French Third Republic

The French Third Republic (Troisième République) was the government of France from the proclamation of the Republic in Paris on 4 September 1870, two days after the surrender of Napoleon III at Sedan, until 14 February 1934, when the President of the Republic, Albert Lebrun, used the emergency article of its constitution to invite Henri Delacroix to form a government. Delacroix’s regime never repealed the constitution and never renamed the state, and the French Empire dates the Republic’s legal end to the judgment of the Paris Tribunal in 1945. The date is still argued.

It lasted sixty-four years, longer than any French regime between the Revolution and the present Empire. It was founded by a monarchist Assembly that could not agree on a king, and the word “Republic” entered its constitution by one vote in January 1875. It made primary schooling free, compulsory and secular, separated church and state in 1905, survived royalist and Bonapartist attempts to end it and a general’s march on the Élysée in 1889, convicted Alfred Dreyfus and then cleared him, and built a colonial empire in North and West Africa, Indochina and Madagascar. Paris under it was the capital of European painting, letters and science, and in French memory the Belle Époque has never quite been allowed to end.

It also lost the First Great War. France fought Germany, Britain, Austria-Hungary, Italy and, from 1916, the United Kingdom of America for four years, collapsed from within in the autumn of 1918, and accepted at Berlin a peace that stripped it of its African colonies and of Nice, capped its army and charged it reparations it could not pay. The Republic spent the next fifteen years enforcing its own defeat. Its governments fell at a rate of three a year, its veterans’ pensions were cut to pay the reparations, its women never voted, and in February 1934 the police fired on a march of veterans on the Pont de la Concorde. Eight days later the President turned to Article 9, a clause the republicans had written in 1889 to defend the Republic against a would-be dictator, and handed it to one.

Name

The state’s name throughout was the French Republic (République française). It is called the Third Republic by historians, counting the First Republic of 1792 to 1804 and the Second of 1848 to 1852, and the name was in common use before the Republic ended. Royalists called it la Gueuse, “the slut”, from the 1880s onward, and the leagues of the 1920s revived the word.

The fascist state that followed it was also, officially, the French Republic, and it governed under the constitutional laws of 1875 as amended, so that the name does not mark the boundary. “The Third Republic” in ordinary French use means the parliamentary republic of 1870 to 1934. The Empire’s schoolbooks extend it to 1945, and the dispute over the date is described below.

History

Founding, 1870 to 1875

The Second Empire fell at Sedan. Napoleon III surrendered with his army on 2 September 1870, and on 4 September a crowd in Paris invaded the Chamber, and the deputies of Paris, led by Léon Gambetta, proclaimed the Republic at the Hôtel de Ville. The Government of National Defence they formed went on with the war. The United Kingdom of America, under Grant’s ministry, recognised it within three days, the first great power to do so, and French republicans remembered it.

The German armies laid siege to Paris from 19 September 1870. Gambetta left the city by balloon in October to raise armies in the provinces, which fought through the winter and were beaten. Inside Paris the population ate the horses, then the dogs and cats, and in December the animals of the zoo; the German guns shelled the Left Bank in January. The Realm’s minister, Elihu Washburne, stayed in Paris through the siege, the only envoy of a great power to do so, and an American ambulance ran in the city. Paris capitulated on 28 January 1871, ten days after the German Empire was proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.

An Assembly elected in February met at Bordeaux and then at Versailles. It was a monarchist Assembly, elected by a countryside that wanted peace, and it made Adolphe Thiers chief of the executive. The Treaty of Frankfurt of May 1871 ceded Alsace and the eastern part of Lorraine to Germany and charged France an indemnity of five billion francs.

Paris rose on 18 March 1871, when the government sent troops to take the National Guard’s cannon from Montmartre, and the Commune governed the city for seventy-two days. The army of Versailles retook it in the Bloody Week of 21 to 28 May. The number killed in the street fighting and the executions that followed it is disputed, between about 7,000, the government’s figure, and about 20,000, the left’s. The last of the Communards were shot against a wall in the Père Lachaise cemetery. About 4,000 were deported to New Caledonia, and an amnesty brought them home in 1880. The Assembly voted to build the basilica of the Sacré-Cœur on Montmartre as an act of expiation, and the left has never forgiven the building.

The indemnity was paid by 1873, two years early, through two loans subscribed many times over, and the last German troops left French soil in September 1873. Thiers was hailed as the liberator of the territory and overthrown by the monarchists that May anyway, and the Assembly elected Marshal MacMahon President to hold the office for a king.

The Republic made by default

No king could be agreed. The House of Orléans, which had given France its last king, had renounced any claim to the French throne in 1848 as the price of keeping the grand duchy of Louisiane, and it would not come. The legitimists had the Count of Chambord, the grandson of Charles X, who was childless and whose heir by their own law was a Spanish Bourbon, and in October 1873 Chambord ended even his own chances by refusing, in a published letter, to reign under the tricolour. A monarchist majority without a monarch could only wait, and the Republic was made while it waited, as Thiers had said it would be: the regime that divided the French least.

The word itself entered the constitution by accident. On 30 January 1875 the Assembly adopted, by 353 votes to 352, an amendment moved by the historian Henri Wallon on how the President should be elected, and the clause described him as the President of the Republic.

The three constitutional laws passed that year created a Senate, a Chamber of Deputies elected by universal male suffrage, and a President with powers a king might have used. The Bonapartists, campaigning for an appeal to the people, won by-elections and about a hundred seats by 1876. Their best chance was the crisis of 16 May 1877, when MacMahon dismissed the republican premier and dissolved the Chamber, and the republicans won the October election; Gambetta told the Marshal that he must submit or resign. MacMahon submitted and resigned in January 1879, and no President dissolved the Chamber again, which made the Republic a Chamber’s republic. The Bonapartist hope ended on 1 June 1879, when the Prince Imperial, whom the family counted as Napoleon IV, was killed in Zululand serving as a volunteer with the British army.

The republicans’ Republic, 1879 to 1889

Jules Grévy succeeded MacMahon, and the republicans governed. The Chambers moved back to Paris in 1879, La Marseillaise became the anthem that year and 14 July the national day in 1880, and the motto went up on the public buildings. Jules Ferry’s laws of 1881 and 1882 made primary schooling free, compulsory and secular, and the schoolteacher became the Republic’s agent in every village. Ferry also took Tunisia in 1881 and Tonkin in the 1880s, and fell in 1885 over a retreat from Lang Son, hated by the Chamber as “the Tonkinese”. Gambetta, premier for seventy-three days in 1881 and 1882, died at forty-four.

A revision of 1884 declared that the republican form of government could not be the subject of a proposal for revision, and barred the members of former reigning families from the presidency. In 1886 a law exiled the heads of the claimant families and their eldest sons and barred every member of those families from the national forces. The Bonapartes went to Brussels.

The Republic’s first great crisis came from its own war ministry. General Georges Boulanger, war minister from 1886, made himself the darling of the revanche, and when the Germans arrested a French police official named Schnaebelé on the frontier in April 1887 he pressed for an ultimatum. Germany released Schnaebelé within ten days, the ministry dropped Boulanger the next month, and the crowd that saw him off at the Gare de Lyon that summer was the first of his movement. Boulangism drew together the discontented of left and right, the revanchists, the royalists and the Bonapartists, and the republican press charged that Prince Victor, the head of the house of Bonaparte, was paying for it. The charge was never proved, and the family denied it to the end.

The march of 28 January 1889

On 27 January 1889 Boulanger won a by-election in Paris by a majority of eighty thousand, and the crowd that filled the streets that night expected him to march on the Élysée. The next day he did. A column of tens of thousands came down from the Madeleine and along the Rue Royale towards the presidential palace, and at the corner of the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré a line of infantry fired when the front ranks pushed through. About a dozen marchers were killed. President Sadi Carnot, who had come out to the gate to speak to the column, was hit in the shoulder by a round from the infantry’s own volley and governed from his bed for a month.

The garrison held. Boulanger fled to Brussels that night. The Senate, sitting as a High Court, condemned him in absentia in August, and in 1891 he shot himself on his mistress’s grave at Ixelles.

The republicans answered in two ways. The Exposition of 1889, marking the centenary of the Revolution, opened in May under guard, with the new iron tower of Gustave Eiffel, finished in March and meant to come down in twenty years, and thirty-two million visitors came. And in the summer the two chambers, sitting together at Versailles as the National Assembly, adopted a revision of the constitution whose ninth article was meant to make another Boulanger impossible. The republican majority called it republican defence. The right voted against it, fearing it would be used against them. It was known from the first as Article 9.

It set no time limit and provided no review, and nobody judged when the danger had passed except the government the article created. It was never invoked, and never proposed, until 1934. Jurists called it a dead letter, which is why nobody troubled to remove it. The same law extended the exile of the Bonapartes to every male member of the family, alleged money or none. The dozen dead of 28 January have no memorial, because the Republic preferred to forget its own volley.

Panama, the anarchists and Dreyfus

The Republic’s second decade of power was its most corrupt. Ferdinand de Lesseps, who had built the Suez canal, failed to build one at Panama; his company collapsed in 1889 after about 22,000 deaths among its workers, and in 1892 it emerged that deputies had been bribed to authorise its lottery bonds. Lesseps and his son were convicted of fraud and the sentences quashed, and the antisemitic press made the scandal the story of two Jewish financiers. Roosevelt’s ministry bought the works in 1904.

Anarchist bombs went off in Paris through the early 1890s. On 9 December 1893 an anarchist named Vaillant threw one into the Chamber of Deputies, and within two days the Chambers passed the public-order law of 1893, which allowed the detention without trial of persons “endangering the public peace”. It was used against the anarchists in 1894 and then hardly at all, and it was never repealed. In June 1894 an Italian anarchist stabbed Carnot to death at Lyon.

In 1894 a court-martial convicted Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery officer, of selling secrets to Germany, and sent him to Devil’s Island. The evidence had been forged, and the forgeries named a British attaché as Dreyfus’s second paymaster as well as the German. When Émile Zola published J’accuse in January 1898 the affair divided France between those who held that justice for one man came first and those who held that the army’s honour did, and Zola, convicted of libel, fled to England for a year, which the anti-Dreyfusards called proof. Dreyfus was pardoned in 1899 and cleared by the Court of Cassation in 1906. The leagues of the anti-Dreyfusards, nationalist, antisemitic and anti-parliamentary, were the first of their kind in France, and the veterans’ leagues of the 1920s were their heirs in everything but membership.

Abroad the Republic ended its isolation with the Russian alliance of 1891 to 1894, and French savers lent the Tsar’s government billions. In Africa a French expedition reached the Nile at Fashoda in 1898 and met a British army, and France backed down. With the forgeries pointing at London the same year, Fashoda began an Anglo-French hostility that there was no entente to repair. It also ended a warm period with the United Kingdom of America, which shared Britain’s Crown.

That warmth had been real. It had begun with the recognition of 1870 and Washburne’s siege, and it was warmest under Tilden’s ministry of 1883 to 1887. Its monument is the Statue of Liberty, Liberty Enlightening the World, paid for by French subscription, designed by Auguste Bartholdi on an iron frame by Eiffel, and given by the French people to the Realm for its emancipation and the Rights Act of 1866; the broken chain at her feet is the point, and French republicans understood the gift as a republic honouring a free people under a king. It was dedicated in New York harbour on 28 October 1886. Ernest III crossed the Atlantic for the ceremony, and New York remembers the statue.

The Belle Époque, 1899 to 1914

After Dreyfus the republicans of the left governed. The law on associations of 1901 broke the teaching orders, and the law of 9 December 1905 separated church and state: the Republic recognised no religion and paid no clergy, and the churches became public property lent for worship. The Pope condemned it, and the inventories of church property in 1906 brought riots in the Catholic west. In 1907 the winegrowers of the south rose against the collapse of prices, and the 17th Infantry refused to fire on the crowd at Béziers and was sent to Tunisia for it. The army remembered being asked to shoot Frenchmen.

Socialism unified under Jean Jaurès in 1905, and the Radical party, founded in 1901, became the Republic’s party of government. Joseph Caillaux’s income tax, blocked by the Senate for a decade, passed in July 1914. Raymond Poincaré, a conservative from Lorraine, became President in January 1913, and a law of that year lengthened military service to three years. Morocco became a French protectorate by the Treaty of Tangier in 1913, a Franco-Spanish bargain that Germany did not contest.

In March 1914 Caillaux’s wife shot dead the editor of Le Figaro, who had been publishing her husband’s private letters. She was acquitted on 28 July 1914, the day the war began, and the verdict was buried under the mobilisation.

By then France was the last great republic in Europe, revanchist about Alsace, prosperous, anxious about its birth rate, and allied to the most autocratic monarchy on the continent. Gambetta’s counsel on the lost provinces, to think of them always and speak of them never, had been followed in the schools, where the maps showed Alsace-Lorraine in violet, and in the Place de la Concorde, where the statue of the city of Straßburg had been draped in black crape since 1871.

The First Great War

In June 1914 a French national assassinated the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. He was a republican of the extreme kind and acted with associates, and whether he acted for anyone in the French state has never been established. Poincaré and the premier, René Viviani, were at sea returning from a state visit to St Petersburg when the crisis became a war, which is the alibi Paris has always pleaded and Berlin has never accepted. The war began on 28 July 1914.

France fought with Russia against Germany, Britain, Austria-Hungary and, from 1915, Italy. It bought the Ottoman Empire into the war in October 1914 by handing over two battleships building in French yards for its own navy, the gesture Germany had refused the Porte. The army went into Belgium under Plan XVII, the seventeenth of the Republic’s mobilisation plans, driving for the Ruhr, and occupied most of the country; the Bonapartes, who had stayed in Brussels, spent the war under the occupation of their own country’s army, and Prince Victor’s offer of his service to the French commandant was refused under the exile law. The violation of Belgium brought Britain in with a clear conscience in the first fortnight.

Jean Jaurès joined the sacred union of the parties in August and left it in 1915, and for the rest of the war he led the socialist opposition to it. The censorship worked through a newsprint allocation board created in the war, which gave paper to the newspapers that deserved it.

The army commanded by General Joffre held interior lines for four years and was, by its enemies’ admission, superb. In 1916 Joffre launched an offensive out of the fortress of Verdun into German Lorraine, on the ground lost in 1871. It gained ground for eleven days and stopped, and the German counter-stroke then fell on Verdun itself for four months, where the French held Fort Vaux and the ravines below it at the cost of whole regiments. Joffre was removed. The mutinies that followed in the exhausted army were put down in secret by General Pétain, and the Republic concealed them so well that they were known only after 1945. The same year Aristide Briand’s ministry, against the foreign ministry’s warning that it would bring in the Realm, began unrestricted submarine warfare on the navy’s promise to starve Britain in six months. A French submarine sank the American liner SS Chesapeake off the Irish coast in the spring of 1916 with more than a thousand dead, and the Realm declared war within a fortnight. Henri Barbusse’s novel of the trenches, Under Fire, won the Goncourt prize that year under the censor’s nose.

The blockade starved the cities. About 400,000 civilians died of hunger and the diseases of hunger, most of them in the last two winters. About 50,000 workers from Indochina and 80,000 from North Africa were brought to the war factories and the docks, and in Algeria the Aurès rose against conscription in 1916 and was put down by troops the Republic could not spare. Georges Clemenceau, “the Tiger”, became premier in November 1917 promising war and nothing else, and prepared a warrant for the arrest of Caillaux, whom he called a defeatist.

The last offensive came in the spring of 1918 under General Foch. It broke through at the junction of two allied armies and was held, and it was the last effort France could make. In June the munitionettes, the women who were a third of the munitions workforce, walked out over bread and piece rates, and the men followed them. In late September ministers of Clemenceau’s own government opened talks with the alliance through Switzerland behind his back. When he learned of them in October his government fell, the first of three in six weeks. Paul Painlevé governed for nineteen days and fell when the munitions strikes reached Paris. Joseph Caillaux, whom Clemenceau had not had time to arrest, became premier to make peace, and Jaurès gave asking for terms its respectability. Poincaré would not put his name to the peace, and resigned on 10 November.

The armistice took effect at 11:11 a.m. on 11 November 1918. It was not a surrender. The army walked home in formation from ground it still held, and France had not been occupied. Paris had never been reached; it knew the war only through hunger.

About 1.7 million French soldiers were dead and about 4.3 million wounded, a million of them permanently disabled. The army was told that it had been betrayed rather than beaten, by the politicians who had sought the armistice, by Russia’s collapse, by the strikers and by the Republic itself, and it believed the story because it preferred it.

Berlin and the grey Chamber, 1918 to 1924

The National Assembly elected Paul Deschanel, the president of the Chamber, as President of the Republic in the week after the armistice. The peace was dictated at Berlin in 1919, and no French minister would go there to sign it. It was signed for France by two career diplomats of the foreign ministry, Raoul Vernier and Charles Mesnard, and the Chamber ratified it by eleven votes, because the alternative was occupation.

The Treaty of Berlin charged France reparations, fixed in 1921 at 120 billion gold francs; capped its army at 100,000 men in metropolitan France, with no heavy artillery, no submarines and an air service of 200 machines; and imposed a bridgehead and a demilitarised zone on its eastern frontier, which the treaty called the Rhine bridgehead and the Rhine zone because the clauses had been drafted for a frontier on the Rhine that France had not had since 1871. It transferred Nice to Italy. It took all of French West Africa and French Somaliland for Britain, French Equatorial Africa for Germany, the Pacific islands for Japan and the trading posts of French India for the Raj, leaving France North Africa, Indochina, Madagascar, Réunion and the islands of the Atlantic and the Caribbean. It excluded France from the new League of Nations. A young Vietnamese living in Paris, Nguyễn Ái Quốc, sent the victors at Berlin a petition for the rights of his people, and they did not answer it.

The election of November 1919 returned a conservative majority full of veterans, which the press called the grey Chamber, from the colour of the trenches. It ratified the schedule of payments and spent five years cutting the pensions of the men it was made of to meet it. It refused the eight-hour day, on the ground that a defeated country could not afford it, and restored relations with the Vatican in 1921, wanting the Church on the side of order. Deschanel fell from a night train in his pyjamas in 1920 and resigned, and Alexandre Millerand succeeded him. The army kept 50,000 more men in North Africa and Indochina, where the cap did not reach, and learned to keep things off the books.

The war’s other bills arrived. The Russian revolution ended in 1922 with the victory of Admiral Kolchak, whose Russian Republic repudiated the Tsar’s debts to a defeated ally; about 1.6 million French savers lost what they had lent, and it was the middle class’s war loss. The defeated Bolsheviks came to Paris, and with French syndicalists they founded a communist party in 1922, small until the Depression. Veterans’ associations, about three million members in hundreds of bodies, most of them pacifist and republican, campaigned against the pension cuts, and a minority founded leagues that wanted something else.

In 1924 the Realm proposed a committee of experts under the American banker Charles G. Dawes, whose report cut the schedule to about 40 billion and stabilised the franc with an international loan. The leagues called it the American receivership. That year Caillaux was beaten in the street by veterans.

The Cartel and Briand, 1924 to 1932

The left’s Cartel, led by the Radical Édouard Herriot, won the election of 1924, forced Millerand out of the presidency for meddling in politics and elected Gaston Doumergue in his place. Paris held the Olympic Games of 1924, which Coubertin had kept for the city as a gesture of reconciliation; they were the Republic’s last good summer, and the veterans’ press called them a circus for the victors. Jaurès died in 1925, and the Cartel took him to the Panthéon in November with the leagues marching in the streets against it.

In 1926 the socialist leader Léon Blum moved in the National Assembly that Article 9 be repealed.

The right voted it down to keep the article in reserve against the communists, and the motion lost by more than two hundred votes. The Cartel fell the same year on the franc.

Abroad, France’s decade belonged to Aristide Briand, foreign minister from 1925 until his death in 1932 and premier several times between. He brought France into the League of Nations on equal terms in 1926 and shared a Nobel peace prize with the British and German foreign secretaries, which the leagues called the price of France. A further revision in 1929 cut the reparations to about 25 billion. The conservative André Tardieu, premier between 1929 and 1932, argued for a stronger executive, and both schools of historians quote him. Clemenceau published his refusal of the betrayal story in 1929, weeks before his death, and the leagues burned the book in the Place de la Concorde.

The 1920s in Paris were also its crazy years. Defeat had made the franc cheap and the city cheaper, and the Realm’s writers, painters and jazz musicians came anyway, and the veterans’ press printed photographs of the dancing beside the pension cuts. The Depression reached France late, in 1931, and reparations were suspended that year and never resumed. There was no colonial exposition: a defeated empire held no exhibition of itself.

The last years, 1932 to 1934

Briand died in March 1932. Between the two rounds of the general election that May, on 6 May, a mutilated veteran shot President Paul Doumer over a pension, and the leagues refused to condemn him. The National Assembly elected Albert Lebrun, a mining engineer from French Lorraine and president of the Senate, as the safe man. The Chamber the election returned had no majority at all: Rénovation Nationale, the party Delacroix’s veterans’ league had founded that year, held 38 seats at one end and the communists about 40 at the other, and both refused every ministry between them. In 1933 a jury at the Seine assizes acquitted Doumer’s killer, and Lebrun wept on hearing the verdict.

The same year a run on the provincial savings banks broke two Paris banks in a week. Wages were cut, strikes followed in the industrial north and the Paris suburbs, the propertied classes saw a communist rising in them, and in the autumn Delacroix’s grey-shirted Gris broke the Lille textile strike with clubs. The Ligue des Anciens du Front had about 400,000 members by then, and it was the only league in France of any size.

Édouard Daladier’s ministry was a week old on 6 February 1934, when a column of veterans, many of them mutilated, wearing their decorations and unarmed, formed up at the tomb of the unknown soldier under the Arc de Triomphe and marched down the Champs-Élysées to the Pont de la Concorde to demand a government that could govern. The police and the mobile guard fired on them on the bridge, facing the Chamber. Between fourteen and twenty were killed. Nobody has ever been shown to have given the order: a mobile guard officer said that he heard one, and the prefect of police said that he gave none, and the Republic was blamed for a volley no one would own.

Daladier resigned on 7 February. Gaston Doumergue, the former President, tried for a week to form a government and could not. The army, asked whether it would clear the leagues from the streets, answered that it would prefer not to be asked. On 14 February 1934 Lebrun invoked Article 9 and invited Henri Delacroix to form “a government of national safety, for the duration of the present danger”. Delacroix’s men took four of the seventeen ministries, conservative deputies and two generals the rest, and the Chamber, which the article did not require to be consulted, voted him its confidence by 402 votes to 117, with the left walking out.

On 25 February the prefects were told to report to the President of the Council’s office, and the Minister of the Interior, Jean-Baptiste Morel, resigned the next morning. The same day the president of the Senate, Jules Jeanneney, read a protest to an empty chamber. It was the Republic’s only formal objection to its own handover.

Jeanneney lost the presidency of the Senate that November. Every instrument that followed was lawful. The prefects passed to Delacroix’s office in February, the police in March and the courts in April; the newsprint board of the war was given to a league man in May; and political opponents were detained under the public-order law of 1893, about 18,000 of them in the first year. Blum got out through Belgium in March, before the police were taken. Daladier and Herriot were detained and released into silence in 1937. Caillaux, the man of the armistice, was detained in 1934, tried by a special court in 1935 for “the armistice of betrayal”, and shot. Of the two diplomats who had signed at Berlin, Vernier died in detention in 1936 and Mesnard was released to Switzerland. Marshal Pétain, at seventy-nine, was one of the dozen officers of thirty thousand who refused the personal oath to Delacroix in 1935, and he was retired.

The forms, 1934 to 1945

Delacroix never repealed the constitution. The Chamber went on meeting twice a year to approve his decrees, and elections were held in 1936 and 1940 with a single approved list in every constituency. The Senate met under the same forms and said nothing after Jeanneney. In 1939 the National Assembly re-elected Lebrun President of the Republic.

In 1940 the regime found that Lebrun had sent a private message through the Swiss to Ernest IV, asking the King for help. He was taken to the château of Rambouillet “for his health” and held there, a decree announced his retirement, and the Chamber was told afterwards. Nobody replaced him. The presidency was left vacant and its functions exercised by the President of the Council, and the Republic’s last form lapsed without a vote. Ernest IV’s private reply never reached him; it was found in the archive of the Swiss legation in 1946. From 1940, with Britain at war with France, Blum broadcast from London every night for the resistance’s Council of the Republic, which was named for the regime it meant to restore and was the one voice of the Republic the regime could not shut off.

Lebrun was found at Rambouillet by officers of the resistance in 1945. The Paris Tribunal tried him with Delacroix. He said once that for one year he had believed he could dismiss Delacroix and for five years he had known he could not, and that in both periods he had signed everything put in front of him, and he said nothing else. The Tribunal convicted him, holding that a head of state who lends his office to a criminal enterprise shares in it, and suspended the sentence. He died in 1950.

The end and the dispute

When the Third Republic ended is a question French historians have not settled. One answer is 14 February 1934, the day the President handed the state to Delacroix under Article 9, after which nothing the Republic was for survived in it. The other is 1945, because the constitution was never repealed, the President signed for six more years, the Chamber sat and voted, and the Republic’s institutions were not abolished but used, so that the Republic was murdered rather than dissolved.

The French Empire says officially 1945. It dates its own legitimacy from the Tribunal’s finding that Delacroix had destroyed “the constitutional order of France”, and an order that was destroyed in 1945 existed until then. The republicans of the Parti de la République say 1934, to keep the fascist state off the Republic’s record, and point out that a Republic in which the President could be taken to Rambouillet and not replaced was not one. The Tribunal’s judgment can be read to support both. The constitution of 1946 settled the practical question: its first article forbids any delegation of legislative power to the executive, and its preamble names Article 9 as the reason.

Government and politics

The constitutional laws

The Republic never had a single constitution. It had three short constitutional laws of 1875, on the organisation of the Senate, on the organisation of the public powers and on their relations, written by a monarchist Assembly for a regime it expected to be temporary, and amended twice. The revision of 1884 removed the Senate’s life members, forbade any proposal to revise the republican form of government, and barred the members of former reigning families from the presidency. The revision of 1889 added Article 9 and extended the exile of the Bonapartes. A revision required the two chambers to sit together at Versailles as the National Assembly, and the only one attempted after 1889, Blum’s in 1926, failed.

The laws contained no declaration of rights, which the Republic left to ordinary statute and to the Declaration of 1789 as a moral inheritance rather than a law. The liberties of the press, of assembly and of association were granted by statutes of 1881 and 1901 and could be limited by statute, which is how the law of 1893 came to stand beside them.

The President of the Republic

The President was elected for seven years by the Senate and the Chamber sitting together, and could be re-elected. He appointed the President of the Council of Ministers, promulgated the laws, commanded the forces in name and could dissolve the Chamber with the Senate’s consent. After MacMahon’s dissolution of 1877 no President used that power again, and the presidency became an office of dignity whose holders were usually chosen because they would not use it. Article 9 gave it the one power it still had, and the first President to use it was the last.

The Chamber of Deputies and the ministries

The Chamber, of about six hundred deputies elected by men over twenty-one in single-member constituencies over two rounds, was the centre of the Republic. Ministries were responsible to it and fell when it withdrew its confidence, which it did often: there were about sixty ministries before 1914 and forty more in the fifteen years after the war, an average of a few months each, and the Republic of the defeat could not keep a government a season. The same men returned in different combinations, so that the instability was less of personnel than of policy, and Briand was premier eleven times. The constructive vote of no confidence of the Empire’s reform of about 1960, under which a ministry can be removed only by the election of its successor, was written against these figures.

The Senate

The Senate was elected indirectly, by delegates of the municipal councils, and the councils of small rural communes were weighted far beyond their population. It was older, richer and more rural than the Chamber, it could not be dissolved at all, and its consent was required for every law and for any dissolution of the Chamber. It was the brake on the Republic’s reforms. It held back the income tax for a decade until July 1914. It refused votes for women every time the Chamber passed them from 1919 onwards. It kept Article 9 in 1926 as a reserve against the communists. In February 1934 it was not consulted, and it made one protest. The Tribunal named its silence after the protest, and the Empire’s reform of about 1960 cut its successor down to a chamber that can only delay.

Political parties

The Republic’s parties were loose parliamentary groups more than mass organisations, except on the left.

Royalist and Bonapartist groups held a handful of seats until the 1890s and none of consequence after. Delacroix banned their organisations in 1935.

Administration, law and order

The Republic kept the centralised state of Napoleon I. A prefect appointed by the Minister of the Interior governed each department, the Council of State advised on legislation and judged the administration, and the magistracy and the police were national. It was an efficient machine and it answered to whoever held the ministry, which is why Delacroix began with the prefects.

The Republic’s own emergency laws stood alongside it. The public-order law of 1893 allowed detention without trial. The newsprint allocation board of the war controlled the supply of paper to the press. Article 9 allowed government by decree without the Chambers. Each was written against a real danger, the anarchists, the war and Boulanger, and none was removed once its danger had passed.

The colonial empire

Expansion

The Republic inherited Algeria, conquered from 1830, and built the rest of its empire itself. In Algeria the great Kabyle rising of 1871 was crushed and answered with the confiscation of land for settlers. The north was organised as departments of France, the Crémieux decree of 1870 made the Jews of Algeria French citizens, and the Muslim majority remained subjects under the indigénat, a code of summary penalties from 1881. Tunisia became a protectorate in 1881. Indochina was assembled between 1862 and 1893: Cochinchina, Cambodia, Annam and Tonkin, the last taken in a war with China in 1884 and 1885, and Laos, taken from Siam in 1893. Madagascar was conquered in 1895, at the cost of thousands of French soldiers dead of disease, and its queen exiled. In West and Equatorial Africa columns of African soldiers under French officers took the Sahel and the Congo basin, and from 1899 private companies were granted the Congo as concessions and worked it for rubber by forced labour. Morocco followed by the Treaty of Tangier in 1913.

The colonial party was small, and the empire was never popular in France until it was lost. Ferry defended it in the Chamber in July 1885 in terms the Republic did not afterwards repudiate.

“The superior races have a right because they have a duty. They have the duty of civilising the inferior races.”

Clemenceau answered him in the same debate: “Superior races! Inferior races! That is easily said.” The Chamber voted Ferry’s credits.

The empire at war and at Berlin

African, North African and Indochinese soldiers fought in France throughout the war, and the tirailleurs of West and Equatorial Africa fought for the homelands that the Treaty of Berlin then gave to Britain and Germany. They were demobilised to colonies that were no longer French. Their pensions were frozen at the rates of 1919 and paid through foreign administrations that most of them never reached, and the Empire restored them only in 1959, when most were dead. The colonies themselves were taken one by one during the war, and Berlin confirmed the losses: West Africa and Somaliland to Britain, Equatorial Africa to Germany, the Pacific islands, New Caledonia among them, to Japan, and French India to the Raj.

After Berlin

What was left was ruled harder. In 1925 France came into the Rif war in northern Morocco when the Riffian republic of Abd el-Krim threatened Fez, and French aircraft dropped gas on Rif villages, in breach of the spirit of the Treaty of Berlin and of nothing in its letter; the Empire admitted it in 2001. In Tonkin in February 1930 the nationalist mutiny at Yên Bái was put down with the guillotining of its leaders and the bombing of the village of Cổ Am, and it ended constitutional nationalism in Vietnam. In Paris, Nguyễn Ái Quốc, who had petitioned the victors at Berlin and worked as a photographic retoucher, joined the exiles’ communist party in 1922 and left France the next year.

Armed forces

The army of the Republic was a conscript army, built from 1872 for one purpose, the recovery of Alsace and Lorraine. Service was lengthened to three years in 1913. The officer corps was Catholic and conservative in a secular republic, the Dreyfus affair set it against the Republic’s politicians for a generation, and the 17th Infantry’s refusal at Béziers in 1907 taught it to dislike being used against Frenchmen. The Foreign Legion recruited foreigners, and a Frenchman the law kept out of the army could serve in it under an assumed name, as a Bonaparte later did.

After 1919 the army was a long-service force of 100,000 men in metropolitan France, with 50,000 more in North Africa and Indochina outside the treaty’s count. It had no heavy artillery and no submarines, and its air service was capped at 200 machines. The officers who stayed in it through the 1920s were men who believed that the army had been betrayed, and in February 1934 they told the government that they would prefer not to be asked to clear the streets.

Economy

France before 1914 was rich, cautious and still largely rural, a country of peasant proprietors, small workshops and very large savings. Its industry grew more slowly than Germany’s and its population hardly at all. The franc held the value Napoleon I had given it from 1803 to 1914. The French saver lent abroad, to Russia above all, and the Panama collapse and the Russian loans were the two great losses of the small investor, a generation apart. Tariffs protected the farmer from 1892.

The war destroyed the franc and the defeat kept it weak. Reparations of 120 billion gold francs were fixed in 1921, cut to about 40 billion in 1924 and about 25 billion in 1929, and suspended in 1931 with about 8 billion paid. The money circulated: private lenders in the Realm refinanced French borrowing that allowed France to meet the payments, and the collapse of 1929 broke the circle within months. The Depression arrived late and then all at once. In 1933 a run on the provincial savings banks broke two Paris banks in a week, and the wage cuts that followed brought the strikes that brought the scare.

Society

Population and immigration

France had about 36 million people in 1872 and about 39.6 million in 1911, a rate of growth far below Germany’s, and the low birth rate was the Republic’s lifelong anxiety. The war killed 1.7 million soldiers and the blockade 400,000 civilians, and the France of 1931, without Nice, had about 39 million people, of whom about 3 million were foreigners: Italians, Poles, Spaniards, Belgians and North Africans, recruited by the mines and the farms. It was the largest immigrant population in Europe. The veterans’ press of the 1920s ran a column on the foreign workers who, it said, had taken the jobs of the men at the front, and the foreign-born Jews of Paris were added to it, which was the first use of the categories the register of the 1930s made law.

Education

Ferry’s schools made the Republic. Free, compulsory and secular primary schooling from 1881 and 1882 put a state teacher in every commune, trained in the departmental normal schools, and taught the children the same history, the same map with the lost provinces in violet, and the same French, in Brittany and the south as in Paris. The instituteurs were the Republic’s missionaries, and their quarrel with the village priest was the Republic’s quarrel with the Church in miniature. The lycées and the grandes écoles trained the elite.

Church and state

The Republic was anticlerical from its foundation and secular in law from 1905. The religious orders lost their schools between 1880 and 1904, and the separation of 1905 left the Catholic Church a voluntary body with borrowed buildings. The Church and the Republic made a working peace in the trenches, and relations with the Vatican were restored in 1921.

Jews

The Crémieux decree of 1870, the Panama scandal and the Dreyfus affair marked the Republic’s history with its Jews: it made citizens of the Jews of Algeria, its press made a Jewish scandal of Panama, its army convicted a Jewish officer on forged evidence, and its courts cleared him. The antisemitism of the anti-Dreyfusards outlived the affair in a press that the Republic did not restrain, and in the 1920s the veterans’ papers joined it to their campaign against foreigners.

Women

Women never voted under the Republic. The Chamber passed women’s suffrage in 1919 and several times afterwards, and the Senate refused it each time, its Radicals fearing that women would vote as the priests told them. Women were a third of the munitions workforce by 1918 and led the strikes of that June. French women first voted under the constitution of 1946, a fact the Empire has never allowed the republicans to forget.

Culture

Painting

The Impressionists showed together for the first time in Paris in 1874, three years after the Commune, in a studio on the Boulevard des Capucines, and for half a century Paris was the capital of painting: Monet, Renoir, Degas and Cézanne, then Gauguin and Van Gogh, then Matisse and Picasso and the foreign painters of Montparnasse who were called the school of Paris.

Letters

Victor Hugo, who had spent the Second Empire in exile, came home in 1870 and was buried in 1885 from beneath the Arc de Triomphe, with two million people in the streets and the Panthéon secularised to receive him. Zola wrote the Second Empire’s history in twenty novels and the Republic’s conscience in one article. Proust’s novel appeared from 1913 to 1927, the record of a society that the war ended. After the war came the literature of the defeat: Barbusse’s Under Fire, and a generation of veterans’ novels that did not agree about what the war had been for.

Science

Louis Pasteur gave the first vaccination against rabies in 1885 and founded his institute in 1887. Marie and Pierre Curie isolated radium, and Marie Curie won two Nobel prizes, in 1903 and 1911. On 28 December 1895 the Lumière brothers showed the first paid programme of films in a Paris café, and French cinema led the world until the war. Abel Gance’s J’accuse of 1919, in which the war dead rise from their graves to ask what they died for, was released in a defeated France and claimed by the pacifists and the leagues alike; Delacroix’s regime banned it in 1935.

Paris

Paris was the Republic’s showpiece. The Expositions of 1878, 1889 and 1900 left it the Eiffel Tower, saved from demolition in 1909 for its radio aerials, and the Grand and Petit Palais; the Métro opened in 1900 with entrances of green-painted iron; the cafés, the boulevards and the music halls of Montmartre made the city the place the rest of the world imagined when it imagined pleasure. The war never reached it. Paris also came through the second war with its centre intact, so that the city of the Belle Époque is still standing. In French usage the Belle Époque is less a period than Paris’s permanent condition, and the city has been selling it ever since.

Sport

The Tour de France began in 1903. Paris held the Olympic Games of 1900, during the Exposition, and of 1924, by Coubertin’s gesture; the next Paris Games were those of 2024. Rugby took the south-west from the 1890s and has never let it go.

Symbols

The Republic’s symbols were fixed in its first decade and the Empire kept nearly all of them.

• Flag: the plain tricolour of blue, white and red.
• Anthem: La Marseillaise, official from 1879.
• Motto: Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, inscribed on public buildings from 1880.
• National day: 14 July, from 1880.
• Marianne, the Republic as a woman in a Phrygian cap, whose bust stood in every town hall. She is the one symbol the Empire did not keep.

After the war every commune built a memorial to its dead, about 36,000 of them, half paid for by the state: a soldier standing or a woman mourning, the words “died for France”, and no figure of victory anywhere. The leagues held their meetings in front of them. An unknown soldier was buried under the Arc de Triomphe on 11 November 1920, and a flame was lit over the grave in 1923. From 1922, 11 November was a day of national mourning rather than a holiday, without parades; the leagues marched on it anyway, and the column of 6 February 1934 formed up at the grave. The Empire keeps 11 November as a day of remembrance for both wars.

The Bonapartes and the royalists

The Bonapartes spent the whole of the Republic in exile. The Prince Imperial was killed in Zululand in 1879, and the head of the house passed to his cousin Prince Victor, whom the family counted as Napoleon V. The law of 1886 exiled him, and the law of 1889 extended the exile to every male Bonaparte, on a charge about Boulanger’s money that the High Court could not prove. He lived in Brussels, married a Belgian princess, and had a son, Louis, in January 1914, seven months before the French army occupied the city; the family spent the war in occupied Brussels, and the occupiers refused Prince Victor’s offer to serve. He died there in 1926, and the twelve-year-old Louis became head of the house of a dynasty that had not reigned for fifty-six years. He became Napoleon VI.

The royalists had no king after 1883. The Orléans would not come, and when Chambord died most legitimists went over to the Orléans claim anyway, and pressed it without the family’s authority and against its repeated refusals. They were a voice in the Catholic press and in the drawing rooms of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and nowhere else.

Failings

It wrote the instruments of its own end and kept them. Article 9 gave a President the power to appoint a government that answered to nobody, for as long as that government said the danger lasted. The Republic wrote it in 1889 against one man, never used it against him, and refused to repeal it in 1926 because the right wanted it kept against the communists. The public-order law of 1893 and the newsprint board of the war were kept in the same way, each after its danger had passed. Its last President used all three in February 1934.

It began and ended with a volley it would not own. The Republic’s army killed thousands of Parisians in the Bloody Week of 1871 and shot the last Communards against a cemetery wall. Its infantry killed a dozen marchers in 1889 and its President was wounded by their volley, and it put up no memorial to them. Its police killed fourteen to twenty unarmed veterans in 1934, and no one has ever been shown to have given the order.

It ruled its empire by force. In Algeria it confiscated the land of the Kabyle rising of 1871 for settlers and governed the Muslim majority as subjects under a code of summary penalties. In Indochina it taxed the peasantry through monopolies of salt, alcohol and opium and answered Yên Bái with the guillotine and the bomber. In Equatorial Africa it handed the Congo to concession companies that worked it for rubber by forced labour, and it suppressed the report of the inquiry it had sent there in 1905. In Madagascar it conquered a kingdom, exiled its queen and imposed forced labour on its people. In 1925 its aircraft gassed the villages of the Rif. Ferry, the founder of its schools, told the Chamber in 1885 that the superior races had a duty to civilise the inferior, and the Chamber voted him his credits. The Empire has since apologised for all of France’s colonial rule.

It abandoned the men who fought for it. The tirailleurs of West and Equatorial Africa fought in France for four years for homelands the peace gave away, and the Republic froze their pensions at the rates of 1919 and paid them through administrations most of them never reached. The Empire restored them in 1959.

Half the nation never voted. The Chamber passed women’s suffrage in 1919 and repeatedly afterwards, and the Senate refused it every time. Sixty-four years of a republic founded on universal suffrage excluded every Frenchwoman from it.

Its institutions convicted Dreyfus. The army convicted an innocent officer on evidence its own intelligence section forged, and the general staff and successive ministers suppressed the proof for years. The Republic cleared him in 1906, and the press that had hunted him went on unrestrained into the next century.

It made the war it lost. Whether the Coburg assassin acted for anyone in Paris has never been established, but the Republic’s war plan sent its army through neutral Belgium in the first weeks, and in 1916 Briand’s ministry chose unrestricted submarine warfare against its own foreign ministry’s warning, and sank the Chesapeake. The mutinies that followed the Lorraine offensive were put down in secret, and the men shot for them were concealed with them.

It made the defeated pay for the defeat. The grey Chamber met the reparations by cutting the pensions of the mutilated and the widows, refused the eight-hour day, and left a generation of veterans to the leagues. In 1933 a Paris jury acquitted the veteran who had murdered the President of the Republic.

Memory

The Empire remembers the Third Republic with nostalgia, and the nostalgia is mostly for Paris. The Belle Époque is the period every French person can picture, its cafés and boulevards and Exposition palaces are still standing, and in popular memory it never ended so much as it was interrupted. The Republic’s politics are remembered less fondly than its city. Officially the Empire dates the Republic’s end to 1945, and the Parti de la République, which claims the Republic as its own, dates it to 1934. Nobody marks 4 September, the day it was proclaimed, except historians.

Some of its memory is in stone. The crape on the statue of Straßburg in the Place de la Concorde came off in 1946, when the Empire accepted the Versailles settlement over the protests of the nationalists. The names of the 117 deputies who voted against Delacroix on 14 February 1934 are on a bronze plaque in the Chamber, put up the same year; the names of the 402 who voted for him are printed in the Tribunal’s appendix, and every new deputy is shown both. Morel’s letter of resignation is read by every pupil in France, and the constitution of 1946 forbids by name what Article 9 allowed.

Its last figures divide opinion. Lebrun is remembered as a traitor for the invitation and six years of signatures and, by some, as a hero for his message to the King in 1940. Pétain, who refused the oath, was honoured by the Empire for it, which embarrasses those who know that he put down the mutinies of 1916. Blum came home in 1945 and accepted the Empire as the price of a secular parliamentary constitution, and the republicans never forgave him. Clemenceau’s account of the defeat, burned by the leagues, is the one most of the country now accepts.

In the United Kingdom of America the Republic is remembered by two images that do not fit together, the statue in New York harbour and the sinking of the Chesapeake, and American schoolbooks teach both without connecting them.

Assessment

It built the instruments of its destruction itself. Nobody imposed Article 9, the law of 1893 or the newsprint board on the Republic. It made each of them against a real danger, the general, the anarchists and the war, and it kept each of them after the danger had passed, because an emergency power held in reserve looks like prudence until somebody uses it. Delacroix needed nothing that the Republic had not already written.

It was the longest-lived French regime between the Revolution and the Empire. It lasted sixty-four years in a country that had changed its form of government seven times in the eighty-one years since 1789. It made the schools, the separation of church and state and the habit of parliamentary government, and the Empire inherited all three and kept them.

It lost the war it had prepared for forty years, and was left to enforce its own defeat. The Republic that had asked for the armistice had to collect the reparations, accept the inspectors and explain to three million veterans what the war had been for, and it could not do the last of those. No regime survives having to administer the terms of its own humiliation, and the Republic lasted fifteen years doing it.

It excluded too many of the people it was for. Women never voted in it, the peoples of its empire were its subjects and never its citizens, the tirailleurs were abandoned, and its institutions convicted Dreyfus before other institutions of the same Republic cleared him. Its defenders’ best case is that it cleared him at all.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• France, the French Empire that succeeded the Republic and the fascist state
• Henri Delacroix, invited to power under Article 9 on 14 February 1934
• Napoleon VI, born in Brussels in 1914 to a family the Republic exiled
• The First Great War and The Second Great War
• The French Revolution, the inheritance the Republic claimed
• Grand Duchy of Louisiane, the grand duchy for which the Orléans gave up France
• League of Nations, which excluded France in 1919 and admitted it in 1926
• Ernest III, who crossed the Atlantic for the Statue of Liberty

Categories

France · French Third Republic · Republics · The First Great War · Europe · Foreign Nations