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French Third Republic
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The French Third Republic (in French, La Troisième République, sometimes written as La IIIe République) (1870-10 July 1940) was the political regime of France between the Second French Empire and the Vichy Regime. It was a republican parliamentary democracy that was created on 4 September 1870 following the collapse of the Empire of Napoleon III in the Franco-Prussian War. It survived until the invasion of France by the German Third Reich in 1940.
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The French Third Republic (in French, La Troisième République, sometimes written as La IIIe République) (1870-10 July 1940) was the political regime of France between the Second French Empire and the Vichy Regime. It was a republican parliamentary democracy that was created on 4 September 1870 following the collapse of the Empire of Napoleon III in the Franco-Prussian War. It survived until the invasion of France by the German Third Reich in 1940. Adolphe Thiers recognized as "le Libérateur du Territoire", and who rallied himself to the Republic in the 1870s, called republicanism in the 1870s "the form of government that divides France least." The Third Republic was France's longest lasting régime since before the 1789 French Revolution.
Background
In 1852, Napoleon III abolished the Second French Republic to become the second Emperor of the French, following the earlier example of his uncle Napoleon I. However, the Second French Empire lasted only eighteen years because of the emergence of the German Empire, which quickly grew to dominate continental affairs after defeating the French in the Franco-Prussian War.
Chancellor Otto von Bismarck of Prussia, who sought to bring his state to ascendancy in Germany, realized that if a unified German state was to be created, some unifying force was needed to bring this about - a nationalist war with France seemed the perfect force to bring the other German states into line with Prussia. A resulting German defeat of France would firmly establish the new Germany on the world stage within secure borders. Through clever manipulation of the Ems Dispatch, Bismarck and French public opinion goaded France into declaring war on Prussia, beginning the Franco-Prussian War. After Napoleon's capture by the Prussians at Sedan, Parisian Deputies established the Government of National Defence, governed in Paris by the President, General Louis Jules Trochu, and in the provinces by the Minister of the Interior, Léon Gambetta. After the French surrender in January 1871, the Government of National Defence disbanded and returned power to the National Assembly based at Versailles. The new government under Adolphe Thiers was overshadowed by the settlement of peace terms with Prussia and the subsequent revolution in Paris known as the Paris Commune, which maintained a radical regime for two months until its bloody suppression by Thiers' government in May 1871. The following repression of the communards would have disastrous consequences on the labor movement.
Prospects of a Parliamentary Monarchy
The French legislative election held in the aftermath of the collapse of the regime of Napoleon III, resulted in a monarchist majority of the French National Assembly, favourable to peace with Prussia. The Legitimists supported the heirs to Charles X, recognising as king his grandson, Henri, Comte de Chambord, alias Henry V. The Orléanists supported the heirs to Louis-Philippe I, recognising as king his grandson, Louis-Philippe, Comte de Paris. The Bonapartists were marginalized due to the defeat of Napoléon III. Legitimists and Orléanists came to a compromise, eventually, whereby the childless Comte de Chambord would be recognised as king, with the Comte de Paris recognised as his heir. Consequently in 1871, the throne was offered to the Comte de Chambord. In 1830 Charles X had abdicated in favour of Chambord, then a child (his father having died already), and Louis-Philippe had been recognised as king instead.
In 1871 Chambord had no wish to be a constitutional monarch, but a semi-absolutist one like his grandfather Charles X, or like the contemporary rulers of Prussia/Germany. Moreover, he refused to reign over a state that used the Tricouleur that was associated with the Revolution of 1789 and the July Monarchy of the man who seized the throne from him in 1830, the citizen-king, Louis Philippe, King of the French. This became the ultimate reason the restoration never occurred. As much as France wanted a restored monarchy, the nation was unwilling to abandon the popular Tricouleur. Instead a "temporary" republic was established, to await the death of the aging, childless Chambord, when the throne could be offered to his more liberal heir, the Comte de Paris. However, Chambord lived until 1883, by which time enthusiasm for a monarchy had faded.
The Ordre Moral Government
In February 1875, a series of parliamentary Acts established the organic or constitutional laws of the new republic. At its apex was a President of the Republic. A two-chamber parliament was created, along with a ministry under the "President of the Council", who was nominally answerable to both the President of the Republic and parliament. Throughout the 1870s, the issue of monarchy versus republic dominated public debate.
On 16 May 1877, with public opinion swinging heavily in favour of a republic, the President of the Republic, Patrice de Mac-Mahon, himself a monarchist, made one last desperate attempt to salvage the monarchical cause by dismissing the republic-minded prime minister Jules Simon and appointing the monarchist leader the Duc de Broglie to office. He then dissolved parliament and called a general election (October 1877). If his hope had been to halt the move towards republicanism, it backfired spectacularly, with the President being accused of having staged a constitutional coup d'état, known as le seize Mai after the date on which it happened.
Republicans returned triumphant, finally killing off the prospect of a restored French monarchy by gaining control of the Senate on 5 January 1879. Mac-Mahon himself resigned on 30 January 1879, leaving a seriously weakened presidency in the shape of Jules Grévy. Indeed it was not until Charles de Gaulle, eighty years later, that a President of France next unilaterally dissolved parliament.
The Opportunist Republicans
Following the 16 May crisis in 1877, Legitimists were pushed out of power, and the Republic was finally governed by republicans, called Opportunist Republicans as they were in favor of moderate changes in order to firmly establish the new regime. The Jules Ferry laws on free, mandatory and secular (la?que) public education, voted in 1881 and 1882, were one of the first sign of this republican control of the Republic, as public education was not anymore in the exclusive control of the Catholic congregations.
In 1889 the Republic was rocked by the sudden but short-timed Boulanger crisis, while the Dreyfus Affair was another important event, spawning the rise of the modern intellectual (Emile Zola). Later, the Panama scandals also were quickly criticized by the press.
In 1893, following anarchist Auguste Vaillant's bombing at the National Assembly, killing nobody but injuring one, deputies voted the lois scélérates which limited the 1881 freedom of the press laws. The following year, president Sadi Carnot was stabbed to death by the Italian anarchist Sante Geronimo Caserio. Also in 1894, 30 alleged anarchists were judged during the Trial of the thirty.
The Radicals' Republic
The Radical-Socialist Party, founded in 1901 (four years before the socialist SFIO which unified the various socialist currents), remained the most important party of the Third Republic starting at the end of the 19th century. The same year, followers of Léon Gambetta, such as Raymond Poincaré, who would become President of the Council in the 1920s, created the Democratic Republican Alliance (ARD), which became the main center-right party after World War I and the parliamentary disappearance of monarchists and Bonapartists.
Governments during the Third Republic collapsed with regularity, rarely lasting more than a couple of months, as radicals, socialists, liberals, conservatives, republicans and monarchists all fought for control. However others argue that the collapse of governments were a minor side effect of the Republic lacking strong political parties, resulting in coalitions of many parties that routinely lost and gained a few allies. Consequently the change of governments could be seen as little more than a series of ministerial reshuffles, with many individuals carrying forward from one government to the next, often in the same posts.
In 1905 the government introduced the law on the separation of Church and State, heavily supported by Emile Combes, who had been strictly enforcing the 1901 voluntary association law and the 1904 law on religious congregations' freedom of teaching (more than 2,500 private teaching establishments were by then closed by the state, causing bitter opposition from the Catholic and conservative population).
Political and Military Scandals of the 1890s
There were two major scandals that rocked the Third Republic during the 1890s. One scandal entailed the Panama scandals in 1892. Due to widespread corruption, the company designated to spearhead the massive project went bankrupt. Approximately 300 million dollars were lost in the financial fiasco . Adjusted for inflation, that loss would have amounted to around six billion dollars by today's account . The role of French politicians in the scandal severely undermined the ability of the French government to regulate the enormous power of the bourgeoisie.
The Dreyfus Affair was another, famous, scandal, which involved the French military. In 1894, a Jewish artillery officer, Alfred Dreyfus, was arrested on charges relating to conspiracy and espionage. Allegedly, Dreyfus had handed over important military documents discussing the designs of a new French artillery piece to a German military attaché named Max von Schwartzkoppen. In 1898, writer Emile Zola published an article entitled J'Accuse. ..! (I accuse. ..!). The article alleged an anti-Semitic conspiracy in the highest ranks of the military to scapegoat Dreyfus, tacitly supported by the government and the Catholic Church. By 1906 however, it became apparent that the documents handed over to Schwartzkoppen were a forgery and thus Dreyfus was pardoned after serving twelve years behind bars.
France and the First World War
One of the reasons for France's entrance in World War I was, in patriotic circles and in most of the political class, to avenge its defeat during the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 (revanchisme). Paul Déroulède's anti-semitic Ligue des patriotes (Patriots League), created in 1882, advocated for example this revenge. This nationalism was also one of the cause of the low popularity of the "colonial lobby," gathering a few politicians, businessmen and geographers favorable to colonialism, until 1918. Thus, Georges Clemenceau (Radical), declared that colonialism diverted France from the "blue line of the Vosges", referring to the disputed Alsace-Lorraine region. Others opponents of the colonialist lobby included socialist leader Jean Jaurès or the nationalist writer Maurice Barrès, while supporters included Jules Ferry (moderate republican), Léon Gambetta (republican), and Eugène Etienne, the president of the parliamentary colonial group.
Another reason pertaining to France's entrance into World War I entails its strategic military alliance with the Russian Empire in the East. This alliance was secured in 1894 after diplomatic talks between Germany and Russia had failed to produce any working agreement. The alliance with Russia was to serve as the cornerstone of French foreign policy until 1917. A further link with Russia was provided by vast French investments in and loans to that country before 1914. In 1904, French foreign minister Théophile Delcassé negotiated with Lord Lansdowne, the British Foreign Secretary, the Entente Cordiale, which ended a long period of Anglo-French tensions and hostility. The entente cordiale, which functioned as an informal Anglo-French alliance was further strengthened by the First and Second Moroccan crises of 1905 and 1911, and by secret military and naval staff talks. Delcasse's rapprochement with Britain was controversial in France as Anglophobia, traditonally strong in fin-de-siècle France had been much reinforced by the Fashoda Incident of 1898, where Britain and France had almost gone to war, and by the Boer War where French public opinion had very much on the side of Albion’s enemies. Ultimately, the fear of German power proved to be the link that bound Britain and France together.
After SFIO and pacifist leader Jean Jaurès's assassination a few days before the German invasion of Belgium, beginning France's participation in World War I, the French socialist movement, as the whole of the Second International, abandoned its antimilitarist positions and joined the national war effort. Georges Clemenceau, nicknamed "the Tiger", would lead the government after 1917, obtaining the SFIO socialist party's support in the Union sacrée (Sacred Union). As in other countries, state of emergency was proclaimed and censorship imposed, leading to the creation in 1915 of the Canard enchaîné satirical newspaper to bypass the censorship. Furthermore,a war economy began to be implemented. This war economy would have important consequences after the war, as it would be a first breach against liberal theories of non-interventionism.
After the outbreak of the war in August 1914, France enjoyed relatively little success. In order to uplift the French national spirit, many intellectuals began to fashion numerous pieces of wartime propaganda. The Union sacrée, or "Sacred Union", sought to draw the French people closer to the actual front and thus garner social, political, and economic support for the French Armed Forces. Unfortunately, the Sacred Union had all but disappeared by 1917 as the French Army was dealt a series of catastrophic blows when its offensives were cut down by German machine gun barrages. These successive defeats gave rise after the Second Battle of the Aisne to mutinies along the Front. According to American historian Leonard V. Smith, as many as thirty-thousand French soldiers engaged in mutinous activities during 1917 alone. Still, the French government, led by Clemenceau, insisted on victory at all costs and therefore the French persisted in their efforts to defeat the Germans.
The Downfall of the Third Republic
Throughout its seventy-year history, the Third Republic stumbled from crisis to crisis, from dissolved parliaments to the appointment of a mentally ill president. It struggled through World War I against the German Empire and the inter-war years saw much political strife with a growing rift between the right and the left. The Third Republic officially ended on July 10, 1940 when the parliament gave full powers to Philippe Pétain, who proclaimed the following days the regime of Vichy ("the French state"), which replaced the Republic.
The second idea regarding the collapse of the Third Republic involves the poor military planning on behalf of the French High Command. According to the British historian Julian Jackson, the Dyle Plan conceived by French General Maurice Gamelin was destined for failure since it drastically miscalculated the ensuing attack by German Army Group B into central Belgium. The Dyle Plan embodied the primary war plan of the French Army to stave off German Army Groups A, B, and C with their much revered Panzer divisions in Belgium. However, given the over-stretched positions of the French 1st, 7th, and 9th armies in Belgium at the time of the invasion, the Germans simply outflanked the French by coming through the Ardennes. As a result of this poor military strategy, France was forced to come to terms with Nazi Germany in an armistice signed on June 22, 1940 in the same railway carriage where the Germans had signed the armistice ending the First World War back in November 1918.
When France was finally liberated after the D-Day invasion of June 1944, few called for a restoration of the Third Republic, and a Constituent Assembly was established in 1946 to draft a constitution for a successor, established as the Fourth Republic that December. The Fourth Republic would last only twelve years as 1958 saw the drafting of a Fifth French Constitution and thus the beginning of the French Fifth Republic, which has subsequently survived to this day.
Synthesizing the Meaning of the Third Republic
Adolphe Thiers, first president of the Third Republic, called republicanism in the 1870s "the form of government that divides France least." France might have agreed about being a republic, but it never fully agreed with the Third Republic. France's longest lasting régime since before the 1789 Revolution, the Third Republic was consigned to the history books as being unloved and unwanted in the end. And yet its longevity showed that it was capable of weathering many a storm.
One of the most surprising aspects of the Third Republic was that it constituted the first stable republican government in French history, and the first to win the support of the majority of the population, yet it was intended as an interim, temporary government. Following Thiers' example, most of the Orleanist monarchists progressively rallied themselves to the Republican institutions, thus giving support of a large part of the elites to the Republican form of government. On the other hand, the Legitimists continued to be harshly anti-Republicans, while Charles Maurras founded the Action française in 1898, a monarchist far-right movement which would be very influential in the Quartier Latin in the 1930s. It would also be one of the model of the various far right leagues, which participated to the February 6, 1934 riots which succeeded in toppling the Second Cartel des gauches government.
The Third Republic failed, but it did not fail as a result of its liberal democratic institutions. It failed precisely because it was not ready to fight the Nazi war machine — historian Marc Bloch wrote a famous book about this, titled The Strange Defeat.
Historiography
A major historiographical debate about the latter years of the Third Republic concerns the concept of La décadence (the decadence). Proponents of the concept have argued that the French defeat of 1940 was caused by what they regard as the innate decadence and moral rot of France. The notion of la décadence as an explanation for the defeat began almost as soon as the armistice was signed in June 1940. Marshal Philippe Pétain stated in a radio broadcast that "The regime led the country to ruin" and in another that "Our defeat is punishment for our moral failures", and claimed that France had "rotted" under the Third Republic. In 1942, there occurred the Riom Trial when several of the former leaders of the Third Republic were brought to trial for declaring war on Germany in 1939 and not doing enough to prepare France for war. Marc Bloch in his book Strange Defeat (written in 1940, and published posthumously in 1946) argued that the French upper classes had ceased to believe in the greatness of France following the Popular Front victory of 1936, and so had allowed themselves to fall under the spell of fascism and defeatism. The French journalist André Geraud, who wrote under the pen name Pertinax in his 1943 book, The Gravediggeres of France indicted the pre-war leadership for what he regarded as total incompetence.
After 1945, the la décadence concept was widely embraced by different French political fractions as a way of discrediting their rivals. The French Communist Party blamed the defeat on the "corrupt" and "decadent" capitalist Third Republic, (conveniently omiting from this narrative their own sabatoging of the French war effort during the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and opposition to the "imperialist war" against Germany in 1939-40). From a different perspective, Gaullists damned the Third Republic as a "weak" regime, and argued that if France had a 5th Republic type regime headed by a strong-man president like Charles de Gaulle before 1940, the defeat could have been avoided. A group of French historians centered around Pierre Renouvin and his proteges Jean-Baptiste Duroselle and Maurice Baumont started a new type of international history that included taking into what Renouvin called forces profondes (profound forces) such as the influence of domestic politics on foreign policy. However, Renouvin and his followers still followed the la décadence concept with Renouvin arguing that French society under the Third Republic was “sorely lacking in initiative and dynamism” and Baumont arguing that French politicians had allowed "personal interests" to override "any sense of the general interest". In 1979, Duroselle published a well-known book entitled La Décadence that offered a total condemnation of the entire Third Republic as weak, cowardly and degenerate. Even more so then in France, the la décadence concept was accepted in the English-speaking world, where British historians such A. J. P. Taylor often described the Third Republic as a tottering regime on the verge of collapse. A notable example of the la décadence thesis was William L. Shirer's 1969 book The Collapse of the Third Republic, where the French defeat is explained as the result of the moral weakness and cowardice of the French leaders. Shier portrayed Édouard Daladier as a well-meaning, but weak willed; Georges Bonnet as a corrupt opportunist every willing to do a deal with the Nazis; Marshal Maxime Weygand as a reactionary soldier more interested in destroying the Third Republic than in defending it; General Maurice Gamelin as incompetent and defeatist, Pierre Laval as a crooked crypto-fascist; Charles Maurras (whom Shirer represented as France’s most influential intellectual) as the preacher of “drivel”; Marshal Philippe Pétain as the senile puppet of Laval and the French royalists, and Paul Reynaud as a petty politician controlled by his mistress, Countess Helene de Portes. Modern historians who subscribe to the la décadence argument or take a very critical view of France's pre-1940 leadership without necessarily subscribing to the la décadence thesis include Talbot Imlay, Anthony Adamthwaite, Serge Berstein, Michael Carely, Nicole Jordan, Igor Lukes, and Richard Crane.
The first historian to explicitly denounce the la décadence concept was the Canadian historian Robert J. Young, who in his 1978 book In Command of France argued that French society was not decadent, that the defeat of 1940 was due to military factors, not moral failures, and that the Third Republic’s leaders had done their best under the difficult conditions of the 1930s. Young has been followed by other historians such as Robert Frankenstein, Jean-Pierre Azema, Jean-Louis Cremieux-Brihac, Martin Alexander, Eugenia Kiesling, and Martin Thomas who have argued that French weakness on the international stage was due to structural factors as the impact of the Great Depression had on French rearmament and had nothing to do with French leaders being too “decadent” and cowardly to stand up to Nazi Germany.
Timeline to 1914
September 1870: following the collapse of the Empire of Napoleon III in the Franco-Prussian War the Third Republic was created.
1871: The Paris Commune. In a formal sense the Paris Commune of 1871 was simply the local authority which exercised power in Paris for two months in the spring of 1871. It was separate from that of the new government under Adolphe Thiers. The radical regime came to an end after a bloody suppression by Thiers' government in May 1871.
1872-1873: After the immediate political problems had been faced, a permanent form of government needed to be established. Thiers wanted to base it on the constitutional monarchy of Britain however he realised France would have to remain republican. Due to expressing this belief, he violated the Pact of Bordeaux and thereby angered the Monarchists in the Assembly. As a result he was forced to resign in 1873.
1873: Marshal MacMahon, a conservative Roman Catholic, was made President of the Republic. The Duc de Broglie, an Orleanist, as the prime minister. Unintentionally, the Monarchists had replaced an absolute monarchy by a parliamentary one.
Feb 1875: Series of parliamentary Acts established the organic or constitutional laws of the new republic. At its apex was a President of the Republic. A two-chamber parliament was created, along with a ministry under the "President of the Council", who was nominally answerable to both the President of the Republic and Parliament.
May 1877: with public opinion swinging heavily in favour of a republic, the President of the Republic, Patrice MacMahon, himself a monarchist, made one last desperate attempt to salvage the monarchical cause by dismissing the republic-minded Prime Minister Jules Simon and reappointing the monarchist leader the Duc de Broglie to office. He then dissolved parliament and called a general election. If his hope had been to halt the move towards republicanism, it backfired spectacularly, with the President being accused of having staged a constitutional coup d'état, known as le seize Mai after the date on which it happened.
1879: Republicans returned triumphant, finally killing off the prospect of a restored French monarchy by gaining control of the Senate on 5 January 1879. MacMahon himself resigned on 30 January 1879, leaving a seriously weakened presidency in the shape of Jules Grévy.
1880: The Jesuits and several other religious orders were dissolved, and their members were forbidden to teach in state schools.
1881: Following the 16 May crisis in 1877, Legitimists were pushed out of power, and the Republic was finally governed by republicans, called Opportunist Republicans as they were in favor of moderate changes in order to firmly establish the new regime. The Jules Ferry laws on free, mandatory and secular public education, voted in 1881 and 1882, were one of the first sign of this republican control of the Republic, as public education was not anymore in the exclusive control of the Catholic congregations.
1882: Religious instruction was removed from all state schools. The measures were accompanied by the abolition of chaplains in the armed forces and the removal of nuns from hospitals. Due to the fact that France was mainly Roman Catholic, this was greatly opposed.
1889: The Republic was rocked by the sudden but short-timed Boulanger crisis spawning the rise of the modern intellectual Emile Zola. Later, the Panama scandals also were quickly criticized by the press.
1893: Following anarchist Auguste Vaillant's bombing at the National Assembly, killing nobody but injuring one, deputies voted the lois scélérates which limited the 1881 freedom of the press laws. The following year, President Sadi Carnot was stabbed to death by Italian anarchist Caserio.
1894: The Dreyfus Affair. A Jewish artillery officer, Alfred Dreyfus, was arrested on charges relating to conspiracy and espionage. Allegedly, Dreyfus had handed over important military documents discussing the designs of a new French artillery piece to a German military attaché named Max von Schwartzkoppen.
A strategic military alliance with the Russian Empire.
1898: Writer Émile Zola published an article entitled J'Accuse. .. The article alleged an anti-Semitic conspiracy in the highest ranks of the military to scapegoat Dreyfus, tacitly supported by the government and the Catholic Church.
Fashoda Incident nearly causes an Anglo-French war.
1901: The Radical-Socialist Party is founded and remained the most important party of the Third Republic starting at the end of the 19th century. The same year, followers of Léon Gambetta, such as Raymond Poincaré, who would become President of the Council in the 1920s, created the Democratic Republican Alliance (ARD), which became the main center-right party after World War I and the parliamentary disappearance of monarchists and Bonapartists.
1904: French foreign minister Théophile Delcassé negotiated with Lord Lansdowne, the British Foreign Secretary, the Entente Cordiale in 1904.
1905: The government introduced the law on the separation of Church and State, heavily supported by Emile Combes, who had been strictly enforcing the 1901 voluntary association law and the 1904 law on religious congregations' freedom of teaching (more than 2,500 private teaching establishments were by then closed by the state, causing bitter opposition from the Catholic and conservative population).
1906: It became apparent that the documents handed over to Schwartzkoppen by Dreyfus in 1894 were a forgery and thus Dreyfus was pardoned after serving twelve years behind bars.
1914: After SFIO (French Section of the Workers' International) leader Jean Jaurès's assassination a few days before the German invasion of Belgium, the French socialist movement, as the whole of the Second International, abandoned its antimilitarist positions and joined the national war effort. First World War begins
See also
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