FOURTEEN
The ceding of Alsace-Lorraine is nothing but war to perpetuity under the mask of peace . . .
—Edgar Quinet
You are weary of this old world at last.
—Guilliame Apollinaire
WITH THE CRUSHING of the Communards and, coupled with it, the destruction of much of central Paris, for the first time since 1789 the capital recedes from the front of the stage, as France strides forward. The opportunities of peacetime are met with a formidable regenerative surge in industry, as well as in the pursuit of leisure. After sketching dead Communards at the barricades, Manet was back at Boulogne painting La Partie de Croquet. Renoir and Degas came back to find studios; Monet and Pissarro returned from refuge in dank and foggy London. Suddenly, as if in reaction against the grim drabness and the sombre horrors of the Siege and the Commune, the Impressionists burst forth into a new, passionate, glorious blaze of colour, redolent with the love of simple, ordinary existence. They would be immortalising with new life places like Courbevoie, Asnières and Gennevilliers, once front-line names during the two sieges, pleasant riverside villages which, in the coming century, would be swallowed up in new suburbs peopled by the modern workforce of prodigious French industry. Seurat would be painting his masterpiece of summer reveries on La Grande Jatte, the sand bar in the Seine which only so recently had seen Trochu’s Garde Nationale charge across the river in its last, hopeless attempt to break the Prussian ring round Paris. It almost seemed to mirror the resurgence of French literature that had followed the cataclysm of 1815. Out of the ruins, the Hôtel de Ville was rebuilt with remarkable speed, a faithful image of its old, medieval self, and a symbol of resurrection. Napoleon I took his place once more atop a resurrected Vendôme Column.
EUROPE’S BANKERS were amazed to see the first half billion of the ff5 billion in reparations that France had to pay Germany handed over just one month after the collapse of the Commune. The rest followed with a rapidity none would have predicted; as early as September 1873 the crushing bill had been paid off, and the last German soldier removed from French soil. By 1875 the budget showed a comfortable surplus; saving deposits were up 27 per cent; coal production up 60 per cent; and iron 26 per cent; a further 18,000 kilometres of railway track had been built, and foreign trade expanded by 21 per cent. In 1872, the new Republican Assembly passed the first of the laws designed to restore the efficiency of her humiliated army; and with it went a new spirit. Accompanying it also went a vocal urge for revenge which alarmed British residents; they had not suffered a humiliating defeat that had seen two of their fairest provinces handed over to the enemy. Throughout the next forty-three years, as the statue of the city of Strasbourg on the Concorde remained shrouded in black, Frenchmen would ponder in silence Deputy Edgar Quinet’s remark at the time of the debate on Bismarck’s peace terms: “the ceding of Alsace-Lorraine is nothing but war to perpetuity under the mask of peace.”60
This was approximately what Thiers had warned greedy Bismarck at the time. As long as Prussian soldiers stood guard the wrong side of Metz, less than 200 miles by straight, flat road from the capital, Frenchmen would grieve and dream dangerously of la revanche—the dream that was “never spoken, but never forgotten.” It may have been hardly apparent at the time in smugly prosperous mid-Victorian Britain, where Mr. Gladstone was about to give way to Disraeli, a Britain currently preoccupied with domestic debates on reform, women’s rights and Ireland, but otherwise at peace with the world. Yet the settlement in the Hall of Mirrors spelled the beginning of the end of Pax Britannica—though it might free-wheel for a few decades yet. Louis-Napoleon’s ill-conceived war and its disastrous consequences had fundamentally disturbed that illusive structure, created by Metternich, the European balance of power.
THE FUNERAL OF THE OLD TITAN of literature, Victor Hugo, in May 1885 at the Panthéon (just restored to its revolutionary usage as a mausoleum for grands hommes) was a tremendous affair barely exceeded by the reinterment of Napoleon four decades previously. But did Hugo—master of bombastic silliness during the siege—quite deserve to lie among the best and greatest in the land? What about Balzac, Molière, Racine? The spectacle only tended to remind Frenchmen of how, under the dull respectability of the Third Republic, the nation needed a hero. It was not to be the Bourbon “pretender,” the Comte de Chambord, grandson of Charles X, who affected to call himself Henri V, but wrecked what slender chances there existed for a new monarchist Restoration by stalwartly refusing to accept the tricolore—or the principles for which the revolution had been fought. (Once again the Bourbons showed they had learned nothing; nevertheless the royalist “Legitimists” continued long—well into the twentieth century—to be a factor in French politics.) Adolphe Thiers, the old veteran of so many political battles, he who had crushed the Paris Commune, was defeated by a conservative coalition in 1873, and died four years later; Gambetta died shortly after retiring from office, in 1882, aged only forty-four; and with him also went much of the colour and romantic flavour of French politics. Nevertheless, both had lived long enough to see the new Third Republic established on sound, if not exciting, foundations.
The new Constitutional Law of 1875 which founded France’s Third Republic was passed by a margin of only one vote. The system— resembling more closely that of the USA than any of the European monarchies—deliberately did not encourage strong or colourful leaders. The nation felt it had had enough of those for the time being. The President was to be elected, for a period of seven years, by a joint session of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate. He had the right to dissolve the Chamber, with the consent of the Senate; but otherwise he had no power of veto, and in effect played the role of a constitutional monarch. The Senate, sitting in Marie de’ Medici’s resplendent Luxembourg, was to be elected indirectly by colleges formed by the municipalities; thus, in the view of Gambetta, it was to become “the grand council of the communes of France.” Only the deputies of the Chamber were to be elected by direct vote. Every precaution was taken to prevent the possibility of another Louis-Napoleon effecting a coup d’état by means of a popular plebiscite.
IN CONSEQUENCE, instead of being ruled by flamboyant titans like Gambetta, for the next few decades France would find respectable mediocrities like the triplicate of Juleses—Ferry, Simon and Grévy. Yet, as the British Ambassador observed in 1886, in a caustic dispatch: “The Republic here has lasted sixteen years and that is about the time which it takes to make the French tired of a form of government.”1 The very next year there followed the a faire Boulanger. In a momentary outburst of jingoism, it looked alarmingly as if France might have found the new hero, the star she sought, in the shape of General Georges Boulanger. The dashing fifty-year-old Minister of War was the epitome of the general on a white horse—except that his was black. When he appeared, martially magnificent, at the 14 July review at Longchamps—though no more than a simple soldier not over-burdened with brains, who had comported himself with bravery during the lost war—spectators went mad with delight. Songs were heard in the street that evoked the bloody summer of 1870: Regardez-le là bas! Il nous sourit et passe: Il vient de délivrer le Lorraine et l’Alsace! “Look at him! He smiles at us and moves on: He is going to liberate Lorraine and Alsace!” In Berlin, Bismarck’s finger crooked round the trigger. In the Chamber, Boulanger was greeted with less gravity, when the Premier, Charles Floquet, jeered: “At your age, Sir, Napoleon was dead!” Fortunately for the peace of Europe, the inflammatory Boulanger lost the political initiative and, three years later, committed suicide upon the grave of his mistress, the evocatively named Mme. de Bonnemains. In the words of Clemenceau’s savage epitaph, he died “as he had lived, like a subaltern.” The episode said something about the fragility of the Third Republic, the underlying simmer of Bonapartism—even without a Bonaparte.
A quite different political crisis exploded in 1892. Ferdinand de Lesseps, the brilliant engineer and hero who had dug the Suez Canal, underestimated the costs of digging a similar canal across the Isthmus of Panama. To muzzle criticism, the Panama Company had paid money to newspapers and “bought” votes in the Chamber. In 1892, the right-wing press—notably a wildly anti-Semitic paper, La Libre Parole, saw a political weapon and broadcast the scandal. Baron Reinach, an eminent Jew who had acted as intermediary between the company and government deputies, was driven to commit suicide. In the ensuing investigations, only one politician was found guilty, but the mud bespattered a whole generation of French politicians. Even Clemenceau was compromised and had to spend long years in the wilderness—when France most needed his leadership.
In the middle of the Panama scandal, the anarchist outrages, an irrational wave of terrorism which struck throughout the western world, reached Paris. In the twenty years leading up to 1914, six heads of state were assassinated, culminating with Empress Elisabeth of Austria (1898), King Umberto of Italy (1900) and US President McKinley in 1901. Describing the pointlessness of the anarchist cause, Barbara Tuchman writes that, of their victims, “not one could qualify as a tyrant. Their deaths were the gestures of desperate or deluded men to call attention to the Anarchist idea...”2 The first ruler to die, in 1881, was Tsar Alexander II; here his Narodniki assassins struck the wrong target, since of all the Russian autocrats he did most to liberate the serfs, and his death was followed by a campaign of savage repression. In Paris the anarchist scourge began with the bombings of houses of public figures by one Ravachol (alias François Claudius Königstein); then a bomb was deposited, to coincide with a miners’ strike in November 1892, in the mine company’s office on the Avenue de l’Opéra. It exploded as an unfortunate agent was carrying it into the nearby police station, blowing up him and five others. The following December, thirty-two-year-old Auguste Vaillant exploded a bomb inside the Chamber of Deputies; it was intended to be a non-lethal protest, but wounded several deputies and led Vaillant to the guillotine. The week after his execution, another bomb exploded indiscriminately in the Café Terminus of Gare Saint-Lazare, killing one and maiming twenty. The culprit, Émile Henry, also proved to be the perpetrator of the bomb in the Avenue de l’Opéra, and was duly guillotined. Then, a month after Henry’s execution, in May 1894, the anarchists en revanche claimed their most eminent French victim when President Sadi Carnot was stabbed to death in Dijon by a young Italian worker.
Suddenly, however, the wave of anarchist outrages, which was beginning to hold Paris in a grip of terror, ebbed as swiftly as it had begun. Meanwhile, in the backstreets and Bohemia, Ravachol briefly became something of a hero; a verb, ravacholer, meaning to “wipe out an enemy,” became current, while a song called “La Ravachole” was sung to the tune of “La Carmagnole,” with the refrain of
It will come, it will come
Every bourgeois will have his bomb.3
But if Ravachol’s death had any lasting significance, it came in 1895, a year after the last assassination attempt, when Paris workers responded by creating the Confédération Générale de Travail (CGT)—the first time since the Commune that the prostrate city proletariat dared raise its head to take collective action. From those militant beginnings the trade union movement would become integral to the workings of the French state.
ON 6 JANUARY 1895, on the parade ground of the École Militaire, a French army officer had his epaulettes ceremoniously ripped off his shoulders in disgrace. It was the beginning of one of the most unpalatable, and destructive, episodes in all French history. For more than a decade, the Dreyfus Affair, or simply l’a faire, focused the passions and attention of the entire country, averting its eyes from the clouds that were now mounting over the eastern horizon. At this distance, and for an anglo-saxon reader, it is often difficult to appreciate the bitterness generated by l’a faire,where even the highest in the land were involved. In the army, where l’a faire had its origins, divisions were magnified and particularly disastrous. Broadly, the cleavage fell between the conservative, traditionalist, partly monarchist and largely Catholic, caste of the army and the new republican, progressive and often anti-clerical elements of post-1870.
The whole sordid story has been told and retold so often that few can be totally unfamiliar with it: Dreyfus was a thirty-five-year-old French artillery captain, of a moderately prosperous Jewish family, but born in the Alsace seized by Germany when Dreyfus was still a child. Like many Alsatian Jews, the Dreyfuses fled westwards, to escape Prussianism and likely conscription into the Germany Army. The swelling numbers of Jews gave rise in Paris particularly to an increase in anti-Semitism, fanned by allegations emerging from the Panama scandal.4 Though he seemed never to have been comfortable among his fellow officers, and lacking in charisma, Dreyfus was passionately attached to Alsace and France, and it was his dedication to la revanche that led him to join the army. In October 1894, he was confronted by a fellow officer, on the orders of the chief of the French General Staff, with a bordereau—a memorandum—filched by a cleaner from the wastepaper basket of the German military attaché. It was alleged to have been written in Dreyfus’ hand and contained some low-grade intelligence about the latest French cannon. Dreyfus protested to the end of his life that it was a forgery. No one at the time believed him, and after a mockery of a trial he was subjected to that humiliation on the parade ground; then deported to Devil’s Island for the rest of his life.
Terrible years went by before Colonel Picquart, an intelligence officer on the French General Staff, discovered that the bordereau was in fact a forgery. The real spy was revealed to be a captain of Hungarian descent called Esterhazy, an unsavoury man of many mistresses and many debts. Despite the powerful evidence he brought the French General Staff, Picquart himself was given a jail sentence. The waters were further mud-died by a new forgery inserted into the Dreyfus file by Picquart’s successor at the head of French intelligence, Colonel Henry. Eventually this forgery too was exposed, and Henry committed suicide (on 31 August 1898). Esterhazy fled to England, where he died under an assumed name many years later. Because of the French military establishment’s determination to hush up the scandal (at the retrial of Dreyfus in Rennes staff officers even rattled their swords to drown out the voice of the appellant’s lawyer), still more years went by; then Émile Zola entered the lists. Up till then the brutal realism of Zola’s novels had generally aroused criticism, if not disgust, but now he suddenly seized on a cause far transcending just the squalor of proletarian Paris. He espoused it with utmost passion and vigour, to write one of the most powerful pieces of journalism of all time—“J’accuse!” It whipped up such powerful public emotion as to make a retrial unavoidable—though Zola, too, went to prison for his pains.
“J’accuse!,” an open letter to the President of the Republic, forced to the surface all manner of latent prejudices—not least the anti-Semitism that had lurked since the days of Philippe le Bel. It forced people to take sides; Dreyfus symbolised either the eternal Jewish traitor—or the denial of justice. L’affaire now became, in the words of Léon Blum, a future prime minister and a Jew himself, then in his twenties, “A human crisis, less extended and less prolonged in time but no less violent than the French Revolution.” It “would have divided the angels themselves,” wrote the Comte de Vogüé, representing the opposite side to Blum. Zola himself was subjected to a barrage of insults and excrement; at his own trial for libel in 1898, the screaming crowds shouting “Death to Zola!” and “Death to the Jews!” sounded (to Zola) alarmingly “as if they were waiting for someone to throw them meat.” Mobs broke the windows of L’Aurore, the newspaper that had published “J’Accuse!” At cafés “Nationalists” and “Revisionists” sat at different tables on opposite sides of the terraces; salons became polarised; Marcel Proust’s father refused to speak to him for a week because of his support for Zola; Monet and Degas did not speak for years; the author, Pierre Louÿs, and Léon Blum never saw each other again, while many other former friends passed each other in silence.
Divisions reached to the highest in the land; Clemenceau fought a duel with Édouard Drumont, author of the fiercely anti-Semitic La France Juive; and six out of seven Ministers of Defence resigned in the course of l’a faire. A bizarre twist was added in 1899 when President of the Republic Félix Faure was in his presidential office as various supplicants awaited his pleasure in the anteroom. Suddenly the shrieks of a woman in pain were heard; rushing into the Salon Jaune, equivalent of the White House’s Oval Office, orderlies were confronted with the spectacle of a stark naked President. Dead of a heart attack, his hand was clenched with the fixity of rigor mortis in the hair of a lusty redhead, in equal déshabille. (Some visitors to Père Lachaise Cemetery feel Faure’s tomb there is more deserving of the inscription accorded to soldiers killed on the battlefield—Mort en Brave.) As Faure was an anti-Dreyfusard, his sudden death was a blow to their cause; some even fantasised that he had in fact been poisoned. At Faure’s funeral, an ultra-nationalist, Paul Déroulède, tried to mount a coup, but it was a lamentable failure. A few months later Faure’s successor, newly elected pro-Dreyfus President Loubet, had his top hat cleft on Auteuil race course by the heavy cane of an anti-Dreyfusard baron.
For at least three of the twelve years that l’a faire dragged on, the French political scene was dominated by it. L’affaire coincided with the publication in France of the first effectively anti-military novels—yet the most lethal impact was on the French Army, still recovering from its debacle of 1870–71. When Dreyfus was finally rehabilitated, in July 1906 after four-and-a-half years on Devil’s Island, it fell deeper into disrepute than Boulanger had already guided it. None of this went unnoticed in Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany, as internal conflict appeared to absorb all France’s energies.
L’AFFAIRE HELPED OBSCURE ADVANCES, material and technological, as well as political and social, that were being made by France during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Replacing gas-light, there was electricity (thanks to the “Wizard of Menlo Park,” Mr. Edison). There was the gramophone; there was the telephone (already functioning, in Paris, about as efficiently as it would for much of the next century), of which Goncourt observed, in 1882, that it was “the very latest thing, this leave-taking which cuts out all possibility of argument.” There were horseless carriages, and in 1894 the first automobile race took place from Paris to Rouen, 78 miles. In 1885, Louis Pasteur discovered a vaccine cure for rabies. In 1895, Louis Lumière showed the first moving pictures.61Rail networks proliferated and became faster—and there were more train crashes. But, given what it had had to put up with over the past six centuries, perhaps the greatest technological advance was Paris’ new sewer system.
The capital itself was becoming full of the new wonders of the world—not least, inescapable from the eye wherever you went, the Tour Eiffel. It was constructed for the 1889 Exposition to mark the hundredth anniversary of the revolution, a commemoration as well as an act of reconciliation; to hail France’s recovery and its spectacular entry into an industrialised world. Using 2½ million rivets, 300 steeplejacks working only 7000 tons of steel, at a modest cost of ff7.8 million, exerting a deadweight pressure per square inch no more than that of a man seated in a chair, the tower was not intended to last for more than twenty years. In 1909, it was only saved from being dismantled by the fact that its huge aerial antennae had become essential to the new development of radio. Many eminent Frenchmen hated it—“a monstrous construction,” “a hollow candlestick,” “metal asparagus,” or—worse—a “solitary riddled suppositoire. ” “Douanier” Rousseau was one of the first artists to break ranks and treat it as a respectable subject for the canvas. By the time of its centenary in 1989, visitors equivalent to almost four times the 1889 population had climbed up the Eiffel Tower (or, more likely, had taken the lift).62
THE TOWER MAY HAVE DOMINATED the 1889 Exposition, but at its feet had been constructed a remarkable, temporary city in which the central theme was France’s new colonial empire. Providing in part a distraction for minds and hearts from France’s territorial losses at home, like the old British Empire France’s new one had been collected also more or less in a “fit of absent-mindedness.” There had been, in 1885, a bitter confrontation between Clemenceau, whose obsession was—and would ever remain—east of the Rhine, and Jules Ferry eager to make indigenous piracy in the Gulf of Tonkin a pretext for creating a French colony there. He and the other proponents of the Tonkin Expedition became national heroes. Soon the rest of Indo-China—Cochin-China, Annam (latter-day Vietnam), Cambodia and Laos joined Tonkin in the colonial basket. Great empire-builders like Lyautey and Gallieni served their apprenticeship in Indo-chine. Meanwhile, in West and Saharan Africa, explorers like de Brazza and Faidherbe carved out a French empire, contiguous with French Algeria, that reached from the River Niger to Lake Chad and the sources of the Nile. To the north-west the kingdoms of Morocco and Tunisia became “protectorates,” forming, with Algeria, one huge block from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. In the east of the African continent, France acquired Madagascar and Djibouti, and in the far Pacific, territories rich in strategic minerals, like New Caledonia.
Towards the end of the century, more of the map of Africa had become shaded green even than the pink of imperial Britain. As British imperialists dreamed of a Cape-to-Cairo railroad running through those all-pink possessions, and French explorers and colonialists sought to cut across Africa horizontally, there was bound to be a collision. In 1898, it came when an expedition under Major Marchand, having crossed Africa, ran into a far stronger force, under General Kitchener, at a small village called Fashoda in the Sudan. London demanded the withdrawal of Marchand, and there was a violent flare-up of nationalism in Paris. The fleets of both countries were actually mobilised; and it was the last time since Waterloo—and up to the present day—that Britain and France, those “dear enemies,” came close to war with each other. An ugly situation was brilliantly defused by Foreign Minister Théophile Delcassé—recognising that Britain required a free hand in Egypt and the troublesome Sudan; France in turbulent Morocco. His classic diplomacy was to lead to the epoch-making Entente Cordiale just a few years after Fashoda.
TERRITORIAL EXPANSION across Asia and Africa ran parallel with the rise in prosperity during the Third Republic in the 1880s, 1890s and right through to the outbreak of war in 1914, enjoyed by a larger number of Frenchmen than at any other time in their history. Alternately dubbed la belle époque, “banquet years” or “miraculous years,” it seemed like a period that would, or should, continue for ever. This age of repeated excitement, fear combined with optimistic expectation, produced a kind of dawn of the consumer society in what one author dubbed the nivellement des jouissances (“levelling of pleasures”).5 Cutting right across France, both socially and geographically, life was wonderfully, unmistakably good. La vie douce could barely convey all it meant—though the Germans’ envious expression of “content as a God in France” perhaps came closest.
But the soaring prices of living accommodation in the capital accounted for one of the most important migrations in its history. Artists moved from the Left Bank’s Latin Quarter, from Montparnasse to Montmartre. In almost every way Montmartre suited them better. The narrow irregular streets and low houses of what until recently had been a detached village, with windmills, vineyards and gardens, put on the map by the balloons of Paris flying from it during the siege, provided an exhilarating contrast to Haussmann’s monumental, orderly and alienating Paris, with all its stress and dizzy whirl. An earlier generation led by Berlioz and writers like Murger, Nerval and Heine was replaced by Pissarro, Cézanne, Monet, Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec, in turn replaced by Van Gogh, Picasso, Braque, Matisse and Dufy, with the millennium year of 1900 acting as a kind of watershed. There in this sleepy village the artists, and their favourite models like Jeanne Avril, “La Goulue” and Valentin-le-Désossé brought immortal fame to cafés and bals musettes such as the Moulin Rouge, the Moulin de la Galette and the Lapin Agile (variously known as the “Lapin à Gill” or “La peint A. Gill”). Montmartre became something of a year-long carnival, where anyone abandoning bourgeois respectability could submerge his identity for a few hours, disappearing into an alluring milieu of bohemians, prostitutes and criminals. For the artists it represented cheap and congenial living—with plenty of motifs to paint all round them. Slowly arising above them was the sugary white cupola of the Sacré Coeur—the monument to reconciliation after the blood-letting of the Commune, loathed by some but painted by many others, eventually to become as integral a part of the Paris skyline as its opposing pinnacle, the Eiffel Tower.
Never had there been so much for so many. It was an epoch of soaring ideas and creativity. The bicycle and le football introduced new pleasures; the Orient Express and wagons-lits (sleepers) brought new and wider worlds within range of Parisians. As Paris assumed once more her God-given eminence as the world’s centre of culture and pleasure, with every passing year it seemed increasingly impossible that the humiliation of 1870, let alone the Commune, had ever happened. National pride was further inflated by Blériot’s feat of hopping across the Channel in an aeroplane.
In the provinces, improved communications and the spread of prosperity had wrought an unparalleled homogeneity to a country where only so recently French was the native tongue of only one in five Frenchmen. It was a period of unprecedented European prosperity (enjoyed even by poor backward Russia), where French peasants, too, were better clothed and fed than they ever had been; there was an abundance of good bread; consumption of wine and potatoes had increased by 50 per cent in the second half of the nineteenth century; consumption of meat, beer and cider by 100 per cent. By 1913 a nexus of communications, such as roads, books, the press, posts and the telephone, had welded together a unified sense of nationhood. After the British, French financiers were the bankers of the world. By 1913, she was producing 45,000 automobiles a year, making her the world leader. Between 1875 and 1913 a massive increase in state expenditure of ff68 million per annum signified a proportionately huge increase in social services.
Yet, in the vital measure of commerce, France had slipped to third place in the world after Britain and Germany. Even more worrying was the shift in their relative levels of population, hugely to France’s disadvantage. Between 1800 and 1900 France’s had increased by only 45 per cent, that of the new, vigorous German Empire by 250 per cent (between 1816 and 1900). In the Expo of 1900, in contrast to that first great Expo of Louis-Napoleon almost half a century previously, the German exhibit comprised powerful dynamos churning out electricity to light the fair’s innumerable illuminations; while it was left to the host nation to show off her latest military weapon, a long-range gun by Schneider-Creusot. German experts were not impressed. Otherwise— once again—the French emphasis lay on proud displays of colonial progress, with replicas of Angkor Wat; and, even more emphatically, on the new role of woman and femininity in French society.
THE GATES TO THE EXPO itself were, symbolically, dominated by a vast female figure entitled La Parisienne. That figure was appropriately suggestive of just how far at least sophisticated Frenchwomen had come in the Brave New Age (and there were now many more sophisticated women, even in the provinces, since Emma Bovary). As Edith Wharton, embarking on a new life in the Rue de Varenne in 1906, observed, with a touch of envy: “as soon as a woman has personality, social circumstances permit her to make it felt.” 6 There were women lawyers and women tennis players; there was Marie Laurencin with her soft pastel colours, perhaps the first woman to paint wholly as a woman; there was Marie Curie, the only woman to win the Nobel Prize twice, sharing both work and love in a rarely idyllic marriage with Pierre, until he was killed in a senseless street accident, run over by a horse-drawn waggon. And there was Colette, unhappily wed to the rascally Willy, who grabbed all the credit for her “Claudine” novels. (She revenged herself in the arms of other women.) In the 1890s, the discovery of the poems of Sappho, coupled with Pierre Louÿs’ Songs of Bilitis (one of the great literary hoaxes of the time), demonstrated that lesbianism had been respectable in classical times.
Then there was Henriette Caillaux, standing up for her husband by shooting down his tormentor, the editor of Figaro, Gaston Calmette, in his own office on the eve of the First World War, declaring as she fired four out of six shots into him: “There’s no more justice in France. It was the only thing to do.” She was acquitted. And there was Sarah Bernhardt, with her multitude of unhappy love affairs, awarded the Légion d’Honneur (like Dreyfus)—though not for acting, because an independent actress was still not considered a “respectable” profession in France.
In 1904, women’s working hours were reduced from eleven to ten hours; in 1907, a married woman was granted sole right to her earnings; in 1910, she was allowed eight weeks’ unpaid maternity leave; and in 1913, a minimum salary was established for women working at home. Curiously, there was less pressure than in England to get the vote. Although it was a French word, in pre-1914 France the su fragette carried little weight. There were perhaps better ways to influence the political scene. With all these changes inevitably came a dramatic change in dress. Women had to be physically mobile, to be able to clamber into a bus, or get into the new Métro, or into a teuf-teuf. The cumbersome bustle disappeared; instead, between 1900 and 1908 the “Swan Bend” look took over, based on a tight corset, prominent bust and behind. Long tight-fitting skirts with leg-of-mutton sleeves entered the Paris scene. And with the new fashions also came new, daring dances—like the cake-walk and the tango.
TO FRANCE AND HER WELL-WISHERS, as well as the Benthamite optimists, Expo 1900 seemed to herald a new century of infinite human progress, without boundaries. But linking the exhibition grounds on both sides of the Seine, the resplendent new Pont Alexandre III, “peerless in all the world” in the eyes of contemporaries, had its cornerstone laid by the ill-fated President Félix Faure and young Tsar Nicholas II, in honour of the latter’s tyrannical father. To the Kaiser and the nervy sabre-rattlers of Berlin, it represented the provocative Franco-Russian alliance of 1894, engineered by Delcassé, which in turn equalled the encirclement of Germany, Berlin’s anxiety of both past and future. Amid all the razzmatazz, one manifestation they would certainly not have missed that summer was the sombre procession of men in black velvet suits, carrying flags draped in black crêpe through the Concorde, as they did every 14 July. Before the stone female figure of Strasbourg they made emotive speeches, followed by several minutes’ silence, then moved off chanting, “You will not have Alsace and Lorraine!”
During the belle époque the national press increased immeasurably its outspokenness—often amounting to scurrility. Opening in 1886, one new review, La Vogue, lasted only nine months but in that time had managed to collect a circulation of 15,000. This expansion was good news for writers and artists, assured of a receptacle for their writings and of critiques for their oeuvres—but at the same time cut-throat competition led to a pursuit of sensation and virulence in foreign affairs, fuelling the flames of populist nationalism. The consequences were too horribly predictable, as memories of the actual horrors of war faded with every passing year.
THE YEARS 1900–1914 offered much for journalists to sink their teeth into in the political arena. First of all, the triumph of the Dreyfusards signalled a swing-back reaction to militant anti-clericalism, ever lurking in the undergrowth since 1789. L’affaire brought to the fore the radicals, with the right (which was seen closely to embrace both the Church and the army) as the enemy. Following on its heels came an episode which, to English minds, smacked of Henry VIII in the twentieth century. In 1902, Émile Combes, a sixty-seven-year-old anti-clerical politician (who had started life studying for the priesthood, then become disenchanted), came to power in Paris determined to complete the separation of Church and state in France. That had already been begun in 1880 by Jules Ferry, who controversially suppressed religious education in state schools. Possessed of all the prejudices of the small-town provincial, Combes now legislated further against “unauthorised” religious orders; even religious processions were stopped. Nunneries and monasteries were expropriated and pillaged. The army was finally called in to effect the expropriations, thereby confronting its officers with a grave issue of conscience.
The newly appointed anti-clerical General André abused his power deplorably. Officers were set to spying on each other; the Grand Orient Lodge of the Free Masons was used as an intelligence service to establish dossiers on their religious persuasions; promotion became more a matter of an officer’s political views, and particularly to which church, and how often, he went on Sundays. Only dossiers labelled “Corinth” gained promotion; those marked “Carthage” did not. An able officer like Foch, whose brother was a Jesuit, would always be at a disadvantage. It was no coincidence that in 1911 the office of the new Chief of the General Staff fell to a general who ostentatiously ate meat on Good Friday, rather than demonstrated any outstanding military ability.
L’affaire, Combes and André were followed by the most intense bout of socialist-led anti-militarism that France had experienced since 1870. All politicians alike distrusted the General Staff. In 1905, a new Act reduced the size of the army by 75,000. The new Kaiser with his bellicose moustaches, a mass of Adlerian complexes attributable to his withered arm, and his all-powerful general staff, needed only to wait.
IN FRANCE that first decade and a half of the new century before the deluge was still one of relentless optimism—and of contentment. Her capital continued to be the centre of modern art. The immortal Cézanne died senselessly of hypothermia after being caught in a storm in 1906, aged sixty-seven, but close on the heels of his great legacy came the “Nabis” (derived from the Jewish word for prophet) movement of Sérusier, Bonnard and Vuillard (and influenced by the early Pont Aven Gauguin). Then there was the scandalising new group, led by Matisse, who proudly assumed the pejorative nickname of “Fauves.” Entering this world of flamboyant colour at the Salon d’Automne of 1905, a critic exclaimed that it was “Donatello au milieu des fauves”—(Donatello in the wild beasts’ den). Matisse, son of a grain-dealer from Flanders, Dufy, Vlaminck and Van Dongen were all northerners seeking refuge from the greyness of the north in the exuberant colours of the south, influenced by a Picasso just emerging from his exquisite, colourfully wistful Rose Period.
In marked contrast to the Paris of a century previously, in which Napoleon had contrived to whittle down the number of theatres to a small handful, there were once again some forty-odd. Theatre life was as lively, and disputatious, as it ever had been. In 1905, there was another dramatic efflorescence in Paris. At the summit, Sarah Bernhardt reigned sublime. In 1900, she had managed to squeeze her fifty-five-year-old frame into a tight-fitting corseted uniform to appear as Rostand’s tragic twenty-year-old hero in L’Aiglon; despite the absurdity of the casting, Paris loved every minute of its four hours.
In those “Banquet Years,” opera and ballet audiences were as excitable as ever, with the arrival in 1908 from Russia of Diaghilev’s Ballet providing one of the major events on the cultural scene of pre-war Paris, as well as a second important spin-off from the fateful alliance sealed in 1894. The year 1913 was to bring Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring—and more sensation. But, more in tune with the happier mood of the belle époque was the comic theatre of Georges Feydeau, that dashing figure of the boulevards. Speed, the speed of the era of electricity, telephone and motor car, was the essence of Feydeau’s hilarious farces. He drew on rich material from his own life, and his favourite prop was the bed, with people in it, hidden under it or behind it; his central figure, the cuckolded husband. By 1913 Paris already boasted thirty-seven cinemas; one of them, the Pathé, near the Invalides, ran to an orchestra of sixty and claimed to have the world’s largest screen. There was more leisure time to dispense with since the working day had been shortened from twelve to ten hours; and the petit bourgeois was, for once, satisfied with his modest income.
France’s technical successes continued to proliferate: by 1907 there were 4000 teufs-teufs clogging up the centre of Paris, and despoiling the tranquillity of the centuries. Great Routes Nationales were being built by latter-day Bonapartes to rush them and their owners to all parts of France. In 1902, France pioneered the famous Paris-Vienna race—won by Renault at a speed faster than the Arlberg express. The ambitious Paris-Peking race, sponsored by Le Matin, followed in 1907; maddeningly it was won by an Italian prince.
The Republic, writes André Maurois, “was still Athenian”; it had “no reason to be envious of Louis XIV’s France, or of the France of the Renaissance; never had the country had a greater renown or a more justifiable prestige.” All this nostalgia would be summed up in 1913 with the appearance of the first instalment of Proust’s monumental À la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Yet, if ever there was a sign of the fragility, and hubris, of human endeavours, the previous year, 1912, was the year that the unsinkable Titanic sank. And, in Europe there was the rumble, though seemingly distant, of wars in the Balkans.
The nations of Europe hastened to take sides like children at school in readiness for a contest. On the western side, most of the picking of teams has taken place in Paris. First, since Delcassé’s “defensive” Franco-Russian pact, all things Russian had grown increasingly popular—from Diaghilev to Stravinsky. In England, the death of both Queen Victoria (mother-in-law of the Kaiser) and Lord Salisbury, whose policy had done much to seek greater friendliness with the Germanic powers, brought a change of line. A new Germany, lacking the steady hand of Bismarck (sacked by young Kaiser Wilhelm II), became alarmed at potential enemies combining to West and East, and lined up Austria, Bulgaria and later Turkey. Then, in 1903, the francophile Edward VII came over to charm a city still piqued by the imperial humiliation of Fashoda, alienated by the unpopular Boer War and instinctively anti-England; the following year the Entente Cordiale, so unnatural though it may have seemed to many a Frenchman and anglo-saxon, was signed. When fun-loving Edward died, Paris was draped in black, and cab-drivers tied crêpe bows on their whips.
In 1905, and again in 1911, the Kaiser blundered into Morocco, stretching nerves in the Chancelleries of Europe, inciting instant crisis and providing grist to the mill of Paris’ fervid, Hun-eating nationalist press. The Entente Cordiale, once a diplomatic politesse,became an alliance-in-waiting as Britain bristled at the challenge of the Kaiser’s swiftly expanding navy. In 1906, the peace-minded Liberal Sir Edward Grey was moved to sanction “military conversations” with the “old enemy” across the Channel. In the Sorbonne, German experts like Charles Andler and Romain Rolland, striving for peace with kindred spirits across the Rhine, were progressively outgunned by the Écho de Paris, where Maurice Barrès damned Andler as a “humanitarian anarchist,” ready to “betray” Alsace-Lorraine. One of Europe’s best hopes of peace was the Socialist leader Jean Jaurès, son of a road-mender from the Tarn. He bitterly opposed France’s pact with a reactionary, feudal and unstable Russia, but hoped to defeat jingoism with an accord between French and German socialists never to make war on each other. He was convinced that, in the unspeakable event of war, German socialists would tear up the railway lines rather than allow their brothers to go to war.
Events defeated him; the spirit of the belle époque gave way to deep distrust of Germany and her intentions. Three days before the outbreak of war, Jaurès himself was shot down in a Paris café by a deranged young zealot, Raoul Villain. There was a sudden last-minute rally to the army, fanned by the jingoist press; in 1912, the restoration of military service to three years, hitherto vigorously opposed, was greeted with remarkable enthusiasm. The eighteen-year-old Prince of Wales, future Edward VII, received a welcome that would have amazed his disapproving mother Queen Victoria—even though there were powerful sections of opinion among the Liberals at home, dead against any commitment to France. In Paris—as opposed to the calmer provinces—war fever mounted. Even some sensible writers began to feel that war was not only thinkable, but perhaps actually desirable, in preference to the continuing tension—like a thunderstorm clearing away oppressively sultry weather. Declared Abel Bonnard, in the Figaro: “War refashions everything anew . . . We must embrace it in all its savage poetry.” Visiting the France he loved in spring 1914 after a prolonged absence, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig expressed deepest alarm at “how deeply the poison of the propaganda of hate must have advanced through the years.”7