Dreams from the Dark Years: Twilight
- cepmurphywrites
- 3 days ago
- 13 min read
By Paul Hynes.
The French Third Republic was born out of a military disaster and perhaps fittingly died in another. The calamity France experienced in 1940 will be explored in later articles but first we will examine the nature of the Third Republic and the events which marked its existence.
The Third Republic was only supposed to be a temporary measure following the decapitation of the Second French Empire which had preceded it and for much of its existence it was deeply unloved. Nonetheless it is also the longest running French experiment with Republicanism at the time of writing. The current Fifth Republic will take the title at the end of 2028 (provided it lasts).
Many of the events featured will be quickly summarised for the sake of brevity despite deserving and having more detailed works related to them. If any particular event requires more elaboration, I would heartily encourage you to look into it further. This piece will also focus only on metropolitan France, though the history of the French Colonial Empire and the hundreds of millions who suffered under it will not escape mention in future articles. After all, Fascism is often simply Imperialism which has come home.
The fall of (the other) Napoleon
The Second French Empire had been the brainchild of Louis Napoleon, who had sought to emulate his uncle, Napoleon Bonaparte. Like his namesake, Napoleon had been energetic in leading sweeping domestic reforms, colonial adventures, and in making France the most formidable power on the European continent.
What made Napoleon most like his uncle however was his ability to lose wars to Prussia, which he managed at Sedan on September 1870 where German armies under Prussian leadership encircled French forces under his personal command and where he was ultimately captured after attempting suicide.
This effectively ensured the war would end in Prussian victory. With the best French armies having been captured alongside their Emperor, there was little to defend Paris and the rest of the French interior. However, for many within France the situation was not hopeless. Parisians stormed the Empire’s legislative chamber and demanded a new Republican government committed to national defence. Liberal legislators led by Leon Gambetta would thus form the Government of National Defence and the French Third Republic was born on September 7th, 1870.
The birth of the new Republic brought widespread enthusiasm from many both within France and abroad. It was hoped that a Republican government would not only be more representative of the French people but would also be more effective at harnessing their strength to resist the German invasion and force a favourable peace. A vast new citizen militia, the Garde National, was soon raised to defend Paris.
Revenge-ism
The story of the Franco-Prussian war deserves a series in itself but put simply things didn’t get better for France. A year after its inception the Government of National Defence had disbanded with its successor signing the humiliating Treaty of Frankfurt. This recognised the legitimacy of the newly unified German Empire, surrendered the border regions of Alsace and Lorraine to it, and agreed to pay heavy financial reparations. This penalty amounted to more than one hundred billion Euros in modern money and until paid the newly unified German army was permitted to remain in French territory.
Worse, Paris lay in ruins. This was not due to German artillery but the Third Republic itself after loyalist forces had brutally suppressed the Garde National and the Paris Commune it had aligned itself to. The patriotic fervour and radicalism which had given birth to the Third Republic had briefly outgrown it with the establishment of the Commune before being brutally suppressed by the same politicians the Parisian people had demanded protect their city the previous year.
Defeat by the Germans and this brief civil war which followed would shape the Third Republic for the majority of its existence. The need to avenge the national humiliation via a new war with Germany became a popular sentiment almost immediately after the treaty was signed. Revanchism (revenge-ism) came to dominate politics for many within Liberal and Republican circles where it would leak into many disparate issues; the need for a modern and powerful military, the need for a high birth rate and a healthy population, the need for strong foreign allies such as the Russian Empire, and the need for a rational, secular France divorced from Catholicism.
Republican opinion would split on whether to pursue a large colonial Empire with splits over whether it would be a distraction from the primary aim of avenging French defeat or whether it would be a bolster to French prestige and strength. In the end the general consensus was that imperial expansion would help spread Republican values across the world and handily create a large captive market for French goods and resource extraction.
Conservatives and Monarchists viewed the collapse of the Second Empire as the result of moral decay and blamed the humiliating defeat and resultant chaos on Republicanism. They believed the return of a King would restore stability and bickered over which of the three royal pretenders held the most legitimacy. What mattered was the return of a strong central authority able to restore French greatness. Emphasis was placed on the superiority of the peasantry over the debauchery of urban environments and on Catholicism being at the centre of national renewal. Hostility increased towards those who didn’t share the Catholic faith, particularly Jews.
The Dreyfus Affair, in which the only senior Jewish officer in the French army was convicted of being a German spy before evidence started to mount that he had been innocent, aggravated deep fissures within the Republic. Dreyfus’ actual guilt and the ensuing legal battle sparked a broader culture war in which the subject of whether Jews could truly be considered French was up for discussion. The Radical Party was born out of defenders of Dreyfus and would come to be the most powerful political force in favour of the Third Republic.
Conversely those who had viewed Dreyfus of being guilty of being a foreigner regardless of the actual accusations hardened in their xenophobia. Action Française was the result, a proto-Fascist party whose violent acts and rhetoric alienated mainstream Catholics but found an audience keen to rid France of everything deemed foreign, including the Third Republic itself.
To many on the French left, the Republican crushing of the Commune was an unforgivable betrayal and memories of its suppression would shape attitudes towards the Third Republic throughout its history. Some would seek to gain electoral power within the Third Republic whilst others call for workers to overthrow the existing regime and replace it with their own based on existing Trade Unions. Socialist internationalism would bring French and German socialists together in an attempt to prevent another war between the two nations with an agreement that both would call for a general strike across borders should it threaten to do so.
The Sacred Union
Sadly this was another case of misplaced optimism. When the war did come workers of both nations would find themselves led into an even greater slaughter as their parties rallied around their respective flags.
The First World War would bring about a brief but unprecedented moment of political unity within the Third Republic. The Union Sacrée (Sacred Union) government formed in the name of finally settling scores with the Germans would bring in parties across the political spectrum including those who had literally shot at one another from across the barricades in 1871. French Catholics who had previously said they would not fight for the secular Republic now signed up to defend it.
The Sacred Union didn’t survive the war. By 1917 conditions on the front and at home had worsened to the point that a strike wave had broken out in French industries and mutinies broke out amongst French soldiers in the trenches. For the French Socialists, collaboration in this bourgeois war was increasingly untenable.
Their Conservative and Liberal colleagues were happy to exclude them particularly after events in Russia provided a blueprint for a successful workers revolution and fear of Bolshevism spread amongst the Republican establishment. A Conservative-Liberal alliance would hang together until German defeat at the end of 1918.
Although France had won the war, casualties had been horrific and much of the French soil the war had been fought over had been poisoned by chemical weapons and littered with unexploded ordnance which rendered them uninhabitable. French demands on the defeated Germany were severe, but they were forced to share the victory with American and British allies who had competing views of what a post-war world should look like.
Thus, whilst France regained Alsace-Lorraine, some of the more extreme French proposals of moving the French border to the Rhine or dismembering Germany altogether were discarded. Prominent French military leaders, such as Marshal Ferdinand Foch argued the peace had failed to guarantee French security. In 1919 he complained the peace was little more than a twenty-year armistice.
France had been guaranteed large reparations from the Treaty of Versailles. However, receiving them from the bankrupt and beleaguered Weimar Republic became an increasingly fractious issue which would ultimately break the Conservative-Liberal ‘National Bloc’ which had represented the last fragment of wartime political unity. The left would also become increasingly divided following the war between those who continued to seek an electoral path to Socialism and those who embraced the new Communist International.
The interwar era would feature a series of crises which would threaten to consume the Third Republic. Revanchist sentiments gave way to a paranoia about yet another war with Germany. Heightened concerns about birth rates were tied to the massacre of French youth in the war and the increasing economic and political power of French women.
Political disunity would lead to political deadlock with parliamentary intrigue becoming increasingly important as a mechanism for government. One of the most skilled politicians of this art was the former Socialist turned Liberal turned Conservative Pierre Laval who would feature in several interwar governments and would become a fixture not only in interwar France but on the international stage, becoming Time Magazine’s Man of the Year in 1931.
Internationally, attempts to find a more equitable and lasting peace settlement would flutter but be hamstrung by French concerns over whether the new Republican Germany should be isolated from or integrated into the international community. The Wall Street Crash and resulting Great Depression would put a final end to these notions as the capitalist powers retreated inwards and Germany degenerated into Nazism.
The next Napoleon?
France had initially seemed to weather the global depression better than the other major capitalist economies with stability owed to large gold reserves and a strong Franc. By the mid-Thirties however the strength of the Franc had become a curse with deflation causing industry to stagnate whilst wages fell and unemployment rose. French workers became increasingly militant as they faced greater assaults on the limited rights they had gained. The French Communist Party prepared to mobilise for what appeared to be the final crisis of Capitalism.
The most potent threats to the Third Republic would come from the political right, however. Action Française had been joined by new right-wing veterans’ movements such as the Croix de Feu. These movements saw the sacrifices of the war being betrayed by a Republican system which was inherently corrupt and decaying.
A strongman was looked for to revitalize France and Maréchal Philippe Pétain appeared the ideal candidate to many. Pétain had become a national hero following his leadership of French forces in the Battle of Verdun, the bloodiest battle of the First World War. The German attempt to break the French lines had failed as had their hopes of bleeding the French army to death. Despite over half a million casualties, the French army had emerged victorious.
It was not a decisive victory like Sedan had been for the Germans, but it had a major impact on French national prestige. Pétain became the figurehead of this victory and became a national hero. The phrase “Ils ne passeront pas!” (They shall not pass!) came to summarise French grit and determination to defend the Fatherland and was often (mistakenly) attributed to Pétain.
In 1917 when a wave of mutinies broke out amongst French soldiers it was Pétain who was sent to speak to the mutineers. After actively listening to their concerns, he quelled further revolts through a mix of improved conditions and brutal punishments. To many he appeared uniquely capable of saving France not only from foreign invaders but also the revolutionary tendencies of the French people.
The First World War had a great impact on Pétain’s personal politics. Whilst he had always been a conservative, the experience of Verdun had given him a newfound belief in the sanctity of the peasant-soldier. He mythologised a people physically and spiritually connected to the countryside, who valued only work, family, faith, and their Fatherland which they had been willing to lay down their lives for in great numbers.
This idealised view of the peasantry represented the real France to Pétain rather than what he viewed as the amoral and multicultural cities the Republic was built upon. Any project for national revival would have to be based around returning the French people to this simple, largely fictional lifestyle.
The far-right moment finally came on the 6th of February 1934. The Stavitsky affair, a scandal exposing major institutional corruption, had brought down the existing government in quick succession over the previous weeks. The fact the con man at the centre of it was a Jew whose family had fled the Russian Empire further emboldened antisemites and xenophobes. The massed ranks of Action Française, Croix-de-feu, and other reactionary movements assembled in Paris for what appeared to be an attempt to seize control of the capital.
What followed was a series of violent clashes between the reactionaries, police, and left-wing counter-protestors. If it had indeed been a coup, it was a poorly coordinated one with both the legislative assembly and Presidential palace being targeted. The police stayed loyal to the Republic and successfully blocked the reactionaries from entering either building before eventually forcing them to disperse. The French army did not intervene and Pétain chose to distance himself from the episode.
The violence managed to bring down yet another government, this time a centre-left one under the Radical Prime Minister Édouard Daladier, but the Republic was temporarily safe. The incident provided an epiphany for the Republican and revolutionary left, at odds ever since the First World War, that what had happened in Germany the previous year had almost happened in France. What was needed was a broad left-wing alliance to quell the Fascist threat.
The Popular Front
Following successful negotiations the Communists, Radicals, and Socialists stood together on the Front Populaire (Popular Front) ticket in the 1936 legislative elections, winning a majority of seats in the assembly. Leon Blum, a socialist deputy whom Action Française members had tried to lynch only a few months beforehand, was now Prime Minister.
After years of political stagnation, the Popular Front introduced sweeping economic and social reforms. Radicals and Socialists formed the government with the Communists provided votes in the assembly. Trade unions were strengthened and wage rises were won in many sectors after successful strikes. A 40-hour working week was introduced with a fortnight of paid leave for all French workers. It would not be long before French coastal towns were full of working-class families taking holidays to the seaside, much to the dismay of more genteel tourists.
This was one of many complaints for those on the right who saw this Communist-supported government with a Jewish Prime Minister as their worst nightmare come true. With Nazi Germany growing increasingly powerful the phrase “Better Hitler than Blum” became popular in anti-Popular Front demonstrations, declaring that France in its current state was not worth fighting for and could perhaps be improved by a German victory. Other reactionaries sought to take matters into their own hands and embarked on a campaign of terrorist violence.
While to British readers the name La Cagoule may not sound any more fearsome than a handy waterproof jacket, in the years of the Popular Front they were a well-connected and highly violent secret society which attempted to force the reactionary takeover many on the French far-right were yearning for, a sort of French Ku Klux Klan. La Cagoule’s military links threatened to upend the tense truce between the military and the Republic. The events of February 1934 had shown a reluctance for the military to move against the Republic openly but links between La Cagoule and French officers were widely suspected. Calls to modernise the military around a corps of professional soldiers were met with scepticism from Republican governments who felt a conscript army would be less likely to go along with a coup. It also led to maintaining long-standing commanders, many of whom were in their seventies, provided they tempered their political beliefs.
After several successful assassinations, the exposure of their network would extinguish the Cagoulards before they were able to enact a plan of mass poisonings against the Popular Front. However, many of their alleged supporters avoided scrutiny, including future French leaders Charles de Gaulle, Henri Giraud, and Francois Mitterand.
The Popular Front would not long outlast them. Capital flight led to inflation the new government struggled to control, forcing them to devalue the Franc and erase much of the real value of the hard-earned wage increases. Whilst their legislative agenda had enjoyed some success, they also found themselves being blocked increasingly by the conservative dominated senate.
The growing threat of Nazi Germany led to the Popular Front, many of whom were pacifists, reluctantly speeding up rearmament whilst also attempting to covertly provide aid to Republican Spain in the Spanish Civil War. These illicit attempts to provide aid led to protests from the right who supported Franco's Nationalists but also those in the centre who felt sending arms to Spain was hampering French rearmament whilst also provoking the Germans who were far more blatantly assisting Franco. Conversely there were many on the left who felt the government’s stated policy of non-intervention was cowardly in the face of the Fascist aggression and called for the Popular Front to support the Republicans wholeheartedly. Some personally travelled south to fight alongside their Spanish comrades in the International Brigades.
Facing a splintering coalition, Blum resigned in June 1937 to be replaced once more by Édouard Daladier. Whilst Daladier had initially supported the Popular Front his new government soon began to lean to the right, curtailing the ability for workers to strike and placing the Communist Party under surveillance. Nonetheless some elements of Popular Front policy were retained such as the 40-hour working week. Covert support for the Spanish Republic was abandoned and following the fall of Barcelona Daladier’s government officially recognised Franco’s regime.
Pétain became the first French ambassador to Fascist Spain, which to many signalled the elderly Maréchal’s retirement.
Sleepwalking
With France now surrounded by Fascist powers, Daladier sped up rearmament and tried to build collective security with the United Kingdom and Soviet Union. He would succeed in getting British support but negotiations with the Soviets would wither after he and Neville Chamberlain chose to sign over the Sudetenland to Germany rather than go to war over Czechoslovakia. Italian attempts to extort France for land and colonies in early 1939 would be met with a much less accommodating response, and soon containment of the Axis powers became the prevailing strategy following the German dismemberment of the rest of Czechoslovakia.
Daladier had been reluctant to offer an unconditional guarantee to Poland against German aggression. He had felt it gave the Poles too much confidence to disrupt last ditch Anglo-French efforts to secure an alliance with the Soviets. Nonetheless he followed the British in promising to declare war should Germany attack Poland, even as hopes for an alliance with Moscow faded following the signing of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact in August.
Despite this, by 1939 it could be said that Daladier had saved the Republic from internal and external challenges. Whilst parties of the far-left and far-right were growing in popularity, he sat astride the centre as a politically effective and genuinely popular Prime Minister. France with its large, captive colonial market and strong trading relationship with the UK and USA was far more dynamic than the failed Nazi autarky policies when it came to rearmament.
French industry was successfully outpacing the Germans with the French military having more tanks and planes then their German opponents. The French public largely supported war with Germany if necessary, confident that French industrial and military power would achieve another victory.
Next time we will examine what went wrong. Could the Third Republic have survived the Second World War or was this crisis always going to be the final nail in the coffin?
Paul Hynes is the author of the Decisive Darkness series and the Red Fuhrer series.