Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective (64 page)

these historians have come to view the lawmakers of late-nineteenth-

century and early-twentieth-century France much as we have viewed the

revolutionaries: namely, as motivated by a mix of geostrategic and domestic

concerns. The key dynamic here was demography. Whereas, between 1850

and 1910, the population of France grew by only about 3.4 million to just

over 39 million, the German population was forging ahead from 33.4 to

58.4 million. While all of the Western industrializing countries experienced

a falling birthrate in this period, France lost out most in terms of absolute –

and relative – numbers. The strategic results likely to follow from this

trend necessarily obsessed French policymakers from 1870 on. “In the

7 See Doyle,
The Oxford History of the French Revolution
, esp. pp. 407–10, for a more detailed discussion of this subject.

8 From a review by Philip Nord in
American Historical Review
102 ( June 1997): 830–31.

Conclusion: the Revolution in the French and global context

263

wake of France’s defeat by Germany and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine,

leaders of the Third Republic were painfully aware of the international im-

plications of the decline; the German victory underscored the relationship

between population and national might, at least as measured by military

strength.”9

This newly urgent French sense of “losing out” in the endless competi-

tion of European states served as one catalyst for the rise of the welfare state

in France. Logically enough, the status of women was most immediately at

issue. As Rachel Fuchs has put it: “To remedy depopulation, . . . reformers

placed reproduction at the center of the cultural crisis and positioned

women as mothers, regenerators of a degenerating race. The valorization of

maternity translated into legislation, as French bureaucrats and social re-

formers enacted family reforms before they developed welfare regulations

directly affecting men” – hence the laws of the next few decades granting

pensions to unmarried as well as married mothers and widows, protecting

children, and establishing maternity leave. Yet, as Fuchs and a number

of like-minded historians have pointed out, in France (as in the other

major states) politicians caught up in strategic anxieties had more than the

status of mothers in their sights. They harped upon the “need to improve

the physical and productive efficiency of the mass of the population.”

They subjected issues of “degeneration,” illness, and poverty to careful

analysis and looked for ways to increase the numbers and enhance the

living conditions of the masses. Employers naturally wanted healthy

workers and pressured the government to implement welfare measures

that, by improving workers’ lives, would increase “national efficiency.”10

Palpably, more was involved here (in the French case) than resent-

ment over the outcome of the Franco-Prussian War and fear of a unified

Germany. Historians working in this area have done well to insist on the

importance for welfare advocates of new notions of state intervention in

citizens’ lives, of a republican “solidarist” philosophy perpetuating the

revolutionary values of “liberty, equality, and fraternity,” of bourgeois

anxieties regarding working-class unrest, and of recent advances in medical

science bearing upon theories of “racial degeneration.” Yet, somehow, it

all seemed to come back in the end to the larger concern over France’s role

in the world. Hence, for example, the ever-present patriotic theme under-

lying republican worries about public health: France’s population had to

overcome its physical inferiority to the German people.11 No more than

9 Karen Offen, “Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism in Fin-de-Siècle France,”

American Historical Review
89 ( June 1984): 651–52.

10 Cited from Elinor A. Accampo, Rachel G. Fuchs, Mary Lynn Stewart, et al.,
Gender and
the Politics of Social Reform in France
,
1870–1914
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 166, 174–75.

11 Elinor Accampo, cited in ibid., p. 15.

264

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

the policymakers of the old regime and the revolutionary era could the

leaders of pre–World War I France insulate themselves from the pressures

of the outside world.12

And of course, as other historians probing these same issues have been

quick to point out, French anxieties about that outside world would only

intensify in the years after the 1914–18 conflict. During the 1920s and

1930s, Sarah Fishman has noted, the 1.4 million men killed in the Great

War, the continuing fall in the birthrate, and the increasingly isolated diplo-

matic position of France in a time of German recovery were factors that

favored the arguments of those advocating drastic measures to strengthen

the family and rebuild the population. After years of lobbying by conserva-

tives, feminists, republicans, pronatalists, Catholics, and others, the Third

Republic finally promulgated an extensive Family Code in July 1939 that

was designed to bolster traditional gender roles within the family and so

encourage Frenchwomen’s customary procreative function. In introducing

this code, Prime Minister Daladier, in language paraphrased by Fishman,

sounded the ineluctable patriotic alarm. “Population decline meant fewer

men to serve in the army, fewer people to share the burden of military

and social spending, labor shortages, abandoned farms, even colonial

contraction; a feeble population also dealt a blow to France’s intellectual

and artistic prestige.”13 Once again, international and domestic issues were

inseparably intertwined; once again, the old dialectic assumed new life

against the somber background of a France placed profoundly at risk.

This dialectic persisted through and beyond the bleak years of the

Occupation. Some of the most compelling evidence of this – not sur-

prisingly – has come from recent historians of women and the family.

In 1980, Michel Chauvière could still arouse controversy by asserting the

Occupation-era Vichy regime’s concern over “maladjusted children” and

other problems symptomatic of dysfunctional family life.14 Yet an accu-

mulating body of research has robbed that controversy of much of its heat

and fire. Now, as a result, Miranda Pollard can without undue commotion

characterize Vichy’s effort to organize French society along traditional

gender lines (and thereby protect women’s reproductive role) as having

been motivated by a combination of statist and social anxieties that we find

12 For some additional work in this area, see Rachel G. Fuchs,
Abandoned Children:
Foundlings and Child Welfare in Nineteenth-Century France
(Albany: SUNY Press, 1984); Sylvia Schafer,
Children in Moral Danger and the Problem of Government in Third

Republic France
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997); and the contributions in “Forum: Population and the State in the Third Republic,” in
French Historical
Studies
19 (Spring 1996): 633–754.

13 Citations from Sarah Fishman,
We Will Wait: Wives of French Prisoners of War, 1940–1945

(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 18–19, 21.

14 I owe this reference to my colleague Sarah Fishman. Consult Michel Chauvière,
Enfance
inadaptée: L’Héritage de Vichy
(Paris: Les Editions Ouvrières, 1980).

Conclusion: the Revolution in the French and global context

265

very familiar by now. Vichyite pro-family policies offered “a panacea for

the ills of the 1930s” as well as “a direct response to the trauma of Defeat

and Occupation.”15

Politicians during 1940–44 might anathematize the vanquished Third

Republic, and their successors just a few years later might scramble to dis-

associate themselves from the years of Vichyite dishonor; nonetheless, the

interplay between foreign and domestic pressures upon French governance

remained the controlling reality in public affairs. This is, perhaps, the chief

message we should draw from Charles de Gaulle’s postwar exhortation:

“No matter what way we organize our national work, our social relations,

our political regime, even our security, . . . as long as the French people do

not reproduce, France will be nothing more than a bright light that van-

ishes away.”16 Constitutional and political arrangements could come and

go in France – indeed, they have, ever since 1789 – but those entrusted

with the management of national affairs, at least in the years after 1870,

would continually find themselves beset by interlocking challenges of an

international and domestic nature.

In light of all this, is it not perfectly understandable that so much current

literature on post–World War II France should also speak of such inter-

locking challenges? One review of some of this recent work has seen in

it an interplay between two principal themes: “first, the experience of the

French with ‘modernization,’ their efforts to promote, cope with, and re-

sist the huge social and cultural changes that accompanied rapid economic

growth after the war; and second, ‘national identity,’ the perennial struggle

in France to affirm the distinctiveness of the country and the Frenchness

of its people.”17

It may be true that the destruction of Hitler’s war machine in the

1940s and the postwar “baby boom” in France finally put to rest some

of the strategic anxieties so prevalent in earlier decades west of the Rhine;

nevertheless, it is arguable that the 1950s and 1960s only recast the old

dialectic of challenges in different, if somewhat less threatening, terms.

French scholars, admittedly, have not been as forward as some of their

American colleagues in examining the postwar manifestations of this

dialectic. Yet it may be only a matter of time before they will have to make

their own contributions to this historiography, as they and their country-

men strive to define the implications for France of even more recent

developments such as European unification, the immigration into France

of non-Europeans, and the ongoing globalization of economic forces.

15 Miranda Pollard,
Reign of Virtue: Mobilizing Gender in Vichy France
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), esp. pp. 201–2.

16 Ibid.

17 See Herrick Chapman, “Review Article: Modernity and National Identity in Postwar

France,”
French Historical Studies
22 (Spring 1999): 291–314; citation from pp. 292–93.

266

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

Thus, to review the French Revolution against the backdrop of specifi-

cally French history is to realize that the sociopolitical cataclysm of 1789–99

was not simply the “decisive historical rupture” that some scholars have

depicted. In each successive phase of the Revolution we have discovered

and analyzed a dynamic interaction between exogenous and endogenous

pressures on those fighting for power and striving to govern. And in

this, we now descry fundamentally the same dynamic that characterized

(and eventually destroyed) the ancien régime, and that was going to reas-

sume its old vigor in the newly urgent circumstances of post-1870 France.

Emphatically, this is
not
to deny the French Revolution all breathtaking

novelty, all historical uniqueness. Lynn Hunt was, after all, right to assert

that the Revolution “was the moment in which politics was discovered as an

enormously potent activity, as an agent for conscious change, as the mold

for character, culture, and social relations.” Certainly she can appropriately

argue that “democratic republicanism” was one of the defining legacies

of the Revolution.18 In an earlier work I affirmed much the same thing,

stating that how “ordinary Frenchmen and Frenchwomen . . . for a few

unforgettable years after 1789 . . . fashioned through rhetoric and ritual and

raw human action a new identity for themselves . . . is assuredly one of

the most fascinating and portentous stories of the revolutionary decade in

France.”19 There is no reason whatever to reverse these judgments.

Yet the Revolution was pivotal in other ways as well. If, for instance, we

situate it within a global-historical context, we cannot help but see it as a

“transitional upheaval” in the history of modern sociopolitical revolutions.

The transition referred to here was one from revolutions, such as those

in mid-seventeenth-century England and late-eighteenth-century British

North America, which took place in essentially insular societies under

minimal pressure from the outside world, to revolutions of the twentieth

century, such as those in Russia and China, which have occurred in societies

under extreme exogenous pressures. The cataclysm in France may have

differed from both of the earlier revolutions in some of its domestic aspects,

but it differed from them most arrestingly in its geographic and derivative

geopolitical aspects. True, we noted earlier that international credibility

was not a negligible consideration for Charles I in 1640. Nonetheless, the