrella makers, milliners,
Figure 6.2 “Les Grands magasins de la ville de Saint-Denis—L’entrée monumen-

tale,” Drawing by MM. Ringel and Ferdinandus, 1881, CC0 Paris
Musées/Musée Carnavalet—Histoire de Paris.
shoemakers, or even custom furniture makers, out of business; they could not
compete with the prices at department stores, which could sell mass-produced
goods and even luxury items on sale.
Bourgeois respectability in this period was associated with the “interior,”
and the newly designed apartment buildings were constructed specifically to
valorize the privacy and security of the domestic interior. Outside was the
space of danger and of immorality, where those looking for sexual encoun-
ters beyond the confines of a conservative, bourgeois marriage could find
them. The concerns about cholera and hygiene that shaped social reform
and state intervention into the lives of the urban working class in the 1830s
and 1840s, for instance, extended now to concerns about sexual immorality
and diseases (such as syphilis). The government sought to regulate prosti-
tution through the licensing of brothels, known as maisons de tolérance.
Officials believed that sanctioning this “necessary evil” would allow middle-
and upper-class men access to prostitutes but would keep these women off
the streets, out of public view, and facilitate screening for venereal diseases.
Yet rather than hiding prostitution away, Parisians learned to recognize the
distinctive signs: a large house number, a yellow lantern, and a madam at
the door to attract clientele. In 1855, there were more than 200 Parisian
maisons de tolérances, employing over 1,800 women.
Observers at the time noted that Haussmannized Paris, with its new public
parks, wide sidewalks, and social spaces like department stores, seemed to
provide a whole range of new public associations with sex. While shopping
was necessary for bourgeois women to maintain the family’s respectability,
it also held the dangers of pleasure. New public spaces also held opportu-
nities for male homosexual encounters. Public urinals, installed to address
hygiene concerns, became a site for men to locate sexual partners. Although
male homosexuality had been decriminalized during the French Revolu-
tion, it was still considered a threat to “decency.” Thus, police surveilled
and arrested men caught in same-sex sexual activities, charging them with
“vagrancy.” Social scientific studies at the time linked male homosexual
activity and female prostitution to “deviant” sexual desire. The active moral
policing of the streets during this time made it challenging for women—
especially working-class women—to simply move through the city. Some
“suspicious” behaviors (such as standing alone under a streetlight) could
get a woman arrested on the charge of being a clandestine prostitute. Con-
sequently, respectability was a constant public performance for women.
Napoleon III’s regime increasingly relied on private contributions to fund
social welfare and on the Catholic Church to maintain social order; bour-
geois women played a key role in both of these endeavors. Despite tens
of thousands of newly poor and indigent joining government welfare rolls
through the 1840s, poverty was seen as a moral rather than a systemic social
failure, so there was little political will to increase state funding for direct
welfare services. Up until the 1880s, the female Catholic religious order,
the Filles de la Charité, delivered poor relief in Paris, under the direction of
city welfare officials who provided minimal funding. Typically, these funds
were supplemented through fundraising efforts organized by women of the
parish. Bourgeois women who joined parish charitable associations were
expected to contribute by visiting families of the sick and the poor to pro-
vide moral encouragement and, if necessary, civilizing advice.
During the Second Empire, new Catholic churches sprang up across the
country (including 22 new churches in Paris alone), as dioceses called on
the generosity of the emperor and of their wealthy parishioners to construct
new neo-gothic or neo-romanesque churches. This demonstrative piety
coincided with the growth of ultramontanism. Observers noted (sometimes
quite critically) an increasing “feminization” of religious practice within the
French Catholic Church, particularly noticeable in its veneration of the Vir-
gin Mary. In 1854, Pope Pius XI issued the dogma of Immaculate Concep-
tion (the doctrine that the Virgin Mary was also free of original sin at her
conception), which formalized a growing trend, particularly in rural France,
of the establishment of new convents, rosary associations, and religious cel-
ebrations in honor of Mary, including pilgrimages to Lourdes to venerate
the 1858 apparition of the Virgin Mary to 14-year-old Bernadette Soubirous
in a grotto of the village.
Realism in the Arts and Positivism in the Sciences

The social and political transformations of the Second Empire were a great
inspiration for a wide range of artists, including painters, novelists, play-
wrights, and composers. This period saw the transition in visual art from
the classical and romantic imagery in the epic works of painters such as
Delacroix, Ingres, and Gérôme to the emergence of Realism, or the move-
ment to depict only what the artist could see in real life. In contrast to heroic
imagery and battle paintings of earlier decades, Realist painters like Gustave
Courbet and Édouard Manet often depicted ordinary life and images of
people from across the social spectrum, including peasants, artisans, and
courtesans. But this transition was unsettling to many. Both Manet and
Courbet were subject to harsh public criticism for both the style of their
painting and the subjects they chose to depict. Manet’s 1863 painting Olym-
pia, which was shown for the first time at the Paris Salon of 1865, left
critics frothing. Some members of the public claimed they wanted to run it
through with umbrellas due to its “indecency.” The painting, a reinterpreta-
tion of the Renaissance painting Venus of Urbino by Titian (1534), which
Manet had copied in several forms during a trip to Italy in 1853, depicted
his frequent model Victorine Meurent reclining nude on a chaise in the pose
of Venus, staring directly at the spectator and attended by a Black woman
named Laure. The nudity itself was not especially scandalous, as another
painting of a nude Venus won the prize at the salon that year. The problem
was that Manet had “perverted” the artistic codes of the period, using a
recognizably real woman as a model for an archetypal figure like Venus.
In contrast, the winning Cabanel painting depicted Venus in the style of
an angelic woman with cherubs. But Manet declared, “I paint what I see,”
suggesting that female courtesans were a reality of the present, which chal-
lenged bourgeois morals. Courbet’s controversial paintings also depicted
realistic figures in scenes such as a funeral in his hometown (Un enterrement
à Ornans, 1850) or ordinary peasant women bathing in the countryside
(Les Baigneuses, 1853). The Realist painters’ break with traditional schools
of fine arts inspired new aesthetic challenges to convention, and by the end
of the 1860s, the early Impressionist painters were also being defined as a
new “school” of modern art.
Similar evolutions took place in the literary sphere. The Realist novel
arrived on the scene with the 1856 serial publication of Gustave Flaubert’s
Madame Bovary. The novel tells the story of a provincial doctor’s wife in
Normandy, the titular Emma Bovary, who embarks on a series of disas-
trous extramarital affairs to escape the disappointments of marriage and
motherhood. When she becomes overwhelmed with debt after overspend-
ing on fancy clothes, she commits suicide in despair at the hopelessness of
her situation. The final installment was published on December 15, 1856,
and a few weeks later, Flaubert and his printer and publisher were accused
by the Imperial Prosecutor of the Second Empire of committing offenses
against public and religious morality due to the “vulgarity” of the novel’s
realism. Flaubert was acquitted two months later, and the novel became an
enormous success across France and the world. The poet Charles Baude-
laire, who lived a bohemian life in Paris with his common-law wife, a Black
actress named Jeanne Duval, was not so fortunate in his dealings with the
Imperial Prosecutor. In 1857, he published a scandalous book of poetry
titled Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), which dealt with themes of
death, decadence, eroticism, and evil. Months later, Baudelaire and his edi-
tors were convicted of causing offense against public and religious morals,
fined, and obliged to remove six “obscene and immoral” poems from any
future print editions.
While realistic depictions of sexuality and defiance of bourgeois morality
caused the greatest public scandals, Realism was a movement that explicitly
sought to destabilize the status quo. For instance, Émile Zola’s Rougon-
Macquart novel cycle critiqued contemporary French society, particularly
the relationship between heredity and environment in the face of the ongo-
ing consequences of industrialization. The bourgeoisie’s description of
Zola’s work as “naturalist” was intentionally pejorative because they were
repelled by his vivid depictions of the bleak conditions of working-class
life. Yet Zola had been inspired by the earlier novels of Honoré de Balzac,
whose epic multi-volume depiction of French society under the Restoration
and July Monarchy, La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy), explored
themes of power, money, sex, and social relations. To combat the scandal-
ous inf luence of these works, more conservative “domestic novels” catered
to bourgeois women. The authors of these novels, who included Joséphine
de Gaulle, the grandmother of the future French president, depicted scenes
of domestic life, often with religious overtones, that educated female readers
on how to create order and domestic harmony in their own homes.
By mid-century, serialized popular literature was all the rage for readers
of every class. Several sub-genres emerged, including adventure stories, his-
torical tales, and morality tales, all of them inspired by new possibilities for
travel both within and outside France. In 1863, the novelist Jules Verne pub-
lished Cinq semaines en ballon (Five Weeks in a Balloon) about an explorer
who traverses Africa in a hot air balloon with his servant and his friend; his
stories, including Voyage au centre de la terre (Journey to the Center of the
Earth, 1864), combined adventure with geographic and scientific knowl-
edge and evolved into the genre that would become science fiction.
As with popular literature, theater became a space where the public sought
entertainment and distraction from daily life. Alexandre Dumas fils enjoyed
one of his greatest literary and theatrical successes with the 1852 adapta-
tion of his 1848 novel La Dame aux camélias (commonly known in English
as Camille). A year later, Italian composer Giuseppi Verdi transformed the
play, which tells the tragic story of an affair between a young bourgeois man
and a courtesan who dies of consumption, into his immensely popular opera
La traviata. For more lighthearted distractions, vaudeville was extremely
popular, and the operetta, or light opera, emerged as a distinct new lyric
genre during the Second Empire. The most famous operetta composer was
Jacques Offenbach, born into a Jewish family in Cologne, who combined
musical virtuosity with sharp satire. His first major operetta, Orphée aux
enfers (Orpheus in the Underworld, 1858) was denounced by critics for its
rejection of recognized forms and its satirical take on elites in power, par-
ticularly the posturing of mythical heroes. Yet it was an enormous success
and played in theaters for more than a decade. The galop (better known as
the “can-can”) from the end of Act 2 became one of the most recognizable
pieces of music in the world after the Moulin Rouge and Folies Bergère
cabaret halls in Paris later adopted it in their own dancers’ can-can.
The Second Empire bourgeoisie developed a wide range of intellectual
diversions, including a growing interest in the physical and social sciences.
Notable scientific achievements in France during this time included the
research of Louis Pasteur, who invented the process of “pasteurization,”
using heat to kill bacteria in fermented beverages, as a means to combat
diseases aff licting French wine. In the following decades, Pasteur and his
research institute became famous worldwide for putting the biological sci-
ences in service to medicine, notably with the discovery of microbes in 1877,
which allowed doctors and scientists to fight contagious diseases through
the production of vaccines.
Numerous scientific societies were founded during the Second Empire,
including the Meteorological Society of France (1852), the Botanical Society
of France (1854), the Zoological Society (1854), and the Statistical Society
of France (1860). Many of their members were political leaders, doctors, or
bourgeois businessmen with a secondary interest in the scientific field, and
with enough training to engage in scientific debates or publish papers on top-
ics of interest. Wealthy bourgeois patrons of the French Geographical Soci-
ety funded the expeditions of French explorers like Paul Belloni de Chaillu,
who traveled through west and central Africa in the 1850s and 1860s col-
lecting animal specimens. Chaillu then lectured throughout Europe and
North America to other geographical societies on his observations about
the connections between African gorillas and indigenous African peoples.
Alongside the bourgeois interest in observing and cataloging the natural
world came a growing interest in the study of human behavior. While the
“social sciences” of philosophy, history, morals, and political economy had
been established through the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in the
early 1830s, the mid-nineteenth century saw a transformation in approach.
Most significant was the inf luence of the ideology of positivism, one of whose
earliest proponents was Auguste Comte, inventor of the word “sociology.”
Positivists sought to identify and study laws of society and nature through
a scientific and rational method based on the observation of experience, in
contrast to what they derided as theological or metaphysical approaches
to human problems. They believed that data they collected would allow
scientists, doctors, and other interested parties (including social reformers
and government officials) to formulate ideas and policies that were based on
ostensibly observable and provable facts rather than revolutionary political
theories or moral systems based on religious belief.
Relatedly, French social scientists developed new approaches to the
“scientific” classification of humans that were shaped by the expansion of
European empires and greater contact with non-European “subjects.” The
Société ethnologique de Paris (Paris Ethnological Society) was founded in
1839 by a group of geographers and linguists to study the different varieties
of humans and the potential perfectibility of races (i.e., whether they could
benefit from European contact or were deemed “uncivilizable”). But while
ethnology was seen to be qualitative in its descriptions of human societies
and behaviors, by the 1850s, some scientists adopted a different approach,
rooted in the study of physical features. Physical anthropology, particularly
the measurements of skulls, came to form the basis for the “anthropologi-
cal” study of the hierarchy of human races. As anthropologists traveled
across the world in search of societies to study, they brought back “arti-
facts” (including skulls and other human remains) to a growing number of
museums in France. The belief in the “scientific” nature of the methodolo-
gies of these emerging fields and the data they produced made them intel-
lectually legitimate among the bourgeoisie and political elites, particularly
those who sought justifications for their place in society and for their right
to rule over others.
Mid-nineteenth-century French historians also attempted to inject more
“scientific” methodologies into their discipline. Historian Gabriel Monod,
for example, sought to train a new generation of French historians through
the university research seminar, which drew on both the positivism of
Auguste Comte and the “scientific” methodologies of German historian
Leopold von Ranke, who suggested that a scholar could find the “truth”
of history through a detached and objective analysis of archival documents.
The archives they analyzed were primarily those of the state, which were
in the process of being constructed. After collecting archival facts, profes-
sional historians were then trained to write narrative histories, which, due
to the nature of the sources, were inherently political histories that narrated
French history from the perspective of the elites in power. As this methodol-
ogy was considered “scientific” and “fact-based,” there was little room for
alternative narratives, including those that privileged the voices of peasants,
working classes, or women. This professionalization and masculinization
of the discipline were so effective that popular histories written by women
were dismissed as the work of amateurs. Even those works of eminent his-
torians such as Jules Michelet, which were created in collaboration with his
second wife Athénaïs, were later described as contaminated by her inf luence
or falsified after his death.
Outside of the academy, local historical associations and museums that
documented and displayed local history f lourished across France during the
Second Empire, largely at the behest of Napoleon III, who was passionate
about history. These institutions were typically run by learned societies peo-
pled with bourgeois industrial and commercial elites. In Paris, Haussmann
created a commission to collect documents and artifacts about the city dur-
ing the renovations and sought to make them accessible to all Parisians in
a free museum, which became the Musée Carnavalet. Here, the city’s his-
tory was presented from the Gallo-Roman age to the contemporary period,
displaying newly uncovered archaeological artifacts as well as document-
ing the city’s many transformations. In tandem with the professionalization
of the discipline of history, this narrative promoted a focus on the origins of
the French nation, beginning with the Roman Empire.
Napoleon III commissioned a new national history that compared the
struggle between the ancient Gallo-Roman and Frankish populations to that
of the ongoing conf lict between the nobility and the Third Estate. During
the Restoration, liberal historians had depicted the Franks as cruel oppres-
sors of the Gauls and claimed a direct ancestral connection from the Gauls
to the contemporary French population. Napoleon III created a topographic
commission to draw a map of Gaul and named chairs of antiquity at various
grandes écoles. He sent archaeologists to survey antiquities in Syria, Spain,
Macedonia, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, and Greece. He also fully supported the
amateur archaeological projects of French military officers in Algeria, who
sought to uncover, catalog, and protect the Roman ruins and antiquities
that dotted the landscape. Some of these archaeological findings sought to
establish a direct connection between the Romans and the French, provid-
ing yet another “scientific” means of justifying the French conquest. But it
was not only archaeologists who were interested in North Africa’s Roman
ruins. Gustave Flaubert’s 1862 historical novel Salammbô, a story about the
Mercenary Revolt in the third century BCE, was set in Carthage, Tunisia.
The novel’s immense success led to renewed popular interest in Carthage
and Roman North Africa, which French state and colonial officials used to
promote the expansion of empire and further settlement of Algeria as essen-
tial for French political and economic progress.
The Consolidation and Expansion of Overseas Empire

Beyond meddling in European political affairs, the expansion and consolidation
of the French overseas empire became a significant way for Napoleon III to
assert French power. In 1854, a French Senate decree known as the Sénatus-
Consulte reorganized the empire: the old colonies (those acquired under the
ancien régime) would be governed under metropolitan law, while the new
colonies would be ruled by decree. During the Second Empire, Great Britain
was both France’s most fierce colonial rival and strongest European ally.
During the Second Opium War (1856–1860), for example, the French and
British attacked the Qing Dynasty to force the Chinese to open their ports to
trade with the Europeans and to legalize the opium trade. Envisioning a more
permanent French colonial presence in Asia, Napoleon III approved a military
invasion of Cochinchina (present-day southern Vietnam) in 1858 in retaliation
for the execution of two Spanish Catholic missionaries and more than a
decade of supposed harassment of French Catholic missionaries and their
converts in the territory. In 1862, the Vietnamese signed the Treaty of
Tonkin. This treaty established the French colony of Cochinchina through
the cession of several key Vietnamese provinces to the French, allowed
the free practice of Catholicism throughout the territory, and required a
large indemnity payment to the French and Spanish governments. Within
three more years, the colony had doubled in size when the French forced
the Vietnamese to surrender three additional provinces, placing all of southern
Vietnam and the Mekong Delta under French control. In 1863, the French
also established a protectorate over the neighboring territory of Cambodia.
Napoleon III sought to replicate the success of British imperial expansion
by modernizing the French navy to help secure new territories overseas. He
was particularly interested in Asia and Africa, where industrializing Europe-
ans saw a treasure-trove of natural resources and potential export markets
for their manufactured goods. In 1853, French admiral Despointes took
possession of New Caledonia, an archipelago of islands east of Australia
that Napoleon III sought to use as a penal colony. Between 1864 and 1897,
more than 20,000 prisoners were sent there. After attempts at European set-
tlement failed, the colony became a valuable producer of nickel, which was
mined by laborers imported from across Asia.
The French also sought to expand their economic inf luence in Africa via
new commercial treaties with Madagascar and local chiefs on the coast of
West Africa. In 1854, General Louis Faidherbe was appointed governor of
Saint-Louis, one of the four original communes on the coast of Senegal.
Faidherbe expanded France’s political and economic presence inland along
the Senegal River, building fortifications to secure French trade routes.
Lacking sufficient French troops to control the territory, he created a regi-
ment of Senegalese infantry troops in 1857 that became known as the tirail-
leurs sénégalais and later recruited soldiers from across French-controlled
colonies in west and central Africa. Faidherbe also constructed roads and
telegraph lines to link French-controlled colonies in the region. The French
renamed Ndakarou, the capital city, as Dakar, and began constructing a
railway line from Dakar to Saint-Louis, which became the first operating
railroad in French West Africa in 1885.
French diplomat and developer Ferdinand de Lesseps led a private exten-
sion of this same sensibility through the decade-long construction of the
Suez Canal in Egypt in the 1860s. As the French vice consul in Alexandria,
Egypt in the early 1830s, de Lesseps had read with great interest the sci-
entific studies of Egypt conducted during Napoleon I’s expedition, includ-
ing surveys for a potential canal on the isthmus. Through discussions with
Saint-Simonians in exile in Egypt, de Lesseps was convinced to pursue the
canal project. He had maintained good relations with the viceroy of Egypt,
Mehmet Ali, and Ali’s son and successor Saïd Pacha accorded de Lesseps
the concession to construct the canal. With the support of Napoleon III, de
Lesseps raised the money to fund the canal through public subscriptions.
Although the British government remained staunchly opposed, construction
on the canal began in 1859. It took a decade to complete, in part due to
challenges faced by both forced and paid laborers who endured a cholera
epidemic and unhealthy working conditions. At the opening ceremony of
the canal on November 17, 1869, Empress Eugénie’s yacht sailed through it
carrying the viceroy and the empress along with royalty from Austria, Prus-
sia, Hanover, and the Netherlands as well as ambassadors from England
and Russia.
The most ill-fated French attempt at imperial expansion during the Sec-
ond Empire was the 1862 invasion of Mexico. The endeavor was initially
supported by Britain, Spain, and even Austria, as well as by French lib-
eral republicans and ultramontanist Catholics. One year earlier amidst a
financial crisis, Benito Juarez’s liberal government in Mexico suspended
payments on all foreign debts. The French, to whom debt payments were
owed, seized the opportunity to invade. Despite the withdrawal of the
British and Spanish, the French saw the moment as opportune since the
United States was embroiled in a civil war and distracted from protecting
what the Americans viewed as their sphere of inf luence. Although many
Mexican Catholics, the nobility, and wealthy conservatives who had been
repressed under Juarez’s liberal policies welcomed the French invasion,
it took nearly 18 months of warfare before the French army captured
Mexico City in June 1863. The Second Mexican Empire was modeled
after Napoleon’s own regime, but the crown was offered to the Austrian
archduke Maximilian. Although Maximilian attempted to import a
combination of European liberalism and monarchy, his policies pleased
nobody, and the French struggled against republican insurgency. Once the
U.S. Civil War ended in 1865, the Americans began pressuring the French
to leave Mexico, even threatening war. After Napoleon recalled French
troops, Maximilian’s regime was overthrown by republican nationalists,
who executed the emperor in 1867.
Amidst this imperial expansion, Algeria remained the central focus of
French colonial projects. During the early euphoric days of the Second
Republic, republican leaders had decreed Algeria to be “an integral part of
French territory.” Later in 1848, the constitution of the Second Republic
transformed the three northern provinces of Algeria—Algiers, Oran, and
Constantine—into French departments, fully integrated into the administra-
tive functions of France. Each department now had a prefect and in areas
of the country deemed “pacified,” European settlers were organized into
communes, which meant that French citizens were eligible to elect mayors
and municipal councils. By 1850, the French military had crushed most
Algerian resistance to the establishment of a settler colonial regime, and
locally elected government officials privileged European interests over those
of the Algerians, both on the ground in Algeria and in metropolitan France.
During the Second Empire, the French government’s approach to Algeria
was largely determined by the emperor, who became personally invested
in the development of the colony during his first visit to Algeria in 1860.
He was immediately struck by the condition of the so-called indigènes and
declared that he would improve the lives of the Arabs and raise them to
the dignity of free men. A year later, he wrote to the new governor general,
“our African possession is not an ordinary colony but an Arab kingdom.”1
In practice, the French enacted a series of new policies, largely inspired by
Saint-Simonian beliefs that Europeans were improving the lives of Algerians
with the application of civilization and concepts like private property. The
first important law that the regime enacted was the 1863 Sénatus-Consulte,
which attempted to survey and classify all Algerian territory. Rather than
having loosely defined communal lands, the aim was to fix land titles
and proprietorships to newly defined tribal communes. The effects of this
law were dramatic: the “unfixed” territories classified under the measure
reverted to the state, which thus acquired more than 1 million hectares of
Algerian land.
Even more significantly, the 1865 Sénatus-Consulte declared that Mus-
lims and Jews born in Algeria were French subjects (distinct from “French
citizens”); however, they would continue to be governed under their per-
sonal status law (Muslim law or Jewish law), depending on religious origin.
Muslim and Jewish men in Algeria could potentially become French citizens
after the age of 21, but only if they gave up their rights under personal
status law and agreed to be governed under French civil and criminal laws.
A final article stated that foreigners (of European origin) who resided for
three years in Algeria could be eligible to obtain French citizenship. This
brief statute legally defined the status of Algerians for the next 80 years.
The Saint-Simonian ideology that guided the 1865 Sénatus-Consulte envi-
sioned the Algerian Muslim path to French citizenship as an emancipatory
project, the evolution from savage backwardness to enlightened moder-
nity via contact with the French colonizers. This same logic would justify
the French colonial “civilizing mission” for decades to come, especially as
the French expanded their empire into sub-Saharan Africa during the era
of New Imperialism in the 1880s up through World War I. Yet very few
Muslim Algerians found this citizenship path open to them. Instead, French
colonial officials and racial theorists claimed that Algerian Muslims were
incapable of achieving European modernity due to their “uncivilized” reli-
gion and ethnicity, which made them “naturally” more inclined to accept
“backward” practices, such as polygamy. Consequently, many French law-
makers and European settlers refused to consider the possibility that Alge-
rian Muslims could be assimilated into French citizenship and society.
Initially, the pro-Algerian rhetoric of Napoleon III’s “Arab Kingdom”
frustrated both the European settler population and the military leadership
in Algeria. Although the military believed it had finally pacified the region of
Kabylia, a series of revolts broke out in 1860 and in 1864–1865, leading to
worries of an ongoing war. However, between 1867 and 1868, natural dis-
asters devastated the Algerian population: first, a locust infestation and then
earthquakes, followed by a bad winter, f looding, and a catastrophic famine
that led to an estimated 500,000 deaths. By the late 1860s, thousands of
Algerians had been reduced to beggars, but there was little momentum to
pursue policies in French Algeria to improve conditions for the so-called
indigènes. Meanwhile, Napoleon III—their supposed champion—was dis-
tracted by events in Europe.
Social and Political Contestation From Within

and Abroad
If the first decade of Napoleon III’s regime was known as his “authori-
tarian” period, the second decade was an attempt to consolidate domes-
tic power, expand the overseas empire, and restore French standing on the
European continent through economic and political liberalization. In a letter
to his minister of state in 1860, the emperor stated his desire to inaugurate a
new era of peace, in part by instituting free trade, which he believed would
improve the economic prosperity of the entire nation. Although he had long
wanted to push a broad free-trade policy, he had held off through the late
1850s, sensing hostility from advisors, industrialists, and the broader pub-
lic. Yet Napoleon III negotiated and signed a free-trade deal with Great Brit-
ain in 1860, which progressively abolished tariffs on French and colonial
manufactured goods and agricultural products. An 1861 law also abolished
the colonial Exclusif, allowing colonies to trade with other powers than
France. France signed 11 similar free-trade treaties with other European
countries between 1861 and 1866, and established more unequal trade trea-
ties (often with weapons in hand) with Siam (1856), Japan (1858), China
(1860), and Madagascar (1868).
As a consequence of Napoleon III’s reforms, French society grew ever
more divided. The elites grew steadily wealthier, and the bourgeoisie began
to close ranks, while the vast majority of the population lived in a state
of poverty, or near-poverty. Artisans and small shopkeepers were always
one economic crisis away from utter financial ruin. Though Napoleon III
had courted, and greatly benefited from, the support of French Catholics,
their warm relationship began to cool by 1859–1860. This was due to the
emperor’s concerns about the growing power of ultramontanism and his
support of nationalist movements in Italy. In response to Catholic criti-
cism, the regime banned Louis Veuillot’s inf luential, ultramontanist jour-
nal L’Univers, prompting an immediate outcry from Catholics. By the early
1860s, the emperor had lost support from Catholics, from some industrial
elites who were hostile to economic liberalization, and from those in the
working classes who had suffered from failing industries that were hurt by
the end of protectionism.
Consequently, the emperor sought new political allies, particularly among
the youth, workers, and liberals who were not allied with republican agita-
tors. Courting their support, he made a surprise move in November 1860
when he signed a decree that allowed the legislature to engage more directly
in governance and eased up on the strict control of the press. The emperor
and Victor Duroy, education minister between 1863 and 1869, also sought
to improve access to education, believing that in a country with universal
male suffrage, every citizen should be able to read and write. An 1867 law
on primary schooling made significant advances toward the goal of free pub-
lic primary schooling and promoted secular instructors in public schools,
making it clear that the empire no longer privileged Catholic schooling. The
law provided funds for village schools and also made it obligatory to have
a primary school for girls in communes with populations greater than 500
persons.
To attract additional support from the working classes, the emperor cre-
ated the Société du prince impérial in 1862, which loaned money to provide
workers with material support for their work or their families. The emperor
also paid for a delegation of 200 workers to attend the Universal Exposi-
tion in London to investigate the organization of British labor unions. Upon
returning, the workers demanded the right to unionize, and in May of 1864,
the Ollivier Law overturned the 1791 Le Chapelier Law that had outlawed
guilds as well as workers’ right to strike. Thus, workers gained new rights
to organize workers’ associations (although trade unions remained illegal)
and to strike within certain limits. In September 1864, French delegates
once again went to London where they met British labor organizers, Polish
and Irish nationalists, Italian republicans, and German socialists, including
the émigré journalist Karl Marx. At this meeting, the organizers formed the
International Workingmen’s Association (IWA). Despite significant tensions
between the different delegates due to their divergent ideas on socialism,
trade unionism, politics, and revolution, the vision behind the organiza-
tion was to share strategies and build alliances across national borders to
improve the condition of all workers. The French delegations played a sig-
nificant role in this organization from its earliest days. At the 1867 Congress
of the IWA in Lausanne, the delegates stated that economic liberation should
also include political liberation, and workers began to organize and agitate
more forcefully for political representation. Strikes broke out in Limoges
in 1864 and in Roubaix in 1867, and the French section of the IWA began
calling openly for social revolution.
Rather than strengthening his regime, Napoleon III’s domestic reforms and
foreign agendas opened him to attacks from all sides. Unsurprisingly, allow-
ing workers to form associations and to organize internationally did not lead,
as the emperor had hoped, to a stronger allegiance to the regime. Instead,
a greater solidarity arose among workers themselves against the policies of
the government and the capitalist bourgeoisie. When economic recession hit
France once again in 1866, protests and strikes became widespread. Though
they were legal, the regime violently suppressed miners’ strikes in the north in
1868–1869, making the regime even more an enemy to workers.
Noting the emperor’s changing stance on economic and political liber-
alization, republicans quickly seized their opportunity to shift the balance
of power in the legislature. They successfully campaigned for republican
candidates in the elections of 1863, since urbanization had shifted electoral
power to the cities, where voters tended to vote for republican candidates.
In the mid-1860s, new republican groupings emerged; more conservative
republicans organized around the opposition leader Adolphe Thiers and his
“Third Party,” while the liberals became known as “open” republicans.
Over the next few years, more radical republicans shifted toward Léon
Gambetta, who called for the separation of church and state, full liberty of
the press, freedom of association, and social reforms in the name of justice
and social equality.
With his health in decline and facing growing opposition, Napoleon III
instituted new liberal reforms, notably the right of legislators to critique
the government. Even more significant, however, was the May 1868 law on
censorship of the press, which permitted the establishment of newspapers
without prior government authorization and allowed public lectures and
assembly. This liberalization of the press benefitted many groups, includ-
ing socialists, republicans, and Catholics. A re-emerging feminist move-
ment began organizing around new journals and lectures, protesting their
exclusion from voting rights and the public sphere. The 1869 legislative
elections demonstrated the strength of opposition organizing; though the
Bonapartists maintained their hold on the rural vote, opposition candidates
gained a majority of parliamentary seats.
Recognizing his losses, the emperor restored some power to the legis-
lature, creating a sort of parliamentary empire. Haussmann, whom Paris-
ian republicans had long criticized as corrupt and overly authoritarian, was
forced out of office in January 1870. Across France, the political climate
became increasingly tense, particularly after the government violently sup-
pressed strike movements in 1869 and 1870. Socialist clubs proliferated
and workers’ protests became daily events in industrial cities. The assassina-
tion of a radical journalist named Victor Noir by a cousin of the emperor
brought more than 80,000 protestors out into the streets of Paris during his
funeral in January 1870, some intending to overthrow the regime. However,
their revolt ended in failure, and the fear of revolution pushed the emperor
to restructure the government again. The Sénatus-Consulte of April 1870
transformed the senate into a second legislative assembly, making the leg-
islature once again a bicameral assembly with the emperor remaining the
supreme executive.
Growing working-class unrest and mounting opposition among liberal
and republican legislators might have continued through the early 1870s
had not Prussia intervened with its own political challenges to the emper-
or’s plans. In 1866, the Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck made the
first move in his long-term plan to unify the German Confederation around
Prussia. The Prussian defeat of Austria in July 1866 enabled Bismarck to
annex several German principalities and take control of the new North
German Confederation. While French opinion on Prussian expansionism
was divided, the economic and military power of the North German Con-
federation, which had triple the coal production of France and a larger
and stronger army, concerned numerous politicians across the political
spectrum.
Their concern was justified, as Bismarck believed that a war with France
was the best means to secure a complete unification of German states in
Europe. Bismarck provoked the French into declaring war in July 1870 by
first pushing, unsuccessfully, to nominate a Prussian prince to the throne of
Spain, knowing it would upset Napoleon III to be “encircled” by Prussians.
After the French foreign minister tried to convince the Prussian king not to
involve himself any further in questions of Spanish succession, Bismarck
leaked a telegram (known as the Ems Dispatch) reporting on the French
ambassador’s demands. The telegram described the French ambassador as
“annoyingly persistent,” which the French took as a direct insult, as Bis-
marck had intended. On July 19, France officially declared war on Prussia
with Prime Minister Émile Ollivier claiming that he accepted the necessity
for war with “a light heart.” While bourgeois Parisians enthusiastically sup-
ported the war effort, the working classes, rural peasants, and those in the
eastern regions bordering the German states were less consumed with patri-
otic fervor. Many French citizens were simply resigned to a war that seemed
inevitable.
The Franco-Prussian War
Historians can easily identify numerous reasons for the quick and humil-
iating French military defeat to the Prussians in 1870–1871. First and
foremost, the French army of 270,000 soldiers was significantly smaller
than that of the Prussians, who mobilized 462,000 troops on the French
border and were supported by another 720,000 soldiers from its southern
allies and reserves of the German Landwehr (home guard). Additionally,
the Prussian army had vastly superior strategic leadership under General
Moltke, who had been professionalizing the Prussian army since the late
1850s. The Prussians were also much better at planning and logistics,
making full use of industrial technology, including telegraphs and rail-
roads to concentrate their troops at strategic locations. The French army,
by contrast, was left to the command of generals with outdated training
and tactics, despite their long-held belief in French military superiority on
the European continent.
The French mobilization for war was chaotic and inefficient. Both the
conscripted troops and reserves were largely untrained, illiterate soldiers.
Napoleon III, barely able to sit his horse due to his gallstones, arrived in
Metz on July 28 to command the army but found that only 200,000 troops
had been mobilized (many of whom were wandering aimlessly searching for
their regiments) and essential supplies and equipment were missing. Both
sides assumed the French would invade first. However, the disorganiza-
tion made it clear that a strong French offensive was impossible. Whatever
morale existed among the French troops was quickly sapped as the Prus-
sians defeated the French in four bloody battles over 13 days, forcing the
French battalions under Marshal Bazaine to retreat back to Metz, which
the Prussians placed under siege. With the army cut in half by the Prussian
advance, a second force under the leadership of Marshal MacMahon fell
back to Chalon-sur-Saône, where they were met by Napoleon III. MacMa-
hon suggested a retreat back to Paris to protect the capital, but Empress
Eugénie feared the consequences of such an action.
Parisians took to the streets, demanding they be allowed to arm them-
selves and defend the city in the event of attack. A crowd of between 10,000
and 30,000 gathered before the National Assembly on August 9 calling for
the end of the Second Empire, including the resignation of the entire general
staff of the army. Meanwhile, MacMahon’s troops fell back to the fortress
of Sedan, where on August 31, they were surrounded and bombarded for
hours by Prussian artillery. The French lost 17,000 men and were forced to
surrender to the Prussians two days later, at which point the Prussians took
more than 100,000 prisoners, including Marshal MacMahon and Napoleon
III. On October 29, Bazaine capitulated at Metz and the Prussians pushed
onward to Paris, where they laid siege to the city between September 19,
1870, and January 28, 1871.
With the capture of Napoleon III, the Second Empire collapsed, and
republican legislators took control of the government in Paris. From Sedan,
the emperor and 13 aides were taken to a castle in central Germany, where
they were held until March 1871, at which point the emperor left for exile
in England. There he met Eugénie and their son, who had escaped France
secretly a few months prior. The emperor was humiliated by the French
defeat and personally crushed that he had not died honorably on the bat-
tlefield. He died in England in January 1873. For the French armies who
continued to fight and the National Guard and citizens left to defend the
city of Paris, however, the catastrophe of the Franco-Prussian War became
something much greater than a battlefield defeat.
Note
1 Letter cited in Claire Fredj, “1863: ‘L’Algérie sera un royaume arabe,’ ” in His-
toire mondiale de la France, eds. Patrick Boucheron, Nicolas Delalande, Florian
Mazel, Yann Potin, Pierre Singaravélou (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2017), 504.

Abi-Mershed, Osama. Apostles of Modernity: Saint Simonians and the French
Civilizing Mission in Algeria. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010.
Auslander, Leora. Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1998.
Gerson, Stéphane. The Pride of Place: Local Memories and Political Culture in
Nineteenth-Century France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003.
Jordan, David. Transforming Paris: The Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann.
Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1995.
McDougall, James. A History of Algeria. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2017.
Ross, Andrew I. Public City/Public Sex: Homosexuality, Prostitution, and Urban
Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press,
2019.
Smith, Bonnie G. Ladies of the Leisure Class: The Bourgeoisies of Northern France
in the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981.
7 The Imperial Third Republic The Imperial Third Republic
Introduction
L’Année terrible (The Terrible Year) is the title of Victor Hugo’s 1872
volume of poetry that recounts the harrowing siege of Paris by the Prus-
sian army in the fall of 1870 and the infamous popular insurgency known
as the Paris Commune in the spring of 1871. The humiliating collapse
of the Second Empire, which precipitated both the siege of Paris and the
Paris Commune, left the French off-kilter. The Third Republic, emerging
in the chaos of war, was immediately beset by challenges. The events
of the Paris Commune suggested to both republicans and conservatives
that the revolutionary impulses of the urban workers and the socialists,
who were beginning to organize across Europe, were a serious threat to
their stability. The broad support of the bourgeoisie, conservative elites,
and the rural masses for the new government’s violent repression of the
Paris Commune insurgents (known as Communards) sealed the fate of
the doomed revolutionary uprising. Those on the right claimed that its
destruction marked the end—finally—of the French revolutionary tradi-
tion, while the international left saw it as a spectacular catastrophe from
which to draw lessons for future revolutions. For Parisians of all stripes,
however, it took years to recover, both physically and psychically, from
the année terrible.
After the Third Republic’s bumpy first decade, republicans managed to
gain full control of the government and sought to unite a divided nation
around French republican ideals. These included secularism, universal
education, a free press, universal male suffrage, the expansion of overseas
empire, and the free market. Subduing threats of disorder from the left and
right, republicans sought—and received—political support from the bour-
geoisie, who, as leaders in banking and industry, either financed political
candidates who supported their ideas or became politicians themselves. In
the search for new investment opportunities, they supported the expansion
of the overseas empire. Yet, by 1900, many of these politicians got caught
up in financial scandals, to the point that corruption became deeply embed-
ded in the political culture of the Third Republic.
DOI: 10.4324/b23310-7
132 The Imperial Third Republic
This world is depicted in Guy de Maupassant’s 1885 Realist novel Bel-Ami,
the story of Georges Duroy, an ambitious former cavalry officer of peasant
origin who seduces his way through the Parisian bourgeoisie to gain status
and fortune. His bravado and cruelty had been forged during his military
service in Algeria, where “an Arab is considered more or less fair game
for the military.” Early in the novel, recalling how he “used to intimidate
the Arabs in the little outposts,” he remembers an escapade that resulted
in “the death of three Ouled-Alane tribesmen and had provided him and
his comrades with a score of hens, two sheep, and some money, as well as
something to joke about for the next six months.”1 Using his knowledge of
Algeria and connections in the dynamic world of daily newspapers, which
had exploded as a result of liberalized press laws in the early 1880s, Duroy
transforms himself from a working-class veteran into a man of importance
to politicians, bankers, and investors. He also comes to realize that with
information about the personal lives of the bourgeoisie, specifically their
sexual exploits and financial missteps, he is incredibly dangerous, a person
who could instantly destroy their hard-earned respectability.
Georges Duroy’s story is emblematic of the growing inf luence of the over-
seas empire on ordinary citizens at the dawn of the Third Republic. Under
Napoleon III’s rule, the empire had taken on increasing importance to the
French; by the late 1870s, it had become an essential piece of national iden-
tity. French republicans believed the expansion of overseas empire was a
key element in the consolidation of their own power, both domestically and
in relation to Germany and Great Britain. They enthusiastically justified the
project as a humanitarian mission to “civilize” and uplift their colonized
subjects, a vision they framed as a duty of the superior French race. The
impact of imperial relations was therefore more complex than just foreign
policy. Historians have begun to describe France in this period as an “impe-
rial nation-state,” in which the overseas empire became increasingly inte-
grated into domestic politics. Indeed, the empire’s expansion meant more
people traveling overseas as military officers, imperial administrators, Chris-
tian missionaries, business people, settlers, and tourists. But even for those
who never left the metropole, overseas goods, images, and colonized people
began to appear everywhere, from missionary newsletters to soap advertise-
ments to “human zoos” displaying “exotic” populations from across the
world. The empire, in other words, was omnipresent.
The Fall of the Second Empire and the Siege of Paris

News reached Paris on September 4, 1870, of the surrender of French forces
under Marshal Patrice MacMahon at Sedan and the Prussian army’s capture
of both Emperor Napoleon III and more than 100,000 troops. Without a
clear successor in place, the Second Empire essentially collapsed. Empress
Eugénie plotted her own escape from Paris to protect herself and her son
from the masses of Parisians in the streets, and the emperor had no vocal
The Imperial Third Republic 133
allies in Paris willing to defend his regime. A huge crowd descended on
the Palais Bourbon where the legislature was debating the government’s
next steps, a task they abandoned when protestors broke into the chamber,
demanding the restoration of a republic. Seizing their advantage, repub-
lican legislators Léon Gambetta and Jules Favre led the crowd across the
city, proclaiming themselves the leaders of a “Government of National
Defense” (GND). They quickly organized themselves and their republican
colleagues into ministerial positions and named the conservative Catholic
General Louis-Jules Trochu as president of the GND. Meanwhile, the rest
of the National Assembly f led to Bordeaux, fearing the potential disaster of
an oncoming Prussian assault of the French capital. Amidst this chaos, the
French Third Republic was proclaimed.
Across France, republicans seized city halls, toppled statues of the emperor,
and organized themselves into Committees of Public Safety to demonstrate
their allegiance to the GND. Nevertheless, the GND never fully succeeded in
defining itself as the legitimate successor to the Second Empire in the eyes of
many rural citizens, who distrusted a government run entirely by Parisians.
A delegation of the GND was thus sent to the city of Tours to establish a
regional presence. Hoping to halt the Prussian military’s advance, in mid-
September, Jules Favre, the new minister of foreign affairs, sought to nego-
tiate an armistice with Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Bismarck
agreed, on the condition that the French surrender the territories of Alsace
and Lorraine, the fort of Mont-Valérien near Paris, and the garrison of Stras-
bourg. But just days earlier, Favre had proclaimed that the French would not
yield an “inch of our territory, nor a stone of our fortresses” to the Prussians.
Similar sentiments prevailed within the GND, which refused to accede to
Bismarck’s conditions, and the Prussians advanced toward Paris.
After the fall of Sedan, the GND had called up all available French mili-
tary units to protect Paris. Thus, the city was not completely unprepared
when the Prussian army encircled the capital on September 20, 1870, cutting
it off from the rest of the country. General Trochu had sought to shore up
the city’s defensive walls with assistance from more than 400,000 provincial
soldiers and 250,000 Parisian national guardsmen who came together under
chaotic conditions. Yet when the Prussians arrived, the siege was nothing
like what the French had expected.
Although Bismarck had suggested a quick and massive bombardment of
the capital, the German high command claimed this would violate the rules
of warfare against civilians and might bring other countries into the conf lict.
They opted instead to starve the Parisians into surrender. Although the GND
had stockpiled some grazing animals like sheep and goats in the Bois de Bou-
logne, food supplies quickly dwindled. The GND was slow to organize food
rationing, so prices skyrocketed. A Central Committee helped coordinate
the city’s defense and its day-to-day functioning, including food distribu-
tion and public health. Soon parks and city streets were stripped of trees
for firewood as a brutally cold winter descended. People began to butcher
horses, then cats and dogs, and even rats. Restaurant menus for Christmas in
1870 featured dishes made from former residents of the Paris Zoo, including
kangaroos, antelopes, bears, and camels. On December 30, the two popular
elephants of the Jardin des Plantes, Castor and Pollux, were butchered and
sold for meat. The famous gas lamps that Haussmann had installed on the
new boulevards were left unlit to conserve energy, leaving the city in dark-
ness. Hardest hit by this deprivation were the working classes and the poor,
with the death rate doubling in Paris during the four months of the siege,
largely due to malnutrition and illnesses aggravated by the cold.
The citizens of Paris grew increasingly frustrated with the government’s
inability to manage the conf lict. On October 7, Léon Gambetta escaped from
Paris in a hot air balloon, a system of transport primarily used to evacuate
wounded soldiers and to transport messages. From Tours, he directed the war
effort, using mass conscription to pull together an Army of the Loire to push
back the Prussian army. However, a disastrous sortie out of Paris, known as
the Battle of Bourget, ended in a deluge of Prussian artillery and the deaths
of 1,300 French troops; a day later Parisians learned that General Bazain’s
army had surrendered at Metz. In late November, General Trochu organized
an attack on the Prussian lines in an attempt to break the siege and link up
with Gambetta’s Army of the Loire. The attack failed, and the French lost
another 9,000 troops. In late December, the Prussians began bombarding the
forts and suburbs of Paris, and in early January, bombshells were falling in
central Paris. On January 19, the French attempted one final futile offensive
to break through the Prussian artillery lines. On January 22, delegates from
the National Guard, Parisian political clubs, and local revolutionary com-
mittees staged another protest, calling for the resignation of the government.
When soldiers fired at the crowd, shots were fired in return. The government
arrested suspected revolutionaries and banned political clubs.
Against the wishes of Parisians, the GND agreed on January 23 to sur-
render. Bismarck and Favre negotiated an armistice agreement at the Palace
of Versailles, which they signed on January 28, 1871. The terms stated that
France would hold elections for a national assembly to provide a more fully
representative government to conclude the terms of the treaty. Every politi-
cal movement in France now sought to portray themselves as the party of
peace, their opponents as warmongers. Parisians, who already felt betrayed
by the government, were furious about the armistice, whose terms allowed
the German army free entry into Paris. It also promised the disarmament of
French troops defending Paris, the surrender of the French forts encircling
the city, and the payment of an indemnity of 200 million French francs.
Throughout the rest of France, however, the armistice was greeted with
relief since 43 departments were occupied by Prussian soldiers and more
than 300,000 French troops were prisoners of war. Much of the frustration
and anger over the war was directed at the republican leadership of the
GND, including Gambetta, who publicly expressed his opposition to the
armistice and its harsh terms.
The results of the legislative elections a week later were devastating to
the republicans. The right-wing “peace party,” largely represented by mon-
archists, won more than 400 seats while the republicans won barely 150,
mostly for the moderates. Despite the new legislative power of the con-
servatives, the French elected the centrist Adolphe Thiers as president of the
Third Republic. Although he had been a committed public servant to the
Orléanist king Louis-Philippe, Thiers had come to believe that a republic
was the best form of government for the country, and he formed a cabinet
of moderate republicans, rather than monarchists. He did, however, agree
to restore order and peace in France.
Thiers and a delegation of five National Assembly members traveled back
to Versailles, where Bismarck opened the discussions by demanding outright
the French cession of Alsace and an indemnity of eight billion francs. Thiers
claimed that France could only pay five billion francs. Bismarck agreed
to those terms, but only if Germany could also take control of territory
in Lorraine, including the city of Metz. After several contentious days of
negotiations, Thiers conceded to this offer, demanding only one additional
thing: French control of the fortress town of Belfort; Bismarck agreed on the
condition that the Prussian army be allowed a parade down the Champs-
Elysées. Thiers returned to the National Assembly in Bordeaux to present
the terms of the treaty. Although the deputies from Alsace and Lorraine and
left-wing republicans from Paris strongly opposed its ratification, the assem-
bly overwhelmingly voted to accept Germany’s terms. On March 1, 1871,
the assembly ratified the treaty, and the following day, Prussian troops
marched into Paris.
The Paris Commune

In September 1870, a revolt broke out in Martinique that presaged the
much larger and well-known Paris Commune. In the wake of the abolition
of slavery across the French empire in 1848, the labor system in the for-
mer plantation colonies became only marginally less brutal. While the white
planter class maintained economic and political power, in large part due to
the government-ordered indemnification of the loss of their enslaved “prop-
erty,” formerly enslaved workers were forced to pay new taxes and compete
on the labor market with indentured laborers from India and China, which
drove down wages. When the mayor of Rivière-Pilote announced that the
Second Empire had fallen and the French had declared a new republic, the
town rose up in a spontaneous revolt, demanding the liberation of a local
prisoner and access to land and higher wages. The revolt spread among rural
agricultural workers, but the urban bourgeois classes, including Black prop-
erty owners, rejected armed revolt, favoring instead “law and order” and
the possibility for negotiations with republican lawmakers. Consequently,
the revolt was brutally repressed within days. Unlike the Paris Commune,
the insurgents of Martinique had many fewer resources to support their
revolt. But as a minority insurgency in the face of a hostile government and
citizenry, the results were nearly identical.
Back in Paris, in anticipation of Prussian occupation, the Central Commit-
tee had relocated 400 cannons to working-class neighborhoods in the city,
including Belleville and Montmartre. These cannons would become a major
source of tension between the Parisians and the newly elected French govern-
ment, which wanted to immediately restore order to the unruly city. Begin-
ning on March 10, 1871, the National Assembly passed a series of measures
that sought to immobilize the city’s revolutionary fervor. They again outlawed
political clubs and meetings and shut down several left-leaning newspapers.
But what most infuriated the Parisians was the suspension of pay for national
guardsmen and the termination of the moratorium on rents, debt payments,
and pawnshop sales, which had enabled Parisians to survive during the siege.
Instead, all overdue rents were to be paid in full immediately, an impossibility
for the lower classes, who were still struggling to find food and shelter. Add-
ing insult to injury, the legislature moved from Bordeaux to Versailles, rather
than returning to Paris, a clear sign to the beleaguered Parisians that the new
government cared nothing for their needs.
On March 18, President Thiers sent the army to retrieve the National
Guard’s cannons perched on the Butte de Montmartre. Instead of quickly
seizing the cannons, the soldiers found themselves surrounded by Parisians,
and when the commanding general ordered the troops to fire on the crowd,
the soldiers refused. A group of Parisians captured two generals and sum-
marily executed them. Rumor spread that the government had sent the army
in to take control of the city, and citizens began quickly constructing bar-
ricades. As government officials f led for Versailles and Thiers ordered the
army to retreat, the National Guard began to occupy government buildings,
including the Hôtel de Ville.
The Central Committee, which declared its authority over Paris and raised
a revolutionary red f lag above the Hôtel de Ville, was a mixture of workers,
national guardsmen, and republican politicians. The committee made several
decisions in the following days that had long-term repercussions for the fate
of the Paris Commune. First, they decided not to send the Parisian National
Guard to capture opposition political leaders in Versailles. Additionally,
they rejected more militant calls to mobilize the guardsmen to secure the
forts around the city and prepare for a military action against the army.
Consequently, the French army occupied the strategic Fort Mont-Valérien
west of Paris, leaving the city defenses open to attack from Versailles.
More radical voices within the Central Committee (notably those inspired
by Auguste Blanqui and the International Workingmen’s Association) called
on its leaders to prepare for a revolutionary civil war. The majority, after
consultation with the mayors of the 20 arrondissements, instead called for
the creation of a democratically elected council, arguing that the national
government and provinces would be more likely to negotiate with a demo-
cratically elected body than with the hastily organized Central Committee.
Figure 7.1 Anonymous photograph of the barricade on the Chaussée Ménilmontant,

March 18, 1871, CC0 Paris Musées/Musée Carnavalet—Histoire de Paris.
The elections were called for March 22. The Parisian bourgeoisie, how-
ever, did not support the new vision for the city government, henceforth
called the Paris Commune (a reference to the municipal government of
Paris during the French Revolution of 1789). In the following month, more
than 100,000 wealthier Parisians f led for Versailles. Insisting that only the
National Assembly had the authority to organize elections to the municipal
council, the mayors of the bourgeois arrondissements staged a protest of
the elections. The confrontation between the 500 conservative “Friends of
Order” and supporters of the Commune ended in violence, when shots were
fired outside the Hôtel de Ville, leaving 13 dead. Though delayed for a few
days, the election was ultimately held on March 26. With the population of
the bourgeois arrondissements greatly diminished, working-class neighbor-
hoods had strong voter turnout and received more substantial representa-
tion on the council.
The Council of the Commune was to be comprised of 92 elected repre-
sentatives, but since a single candidate (Auguste Blanqui, imprisoned out-
side the city) was elected to multiple seats, only 85 seats were filled; after
new elections in April, 79 seats were filled. Half of the new members of the
council were under 35 and had no administrative experience. Additionally,
many had never participated in any previous revolutionary actions, as they
had been children during the 1848 revolution and the political repression
of the Second Empire had forestalled most possibilities for revolutionary
organizing. More than half of the council came from the working classes,
but intellectuals, artists, and the liberal professions were also well repre-
sented. Although the council was overwhelmingly leftist in political orien-
tation, there was little unity of ideology or vision. A significant number of
Blanquistes and neo-Jacobins, for example, sought the creation of a strong,
centralized revolutionary government. The deep ideological tensions of the
International Workingmen’s Association also spilled over into the Council
of the Commune: Marxist-inspired internationalists sought to use the power
of the Commune to promote political equality and the collectivization of the
means of production while internationalists inspired by Proudhon and the
Russian revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin had a much more anarchist vision
of political equality that sought the eventual abolition of the state.
Despite these divisions, the council immediately began organizing the
defense of the city and the implementation of a democratic social republic.
Over the next weeks, the Communards would develop a political system
that essentially created in Paris a parallel administrative structure to that of
the Third Republic. They established nine different commissions that gener-
ally replicated government ministries: the Commissions of War, Finances,
General Security, Justice, Education, Labor and Exchange, Public Services,
Welfare, and Foreign Relations, all governed by an Executive Committee.
The council abolished military conscription to the national army, instead
implementing compulsory service in the National Guard. In a direct response
to the National Assembly’s March 10 legislation, the council authorized a
remission of rent payments from the siege as well as a suspension on the
sale of pawned items. The council also adopted the red f lag, symbol of the
workers’ struggle as well as the republican calendar.
Although the Commune only lasted 72 days, its ambitious revolution-
ary project sought to dismantle and reconfigure the hierarchies and power
relations of Second Empire Paris, made visible through Haussmannization
and the regime’s political repression. It had both clear socialist orientations
and notably republican impulses. On April 2, the Commune decreed once
again the full separation of church and state. Following the model of the
1789 revolution, it cut off the religious affairs budget and declared that all
religious-affiliated property belonged to the nation. That same day, Com-
mune leaders arrested the archbishop of Paris, Mgr Georges Darboy, hold-
ing him hostage with the intent to negotiate a prisoner trade for Auguste
Blanqui (which never came about). Secularization extended to education, as
the head of the Education Commission, socialist Édouard Vaillant, banned
religious teaching in schools and sought more democratic primary and
professional schooling by making it free to all students, regardless of class
or gender. Artists also sought to democratize their profession and provide
arts education. The painter Gustave Courbet, who had been elected to the
council in April, launched an appeal to artists to participate in the renewal
of the city through the creation of a Federation of Artists, which elected him
president. The federation sought to both conserve artistic treasures of the
past and promote artists of the present and future. Notoriously, however,
the federation also destroyed several Napoleonic-era statues, notably the
Vendôme column (which commemorated the French victory at the Battle of
Austerlitz in 1805). Many saw this project as antithetical to the Commune’s
democratic and republican values.
In keeping with its socialist and internationalist orientation, the Commune
sought to reform the conditions of labor. Through a decree on April 16, the
Commune took control of all abandoned property, notably factories and
workshops left empty by the bourgeoisie who had f led. The plan was to
eventually hand the businesses over to the workers, who would indemnify
the previous owners and then run them on the model of workers’ coopera-
tives. Two armament factories were immediately set up on this model, and
the workers voted to limit their workday to ten hours. On April 20, the
council outlawed private labor exchanges and monopolies, replacing them
with a municipal labor office. They also banned night shifts in bakeries.
The Commune transformed many white-collar government jobs into elected
positions and lowered the salaries to roughly equivalent of a workers’ sal-
ary, making these positions newly accessible to the working classes.
Women were active Communards from the very beginning, even if they
held no elected positions on the council or the commissions. Drawing on
long-established networks of socialist feminism and revolutionary organiza-
tion, the women of Paris formed their own political clubs and fought to gain
equality for women’s labor amid debates about the reorganization of labor.
Russian internationalist Elisabeth Dmitrieff created the Union des femmes
pour la defense de Paris et les soins aux blessés (Union of Women for the
Defense of Paris and Aid for the Wounded), which sought to reorganize wom-
en’s labor into worker cooperatives. Socialist journalists André Léo and Paule
Mink argued for female emancipation, including equal pay and the right to
full political participation. Socialist women’s influence over the council was
such that decrees recognizing free unions and pensions were offered to unmar-
ried “widows” of fallen Communards and all their children, whether “legiti-
mate” or not. Plans were also put in motion to institute gender equality in
workers’ wages, a controversial proposal since many male workers believed
that women were pushing wages down. Women served as nurses and cooks,
and many, including the teacher and feminist anarchist Louise Michel, were
active on the barricades and battlefields. The visible presence of female insur-
gents, especially during the final vicious street battles, led opponents of the
Commune to depict the women Communardes as dangerously degenerate.
The figure of the pétroleuse (female incendiary), who legendarily prowled the
streets with her gas can setting buildings alight (and was unjustly blamed for
the destruction of Paris during the bloody climax of the Commune), came to
represent the dangerous anarchy of the Communards.
The backlash against the Commune began almost immediately. Cities out-
side of Paris had also attempted to establish their own communes, notably
Lyon, Marseille, and Toulouse, but each had collapsed within days. From
Versailles, Adolphe Thiers described the Communards as violent assassins
and bandits who sought to overthrow the Third Republic. As numerous
republican politicians publicly disavowed the Paris Commune, the prov-
inces began to side with the government against the Commune, drawing on
long-standing resentments against the capital and fear of violence and dis-
order spreading elsewhere. This provincial support gave Thiers the political
will to undertake a new siege of the city, using whatever force was necessary
to reclaim the capital.
On March 21, the Army of Versailles launched the first attack from the
west, where soldiers had occupied Mont-Valérien, giving them an impor-
tant tactical advantage against the Communards. Throughout April, the
army bombarded the city and launched assaults from the suburbs. On
April 30, the Communards lost control of the fort of Issy, southwest of
Paris, then recaptured it the following day. In its most controversial deci-
sion, the council consolidated its executive authority into a five-member
Committee of Public Safety on May 1. On May 8, the French army
regained control of Issy and the Parisian defenses began to collapse. Blame
for the Commune’s political and military failures f lew inside Paris, but the
worst was yet to come.
Desperately needing more troops for his final assault on Paris, Thiers
sought to finalize the peace treaty with German chancellor Otto von Bis-
marck to secure the return of over 300,000 French prisoners of war. Once
the treaty was ratified on May 18, more than 200,000 soldiers were sent to
Versailles to prepare for the invasion of Paris. Many army officers viewed
the destruction of the Vendôme column as an attack on their honor and
profession, and they enthusiastically sought to destroy the Commune. The
repression of the Communards from May 21 until May 28 was so brutal
that it became known as the semaine sanglante (the bloody week).
Within hours of the army’s first offensive, more than 900 barricades
sprang up throughout Paris. By the end of the second day, many national
guardsmen abandoned any coordinated effort, returning to defend their
neighborhoods and homes. The army pushed northward and eastward into
Montmartre and Belleville, where soldiers and Communards fought for
days in bloody street battles. Along the way, the army began summarily
executing both combatants and civilians. On May 24, the Committee of
Public Safety evacuated key public buildings—the Hôtel de Ville, the police
prefecture, the Palais de Justice—setting them on fire as they f led. Faced
with the army’s brutality and Thiers’s refusal to negotiate an end, frustrated
Communards executed six important hostages, notably the archbishop of
Paris, at La Roquette prison on May 24. Over the next few days, another
60–100 hostages would be executed by Communards, without direction
from the Committee of Public Safety.
Historian Robert Tombs describes the army’s massacre of the Commu-
nards as “the worst violence committed against civilians in Europe between
the French and Russian Revolutions.”2 Tombs argues that likely between
5,700 and 7,400 Communards died in combat or through summary execu-
tions during the semaine sanglante. After the army closed in on the last
fédéré holdouts in the cemetery of Père-Lachaise in Belleville on May 28,
they lined up the captured combatants and shot all 147 of them, dumping
them into a mass grave. More than 38,000 Communards were arrested in
the aftermath, with most interned in a bleak prison camp in Versailles. With
little treatment for the wounded, epidemics erupted, leading to hundreds of
deaths. 10,000 prisoners were condemned for their participation over the
next five years. 95 were sentenced to death (although only 23 were actually
executed), 251 condemned to forced labor, and more than 3,500 deported
to New Caledonia (among them, Louise Michel). Several hundred of these
convicts were sent on the same boats as the convicted insurgents of the 1870
revolt in Martinique.
Critics of the Commune quickly took control of the narrative and villain-
ized its participants. The army and government claimed the whole thing was
the work of the unruly working classes, easily influenced to immoral acts
by their degenerate leaders and leftist journalists. Conservative writers like
Hippolyte Taine and Maxime du Camp described the Communards as law-
less bandits, plundering the property of wealthy Parisians. Additionally, both
moderate and radical republicans distanced themselves from their former
allies, explicitly condemning the Communards. Leftist writers Émile Zola and
George Sand wrote texts condemning the Commune (in some cases justifying
the government’s use of violence), and many emblematic Communards such
as Courbet found themselves marginalized from their intellectual and artistic
communities. Even revolutionary thinkers like Karl Marx were judgmental:
although Marx delivered a stirring defense of the Commune to the Interna-
tional Workingmen’s Association (later published in English as a pamphlet
titled The Civil War in France), in his correspondence, he admitted that he
saw the events as a failure except in their symbolic value, which might inspire
future socialists to more politically viable acts of revolution.
On the left, the Commune became an international symbol for a failed
socialist revolution but one that could impart lessons. Though largely written
out of later narratives, the Communards themselves sought to place the rebel-
lion in the longer trajectory of the betrayal Parisians felt from the GND and
Third Republic officials, who allowed the city to be destroyed and occupied
by the Prussian army. As the government had retreated (to Bordeaux and Ver-
sailles), it was the Communards, they argued, who had stepped in to reassert
the rule of law and representative democracy. Communards argued that the
burden of responsibility for its failure must be shared among many, including
republicans who had turned their backs on the devastated city. The govern-
ment and rural masses, however, saw the restoration of order to the city and
the country as the imperative task in the wake of the année terrible.
Governing the Third Republic
Adolphe Thiers’s vanquishing of the Commune earned him the support
of the monarchists in the National Assembly, who still held the majority
despite some republican success in a by-election in 1871. Though he became
president of the Third Republic on August 31, Thiers had little authority
and was responsible to the National Assembly, whose two major factions—
republicans and monarchists—sought to take more direct control of the
government. Republican leader Léon Gambetta wanted to rehabilitate the
image of republicanism by dissociating it from the violence of the Com-
mune. He toured rural France, seeking to turn former Bonapartists toward
republicanism by claiming the republicans sought civic equality, protection
of private property, universal education, and freedom of conscience.
Thiers, meanwhile, was committed to a conservative version of the
republic. His reputation for law and order was solidified in March 1872
when the National Assembly made it a criminal offense for French citizens
to become members of the International Workingmen’s Association, lead-
ing to the arrests of numerous socialists. Yet monarchists claimed he was
far too swayed by leftist republicans and called for a vote of no confidence
in his presidency in May 1872, which passed 360 to 344 votes, leading to
Thiers’s resignation. The conservative majority voted to replace him with
Marshal MacMahon, the veteran of wars in Crimea, Algeria, Italy, and the
Franco-Prussian War. A committed monarchist, MacMahon’s rise to the
presidency appeared as the perfect opportunity to restore the monarchy
to France.
Monarchists threw their support behind MacMahon, who chose the
Orléanist Duke de Broglie as his chief minister. De Broglie convinced the
assembly to elect MacMahon into a seven-year presidential term in Novem-
ber 1873, and organized a regime based on “Moral Order.” He banned
public representations of republicanism, including the display of busts of
Marianne in town halls and the celebration of civic burial ceremonies (as
opposed to those administered by the Catholic Church). De Broglie also
desired to abolish universal suffrage. However, a new Bonapartist threat
emerged when Napoleon III’s son came of age in March 1874. At his birth-
day celebration in London, attended by more than 7,000 French Bona-
partists, he appealed for a new referendum, stating that if the popular vote
demanded his return to power, he was ready. Bonapartist candidates then
won a surprising number of seats in local by-elections in May 1874, pushing
moderate Orléanists and republicans to come together to defeat this threat
with a new constitution for the Third Republic.
Although a full constitution was never written, in January 1875, the
assembly voted to approve, by a one-vote victory (353–352), an amendment
that divided legislative power between two assemblies: a Senate and Cham-
ber of Deputies, who would together elect the president of the republic by
a majority of votes for a seven-year term. A compromise created a senate
body of 300 members, all over 40 years of age and serving for nine years;
75 senators would be chosen by the National Assembly and serve life terms,
and the remaining would be elected by colleges of local leaders.
External events, however, reunited the republicans in opposition to the
monarchists. When the pope turned to France in early 1877 for support
in his political struggle in Italy, anticlerical republicans denounced French
Catholics who supported the pope, including MacMahon. In an 1877
speech, Gambetta famously exclaimed, “Le cléricalisme, voilà l’ennemi!”
(Clericalism, this is the enemy!). On the pretext that the centrist prime
minister Jules Simon refused to control anti-Catholic republican deputies,
MacMahon dismissed Simon’s government and brought back the Duke de
Broglie, who then dissolved the Chamber of Deputies on May 16 in order to
call new elections and in hopes of achieving a conservative majority. Repub-
licans immediately denounced Simon’s dismissal as a coup d’état, campaign-
ing hard to portray the republican platform as one that defended universal
suffrage and the will of the people against an elitist ruling class. In October,
the republicans retained a majority, won heavily in municipal elections in
January 1878, and then gained a majority in the senate in January 1879.
Without any base of support, MacMahon resigned. The moderate Jules
Grévy was elected as the first republican president of the Third Republic on
January 30, 1879.
Once in power, moderate republicans sought to construct a stable regime
composed of the elite republican ruling class. They marginalized both the
monarchist right and the radical left from the executive and maintained the
strength of centrist republicans in the legislature and in municipal posts
throughout the metropole. Henceforth, general elections were organized
every four years, with the president obliged to appoint the president of
a Council of Ministers (effectively a prime minister) who represented the
majority in the Chamber of Deputies. The chamber was entitled to question
this minister on any policy issue, and it could force the president to appoint
a new one; this led to an extremely high turnover of ministers during the
Third Republic (108 in total, between 1870 and 1940).
In the early 1880s, Léon Gambetta sought to “discipline” the republican
party and consolidate executive power by instituting new electoral proce-
dures known as the scrutin de liste, which forced parties to present a list of
approved candidates for elections to prevent the split of votes among multi-
ple republican candidates for the same post. Moderate republican politicians
also sought to deepen their ties to rural France and to steady income streams
from banking and industry. Although deputies were paid a small allowance,
a growing number of expenses connected to the modern electoral system
made it almost impossible to succeed in politics without an independent
income. Most politicians worked in liberal professions or owned businesses
or property, while others supplemented their incomes through membership
on the boards of banks and corporations, a situation that opened many
to charges of corruption during the Third Republic. Others married into
families with large fortunes, notably industrialists who had a political inter-
est in alliances with the republican ruling class.
Despite these concerted attempts to ensure moderate republican power,
not all republicans fell in line. More radical leftist republicans, led by Georges
Clemenceau, agreed with the moderates on standard tenets of liberalism and
anticlericalism. However, where the moderates sought to avoid upsetting
the bourgeoisie and the rural peasants, the radicals pushed for more social
and economic equality and direct democracy. Clemenceau tried to abolish
the presidency and dual-house legislature, for example, and replace it with a
more powerful single-chamber National Assembly. Furthermore, the 1880
amnesty of the Communards enabled socialists to re-emerge in French party
politics, such that the more organized radicals and socialists began to form
a more cohesive threat to the moderate republicans.
Republicanizing France
Once established in power at the national level, the republicans sought to
solidify their control by rooting out opposition and, more importantly,
creating a culture of loyalty to the values of the Third Republic. Central
to this project was the attempt to unify the entire country around a single
idea of the republic, which drew directly on imagery from the 1789 revo-
lution. For example, in 1879, “La Marseillaise” once again became the
national anthem. In 1880, despite conservative opposition at the celebra-
tion of a violent populist uprising, July 14 was named the national holiday
in honor of the French revolutionaries’ storming of the Bastille prison in
1789. The government also once again required city halls to publicly dis-
play the revolutionary motto “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” and the image
of Marianne.
More significantly, however, were the republican reforms to the education
system, which wrenched education out of the hands of the Catholic Church
and replaced it with a government-controlled secular curriculum that edu-
cated future citizens in core republican values. The Ferry Laws of June 1881
and March 1882 henceforth made all public schooling free of charge and
secularized the locations and curriculum of public schools. The loi Goblet
in October 1886 secularized public school personnel, imposing a deadline
of five years to replace priests with government-trained teachers, seen as the
front-line warriors in the effort to republicanize the rural population.
To implement this program, the government invested enormously in
education, building thousands of new schools, including Écoles normales
supérieures, which trained teachers. Beginning in 1889, teachers were
paid by the national government, rather than the communes, and a unified
national curriculum was directed from the state, which imparted civics les-
sons along with literature, history, geography, natural science, and math-
ematics. Primary school became obligatory for all children aged 6 to 13,
and supplementary schooling for the most promising students was free of
charge. Primary schooling targeted the popular classes, since the centrist
republicans aimed to counteract the deleterious inf luence of both radical
socialism and the Catholic Church. If parents refused to enroll their chil-
dren, the state tracked them down and coerced them into participating. To
counter the dangerous inf luence of Catholicism on girls and women, the
government created new secondary schools for girls, in part to train new
teachers to replace the vast number of nuns ejected from the schools. But
Catholics, notably in Brittany and in southeastern France, fought back
against the state and attempted to maintain their own private schools, and
many rural Catholics remained hostile to the “republicanizing” teachers
in the village.
The Third Republic saw yet another state institution—the army—as
fundamental to the republicanization of the nation, particularly after the
Franco-Prussian War and the chaos of the Paris Commune. In July 1872,
a new law instituted obligatory military service, without a buy-out option,
for all male citizens. Although this new “blood tax” was theoretically uni-
versal, a complex system of exemptions and a division of service obliga-
tions into five-year and one-year terms (which applied largely to wealthier
classes) significantly decreased the initial republican claim to “equality” of
all male citizens. Under pressure from the left, subsequent revisions to the
law in 1889 and 1905 made all service terms two years and removed nearly
all exemptions. When called up, young men were typically sent to casernes
far from home, a situation that exposed them to the diverse landscapes and
peoples of France. Until World War I, French soldiers who saw service were
typically called to fight in colonial wars, including “maintaining order” in
Algeria.
By the 1880s, most of rural France was no longer isolated from Paris and
other urban areas, due to the expansion of transportation networks during
the Second Empire. Additionally, major improvements in telegraph technol-
ogy brought faster lines of communication throughout the metropole and
across the empire, alongside the invention of the telephone in 1876 and the
creation of the Société générale du téléphone in 1880. The spread of repub-
lican values, however, was most significantly helped by the massive expan-
sion of the press and book publications. After a July 1881 law liberalized
the press, the number of daily newspapers in Paris jumped from 40 in 1874
to 90 in 1882, while in the provinces it expanded from 179 to 252. Readers
across France continued to subscribe to Le Petit Journal, the conservative
Parisian daily; in 1878, it printed more than 500,000 copies daily, shipping
more than half to the provinces. Readers also subscribed to a wide variety
of politically themed journals, tabloids, the illustrated press, and specialized
content focused on theater, fashion, popular science, or the financial mar-
kets. Although Catholics had dominated the market for children’s literature
and lending libraries, republicans sought to create their own didactic con-
tent by publishing textbooks and guides that emphasized republican moral
values.
The historian Eugen Weber famously argued in his 1976 book Peasants
into Frenchmen that through its top-down modernizing processes, the Third
Republic transformed the rural peasantry into a cohesive French nation
between 1870 and 1914. However, numerous historians have since chal-
lenged parts of this argument, from the timeline of the emergence of French
nationalism to the conception of nation-building as a top-down process. In
contrast to the assumption that instituteurs (primary school teachers) were
front-line soldiers in a republican war to eradicate local dialects, histori-
ans have shown that teachers were often recruited from the regions where
they taught and tolerated the use of local dialects (rather than standardized
French) well into the twentieth century. The regions most isolated from
Paris, such as the Pyrenees or Brittany, also forged their own visions of
national belonging since they had also developed strong regional or frontier
identities. This was particularly the case with French citizens in even more
peripheral locations like Algeria.
Settlers and Subjects in Republican Algeria

In March 1871, amidst the Paris Commune, a massive insurrection broke
out in Kabylia, in central and eastern Algeria, the largest uprising against
the French since the conquest of 1830. Led by the Kabyle sheik Mokrani,
the rebellion quickly spread to the east and south, soon counting more
than 250 tribes and a third of the Algerian population. Angry about the
Commune and protective of the growing settler community in Algeria,
military leaders used overwhelming force to quash the insurrection. The
Army of Africa mobilized more than 100,000 soldiers to defeat the insur-
gency, capturing the sheikh on May 5. As they moved through the Alge-
rian countryside, they burned villages, killed combatants and civilians,
and arrested more than 200 leaders of the insurgency, who were deported,
alongside the Communards, to New Caledonia. The French then confis-
cated another 450,000 hectares of Algerian land, which was largely dis-
tributed to new settlers, including those who came from territory lost to
Germany in Alsace-Lorraine. In punishment, Kabylia was ordered to pay
36 million francs.
For many decades after the uprising, European settlers in Algeria misat-
tributed the cause to Muslim anger at the Crémieux Decree. On October 24,
1870, Isaac Crémieux, a Jewish republican lawyer who had become interim
minister of the interior and of war, issued an emergency proclamation
declaring that all Jewish inhabitants born in the three northern departments
of Algeria were henceforth French citizens. Many French Jews had been
pushing for the inclusion of “assimilated” Algerian Jews into French citizen-
ship. But settlers in Algeria had long resisted this project due to arguments
that Algerian Jews were too much like the Arabs (some, in fact, claimed they
were “Arabs of the Jewish faith”). These settlers pointed out, for example,
that some Algerian Jews continued to practice polygamy, and borrowed
stereotypes about Algerian Arabs (such as “laziness,” “poverty,” and “dirti-
ness”) to describe Algerian Jews, despite the fact that Jews in the north often
spoke French, dressed in European clothing, and were fully integrated into
European society. Rather than diminishing settler antisemitism in Algeria,
the Crémieux Decree magnified it and contributed to a growing cultural and
political rift between the Jewish and Muslim populations of Algeria. While
the northern Jewish populations became more assimilated into European
settler society, the Muslim Arab and Berber populations were increasingly
excluded from French citizenship, due to the European belief in their inher-
ent “backwardness.”
Although some radical reformers in France campaigned in the 1880s to
bestow citizenship on Algerian Muslims and do away with personal sta-
tus law altogether, this measure was strongly opposed by European set-
tlers. Muslim religious leaders in Algeria, too, wanted to maintain control
over “Muslim law”—one of the only means of preserving their community
and organizing solidarity in the face of violent repression and discrimina-
tion. This was particularly so after June 1881, when the Third Republic
enacted a series of regulations known as the code de l’indigénat (“native
status codes”), which enabled colonial administrators to inf lict repressive
and arbitrary fines or imprisonment on non-citizen Algerians for a vague
list of real or suspected crimes, ranging from lack of proper respect for
authority to sedition. Although justified as temporary emergency powers,
the laws remained in place until 1944. In the first—and harshest—decade of
the regulations, Algerians spent more than 700,000 days in prison and paid
1.7 million francs in fines, often for petty crimes.
The indigénat was part of the Third Republic’s shift from a military to
a civil administration in Algeria. In 1879, Albert Grévy became the first
governor general of Algeria with a non-military background. By 1902, the
army only maintained control over the Territoires du Sud in the Sahara.
Beginning in 1881, the three Algerian departments each elected two depu-
ties to the National Assembly, and from 1884, one senator each. The depu-
ties who were elected tended to maintain their offices for decades, often
gaining their constituencies’ support by promising further land allocations.
Toward the end of the century, wealthy landowners (known as colons) and
business owners began to push for more local autonomy. In 1900, they
began managing the colony’s budget through an elected assembly, known as
the Délégations financières, made up of 48 Europeans (split between colons
and urban settlers) and 21 Algerians.
Of the approximately 400,000 European settlers in Algeria in 1884,
the majority were foreign-born. This diverse and migratory population
unsettled French officials, who were concerned that the ongoing inf lux
of foreigners would harm the colony. In June 1889, the French issued a
new nationality law, which stated that, unless specifically requested other-
wise, all children born in Algeria to foreign fathers would become French
citizens at birth. Additionally, children who came to Algeria with foreign
parents would become French at their age of majority. This law aimed to
instill a sense of rootedness among non-French Europeans who became
known by the end of the century as the “French of Algeria,” or, more com-
monly, pieds noirs.
Though a clear and identifiable settler identity and culture slowly devel-
oped over the next several decades in Algeria, tensions remained high in
the 1880s and 1890s. They were particularly visible between long-standing
settlers of French origin and “foreign” newcomers, who were denounced
as a threat to French sovereignty in Algeria. At the same time, some radical
republicans, who sought full autonomy from the metropole, identified their
greatest enemies as Parisian republican “opportunists” like Jules Ferry and
his supposed collaborators, the assimilated Jews of Algeria. This was one
major root of the virulent antisemitism that emerged in Algeria in the 1890s
and defined European settler identity as specifically “Latin” and Catholic,
distinct from Algerian Jews and Muslims and the French metropole. By the
end of the century, the distinctions between “French” and “foreign” settlers
began to blur. European settler working classes began to develop their own
French dialect, specific to Algeria, and the number of Europeans born in
Algeria surpassed the number of foreign-born settlers.
The Catholic Church in Algeria played a central role in shaping settler
culture and supporting the colonial regime, particularly in its ideological
segregation of the various populations of Algeria. Despite growing hostil-
ity between republicans and Catholics in the metropole after 1870, rela-
tions between church and state in Algeria were friendly, even collaborative.
During the early Third Republic, the Catholic Church was led by Cardinal
Lavigerie, appointed archbishop of Algiers in 1867. Lavigerie sought to res-
urrect the ancient Église d’Afrique, the legacy of Saint Augustine, which
had been left in ruins, according to legend, by Vandal and Arab invasions.
Just as previous Algerian colonizers were obsessed with Algeria’s Roman
heritage, Lavigerie saw France—and the French Catholic Church—as the
best means of restoring the legacy of Roman Christianity in North Africa.
Lavigerie also had an extremely negative view of Arabs and Muslims, whose
civilization and faith he viewed as inferior. However, he believed that Kabyle
Berbers had maintained vestiges of Christianity from the Roman era, and
were thus, more receptive to conversion. Lavigerie created a new order in
1868 known as the Missionaries of Africa, or the “White Fathers,” specifi-
cally to convert Kabyle Berbers “back” to Christianity. Their evangelizing
tactics targeted the most marginalized members of Kabyle society, including
widows, orphans, and the ill, who benefitted from schooling or financial
support from the church. However, only a very small percentage ever con-
verted to Christianity (not more than a few thousand), and those who did
were viewed with suspicion by both Muslim Algerians and French colonial
officials. With this failure to convert Algerian Muslims, the Catholic Church
turned its attention almost entirely toward the European population, the
vast majority of whom were Catholic in culture, if not in practice. Soon,
Catholic pilgrimages and religious festivals as well as church bells marked
the passage of time across the landscape of colonial Algeria.
Despite the growing imposition of colonial administration—the con-
stant surveillance, the “ordinary violence” of the indigénat, the dominance
of European settler culture—Algerians found ways both to resist French
authority and to live their lives in spite of it. Banditry became a key form
of rural protest against land dispossession and colonial authority. Typically
poor laborers or farmers, some bandits collected “taxes” from the local
population, including both Algerian caïds (local leaders) and European
settlers. They occasionally created “protection” rackets or even formed
alliances against colonial administrators they viewed as corrupt. In urban
spaces, Algerian men gathered in the cafés maures, where rituals of socia-
bility, including the consumption of coffee and smoking a shisha, enabled
them to share news of the family and the workplace, discuss politics and
religion, or even conduct business. As Algerians were marginalized from
formal education and civil society in Algeria (only a little over 4 percent
of Algerian children had been educated in French schools by 1900), spaces
like the café and the mosque became the means of promoting an alterna-
tive civil society and maintaining social networks. In these spaces, Algerians
also discussed news of the outside world, including the French invasion of
Tunisia in 1881 and the arrival of French troops in Indochina in 1883, the
Mahdist revolt in Sudan against the Egyptian Khedive (1881–1889), and
the Fashoda crisis (1898–1899). These discussions greatly concerned French
colonial administrators, who feared the Algerians would gain inspiration
from regional instability and insurrection and revolt against the French.
Such fears allowed French administrators to justify increased surveillance
over Algerians’ daily lives, spaces of sociability, reading habits, and religious
practices, constantly searching for evidence of seditious behavior and pan-
Islamic networks seeking revolution. They were not necessarily wrong.
Annexation and Conquest in the Era of High Imperialism

Along with radically transforming the educational system of France, Jules
Ferry also undertook a massive expansion of the overseas empire during his
terms as prime minister (1880–1881, 1883–1885). Known as the era of High
Imperialism, this period saw all of the major European powers expanding their
imperial footprint in previously “unclaimed” territories in Africa and Asia.
The Second Industrial Revolution, which began around 1870 and produced
major innovations in heavy industry, led to growing demands for both natural
resources and export markets for the industrializing countries. Additionally,
increasing national competition with imperial powers like Britain and France
pushed new nation-states like Germany and Italy to seek their own overseas
colonies and smaller countries like Belgium and the Netherlands to expand
their own imperial holdings. Imperialism had become a key tool of modern
political life. To build support for their conquests, European leaders sought to
Map 7.1 Map of the Second French Empire, 1880–1914.
justify colonization with a variety of arguments: economic necessity, national

strength, and the duty of “superior” white races to bestow civilization on the
“savage” lower races. Although many of these arguments had been rehearsed
in France during the colonization of Algeria, they re-emerged in force during
the peak of French imperialism between 1880 and 1914.
In April 1881, French troops invaded Tunisia after more than a decade of
negotiations and conf licts involving the Italians, British, and the weakened
Ottoman regency of Tunisia. Citing security concerns on the eastern border
of Algeria, Ferry falsely convinced Gambetta and the Chamber of Depu-
ties to support military intervention to “re-establish order.” By May 12,
French troops had seized most of the territory and were camped outside of
Tunis. The commanding general presented a copy of a treaty establishing
a French protectorate in Tunisia to the shocked bey, who had little choice
but to sign it. The Tunisians then rose up in a series of insurrections, which
were violently suppressed. While the French gained a new colony, the acqui-
sition of Tunisia upset many in Europe. The Italians, in particular, were
incensed, as they had long had their own imperial designs on Tunisia, and in
May 1882, the Italian king switched his allegiance from France to Austria-
Hungary. News dispatches in June 1881 reported riots in Marseille and vio-
lence between Italian and French workers. Additionally, Ferry was forced
to resign as prime minister in November 1881, in part because numerous
deputies believed that he had tricked them into supporting the expedition
when he had intended all along to establish the protectorate.
During the year Ferry was out of office, the French joined a British-led
military expedition to secure Khedive Tawfiq’s rule in Egypt and British
access to the Suez Canal. Although Ferry would have liked to secure stronger
French inf luence in Egypt, it was ultimately the British who controlled the
country through military occupation and economic inf luence. Competition
with the British was one of the prime motivations behind Ferry’s decision
to expand the French presence in Southeast Asia when he came back into
power in 1883. That June, Ferry sent several thousand troops to Tonkin, in
northern Vietnam, to support Captain Henri Rivière, who had seized the
citadels of Hanoi and Nam Định. Rivière’s military actions had provoked
Chinese resistance to the French, including attacks from Chinese bandits
known as the Black Flags; when they ultimately killed Rivière, the French
launched a military invasion. After years of warfare against these local
resistance groups, in 1887, the French formally organized the colony of
Indochina, which included the provinces of Cochinchina, Tonkin, Annam,
and Cambodia. Over the next decade, French troops had to “pacify” their
conquered territory, as insurgents continuously resisted French occupa-
tion. Ferry’s commitment to French expansion in Indochina earned him the
nickname le tonkinois (the Tonkinese) but also cost him his second term as
prime minister in 1885, as radicals in the Chamber of Deputies denounced
French wartime losses.
The expansion of the French presence in Asia also led to a further expan-
sion of French presence in Africa, necessitated by the need to resupply ships
that used the Suez Canal to access the Indian Ocean. When the British refused
to allow the French to use their port in Aden in 1885, the French took con-
trol of the port of Djibouti on the Horn of Africa, renamed French Somali-
land. In West Africa, the French expanded the territory under their control
as well, moving into the interior of Senegal, along the coast into Guinea and
Dahomey (present-day Benin), and further south into central Africa, into the
countries currently known as Gabon and the Republic of Congo.
The 1880s saw countries like France, Britain, Germany, Belgium, Portu-
gal, and Italy seeking to carve out their own colonies in the interior of the
African continent. Known as the “Scramble for Africa,” this rush for terri-
tory was often organized in secret and outside established rule of law. Most
infamously, Belgian King Leopold II claimed the Congo region in 1885 as
his own personal colony, from which he extracted enormous wealth from
rubber and ivory through notoriously brutal treatment and forced labor of
Africans. To ease growing tensions and establish clear rules for further colo-
nial expansion, German chancellor Otto von Bismarck called a diplomatic
conference in Berlin in 1884–1885, during which the European powers for-
mally partitioned Africa.
The terms of that agreement, known as the General Act of the Berlin
Conference, first prohibited the slave trade, a move that critics claimed
was a cover for the violence at the heart of the colonizing process (particu-
larly in the Belgian Congo). Additionally, the large Niger and Congo rivers
were declared free-trade zones for ship traffic, and the 14 signatories estab-
lished free-trade rights in the Congo Basin and Lake Malawi. Colonization
required a country to occupy its territory, and any new possession had to
be declared to the other signatories. European leaders then negotiated new
boundaries of their holdings in Africa, drawing arbitrary lines on a map
based on prior conquests and meridians rather than existing local political
boundaries or historical knowledge of local cultures.
Following the Berlin Conference, the French consolidated their terri-
tory in West and Central Africa. Although Africans fought back against
French conquest, their resources couldn’t match French industrial firepower.
New territories under French control, such as French Sudan (present-day
Mali), were initially organized as independent colonies. In 1895, however,
the French brought Senegal, French Sudan, Côte d’Ivoire, and Dahomey
under a single colonial umbrella known as Afrique-Occidentale française
(French West Africa, or AOF). It was administered by the governor general
of Senegal in Saint-Louis, although the capital shifted to Dakar in 1902.
The territories of Guinea (1901), Upper Volta (later Burkina Faso, 1919),
Mauritania (1920), French Togoland (1922), and Niger (1922) were later
incorporated into the AOF. In 1910, the French did the same with its cen-
tral African colonies of French Gabon, French Congo, Ubangi-Shari, and
French Chad, establishing Afrique-Équatoriale française (French Equatorial
Africa, or the AEF), with a governor general based in Brazzaville. Neither
the AOF nor the AEF were cohesive colonies. They were constructed of vast
swaths of territory in which hundreds of different ethnic groups resided,
many of which had long been at war with each other. To develop their Afri-
can colonies, the French used forced labor and violence in the construction
of railroads and other infrastructure. This violence, however, was justified
as a necessary part of the “civilizing” process.
Although earlier republicans had not been convinced that the expan-
sion of the overseas empire was both an economic necessity and a moral
duty, by the late 1870s, key republican leaders, including Gambetta and
Ferry, attempted to rally the entire country to support empire-building. In
an 1883 speech before the National Assembly, Ferry argued that there were
three main reasons to support French colonial expansion into Africa and
Asia. First, the country needed new export markets, as both Germany and
the United States had become protectionist, closing off markets for French
industrial products. Another reason was political and military, in that large
naval ships now needed resupply and defense ports across the world. Fer-
ry’s third point was the “humanitarian and civilizing side of the question,”
which he framed both as a right and as a duty:
Gentleman, I must speak from a higher and more truthful plane. It must
be stated openly that, in effect, superior races have rights over inferior
races. . . . I repeat that superior races have a right, because they have a
duty. They have the duty to civilize inferior races.3
French republicans believed that France was uniquely suited to this
“civilizing mission” due to its cultural, intellectual, and political achieve-
ments, culminating in the Third Republic. It was the duty of the French,
its proponents claimed, to spread the values of the French Enlightenment
and republicanism, including the French language, the rights of man, secu-
larism, private property, and free trade. Initially, French colonial adminis-
trators favored a project of assimilation. They envisioned France’s African
subjects attaining French citizenship over time, after they had demonstrated
their ability to govern themselves and exist on equal political footing with
white French citizens. Until that time, however, they would remain subjects
(rather than “citizens”) of the French empire. As such, they were governed
under the Code de l’indigénat, which was expanded to include all “sub-
jects” of the French empire. It was consequently the “duty” of France to
assist “inferior” colonized peoples by providing them with education and
economic development assistance and by teaching them the value of labor
(as European stereotypes viewed Africans and Asians as “lazy”). These
were expensive propositions, however, and despite the vocal enthusiasm of
the colonial lobby and groups like the Geographic Society, few volunteers
were willing to undertake such a tremendous “humanitarian” project in the
name of the French Republic.
To the chagrin of anticlerical republicans, who envisioned the French
civilizing mission as a secular project, it was often Christian missionaries
who provided the personnel to staff the empire’s schools, hospitals, and
orphanages. While Catholic missionaries ranged from ambivalent to hos-
tile to the Third Republic, their evangelizing work was often inseparable
from their position as representatives of the colonial regime. Indeed, despite
the anticlerical politics of republicans at home, the protection of Christian
missionaries helped justify further occupation and colonization, particularly
in Indochina, in Madagascar in the 1890s, and in Tahiti in 1880. In part
because of this fraught relationship between the church and the govern-
ment, missionaries depicted themselves as national heroes in their publica-
tions to supporters back in France, doing the work to spread civilization as
well as Christianity. As a result, many in France began to see Christianity
and “Frenchness” as necessarily unified identities and belief systems crucial
to “civilizing” racially inferior peoples across the world.
To educate its citizens and promote the empire as a positive national pro-
ject, the government and colonial boosters integrated colonial products,
peoples, and imagery into the everyday lives of French consumers. They
also highlighted the spectacular exoticism of the empire in elaborate dis-
plays at the Universal Expositions, where organizers would attempt to rep-
licate scenes from the empire. Here, French visitors were able to visit an
“Arab bazaar” or a “native African village,” staged as a living diorama.
They might encounter exotic foods from the Antilles or dancers from Tahiti
or ride in a rickshaw brought from Annam. The people on display were
frequently depicted as “savages,” people in need of civilization.
Building on the enormous popularity of these expositions, Parisian eth-
nologists staged more than 40 exhibitions of living human “specimens”
who were locked in cages in the zoological Jardin d’Acclimatation in Paris
between 1877 and 1931. These “human zoos” were one of the most popu-
lar tourist attractions of the era, and millions of visitors came to view “sav-
age” peoples from Africa, the South Pacific, as well as Inuits, Cossacks, and
South and East Asians. The accompanying literature, prepared by leading
ethnologists, described the “backward” cultures of the people on display,
helping to solidify both the social scientific and popular conceptions of
racial hierarchy prevalent from the mid-nineteenth century onward. This
narrative, left essentially unchallenged for over a hundred years, built public
support for the government and French commercial projects in the overseas
empire. The performers who appeared in these exhibitions, however, were
often skilled actors, dancers, and craftspeople who moved across the Euro-
pean continent and the United States, making a living, as best they could.
Only one notable figure of the era, the deputy Frédéric Passy, a peace
activist who was jointly awarded the first Noble Peace Prize in 1901 with
Red Cross founder Henry Dunant, spoke out against the moral problems
with colonization and presciently argued in 1885 that colonized peoples
would eventually revolt against their colonizers. Despite their initial chal-
lenges to the republican arguments in favor of the expansion of overseas
empire, nearly every political party shifted over time to strongly defend
French imperialism, including the socialists.
By the mid-1880s, the chaotic trauma of the Franco-Prussian War and
the Commune had faded to the background, despite lingering resentment
against Germany over the “stolen” territories of Alsace-Lorraine. The fear
of revolutionary disorder, particularly among the urban working classes
and socialists, had also diminished. The 1880 amnesty of the Communards
enabled the slow rebuilding of the political left, under the watchful eyes of
the powerful republicans, who sought to diminish threats from both the
right and the left. Yet, despite the republican attempt to instill a culture of
national unity and republican loyalty, the 1890s brought new challenges to
the republican model, which divided the country even further. By the onset
of World War I in 1914, the Third Republic was once again in crisis.
Notes
1 Guy de Maupassant, Bel-Ami, translated by Douglass Parmée (New York: Pen-
guin Books, 2012), 6.
2 Julia Nicholls, Revolutionary Thought After the Paris Commune, 1871–1885
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 2, from Robert Tombs, Paris,
bivouac des revolutions: La Commune de 1871, trans. by J. Chatroussat (Paris:
Éditions Libertalia, 2014), 360.
3 Jules Ferry, “Speech before the National Assembly,” in Sources of the Making of
the West, Peoples and Culture, Volume II, 6th edition, ed. Katherine J. Lualdi,
441–443 (Boston, MA, and New York, NY: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2019).
Blanchard, Pascal and Sandrine Lemaire, eds. Culture coloniale, 1871–1931. Paris:
Éditions Autrement, 2003.
Daughton, J.P. An Empire Divided: Religion, Republicanism, and the Making of
French Colonialism, 1880–1914. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Lorcin, Patricia M.E. Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice, and Race in French
Colonial Algeria. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2014.
Nicholls, Julia. Revolutionary Thought After the Paris Commune, 1871–1885.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
Schreier, Joshua. Arabs of the Jewish Faith: The Civilizing Mission in Colonial Alge-
ria. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010.
Surkis, Judith. Sexing the Citizen: Morality & Masculinity in France, 1870–1920.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006.
Tombs, Robert. The Paris Commune, 1871. London: Longman, 1999.
8 The Fin de Siècle
and Its Discontents The Fin de Siècle and Its Discontents
Introduction
At the turn of the twentieth century in French Algeria, a character named
Cagayous became the star of serialized adventure stories by “Musette,”
the pseudonym of Auguste Robinet, a journalist and social worker from
Algiers. Cagayous was a pied noir, the term for European settlers of
Algeria. Cagayous spoke in the French dialect distinct to Algeria known
as pataouète, which borrowed heavily from Spanish, Italian, and Arabic.
A hustler from the working-class neighborhood of Bab el Oued, Cagayous
spent much of his time hanging around the city, leading his gang of street
toughs. And in keeping with the politics of colonial Algeria, he was rabidly
antisemitic, describing the Jews of Algeria as insects, parasites, and degener-
ates. Between 1894 and 1920, the Cagayous tales were enormously popular.
They inf luenced the formation of a specifically Algerian form of the colonial
novel that focused on the European settlers as a new and unique “Latin
race,” distinct from the metropolitan French, the Muslim Arabs and Ber-
bers, and the Jewish inhabitants of Algeria. Though Cagayous was uniquely
Algerian, a preoccupation with issues of race, nationalism, and degenera-
tion had become widespread across both the colony and the metropole, one
that would lead to traumatic social and political divisions and violence.
The period from 1880 to 1900 is often described in French as the fin
de siècle, translated as “end of century.” But this literal translation fails
to represent the remarkable range of meanings that the phrase evokes for
this period of French history. Despite concerted attempts by the leaders of
the Third Republic to unify the nation around their republican and impe-
rial projects, the fault lines that had divided France since the 1789 revolu-
tion re-emerged in the form of reactionary political movements. Corruption
and scandal rocked the republican government, allowing its leftist and con-
servative critics to mobilize new forms of opposition. When republicans
introduced legislation to further undermine the inf luence of the Catholic
Church, they inf lamed their enemies, leading Catholics, monarchists, and
nationalists to consolidate their right-wing opposition to the republic. The
culmination of these tendencies in the Dreyfus Affair illustrates the rise of
DOI: 10.4324/b23310-8
The Fin de Siècle and Its Discontents 157
far-right nationalism and its merger with growing antisemitism. Interna-
tional working-class and trade union activism at the end of the nineteenth
century also challenged the political unity of the Third Republic. Nonethe-
less, the Dreyfus Affair led French socialists, under the leadership of Jean
Jaurès, to defend the republic against the far right.
Women became a powerful political and social force in France at this
time. Growing feminist activism and expanded roles for women led to crit-
icism from officials who feared a population crisis amidst escalating global
competition. A stunning range of commentators lamented the degenera-
tion of modern French society. Yet the tension between the positive and
destructive tendencies of modernity proved enormously inspirational to
artists, intellectuals, and scientists of the period, who established Paris
as a cosmopolitan center of artistic ferment and intellectual innovation.
The masses gained access to theater, cabarets, and new art forms, such
as cinema, that brought the world to them. Many more French men and
women were able to travel within the country and throughout the empire,
thanks to new forms of travel and tourism. Thousands of visitors came to
France as well.
As a global, cosmopolitan empire, the Third Republic found itself entan-
gled in a web of political and diplomatic alliances and conf licts. From the
confrontation with Britain at Fashoda to the Moroccan crises, France was
deeply enmeshed in the buildup to global war. In the aftermath of World
War I, the French would nostalgically describe the beginning of the twen-
tieth century as the “Belle Epoque,” although the entire period from the
1880s until the onset of World War I was hardly a period of stability and
harmony. Rather, it was an era of major transition out of a tumultuous
nineteenth century into the “modern” twentieth century.
Crisis and Contestation in the Third Republic

The 1880s were a challenging decade for those who sought to reinforce
the power of the Third Republic. Political contestation emerged from both
the right and left, much of it seeking to expose corruption at the heart of
the government. Beyond the jostling of political elites who sought regime
change, working classes and activists on the margins of the right and left
also sought an entry into the political sphere through new tools of mass
politics.
The 1880s began with an economic crisis that impacted the entirety of
France’s industrial and agricultural sectors for nearly a decade. It started
with a banking scandal in Lyon, where a Catholic monarchist named Paul
Bontoux had founded a bank in 1878 explicitly for Catholics who sought
to avoid Jewish banks. Although thousands had invested their savings in the
bank, it collapsed in 1882. The bank officers f led the country, leaving share-
holders emptyhanded. A stock market panic followed, leading to a severe
downturn in economic growth and industrial production. This national
158 The Fin de Siècle and Its Discontents
financial crisis was aggravated by a global economic depression that lasted
nearly the entire decade. Due to competition from foreign imports, the price
of French wheat dropped 40 percent between 1880 and 1900, which hit
farmers and agricultural workers hard, since two-thirds of the population in
the 1880s was rural, and more than 60 percent of agricultural holdings were
smaller than 2.5 acres. The crises led to a mass rural exodus from regions
such as the Massif Central and the Pyrenees, which had maintained more
traditional farming and social structures. As the economic crisis deepened,
business leaders in the textile and metallurgic industries along with those in
agriculture advocated ending free-trade policies and introducing protection-
ist measures. Agriculture Minister Jules Méline subsequently put duties on
grain and cattle imports and sought to protect the colonial market as well.
These economic policies, however, privileged rural agriculture to the detri-
ment of cheaper food imports for urban working classes.
By the end of the nineteenth century, France had become a central desti-
nation for labor migration in Europe. In 1886, 1.2 million foreigners lived
in France, approximately 3 percent of the population. Most were working-
class migrants, about 50 percent of whom were Belgians. Italians were also
an important migrant population, particularly in southern France and cities
such as Marseille. While hundreds of thousands of new workers f looded the
labor market, some industries faced mass unemployment: half the workers
in the construction industry in Paris in 1885 were unemployed, despite the
fact that housing development and real estate speculation had maintained
a booming housing market well into the 1880s. Even those with jobs were
unsatisfied, however, as their spending power had dramatically decreased.
Living conditions for French workers were among the worst in Europe, with
families crowded into single rooms and spending up to two-thirds of their
incomes on food, sometimes half of that solely on bread. Strike waves broke
out within numerous industries, including a six-month strike of miners in
Decazeville in southern France in 1886, which turned violent when the min-
ers killed a foreman. Meanwhile, factory owners sometimes used foreign
workers to break strike movements, which created significant working-class
resentment against foreign laborers.
Following the 1880 amnesty of the Communards and the lessening of
political repression by republican leaders, workers and leftist intellectuals
began organizing using the new tools of democratic mass movements: news-
papers, political parties, and labor unions. The first French socialist party,
the Parti ouvrier français (French Workers Party) was founded in 1880 by
Jules Guesde, a former Communard, who had launched a socialist news-
paper in 1877 called L’Égalité. The party was Marxist and internationalist
in orientation and sought to nationalize French industries through socialist
revolution and turn them over to the workers. A breakaway faction founded
the Fédération des travailleurs socialistes (Socialist Workers Federation) in
1884, which advocated electoral participation rather than revolution. Yet
the two factions met in Paris in 1889 alongside socialists from around the
world at an international congress that came to be known as the Second
International. Despite the internal struggles between those who advocated
revolution and those who sought more moderate reforms through electoral
politics, French socialists unified into a single party in 1905, the Section
française de l’internationale ouvrière (French Section of the Workers’ Inter-
national, or SFIO). It was led by French socialist Jean Jaurès, who created
the left-leaning daily newspaper L’Humanité in 1904.
Anarchists erupted onto the scene again with several political assassina-
tions, including an attack on the republican French president, Marie Fran-
çois Sadi Carnot, who was stabbed by an Italian anarchist in Lyon in 1894.
In the aftermath of these attacks, a series of repressive laws sought to end
this wave of anarchist violence, sending many French anarchists to seek
refuge in the emerging revolutionary syndicalist movement, which drew on
earlier teachings of Blanqui and Proudhon in advocating direct action by
workers to abolish capitalism. Although workers’ cooperatives and trade
organizations had been greatly weakened by the repression of the Com-
mune, in 1884, the Waldeck-Rousseau Law legalized trade unions, enabling
syndicalist leaders to create the Fédération des Bourses du Travail in 1892.
This organization sought to coordinate strikes, including a potential general
strike to bring down the capitalist system. Additionally, industry-specific
trade unions began to grow exponentially, leading to the creation of the
Confédération générale du travail (General Confederation of Labor, or
CGT) in 1895, which merged with the Fédération des Bourses in 1902 but
maintained the revolutionary edge of the anarcho-syndicalists.
Catholics and monarchists also challenged the power of centrist repub-
licans in the 1880s. Both right-wing parties and “radical” (left-leaning)
republicans gained a significant number of seats in the 1885 legislative elec-
tions, leading to unstable and scandal-mired governments for the next dec-
ade. The first of these scandals was exposed in October 1887 and involved a
deputy named Daniel Wilson, who was also the son-in-law of President Jules
Grévy. Wilson had been selling his inf luence with the president to those who
could pay for any number of favors, from Légions d’honneur to pardons for
the death penalty. The scandal provoked the fall of the government.
Attempting to reinforce their power in the midst of these challenges,
republicans brought the popular military figure General Georges Boulanger
into the government as minister of war, believing him to be a republican. Yet
Boulanger’s authoritarian tendencies quickly attracted the support of mon-
archists and right-wing nationalists. When German chancellor Otto von Bis-
marck described Boulanger as a symbol of the French threat to Germany,
Boulanger became a hero to anti-German nationalists. He was extremely
popular with the masses, and Parisians followed him in the streets. In the
wake of the Wilson scandal, Boulanger began plotting with monarchists to
stage a possible coup d’état. In January 1889, he won a by-election in Paris,
despite strong republican opposition. But he never did stage a coup. When
a republican minister convinced him the government had evidence of his
treason, Boulanger f led to Belgium, committing suicide two years later on
the grave of his mistress.
Immediately following the Boulanger Affair, the virulent antisemitic
newspaper La Libre Parole (Free Speech) exposed a much bigger scandal
involving legislators of every party and numerous government ministers.
The Panama Scandal of 1892 resulted from French engineer Ferdinand de
Lesseps’s failed scheme to finance the Panama Canal. De Lesseps pursued
financing by a “lottery” and bribed parliamentary deputies to obtain govern-
ment authorization. The company went bankrupt in 1889, and the names of
the politicians who had taken bribes were leaked to La Libre Parole; several
senators were eventually charged with corruption. During the next round
of legislative elections in 1893, the sensational newspaper headlines that
had accused all politicians of corruption had hit their mark: a high rate of
abstention alongside growing support for socialist parties indicated strong
public dissatisfaction with the republicans in power.
Antisemitism and Xenophobia

It was no accident that an antisemitic newspaper had exposed the Panama
scandal and directly targeted the corruption of republican politics, claim-
ing the briberies were intimately tied to the racially corrupting figure of
“the Jew.” French antisemitism emerged as a distinct phenomenon in the
1880s, drawing on broader European movements that had been circulat-
ing in the 1870s and specifically French currents that developed in Alge-
ria. The 1881 Lisbonne Law, which liberalized the press and allowed
for freer public expression of what had previously been deemed libelous
speech, was key to the expansion of French antisemitism during the fin
de siècle.
In the 1880s, the French Jewish community was not especially large—
between 70,000 and 80,000 in the metropole and some 35,000 in Algeria,
who had gained French citizenship in 1870 under the Crémieux Decree.
Jews were typically well integrated into French society and Jewish leaders
were well known for their commitment to republicanism. Yet the visibility
of wealthy Jewish bankers such as the Rothschilds and the Pereire brothers,
whose bank Crédit Mobilier had funded, among other things, the Haussm-
annization of Paris before it collapsed in the late 1860s, led antisemites to
accuse French Jews of scheming to destroy the nation through an interna-
tional Jewish capitalist conspiracy.
At the center of these claims was Édouard Drumont, a French journalist,
who published an 1886 book titled La France juive (Jewish France). In an
illustrated version published the following year, Drumont accused wealthy
Jewish bankers of profiting from financial speculation, in collusion with
the Third Republic, to the detriment of ordinary French citizens, particu-
larly small business owners. The book introduced the myth of an interna-
tional Jewish conspiracy that had three components: Jewish separatism, the
alleged Jewish mission for world domination, and the support of the French
Third Republic to carry out this quest. By 1914, the text had become a best-
seller in France. In 1889, Drumont founded the Antisemitic League, which
organized protests and distributed propaganda that denounced Jewish par-
ticipation in and responsibility for the major political scandals of the period,
including the Panama Affair. In 1892, Drumont began publishing the daily
newspaper La Libre Parole, whose content was heavily antisemitic, anti-
republican, and anti-capitalist. The paper was also staunchly nationalist: the
subtitle on the first page stated “France for the French!”
The popular appeal of antisemitism was connected in part to the eco-
nomic crisis that hit the working classes and the petite bourgeoisie particu-
larly hard. Wealthy elites and foreigners were easy scapegoats. Growing
xenophobia and concern about foreign “invasion” followed the inf lux of
Jews from central and eastern Europe f leeing antisemitic pogroms as well as
the migration of Jews from Alsace-Lorraine in the aftermath of the Franco-
Prussian War. Instances of violence against foreign laborers increased over
the 1880s and early 1890s, while people like Drumont blamed the Jews
for state violence against French labor. In Algeria, where La Libre Parole
had considerable readership, antisemitism drew on a variety of perceived
grievances, including Jewish “corruption” in the 1871 elections, the first
in which the Jewish population had voted after gaining French citizenship.
This perception of Jewish political corruption in Algeria led to outright vio-
lence against Jews in the streets of Constantine, Oran, and Algiers between
1896 and 1902.
The Dreyfus Affair

By the 1890s, a new nationalist movement had emerged that incorporated
elements of the traditional monarchist right, Catholic anti-republicanism,
and political antisemitism, which viewed republicanism as a puppet of the
international Jewish capitalist conspiracy. These united political ideologies
gathered supporters in organizations like the Ligue des patriotes (League of
Patriots). This movement played a central role in the divisive political scan-
dal known as the Dreyfus Affair.
The ordeal of Captain Alfred Dreyfus began in September 1894 when
French secret services intercepted documents containing secret military
information, which an unnamed French military officer had addressed to
the Germans. At a moment of heightened tension, with both the French and
Germans seeking to modernize their militaries, these documents suggested
the existence of a spy in the French military. Without any clear evidence, and
despite the disagreement of handwriting experts, Captain Dreyfus became
the primary suspect, in part because of his Jewishness. Dreyfus claimed he
was innocent, and many were convinced: he was independently wealthy and
his family had left Alsace-Lorraine in 1871 to become French citizens, prov-
ing his loyalty to France.
Yet someone leaked the story to La Libre Parole, which ran an article
claiming that a Jewish military officer had been arrested for treason. Dru-
mont then launched a major press campaign against all Jews in the French
military. Despite the lack of clear evidence, the military succumbed to anti-
semitic pressure and convicted Dreyfus, who was stripped of his rank and
sentenced in January 1895 to lifetime in the prison colony of Devil’s Island.
Almost immediately, doubts began to emerge about Dreyfus’s guilt, in part
because documents continued to be leaked to Germany even after his exile.
The minister of war refused to reopen the case, however, in fear of the press.
The actual traitor, Major Esterhazy, was discovered a year later, but he was
declared innocent at a closed trial in December 1897.
Furious at the blatant injustice against Dreyfus, novelist Émile Zola wrote
a scathing manifesto titled “J’Accuse. . .!” (I Accuse. . .!). Published in the
radical republican deputy Georges Clemenceau’s newspaper L’Aurore on
January 13, 1898, the letter denounced the army, the justice system, and
the politicians of France for the crime of condemning an innocent man and
exploiting the patriotism of French men and women for “works of hatred.”1
Zola’s article was a lightning rod for what became an intellectual and politi-
cal civil war in France. The army sued Zola for libel, and the subsequent trial
divided France into two camps: the Dreyfusards, who supported Zola and
the cause of Dreyfus’s innocence, and the anti-Dreyfusards, who maintained
Dreyfus’s guilt and that of French Jews more generally. The vast majority
of the French believed in Dreyfus’s guilt, and the extreme nationalistic and
antisemitic tenor of the anti-Dreyfusard press inf lamed waves of antisemitic
violence, as anti-Jewish riots broke out in Nancy, Rennes, and Algiers.
Yet, it was not just Jews who were under attack but the republic as well.
A right-wing movement called the Action française was founded in 1899 to
counter left-wing intellectual support for Dreyfus. It soon drew the back-
ing of antisemitic intellectual Charles Maurras, whose “integral national-
ism” sought to convert French nationalists to monarchism. While most of
the major newspapers sided with the Dreyfusards, Le Figaro joined with
the antisemitic, nationalist, Catholic, and popular press, which catered to
the vast majority of the French reading public. The anti-Dreyfusard camp
became more organized and vocal, mobilizing organizations like the Ligue
de la Patrie française, which was founded in 1898 and counted some
150,000 members, including academics and artists such as Jules Verne, Paul
Cézanne, Auguste Renoir, and honorary president Maurice Barrès.
Consequently, republicans mobilized to defend the republic against anti-
Dreyfusard attacks. They united behind René Waldeck-Rousseau, who was
named prime minister of a boldly republican government, which allowed,
for the first time, a socialist into its cabinet. Brought back from exile in
1899, Dreyfus was tried again, this time in Rennes, to avoid any violent
incidents. It seemed that he would be exonerated; however, the military
refused to find him innocent, claiming he was “guilty but with extenuat-
ing circumstances.” Waldeck-Rousseau arranged his pardon by presidential
decree but Dreyfus’s supporters were upset by this solution, believing that
it meant accepting a guilty verdict. They urged Dreyfus to demand to have
his conviction vacated. However, Dreyfus’s family urged him to accept the
pardon, which he did.
Zola, who had f led to escape his own conviction for libel due to his
defense of Dreyfus, returned to France in 1899 but died of asphyxiation
three years later due to a suspiciously blocked chimney. His funeral was a
national affair, and his ashes were transferred to the Panthéon in June of
1908. Dreyfus’s case was eventually reopened in 1906, at which point he
was cleared of all charges and formally rehabilitated. He was reinstated
into the army at the rank of major. Although he was wounded in an attack
during the transfer of Zola’s ashes, Dreyfus fought during World War I and
died in 1935.
Beyond the dramatic personal upheavals that the Affair produced for
Dreyfus and his family, for individuals such as Émile Zola, and for victims
of antisemitic violence, the Dreyfus Affair dramatically transformed politics
and culture in France, with serious repercussions across Europe. For exam-
ple, Austrian Jewish journalist Theodor Herzl, who was in Paris covering
the events for the Viennese Neue Freie Presse, later claimed that the Dreyfus
Affair directly inf luenced his belief in the necessity of a Jewish state and
his role in the emerging Zionist movement. In France, two new forces of
political contestation grew stronger on the extremes of the right and left,
challenging the republican hold on political power: socialism on the left,
and the nationalist right that fused populist resentment of Jewish elites with
monarchist Catholic resentment of republican values.
Separation of Church and State

Radical republicans came to power at the turn of the twentieth century,
seeking to defend the Third Republic by consolidating their own power
and further dismantling the Catholic Church, the most visible enemy of
the republic. Although the Catholic Church had signaled its allegiance—
or Ralliement—to the Third Republic in 1890, the Catholic far-right’s
role in the Dreyfus Affair had destroyed any goodwill between Catholics
and republicans. From 1900 onward, French republicans engaged in what
French historian René Rémond has described as “state anticlericalism,”
which Catholics perceived as direct persecution.
The 1901 Law on Associations dramatically transformed French political
and cultural life. It declared that to legally create a non-professional associa-
tion, a group must have more than two members and have a purpose other
than making profits. One significant result was that formal political parties
began to emerge. Although this law was not solely directed at Catholics,
the third section specifically targeted Catholic congregations, stipulating
that they had to apply for government authorization to remain on French
soil. Any religious order headquartered outside of France was automatically
denied, and the authorization of any congregation was subject to a parlia-
mentary vote. More than 600 Catholic congregations applied for authoriza-
tions, although some (notably the Jesuits and Benedictines) chose to move
their orders out of the country.
Émile Combes, who became president in 1902, moved aggressively to dis-
mantle the inf luence of the Catholic Church in France. Beginning in 1902,
the government closed more than 3,000 Catholic schools that were associ-
ated with unauthorized congregations. In 1903, only five of the requests for
authorization from Catholic congregations were approved, forcing thou-
sands of nuns and priests into exile. A law passed on July 7, 1904 then for-
bade Catholic congregations from teaching, even if their existence had been
authorized, and required the closing of their schools within ten years. Yet
Catholics did not completely succumb to the repression of the state. In Brit-
tany, for instance, Catholics revolted against the closing of Catholic schools.
Additionally, Combes refused to follow the protocol of the 1801 Concordat
on naming bishops, according to which the French leader would consult the
pope. This provoked a diplomatic incident between France and the Vatican,
and Combes broke off relations with the Vatican in July 1904, a situation
described as the “discordat.”
Combes then attempted a complete separation of church and state. The
first article of the Briand law of December 9, 1905 guaranteed religious
freedom; however, the second article declared that the republic “does not
recognize, provide salaries, or subventions for any religion.” Additionally,
all church properties built before that date were transferred to the state or
local governments, which turned them back over to authorized religious
associations run by laymen and women, rather than the Catholic hierarchy
directed from Rome. An additional article banned religious symbols from
public buildings. French Protestants celebrated the law because it appeared
to put them, as a minority religious group, on more equal political footing
with Catholics. Once state agents began entering churches to inventory
artworks, Catholics began to protest violently. In February 1906, Pope
Pius X issued an encyclical, Vehementer nos, that explicitly condemned
the law.
The term laïcité, which is often translated as “secularization,” describes
these specific laws that put into practice the separation of church and state in
France and its empire. However, this process was not organic. Instead, laïcité
resulted from a range of state policies instituted by the republican govern-
ment to curtail the political and cultural influence of the Catholic Church.
The Christian, Jewish, and Muslim populations across France and its empire
remained no less attached to their religious faith. In fact, the state repression
of the Catholic Church and its schools in many areas fueled an even stronger
attachment of Catholics to their church. For instance, the basilica and grotto
at Lourdes counted around 1 million pilgrims in 1908, while newly conse-
crated basilicas in Lyon (Notre-Dame de Fourvières), Paris (Sacré-Coeur), and
Bône, Algeria (Saint-Augustin) were filled with parishioners.
During this period, there was significant internal upheaval and theologi-
cal conf lict within the Catholic Church itself. Several of the most notable
conf licts were based on theological debates about modernity and social
responsibility. Charles Maurras’s Action française, for instance, sought
to integrate conservative Catholicism with nationalism and monarchism
into an “integral nationalism” that was initially welcomed by some clergy.
Christian scouting was introduced to France in the 1910s and became a
major youth movement, as did the youth section of the Action catholique,
a Social Catholic organization that sought to apply the principles of the
1891 encyclical Rerum novarum (Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor)
by encouraging Catholics to undertake active community engagement
while also rejecting unrestricted capitalism and leftist political ideologies
like socialism.
Additionally, the republicans’ aggressive and anticlerical policies were
unevenly applied in the empire. Many Catholic orders that had gone into
exile found that their missionary enterprises thrived overseas. By 1900, more
than 50,000 Catholic religious workers were spread out across the empire,
assisted by many thousands more indigenous Catholic priests. Although
some Catholic schools were closed in places like Polynesia, they were toler-
ated in other parts of the empire, as missionaries continued to teach French
history and culture as a means of inculcating “Christian civilization” in
their students.
The New Woman, Gender, and Population Crisis

While republican, bourgeois, and working-class men increasingly turned
away from the Catholic Church, women largely remained faithful adher-
ents. The grumbling about the so-called feminization of the church grew
louder. Republican leaders pushed back against the demands of the bur-
geoning women’s suffrage movement, arguing that women would only vote
the way their priests told them to vote and deliver the country into the
hands of the far right. This had, in part, motivated republicans to enact the
Camille Sée Law in 1880, establishing state-sponsored secondary education
for women to draw them away from Catholic inf luence.
Despite the conservative tendencies of many French women, however,
politicians and cultural observers noted a “crisis” of traditional womanhood
emerging in the 1890s. These men largely feared the rise of the so-called
New Woman, a group of primarily middle-class, urban French women who
challenged “traditional” bourgeois gender norms. Rejecting her “ornamen-
tal role,” the New Woman might not marry at all, or might enter into a non-
traditional marriage. Images of the New Woman showed her riding a bicycle
dressed in bloomers and smoking a cigarette. She might work outside the
home as a doctor, lawyer, journalist, or even worse, an actress!
Some famous examples of the New Woman in France include the global
star Sarah Bernhardt and the actress-turned-publisher Marguerite Durand,
who founded the newspaper La Fronde in 1897. Durand claimed that her
feminine charms and her famous blonde hair seduced people to her cause.
She aimed to demonstrate that women were as capable as men of doing the
work of journalism, discussing politics, finance, etc. Her journalists, known
as the frondeuses, went out to report on the news of the day, despite some
critics comparing them to prostitutes.
Working women were not, of course, all that unusual in France. In 1900,
45 percent of all French women worked outside the home, but most of
them were working class. Women had been admitted to medical schools
beginning in 1869, thanks to the intervention of Empress Eugénie. How-
ever, very few ultimately entered the medical profession; there were only 95
women doctors in total by 1903. Other university faculties began to admit
women decades later, with the Sorbonne taking its first female student in
1883. Women were only admitted to engineering and technical schools and
allowed to sit for the agrégation exam, which would allow them to teach in
higher education, after 1914.
Beginning in the 1870s, French feminists were once again vocally demand-
ing equal rights, and feminist activist Hubertine Auclert founded the first
suffragist newspaper La Citoyenne in 1881 for the explicit purpose of gain-
ing French women the right to vote. Auclert’s argument compared French
women’s condition to the situation of women in North Africa, blaming
both patriarchy and French colonialism for the downtrodden state of Arab
women. She condemned the hypocrisy of French claims to civilization when
they allowed polygamy and child marriage in Algeria, then compared this
to the subjugation of women under the Napoleonic Code. Many French
suffragists sought access to the vote in order to improve the social, political,
and economic situation of French women but also claimed they wanted to
uplift women across the French empire. Yet this was not a popular position
within French society.
The problem was the declining French birthrate. An 1884 bill legalizing
divorce had greatly liberated women from the restrictive marriage laws of
the Napoleonic Code, but it set off alarms among conservatives that the
family would be destroyed. The gradual, but steady, decline in the birth-
rate since the 1870s became a major concern for French politicians and
nationalists, in large part because Germany’s birthrate was near double that
of France. The fear was that France would not have enough soldiers to
fight—and win—a future war with Germany. The future of the nation was
in danger if bourgeois women refused to do their duty to the nation and pro-
create. Many blamed feminism, the New Woman, and dangerous modern
inf luences for what they claimed was cultural degeneration. But while these
anxieties signaled deeper concerns about France’s place in the world, they
were also connected to tensions around the speed with which “modernity”
was replacing traditional values, a situation represented most clearly in the
art and literature of the moment.
Arts, Culture, and Intellectual Life of the Fin de Siècle
The Dreyfus Affair had signaled numerous transformations in French society
at the turn of the twentieth century, including the heightened inf luence of
newspapers in shaping popular opinion. The role of the intellectual in soci-
ety had changed too. Émile Zola, merely an acclaimed novelist before the
Dreyfus Affair, transformed into a symbol of justice and of the republic with
the publication of “J’Accuse. . .!” On the right, figures like Charles Maurras
and Maurice Barrès offered intellectual legitimacy to those who criticized
the republic and even sought to destroy it. University professors became
media personalities, writing articles and political treatises for their par-
ticular cause or ideology. The figure of the “public intellectual”—someone
with education and authority who inf luenced public opinion on a range
of political and cultural topics—came to hold a revered position in French
society throughout the twentieth century.
Well before the Dreyfus Affair, however, the mid-century positivist belief
in the rationalism of the modern world began to give way to a more pes-
simistic and apprehensive perspective that found its expression across lit-
erature, visual art, music, theater, and even the social and hard sciences.
Poets, painters, and composers were no longer interested in the Realist
vision to portray the objective realities of the world. Instead, they sought
to capture the sensations of experience, the hidden meanings and symbols,
and the deeper emotions buried beneath reality. This shift was greatly
inf luenced by new research in psychology and the pathologies of human
behavior by figures such as French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, soci-
ologist Gustave Le Bon, naturalist Charles Darwin, and even Sigmund
Freud. While scientists were documenting both the evolution of life and
humanity, they were also classifying criminals, revolutionaries, and dan-
gerous races merely by their head shape or skin color. These theories of
evolutionary hierarchies “discovered” a biological determinacy in “primi-
tive” peoples and behaviors. Psychologists, meanwhile, were busy iden-
tifying new human pathologies, like nervous symptoms (neurasthenia),
epilepsy, and hysteria, which they linked to the conditions of modern,
urban life. Surrounded by the social upheavals of modernity, some feared
that humanity was regressing to a more “primitive” state, while others
developed a certain nostalgia for a simpler, healthier life. This tension is
visible in nearly every art form of the period.
In 1884, novelist J. K. Huysmans published À Rebours (Against the
Grain), a novel that depicted a new psychological type—the neurasthenic—
who came to define the Bohemian and avant-garde artists of the fin de siècle,
especially the Symbolists. The Symbolist movement originated in the 1870s,
in the operas of the German composer Richard Wagner, and set French art-
ists off on a search for the mystical concepts at the origins of creative expres-
sion. French Symbolist poets sought to express the interiority of the self and
the liberation of verse from strict poetic conventions. Poets like Charles
Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stéphane Mallarmé could
be found in the “decadent” Bohemian cafés of Montmartre in Paris, where
the artistic avant-garde gathered through the night, communing over the
lack of public interest in their art. While modernist literature had moved
on from Symbolism by 1900, the concern with psychology and the work-
ing of the mind remained. For instance, novelist Marcel Proust developed
what came to be known as stream-of-consciousness writing techniques. In
the first book in his novel cycle In Search of Lost Time, Proust explored
the relationship between sense and memory, famously depicting a character
who takes a taste of a madeleine cake and is instantly transported back to
his childhood through involuntary memory.
The visual arts, too, began exploring the sensations of modernity. Begin-
ning in the 1880s, the Impressionists, like Claude Monet and Auguste Renoir,
began producing paintings with more dreamlike visions, rejecting a realistic
representation of a scene or object. Monet would often paint sequences of
the same scene at different times of day to show the contrast of light and
color that transformed the “reality” of the image. Despite its initial rejection
by the academic establishment, Impressionism was not especially challeng-
ing to bourgeois, republican culture; its landscapes were often filled with
bourgeois inhabitants. Paul Cézanne, a post-Impressionist, experimented
with perspective and shapes in his landscapes of southern France. Dutch
painter Vincent van Gogh exposed his own internal turmoil through color-
ful, expressionist paintings that still managed to sell despite their unusual
deviations in style; however, artistic recognition only came after his suicide
in 1890 at the age of 37.
More controversially, some painters relied heavily on representations of
what were considered “primitive” cultures. Although they were typically
European artists trained in Paris (sometimes never even leaving the city),
they identified with the “primitive” cultures they represented, as subjects
alienated from modern life. This particular movement of artistic Primitivism
was conditioned and made possible by French imperialism. After all, artists
had first encountered “primitive” peoples and cultures in French novels and
museums, in displays at “human zoos” and universal expositions, and in the
cabarets and music halls of Montmartre.
Before setting out for Tahiti himself, for example, French Impressionist
painter Paul Gaugin had viewed an exhibit about the island at the 1889
colonial exposition and read the popular novelist Pierre Loti’s romantic
novel Le mariage de Loti, which was set on a South Pacific island. Gaugin,
like other painters of the period, also borrowed techniques from Japanese
art. Other Primitivists discovered African and Asian cultures in the scat-
tered ethnographic collections of the Trocadero Museum in Paris. One of
these artists was Pablo Picasso, whose famous painting Les Demoiselles
d’Avignon (1907) featured multiple women painted in distorted, geometric
forms, some of whom are wearing African masks. This painting launched
a new movement called Cubism, which emphasized the two-dimensionality
of traditional painting and sought to represent space through geometric,
Figure 8.1
Louis-Émile Durandelle, Exposition universelle de 1889/État d’avanc-
ement, November 23, 1888, Albumen silver print, The J. Paul Getty
Museum, Los Angeles.
fractured objects. This primitivism was clearly an artistic appropriation of

cultures that European artists scarcely understood, but it was also an artis-
tic attempt to resolve the modern cultural anxiety over the consequences of
industrial progress.
At the Universal Exposition of 1889, a new design aesthetic emerged in
the monumental wrought-iron architecture of the Eiffel Tower and the Gal-
lery of Machines, a large hangar-like structure composed of glass and iron
beams. These two feats of design and engineering came to represent France’s
technological skill and republican modernity, its achievements in industry
and science. By 1900, this modern style known as Art Nouveau had trans-
formed from confident public monuments to French technology into more
intimate spaces that emphasized arts and crafts and luxury goods. Addi-
tionally, its design aesthetic shifted to representations of the psychological
complexity of modern life: in interior spaces, the sinuous lines and plant-like
designs that characterized Art Nouveau decor signaled “feminine” imagery
and organic, dreamlike patterns. They also drew extensively on Japanese
designs, particularly in the attention to and representation of nature.
Similar innovations were taking place in music, theater, and dance as
well, which sometimes alienated audiences. The legendary May 1913 pre-
miere of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring in Paris nearly caused
a riot among the audience. Although inspired by Russian folk melodies,
Stravinsky’s score was loud and unmelodic, using experimental chord pro-
gressions and dissonance. Additionally, the ballet, performed by the Ballets
Russes and choreographed by the great Vaslav Nijinsky, featured modern
movements meant to replicate the pagan dances and folklore that formed
the ballet’s source material; Parisian bourgeois audiences, however, were
accustomed to seeing traditional, classical movements. Vocal members of
the crowd were ejected from the performance and critical reviews described
it as “barbaric.”
The Emergence of Mass Culture

One of the key features of this period was the emergence of what histori-
ans describe as mass culture. In earlier eras, many spaces of high culture
and art such as museums, theaters, concert halls, or academic lectures were
inaccessible to the working classes, and even some in the middle classes.
This changed as a result of the Third Republic’s democratization of educa-
tion, in which the government also attempted to “republicanize” arts edu-
cation. Although this did not go as planned, since artists regained direct
control of the art market, the state still controlled the growing number of
museums, funded art schools and workshops for decorative arts, and under-
took the task of maintaining the architectural “patrimony” of the French
nation. Workers’ collectives in Paris opened more than 230 popular univer-
sities between 1899 and 1908 that spread into the provinces and educated
more than 50,000 adult students. Similar innovations brought theater to
the masses, partly as a pedagogical tool but also as a means to represent
the political ideas and struggles of the working classes in a “Theater of the
People.”
And theater was incredibly popular. In the years between 1880 and
1900, nearly 1 million Parisians went to the theater at least once a month.
With train lines that could easily convey passengers from the provinces to
Paris, the bourgeois classes could regularly make the trip to the city. Once
there, they would take in performances at the Châtelet theater or the Opéra
Garnier, which had installed electric lights in 1887 and presented spectac-
ular productions that treated viewers to colorful costumes and sets, live
horses, and amazing visual effects, which drew on the technologies of spir-
itualism, including ghosts, levitation, and magical creatures. For all classes,
pantomimes, known as the Grand Guignol, were increasingly popular as
well and produced horror stories and melodramas that were denounced by
intellectuals as mindless but were widely loved.
The Folies-Bergère, one of the most popular music halls and cabarets in
Paris, presented operettas and pantomimes as well as vaudeville sketches,
magicians, and acrobats. The French interest in psychology and nervous
conditions embedded itself in a new music hall genre called the Epileptic
Singer. Performed primarily by women between 1875 and 1907, the incred-
ibly popular routine included gyrations and dancing that reminded view-
ers of the “hysterics” at Salpêtrière hospital; later it came to be associated
with the music and dance culture of African-American performers and jazz
rhythms coming from the United States.
Dance halls and cabarets, bistros, and cafes offered public space for work-
ing-class patrons to consume alcohol and smoke tobacco. In the early twen-
tieth century, many working-class men in Paris were consuming up to three
liters of wine per day, and many working-class families were beginning to
drink wine at home with their meals. While critics decried the problems
of alcoholism and tobacco abuse among the working classes, artists and
members of the upper classes sought delirium in bottles of absinthe, or in
drugs such as cocaine and opium. The use of hallucinatory drugs was often
associated with the growing fascination with the occult, as spiritualism and
metaphysical societies sought access to “infinite” knowledge of the divine.
In 1895, two brothers from Lyon, Auguste and Louis Lumière, patented a
device known as a cinématographe, which they designed after seeing a dem-
onstration of Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope, a machine that showed a loop
of film through a peephole. The Lumière brothers’ machine, by contrast,
allowed them to both shoot moving images and project them. In December
of that year, they held a public viewing at the Grand Café on the Boulevard
des Capucines in Paris. They showed films of workers leaving their factory
in Lyon (considered the first motion picture) and an arriving train mov-
ing toward the camera, which, legend has it, caused frightened viewers to
jump from their seats. After this screening’s success, the film industry took
off. The Lumière brothers trained cameramen and sent them all over the
world, documenting the French empire and all corners of the globe. These
films were screened to French audiences for very little cost in cafes and
theaters in cities like Paris, Brussels, London, and even New York. News-
reels, which were produced weekly by Charles Pathé and then Léon Gau-
mont, played before the films to provide visual reports of current events.
After the first permanent movie theatre opened in 1897, many more were
rapidly built. The Lumière brothers’ great French competitor was Georges
Meliès, a director of a magic theater, whose early films used magic tricks to
produce amazing special effects. In his Montreuil film studio, he produced
the famous science fiction/adventure film A Trip to the Moon (1902), in
which scientists attempt to launch a rocket to the moon but end up hitting
it in the eye, much to the consternation of the moon.
Accessing news became an essential part of fin-de-siècle life. Newspaper
kiosks stood on nearly every corner of Parisian boulevards and appeared
in provincial towns and villages. By the early 1890s, there were 6,000 peri-
odicals printed in France. They covered political news but also announced
theater openings, reviewed performances, gave the results of horse and bicy-
cle races, and often included serial fiction alongside advertisements of the
latest fashions and cosmetics. With the expansion of literacy by 1900, more
of the public was reading works of fiction, and thanks to bookstores in train
stations, books were also widely available. Children’s literature became a
growing market alongside practical handbooks on cooking and housekeep-
ing, gardening, and travel guides.
New forms of transportation greatly facilitated the possibilities of travel
for every social class. The availability of cheap rubber from the empire and
cheaper mechanized production led to cheaper bicycles; by the 1890s, they
were affordable even to working-class consumers. In 1900, the first Paris
metro line opened with 15 million riders the first year and over 300 million
a decade later. The Automobile Club of France was founded in 1895, and
cars offered wealthy elites the opportunity to explore the country. Michelin,
the tire manufacturer, began publishing popular tourism guides for motor-
ists in 1900. While tourism was initially built around middle- and upper-
class leisure pursuits, such as holiday resort escapes to the seaside or the
mountains, churches and secular charities also began sponsoring colonies
de vacances, or summer camps for working-class children to get them out
of the city; for some sponsors this had a eugenic function, encouraging the
health of the working classes while also promoting moral values to protect
against degeneracy.
By extension, travel outside of France and throughout the empire became
increasingly popular. Although boats carrying mail and passengers between
France and Algeria had crossed the Mediterranean twice weekly since the
early 1860s, more regular service to other cities began in the 1880s. Addi-
tionally, a new railroad linking the northern cities of Algiers, Blida, and
Oran (and later Constantine), made Algeria a popular tourist destination.
In Indochina, the hill station of Dalat, founded in 1897 as a sanatorium for
colonial soldiers, transformed into a mountain resort and spa town, provid-
ing outdoor adventure while also preserving the health of the Europeans in
the colony.
At the same time, France—and Paris in particular—became one of the pre-
mier destinations for wealthy tourists from across the world. Ever since the
Second Empire, Paris had been associated with fashion and luxury goods,
but the narrative of Paris as the epitome of global, cosmopolitan style and
couture was crafted during the fin-de-siècle period. The wealthy wives and
daughters of Gilded Age American businessmen, for example, sailed across
the Atlantic to buy seasonal wardrobes from the world-famous Parisian
salon of the House of Worth. Wealthy collectors came to buy what they
could on the hot Parisian art market, while others—novelists, poets, paint-
ers, or musicians—came to join the lively intellectual and artistic culture.
Despite the conf licts in French politics and society during these decades,
Paris attracted visitors and migrants from far and wide, who established
roots or merely sampled the delights of France’s vibrant cultural attractions.
Nationalism, New Alliances, and Imperial Conf licts

The universal expositions hosted in Paris in 1889 and 1900 were nationalist
celebrations designed to convince both the French population and the rest
of the world that France had reached the pinnacle of industrial development
and cultural civilization, including mastery over the world’s peoples and
environments. The Eiffel Tower, decried by some as an eyesore, was heralded
as the tallest man-made structure in the world at the time of its construction
in 1889. In 1900, the colonial exhibitions continued producing dioramas of
“authentic” colonial villages that illustrated both the “primitive” conditions
in which the colonial subjects of the French empire lived and the necessity of
the French “civilizing mission.” French colonial boosters used these exhibi-
tions to try and convince more skeptical French citizens of the necessity for
funding their imperial economic and social development projects.
This support was especially important since French colonial rivalries with
Britain and Germany were heating up. France had the second-largest empire
in the world by 1900, surpassed only by Britain. France and Britain had
nearly gone to war over territory in the upper Nile, at Fashoda in 1898.
The French claim to the territory was tenuous, while the British insisted
the territory was necessary to their protectorate of Egypt and the possibil-
ity of establishing a “Capetown to Cairo” railroad. The French eventually
backed down and agreed not to hinder the British in Egypt in exchange for
full French control over Morocco. This agreement enabled the French and
British to establish the diplomatic Entente Cordiale in 1904, in order to
align their interests against the increasing threat of German militarism and
aggression.
In 1882, Germany had signed a diplomatic alliance with Austria-Hungary
and Italy called the Triple Alliance. By 1900, Germany boasted an increas-
ing birthrate, intensive arms manufacturing, and plans for global expansion.
The nationalist factions of both France and Britain began pushing for more
aggressive foreign policy objectives and stronger domestic military support.
When Russia joined the French-British coalition in 1907, the Entente Cordiale
became a “Triple Entente” against the Triple Alliance of Austria-Hungary,
Italy, and Germany. These alliances ensured that if one country in the Triple
Alliance went to war with a country in the Triple Entente, the other coun-
tries in the alliance would step in to defend their allies.
The threat of war with Germany re-emerged in 1906, when Germany
sought to block French expansion into Morocco. Although tensions calmed,
in 1911, during the Agadir Crisis, Kaiser Wilhelm II sent an armed ship to
Morocco to prevent French occupation. Eventually, diplomats from both
countries reached a deal: France would occupy Morocco as a “protector-
ate” while ceding territory in the French Congo to Germany. Under French
pressure and facing rebellion from his own citizens, the sultan of Morocco
signed the Treaty of Fez in March 1912, making Morocco a protectorate of
France.
As German aggression mounted, French politicians began preparing for
what seemed an inevitable war with Germany. Against Germany’s stand-
ing army of 850,000 men, France’s army had fewer than 500,000 men.
Thus, in 1913, the French legislature extended the obligatory military ser-
vice from two years to three, giving the French an additional 250,000 men.
The French left violently opposed this law, and socialist Jean Jaurès claimed
that the growing militarism of Europe was immensely destructive. He was
right. But even with these dire predictions, nobody was prepared for what
was to come with World War I.
Note
1 Émile Zola, “J’Accuse. . .!” L’Aurore, January 13, 1898.

Gluck, Mary. Popular Bohemia: Modernism and Urban Culture in 19th Century
Paris. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.
Harris, Ruth. Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion and the Scandal of the Century. New York:
Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books, 2010.
Jennings, Eric. Imperial Heights. Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French
Indochina. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011.
Roberts, Mary-Louise. Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siècle France.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
Silverman, Debora. Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology and
Style. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989.
Velmet, Aro. Pasteur’s Empire: Bacteriology & Politics in France, Its Colonies & the
World. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020.
Weber, Eugen. France, Fin-de-Siècle. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
Belknap Press, 1986.
9 Global France at War, 1914–1919 Global France at War, 1914–1919
Introduction
In his 1916 novel Le Feu (Under Fire), Henri Barbusse described life in the
trenches of the Western Front for a group of ordinary French soldiers who
experienced World War I not as heroic combat but as alternating moments
of extreme violence and boredom, frustration and camaraderie. The novel
was an enormous success due to its realistic depictions of the front and
unromanticized vision of the war, and it won the prestigious Prix Gon-
court. The book exposed its readers to a variety of startling images, includ-
ing decaying corpses in “No Man’s Land” as well as battalions of colonial
soldiers like the tirailleurs sénégalais, described as exotic and bloodthirsty,
“made for the assault . . . another race from us.”1 Although it was not neces-
sarily understood to be a pacifist, antiwar novel upon its release, the book
was (and remains) the bestselling French novel of the Great War and was
representative of Barbusse’s postwar political commitments to pacifism and
socialist internationalism.
In the summer of 1914, Barbusse, like nearly everyone else in France, had
no inkling of the toll that the war would take on France, on its overseas
empire, or on the world as a whole. Indeed, the magnitude and nature of
the casualties that soldiers sustained signaled a dramatic transformation in
warfare. The death toll of the Great War was the highest Europe had ever
seen, resulting in 9–10 million deaths. The vast majority of those killed were
soldiers, and France suffered proportionately more casualties than did any
other major power; 16 percent (1.3 million) of its mobilized men were killed
and another 3.5 million French soldiers were injured, rendering an entire
generation of young men nearly extinct. Yet the war affected far more than
just the soldiers on the front lines.
The Great War is often described as a total war, in that it mobilized the
entirety of the population and resources of France and its empire. The Ger-
man army occupied around 10 percent of the country, and French civilians
who lived in the occupied territory faced deprivation, violent reprisals, and
forced labor. In the rest of France, those left behind on the home front took
over the jobs of the mobilized soldiers on farms and in factories. When labor
DOI: 10.4324/b23310-9
176 Global France at War, 1914–1919
was in short supply, the French government recruited and conscripted men
from southern Europe, North Africa, and East Asia to work in factories. As
names of rivers and villages in northern France like the Marne, the Somme,
and Verdun came to represent horrific battles, France became increasingly
dependent on its civilian population and its empire to ensure its survival and
the defeat of German militarism.
World War I brought to the surface tensions that had simmered within
French and European society since the late nineteenth century, including
growing competition between nation-states, class conf licts, anxiety about
technology and its impact on humanity, and the complex relationship
between France and its overseas empire. Some, particularly the political and
intellectual elites, viewed the war as a potentially positive endeavor, as a
way to honor political alliances. For the older generation, it was a chance to
avenge the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Others talked
of “clearing the air”—a quick war that would ease the growing national-
ist tensions that had been building up since Germany’s unification and had
been playing out in the small proxy wars in the Balkans and the overseas
empire since 1900. Some conservatives also saw war as a potential means
of rejuvenating French culture, following the rise of mass culture and the
popularity of new (“degenerate”) cultural movements that rejected bour-
geois norms and valued modernity over tradition, innovation over custom.
During the nineteenth century, one could argue that the events, symbols,
and memory of the French Revolution defined the culture and politics of
France. Much the same could be said about the French relationship to the
Great War during the rest of the twentieth century. By 1914, the upheav-
als and divisions of the late nineteenth century had created a society on the
brink of social revolution. Yet for at least the first three years of the war,
much of this energy was redirected into the war effort to defeat Germany.
Some consequences were felt immediately, including the devastating loss of
an entire generation, the ravaged landscape of northern France (including
the loss of France’s industrial capacity), the massive financial debt owed to
the United States, and the palpable French anger at Germany. Other con-
sequences were felt as shockwaves over the next several decades, including
unrest in the French empire, unsettled gender norms, and the physical and
psychological toll of such inhuman violence on individual human beings
and on the collective social body.
Mobilization and the “Sacred Union”

Despite the long buildup of nationalist and diplomatic tensions in Europe,
most of the French population was shocked to find themselves suddenly
engaged in a war with Germany in August 1914. The spark that lit the
fuse for war—the assassination of the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand
by a Serbian nationalist on June 28—had initially seemed like just another
Balkan conf lict, and European diplomats appeared to be handling the crisis.
Global France at War, 1914–1919 177
While the alliance system was shifting into motion during the month of
July, the French population was riveted to a domestic drama taking place
in a courtroom in Paris: the sensational murder trial of Madame Henriette
Caillaux. The wife of a powerful French cabinet minister, Madame Cail-
laux, had shot the editor of the newspaper Le Figaro in retaliation for his
disparaging coverage of her husband’s leftist politics and amorous exploits.
The announcement of her acquittal on July 28—the same day that Austria-
Hungary declared war on Serbia, and only four days before Germany issued
an ultimatum of neutrality to France in the case of Germany’s entry into war
with Russia—eclipsed the events in central Europe. However, another brutal
assassination proved that the French were not impervious to the growing
political tensions in Europe. On July 31, 1914, a young right-wing nation-
alist shot French socialist leader Jean Jaurès in a Parisian café; just days
previously Jaurès had exhorted crowds of working-class Europeans to reject
a nationalist war and seek a more peaceful solution to the growing tensions
and discontent.
Despite Jaurès’s pleas, on August 1, Germany declared war on Russia and
bells rang out across France to announce the French mobilization for war.
Although the average French citizen was not enthusiastic about the prospect
of war, anger at German aggression followed by rumors of German atroci-
ties in neutral Belgium fueled French patriotism. Even socialists who might
have previously supported Jaurès’s pacifist ideology began to rally around
the French war effort. Frenzied preparations for war began immediately.
Railroads were requisitioned for troop transport, as millions of men were
called up for military service. Peasants, who made up 41 percent of France’s
working population, were initially hesitant to leave their farms on the eve
of the harvest. But their wives, children, and parents took on the burden of
agricultural labor, made even more difficult as farm animals and equipment
were also “conscripted” to support the war. Clergy were not exempt from
service, and most served as soldiers rather than as chaplains. Few French
citizens openly protested the war or refused to serve.
The first weeks of the war were chaotic. French military commanders,
under the leadership of General Joffre, initially organized an offensive strat-
egy based on Napoleonic war tactics and primarily sought the recovery
of French territories in Alsace-Lorraine. This plan, known as XVII, failed
for several reasons. Although Joffre knew of the German Schlieffen Plan
to invade France, he assumed the invasion would come directly from the
east through Alsace-Lorraine and that the local populations of these terri-
tories would rise up to assist the French armies. Additionally, he drastically
underestimated the challenges of the terrain in eastern France. The Ger-
man forces in these territories were superior in both guns and artillery and
sent the French army into quick retreat. The most devastating weakness of
Plan XVII, however, was the failure of French commanders to prepare for
a major German advance from the north through Belgium. On August 2,
the Belgian government rejected Germany’s ultimatum that German troops
be allowed to pass through the country uncontested. The subsequent inva-
sion and violation of Belgian neutrality on August 3 caused Great Britain
to declare war on Germany. Although Belgian troops resisted and French
forces pushed north, the German army advanced into France during the
month of August with heavy French losses.
By late August, Parisians were stunned to learn that the German army
had reached the Somme River in northern France. Many f led, fearing a rep-
etition of the 1870 siege of Paris, including the French government, which
moved to Bordeaux. In the midst of the chaos, General Joffre regrouped
and prepared for what became known as the Battle of the Marne. Several
factors worked in favor of the Allied British and French armies and pre-
vented a German advance all the way to Paris. First, German supply lines
were thinly stretched and the German heavy artillery could not keep up
with the infantry. Additionally, German soldiers were exhausted and vul-
nerable to counterattack. Between August 30 and September 5, British and
French forces withdrew south across the Marne River. Legendarily, every
motorized vehicle in Paris, including taxis, was requisitioned to carry troops
and supplies to the front. Between September 6 and 9, the Allied troops
“miraculously” sent the Germans retreating northward. However, over the
next several weeks both sides staked out positions and dug themselves in by
building trenches in an unbroken line from Switzerland to the North Sea. In
doing so, they created what became known as the Western Front, the battle
lines of which barely shifted for the next four years.
By November 1914, it was clear that the war would not be over by
Christmas, as many military leaders and politicians had initially proclaimed.
Worse, the trench lines had left a highly valuable segment of French territory
occupied by German forces. Refugees f looded south, but many hundreds
of thousands remained behind the lines while German troops requisitioned
their homes, food, and livestock. Germany also now controlled more than
50 percent of French coal, iron, and steel production capacity. In the unoc-
cupied territories, mass mobilization had also brought on a food crisis. To
feed 3 million soldiers, who included many of the country’s millers and
bakers, the army requisitioned most of France’s bread supply in addition to
the recently harvested wheat crop and basic supplies like salt. As the price
of f lour rose, many in the cities believed that greedy peasants were stock-
piling supplies, when, in reality, food was in short supply everywhere, and
peasants struggled to meet the demands of the army, reserve adequate seed
supply for the next season, and feed their families.
Yet the conditions of war and specifically the rumors of German atrocities
against Belgian civilians brought soldiers and civilians of France together
under the banner of what President Raymond Poincaré had termed the
Union sacrée (sacred union). The political and social conf licts that had
divided France for decades were overridden by the urgent necessity to unite
around the defense of the patrie (homeland) and the defeat of Germany.
Both the unity of the French nation and the goal of victory at all costs would
be tested as the conditions on both the battlefront and the home front dete-
riorated over the coming months and years.
Death and Destruction on the Western Front

During the early weeks of the war, the French army sustained severe losses.
More than 300,000 French soldiers died in the first two months of the war
alone. As the Western Front settled into trench warfare, the army needed
a constant replacement of bodies to fight a nonstop war of attrition. By
the end of 1915, France had lost nearly 2 million men, whether killed,
wounded, or missing in action. Frenchmen between the ages of 21 and 23
were already required to do three years of military service, but even after the
French army mobilized its reserves, this was not enough. The army began
conscripting younger classes of men aged 18 and 19, which meant that the
men in the trenches became increasingly younger as the war went on. In
1915, some French officials attempted to solve the manpower crisis through
the increased use of colonial troops, particularly from West Africa. At the
outbreak of war, France already had 90,000 troupes indigènes (indigenous
troops) in its ranks, but the French army began conscripting young men
from the colonies to enhance those numbers. In the end, the French recruited
(often forcibly) nearly 500,000 colonial soldiers between 1914 and 1918.
Although the trenches of the Western Front were designed to be tempo-
rary, they grew into labyrinthine underground settlements. Infantry at the
front lines were ordered “over the top,” made to climb the 6-to-8-foot dirt
trench walls, crawl through the barbed wire and mud of “No Man’s Land”
to attack—and ideally capture—the opposing army’s trench in the midst of
artillery barrages and machine gun fire. The wounded might have to wait
until dark for the stretcher-bearers to come. Those who survived to return
to their own trenches might stay a few more days on the front lines until
they were rotated back to the rear trenches to recuperate. Field hospitals
were often located close enough to the front lines that they could be hit by
artillery barrages, and ambulance drivers faced these risks daily. The damp
and cold climate of northern France made conditions worse, as the trenches
filled with mud and water for much of the year. Rats and lice infested every
corner, and soldiers faced disease, sleeplessness, and boredom. French infan-
trymen in the trenches came to be known as poilus, or “hairy ones” due to
their overgrown beards and unkempt hair.
Two major battles of 1916, the Somme, in which the French endured
200,000 casualties in only four months, and Verdun, which lasted ten
months and succeeded in almost no territorial gains for France, illustrate
both the relentlessness and brutality of trench warfare. After immediately
realizing its weaknesses against the superior German heavy artillery, the
French general staff substantially increased the French heavy-artillery equip-
ment and regiments. This became essential during the battle of Verdun,
where the barrage of artillery shells continued nonstop for months. Those
Figure 9.1 Poster promoting the 1915 “Journée du Poilu,” by Lucien Jonas, State
Library of Victoria, Australia.
who made their way across No Man’s Land at Verdun faced constant obsta-
cles of mud-filled shell craters and mutilated and unrecovered corpses. Over
the ten months of the battle, almost 80 percent of the French army passed
through Verdun, and the French army alone suffered over 350,000 casual-
ties. Yet the French, under the leadership of General Philippe Pétain, held
off the German offensive, in large part thanks to the battle of the Somme, a
British and French offensive that began in July 1916 as a means to relieve
pressure on Verdun. By the end of 1916, however, the villages around Ver-
dun had been decimated, its farmland transformed into a cratered landscape
of unmarked graves.
With artillery shells causing most of the casualties, men suffered devas-
tating and horrific wounds. Bodies were torn apart from shell explosions,
shrapnel, and modern bullets. Amputations were common, particularly at
the beginning of the war, although these were lessened by better medical
technology, including the use of blood transfusions and X-rays. Those who
sustained injuries to the head and face became known as the gueules cassées
(men with broken faces) and served as a symbolic reminder of the horrors
of the war for decades.
But not every wound came from a bullet or shell. Although outlawed by
prewar Hague Conventions, poison gas was used first by the French against
the Germans in 1915. The Germans quickly retaliated with chlorine gas at
Ypres and by 1917, the most notorious gas—mustard gas—was widely used
on both sides, most commonly sent across in artillery shells. For soldiers,
gas masks became a normal part of their uniform, and the fear of death by
asphyxiation joined the list of horrors that modern warfare had wrought.
The stresses of trench warfare—the cold and boredom, the nonstop artil-
lery barrages, the daily conditions of death and destruction—had severe
psychological consequences for millions of men. Gender norms of the pre-
war period had stressed manliness and courage—going to war was seen as
the ultimate expression of masculinity. The Great War that men encoun-
tered, however, was not a glorious, honorable confrontation with a visible
enemy, but a muddy, cold, anonymous slaughter, often seemingly devoid of
meaning. Yet these traumatic stressors were not openly discussed, or even
acknowledged. While the Anglophone world used the term “shell shock”
to describe the range of traumatic stress disorders aff licting soldiers, the
French psychological profession employed a range of diagnoses, including
“cerebral commotion.” And the goal of any treatment was to return soldiers
to the front lines.
Soldiers themselves wrote extensively about their experiences in the trenches
and on the battlefields in letters, poems, songs, prayers, and diaries. In the inter-
war period, some suggested soldiers fought not out of patriotism or hatred for
the enemy but instead out of loyalty to their comrades-in-arms. Additionally,
soldiers had a strong sense of duty to protect French territory, and specifically
their families, from German invasion, even if that did not directly translate into
blind patriotism. Although it was long assumed that a significant gulf existed
between the battlefront and the home front due to physical separation, spiritual
alienation, and government censorship of letters, historians have shown that
this divide was often quite permeable; both soldiers and their families were
deeply connected to what was happening in each other’s lives during the war.
In general, morale was higher among soldiers when letters arrived with news of
home and packages containing food and warm clothing and even better when
they received leave to visit loved ones. Although neither soldiers nor civilians
fully grasped the challenges the other was facing, the survival and well-being of
both groups depended on the other.
Total War, Occupation, and the Home Front

Civilian experiences during the war were largely dependent upon an indi-
vidual’s location, occupation, and family ties. 10 percent of the country
was cut off from the rest of France and forced to live under strict Ger-
man rules. In the occupation zone, meetings were prohibited, curfews were
imposed, and personal movement required a pass. Food became scarce, as
the Germans requisitioned anything worth eating, drinking, or harvesting.
The occupied civilian populations were also subjected to forced labor. When
these demands were not met, the Germans took hostages or deported large
groups of people as collective reprisals, some of whom were placed into
concentration camps, the first time these sorts of camps were used on Euro-
pean soil. Other civilians and prisoners of war were deported to Germany to
work in labor camps and factories, as Germany had its own labor shortage
and a lack of access to overseas colonies to help meet its demands.
From the onset of the war, the French government had mobilized anti-
German propaganda to build public support for the war. Cinema and radio
played an important role in spreading news through tightly controlled news-
reel films and radio reports. French intellectuals, writers, artists, musicians,
and religious figures also worked to mobilize support for the French cause.
The war was frequently depicted as a struggle of civilization against bar-
barism. Stories of Germans raping and pillaging in the early days of the
war grew into rumors that German soldiers chopped hands off their vic-
tims. The term boche—a slur against German soldiers meaning “wooden
head”—became common parlance. Hatred for Germans even made its way
into children’s stories and fed xenophobia in rural villages.
Well before the war, French officials had been scrambling to match Ger-
many’s industrial production and its soaring population growth. After the
declaration of war, industrial activity nearly halted, with most companies
losing nearly two-thirds of their pre-1914 workforce to the army; only
railway workers transporting troops to the front were exempt from the
mobilization order. The government moved in late 1914 to establish a war
economy, mobilizing the entirety of the civilian population and overseas
empire toward the war effort. French industrial production shifted almost
entirely to arms production, and France became the chief arms supplier for
the Allies. By 1918, around 17,000 French companies employed 1.7 mil-
lion people in arms manufacturing. To fund this production, however, the
French state borrowed heavily from its own citizens and from the American
government; at the end of the war, France owed 43.5 billion francs to the
United States.
When the military situation stabilized in 1915, the government passed the
Dalbiez Law, allowing factory owners to recall their essential workers who
had been mobilized to the front. A total of 500,000 workers returned to the
factories, but this was not enough to meet demand. The government author-
ized the recruitment of foreign labor from southern Europe and French
colonies, as well as the recruitment of women. This was one of the most
important social consequences of the war; through their industrial employ-
ment, French women gained access to jobs, salaries, and freedoms most
had never had before the war. This was as much a symbolic as a material
transformation as women’s employment only rose from 35 to 40 percent
during the war.
With the mounting casualty and death tolls, the war affected nearly every-
one personally. The war created 600,000 widows and somewhere between
700,000 and 1.2 million orphans, who were eventually appointed pupilles
de la nation (wards of the French nation), as a means to acknowledge their
centrality in the collective memory of the war.
The Empire at War

France drew extensively on its empire to support the Allied war effort.
Although Algeria was not directly engaged as a battlefront, it contributed
enormous resources and manpower at great expense to the local population.
Algerian food exports were sold to the French army well below market prices
during the four years of the war, and Algerians faced famine conditions in
1917 due to the lack of labor power. Worse yet, a drought hit exactly when
food requisitions took the heaviest toll. Although the economic contribu-
tion to the war was smaller in French West Africa, colonial administrators,
industrialists, and even merchants sought to exploit and develop the local
economy with less oversight from the metropole.
The French, along with the British, also took the opportunity to expand
their empire’s boundaries, turning a European conf lict into a global war.
Combined British and French forces, largely manned by African soldiers,
attacked German colonies in Africa, capturing Togo, German East Africa,
and Cameroon. In the Middle East, a small number of elite metropolitan
French forces, several European colonial regiments from Algeria and Tuni-
sia, and several regiments of West African tirailleurs sénégalais participated
in the disastrous Allied Gallipoli campaign in 1915, with a loss of around
10,000 soldiers. Although the British are well known for their wartime
machinations in the dissolving Ottoman Empire, the French also sought
to mark out their own interests and ambitions in the region. Through the
Figure 9.2 Photograph of tirailleurs sénégalais at Douaumont from L’Illustration,

no. 3906, 12 January 1918, Wikimedia Commons.
Sykes-Picot Agreement, Britain planned to claim control of Mesopotamia

while France aimed to secure control of coastal areas of what would become
Syria and Lebanon in the eventuality of an Allied victory.
The most well-known mobilization of the colonies, however, was in
France’s use of colonial soldiers in its army. Even before World War I began,
French colonial military leaders had argued that France could overcome its
population deficit compared to Germany by recruiting a large military force
in its West African territories. This argument both presumed there were a
substantial number of West Africans eager to fight in the French army and
depended on racist conceptions of sub-Saharan Africans as courageous war-
riors. Those who promoted the “primitive,” or “savage” warrior capacity
of the tirailleurs sénégalais advocated that they should be sent to the front
lines as shock troops. Detractors, however, were concerned about African
troops surviving the cold climate, spreading tropical diseases, or coming
into direct contact with white French women.
Those West African regiments that were sent to the front lines in France
sustained significant losses, as they were primarily used as assault troops in
infantry battalions; of the 140,000 West African troops recruited to serve on
the Western Front approximately 31,000 died in combat. With obligatory
military service instituted in Algeria in 1912, France recruited more than
250,000 troops in North Africa during the war and brought 150,000 Alge-
rians to serve in Europe. These soldiers, known as zouaves, were often well
integrated into French regiments, in contrast to the West African troops.
Another 60,000 Moroccans and 40,000 men from Indochina and Madagas-
car also served, typically in auxiliary units.
World War I was the first time that many metropolitan French citizens
had direct contact with non-white subjects of the French empire, whether
they came as soldiers fighting on the front or conscripted labor. One major
site of encounter was the coastal Mediterranean town of Fréjus, where the
colonial army garrisoned African troops during the winter months, since
they were thought to suffer greatly from the northern cold. In Fréjus, as else-
where in France, one of the great fears in bringing hundreds of thousands
of colonial soldiers and laborers to France was the risk of sexual relation-
ships between them and white French women, especially given the destabi-
lized gender norms resulting from the war. In reality, the relationships that
formed between colonial soldiers and French women were complex, ranging
from soldiers’ visits to prostitutes to friendships with nurses to romantic
relationships (in some cases with a promise of marriage that could or would
not be fulfilled) to engagements and even marriage. French officials and cen-
sors fixated on the volume of correspondence they read between colonial
soldiers and French women though there was little they could do about it.
More significant interactions between French civilians and colonized
peoples occurred in the industrial factories, where recruited colonial labor
replaced French men who had been mobilized. Several hundred thousand
foreign workers were brought to work in France, the majority of whom
came from southern Europe, particularly Spain (some 330,000) along with
80,000 Algerians, 50,000 Indochinese, 37,000 Chinese, 35,000 Moroccans,
18,000 Tunisians, and 5,000 Malagasy. As with soldiers, much of this labor
was recruited through conscription. In late 1915, for example, the govern-
ment attempted to recruit 25,000–30,000 Algerian laborers to work in
French factories, but only 5,000 volunteered. The government then decreed
that labor could be recruited through military conscription. Some colonized
peoples resisted these orders, leading to revolts in Indochina and Algeria;
15,000 soldiers were sent to repress an insurrection in Kabylia with brutal
tactics, including razzias, summary executions, and bombings.
Before colonial workers even arrived on French soil, racial stereotypes
about their laziness, lack of intelligence, or physical weakness preceded
them, and many employers objected to the government’s plans. Colonial
laborers were placed in the least desirable jobs and paid much less than
their French counterparts. The government also more directly controlled the
time and movements of colonial workers than they did for other European
migrants. French officials and business owners typically refused to invest
in new housing, so temporary colonial and Chinese workers lived in old
military barracks or provisional housing in former factories. Part of the rea-
soning for their enforced isolation was to prevent the “contamination” of
European laborers, particularly women who had joined the industrial work-
force en masse. These arrangements also kept colonial workers separated
from labor unions and socialist ideologies that were seen as dangerous to
the smooth functioning of the war effort and the colonial system.
Labor unions also initially opposed the importation of foreign labor, sug-
gesting that colonial workers would depress wages and take the jobs of
French workers and veterans. This widely held fear led to the eruption of
racial violence in the summer of 1917 when white French soldiers on leave
and civilians in Paris and several other cities attacked colonial laborers,
primarily North Africans. The patterns of violence suggested that soldiers
believed the French government was recruiting colonial labor in order to
send more French men to the front. While these tensions were hardly new,
or benign, the racial conf licts of 1917 demonstrated a growing crisis of
confidence in the government and the emergence of organized working-class
resistance against the war.
1917: The Turning Point

1917 was a year of great turmoil for the French, both on the battlefront
and on the home front. Although the United States joined the Allies in
April 1917 as an “associated power,” the new Bolshevik government in
Russia announced its intention to seek peace with Germany following the
overthrow of the tsarist regime in the 1917 revolutions. The Russians were
not the only ones exhausted by the war. The Western Front remained a stale-
mate and the French offensive along the Chemin des Dames—the French
military’s final attempt to pierce through the German lines—was an utter
failure. The infantry attack on April 16 was particularly deadly, with the
tirailleurs sénégalais bearing the brunt of the assault (6,300 of the 10,000
troops who participated became casualties on the first day). One month
later, General Nivelle, who had vociferously advocated for the offensive,
was replaced by General Pétain, the “vainquer of Verdun,” but only after
the French had lost nearly 150,000 men without any advance through Ger-
man lines.
In the wake of this disaster, a series of mutinies spread throughout
the French army. Only a small fraction of the French forces participated
(the total number is estimated at between 25,000 and 30,000); however,
the refusal to take up positions on the front lines illustrated the frustra-
tions of soldiers with the conditions of warfare. Most soldiers sought spe-
cific improvements, especially access to leave. Some also specified that they
“don’t want the blacks in Paris and in other regions mistreating our wives,”
illustrating the growing racial tensions over colonial labor and strikes on the
home front.2 Most, however, only sought “peace.” Colonial troops resisted
as well, including 200 Senegalese tirailleurs who refused to retake a position
in the Chemin des Dames sector in August 1917. While some in the mili-
tary high command advocated harsh punishment of mutineers, especially
colonial troops, General Pétain took a different approach. He improved the
quality of food, liberalized the leave policy, and executed only 47 mutineers.
The larger struggle, though, was revitalizing the morale of the military and
the French national community.
Civilians also began protesting the conditions of the war in 1917. While
pacifists were a minority throughout the war, they became more vocal as
the seemingly endless war progressed. French sections of organizations
like the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom brought
together French pacifists and feminists. These activists claimed that
although women did not have the right to intervene as active citizens, they
had a special duty as mothers to the nation’s current and future soldiers
to reject war and seek peace. In 1916, the Ligue des droits de l’homme
(League of the Rights of Man) sought to reconcile pacifism and patriot-
ism; although most members still wanted to defeat Prussian militarism, a
minority wanted immediate negotiations to end the war. French intellectu-
als were also torn between patriotism and desire to end the deadly war.
Barbusse’s 1916 novel, Le Feu, for instance, depicted socialist internation-
alism as the means to achieve peace.
Not coincidentally, worker unrest was mounting in the spring of 1917.
A wave of strikes broke out across the country that coincided with the muti-
nies in the armed forces. Although French labor unions had agreed in 1914
not to go on strike during the war, conditions for French workers had dete-
riorated as the economy worsened and inf lation priced basic commodities
out of their reach. Thanks to the support of the empire and the civilians who
kept agriculture going in extreme conditions, most citizens of metropolitan
France never experienced the conditions of extreme hunger that affected
Germany or Russia, especially during the winter of 1916–1917. Yet the gov-
ernment instituted unpopular rationing on food that most directly affected
those in the cities.
Unexpectedly, the French interior minister estimated that 80,000 of the
100,000 workers on strike in Paris in May and June of 1917 were women.
The strikes began in the fashion industry among female garment workers
and soon spread to the Parisian metallurgy and munitions factories. These
women demanded better pay and time off to meet the demands of war-
time, including the necessity to find food. Although women-led strikes have
long been described as “apolitical,” the 1917 strikes illustrated the immense
impact the war had on the civilian population and the growing resistance
to the “union sacrée.” By the year’s end, the Socialist Party and the labor
unions mobilized this energy to push for an end to the war.
With morale collapsing and the Russian departure from the war immi-
nent, the French government regrouped. The collapse of Paul Painlevé’s
scandal-ridden government led President Poincaré to appoint the radical
senator Georges Clemenceau as prime minister (who then appointed him-
self minister of war as well). Clemenceau had a reputation for being harsh
on those who criticized him or the war effort, but he managed to rally the
national community heading into the final year of the war. He visited the
troops at the front and made concessions to French labor, including wage
increases. But he also brooked no dissent, even arresting his political rival
Joseph Caillaux on the charge of treason for advocating a negotiated end
to the war.
In one of the greatest tragedies of the war, a global inf luenza epidemic
spread rapidly through France in multiple waves beginning in April 1918; it
killed between 125,000 and 250,000 French civilians and 30,000 soldiers,
hitting those aged 20–40 the hardest. Yet throughout 1918 the French mili-
tary pressed on, with the support of the United States and the Allied war
effort, making a series of counteroffensives in the summer and fall that led
to the German request for an armistice. On November 11, 1918, the Great
War officially ended.
Social and Political Consequences in Metropole and Empire

Most French soldiers were not immediately demobilized at the end of the
war; until Germany officially accepted the terms of surrender—to be negoti-
ated in Paris in 1919—2 million soldiers remained in uniform in case war
resumed. When they did begin making their way home, the places they
returned to were drastically transformed. Although France had technically
won the war, its veterans returned largely disillusioned. Nearly everyone in
French society had been touched by the war and many struggled to come to
terms with its consequences.
Thus began an era of collective mourning of the war dead that contin-
ued throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Memorials, ranging from cemeter-
ies, ossuaries, battlefield monuments, or local monuments, inscribed the
names of those who had fought and died for France. The government estab-
lished November 11 as a day of remembrance and public holiday. On that
day in 1920, the French ceremonially placed the remains of an unknown
poilu from Verdun under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. The funeral cortège
included several mutilés de guerre (wounded veterans) and an “unknown”
family comprised of a widow who had lost her husband, a mother and
father who had lost their son, and a war orphan who had lost his father.
This was intended to officially recognize the sacrifices of the nation and cre-
ate a narrative of triumph out of suffering.
Although most soldiers had stayed connected to the home front through
letters and short leaves, many veterans increasingly came to view civilians as
disconnected from the horrors of the battlefront and indifferent to their suf-
fering. The unacknowledged psychological toll of the war only widened this
gulf, particularly as men returned home to find women more independent,
often working in what had previously been viewed as men’s jobs. Wounded
veterans faced even greater challenges as many had lost arms or legs and
could no longer work in their previous professions. Significantly, doctors,
inventors, artists, and scientists came together to create improvised techno-
logical solutions to improve the lives of disabled French veterans, integrate
them back into work, and hopefully reduce the psychological damage of
their aff lictions. This endeavor led to new prosthetic devices, particularly
“mechanical arms” with “articulated hands,” which permitted a disabled
man to “execute, in public, all of the normal practices of life . . . drinking
out of a glass, removing his hat, playing the violin, as well as perform-
ing certain forms of vocational work: drilling wood, planing, etc.”3 For the
gueules cassées, plastic surgeons and artists such as the American sculptor
Anna Coleman Ladd developed life-like prosthetic face masks that disfig-
ured men could wear, which sought to match as closely as possible the sol-
dier’s uninjured face. French veterans, including the gueules cassées, also
founded numerous organizations to lobby the government for support and
played an active role in commemorating the war throughout the twentieth
century.
Colonial veterans and their families, however, had a tremendously differ-
ent postwar experience. Although a March 1919 law declared that pensions
for wounded North African veterans would be equal regardless of race,
religion, or political status, this sense of equality did not extend across the
empire or to other kinds of rights. Part of the motivation for colonial troops
to join the French war effort initially was the suggestion that they might
access the full rights of French citizenship. A proposal in the Chamber of
Deputies in 1915 had stated that it was
an obligation for France to seek to compensate the indigènes who fight

for her, or who, simply but loyally have fulfilled their military duty. The
highest, noblest recognition that France can perceive is to offer what she
considers most precious, that is to say, French nationality.4
However, negotiations during the war over who could access French citizen-
ship tended to focus on polygamy and Muslim personal status. In the end,
the 1919 Jonnart Law offered only a slight reform to the status quo and did
not offer blanket access to French citizenship for the colonial soldiers who
had fought for France. Even in Senegal where Blaise Diagne, the first Black
African to serve in the French National Assembly, had won certain conces-
sions for veterans, Muslim veterans could only achieve French citizenship if
they renounced their Muslim personal status.
Colonial and Chinese laborers were additionally expected to return home
after the war. In Paris and Marseille, police raids rounded up migrant labor-
ers to forcibly repatriate them. Throughout the interwar period employ-
ers typically sought laborers from Europe rather than the colonies, while
migrant laborers from North Africa were used seasonally and in the most
demanding jobs. Yet, to the consternation of French leaders, the experience
of working in France had introduced colonial workers to working-class cul-
ture, including strikes, labor unions, and political socialism. This resulted in
the politicization of colonized peoples in the wake of the war, particularly
the growth of leftist nationalist movements such as the Etoile nord-africain
(North African Star) in France and Algeria.
The Treaty of Versailles: A Complicated Peace
In January 1919, delegations from across the world arrived in Paris for
the peace conference that culminated in the Treaty of Versailles. The war
had led to the dissolution of four empires—the Russian, Austro-Hungarian,
the Ottoman, and the German empires—and the leaders of France, Britain,
Italy, and the United States (“the Big Four”) gathered to negotiate the condi-
tions for peace and the redistribution of land and power in the territories of
these former empires. Although Russia had entered the war as an Entente
power, the Allied powers considered the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 as
severely damaging to the war effort, and Soviet communism became a new
ideological adversary. Several countries now had troops fighting against the
Soviets in the ongoing Russian civil war. Consequently, the Russians were
not invited to participate in the peace conference. Neither were the Ger-
mans, who were forced to accept the punitive terms of the treaty.
More than simply establishing the terms of peace, the French were par-
ticularly intent on punishing Germany for the devastation wrought upon
France and its population. France sought to weaken Germany militarily
and politically, and President Georges Clemenceau demanded the return of
Alsace and Lorraine as well as financial reparations from Germany. Brit-
ish prime minister David Lloyd George agreed with some of Clemenceau’s
arguments, including that Germany pay some occupation costs to Belgium
and France and allow an Allied occupation force in the resource-rich Rhine-
land and Saar basin; however, the British wanted to re-establish trading
ties with Germany and resisted many of France’s attempts to impose harsh
economic penalties. The strongest resistance to French conditions, how-
ever, came from the Americans. U.S. president Woodrow Wilson arrived
in Paris with an agenda he had expounded in his January 1918 “Fourteen
Points” address to Congress. These included the establishment of a League
of Nations to settle diplomatic disputes, and the creation of independent
nation-states in central and eastern Europe under the principle of self-deter-
mination. His vision of a “just peace” forced the French to back off from
their most aggressive demands in the treaty. Even so, the terms were harsh
and understood by the German people as a great humiliation. In what came
to be known as the “war guilt clause,” Germany was forced to accept full
responsibility for the war and the financial reparations were overwhelming.
Germany also lost significant territory in Europe and its overseas colonies
and was forced to demilitarize.
Wilson’s vision of self-determination for independent nation-states in
Europe had widespread support and thus new states like Czechoslovakia,
Austria, Hungary, and Poland were created from the wreckage of the for-
mer German, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian empires. Little consideration,
however, was given to the potential difficulties these weak states would
face. Colonized subjects all over the world heard Wilson’s call for self-
determination and were inspired by the idea that they too could choose their
own political destinies. With anti-imperialist sentiment on the rise, colo-
nial nationalists sent delegations to Paris to petition world leaders for the
opportunity to choose their own path. They were, unsurprisingly, soundly
rejected. The French infamously prevented future Vietnamese nationalist
Ho Chi Minh from submitting a petition on human rights to the peace con-
ference, leading him to turn toward the Soviet Union. Wilson later noted
that he had not intended the principle of self-determination to apply to long-
standing British and French colonies.
Although the British and the French had both occupied Germany’s for-
mer colonies in Africa as well as substantial territories within the former
Ottoman empire during the war, Lloyd George conceded to Wilson’s desire
to govern these territories under the League of Nations through the crea-
tion of a mandate system. In theory, the mandate system was a means to
enable the populations of these territories to achieve political independence
while under the trusteeship of Britain and France although this was merely
a smoke screen that enabled the British and the French to gain political and
economic control there. France gained control over territory in Cameroon
and Togoland in Africa, as well as over Syria and Lebanon in the Middle
East. No colonial territories from either the French or British empires gained
independence at the conclusion of the Great War, and those who signaled
aspirations for independence were brutally repressed. The French had now
come to believe that their empire was a necessity for survival in times of
global war and peace.
Notes
1 Henri Barbusse, Le Feu: Journal d’une escouade (Paris: Flammarion, 1917), 52.
2 Cited in Leonard V. Smith, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, and Annette Becker,
France and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003), 124.
3 Roxanne Panchasi, “Reconstructions: Prosthetics and the Male Body in Post
WWI France,” Differences 7, no. 3 (1995), 123.
4 Cited in Richard Fogarty, Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the
French Army, 1914–1918 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2008), 230.

Connolly, James E. The Experience of Occupation in the Nord, 1914–1918. Living
With the Enemy in First World War France. Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2018.
Fogarty, Richard. Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army,
1914–1918. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.
Grayzel, Susan R. and Tammy M. Proctor, eds. Gender and the Great War. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Hanna, Martha. Your Death Would Be Mine. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2006.
Jankowski, Paul. Verdun: The Longest Battle of the Great War. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2014.
Smith, Leonard V., Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, and Annette Becker. France and the
Great War, 1914–1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Stovall, Tyler. Paris and the Spirit of 1919: Consumer Struggles, Transnationalism,
and Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
10 Illusions of Peace, 1920–1939 Illusions of Peace, 1920–1939
Introduction
In the early 1930s, Jane and Paulette Nardal, sisters from Martinique, hosted
a salon in Paris for the growing network of Antillean, African, and African-
American writers, artists, and intellectuals who were drawn to France’s “colo-
nial metropolis” in the aftermath of World War I.1 Through their writings,
their anti-colonial and anti-fascist political activism, and their salon, the
Nardals became key figures in the development of an intellectual movement
of the interwar period known as négritude. This movement sought to both
acknowledge the historical and political inequalities of racism and affirm the
values of Black civilization and culture. It is primarily associated with three
men—Aimé Césaire, from Martinique, Léon Gontran Damas, from Guiana,
and Léopold Sédar Senghor, from Senegal—who had all come to Paris in the
1920s to study. American writers and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance,
such as Claude McKay and Langston Hughes, also exchanged ideas in the
Nardals’ salon. Despite the immense tragedy of World War I, including the
human and material toll that France extracted from its colonies, these writers
and artists found a ripe intellectual atmosphere in Paris to reconsider existing
hierarchies, political systems, and social relationships, even if the solutions
often remained frustratingly out of reach for many.
In the aftermath of the Great War, France seemingly had come out on
top. When the Germans signed the peace settlement at the Palace of Ver-
sailles on June 28, 1919, many in France believed that the Allied powers had
destroyed Prussian militarism. The settlement, and specifically the creation
of League of Nations mandates, enabled France to expand its empire in
Africa and the Middle East. France had borne the brunt of the war’s damage
to its farms and industry along the Western Front and was deeply in debt
to the United States. Yet economic recovery in the 1920s seemed to signal
better times ahead.
Those who survived World War I faced numerous challenges in the post-
war period. Working-class men—the majority of the armed forces during
the war—sought better working conditions. They forcefully challenged con-
servative governments, especially with the specter of the Russian Revolution
DOI: 10.4324/b23310-10
194 Illusions of Peace, 1920–1939
Map 10.1 Map of the French Empire after 1914.
and global communism in the wings. From this momentum, the French Com-
munist Party formed in December 1920, splitting from the French Socialist
Party (SFIO) in the wake of the communist Third International. The mod-
ernization of industry demanded a larger industrial workforce, and many of
these workers were immigrants from Europe and the French empire, setting
off what would become a permanent shift in the ethnic profile of the French
population. The war had convinced the French of the value and necessity of
strengthening ties with its overseas empire. By the late 1930s, French impe-
rial power was at its zenith. However, those in the colonies were increas-
ingly convinced that France was not looking out for their best interests.
Communism, in particular, inspired new forms of anti-colonial agitation
that would challenge the French to promote economic development and
grant political rights to its imperial subjects or lose their allegiance entirely.
One of the most significant, lingering effects of the war could be felt in
shifting gender roles. While women sought to prolong their expanded role
in the workplace and public life, their new independence shocked conserv-
atives, who stressed the necessity for women to return to the home and
rebuild the French population. However, many women in post-World War I
France did not have the option to become wives and mothers since millions
of men were lost to the war. These public debates about women’s role in
society were some of the most conspicuous ways that French society sought
Illusions of Peace, 1920–1939 195
to work through, albeit unsuccessfully, the social and cultural anxieties that
the war had unearthed.
As politics grew more radical across Europe by the early 1930s, France
experienced the growth of the far right and rising antisemitism. Economic
depression further polarized the right and left, and external political crises,
especially the expanding power of fascism, mobilized citizens to action. The
leftist coalition Popular Front government, which came to power in 1936,
attempted to enact reforms to democratize France and its empire. However,
growing pressure from domestic political and economic crises as well as the
impact of the Spanish Civil War led to its collapse. Meanwhile, German
expansionism in the late 1930s once again forced France to mobilize for war.
The Search for Domestic Stability

For most French people, the immediate postwar period was a fusion of
mourning and reconstruction. Official ceremonies and monuments of com-
memoration shaped the national narrative about the sacrifices of those who
fought and died for France, but individuals, families, and communities also
organized their own rituals and expressions of grief. Legislation in 1920
allowed families to exhume and repatriate the remains of their dead who
had died on the battlefield. For most families, however, the remains of their
loved ones stayed in unmarked graves or in military cemeteries. While many
found solace in their religious faith, some sought traces of their deceased
loved ones in séances and psychics. Others traveled to the sites of violence,
and battlefield tourism became a thriving industry of tour guides, buses,
hotels, and restaurants around the major sites of carnage.
French veterans were the most prominent voices in the commemoration
of the war, forming associations to memorialize their sacrifices but also to
lobby the government over pensions and other perceived injustices done to
them. Thousands of veterans attempted to write about their emotional and
intellectual experiences during the war in memoirs and poetry. But these
depictions were not wholly uncontested: in 1929, French veteran Jean Nor-
ton Cru produced a study of 300 eyewitness accounts of the war published
between 1915 and 1928 and declared that the testimony was often altered
to fit a heroic narrative or to suit political or public desires. Others chan-
neled their experiences into fiction, such as the novelist Louis-Ferdinand
Céline, who won France’s highest literary prize with his 1933 semi-auto-
biographical novel Voyage au bout de la nuit (Voyage to the End of the
Night). Yet Céline broke with classic literary styles to convey the pessimism
and psychological anguish that veterans like him faced during and after the
war. Like many World War I veterans, Céline turned to the far right in the
interwar period, his writings obsessing over racial degeneration to explain
the failures of modern life.
The attempt to make meaning out of the brutal war led to the renewal
of religious fervor. Both Catholics and Protestants in France had largely
accepted the idea of the union sacrée. For the faithful, the war was under-
stood as a crusade against evil and the faithless Germans, who could be
defeated by the Christian French. Yet the war also created greater ecumeni-
cal ties between faiths: religious minorities at the front, Protestant and Jew-
ish soldiers were often consoled by Catholic chaplains. The fraternity that
developed helped bridge many of the personal and theological divides that
had long characterized France’s religious politics. Churches commemorated
the war dead through special religious services, placing plaques on the walls
of local churches, or even building stained-glass windows of remembrance.
Although the basilica of Sacré-Coeur in Montmartre was built as “penance”
for the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, it was only consecrated
in October of 1919, thus taking on meaning for many Catholics, who saw
a spiritual and mythic significance in the Great War, which had produced a
French victory and the return of Alsace-Lorraine.
Political Catholicism in France was also transformed by the war. Both
French Catholics and secular French republicans pursued the reopening of
diplomatic relations with the Vatican. French politicians participated in the
canonization ceremony for Joan of Arc in Rome in May 1920, inaugurat-
ing this Second ralliement, and diplomatic relations between France and
the Vatican were reestablished in 1921. Conservative Catholicism remained
especially powerful as evidenced by the strength of the Action française, the
nationalist movement that aligned with groups like royalist Catholics, who
violently opposed the French republic. Yet by the mid-1920s this political
nationalism worried the Vatican. In an effort to regain control of French
Catholic loyalties, the Vatican condemned the movement.
Despite the concentration of Catholic elites within far-right political move-
ments in the 1920s, a significant number of French Catholics were engaged
with left-leaning movements too. In particular, the religious fervor of the post-
war years was channeled into newly organized Catholic service projects and
youth movements that targeted the masses. The 1920s brought a renewal
of interest in the priesthood and in Catholic lay movements focused on the
working classes, who had historically been marginalized by the church. The
Bolshevik Revolution and the establishment of the French Communist Party
in 1920 made French Catholics aware that they had serious competition in
attracting the attention of the working classes to their message.
To this end, a Belgian priest started the Jeunesse ouvrière chrétienne
(Young Christian Workers, or JOC) in 1924 and began operating in France
in 1926. It turned young working-class Catholics into missionaries to their
own class. Offshoot organizations targeted Christian students and rural
workers, all of whom were brought into an umbrella organization called
the Action catholique spécialisée (Specialized Catholic Action) in the early
1930s. Catholic and Protestant scouting movements gained support from
notable figures, like the legendary resident-general of Morocco Marshal
Hubert Lyautey. French Protestants and Jews saw a similar growth of activ-
ism in the interwar period, notably within internationalist youth movements.
In the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair, World War I became an oppor-
tunity for French and Algerian Jews to demonstrate their patriotism and
loyalty to the republic. They became a more visible presence after the
war, particularly as more Jewish immigrants arrived from eastern Europe.
Although Muslims were typically excluded from the religious dimensions of
the union sacrée, Muslim colonial soldiers and laborers had also become a
more visible religious minority. By the mid-1930s, there were over 100,000
Muslims and 260,000 Jews living in France. Institutions such as the Service
des affaires indigènes nord-africaines (SAINA), which provided social assis-
tance to North African workers, and the Grand Mosque of Paris, which
was completed in 1926, served as spaces ostensibly to support and honor
the sacrifices of France’s Muslim population during the war. But they were
also a means for the French government to surveil those whose bodies and
religious practices were considered foreign to the republican secular tradi-
tions of France.
Political Revolutions at Home and Abroad in the 1920s

During the interwar period, neither revolutionary leftists nor right-wing
fascists would take full control in France, yet both would play a key role
in French politics. French labor activists watched the revolutionary insur-
rections in Russia as well as those in Germany, Scotland, and the British
Empire with great interest, seeking to benefit from this leftist momentum.
The largest French labor union, the CGT, tripled its membership from
600,000 in 1914 to 1.8 million in 1920, and a new Christian labor union
called the Confédération française des travailleurs chrétiens (French Con-
federation of Christian Workers, or CFTC) formed in 1919 with around
150,000 members. In the midst of the Paris Peace Conference, workers took
to the streets, and barricades and street fighting broke out on May Day in
1919. The municipal government of the working-class Parisian suburb of
Saint-Denis even declared that it was re-forming as a soviet workers’ regime.
French leaders responded with some concessions, including the institution
of the eight-hour workday and six-day workweek, although many work-
places ignored that law. Most workers at this time were not employed in
large industrial factories but by small businesses, which tended to be more
conservative. While strikes and demonstrations continued into 1920, politi-
cal divisions challenged worker unity.
Despite bitter internal divisions between reformers and revolutionaries,
the SFIO steadily gained members and then significant power in the Novem-
ber 1919 local elections, particularly in Paris’s industrial suburbs. However,
the left soon divided into three distinct camps. A small minority supported
a nationalist vision of France and its effort to defeat German militarism dur-
ing World War I, while a centrist parliamentary camp sought to reconstruct
the Socialist International. A third minority position grew steadily, particu-
larly among colonial subjects and labor union members, and moved toward
a more revolutionary position in line with the Soviet Third International
(Soviet Comintern). The Bolsheviks had formed this organization in Mos-
cow in March 1919, breaking with the Second International socialist par-
ties, which they argued had betrayed workers by supporting the war effort.
At the December 1920 SFIO congress, the vast majority voted to change the
party’s name to the Parti communiste français (French Communist Party, or
PCF). Those who were opposed founded a new socialist party with the old
name, the SFIO. A similar split occurred within the labor unions, with the
revolutionary wing leaving the CGT to create a new union called the CGTU.
During the early 1920s, the PCF functioned much like the former SFIO,
with little top-down interference from Moscow—to the frustration of the
Soviet Comintern. However, by 1924, the Soviets had managed to impose
a “bolshevization” of the party, ousting those who were seen as insuffi-
ciently revolutionary or working against the ideological line of the Comin-
tern, including Trotskyists, syndicalists, Freemasons, and non-revolutionary
socialists. This resulted in a significant decline in the PCF’s membership,
many of whom returned to the SFIO. Since the PCF refused to participate
in electoral alliances with the SFIO or other leftist parties, the communists
found themselves competing actively for the allegiance of industrial work-
ers, rural union members, and newly engaged colonized peoples.
Meanwhile, conservatives tried to channel the forces of nationalism and
anti-communism to strengthen their own political positions. The labor
strikes following the war galvanized conservatives along with a fear of the
spread of the Russian and German revolutions westward. Additionally,
calls for women’s suffrage were growing louder in France, as women in
Britain, Germany, the Soviet Union, the Netherlands, and Belgium gained
voting rights in recognition of their contribution to the war effort. Despite
the Chamber of Deputies’ overwhelming support for a bill to grant French
women suffrage in the spring of 1919, terrified conservatives managed to
defeat it. They then created a new broad-based right-wing coalition called
the National Bloc, which triumphed in the November 1919 legislative elec-
tions, ushering in the most conservative legislature in France since 1871.
The National Bloc was known for its hardline stance on Germany’s war
reparations, as they sought to repay the French debt to the United States and
thoroughly punish the Germans.
This conservative coalition, under the new leadership of Prime Minister
Raymond Poincaré, a socialist-turned-conservative, ordered French troops
to invade and occupy the German industrial Ruhr valley in 1923. Under
the Treaty of Versailles, Germany’s reparations payments had been set at
132 billion marks, with annual payments of 2 billion marks. In the after-
math of the war, the German economy was tremendously unstable and
the government was unable to pay reparations. The Ruhr invasion did not
improve the situation. Instead, it exacerbated Germany’s financial crisis and
led to hyperinf lation, which wiped out the savings of the German middle
class, led to mass unemployment, and further destabilized the parliamentary
Weimar government. The French economy was also in trouble, but politi-
cians could not agree on a financial plan to address it. The French sought
a one-billion-dollar loan from bankers in the United States, who refused to
approve the loan until reparations were renegotiated by an international
commission led by American banker Charles Dawes. With a new payment
plan developed for Germany, reparations payments began again in 1925.
The crises around the Ruhr invasion revealed several weaknesses in the
Treaty of Versailles, including the harsh reparations clauses and the lack of
enforcement measures. With a greatly weakened National Bloc, a leftwing
coalition of socialists and radicals known as the Cartel des gauches won a
small majority of legislative seats in 1924, and the radical Édouard Her-
riot became prime minister. He accepted the Dawes Plan, withdrew troops
from the Ruhr, and signed the Locarno Pact with Germany, under which
the two countries agreed to respect each other’s borders and work toward
Germany’s admission into the League of Nations. These pacifist impulses
would not last, however.
Historians have long debated whether interwar France experienced a
comparable fascist movement to that of Mussolini’s Italy or Nazism in Ger-
many. What is clear, however, is that the far right in France emerged as
a visible and powerful political movement through the 1920s. It built on
organizations and ideologies in existence long before World War I, particu-
larly the Action française, monarchism, antisemitism, and nationalism. The
rise of the Cartel des gauches in 1924 led to the emergence of new far-
right political organizations, dissatisfied with older groups that they found
insufficiently radical and militant. Inspired by Mussolini’s Black Shirts, the
far-right paramilitary leagues of mid-1920s France wore military-style uni-
forms and used street violence to show their opposition to their political
enemies, notably socialists and communists. While these militants were typi-
cally young men and veterans attracted to the violence and ultra-masculine
rhetoric that condemned postwar progressivism, they were often funded by
wealthy conservative businessmen who sought to control the spread of com-
munism inside France. For instance, Pierre Taittinger, founder of the cham-
pagne house, also funded a far-right league called the Jeunesses patriotes
(Patriotic Youth), while perfume manufacturer René Coty founded a move-
ment called the Faisceau. However, the most well-known French far-right
movement was the veteran’s organization, Croix de Feu (Cross of Fire),
founded in 1927 and led by Colonel François de la Rocque.
The Gender Revolution and Its Consequences

Despite playing a crucial role in the war effort, women were generally
expected to return to the domestic sphere after 1919. However, this is not
exactly what occurred. Due to the high death and casualty rates of young
men, an abundance of single women had become independent during the
war and wanted to keep their opportunities for employment. Additionally,
the war had placed enormous strain on many marriages. Divorce had been
relatively rare before the war, but it became more common afterward,
particularly in Paris, and for the first time, men were more likely than
women to initiate divorce proceedings. Many in the popular press blamed
the crisis on unfaithful wives during the war (17 percent of all divorce peti-
tions filed after the war listed female infidelity as the cause) or on those
“independent” women who were indifferent to their family and patriotic
obligations.
Upon their return from war, men found that social and cultural norms
had unexpectedly shifted. The emasculating conditions of trench warfare
combined with the fact that women had taken over men’s roles led to what
scholars describe as a “crisis of masculinity.” Even during the war, liter-
ary depictions of women juxtaposed patriotic wives, mothers, and nurses,
with “bad” women who spent money on luxury items like clothes and
food, or who had extramarital affairs while their husbands were suffering
in the trenches. The crisis of masculinity was closely linked to the conserv-
ative attempt to regulate homosexuality and other sexual “perversions.”
Lawmakers who introduced obscenity laws during this period claimed to
be protecting the “race” and defending the French family from degenerate
and “unnatural acts.” The ideal they sought was a return to “normalcy”—
heterosexual marriages in which women remained in the domestic sphere
caring for numerous children while men regained their spaces of labor and
political power.
Newspapers, novels, cartoons, and advertisements in the 1920s illus-
trate the French obsession with women’s behavior, specifically with
women who no longer behaved according to prewar notions of bour-
geois domesticity. Much of the concern was focused on fashion and
the masculinization of women’s appearance. The trend in the 1920s for
short, bobbed hair seemed to visually signal women’s co-optation of
men’s place in society. The new dress styles of fashion designers such as
Coco Chanel, which emphasized straight lines and dropped waists that
created a more “boyish” look, were often derived from the wartime
industrial necessity for women to have functional, minimalist clothing.
But Catholics and pronatalists decried the immodesty of these fashions
and their tendency to cause women to not only look—but to act—like
men.
Blaming women for France’s low birthrate had long been a conserva-
tive talking point. France’s birthrate was already well behind that of
Germany and Great Britain before the war, but the double impact of France’s
higher casualty rate combined with decreased natality during the war (in
large part because soldiers did not get leave) meant that pronatalists saw
a demographic crisis reaching epic proportions. Spurred into action, con-
servative lawmakers introduced a bill in the Chamber of Deputies in 1920
that imposed stiff penalties on any forms of propaganda that encouraged
abortion or the use of contraceptive devices. It passed overwhelmingly and
was approved by the Senate, becoming the most repressive bill of its kind
in Europe.
One consequence of this backlash against single women and the panic
about the birthrate was that French lawmakers in the interwar period
refused to accord women the right to vote. It was not until 1938 that mar-
ried women were legally allowed to obtain a passport, an identity card, and
open a bank account without the authorization of their husbands. Nev-
ertheless, it was also the fear of depopulation that led French lawmakers
in 1927 to allow French women independent nationality—henceforth, if
a French woman were to marry a foreign man, she and her children could
retain French nationality. Despite the appearance of progress, the debates
about women’s nationality were rooted in growing conservative fears about
the demographic crisis and the sense that France was overrun with foreign-
ers and colonial subjects who might marry French women, degrading them
and their potential French children with their inferior “civilization.”
Global, Cosmopolitan Paris

This moral panic over women’s behavior was amplified by the reputation
that Paris gained during the 1920s and 1930s for hedonism and debauch-
ery. Nicknamed les années folles (the crazy years), the 1920s were marked
by a desire among many younger people, radical intellectuals, anti-colonial
activists, and avant-garde artists to break with tradition and conservatism
and embrace a new revolutionary modernity. As the top destination for
artists, intellectuals, writers, and immigrants from all over the world, Paris
became a cosmopolitan melting pot of people and ideas that nurtured both
elite and mass culture. French people not only discussed new ideas in salons
and encountered jazz for the first time in nightclubs, they also encountered
new musical styles on radios and phonographs and through the cinema.
Beyond Paris, the entire social and auditory landscape of France and its
empire transformed as new technologies broadcast both news and culture.
The avant-garde art scene in Paris had shifted away from the gentrifying
neighborhood of Montmartre in the wake of World War I. The action had
moved south to the bustling Left Bank, where American expatriates such
as Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald brushed up
against artists like Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, or Tristan Tzara in the
bars and cafés of Montparnasse. Tzara, a radical Romanian poet, had come
to Paris in 1920 from Zurich where he had founded an artistic movement
called Dada in the midst of World War I. Dadaism sought to destroy tradi-
tion and hierarchy through art, and often its members would display unu-
sual, or shocking objects as artwork, such as Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 work
Fountain, a readymade urinal he signed with the pseudonym “R. Mutt.”
In the mid-1920s, Dadaists in Paris broke off and formed another artistic
movement known as Surrealism, which drew on psychoanalytic ideas to
combine and transform representations of reality into dream-like images
that ref lected emotions rather than rationality. Although the painter Sal-
vador Dalí is probably the most well-known Surrealist, the movement’s
inf luences can also be seen in the work of novelists like Louis Aragon and
André Breton, the photographer Man Ray, or the filmmaker Luis Buñuel.
American artists had an immense inf luence on interwar Paris. One of
the most popular was the African-American dancer Josephine Baker. Born
in St. Louis, Missouri, Baker performed on Broadway and then went to
Paris in 1925 with a wave of African-American expatriates, who initially
saw more opportunities and less racial discrimination in France. Baker was
widely known for her danse sauvage, in which she danced in a skirt made of
artificial bananas. Baker also performed in films throughout the 1920s and
1930s, where her reputation for her “exotic” and “primitive” dancing fit
the vogue for primitivism in both the high arts and mass culture. Parisians
f locked to nightclubs to hear jazz and blues, particularly African-American
performers like Sidney Bechet, who brought more “emotional” and “primi-
tive” musical styles to France. French composer Darius Milhaud wrote the
score for a ballet called The Creation of the World in 1922–1923, inspired
by African folk mythology and the jazz clubs of Harlem.
Between 1921 and 1926, France saw a 60 percent increase in the number
of foreigners in the country. A great many of these newcomers were not
bohemians or expat artists but rather labor migrants, students, and politi-
cal refugees, such as Italian anti-fascists or Russians f leeing the Bolsheviks.
Many of the economic migrants came from within Europe, notably Poles
and Italians; however, a significant number were also colonial subjects. Some
were former soldiers or laborers who stayed after the war; others came in
search of jobs, education, and new political communities, and most were
men. Many colonial veterans and laborers had encountered challenging cir-
cumstances upon returning home, and the postwar labor shortage in France
enabled them to return to the metropole and find work easily. The majority
of colonial workers clustered in the industrial centers and mining areas of
northern France while more than a third ended up in Paris. French police
surveillance claimed that between 10,000 and 15,000 Black men lived in
Paris in 1926, numbers that seemed to include men from sub-Saharan and
perhaps North Africa as well as African Americans and Black French citi-
zens from the Caribbean. Despite opposition from many in France, more
than 85,000 Algerians lived in France by the early 1930s, though by the
end of World War II only around 22,000 Algerians remained in the coun-
try. During the 1920s, French colonial subjects and Black citizens from the
Antilles built kin networks in France and established veterans’ organiza-
tions, fraternal orders, and mutual-aid societies, which helped improve their
communities’ conditions in the metropole.
This economic migration to France greatly transformed colonial politics,
enabling the growth of anti-colonial organizations in both the metropole
and colony. The most well-known leaders of anti-colonial and communist
movements from across the world—Ho Chi Minh, Léopold Sédar Senghor,
Figure 10.1 1926 photograph of Josephine Baker by Walery, CC0 National Portrait

Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.
and Zhou Enlai—first became politically active and interacted with each
other in interwar Paris. In 1927, American civil rights activist Roger Nash
Baldwin called Paris “the headquarters of agitation of the French colo-
nial peoples, where black, brown and yellow men can argue their case for
freedom from France as the equals of other French citizens without the
slightest fear of racial discrimination.”2 In particular, war veterans from
across the empire met in Paris and discussed issues like the “blood tax” that
they had paid to France during the war but that had seemingly not won
them improved political and economic conditions. African veterans seeking
access to French citizenship met in organizations with Antillean lawyers
and Indochinese laborers, some of which were funded by the French Com-
munist Party. The PCF was initially eager to support the communist engage-
ment of colonized peoples but was wary of the radical propositions of some
individuals such as Ho Chi Minh, who were eager to overthrow the entire
imperialist system.
In 1926, Messali Hadj, a young Algerian veteran working in Paris, came
into contact with the French Communist Party. Along with a number of
Algerian workers, he then founded the Étoile nord-africaine (North African
Star, or ENA) in Paris and became its secretary-general in 1927. The ENA
became the first North African nationalist organization and demanded
more rights for colonized peoples. Messali also made the first public call
for Algerian independence in a speech in Brussels in February 1927. The
French government dissolved the ENA in 1929, and Messali broke with
French communists who, he claimed, wished to impose their own system
without respecting the desires of the colonized. He restarted the organiza-
tion in 1933 with the primary objective of gaining Algerian independence,
which put him in direct conf lict with many Algerian political elites such
as the ulamas (Muslim scholars) and the évolués (French-educated Alge-
rians), both of whom typically sought political reform rather than out-
right independence. After the French government again banned the ENA
in 1937, Messali created the Parti du peuple algérien (Party of the Algerian
People, or PPA).
The French desire to surveil colonized peoples and control anti-colonial
unrest did not just occur in the metropole, however. Throughout the interwar
period, French leaders sought to maintain order in the colonies, alternately
trying to appease their subjects’ frustrations through moderate political and
economic reforms while suppressing subversive elements across the empire.
Modernizing the Empire: The Empire Fights Back

World War I had demonstrated to French leaders that the empire was essen-
tial to France’s economic and political security. Yet French political elites
refused to seriously consider either proposals for full integration of imperial
subjects to the rights and privileges of French citizenship or the demands of
colonized peoples for independence. Even the most well-intentioned colo-
nial reformers faced two serious problems: the metropolitan French civilian
population’s notable lack of interest in colonial affairs and a widespread
belief that France should not financially support the empire. These positions
only grew stronger as France suffered through economic depression in the
1930s. Additionally, the Soviet Union and the rise of global communism
provided ideological and material support for anti-colonial movements
across the world, including those in French Indochina and Algeria. However,
the refusal of the French Communist Party and its section in Algeria (which
later broke off into the Algerian Communist Party) to directly address the
colonial system’s inequalities created considerable strain between colonial
and European members. Additional tensions emerged between radical anti-
colonial independence movements and reformist nationalist movements,
which sought closer ties to the metropole and greater rights for colonized
peoples.
Colonial boosters had a wealth of ideas about how the empire could
be more efficiently governed and exploited. Some of these plans, such
as the expansion of national radio broadcasting networks across North
Africa, were attempts to further France’s “civilizing mission” and to
promote government-friendly political propaganda. Others sought to
invest in economic development programs that would modernize indus-
try and labor practices, making them more efficient to gain the sup-
port of local populations. In 1919, the majority of France’s colonies
were still agricultural and based on patterns of communal or family
land holding, but French authorities wanted to transform this system
so that individual landowners would farm export crops for profit and
join the imperial economy. When many of these plans failed during the
depression, French authorities used forced labor to maintain produc-
tion, particularly on infrastructure projects in West Africa in which
the government had heavily invested. Dramatic f luctuations in prices
and labor supply throughout the interwar period prevented the full
integration of the colonies into the French economy, even though they
supplied much-needed resources like rubber, minerals, and cotton to
the metropole.
Although several propositions to grant French citizenship to colonial sol-
diers fighting in World War I had failed during the war, the question of colo-
nial citizenship was taken up again in 1918. Colonial authorities wanted
to reward African colonial soldiers for their loyalty and service while also
maintaining chief ly authority in sub-Saharan Africa, settler privilege in
North Africa, and the broader structure of the colonial system. In the case
of Algeria, the Jonnart Law, which came into force on February 4, 1919,
provided a new path to French citizenship for “indigenous Muslims” who
had proved their loyalty to the French nation or who demonstrated their
proximity to “French civilization.” It also expanded the Algerian electorate
to approximately 40 percent of the male Algerian “indigenous” population
and exempted a broader swath of the population from the highly unpopular
indigénat, the native legal code. Under this reform, the French government
reasserted the two-college system for the Algerian Assembly: a “first col-
lege,” for those with French nationality, and a “second college,” for those
with local civil status. Still, French legislators refused to allow Muslim Alge-
rians representation in the French National Assembly.
Similar political reforms across the empire illustrate a shift from nine-
teenth-century colonial visions of the assimilation of colonial subjects into
French citizenship to that of a more limited association. The French concept
of “association” suggested that non-white races were so inherently different
(i.e., backward) that they could not and should not be assimilated into the
French nation. In practice, assimilation and association were not all that dif-
ferent, but for metropolitan French of the interwar period, the idea of asso-
ciation seemed less ambitious and costly. Others argued that association
was more humane, allowing for local, rural cultures to be respected rather
than be forced to abruptly “civilize” into a unifying—and foreign—French
culture. The policy of association also justified French leaders’ efforts to
make the colonies economically self-sufficient, even if they recognized the
necessity to invest, at least minimally, in economic modernization and
development of industry.
Despite these “reforms,” anti-colonial movements and uprisings expanded
across the French empire. The Rif war of the mid-1920s saw Moroccan
Berber guerrilla forces rebelling against both Spanish and French military
rule, which gave Moroccan governor-general Marshal Lyautey the oppor-
tunity to crush tribal resistance in Morocco with a full military onslaught.
During the same years, a small local uprising among the Druze in southern
Syria escalated into a national rebellion. The French had never established
a firm political hold after securing post-World War I mandates in Syria and
Lebanon. Instead, they applied Lyautey’s policies of indirect rule, which
heightened sectarian tensions and strengthened opposition to French colo-
nial rule in the midst of famine and economic disorder. In the Indochinese
territories of Annam and Tonkin, the united Indochinese Communist Party
emerged in 1930 as the most powerful anti-colonial movement in Indo-
china. And in the Antilles, the 1934 murder of André Aliker, the editor
of the Martinican communist newspaper, sparked protests over working
conditions, the fragility of French citizenship for Black populations in the
Antilles, and the colonial structures of the Martinican government.
As in the metropole, the French developed elaborate surveillance net-
works across the empire to track their imperial subjects, especially those
they believed could have subversive tendencies. In the mid-1930s, the
French created a radio listening service to monitor the content of foreign
broadcasts in North Africa, notably those coming from Germany, Italy, and
Spain. French surveillance officers also followed the movements of Muslim
pilgrims to holy sites in the Middle East, where they were concerned about
Algerian Muslims’ exposure to pan-Arab and nationalist ideas circulating in
the region. Yet Algerians and other imperial subjects subverted the surveil-
lance regimes by gathering in cafés to listen to Arabic records from Egypt
and the Levant that promoted pan-Arab themes. Local Maghrebi artists also
promoted nationalist ideas in local dialects that French surveillance agents
could not understand.
The Global Depression in France and Its Empire
The Great Depression arrived later in France than elsewhere, as the
nation’s economy was relatively sheltered from global financial markets.
However, by early 1932, the global financial crisis began to have a negative
impact on the value of the French currency and exports from both France
and its empire. Americans had raised tariffs against European goods, and
as German and Austrian banks failed in 1931, American president Her-
bert Hoover called for a moratorium on German reparations, cutting off
a major source of revenue to France. When Britain abandoned the gold
standard in September 1931, the French franc became overvalued. Indus-
trial production declined 17 percent in 1931, resulting in closed factories
and unemployment for workers throughout the country. Many employ-
ers initially laid off immigrant and women workers, but eventually even
skilled French workers lost their jobs. Though some attempted to return to
work on farms or in vineyards, these sectors suffered as well. Wheat and
wine prices fell dramatically in the early 1930s, and small shopkeepers and
artisans with thinner profit margins were among the hardest hit.
The negative effects of the depression worked against the conservative
prime minister Raymond Poincaré in the elections of 1932. Socialists and
radicals won a majority of seats in the legislature and radical Édouard
Herriot once again became prime minister. Herriot’s government def lated
the value of the franc and introduced austerity measures, cutting the
wages of white-collar government employees. This immediately hurt the
middle classes and further reduced consumer spending, resulting in vir-
tually no popular support for the government. With neighboring coun-
tries like Germany and Italy appearing to fare much better under fascist
regimes, liberal democracy began to lose its appeal among the French
population.
The economic and governmental crises alongside the success of Nazism
and Italian fascism fed the renewal of far-right, anti-parliamentary move-
ments in France and North Africa in the 1930s. By 1936, the Croix de
Feu had nearly 500,000 members and far-right leagues staged paramilitary
urban marches modeled on those of Mussolini’s Blackshirts or Hitler’s S.A.
In the 1930s, these movements attracted not just veterans but middle-class
adherents who blamed their economic ills on communists, socialists, and
often Jews. Metropolitan far-right organizations like the Croix de Feu and
its successor the Parti social found a captive audience in antisemitic Euro-
pean settlers in Algeria. For the European far right in Algeria, the potential
expansion of rights to Algerian Muslims and the emergence of Algerian
nationalism represented an additional threat—aside from their communist
and Jewish enemies—to their political and social order.
On February 6, 1934, French communists and far-right leagues staged
a protest in Paris against government corruption in the wake of a scandal
around a conman named Alexandre Stavisky. A naturalized Ukrain-
ian Jew, Stavisky had used his connections with radical politicians to
sell millions of francs of fraudulent municipal bonds. After the scandal
erupted in early January 1934, Stavisky was found dead, supposedly of
suicide. French communists, who at that time still refused to collaborate
with other leftist parties, were the first to call for the February protest
against government corruption. But when the far-right leagues joined in,
the protest turned into a riot, in which protestors violently confronted
police and attempted to storm the National Assembly. The police opened
fire, and more than 1,400 protesters were wounded, and 15 were killed.
Cars and buses were overturned, police horses were injured by razors,
and central Paris looked like a battlefield. The following day, the govern-
ment resigned, and the PCF and SFIO joined together to call for a general
strike against fascism.
The Popular Front and the European Refugee Crisis

In the wake of the 1934 riots and the rising threat of fascism across Europe,
the three parties of the French left—the SFIO, the PCF, and the radicals—
created a political alliance to protect French democracy. Known as the Popu-
lar Front, this alliance was enabled by the previous government’s willingness
to sign a military assistance pact with the Soviet Union in 1935 and Stalin’s
shift to support international anti-fascist alliances. The election campaigns
of 1936 were extraordinarily vicious, both rhetorically and physically. SFIO
leader Léon Blum was attacked in February 1936 by far-right students,
urged on by supporters who shouted, “death to the Jew.” In the May 1936
elections, the Popular Front coalition ultimately won the majority of seats,
and Léon Blum became prime minister of France, the first socialist and the
first Jew to hold that office.
Workers, colonized peoples, and many on the left had great hopes that
the Popular Front would both enact sweeping political and economic
reforms and serve as a bulwark against the rise of fascism in France and
Europe. Inspired by the Popular Front’s victory, French workers engaged
in a massive wave of strikes. By mid-June, more than two million people
were on strike. While many in France were greatly concerned about the
potential for a Soviet-style revolution, Blum was no revolutionary and
sought to appease both workers and bosses with economic and labor
reforms. The resulting Matignon Accords provided 7–15 percent wage
increases, the recognition of union bargaining rights, the 40-hour work-
week, and two weeks of paid vacation for all workers. Faced with the
threat of revolution, conservatives agreed to these reforms. In the summer
of 1936, Blum also pushed through legislation that nationalized the Bank
of France and took control of the aircraft industry, and, notably, abol-
ished the fascist leagues. In one of his most radical moves, Blum appointed
three women to cabinet positions, although the question of women’s suf-
frage was once again put off.
The reaction to the Popular Front’s reforms was divided. While the work-
ing classes initially celebrated the new reforms, particularly the new paid
holidays, many did not think they went far enough, especially in the French
colonies. Although Blum supported some colonial reforms, he cowed under
the pressure of the settler lobby after socialist Maurice Violette announced a
plan to expand French citizenship to a small number of “indigenous” Alge-
rians. The Blum-Violette Plan, as it became known, turned European settlers
in Algeria against the Popular Front and colonial reform projects, signaling
the end of reformist nationalism in Algeria.
In France, conservatives reacted predictably negatively to Blum’s
social and economic reforms. Some extracted their money and left the
country; others resorted to hostile insults laced with antisemitic invec-
tive. Despite the Popular Front government’s attempts to jumpstart the
French economy, however, the franc remained overvalued and inf lation
continued. When the government devalued the franc in October 1936 to
avoid hyperinf lation, it reduced the value of that year’s wage increases,
leading many lower-middle-class voters to turn to the far right. Although
far-right leagues were still outlawed, in late 1936, former communist
Jacques Doriot founded the French Popular Party to fight communism
and promote fascism. The party was funded by wealthy businessmen
and recruited men and women mostly from the lower-middle classes in
France and Algeria. By early 1937, it had gained more than 700,000
members and was the most popular party among the European settler
community in Algeria.
In addition to dealing with these economic and social tensions, the Popu-
lar Front had to confront multiple crises emerging from fascist regimes out-
side of France. The rise of Nazism in Germany and the Nuremberg Racial
Laws of 1935 sent thousands of German and Jewish refugees f looding into
France. In September 1936, the Popular Front issued a decree that enabled
“refugees coming from Germany” to apply for asylum, although it only
applied to those refugees already in the country. The government was will-
ing to help refugees who were already in France gain access to jobs, social
benefits, and potentially even naturalization, but only if further waves of
refugees could be kept to a minimum. The Spanish Civil War completely
upended this policy, however.
Although Spain had also elected a leftist republican coalition into
power in early 1936, a fascist revolt led by General Francisco Franco
began in July. Germany and Italy immediately threw their support
behind Franco while the Soviet Union and the communist International
Brigades from all over the world united in support for the republicans.
France was caught in a bind, as Popular Front leaders faced pressure
both from Great Britain and from pacifist radicals to remain politically
neutral to avoid setting off another European war. Yet French commu-
nists were highly frustrated by the government’s refusal to support the
Spanish republicans, especially as it became clear that Italy and Ger-
many were supplying arms to Franco. Despite its political neutrality,
France dealt with the consequences of the war anyway, as hundreds of
thousands of refugees f looded across the Pyrenees after the fall of Cata-
lonia to Franco’s forces in early 1938. At first, France closed the border,
supposedly in accordance with the policy of non-intervention. But after
immense public outcry at the humanitarian disaster, France opened the
border to civilians and wounded soldiers, housing them in makeshift
camps and former military barracks across southern France. In the wake
of the failing economy and its response to the Spanish crisis, the Popular
Front lost its remaining popular support. By March 1938, a new centrist
regime had come to power under radical leader Édouard Daladier, who
sought to regain control of the economy by halting strikes and providing
incentives for business investment.
Responding to the Fascist Threat

In the aftermath of the Popular Front, the centrist French government sought
to restore domestic order and confidence. However, by 1938, French lead-
ers couldn’t ignore the mounting tensions between European powers. Inside
economically troubled France, the f lood of refugees from Spain and central
and eastern Europe was drawing more resentment than sympathy. French
leaders felt increasingly isolated in their attempts to defend the terms of
the Treaty of Versailles, especially as Germany began building up its armed
forces and Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland without penalty in 1936.
Yet they knew that France could not afford another war with Germany
over contested European territory. While worrisome, Hitler’s annexation
of Austria and the Czech Sudetenland in 1938 was met with the policy of
appeasement by Daladier and British prime minister Neville Chamberlain.
Few were willing to risk a new European war over a small parcel of land in
Czechoslovakia.
The French had not completely neglected preparations for a future war
with Germany, however. Beginning in 1930, France spent millions of francs
on the construction of the Maginot Line, defensive concrete fortifications
designed to run from the Swiss border to the North Sea and prevent a
future German invasion. However, due to the depression, the French only
completed their defenses to the Belgian border, and without anti-aircraft
equipment, it became a legendarily useless project. Additionally, as the mili-
tary and defense alliances in eastern Europe began to collapse in 1938, the
French established a more coordinated system of colonial defenses to help
protect its imperial possessions. Despite the further integration of the colo-
nies and metropole, however, World War II would illustrate the fragility of
France’s hold on its empire.
Notes
1 The phrase “colonial metropolis,” in reference to interwar Paris, is drawn from
the research of Jennifer Boittin, whose book Colonial Metropolis: The Urban
Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris (Lincoln, NE:
University of Nebraska Press, 2010), explores these questions.
2 Cited in Michael Goebel, Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds
of Third World Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 2.

Boittin, Jennifer. Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and
Feminism in Interwar Paris. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2010.
Goebel, Michael. Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third
World Nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Hassett, Dónal. Mobilising Memory: The Great War and the Language of Politics in
Colonial Algeria, 1918–1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.
Lewis, Mary D. The Boundaries of the Republic: Migrant Rights and the Limits of
Universalism in France, 1918–1940. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007.
Passmore, Kevin. The Right in France From the Third Republic to Vichy. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2013.
Roberts, Mary Louise. Civilization Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Post-
war France, 1917–1927. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Thomas, Martin. The French Empire Between the Wars: Imperialism, Politics and
Society. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005.
Wardhaugh, Jessica. In Pursuit of the People: Political Culture in France, 1934–
1939. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009.
11 War and Occupation, 1939–1944 War and Occupation, 1939–1944
Introduction
Between 1942 and 1944, French Jewish university student Hélène Berr kept
a journal in which she recounted her experiences of life in Paris under Nazi
occupation. Her journal has been compared to the diary of German-Dutch
Jewish teenager Anne Frank, who meticulously recounted the experience of
hiding in a secret annex to her father’s offices for more than two years to
escape capture by the Nazi regime. Like the Franks in Amsterdam, Berr and
her family were arrested by French authorities and deported to Auschwitz,
where both of her parents were killed. Berr (like Anne Frank and her sis-
ter Margot) was then transferred to Bergen-Belsen, where she contracted
typhus in April 1945 and died mere days before the camp’s liberation. Berr’s
journal, which ends with her internment at Drancy, the camp in France
where Jews awaited deportation, was only published for the first time in
France in 2008. The journal exposes many illuminating details about life
for French Jews under Nazi occupation. One of the most striking is the Berr
family’s (lack of) consciousness of the danger around them. Unlike Anne
Frank, whose family were German refugees in the Netherlands, Berr’s fam-
ily were assimilated Jews in France, and believed, well into the war and Nazi
occupation, that their loyalty to France would keep them safe. Yet, it turned
out that France, in the end, had ambivalent loyalty to its Jews.
Through the spring and summer of 1939, the French watched with grow-
ing trepidation as the Germans violated the 1938 Munich agreement, begin-
ning with the occupation of Czechoslovakia in March. Even more worrying,
the Germans then signed a non-aggression pact in August with their greatest
enemy, the Soviet Union. The mood in France was somber, and during the
summer of 1939 Prime Minister Édouard Daladier capitalized on his popu-
larity as the savior of peace to govern with increasingly more authoritarian
policies. Bypassing parliament, he governed largely by decree and claimed
he was working to institute moral and national renewal. This resulted in
the implementation of the Family Code, which gave financial incentives for
large families and further repressed abortion and pornography. In the late
1930s, in the midst of growing refugee crises and the lingering effects of the
depression, French xenophobia and antisemitism escalated.
DOI: 10.4324/b23310-11
War and Occupation, 1939–1944 213
Yet despite the overwhelming French desire to avoid war, it was no sur-
prise when the German army launched an attack on Poland on September 1,
1939. Two days later, the French government declared war on Germany. The
months between that declaration and the actual German invasion of France
in May 1940 have come to be known as the drôle de guerre, or the “phony
war,” as the French army sat in helpless stasis, in worried expectation of the
inevitable German attack. When the invasion finally began on May 10, it did
not lead, as during the Great War, to years of static trench warfare. In a posi-
tion of great weakness, the French government, now led by the aging World
War I military hero Marshal Philippe Pétain, chose the path of armistice.
As in countries like Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, and others, it took
many decades before the French were able to begin to come to terms with the
“dark years” of World War II. Overshadowing a more complex history of the
Nazi occupation was the postwar myth that most of France put up a strong and
unified resistance to Nazi rule, while only a small minority supported the collab-
orationist Vichy regime. The reality, however, was far less heroic. France’s own
xenophobia and antisemitism led to the exclusion, internment, and deportation
of both French and foreign Jews from French soil, which means that the blame
for these genocidal crimes cannot solely be laid at the feet of the Germans. Fur-
thermore, it was this very racism that significantly weakened France’s position
across its empire, as the carnage and horror of World War II put to question
all of the justifications of European and French imperial domination that were
based on the supposed racial and civilizational superiority of white Europeans.
By 1945, French “grandeur” had taken a serious hit on the global stage.
Defeat, Exodus, and Armistice

The French army’s ignominious defeat in 1940 has often been ridiculed as the
result of inferior weaponry and military strength, poor planning, and even cow-
ardice. Yet French military leaders had long been planning for the next war and
had significantly built up French armaments in response to the growing fascist
threat during the 1930s. What was lacking, however, was a flexible strategy in
response to the German blitzkrieg, or lightning attack. French military leaders
anticipated a German invasion through Belgium and sent the best troops north
to face the attack; however, German Panzer tank divisions attacked further south
in the Ardennes forest, a sector that the French high command assumed was well
protected by the Meuse River and thick foliage. The ill-equipped reserve troops
stationed there could not hold off the massive assault of the German army’s
coordinated attack with infantry, aerial bombardments, and Panzer divisions.
The German invasion began on May 10, 1940 and six days later nothing
lay between them and the city of Paris. French leaders evacuated the govern-
ment to Bordeaux, and French prime minister Paul Reynaud brought in Gen-
eral Weygand to command the army. He also reshuffled his cabinet, bringing
the “Vainquer of Verdun,” Marshal Philippe Pétain into the government. While
some military officers escaped to North Africa to reorganize the fight against
214 War and Occupation, 1939–1944
Germany, government leaders debated capitulation. As a lone advocate of resist-
ance against Germany, Reynaud was outnumbered and resigned from office. In
his place, Pétain, who favored an armistice, took control and announced in
a radio broadcast to the French people on June 17, “It is with a heavy heart
that I tell you today that we must cease hostilities.”1 Less than a week later, the
Germans presented the terms of the armistice to the French in a railway car-
riage in Compiègne, the same location where the Germans had signed the 1918
armistice. Under the 1940 terms, France was divided into an Occupied Zone in
the North, under the direct control of the Germans, and an Unoccupied Zone in
the South, controlled by France. French troops were demobilized, apart from a
small force to maintain order, and the nearly 2 million French prisoners of war
captured during the German invasion remained in captivity until the end of the
war. Additionally, the French were required to pay for the cost of the occupa-
tion. The French also agreed to hand over any Germans who had sought refuge
from the Nazis in France before the war, instantly negating any benefits that
French citizenship might have offered them. With the signing of the armistice on
June 23, 1940, France moved officially into a new phase of the war.
Map 11.1 Occupation Zones of France during World War II.

The division of the country placed three-fifths of France under direct
control of the Germans, including the city of Paris and the entire Atlantic
coast. However, French leaders regrouped and formed their new govern-
ment in the spa town of Vichy in central France, chosen for its location,
docile population, and available hotel rooms. This government, in power
from June 1940 until August 1944, would thus come to be known as the
Vichy regime. However, not everyone willingly accepted the terms of the
armistice: 26 deputies left France for Algeria to form their own government
in exile, and Charles de Gaulle, a military leader and former under-secretary
for war under Reynaud, headed for London to rally support from the British
to continue the fight against Germany.
The same day that Pétain announced the armistice on French radio, de
Gaulle made a plea on the BBC to the French to continue the fight against
Germany and join him in London. Although de Gaulle’s speech was never
broadcast in France, some 7,000 French soldiers joined him, forming the
basis of an external resistance force that worked in concert with a handful
of internal resistance movements to fight both Nazi and Vichy power in
France. For the most part, however, French citizens remained loyal to the
Vichy government and its new leader, the 83-year-old Pétain, who inspired
fervent admiration for preventing the total destruction of France. This loy-
alty to Pétain only increased after the British, taking no chances that the
French naval f leet would fall into the hands of the Germans, destroyed the
French naval squadron stationed at Mers-el-Kebir in Algeria in July 1940
after the French refused to turn it over to the British or scuttle it themselves.
For many French, the British became a greater enemy than the Germans.
In the midst of the German invasion and armistice negotiations, approxi-
mately 8 million French civilians f led northern and eastern France toward
the south. This “exodus” of women, children, the elderly, and men who
were unable to join the armies at the front loaded up what belongings they
could carry in cars, wagons, carts, and bicycles or set off on foot to avoid
being caught in occupied territory, as many had during World War I. With
the abrupt end to the fighting, however, Frenchmen and women had to
adjust to a new situation, choosing whether to live under the harsh occupa-
tion regime or under the as-yet-unknown context of the new Vichy govern-
ment. What was clear, though, was that the much-despised Third Republic
was dead.
Vichy and the National Revolution

Many of those politicians joining the new Vichy regime had vocally expressed
their disdain or disillusion for the Third Republic and now sought to remake
France by rejecting what they saw as the decadent secularism of parlia-
mentary democracy. Some of these politicians, including the former radical
Gaston Bergery, who called for a new authoritarian government and collab-
oration with Germany, clearly wanted the new regime to emulate its fascist
neighbors. Others were more traditional conservatives, seeking a return to
a political and social system in which anti-egalitarian social and racial hier-
archies, traditional gender roles, and the Catholic Church regained a domi-
nant place in France and its empire. Pétain initially formed his government
around these traditional conservatives, which disappointed the more radical
pro-fascist and vocal anti-Jewish voices. Shut out by Pétain, the journal-
ists of the virulent antisemitic periodical Je suis partout, for example, went
directly to Paris to work with the Germans.
Given full powers to revise the constitution with overwhelming support
from the French National Assembly, Pétain set about forming a new govern-
ment that he called the French State (État français). It more closely resem-
bled a monarchy than a democracy. He dissolved the National Assembly
until further notice and passed a constitutional act that gave a “head of
state” full powers to appoint and dismiss ministers. The traditional political
parties also no longer selected the prime minister. Instead, Pétain revoked
the 1875 constitutional amendment that had created the office of the presi-
dent; he declared himself the “head of state” and chose his own successor,
initially a career politician named Pierre Laval. From the outset, Laval was
committed to the policy of French collaboration with the Nazi regime. This
often put him at odds with others close to Pétain, such as Charles Maur-
ras, who pursued the regeneration of France through a conservative social
revolution.
The Vichy regime’s National Revolution was less a clear ideological pro-
ject than a program aimed at restructuring society to combat the Third
Republic’s “degenerate” modern ideas of liberal individualism, class strug-
gle, secularism, and democracy, which Vichy leaders blamed for the French
defeat. Although these arguments can also be seen in the emerging fascist
regimes across Europe, Vichy’s National Revolution responded directly to
social and political conf licts that had been brewing in France and its empire
since the nineteenth century. Openly rejecting the liberal values of French
republicanism, Vichy officials replaced the national motto, “Liberty, Equal-
ity, Fraternity,” with the conservative values, “Work, Family, Fatherland.”
Vichy officials rejected socialist and communist visions of class struggle.
Beginning in September 1940, communists were rounded up and placed
in internment camps in southern France, alongside the remaining Spanish
Civil War refugees and members of the International Brigades. Additionally,
the October 1941 Labor Charter effectively destroyed French labor unions
and outlawed strikes. Instead, Vichy leaders sought national unity through
a return to rural, agrarian society and a more traditional social order. The
peasant, rather than the industrial worker, became the emblematic figure
of the National Revolution, which valorized regional cultures and folklore.
Beginning in late 1940, the regime provided agricultural subsidies and edu-
cational incentives to support a mass “return to the soil.”
Drawing on conservative Catholic conceptions of morality, particularly
the critique of “degenerate” and “unnatural” sexuality and gender roles, the
National Revolution emphasized the “traditional” (i.e., patriarchal) family
Figure 11.1
Vichy propaganda poster promoting the National Revolution, by
R. Vachet, c. 1940–1942, via Wikimedia Commons.
as the essential building block of the social order. Depopulation concerns

were clearly at work in many of the regime’s policies toward women, who
were blamed for the French defeat due to their refusal to breed healthy sons
as their national duty. Motherhood was endowed with national significance,
and from 1942 onward, Mother’s Day was celebrated with official, public
events and rewards. Additionally, Vichy officials stepped up their propa-
ganda campaigns against abortion and contraception, extending the policies
of the 1939 Family Code. The National Revolution included a heavy focus
on domestic, physical, and sexual education to train young women to con-
form to the ideal of Vichy womanhood.
The Vichy regime aggressively targeted education in its reforms, as many
conservatives believed that the secular public school system was responsible
for much of the corruption of French republicanism. A June 1940 law that
allowed the regime to fire civil servants who were deemed “threats to order”
enabled a massive purge of public school teachers. Schoolchildren now had to
sing the anthem of loyalty to Pétain, “Maréchal, nous voilà,” and moral and
religious instruction were added back into the curriculum. The regime also
heavily endorsed youth movements, such as the Chantiers de la Jeunesse—
Vichy’s alternative to military service—and the already-popular confes-
sional scout programs. Despite the regime’s efforts at revitalizing French
youth, however, the war years saw a dramatic increase in juvenile crime
rates, typically in direct response to Vichy policy and ideology, rather than
absent father figures, as conservative commentators claimed.
Vichy officials also attempted to purge other undesirable elements from
the national community, including Freemasons, foreign refugees, and Jews.
In the summer of 1940, officials began passing exclusionary laws primarily
aimed at foreigners and Jews, starting with a law that made having a French
father a prerequisite for a civil service job. Soon after, a series of laws denat-
uralized many of the foreigners who had obtained French citizenship after
1927; a commission stripped 15,000 people of French citizenship between
1940 and 1944, 6,000 of them Jews. On October 3, 1940, the Vichy regime
passed the First Jewish Statute, which included a more expansive definition
of Jewishness than the Nazis used, and which was enacted without any pres-
sure from the Germans. It excluded French Jews from employment in public
service and professions that inf luenced the public, and it allowed Jews to
be interned at the will of prefects. By early 1941, approximately 40,000
Jews resided in seven internment camps in southern France. The Second
Jewish Statute of June 1941 widened the definition of Jewishness even fur-
ther, banned more occupations for Jews, and issued quotas to limit Jewish
participation in liberal professions such as law, medicine, and architecture.
Vichy policies and the National Revolution were not confined to the
metropole. The French overseas empire remained entirely under the con-
trol of the Vichy government. In his June 25 speech, just after signing the
1940 armistice with Germany, Pétain proclaimed, “I was no less concerned
about our colonies than the metropole. The armistice safeguards the links
that unite us with them. France has the right to count on their loyalty.”2
With the humiliation of defeat and occupation at the hands of Germany,
Vichy leaders and French civilians looked to the overseas empire not only
for strategic reasons but as a symbol of France’s global status and power.
For the next few years, until the war expanded into North Africa and East
Asia, the Vichy regime’s National Revolution and racial policy were applied
throughout the empire, with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Pétain became
preoccupied with securing the loyalty of the empire and preventing defec-
tions to Charles de Gaulle’s Free French forces, especially after Chad, under
the leadership of its French Guiana-born governor Félix Éboué, officially
joined de Gaulle in August 1940.
Certain figures within the French colonial administration eagerly pro-
claimed their adherence to the Vichy regime and were rewarded for their
loyalty. For example, Pierre Boisson, governor general of the small territory
of French Equatorial Africa (AEF), was transferred to a more prestigious
post as head of French West Africa (AOF) after declaring his fidelity to
Pétain. Vichy needed a loyal figure in leadership of the AOF, as Dakar was
a strategic port city; Boisson pledged to protect the territory from Anglo-
Gaullists as well as from Germans and Italians. Other colonial officials
remained loyal for a variety of reasons, including ideological sympathy for
the regime and the National Revolution, loyalty to what they believed was
a legitimate government in power, or widespread Anglophobia, which only
grew stronger after the destruction of the French f leet at Mers-el-Kébir.
The regime was extremely concerned that colonized elites would be
swayed by Anglo-Gaullist anti-colonial propaganda to abandon their alle-
giance to Vichy. Indeed, some veteran colonial administrators, including
Lyautey, argued that exporting the nationalism, nostalgia, and folklore of
the National Revolution’s ideology would be a disaster for France. They
worried that this would crystalize the anti-egalitarian divides between the
colonizers and the colonized and prompt the “natives” to oust the French.
One might assume that colonial administrators would have combatted this
danger by bringing colonized subjects closer to French citizenship. Yet this
was not the case. In some locations, the new authoritarian racial ideol-
ogy justified the disenfranchisement of the Black population, as occurred
in Guadeloupe, one of the few of French colonies to have universal male
suffrage. French propaganda throughout the empire stressed the impor-
tance of “natural” hierarchies, be they social or racial, and the dangers of
“parasitic” elements within the empire, including Jews, Freemasons, and
communists.
Already one of the most pro-fascist regions of France before the war
began, Algeria’s European settler population welcomed the Vichy regime
and put into aggressive practice the National Revolution’s exclusionary pol-
icies. Unsurprisingly, support for Vichy and the National Revolution was
notably weaker among the Muslim and Jewish populations of Algeria. On
September 26, 1940, Messali Hadj’s nationalist organization, the PPA, was
banned and its leaders arrested. On October 7, of that same year, three
days after issuing the First Jewish Statute, the regime repealed the Crémieux
Decree of 1870 that had given French citizenship to the assimilated Jews of
Algeria. Internment camps were established in southern Algeria, and they
housed between 18,000 and 20,000 prisoners, including refugees from Nazi
Germany, Spanish Civil War refugees, communists, and Jews as well as
political prisoners deemed “particularly dangerous extremists.”
Although the National Revolution was the ideological basis for Vichy’s
reformist policies, some within the government, notably Pierre Laval, were
indifferent to it. They saw, instead, collaboration with the Germans as a
more important long-term focus. In the autumn of 1940, Laval controlled
the direction of the Vichy regime and went often to Paris to negotiate with
the Germans. However, many in Vichy, including Pétain and the advisors
in his close entourage, became suspicious and resentful of Laval, who often
did not report back on the status of his conversations with the Germans.
By December 1940, Pétain and his advisors plotted Laval’s removal, soon
dismissing him and placing him under house arrest. The Germans, however,
refused to negotiate with the three politicians who swiftly succeeded Laval.
By April 1942, Laval managed to take power once again and facilitated the
Vichy regime’s direct and willing participation in Nazi genocide.
Public opinion toward Vichy and the National Revolution varied depend-
ing on time and place, and the amount of repression or benefit that individu-
als experienced under the regime. Initially, many French citizens felt relief
that Pétain and Vichy officials were able to end the war quickly and prevent
further death and destruction. A cult of personality emerged around Pétain
that lasted throughout much of the war: his image hung in public build-
ings and private homes and was imprinted on postage stamps and coins.
Between 1940 and 1942, he also solidified his mythic presence across France
and the empire with highly choreographed visits to nearly 50 provincial cit-
ies. By 1942–1943, however, food shortages, the return of the unpopular
Laval, Vichy Jewish policy, and the institution of forced labor by the Ger-
mans (known as the Service du travail obligatoire, or STO) led to a growing
breach between the regime and its subjects.
Everyday Life Under Occupation

In the Occupied Zone, the Germans installed a military force that supervised
the operations of the Vichy regime, investigated crimes against the Germans,
and uncovered enemy agents in secret police units. Other units were charged
with extracting natural resources and confiscating public and private prop-
erty, art, and wealth from the French to meet the terms of the armistice.
Obtaining and distributing food and securing housing and resources for the
occupation army, prisoners of war, and 23 million French civilians in the
Occupied Zone also required significant German resources, both financial
and human.
As the division and occupation of France became the new reality, French
civilians shifted their focus to material challenges. Across France, obtaining
ration coupons and food, clothing, heating materials, and other basic sup-
plies became the central preoccupation of French civilian existence during
the war. Unlike the rationing system during World War I, this one was not
voluntary and was not serving to help France win a war; instead, it was
imposed by an enemy occupier as a means to prevent shortages in Ger-
many. Food became political. Black markets emerged that enabled those
with resources to obtain scarce food, fabric, cigarettes, and luxury items
from overseas like sugar or coffee. Unsurprisingly, those in rural areas fared
better than those in urban centers, who faced long lines at food shops,
which often ran out of food. Soon, the long-standing social divisions within
French society became even more pronounced, testing civilian solidarity as
those without resources sought someone to blame for their troubles. Many
pointed to the refugees from Alsace-Lorraine, or the northern areas, or even
the “foreigners” who had arrived in the interwar period, describing them as
interlopers who were using precious local resources.
French civilians in the Occupied Zone faced a spectrum of increasingly
harsh policies. The Germans instituted a curfew and set the clocks to Ber-
lin time, an hour ahead of those in the Unoccupied Zone, eliminating a
precious hour of daylight from those who lacked fuel for heat and light. In
Alsace-Lorraine, the population was forced to undergo total Germanization:
language use, street signs, school lessons all had to conform. Wearing a
beret was outlawed, and youth were encouraged to join Nazi organizations
like the Hitler Youth. From 1942 onward, approximately 130,000 eligible
men were conscripted into the German Wehrmacht under threat of repris-
als to their families if they tried to escape. Those in the forbidden zone of
the Nord/Pas-de-Calais region were likewise cut off from the rest of France,
and workers there were conscripted for labor in Germany from the summer
of 1940. In Paris, civilians were under constant surveillance and developed
new patterns of behavior to avoid confrontations with Nazi occupiers, who
often billeted in their homes or demanded the French step aside to allow
Germans to pass on the sidewalk.
Protecting French art and culture from destruction or German confisca-
tion was one means through which the French could salvage something from
the humiliation of defeat and occupation. Museums in Paris began sending
their most treasured works of art—the country’s “artistic patrimony”—to
the Loire Valley and on to storage sites like rural chateaux, abbeys and
churches, and private properties that met the criteria for housing national
collections. As the German army advanced toward Paris in May 1940,
paintings from the Chambord chateau were trucked south along the same
roads as frightened French refugees. And to prevent similar damage to
France’s cathedrals and monuments as during World War I, architectural
experts dismantled the stained-glass windows of Sainte-Chappelle in Paris
and protected the windows of the cathedrals in Chartres, Amiens, and Metz,
among others.
In November 1942, facing growing resistance among the French popu-
lation after the Allied invasion of North Africa, Hitler ordered his troops
to invade and occupy the Vichy-controlled southern zone of France. The
Italians then took control of southeastern France, including the cities of
Nice, Toulon, and the island of Corsica. While the Vichy regime techni-
cally remained in power, the majority of France was now under direct Ger-
man occupation and supervision. This exposed the fiction of an independent
French government in Vichy. With North Africa in Allied hands, the Vichy
regime also lost control of one of their main overseas power bases, greatly
weakening their position.
As resistance to both Vichy and German power grew across France and its
empire, German repression increased. The Germans demanded more money
and labor from the French. In February 1943, the Germans instituted the
STO, a requirement that all men between 18 and 35 register for compul-
sory labor service in Germany. This policy, which sent approximately
700,000 French men to work in Germany, was extremely unpopular and
sent young men f leeing to rural areas where resistance guerrillas welcomed
them. After the Germans dismantled the remaining French army, many mili-
tary men joined the resistance. In response, in January 1943, Laval turned
a paramilitary organization called the Service d’ordre legionnaire into the
milice, an official Vichy police force whose mandate was to battle the inter-
nal resistance and assist in the roundup of Jews.
France and the Jews

With the creation of the Vichy regime in the summer of 1940, which
brought a number of well-known French antisemites to political power,
Jews in France were suddenly caught between two separate antisemitic
regimes. After 1942, these regimes facilitated the deportation of more
than 75,000 Jews from France and the deaths of another 4,000 in French
camps or by execution during the war. Of the 80,000 Jews in France who
were victims of the Shoah (the Hebrew term for the Holocaust, and the
one most commonly used in France), only 2,500 (or 3.5 percent) returned
alive. 68 percent of the victims were described as “foreign” Jews while
only 24,000 (32 percent) were French Jews. For many decades, these fig-
ures enabled Vichy officials to claim that they had allowed foreign Jews
to be deported as a means to save French Jews. However, three-quarters
of all Jewish arrests in France were conducted by French police, and no
other European government offered as much support to the Germans in
the Shoah as the Vichy regime. To German astonishment, the Vichy regime
had initially volunteered to deport Jews freely from the Unoccupied Zone
without any demands or pressure.
Just before the war, the Jewish population numbered between 300,000
and 330,000 of a total 43 million residents of France. There was not a
coherent Jewish community, however, and French law made a distinc-
tion between “French” and “foreign” Jews. Approximately 90,000 of the
190,000 “French” Jews belonged to families with deep roots in France,
who believed themselves fully assimilated into the nation. These fami-
lies tended to live in cities, work in liberal professions or government,
and had experienced previous waves of antisemitism, including the Drey-
fus Affair, which they often ascribed to German inf luence rather than to
French prejudice. During the interwar period, waves of “foreign” Jews
had begun arriving in France, mostly from eastern Europe. Far less assimi-
lated into the nation and republican traditions, many of them arrived just
as French xenophobia reached its peak. Thus, their experience and trust
in the French government and population were vastly different from the
assimilated “French” Jewish population. Meanwhile, the Jews of Algeria
found themselves in 1940 returned to the status of “indigènes,” deprived
of the French citizenship they had gained with the 1870 Crémieux Decree.
Consequently, the experiences of Jews in France and its empire differed
greatly depending on whether they lived under German, Italian, or French
control; whether they were considered to be “French,” “foreign,” or
“indigène”; their class status; whether they lived in Catholic or Protestant
areas; and many other variables.
Even prior to the Vichy regime, the French government treated foreign
Jews as enemies of the nation and placed them into internment camps under
a memorandum of August 30, 1939, which instructed that “all foreign
nationals from territory belonging to the enemy must be brought together
in special centers.”3 These “centers” were, in reality, the numerous refugee
and internment camps in the south of France, which later came to hold an
additional 40,000 Jews who were rounded up under the October 4, 1940
decree. After 1942, they also held the Jews who were interned in the south-
ern zone before their future deportation to the east.
In September 1940, the Germans required all French Jews in the Occu-
pied Zone to register with the authorities and began the “Aryanization”
of Jewish businesses. Following the German lead (but notably without any
German pressure), Vichy officials immediately began developing their own
comprehensive framework of exclusionary antisemitic laws beginning with
the First Jewish Statute in October 1940. Vichy officials also instituted a
census of Jewish residents in the Unoccupied Zone. These registries later
provided deportation officials with the names and addresses of all of the
Jews in France.
With the First Jewish Statute, Vichy’s policy initially sought to marginal-
ize Jews from French society. However, as German policies became increas-
ingly harsh, Vichy’s exclusionary laws followed those of the Germans, as
when Vichy Aryanized Jewish businesses and property in 1941. In other
situations, though, Vichy’s policies went further than the Germans’, as they
attempted to demonstrate their autonomy from German authority and show
off their antisemitic credentials. Many of the most extreme policies emerged
from the Commissariat-General for Jewish Affairs (CGQJ), which was set
up in March 1941 under pressure from the Germans, who wanted a specific
office to coordinate Jewish policy in France. The man in charge of the CGQJ
was Xavier Vallat, who claimed during his trial for collaboration after the
war that he was no Nazi but an authentically French antisemite who saw
Jews as unassimilable to the French republic. This position enabled Vallat
to make exemptions for Jews who had served France with distinction as
well as to make distinctions between “French” and “foreign” Jews. While
this did little to help any Jews in France escape persecution, it was distinc-
tive from German racial antisemitism. Vallat was openly anti-German, and
Laval replaced him in April 1942 with Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, a viru-
lently antisemitic journalist who expanded the definition of Jewishness in
the Second Jewish Statute of June 1941. Beginning in December 1942, all
Jews in the southern zone were required to have the word “Jew” stamped
in their ration and identity cards, making them more vulnerable to arrest.
Germany’s secret plans to eliminate the Jews of Europe began in the after-
math of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941.
While Vichy officials were most likely ignorant of these plans, they facili-
tated the deportation and murder of Jews from France in numerous ways.
The Germans had begun arresting Jews in the Occupied Zone in 1941 and
placing them into four camps mostly run by the French. On March 27, 1942,
the first convoy delivered more than 1,000 Jews from France to an unknown
destination in the east. Other deportations were formalized that summer. In
June 1942, the Germans demanded that all Jews wear the six-pointed yellow
star outside their clothing. Over two days in mid-July, German authorities
arrested more than 13,000 “foreign” Jews in Paris. They were housed tem-
porarily in the winter sports stadium, known as the Vélodrome d’Hiver (or
Vél d’Hiv), and then at a housing estate-turned-camp called Drancy before
being deported to Auschwitz. Although these 13,000 Jews were fewer than
half of the 28,000 the Germans had initially demanded, the violent arrests
of innocent Jews shocked many French observers, turning public opinion
against Vichy and even further against the Germans. Many Jews f led to the
south, believing they were safer under Vichy rule, only to find that the Vichy
regime was deporting Jews to the north as well. Between March and Sep-
tember 1942, more than 38,000 Jews were deported from France in trains
bound for Auschwitz.
Before 1942, Jews in both the Occupied and Unoccupied Zones turned
inward to their community organizations for moral and social support. In
early 1941, the Coordinating Committee for Jewish Charities was estab-
lished in Paris to centralize welfare efforts for Jews under the watchful eyes
of the Germans. This had troubling consequences: the German strategy of
impoverishing the Jewish population and making them reliant on a German-
controlled Jewish organization greatly facilitated German efforts to deport
the Jews from French soil. Consequently, communist Jewish organizations
refused to work within these structures but risked arrest and execution for
their activities.
Thousands of Jews attempted to escape from France between 1939 and
1944. However, such an escape demanded resources beyond the reach of
most foreign refugees, many of whom had already left everything behind.
Several well-known Jewish artists, for example, had come to France during
the interwar period to join the f lourishing artistic scene in Paris or to f lee
persecution in their homelands. Some escaped early and f led to Switzerland
or the United States, while others did not survive their internment. Wealthy
and assimilated French Jews faced a different set of problems as their bank
accounts were frozen and businesses plundered. The valuable collections of
wealthy Jewish art dealers and collectors were targeted for seizure by both
the Nazis and French museum officials; new Vichy laws allowed French
officials to seize “ownerless” property of denaturalized foreign-born Jews in
France to enhance the collections of France’s “national patrimony” in muse-
ums like the Louvre. Additionally, the web of immigration laws and restric-
tions both within France and from receiving countries like the United States
became so immense between 1940 and 1942 that only the most persistent
and lucky emigrants could obtain proper documentation, transportation,
and an assured welcome in their new host country. After the summer of
1942, legal emigration was out of the question, and all escape from France
had to be clandestine, which took immense monetary and human resources.
Jews across the French empire faced similarly complex legal, financial,
and political challenges and exclusions, although the dangers of arrest,
internment, and deportation varied depending on their location and legal
status. According to the 1941 census, the nearly 120,000 urbanized, assimi-
lated Jews in Algeria were socially and politically diverse but almost none of
them were grands colons, or major landowners. Many were working-class
artisans or government functionaries, for whom the exclusion from their
posts was financially and socially devastating. While the circumstances of
their removal led some Algerian Jews to come together for the first time as
a community, others—particularly secular Jews—had less interest in high-
lighting their Jewish identity, especially as the antisemitism that had f low-
ered in Algeria in the 1930s came into full bloom under the Vichy regime.
It is nearly impossible, for instance, to find public denunciations of antisem-
itism in Algeria between 1940 and 1942, and there exist only a handful of
statements of support for Algeria’s Jewish populations. Yet, while they were
consistently threatened with internment or more violent exclusion, Jews in
Algeria never faced the same daily dangers as those in the metropole.
In the territory of the AOF, there were only 110 Jews, most of whom were
of North African origin and thus possessed French nationality before the
war, yet Vichy anti-Jewish policy applied there as well. The Jews of the AOF
were forced to register with the French administration and were fired from
the jobs that were forbidden to Jews. However, no Jews were deported from
the AOF, and compared with the fate of their co-religionists in metropolitan
France, their experience under Vichy was far less brutal.
It is undeniable that the Vichy government’s antisemitic policies, which
became progressively more extreme, actively contributed to the Holocaust.
The First Jewish Statute sent shockwaves through the Jewish community in
Unoccupied France. Yet few were willing initially to act against the state.
Some assimilated French Jews believed that the government would protect
them, particularly if they proved their loyalty and usefulness to the Vichy
regime. This was not a completely irrational perspective. Jews in the Unoc-
cupied Zone received contradictory messages in propaganda and official
policy and from the civilian population. For example, Jewish religious lead-
ers were on good terms with Vichy officials like Pétain (who had a contra-
dictory record on Jewish policy) as well as community leaders like Pastor
Marc Boegner, head of the French Protestant Federation. Many French Jews
also gained exemptions from exclusionary laws, which helped perpetuate
the illusion that Vichy was protecting them. Until 1942, some Jewish youth
in the Unoccupied Zone participated in Vichy-sponsored youth movements
such as the Jewish scouts (Éclaireurs Israélites de France) and the Chan-
tiers de la Jeunesse. Other Jews used clandestine publications to educate the
French public about their persecution, believing that it was simply ignorance
that was preventing mass public protest against the increasingly radical anti-
semitic legislation.
While many in France were ambivalent about the fate of Jews, or even
enthusiastic about purging them from French society, other individuals and
groups across France sheltered Jews and helped them escape deportation.
Jewish rescue operations formed out of Jewish community initiatives, col-
laborations of religious and humanitarian organizations, and from the ini-
tiative of individuals. Jewish organizations prioritized getting children out
of the internment camps, and in the fall of 1941, alongside the Quakers
and an organization called the Oeuvre de secours aux enfants (Children’s
Rescue Organization, or OSE), they organized the release of hundreds of
Jewish children from the internment camps into children’s homes across
the Unoccupied Zone. In the summer of 1941, a Catholic priest in Lyon,
working with the archbishop, received permission from the Ministry of
the Interior to “transfer” foreign Jews out of internment camps to shelters;
this setup facilitated later transfers that helped Jews escape deportation.
French Protestants, working with the aid organization Cimade from inside
the camps, set up four shelters for Jewish internees and later established
rescue networks to smuggle Jews out of France. After 1942, these activities
constituted an important element of both Jewish and non-Jewish resistance
across France.
Collaboration and Resistance in France and the Empire

The collaboration/resistance narrative remains one of the most endur-
ing legacies and moral problems that historians must confront when we
study the German occupation of Europe during World War II. This frame-
work inf luences how we attribute blame to those who collaborated with
the Vichy regime and the Nazis in their war aims, their repression of the
civilian population, and their genocidal policies; it also structures how we
determine the meaning of resistance to these events and crimes. For decades
after the war, resistance and collaboration were framed as a dichotomy:
one either resisted the Germans or collaborated with them. However, recent
research has shown that this binary is a grave oversimplification of people’s
moral choices and actions during the war. In the end, only a tiny minority
of French men and women were actively involved in political collaboration,
and conversely, a tiny minority in armed resistance against the Nazis and
the Vichy regime. Many people simply struggled to survive the war, and it is
impossible to characterize their choices or actions with a single word. Was
buying food on the black market a form of resistance? Was indifference to
the internment of foreign Jews a form of complicity? What about people’s
views that might have changed over the course of the occupation? It is also
difficult to interpret silences, as some historians have argued that not par-
ticipating in state-sanctioned activities could be a form of passive resistance.
Additionally, people’s actions could be interpreted differently depending on
their location, as people under direct occupation faced much greater risks
in resistance.
Between the poles of resistance and collaboration, however, was a situa-
tion that French historian Philippe Burrin has described as accommodation,
or “choos[ing] the least of all evils and mak[ing] concessions that might or
might not prove compromising.”4 This was the situation in which the vast
majority of civilians, industrialists, and leaders of institutions like the Cath-
olic Church across France and its empire found themselves between 1940
and 1943. French intellectual and writer Simone de Beauvoir is emblematic
of someone who faced the challenges of civilian life under Nazi occupation.
Like many French women, she was isolated and alone, after her partner,
writer Jean-Paul Sartre, was imprisoned during the German invasion. Yet as
a single woman, she was not subject to the Vichy regime’s National Revolu-
tion laws that prohibited married women from working in civil service jobs
or divorcing. However, to keep her job as a teacher, she signed the required
document in September 1940 declaring that she was not Jewish, while many
of her Jewish colleagues were being purged from their teaching posts. When
Sartre returned from the prisoner of war camp in 1941, he and Beauvoir
traveled into the Unoccupied Zone seeking to create a sort of resistance
organization of anti-fascist writers and intellectuals, but the effort failed.
They returned to Paris and buried themselves in their own work. Despite
witnessing the dramatic roundups of Jews around them and groups of dis-
placed refugees in southern France, these events did not inspire either Sartre
or Beauvoir to join the resistance.
Those who edged closer toward collaboration were engaged in a diverse
range of activities and adherence to Nazi and Vichy ideologies. What distin-
guished France from other European countries occupied by Germany was
the high-level collaboration of French government officials with the German
occupiers to achieve their war aims, including the internment and deporta-
tion of the Jewish populations in France, a situation that occurred nowhere
else in Europe. It was not only the political elites who collaborated, though.
Members of the milice, who were recruited to fight “terrorism” from the
French resistance, fervently supported the Vichy and Nazi regimes. They
were also among the most feared and despised collaborators for using tor-
ture and violence against captured résistants. Some far-right intellectuals,
writers, and leaders of fascist movements went even further in their adher-
ence to antisemitism and Nazism; their ideological support has been labeled
“collaborationism.” Additionally, historians estimate that around 40,000
Frenchmen voluntarily joined the German military during World War II. At
lower levels of government and public service, individuals carried out their
duties, which included arresting foreigners, Jews, and fellow French men
and women who resisted both the Vichy and Nazi regimes. But it is clear
that the majority of the French population did not necessarily support active
collaboration with the Germans, even if they initially supported the armi-
stice or admired Pétain and the ideals of the National Revolution.
Like collaboration, resistance was a mentality and a set of actions
much broader than the well-known examples of armed confrontation. At
the beginning of the war, resistance was almost nonexistent, both outside
and inside France. It slowly grew over the course of the war, in response
to events like the Allied invasion of North Africa and the implementa-
tion of the STO. While armed guerrilla (maquis) warfare was limited to
a small minority of Frenchmen, many others—women, foreigners, Jews,
Christians, Muslims, etc.—engaged in acts of resistance across France
and its empire that included the rescue of Jews and support activities for
the numerous resistance networks across both the Occupied and Unoc-
cupied zones.
When the British allowed the relatively unknown French general Charles
de Gaulle to broadcast his appeal for French resistance to the German inva-
sion in June 1940, they hoped he would attract more important French poli-
ticians and military figures to the cause. When this proved not to be the case,
British prime minister Winston Churchill recognized de Gaulle officially as
“leader of all the Free French, wherever they are to be found, who rally to
him in support of the Allied cause.”5 De Gaulle grudgingly accepted the Brit-
ish High Command’s leadership over his forces in exchange for military sup-
port. Although approximately 46,000 soldiers from France and its empire
eventually joined the Free French Forces of the Allies, de Gaulle found it
extremely disheartening that almost the entire French empire remained loyal
to Vichy. In September 1940, he led an expedition to French West Africa
but failed to win its support, which was a blow to de Gaulle’s reputation.
His continuous attempts to act autonomously throughout the war alien-
ated him from British and American leaders, who found him imperious and
authoritarian.
Additionally, de Gaulle had difficulties coordinating with resistance net-
works inside of France. He was helped considerably in late 1941–early
1942 with the arrival in London of several Frenchmen active in internal
resistance networks: French politician Jean Moulin, bringing information
about southern resistance movements; journalist Emmanuel d’Astier de la
Vigerie, coordinating resistance in the early Libération-Sud network, and
socialist journalist Pierre Brossolette, representing two major resistance
movements in the Occupied Zone. By moving back and forth between
London and France, these men coordinated and unified internal resistance
movements under de Gaulle’s leadership, a project that had some success
by 1942, but began to falter in 1943. Communists only officially joined
the resistance after the German invasion of the Soviet Union and had little
interest in fighting under de Gaulle. A further setback occurred when the
Gestapo arrested Moulin, torturing and killing him in June 1943. Despite
these challenges, de Gaulle’s team created a National Resistance Council
that coordinated activities of internal resistance groups for the remain-
der of the war, including diversionary tactics for the Allied invasion of
Normandy.
Resistance networks within France were fairly diverse in their member-
ship and political orientation. The organized resistance was largely urban-
based, centered in Paris and Lyon; it recruited members from the middle
and lower-middle classes, including teachers, journalists, businessmen, and
engineers, many of whom were refugees. Without much weaponry, many
participants helped write and distribute clandestine newspapers or worked
at recruitment and propaganda. After 1942 and the implementation of the
STO, more men f led into the maquis in the rural countryside, enhancing
the armed activities of these groups. Women participated actively, gathering
information, working as liaison agents, and helping to produce and distrib-
ute resistance newspapers, such as the legendary Combat, whose editorial
secretary was a woman named Jacqueline Bernard. Protestants and Catho-
lics also created networks across France to hide and smuggle Jews out of
France to prevent their deportation.
After Germany occupied the southern zone in 1942, resistance activities
became even more dangerous, carrying risks not just for individuals but for
entire communities. The Germans did not hesitate to institute violent collec-
tive reprisals for resistance activities. One of the most notorious examples
of German collective reprisals occurred when a Waffen-SS battalion believed
that one of their officers had been captured by a local resistance militia
near the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane. The men in the village were
herded into barns and shot, while the women and children were locked
in the church that was set on fire. 642 villagers died, and only a handful
escaped the massacre.
Opposition to fascism and anger against German repression were not the
only motivations for resistance, however. In the overseas empire, resistance
movements sought both the collapse of Vichy rule and, in some cases, independ-
ence from colonialism. Social unrest in Martinique and Guadeloupe in 1943
evolved into full-fledged resistance movements that toppled the Vichy-aligned
leadership there. Many Antilleans, such as the Martinican medical student
Frantz Fanon, risked their lives to join de Gaulle’s Free French; they fought in
Allied campaigns in North Africa, D-Day, and the liberation of France, though
they were deliberately excluded from mainstream resistance organizations so as
to avoid discussions about independence from colonial rule.
In Indochina, resistance to Vichy did not mean support for de Gaulle.
Some conservative nationalists only supported Vichy’s traditionalism and
folklorism as a means to subvert French power, while Vietnamese com-
munists saw an opportunity for national liberation during the war. Begin-
ning in 1940, communist rebels launched an uprising against the Vichy
regime, which responded with violent reprisals. Yet the French were greatly
weakened once the Japanese began using Indochina to consolidate their
expansion into Southeast Asia. With the assistance of the United States,
Vietnamese communists like Ho Chi Minh and the pro-independence move-
ment known as the Viet Minh consolidated a broader nationalist uprising
against the French.
The Allied Invasions
A major turning point in the war occurred in 1942 when the British and
American governments launched a military invasion of French North Africa
to engage German military forces and prepare for a future invasion of
Europe through Italy. Initially pro-Vichy, the French admiral François Dar-
lan, in Algiers visiting his son when the Allied invasion occurred on Novem-
ber 8, shocked his fellow Vichy officials and many in the French navy when
he switched allegiance and essentially signed the French f leet and French
colonial troops over to the Allies. Despite pushback from some naval com-
manders who were staunch defenders of Pétain’s National Revolution, from
the end of 1942 onward, French West Africa, French Equatorial Africa,
and colonial troops in North Africa joined de Gaulle’s Free French forces.
Darlan, meanwhile, was assassinated in Algiers on Christmas eve in 1942.
After the Allied takeover of North Africa, de Gaulle transferred the
headquarters of the Free French to Algiers and created his own provisional
government, planning for the eventual liberation of France. While his emis-
saries coordinated with internal resistance movements in France, de Gaulle
struggled to maintain good relations with British and American leaders
who had the power to make him the head of a postwar French govern-
ment. In the spring of 1943, Allied military leaders under American general
Dwight Eisenhower began planning the invasion of Europe that became
Operation Overlord, better known as D-Day. Internal French resistance
greatly expanded in the months before the Allied landings in Normandy
on June 6, 1944, but it hardly figured into strategic plans for D-Day, which
upset de Gaulle. Within France, communists anxiously awaited the inva-
sion, intending to launch a full-scale insurrection to consolidate their power
at the war’s end. This deeply worried de Gaulle, who feared the Allies might
not give him the support he needed to seize control of the French govern-
ment. Consequently, de Gaulle insisted that his organization be called the
Provisional Government of the French Republic (GPRF). Although he was
invited to London just before the invasion, relations between de Gaulle,
Winston Churchill, and Franklin Roosevelt remained hostile. No French
soldiers participated in the Normandy invasion, and in his speech on the
day of the invasion, Eisenhower invited French civilians to follow his orders,
rather than de Gaulle’s. Nevertheless, French divisions, containing a strong
representation of colonial troops, joined the Allies in a second invasion from
the Mediterranean in August 1944.
French civilians participated in the Allied invasions, whether they were
active in maquis or simply villagers in Normandy, nearly 20,000 of whom
lost their lives. The entire region was subjected to massive aerial bombard-
ment, and cities such as Caen and Le Havre were bombed into ruins. To
support the invasion and liberation, civilians provided intelligence on Ger-
man military movements, cared for wounded Allied soldiers, and fought
against Germans when necessary. As Allied troops moved inland, General
Eisenhower set his objective on the destruction of Nazi Germany, especially
as the Soviets were advancing on Berlin from the east. He saw the liberation
of Paris and southern France as a time-wasting diversion. Gaullists, in con-
trast, desired the immediate liberation of Paris, largely to cement their own
power in the face of a possible communist insurrection. The city, however,
was descending into chaos. Strikes broke out in mid-August and the citizens
of Paris had thrown up barricades to aid resistance against the Germans.
American military commanders ultimately agreed to allow the French to
officially “liberate” the city of Paris. On the morning of August 25, forces
from General Leclerc’s 2nd Armored Division, primarily made up of Span-
ish republicans, arrived in the city along with American troops. That after-
noon, the Germans surrendered the city. The following morning, General
de Gaulle led a celebratory parade of troops down the Champs-Elysées
toward Notre Dame for a celebration Mass. Although brutal fighting con-
tinued throughout the rest of France, including the Battle of the Bulge in the
Ardennes Forest—the last major German offensive—the liberation of Paris
signaled an end to the war and to the Vichy regime.
Liberation, Épuration, and Postwar Mythmaking

Just before the liberation of Paris, both Pétain and Laval contrived plans to
maintain power after the liberation, including negotiation with the Allies.
However, the Germans essentially abducted both Pétain and Laval, forcing
them into exile in the small town of Sigmaringen, Germany. Along with
other members of the defunct Vichy government-in-exile and staunch col-
laborationists like Louis Ferdinand Céline and Abel Bonnard, Pétain and
Laval sat out the end of the war in a drafty castle preparing justifications of
their actions during the war.
De Gaulle, meanwhile, made every effort to consolidate his power. The
Allies, and specifically the Americans, had little interest in securing power
for de Gaulle. In fact, they had already made provisions to directly admin-
ister France in a manner similar to the Allied military government in Italy
(AMGOT). De Gaulle knew, however, that to seize democratic power he
would have to gain control of an unruly and diffuse resistance movement.
The most significant threat to him were the communists, who had the loy-
alty of vast numbers of resistors and the credibility of their anti-fascist posi-
tion. However, the communists were also weakened by the ongoing war
and the Soviet Union’s strategic decision not to send military support and
risk shifting Allied attention and resources from the fight against Germany.
One way de Gaulle’s provisional government sought to gain political
control and win the allegiance of the French population was through
both an official and unofficial purge of collaborators, known as the épu-
ration (the cleansing). Four types of courts were established to try col-
laborators for crimes against the state. The High Court sentenced 18
Vichy officials to death for treason, including Laval and Pétain, although
de Gaulle later commuted Pétain’s sentence to life imprisonment based
on his age and World War I service. Between the official death sentences
and those carried out in the épuration sauvage, or the extra-judicial hunt
for collaborators, more than 10,000 people were killed in the aftermath
of the Liberation. Another 40,000 people were sentenced to prison or
detention, and 50,000 more to dégradation nationale, or the loss of civil
rights.
French women who had relationships with Germans, pejoratively known
as “horizontal collaborators,” became the specific target of a form of épu-
ration that involved public shaming and, occasionally, legal action. These
women had their heads forcibly shaved and were paraded in the streets,
sometimes naked, while crowds shouted and painted swastikas on their
bodies. Many of them were accused of denouncing members of the resist-
ance, and while some of these women may have legitimately sought the ben-
efits of collaboration, others were sex workers. “Sleeping with the enemy”
was a metaphor for the French shame of collaboration, and it helps explain
the dramatic and violent actions taken against these women.
The drama of the purges helped unify the French population around
the long-unchallenged myth that the handful of “bad seeds” who had col-
laborated with the Nazis had been removed from generally healthy soil.
Yet the purges did not lead to French unification around de Gaulle. Resist-
ance movements felt increasingly betrayed by de Gaulle’s strategic coldness
toward local resistance leaders and their contributions. Additionally, the
slow return of POWs, forced laborers from the STO, and eventually the
deported Jews—of whom only 2,500 returned alive—signaled the magni-
tude of the horrors that had taken place during the war. For many, the
end of the fighting was only the beginning of new kinds of deprivation,
particularly in the bombed-out towns and villages in northern France. Mas-
sive food shortages lingered long after the war, and many women found
themselves turning to Allied troops for support, in what became a complex
exchange of sex for food and friendship. French women faced accusations
of being prostitutes or sexually promiscuous and, following accusations of
rape by American GIs, African-American soldiers were scapegoated within
their own army.
Yet it was de Gaulle who conjured an even stronger myth that enabled the
French to imagine themselves collectively as heroic resisters who had fought
both the Nazi occupation and the Vichy regime with every weapon at their
disposal. During a speech in Bayeux, Normandy in June 1946, de Gaulle
called France a nation of “40 million resisters.” This version of France’s
World War II history, known as the Gaullist myth or the “myth of the resist-
ance,” would shape the French memory of its participation in both the war
and the Holocaust and its vision of its place in global affairs for decades
after the war.
All was not so harmonious across the French empire, however. On
May 8, 1945, while Europeans were celebrating victory in Europe, a
group of Algerians had gathered in the town of Sétif to protest the condi-
tions of colonial rule. Nationalism in Algeria had been growing steadily
since the February 1943 publication of Ferhat Abbas’s Manifesto of the
Algerian People, which called for self-determination and equality for all
inhabitants of Algeria. Additionally, the April 1944 arrest of the left-
wing Algerian nationalist leader Messali Hadj only added fuel to the fire.
It was his party—the PPA—that organized the protest in Sétif, which
quickly transformed into a violent altercation. Several Europeans were
killed in the ensuing struggle, which spread to neighboring towns and
villages in the following days. In response, the French military retaliated
brutally. While the French claimed that approximately 1,100 Algerians
were killed, the PPA and post-independence Algerian government argued
that nearly 45,000 were killed; foreign military observers estimated
between 6,000 and 20,000 deaths, a great number of whom were Alge-
rian civilians. These French massacres became symbolic of the violence
that the colonial regime maintained, even in the wake of a war in which
colonial soldiers had sacrificed their lives in fighting for France and its
empire.
Notes
1 Cited in Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003), 126.
2 Cited in Ruth Ginio, “Vichy Rule in French West Africa: Prelude to Decoloniza-
tion,” French Colonial History 4 (2003), 205–206.
3 Cited in Renée Poznanski, Jews in France During World War II, trans. Nathan
Bracher (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Brandeis University
Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2001),
20.
4 Philippe Burrin, France Under the Germans: Collaboration and Compromise,
trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: The New Press, 1996), 2.
5 Cited in Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 390.

Burrin, Philippe. France Under the Germans: Collaboration and Compromise.
Translated by Janet Lloyd. New York: The New Press, 1996.
Caron, Vicki. Uneasy Asylum: France and the Jewish Refugee Crisis. Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press, 1999.
Fogg, Shannon L. The Politics of Everyday Life in Vichy France: Foreigners, Unde-
sirables, and Strangers. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Ginio, Ruth. French Colonialism Unmasked: The Vichy Years in French West Africa.
Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2006.
Jackson, Julian. France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2003.
Jennings, Eric T. Vichy in the Tropics: Pétain’s National Revolution in Madagas-
car, Guadeloupe, and Indochina, 1940–1944. Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2001.
Poznanski, Renée. Jews in France During World War II. Translated by Nathan
Bracher. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Brandeis University
Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2001.
Wievorka, Olivier. Divided Memory: French Recollections of World War II From
the Liberation to the Present. Translated by George Holoch. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2012.
12 Postwar Reconstruction
and Imperial Deconstruction,
1944–1962 Postwar Reconstruction and Imperial Deconstruction, 1944–1962
Introduction
After serving in the Free French Army that helped liberate France from Nazi
occupation, Frantz Fanon, a student from Martinique, moved to Lyon in
the late 1940s to study psychiatry. In Martinique, Fanon had been a pro-
tégé of the anti-colonial poet and politician Aimé Césaire, who was elected
mayor of Fort-de-France in 1945 and then deputy to the French National
Assembly as a member of the French Communist Party. In addition to
his medical studies, Fanon attended the lectures of philosopher Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, a specialist in phenomenology, a philosophical approach
that seeks to understand consciousness and meaning in human experience.
Drawing on his own experiences of racism in France, Fanon began develop-
ing an intellectual analysis of the psychological effects of racism and colo-
nial subjugation on Black people. This work was published in 1952 as Peau
noires, masques blanches (Black Skin, White Masks). In Algeria, where he
completed his medical residency, Fanon’s analysis evolved, as he observed
the daily lives of his hospitalized Algerian psychiatric patients. Instead of
focusing simply on blackness, colonialism became, in his analysis, a larger
and more generalized issue of oppression, and a problem whose solution
would necessarily be political and violent.
In 1954, Fanon joined the Algerian fight for independence and began writ-
ing editorials for El Moudjahid, the journal of the Algerian National Lib-
eration Front. In 1961, he published his most famous work, The Wretched
of the Earth, a searing analysis of the harm of colonialism on colonized
populations and a defense of the use of violence to gain liberation. This text,
prefaced by French intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre, was published just days
before Fanon’s death of leukemia at the age of 36. Although Fanon was a
radical figure, his texts have become canonical, in part because they illus-
trate the urgency and trauma at the heart of discussions around colonialism
and decolonization in the aftermath of World War II.
In January 1944, Charles de Gaulle addressed a gathering of French
colonial administrators in Brazzaville (French Congo). Brought together
by French Equatorial Africa’s governor general Félix Éboué, the delegates
DOI: 10.4324/b23310-12
236 Postwar Reconstruction and Imperial Deconstruction, 1944–1962
conferred over how best to preserve the French empire. They discussed
reforming problematic policies, such as forced labor, and promoting the
“evolution” of African people toward more efficient capitalist production
and modernity. On March 24, 1945, the French government created the
French Union, a new configuration of the empire that particularly affected
Indochina, which was still under Japanese control. Yet France maintained a
convoluted system of citizenship and belonging, and tensions were mount-
ing across the empire. The Sétif uprising in Algeria and its violent repression
in May 1945, in addition to the rise of an anti-colonial nationalist move-
ment in occupied Indochina, set the tone for the turbulent postwar relation-
ship between France and its empire.
In the metropole, the situation following the Allied victory was like-
wise chaotic and bleak. The Provisional Government struggled to restore
authority amidst economic deprivation and political chaos. A newly power-
ful French Communist Party (PCF) clashed with French socialists. Yet the
most powerful postwar party was the Mouvement républicain populaire
(Popular Republican Movement, MRP), a new Christian-democratic party,
which combined remnants of the right wing and centrists. After months of
wrangling over a new constitution, it passed by referendum, and in Octo-
ber 1946, the Fourth Republic was born. Over the next two decades, the
political and economic situation of France significantly improved. With an
inf lux of money from the U.S. Marshall Plan, France experienced rapid eco-
nomic growth in the 1950s and 1960s, building a strong welfare state that
emphasized health care and family allowances. This period of economic
growth, known in France as the “thirty glorious years,” fueled a baby boom
and a consumer revolution.
French women finally gained the right to vote in 1944, and although there
was strong pressure to maintain conservative gender norms, feminist texts
such as Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) challenged these roles
and contributed to the robust intellectual life and political engagement in
France. This proved critical as the French faced the growing crises of decolo-
nization. After fighting a nearly eight-year war in Indochina, the French mil-
itary was defeated by Ho Chi Minh and his communist Viet Minh, who won
independence in 1954. In November that same year, the Algerian War broke
out. Refusing to consider it a war for independence, the French labeled it a
domestic, terrorist uprising. As the war escalated in urban areas, the French
military instituted a draft and began using torture and “disappearances”
to defeat the Algerian guerrilla fighters. French and global public opinion
turned against the conf lict. The collapse of the socialist government in 1957
and a coup attempt among French military leaders in Algiers led to the
creation of the Fifth Republic in 1958. To restore France’s global image and
“grandeur,” French leaders began decolonizing the empire in French West
Africa and negotiated with the Algerian Provisional Government, always
working to maintain economic ties through treaties of postcolonial coopera-
tion. By 1962, France’s global footprint had been drastically reduced, even
Postwar Reconstruction and Imperial Deconstruction, 1944–1962 237
as its leaders sought new ways to gain a larger share of power within the
burgeoning European Union and the Cold War political order.
Restoring Authority Amidst Social and Political Chaos

Charles de Gaulle’s main postwar priority was to establish his authority
amidst the chaos of the Liberation. In nearly every major city and region
of France, de Gaulle performed a triumphant entry, depicting himself as a
commanding and successful leader, which helped consolidate his power and
the myth of the Gaullist resistance. He was also helped by turmoil within
the PCF. Maurice Thorez, secretary-general of the PCF, returned to France
in November 1944 under orders from Stalin to ensure that French commu-
nists cooperated with de Gaulle and sought power democratically (rather
than through revolution). Although the communist rank and file found this
a bitter pill to swallow, it was the party line until the eruption of the Cold
War in 1947.
The reconstruction of the country’s infrastructure was a key priority.
Allied bombing campaigns had decimated northern France, leaving impor-
tant port cities on the English Channel in ruins. Industrial production had
ground to a halt, and the final battles across France had ruined any chance of
a successful harvest. In fact, the entire country faced desperate food scarcity
that lasted through 1948. The Provisional Government continued to ration
food and supplies, despite the unpopular policy. The situation grew dire as
more than a million prisoners of war, 700,000 STO laborers, and hundreds
of thousands of deportees and refugees f looded back into the country. In
the midst of this chaos, the Provisional Government sought to construct a
permanent political structure.
In October 1945, the French population overwhelmingly rejected the rees-
tablishment of the Third Republic and voted, instead, to create a new con-
stitution. French voters elected a new Constituent Assembly roughly split
among three political parties: the communists, the socialists, and the new
MRP, a center-right, Catholic-inspired Christian-democratic party. Nearly
60 percent of the MRP’s voter base was women, which studies at the time
attributed to their tendency to vote for parties with links to the Catholic
Church. Yet the MRP actively discouraged women from participating in
politics, suggesting that their moral duty was to marriage and motherhood,
while the PCF heavily recruited for its women’s section and presented the
highest number of women candidates (20 percent) for legislative elections.
To avoid being overwhelmed by the communists, the socialists proposed a
coalition between the three parties, which was known as tripartism.
De Gaulle had always imagined himself at the head of a government with
a much more powerful executive branch than had existed in any previous
French republic. However, the new coalition within the assembly disagreed.
De Gaulle resigned in protest in January 1946, believing (wrongly) that
he would quickly be called back to power. The three parties immediately
found themselves at odds: communists desired a single legislative house,
while the MRP insisted on a two-house legislature. The initial draft of the
constitution—a single house and a largely ceremonial presidency—was defeated
by referendum in May 1946. Subsequent negotiations resulted in a constitution
that, ironically, closely resembled that of the Third Republic; it established a
bicameral legislature with a consultative council and a National Assembly,
elected by universal suffrage. The leader of the majority party or coalition in
the National Assembly would serve as prime minister, and both houses elected
the president, who had limited powers. The Fourth Republic was approved by
referendum in October 1946.
The constitution of the Fourth Republic re-organized the structure of the
French empire by proclaiming the legal institution of the French Union.
No longer were French territories considered “colonies”; instead, France
established several new administrative categories for its overseas posses-
sions, notably départements d’Outre-mer (overseas departments, or DOMs),
and territoires d’Outre-mer (overseas territories, or TOMs). The northern
departments of Algeria, which had been DOMs since 1848, were now joined
by the “old colonies” of the Caribbean, including Martinique, Guadeloupe,
French Guiana, the island of Réunion (and later St. Pierre et Miquelon).
Most other colonies became TOMs, while former mandate states were
labeled Associated Territories and former protectorates became Associated
States. The three territories that made up Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, and
Cambodia) became the Indochinese Federation. Subjects across the empire
were granted citizenship in the French Union, which was not the same as
full French citizenship, although it conferred on them the right to elect rep-
resentatives to regional elected assemblies, and certain “evolved” subjects
gained full access to rights as French citizens (approximately 65,000 men).
New legislation enabled male citizens across the empire to vote in elections
for their local assemblies as well as for a limited number of deputies in the
second college of the French National Assembly. Additional reforms intro-
duced freedom of assembly and authorized trade unions, which created new
opportunities for French-educated elites. In Algeria, the September 1947 loi
organique notably dismantled the native codes and gave Algerians the right
of unrestricted movement between France and Algeria. However, the settler
population perpetuated racial and class inequalities by maintaining a double
college system in the Algerian Assembly, which prevented the non-European
Algerian population from ever attaining any significant legislative power.
France, the Cold War, and European Cooperation

Despite de Gaulle’s political maneuvering during World War II, France
emerged from the war in a weak position, vis-à-vis the other Allied pow-
ers. By consolidating the diffuse armed resistance movements and the Free
French forces, de Gaulle rebuilt the French Army in 1944. He hoped to con-
vince the “Big Three” (Churchill, Stalin, and Franklin D. Roosevelt), who
had excluded France from any discussions on the fate of Europe at their
meetings in Yalta (February 1945) and Potsdam (July 1945), of France’s
necessary contribution to the postwar order. To a certain extent it worked,
as France gained a permanent seat on the Security Council of the newly
formed United Nations and was granted a small occupation zone of control
in western Germany.
Unsurprisingly, one of the key foreign policy concerns for France was
rebuilding alliances with the United States and Great Britain to prevent yet
another German invasion. This was complicated when relations began to
break down between the United States and Soviet Union in 1946 after Sta-
lin began to install buffer regimes in states under his inf luence. The United
States responded with the Truman Doctrine, a series of policies designed to
prevent the further spread of communism across the world. When French
officials sought financial assistance from the United States in 1947, they
learned that the American government was wary of the growing political
power of the PCF. Yet, the growing tensions between the United States and
Soviet Union resulted in the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organi-
zation (NATO) in April 1949, of which France was a founding member.
Additionally, the French moved even further into the American orbit by
serving as host country to the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Powers
in Europe (SHAPE) in 1951.
The emerging Cold War also transformed the French empire, notably
through communist-led colonial insurrections in Indochina and Madagas-
car. The Vietnamese communist forces under Ho Chi Minh had resisted
their Japanese occupiers during World War II and launched an uprising in
the wake of the Japanese surrender in August 1945. On September 2, Ho
Chi Minh declared Vietnamese independence with a text that borrowed
language directly from the American Declaration of Independence and the
French “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.” But after
negotiations broke down with Ho over the Democratic Republic of Viet-
nam’s inclusion into the newly created French Union, de Gaulle sent troops
and colonial officials to take back control of the territory. Although French
communists claimed they supported decolonization of the territory, there
was little real support in France for the decolonization of the empire. By late
1946, the Indochinese territory was mired in conf lict.
In 1948, the French threw their support behind Bao Dai, the former
emperor of Annam, in an effort to unite Cochinchina, Annam, and Tonkin.
They also sought to win American support for the fight against Ho Chi
Minh’s communist forces. They depicted Ho Chi Minh not as a national-
ist but as an international communist controlled by China and the Soviet
Union. This narrative took off after Mao and Stalin officially recognized the
communist-led Democratic Republic of Vietnam in early 1950. That same
year, the U.S. government began supplying arms and significant financial
support to the French military, and by 1954, the Americans were paying
almost 80 percent of French war expenses.
While French communists voted against the war in Indochina and con-
demned the brutal repression of an anti-colonial insurrection in Madagascar
in April 1947, they continued to support the French government. Yet this
was not enough to maintain their political power in the midst of rising Cold
War tensions. After the Soviet takeover of Prague in 1948 and the block-
ade of Berlin between June 1948 and May 1949, many western Europeans
turned against Stalin; the governments of Italy, Belgium, and Luxembourg
began throwing communists out of power. In France, domestic politics gave
socialists and conservative politicians leverage to isolate the PCF within
the French government, despite its continued electoral support among the
working classes. Throughout 1947, the country experienced waves of com-
munist-backed industrial strikes. These gave the socialist prime minister
Paul Ramadier the opportunity to eject the PCF from the national govern-
ment and from a number of mayoral seats. After another strike wave broke
out in November 1947, the government banned strikes.
In the midst of this chaos, de Gaulle created a new conservative political
party called the Rassemblement du peuple français (Rally of the French Peo-
ple, RPF), which immediately gained massive popular support. De Gaulle’s
larger-than-life personality and the wave of dissatisfaction at the economic
and political chaos of the postwar period led many to turn back to de
Gaulle. In the elections of October 1947, the RPF gained over 40 percent of
the vote, and the party had over a million members. However, a coalition of
centrist parties prevented both the PCF and the RPF from winning a major-
ity, and the government’s crackdown on communism and labor militancy
demonstrated that de Gaulle was not necessary to assert muscular national
authority. Facing these defeats, de Gaulle again withdrew from politics in
1953, and the RPF subsequently collapsed a few years later.
Amidst the economic crisis of the postwar years, the United States devel-
oped an economic recovery plan that injected an enormous infusion of cash
into Western European countries. Called the European Recovery Program,
or the Marshall Plan, this funding was intended for Europeans to rebuild
their economies and help combat the spread of communism. Despite the
massive U.S. investments in the French economy, not everyone in France
fully embraced the American way; the disastrous war in Indochina and
growing unemployment of the early 1950s contributed to a popular move-
ment against both U.S. intervention and the French state. This movement,
known as Poujadisme, emerged in 1953 after its leader Pierre Poujade, a
small business owner, became frustrated by the weak economy, high taxes,
and price controls the government set to deal with inf lation. Throughout
the summer, rural unrest spread, as small business owners and farmers pro-
tested against imports of Algerian wine and low prices for their own prod-
ucts and livestock. This resistance against the government and the fear of
“Americanization” resulted in a general strike in August. As with previ-
ous far-right movements in France, supporters soon blamed their economic
difficulties not just on American intervention but on all foreigners, from
refugees to migrant labor. Antisemitism, despite the horrors of the Shoah,
re-emerged as well.
As the French government turned increasingly to the United States for
financial and political support, both the far left and far right grew anxious
about the growing influence of the new Cold War superpowers on France.
A 1952 poll showed that 45 percent of the population believed that France
should stay out of a war between the United States and the Soviet Union, while
only 36 percent was prepared to support the United States if war broke out.
Despite its exile from the government, the French Communist Party continued
to maintain strong popular support during the late 1940s and early 1950s,
particularly in working-class areas of cities like Paris, and its surrounding
“red belt” suburbs. Among other groups, however, support for communism
declined. Several prominent leftist intellectuals began to shift their ideologi-
cal support away from Moscow, even openly criticizing Stalin and the Soviet
Union. Meanwhile, the Vatican cracked down on leftist Catholic movements
in France that sought to reconcile Christianity with Marxism.
Postwar French politicians and industrialists expressed enormous anxi-
ety over the reconstruction of Germany, especially as Cold War tensions
intensified. The Berlin blockade of 1948–1949 had transformed the Euro-
pean landscape, as the Allied occupation zones of Germany became the
main buffer between France and the Soviet Union. Consequently, the United
States and Britain urged France to abandon its plan to diminish Germany’s
industrial capacity. As the Americans injected enormous amounts of cash
into the newly created Federal Republic of Germany after 1949, notably to
build up German industry, the French agonized over their perceived posi-
tion of political and economic weakness in both Europe and the world.
Yet a French official from Lorraine named Robert Schuman believed that
French Germanophobia was counterproductive and saw a solution in greater
political and economic cooperation. With the help of former businessman
and political economist Jean Monnet, he proposed a new common market
for French and German coal and steel, which would promote moderniza-
tion and integrate these industries into a new European federation. When
six governments signed onto the proposal in 1950, the federation became
known as the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). It formed the
blueprint for later forms of European integration and unification, such as
the 1957 Treaty of Rome, which integrated the economic markets of Euro-
pean countries through the European Economic Community, better known
as the Common Market.
Reconstruction, State Planning, and the Marshall Plan

Unlike most of France’s northern and eastern industrial cities and even
southern port cities like Marseille, Paris emerged from the war with little
destruction to its physical and industrial infrastructure. Jobs were plenti-
ful, and by the end of the 1950s, the population of Paris and its outskirts
approached 8 million. For the middle and upper classes, standards of living
improved so significantly that the years between 1945 and 1975 are called
les trente glorieueses, or “the 30 glorious years.” For the working classes
and foreign migrant laborers, however, wages and the standard of living
were much slower to rise. Urban housing remained run down and over-
crowded—a situation that government authorities were slow to address. Yet
the working-class population swelled, and by the mid-1950s, 20 percent of
all industrial workers were employed in the Paris region, often in automo-
bile manufacturing. The artisanal economy grew as well, and commercial
districts mushroomed, as did open-air markets and new chain stores. The
outer arrondissements of Paris and the peripheral districts in the northeast
saw the development of large-scale industry, from aircraft factories to indus-
trial meat packing and tanneries. These transformations were a direct result
of French state interventions at both the local and national scales.
The dramatic upheavals of the Liberation enabled the French government
to take direct control of the economy on an unprecedented scale. While
many French projects were a continuation of Vichy-era technocratic plan-
ning, postwar politicians across the political spectrum enacted ambitious
large-scale nationalizations of the automobile and aircraft industries, a sub-
stantial welfare state with comprehensive social security provisions, and
modernization of numerous economic sectors. The Banque de France
and several smaller banks and insurance companies were also nation-
alized in a plan that included the creation of an elite school of public
administration to train senior civil servants called the Ecole nationale
d’administration (National School of Administration, ENA).
In 1946, Jean Monnet was charged with creating a centralized economic
planning body called the Commissariat-général au Plan (Central Planning
Commission). Monnet helped prepare a report on the French economy that
Léon Blum took with him to the United States in 1947 to ask for financial
assistance. The report stressed the French intention to channel financial sup-
port into the modernization of its industrial economy. In what became known
as the Blum-Byrnes Accord, the United States agreed to cancel French war
debts and extend a credit package of approximately $650 million. Monnet
and his team created a five-year plan for modernizing six sectors of the French
economy: coal, steel, electricity, cement, transport, and agriculture. The state
nationalized the electricity industry, invested heavily in a new hydroelectric
system, and rebuilt roads, railroads, and the mining sector. Much of the
French Marshall Plan funding also went directly into industrial moderniza-
tion projects, including the construction of new housing.
Since World War I, working-class laborers had lodged in rundown tempo-
rary settlements and immigrant ghettos in the outer ring of Parisian suburbs.
Algerian laborers, in particular, lived in deplorable conditions in shanty-
towns known as bidonvilles that lacked running water. In the “slums” of
working-class neighborhoods in eastern and northern Paris, homeless fami-
lies squatted in derelict buildings with no ventilation or sanitary facilities.
The city of Marseille faced similar housing shortages and rapidly expanding
shantytowns, so regional authorities began relocating squatters into former
internment camps nearby. Between 1953 and 1962, French authorities con-
structed almost half a million public housing units, yet this did not solve
the housing crisis. Even as the economy grew and more consumers sought
access to better houses for their growing families, the shortage continued
through the 1960s.
Despite the reformist mentality of the early postwar period and French
enthusiasm for economic planning, initially the overseas empire received
little economic investment, compared to the metropole. What investment
did occur was thanks to Marshall Plan funds. Between 1948 and 1951,
a little over 3 percent of the French Marshall Plan aid was designated for
use in Algeria, while only 1.69 percent was set aside for all the other over-
seas territories. As in Europe, after 1945, workers across the French empire
faced stagnating wages, high inf lation, and a lack of basic supplies. Conse-
quently, hundreds of thousands of Algerians went to France to find work.
In “depopulated” areas of France, the French even sponsored a project to
resettle Algerian Berber families (deemed more adaptable to French civiliza-
tion, per the “Kabyle myth”). In French West Africa, many of the work-
ers trained in France by the CGT began to establish trade unions and to
demand higher wages and better working conditions; they organized strikes
and campaigned for the adoption of a new labor code, forcing the French to
treat African workers seriously.
The Welfare State, Population Rejuvenation,

and Immigration
The “lack of men and the weakness of the French birth rate,” Charles de
Gaulle bemoaned in a March 1945 speech, “are the underlying cause of
our misfortunes.” He proposed two solutions to secure the nation’s future:
France needed to produce “twelve million beautiful babies” and introduce
“methodically and intelligently, good elements of immigration into the
French collectivity.”1 Some pronatalists had suggested that France should
welcome child immigrants, especially orphaned Jewish refugees, which
would provide a new inf lux of potential citizens and, importantly, demon-
strate that the Vichy regime had not destroyed the French tradition of asy-
lum. However, the overwhelming French interest in what they termed “good
immigrants” who would assimilate quickly put the lie to this appearance of
humanitarianism.
Despite a 1945 ordinance that banned the use of ethnic criteria in selecting
immigrants, French officials used ethnic and racial stereotypes in determining
which immigrants would fit their vision of assimilation. “Nordic types,” includ-
ing Germans, were best, despite the war that had just occurred. Southern Euro-
peans with “criminal tendencies” ranked lower, as did adult Jews in general.
A 1945 letter from de Gaulle to Minister of Justice Pierre-Henri Teitgen stated
it was imperative to “limit the influx of Mediterraneans and Orientals who
over half a century have profoundly modified the human structure of France.”2
Some officials even suggested forcibly importing children from the French occu-
pation zones who were born of French fathers and German mothers (whether
through consensual relationships or rape), thereby solving both France’s prob-
lem of underpopulation and the threat of German overpopulation. Ultimately,
the October 1945 Nationality Code stated that a child born anywhere to a
French mother would be French and that a foreign woman who married a
French man was automatically granted French nationality.
Concerns about the birthrate led to the continued repression of abortion
and birth control. Many of the investigative and juridical structures the Vichy
regime had put in place to track down abortion doctors and women seeking
abortions continued in the postwar period. Additionally, pronatalists had the
ear of government officials and promoted the growth of the French popula-
tion through incentives for French women to reproduce. The French birth
rate did begin to rise by the late 1940s. 9 million births in 1955 swelled to
11 million in 1958. This increase was largely the consequence of pro-natalist
social welfare provisions, which rewarded French women and families who
conformed to traditional heterosexual family structures. In 1946, the govern-
ment developed a program to pay allowances through the Caisse d’allocations
familiales (Family Allocations Office, or CAF) to families with multiple chil-
dren; the more children they had, the more money they received from the
state. Mothers who stayed at home with children received special allowances,
and the state subsidized schooling and transportation. A new national service
program called the Family Worker program recruited young French women
to train in home economics, hygiene, and childcare.
Women across the French Union were also targets of gendered social
engineering projects in the postwar period. Implicitly contrasting them with
white French women, officials in the French Antilles claimed that Antil-
lean women (who had become full French citizens with the integration of
the Antilles as overseas departments) were overly fertile, which contributed
to poverty and underdevelopment. To relieve demographic pressure on the
islands, and to “improve” these women’s promiscuous nature through con-
tact with “superior” French culture, labor migration pathways brought
Antillean women to work in childcare in France. The high Algerian birth-
rate also greatly concerned French government officials, social scientists,
and social workers. They specifically targeted Algerian women in both
France and Algeria with re-education attempts, which focused on integrat-
ing Algerian immigrants into French consumer culture.
The Consumer Revolution and Gender

Beyond just demographic concerns, the state attempted to engineer
the postwar French family through the creation of the domestic “con-
sumer citizen,” who would actively participate in modernization and
reconstruction in the private sphere. Women were the target of this cam-
paign, which emphasized their place in the home and their primarily
reproductive and caregiving roles. In line with this vision, women were
typically depicted as consumers rather than producers in the postwar
modernizing economy. Yet new women’s groups argued that women had
power as consumers and could help raise the standard of living in France
through their purchasing.
In the early postwar years, consumption was organized around subsist-
ence, especially when food and basic supplies were still rationed. However,
by the mid-1950s, the French increasingly sought new consumer goods for
their homes, revealing a higher standard of living. With access to credit,
middle-class French families could now afford the household appliances—a
refrigerator, vacuum cleaner, washing machine—needed to turn a house-
wife into a technologically modern domestic expert. And for wealthier fami-
lies, an automobile to drive them to the new supermarket and back, was
essential.
The press, and especially women’s magazines, were extremely inf luential
in shaping the domestic consumer culture of the postwar era. Alongside arti-
cles giving advice on domestic skills for the “modern” housewife, magazines
such as Elle and Marie-Claire featured advertisements for the newest appli-
ances and consumer goods, most of which came from the United States.
Consumer product fairs, such as the Salon des arts ménagères (Domestic
Arts Salon), brought the masses out to view products for every imagina-
ble purpose, ranging from affordable appliances to impractical space-age
machines. Even fashion advertising participated in the repurposing of tra-
ditional gender norms. Couture designers such as Dior, whose iconic New
Look dresses of the late 1940s and early 1950s (think wasp waists and full
skirts) were featured on the cover of Vogue and other high fashion maga-
zines, set the standard for ready-to-wear fashions that presented a visibly
“feminine” silhouette.
Despite constant messaging that suggested mass consumer society and
a rationalized domestic life would fulfill them, many French women by
the early 1960s expressed increasing dissatisfaction with their lives as full-
time wives and homemakers. Articles about the isolation and depression of
housewives were printed next to ads for Moulinex appliances in women’s
magazines. Meanwhile, Simone de Beauvoir’s controversial feminist treatise
The Second Sex denounced married women’s subjection to the domestic
sphere as a form of slavery. Though panned upon its publication in 1949,
the book began to gain more positive attention and readership. This shift
in attitudes concerning women’s role in society and the meaning of the con-
sumer did not take place in a vacuum. Rather it occurred at the height
of French decolonization, the growing tensions of the Cold War, and at a
moment in which the French relationship to the United States—the country
that represented all that was both shiny and evil about consumerism and
capitalism—was becoming ever more complicated.
Intellectual and Cultural Life in Postwar France
One of the most enduring popular images of postwar France is that of
French intellectuals and writers sitting in Left Bank Parisian cafes, discuss-
ing and writing revolutionary new novels, essays, and film screenplays. All
of them sought to be philosophically and politically “engaged” with the
events of the moment, considering the fate of human existence in the wake
of World War II or the decolonization of France’s empire. For most of these
writers, their work had acquired a new urgency in the aftermath of events
like the genocide of the European Jews and the dropping of atomic bombs
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
French existentialism was an intellectual movement most often associated
with writers Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
and Albert Camus (although he did not consider himself an existentialist).
Drawing on the branch of philosophy known as phenomenology, exis-
tentialism sought to analyze and understand human existence. For Sar-
tre and Beauvoir, existentialism was a means through which they could
think through questions of human agency and responsibility, especially in
a world where traditional moral and ethical frameworks (including reli-
gion) had broken down or been entirely corrupted. Others wrestled with
these profound moral questions in fiction and essays that they published in
new literary magazines such as Sartre and Beauvoir’s Les Temps modernes
(Modern Times). One of the key concerns of the moment was the meaning
and purpose of political engagement and what it meant to be an “engaged”
intellectual. A fierce conf lict arose among these intellectuals over the left’s
relationship to communism, specifically to what extent French intellectuals
should support the repressive tactics of the Soviet Union in defense of its
political ideology.
African-American writers like Richard Wright, who moved to Paris in
1947 with his family, and James Baldwin, who arrived a year later, con-
tributed greatly to the intellectual world of postwar France as did writ-
ers from the French empire. Both Wright and Baldwin settled in France to
escape the racism of Jim Crow segregation, a topic their novels addressed
directly. They were also engaged in the radical politics of the time, whether
civil rights, communism, or the non-aligned movement and decolonization.
Wright’s work was published in Modern Times, and his writing about his
experiences of racism in the United States forced intellectuals like Sartre and
Beauvoir to take up racism as a serious intellectual issue.
Like most French citizens, French intellectuals remained disengaged from
the racism at the heart of French imperialism. Yet several intellectuals and
writers from the French empire contributed to a complex cultural awaken-
ing during the wars of decolonization, especially the Algerian War. Aimé
Césaire, the Martinican poet and politician, and Léopold Sédar Senghor, the
Senegalese writer and politician, had initiated a literary movement known as
négritude in the 1930s, which sought to reappropriate positive connotations
of Blackness and demonstrate a common identity and civilization for Black
Africans across the world. In 1947, Césaire published the book-length ver-
sion of his 1939 poem titled Cahiers d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook
of a Return to a Native Land), which examined how Black populations
could affirm their identity under French colonialism. In 1955, he then pub-
lished an intellectually devastating text titled Discourse on Colonialism that
denounced the entire racial system that undergirded European imperialism.
Even more radical in his denunciations of French colonialism was
Césaire’s student, Frantz Fanon, whose 1961 book The Wretched of the
Earth became an instant, canonic work of revolutionary and postcolonial
theory. Its most well-known chapter asserted that since colonialism was a
dehumanizing process, violence was the means through which people, like
the Algerians, could regain their liberation and form a nation free from the
psychological chains of imperialism. While Fanon’s vision of violent libera-
tion in Algeria was too extreme for most French intellectuals, Algeria and its
brutal war of decolonization forced them to confront their views on ethics,
morality, and political engagement, particularly on issues such as torture
and conscientious objection.
Revolt and Repression in the Empire

In the aftermath of World War II, the French remained staunchly opposed to
granting independence to their colonies. Nationalist movements—especially
those that sought full independence—were met with violent repression
throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s. In March 1947, for example,
nationalists in Madagascar started a major uprising against French colonial
rule. By the end of 1948, the French military had crushed the rebellion,
resulting in the arrests of its leaders and the deaths of as many as 100,000
Malagasy.
Meanwhile, the war in Indochina (1945–1954) remained a major con-
cern of the government and military in the decade after World War II. Yet
the war was a geographically distant—and largely unseen—conf lict for
the French public. Historians divide the Indochina War into two phases.
From 1945 to late 1949, the war of colonial reconquest saw professional
French soldiers, the French Foreign Legion, and colonial troops (includ-
ing hundreds of thousands of Indochinese auxiliaries) fighting a coun-
terinsurgency war against the Viet Minh. The French military was noted
for using tactics such as aerial bombings of villages with napalm in the
mountainous rural terrain, and the systematic torture of civilians and sus-
pected Viet Minh. During the second phase, from early 1950 to 1954, the
French-supported national Vietnamese army fought the ground war while
the French army began intensive counterinsurgency operations—described
as “cleansing operations”—among the civilian population and fortified
their posts to protect the Red River delta. At Dien Bien Phu in the spring
of 1954, the French were finally, and humiliatingly, defeated by the Viet
Figure 12.1 A French Foreign Legionnaire during a sweep through communist-held

areas in the Red River Delta, between Haiphong and Hanoi. Behind the
Legionnaire is a U.S. gifted tank, ca. 1954, NARA RG 306: Records of
the U.S. Information Agency.
Minh, who captured almost 10,000 French troops and killed approxi-
mately 3,000. In the aftermath, the French accorded independence to the
new nations of Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, which were divided along
the 17th parallel.
The soldiers who returned from the war in Indochina did not have
much of a reprieve. On November 1, 1954, small armed groups in rural
Algeria attacked a variety of targets: farms and crop warehouses, local
radio stations, and police station barracks, where militants stole weap-
ons and killed two soldiers. Pamphlets scattered across the countryside
in Kabylia attributed the attacks to the Front de libération nationale
(National Liberation Front, or the FLN). This group sought national
independence for Algeria through the “restoration of the Algerian
state, sovereign, democratic, and social, within the framework of the
principles of Islam,” as well as the “preservation of all fundamental
freedoms, without distinction of race or religion.”3 The Algerian War
of Independence had begun.
The FLN was not the only nationalist movement in Algeria, though, and
it sought legitimacy against at least three other pre-existing movements: the
Communist Party of Algeria, composed of both Algerians and European
settlers who sought a reformed democratic system connected to France;
Ferhat Abbas’s Union démocratique du manifeste algérien (UDMA), which
sought an independent Algerian state connected to France through a form
of federation; and Messali Hadj’s outlawed Mouvement pour le triomphe
des libertés démocratiques (MTLD). Messali had been under house arrest
on November 1 and saw the FLN’s creation as an attempt to challenge
his own status as a symbol of the Algerian nation; despite two months of
negotiations between his organization and the FLN, neither were willing
to compromise. Instead, Messali formed a new rival movement called the
Mouvement national algérien (MNA) in December 1954, and conf licts
between the two movements were never resolved. For the French, how-
ever, the FLN and its corresponding military arm—the Army of National
Liberation (ALN)—were simply “terrorists.”
Given the loss of Indochina, French leaders saw Algeria as the lynchpin
in their struggle to maintain France’s hold on its African empire and the
key to maintaining France’s global power in the midst of the Cold War.
While insisting that Algeria should remain part of France, Prime Minis-
ter Pierre Mendès-France argued that repression needed to be accompa-
nied by reforms that would demonstrate to the Algerian population (and
the rest of the French Union) the good faith of the French government in
pursuing modernization and equality for the citizens of the empire. The
government announced plans for French investment in employment and
educational opportunities throughout rural Algeria, often enacted by the
Sections administratives spécialisées (Specialized Administrative Sections),
which brought the military and government into contact with local civilians
through the dual goal of providing social services and conducting surveil-
lance and “pacification.”
Despite these attempts at reform, Algerian nationalists saw these efforts
as too little, too late. As Algerian guerrilla attacks continued, the French
government instituted a state of emergency in April 1955 that legalized the
military’s use of collective reprisals and summary executions against Alge-
rians suspected of supporting the FLN. The military called up reservists
to support the soldiers already on the ground in Algeria, many of whom
arrived there directly from the war in Indochina. In August 1955, the FLN
brutally attacked French settlers in the city of Philippeville, and the French
military responded with overwhelming force, much as they had with the
Sétif uprising in 1945. This pattern of FLN attacks and violent French mili-
tary repression, with civilians caught in the middle, became the norm for the
rest of the conf lict.
Amidst the growing crisis in Algeria, unrest spread in the neighbor-
ing protectorates of Morocco and Tunisia. Although the French had
deposed the Moroccan sultan Muhammed V in 1953 for his nationalist
tendencies, this led to riots and threats of terrorist action. To stave off
the possibility of another colonial war, the French invited Moroccan
nationalists to a conference in Paris and began negotiations for inde-
pendence, which was declared on March 2, 1956. Likewise in Tunisia,
the French had attempted to repress nationalist sentiment by impris-
oning the Neo-Destour Party leader, Habib Bourguiba. However, the
French refusal to allow political and labor reforms led to mass political
organization and revolts across Tunisia. When Bourguiba was released
from prison in 1955, he agreed to a program for autonomy in exchange
for ensuring that the fellaghas (militants) would lay down their arms.
When he learned that the French had promised full independence to
Morocco, however, he demanded the same for Tunisia. In March 1956,
Tunisia became fully independent, and Bourguiba became its first
president.
Egypt proved to be a somewhat trickier problem, however. After over-
throwing the monarchy and taking power in 1956, President Gamal Abdel
Nasser had nationalized the Suez Canal and provided support in the form
of weapons and political allegiance to the FLN in Algeria. In retaliation, the
French joined a planned invasion led by the British and Israelis in Novem-
ber 1956 to take back control of the canal. The mission was ultimately
aborted after pressure from both the United States and Soviet Union, who
both strongly opposed the idea and threatened to isolate the three smaller
nations.
Unlike with the Indochina War, which had remained in the background,
news from the conf licts in North Africa—particularly that of Algeria—
inundated the public sphere in metropolitan France. While the over-
whelming majority of the French population rejected the idea of Algerian
independence, many began to question the government’s tactics due to the
war’s increasing violence, the decision to send 400,000 troops there in 1956
to “maintain order,” and the possibility of a draft. In March 1956, socialist
prime minister Guy Mollet sent a measure to the National Assembly ask-
ing them to extend “special powers” to support the new resident minister
of Algeria Robert Lacoste. Included in this measure was the devolution of
police powers to the French army in Algeria, which now had the power
to detain and interrogate suspects at will. French army officers, newly dis-
patched from Indochina, saw the FLN as yet another communist insurgency
and began implementing notoriously abusive practices of torture, summary
executions, and “disappearances.”
Figure 12.2 French troops seal off Algiers’ casbah, May 27, 1956, prior to a surprise
18-hour raid during the “Battle of Algiers”, AP Photo.
The French behaved much the same in Cameroon when they violently
suppressed a pro-independence movement called the Union of the Peoples
of Cameroon (UPC) in the mid-1950s. Officers trained in counterinsur-
gency tactics and theory in Indochina described the UPC as an “African Viet
Minh” and their task as eliminating “communist” subversion. In “cleansing
operations,” civilians were placed into “regroupment camps” under strict
military surveillance and torture was widely used. In its wars of decoloni-
zation, the French attempted to keep all evidence of its use of torture and
excessive violence under wraps. They failed, however, in large part because
the Algerian FLN had succeeded in making its fight for independence an
international cause.
In January 1957, the FLN organized a national general strike of Muslim
Algerians, hoping to demonstrate to the international community the Alge-
rian population’s overwhelming support for the FLN and for independence.
French repression against the strike was severe. At the United Nations, the
French blocked a resolution in favor of Algerian self-determination from
reaching the General Assembly, but the assembly still adopted a statement
calling for “a peaceful, democratic, and just solution” to the conf lict.4 Addi-
tionally, the United States began pressuring the French administration to
resolve the conf lict in Algeria and decolonize the entire empire.
As further reports of military atrocities in Algeria reached the French pub-
lic in 1958, pressure mounted on the Mollet government. French communist
journalist Henri Alleg’s memoir La Question, which graphically recounted
his torture at the hands of the French military, was published in Febru-
ary 1958 and sold 60,000 copies before being banned a month later. It cre-
ated shockwaves: the French military was not just torturing Algerians but
also French men and women. When it was discovered that French military
planes had pursued the ALN over the Tunisian border in February 1958
and bombed a village called Sakiet Sidi Youssef, causing nearly 200 civilian
casualties, the French government collapsed amidst the international pub-
lic relations disaster. When the new prime minister, Pierre Pfimlin, came to
office, he made it clear that he was willing to negotiate with the FLN to end
the conf lict; however, this was viewed as a betrayal by the French military,
“another Dien Bien Phu.”
Unrest among the officers in Algeria led to a near coup. General Massu,
the commander of the 10th Parachute Division in Algeria, took control of
a Committee of Public Safety in Algiers, announcing that it would be pre-
sided over by General de Gaulle. The only solution the military in Algeria
would support was the return of de Gaulle to power in France, and an
overwhelmed Pfimlin, seeing that Algeria was on the brink of a coup, met
with de Gaulle on the night of May 26. The next day, de Gaulle—without
the knowledge or support of Pfimlin—announced that he would be forming
a new government to ensure national unity, leaving Pfimlin no choice but
to resign. On May 29, President René Coty asked de Gaulle to form a new
government.
“Je vous ai compris”: De Gaulle, the Fifth Republic,

and Decolonization in Africa
On June 1, 1958, Charles de Gaulle stood before the French National Assem-
bly, promising a new constitution for France. He demanded full powers
over the government and suggested that he alone could resolve the Algerian
crisis. Three days later, arriving in Algiers to massive support from the set-
tler population, he gave a speech that began with this famously ambiguous
phrase: “Je vous ai compris” (I have understood you). But who and what
exactly did he understand? In many ways, it did not really matter because
those listening believed he understood their perspective. Back in France, de
Gaulle immediately began organizing a referendum for a new constitution.
With this referendum, the citizens of France, Algeria, and the overseas ter-
ritories were allowed to vote simply “yes” or “no” on their acceptance of
the constitution. Although groups like the French Communist Party and
the FLN opposed the referendum, de Gaulle and his supporters won with
66 percent of the vote in France and 96 percent in Algeria (amidst charges
of vote tampering in rural Algeria).
The constitution of the Fifth Republic extended full French citizenship
to all Algerians, removed all religious barriers to citizenship, and further
solidified the idea that Algeria was part of France. On October 3, 1958,
de Gaulle went to the Algerian city of Constantine, where he announced
a massive new economic development project for Algeria. The five-year
Constantine Plan promised hundreds of thousands of new jobs, millions of
new houses, and education for the Algerian Muslim population. But he also
installed a new military commander named General Maurice Challe, who
had organized the disastrous Suez campaign. Challe was ordered to defeat
the FLN in six months. The “Challe offensive” aimed to cut off ALN supply
lines, in part by “regrouping” Algerian civilians in temporary camps and
villages. This practice cut peasants off from their farmland and animals,
leaving them in conditions of near starvation; it became so widespread that
it was later estimated that by 1960 more than two million Algerian civilians
had been “regrouped” into what resembled concentration camps. The Alge-
rian Muslim population was subjected to enormous pressures from both
the French military, who insisted on loyalty to France, and from the ALN,
who threatened violent consequences if they betrayed the cause of Algerian
independence.
Meanwhile, De Gaulle accepted the principle of Algerian self-determination,
an astounding development. He suggested that Algerians had three options:
secession (which he assumed they would not accept because France’s
economic support would stop immediately), further integration with France,
or a federal framework guaranteeing association and cooperation among
the various communities that inhabited Algeria. De Gaulle clearly preferred
this associational “third way.” But the FLN and the European population of
Algeria had opposing end goals.
Both the European settlers of Algeria and French military leaders were
outraged that de Gaulle had opened the door to Algerian self-determination.
Many claimed that de Gaulle had betrayed them. General Massu, who
claimed that he had single-handedly brought de Gaulle back to power, pub-
licly expressed his disappointment in de Gaulle and was quoted in inter-
national news sources saying that he and fellow French officers were not
obligated to follow de Gaulle’s orders unconditionally. De Gaulle was out-
raged, and stripped Massu of his command, transferred him back to France,
and banned him from returning to Algeria.
Massu’s banishment set off a rebellion among a reactionary faction of
the French military and the European settler population in Algeria. Small
settler groups began organizing paramilitary units, many with ideological
attachments to fascism, far-right Catholicism, and the military. In one event,
January 1960’s Barricades Week, paramilitaries and demonstrators barri-
caded the streets in central Algiers. The French military did not stop them,
but the gendarmerie was sent in to dismantle the barricades. After someone
opened fire, the scene exploded into violence. More than 20 people died
and approximately 150 were wounded. In France, people were aghast to see
French settlers shooting at gendarmes, which led the metropolitan French
population to shift support away from the European settlers, who were now
viewed as violent, irrational, and racist. De Gaulle forcefully condemned the
settler violence and the military factions supporting the settler paramilitary
forces.
Throughout 1960, de Gaulle continued to advocate for a negotiated set-
tlement with the FLN that would maintain a strong political and economic
relationship between France and Algeria. This vision was a piece of the con-
cept known as “Eurafrica,” with Algeria forming the bridge between Africa’s
economic resources and Europe’s markets and consumers. The French greatly
feared losing access to these resources, especially Algeria’s Saharan oil, newly
discovered in 1956. France had begun investing heavily—in both material
and symbolic terms—in the European Common Market to create an alterna-
tive to American and Soviet dominance, and Eurafrica was a lynchpin of this
plan. For de Gaulle, Algeria needed to remain French-dominated in ways that
reminded the world of France’s unique and ennobling cultural values.
Yet the FLN, despite military weaknesses, refused to concede to de
Gaulle’s vision. In September 1958, Algerian nationalist leaders created the
Provisional Government of the Republic of Algeria (GPRA). Attempting to
win political and material support from more radical leftist regimes, GPRA
representatives headed to China, Moscow, and Latin America to win sup-
port for the Algerian cause. The cause of Algerian independence was also
gaining support both within France and internationally.
In the spring of 1960, it came to light that a network of French people,
known as the porteurs de valises (suitcase carriers), had been secretly sup-
porting the French Federation of the FLN by transporting or sending money
that was collected among Algerian immigrants in France into Switzerland.
Additionally, committees of intellectuals and artists published manifestos
supporting soldiers who engaged in conscientious objection and refused to
commit acts of torture or violence in Algeria. In France, war fatigue had
set in and public sympathies were shifting. For de Gaulle, a new problem
emerged: the colonies of West and Central Africa also began demanding
some form of political independence. His vision of Eurafrica was rapidly
beginning to collapse.
Even before de Gaulle’s return to power, French colonial officials had
been urging reforms to the structure of the French Union in Africa. These
reforms were intended to reorganize the French Union without revising the
constitution of the Fourth Republic, but there was strong disagreement over
whether to devolve power to individual territories or to maintain a “fed-
eral” structure, encompassing the whole of the AOF. While African political
leaders such as Senegalese deputy Léopold Sédar Senghor saw a danger in
the “balkanization” of small, African states, they also saw great potential in
a federation that might offer West Africans greater political strength.
Map 12.1 Map of French decolonization, 1945–1962.
What emerged from the constitution of de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic was

a new creation for the remaining French empire: the French Community.
The territories of the AOF and AEF now became “member states,” with all
citizens eligible to vote “yes” or “no” on the constitution. Self-determination
was written into the constitution: each member state was now free to exit
the community and gain independence of its own volition. Guinea, which
voted “no” on the constitution, immediately become independent. Senegal
attempted to create the “Mali Federation” within the French Community
structure, combining Senegal, French Sudan, Dahomey, and Upper Volta.
Yet growing conf licts between these states over questions of political power,
labor, and nationality led to the collapse of the federation. By the end of
1960, every state but Algeria in French colonial Africa had negotiated
independence.
With the collapse of the French empire in West and Central Africa, de
Gaulle acknowledged in 1960 that Algeria would eventually be “Algerian.”
This statement angered a wide variety of factions, from the European settlers
to French politicians who had invested heavily in keeping Algeria French.
That December, while de Gaulle toured Algeria, Algerians demonstrated
spontaneously across the country in support of independence, shocking
both the French government and the FLN. The force of the demonstra-
tions led de Gaulle to organize a referendum in 1961 that asked voters if
they supported the self-determination of the Algerian people. Although the
FLN called for a boycott of the vote in Algeria and the European settler
population urged a “no” vote, the metropolitan French population voted
75 percent in favor, while the massive abstention numbers in Algeria led to
only 39 percent voting “yes” and 18 percent voting “no.” Feeling betrayed,
the European settler population became increasingly volatile and militant in
its defense of French Algeria. Over 18 months, beginning in January 1961,
the newly formed Organisation de l’armée secrète (Secret Army Organiza-
tion, or the OAS)—made up of settlers and former French soldiers—used
bombings, civilian murders, and targeted assassinations (including multiple
assassination attempts of de Gaulle) to prevent Algerian independence.
In anticipation of the opening of negotiations in Evian, Switzerland
between the French government and the GPRA, four French generals (Challe,
Jouhaud, Zeller, Salan) and their military supporters seized control of the
government in Algiers. But while the Generals’ Putsch had widespread sup-
port among the radicalized European settlers, de Gaulle quickly intervened,
dressing in military uniform to address the nation on television. He blamed
the four generals for the putsch and harshly forbade any soldier or French-
man to obey their orders. The armed forces rallied around de Gaulle, and
within days, the generals and some 14,000 officers were arrested. In May,
despite a number of false starts, the negotiations for peace began.
Unsurprisingly, the violence did not stop. In Algeria, the OAS ramped up
its attacks, as did the ALN, including against civilians unsupportive of the
FLN. Violence erupted in France as well, targeting Algerians in the metro-
pole. On October 17, 1961, between 20,000 and 40,000 Algerians gathered
at the Place de la Concorde at 8 pm to protest a discriminatory curfew on
North Africans in Paris that attempted to limit the power of the FLN over
Algerians in the metropole. The police were extraordinarily violent toward
the protestors. At first, they prevented protesters from gathering at the city’s
main squares. They also opened fire on protestors, with eyewitnesses claim-
ing the police threw beaten and unconscious protestors into the Seine. More
than 14,000 protestors were arrested, and it is estimated that more than
120 Algerians were murdered by the police in Paris in September and Octo-
ber 1961. Graffiti soon appeared on a quai next to the Seine that said ICI
ON NOIE LES ALGERIENS (Here we drown Algerians).
Meanwhile, negotiations between France and Algeria inched forward
with the young diplomats of the GPRA holding out for the integrity of the
Algerian nation-state against French demands to control the oil resources in
the Sahara. When the French agreed to eventually surrender their claims to
the Sahara, an agreement was reached. On March 18, 1962, de Gaulle and
the GPRA signed the Evian Accords, granting Algeria independence. The
accords were then overwhelmingly approved in a referendum by 90 percent
of voters in France and 99 percent of voters in Algeria.
However, the violence in Algeria continued unabated. At first, the OAS
tried to prevent European settlers from leaving Algeria by blocking trans-
port out of the country, but hundreds of thousands of Europeans began
f leeing Algeria for France, carrying only their suitcases. Although the Evian
Accords guaranteed security for the European settlers, more than 800,000
f led to France, fearing violence and FLN retaliation after independence, a
situation not helped by the increasingly furious OAS violence against inno-
cent Algerian civilian targets. Some left, however, because they could not
face the idea of being governed by Algerian Muslims.
Independence, proclaimed on July 5, 1962, did not bring Algerians imme-
diate peace and prosperity. OAS members used scorched earth tactics to
destroy everything they could, setting fire to the library of the University of
Algiers and blowing up the oil refinery in Oran on their way out of town.
Additionally, internal divisions among Algerian nationalists and civilian
groups led to tensions that were not resolved for decades. One group of
Algerians, known as harkis, had been auxiliaries in the French army or had
actively supported the French during the war. Now seen as traitors to the
Algerian cause, they faced danger in Algeria and many were brought to
France through the lobbying efforts of their former French officers.
Yet July 5, 1962, was a day of great celebration in Algeria. Algerian inde-
pendence was also a symbol for many across the world of a successful lib-
eration struggle, one that had been fought against tremendous odds. Algiers
became the “Mecca of revolution” and the hotspot of the 1960s Third-
Worldist movement. For the French, Algeria became a shameful memory,
a word that could not be officially uttered for decades. There were no war
memorials, no acknowledgment that there had even been a “war.” Through-
out the 1960s, however, it became clear that the events of decolonization
had transformed France as much as they had its former empire.
Notes
1 “Le discours du général De Gaulle devant l’Assemblée,” Le Monde, March 6,
1945.
2 Cited in Patrick Weil, How to be French: Nationality in the Making since 1789,
trans. Catherine Porter (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 131, 136.
3 Cited in Martin Evans, Algeria: France’s Undeclared War (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2012), 116.
4 Cited in Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Inde-
pendence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2003), 130.

Cooper, Frederick. Citizenship Between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and
French Africa, 1945–1960. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014.
Evans, Martin. Algeria: France’s Undeclared War. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011.
Goscha, Christopher. The Penguin History of Modern Vietnam. London: Allen
Lane, 2016.
Kuby, Emma. Political Survivors: The Resistance, the Cold War, and the Fight
Against Concentration Camps. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019.
Naylor, Ed., ed. France’s Postwar Modernising Mission: Citizenship, Welfare and the
Ends of Empire. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018.
Nord, Philip. France’s New Deal, From the Thirties to the Postwar Era. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.
Pulju, Rebecca. Women and Mass Consumer Society in France. New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2011.
Rioux, Jean-Pierre. The Fourth Republic, 1944–1958. Translated by Godfrey Rog-
ers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
13 The Politics of Grandeur The Politics of Grandeur
The Fifth Republic in a New

Europe
Introduction
In Georges Perec’s prize-winning 1965 novel Les Choses (Things), a young
French couple named Jerôme and Sylvie attempt to find meaning in their
lives by accumulating objects and adopting middle-class behaviors. Yet
there is never enough; they dream of having more money, a nicer apartment,
better jobs, and a clearer vocation. After the Algerian War ends, they quit
their jobs and move to Tunisia to teach, but even this leads to discontent.
In later printings, the novel carried the subtitle “A Story of the Sixties,”
and its themes of rampant consumerism, youth discontent, and the politi-
cal shadow over the characters’ personal lives highlighted the anxieties of a
generation that erupted forcefully onto the public stage.
Politically and economically, the 1960s were among the most stable
decades France experienced in the twentieth century, yet turmoil lurked
below the surface. After the violent conclusion to the Algerian War, French
president Charles de Gaulle made a concerted effort to turn the page on
France’s colonial past. He focused instead on restoring French “grandeur”
and France’s position as a global political leader; in his view, this meant
forging a path out from under the shadow of the Cold War superpowers. By
concentrating on the growth of the European Economic Community (sup-
ported by long-standing economic ties to Africa) as well as closer ties to
West Germany and withdrawal from NATO, de Gaulle signaled France’s
commitment to European unification. De Gaulle also engaged with non-
aligned nations, including communist China, opening the gates for the surge
of interest in Maoism in France by the late 1960s.
Economic growth created an aff luent middle class, whose children sought
higher education in droves, even as the state lacked the capacity to provide
for them all. The sexual revolution and a renewed intellectual engagement
with Marxism spawned the “New Left” and a reconsideration of hierar-
chies of power. Tensions among politically engaged youth and industrial
workers exploded in the “events” of May 1968, as they came to be known:
a potential social and political revolution, which felt monumental at the
time. Yet the uprising and strike formed but one ripple of a global wave of
DOI: 10.4324/b23310-13
260 The Politics of Grandeur
protest that included several hotspots in former French colonies. In France,
May ’68 is notable as much for its lack of immediate political success as for
its long-standing hold on French memory. New forms of political and social
opposition emerged in its aftermath, from feminist movements protesting
the ban on abortion to environmentalist opposition to France’s dependence
on nuclear energy.
Gaullism and the Restoration of French Grandeur

Between 1962 and the spring of 1968, de Gaulle presided over one of the
most stable governments in the history of modern France. In contrast to the
constant shuff ling of prime ministers and cabinets during the Fourth Repub-
lic, there were only three prime ministers during de Gaulle’s tenure: Michel
Debré (1958–1962), Georges Pompidou (1962–1968), and Maurice Couve
de Murville (1968–1969). Political opposition never developed the electoral
strength to mount forceful checks on what became known as “Gaullism.”
However, currents of dissatisfaction with de Gaulle, notably opposition to
his authoritarian tendencies, simmered and eventually boiled over during
the events of May ’68.
When de Gaulle returned to power in 1958, he had two main objectives:
to create a new constitution that would give more authority to the executive
branch and to resolve the crisis of the Algerian War. With the birth of the
Fifth Republic in 1958, de Gaulle obtained his first objective. No longer was
the president elected by the parliament but by an electoral college comprised
of some 80,000 people. The president now had the power to name the prime
minister, dissolve the National Assembly, and propose referendums directly to
the French people, bypassing the legislature. In response to various real and
perceived attacks, including the assassination attempt by the OAS at Petit-
Clamart in August 1962, de Gaulle introduced a referendum in October that
year that once again transformed the election for president to a direct elec-
tion by popular vote, rather than by the electoral college. This reinforced the
power of the presidency and cut the legislative branch out entirely.
De Gaulle’s response to Algeria was ultimately tied to his desire to restore
France’s tarnished global status. This helps explain what many European set-
tlers in Algeria saw as his inexplicable about-face: from support for French
Algeria in September 1959 to calling for a referendum on self-determination
in January 1961 and then to negotiations for Algerian independence. The
Algerian War, in his view, was destroying the global reputation of France,
particularly in its current and former colonies. His vision of “Eurafrica” as
a cornerstone of the European Economic Community (EEC) required main-
taining good political and economic relationships with former colonies in
Africa, including Algeria.
Although the break between France and Algeria in 1962 was dramatic,
many new ties were created as well, in large part due to Algeria’s need to
rebuild its infrastructure and economy, and the French desire to maintain
The Politics of Grandeur 261
access to Algerian oil and nuclear testing sites in the Sahara. With the exo-
dus of the majority of the European settler population, Algeria had both
lost its white-collar labor force and much of its infrastructure following the
OAS’s destructive tactics. To help rebuild the country, tens of thousands
of technical experts and workers called coopérants, arriving from France,
Latin America, or communist countries like Yugoslavia, f looded into Alge-
ria and other postcolonial countries to fill jobs in education, government,
agriculture, and to help rebuild infrastructure. For the French government,
this policy of “cooperation” strengthened economic and political ties with
former colonies while also demonstrating support for new postcolonial
regimes. For the coopérants, this was an opportunity to make up for what
many saw as the damage of colonialism. These networks became the main
origin point of French “Third Worldism”—a political movement and ideol-
ogy that supported anti-imperial liberation movements across the world.
In February 1960, the French set off a nuclear bomb near Reggane in the
Algerian desert. This nuclear test, codenamed Gerboise bleue (blue jerboa,
or desert rat) was the first of 18 that would be conducted in the Algerian
Sahara over the subsequent five years. By demonstrating its nuclear capabili-
ties, France believed it could move out from under the “double hegemony”
of the two Cold War superpowers. Since the end of World War II, France had
found itself by circumstance in the American camp, and many of de Gaulle’s
maneuvers were aimed at liberating France from American domination.
Although de Gaulle’s relationship with the United States remained strong
through the 1950s, it began to degrade by 1963. He refused, for example,
to sign onto the 1963 Partial Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty. He also refused to
integrate the French nuclear arsenal into an Atlantic force along with those
of the United States and Great Britain. De Gaulle had already pulled French
naval forces in the Mediterranean out of NATO, and on March 7, 1966, he
withdrew all remaining French military forces from NATO and ordered the
removal of all NATO bases from French territory.
Strengthening French sovereignty and global power was key to de Gaulle’s
foreign policy formulations. For instance, de Gaulle was never a full adher-
ent to the idea of a supranational European union. In April 1963 he stated,
“It seems essential to us that Europe is Europe and that France is France.”1
On the other hand, he signed a symbolic treaty of Franco-German coopera-
tion with the West German chancellor, an olive branch that stood in direct
contrast to de Gaulle’s hostile attitude toward the British. To the consterna-
tion of other European leaders, de Gaulle explicitly opposed British entry
into the European Common Market in 1963, and again in 1967.
De Gaulle also pointedly demonstrated his independence from Ameri-
can inf luence by establishing diplomatic ties to both China and the Soviet
Union and its satellites, which the Americans took to be an intentionally
anti-American gesture. At de Gaulle’s invitation, Soviet premier Nikita
Khrushchev visited France in the spring of 1960, and de Gaulle returned
the visit in 1966. He also toured Poland and Romania. His visit to China in
January 1964 was followed up with a visit to Cambodia in 1966, where de
Gaulle vocally criticized American intervention in Vietnam.
Gaullism as a force began to wane by the end of the decade, however.
Even as the opposition parties gained ground in legislative elections in 1965
and 1967, de Gaulle believed that the presidential elections were the only
true indicators of the feelings of the population. Rather than consulting leg-
islators, he forged his own path, in several instances proclaiming opinions
that were contrary to many in France. For instance, when the “Six-Day
War” broke out between Israel and the Arab states of Egypt, Syria, and
Jordan in 1967, de Gaulle openly criticized Israel and issued a French arms
embargo on the Middle East, despite public opinion largely favoring Israel
in the conf lict. On an official visit to Quebec that same year, he proclaimed,
“Long Live Free Quebec!” in support of the French-speaking Quebecois
independence movement, which greatly angered the Canadian government.
It was the domestic crisis of 1968, however, that eventually led to the col-
lapse of Gaullism.
Economic and Social Transformation in the Aftermath

of Decolonization
By the 1960s, the French population was largely reaping the economic and
social benefits of the trente glorieuses. A generous welfare state, includ-
ing family allowances, had encouraged a postwar “baby boom.” Thanks
to state-sponsored public education and social security, families now had
money to spend on consumer goods. The nature of labor transformed dra-
matically as well, especially with the emblematic figure of the jeune cadre,
a managerial technician. Because the authority of these new managers came
from their knowledge and expertise as opposed to their ownership or inher-
itance, the massive expansion in the managerial sector required a better-
educated workforce.
The education system in France remained largely unchanged through the
1950s, however. One track for the elites emphasized a classical humani-
ties education, while technical tracks and apprenticeships were available
for the masses. However, between 1948 and 1958, the number of students
in French secondary schools almost doubled, and in 1960 the Berthouin
reforms led to a new democratization of education, particularly for the chil-
dren of working-class and middle-class families. However, an entrenched
elitism still remained in the system of access to the top French universities or
grandes écoles, which students could only enter through successful comple-
tion of an exam that required costly preparation classes.
State investment in public housing during the 1950s and 1960s led to
the creation of massive public housing complexes on the outskirts of most
French cities. Many of these complexes, which were called Habitations à
loyer modéreés (rent-controlled housing, or HLMs), were built quickly and
with poor quality materials. One generation later, they were often in a state
Figure 13.1 Photograph by Monique Hervo of the bidonville La Folie in Nanterre,

a suburb west of Paris, 1964–1965, ©Monique Hervo/“Collection La
contemporaine” LC_HER_02N_B01.
of massive disrepair. Yet, gaining access to a new, modern home was a sym-
bol of social mobility, particularly for working-class families.
In the mid-1960s, hundreds of thousands of migrant laborers from North
Africa, Portugal, and Spain still lived on the outskirts of French cities with
their families in taudis (dirt-f loor slums) and bidonvilles (shantytowns)
with no indoor plumbing or electricity. In one Nanterre bidonville, 3,000
inhabitants shared two water taps; unsurprisingly, the general public com-
plained about the hygiene of the bidonvilles and their inhabitants, leading
to stereotypes about “dirty Arabs” and their inability to fit into “civi-
lized” French society. In 1956, the French Interior Ministry established the
SONACOTRA (Société nationale de construction pour les travailleurs algé-
riens), which sought to improve the crowded boarding house conditions
for single Algerian laborers. In December 1964, Minister of Economy and
Finance Michel Debré announced plans to construct new affordable housing
units for those in the bidonvilles, a task facilitated through SONACOTRA,
which razed the shacks and expropriated the land. Although many families
did begin to move into HLMs over the next decade, the bidonvilles persisted
well into the 1970s.
In the aftermath of decolonization, new waves of inhabitants of France’s
former colonies arrived in France, including the more than 800,000 Euro-
pean settlers from Algeria who unexpectedly “repatriated” to France in the
wake of independence. Believing that the majority of settlers would remain
in Algeria, the French government had made almost no provisions for
these “repatriates” nor prepared for the more than 100,000 harkis (Alge-
rian auxiliaries to the French army) who arrived between 1962 and 1967.
The French had typically repatriated French nationals after wars or foreign
conf licts, and several committees to assist repatriates and refugees had been
established after World War II. The first postcolonial repatriates from Indo-
china were assisted by these same committees, but the arrival of French
citizens leaving post-independence Morocco and Tunisia, along with those
f leeing Egypt during the Suez crisis, led to new governmental structures to
help them find housing and jobs. The first wave of postcolonial immigration
brought approximately 500,000 people to France. The next wave coming
from Algeria was twice as many, and within a much shorter time period.
A December 1961 law formalized the definition of “repatriate” to designate
all Frenchmen and women overseas “who believe they must leave, due to
political events, a territory where they were established and that was previ-
ously under the sovereignty, the protection [protectorat] or the tutelage of
France.”2 This law, and one passed in March 1962, which provided finan-
cial support for the return voyage and temporary subsistence funds until the
repatriates were integrated into French society, aimed to avoid the pauperi-
zation of this primarily white migrant population.
With affordable housing already in short supply, the unexpected arrival in
1961–1962 of nearly 1 million people seeking permanent shelter with few
resources put enormous pressure on the French government and social ser-
vices. The city of Marseille was particularly strained, as it was the primary
ferry port that welcomed migrants from North Africa. More than 350,000
arrived in June 1962 alone. The government and social service organiza-
tions assisted the pieds noir (European settlers) in finding shelter, but this
often took months and sometimes years. Thousands of families ended
up squatting in abandoned buildings or staying in government-run shel-
ters, sometimes for months. By the mid-1960s, through an enormous state
effort, most of the pied-noir population was effectively resettled throughout
France. Still, many maintained a long-standing bitterness toward the French
government for having “abandoned” French Algeria, forcing them into a
humiliating exile.
Meanwhile, the environment for non-European migrants from France’s
former colonies was notably hostile. Algerian labor migrants were already a
significant population before decolonization, with 180,000 settling in France
between 1949 and 1955. In setting the conditions for Algerian independ-
ence, the French had negotiated free circulation between France and Algeria
for citizens of both countries, assuming that European settlers would remain
in Algeria after independence. In 1958, the French had granted French citi-
zenship to all Algerians in both the metropole and colony. Yet, already in
the spring of 1962, the French began making a distinction between Euro-
pean “repatriates” arriving from Algeria and Algerian “refugees” (i.e., the
harkis). To formalize their foreignness, however, required stripping most
Algerians of French citizenship. The ordinance of July 21, 1962, allowed
Algerians with common law status to maintain their French nationality,
alongside dual Algerian nationality. On the other hand, Algerians with local
civil status, or whose rights were judged by local law courts, could only
keep French nationality if they submitted a declaration to a French judge on
French territory and then registered with the Public Health Ministry within
six months of the ordinance. The French thus made it extremely challeng-
ing for most Algerians, including those in the metropole, to maintain their
French citizenship after 1962, even if they had worked and lived in France
for decades or even fought in the French army.
From the 1960s onward, there were increasing numbers of migrants arriv-
ing in France from the former AOF colonies, mostly male laborers seeking
employment. French officials, such as Prime Minister Georges Pompidou,
thought that labor migration would benefit the French economy and ease
labor market tensions. However, as in the interwar period, colonial and
racial conceptions of non-white workers as lazy, anarchic, and violent led
French officials to increase surveillance of these workers. Official reports
suggested that while sub-Saharan Africans had filled in key positions left by
Algerians, their work was “mediocre.” Both private and public firms report-
edly claimed that Italian, Spanish, and even North African laborers were
more reliable than those from sub-Saharan Africa, which further reinforced
colonial-era racial hierarchies and prevented the full integration of migrant
laborers.
The experience of the Algerian harkis illustrates even more clearly the
marginalization of “othered” and politically complicated migrants. While
the French state worked hard to integrate pied-noir “repatriates” into
French society, harkis were shuff led into former internment camps and then
isolated forest hamlets, abandoned villages, and temporary estates on the
outskirts of towns. Many families resided in these locations for decades,
having almost no interaction with their French neighbors, although they
were subjected to almost constant surveillance. State officials claimed that
it was necessary to isolate this population because they were “backward,”
lacking education, and not yet ready to live freely in French society.
Sexual Revolution, Popular Culture, and Changing

Social Norms
The 1960s in France have been described as a “long sexual revolution”
during which social and sexual attitudes radically transformed. This shift
to a supposedly more “modern” sensibility around sexuality began in the
1950s as the ideas of Sigmund Freud, Simone de Beauvoir, and the Ameri-
can Alfred Kinsey began to trickle into the wider public through women’s
magazines, novels, and advice books. French perceptions of sex, marriage,
parenting, and childhood began shifting away from rigid adherence to social
norms to a valorization of individual needs and the freedom to explore a
variety of sexual and social opportunities. Much of this was related to dra-
matic changes in religious practices and beliefs at the time. Vatican II and
its early 1960s move to liberalize the theology and practices of the Catholic
Church inspired a renewal among leftist Catholics, who were active in the
Third-Worldist movements burgeoning in the aftermath of decolonization.
The sexual revolution also occurred in tandem with widespread seculariza-
tion, which Christian leaders observed as a crisis within their various com-
munities. The number of French people who identified as Catholic declined
steadily in the 1960s and 1970s, as did the number of men and women who
took up vocations within the church. Simultaneously, younger generations
embraced a more open and liberal vision of gender and family norms, turn-
ing away from more conservative Christian structures.
By the late 1950s, many women rejected conservative gender norms that
depicted their primary occupation as marriage and their essential social
function as reproduction. Women were also frustrated by the double stand-
ard of French marriage law that excused male adultery and gave women
little power if they sought a divorce (especially in issues of child custody).
In 1965, however, new laws allowed married women to get jobs and open
bank accounts in their own name. Additionally, many women began access-
ing contraception when the birth control pill became available to women in
the early 1960s, though it technically remained illegal until 1967.
Even if Frenchwomen were slowly gaining more freedoms in the social
sphere, they made little headway in the political sphere. De Gaulle, despite
having issued the 1944 ordinance that gave French women the right to vote,
maintained extremely conservative views about women’s role in society
and politics. Between 1958 and the early 1970s, the percentage of women
in the National Assembly and Senate steadily declined. Apart from Nafissa
Sid Cara, who held a junior ministerial post from 1959 until 1962, no other
woman held a governmental post until after May 1968. Despite strong French
pro-natalist attitudes and government conservatism throughout much of the
1960s, however, the 1965 reform of French marriage law and the 1967 Loi
Neuwirth, which legalized the use of contraception, demonstrate the extent to
which rapidly evolving social norms directly influenced politics.
These social transformations were also the result of the postwar baby
boom, which had reversed the declining fertility rates that pronatalists had
obsessed over for more than half a century. One significant result of this
population increase was a new fixation on the problems of youth. A dis-
tinct youth culture had emerged in France by the mid-1950s. Much like
in the United States, French teenagers had their own subcultures with dis-
tinctive music, dress, and hairstyles, some of which were copied directly
from American popular films and magazines. Conservative commentators
grew anxious about the sexual behaviors of teen girls and young unmarried
women, and as new waves of postcolonial immigrants arrived in the metro-
pole, they singled out North African “Arab” men as a specific danger to the
virtue of young French women.
American popular culture was also seen as a threat to the morality of
French teenagers. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the inf luence of
American popular culture on French music and film was widely apparent.
Initially, the concern was that American music would displace more tradi-
tional styles of music, such as the French chanson, which were still regularly
played on radio stations. Rock and roll first made its appearance in France
in the mid-1950s. Young men, including France’s most famous rock and roll
singer Johnny Hallyday (the alias of Jean-Philippe Smet), copied the styles
of American rockers like Elvis Presley, dressing in jeans and black leather,
which signaled working-class “gang” attire. The National Assembly even
attempted to ban rock and roll entirely, but eventually the market solved
this particular problem. A less rebellious style of music, known as yéyé,
featuring mostly young, female singers such as Françoise Hardy and Sylvie
Vartan performing “innocent” pop songs, became much more popular. By
1970, pop music had almost entirely eclipsed “dangerous” rock music.
Between 1945 and 1981, the French state tightly controlled radio station
licenses and content, privileging public service programming and elite cul-
ture over more popular content. If French people heard popular music on
the radio, they were likely listening to foreign stations, broadcasting from
neighboring Luxembourg, Monaco, or West Germany. The station Europe
1, created in the Saarland in 1955 to circumvent French broadcasting pro-
hibitions, soon gained a massive youth audience with its chart-topping
hits program, Salut les copains. Transistor radios, invented in 1947, had
become widespread in France by the mid-1950s and were often combined
with record players. These smaller devices allowed youth to listen to music
in spaces apart from their parents and develop their own distinct taste. This
taste was also cultivated with the explosion of the popular music press in the
early 1960s. For example, Salut les copains, a magazine that accompanied
the radio show, was launched in July 1962, and within a year, its monthly
sales had topped over a million copies.
Alongside radio, television quickly became one of the main sources
through which the French obtained information about political, social, and
cultural life in France and the outside world, especially the United States.
In 1958, there were roughly a million television sets in France, reaching
about 9 percent of households; by 1969, there were 10 million televisions,
reaching approximately 60 percent of households. As with radio, the French
state initially held a monopoly on television broadcasting, controlling all
programming on the single available channel until 1964, when a second
was added.
But it was cinema that was the biggest cultural attraction for the French
during the 1960s. One of the most well-known French cinema movements—
the French Nouvelle vague (New Wave)—produced numerous films that
depicted the anxieties and tensions of childhood and youth in this period
and the teenage desire for rebellion against the strict norms of bourgeois
society. Films such as François Truffaut’s 1959 film Les Quatre cents coups
(The Four Hundred Blows), which was hugely successful at the box office
and nominated for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, depicted
a rebellious and misunderstood young boy in Paris, constantly fighting
against the authority of his parents and teachers. A few years later, Jean-Luc
Godard’s 1964 film Bande à part (Band of Outsiders) portrayed three rebel-
lious young adults who set out to rob a wealthy older woman’s villa outside
Paris. Two famous scenes in the film—a dance routine in a café, and a race
through the Louvre museum—contribute to the film’s insouciant tone; the
characters are “bad,” but charming and relatable.
Some French New Wave films, particularly those of the so-called Left
Bank directors, are often considered “avant-garde” because of the direc-
tors’ use of techniques that created fragmented and ambiguous narratives.
This resulted in films without clear narrative plots or resolutions but which
forced audiences to engage intellectually with the content and form of the
film. These techniques provided a means to address complex—and largely
repressed—political questions of memory in French society. Alain Resnais’s
1956 documentary film Night and Fog re-introduced the subject of Nazi
concentration camps into public consciousness. In his 1959 film Hiroshima,
mon amour, he then directly addressed the atomic bombing of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki as well as French cooperation with Germany during World
War II and the public shaming of French women engaged in “horizontal
collaboration” with German soldiers.
The Algerian War was, unsurprisingly, a major topic of films produced in
the early 1960s. Left Bank filmmaker Agnès Varda’s 1962 film Cléo de 5 à
7 (Cleo from 5 to 7) follows a young pop singer in Paris who has to waste
two hours before hearing the results of a medical test that will confirm a
cancer diagnosis. As she moves through the city, radio broadcasts give news
reports on death tolls and the number of arrested rebels in the Algerian War.
When Cléo meets a French soldier on leave from Algeria, this brief interac-
tion allows her to come to terms with her diagnosis. Chris Marker, another
Left Bank director, produced a documentary in 1963 called Le joli mai (The
Lovely Month of May) for which he spent hours interviewing people on the
streets of Paris in the spring of 1962 about subjects ranging from their eve-
ryday lives to the political events taking place around the Algerian War and
the signing of the Evian Accords. Italian filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966
film The Battle of Algiers recreated the violent events of the war by using
the script of FLN militant Yacef Saadi and casting him in the film as himself.
Due to its sympathetic portrayal of the Algerian nationalist cause, the film
was banned in France in the five years following its release.
The films of the New Wave make clear that by the early 1960s politics
had infiltrated the lives of young French people, whether they sought to be
politically active or tried to avoid it. The Algerian War loomed heavily over
them. More than a million young Frenchmen were drafted to serve in Alge-
ria between 1956 and 1962, and on their return, veterans were met with
repressive silence, since the “events in Algeria” were officially not a “war”
and therefore not worthy of public discussion. Yet, the violence of that war
had also affected those in the metropole, from OAS bombings to police
attacks against pro-FLN demonstrations, and the memory of these events
was brought violently back into the public consciousness with the televised
events of May ’68.
Intellectual Life in the 1960s

During the Algerian War, many leftist activists and French intellectuals
mobilized to protest the nation’s conduct in the war. For instance, Simone de
Beauvoir and a Tunisian-born lawyer named Gisèle Halimi wrote a treatise
denouncing the torture and sexual assault of Djamila Boupacha, a young
Algerian FLN militant, at the hands of the French paras. They pointedly
critiqued the indifference of the French public toward French atrocities
in Algeria. Additionally, 121 intellectuals signed a manifesto in Septem-
ber 1960 supporting the right of soldiers to refuse to take up arms, while
many others offered varying degrees of support to the FLN.
Those intellectuals who eventually supported Algerian independence—
and the cause of Third-World liberation more generally—became known as
tiers-mondistes (Third-Worldists). In his preface to Fanon’s 1961 book The
Wretched of the Earth, Jean-Paul Sartre described the ideological rationale
behind the movement, arguing that anti-colonial militants’ violent use of
force against the colonizer (or rather, all Europeans who benefitted from
colonialism) was necessary because European civilization was corrupt and
destined for destruction. Although the Algerian War held a prominent
position in the discourse of French tiers-mondistes, many of these figures
became known for their activism in favor of Latin American revolutions and
against the American intervention in Vietnam. But they also had a tendency
to objectify the “exotic” foreignness of the people fighting for liberation in
Africa, Latin America, and Asia while also assuming that each revolutionary
struggle was the same, whether class based or anti-colonial.
Until the 1960s, almost all of the most well-known French philosophers
and intellectuals were trained at the grande école known as the École nor-
male supérieure (ENS) in Paris. As the intellectual focus of these philoso-
phers began to shift away from the existentialism of the immediate postwar
years, a new paradigm arose that was informed by the human sciences and
came to be known as structuralism. For example, French anthropologist
Claude Lévi-Strauss applied the structural linguistic theories of Ferdinand
de Saussure to the study of myths, rituals, and kinship relations. Saussure
had analyzed language as a system of signs organized by a relationship
between what he called the “signified” (the meaning of the concept) and the
“signifier” (the word itself). Structuralists like Lévi-Strauss or literary critic
Roland Barthes believed that language, narratives, and cultural behaviors
should not be studied in isolation but rather in the context of larger struc-
tures that they exist within.
As director of studies at the ENS beginning in 1948, French philoso-
pher and communist Louis Althusser applied structuralism to his analysis
of Marxism. His early 1960s seminars and essays appeared at a moment
of debate and crisis within the French Communist Party and the French
left more generally over whether to adhere to the Soviet party line or to
break away. His scholarship offered an alternative to Stalinism by develop-
ing a more “scientific” and humanist reading of Marxism. Althusser was
especially inf luential to the generation of postwar university students who
f looded French universities in the mid-1960s, including such figures as Régis
Debray, best known for his philosophical engagement in revolutionary Latin
American politics in the 1960s and 1970s.
Structuralism also informed the work of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan,
whose famed weekly seminar in Paris attracted intellectuals from nearly
every discipline throughout the 1960s. Initially trained as a medical psy-
chiatrist, Lacan applied structuralist methodologies to Freudian psychoa-
nalysis. While much of the field of French psychoanalysis was becoming
more medicalized, Lacan was turning instead toward language and the
symbolic—two central themes in both Freudian and structuralist analysis.
By the mid-1960s, Lacan had developed a more distinct set of “Lacan-
ian” concepts that later inf luenced post-structuralism and French femi-
nist thought. Additionally, he was becoming a more publicly recognizable
figure (the “French Freud”), and his 1966 book Écrits (Writings) became
a bestseller in France.
A number of French intellectuals became widely recognized in this period,
including Roland Barthes, feminist philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia
Kristeva, and philosophers Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. If the
emblematic publication of the French intellectual sphere of the 1950s was
Sartre and Beauvoir’s Les Temps modernes, then Tel Quel was the compa-
rable publication of the 1960s. Actively committed to literature and politics,
the journal published the work of novelists such as Alain Robbe-Grillet and
Nathalie Sarraute, whose fiction was part of the literary movement known
as the nouveau roman (new novel). In its pages, readers could also find liter-
ary and film criticism that initially ref lected structuralist tendencies but over
time showed the growing inf luence of Freud and Lacan and then the shift to
post-structuralism via the work of Derrida and Kristeva.
A significant number of the figures associated with Tel Quel were also
vocal leftist—often communist—voices, and Marxism was a major intel-
lectual and political inf luence on this community. In the mid-1960s, the
conf licts around Stalinism within the PCF as well as the inf luence of Third-
Worldist currents and growing antagonism against the United States—and
specifically its incursion into Vietnam—led to a burgeoning Maoist move-
ment among the French left that grew into full force by the early 1970s.
Even Sartre and Beauvoir, who had been somewhat eclipsed by the rise of
structuralism and psychoanalysis, staged a public comeback over the issue
of American imperialism by hosting the Russell Tribunal in Paris in 1966,
in which several notable European intellectuals put the United States “on
trial” for war crimes for its military intervention in Vietnam.
Among French university students, the inf luence of structuralism, Althuss-
er’s Marxist analysis, and the German movement of social and critical
theory known as the Frankfurt School—in particular the work of Herbert
Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Jürgen Habermas—all
led to a climate in which students openly contested the consumer capital-
ist society around them, the oppressive hierarchies of postwar French soci-
ety, and the domination of “American imperialism.” Protesting against the
American war in Vietnam became a major cause among politically engaged
young French men and women, drawing on the legacy of the left’s pro-
tests against French conduct in Algeria less than a decade earlier. Jean-Luc
Godard’s 1967 film La Chinoise captures the foothold that Maoism gained
within this young generation by portraying five radical university students
discussing how they can apply the teachings of Mao to their lives in Paris.
May ’68
The growing social and political tensions in France, and Paris specifi-
cally, reached a peak in the spring of 1968 with the eruption of a series of
increasingly violent confrontations between university students and police.
A massive social movement followed, resulting in the largest general strike
in French history to that point. The events of “May ’68,” however, have
been contested terrain in the history and memory of modern France largely
because the protests did not lead to a major political or social revolution.
Some argue that they led to the opposite, with the emergence of reaction-
ary policies that worked against the interests of the leftist movements at
the heart of the reform efforts. Yet for a supposed “non-event,” it has
held significant power over the French imagination. Fifty years later, the
soixante-huitards (sixty-eighters) continue to maintain a public presence
and re-evaluations of the legacy of their engagement appear almost daily.
But what actually happened?
Most narratives of May ’68 begin a few months earlier, in late March,
at the Nanterre campus of the University of Paris, where students occupied
administrative buildings to protest the conditions of their education and
where several students had recently been arrested at an anti-Vietnam war
protest. The Nanterre campus was a locus of student activism for a number
of reasons. It had been built on the outer edge of Paris, next to the bidon-
ville, in order to relieve pressure on the enormously overcrowded urban
campuses of the University of Paris. Like the five other new public university
campuses built to accommodate soaring enrollment of the 1960s—Rouen,
Amiens, Reims, Orléans, and Orsay—the Nanterre campus was soulless,
poorly designed, and built from cheap materials. By the mid-1960s, the
buildings were falling apart, the lecture halls overcrowded, and the students
had none of the benefits of an urban university social life.
Although the students eventually evacuated the building in Nanterre,
there was ongoing conf lict between students and the university administra-
tion through April. It grew even more heated on May 2 when administrators
closed the campus and announced that the leaders of the March student
movement, including a Franco-German student named Daniel Cohn-Bendit
(nicknamed “Dany the Red”), would be called up before a disciplinary
council in Paris on May 6. Student activists from Nanterre and the Sor-
bonne met at the Sorbonne in central Paris the next day to protest against
the closure of the Nanterre campus. While university administrators and
government authorities initially felt threatened by these leftist student activ-
ists, a new danger emerged from a right-wing student organization called
Occident. Using paramilitary tactics, Occident members attacked leftist stu-
dent organizations and threatened to invade the Sorbonne courtyard, where
leftist students had gathered.
Called in to clear the courtyard, police began herding students into
police vans when someone threw a paving stone at a police car, breaking
the windscreen. The police then threw tear gas into the crowd, setting off
a violent confrontation that would last for several days. Professors and
students from across the city, including those from high schools, joined
the protests to support the university students, barricading streets with
overturned cars and paving stones (pavés). When administrators closed
the Sorbonne, outraged students demanded its reopening, the withdrawal
of police, and the liberation of arrested demonstrators. Meanwhile, the
conf lict spread across France. On May 6, the government’s elite security
force attempted to repress the student revolt. The Compagnies républic-
aines de sécurité, or “CRS,” was already associated with violent repres-
sion in the leftist imagination due to their suppression of demonstrations
against the Algerian War. Across the Latin Quarter, students chanted,
“CRS-SS,” drawing analogy to the much-reviled Nazi forces. When hor-
rifying images of police brutality hit television screens, the students gained
widespread public sympathy.
Two events shifted the conf lict’s momentum from street battles between
students and police to a national social movement. The first was the involve-
ment of Prime Minister Georges Pompidou and eventually President Charles
de Gaulle. Rather than sending in the military to repress the students, Pom-
pidou hoped to diffuse the situation by reopening the Sorbonne on May 12.
Yet the opposite happened. The reopening of the Sorbonne created new
spaces for discussions about student grievances and revolutionary ideolo-
gies. The university’s courtyard was decorated with the faces of Mao, Che,
Marx, Lenin, and Castro. It also led to the occupation of other institutions,
including the École des Beaux Arts, where students produced revolutionary
banners and posters that began to appear throughout the city.
Additionally, student leaders urged union organizations and workers to
join their demonstrations. Young workers had already been on the streets
with the students, but on May 13 hundreds of thousands of people joined
Figure 13.2 May ’68 screenprint poster developed at the Atelier populaire, using
the phrase “L’État c’est moi” (I am the state) of the absolutist king
Louis XIV in connection with both French president Charles de Gaulle
and the workers and students fighting for power , Victoria University
Library (Toronto), Paris Posters.
the demonstrations, uniting the student protests with the industrial work-
ers’ struggle. The next day, waves of strikes broke out across France, and
workers began occupying factories, as they had in 1936 during the Popular
Front era. Yet, in 1936, there had only been approximately two and a half
million people on strike; in May 1968, there were an estimated 10 million
striking workers.
Meanwhile, de Gaulle refused—impatiently—to engage with the students,
left the country on a short state visit to Romania, and refused to negotiate
with labor unions to stop the strikes. His actions—or lack thereof—led to
the growing impression of a power vacuum in the government, confirm-
ing to many that Gaullism was out of touch with modern society. Pompi-
dou attempted to negotiate with both labor unions and bosses, eventually
reaching an agreement (the Grenelle Accords) that led to generous increases
in wages, family allowances, and improvements in working conditions for
many. However, this did not defuse the crisis.
More radical workers rejected the deal and socialist politicians under the
leadership of François Mitterrand announced that they were forming a pro-
visional government to replace de Gaulle. Shockingly, the president and his
wife suddenly left the country for Germany. De Gaulle returned the follow-
ing day with renewed confidence and announced on national television that
he would not step down but instead would dissolve the National Assembly
to prevent subversion. This step bolstered his supporters who organized a
counter-demonstration that proved larger than that of May 13. His sup-
porters marched down the Champs-Elysées, singing the “Marseillaise” and
chanting slogans such as “Clean out the Sorbonne!”
De Gaulle’s speech and the counter-demonstration essentially shut down
the revolutionary momentum of the left. Strikers began to return to work,
most of them content with the benefits they had achieved with the Grenelle
Accords. Pompidou had also persuaded de Gaulle to dissolve the National
Assembly and hold new elections. This ended in a landslide victory, as right-
wing parties won a majority of 354 seats against 124. Newly empowered,
de Gaulle released the OAS generals who had been convicted of treason
during the Algerian War and in July issued a general amnesty for all of the
OAS members convicted of crimes in the Algerian War. These moves sig-
naled to the far right and military that they were being brought back into
the fold regardless of their Nazi collaborations during the Vichy years and
their attempted treason during the Algerian War.
The Meaning and Legacy of May ’68

For those who had watched from the sidelines, the accepted post-’68 narra-
tive typically goes like this: what occurred was a “spontaneous youth revolt”
that failed to achieve its revolutionary goals because it was merely a tantrum
of enfants gâtés or “spoiled children.” Certainly, the events of May ’68
did not bring down the government, nor did they lead to widespread social and
political reform, as many protestors had undoubtedly desired. Yet this narra-
tive of “spoiled” French youth fails to acknowledge the intellectual inf luence
of the leftist activism of the previous decade. It also ignores the global wave
of unrest that had served as a key inspiration for the Nanterre student move-
ment as well as for the striking workers. For instance, a handful of May ’68
student leaders had been present in Tunisia in March during protests at the
University of Tunis, which included French philosopher Michel Foucault.
Additionally, French student activists, including Daniel Cohn-Bendit, were
strongly affected by West German student protests against the visit of the
shah of Iran in 1967 as well as the attempted assassination of German leftist
student leader Rudi Dutschke in April 1968. Student unrest occurred across
Europe and the United States, with similar occupations of university admin-
istrative buildings, like at Columbia University in New York in April 1968,
where students protested American military atrocities in Vietnam.
It is also worth considering the legacy of May ’68 beyond the existence of
(or lack of) immediate post-event reforms. Although de Gaulle’s reassertion
of presidential authority appeared to firmly quell dissent, it was clear that
he lacked full confidence in the Gaullist mandate. He dismissed Pompidou
in July and appointed the ineffectual Maurice Couve de Murville as prime
minister. Yet de Gaulle also recognized the need to enact some additional
reforms, especially around education, to appease the unrest at the root of
the revolt. His new minister of education Edgar Faure began a major reform
of the system of higher education that devolved significant power to pro-
fessors and students. In late 1968, a new law created 67 independent uni-
versities, which included 13 institutions in Paris that replaced the previous
organizational structure of the University of Paris. Each of these universities
was to have an independent governing council comprised of faculty and stu-
dents, although this was complicated by the funding structure, which was
still dependent on older hierarchical models.
While the events of May ’68 changed very little about the lives of many
people outside Paris, for those within the movement, it had a significant and
often long-term impact. Hundreds of militants had been imprisoned dur-
ing confrontations with the French police and CRS, and the issue of police
violence and state repression against activists became a central cause for
post-’68 leftist activists. Greatly inf luenced by Althusser, the Maoist organi-
zation Gauche prolétarienne (Proletarian Left) formed in October 1968 and
sought to create a radical Marxist movement outside the inf luence of the
Stalinist PCF. Its membership included student leaders of the May ’68 move-
ment like Serge July, filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, and intellectuals such as
Sartre, Beauvoir, and Foucault. The concept of “popular justice” gained
force as Maoists organized around prison conditions and the plight of incar-
cerated political prisoners.
Historians also point to a shift in the focus of leftist intellectuals and
activists in the aftermath of 1968, from revolution to ethics: this is vis-
ible in the campaign for prison reform and in the trajectory of several ‘68
activists who turned toward the defense of democratic rights and civil lib-
erties after their own experiences of incarceration. After the exposure of
Soviet gulags, some of these activists began to challenge the ideologies of
political violence present in Third-Worldism and Maoism. This shift also
led to the creation of a movement known as sans-frontièrisme, in refer-
ence to Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), which several
former activists founded in 1971 in response to the failure of existing and
“politically neutral” humanitarian organizations to adequately address the
growing humanitarian crises of the Third World. These particular activists
and intellectuals argued that it was necessary for their organizations and
the French state to step in to international conf licts to defend the individual
human rights of the oppressed around the world, an ideology distinct from
that of the radical left.
The May ’68 destabilization of France’s rigid and unbending political sys-
tem also led to the formation of new social and political movements, particu-
larly in the early 1970s. In contrast to Marxism or Third-Worldism, feminist
and gay rights movements sought liberation for themselves in light of their
own oppression. Environmental activists sought to challenge both the impo-
sition of the state on their local landscapes and what they believed was the
imminent danger of nuclear technology, whether from bombs or nuclear
energy generation. A visible and controversial feminist movement called the
Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (Movement for the Liberation of
Women, or the MLF) formed out of these discussions. Less a centralized
organization than a diverse set of small groups and individuals who came
together in Paris in open meetings, the MLF emerged in part from many
women’s exclusion from leadership roles by the male leaders of May ’68.
The militants of the MLF developed a theory of women’s exploitation in
which patriarchy was the central force of oppression, rather than just capi-
talism (although resistance to capitalist structures remained a key theme as
well), and by the early 1970s, they were mobilizing around the issue of legal
abortion.
The Twilight of Gaullism

Following the uprising of May–June 1968, President de Gaulle continued,
rather unsuccessfully, his attempts to regain control of the unsettled country.
Although Edgar Morin’s educational reforms were generally well received,
conservatives cringed at the idea of appeasing the unruly masses any fur-
ther. The president, meanwhile, sought to reaffirm his own personal author-
ity with a referendum on several major structural reforms. He proposed
to reorganize the administrative structure of France from departments into
large regions. Next, he argued for dismantling the Senate from a full rep-
resentative legislative body to more of an advisory council, for which half
of the members would be elected by regions and half by national economic
and social organizations. Neither the elites nor the workers were pleased by
this proposal.
In a televised speech on April 25, 1969, two days before the referen-
dum, de Gaulle announced to French citizens that if they voted “no,” it
would be a referendum on his presidency as much as his proposal. The vote
totals gave a clear response: only 47 percent voted “yes.” Consequently,
on April 28, de Gaulle announced that he would step down as president,
effective at midnight. He left immediately for his home in northern France
and retired completely from public life, dying unexpectedly the next year
on November 9, 1970, at the age of 79. Although the French electorate had
not reaffirmed a mandate for Gaullism, they also did not react by voting
for a slate of leftist candidates in the next elections. The 1969 presidential
election brought to power the center-right candidate and former prime min-
ister, Georges Pompidou. While the PCF retained its major share of votes,
the non-communist left had obtained only around 11 percent of the vote, a
major loss. For the next few years, the socialists attempted to rebuild while
Pompidou worked to ease France out from under the shadow of de Gaulle,
building his own version of modernizing, neo-liberal centrism.
Notes
1 Cited in Jean-Jacques Becker, Histoire politique de la France depuis 1945 (Paris:
Armand Colin, 2015), 125.
2 Cited in Yann Scioldo-Zürcher, Devenir métropolitain: Politique d’intégration
et parcours de rapatriés d’Algérie en metropole (1954–2005) (Paris: Éditions de
l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2010), 111.

Bess, Michael. The Light-Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in
France, 1960–2000. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
Bourg, Julian. From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French
Thought. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007.
Briggs, Jonathyne. Sounds French: Globalization, Cultural Communities, and Pop
Music, 1958–1980. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Davey, Eleanor. Idealism Beyond Borders: The French Revolutionary Left and the
Rise of Humanitarianism, 1954–1988. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2015.
Duchen, Claire. Feminism in France: From May ’68 to Mitterrand. London: Rout-
ledge, 2013.
Jackson, Julian. De Gaulle. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2018.
Ross, Kristin. May ’68 and Its Afterlives. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
2002.
14 Globalized France Globalized France
Introduction
In 1992, Martinican author Patrick Chamoiseau’s novel Texaco won the
Prix Goncourt, one of the most prestigious literary prizes in France. Cham-
oiseau’s novel wove significant passages of Martinican creole in with French,
replicating the spoken dialects in Martinique. The personal narrative begins
in 1820 and recounts the family history of Marie-Sophie Labourieux, the
daughter of a freed slave who lives in the shantytown of Texaco on the
outskirts of Martinique’s capital, Fort-de-France. Labourieux’s story stands
as a metaphor for the experience of the Martinican people under slavery,
French colonialism, and later departmentalization, which left the Antilles in
a situation of “equality of principle, but inequality of fact.”
Chamoiseau represented an important new trend in Francophone litera-
ture, film, and art, which began in the mid-1980s when writers and artists
sought to represent the voices and histories of formerly colonized popula-
tions. This occurred in parallel with the emergence of new political and
social movements that claimed space for groups that had been previously
marginalized on the basis of their ethnic identity, language, race, religion,
or sexual orientation. These movements garnered support from many on the
left and drew vehement protests from others, leading to renewed attempts
by the early 1990s to redefine “Frenchness” in the face of what some observ-
ers described as a “social fracture.”
While the 1970s saw the French struggling with the legacies of May ’68 and
the economic crises brought on by a globalizing economy and the oil shocks,
the 1980s brought a reconfiguration of traditional political and social struc-
tures in the face of growing economic and social insecurity. By the late 1980s
and early 1990s, politicians and intellectuals sought to unite the nation around
a renewed, universal vision of “Frenchness,” in an attempt to fix perceived
“social fractures,” the root of which were, in their minds, minority groups who
refused to fully integrate into the French nation. In the decades after decoloniza-
tion, the work of determining how the diverse populations of France, its over-
seas departments and territories, and its former empire could live and function
together required painful and sometimes violent negotiations.
DOI: 10.4324/b23310-14
Globalized France 279
Modernization and Economic Crisis in the 1970s and 1980s
Although considered a political outsider, Georges Pompidou had been the
longest-serving prime minister of the Fifth Republic during de Gaulle’s pres-
idency. Thus, it was no surprise that Pompidou announced his candidacy
for president almost immediately after de Gaulle’s resignation in April 1969
and won the election with 60 percent of the vote. The presence of numerous
old-guard Gaullists who remained in key governmental posts solidified the
continuity between de Gaulle’s and Pompidou’s regimes.
At first, Pompidou and Prime Minister Jacques Chaban-Delmas sought to
resolve some of the social problems that had led to May ’68 by restructur-
ing state power, modernizing the economy, and connecting more directly
with the population. Over the next three years, Chaban-Delmas liberalized
the media and stimulated French industry and exports. His most inf luen-
tial reforms, however, were infrastructure modernization and building pro-
jects, which transformed the physical and symbolic landscape of France.
This included the construction of the high-speed TGV train lines (trains
à grande vitesse) and the construction of the first skyscraper in the city of
Paris, a much-derided tower known as the Tour Montparnasse. In 1971,
Les Halles—the rundown central food market that had been constructed
during the Haussmannization of Paris in the 1850s—was demolished and
replaced with an underground transport hub and shopping mall. In neigh-
boring Beaubourg, Pompidou ordered the construction of the modern and
contemporary art museum known as the Centre Pompidou. In an attempt
to improve the economic situation of the lowest-paid workers, in 1970,
the government transformed the minimum wage (known henceforth as the
SMIC) from an hourly wage to a monthly base salary with increases that
were tied to general economic conditions rather than price indexes, a reform
that had significant popular support.
Within the Pompidou administration, competing visions of state power
emerged—an ideological conf lict that continues to this day. Like de Gaulle,
Pompidou felt the president should have full authority over the state and its
citizens, while Chaban-Delmas felt that primary state power should reside
with the National Assembly and the prime minister. A series of financial scan-
dals and unrest eventually led to Chaban-Delmas’s resignation in July 1972
and his replacement with Pierre Messmer, an austere, orthodox Gaullist.
Messmer immediately revoked several of the more liberalizing policies of his
predecessor, including the autonomy of the radio-television industry.
The Pompidou-Messmer government attempted further economic mod-
ernization and developed a Gaullist foreign policy, seeking to maintain inde-
pendence vis-à-vis the two Cold War powers. Pompidou made a concerted
outreach to postcolonial Africa and the Middle East, and toured both the
United States and Soviet Union in 1970. But he was openly resistant to
West Germany’s attempts at a peaceful German reunification, and in a clear
break from de Gaulle’s European policy, Pompidou lifted France’s boycott
280 Globalized France
on Britain’s entry into the European Community, instead facilitating the
British entry into the Common Market in 1972.
Nonetheless, by early 1973, Pompidou faced domestic social unrest that
illustrated the growing instability of the Gaullist political and economic
model. When word leaked that the Lip watch company was bankrupt,
workers in Besançon occupied the factory and seized the watches they
had constructed. The movement’s leaders drew on the tradition of left-
ist Catholicism and the direct action of student, labor, and anti-colonial
activists in the late 1960s. The workers reorganized the labor system in
the factories, restarted production, and began selling the watches they had
seized to prevent the factory owner from “stealing the means of produc-
tion.”1 An August 1973 poll found that 63 percent of the French population
supported the Lip workers, demonstrating that there was little sympathy
for bosses who laid off workers nor for government policies that crushed
worker protests.
The 1973 legislative elections also saw the appearance on the national
stage of a new far-right political party called the Front national (National
Front, or FN). The movement’s leader was Jean-Marie Le Pen, a former
French paratrooper who had served in Algeria. Le Pen sought to link cur-
rent economic problems, specifically rising unemployment and economic
insecurity, to growing anxieties about non-white immigration to France
after decolonization. Although the FN won only a fraction of the vote in its
early campaigns, its anti-immigration rhetoric had significant consequences
as acts of violence against immigrant populations in France multiplied
throughout the country.
Economic tensions grew with the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War in the
Middle East in October 1973, which pitted a coalition of Arab states against
Israel. The war sent the French economy into a devastating crisis after the
Arab oil-exporting countries of OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum
Exporting Countries) imposed an embargo on all of the countries that sup-
ported Israel (including the United States, Canada, Japan, the Netherlands,
and the United Kingdom). The “first oil shock”—between October 1973
and January 1974—quadrupled the price of a barrel of oil globally, and
inf lation skyrocketed to 15.6 percent in France. Despite not being directly
targeted by the embargo, production and economic growth slowed dramati-
cally in France in 1974. The resulting recession marked the end of the eco-
nomic “miracle” of the trente glorieuses. This global crisis also signaled that
France could not remain isolated from its European neighbors and main-
tain its Great Power status. Indeed, Pompidou’s greatest divergence from de
Gaulle in foreign policy matters was the understanding that France needed
Europe to maintain its vision of “grandeur.”
In the midst of this instability, Pompidou faced a personal health crisis
when he was diagnosed with leukemia. Pompidou hid his condition but was
forced to reduce his workload while the political and economic situation
deteriorated around him. When Pompidou passed away on April 2, 1974,
the Senate president Alain Poher become the interim French president until
new elections could take place on May 5. The Gaullist Giscard d’Estaing
went on to win the presidency with 50.8 percent of the vote against socialist
François Mitterrand’s 49.2 percent, which indicated a renewed strength of
the French left, though it was not yet able to defeat the Gaullist hold on the
Fifth Republic.
Much more informal than his predecessors, Giscard d’Estaing was viewed
as an “American-style” president. He seemed invested in the youth and the
everyday problems of the French population, although he believed that class
struggle was out-of-date and no longer widely tolerated. Instead, he sought
to reinvigorate the economy and society with pro-market liberal reforms.
His choice of prime minister—the 42-year-old Jacques Chirac—ref lected the
decreasing inf luence of the older, orthodox Gaullists in favor of younger,
ambitious technocrats trained at the ENA. Giscard d’Estaing liberalized
some laws to conform to the changing social climate, including lowering the
voting age from 21 to 18, and, more controversially, legalizing contracep-
tion, divorce by mutual consent, and then abortion with the passage of the
Veil Law (named after Health Minister Simone Veil) in January 1975.
Giscard d’Estaing’s “advanced liberalism” was first and foremost an
economic program. Initially, the government’s plan was to curb inf lation
by tightening limits on public spending and increasing interest rates, but
after protests from farmers and business owners pushed to the edge of
bankruptcy, the plan was adjusted to appease this vocal segment of the
electorate. Instead, Giscard d’Estaing significantly raised taxes and obliga-
tory “social charges” to fund an expansion of the social security system to
unsalaried workers and offer new social programs for disabled persons. He
also promised to lower the age of retirement and shorten the workday for
manual laborers.
This strategy sought, in part, to fend off the growing popularity of the
political left. Yet leftist candidates gained support among voters, partly due
to frustration with the government’s economic austerity. At the same time,
the right also began to challenge Giscard d’Estaing’s administration, and his
former prime minister Jacques Chirac even formed a new Gaullist political
party called the Rassemblement pour la République (Rally for the Repub-
lic, RPR). After a scandal rocked the administration of Paris, Chirac was
elected mayor of the city in March 1977. Nevertheless, the divisions on the
right opened enough space in the next presidential election for the socialist
candidate François Mitterrand to win 52.2 percent of the vote and for the
socialists to obtain a solid majority in the legislative elections of 1981.
As the first leftist president of the Fifth Republic, Mitterrand’s victory was
a momentous political event. He began his first term as president in a much
stronger position than his two predecessors and immediately launched a
project of dramatic reforms. The three major axes of these reforms were the
nationalization of large sectors of the French economy, the decentralization
of power to regional authorities, and the financing of major public works
projects around arts and culture. The nationalization law went into effect
in 1982, leading the state to take full or partial control of numerous indus-
trial and financial enterprises. That same year, the government created new
administrative divisions: regional councils were henceforth responsible for
long-term projects, including social, cultural, and economic development,
while departments would manage day-to-day affairs. The Ministry of Cul-
ture’s budget was nearly doubled, expanding state spending on local pro-
jects and grand travaux, which sought to enhance national culture. During
Mitterrand’s tenure, the ministry funded the construction in Paris alone of
the Musee d’Orsay (1986), Le Parc de la Villette (1986), La Cité des sciences
et de l’industrie (1986), L’Institut du monde arabe (1987), L’Opéra Bastille
(1989), La Grande Arche de la Défense (1989), La Cité de la musique (1994),
the pyramid of the Louvre by I.M. Pei (1995), and the new Bibliothèque
nationale de France—François Mitterrand (1995). These projects re-shaped
the landscape of Paris and once again made the city a global destination for
art and cultural production and exhibition. Other notable reforms included
the liberalization of audio-visual sectors (and the privatization of radio),
and the October 1981 law abolishing the death penalty.
Hoping to decrease unemployment, Mitterrand’s government instituted a
39-hour workweek and five weeks of paid vacation. It also shifted the retire-
ment age to 60 years and increased payments for the SMIC and for fam-
ily and housing allowances. However, industrial production continued to
decline and unemployment continued to rise, even as the state accrued more
financial responsibilities. To make these payments, the government began
to borrow heavily. By 1982, the public debt had reached 32 billion francs.
Despite initial enthusiasm, by 1982, public support turned against Mitter-
rand’s reforms. Yet the new austerity program that began in 1982–1983 was
equally unpopular, as the brunt of the economic burden fell on the work-
ing classes who faced near-constant unemployment. By the spring of 1983,
numerous groups began protesting government reforms, including medical
students, doctors, farmers, and even the police.
Touting him as the symbol of the future, Mitterrand named Laurent
Fabius as prime minister in 1984—at 37 years old, he was the youngest
prime minister in French history. Fabius attempted to modernize the labor
market, breaking with the left to introduce neo-liberal policies, including
part-time contracts and lower business taxes. Commercials were allowed on
private radio stations, and the first private television station, Canal+, was
authorized in 1984 provided that it help fund the film industry. There was a
strong negative reaction to the privatization of media, particularly as Ameri-
can series, game shows, and commercials appeared on new stations financed
by the Italian businessman Silvio Berlusconi. Many on the left claimed this
was a clear sign of civilizational decay.
Meanwhile, opposition to the Mitterrand administration intensified. In
July 1985, a Dutch photographer was killed when French Security Services
bombed the Greenpeace boat Rainbow Warrior in the harbor of Auckland,
New Zealand, before its planned protest of French nuclear trials in the
South Pacific. This event caused an enormous scandal across France and
revealed several cracks in the foundation of state power. Consequently, in
the highly contentious legislative elections in 1986, the Socialist Party lost
its majority. This led to “the era of cohabitation,” in which the president
named a prime minister from the opposition party, which had achieved the
legislative majority. Unprecedented in France, this state of affairs led to sig-
nificant conf lict and instability as Mitterrand and Chirac fought each other
for the presidency.
Immigration and the Growth of the “Banlieues”

Numerous destabilizing events—economic crises, two world wars, and decol-
onization—had brought waves of migrants into France, but it was actually
the economic prosperity of the trente glorieuses that led to the most significant
increase in the number of foreign and colonial workers in France. The num-
ber of Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian workers in France declined over the
1960s, as the labor markets in Switzerland and West Germany became more
attractive. Beginning in 1962, by contrast, Algerian labor migration steadily
increased, particularly after the Evian Accords guaranteed the free circula-
tion of the French and Algerian populations between the two countries. Yet
this clause in the treaty was intended specifically to assist the circulation of
the European population, and French migration officials consistently tried
to slow the influx of non-European migrants from North Africa. In Octo-
ber 1968, a revision to the Evian Accords abruptly limited the free circulation
of Algerian migrants between France and Algeria. Instead, the French signed
accords with Turkey and Yugoslavia in 1965 to import labor migrants and
began recruiting workers from Tunisia and Morocco.
Meanwhile, the appalling state of housing and living conditions for for-
eign workers remained a major problem. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s,
neither the government nor the companies that employed migrant workers
wanted to spend money to build permanent housing for workers that they
viewed as temporary and unreliable. After a terrible fire in a slum in Auber-
villiers in January 1970 killed five Malian men, however, public protests and
media attention forced the government to respond. By 1973, a handful of
new laws penalized racism and trafficking of workers.
It was grassroots associations and North African workers themselves who
advocated most powerfully for themselves and their families. In 1972, the
Mouvement des travailleurs arabes (Arab Workers Movement, or MTA) began
campaigning for better living and working conditions for both laborers and
immigrants more generally; they also fought against the forced deportation
of undocumented migrants (known as sans papiers). Although it came into
conflict with companies and the government, the MTA gained the support of
labor unions, left-leaning Christians, and immigrant-rights associations such
as the Protestant organizations Cimade and GISTI (Groupe d’information et
de soutien des immigrés), which was formed in 1972 through a collabora-
tion of social workers, lawyers, and left-leaning student activists who used
their legal and technical expertise to improve the conditions of immigrants
in France. Through these NGO efforts and the activism of workers them-
selves—including a hunger strike to protest their lack of basic human rights
and access to legal status—the Interior Ministry regularized the status of
50,000 migrants in 1973.
Nevertheless, the number of violent racist attacks targeting North Africans
in France was increasing: Algerian worker solidarity organizations counted
11 deaths of Algerians between late August and mid-September of 1973.
One cause was growing momentum among far-right organizations like the
National Front to rhetorically and physically confront what they called the
“problem” of Algerian immigration. When a mentally disturbed Algerian
man murdered a bus driver in Marseille on August 25, National Front mem-
bers formed a Committee of Defense of Marseillais. In response, anti-racist
associations and individuals such as the bishop of Marseille called for peace
and solidarity. Meanwhile, the French government began arresting and
deporting individuals that they claimed were inciting violence and disturb-
ing public order. Neither effort successfully calmed tensions, and on Decem-
ber 14, the Algerian consulate in Marseille was bombed, killing four and
seriously injuring numerous others. Behind the attack were pieds noirs and
former OAS members who had organized themselves into the Club Charles
Martel, a far-right organization intending to violently rid France of Algerians.
On the other side of the Mediterranean, the Algerians were furious at
French racism toward Algerians and the ineffectual response of the French
government. On September 19, 1973, Algerian president Houari Boume-
diene suspended Algerian immigration to France. He demanded that the
French government create a secretary of state for immigration and more
seriously investigate the racist attacks against Algerians. In a press confer-
ence, however, Pompidou stated that there was no racism in France. By the
fall of 1973, the French government was caught between competing inter-
ests; Pompidou and others on the right may have been perfectly happy to
stop Algerian immigration altogether, but the oil shock led employers to fear
that the lack of migrant labor would further depress the French economy.
Additionally, the French government needed Algeria as an ally in its foreign
policy machinations concerning OPEC.
With immigration overwhelmingly viewed in France as a “problem” to
be managed, in 1974, Giscard d’Estaing adopted more restrictive measures
to control the in-f low of immigrants. His government also promoted the
permanent integration of migrants already settled in France and suspended
new immigration (including family reunification) in July 1974. French lead-
ers justified the new restrictive policies as a means to avoid the kinds of
violent racial conf licts that were erupting in the United States. Specialists
argued that the state should limit immigration to a perceived “threshold
of tolerance,” which would allow immigrants already present in France to
assimilate and would prevent new instances of racial conf lict. In 1977, the
government offered to pay 50,000 migrants and their families to return to
their countries of origin. But only 4,000 offers were accepted. Beginning in
1979, government hardliners began planning to create annual targets for
forcible expulsions, aimed specifically at Algerian workers.
Housing permanent immigrants continued to be complicated, particularly
when state officials relied on racist, colonial-era theories about integration.
In the late 1950s, housing officials in Marseille had labeled North African
and Roma families as “unadapted” and moved them north of the city, far
from services and transportation, into hastily constructed housing blocks
with no hot water or heat. These projects were intended to be temporary,
with those housed there eventually moving to better-constructed housing
once they adapted to modern French life. In the mid-1960s, cities like Mar-
seille partnered with agencies like SONACOTRA to build cités de tran-
sit, or larger-scale versions of the temporary housing projects for migrant
families from North and sub-Saharan Africa. The situation had not vastly
improved by the early 1970s, when the French state finally began investing
vast amounts of money into rehousing immigrant families across France.
The transfer of immigrant families to the banlieues, suburbs on the out-
skirts of French cities, had significant social consequences for decades to
come. Beginning in the 1970s, housing officials forcibly moved immigrant
families out of slums and bidonvilles that were being razed for new public
housing and into the empty apartments of the “grands ensembles” vacated
by middle-class white families in search of better homes. Although intended
to avoid the “ghettoization” of immigrants in isolated neighborhoods, that
was exactly what occurred: white families moved back into city centers and
immigrants moved into their abandoned HLMs. Granted, the living condi-
tions of migrants formerly living in bidonvilles vastly improved, but by the
mid-1970s, the concept of the banlieue began to signify a socially problem-
atic neighborhood. The image of the dangerous banlieue, full of delinquent
immigrant youth, began to appear widely across French media in the early
1980s. Since then, the term “banlieue” has become a euphemism for racial
segregation. Used as a shorthand for racial conf lict that forces itself onto a
self-consciously “color-blind” society, the term banlieue has allowed offi-
cials to blame these area’s social problems on the behaviors and ethnic ori-
gins of the inhabitants themselves, rather than investigating their structural
causes or investing in social programs and infrastructural improvements.
Yet this so-called ghettoization of certain immigrant populations also
occurred within the inner core of French cities, in some cases resulting from
failed urban renewal projects. One example is the Olympiades project in
the 13th arrondissement of Paris. Inspired by futurist architectural designs,
the project initially envisioned more than 50 towers combining apartments,
businesses, green space, and stores. The plan was to draw white, middle-
class families back from the suburbs by providing upscale housing and ser-
vices. However, the buildings resembled HLMs and were unappealing; only
Figure 14.1 HLM called Bellefontaine in Toulouse, photo in public domain, via

Wikimedia Commons.
30 buildings were ever constructed. Many of the apartments sat empty for
years until more than a hundred thousand refugees f led Southeast Asia and
the ravages of the Vietnam War; many settled into these cheap and available
apartments, turning this neighborhood into the “Chinatown” of Paris.
The Emergence of Regionalism and Demands for Local

Autonomy
Debates about immigration, urban housing, and other social problems in
the 1970s and 1980s revealed cracks in the façade of the strong centralized
state and a unified French national identity. Significantly, both the metro-
pole and the overseas territories saw the re-emergence of regional identities
and calls for political decentralization and local autonomy. The 1972 law
that reorganized the metropole into 22 administrative “regions” provided a
means for cultural movements to assert some autonomy through the promo-
tion of their unique local languages, cultures, and identities.
Three distinct regional movements—in Brittany, Corsica, and the Basque
region on the border of Spain—emerged during this era. The “Breton Move-
ment,” in Brittany, asserted a distinctly Breton identity and worked to save
the Breton language and culture from eradication. Although it was mostly
a linguistic and educational enterprise, more militant groups such as the
Breton Liberation Front pushed for political autonomy for the region. On
the island of Corsica, meanwhile, many felt that the Corsican regionalist
movement was being ignored by officials in Paris, so militants shifted to
armed struggle. In August 1975, separatist militants occupied the wine cel-
lar of a pied-noir vintner in Aléria to protest what they saw as unfair land
distribution practices in the wine industry following Algerian independence.
The French state sent more than 1,200 gendarmes and CRS with tanks and
helicopters. During the siege, two gendarmes were killed and a militant was
wounded. In solidarity with the militants, young people in Bastia, the capi-
tal, rioted in the streets the following week. Although the Corsican separa-
tist movement was forcibly disbanded by the government, state repression
only strengthened the nationalist cause. In 1976, the newly created National
Liberation Front of Corsica asserted its desire for independence, or at least
increased political autonomy, from France. This nationalist movement con-
tinues to this day.
In the Basque regions of France and Spain, an organization called ETA (an
acronym of the Basque phrase Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, meaning “Basque
Homeland and Liberty”) emerged in the late 1950s. Though initially seek-
ing cultural autonomy, the ETA transformed into an armed organization
fighting, mostly in Spain, for an independent Basque state. After engaging in
targeted campaigns of bombings, assassinations, and kidnappings, the ETA
was labeled a terrorist organization by Spain and numerous other countries
though they were tolerated in France until the 1990s, when the French gov-
ernment began to arrest and imprison them as well.
Another strand of “regionalism” was rooted in the local struggles of farm-
ers and small business owners against the oppressive bureaucracy of the
centralized state. Mass urbanization was a key feature of postwar France,
and the number of adults employed in the agricultural sector dropped from
36 percent in 1945 to merely 6 percent by the early 1970s. With money
largely provided by the Marshall Plan, the French state modernized rural
farms and reclaimed “unproductive” landscapes, turning non-arable lands
into parks and tourist destinations for the growing urban population, who
sought a stronger connection to nature; by the mid-1970s, dissatisfaction
with consumer culture and urban life had fueled a cultural nostalgia for a
utopian rural peasant lifestyle and many white middle-class French families
could afford to buy a rural country house. Additionally, the emerging envi-
ronmental movement added incentive to prioritize the “protection” of the
natural environment over the desires of small landowners and farmers. By
the early 1970s, the individual struggles of small farmers had evolved into a
larger social movement that attempted to link their own conf licts with the
French state to anti-colonial movements and peasant struggles in Africa.
The best example of this is the Larzac Movement, a decade-long battle of
popular resistance against the extension of a military base on the Larzac pla-
teau, which required the forced expropriation of more than a hundred small
farms. The populist movement gathered support from across the political
and ideological spectrum, including far-right conservatives who opposed the
centralizing power of the state and far-left activists who supported a grow-
ing anti-militarist ecology movement. After a decade of fighting and illegal
squatting, the Larzac farmers were victorious when Mitterrand’s govern-
ment gave up the project, creating new policies to promote smaller farms
and ecological practices.
Demands for regional autonomy were brewing in France’s overseas terri-
tories as well. Beginning in the late 1970s, residents in several départements
d’outre-mer (DOMs) and the territoires d’outre-mer (TOMs) challenged
what they saw as neo-colonial, exploitative political and economic domina-
tion by France. The economies of Martinique and Guadeloupe had dramati-
cally shifted with departmentalization, especially after the Caribbean sugar
industry collapsed in the 1960s due to competition from European sugar
beets. Consequently, the French Antilles became an import economy. As
they gradually stopped producing and selling their own products, tourism
became their main source of income.
The collapse of the plantation system also led to mass urbanization that
coincided with a population surge; by the mid-1960s, more than half of
the population of Martinique and Guadeloupe was under 20 years old. By
the 1970s, unemployment rates skyrocketed, while social benefits such as
the SMIC offered little relief, as they were not adjusted to offset the much
higher cost of living in the Antilles. To ameliorate the high unemployment
and under-employment rates among the younger generation, French officials
brought thousands of Antilleans to France for job training and employment,
most of whom worked in entry-level jobs as house cleaners and home health
aides (women) and in the military, police, and transport (men). Officials
in the Antilles were frustrated by the loss of a generation of workers to
a French program that did almost nothing to fix the broader problem of
underdevelopment in the Caribbean. The migrants, meanwhile, had mixed
experiences in France, where many found better employment opportunities
but faced significant racism and segregation.
In the late 1960s, some Antilleans began to advocate for full separation
from France. In Guadeloupe, the violent repression of a strike movement in
1967 led to growing support for autonomy and even independence. Aimé
Césaire, who had strongly supported departmentalization in 1946, slowly
evolved into a more dissident leader. He spoke out against immigration poli-
cies in the late 1970s and was openly calling for Martinican independence
by 1979. Meanwhile, feminist politicians such as the Guadeloupean lawyer
and communist deputy Gerty Archimède and Paulette Nardal, as well as
workers and unions in the Antilles fought valiantly against French discrimi-
nation and domination.
Similarly, in Réunion, a marked improvement in the economy and stand-
ard of living after departmentalization led to a significant population surge
(140 percent over 35 years). As with Martinique and Guadeloupe, the
French government sponsored the migration of some 37,000 workers from
Réunion to the metropole during the 1960s and 1970s. It also attempted
to ameliorate the social and economic condition of orphaned children in
Réunion by transferring 1,600 children to France between 1963 and 1982,
where they were fostered in or adopted by rural French families across more
than 60 departments. However, assimilation was challenging for these chil-
dren. They were often pathologized by their new teachers and families as ill-
behaved, lazy, and ungrateful despite having endured significant dislocation
and displacement with no promise of return to their homeland. What began
with metropolitan “good intentions” turned into something that the Parti
communiste réunionais described in 1968 as child trafficking.
New Caledonia was even more complicated. As a settler colony with a
valuable natural resource (nickel) whose global demand peaked between
1966 and 1973, the government and metropolitan population refused to
heed the territory’s growing calls for national autonomy and full decoloni-
zation from France. As with the Corsican and Basque movements in France,
New Caledonian activists (known as Kanaks) shifted to armed political
resistance, which seemed like the only viable strategy in dealing with the
intransigent French government. Although the French government then
tried to initiate several political and economic reforms, violence broke out in
the colony, and a new pro-independence organization emerged, the Front de
libération nationale kanake et socialiste (FLNKS), modeled on the Algerian
FLN. Since that time several referendums have asked voters if they support
independence from France, and despite contestation within New Caledonia,
the results have consistently rejected independence.
Emancipation and Social Contestations of State Power

In addition to locally organized challenges to state power structures, the
1970s and 1980s also saw new contestations of both traditional social
structures and gender and racial hierarchies. While many of these issues had
erupted into the public sphere through May ’68, more public attention also
brought more conf lict. As radical feminists and gay rights organizations
challenged the state and bourgeois norms, ideological conf licts emerged
within the movements themselves over strategies, aims, and politics. Many
of their demands for access to rights and services gained wider, popular sup-
port; however, conservative commentators denounced communautarisme
(communitarianism) and “identity politics” as a major threat to the univer-
salist French republic.
Feminism, gender, and sexuality emerged as new battlegrounds for
conf licts that developed through the 1970s and 1980s over identity and
control over one’s body as well as the right to public space. In the after-
math of May ’68, during which women had been sidelined by their male
colleagues from most leadership roles, feminists started organizing their
own meetings, without the presence of men, to address women’s issues,
including misogyny, sexual morals, access to contraception, and the legali-
zation of abortion. This led to the creation of the Mouvement de libération
des femmes (Movement for the Liberation of Women, or MLF). One of the
principle aims of the MLF and the “radical” feminism of the 1970s was to
emancipate sexuality from the act of reproduction. These feminists aimed to
obtain women’s right to contraception and abortion while liberating women
from the constraints of domesticity and bourgeois gender norms. These
ideas also resonated beyond metropolitan France, particularly among femi-
nists in Guadeloupe and Martinique, where women often had large families
and were faced with the double burden of being both the primary domestic
caretaker and working outside the home in jobs that paid far less than those
of men. Yet there were diverse approaches to the relationship between sex
and gender and to the issue of political tactics, which eventually divided
many of these movements.
Despite these ideological divisions, MLF members published a series of
inf luential texts and engaged in a number of public performances. They
organized and published the Manifeste des 343, a petition in favor of the
decriminalization and legalization of abortion in France. Written by Simone
de Beauvoir, the text was signed by 343 well-known French women, includ-
ing the iconic actress Catherine Deneuve and the award-winning novelist
Françoise Sagan, all of whom publicly declared that they had undergone an
abortion. The hope was that the popularity of these women would make
it impossible to prosecute them. The manifesto was published on April 5,
1971, in the center-left weekly magazine Le Nouvel Observateur. A few days
later, the satirical weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo published a front-page
cartoon with the provocative headline, “Who impregnated the 343 sluts of
the abortion manifesto?” The manifesto’s signatories then adopted the pejo-
rative label of salopes (sluts) themselves to illustrate the ongoing hypocrisy
and conservatism of French society on the issue of abortion. Months later, in
November 1971, the MLF organized the first major public protest in favor
of abortion rights in Paris.
Feminist activism shaped both public opinion and legal reforms, including
the outcome of the 1972 Bobigny trial, in which five women were accused
of helping a young woman access an illegal abortion after her rape. The
feminist lawyer Gisèle Halimi defended the women and transformed the
trial into a political and media event, much as she had done a decade earlier
during the Algerian War and the trial of Djamila Boupacha. Feminists across
the country defended the women, and the events significantly transformed
public support for decriminalizing abortion, which occurred temporarily
with the passage of the 1975 Veil Law and became permanent in 1979. In
the late 1970s, feminist movements shifted focus toward the criminalization
and punishment of rape. As a result, the problem of sexual violence, along
with matters of sexual ethics more generally, moved into mainstream dis-
course. In December 1980, the legal statutes on rape were updated for the
first time since the early nineteenth century.
Several MLF militants were also key figures in the 1971 formation of the
gay liberation movement known as the Front homosexual d’action révo-
lutionnaire (Homosexual Front for Revolutionary Action, or the FHAR).
Before 1971, the French gay community was largely organized around a
discreet “homophile” organization known as Arcadie, founded in 1956 by
André Baudry as a private social club and monthly newsletter for its mem-
bers. By the late 1960s, a younger generation of gays and lesbians resented
Baudry’s “sermonizing” and attachment to bourgeois standards and discre-
tion. Instead, they sought the right to be open about their sexuality in pub-
lic, free from legal and moral restrictions.
In March 1971, in a performance event that inaugurated the FHAR, a
group of lesbian MLF activists and several gay men interrupted a radio
broadcast dedicated to the topic of homosexuality, which featured Baudry
as the guest. In contrast to Arcadie members, who sought to demonstrate
that homosexuality was not threatening to French society, FHAR activists
were known for their provocative public performances and refusal to qui-
etly stay in the closet. Guy Hocquenghem, a FHAR member and revolution-
ary Maoist, was instrumental in the movement’s early success, arguing that
homosexual liberation was revolutionary. His 1972 manifesto Homosexual
Desire renounced the earlier traditions of discreet homosexuality in favor
of deviance, public sex, cruising, and, more controversially, encounters
between adults and children, and Frenchmen and Arabs.
By the mid-1970s, however, gay liberation transformed into a different
sort of political project—less revolutionary and more committed to the social
acceptance of gay identities, notably through the push for the legalization of
homosexuality. In June 1977, the first Gay Pride parade in France was held
in Paris and appeared to many like the moment when the issue of gay rights
entered into mainstream public discourse and political debates. During the
1978 legislative elections, numerous gay rights organizations lobbied candi-
dates to support the decriminalization of homosexuality, which occurred in
1982 under Mitterrand’s government.
Yet the AIDS epidemic, which began in 1981, even more dramatically trans-
formed social relationships within the gay community as well as the French
public perception of homosexuality, which had important consequences for
later gay rights legislation. When AIDS was first identified, male homosexual
behavior was stereotypically characterized in public discourse as hedonistic,
liberated, and multi-partnered, detached from the model of the heterosexual,
monogamous couple. The reality was much more complex, but eventually
stable partners became the social ideal. As the epidemic progressed, move-
ments such as AIDES (founded in 1984 by Michel Foucault’s partner Daniel
Defert after the philosopher’s death from an AIDS-related illness) and Act
Up-Paris (founded in 1989 after the creation of Act Up-New York two years
earlier) emerged to demand treatments for those individuals in need, to raise
money to find a cure for the disease, to spread information on prevention, and
to promote a better public image of HIV-positive individuals.
In 1991, a massive scandal erupted in France when it was revealed in the
press that beginning in 1985, the national center for blood transfusions had
given blood contaminated with HIV and Hepatitis C to more than 1,300
hemophiliac patients, including children. Numerous individuals were pros-
ecuted when it was discovered that they had decided to use the contami-
nated blood out of economic considerations rather than protecting public
health. The affaire du sang contaminé (the “contaminated blood” scandal)
further destabilized public trust in the government. Former prime minister
Laurent Fabius and two of his cabinet ministers (Social Affairs Minister
Georgina Dufois and Health Minister Edmond Hervé) were charged with
involuntary injury and homicide in 1999, accused of having waited too
long to put testing systems in place to protect the public from contaminated
blood. Although Dufois described herself as “responsible but not guilty,”
the charges against her and Fabius were dismissed, and Hervé was convicted
of involuntary homicide but served no sentence. The victims were outraged,
arguing that ignoring the AIDS crisis in 1985 was tantamount to murder.
Others described the incident as a dangerous refusal by the state to take seri-
ously the AIDS epidemic as a public health crisis, rather than a disease that
only aff licted gay men.
Beyond gender and sexual identities, overlapping issues related to eth-
nicity, race, and immigration were also major elements of social debates
around identity and citizenship in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. During the
contaminated blood scandal, for instance, former prime minister Laurent
Fabius faced numerous antisemitic attacks, while attacks on synagogues
and desecrations of Jewish cemeteries had become increasingly common
throughout France beginning in the 1980s. Escalating antisemitism was
partly due to the rise of the National Front but was also related to the
more visible presence of a wider variety of minority ethnic groups in France.
While the French Jewish community had maintained a fairly discreet pres-
ence following World War II, the inf lux of more politically vocal Jews from
North Africa and conf licts in the Middle East (notably the 1967 Arab-Israeli
War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War) led a growing number of French Jews
to openly proclaim their support for Israel. In cities like Marseille, tensions
simmered between pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian organizations, who held
competing demonstrations in October 1973. Although there were notable
Jewish-Muslim solidarity organizations that had emerged out of leftist, anti-
colonial, and student activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, by the
1980s, most Jewish and Muslim activist groups prioritized the unique strug-
gles facing their own communities, and conf licts emerged between them
over the politics of Israel.
The increasingly visible presence of France’s “Arab” population in the
1970s and 1980s inspired social and political engagement from the commu-
nities themselves and led to renewed government efforts to integrate these
so-called immigrant populations. Along with funding job training centers
for workers in Algeria, Mitterrand’s socialist government promoted a new
educational policy that sent additional resources to zones d’éducation prior-
itaire (priority educational zones, or ZEPs), which sought to better integrate
the “immigrant” youth in schools where they represented 30 percent or
more of the student population. In a dramatic reversal from the previous
government, the socialists argued that the unemployment rate in France and
bad economic conditions were not reason enough to justify the refusal of
work permits to North Africans. They also agreed to regularize the status
of migrant families already in France. A new law implemented in Octo-
ber 1981 declared that migrants could not be expelled from France except in
the case of a conviction without parole for crimes with a prison sentence of
at least one year. However, in seeking to regularize migration status, and to
discourage human trafficking, the government henceforth made “irregular
status” punishable by a prison sentence.
Despite what they claimed were more humane immigration policies,
French socialists demonstrated that they too were wary of North African
immigrants. Faced with striking workers of North African origin in 1983,
the socialist prime minister Pierre Mauroy claimed that they were being
led by Muslim “religious forces” disconnected from the French social sys-
tem.2 Socialists began shifting their discourse on immigration away from the
plight of workers to that of “immigrants” more broadly, focusing on youth,
cultural identity, and projects for integration. This was designed to counter
a growing right-wing narrative that drew connections between the “danger-
ous” immigrant youth of the banlieues and a growing Islamist threat from
places like Iran, where the Ayatollah Khomeini had overthrown the shah of
Iran in 1979. Khomeini’s theocratic government was seen as dangerous to
the secular, democratic traditions of France, and “the West” more generally.
Numerous small-scale revolts against poverty, structural racism, and
police violence did break out within the banlieues in the early 1980s; how-
ever, these communities also developed non-violent political strategies to
address these same issues. A 1981 law that liberalized the access of “for-
eigners” to the right of association led to the growth of a wide range of
new organizations to support immigrant and non-white French life, many
of which were led by activists who were the children of immigrant laborers
and harkis (often described as jeunes issus de l’immigration). The term beur,
describing second-generation North African immigrants, came into wide-
spread use in France at this time. A street slang inversion of the word arabe,
the term initially had a positive connotation, describing this second genera-
tion making a claim for their rightful place in French society. Over time,
however, the term came to negatively connote those who had rejected the
immigrant cultures of their parents’ generation and fully endorsed the inte-
grationist policies of the French government. Adopting the earlier phrase
“right to difference,” the French-born children of immigrants applied the
concept to their own situation as well.
The “beur generation” was instrumental in bringing these issues to the
national stage in the early 1980s. While recovering from a violent altercation
with the police, Toumi Djaïdja, the son of a harki who lived in the Minguettes
quarter of Lyon—the site of several incidents of police violence and unrest—
began planning a protest march against racism. This movement, which
became known as the Marche pour l’égalité et contre le racisme (March for
Equality and Against Racism), more commonly known as the Marche des
beurs, drew the support of immigrant youth and leftist activists across France.
A small group of 32 marchers set out from Marseille on October 15, 1983,
seeking to raise awareness for the violent effects of racism in France. By the
time they reached Paris, they were 100,000 strong. The power of this move-
ment was not lost on President Mitterrand, who met with the leaders on their
arrival. The National Assembly then voted to extend the residency permit
for “privileged” migrants to ten years but placed new restrictions on other
forms of entry and residency (including familial reunification). Consequently,
to many migrants, this did not feel like progress. Worse yet, in October 1984,
Toumi, the leader of the march, was sentenced to 15 months in prison for
theft. Though he denied the accusations, he (and the broader beur generation)
was widely denounced; for many of those associated with the march, it felt
like their entire cause had been discredited.
Despite these setbacks, however, activists continued to organize against
racism. Partly inspired by British anti-racist movements (such as “Rock
Against Racism”), in October 1984, young activists within the Socialist
Party, including Julien Dray and Harlem Désir, founded a new organization
called SOS Racisme, aiming to mobilize politics to fight racism and discrimi-
nation; the Union des étudiants juifs de France (Union of French Jewish Stu-
dents, or UEJF) was a key ally of the movement in its early stages. Although
these organizations promoted the participation of ethnic minorities in pub-
lic life, many of the activists and leaders felt alienated by government-led
movements. This was largely because the French left had abandoned the
idea of the “right to difference” by the mid-1980s. Instead, they pursued
policies that disciplined the behaviors of specifically Muslim immigrant cul-
tures and pushed them to adhere more directly to what French authorities
claimed were universalist, secular, French republican values.
In the French Antilles of the 1980s, writers and artists began reconsid-
ering how their unique identity shaped their relationship to their history,
to France, and to their burgeoning national consciousness. In particular,
younger writers began to critique the ideas and inf luence of négritude, the
1930s literary and cultural movement led by Aimé Césaire in the Caribbean
and Léopold Sédar Senghor in Senegal, which highlighted the consciousness
and achievements of Black artists and writers across the African diaspora.
In 1981, Martinican author Édouard Glissant introduced the concept of
antillanité, or a specifically “Antillean identity” in his book Le Discours
antillais. In this work, he highlighted the positive aspects of métissage—the
cultural mixture that was fundamental to Caribbean, and specifically Antil-
lean identity—as opposed to the obsession with Black African “purity” in
négritude. In 1989, building on this movement, Martinican novelists Patrick
Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, and linguist Jean Bernabé published Eloge
de la créolité in which they identified a literary and cultural movement based
in the “authentic” experience of “creoleness,” or the linguistic and cultural
heterogeneity of the Antilles. They expressed support for literature written
in créole languages, as a means to resist the domination of French culture.
Although they later had disagreements over their visions of Antillean iden-
tity, Glissant and the supporters of créolité saw the mixture of peoples, cul-
tures, and histories of the Antilles as something unique from the universal
French experience. They argued that the Antillean history of slavery, inden-
tured servitude, and colonization was something that should be ref lected in
the literature and art of the islands.
At the same time, Antillean women writers challenged male Antillean
authors’ valorization of antillanité and their desire to highlight only the posi-
tive aspects of Antillean identity through literature. Guadeloupean novel-
ists Simone Schwarz-Bart and Maryse Condé (among others) explored the
ambivalence and complexity of Antillean identity. Their work considers, for
instance, how the condition of Antillean women was born from the legacy of
slavery, colonization, and male violence, resulting in their ongoing social and
economic marginalization. In addition to her novels, which depict Antillean
women who struggle against sexual and racial abuses, Schwarz-Bart (who
was married to the French Jewish novelist André Schwarz-Bart) worked to
uncover the hidden histories and cultures of Black women across the Fran-
cophone world and published a six-volume encyclopedia in 1989 dedicated
to this endeavor (Hommage à la femme noire). The later novels of Maryse
Condé are described as “Caribbean” novels: they interrogate the complexity
of the creole experience, which should not, she suggested, be reduced to that
of the singular male figure (as it often had been in négritude texts).
During this period, writers of Maghrebi origin explored similar ques-
tions of identity, language, and culture. The oeuvre of Algerian novelist
Assia Djebar, for example, engages themes of French colonialism, women’s
oppression under patriarchal systems (both political and religious), and the
autobiographical experience of her generation of Algerians, caught up in the
politics of resistance to colonialism, the national and linguistic complexities
of independence, and then, in the 1990s, the violence of civil war. Moroccan
writer Tahar Ben Jelloun was born in Tangiers in 1944 but moved to Paris
in the late 1970s and began writing newspaper articles and then novels. In
1987, he won the prestigious Prix Goncourt for his novel La Nuit sacrée
(The Sacred Night), the first Maghrebi author to win the prize. For both
Djebbar and Ben Jelloun, the choice the write in French was fraught with
tension. “Writing in French is not a choice,” Ben Jelloun wrote in the 1960s,
“it is the result of colonial violence.”3 These issues were equally complicated
for the “beur generation,” whose relationship to their parents’ homeland
and native languages became a symbol of their supposed lack of integra-
tion into French society. Writers such as Leila Sebbar and Azouz Begag,
whose 1986 autobiographical novel La Gone du Chaâba (Shantytown Kid)
depicted the struggles of the “beur” children of poor Algerian immigrants in
the slums outside of Lyon, brought these questions to the attention of many
white French readers.
Despite the continued marginalization and negative portrayals of people
of color (whether French-born descendants of immigrants or French citizens
from the DOMs/TOMs), the 1980s and 1990s saw a notable increase in
representations of their lives in fiction, film, and television. These repre-
sentations had significant resonance, both commercially and symbolically,
across the Francophone world. Typically made by filmmakers of Maghrebi
descent, “beur” and “banlieue” cinema featured “beur” characters or rep-
resented the lived reality of the banlieues. Mehdi Charef’s 1985 film adapta-
tion of his own novel Le thé au harem d’Archi Ahmed (Tea in the Harem)
is considered one of the first and best-known examples of “beur cinema,”
as it chronicles the daily life of a young man named Madjid and his white
working-class friend Pat who live in a Parisian banlieue. Two other 1995
“banlieue” films, Matthieu Kassovitz’s La Haine and Jean-François Richet’s
Ma 6T va crack-er, depicted the complicated lives of immigrants and their
children in France, including issues of poverty, cultural disconnection from
their homeland, religion, gender issues, racial and police violence in the ban-
lieues, and the question of Frenchness.
The musical cultures of Black and Maghrebi French citizens also began
to filter onto French radio in the mid-1980s, notably through rap, hip-hop,
and raï, an Algerian genre that originated in Oran in the 1920s and mixed
Algerian folk music with modern Western styles. Inspired by American rap
and hip-hop, French hip-hop artists from the banlieues described their own
life experiences as minorities and issues like police violence. A 1996 French
law that required radio stations to devote at least 40 percent of their airtime
to French artists fueled a massive expansion in the professional production
of these genres. While white elites claimed this “dangerous” music posed a
threat, rap and hip-hop grew incredibly popular for multi-ethnic audiences,
across a wide socio-economic spectrum.
The core audience for raï in the 1980s was Maghrebi youth and older
immigrants, who were nostalgic for the sound of Algerian artists, such as
Cheb Khaled and Cheb Mami. By the late 1990s, however, raï artists were
collaborating with French musicians and the genre was classified as “world
music” (i.e., less threatening than rap). Raï was equally political, though,
with lyrics discussing issues of immigration, poverty, and racism faced by
Maghrebis on both sides of the Mediterranean. Singer Rachid Taha, who
was born near Oran, Algeria, but whose family moved to Lyon when he
was ten, was a major musical and cultural icon to the “beur generation.”
He formed an Arab-language band in 1981 called Carte de Séjour (which
translates as “residence permit” in English) that mixed the sounds of raï,
punk rock, and gnawi rhythms of the Sahel. The band caused a huge scandal
in 1986 when they made a punk-rock cover of the Charles Trenet’s 1943
patriotic anthem “Douce France,” which openly critiqued France’s treat-
ment of immigrants.
The “Social Fracture” and Political Fragmentation
The dramatic shifts in social structures during the 1970s and 1980s chal-
lenged the entire French republican model as well as traditional class soli-
darity and political alignments. Consequently, the 1980s and early 1990s
saw a renewed debate on the meaning of French republicanism. In the face
of economic globalization and the increasing diversity of the French popula-
tion, some observers began to diagnose a growing “social fracture.” What
had been a clearly identifiable white industrial working class in the mid-
twentieth century was steadily diminishing as industrial production shifted
overseas, where labor was cheaper. The growth in public sector jobs and the
development of the postwar welfare state funded an expansion of the sala-
ried middle class, which increased the mobility of the white French popula-
tion. By the end of the twentieth century, only 20 percent of the working
population could be characterized as “working class”—with most of those
workers found in the service sector rather than in industrial factories. The
growing divide between migrant and permanent workers also led to further
fractures in class identities.
The far-left parties, including the PCF, had initially supported the first
Mitterrand government in the early 1980s. However, when his social-
ist government began implementing austerity measures in 1982–1983,
they appeared to have abandoned the working classes for a neo-liberal
approach that privileged private enterprises and catered more to elite,
university-educated leftists, rather than the blue-collar working class.
Additionally, the party’s seeming focus on issues connected to “identity
politics,” rather than class, struck some as a betrayal of its socialist roots.
What occurred was a strategic shift in the PS platform. A 1991 Socialist
Party policy document argued that France had reached an era of mass
individualization, characterized by the prominence of the “salaried class.”
The document, which didn’t mention the “working class,” praised the
market economy and focused on protecting individual rights, upholding
tolerance, and combatting exclusion. Its vision of “social justice” vaguely
referenced economic redistribution, which aligned with a growing con-
sensus in the late 1980s among bourgeois elites that French society was
becoming less conf lictual around class politics.
Yet this was not necessarily an accurate view of society. Many people
remained at the margins, especially the long-term unemployed and the
“immigrant” populations of the banlieues (still described as immigrants
even if they were born in France), who had little possibility for social and
economic mobility. By the mid-1980s, more people, including white-col-
lar workers, had a lower standard of living than in previous decades, and
university-educated students faced enormous challenges gaining access to
permanent employment. The correlations between religion and party and
profession and party, which had once been fairly accurate indicators of vot-
ing preference, began to collapse. Many voters no longer found themselves
aligning with the traditional political parties and so abstained from voting.
By the late 1980s, the postwar divisions between the “right” and “left”
began to lose coherent meaning, and the main beneficiary of this political
fragmentation was the National Front, whose leaders and ideology offered
a coherent explanation for the confusing state of the country.
The National Front’s electoral breakthrough came with the 1984 elec-
tions to the European parliament, in which the FN won 11 percent of
the vote, having made inroads into previously left-wing constituencies.
The FN’s outspoken leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, ran as a populist and
presented an openly reactionary and xenophobic platform. In the 1986
French legislative elections, the FN won an astonishing 35 seats in the
National Assembly and nearly 10 percent of the vote. FN deputies pre-
sented a series of legislative proposals aimed at protecting a conservative
idea of Frenchness from “foreign” inf luence. The party’s emphasis on the
danger of immigrants to the French economy and social values appealed
beyond the right-wing base to a growing number of white working-class
voters disillusioned with the leftist parties. After Le Pen made openly anti-
semitic comments and a voting system change in 1988, the FN lost nearly
all of its seats in the National Assembly. However, by the mid-1990s it had
regained strength, with Le Pen winning 15 percent of the vote in the first
round of the presidential elections in 1995.
Neo-Republicanism in the 1990s

The response of the mainstream political elite and the leftist intelligentsia in
France to the growing popularity of the National Front in the mid-to-late
1980s was to re-invest in a vision of republicanism (known as neo-republi-
canism) that sought to both rehabilitate and modernize the symbolism and
values of the Third Republic. Much like the centrist republicans of the late
1870s and early 1880s, the neo-republicans of the 1980s and 1990s sought
to unify the French nation around a set of core values, including a renewed
emphasis on laïcité (secularism), integration (of so-called immigrant pop-
ulations), and liberalism (particularly the language of human rights). By
the early 1990s, the language of republicanism was widespread in political
discourse.
Despite this centrist effort at national republican unity, political identities
and allegiances remained fractured through the 1990s. In 1993, the right
won its biggest electoral victory since 1958, which ushered in a new period
of “cohabitation.” Prime Minister Édouard Balladur and a slate of cen-
trist and right-wing ministers embarked on a number of aggressive reforms,
including the privatization of the Banque de France (a reform imposed by
the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, which further solidified the European Union).
This was extremely unpopular in France, as was the Maastricht Treaty
itself, whose referendum on ratification in September 1992 had narrowly
passed in France with only 50.8 percent of French voters voting in favor.
The government also passed Interior Minister Charles Pasqua’s 1993 reform
to the nationality code, which he had unsuccessfully attempted six years
prior. Henceforth, all children born in France to foreign-born parents were
no longer automatically granted French nationality. While the reform had
more popular support than it did previously, there was considerable tension
over its passage such that the mid-1990s saw a resurgence of immigrant
(particularly sans-papiers) rights organizations in France.
Mitterrand’s foreign policy positions also came under fire from all sides.
Although Mitterrand had hesitantly supported German reunification, he
insisted that it occur within the structure of the European Union, hoping
that Germany would not economically and politically dominate Europe
once again. His willingness to join the U.S.-led coalition in the first Gulf
War in 1991 was unfavorably contrasted with his hesitancy to engage in
the conf lict in the former Yugoslavia, where French troops belatedly joined
a UN-led peacekeeping force in February 1992. Years after the Rwandan
genocide in 1994, in which close to 1 million ethnic Tutsi were brutally
killed by the majority ethnic Hutu, it was revealed that the French govern-
ment had been providing military and political support to the Hutu Rwan-
dan dictator Juvénal Habyarimana since the 1970s. Both governmental and
academic investigations into the events of 1994 are ongoing in France, as
many have accused the French of complicity in the genocide.
Mitterrand’s domestic support, and that of the PS more generally, was
further damaged in 1994 when detailed investigations were published into
his conduct during the Vichy period and his initial support of Pétain’s gov-
ernment during his youth. Though he eventually joined the resistance, the
allegations contradicted the image of Mitterrand as a lifelong socialist and
résistant. Debates about the French role in the perpetration of the Shoah and
challenges to the Gaullist “myth of the resistance” had re-emerged in public
discourse in France a few years earlier, due in part to the trial of Klaus Bar-
bie, the French Gestapo head in Lyon, who had been extradited from Bolivia
back to France. German unification had also set off global discussions about
the need for Germany to address its responsibility for the Shoah, which put
additional pressure on the French to punish war criminals harshly. Addi-
tionally, the 50th anniversary of the “Raf le du Vel d’Hiv” in 1992 had led
to calls for an official French recognition of the state’s responsibility for the
persecution and deportation of Jews during World War II. Although he laid
a wreath at the Vel d’Hiv memorial in 1992, in a September 1994 speech,
Mitterrand claimed that the French state had no responsibility to apologize
for its conduct during the Shoah, as it was not responsible for these crimes.
In the midst of this polemic, Mitterrand was secretly suffering from
prostate cancer and stepped back from public view with the presidential
elections of 1995. Although the socialist candidate Lionel Jospin won the
highest percentage of the vote in the first round, Jacques Chirac won the
presidency in the second round, after gaining 2.3 million votes that had first
gone to Jean-Marie Le Pen. The National Front also made clear headway
in municipal elections in 1995, winning control of three cities in southern
France (Toulon, Orange, and Marignane), which leading political commen-

tators described as “National Front strongholds.”
To distance himself from Mitterrand, one of Chirac’s first symbolic
actions in office in July 1995 was to officially recognize the role that the
French state had played in the Shoah, specifically in the deportation of
Jews to Nazi concentration and extermination camps. However, he was
careful to distinguish the French state (i.e., the Vichy regime) from the
republican French nation, which, he suggested, was the origin of the rights
of man and the root of French resistance to Nazism. While recognizing
French responsibility, he also sought not to fully undermine the Gaullist
narrative of the resistance and of French victimhood at the hands of Nazi
perpetrators. Nevertheless, this speech opened the door to numerous other
movements for historical recognition and campaigns for reparations. Oth-
ers sought official state recognition for crimes committed as a result of
French colonialism, including slavery (and its abolition), the plight of the
Algerian harkis, and the use of torture and murder during the Algerian
War of Independence.
Despite the initial optimism of the Chirac government, he faced numer-
ous challenges to his attempts to reform the social and economic system in
France. Prime Minister Alain Juppé’s austerity budget was met with crip-
pling public sector strikes in October 1995 that lasted over two months and
forced the government to back down. Fears about the economic and social
impact of globalization also continued, particularly after “mad cow dis-
ease” struck Britain in early 1996. Despite affecting only 30 cows in France,
farmers slaughtered their cattle herds in panic, and beef consumption
dropped across Europe. Farmers once again began to unite in opposition to
government policies, European integration, and globalization, often target-
ing American companies and products. In the summer of 1999, a group of
farmers led by José Bové, a sheep farmer and activist who had participated
in the Larzac protest in the 1970s, dismantled a half-completed McDonald’s
restaurant in the town of Millau to protest U.S. restrictions on the impor-
tation of Roquefort cheese and McDonald’s use of hormone-treated beef.
Bové later became one of the most visible figures in the worldwide anti-
globalization movement.
A series of government scandals in 1997 and ongoing contestation from
public-sector unions pushed Chirac to dissolve the National Assembly and
call new elections. He hoped this would reinvigorate his supporters. Instead,
a leftist coalition came to power. Chirac appointed as prime minister the
socialist leader Lionel Jospin, who began instituting what he called a “post-
socialist” economy. The most controversial policy was the implementation
of a 35-hour workweek, which he argued, would create hundreds of thou-
sands of new jobs and reduce the unemployment rate. Jospin also revoked
the 1993 Pasqua laws, once again making French citizenship automatic
for all children born in France, even to foreign-born parents. The socialist
government additionally legalized civil unions for both homosexual and
heterosexual couples (known as PACS).
France was still quite conservative compared to most of Europe in its
approach to gay rights. In 1994, the European parliament had adopted
a resolution supporting equal rights for gay couples, by extension urging
European member states to consider the legalization of gay marriage or its
juridical equivalent (i.e., civil unions or domestic partnerships). By the late
1990s, the Scandinavian countries, Belgium, the Netherlands, and others
had adopted such measures. Yet conservative and Catholic detractors in
France claimed that legalizing homosexual civil unions would undermine
the Christian foundations of marriage while republican detractors, con-
cerned with the universalism of the republic, argued against the measure
because it was undertaken in the interest of a specific minority community.
Although the passage of PACS (civil unions) in November 1999 was cel-
ebrated as a victory for gay rights in France, the law did not cover parental
rights and adoption; adoption remained legally available only to married
couples and unmarried individuals. Reproductive technology was also
extremely limited due to the “bioethics law” of July 29, 1994, which out-
lawed surrogate pregnancies and limited access to IVF to married couples or
those in domestic partnerships and of childbearing age (denying access for
single women and gay couples). These rulings had significant repercussions
for those seeking to parent outside of traditional heterosexual couples and
pushed many gay rights proponents to pursue the legalization of gay mar-
riage rather than civil unions.
Jospin’s government also passed a 1999 bill that required gender par-
ity in both wages and political representation (or at least equal political
access). Although it passed with an overwhelming majority, it created a
lively public debate about whether or not the requirement of gender parity
violated the French republican principle of universalism, which claimed to
be blind to gender and racial difference. Opponents claimed the bill repli-
cated the American policy of “affirmative action,” which gave extra support
to minority groups in recognition of their disadvantaged status. Proponents
argued that ignoring the disadvantaged status of women and other minori-
ties simply maintained their discrimination and did nothing to improve the
situation.
Laïcité, Islam, and Integration

In 1989, an event known as the affaire du foulard or “headscarf affair”
exposed some key contradictions within the universalist claims of neo-
republican ideology. On October 3, 1989, three Muslim girls in the town
of Creil, near Paris, were expelled from their middle school for refusing to
remove their headscarves inside the building. The school principal argued
that he was merely enforcing the republican value of laïcité and preventing
the girls from infecting secular public schools with what he later described
as “insidious jihad.”4 When the event hit the national press, the nation
exploded in polemical debates. On one side of the argument, those defend-
ing the principle of laïcité and the importance of republican unity argued
that the public presence of Muslim women wearing religious symbols in the
form of “the veil” (anything from hijab headscarves to full-body burqas)
was a significant threat to the nation and demonstrated the infiltration of
“radical Islam” into the “republican school.” Others argued that singling
out these three Muslim girls was a form of discrimination against Muslims
for their religion, as Christians and Jews often wore religious symbols in
public without facing hostile reactions or claims that they were proselytizing
or promoting violence.
The socialist minister of education Lionel Jospin attempted to reach a
compromise and asked the Conseil d’Etat for a legal decision on the mat-
ter. The conseil determined that headscarves would be permitted in secu-
lar public schools as long as they were not considered “ostentatious” and
the wearer was not proselytizing or disrupting the classroom. Furthermore,
local school officials were granted the power to ask students to remove their
headscarves since they could best determine whether the student in question
was simply expressing her religious faith (a private matter of personal con-
science) or disrupting public order.
This ruling calmed tensions, but other “foulard affairs” have f lared up.
In 1994, spurred by growing numbers of anti-headscarf activists, Education
Minister François Bayrou decreed—only to lose on appeal—that all “osten-
tatious” signs of religious affiliation were now banned in public schools. In
March 2004, however, President Jacques Chirac successfully enacted the
law, known unofficially as “the headscarf ban,” despite the administration’s
attempt to claim it affected all religions equally.
By the late 1980s, even the socialists had abandoned the rhetoric of the
“right to difference” in favor of the unifying discourse of republicanism. The
new enemies of republicanism were defined as the National Front and iden-
titarian movements who defined themselves by their distinctive race, ethnic,
or religious affiliations (communautarisme). According to this republican
vision, these groups were failing to integrate into the French nation, which
was re-imagined as a singular cultural and social body, not a multicultural
space, where immigrants and foreign residents were free to retain ties to
their home countries, native languages, and non-Christian religious cultures.
The growing republican alarm about French Muslim difference through the
1990s coincided with a French Islamic revival, particularly among second-
generation Maghrebi youth, to the point that Islam had replaced “beur” as
a common identity marker. As a result, many new mosques, Islamic schools,
and Muslim community associations emerged across France. The grow-
ing demands on the state from the French Muslim population for funding
to build mosques, to incorporate Muslim holy days into the school calen-
dar, to provide halal food in school canteens, and so forth, were taken by
staunchly secularist republican politicians as signs of French Muslim refusal
to integrate into French society. These events coincided with the first Gulf
War (1990–1991), the beginning of the violent Algerian Civil War (1991–
2002), and a highly publicized “urban riot” of mostly Arab youth protest-
ing police violence in the banlieue of Vaulx-en-Velin near Lyon in 1990. This
all seemed to highlight to republican and far-right politicians that “Arabs”
and “Muslims” posed an imminent danger to the republic, from both inside
and outside.
By the mid-1990s, media representations of Arabs had become con-
tradictory, and the boundary between domestic and foreign, French and
immigrant had become almost meaningless. While certain visibly success-
ful individuals in France such as the soccer star Zinedine Zidane or the
comedian Djamel Debbouze were often upheld as examples of the “suc-
cessful integration” of Arab and Muslim immigrant populations, they were
contrasted with more threatening figures, such as veiled Muslim women, or
young male adherents to radical Islam, who were seen as potential terrorist
threats. The July 1995 bombing of the Saint-Michel RER station in Paris
was described in its immediate aftermath as the work of both an “Islamic
terrorist born in Algeria” and a “young delinquent from Vaulx-en-Velin.”
The attacker, Khelad Kalkal, was both. Born in Algeria, he had grown up in
the Lyon suburb then moved back to Algeria in the early 1990s, where he
had been recruited into the Groupe islamique armé (GIA), one of the two
main Islamist insurgent groups fighting against the Algerian army for con-
trol of the country. The Paris RER bombing and multiple others in Paris and
Lyon were directed by GIA leader Djamel Zitouni; he wanted to punish the
French government for its support of the Algerian government in the deadly
civil war, which killed some 200,000 Algerians over the “dark decade.” The
French support for the Algerian government divided the Algerian popula-
tion in France and led many thousands of Algerians to f lee to France, seek-
ing safety from terrorist attacks as well. In France, however, the Algerian
Civil War seemed to inscribe the image of the “radical Islamic terrorist” into
the minds of the French as a danger lurking right in their backyard.
These debates about universalism and French republican responsibilities
toward disadvantaged and minority populations would continue on well
into the next century. In 1998, the nation celebrated the World Cup vic-
tory of the “multicultural” men’s national soccer team, composed almost
entirely of players either born in France’s former colonies or born in France
to immigrant parents (the team was nicknamed “black, blanc, beur”). And
yet there was growing right-wing support for even more restrictive limits
on immigration and for a vision of Frenchness that excluded “foreign” ele-
ments from the nation, particularly Islam. The root of this concern was the
seeming insecurity of the traditional nation-state, which had long offered
support to the majority white population of France. What did it mean to
be French at the turn of the twenty-first century in a newly unified Europe?
How would the French maintain their uniquely French values in a globaliz-
ing economy that challenged the ability of farmers and small business owners
to survive? How could the French define this identity in terms of its history
and relationships to its former colonies and current overseas departments
and territories? Finally, the issue that loomed over all of these debates: who
gets to define the vision of “Frenchness” at play? Would this be an elite,
white, male Frenchness, or a more inclusive vision, drawn from the voices
of workers, immigrants, Muslims, gays, farmers, feminists, students, and
others who saw themselves as the exclus of French society? The turn of the
century brought the opportunity for the French to reevaluate their position
in the world, both for better and for worse.
Notes
1 Donald Reid, Opening the Gates: The Lip Affair, 1968–1981 (London: Verso
Books, 2018), Chapter 3.
2 Cited in Gerard Noiriel, Une histoire populaire de la France: de la guerre de Cent
Ans à nos jours (Marseille: Agone, 2018), 713.
3 Cited in Richard Serrano, “Translation and the Interlingual Text in the Novels
of Rachid Boudjedra,” in Maghrebian Mosaic: A Literature in Translation, ed.
Mildred Mortimer (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001): 28.
4 Cited in Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2007), 22.

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France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Clifford, Rebecca. Commemorating the Holocaust: The Dilemmas of Remembrance
in France and Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Nasiali, Minayo. Native to the Republic: Empire, Social Citizenship, and Everyday
Life in Marseille Since 1945. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016.
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Conclusion Conclusion
The Legacy of Empire in

Twenty-First-Century France
In the twenty-first century, French colonialism and its legacies continue to

shape nearly every aspect of French politics and society. On February 23,
2005, the French National Assembly passed a controversial law known as
the Debré Law. Although the full title of the legislation was the “Loi portant
reconnaissance de la Nation et contribution nationale en faveur des Fran-
çais rapatriés” (Law concerning the recognition of the nation and national
contribution in favor of repatriated French), its impact was far wider than
just a symbolic recognition of the contribution of French settlers to France’s
overseas empire. The law’s polemical fourth article imposed on French lycée
teachers the requirement that school curricula highlight the “positive aspects
of the French overseas experience, notably in North Africa.” Although it
was repealed less than a year later, the law’s very existence and the furious
public debate it incited highlighted the ongoing tensions in France around
the legacy of colonialism and its representation in “official” memory.
The Debré Law was the result of decades of lobbying from associations
of French rapatriés, European settlers from Algeria and other former colo-
nies who felt that their victimhood in the aftermath of their repatriation
to France post-decolonization had never received proper state recognition.
It passed in the wake of a series of public and damaging revelations about
French conduct in both metropolitan France and Algeria during the Algerian
War of Independence. This included an interview published in Le Monde in
2000 with FLN militant Louisette Ighilarhiz in which she recounted how
she was tortured at the hands of French paratroopers in Algeria. Her revela-
tions were then substantiated by figures such as General Paul Aussaresses,
who openly admitted to committing numerous acts of torture and even
murder and then sought to justify the morality and legality of those acts.
These new revelations came in the midst of widespread public debate about
how to commemorate the massacre of Algerians in Paris in October 1961
(directed by Paris police chief Maurice Papon, who was put on trial in 1998
for his role in the deportation of French Jews during the Vichy regime). In
October 2001, on the 40th anniversary of the event, Paris mayor Bertrand
Delanoë dedicated a new memorial to the victims of police repression on
the Saint-Michel bridge in Paris. That same year, the Antillean community
DOI: 10.4324/b23310-15
306 Conclusion
achieved a victory in their campaign to have transatlantic slavery recog-
nized as a “crime against humanity” with the passage of the 2001 Taubira
Law (named after Guianese deputy Christiane Taubira), which also stipu-
lated that slavery, the slave trade, and abolition should be commemorated
annually.
These events are an element of what scholars have characterized as the
French “memory wars,” which began in the 1990s when a diverse set of
activists sought recognition and historical acknowledgment of their particu-
lar group’s missing narrative from mainstream national history. Building
on the success of the French Jewish community in finally achieving recogni-
tion of the French government’s responsibility for the deportation of Jews
from French soil during World War II, activist groups sought both official
state recognition and public commemoration of the crimes and excesses of
French colonialism and decolonization. The 2005 Debré Law was contro-
versial because it memorialized the experience of a specific group of French
colonial actors but rejected any state recognition of responsibility for colo-
nial violence. Its supporters, mostly on the right and far-right, claimed that
it was a necessary step to provide a more “balanced” narrative of empire,
given the left’s alleged distortion of this history. Opponents of the law, how-
ever, who included numerous historians of colonialism, characterized it as
a clear effort to promote a “nostalgic” and pro-colonial narrative of empire
that was at odds with historical fact. Yet another group of historians and
intellectuals weighed in as well, led by historian Pierre Nora, who claimed
that all memory laws should be abrogated, as they were divisive, anti-repub-
lican, and forced the French into an attitude of constant “repentance” for
past actions.
The repeal of the Debré Law in January 2006 did little to ease these ten-
sions. For one thing, it was evident that the law had been an attempt by
French president Jacques Chirac’s center-right government to court the
support of right-wing voters away from the National Front. These efforts
included the adoption of more openly nationalist, anti-immigration plat-
forms and the denunciation of certain forms of communautarisme as dan-
gerous to the republican nation. The government’s forceful reaction against
the widespread revolts in banlieues across France in October and Novem-
ber of 2005, which ignited in response to high unemployment rates, police
violence and harassment, and ongoing discrimination against Muslims and
ethnic minorities in France, further solidified a state of polarization that
French scholars have often described as resulting in “identity wars,” “colo-
nial fractures,” and “postcolonial crisis.”
Questions about the relationship of colonial memory and French national
identity did not fade away. At a 2007 presidential campaign speech in
Toulon, a stronghold of the National Front, center-right candidate Nico-
las Sarkozy denounced the idea of repentance and promoted the positive
impacts of French colonialism. In November of that year, Sarkozy then sug-
gested that one is French if one believes that Christianity and the values
Conclusion 307
of the Enlightenment are the foundation of civilization. A few years after
Sarkozy’s election as president, his immigration minister, Eric Besson,
launched a nationwide debate on national identity, with a detailed set of
guidelines sent out to local leaders that broached a series of questions,
including “why should we welcome foreigners into the republic and our
national community?” and “has the state fully completed its task concern-
ing the memory of the barbarities committed during World War II and in the
extermination camps, of colonization, and slavery?” French prime minister
François Fillon declared in 2009 that France had a “long Christian tradition
that should not be ignored by other religions more recently arrived on our
soil,” which seemed a clear rebuke to Muslim immigrants.1 At that same
moment, the Sarkozy administration began deporting record numbers of
undocumented migrants, and, in 2010, banned the wearing of “full-face
Muslim veils,” such as the niqab or burqa, in any public space. This solidi-
fied the image of center-right republicanism as nationalist and openly cater-
ing to the xenophobic far right through the promotion of “Frenchness” as
explicitly white, European, and Christian.
These simmering debates came to a boiling point in 2015. On January 7,
2015, Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, French brothers of Algerian descent, went
to the offices of the satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris armed
with assault rif les and other weapons, entered the building and killed 12
people, injuring 11 others. They claimed that they were affiliated with the
Islamic terrorist organization Al-Qaeda and sought to punish the journal-
ists and cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo for their blasphemous representations
of the prophet Muhammad. The brothers were ultimately killed two days
later after a massive manhunt and police standoff. On January 9, Amedy
Coubaly, a French-Malian associate of the Kouachi brothers, committed a
related terrorist attack in eastern Paris. Coubaly claimed allegiance to the
Islamic State and shot three people before going into a Jewish supermarket
and taking several hostages. He killed four more people during the hours-
long siege. In the aftermath of the attacks, the public response was both
shock and generalized solidarity with the victims, who became symbols of
both French republican laïcité and free speech globally. Beginning the night
of January 7 in Paris and spreading quickly over the next few days across
the world, demonstrators marched against the attacks, often carrying signs
with the phrase “Je Suis Charlie” (I am Charlie) to demonstrate solidarity
with the journalists and their free-speech principles. Yet others, even those
who vocally denounced the terrorist acts, were more circumspect about
their support for Charlie Hebdo, particularly as it had a long history of rac-
ist depictions of ethnic and religious minorities. Some observers feared that
its promotion in the name of free speech and French republicanism might
stir up further tensions.
Tensions remained high. Less than a year after the Charlie Hebdo attacks,
on November 13, 2015, a series of six coordinated terrorist attacks broke
out across Paris, including two suicide bombings at a football match at the
308 Conclusion
Stade de France, several shootings at restaurants in central Paris, and the
mass shooting of concert-goers at the Bataclan theatre in the 11th arron-
dissement. In total, 130 people were killed, including 90 in the Bataclan
theatre, and more than 400 were injured. The attackers, who claimed alle-
giance to the Islamic State, were mostly French and Belgian citizens, although
they had traveled to Syria where they were radicalized. After the November
attacks, the growing fear of both foreign and native-born Muslim terrorists
in France, who claimed allegiance to radical Islamic movements like Al-
Qaeda and the Islamic State, grew exponentially. Attacks against Muslims
increased in France, and far-right politicians like Marine Le Pen, who had
taken over the National Front from her father, openly stated in Decem-
ber 2015 that France must close its borders to immigration at the same
moment that Europe confronted heightened numbers of migrants f leeing
the ravages of the civil war in Syria, famine in Africa, and violence in Iraq,
Afghanistan, and Libya. French President François Hollande immediately
declared a “state of emergency,” which the French Senate extended for three
months. This authority gave the police heightened powers to control the
movement of people, to detain potential suspects, and to engage in searches
outside the parameters of normal law, among other things.
The intellectual and cultural response to these events was both heated and
contentious. Even before the Charlie Hebdo attacks, a group of intellectu-
als, sometimes described as “neo-reactionary,” had been theorizing a vision
of France as a nation under attack from immigrant hordes. They defined
Frenchness in highly conservative (and sometimes contradictory) terms as
rooted in both Christian and “Western” values, and French republican-
ism. On the one hand, conservative Catholics, for example, claimed that
French values were being challenged by left-wing American ideas such as
“the theory of gender,” which they believed was at the root of the socialist
campaign to legalize gay marriage. They were afraid of a cultural invasion
of ideas from outside but also contamination from within that would lead,
they argued, to the propagation of homosexuality in schools, and the loss
of distinctions between male and female social roles. The fear of conta-
gion led to racist attacks against Christiane Taubira, the Guianese minister
who passed through the 2013 law legalizing same-sex marriage (numerous
images of her as a monkey holding a banana appeared on social media,
for example). Opponents of gay marriage also attacked Education Minis-
ter Najat Vallaut-Belkacem, claiming she was brainwashing children with
“gender theory” because she sought to promote gender equality in schools
and that her Muslim origins made her unsuitable to be minister of education
(the right-wing magazine Valeurs Actuelles called her the “Ayatollah” of the
Education Ministry). In 2011, a new edition of Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel
Le Camp des Saints, which depicts a dystopian vision of civilization overrun
by immigrants from the global south, became a bestseller in France. A year
later, French nationalist and gay icon Renaud Camus coined the phrase
le grand remplacement (the great replacement) to describe his theory that
Conclusion 309
“white civilizations” are being replaced by Black and brown immigrants, a
battle cry for the Islamophobic far-right who seek to defend both “Christian
civilization” and French republicanism from what they view as the religious
extremism of France’s “immigrant” (i.e., Muslim) communities.
Activists within these so-called immigrant populations of France have
been fighting back against the mounting Islamophobia, racist discourses,
and discrimination against their communities. French anti-racist activ-
ist, journalist, author, and filmmaker Rokhaya Diallo appears frequently
as a commentator on television openly discussing racism and sexism and
its effects on primarily Black French citizens. Assa Traoré became an anti-
racism activist in 2016 after the death of her brother Adama Traoré at the
hands of French police and works primarily to bring attention to the issue
of police violence. More controversial is the project of Houria Bouteldja,
the daughter of Algerian immigrants and founder of the movement known
as the Indigènes de la République (Natives of the Republic), a decolonial
movement that refuses integration with the white French community, as it
claims that the republic refuses to recognize those of Arab or African origin
as full citizens. In the midst of the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) movement,
which began in November 2018 as a nationwide popular protest movement
against planned increases in diesel and gas taxes and then continued for
months as working-class Frenchmen and women protested across France
in favor of economic justice, a small movement known as the gilets noirs
(black vests) emerged specifically to support the condition of undocumented
migrants through protests and solidarity campaigns.
Colonialism and immigration remain hot-button topics in France, as evi-
denced by the fact that they remain central to the discourse of recent presi-
dential campaigns. The winner of the 2017 presidential election, Emmanuel
Macron, declared in a December 2017 visit to Algeria that he would not be
“held hostage” by France’s colonial past in Algeria and urged the youth of
the country to move past French “crimes.” He offered no official apology
for the actions of France in Algeria, despite having earlier acknowledged
that France had committed “crimes against humanity” during its colonial
rule there. More troubling, in the campaign for the 2022 presidential elec-
tion, popular far-right candidate (and media personality) Éric Zemmour
openly promoted the “great replacement” theory and described Islam as
incompatible with French republican values. In France today, the legacy
of colonialism haunts nearly every aspect of French politics and culture. It
seems unlikely that these ghosts will rest anytime soon.
Note
1 Quote cited in Ludivine Bantigny, La France à l’heure du monde. De 1981 à nos
jours (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2019), 104.
Index
Entries in italics refer to figures.
Abbas, Ferhat 233, 249 Republic 238, 243; French citizenship

Abd el-Kader 81, 88 – 9 in 124 – 5, 146 – 7, 205, 264 – 5;
abolitionism 37, 89 Macron in 309; military in 145;
abortion: in Fourth Republic 244; missionary activity in 148 – 9;
legalization of 276, 290; legislation post-colonial immigration from
against 200, 212; Vichy campaign 263 – 4, 285; post-independence
against 217 relationship with 260 – 1, 284;
absolutism 2 – 3; challenges to 17 – 19; resistance to French authority in 149;
and the Enlightenment 15 – 16, 22 socialists on 95; tourism to 172; in
Académie française 14 World War I 183, 185; in World War
Acadia 7 – 8 II 219, 233
Act Up-Paris 291 Algerian Civil War 303
Action catholique spécialisée 196 Algerian immigrants 202; activism of
Action française 162, 165, 196, 199 204; and French culture 244; housing
active citizenship 30, 36, 187 of 263; literature of 295 – 6; violence
Adams, John 46 against 256, 284, 305; in War of
Adorno, Theodor 271 Independence 254
AEF see French Equatorial Africa Algerian Jews 124, 146 – 8, 156, 197,
affaire du sang contaminé 292 222, 225
affirmative action 301 Algerian land, dispossession of 90
Africa: postcolonial 279; Scramble for Algerian nationalism 207
151 – 2; see also North Africa Algerian War of Independence 236,
African-Americans 171, 193, 202, 246, 248 – 54, 259 – 60; amnesty
232, 246 after 274; film on 268 – 9; and
Agadir Crisis 174 French intellectuals 269, 271; state
agricultural laborers 98, 100, 135, 158 recognition of crimes in 300, 305
Ahmed Bey 88 Algerian women 244
AIDS/HIV epidemic 291 – 2 Algiers 12, 77 – 9; battle of 251, 268;
Alexander I, Tsar 61, 63, 67 French rebuilding of 87 – 8; urban
Alexander II, Tsar 109 renewal of 114
Algeria: antisemitism in 160; conquest Aliker, André 206
and “pacification” of 77 – 9, 81, Alleg, Henri 252
87 – 90; coup in 252; decolonization ALN (Army of National Liberation)
of 255 – 7; deportations to 101, 249, 252 – 3, 256
107; European settlers in see pieds Alsace-Lorraine: German annexation
noirs; Fanon in 235, 247; in Fourth of 133, 135, 154; refugees from
Index 311
146, 161, 220; return of 190, 196; Assaye, Battle of 59
in World War I 177; in World War Assembly of Notables 4, 23
II 221 assimilation 8, 69, 153, 206, 243, 289
Althusser, Louis 270 – 1, 275 association, policy of 206
American Revolution 17, 19, 22 – 3, 27 Auclert, Hubertine 166
Americanization 240 Auerstadt, Battle of 62
anarchists 97, 159 Augustine, Saint 78, 148
ancien régime 2 – 6; Burke’s defense of Auschwitz 212, 224
21; end of 22, 26 – 7 Aussaresses, Paul 305
Annam 151, 153, 206, 239 austerity 207, 281 – 2, 297, 300
anthropology 120 Austerlitz, Battle of 62, 139
anticlericalism 50, 75 – 6, 143 – 4, Austria: and French Revolution 35 – 7,
153, 163 44; Hitler’s annexation of 210; and
anti-colonial movement 191; and Italian unification 109; and Napoleon
communism 194, 205; in interwar 54, 56, 61 – 2, 68; in Seven Years War
Paris 202 – 4; and négritude 193 12
anti-communism 198 Austria-Hungary 150, 173, 177, 190
antillanité 294 – 5 autonomy, local 147, 286 – 8
Antillean women 244, 295 avant-garde art 167 – 8, 201
Antilles 10, 153; anti-colonial avant-garde film 268
movement in 206; Black citizens from
202; economic restructuring of 288; Babeuf, Gracchus 97
literature of 294 – 5 baby boom 236, 262, 266
anti-parliamentary movements 207 Baker, Josephine 202, 203
antiquities 87, 121 Bakunin, Mikhail 138
Antisemitic League 161 Baldwin, James 246
antisemitism: in Algeria 147 – 8, 225; Baldwin, Roger Nash 203
in Fifth Republic 292; in Fourth Balkans 108, 176
Republic 241; in interwar period Balladur, Édouard 298
195, 207, 209, 212; in Third Baltard, Victor 113
Republic 157, 160 – 3, 199; and Vichy Balzac, Honoré de 95, 118
regime 213, 216, 222 – 3, 226 – 7 banditry 149
AOF see French West Africa Bank of Algeria 90
Arab Bureaux 95 Bank of France 57, 208, 242, 298
Arabs: in Algeria 89, 124, 132, 146; banlieues 285, 293, 296 – 7, 303, 306
in metropolitan France 263, 266, Bao Dai 239
291 – 3, 303; see also beurs Barbary pirates 12 – 13, 78
Arago, François 99 Barbusse, Henri 175, 187
Aragon, Louis 202 Barras, Paul 50 – 1
Arc de Triomphe 188 Barrès, Maurice 162, 167
Archimède, Gerty 288 barricades: in coup of 1851 107; in
archives, national 82 June Rebellion 70, 92 – 3; in May ’68
Army of Africa 79, 87, 146 272; and Paris Commune 137; in
Army of England 51 Revolution of 1830 80; in revolution
Army of Italy 50 – 1 of 1848 99
arrondissements 57, 136, 242, 285, 308 Barricades Week (1960) 253 – 4
Art Nouveau 170 Barthes, Roland 269 – 70
artisans 26, 84, 91 Basque regions 286 – 7, 289
arts education 138, 170 Bastille 26 – 8, 33, 144
artworks, German theft of 220 – 1, 224 Bataclan theatre massacre 308
Aryanization 223 Batavian revolution 46
Aspern-Wessling, Battle of 64 Baudelaire, Charles 118, 167 – 8
assassinations 159 Baudry, André 291
312 Index
Bayrou, François 302 Blum, Léon 208 – 9, 242
Bazard, Claire 94 Blum-Byrnes Accord 242
Beauharnais, Eugène de 50, 62 Blum-Violette Plan 209
Beauharnais, Hortense 101 Boegner, Marc 225
Beauharnais, Marie-Josèphe-Rose de Boisson, Pierre 218
see Joséphine Bonald, Louis de 76
Beauvoir, Simone de 227, 236, 245 – 6, Bonaparte, Louis 102
265, 269 – 70, 275, 290 Bonaparte, Louis-Napoléon 87, 101 – 3;
Bechet, Sidney 202 coup of 1851 105 – 8; as emperor see
Begag, Azouz 295 Napoléon III
Belgium: colonial empire of 149, 151; Bonaparte, Lucien 50, 55, 57
in French Revolution 40, 44, 46, 51, Bonaparte, Napoléon see Napoléon
72 – 3; uprising for independence 21; Bonaparte
in World War I 177 – 8 Bonaparte, Joseph 49 – 50, 63
Belle Epoque 157 Bonapartism: and Algeria 89; during
Ben Jelloun, Tahar 295 Bourbon Restoration 73, 75, 78 – 9; in
Benedictines 164 July Monarchy 92; in Third Republic
Benso, Camillo 109 142
Berbers 78, 90, 147 – 8, 156, 206, 243 Bonnard, Abel 231
Bergen-Belsen 212 Bontoux, Paul 157
Bergery, Gaston 215 Boulanger, Georges 159 – 60
Berlin blockade 240 – 1 Boumediene, Houari 284
Berlin Conference 151 – 2 Boupacha, Djamila 269, 290
Berlin Decree 63 Bourbon monarchy: in ancien régime 4;
Berlusconi, silvio 282 and Legitimists 83; restoration of 68,
Bernabé, Jean 295 71 – 6, 78 – 9, 82; in Spain 63, 75
Bernadotte, Jean-Baptiste 51 bourgeoisie: in ancien regime 6, 22, 33;
Bernard, Jacqueline 229 and Bourbon Restoration 71, 74; in
Berr, Hélène 212 Fifth Republic 297; in July Monarchy
Berry, Duke de 75 82, 92; in Revolution of 1848 98; in
Berthouin reforms 262 Second Empire 114 – 17, 119, 126 – 7;
Besson, Eric 307 social norms of 200, 267, 289 – 91;
beurs 293 – 4, 296, 302 – 3 social reformers among 86; in Third
bidonvilles 242, 263, 271, 285 Republic 131; Zola on 105 – 6
bioethics law 301 Bourguiba, Habib 250
birth control see contraception Bové, José 300
birthrates 166, 173, 200 – 1, 243 – 4 Boyer, Jean-Pierre 77
Bismarck, Otto von 106, 128, 133 – 5, bread prices 26, 44
140, 151, 159 Breton, André 202
Black Africans 78, 189, 247, 294; see Breton Club 33
also African-Americans Briand law of 1905 164
Black militias, in Haiti 31, 33, 37 Britain: in Cold War 239; colonial
Black people: in contemporary France empire of 149, 151, 173; and
294 – 6, 309; in Encyclopédie 17; Crimean War 109; and EEC 261,
free in slavery era see people of 280; France’s relationship with 157;
color, free; in interwar Paris 202; in and French North America 8, 12; and
Martinique 135; and négritude 193; French Revolution 40; and invasion
under Vichy regime 219; see also of Mexico 123; and Napoleon
African-Americans; Black Africans 54 – 6, 60, 63 – 4, 66 – 9; and Treaty
Black women 117 – 18, 295 of Versailles 190 – 1; in World War I
Blanc, Louis 96, 98 – 100 178, 184
Blanqui, Auguste 136 – 8, 159 British East India Company 7, 59
blood tax 145, 204 Brittany 33, 145 – 6, 164, 286 – 7
Index 313
Brossolette, Pierre 228 censorship: in Bourbon Restoration
brothels, licensed 116 79; and the Enlightenment 15; in
Buffon, Comte de 15, 17 July Monarchy 82, 84; in Second
Bugeaud, Thomas-Robert 88 – 9, 99, Republic 99 – 100; under Napoleon
101 57
the Bulge, Battle of 231 Centre Pompidou 279
Buñuel, Luis 202 Césaire, Aimé 193, 235, 246 – 7, 288,
Buonarotti, Philippe 97 294
Burke, Edmund 21 Cézanne, Paul 162, 168
burqas 302, 307 CGQJ (Commissariat-General for
Burrin, Philippe 227 Jewish Affairs) 223
CGT (Confédération générale du
Ça ira 44 travail) 159, 197 – 8, 243
cabarets 157, 168, 171 CGTU 198
Cabet, Étienne 83, 96 Chaban-Delmas, Jacques 279
cahiers de doléances 24 Chad 152, 218
Caillaux, Henriette 177 Chaillu, Paul Belloni de 120
Caillaux, Joseph 188 Challe, Maurice 253
Caisse d’allocations familiales 244 Chamberlain, Neville 210
Calonne, Charles Alexandre de 23 Chamoiseau, Patrick 278, 294 – 5
Cambodia 122, 151, 238, 248, 262 Champ de Mars, massacre of the 34
Cameroon 183, 191, 251 Chanel, Coco 200
Camille Sée Law 165 Chantiers de la Jeunesse 217, 225
Camus: Albert 246; Renaud 308 – 9 charbonnerie 78, 84
cantinières 65 Charcot, Jean-Martin 167
capitalism: and July Monarchy 98; in Charef, Mehdi 296
Second Empire 114; socialists on 87, Charles X 70 – 1, 74 – 81, 102
95 – 6 Charlie Hebdo 290, 307 – 8
Cara, Nafissa Sid 266 Charter of 1814 72 – 3, 79
Caribbean: French Revolution in chattel slavery 9, 78
22; sugar colonies of 1, 8 – 10, 22, Chemin des Dames offensive 186
30 – 1, 288; see also Antilles; Saint- child labor 98
Domingue children’s literature 76, 145, 172
Carnot, Marie François Sadi 159 China: indentured labor from 135;
cars 172, 208, 215, 242, 245 People’s Republic of 239, 254, 259,
Carte de Séjour (band) 296 261; trade with 7, 126
Cartel des gauches 199 Chirac, Jacques 281, 283, 299 – 300,
Catholic Church: in Algeria 87, 148 – 9; 302, 306
in ancien régime 5; in Bourbon cholera 81, 92, 109, 116, 123
Restoration 72, 74 – 7; debates Chopin, Frederic 95
within 165; and electoral politics Christianity: and the Enlightenment
237; and enslaved persons 10; at fin 15 – 16; and French national identity
de siècle 156; in French Revolution 306 – 7; in New France 7 – 8
29 – 30, 42; missionary orders 7 – 8; Christianization 10
Napoleon and 56 – 7; in Second church and state 18, 29, 127, 138, 148,
Empire 103, 108, 117; and Third 163 – 4
Republic 144 – 5, 163 – 4; in World Churchill, Winston 228, 230
War II 216, 227 Cimade 283
Catholic schools 82, 126, 164 – 5 cinema 157, 171 – 2, 182, 201, 267 – 8,
Catholicism: leftist 94, 241, 266, 280; 296
political 196 cities, in ancien régime 6
Cavaignac, Eugène de 101 – 2 citizenship: in Code Napoléon 58; in
Céline, Louis-Ferdinand 195, 231 colonial empire 125, 146 – 7, 153,
314 Index
204 – 6; in Fifth Republic 253; in Committee of Public Safety (Third
French Revolution 29 – 33, 37, 41; in Republic) 133, 140
French Union 238; and Pasqua laws Common Market see EEC
299 – 300; in Vichy regime 218 – 19; Communards 131, 138 – 41, 144, 146,
for World War I veterans 189 154, 158
civic virtue 42, 90 communautarisme 289, 302, 306
Civil Constitution of the Clergy 29, 34 communism 96; and anti-colonial
civil unions 301 movement 204; far right opponents
civilizing mission 95, 125, 152 – 3, of 199, 207; and Fourth Republic
173, 205 237 – 41; French intellectuals and
Clary, Desirée 51 246; in inter-war period 194, 198;
class consciousness 93 in World War II 216, 219, 224, 228,
Clauzel, Bertrand 88 230 – 1
Clemenceau, Georges 144, 162, 187, 190 Communist Party (PCF) 194; and
Club Charles Martel 284 anti-colonial movement 204 – 5; and
Club Massiac 31 Cold War 239 – 41; and de Gaulle
coal mining 74, 91, 110, 128, 242 237, 252; in elections 277; Fanon
Cochinchina 122, 151, 239 in 235; and February 1934 crisis
Code de l’indigénat 147, 149, 153, 205 208; formation of 196, 198; and
Code Napoléon 49, 58, 68, 72, 90, 166 Mitterrand 297; and Stalinism
Code Noir 10 – 11 270, 275
cohabitation 283, 298 Communist Party of Algeria 205, 249
Cohn-Bendit, Daniel 272, 275 Communist Party of Réunion 289
Colbert, Jean-Baptiste 6 – 7 Compagnie des Indes 7
Cold War 238 – 41, 245, 249, 259, Comte, Auguste 120 – 1
261, 279 concentration camps 182, 253
collaboration, in World War II 215 – 16, Concordat of 1801 49, 56 – 7, 72, 164
219, 226 – 7, 232 Condé, Maryse 295
colonial fractures 306 Condorcet, Marquis de 31
colonialism: debate on legacy Confédération française de travailleurs
of 305 – 6, 309; Fanon on chrétiens 197
269; harms of 235, 247, 261; Confederation of the Rhine 62, 68
resistance to 295 Congo, Republic of 151 – 2, 174, 235
colonies: in Fifth Republic 255 Congress of Vienna 70 – 2, 75
(see also French Community); in conscription 36, 48, 64 – 5, 179, 185
Fourth Republic 243, 254 (see Conseil d’Etat 302
also French Union); and French Conspiracy of Equals 97
Revolution 30 – 1, 33; in interwar conspiracy theory, international Jewish
period 204 – 6; in Second Empire capitalist 160 – 1
122 – 6; soldiers and workers Constant, Benjamin 72
from 184 – 6, 189, 202; and Third Constantine Plan 253
Republic 135, 149 – 54; and Treaty Constituent Assembly (1793) 27 – 31, 34
of Versailles 190 – 1; under ancien Constituent Assembly (1946) 237 – 8
régime 5, 7 – 12, 18 – 19; under July Constitution of 1791 30, 35 – 6
Monarchy 89 – 90; under Napoleon Constitution of 1793 41, 44
59; under Vichy regime 218 – 19, Constitution of 1795 45
228 – 9 Constitution of 1799 59
Combes, Émile 164 Constitution of 1802 57
Commissariat-général au Plan 242 Constitutional charter, revised 81 – 3
Committee of Public Safety (Algerian constitutional monarchy 28, 34, 70 – 1
coup) 252 Consulate 55 – 7, 61
Committee of Public Safety (French consumer revolutions 1, 6, 236, 244 – 5,
Revolution) 41 – 2, 44, 50 262, 287
Index 315
Continental System 63, 67 276 – 7, 279; Charles, and Fourth
contraception 200, 217, 244, 266, Republic 237, 240; Charles, and
281, 290 French grandeur 259 – 60; Charles, at
convents 5, 8, 117 Liberation. 231 – 2; Charles, and
coopérants 261 May ’68 272 – 5, 273; Charles,
Coordinating Committee for Jewish return to power 252 – 3; Charles,
Charities 224 and women’s rights 266; Charles,
Cordeliers Club 33, 36, 42 in World War II 215, 218, 228 – 30;
corruption, in Third Republic 131, 143 Joséphine 118 – 19
Corsica 49 – 50, 52, 221, 286 – 7, 289 de la Rocque, François 199
corvée 3, 6, 27 de Maistre, Joseph 76
Côte d’Ivoire 152 de Staël, Germaine 16, 57, 76
Coty, René 199, 252 death penalty 39, 76, 99, 159, 282
Coubaly, Amedy 307 Debbouze, Djamel 303
Count d’Artois see Charles X Debré, Michel 260
counterrevolution 33 – 7, 40 – 2, 45 – 6, Debré Law 305 – 6
55, 74, 76 Decaën, Charles 59
coup of 18 Brumaire (1799) 55 Declaration of the Rights of Man and
Courbet, Gustave 117 – 18, 138 – 9, 141 Citizen 28, 30 – 1, 37, 239
Couve de Murville, Maurice 260, 275 Declaration of the Rights of Women
Crédit Foncier 110, 113 and the Female Citizen 30
Crédit Mobilier 110 decolonization 235 – 6, 257; communists
Crémieux, Isaac 146 and 239; French intellectuals and
Crémieux Decree 146 – 7, 160, 219, 222 246 – 7; and migrant labor 263 – 4;
créolité 295 wars of x, 246, 251; see also Algerian
Crimean War 108 – 9, 142 War of Independence
Croix de Feu 199, 207 Defert, Daniel 291
CRS (Compagnies républicaines de deficit spending 113
sécurité) 272, 275, 287 degeneration 156 – 7, 166, 176,
Cru, Jean Norton 195 195, 216
Cult of the Supreme Being 43 dégradation nationale 232
Czechoslovakia 190, 210, 212 Delanoë, Bertrand 305
democracy, radical 97
Dadaism 201 demographic crisis 200 – 1
Dahomey 151 – 2, 255 Deneuve, Catherine 290
Daladier, Édouard 210, 212 department stores 105, 115, 116
Dalbiez Law 183 départements 29
d’Alembert, Jean le Rond 15 depopulation 201, 217
Dalí, Salvador 202 Deroin, Jeanne 94
Damas, Léon Gontran 193 Derrida, Jacques 270
Danton, Georges 36 desertions 27, 65, 80
Darboy, Georges 138 Désir, Harlem 294
Darlan, François 230 Desmichels, Louis Alexis 88
Darwin, Charles 167 despotism, Oriental 78
d’Astier de La Vigerie, Emmanuel 228 Dessalines, Jean-Jacques 60
Daumier, Honoré 84 Devil’s Island 105, 107, 162
David, Jacques-Louis 61 Diagne, Blaise 189
Dawes, Charles 199 Diallo, Rokhaya 309
D-Day 229 – 30 Diamond Necklace Affair 23
de Broglie, Duke 142 – 3 Diderot, Denis 15
de Gaulle: Charles, on birthrates 243; Dien Bien Phu 247 – 8, 252
Charles, and colonial empire 235 – 6, Directory 45 – 6, 52, 55, 97
239, 252 – 6; Charles, fall from power divine right of kings 2, 72, 76
316 Index
divorce 43; in interwar period 200; Elba 68, 71 – 2
right to 58, 95 emergency, states of 55, 249, 308
Djaïdja, Toumi 294 émigrés 35, 39, 56 – 7, 73, 75
Djebar, Assia 295 Ems Dispatch 128
Djibouti 151 ENA (Ecole nationale d’administration)
Dmitrieff, Elisabeth 139 242, 281
doctrinaires 75 Encyclopédie 15, 17
Domingue, Julien 31 Enfantin, Prosper 94 – 6
DOMs/TOMs (départements/territoires enfants gâtés 274
d’Outre-mer) 238, 278, 288, 296 Engels, Friedrich 97
Doriot, Jacques 209 Enlightenment xi, 2, 13 – 19; rejection
Double Vote, Law of the 75 of 72; and socialism 93; values of
Dray, Julien 294 153, 307
Dreyfus, Alfred 161 – 3 enslaved people: Africans 9 – 11, 13;
Dreyfus Affair 156 – 7, 161 – 3, 167, and French Revolution 30, 32 – 3; and
197, 222 Indian Ocean trade 7; Indigenous 9,
drôle de guerre 213 12; in Martinique 90; in metropolitan
drugs, hallucinatory 171 France 12 – 13, 19; see also slavery
Drumont, Édouard 160 – 2 environmental protection 287
Druze 206 epidemics 6, 92, 141, 188, 291
du Camp, Maxime 141 Epileptic Singer 171
Duchamp, Marcel 201 épuration 231 – 2
Ducos, Roger 55 Estates-General 4, 23 – 7, 33
Dufois, Georgina 292 ETA (Euskadi ta Askatasuna) 287
Duke of Orléans (Philippe II) 4; see also ethnic minorities 294, 306
Louis-Philippe Étoile nord-africaine 189, 204
Duke of Rovigo 88 Eugénie de Montijo 108 – 10, 123,
Dumas, Alexandre (fils) 119 129 – 30, 132, 166
Dunant, Henry 154 Eurafrica 254, 260
Durand, Marguerite 165 – 6 European Parliament 298, 301
Duroy, Victor 126 European Union 237, 298 – 9
Dutch Patriot revolt 21 Evian Accords 256 – 7, 268, 283
Dutschke, Rudi 275 Exclusif 12, 19, 90
existentialism 246, 269
Éboué, Félix 218, 235 Eylau, Battle of 62 – 3
École des Beaux-Arts 272
Ecole des Chartes 82 Fabius, Laurent 282, 292
École Polytechnique 58, 94 Faisceau 199
Écoles normales supérieures 144, 269 Falloux Law 103
ecology movement 288 Family Code 212, 217
economic insecurity 93, 280 family law 43
ECSC (European Coal and Steel Fanon, Frantz 229, 235, 247, 269
Community) 241 fascism 195, 199, 207 – 9, 215 – 16, 229,
Edict of 1716 13 253
Edict of Nantes 3 Fashoda crisis 149, 157, 173
Edison, Thomas 171 Faure, Edgar 275
EEC (European Economic Community) Favre, Jules 133 – 4
241, 254, 259 – 61, 280 fédérés 36, 141
Egypt, Napoleon’s invasion of 48, 51 – 2 feminism: in later Fifth Republic
Egyptian Institute 54 289 – 90; and May ’68 276; socialist
Egyptian Khedivate 149, 151 94, 139; and World War I 187
Eiffel Tower 169, 173 Ferry, Jules 148 – 52
Eisenhower, Dwight 230 – 1 Ferry Laws 144
Index 317
FHAR (Front homosexual d’action Franco, Francisco 209 – 10
révolutionnaire) 291 Franco-Prussian War 106, 128 – 9,
fiction, serial 172 132 – 4, 145, 154, 176
Fifth Coalition 64 Frank, Anne 212
Fifth Republic 236, 252 – 3; in 1990s Frankfurt School 271
298 – 301; economic and social Franklin, Benjamin 19
transformation 262 – 5, 289 – 96; Franz Ferdinand, Archduke 176
foreign policy 260 – 2; immigration Franz Joseph I, Emperor of Austria 109
to 283 – 6; intellectual life of Frederick Augustus, King of Saxony 63
269 – 71; laïcité and Islam in 301 – 4; Free French Forces 228 – 30, 235, 238
modernization and economic crisis free love 94
279 – 83; popular culture in 265 – 9; free market 18, 131
regionalism in 286 – 9; social fracture free soil doctrine 13
and political fragmentation 297 – 8 freedom of assembly 33, 238
Filles de la Charité 116 – 17 Freemasons 14, 78, 198, 218 – 19
Fillon, François 307 Fréjus 185
fin de siècle 156; artistic avant-garde French Community 255
of 167 French Congo see Congo, Republic of
financial crises 23, 123, 158, 198, 207 French East India Company 6 – 7
First Empire 14, 61, 64, 66 – 9, 67, 102, French Equatorial Africa 152, 218,
107 230, 235, 255
First Estate 3, 6, 17, 24, 26 – 7 French Foreign Legion 247, 248
First Jewish Statute 218 – 19, 223, 225 French franc 134, 207
First Republic 37; end of 61 French Guiana: deportations to 101; as
Fitzgerald, F. Scott 201 DOM 238; slavery in 59, 99
Flaubert, Gustave 118, 122 French Revolution: barricades in 80;
FLN (National Liberation Front) 235, Bourbon erasure of 79; culture
249 – 57, 268 – 9 of 42 – 4; economic and political
FLNKS (Front de libération nationale crises before 23 – 6; global reaction
kanake et socialiste) 289 to 21; liberal revolution in 22,
FN (Front national) see National Front 28 – 34; and Napoleon 48 – 9;
Folies-Bergère 119, 171 radicalization and war 33 – 42;
forced labor: in African colonies 151 – 2, socialists on 97; Thermidorian
205; Communards condemned to reaction 44 – 6
141; in World War I 175, 182; in French Sudan 152, 255
World War II 220 – 1, 228 – 9, 232, French Union 236, 238 – 9, 244,
237; see also slavery 249, 254
Foucault, Michel 270, 275, 291 French West Africa 123, 151 – 2;
Fouché, Joseph 56 – 7 decolonization of 236, 254 – 5; in
Fourier, Charles 95 – 6 Fourth Republic 243; in Vichy era
Fourierism 95 218, 225, 228; in World War I 183
Fourth Coalition 62 French West India Company 10
Fourth Republic x, 236 – 8, 254, 260; Frenchification 8
consumerism and gender in 244 – 5; Frenchness: and Arab immigrants 296;
foreign policy of 238 – 41; intellectual and Christianity 153; of Indigenous
and cultural life 246 – 7; population women 8; and political citizenship
policies 243 – 4; reconstruction of 58; redefining 278, 303 – 4, 308;
241 – 3; wars of decolonization under Napoleon 58
247 – 52 Freud, Sigmund 167, 265, 270
France: colonial empire of 150, Fronde 2, 4, 80
194, 255; global influence of
x – xi; historiography of x; pre- Gabon 151 – 2
revolutionary see ancien régime Gallicanism 76
318 Index
Gambetta, Léon 127, 134, 142 – 3, government debt 18, 29
150, 152 GPRA (Provisional Government of the
garment industry 91 Republic of Algeria) 254, 256
Garnier, Charles 113 GPRF (Provisional Government of the
Gauche prolétarienne 275 French Republic) 230, 237
Gaugin, Paul 168 grain, in French Revolution 18, 26,
Gaullism 260; after de Gaulle 279 – 81; 41, 44
electoral fortunes of 262; myth of Grand Guignol 171
232, 237; twilight of 276 – 7 Grand Mosque of Paris 197
Gaumont, Léon 171 grand travaux 282
gay marriage 301, 308 Grande Armée 62, 65 – 8
gay rights movement 276, 289, 291, 301 grandes écoles 58, 121, 262, 269
gender equality 139, 301, 308 grandeur 213, 236, 259 – 62, 280
gender norms: in Fifth Republic 266, Great Depression 195, 204, 207 – 8, 212
290; at fin de siècle 165; in World Great Fear 27
War I 176, 181, 185 great replacement theory 308 – 9
gender roles, inter-war 194 Great War see World War I
gender theory 308 Grégoire, Abbé 31
General Maximum, law of the 42, 44 Grenelle Accords 274
genocide 246, 299 Grévy, Albert 147
Geoffrin, Marie-Thérèse 16 Grévy, Jules 143, 159
German Confederation 73, 128 Guadeloupe 9; autonomy movement in
German militarism 173, 176, 197 288; as DOM 238; feminism in 290;
German reunification 279, 299 literature of 295; slave revolts in 33;
Germanization 221 slavery in 59, 99; under Napoleon
Germany: annexation of 59; under Vichy regime 219, 229
Alsace-Lorraine 135, 146, 154; Guesde, Jules 158
colonial empire of 149, 151; France’s gueules cassées 181, 189
relationship to 132, 166, 173 – 4, guilds 5, 18, 29, 33, 126
261; and the Holocaust 223 – 4; Nazi Guillotin, Joseph-Ignace 37
regime in 195, 209 – 10; reparations guillotine 21, 37, 41
payments by 190, 198 – 9, 207; Guinea 151 – 2, 255
trade policy of 152; in World War Guinea Company 10
I 176 – 8, 182, 186 – 8, 190; World Guizot, François 98 – 9
War II invasion and occupation Gulf War, first 299, 303
213 – 15, 214, 220 – 2, 227; see also
collaboration; resistance Habermas, Jürgen 271
Germinal franc 57 Habyarimana, Juvénal 299
Gestapo 228, 299 Haiti 60, 77; see also Saint-Domingue
GIA (Groupe islamique armé) 303 Haitian Revolution 22, 30, 32, 33, 37,
gilets jaunes 309 40, 46
gilets noirs 309 Halimi, Gisèle 269, 290
Girondins 35, 39 – 42, 44 Hanoi 114, 151
Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry 281, 284 Hardy, Françoise 267
GISTI (Group d’information et de harkis 257, 264 – 5, 293 – 4, 300
soutien des immigrés) 283 – 4 Harlem Renaissance 193
Glissant, Édouard 294 – 5 Haussmann, Georges 105, 111 – 13,
globalization xi, 1 – 2, 297, 300 121, 128, 134
gnawi rhythms 296 Haussmannization 111 – 13, 115 – 16,
GND (Government of National 138, 160, 279
Defense) 133 – 4, 141 headscarves 301 – 2
Godard, Jean-Luc 268, 271, 275 Helvetic Republic 61
Gorée 77 Hemingway, Ernest 201
Gouges, Olympe de 30, 42 – 3 Henry IV 3
Index 319
Herriot, Édouard 199, 207 War I 185; see also Cambodia;
Hervé, Edmond 292 Laos;Vietnam
Herzl, Theodor 163 Indochinese Communist Party 206
High Imperialism, era of 149 Industrial Revolution 91; Second 149
hip-hop 296 industrial workers 86, 91; and
history, during Second Empire 120 – 1 communists 198; decline of 297; in
Hitler, Adolf 207, 210, 221 Fourth Republic 242; in June Days
HLMs (Habitations à loyer modérées) 101; and May ’68 259, 274; migrant
262 – 3, 285, 286 194; in Second Empire 105; women
Ho Chi Minh 191, 202, 204, 229, as 185
236, 239 industrialization 71, 84, 87, 90 – 3, 118
Hoche, Lazare 50 – 1 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique 61, 117
Hocquenghem, Guy 291 integration: of colonies 204 – 5, 210,
Hollande, François 308 244, 253; of migrants 265, 284 – 5,
Holocaust 222, 225, 232, 241, 293, 295, 298, 303
299 – 300 intellectuals, public 14, 167
Holy Roman Empire 61 – 2, 68 intendants 4
homosexuality 116, 200, 291 – 2; see intermarriage, in French North America 8
also gay rights movement International Brigades 209, 216
Hoover, Herbert 207 International Workingmen’s Association
Horkheimer, Max 271 (IWA) 127, 136, 138, 141 – 2
Hôtel de Ville, Paris 28, 80, 136 – 7, 140 internment camps 216, 218 – 19, 223,
housing, urban 242 – 3, 262 – 3, 283, 226, 243, 265
285 – 6 interwar period 181, 193 – 5; colonial
Hugo, Victor 70, 83, 93, 95, 107, empire during 204 – 6; and domestic
111, 131 stability 195; and political
Huguenots 3 revolutions 197
human zoos 132, 154, 168 Iran, shah of 275, 293
Hundred Days 72 – 4 Islam: and Algerian independence 249;
Hussein Dey 78, 88 and Bourbon monarchy 78; and the
Huysmans, J. K. 167 Enlightenment 15; and republican
identity 301 – 3, 309
identitarian movements 302 Islamic State 307 – 8
identity politics 289, 297 Islamic terrorism 303, 307 – 8
identity wars 306 Islamophobia 309
Ighilarhiz, Louisette 305 Israel 250, 262, 280, 292
immigration: in Fourth Republic Italian Republic 56
243 – 4; postcolonial x – xi, 264 Italy: alliances with Germany 173;
immorality 16, 86, 92, 116, 141 Allied military government in
indentured labor 9, 295 231; and French colonialism 150;
India, French territories in 12 Kingdom of (Napoleonic) 62;
Indian Ocean, French trade in 6 – 7 Napoleon III and 103, 109, 126;
indigènes 124 – 5, 189, 222 Napoleon’s campaign in 51; in World
Indigènes de la République 309 War II 221
Indigenous peoples, of New France IVF (in vitro fertilization) 301
8 – 9, 11 – 12
individualization, mass 297 al-Jabarti, Abd al-Rahman 52
Indochina x; anti-colonial movement in Jacobinism 21, 33, 36; factions of
206; in Fourth Republic 238; French 35, 38 – 9; and July Monarchy 84;
occupation of 149; postcolonial reaction against 44 – 5; and the Terror
immigration from 264; protection 41 – 2; and women 43 – 4
of missionaries in 153; tourism to Jansenism 3 – 4, 15
172; under Vichy regime 229; war Jaurès, Jean 157, 159, 174, 177
in 236, 239 – 40, 247 – 50; in World Jefferson, Thomas 28, 40, 48, 60
320 Index
Jena, Battle of 62 labor unions: in colonial empire 243;
Jesuits 3, 8, 19, 164 Flora Tristan on 86; in Fourth
jeune cadre 262 Republic 238; in French Revolution
jeunes issus de l’immigration 293 29; in interwar period 197 – 8; in
jeunesse dorée 44 May ’68 274; and migrant labor 186,
Jeunesse ouvrière chrétienne 196 189, 283; in Second Empire 126 – 7;
Jeunesses patriotes 199 in Third Republic 158 – 9; in Vichy
Jewishness, Vichy’s definition of 218 regime 216; in World War I 187
Jews: in Algeria see Algerian Jews; Lacan, Jacques 270
in Fifth Republic 292; in French Lacoste, Robert 250
Revolution 30 – 1; in interwar Ladd, Anna Coleman 189
period 196 – 7; and Napoleon 68; as Lafayette, Marquis de 27 – 8, 31
refugees 209, 243; resistance by 228; Lafitte, Jacques 80
in Third Republic 160 – 2; under laïcité 164, 298, 301 – 2
Napoleon 68 – 9; in World War II laissez-faire 71, 98
212 – 13, 218 – 19, 222 – 7, 229, 232, Lamarque, Jean Maximilien 92
305 – 6 Lamartine, Alphonse de 99, 101 – 2
Joffre, Joseph 177 – 8 Langston Hughes 193
Jonas, Lucien 180 Laos 238, 248
Jonnart Law 189, 205 Larzac Movement 287 – 8
Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor 23 Laval, Pierre 216, 219, 221 – 3, 231
Joséphine (Empress) 50 – 1, 61, 64, 102 Lavigerie, Charles 148
Jospin, Lionel 299 – 302 Law, John 4
Journée du Poilu 180 Law on Associations 1901 163
Juarez, Benito 123 Le Bon, Gustave 167
July, Serge 275 Le Chapelier Law 126
July Days see Revolution of 1830 Le Charivari 84
July Monarchy 81 – 4; and Algeria Le Pen, Jean-Marie 280, 298 – 9
87 – 90; end of 87, 98, 100; Le Pen, Marine 308
industrialization and urbanization League of Nations 190 – 1, 193, 199
during 91 – 3 Lebanon 184, 191, 206
July Ordinances 79 – 80 Leclerc, Charles 59 – 60
June Rebellion 70, 92 – 3 Leclerc de Hauteclocque, Philippe 231
Juppé, Alain 300 Ledru-Rollin, Alexandre 98 – 9, 101
juste milieu 75, 81 Left Bank directors 268
justice, popular 275 Legislative Assembly (French
Revolution) 36 – 7
Kabyle myth 243 Legitimists 83
Kabylia 89, 125, 146, 185, 249 Leipzig, Battle of 68
Kalkal, Khelad 303 Léo, André 139
Kassovitz, Matthieu 296 Leo XII, Pope 76
Khaled, Cheb 296 Leopold II of Belgium 151
Khomeini, Ayatollah 293 Les Halles 105, 113, 279
Khrushchev, Nikita 261 Les Misérables 70, 93
Kinsey, Alfred 265 Lespinasse, Julie 16
Klaus Barbie 299 Lesseps, Ferdinand de 123, 160
Kouachi, Chérif and Saïd 307 levée en masse 36
Kristeva, Julia 270 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 269
liberalism 144, 298; advanced 281
La Fronde (newspaper) 166 liberalization 84, 125 – 7, 282
La Libre Parole 160 – 2 liberté, égalité, fraternité 43, 144
La Marseillaise 44, 144, 274 Lisbonne Law 160
labor migration see migrant labor literacy 82, 172
Index 321
Lloyd George, David 190 – 1 Manet, Édouard 117 – 18
Locarno Pact 199 Manifeste des 343 290
Locke, John 16 manorial dues 6
loi Goblet 144 manufacturing, in ancien régime 5
Loi Guizot 82 Mao Zedong 239, 271 – 2
Loi Neuwirth 266 Maoism 259, 270 – 1, 275 – 6
Loti, Pierre 168 maquis 228 – 30
Louis XIV xi, 2 – 4; and the Marathas 59
Enlightenment 15; and slavery 10, 12 Marche des beurs 294
Louis XV 4, 15, 17 – 18 Marcuse, Herbert 271
Louis XVI: and counterrevolution maréchaussée 11
34 – 5; and economic crisis 23; and Marengo, Battle of 56
the Enlightenment 17; and Marie de l’Incarnation 8
Estates-General 24 – 6; and French Marie-Antoinette 23, 41, 43
Revolution 28; trial and execution Marie-Louise of Austria 64
of 39 Marker, Chris 268
Louis XVIII 68, 70 – 5, 82, 102 the Marne, Battle of 178
Louisiana 8, 11 – 12, 60 marriage: gay 301, 308; Gouges on 30;
Louisiana Purchase 60 informal 65; socialists on 86, 94 – 5
Louis-Philippe (King) 80 – 4, 87 – 9, marriage law 266
92 – 3, 98 – 9, 101 Marseille 6, 140, 150; housing in 243;
Lourdes 117, 164 migrants to 158, 189, 264, 284 – 5
Louverture, Toussaint 37, 38, 40, 46, Marshall Plan 236, 240 – 1, 243, 287
59 – 60 Martinique 9, 50 – 1; 1870 revolt in
Louvre 80, 82, 224, 268; pyramid 135 – 6, 141; autonomy movement in
of 282 288; as DOM 238; feminism in 290;
Lumière brothers 171 literature of 278; slavery in 33, 90,
Luxembourg Commission 100 99; under Vichy regime 229
luxury goods 1, 6, 91, 170, 172 Marx, Karl 97, 127, 141, 272
Lyautey, Hubert 196, 206, 219 Marxism 138, 158, 241, 259, 270, 276
lycées 49, 57, 81 masculinity 89, 181, 200
Lyon silkworker uprising 83 – 4, 93 mass culture 170, 176, 201 – 2
mass movements, democratic 158
Maastricht Treaty 298 Massu, Jacques 252 – 3
McDonald’s 300 Matignon Accords 208
McKay, Claude 193 Maupassant, Guy de 132
MacMahon, Patrice 129, 132, 142 – 3 Mauritania 152
Macron, Emmanuel 309 Mauritius 7, 59, 71
mad cow disease 300 Mauroy, Pierre 293
Madagascar 7, 99; colonization of Maurras, Charles 162, 165, 167, 216
122; insurrection in 239 – 40, 247; Maximilian of Mexico 124
protection of missionaries in 153; May 1968: events of 259 – 60, 266, 269,
treaties with 126 271 – 4; meaning and legacy of 274 – 6
magazines, women’s 245, 265 Mazarin, Cardinal 2
Maghrebi literature 295 – 6 Médecins Sans Frontières 276
Maghrebi youth 296, 302 Mehmet Ali 123
Maginot Line 210 Meliès, Georges 171 – 2
Mallarmé, Stéphane 168 Méline, Jules 158
Malta 52, 60, 90 memory wars 305 – 6
Mami, Cheb 296 Mendès-France, Pierre 249
Man Ray 202 mercantilism 7, 18
mandate system 191 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 235, 246
Mandrin, Louis 1 Messali Hadj 204, 219, 233, 249
322 Index
Messmer, Pierre 279 motherhood 118, 217, 237
métissage 11, 294 Moulin, Jean 228
metropolitan France x MRP (Popular Republican Movement)
Metternich, Klemens von 68, 72 236 – 8
Mexico 7 – 8, 69, 123 – 4 MTA (Mouvement des travailleurs
Michel, Louise 139, 141 arabes) 283
Michelet, Jules 114, 121 MTLD (Mouvement pour le triomphe
migrant labor: from DOM/TOMs des libertés démocratiques) 249
288 – 9; during World war I 183, 186; municipal revolution 27
in Fifth Republic 263, 265, 283 – 4; Musée Carnavalet 121
in Fourth Republic 241 – 2, 244; in music: of Black and Maghrebi
interwar period 189, 202; in Third communities 296; rock and pop
Republic 158 267; in Second Empire 119; in Third
Milhaud, Darius 202 Republic 167, 170 – 1
milice 222, 227 Muslim immigrant populations 294,
military: in Algeria 88 – 9, 101; in 303, 307
French Revolution 35 – 6; Jews in Muslim women 301 – 3, 307
161 – 2; in Third Republic 145, 174; Muslims: Algerian 78, 124 – 5, 147 – 8,
under July Monarchy 81 – 2; under 156, 205 – 7, 257; in metropolitan
Napoleon 62, 64 – 9, 73; in World France 197, 293, 302 – 3, 306, 308 – 9;
War I 177 – 9, 186; see also navy Napoleon and 52; personal status of
Mink, Paule 139 189
Mirabeau, Honoré 28 Mussolini, Benito 199, 207
missionaries 7, 9, 148, 153, 165, 196 mutilés de guerre 188 – 9
Missionaries of Africa 148 mutinies 35, 186 – 7
Mississippi Bubble 4 mutual-aid societies 83, 93, 202
Mitterrand, François 274, 281 – 3, 288,
291 – 2, 294, 297, 299 – 300 Nanterre student movement 271–2, 275
MLF (Mouvement de libération des Napoleon Bonaparte 46, 48; Egyptian
Femmes) 276, 290 – 1 campaign 51 – 5, 53; as Emperor
MNA (Mouvement national algérien) 249 61 – 8; as First Consul 55 – 61; last
modernity 125, 157, 165 – 8, 176, 201, years 68, 71 – 3; popular memory
236 during Bourbon Restoration 78 – 9;
Molé, Louis-Mathieu 99 rise of 49 – 51
Mollet, Guy 250, 252 Napoleon II 64, 102
monarchism: in French Revolution 35; Napoleon III 106; colonial policy
in Third Republic 135, 142 – 3, 162, 122 – 3, 125, 132; foreign policy
165, 199 of 108 – 9; and Franco-Prussian
monarchy: in ancien régime 2 – 4; War 128 – 30, 132; and history
see also absolutism; constitutional 121; liberalization period 125 – 7;
monarchy modernization program 110 – 14; and
monastic orders 29 social order 116
Monet, Claude 168 Napoleon IV 142
Monnet, Jean 241 – 2 Napoleonic armies see military, under
Monod, Gabriel 120 – 1 Napoleon
Montagnards 38 – 41, 45 Napoleonic Wars x, 48, 60 – 70, 73, 76,
Montesquieu, Baron de 15 88
Montmartre 136, 140, 168, Nardal, Jane and Paulette 193, 288
196, 201 Nasser, Gamal Abdel 250
Montreal 8 Natchez revolt 11 – 12
Mont-Valérien 133, 136, 140 National Assembly: and the colonies
Morin, Edgar 276 31 – 3; establishment of 22, 25 – 7;
Morocco 173 – 4, 206, 250, 264, 283 in Fifth Republic 279, 294; in
Moscow, Napoleon at 67 – 8 Fourth Republic 238, 250; and Paris
Index 323
Commune 136 – 8; popular challenges Nijinsky, Vaslav 170
to 33; in Second Republic 100 – 3, Nivelle, Robert 186
107; in Third Republic 135, 142 – 4, No Man’s Land 175, 179, 181
208, 216; under de Gaulle 260, nobility: of ancien régime 3, 5 – 6, 14,
267, 274 18, 22; in French revolution 24,
National Bloc 198 – 9 26 – 7; Napoleonic 49, 74
National Convention 36 – 45, 50, 59 Noir, Victor 128
National Front: in 21st century 306, Nora, Pierre 306
308; as anti-republican 302; electoral Normandy, Allied invasion of 228,
successes 298 – 300; formation of 280; 230, 232
and migrant workers 284 North Africa: Allied invasion of 228,
National Guard: in Franco-Prussian 230; migration from 283 – 5, 292 – 3;
War 134; in French Revolution and Ottoman Empire 52; Roman
27 – 8, 34 – 5, 45; and Paris heritage of 90, 121 – 2, 148; slavery
Commune 136, 138; in Second in 78; wars of decolonization in 250;
Republic 99, 101 women in 166
national heritage 82 – 3 North America, French colonization of
national identity 82, 132, 286, 307 7 – 12
National Resistance Council 228 North German Confederation 128
National Revolution 215–20, 217, nostalgia 65, 167, 219, 287
227, 230 Notre-Dame 111; in French Revolution
National Workshops 100, 113 43; and liberation of Paris 231;
nationalism 69, 109, 156 – 7; integral Napoleon’s coronation at 61; in
162, 165 Revolution of 1830 80
nationalization 158, 281 – 2 nuclear energy 260, 276
NATO (North Atlantic Treaty nuclear weapons 261
Organization) 239, 259, 261 Nuremberg Racial Laws 209
navy 54, 62, 122, 230
Nazism 199, 207, 209 OAS (Organisation de l’armée secrète)
Necker, Jacques 23, 25 – 7 256 – 7, 260 – 1, 269, 274, 284
Necker, Suzanne 16 Occident 272
négritude 193, 246, 294 Occupied Zone (World War II) 214,
Nelson, Horatio 54, 62 220, 223, 228
neo-liberalism 277, 297 October Days 28
neo-reactionaries 308 October Edict 68
neo-republicanism 298 – 301 Œuvre de secours aux enfants 226
Netherlands: and French Revolution Ogé, Vincent 32
40, 46; Huguenot diaspora to 3; in oil shocks 278, 280, 284
Napoleonic Wars 60 Ollivier, Émile 128
New Caledonia 122, 141, 146, 289 Ollivier Law 126
New France 6 – 9, 12 Olympiades project 285
New Left 259 OPEC (Organization of Petroleum
New Orleans 11, 60 Exporting Countries) 280, 284
New Wave film 267 – 8 Opéra Garnier 113 – 14, 170 – 1
New Woman 165 – 6 Opium Wars 122
newspapers 14; in Bourbon Oradour-sur-Glane 229
Restoration 78 – 80; in July Orczy, Emma 21
Monarchy 84; in Napoleonic Orléanism 81, 83, 102, 135, 142; see
era 57, 66; in Second Empire also July Monarchy
127; in Second Republic 100 – 1, Ottoman Empire: in Algeria 77 – 8,
103; socialist 96, 158; in Third 87 – 8; and Crimean War 108 – 9;
Republic 136, 145, 166; workers’ Napoleon and 52 – 4; in World War I
83, 93 183, 190 – 1
Niger 152 Owen, Robert 96
324 Index
pacifism 81, 175, 187 Pfimlin, Pierre 252
Painlevé, Paul 187 phalanges 95
Palestine 54, 108 phenomenology 235, 246
Panama Scandal 160 philosophes 14 – 17
Paoli, Pasquale 49 Physiocrats 18 – 19
papacy: and Action Française 196; Picasso, Pablo 168, 201
and ancien régime 3; and French Piedmont-Sardinia 109
Revolution 29; and Napoleon III pieds noirs 156; and antisemitism 207;
109; and revolutions of 1848 103; in Communist Party 249; exodus
and Third Republic 143 to France 256 – 7, 261, 263 – 4;
Papal States 103 and fascism 209, 219; first 89 – 90;
Papon, Maurice 305 in Second Empire 124 – 5; state
paramilitary movements 199, recognition of 305; in Third Republic
207, 253 146 – 9; and War of Independence
Paris: banlieues of 285 – 6; fashion 253 – 6
industry in 172 – 3; in Franco-Prussian Pius IX, Pope 103
War 129 – 35; in interwar period Pius VII, Pope 56
201 – 4; in July Monarchy 91 – 2; Pius X, Pope 164
liberation of 231; police killings of Pius XI, Pope 117
Algerians in 256; and Revolution Plan XVII 177
of 1848 98 – 9; in Second Empire plantation system 6, 9 – 11, 31, 59 – 60,
110 – 16, 112 288
Paris Commune 131, 135–41, 145–6, 154 plebiscites: under Napoleon I 56, 61;
Paris Commune (French Revolution) 39 under Napoleon III 107
Paris Ethnological Society 120 Poher, Alain 281
Parisian workers 99 – 101 poilus 179, 188
parlements 3 – 4, 13, 18, 23 – 4 Poincaré, Raymond 178, 187, 198, 207
Partial Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty 261 Poland: after World War I 190; in
Pasqua, Charles 298 – 300 Napoleonic Wars 62 – 4, 67, 69; in
Passy, Frédéric 154 World War II 213
Pasteur, Louis 119 police violence 275, 293 – 4, 296,
pataouète 156 306, 309
Pathé, Charles 171 Polignac, Jules de 77 – 8, 80
patrimony 82, 170; artistic 221, 224 political clubs 33, 44, 84, 134, 136,
PCF see Communist Party (PCF) 139
peasantry: in Algeria 88; in ancien Polverel, Étienne 37
régime 3, 5 – 6; and Bourbon polygamy 125, 166, 189
Restoration 74; in French Revolution Pompidou, Georges 260; and labor
22, 24 – 7, 29, 36, 41 – 2, 44; and migration 265; and May ’68 272,
July Monarchy 83 – 4, 87, 91; in 274 – 5; as President 277, 279 – 80,
Napoleonic armies 64 – 5; and 284
Revolution of 1830 79; in Second Pondichéry 7, 12
Republic 100; in Third Republic 144, Pontecorvo, Gillo 268
146; in Vichy regime 216; in World pop music 267 – 8
War I 177 – 8 Popular Front 195, 208 – 10, 274
Pei, I. M. 282 population regroupment 90
Pellepoix, Louis Darquier de 223 pornography 212
Peninsular War 48, 64, 66 porteurs de valises 254
people of color, free 11, 13, 22, 30 – 3, Portugal 7; in Napoleonic Wars 48, 56,
37, 90 63 – 4, 68
Perec, Georges 259 positivism 117, 120 – 1, 167
Pétain, Philippe: fall from power postcolonial crisis 306
231 – 2; in World War I 181, 186; in post-structuralism 270
World War II 213 – 19, 225, 227 Poujade, Pierre 240
pétroleuses 139
Index 325
poverty: in July Monarchy 91 – 2, 98; Al-Qaeda 308
socialists on 96 Quebec 8, 262
PPA (Parti du peuple algérien) 204,
219, 233 race: and the Enlightenment 17; and
Prairial Laws 44 slavery 12 – 13
prefects 57 racial hierarchies 11, 154, 216, 265, 289
presidency: in Fifth Republic 260, 279; racial stereotypes 185, 243
in Fourth Republic 238; in Second racism: and colonial empire 213; Fanon
Republic 101 – 2; in Third Republic and 235; and French intellectuals
142, 144 246; and migrant workers 284, 288;
Primitivism 168 movement against 293 – 4, 309; and
primogeniture 43, 77 négritude 193
printing privileges 15 radio: in Algerian War 248; in Fifth
prisoners of war 237; in Franco- Republic 267; in interwar period
Prussian War 134, 140; in 201; local content rule on 296;
Napoleonic wars 66; in World War privatization of 282; in World War
I 182; in World War II 214, 220, I 182
232 ragpickers 91 – 2
private property: in Algeria 90; in Code raï 296
Napoléon 58; socialists and 86, 97 Rainbow Warrior 283
privatization 282, 298 Ramadier, Paul 240
Prix Goncourt 175, 278, 295 rap 296
pro-natalism 244, 266 rapatriés 305
property rights, Napoléon and 49, rape: of enslaved women 11; laws on
58, 68 290; in Napoleonic wars 65, 71; in
prosthetic devices 189 World War II 232, 244
prostitution: in Second Empire 116; Raspail, François-Vincent 101
Zola on 105 Raspail, Jean 308
Protestants: in ancien régime 2 – 3, 19; rationing 133, 187, 220, 223, 237, 245
and World War I 195 – 6; in World Raynal, Abbé 17
War II 225 – 6 razzias 89, 185
Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 96 – 7, 114, realism, in the arts 106, 117 – 18
138, 159 refugees: during World War I 178; in
Proust, Marcel 168 interwar period 202, 209
provisional government: of 1830 80; of regionalism 286 – 7
1848 99 – 101; after Franco-Prussian religious freedom 164
War see GND; after World War II see religious symbols 164, 302
GPRF; Algerian 236 Rémond, René 163
Prussia 3, 12; and French Revolution Renoir, Auguste 162, 168
35 – 7, 46, 70; and Napoleon 62 – 3, reproductive technology 301
68; and Second Empire 123, 128; see Republic of Virtue 42
also Franco-Prussian War republican calendar 43
PS see Socialist Party republican values 139, 144 – 5, 163,
psychoanalysis 201, 270 294, 301, 309
psychology 167 – 8, 171 republicanism: and Bourbon
public education 262; and Catholic Restoration 70; and Catholic
Church 103; in Fifth Republic Church 163, 165; and colonial
262; in French Revolution 41; empire 152; debated meaning of
headscarves in 301 – 2; in July 297 – 8, 302 – 3, 307; and Dreyfus
Monarchy 82; in Paris Commune Affair 162 – 3; Jews and 160; in
138; in Second Empire 126; in Second Empire 127; and Third
Third Republic 144 – 6; under Vichy Republic 142 – 4; under Napoleon III
regime 217 110; Vichy’s rejection of 216 – 17; see
punk rock 296 also neo-republicanism
the Pyramids, Battle of 53 republicanization 54, 144 – 5, 170
326 Index
resistance: myth of the 232, 299 – 300; campaign in 48, 58 – 60; plantation
in World War II 226 – 9, 231 – 2 economy of 9 – 11; slave revolt in see
résistants 227, 299 Haitian Revolution
Resnais, Alain 268 Saint-Just, Louis Antoine de 42
Réunion 7, 59, 99, 238, 288 – 9 Saint-Michel RER station, bombing of
révolution escamotée 83 303
Revolution of 1830 70 – 1, 79, 81 – 4, Saint-Simon, Henri de 94 – 5
87, 97 Saint-Simonianism 94 – 5, 111, 124 – 5
Revolution of 1848 97 – 9 salaried class 297
Revolutionary Tribunal 36 – 7, 41, 44 salonnières 16
Reynaud, Paul 213 – 15 salons, of the Enlightenment 14, 16
Rhineland 190, 210 Salut les copains 267
Richelieu, Cardinal 8 Sand, George 95, 141
Richepance, Antoine 59 sans-culottes 33, 36 – 8, 41 – 2, 45
Richet, Jean-François 296 sans-papiers 299
right of association 93, 293 Sarkozy, Nicolas 306 – 7
right to labor 99 – 100 Sarraute, Nathalie 270
Rimbaud, Arthur 168 Sartre, Jean-Paul 227, 235, 246, 270,
Rivière, Henri 151 275
Robbe-Grillet, Alain 270 satire 84
Robespierre, Augustin 50 Saussure, Ferdinand de 269
Robespierre, Maximilien 38, 42, 44 Scarlet Pimpernel 21
Robinet, Auguste 156 Schoelcher, Victor 107
Roland, Jean-Marie 39 Schuman, Robert 241
Roland, Pauline 94 Schwarz-Bart, Simone 295
Roma people 285 scouting movements 165, 196, 217, 225
Roosevelt, Franklin 230 scrutin de liste 143
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 15 – 17, 49, 114 Sebbar, Leila 295
RPF (Rassemblement du peuple Second Empire: arts and sciences
français) 240 of 117 – 22; bourgeois culture of
RPR (Rassemblement pour la 114; and colonial empire 122 – 5;
République) 281 end of 129 – 30, 132 – 3, 135;
Ruhr invasion 198 – 9 industrialization of 110; literature of
rule of law 42, 141 105 – 6; monuments of 113
rural exodus 158 Second Estate 3, 6, 17, 24, 26 – 7; see
Russell Tribunal 270 – 1 also nobility
Russia: and Crimean War 108 – 9; Second Jewish Statute 218, 223
and French Revolution 54, 56; Second ralliement 196
in Napoleonic Wars 61 – 4, 67 – 8; Second Republic 87, 99 – 103, 108,
in Seven Years War 12; in Triple 114, 124
Entente 173; in World War I 177; Second Vatican Council 266
see also Soviet Union secularism 131, 153, 215 – 16, 298; see
Russian Revolution 141, 186, 190, also laïcité
193, 196 secularization 22, 266; and the
Rwandan genocide 299 Enlightenment 15 – 16; opposition to
35; and Paris Commune 138; and
Saadi, Yacef 268 Third Republic 144, 164; see also
Saarland 190, 267 laïcité
Sacré-Cœur basilica 164, 196 segregation, racial 285
Sacrilege Law 76 seigneurial dues 5, 25, 27, 36
Sagan, Françoise 290 self-determination 109, 190 – 1, 233,
Saint-Domingue 1, 19; and French 251, 253, 255, 260
Revolution 30 – 3; Napoleon’s semaine sanglante 140 – 1
Index 327
Senate: de Gaulle’s proposals for social question 86, 92 – 3, 97
276 – 7; in Fifth Republic 266, 308; social sciences, in Second Empire
in Third Republic 142 – 3, 201; under 119 – 20
Napoleon 57, 71; under Napoleon social security 242, 262, 281
III 128 social workshops 96
Sénatus-Consultes 122, 124 – 5, 128 socialism 86 – 7; during July Monarchy
Senegal: colonization of 77, 123, 93 – 7; in interwar period 197 – 8;
151 – 2; decolonization of 255; slavery and migrant workers 189; and Paris
in 99 Commune 139, 141; in Second
Senegal Company 10 Empire 106, 127 – 8; in Second
Senghor, Léopold Sédar 193, 202, 246, Republic 102 – 3; in Third Republic
254, 294 131, 142, 144, 157 – 9; and World
September Laws 84 War I 177, 187
serfdom 68 Socialist Party 283, 294, 297, 299; see
Service des affaires indigènes nord- also SFIO
africaines 197 Société des Amis des Noirs 31 – 2
Sétif uprising 233, 236, 250 Société du prince impérial 126
Seven Years’ War 12 Société générale du téléphone 145
Seventh Coalition 73 Society of Missions 76
sexual revolution 259, 265 – 6 Society of Orders 3, 15, 18
sexual violence 11, 290; see also rape sociology 120
SFIO (Section française de soixante-huitards 271
l’internationale ouvrière) 159, 194, the Somme, Battle of 176, 179, 181
197 – 8, 208 SONACOTRA (Société nationale de
SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters of the construction pour les travailleurs
Allied Powers in Europe) 239 algériens) 263, 285
shell shock 181 Sonthonax, Léger Félicité 37, 40
Shoah see Holocaust Sorbonne 166, 272
Sieyès, Emmanuel 24, 55 SOS Racisme 294
Sigmaringen 231 Southeast Asia 151, 229, 286; see also
Simon, Jules 143 Indochina
sister republics 46 southern Atlantic region 9
Six-Day War 262 Soviet Union 190 – 1; and anti-
Sixth Coalition 68, 71 colonialism 204 – 5; in Cold War
skyscrapers 279 239, 241; de Gaulle and 261; French
slave trade 10, 89, 151, 306 intellectuals and 246; German
slavery x – xi; abolition of 22, 40, invasion of 223, 228; and liberation
46, 59, 89 – 90, 99, 135; and the of France 231; pact with Hitler 212;
Enlightenment 17; in French and Popular Front 208; in Spanish
colonial empire 9 – 12, 31; legacy Civil War 209
in Antilles 278, 295, 305 – 6; Spain 7; and French Revolution 40, 46;
in nineteenth century 78; state and Latin America 69; in Napoleonic
recognition as crime 300; see also Wars 48, 63 – 4
forced labor Spanish Civil War 195, 209 – 10,
slums 242, 263, 283, 285, 296 216, 219
Smet, Jean-Philippe 267 St. Pierre et Miquelon 238
SMIC (salaire minimum Stalin, Josef 208, 237 – 41
interprofessionnel de croissance) 279, Stalinism 270, 275
282, 288 state bureaucracy 57, 68
smuggling 1 Stavisky, Alexandre 208
sociability 16, 149 Stein, Gertrude 201
social contract 16, 28 STO see forced labor, in World War II
social fracture 278, 297 Stravinsky, Igor 170
328 Index
stream-of-consciousness 168 101 – 2; in Third Republic 135 – 6,
strikes 29; during July Monarchy 93; 140, 142
in Fourth Republic 240; general Third Coalition 62
159, 208, 240, 251, 271; in interwar Third Estate 3; and French Revolution
period 198; in May ’68 274; and 22, 24 – 7, 29 – 30, 35; and luxury
migrant workers 189; in Second goods 6; selling titles to 5
Empire 126 – 8; in Third Republic Third International 194, 198
158; in Vichy regime 216; in World Third Republic 131 – 3, 135; and
War I 187 Algeria 146 – 9; antisemitism and
structuralism 269 – 71 xenophobia in 160 – 3; arts, culture
Sudan 149 and intellectual life 167 – 70; church
Sudetenland 210 and state under 163 – 5; crisis and
Suez Canal 123, 151, 250, 264 contestation 157 – 60; end of 215 – 16;
sugar plantations 1, 10, 33 at fin de siècle 156 – 7; foreign policy
Surrealism 201 – 2 of 173 – 4; gender and population
surveillance: of Black people 13; in 165 – 6; governing 142 – 4; imperialism
colonial empire 149, 206 of 149 – 54, 150; mass culture of
Sweden 12, 51, 68 170 – 3; and Paris Commune 140 – 1;
Sykes-Picot Agreement 184 republicanization under 144 – 6
Symbolist movement 167 – 8, 298 Third Worldism 257, 261, 266, 269 – 70
syndicalists 159, 198 Thorez, Maurice 237
Syria 121; civil war in 308; French tirailleurs sénégalais 123, 175, 184, 186
mandate over 184, 191, 206; tithes 5, 27, 29
Napoleon’s invasion of 54 tobacco 1
Tocqueville, Alexis de 89, 107
Taha, Rachid 296 Togoland, French 152, 191
Tahiti 153, 168 tolerance, threshold of 284
taille 6 tolls 6, 25
Taine, Hippolyte 141 Tombs, Robert 141
Taittinger, Pierre 199 Tonkin 122, 151, 206, 239
Talleyrand-Périgord, Charles-Maurice Tortuga Island 9
de 46, 52, 55 – 6, 61, 71, 73 torture 78; in Algeria 236, 247, 254,
Taubira, Christiane 306, 308 269, 300, 305; in decolonial wars
Taubira Law 306 247, 250 – 2; in World War II 227
tax farmers 6 Toulon: Italian occupation of 221;
taxation: in ancien régime 1, 3 – 6, 18; Napoleon’s victory at 50
and French Revolution 22 – 5 tourism 154, 157, 172, 287 – 8
Tel Quel 270 trade, global 2, 4, 6, 18
telegraph 108, 111, 123, 129, 145 trade unions see labor unions
television 256, 267, 272, 274, 282, Trafalgar, Battle of 62
296, 309 Traoré, Assa 309
Tennis Court Oath 25 Trarza 77
the Terror 34, 41 – 2, 44, 55, 78, 81; Treaty of Amiens 58, 60
white 45, 73 Treaty of Campo Formio 51, 56
textiles: in ancien régime 5; Indian 7 Treaty of Fez 174
TGV (trains à grande vitesse) 279 Treaty of Paris (1763) 12
theater: in July Monarchy 84; in Second Treaty of Paris (1815) 73
Empire 119; in Third Republic 157, Treaty of Pressburg 62
167, 170 – 1 Treaty of Rome 241
Thermidorians 42, 44 – 5, 50, 73 Treaty of Schönbrunn 64
Thiers, Adolphe: in July Monarchy Treaty of Tilsit 63
93; in Revolution of 1830 79 – 80; Treaty of Utrecht 4, 8
in Revolution of 1848 99; in Second Treaty of Versailles 190 – 1, 193, 198 – 9,
Empire 127; in Second Republic 210
Index 329
trench warfare 179, 181, 200, 213 universal suffrage 81, 98 – 9, 142 – 3,
Trenet, Charles 296 238; see also women’s suffrage
trente glorieuses 236, 242, 262, 280, universalism 301, 303
283 universities: independent 275; popular
tricolor 28, 43, 54, 79, 99 170
Triple Alliance 173 University of Paris 14, 271 – 2, 275
Triple Entente 173 unnatural acts 200
Tristan, Flora 86, 95 – 6 Unoccupied Zone (World War II) 214,
Trochu, Louis-Jules 133 – 4 220, 222 – 8
Trotskyists 198 UPC (Union of the Peoples of
troupes indigènes 179 Cameroon) 251
Truffaut, François 267 – 8 Upper Volta 152, 255
Truman Doctrine 239 Urbain, Thomas 95
Tuileries Palace 34, 36, 39, 80, 99, 108 urban renewal 106, 110 – 14, 112, 285
Tunisia 121–2; decolonization of 250, urban workers: in Bourbon Restoration
264; French invasion of 149–50; and 74; bourgeois ideas about 92; and
May ’68 275; migrant labor from 283 colonialism 95; in French Revolution
Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques 18 22, 26 – 7, 33, 44; in July Monarchy
Tzara, Tristan 201 83, 87; in Revolution of 1830 80;
in Second Republic 100; in Third
Ubangi-Shari 152 Republic 154, 158
UDMA (Union démocratique du urbanization 84, 86 – 7, 90 – 1, 110, 127,
manifeste algérien) 249 287 – 8
UEFJ (Union des étudiants juifs de Ursuline order 8
France) 294 utopian socialism 86, 95 – 7
Ulm, Battle of 62
ultramontanism 76, 103, 108 – 9, 117, Vaillant, Édouard 138
123, 126 Vallat, Xavier 223
ultra-royalists 71, 73 – 7, 79, 83 Vallaut-Belkacem, Najat 308
unemployment: in Bourbon Restoration Valmy, Battle of 37, 40, 81
74, 83; in Fifth Republic 280, 282; van Gogh, Vincent 168
in Fourth Republic 240; and Great Varda, Agnès 268
Depression 207; in interwar Germany Vartan, Sylvie 267
198; and revolution of 1848 98 – 100; Vaulx-en-Velin 303
in Third Republic 158 Veil Law 281, 290
Union sacrée 178, 187, 196 – 7 veils 302, 307; see also headscarves
United Nations 239, 251 – 2 Vélodrome d’Hiver 224, 299
United States 22, 30; and Cold venal offices 5, 18
War 239 – 41; consumer goods Vendée 41, 50
from 245; de Gaulle and 261; Vendôme column 140
and decolonization 252; financial Verdi, Giuseppe 119
assistance from 242; France’s debt to Verdun: Battle of (WWI) 176, 179 – 81;
176; and French Revolution 40, 46; in French Revolution 37
and Haiti 60; Jewish refugees to 224; Verne, Jules 119, 162
left-wing opposition to 270 – 1; and Vernet, Horace 89
Napoleon 56, 58; popular culture of Versailles 3
267; racism in 246; and Suez crisis veterans: of Algerian conquest 101; of
250; in World War I 186 Napoleonic wars 72, 88; of World
Universal Exposition 153, 168, 173; of War I 186, 188 – 9, 195, 204
1855 109, 114; of 1889 169 Veuillot, Louis 126
universal male suffrage: Blanqui on Vichy regime 213, 215; end of 231 – 2;
97; in Second Empire 107, 126; German occupation of 221, 229; and
in Second Republic 101; in Third the Holocaust 222 – 5; Mitterrand
Republic 131 and 299 – 300; politics of 215 – 20
330 Index
Victoria, Queen of the UK 109 187; in World War II 215, 217, 227,
Viet Minh 229, 236, 247 – 8, 251 232
Vietnam: American intervention in Women’s International League for Peace
262, 270 – 1, 275; colonization of and Freedom 187
122, 151; communist movement in women’s suffrage 165 – 6, 198, 201,
229; in Fourth Republic 238; war of 209, 236
independence 239, 247, 248 worker cooperatives 96, 139
Villèle, Joseph de 75, 77 working classes: in Algeria 148;
violence: colonial 295, 306; political in Fifth Republic 280; in Fourth
276; popular 92; revolutionary 38, Republic 240, 242; and Franco-
75, 92 Prussian War 128, 134; in French
Violette, Maurice 209 Revolution 29; in July Monarchy
visual arts: in Second Empire 117; in 93, 97; in literature 105 – 6, 118;
Third Republic 167 – 8 and mass culture 170 – 2; and Paris
vivandières 65 Commune 138; in Popular Front era
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) 15, 17 208 – 9; in Revolution of 1848 98 – 9;
von Ranke, Leopold 121 in Second Empire 111, 114 – 15,
voting rights 29; in 1793 Constitution 126; in Second Republic 100; and
41; in Code Napoléon 58; in July socialism 86, 95; and World War I
Monarchy 81; see also universal 186 – 7; see also labor unions
suffrage working women 44, 166
world music 296
Wagner, Richard 167 World War I 175; aftermath of 157,
Wagram, Battle of 64 188, 193 – 5; colonial empire in
Waldeck-Rousseau, René 162 183 – 6; commemoration of 195;
Waldeck-Rousseau Law 159 Dreyfus in 163; end of 186 – 8; home
War of Spanish Succession 4 front 182 – 3; outbreak of 176 – 9;
Wars of Religion 2 – 3 Western Front of 179 – 82
Warsaw, Duchy of 62 – 4, 67 World War II 210; Allied invasions
Washington, George 40 230 – 1; collaboration and resistance
Waterloo, Battle of 73, 79 in 226 – 9; French defeat and
Weber, Eugen 146 occupation 213 – 15, 214; memory of
welfare state 242, 262, 297 306 – 7; see also Vichy regime
West Indies 12, 19 Wright, Richard 246
Western Front, in World War I 175,
178 – 9, 184, 186, 193 xenophobia 160 – 1, 182, 212 – 13,
wheat 98, 158, 207 222, 298
Wilhelm II, Kaiser 174
Wilson, Daniel 159 yéyé 267
Wilson, Woodrow 190 – 1 Yom Kippur War 280
wine 83, 105, 113, 171, 207, 287 youth culture 266
women: in ancien régime 5; citizenship Ypres, Battle of 181
of 30; in Code Napoléon 58; Yugoslavia 261, 283, 299
emancipation of 86, 94 – 6, 139,
166, 276, 290; in Enlightenment 16; Zemmour, Éric 309
enslaved 11 – 12; in Fifth Republic ZEPs (zones d’éducation prioritaire) 293
266; in Fourth Republic 244 – 5; Zhou Enlai 203
in French Revolution 28, 33, 35, Zidane, Zinedine 303
43 – 4; in interwar period 199 – 201; Zionism 163
in military service 65; in Paris Zitouni, Djamel 303
Commune 139; in Second Empire Zola, Émile 105, 113, 118, 141, 162 – 3,
114, 116 – 17; in Third Republic 167
157, 166; in World War I 183, 185, zouaves 184 – 5

Modern France and The World

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Modern France and the World

Darcie Fontaine is a historian of the modern French empire, focusing on

Modern France and the World

ISBN: 978-1-138-84617-3 (hbk)

1 Globalizing France in the Era of Enlightenment 1

2 Radical Revolutions and Rights of Man 21

3 The Napoleonic Empire 48

4 Restoration and the Liberal Order 70

5 Social and Political Revolutions 86

6 New Imperial Designs: The Second Empire 105

7 The Imperial Third Republic 131

8 The Fin de Siècle and Its Discontents 156

9 Global France at War, 1914–1919 175

10 Illusions of Peace, 1920–1939 193

11 War and Occupation, 1939–1944 212

12 Postwar Reconstruction and Imperial

14 Globalized France 278

Conclusion: The Legacy of Empire in

1.1 1665 engraving of a sugar plantation in the Antilles,

1.1 Map of the French overseas empire before 1763 2

Numerous friends, colleagues, and students have contributed significant

Map 1.1 Map of the French overseas empire before 1763.

The Ancien Régime

Trade, Settlement, and Slavery in the Indian Ocean,

Figure 1.1 1665 engraving of a sugar plantation in the Antilles, Library of Congress,

year from disease, malnutrition, and overwork. Sugar plantations were

Race and Slavery in the French Empire

The Estates-General of 1789

If the privileged order should be abolished, the nation would be nothing

Sieyès argued for a single chamber at the Estates-General so that the

The Storming of the Bastille and the Beginning

Figure 2.2 “General revolt of the Negroes. Massacre of the whites,” frontispiece

The King’s Flight and the Radicalization of the Revolution

The Onset of War, Popular Activism, and Slave Revolt

Figure 2.3 1805 portrait of Toussaint Louverture by Marcus Rainsford, John Carter

Civil Strife, Terror, and the Expansion of War

Terror and Revolutionary Culture

The Thermidorian Reaction and the Directory

Suggestions for Further Reading

The Rise of Napoleon Bonaparte

The French Invasion of Egypt

The Coup of 18 Brumaire: Napoleon as First Consul

Domestic Reforms and the Civil Code

Imperial Expansion Under Napoleon

The Expansion of the French Empire in Europe:

Soldiers and Civilians at War

The Russian Campaign and the Collapse

Map 3.1 Europe Under Napoleon (1812).

Russian resistance to the economic blockade of Britain was the catalyst

The Global Consequences of the Napoleonic Empire

Suggestions for Further Reading

The Bourbon Restoration, the Congress of Vienna,

The Revolution of 1830

The July Monarchy and the Liberal Order

Suggestions for Further Reading

The Conquest and “Pacification” of Algeria

Socialist Responses to the Social Question

Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte and the Second Republic

The Second Empire

The Coup of 1851 and the Birth of the Second Empire

Capitalism, Credit, and the Modernization

Figure 6.1 Photograph by Charles Marville of urban renewal in nineteenth-century Paris,

Figure 6.2 “Les Grands magasins de la ville de Saint-Denis—L’entrée monumen-

1 Globalizing France in the Era of Enlightenment 1

2 Radical Revolutions and Rights of Man 21

3 The Napoleonic Empire 48

4 Restoration and the Liberal Order 70

5 Social and Political Revolutions 86

6 New Imperial Designs: The Second Empire 105

7 The Imperial Third Republic 131

8 The Fin de Siècle and Its Discontents 156

9 Global France at War, 1914–1919 175

10 Illusions of Peace, 1920–1939 193

11 War and Occupation, 1939–1944 212

14 Globalized France 278

1.1 Map of the French overseas empire before 1763 2

Figure 1.1 1665 engraving of a sugar plantation in the Antilles, Library of Congress,

Figure 2.2 “General revolt of the Negroes. Massacre of the whites,” frontispiece

Figure 2.3 1805 portrait of Toussaint Louverture by Marcus Rainsford, John Carter

Figure 6.1 Photograph by Charles Marville of urban renewal in nineteenth-century Paris,

Figure 6.2 “Les Grands magasins de la ville de Saint-Denis—L’entrée monumen-

Figure 7.1 Anonymous photograph of the barricade on the Chaussée Ménilmontant,

Figure 9.2 Photograph of tirailleurs sénégalais at Douaumont from L’Illustration,

Figure 10.1 1926 photograph of Josephine Baker by Walery, CC0 National Portrait

Figure 12.1 A French Foreign Legionnaire during a sweep through communist-held

Figure 13.1 Photograph by Monique Hervo of the bidonville La Folie in Nanterre,