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Originally published in 1986.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691611136 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #93 |
| Pages: | 250 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.60(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
Read an Excerpt
Decisive Years in France, 1840â"1847
By David H. Pinkney
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1986 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05467-4
CHAPTER 1
The 1830s: The Old Regime Lives On
In 1889 France celebrated the centenary of the French Revolution with a lavishness and éclat recalled to us today, after the passage of almost another century, by the Eiffel Tower. It was the centerpiece of the great international exposition that marked the anniversary and proclaimed to the world the strength and the accomplishments of the Third Republic, itself a product of the Revolution. Fifty years earlier, in 1839, the semicentennial of the Revolution passed unmarked by official celebration or even notice.
The omission in 1839 was surely deliberate. Since 1830 militant workers and republicans had adopted 14 July as an. annual occasion for protest marches, and the government wished to offer them no encouragement. Moreover, although the leaders of the Orleanist monarchy viewed the regime as the ideal and ultimate outcome of the revolution begun in 1789, they were not disposed to sponsor celebrations that might suggest to an impressionable and volatile citizenry that disorder and violent revolution might be beneficial and glorious. In that very year, 1839, the government had removed from public display all paintings celebrating the Revolution of 1830.
The neglect of the Revolution's anniversary in 1839 was appropriate in another way, which its authors certainly did not intend. In France of the middle and later 1830s, one can now see, the ancien régime lived on. The Revolution of 1789 had not produced a new world or even a new France. Institutions of government and administration and the persons in positions of power were different, but the storms of revolution, however much they had agitated the surface of events in the 1790s and the succeeding decade, had left largely unchanged the fundamental aspects of French life — economic activity, social structure, distribution of population, language, and communication. France in the 1830s was, as it had been in the 1780s, agrarian, rural, far from centralized, divided by language and distance, populated largely by peasants, and dominated by an aristocracy of landowners. Those democratic institutions that survived from the Revolution remained, as in the 1790s, alien grafts on a hierarchical society.
In the final years of the decade, however, a new age was on the horizon, and in the 1840s it clearly dawned. In the early and middle years of the latter decade decisions were made, laws passed, innovations launched, careers begun, ideas formed and disseminated, and the effects of a few events of the 1830s emerged that turned agrarian, rural, divided, peasant France definitively toward the industrial, urban, culturally unifed, bourgeois France of the twentieth century. Simultaneously there emerged the ideology of the principal challenge to that older society, the positivism of August Comte, and the ideology of what would prove to be the most widely appealing substitute for it — socialism, both Utopian and scientific. In the arts a few seminal figures — Henri Labrouste, Gustave Courbet, Gustave Flaubert, and Charles Baudelaire — during that same critical decade turned French architecture, painting, fiction, and poetry into new paths that would be followed for half a century and more. France's role in the larger world of diplomacy and empire took new directions. After coming close to renewed war in 1840 France and Britain began the rapprochement that ended their centuries-long enmity and led to what was probably the most important bilateral alliance of the twentieth century. The French decision in 1840 to remain in Algeria and to subjugate and colonize that territory marked the beginning of the second French colonial empire, which in fifty years far exceeded in extent the great empire of the Bourbon monarchy two centuries earlier.
The principal thesis of this book is that the years 1840–1847, long regarded as a backwater in French history, were uniquely decisive and seminal years in the century and a half between the Revolution of 1789 and the fall of the Third Republic in 1940.
In the 1830s France was an agrarian and rural society. Land was the principal form of wealth, the primary source of revenue for most individuals and for the country as a whole, and the determinant of a citizen's position in society. Fifty-five to 60 percent of the population lived directly from agriculture. Seventy-five to 80 percent were nominally rural, and they and, indeed, many of the minority formally classified as urban — those living in communes with a town of 2,000 or more population — were enmeshed in the agrarian economy and in rural society. Paris, with a population of 899,000 in 1836 (about half the population of London), was the only city with more than 200,000 inhabitants; and less than 3 percent of the French population lived there in that year. Today 19 percent of the French lives in Paris and 56 percent in urban zones with a population of 100,000 or more.
Paris was, of course, the seat of government, but distance and the still-primitive technology of transportation and communication restricted its practical influence on day-to-day life in the provinces. Provincial economy and culture still enjoyed considerable autonomy. Regional capitals such as Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Nantes, Rouen, and Lille continued to play important roles in economic decision making and as cultural centers.
At the top of the social hierarchy were the grands notables — the titled aristocracy, the wealthy though nonnoble landed proprietors, and a few wealthy bankers, wholesale merchants, and industrialists. Neither precise enumeration nor categorization by source of wealth is possible, but save for the relatively few businessmen in the group, the grands notables owed their wealth and position in society and polity to their ownership of land. The right to vote and the right to hold elective office were conditional on the payment of prescribed levels of taxation, and the principal taxes were on land. Possession of substantial holdings assured them of the vote in all elections, national and local, and the right to stand for any electoral office. They sat in departmental general councils, in electoral colleges, in the Chamber of Deputies, and in the Chamber of Peers, and they filled top posts in ministries and on the bench and held the higher commands in the army and navy. The Revolution of 1789 and the Reign of Terror had been deadly for many of the aristocracy, but it had survived as a class and during the Empire had been reinvigorated by the injection of the new Napoleonic nobility. After the Revolution of 1830 many of the old nobility, loyal to the deposed Bourbons, had renounced any political role under the usurping Louis-Philippe and dramatically withdrew to their estates, but by the latter thirties most had returned from their self-imposed exile. They sat in large numbers in both chambers of Parliament and on general councils, and, as under the ancien régime, they again served in high positions in ministries, in the Church, in the diplomatic corps, and in the armed forces. Some with disposable capital from their lands invested in commerce and industry. Among the two hundred members of the General Assembly of the Bank of France, in 1840 fifty-five were nobles. But the vast majority of aristocrats were exclusively landowners, and in their positions in Parliament and administration they represented the agricultural interests and gave an agrarian bias to the decisions and legislation they influenced.
At the local and provincial levels the grands notables — nobles and others — were not only the most influential leaders in politics; they also played a directing role in intellectual life as members of local academies and learned societies. They and their families shaped values and social standards and, as the arbiters of taste, set the fashions in their districts. Their local, rurally biased influence in these matters retained a potency now lost, because at that time the barriers of distance, expense, and inconvenience of travel and the costs of printing and post still narrowly confined the influence of Paris.
The opposite end of the social hierarchy in France of the 1830s was even more distinctly agrarian and rural. Three-fifths of the population were peasants, ranging from agricultural laborers through sharecroppers, renters, and part-time artisans to substantial peasant proprietors. Most of them lived on farms or in small farming villages. No generalization on lives, concerns, and roles is applicable to all 25 million of them, but it is certain that most led hard and confined lives dominated by an unending struggle for existence that left little time or energy for interests separated from the land and its cultivation. Between the beginning of the century and 1836 rural population had increased by at least 1.7 million, perhaps as much as 5.3 million, but agricultural productivity, after an upward spurt in the 1750s and 1760s, had yet to experience its revolution. In more than half the departments in 1840 the yields of wheat were at levels now associated with underdeveloped countries and with primitive methods of cultivation. Harvesting was still done largely with sickles rather than with the more efficient scythes and hooks already in use in England. Only two departments had achieved yields comparable to those of contemporary England and the Low Countries. Since the dramatic improvements of the 1770s individual productivity of male agricultural workers had by the early 1830s increased at a rate of less than 0.3 percent annually. In the existing state of technology in French agriculture too many people were trying to live off the land. Peasants, nonetheless, saw land as the only source of economic security, and in the thirties they were in fierce competition to acquire it and to increase their holdings. So committed were they to the cult of land ownership that they borrowed money at usurious rates, ordinarily from local lawyers, and were becoming heavily indebted while forcing up the price of land. Even in those regions in which barren soil precluded higher yields and the lack of raw materials, capital, or adequate transportation precluded development of petty industry, so that peasants were forced to migrate in search of additional income, they chose seasonal migration to jobs in more flourishing regions, hoping to earn enough while away to purchase more land on their return.
Another reaction to the threat of dearth and impoverishment was the development of the domestic craft industry. In search of supplementary income peasant families turned to crafts as secondary occupations for men and women, the latter engaging especially in lace making, spinning, and weaving. A recent regional monograph reported the example early in the century of a single canton in the Department of the Rhône, where in the winter months ten thousand persons worked at spinning and weaving cotton as a supplementary employment. In the 1830s the situation was little changed. In the Department of the Haute-Loire a single merchant house contracted with 3,500 women scattered over twenty communes to make lace. In one arrondissement of that department the weaving of silk ribbons, largely in rural households, provided more employment than any other industry. In Lower Alsace the absence of almost all migratory movements until after 1840, despite an increasing population, attests to the expansion of rural industry in the province, the only way for surplus workers to survive without migration. The development of such industry is sometimes referred to as "protoindustrialization," but it was, in fact, more a revival of old economic practices than a precursor of modern industrialization. Its effect was to permit the survival of both backward agriculture and backward industry.
Peasants had little time or inclination and few resources to engage in activities not related directly to the onerous task of earning a living. Few paid sufficient taxes to qualify as voters even in local elections, where requirements were lower, or to hold public office. They saw little value in education and resisted sending their children to schools that the Guizot School Law of 1833 required every commune to maintain. Conscription records indicate that in 1838 less than half the conscript class knew how to read and write. Popular speech was in the local patois or even in foreign languages — Provençal in the south, Breton in the far west, Flemish on the northeast frontier — and these linguistic differences, combined with high levels of illiteracy, cut the peasantry off from the influences of high culture. Stendhal, writing in 1835–1836, declared that the people living in the large triangular area in the south of France bounded by Bordeaux and Bayonne in the west and Valence on the middle Rhône "believe in witches, can't read, and do not speak French"; on the southeast, he said, Grenoble was the last outpost of "civilization."
Most French lived their lives in the isolation of villages or farms. Travel was difficult, time consuming, and expensive. In 1839 fewer than three hundred miles of railways existed in all France, and for most citizens a steam train was still only a curiosity. The vaunted system of royal highways, well drained and hard-surfaced for travel in all seasons, served only major cities and towns and the few hamlets that happened to be on their undeviating routes between one center and the next. Local roads were usually no more than wagon tracks across fields, passable only in dry seasons. The traditional method of road maintenance by the royal corvée, compulsory road work by neighboring peasants, had been discontinued in 1787 on the eve of the Revolution, and not until 1836 did the state make adequate provision for regular maintenance, repair, and improvement of local roads. A primary school inspector of the Ministry of Public Instruction, describing a rural department of central France, the Indre, in 1843 sketched a picture applicable to many parts of France in the preceding decade before local road maintenance was organized: "Vast stretches of land lying waste, lack of highways, almost impassable secondary roads, houses separated by long distances, the rural population in extreme poverty, the working class in deep ignorance and inertia."
Some few departments had long-established connections with Paris, such as those in the Limousin that supplied seasonal construction workers to the capital, but for most of the provincial population Paris was as far away as the moon. Even the prefect, the personification of the central power of Paris in each department, was a remote and shadowy figure for most peasants. For them the central state existed as the tax collector, who imposed a resented levy on their meager livings, the conscription officer, who spirited away their sons just when they became productive adult hands, and the school inspector of the Ministry of Public Instruction, who tried to coerce them into more public spending on the luxury of a local school. Aside from these intrusions of Paris most peasants lived their lives unmindful of and unconcerned with the great issues of the day that occupied the politicians in the Palais Bourbon, in the Luxembourg, and in the ministries, the intellectuals in the academies and salons, the press, and the angry insurrectionaries dreaming and plotting in the narrow streets and passageways of the workers' quarters in Paris and Lyon.
The new age of heavy industry, world trade, investment banking, and the business bourgeoisie, epitomized in the nineteenth century by Great Britain, had not yet dawned in France. G. de Bertier de Sauvigny has observed that, "From the point of view of the economists ... the France of the Restoration was nearer to that of Louis XV than that of Napoleon III," and the same contrast is applicable to France of the early July Monarchy.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Decisive Years in France, 1840â"1847 by David H. Pinkney. Copyright © 1986 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- CONTENTS, pg. vii
- LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS, pg. ix
- PREFACE, pg. xi
- I. The 1830s: The Old Regime Lives On, pg. 1
- II. Industrial Takeoff, pg. 23
- III. Centralization Made Real, pg. 50
- IV. Search for New Identities, pg. 70
- V. Visions of a New Society, pg. 92
- VI. New Departures in the Arts, pg. 105
- VII. Toward a New Place in the World, pg. 128
- CONCLUSION, pg. 149
- NOTES, pg. 155
- BIBLIOGRAPHY, pg. 201
- INDEX, pg. 231