From revolutionaries to citizens : antimilitarism in France, 1870-1914

285 Pages·2002·3.198 MB·English

by  Paul B Miller

FROM REVOLUTIONARIES TO CITIZENS
paul b. miller
FROM REVOLUTIONARIES TO CITIZENS
Antimilitarism in France, 1870–1914
U
duke university press
Durham and London
2002
∫ 2002 duke university press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper $
Typeset in Minion by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication
Data appear on the last printed page
of this book.
if everyone would only
fight for his own convictions,
there would be no wars.
Prince Andrei to Pierre, in
War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
CONTENTS
acknowledgments xi
introduction:
‘‘The Revolution That’s Coming’’ 1
1. origins of war:
The Roots of Antimilitarism
in the Third Republic 12
2. antimilitarist armies:
Structures and Strategies 37
3. enemies and allies 65
4. antimilitarist militants:
The Question of Commitment 92
5. glory to the 17th! 116
6. antimilitarist wars i:
The Battle Within 145
7. antimilitarist wars ii:
The Battle Without 173
epilogue: En Avant! 201
notes 213
bibliography 249
index 267
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This manuscript lay essentially dormant from spring 1995, when I submitted
it as a Ph.D. thesis, to summer 1999, when I finally had the time and, truth be
told, income to worry about it. Thus my first words of thanks deserve to go
to my new employer and academic life savior, Western Maryland College.
While all the faculty, administration, and especially my history colleagues
have been tolerant of my frantic e√orts to finish this book during my first
years of teaching, I especially want to mention President Joan Develin Coley
and Professor Ted Evergates, whose initial support helped me to realize my
dream of publishing, and Professor Donna Evergates, who never let me feel
guilty when the publisher’s deadlines conflicted with departmental ones.
At Yale my advisers John Merriman and Paul Kennedy made graduate
school a delight in more ways than just intellectual ones. I am overjoyed to
now call them friends, foremost, but also colleagues. Other professors whose
knowledge and kindness helped usher this book from hell to hardcover
include David Bell, Michael Burns, Roger Chickering, Sir Michael Howard,
Douglas Porch, Len Smith, Jay Winter, and my Duke readers—Paul Jan-
kowski and the anonymous reviewer. My grad school buddy, Talbot Imlay,
has put up with so many questions from me over the years that I feel guilty
being able to o√er only my thanks to him.
In France Professors Jean-Jacques Becker, Rémy Cazals, Jacques Julliard,
and Christophe Prochasson, whom I am sure have long forgotten me by
now, were gracious with their ideas and, most important for a novice Ameri-
can researcher, encouragement. L’Institut CGT d’Histoire Sociale was gra-
cious with its photos. Thanks, too, to the numerous archivists and librarians
from Kew to Carcassonne who survived my time constraints and accented
French to get me the goods. Teo Ruiz and Rachel Fuchs helped make several
of these contacts possible, and memorable.
At Duke, my editor Valerie Millholland’s patience with the revisions and
her unflagging support for my e√orts calmed my anxieties and made me feel
fortunate to be publishing with such a professional press. My day-to-day
crises were ably handled by Valerie’s assistant Miriam Angress. Back in
Maryland, Margaret Gri≈n never flinched when I asked her to photocopy or
paginate the manuscript, yet again; nor Wallace Newsome when I asked him
to reprint it.
On the financial end, generous research support came from a Georges
Lurcy Fellowship, the MacArthur Foundation, and a wmc faculty develop-
ment grant.
Sources of moral support were even more forthcoming. My undergradu-
ate mentor and close friend Charles Dellheim has su√ered it all, and then
some, and I thank him for always sticking close by. In Europe, Karin, Jürgen,
and Julian Findeisen gave and continue to give me a home away from home
that has made my time abroad, and my life in general, much more meaning-
ful. Karin additionally helped me translate some German documents, while
Jürgen helped me dig them up. Hilari Allred, John Eglin, Aunt Gloria, David
Herrmann, Stéphanie Laithier, Jan Mahoney, James Najarian, Jay Schwartz,
and Danno and Ange were more important to me—whether they read the
manuscript or not—than they will ever realize. Mom, Dad, Ellie, Bill, and
Tyler kept me going in ways that, come to think of it, they probably realize all
too well.
xii acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
‘‘The Revolution That’s Coming’’
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Toward the end of a series of articles on revolutionary syndicalism that
appeared in 1906 in the conservative Paris daily L’Écho de Paris, journalist
Gaston Dru wrote in exasperation:
I stop myself, for it would take me a book to give the history of
antimilitarism since 1902, to study the formation of groups like the
Ligue internationale pour la défense du soldat, the Ligue antimili-
tariste internationale . . . to analyze the issues of La Voix du Peuple, Le
Conscrit . . . to recapitulate the outcome of this agitation: the inci-
dents in the Brest and Toulon arsenals, where soldiers sang the ‘‘Inter-
nationale’’ . . . Poitiers, where artillery men revolted . . . Auxerre,
where thirteen soldiers deserted in less than a year. I stop myself, for it
is impossible to describe the storm of insanity that, for two years now,
has swept away the reason of the country.∞
The ‘‘storm of insanity’’ that Dru felt demanded a book-length account to
comprehend fully is the subject of this work. Yet rather than stopping in 1906
when the storm was near its height, this study will examine French anti-
militarism from the establishment of the Third Republic during the Franco-
Prussian War of 1870–1871 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Further, it
will not be limited to syndicalists (trade unionists) but will range from
anarchism to socialism in an e√ort to encompass the di√erent antimilitarist
ideologies and strategies that existed in this period.
One objective of this book, then, is to produce a long-overdue narrative
of the antimilitarist propaganda and activities of the French Left prior to the
First World War. Yet it is bound to be tricky to write such a history when the
most devastating and, some have argued recently, ‘‘unnecessary’’ military
conflagration the world had ever seen comes at the end of it.≤ The obvious
problem is that one tends to be blinded by the outcome—the yielding of the
antimilitarists before the forces pressing for war—and thereby lose all sense
of the processes that allowed the Left to accept the war. In other words, al-
though scholars have variously sought to explain why antimilitarists ‘‘failed’’
to move a single man to resist war in August 1914, they themselves have failed
to look closely at the steps that led the Left to do nothing in the first place.
How was it that the French Left, which succeeded in creating the most
antimilitarist culture and society in pre-World War I Europe, came to accept
and, in many instances, support war in 1914? By posing the central question
thus, this study shifts the emphasis from the weaknesses of the Left to its
undeniable strength as a force for popular resistance to unjust militarism,
and as a threat, in the eyes of the public powers, to a successful mobilization.
This does not mean that I have ignored the dominant explanations for the
lack of a coherent leftist response to the war, such as the waning of revolu-
tionary syndicalism from 1909 to 1914 and its inability to formulate a defini-
tive plan for what to do in the case of war. On the contrary, these and other
causes for ‘‘capitulation,’’ including governmental repression and ideological
and strategical disunity, are explored through much new research from local
police and Interior Ministry archives.
Yet alongside the general account of the rising and declining fortunes of
the Left, this work examines the changing language and meaning of the
antimilitarist propaganda. It is concerned, in short, with how the experience
of protest shaped the identity of Frenchness. In this regard I refer more
generally to French citizenship than to republicanism, although after the
Dreyfus A√air republicanism is increasingly part of it. As Philip Nord has
shown, various aspects of republican culture, including national holidays,
public monuments, newspapers, and membership in assorted leagues, gave
strength to democratic public life in the nineteenth century and gave shape
to ‘‘a particular kind of citizen: a conscientious human being who revered
the philosophes and the revolutionaries of 1789, who valued liberty, laicity,
and the riches a√orded by literacy and a vital associational life.’’ There is no
need for Nord to study anarchists, trade unionists, or even socialists because
their modus operandi, in theory, was to reject this ‘‘bourgeois’’ national
model of civil society in favor of an international, socialist one. But as he
2 from revolutionaries to citizens