Robert Tombs - France 1814 - 1914

FRANCE 1814 -1914

Longman History of France

General Editor: J.H. Shennan
Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Lancaster University and Professor of European History

Under the General Editorship of Professor J.H. Shennan of Lancaster University, this new series will cover the history of France from the later medieval period through to the present in six authoritative but approachable volumes, each contributed by a leading expert on the period.

The first volume to be published is:

France 1814-1914
Robert Tombs

Robert Tombs

First published 1996 by Pearson Education Limited

Published 2014 by Routledge
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Copyright 1996, Taylor & Francis.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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ISBN 13: 978-0-582-49314-8 (pbk)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

Tombs, Robert.
France 1814-1914 / Robert Tombs.
p. cm. (Longman history of France)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-582-49315-3. - ISBN 0-582-49314-5 (pbk.)
1. FranceHistory19th century. 2. FranceHistoryThird
Republic, 1870-1940. 3. RevolutionsFranceHistory19th century.
4. RepublicanismFranceHistory19th century. 5. National characteristics, French. I. Title. II. Series.
DC251.T65 1996

944.06--dc20

95-43706
CIP

Set by 7 in 10/12pt Garamond

In writing this book I have been most fortunate in the generosity of friends, colleagues and students. Some, such as Albert Vaiciulenas and Sheila Lawlor, have probably forgotten the ideas they casually contributed at an early stage. Others have been generous in reading parts of the manuscript, contributing suggestions or information, or permitting me to draw on their published or unpublished works, especially Betty Bury, John Keiger, Steven Englund, Robert Alexander, Daniele Archibugi, Christopher Andrew, Tim Blanning, Alan Pitt, Alistair Reid, Lizzie Runham, Chlo Campbell, Claire Scobie, Ruth Pavey and Catherine May. Fellows of St John's, especially John Iliffe, Peter Clarke and Simon Szreter, have instantly supplied expertise and information over the lunch table. Joe Shennan has been a most supportive editor, and Andrew MacLennan a paragon among publishers. I am most grateful to all of them. They have, among other things, saved me from many embarrassing errors; those that remain, as well as the opinions expressed, are entirely my responsibility. I am of course immensely indebted to the work of many other hitorians, as will be evident to all specialists; and where this is not explicit in the text it is I hope sufficiently clear from the notes and bibliography. Without the boundless forbearance of my wife Isabelle, in addition to her intellectual contribution, this book could hardly have been written. I am deeply and additionally grateful to Betty Bury for allowing me to dedicate it to the memory of Patrick Bury, teacher and friend.

The publishers are grateful to Presses de la Foundation Nationale des Sciences Politiques for permission to reproduce , from p. 26 of Les Ministres de la Rpublique by Jean Estbe.

This book has two fundamental, connected and inescapable themes: the aftershocks of the French Revolution and the functioning of the French State. Fundamental, because they underlie the argument in every chapter. Connected, because the Revolution had profoundly changed the forms and functions of the State. Inescapable, because the Revolution and the State are what modern French history is about.

Can one sum up the history of a country so simply? Surely it must also be 'about' the ordinary lives, struggles, work, loves and leisure of millions of individuals peasants, poets, women, children, families, orphans, communities many of them little concerned for most of the time with revolutions, governments and wars? Yes indeed, and they will all appear in this book. But in what sense, if any, can they all be thought to have a shared history, and also a history distinct from the inhabitants of other areas of Europe? What kinds of events and changes could constitute such a history? The overall framework must, I believe, be political. A State and a nation are not natural phenomena but laboriously constructed and defended political edifices containing a wide diversity of ways of life, beliefs, customs, languages, and occupations. A 'national society', a 'national culture' and a 'national economy' are all to a greater or lesser extent manufactured, and were mostly manufactured during the nineteenth century, as all over Europe States were making sustained and fairly successful efforts to control their subjects' lives and even to change their beliefs and culture.

What the people composing each 'nation' significantly had in common was their relation to their State. Except in this sense, I doubt whether there is such a thing as a history of France, or of any other large nation-state, that does not under scrutiny break down into a collection of histories of regions or social groups, or else fade into a wider European or western history. France in the nineteenth century, more than most countries, contained a very diverse conglomeration of peoples. The immense changes that took place during the nineteenth century, such as industrialization and urbanization, did little, at least in their early stages, to make France more homogenous or integrated. Undeveloped rural areas in Britanny or the Massif Central came to have even less in common with dynamic mining, manufacturing and commercial-farming regions such as Flanders or Alsace, while a textile town such as Lille grew more like its non-French counterparts such as Manchester, and resemblance was often cemented by economic links, immigration and conscious emulation. In short, what a woman dairy-farmer from Quimper had in common with a woman cotton-spinner from Mulhouse was that both were subjects of the French State, governed by its laws on work, suffrage and the family, and affected more generally by its revolutions and wars; in other ways, each had more in common with women in Cardigan or Zurich.