書單: 2戰敗文化：法國

2 FRANCE

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以下是《戰敗文化：法國》一文的條列重點與核心問題整理：

🧩 一、文章重點摘要

1️⃣ 戰敗的起點與心理重建

1870年普法戰爭的失敗（Sedan）重創法國民族自信。
法國社會透過「神話化革命」與重演共和儀式（如9月4日建立臨時政府）來轉化屈辱。
「只有拿破崙三世被打敗，而非法蘭西」成為主流敘事。

2️⃣ 「報復（Revanche）」觀念的文化根源

「Revanche」繼承自中古騎士榮譽與決鬥文化，象徵一種貴族式的復仇榮譽。
戰敗後的民族性被形塑為「不讓傷口癒合」的精神象徵（Blanqui：「要永遠保留我們的傷口」）。

3️⃣ 神話人物與集體心理重塑

聖女貞德（Joan of Arc）：從宗教象徵轉為共和的民族救贖者。
羅蘭（Roland）：象徵「戰敗中的榮耀」與「為信念而死」的殉道精神。
Vercingétorix：象徵戰敗乃歷史創造的必要之惡——「被征服使我們成為法國」。

4️⃣ 教育改革與民族再生

共和派將普魯士的「國民教育體制」視為模範，建立世俗義務教育。
教育成為「戰爭的延續」——以學校取代軍營，培養公民代替士兵。
「教育是戰敗後的戰場」：敗戰促成現代公民社會與理性秩序。

5️⃣ 復仇的轉向──殖民與文化擴張

殖民主義成為心理代償：失去阿爾薩斯-洛林，轉向非洲與亞洲尋找榮耀。
三種立場：
- 「殖民替代論」：放棄歐洲競爭，效法英國發展海外帝國。
- 「殖民為報復策略」：殖民是暫時的繞道，最終仍為奪回阿爾薩斯-洛林。
- 「反殖民論」：殖民違背共和理想，是背叛與犯罪（Clemenceau：「看見的不是部長，而是叛徒」）。
文化帝國主義的誕生：1884年成立「法語聯盟（Alliance Française）」以文化傳播取代軍事擴張。

6️⃣ 文化補償與現代性象徵

體育與科技（如飛機、汽車）成為新民族力量象徵。
「飛行員」取代「戰士」，成為現代化與勇氣的化身。
法國將戰敗轉化為「創造性的敗北」，以文化與文明輸出重塑榮光。

❓二、文章提出的主要問題

民族如何在戰敗後重建自尊？
- 法國的重生是透過報復神話，還是文化重塑？
- 戰敗是否能孕育出更高層次的現代性？
報復（Revanche）與復興（Renouveau）之間的界線是什麼？
- 😭😭從個人榮譽轉向民族意志，報復是否變成理性化的政治策略？
- （台灣長老教會人是在懺悔贖罪報復嗎？）
殖民主義是否是戰敗文化的延伸？
- 法國的殖民行動，是補償還是逃避？
- 「文明使命」是否只是報復心理的轉移？
教育、文化與國家建構的關聯為何？
- 教育改革如何取代軍事報復？
- 為何知識與理性在戰敗後被重新定義為「救國」的力量？
英雄與神話的再利用：
- 為何聖女貞德、羅蘭、Vercingétorix能在不同時期被重新詮釋？
- 這些神話是否成為壓抑現實的心理安慰？
戰敗文化能否孕育出創造性力量？
- 法國的戰敗是否促成了文化輸出與現代主義興起？
- 「創造性的敗北」是否為近代民族復興的共通模式？

是否希望我幫你把這份條列改寫成一篇可直接引用於研究或投稿的「摘要＋問題意識段落」？那我可以幫你整理成約 600～800 字、風傳媒評論格式。

🥰🥰🥰

以下是《戰敗文化：法國》一文的條列重點與核心問題整理：

🧩 一、文章重點摘要

1️⃣ 戰敗的起點與心理重建

1870年普法戰爭的失敗（Sedan）重創法國民族自信。
法國社會透過「神話化革命」與重演共和儀式（如9月4日建立臨時政府）來轉化屈辱。
「只有拿破崙被打敗，而非法蘭西」成為主流敘事。

2️⃣ 「報復（Revanche）」觀念的文化根源

「Revanche」繼承自中古騎士榮譽與決鬥文化，象徵一種貴族式的復仇榮譽。
戰敗後的民族性被形塑為「不讓傷口癒合」的精神象徵（Blanqui：「要永遠保留我們的傷口」）。

3️⃣ 神話人物與集體心理重塑

聖女貞德（Joan of Arc）：從宗教象徵轉為共和的民族救贖者。
羅蘭（Roland）：象徵「戰敗中的榮耀」與「為信念而死」的殉道精神。
Vercingétorix：象徵戰敗乃歷史創造的必要之惡——「被征服使我們成為法國」。

4️⃣ 教育改革與民族再生

共和派將普魯士的「國民教育體制」視為模範，建立世俗義務教育。
教育成為「戰爭的延續」——以學校取代軍營，培養公民代替士兵。
「教育是戰敗後的戰場」：敗戰促成現代公民社會與理性秩序。

5️⃣ 復仇的轉向──殖民與文化擴張

殖民主義成為心理代償：失去阿爾薩斯-洛林，轉向非洲與亞洲尋找榮耀。
三種立場：
- 「殖民替代論」：放棄歐洲競爭，效法英國發展海外帝國。
- 「殖民為報復策略」：殖民是暫時的繞道，最終仍為奪回阿爾薩斯-洛林。
- 「反殖民論」：殖民違背共和理想，是背叛與犯罪（Clemenceau：「看見的不是部長，而是叛徒」）。
文化帝國主義的誕生：1884年成立「法語聯盟（Alliance Française）」以文化傳播取代軍事擴張。

6️⃣ 文化補償與現代性象徵

體育與科技（如飛機、汽車）成為新民族力量象徵。
「飛行員」取代「戰士」，成為現代化與勇氣的化身。
法國將戰敗轉化為「創造性的敗北」，以文化與文明輸出重塑榮光。

❓二、文章提出的主要問題

民族如何在戰敗後重建自尊？
- 法國的重生是透過報復神話，還是文化重塑？
- 戰敗是否能孕育出更高層次的現代性？
報復（Revanche）與復興（Renouveau）之間的界線是什麼？
- 從個人榮譽轉向民族意志，報復是否變成理性化的政治策略？
殖民主義是否是戰敗文化的延伸？
- 法國的殖民行動，是補償還是逃避？
- 「文明使命」是否只是報復心理的轉移？
教育、文化與國家建構的關聯為何？
- 教育改革如何取代軍事報復？
- 為何知識與理性在戰敗後被重新定義為「救國」的力量？
英雄與神話的再利用：
- 為何聖女貞德、羅蘭、Vercingétorix能在不同時期被重新詮釋？
- 這些神話是否成為壓抑現實的心理安慰？
戰敗文化能否孕育出創造性力量？
- 法國的戰敗是否促成了文化輸出與現代主義興起？
- 「創造性的敗北」是否為近代民族復興的共通模式？

是否希望我幫你把這份條列改寫成一篇可直接引用於研究或投稿的「摘要＋問題意識段落」？那我可以幫你整理成約 600～800 字、風傳媒評論格式。

😭😭🤣

為何聖女貞德、羅蘭、Vercingétorix能在法國不同時期被重新詮釋？

這是一個非常有意思、牽涉「歷史記憶政治」的問題。簡單說，聖女貞德、羅蘭、Vercingétorix（維欽托利）之所以能在法國不同時期被重新詮釋，是因為他們並非單純的歷史人物，而是被法國人反覆「召喚」來代表不同時代所需要的民族象徵與政治意識。他們是「可再利用的神話」，而非固定的歷史形象。以下分層分析：

一、三位人物的「原型」意義

人物	歷史時期	原始形象	核心象徵
Vercingétorix	西元前1世紀，高盧反抗凱撒	英勇的部族首領、戰敗但高貴	法蘭西民族的遠祖、反抗外敵
羅蘭（Roland）	傳說中8世紀查理大帝部將	《羅蘭之歌》的英雄、忠誠與犧牲	基督教戰士、封建忠誠、法蘭西榮光
聖女貞德（Jeanne d’Arc）	百年戰爭（15世紀）	神助的農村少女、拯救法國	信仰與民族拯救的化身

二、各時期的「再詮釋」動機

（1）舊制度與絕對王權時期

羅蘭：象徵對國王的忠誠與基督教信仰。
王室透過《羅蘭之歌》弘揚封建忠義，以「忠於國王即忠於上帝」作為統治正當性。
Vercingétorix：幾乎被遺忘，因他象徵「反抗中央權威」，不適合絕對王權敘事。
貞德：因被教會視為異端而不受重視，直到19世紀才真正復興。

（2）法國大革命與共和時代

Vercingétorix：被革命者重新召喚為「人民反抗帝國」的象徵。
對照羅馬帝國（專制）與高盧部落（自由），象徵人民自主與反暴政。
羅蘭：形象轉淡，因「封建忠誠」與共和價值衝突。
貞德：被再詮釋為「人民少女推翻暴君與外侮」的共和英雄。革命者淡化其宗教性，強調民族解放。

（3）拿破崙與第三共和時期

拿破崙三世在1850年代興建「Alesia紀念碑」，宣稱Vercingétorix是法蘭西的「統一者」，以鞏固帝國正當性。
→ 這是民族主義化的高盧祖先神話。
第三共和（1870後）在普法戰爭失敗後，積極宣揚貞德與Vercingétorix為「法國堅忍不屈的象徵」。
貞德被視為「民族母親」，教育部將她納入教科書，用以激發愛國心。
羅蘭則被學校課本重新解釋為「忠於祖國的戰士」而非封建將領。

（4）維琪政權與戰後

維琪法國（1940–44）：重新奪回貞德的詮釋權，把她塑造成「純潔、傳統、服從上帝與家鄉」的女性榜樣，用以支撐保守的國族主義與性別秩序。
**自由法國（戴高樂）**則將貞德重新塑造為「民族解放、抗德的女英雄」。
→ 同一個人，同時被兩個政權利用為正反兩面象徵。

三、再詮釋的深層機制

民族創傷的回應
- 法國每逢戰敗（1870、1940），就重新召喚這些英雄作為「復興的象徵」。
- 他們的故事提供了一種「文化療癒」：即使被征服，也能保持尊嚴與信念。
教育與儀式化
- 第三共和透過課本、雕像、紀念日（如貞德節）把這些人物變成「日常信仰」的一部分。
- 他們被制度化為國民教育的「神話語言」。
政治可塑性
- 他們是「空容器式的象徵（empty signifier）」：
  可被左派、右派、天主教徒、共和派依不同脈絡填入不同意義。
  例：貞德既是民族主義象徵，又被女權與和平主義者重新奪回為「女性自主」象徵。

四、結論

法國之所以能反覆「召喚」貞德、羅蘭與Vercingétorix，是因為這三人各自構成了民族想像的三個層次：

Vercingétorix：民族的起源與抵抗；

羅蘭：信仰與榮譽；

貞德：拯救與重生。

在不同時代，法國人不斷重寫他們的意義，藉此在戰敗、動亂、分裂之後重新確認「我們是誰」。
這正體現了法國的歷史神話是可變的、政治性的、而非靜態紀念碑。

如果你希望，我可以幫你整理成一篇可投稿的短論（約1200–1500字），題目如〈從Vercingétorix到貞德：法國的歷史神話如何維繫國族記憶〉。是否要我幫你擴寫成這種版本？

🤣🤣🤣😄

In the long list of political and military leaders who, since the fall of the Roman republic, have taken their lives in the face of defeat, the case of Lucien-Anatole Prévost-Paradol is one of the least known yet most curious. At about one o’clock in the morning of July 20, 1870, Prévost-Paradol, the French ambassador in Washington, stood before his wardrobe mirror and shot himself in the heart. Just the day before, Napoleon III of France had declared his ill-advised war against Prussia, but the French humiliation was months in the future; indeed, the fighting had not even begun. Nonetheless, a diplomatic colleague’s pointed remark that Prévost-Paradol was the first casualty of the Franco-Prussian War was right on the mark, but for other than the obvious reason.1 It was not despondency over his government’s future prospects that had made Prévost-Paradol decide to end it all; he was not a Napoleonic loyalist. Quite the contrary, since at the age of twenty-five, as an editorialist for the Journal des débats, he had been in the front ranks of the liberal opposition to Napoleon’s Second Empire. When the regime began to liberalize in 1869, Prévost-Paradol must have thought he had achieved his goal, and he offered his services to his sovereign. But what should have been the crowning achievement of a successful political career—his appointment as ambassador—turned out to be fool’s gold. Prévost-Paradol found himself, as another colleague, Charles Victor Cherbuliez, put it, “in the situation of a young man who marries a shrew for her money, only to discover the very next day that she has lost her entire fortune in a disastrous speculation.”2

The tragic irony was that just two years earlier Prévost-Paradol had predicted the disastrous Prussian adventure with a clarity unmatched by his contemporaries. In his widely read and respected book La France nouvelle (1868), he described France and Prussian Germany as two trains speeding toward a head-on collision. “After various efforts at evasive action, the collision has become inevitable.… What rivers of blood and tears will flow when it takes place!” It made little difference that no one really wanted such a collision: “Human omnipotence and human foolishness will combine to ensure catastrophe.” (Prévost-Paradol’s term in the original is holocauste.)3 Prévost-Paradol had little faith in France’s prospects of prevailing since even a French victory would not eradicate Germany’s nascent nationalism but only further fan its flames. A German victory, on the other hand, would signal the end of France as a leading power. The great nation would be reduced to the status of a middling European player, left to languish “in its own ruins with neither power nor honor.”4 As Prévost-Paradol saw it, the only way out of this dire situation was the creation of a greater imperial France through expansion in Africa, using Algeria as a base. “Eighty to one hundred million Frenchman on both sides of the Mediterranean would shore up France’s long-term economic and cultural position in Europe.”5

As prophetic as La France nouvelle may appear in the light of later events, Prévost-Paradol only summarized with special urgency and greater topicality a view that had been continually debated among the French intelligentsia since the 1840s. Many feared that the fall of Napoleon I marked the beginning of France’s decline into a second-rate power doomed to lag behind the rest of the modern world and to suffer the pressures of the other great powers—England and America to the west, Germany and Russia to the east.6 “Our role has been played out, at least in the short term; the future belongs to Prussia, America and Russia”: in the two decades between 1840 and 1860, statements like this one, by Hippolyte Taine, were as common as the title La décadence de la France for the books and articles in which they appeared.7

The doom and gloom of this period may well have been a delayed reaction to the French collapse of 1814–15, which, far from being acknowledged as a national trauma, had rather been dismissed as the personal failure of Napoleon I. Stendhal, who was in Paris at the demise of the First Empire, recorded the indifference with which the nation reacted to the event: “It was all taken in stride, and the regime’s representatives as well as ordinary citizens were only concerned with one thing: their personal interests.” Of the Empress Josephine’s departure from France, he wrote: “Nary a sign of popular sympathy.… People asked who it was that was traveling and shrugged when they were told.”8 The apathy can be explained as the result of general exhaustion with war itself, as Germany experienced at the end of World War I or Italy after the fall of Mussolini.9 Perceived as the main obstacle to a quick peace settlement with the allied enemies, Napoleon was declared the chief culprit for the war and was duly sacrificed, to France’s great relief. Thus the nation felt itself to have been untouched by defeat even though it had been vanquished and occupied by an external enemy for the first time in four hundred years. Along with the scapegoating of Napoleon, the relatively generous peace terms offered by the victors allowed France to maintain a sense of equanimity. Also important, however, was the fact that France had been defeated not by a single enemy but by a coalition, toward whose individual members the French nation could still feel as superior as Gulliver toward the Lilliputians.

This complacency—“Nos gloires compensaient nos revers” (Our triumphs make up for our setbacks)—was severely shaken during the July monarchy.10 One indication of the growing loss of confidence was the cult of Napoleon that arose at the same time as the debates over France’s “decadence.” The fact that Napoleon, barely one generation after his exile to St. Helena, was brought home to Paris, interred in Les Invalides, and enthroned as a new national hero indicated that the political establishment—which had staged the whole spectacle—was no longer sure of its own rule. Summoning the ghost of Bonaparte, as Marx described the phenomenon, was an attempt to slow or even reverse France’s decline, and the Second Empire, inaugurated by Napoleon’s nephew Louis, better known as Napoleon III, can only be understood as arising from this nostalgic source. Not surprisingly, therefore, Napoleon III’s political and military activities never transcended the symbolic realm of operatic adventure; indeed, they gave concrete form to the discrepancy between grand gestures and great politics.

Such a discrepancy was clearly at work in 1866, when Prussia commenced the last phase of building a new German empire. It was obvious to even the most obtuse observers that France, which opposed German unification, would treat every step in that direction as a personal threat. Nonetheless, there was considerable amazement throughout Europe when, after Prussia’s defeat of Austria at Königgrätz (known in France by the name of the neighboring village Sadowa), the cry “Revanche pour Sadowa” was heard on the streets of Paris. The uproar over Austria’s drubbing was so loud, in fact, and so widespread that one might have been tempted to conclude that France itself had been vanquished. A government agent, gauging public sentiment, reported: “The irritation against Prussia is still very intense in my district and the feeling of the masses is that France must take her revenge.” And another added: “We wish the emperor would take his revenge; I mention this wish, this familiar expression, because I hear it is on everyone’s tongue today.” The events that prompted this immense consternation had suddenly belied the conviction, held firmly since 1806, that the territory beyond the Rhine contained nothing more than a confederation of passive and powerless principalities. Empress Eugénie described to the Prussian ambassador her own awakening from this illusion: “The energy and rapidity of your movements,” she wrote, had made clear “that with a nation like yours as a neighbor, we are in danger of seeing you in Paris one day unannounced. I will go to sleep French and wake up Prussian.” French indignation persisted for four years, by which time the revanchistes were able simply to substitute “Sedan” for Sadowa. The imaginary defeat had become all too real.11

The Unfolding of Defeat

Although the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 was one of the shortest in modern history, it encompassed three distinct phases of military engagement. The first ran from the Second Empire’s declaration of war on Prussia on July 19 until Napoleon III’s surrender and capture at Sedan on September 2, 1870, which precipitated the fall of the imperial regime and the proclamation of the Third Republic two days later in Paris. The second phase began in October—after the provisional government’s failed efforts to negotiate a lenient peace settlement along the lines of 1814 and the Prussian siege of Paris. Surrounded by Bismarck’s troops, the republic mobilized the people in a levée en masse that lasted until January 28, 1871, when the provisional government gave up. Finally, in March 1871, following the acceptance of German terms for peace and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, much of the population of Paris took up arms in what Marx termed “the French Civil War” and what has gone down in history as the Paris Commune uprising. It ended in May in such complete, murderous defeat that Prévost-Paradol’s term holocauste may be applied with justice. While eighty thousand Frenchmen died in the war with Prussia, thirty thousand perished in the Commune—roughly one out of thirty Parisians was killed in the course of the uprising and its suppression.12

The phrase l’année terrible, much in use at the time and taken up by Victor Hugo to describe this cycle of war and defeat, was an obvious reference to the Reign of Terror of the 1790s. Indeed, on closer examination, the entire history around Sedan is shot through with French revolutionary mythology.13 The 1840s revival of Bonapartism, which aimed at counteracting national decline, was followed in this period of crisis by the revitalized myth of the invincible Revolution. In this light, it was possible to see the German invasion of late summer and autumn 1870 as a repeat of 1792, when the Austro-Prussian invasion was halted at Valmy, a view that implied a belief in France’s ultimate victory. Thus, even on September 1, 1870, one day before Sedan and the demise of Napoleon III’s empire, reports of lost battles and German advances on Paris were depicted in the Revue des deux mondes not as a national emergency but as a welcome wake-up call for a nation spoiled by too many quick and easy victories. “These setbacks have awakened France,” the paper editorialized, “and created an awareness of the growing danger just in the nick of time. Meanwhile we are experiencing something we haven’t seen for ages: a people that, seeing the abyss before its eyes, reaches deep into itself, comes to its senses, musters its strength, and overcomes its surprise and inertia in order to confront a present danger.” The same issue featured an article by Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, who had for years been advocating colonial expansion as the best means for reestablishing French power. Leroy-Beaulieu was full of confidence about the prospects for his plans: “After we have repelled the enemy and dictated a glorious peace on our own terms, the patriotic work will begin in earnest.”14

The first days after Sedan showed just how thoroughly the catastrophic reality had been obscured by its translation into mythological terms. Hermann Grimm, a German commentator, later described the mood, with mild sarcasm, as the French gift for ignoring unpleasant facts: “A France vanquished by the Germans is in French eyes merely a demonic apparition; the hordes now laying siege to Paris are mere ghosts.”15 The news of France’s crushing defeat produced an astonishing capacity among the citizenry to invent an alternate, more comforting reality. Within hours, before national malaise could set in, the revolutionary past was being reenacted. A Parisian mob disrupted the meeting of the corps législatif on the afternoon of September 4 and joined republican delegates under the leadership of Léon Gambetta in marching on the Hôtel de Ville. There Gambetta assumed the role of Danton by proclaiming the republic. The crowds were not just following the models of 1789, 1792, 1830, and 1848; they had become the very reincarnation of those earlier events. Or rather, the reenactment of revolution was a triumph that erased the experience of defeat, or at least pushed it to the back of people’s minds. Once again, only Napoleon had been defeated, not the nation, and the shame of Sedan disappeared with him into a German prison.16 The revolution, on the other hand, and the republic it created were the guarantors of ultimate victory.17 Of that everyone was certain.

Confident in this conviction, the provisional government made Bismarck a peace offer that refused all territorial changes and proposed a return to the status quo ante. Foreign Minister Jules Favre’s famous formulation “not an inch of our territory or a stone of our fortresses” set the tone for the dispatch. When Bismarck insisted on the transfer of Alsace-Lorraine and financial compensation roughly equivalent to Napoleon’s demand of Prussia sixty-three years earlier, Favre burst into tears and exclaimed: “You want to destroy France!”18

The war that now began—the conflict’s second phase—differed from what had come before in being weighed down by the earlier defeat. The new men at the helm had not wanted to take command of a sinking ship; Gambetta had warned on the evening of September 3 that “in no case should the republic be held responsible” for the French defeat at Sedan.19 But he was in no position to resist the push from the masses or the pull of revolutionary rituals. Indeed, his decision to proclaim the republic just two days after Sedan had as much to do with popular pressure as with the power of ritual. Perhaps the French situation after Sedan can best be compared to that of Germany after the battle of the Marne in August 1914: for both countries, the strategic failure was obvious, but the war was too “young” in the public mind to be concluded on the spot. The disparity between military strategy and popular psychology is, as we have seen, one consequence of the democratization of war in the age of nationalism. A war waged with everything at stake (“victory or death”) tends to end only when one side has been utterly beaten down. And such an outcome takes time—twenty years in the case of the Napoleonic Wars, four years for both the American Civil War and World War I.

Sedan had thus shaken the French from their complacency without destroying their will to fight. What they had imagined would be a swift and easy victory now appeared to be a prolonged and perhaps treacherous undertaking. They continued to dwell in the realm of fantasy, only this time their fantasies swung to the opposite extreme. Instead of envisioning the conquest of Prussia as little more than a casual stroll to Berlin, people everywhere—and not just the hysterical Parisian press—prophesied the imminent demise of the French nation should it fail to beat back the Germans. For Ernest Renan, Bismarck’s demands meant the finis franciae: “A weakened and humiliated France would be incapable of survival. The loss of Alsace and Lorraine would mean the end of France.”20

The forces Gambetta assembled in September and October 1870 to mount a défense nationale were themselves a strange conglomeration of fantasy and reality. The soldiers were real enough, as were the losses they suffered at the hands of the Prussian army. Everything else, however, was a summoning of ghosts, a continuation of the revolutionary rituals begun on September 4 in Paris. The organizers of the défense nationale were convinced that the new Third Republic would follow the victorious course of the First Republic in 1792. But no victory was forthcoming. Instead, France suffered a second defeat, which this time could not be attributed to a deposed tyrant.

Only then did the revolutionary myth lose its power to mobilize and galvanize. As a result, the nation split into its two traditionally antagonistic parts: Paris and the provinces.

The Parisian War

The view that Paris is France is as old as the conflation of the nation with the monarchy, which ruled from the city. Paris’s special status was evident as early as the fifteenth century in sobriquets like “ville souveraine,” “ville maîtresse,” “chef de tout notre empire” (Charles V), and “la France de la France.” Recognizing Paris’s secularized (or better still, urbanized) divine calling and anticipating the role the city would play in the Revolution of 1789, Montaigne opined: “Je ne suis français que par cette grande cité.” If Paris owed its fame before Louis XIV’s relocation to Versailles to the reflected glory of the monarchy, after the Revolution, it owed its power to no one but itself. The source of this power was the Parisian populace, or, to use the modern term, its urban masses. Uprooted, atomized, proletarianized, easily manipulated and seduced by demagogues, the Parisian masses may have seemed like a caricature of the Rousseauian ideal of direct democracy. But they were the people on site in that part of the nation where things happened, and thus they inherited the appellations “ville souveraine” and “la France de la France.”

After Sedan, France would likely have agreed to Bismarck’s offer of peace in exchange for Alsace-Lorraine if not for Paris, which was determined to carry on the fight. Indeed, September 4 was to be the last time the provinces would simply accept their marching orders from the capital. With the surrender of the provisional government on January 28, 1871, a rift that had begun years before widened into a chasm. For a half century after 1789, the Revolution had united the two groups who were its main beneficiaries: the working class and the bourgeoisie. The Parisian populace—that conglomeration of street life, literary myth, utopian aspiration, and demagoguery—had proved ever ready to do the bourgeoisie’s bidding on the barricades, and every time it did, the reward was its recognition as the actual sovereign of the nation. In June 1848, however, when the people launched a working-class revolt and made their own political demands, what they got in return was repression, not recognition. In his role as populist emperor, Napoleon III was temporarily able to paper over the divisions and avoid civil war. But after his defeat at Sedan and the failure of the défense nationale to reestablish solidarity, the disunity of 1848 reemerged in full force, not only as class conflict but as an intrinsic part of the nation’s life-or-death struggle against the external enemy. The rebellion of the Paris Commune, the third phase of the 1870–71 war, was thus not just the first great modern battle between social classes, as history has recorded it, and certainly not the harbinger of world revolution, as it was stylized in Communist mythology. Rather, the Paris Commune melded the entire history of revolutionary and class struggle into a single great phantasm that drew on the memories of heroism and sacrifice of the Parisian people, from the triumph of 1792 to the defeat of 1848. Only if seen in this light—as the culmination of a decades-old enmity—can the passion and the hatred with which the war was waged on both sides be properly understood; only from this perspective can one comprehend the quality of madness that seemed to grip Communards and government forces alike during the eight weeks of the uprising, a madness noted by those few contemporaries who managed to retain their impartial judgment.

There had been signs of the clash to come in the period preceding the Commune’s declaration on March 28. Even during the prior four months of the défense nationale, the rampant mistrust that had marked the Reign of Terror was very much in evidence. Traitors were suspected everywhere. On October 30, 1870, the news of Marshal Bazaine’s capitulation at Metz and rumors of peace negotiations led to the mob’s occupation of the Hôtel de Ville. Following the provisional government’s surrender, suspicions of treachery blossomed into full-fledged paranoia. The new government installed after elections at the beginning of February was no longer the revolutionary republican body of September 4 but rather a conservative regime of closet royalists. As soon became clear, the change in leadership expressed not only the nation’s war fatigue and desire for peace but also the old provincial resentment against Paris. Signs began to appear that, after concluding peace with the enemy, the government would turn to its next task—enforcing discipline on the unpopular capital. Adolphe Thiers, who in 1848 had advocated the bloody suppression of the proletarian revolt in Paris, was now the head of the new government and summed up his political program as “the conclusion of peace and the subjugation of Paris.”21

Thiers started with the décapitalisation of the capital, a neologism for transferring the National Assembly to Versailles.22 Further humiliations—half-symbolic, half-concrete—were to follow: a revocation of the moratorium on rent increases and debts that Napo-lean III had instituted at the beginning of the war; a wage freeze for the national guard; and finally a secret nighttime raid to remove the cannons at Montmartre. This last act, carried out on March 18, caused the simmering discontent to boil over; indeed, it is hard to imagine a more symbolically laden incident. The cannons, paid for partly by donations from private citizens, including Victor Hugo, and regarded by the people as their own, were aimed not at the government but at the German besiegers, who had staged a victory parade into Paris two and a half weeks before, on March 1.23 Thus, when the Communards rose up, they saw their rebellion not as an act of class warfare against the bourgeoisie but as an act of defense of the nation against a foreign enemy, similar to that of 1792. Nor did they intend to harm France—Paris had always considered itself the soul of the nation—but only to overthrow the treacherous government and the National Assembly, which had stabbed the nation in the back by capitulating.24 As the National Assembly in Versailles debated Bismarck’s offer of peace, décapitalisation, and other measures aimed at Paris, the deputies from the capital warned of the consequences. Gambetta proclaimed: “If we conclude such a humiliating peace, revolution will break out in Paris.… The unfortunates [in the assembly] fail to understand that what comes next will be worse than the war itself.”25 Louis Blanc, a deputy, listed the effects of décapitalisation: “Paris will be forced to create an independent government over which the National Assembly, convening outside the capital, will have no power.… Out of the still-glowing ashes of the war, a far more terrible civil conflict will be born.”26 Félix Pyat, a deputy and later a Communard, relayed the feelings of his Paris constituency even more bluntly: “There won’t be enough dung on the streets of Paris to provide the deputies with the welcome they deserve.”27

The tragedy—or lost cause—of the Commune did not reside in its continuing a militarily hopeless struggle down to the last man.28 Had Paris, with the nation’s blessing, made such a sacrifice, it would have entered into French mythology as a heroic city, a latter-day Thermopylae, universally admired or at least respected, as it had been before the armistice of January 28. The sole reason the Commune was damned as treacherous was that it was no longer in tune with prevailing national sentiment.

Heroic actions, even those that are considered misguided or morally dubious, usually command a measure of respect independent of ethical and pragmatic considerations. The draconian suppression of the Commune displayed none of this. After troops under Marshal MacMahon entered the city on May 21, retribution was swift and furious. Within a week, government forces, cleared the last barricade and seized control. Communards by the hundreds were arrested and executed, and by the time Paris had been pacified, tens of thousands of its inhabitants had perished.

The ferocity of the campaign has traditionally been explained as a manifestation of bourgeois paranoia, which had been growing since 1848. This explanation, however, neglects those who actually carried out the massacre. If there was one institution whose self-confidence had been especially shaken by the defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, it was the army, which had failed to win a single battle; indeed, the army’s only actions had been retreats. It had surrendered not once but twice and had been unable to prevent the siege of Paris or to break through the German troops encircling the city. And finally, it could only stand by and watch helplessly as the heroic défense nation-ale was mounted by civilians like Gambetta and the soon-to-be-legendary fighters of the franc-tireurs. It would be difficult to imagine a more thoroughly defeated, demoralized, and generally despised force than the French army after its final capitulation in January 1871. To add insult to injury, the newly elected National Assembly placed so little faith in the armed forces that it sued Germany for peace at any price and restricted the army’s role to maintaining law and order among its own civilian population.

Particularly despondent were the members of the officer corps. Although the decision to end the défense nationale, which was taken by the National Assembly and the government and was backed by public opinion, spread the burden of humiliation over various shoulders, further action was necessary to revive the officers’ sense of pride. Hence the fury they displayed in suppressing the Commune. Whereas the rank and file, according to various eyewitness accounts, went about their jobs with mechanical efficiency, the officers threw military ethics to the wind and did everything to ratchet up the level of violence. The higher the rank, the greater the brutality.29 Their motivation, of which they themselves could hardly have been conscious, is fairly clear: the annihilation of the Communards enabled the officers to eradicate their own mark of shame. The Paris Commune—the living, breathing ideal of heroic resistance—was a profound irritant to the officers, who had proved unequal to the German challenge. Their humiliation sealed the Commune’s fate and determined the way in which it was destroyed—not in a surgical, professional military operation but in a bloodbath, as the army sought to drown the memory of its defeat.

To some, this act of self-purification was a success. At the end of the week of bloodshed, Edmond de Goncourt wrote in his diary: “Thus the army has won back its self-confidence. The blood of the Communards is the best proof of their fighting capacity.”30 Others were less convinced. The sarcasm with which Flaubert’s lover, Louise Colet, described the victorious posturing of the army two weeks later was as arch as it was cutting: “Decked out from head to toe in medals, the officers celebrate themselves. Ovations, embraces, laurels. As though they had conquered Berlin.”31

The rest of the nation reacted as the army did, if in less extreme fashion. As the rebellion’s prospects dimmed, the initial applause and admiration for the Parisian spirit of resistance turned slowly to disaffection, then condemnation. This is abundantly clear from editorials in the liberal Revue des deux mondes of spring 1871. Early on, even the startling proclamation of the Commune as an independent government failed to provoke outrage; it was seen, at worst, as “the result of a gigantic misunderstanding.” “During the siege,” one editorialist wrote on April 1, 1871, “Paris had some justification for the idea that it was saving France.… In this patriotic role, illusory as it might have been, Paris showed qualities that impressed all of Europe.… Its battle was stubborn, brave, and righteous.” Six weeks later, on May 15, a few days before the bloodbath, the tone was sharply accusatory: “Thanks to the behavior of Paris, we stand to lose all that we were about to regain and have become, on top of that, a laughingstock and an object of derision for the entire world.” After the suppression of the rebellion, there was no room for compromise, understanding, or even pity—the Paris Commune was criminalized. The worst “criminals” were the fighters on the barricades, who had been glorified only a few months earlier. By June 1, the Commune was described as “the would-be tyranny of the scum of the earth,” and the uprising was dubbed “the most despicable crime imaginable that one could perpetrate against the nation.”

Major intellectuals, except for those who actively participated in the Commune, thought along similar lines. Normally polarized by political developments, they now joined in the near-unanimous chorus of condemnation. Edmond de Goncourt wrote: “Excellent. There were no overtures, no negotiations, no lazy compromises, just complete suppression with brute force.… This bloodletting of the rebellious part of the population will guard for years hence against any new uprisings.” Emile Zola, who described the bloodbath as an instance of “uncompromising justice,” foresaw an epidemic: “The bandits who while alive plundered the city and set it aflame will now infect it with their corpses.” Last but not least, the positivist and archrepublican Emile Littré declared that the Communards were “guilty of the most appalling crime of all. They rebelled at the very moment our nation was lying defeated, bleeding, and defenseless at the feet of the victorious enemy.”32

Excoriating the Paris Commune was the first attempt to forestall the emergence of a full-blown stab-in-the-back legend by blaming a marginalized part of the nation for defeat and collective shortcomings. This impulse was an extreme variation of the scapegoating of Napoleon that had occurred after Sedan. Condemnation, however, did not remain the last word, at least for the republican left. In years to come, the earlier conciliatory view—which held that the Commune was merely the product of “confusion” and “misunderstanding”—regained popularity. Eyewitnesses to the events, such as the young Georges Clemenceau, and more sovereign minds like Ernest Renan saw the Commune not as a criminal act of treason but rather as an instance of collective insanity.33 As soon as “la folie de la défaite” was recognized as the catalyst for madness, the damnation of the Commune uprising as a crime against the nation subsided.34 Indeed, it led to the Commune’s rehabilitation. In contrast to the unheroic and opportunistic capitulation of the National Assembly and the government, the Commune was ultimately credited with the one true heroic and radical deed of the era.

That change of heart, however, took time. For years, the trauma would continue to divide the Third Republic: conservatives, who favored Realpolitik and the fulfillment of German demands, called their opponents, who resisted reconciliation, “Radicals,” while these in turn derided their critics as “Opportunists.” The Commune thus became a two-faced ghost haunting the Third Republic.35 The Opportunists were beset by the nagging spirit of Banquo, who never ceased to remind them of the massacre during the week of bloodshed. The Radicals were hectored by Hamlet’s father, who urged them to avenge the carnage and carry on the struggle against Germany. The side that would win the conflict would be the one best able to cast the other as traitor to the nation. There was, however, a case of betrayal on which both parties were of one mind.

The Scapegoat

In France, everyone who loses a battle is a traitor. This aperçu, attributed to Bismarck and consonant with a number of similar remarks by European contemporaries, refers primarily to the tradition, dating back to the First Republic, of holding generals responsible for lost battles and premature capitulations.36 The offending officers were guillotined or, if they were clever, like the famous Revolution-era general Charles-François Dumouriez, sought exile with the enemy and thus transformed the accusation of treason into a self-fulfilling prophecy. The fate of Marshal Achille-François Bazaine would hardly be worth mentioning were it not for the purity of the traitorous impulse he was seen to embody.

Bazaine commanded the only army corps to remain intact after Sedan and survive the transition from empire to republic. At the end of October 1870, instead of leading it back to besieged Paris to assist the provisional government and the défense nationale, Bazaine allowed his army to be encircled by the Germans at the fortress of Metz and, following the example of his commander in chief, Napoleon III at Sedan, he surrendered. The reaction in Paris was even more furious than it had been to Napoleon’s own capture and defeat. In the unmistakable tone of his Jacobin predecessors, Gambetta announced: “A general upon whom France was counting … has, in the nation’s hour of greatest need, robbed it of more than a hundred thousand defenders. Bazaine is guilty of high treason.”37 Bazaine was never proven to have committed such a crime intentionally, either in the press campaign that commenced immediately or in the trial, which took place three years later. The impression he made then in the Hall of Justice at Versailles was of someone merely carrying out orders, who had been rendered mindless and incapable of acting in the absence of his commander in chief. Nonetheless, the military tribunal handed down a death sentence, which was commuted to life in prison. Bazaine miraculously succeeded in breaking out of jail and fleeing. He spent the rest of his life in Madrid, unmolested and in peace.

What made Bazaine’s case a national cause célèbre was its usefulness to all sides concerned. His former colleague General MacMahon, loser of the battle of Sedan and later president of the Third Republic, prized Bazaine as a figure of darkness in contrast to whom he could appear bathed in light. The same held true for the army in general, including the officers who served on the military tribunal; all the contempt directed at them could easily be shifted onto the defendant’s shoulders. The Bonapartists valued Bazaine because, in the hierarchy of crimes against the state, his treason overshadowed their own failure and incompetence. The monarchists, who from the start had opposed the wars of both the empire and the republic, hardly needed a scapegoat; nonetheless, they too welcomed Bazaine as an example of the decadence of their political opponents. Finally, public opinion supported this scapegoating, as evidenced by the immense popular success of an anonymously published book, in which an underling and personal enemy of Bazaine renewed the accusations of deliberate treason.

Seventy years later, the factors that had made Bazaine so ideal a scapegoat were summed up as follows: “It was a consolation to large numbers of French patriots to find that one man was responsible for the long roll of their defeats, as it was growing fashionable to blame Bazaine for MacMahon’s disaster at Sedan as well as for his own campaign. This view, which left other military reputations unimpaired, was a welcome tonic to the self-respect of a defeated people. If it had all been Bazaine’s fault, they had not really been defeated.… This simple ritual act preserved the nation’s faith in its own invincibility.”38 There is no clearer evidence of this dynamic than Gambetta’s comment on Bazaine’s conviction: “With this, France has taken its first step on the road to honor, justice, and revanche.”39

“Prussia’s Victory, France’s Glory”

Of scarcely less consequence for the French psyche than the transition from foreign to civil war was a second shift: the conflict began as a war against Prussia but ended as a defeat by Germany. France had never felt very warmly toward Prussia. Ever since the publication of Mirabeau’s scathing De la monarchie prussienne sous Frédéric le Grand in 1788, Prussia had been considered less a state, to say nothing of a nation, than a gigantic factory whose capacity for producing hommes machines may have been impressive but whose utter lack of soul and inability to bring forth hommes libres was thoroughly alienating.40 Prussia’s ignoble collapse and capitulation to Napoleon I in 1806—after a single lost battle—had shown how unreliable that factory could be and how inferior it was to the vital power of France.

This insight, so flattering to the French self-image, was reinforced in Germaine de Staël’s On Germany, the work that, more than any other, shaped France’s picture of Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century. De Staël’s Germany was both the counterideal to Napoleon’s authoritarian state and the counterimage to militaristic Prussia: the most peaceable nation on earth, a “people of dreamers” (Flaubert), the “country of the soul” (Edgar Quinet), the land of poets and thinkers, a tender, almost maidenly figure that was not only an alter ego but a potential lover—Renan referred to Germany as “my mistress”—in need of France’s chivalric protection. This conception gained in popularity the more Prussia strove for hegemony over other German territories and became (in France’s eyes) a “carnivorous force” bent on devouring the smaller states.41

The year of Königgrätz/Sadowa and Prussia’s annexation of nearly the entire region north of the Main River—1866—marked the high point of France’s notion of a threatening Prussian beast preying on the rest of Germany. The idea that the terreur prussienne (the title of an allegorical novel by Alexandre Dumas about Prussia’s military occupation of Frankfurt) could become a terreur allemande would have seemed absurd to most Frenchmen at the beginning of the war in 1870. But that was precisely what happened in the months that followed. It was as if the good-hearted Schmucke of Balzac’s Cousin Pons had suddenly acquired the rapacious allure of Rastignac at the end of Père Goriot. To make matters worse, France found itself on the losing end of a humiliatingly gendered role reversal. To have been unseated from its position as chivalric protector was bad enough. But to be cast in the role of defiled maiden must have seemed a particularly bitter instance of treachery, all the more galling since the former damsel in distress had suddenly metamorphosed into a murderous monster. Gretchen had become a Valkyrie, if not a Bismarck. The French trauma of 1870–71 cannot be understood without taking account of this erotic component.42

How deeply the injury ran is shown by the fact that the image of Prussia could not easily be transferred onto Germany. Since prior to 1866 France itself had never felt directly threatened by Prussia, the image of Prussia lacked the requisite aura of monstrosity to serve as a national enemy. An emotional leap was required to transform the caricature of Prussia into the nightmarish face of Germany. It was precisely France’s former love for the land of poets and thinkers, now distorted into horror and deadly enmity, that provided the necessary stimulus. Practically overnight, Madame de Staël’s Germanic Arcadia was reenvisioned as an evil empire of scientific barbarism threatening not just France but the whole of civilized humanity.

Along with this reversal, the image of England, France’s traditional national enemy, was transposed wholesale onto its new archrival. Characteristics usually attributed to England—the stereotype of “perfidious Albion,” in currency since the Hundred Years War, and the idea of the mercantilist modern-day Carthage, fashionable during the eighteenth century—were similar to the dismissive view of Prussia first articulated by Mirabeau.43 English mercantilism and Prussian militarism were parallel scourges, both departing from French esprit in their “calculating coldness, heartlessness, methodicalness, lack of grace, fighting spirit and heroism.” Mirabeau identified in Prussian soldiers a “coolheadedness, obedience, order, and discipline,” in contrast to the French, who, in the strict sense, were “less than perfect soldiers” but “more animated, spontaneous, and courageous.”44 He left no doubt as to which type he preferred. Likewise, in the aftermath of defeat in the Seven Years War in 1763, there was no question among the French public that the moral victor was not England—“this restless people of accountants and egotists”—but France, thanks to its “reliably loyal national integrity and strength of character.”45

Thus the Third Republic’s tendency to transform military defeats into spiritual triumphs—widely noted by social historians—was not born at Sedan.46 Moreover, what scholars have called the “art and greatness of demise” and the “pedagogy of failure” are not specifically French—they are evident as well in the American South and in Weimar Germany.47 Still, the Third Republic displayed an extreme case of defeat hysteria and the question remains as to why. The answer, perhaps, is suggested by the example of Victor Hugo.

Hugo, the poet laureate of romantic and republican France since the 1840s, had three fundamental convictions, which he put forward with unflagging persistence. First, that humanity had found its ultimate expression in republican France. Second, that the cause of French republicanism was accordingly the highest cause of humanity itself. And third, that the unification of Europe could only be envisioned as an extension of the French republic. In 1842, during a period of expansionist enthusiasm in France, Hugo had demanded that the Rhine be set as the border with Germany, a move he advocated not in the name of his country but in the name of Europe and humanity. Against this backdrop, it is easy to predict his attitude toward the Franco-Prussian War and France’s defeat and territorial amputation. As the leading poet of the republic of humanity, he more than anyone set the tone after Sedan and his writings of the period firmly established him as the choirmaster of France’s oratorio of martyrdom.

“Like ancient Greece and Rome,” he wrote, “France today is civilization and a threat to France is a threat to all.… Should the unthinkable transpire and France be defeated, it would be a sign of how far humanity has sunk.” That was not all: “Saving Paris means more than saving France: it means saving the world. For Paris is the heart of humanity, its holy city, the capital of civilization.” And: “The mutilation of France by Germany strikes at the core of all of Europe.”48

All these statements were made in the immediate aftermath of France’s defeat. Hugo’s later comments, such as those offered at the Congress on World Peace in 1874, are of similar tenor: “Every slap in the face of France is a blow felt by all of humanity.” And a year later: “The amputation of France is a disaster for all humanity, for France is not just France but the world, and all progress depends on France’s remaining intact. Every province lost by France is a loss for humanity and for progress.”49 In contrast to the outrage that would greet the next German invasion of France almost half a century later, European public opinion did not take these lamentations any more seriously than it did the triumphalist effusions emanating from nationalist German intellectuals. The consensus ran with Thomas Carlyle, who in his famous letter to the Times of London on November 11, 1870, deemed French sentiment “delirious,” “pitiable,” and “miserable” on the one hand, and “blamable” and “contemptible” on the other.50

The great handicap of revisionist French propaganda after 1871 was that, unlike in the revolutionary era, there were no reserves of fighting spirit left to mobilize. The prevailing plaintive tone was an authentic expression of the nation’s lack of aggression and energy. Moreover, Germany had not yet been perceived as the world’s most dangerous barbarian, as it would be in 1914. Rather it was seen as a country that, having suffered two centuries of French hegemony and humiliation, had simply achieved a well-deserved revanche in the spirit of fair play. Carlyle was one of many to speak in such terms. German intellectuals, whose nationalism still had liberal-republican foundations, also characterized the Franco-Prussian War as a settling of accounts, not an act of wanton aggression. Beginning with David Friedrich Strauss’s open letter to Ernest Renan in August 1870, a month before Sedan, one can chart the development of a German equivalent to the French republican summoning of “ghosts.” Strauss, along with Theodor Mommsen, Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch, Georg Herwegh, and other intellectuals whose national hopes had been shattered in 1848, found redress for their domestic defeat in the revanche now exacted upon France.51 To their mind, the shift in focus from an internal to an external enemy was logical since, after all, hadn’t imperial France consistently blocked all efforts to achieve German national unity? Was it not true that Germany’s fragmentation into multiple states was largely a consequence of French meddling?

It quickly became apparent that German historical arguments were better grounded in fact than Victor Hugo’s pitiable wailing. Those among the French intelligentsia who had not succumbed to hysteria soon joined the discussion started by their German counterparts. Historians like Ernest Renan and Fustel de Coulanges who had studied at German universities were willing to abandon the indefensible position that France stood alone as the nation of humanity. Instead they took up a more promising vantage from which to launch a new offensive. The old idea of France as the active agent of world history was replaced by France as the object and victim of that history, not only in defeat but also—and this was the main departure from Hugo’s worldview—in victory. Fustel de Coulanges compared past French triumphs and present Prussian-German successes, treating neither as glorious achievements or treacherous crimes but as mere turns of the wheel of fortune. In so doing, he made questions of blame and responsibility seem irrelevant. The French should appeal to the world not as a nation of defiled innocence, he argued, but rather as a nation that had fallen from the heights of power and therefore was well suited, indeed obliged, to warn the states now scaling those heights of the inevitable consequences. “Every nation that adopts military glory and power as its motto, as we once did, will make the mistakes we made.”52 Warning the victors of the perils of triumph was nothing new; it had often seemed, as in the American South, an effective means of transforming defeat into moral superiority.

Vae Victoribus

On September 15, 1870, two weeks after Sedan, Ernest Renan published a long essay on the German-French conflict and what was by then its incontrovertible outcome. In the final sentence, he reversed the famous warning Vae victis, or Woe to the vanquished: “Wise friends now say to Prussia, quietly, not as a threat but as an admonition: Vae victoribus!”53

Renan did not coin the phrase. It had been used two weeks earlier in a Parisian weekly, L’illustration, which in turn quoted an article published in the Neue Freie Presse, a Viennese daily, under the title “Vae Victoribus.” According to L’illustration, the admonition had been addressed to Prussia and read: “Vae victoribus! Victory is a poor adviser, and nations tend to slip on the blood they have shed. Rome under its Caesars did not suspect that its Vae victis would apply in equal measure to Rome itself. After every victory, there’s a new tomorrow. Waterloo follows Austerlitz. And so, too, our cry: Victor, beware!”54

Austrian voices carried special weight in the Parisian press during those critical days. Ever since the defeat at Königgrätz/Sadowa in 1866, which France considered its own, Austria was regarded as a kind of partner in misfortune. Apparently Parisians did not know that the article had appeared simultaneously in the Berlin paper Die Zukunft and that its author was one Jakob Venedey of Prussian-ruled Cologne. A old-school liberal and a delegate at the failed constitutional convention at the 1848 German National Assembly, Venedey had become a Francophile during long years of political exile in Paris. The question of victorious Prussia’s treatment of defeated France, however, was not the focus of his article. Rather he primarily addressed an internal threat that, as one of the few forty-eighters not to be carried away by victory, he recognized all too clearly—namely, that military triumph would cripple the German democratic movement.

France, however, hoped to use the magic formula of Vae victoribus to sour the champagne of German victory. The fact that the incantation had been conceived by a German political émigré was only an ancillary bit of historical irony. What made the slogan effective was its basis in the ancient conception of the wheel of fortune, whose top and bottom switch with every half rotation—an image that fit quite well with the Christian dogma of “the last shall be the first.” Maxims by Renan such as “Today’s victors are tomorrow’s losers” and “Defeat is the price for a past victory and the guarantor of a future one” cast the victor in a mute and passive role.55 If the next rotation of the wheel was to make today’s victor into tomorrow’s loser, and today’s loser into tomorrow’s victor, then the “temporary victor” (as Reinhart Koselleck calls him) was like the rich man in the New Testament, more to be pitied than feared.56

On March 1, 1871, the day the National Assembly accepted German peace terms and ceded Alsace-Lorraine, Victor Hugo gave his last speech before resigning his seat in protest. No other document from the time reveals as clearly the intellectual and moral dynamics that transformed the idea of Vae victoribus into that of revanche. Vae victoribus dictated that the victor would be felled by history, with the vanquished merely in the role of passive onlooker, while revanche encouraged the losing side to take destiny into its own hands. The relationship of revanche to Vae victoribus was thus roughly that of Communist class struggle to the Marxist concept of historical inevitability (and as we will see, it led its adherents into a similar cognitive dissonance).

Hugo began his speech with an expression of sympathy for Germany: “We deeply regret its transformation from a people to an empire.”57 The culprit here was Prussian despotism, from which, he promised, France would eventually free herself, just as she had freed herself from English hegemony during the Hundred Years War. The necessary strength for the task would be drawn from hatred. Hugo was quick to add that he was talking about hatred of despotism, not nationalistic hatred, but given his long list of potential targets, it is doubtful that he really meant good old-fashioned hatred of tyranny. “From tomorrow onward,” he said, “France will have but one thought: to gather her strength; instruct her children in righteous anger; forge cannons and citizens so that the people and the army will be one; enlist science in the service of war; learn from the Prussian model as Rome did from Carthage; construct defenses; modernize. In a word, the nation will once more become the mighty France of the spirit and the sword.” The transcript of the proceedings indicates that the speech was interrupted here with applause and cries of “Très bon, très bon.” “One day,” Hugo continued, “the nation will be ready, and its revenge will be terrible. First it will retake Lorraine, then Alsace. Will that be all? No, I repeat, no! Next—listen carefully—will come Trier, Mainz, Cologne, Koblenz.…” Here the transcript notes, “Cries from various sides: Non! Non!” At that point, Hugo explained that he envisioned not a war of national conquest but a war to free Germany from despotism. “My form of revenge is brotherhood!” he declared. “Let us form a single republic,… let us shake hands! For in the end, we will have done one another a great service: you have freed me from my emperor, and I will free you from yours.”

The resourcefulness and spirit with which Hugo guided his speech through its rocky passages do not quite conceal the moments of turbulence. Put another way, Hugo’s universalist soul seemed to be struggling against his nationalist one. The question remains whether those who protested “Non! Non!” were simply too impatient to wait for the conciliatory end of the passage or whether Hugo would have ended his speech differently without their interruption. Whatever the answer, the speech announced a turn of the tide from the “old” liberal-republican to the “new” chauvinistic, all-encompassing nationalism that took hold of France after the experience of 1870–71. Victor Hugo was the medium through which both ideologies spoke.

La Revanche

If I have committed the mad blunder, in a grim century, of taking life for an epic, it is because I am a grandchild of defeat. Convinced materialist that I am, my epic idealism will compensate, until I die, for an affront and a shame which I never suffered, for the loss of two provinces which we got back a long time ago.

—Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words

The rallying cry “La revanche” points to a phenomenon whose role in history is well known but whose true meaning remains obscure. There is widespread agreement that revanche—as a political religion, foundational myth, and integrating force—gave the Third Republic a cohesion without which the new state, born of defeat and rent by internal polarization, would hardly have survived its first months.58 The fact that it did survive was quite an achievement, especially if one compares it with the similar but far less successful Weimar Republic in post–World War I Germany. At the same time, revanche has been dismissed as a collective delusion, an enormous “life lie” that held France in thrall from 1871 to 1914. These two readings of revanche—as integrating force and mass delusion—are not, however, mutually exclusive. Indeed, they play off each other in myriad ways.

Surprisingly, revanche has never itself been the subject of a historical study.59 As a first step, one must go back long before 1870–71 and look at the etymology of the word, at the courtly concepts of honor that sustained revanche, and at the medieval myths and legends that were resuscitated in order to express competing types of revanche in the combative climate of the Third Republic.

Etymologically, revanche is not the same as vengeance, although the words share the same root. Unlike vengeance (or revenge), which, although prompted by an earlier action or offense, is not subject to a statute of limitations—think of Macbeth or Forza del destino—revanche must be exacted immediately after the offense is commited. If this connection is missed, an act of revanche, like that of offering thanks belatedly, no longer has any meaning.

In its most attenuated form, revanche may take on the sublimated meaning of satisfaction, or even the fully neutral one of response or reply. Revanche, then, is better understood as a gift and exchange ritual rather than as part of revenge, though all three—gift giving, expressions of gratitude, and revenge—as philosopher-psychologists like Emerson and Nietzsche recognized, are related.60 But every shading of revanche—be it the brutality of revenge, the formality of athletic competitions, or the reflexivity of a return invitation—entails a reestablishment of the equilibrium disrupted by one of the parties concerned. Perhaps the purest sense of the term occurs in games and sports, where protocol requires that the winner offer the loser “satisfaction” (or redress) in the form of a rematch. Emile Littré’s Dictionnaire de la langue française of 1878, which gives the basic meaning of the word as “an action that compensates for an earlier offense,” makes no reference to revanche as a contemporary slogan. It does, however, provide a pair of definitions that refer to sports and may help to illustrate the psychology behind the concept: “a second match in which the loser seeks to balance the result of a first. To play for revanche. To offer revanche” and “every new game that the loser demands after a lost match.”

In its double sense of revenge and the peaceful reestablishment of equilibrium, however, the French concept of revanche is unique among European languages. Other languages clearly distinguish between the two meanings. The words for violent, martial, bloody retaliation are revenge and vengeance (English), Rache and Vergeltung (German), and vendetta (Italian). For peaceful equalization, the words are compensation, satisfaction, reparation, atonement (English), Genugtuung, Befriedigung, Zufriedenstellung (German), and soddisfazione and riparazione (Italian). Rivendicazione, from the verb vendicare (to revenge), also falls into the category of peaceable settlements, meaning the successful enforcement of legal or property claims. In contrast to revanche, its etymological twin, rivendicazione does not contain the idea of vendetta.

French, of course, also has terms signifying an exclusively peaceful reestablishment of equilibrium: satisfaction, réparation, compensation, conciliation, accommodation, arrangement. These words, which evolved with the development of bourgeois society, essentially expressed the bourgeois understanding of law and order, an understanding based on nonviolent exchange. Their usage also signaled the emergence of a specifically bourgeois code of honor, or rather a split of the courtly code into two distinct forms. From then on, the bourgeois concept of honor as honesty and the chivalric one of honor as bravery coexisted in more or less separate spheres.

As these etymological facts suggest, the idea of revanche is rooted in a continuation—even a pathological exaggeration—of the chivalric code of honor. The story of how politically disempowered aristocrats in their gilded cage at Versailles—locus of the newly centralized monarchy—cultivated ornate forms of etiquette by which they lived and not infrequently died is too well known to bear repetition. Equally well known is the role played by the duel in this thicket of obligations, entitlements, ceremonies, and rivalries of honor. Since, however, there is a direct line leading from the duel to revanche, it is worth briefly dwelling on its history.

In both qualitative and quantitative terms, seventeenth-century France was the leading dueling nation in Europe. Roughly ten thousand duelists were killed between 1589 and 1610 alone.61 And nowhere was the threshold of offense lower and the demand for satisfaction or revanche more lightning quick. The French were ever at the ready to take up arms over “a somewhat too direct stare, a thoughtless brush of contact, a word spoken too loudly,” or (in one case) even “a glass of lemonade,” and the ritual of the duel—its choreography—was more strictly and artificially formalized in France than anywhere else.62 A key moment in the evolution of the duel from a contest between individuals to an expression of broader revanche was the French aristocracy’s final rebellion against the absolute authority of the crown, which lasted from 1648 to 1653. The defeat of the Fronde—as the rebellion was known—was the fundamental trauma of the First Estate and would preoccupy it for over a century: the aristocracy would long for revanche up until the Revolution. The dueling mania of the seventeenth century thus can be seen not only as a compensatory action on the part of a decommissioned warrior caste but also as a form of ritualized resistance to the central authority. Every duel represented not just a contest of individual wills but a defiance of the royal prohibition on dueling and, as such, a tiny act of revanche. As irrelevant and laughable as the points of honor involved in dueling might have appeared to (bourgeois) outsiders, they were a matter of existential seriousness to the participants. Personal honor was, in the words of Marshal Blaise de Monluc, literally the last and only thing that remained to the aristocracy after its defeat: “Our lives and our possessions belong to our kings. Our souls belong to God, but our honor is our own. My king can do nothing about my honor.”63

The possibility for revanche on a grander scale opened up in the eighteenth century with the decline of the absolutist system. The nation’s defeat at the hands of England in 1763 pushed French society farther in this direction and sped up the process. It was perhaps the first defeat of the modern sort, not a battle lost in royal cabinet warfare but a humiliation experienced by the whole nation. The crisis of confidence into which the ancien régime was plunged offered the aristocracy two ways to revive its fortunes. It could confront the crown as a power center untainted by defeat—or scandal—and it could approach the nation, this newly discovered source of political legitimacy, as the embodiment of moral authority.64

The situation of the aristocracy was thus not unlike that of the republicans in the fall of 1870. Just as the republicans took the cause of national honor into their own hands with the défense nationale, the post-1763 aristocracy assumed leadership of the demands for revanche against England.

To be precise, it was not the aristocracy as a whole that took on this role but rather the generation entering political life in the 1770s, enlightened aristocratic patriots like Mirabeau, Saint-Simon, Lafayette, and Ségur. These men felt a greater affinity with the generation of their great-grandfathers than with that of their fathers, and they preferred the serious business of American rebellion against England to the easy life of Versailles. Certainly they supported and even fought in the American struggle as a means of gaining revanche against England, but they saw that conflict and their own ambitions for a renewal of France as part of the same quest, namely, to restore the aristocracy to the leading role it had occupied before the fall of the Fronde. An intimation that they knew these two aims were connected—that revanche was being sought at a remove, approached via detours and sideshows—can be gleaned from a statement by Ségur, Lafayette’s fellow fighter in America: “We had had enough of this long, lazy peace. We were burning to settle the scores for previous defeats, and so we hastened to support the American cause against England.”65 What was the French participation in the American rebellion if not a transatlantic projection (in the psychological sense) of the struggle against—or rather revanche for—despotism at home?

This interpretation is supported by the manner in which the young aristocrats began their great undertaking. Lafayette, Ségur, and Saint-Simon refused to place themselves in the service of their government in its official support for the Americans. They wanted their own private revanche. Pointedly demonstrating his sovereignty like a feudal lord of the Middle Ages, Lafayette equipped a frigate, the Victoire, at his own expense and set off to sea under cover of darkness and in direct disobedience of explicit orders from the king.

If the origins of revanche lie in the aristocratic tradition of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, then ironically, the Parisian street rabble of the 1870s—the most revanche-ready group in France—appears as the direct descendant and heir of the aristocratic code of honor. Though the connection is speculative, several points argue in its favor. Both the aristocracy and the masses were collective subjects who defined themselves against the monarchy, and in this their histories ran parallel. For a time, in the early days of the Revolution, the Versailles aristocracy in its satins and silks and the Parisian masses in their rags seemed to function as a pair of pliers, squeezing the monarchy from both sides. During this phase of the Revolution, the masses could perceive themselves as an equivalent of the aristocracy, their common interest being the restoration of the old relationship between lord and vassal that had been interrupted by absolutism. There was also a trickle-down effect of aristocratic forms of behavior and concepts of honor into the lower classes. “Paris is a person,” Roland Mausnier says of this population, possessing “all the eminent qualities of the gentleman and cavalier.”66 With the reformist aristocracy’s departure from the Revolution in 1790, the Parisian masses became the sole heir and bearer of this aristocratic inheritance, which was recast as the concept of national honor.

Although in the Third Republic revanche would function as a universally accepted slogan, there were at least two conflicting interpretations of the idea. They corresponded to the long-standing split between “the two Frances”—the red and the black, the liberal-republican and the royalist-Catholic. The two camps had been mortal enemies since the Reign of Terror in 1793 and would continue to polarize political life until the Dreyfus affair a century later. Indeed, far from having seized lasting power with the 1870 proclamation of the Third Republic, the republicans were defeated in the elections of February 8, 1871, and spent almost ten years in opposition to a government that was republican in name only—and in fact not even that. The République des Ducs, as historian Daniel Halévy called the new French state, had no constitution, and the head of state was called not the president of the republic but the chief of the executive power. Perhaps the most revealing aspect of the regime was that it was located in Versailles, not Paris.67 The reason parliamentary democracy was not abolished altogether was only because the Bourbonist, Orléanist, and Bonapartist factions could not agree on a common pretender. Furthermore, none of these factions had an interest in burdening itself with the legacy and consequences of France’s defeat. It was far more advantageous to take unpopular steps in the name of the republic and thereby discredit everything republican. That way, the monarchists and Bonapartists could step in at the crucial moment as the nation’s unencumbered saviors.

During this interregnum—the period from 1871 to 1879, when the republic was established on more solid ground—the two Frances competed by blaming each other for the events of the année terrible. While the republicans regarded Sedan as a consequence of France’s deviation from the path of republican virtue into Catholicism, royalism, and Bonapartism, the royalist-Catholic camp saw France’s collapse as divine punishment for social secularization. In 1870–71, a second blow served only to widen the schism. The impact of the Paris Commune for bourgeois-liberal France was matched for the Catholic legitimists by the demise of papal world authority when Italy annexed Rome.

More significant than their antithetical explanations for defeat, however, were the two Frances’ contrasting visions for the future. For Catholicism, reconciliation with God (réparation) through repentance was the first step out of the abyss and the precondition for the nation’s salvation and reinstatement in the Almighty’s good graces. Actual revanche would then be carried out through the grand roi sent by heaven.68 The republican corollary was the moral and organizational reform (régénération) of the nation, which would then, as a republica triumphans, undertake revanche. Both sides looked to the German victor as a model: republicans to the Prussian schoolmaster, Catholics to the pious German loyal to God and master. “While France abandoned herself to boundless skepticism, the German people followed their hearts, devoting themselves to the family and spiritual values and honoring what was truly great.”69 So ran the central message of Blanc de Saint-Bonnet’s La legitimité, one of the essential documents of political Catholicism. The problem of how one could extol a conqueror as a role model while simultaneously condemning him as a barbarian or a Protestant heathen was solved by both republicans and Catholics in similar fashion. Just as Victor Hugo’s vision of a republican crusade of revanche against Germany culminated in the liberation of the true Germany from tyranny, Catholic revanche achieved its apotheosis in the hoped-for return of misled German Protestants to the bosom of the one true church.70

The Sacré-Coeur and the Cult of the Wound

The double disorientation in the fall of 1870—caused by national defeat and the events in Rome—led to an outbreak of religiosity in France, especially in western France, that attained almost medieval proportions. There were public prayers, processions, pilgrimages, and other acts of penance for the supposed sins that had caused God to punish France at Sedan, and penitents swore religious vows in the conviction that such displays of piety would soften God’s heart and protect the imperiled French homeland from the German threat. A religious vow common in Lyon, Angers, and Nantes was the promise to erect a Church of the Sacred Heart, or Sacré-Coeur, if the city was spared. Raised to the level of a national vow, the construction of the Sacré-Coeur basilica on Montmartre became the preeminent symbol of Catholic France’s attempt to come to terms with military defeat.

To call on the sacred heart in times of emergency and vow to ensure its favor had become common practice soon after the rise of the cult in the seventeenth century. The practice simplified the cult’s original aim, which seems to have been to bring something of the personal, Protestant quality of the relationship between God and man into the Catholic confession: the sacré-coeur was the embodiment of Christ’s love for mankind, the heart, pierced and bleeding, serving as the link between the son of God and man. But after 1789, or, more precisely, 1793, the sacred heart took on a specific significance. It continued to be invoked in emergencies; now, however, the emergency was neither an epidemic nor a natural catastrophe nor a war but the Jacobin republic itself. Ever since the peasant uprising in 1793 adopted the sacré-coeur for its banner, it had become the battle symbol for Catholic, antirepublican, and counterrevolutionary France.71

Just as Catholics elevated the sacré-coeur, republicans looked to a related symbol, the image of the open wound with blood streaming from it. But instead of embodying divine love, the blood symbolized for republicans the wounding of the republic by counterrevolution and was used to justify calls for revenge. Whether in the displaying of gravely injured citizen-soldiers or the laying out of the murdered Marat (his stab wound carefully touched up by Jacques-Louis David) in the convent, the message was the same: “In the name of the wounds that have been done to it, the republic demanded the Reign of Terror, and it got it.” Or: “O you despicable kings,… culprits of these terrible mutilations,… this beloved blood, soaking the soil of freedom, cries out to heaven for justice.… We shall not hesitate to avenge it.”72 In the case of Marat, the republican usurpation of Christian symbolism explicitly appropriated the image of the sacré-coeur: Marat’s heart was carried in a separate urn during the funeral procession. “Let Marat’s blood be the spring of life for uncowed republicans,” read one passage from the elegy, while another asked: “O heart of Jesus. O heart of Marat … Sacré-Coeur.… Can one compare even the love and works of Mother Mary’s son with those of the Ami du peuple and his disciples on the holy mount of the Jacobins?”73

As the ghosts of the First Republic and the first défense nationale were being summoned in 1870–71, the cult of the wound also made its reappearance. Victor Hugo, addressing the National Assembly in Bordeaux, proclaimed: “Every one of us feels the nation’s wound in his own heart.” Several months earlier, he had told wounded soldiers in a Parisian military hospital: “You are looking at a jealous man. More than anything else in the world, I wish I had one of your wounds. I salute you, children of France and favorite sons of the republic, you who have been chosen to suffer for our homeland.”74

In 1879, the truly republican Third Republic, no longer dominated by the monarchists, further developed the cult of the wound by transferring the metaphor from the heroes of the nation to the nation itself. The wound the nation was duty-bound to avenge was the loss of Alsace and Lorraine, which had been ripped from the national body, and the task and obligation facing France was to not let that wound heal. The nation, according to the revolutionary Louis-Auguste Blanqui, was to preserve its wound “intact and permanently … as a sign that we have remained true to our pain.” In 1886, when after a brief period of apathy the idea of revanche regained its hold on the public imagination, Paul Déroulède, known as the poet of revanche, greeted its renaissance with words of praise for the general who would become its main proponent: “Some people believe the wounds in our flanks caused by the loss of Alsace-Lorraine have healed. You have reopened these wounds. You have deepened them. You have bored into them with glowing iron. You have caused them to bleed anew and prevented them from healing.”75 Since there was, in the physical sense, no immediate way to repair the injury, the only possible treatment consisted of keeping the wound open, letting the blood flow, a fount of revenge lust that would pulse through the nation until revanche, in the form of reannexation of the lost provinces, could be carried out.

The repossession of Alsace-Lorraine was at the very center of the republican conception of revanche. The two provinces were venerated, seen to embody the Revolution as no other part of the nation except Paris could ever hope to. Before 1789, Alsace had been merely a conquered territory, without a deeper connection to the nation. The Revolution had established such a connection and, in so doing, had won the hearts of the Alsatians. The fact that the French national anthem was composed in Alsace, that it “conquered” the nation from there, symbolically completed the unification process. And when the Alsatians solemnly protested against their forced return to the new German empire, their resistance was seen as poignant proof that they had become true Frenchmen.

By contrast, Alsace-Lorraine played no role whatsoever in the Catholic conception of revanche. The reinstallation of the pope as a political authority seemed far more important than regaining two provinces so closely associated with the archenemy, revolution. Moreover, Alsace had a large Protestant population. Nevertheless, it cannot be said that Catholicism lost the battle for the true interpretation of defeat—and, consequently, for political power in the Third Republic—solely because it failed to recognize the importance of Alsace-Lorraine. Nor can the republican resurgence after eight years in opposition be explained solely by its successfully linking the two provinces with the idea of revanche. In hindsight, the République des Ducs looks like the last gasp of royalism, which had been on the wane since 1793, while the republican victory seems to be the long overdue, definitive institutionalization of the democratic principle after multiple restorations and usurpations. And yet, the disempowered old regime continued for some time to retain command of the symbols it had created during its long rule. When it came to symbolism, the newcomers were left with little choice but to feed off their opponents until they could develop some powerful symbols of their own.

The republicans of 1870–71, however, were no longer the have-nots and parasites of 1793. In the eighty years that had elapsed since the Revolution, they had in fact developed some effective political symbolism, as they proved on September 4 and in the months of the défense nationale. Nevertheless, the limits that had always restricted their aspirations quickly reemerged. Every republican seizure of power since 1792 had been launched from Paris, only to be reversed sooner or later by the provinces. With the last of these reversals, the electoral defeat in 1871, it became only too apparent that the next advance could not restrict itself to the capital but would have to encompass the whole nation. Since the provinces still largely lived in the spiritual and symbolic world of Catholicism, the first goal of any republican regime determined to stay in power had to be the occupation of that terrain. Several figures from the pantheon of national martyrs and saviors were thus put on display, as the wounded soldiers of the Revolution had been in their time, in order to enlist the nation as a whole in the republicans’ interpretation of defeat, their vision of France’s salvation, and their certainty of successful revanche.

Joan of Arc

In the four hundred years since her historic appearance as the savior of France, Joan of Arc had become a legend without an institutional and ideological home. The absolutist monarchy had no interest in reviving memories of a people’s heroine to whom it owed its existence and survival. The church could scarcely adopt a figure it had burned as a heretic. Even for the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, Joan of Arc was, as a servant of church and king, at best an object of pity and scorn, or, in Voltaire’s words, la pauvre idiote who had allowed herself to be used and ultimately destroyed by the ruling powers. A figure “betrayed by her king and burned by the church” was also hardly a suitable standard-bearer for the Revolution. While there were efforts in 1789 to position Joan as the precursor of the revolutionary Marianne, they were rarely more than halfhearted, as in 1792 in Orléans, where during the first défense nationale there was some debate as to whether to melt down the Joan of Arc statue for cannons. One faction of the revolutionary city council advocated doing just that, arguing that Joan had been an archroyalist. Opponents pleaded for the statue’s preservation as a memorial to one who had defended the nation against an external enemy. The quarrel ended in a compromise: the statue would be melted down, but the cannon forged from the iron would bear the name “Pucelle d’Orléans.”76

The revolutionary-republican interpretation and appropriation of Joan of Arc only came about a full generation later, in the romantic-liberal historiography of the 1830s and 1840s. The weak-willed tool and victim of crown and church became Jules Michelet’s fille du peuple, the personification of a people beginning to awaken and take destiny into its own hands. This Joan of Arc was both a triumphant conqueror like Christ, driving the money changers from the temple, and a passionate martyr with Christian features once she had fallen into the hands of the enemy and the church. One wonders whether her association with the sacré-coeur in the final sentence of Michelet’s history of Joan of Arc was conscious or unconscious: “Let us as Frenchmen constantly remind ourselves that our homeland was born from the heart of a woman, from her gentility, her tears, and the blood that she shed for us.”77 The double face of triumph and martyrdom predestined Joan to become the leading symbol for post-1871 revanche, itself an ambivalent mix of militant rhetoric and peaceful realism.78 One commentator pointedly characterizes the mood of the time as “a bizarre conglomeration of revanchiste pacifism and faint-hearted aggression.”79

The republicanism of the 1870s exploited the innate advantage of this fully formed, ready-to-use Joan of Arc in the struggle against the Catholic and pro-monarchist regime then in power. Slower to tap her symbolic potential, Catholicism was just beginning to discover her as a figure for its own purposes, trying to build on the romantic-republican image to develop a suitable picture of the Catholic fille du peuple. Just how unlikely Joan of Arc was as a potential savior figure within the Catholicism of the period is illustrated by the numerous accounts of visions by devout Catholics in the crisis autumn of 1870. Many reported seeing a virgin with a sword in her hand, leading the fight against Germany. In every case, however, the woman in question was not Joan but the Virgin Mary.80

As the republican patron saint of the nation, Joan of Arc made numerous appearances during the 1870s—in poems (the most famous of which was in the Nouveaux chants du soldat of Paul Déroulède), in plays (such as Jules Barbier’s enormously popular Jeanne d’Arc in 1873), on monuments (Emmanuel Frémiet’s 1874 statue in Paris of Joan on horseback), and, perhaps most significantly, in the collective psyche, where she had lived on since her death. “Prussians, when you enter this humble house: tremble!” wrote Jules Michelet in the guest book at Joan of Arc’s childhood home in Domrémy in August 1872.81 One can assume that the figure of an armored and armed fille du peuple occasioned similar expectations in the popular consciousness in the immediate wake of the année terrible.

Over time, the conflict between the two Frances was subsumed within the two factions’ struggles to control the government. Indeed, once republicanism regained power, it lost interest in Joan of Arc. The fact that she had in the meantime been sanctified by Catholics (“Johanna nostrum est”) was one reason for this neglect. More to the point, during the 1880s and 1890s the “republican republic,” enjoying domestic stability, no longer wished to recall its birth in defeat. More optimistic legacies and symbols were the order of the day, ones better suited to national renewal and modernization. It was time to bring back Marianne, the divine feminine symbol of the republic, whose genealogy was unsullied by associations to crown and church.82 During the republicans’ eight-year-long march back to power, Marianne and her connotations of revolution had been kept discreetly in the background, relegated to second-class status behind Joan, who was deemed a more appropriate figure for national integration. The mistake of prematurely frightening off the provinces was not to be repeated. Significantly, the new Marianne of the 1880s was a much more reassuring figure. She had been transformed from the bare-breasted goddess of freedom storming over the barricades in Delacroix’s painting, to a majestically enthroned Minerva, republica triumphans in the serene repose of republica sedens.

Representing France’s triumphal rise from the ashes of defeat, Marianne nonetheless satisfied only some of the country’s emotional needs. She lacked that other quality, the mixture of triumph and martyrdom that had made Joan of Arc so attractive. To renounce Joan’s ambiguity for Marianne’s clarity was to neglect the need for martyrs that every vanquished nation feels. Perhaps, though, the role previously played by Joan of Arc could be taken over by yet another figure.

Roland

The legend related by the Song of Roland contains all the classic elements of the heroicizing of defeat: a hopeless battle against a faceless overwhelming enemy (the Saracens); betrayal within one’s own ranks (Ganelon); sacrifice for a superior cause that emerges triumphant in the end (Charlemagne’s revenge and the victorious conclusion of his crusade against the Saracens of Saragossa); and above all, the figure of a martyr-hero (Roland). It is not surprising, then, that this epic, “whose existence only a few scholars even knew of before 1870,” as one historian writes, “was transformed within a few years from a minor part of the collective unconscious to a national myth.”83 Its significance in the interpretation of defeat would ultimately become as great as that of the legend of Joan of Arc.

It was easy to read the story of Roland and his men’s demise at Roncesvalles as an allegory for the events of 1870–71: Ganelon, the traitor responsible for Roland’s fall, stood in for Marshal Bazaine, while the avenger Charlemagne served as the grand roi of political Catholicism.84 “Here we have the story of a great defeat for France,” wrote one contemporary interpreter, Léon Gautier, “out of which the nation emerged not only glorious but having fully settled old scores. What could be more topical today? Defeat may be all we see at the moment, but this nineteenth-century Roncesvalles does not lack for glory, and perhaps before we know it we will be celebrating a new Saragossa.”85 Gautier wrote these words in December 1870 in an introduction to the first translation of the Song of Roland into modern French. A medievalist, he was an outspoken adherent of political Catholicism who interpreted the epic poem as a glorification of prerevolutionary (royalist-Catholic) France—a fact no more surprising than the emerging Catholic interest in Joan of Arc. What is remarkable, however, is that even a dedicated republican like historian Ernest Lavisse, who in his textbooks later portrayed Roland as a modern patriotic hero, depicted him at this point as an exemplary Christian knight and martyr.86 Of course, Lavisse may have adopted the Catholic view out of political expediency, but if not, one must conclude that with Roland, as opposed to Joan of Arc, the Catholic and republican perspectives were not mutually exclusive. The astonishing consistency in the image of Roland across ideological lines during the 1870s argues for this conclusion. Gautier’s edition of the text was retained even after the republican educational reforms of the 1880s and was only slowly supplemented, but never replaced, by the “republican” translations of Edouard Roehrich (1885), Gaston Paris (1887), and Maurice Bouchor (1899).

What made Roland, unlike Joan of Arc, a figure that could remain above the fray of political rivalries?

Joan of Arc and Roland may have been closely related as figures of medieval Christianity, but they diverge dramatically in their narrative and symbolic implications. Joan of Arc’s demise and martyrdom is merely an epilogue to the main drama, the rescue of France. Roland’s defeat, on the other hand, is the main drama. The subsequent victory, Charlemagne’s revanche, lies outside the time frame of Roland’s heroism. Although important to readers during the years immediately following defeat as a model for revanche against Germany, Charlemagne’s triumph was comfortably distanced from a present that had other, more immediate concerns on its mind. For the Third Republic, Roland was a conglomeration of Christ and Leonidas, the Spartan king who, betrayed, died fighting.87 Roland’s demise is also more a self-sacrifice than a defeat. Refusing all attempts at rescue, he dies at the end of the epic not in the heat of combat with the saber-wielding Saracens but on the empty field of battle, after the Saracens have taken flight. Roland’s death thus comes on his own terms. Although “defeated for the greater good,” as one translation from the period puts it, the hero retains, in the words of a later commentator, his “undefeated status.”88

Defeat as a condition for salvation and triumph—Michelet had already identified this Christian association as the central message of the Song of Roland.89 Just as the love—the blood—of Christ in the cult of the sacré-coeur redeems sinful humanity, Roland’s self-sacrificial end releases the nation from the burden of reckoning with a real, worldly defeat. In the temple of revanche, Roland occupies a quiet, contemplative niche, while Joan of Arc occupies the main altar as the savior of the homeland. This explains the lack of conflict surrounding the Roland figure in the ideological and symbolic competition between Catholicism and republicanism: one seldom fights for possession of minor side chapels and altars. But as the story of the revanche concept shows, the side chapel may over time become a church of its own.

Spiritual and moral composure, which should have been but the first step on the road to revanche, came increasingly to take the place of revanche as the national trauma healed. The ambiguous result, embodied most clearly in the figure of Roland, was an understanding of revanche that renounced any real action and restricted itself to laments and complaint. In iconographic terms, this innovation was a “Pietà of revanche.” The illustrations to Gautier’s 1872 edition, in fact, present Roland’s corpse unmistakably in the pose of the dead Christ. Which brings us back to the First Republic’s cult of the wound. Roland, however, spoke to a much broader public than the fatally wounded Marat. Instead of embodying either revolutionary or Christian France, Roland became the heroic symbol of the nation as leader of all civilization. Under the banner of this ideologically neutral slogan, Catholics and republicans alike could make common cause against barbarian Germany and at the same time declare France’s revanche to be the entire world’s cause.

One of the first to read contemporary political meaning into the Song of Roland was the literary historian Charles Lenient in 1872. Contrasting the French epic and the Nibelungenlied—“two rival works engaged in a nonmilitary duel, the only kind possible for us at present”—Lenient concluded that the Song of Roland was the product of a humane civilization, while its German counterpart was the expression of a darkly violent archaism.90 Although Lenient’s perspective is hardly original, it serves as an early example of the Third Republic’s transposition of the revanche impulse into the pose of cultural superiority. The line of French propaganda arguing for innate German barbarism, which continued until the First World War, echoed almost word for word Lenient’s formulation that the Nibelungenlied “is essentially barbaric, as is German thought as a whole, even if today it dons the guise of science and modern civilization.” Among the numerous oppositions Lenient draws in his study of the two epics are the following:

1. The contrast between the heroes: “Roland fights with an open visor. Siegfried kills his enemy from behind. He is the inventor of the art of killing without being killed.”

2. The Franks fight for the Occident: “This is no local quarrel but rather a prologue to the great battle between the Occident and the Orient.… The eternal glory of France has been to fight for the cause of humanity.”

3. Roland’s battle is not one of self-interest: “Roland conquers the world with his virtue and his bravery. His heroism is in equal measure cosmopolitan, universal, and patriotic.” In contrast, the Nibelungenlied knows no ideal other than “stealing from one’s neighbors.” Even the only positive hero, Siegfried, is filled with this “national trait in all its naïve brutality and primitiveness.”91

4. Two incompatible forms of revanche: The Song of Roland depicts “an orderly retribution, exacted [by Charlemagne] in the bright light of day and with full legal justification.” The Nibelungenlied, in contrast, is ruled “not by any morality, but by a sword- and torch-wielding Valkyrie, raging like a Fury or a bloodthirsty bacchanalian.”

It is clear, then, that the call for revanche was not what it claimed to be. None of the historical and legendary figures it enlisted to interpret defeat—especially not the Christian martyrs—symbolized a call for immediate retribution. On the contrary, they stood for spiritual triumph through heroic endurance. “The defeat of the nation is sublimated by the heroism of its sons,” writes one historian, “and the nation’s lost honor restored through the glory of the vanquished.… For battle is always an opportunity for acts of heroism, and every ‘belle action’ is self-justifying, deriving its dignity from its moral beauty.”92 Tellingly, the Third Republic’s interpretation of defeat is also referred to as “consolation literature,” “pedagogy of failure,” and “the art and greatness of demise.” Over the years, a veritable pantheon was constructed for the lionization of lost battles. From Crécy to Agincourt, Waterloo to Reichshofen, so the message ran, the French had only ever been defeated by the crude might of mechanically drilled plebeians. It was a short step from here to the self-affirming and consoling formula “We’re invincible, once we put our minds to it.”93

But while the gap between revanchiste expectations and reality was partially bridged in mythology by images of heroic defeat, the rift in the public mind of the Third Republic remained wide. “France desires revanche, but it wants peace”: this sentence, popular among European diplomats during the 1870s and 1880s, summed up the French dilemma.94 The French public was not particularly discomfited by the contradiction, nor did it take steps to resolve it. As always in such situations, a process of ritualization soon transformed unrealistic expectations into a citadelle sentimentale, an emotional fortress. Arriving in Paris in 1881, the German writer Max Nordau recognized “a kind of belief in the Messiah,” whose coming, however, no one expected to see within his or her lifetime.95 This development was, of course, encouraged by the mythology of heroicized defeat popularized, above all, in school textbooks.

If the process of psychological stabilization in the Third Republic is pictured as a kind of caravan, attempting to leave its misfortune behind, then the pack of barking dogs that pursues it represents the naysayers—present in all political and religious movements—who seek to ensure that pure theory will never fall victim to impure practice.96 In times of general contentment, their cries of warning and admonition fall on deaf ears or are absorbed by preexisting ritual. In times of crisis, however, they are able to mobilize passions, as if the repressed defeat were once more standing directly on the doorstep. Not every trauma become ritual has the potential for being reawakened, but revanche certainly did. Before examining the questions of when, how, and by whom it was reactivated, a few words are appropriate about the man who, more than anyone else, was responsible for planting the seeds of revanche in the French soul after 1870. Léon Gambetta would prove to be uniquely adept at combining rhetoric, ritual, and realism in the decades to come.

Gambetta, or the First Revanche

Even today Gambetta’s exhortation to revanche—“Let us never speak of it, but think of it always”—has not lost its refined ambivalence.97 Was this a veiled admission that revanche was an illusion? Or was it an appeal to the French not to lose their way in rhetoric so that they could fight for the cause more energetically? If political genius consists of maintaining ambiguous positions long enough for time to decide the issue, and even then avoiding all hard-and-fast stands, Gambetta was undoubtedly the greatest genius of the early Third Republic. This does not mean he was an unscrupulous opportunist. As the organizer and spiritus rector of the militarily hopeless défense nationale, he was the most committed republican-Jacobin ideologue imaginable. His refusal to proclaim himself dictator after the lost election of February 1871 also appears as an act of almost Roman republican virtue.

Gambetta’s political genius was to capture the predominant mood and make himself its chief spokesman; to retreat when, as in the capitulation of 1871, the nation’s mood had moved too far from the original set of declared goals; to leave others to perform the thankless tasks associated with political bankruptcy; and all the while to prepare for his return to public life as heroic defender of the nation and martyred savior of its honor. Gambetta alone possessed the political and moral authority to define revanche since, as leader of the défense nationale, he had also created the notion. The défense nationale, in its refusal to acknowledge the defeat at Sedan and its attempt to reverse the consequences, was, after all, the first expression of revanche. And what could be more in the spirit of revanche than resolving to achieve—even if only in the indefinite future—the goals left unfulfilled by the défense nationale?

Still, despite Gambetta’s ambiguous exhortation to think of revanche always, he probably considered it a hopeless, indeed dangerous illusion. “Only madmen can think of regaining Alsace-Lorraine,” he said. And: “We have to keep our heads.”98 Yet such political realism hardly prevented him from speaking out in public with an incendiary passion to rival even that of Paul Déroulède, founder of the Ligue des patriotes and poet of revanche. The transcript of one of Gambetta’s speeches on the subject of Alsace-Lorraine reads: “Ah! Noble provinces! Now as before a part of France that looks to the tricolor.… How they have suffered from their forced separation, but oh, how they took the nation with them in their hearts. [Here the transcript notes that Gambetta had “tears in his eyes.”] Gentlemen, I can no longer speak…” The record concludes: “Exhausted, the speaker sinks back into his chair. Several people accompanying him begin to sob, shake his hand and withdraw silently.”99 This speech also illustrates, however, how carefully Gambetta avoided talking about revanche as a national mission. His theatrical performances were not calls to action but attempts to prompt a collective catharsis by enumerating the nation’s woes. Some critics accused Gambetta of performing a comedy of revanche, and George Sand memorably averred that he was “nothing, nothing at all, nothing, I repeat.”100 But this accusation confuses tactics with strategy. The strategy remained what it had always been: to keep the newly born republic free of the taint of defeat.101 During the défense nationale, the tactic had taken the form of military struggle. Militarily speaking, the continuation of the fight after Sedan may have been a hopeless, irresponsible “slaughter without purpose,” as one general observed, but politically and psychologically it made perfect sense.102 In September 1870, after a five-week blitzkrieg, the French public could not have accepted a sobering, not to say humiliating peace. Months of intense warfare after Sedan were required to transform the “demonic illusion” of “hordes” of German “ghosts” into a full-blown reality. Gambetta’s great achievement was to understand this dynamic of the modern mass psyche and to put his knowledge to political use. It was of relatively little consequence whether the war was won or lost. The important thing was to not allow the republic to go down in history as having violently toppled the government and then shied away from fighting the Germans. As a symbolic gesture and a confirmation of authority, the continuation of the war—once again, regardless of the outcome—was the republic’s most solid foundation and the best guarantee against any challenge to its legitimacy by a stab-in-the-back legend.

After the end of the défense nationale, revanche took over this function. As early as March 15, 1871, the Revue des deux mondes cautioned against actual revenge “while France’s wounds are still bleeding.… Only when all the preparations have been made, will the moment for revanche arrive.”103 Gambetta’s adoption of this line, after he had called on his people to fight heroically, down to the last man, exemplifies the entire political spectrum’s realignment once the decision had been made to adopt a new course of action. Even romantics like Victor Hugo resigned themselves to waiting patiently for better times.104

But if actual revenge was to be postponed, the role played by revanche in the republican struggle against monarchism in the years 1871–79 was all the more intense, since, in the deep trauma of defeat during this period, it served as a slogan for both national salvation and the republican cause. Although revanche did not commit the republicans to any concrete action, it succeeded thoroughly in calling the other side’s patriotism into question. In 1879, with the republicans’ return to political power, the unity that had held as long as there had been a common enemy disintegrated. Along with the two Frances of monarchism and republicanism, there now appeared to be two republics, or, more precisely, two models of the republic: the liberal-bourgeois one of 1789 and the radical-Jacobin one of 1792. The Paris Commune had already shown how murderously extreme the conflicts between the two could be. In light of this history, it was almost preordained that the call for revanche would sooner or later undergo a transformation of meaning and function.

Boulanger, or the Second Revanche

The first years of the “republican republic” were lively, expansive, and self-confident, a series of respectable successes. Long-overdue reforms like the introduction of compulsory primary education were implemented within a few months. In its foreign policy, France emerged from the isolationism of the 1870s and became an active player, above all in the realm of colonial politics. At home, the Third Republic solidified its status with a number of symbolic measures: the declaration of July 14—Bastille Day—as the national holiday; the adoption of the “Marseillaise” as the national anthem; the return to Paris of the National Assembly from Versailles, where it had met since the time of the Commune; and finally, as a sign of its new self-assurance and readiness for reconciliation, amnesty toward the exiled Communards.

In the meantime, the traditional political factions regrouped. In place of the old tripartite right, left, and center, people now spoke of only two camps: the Opportunists, the liberal-bourgeois republicans who had assumed leadership in 1880, and the Radicals of the Jacobin opposition, who were immediately joined by the former Communards. The remnants of monarchism, which even in its heyday had consisted of three mutually hostile groups (the legitimist Bourbonists, the liberal Orléanists, and the populist Bonapartists), were divided between both sides.

In 1885, five years after its promising beginning, the Opportunists’ republic found itself in crisis economically, politically, and morally.105 France had slipped from being the second-leading industrial nation (behind Great Britain) to fourth place (after the United States and Germany). Following setbacks in its colonial policy, which the Radicals had always opposed as an indirect betrayal of Alsace-Lorraine, the government fell. Soon after the president of the republic, Jules Grévy, was forced to resign in the wake of a number of corruption scandals. For the Radical opposition, these events were just the first bubbles of discontent rising from the swamp of parliamentary mercantilism into which the Opportunists had transformed the republic. Each of the various factions within the opposition, moreover, had a score to settle with the Opportunists, and all would eventually join together under a banner of revanche that no longer had much connection with Gambetta’s notion of the 1870s.

For the ex-Communard faction, men like Henri Rochefort and Félix Pyat, the time had come to avenge the massacre of May 1871. “Real revanche gives these loudmouths the shivers,” scoffed the conservative newspaper Correspondent. “The only revanche they are interested in is internal: revenge against the men of Versailles, the bourgeoisie and the Opportunists.”106 In fact, they sought more than internal revanche, seeing the occasion as one for resuming the battle with Germany. The Germany they now opposed, however, was a different nation from the one beyond the Rhine. It was synonomous with the world of French high finance that had been implicated in all of France’s major corruption scandals through men who typically bore German Jewish names like Rothschild, Reinach, and Fould. Anti-Germanism thus became antisemitism.

Antisemitism had been, since Proudhon’s day, “one of the numerous holy sites of French socialism.”107 Reconceived by Edouard Drumont, the author in 1886 of La France juive, as a strategy of resistance against the Opportunist regime, antisemitism provided the inspiration for a faction within the opposition, as well as a convenient scapegoat image for various groups. The antisemites shared with the ex-Communards the conviction that Jewish-controlled France was in reality a France controlled by Germany through French Jewish middlemen. In this formulation, the idea of revanche could be turned inward without losing its patriotic force: revanche against Germany had to begin with a battle against this sinister Other France.

The third group aligned against the Opportunists was the Ligue des patriotes, the all-purpose movement founded by Paul Déroulède for everyone opposed to the Opportunists’ tacit renunciation of revanche. Like the ex-Communards and the antisemites, the Ligue, which, incidentally, counted Gambetta among its members until his death in 1882, had its roots in the Jacobin left of republicanism. That all three groups—nationalists, antisemites, and leftists—coalesced within the space of a few years into a nonparliamentary, radical right can only be explained by the fact that this new right was very different from the conservative old right, namely what Zeev Sternhell calls a revolutionary right.

Just as remarkable as the odd mixture of factions that constituted the anti-Opportunist opposition was the figure who now emerged to lead it. “You will encounter the greatest theatrical genius of all time,” a fellow officer said of General Georges-Ernest-Jean-Marie Boulanger, “a man whose smallest action appears to be of immense significance. Whether he is giving an order or receiving a wound, all the attention is focused on him. Assemble a hundred generals and he will be the only one to get noticed.” These words were uttered in 1886, when Boulanger was named minister of war, and the Radicals responsible for his appointment chose him for precisely such attributes. Boulanger was intended to be a constant thorn in the side of the despised Opportunist regime, whose newly deposed leader, Jules Ferry, warned against this “shameless demagogue, gifted speaker, populist politician, and dangerous actor.”108

Boulanger fulfilled all expectations with breathtaking energy and speed. Quickly setting up a press office within the Ministry of War, he transformed the public perception of the ministry and the army, if not the institutions themselves, within weeks and established himself as a charismatic national leader.109 When Boulanger took up his post in January, a general atmosphere of disillusionment and pessimism prevailed in the wake of the government scandals. By the summer, the ministry was a place of stability and national self-confidence, buoyed by a feeling of having recaptured its proper place. The zenith came with a completely revamped celebration of Bastille Day in Paris. The festival, which since its adoption as the national holiday had been characterized by bourgeois moderation and the lack of an army presence, was staged by Boulanger as the sort of military pageant not seen since the days of Napoleon III. As a sign of resuscitated French military power, the army paraded down the streets of Longchamps, in the Bois de Boulogne, with Boulanger on horseback at its lead—“handsome, virile, republican”—while bringing up the rear, as if ashamed, were the ministers of state, the incarnation of the “laziness of the Opportunist government with its scandals, cowardice, and ballast of crisis.”110 For his masses of supporters, Boulanger was a savior whom one addressed in almost godlike fashion: “Save us from the abyss,” wrote one admirer. “Lead our legions into glory. Guide our two sisters Alsace and Lorraine back home with your strong hand.” For his detractors, Boulanger was a charlatan and an adventurer, exploiting the fact “that humiliated France longs for a prince, or at least a soldier, and that only the general who gives patriotism its revanche for Metz and Sedan has a chance of success.”111

Nicknamed General Revanche shortly after his assumption of office, Boulanger seemed to many a new Gambetta who would restore the nation’s self-confidence. In fact, though, he possessed only some of his predecessor’s talent. He was able to create a rhetorical, symbolic reality and use it to conduct politics, but he lacked the ability to distinguish between the two, which had been an essential part of Gambetta’s gift. The nationalist fever he whipped up, especially among the people of Paris, had little ultimate significance. Although German propaganda never ceased to condemn France’s desire for revanche as warmongering, internal German evaluations seemed to take French belligerence far less seriously. The military attaché in Paris, for instance, dismissed Boulanger’s military spectacles as “misuse of the armed forces for popular amusement” and the aggressive revanchiste pampleteering as “literary speculation trying to exploit the current ‘patriotic excitement.’” Bismarck’s son and assistant, Herbert, regarded “the Parisian insanity” as of “greater pathological than political interest.”112

Indeed, despite the sudden flickering of revanchiste sentiment in 1886, the country’s double psychology—“France desires revanche, but it wants peace”—dominant since 1871, persisted. A glance at the literature of the time reveals an abundance of poems, songs, ballads, odes, and manifestos, as well as journalistic articles and science fiction stories, that fantasize about military victory over Germany. The national indignation, wounded pride, and impassioned whining that had inspired Victor Hugo’s patriotic arias still determined the basic mood. If there was anything new, it was a nascent inferiority complex vis-à-vis Germany, albeit one that was never acknowledged and was certainly not conscious. Immediately after 1870, people had been able to explain defeat as an accident that would soon be corrected. Fifteen years of French passivity and Germany’s Bismarckian empire—which showed no signs of disappearing back down the hole whence it came and indeed was steadily developing into Europe’s mightiest nation—had consigned France’s sense of its own grandeur to an ever more distant past. In the presence of this overwhelmingly powerful neighbor, revanche increasingly lost its original meaning and developed undertones of a readiness to defend France against renewed attack. More telling than all the rhetoric of revanche was the construction of a line of new fortresses on France’s eastern border.

The bluster of the revanche literature of 1886–87, thus, evokes the prey puffing itself up to scare off the predator. Nowhere is this clearer than in a pamphlet entitled “Homage to General Boulanger”:

Dare not lay a hand on our beautiful France,

Tremble before you take up the fight.

Hope in vain of emerging victorious.

Dare not, Prussians, dare not.

And a poem dedicated to Boulanger:

France wants no war

But if necessary, it knows

How to enforce respect for its borders

Should the enemy threaten.

When our general

Gives the signal

We are ready to follow.113

Perhaps the most notable thing about the role of revanche in Boulanger’s career as a charismatic leader was that, following his dismissal after only one year in power, the rhetoric vanished as quickly as it had appeared. The antiparliamentary movement, or “Boulangism,” that formed in response to the general’s ouster had no use for external revanche, only for its internal application.114 To borrow an image from Zeev Sternhell, the opposition that gathered around Boulanger had turned its sights from the blue line of the Vosges, the Alsace-Lorraine border, to the Bourbon Palace, where the National Assembly met, and the Elysée Palace, the president’s residence.115 In the process Boulanger himself, whom dismissal had made into a martyr, became, as one of his adherents remarked, “the best of all war machines,” not for revanche against Germany but “for softening up the republic so it could be taken by storm.”116

Barrès, or the Last Revanche

With Boulanger’s flight from France and his suicide at the grave of his mistress in Brussels, the liberal republic emerged triumphant once more. Having learned from its opponents the importance of managing appearances, the republic promoted itself at the 1889 World’s Fair, which marked the hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution. This revitalized republic was no longer the regime of Opportunism, feeling its way carefully and timidly out of defeat, but a force of vitality, symbolized by the architecture of Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel, whose tower rose above Paris like a ramp to the future. Along with such internal confirmation came the consolidation of gains made in foreign affairs. Bismarck, France’s nemesis for twenty years, was nearing the end of his career, and a French alliance with Russia offered, for the first time, the possibility of a serious counterweight to Germany’s superior military power. Moreover, after ten years the nation’s controversial colonial policies were finally beginning to bear fruit. After Great Britain, France possessed the second-largest overseas empire, elevating it to the status of world power, while Germany, for all its might, was merely a European one.

After 1890, revanche seemed to have lost its force. “The group advocating revanche consists of persons of no influence,” declared a report by the Russian embassy. “It is small and has little success with public opinion. We can even have doubts as to its very existence.”117 The idea of regaining Alsace-Lorraine became the object of pointed sarcasm within intellectual circles, most notoriously in the writer Rémy de Gourmont’s pronouncement: “As for me, I wouldn’t give the little finger of my right hand for those forgotten provinces. My hand needs it to rest on as I write. Nor would I give the little finger of my left hand: I need it to flick the ash from my cigarette.”118

Nonetheless, revanche made one final appearance before slipping free entirely of its tether to the defeat of 1870–71. Maurice Barrès, writer and philosopher, belonged to a generation that had no personal experience of the collapse of the Second Empire—or had it only as children. Barrès began his literary career as a self-proclaimed aesthete and dandy, without any feelings of connection to the national trauma.119 Nothing was more foreign to him than the moralizing political poetry of Paul Déroulède, for whom he once recommended “a proper textbook on the art of poetry, which would stop him from scribbling verse—now that would be an act of patriotism.”120 The cosmopolitan nature of culture was for Barrès self-evident: “We have spiritual fathers in all countries.” France, he was convinced, could not afford to close itself off but had to remain open to all influences, especially the influence of German culture. “The civilized world is a grand museum … and the German hall has some of the best attractions.”121

Yet Maurice Barrès, cosmopolitan aesthete and creator of a cult of egotism that flourished during the 1880s and 1890s, had by the time of the Dreyfus affair been transformed into a militant, reactionary, racist nationalist and remained one throughout the years leading up to the First World War. Although the story of his transformation belongs more properly to the epoch of fascism than to the recovery from the trauma of 1870–71, Barrès’s trajectory is worth examining as the last manifestation of revanche.

To the young Barrès, Boulanger was a hero, a man of action “who energetically opened the windows, threw out the idle chatterers, and let in the fresh air.”122 And Boulangism, with its attack on the establishment, was a new kind of politics, the very antithesis of business as usual, a course of pure and purifying action. Barrès was able to make the transition from aestheticism to this sort of politics so seamlessly because both aspired to purity. His form of nationalism was at once aesthetic and racist—qualities that are not necessarily contradictory.123 At its origin was his outrage at the corruption of the liberal parliamentary system, and only in his search for the causes of that corruption did Barrès come to confront the national defeat of 1870. His discovery of how Germany rose from the ashes of defeat after 1806 was also of great significance. He was profoundly influenced by the writings of the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whose notion of a self-contained national community, or Volk, developed at a time when “Germany was merely the name of a French protectorate.”124 Eduard von Hartmann’s psychology of the unconscious, to which Barrès owed the insight that “society is the soul of all,” was another important ideological source, as were the works of Ernest Renan and Hippolyte Taine.125

At the center of Barrès’s philosophy stood the purity of the nation, which was to be reattained through the eradication of internal enemies and “impure” elements. How little Germany initially figured as an opponent is clear from Barrès’s remark that “more than just the Rhine” separated him from the enemy at home.126 Then came the Dreyfus affair. A standard-bearer for the anti-Dreyfus cause, Barrès insisted on the captain’s guilt even as the case against him began to unravel. With the revelation that much of the evidence against Dreyfus had been forged, Barrès experienced his second personal and political defeat (after the Boulanger adventure) within a decade. Perhaps even more significant was the ultimate triumph of the liberal regime in 1899, when a government came to power headed by the leftist republican René Waldeck-Rousseau and committed to a pacifist foreign policy. These setbacks may explain why Barrès decided to make peace with the republic and redirect the energies he had long applied to the internal struggle outward, to Germany.

Barrès’s about-face was the inversion of an inversion. His desire for revanche had initially been turned by Boulangism and the anti-Dreyfus campaign against internal institutions, where it seemed to have greater prospects for success; it now swung around once more, since those institutions had proven unassailable. After 1900, Barrès’s revanchiste writings came to resemble those of his predecessors from the 1870s, with one significant addition. Everything German was now not only barbaric, violent, predatory, uncultured, and without spirit but also disloyal, assimilated, imitative, servile, and lacking in character—attributes previously reserved by antisemites for Jews. In Barrès’s telling, these traits had enabled the Germans to gain power. In contrast, everything French was cultivated, humane, and redolent of spiritual greatness. The same man who fifteen years earlier had made fun of the political poetry of Paul Déroulède and dismissed popular anti-German pamphlets as the “vain crowings of brainless traveling salesmen” now embraced Déroulède (“a hero in the tradition of Corneille,… my greatest ally”) and portrayed the German characters in his novels in the style of the antisemitic caricatures from the Dreyfus era.127 As Ernst Robert Curtius was the first to recognize, late Barrèsian nationalism was nothing other than a means of voicing the fear, already evident in Boulangist revanche, of being once more overpowered by Germany, as well as an attempt to ward off this looming coup de grâce. “The very title of Barrès’s revanche novel Les bastions de l’Est speaks volumes,” writes Curtius. “Nationalism is forever in search of bulwarks and protective walls against foreign invaders.”128

From Revanche to Elan Vital

In his analysis of Barrèsian nationalism, Curtius lists its defining attributes as “a permanent sense of threat,” “an intense concern with mustering one’s dwindling strength,” and “a strange nervous anxiety about foreign powers.” But he also emphasizes what Barrèsian nationalism was not, namely, “the result of a thoroughgoing consciousness of one’s own strength and a boundary-shattering drive toward expansion … [or] a self-assured, calm expression of superiority.”129 Consciousness of strength, drive toward expansion, superiority—there can be no doubt as to what Curtius, writing after 1918, is referring to. For a few years before World War I, European observers had perceived just such renewed self-confidence in France. A new generation—known as the Agathon generation after the nom de plume of two writers who announced the movement—knew of events like Sedan, the German invasion, and the Paris Commune only from history books.130 To members of the Agathon generation, all born around 1890, Boulanger was merely a historical figure and the Dreyfus affair a quarrel among their parents. The technological achievement of the Eiffel Tower, in whose shadow they had grown up, impressed them far more than the historical legacy and cultural achievement of their predecessors, whom they generally despised as dilettantes. In their rebellion against the prevailing liberal-pacifist spirit of the post-Dreyfus years, they looked to Maurice Barrès and his fellow traveler Charles Maurras as their nationalistic schoolmasters, but in truth they were less interested in the elder Barrès’s revanche novels than in the young Barrès’s cult of egotism. And Maurras, founder of the aggressively nationalist L’action française, impressed them mainly with his contempt for bourgeois hypocrisy and sentimentality, as when he made fun of the “eternal and infinitely stupid gloria victis” of the older revanche elegists.131

The youth of the Agathon generation comprised, however, no more than several hundred or perhaps a thousand students from the Sorbonne and the grandes écoles. As disproportionate as their influence was—not unlike the intellectual New Left’s in the 1960s—the spectrum of opinion was much broader. The importance of Barrès and Maurras in fact paled in comparison with that of Henri Bergson, with his doctrine of the élan vital, which emphasized contingency and creativity. To the disaffected young, Bergson offered the revelation of a world in which all traditional borders had been forced open. Julien Benda, critic and philosopher, referred to Bergsonianism as “intellectual Boulangism,” a characterization that was unjust to Bergson’s philosophy but accurately captured its enthusiastic contemporary reception. Revocation of boundaries, expansiveness, dynamism, and the questioning of all established facts were the order of the day throughout turn-of-the-century Europe, expressed in everything from imperialism to physics, medicine, psychology, technology, industry, art, and literature.132 In Paris, the movement reached extraordinary intensity, coinciding as it did with the period of vibrant national renewal. For the Agathon-Bergson generation, France’s colonial empire, created in a mere two decades, was not what it had been for their fathers, a self-awarded consolation prize for the loss of Alsace-Lorraine and an occasion for twinges of conscience over the betrayed ideals of 1789. The empire represented France’s new role as a world power and was considered a reservoir of strength without which national regeneration would have been impossible. The expectation articulated a decade earlier that “the colonial movement should yield a new generation of Frenchmen, bolder, more active, and more self-confident than their predecessors” seemed to have been fulfilled.133

Along with the colonial project, sports played an important role in the revitalization of France. The kindling of interest in sports was a Europe-wide phenomenon, but only in France did it lead to the development of a subgenre, technological sports, which immediately took hold of the popular imagination. The new enthusiasm for bicycle races and automobile and airplane competitions may well have been an artful metaphoric corrective to the slow pace of industrialization in France compared with the progress in England, Germany, and the United States. The pilot and the race-car driver were hailed as a new homme machine, a technological hero and superman, the product of industrial and anthropological evolution. Significantly, preoccupation with this type manifested itself less in the highly industrialized (that is, the Protestant, Anglo-Saxon, Germanic) world than in the Latin-Catholic one, which observed the Industrial Revolution from a distance.134 Where the French, for example, venerated the propeller-driven airplane—a roaring machine, speed become form—and, with it, the lone pilot, the Germans were attracted to the dirigible, which was monumental, grave, and above all the province not of a single individual but of a team.

If the Eiffel Tower had been the emblem for the early period of France’s restored self-confidence, after 1900 the airplane became the symbol of French revitalization in full swing, or, more precisely, of the country’s return to the ranks of the nations able and willing to wage war. According to the journal Agathon, the masses saw the airplane as “a war machine.”135 The compensatory mechanism is unmistakable: to overcome its industrial and demographic inferiority to Germany, France fixated on the airplane, which embodied the superiority of quality over quantity. Fantasy war novels never tired of recounting how a handful of French flying men forced whole German armies into ignoble retreat.

Nonetheless, the myth of the airplane was more than merely a new remedy for the old inferiority complex. One novel element was the connection between war and sport, sublimated in and embodied by international competitions such as the Olympic Games, which were revived in Athens in 1896 thanks to a French initiative. In a kind of osmosis of meaning, war increasingly began to appear as a sport pour le vrai, a “match” played with live ammunition, the winning of which was a question more of technology, training, and endurance than of national sentiment. Traditional national enthusiasm, as the adherents of the war-as-sport perspective insisted, was hopelessly outmoded: it did not take into account the new facts and rules of technology, sport, élan vital, and imperialism. It failed to recognized that only the blue sky of aviation—and not the blue line of the Vosges—had the capacity to renew the nation.

The “new nationalism”—the bellicose chauvinism and imperialism of the years immediately preceding the First World War—was accompanied by renewed debate about Alsace-Lorraine.136 This was not a flickering, however, of the old nationalism. The return of Alsace-Lorraine to public consciousness in 1911, after a long absence, had less to do with the provinces themselves than with the French-German confrontation then taking place in Morocco, a purely colonial matter. People were thinking not of Metz and Strasbourg but rather of the imperialist commitments at risk and the national prestige involved. There is no better evidence of the truly “provincial” significance of Alsace-Lorraine in this context than the fact that all the major Franco-German crises before 1914 took place not along the Rhine and not over the “lost provinces” but over colonial spheres of influence in Northern Africa.137 Sedan and Alsace-Lorraine were little more than afterthoughts in a revanche that was now primarily concerned with redressing French humiliation in the colonial sphere.138 France’s belligerent response to German expansionism in the Morocco crisis of 1911 resembled the combative “revanche pour Sadowa” sentiment of 1866 more than any of the other revanche surges since 1870. The uncanny similarity obtains even in the number of years it took both events to lead to an actual outbreak of hostilities: four after 1866 and three after 1911. Forty years after Sedan, France was once again prestige-conscious and ready for war.

The Renewal

According to the law—or reflex—of learning from the victor, the model for French renewal was preprogrammed: it was the Prussian schoolmaster, or, more generally, the modern Prussian-German public educational system with all its expectations and results, such as literacy and professionalization of the masses; broad dissemination of the latest technology and training in technical skills, and a high degree of social organization and discipline. German soldiers’ detailed knowledge of geography, to take but one example, had made a deep impression on the civilian population of France. “When they asked for directions,” recalled one Frenchman, “the question was never ‘Where does this road go?’ but rather ‘Isn’t this the road to…?’ And they never got lost.”139 In contrast, the German side was astonished by the level of illiteracy among French prisoners of war—officers as well as soldiers.140

National renewal would obviously have to begin with the army. It was clear, however, that the military caste, which had thought of itself since the seventeenth century as the most accomplished in Europe, would bitterly resist being remade according to a foreign model. Its resistance explains the halfhearted military reform carried out in the early 1870s. Conscription ostensibly became universal in 1872—the common practice of “substitution,” for example, was outlawed—but the law was so full of holes that the old professional army continued to exist de facto. The general staff, created along Prussian lines after 1874, served only as an adviser to the war minister, having no competence in drawing up plans and making decisions. These remained the responsibility of the Conseil supérieur de la guerre, a committee made up of retired generals whose activities, according to one participant, were “confused and never methodically directed” and often consisted of “interminable meetings where one discussed everything but the army.”141

More important in the present context than the patchy results was the way in which the reformers justified their policies. Adopting the Prussian system, they argued, ultimately meant nothing more than continuing their own tradition by other means. Was not the Prussian army of 1870, they asked, also the product of reform, specifically reform implemented after the 1806 German defeat at Jena-Auerstedt and modeled on the example of then-victorious France? To adopt the Prussian system was thus to return to the original French one, which had been developed in Prussia while France had rested on its laurels and lost its advantage. Reform, argued Jules Lewal, a leading military theoretician of the 1870s, was “a matter not of imitating a foreign model, but of returning to original French doctrine.”142 From this perspective, the Prussian army seemed not so much a superior power as a kind of medium for the conservation and regeneration of French military excellence, which had been criminally neglected at home since 1815. To support their view, the reformers cited Prussian officers’ statements noting their debt to French role models. During the days of Napoleon III, for example, the French military attaché in Berlin, Eugène Georges Stoffel, reported that Prussians readily admitted their debt to France: “Jena forced us to think things over and we learned our lesson.”143 The picture of Prussia as both a parasite feeding off French excellence and also an heir to it was not restricted to the military. Ludovic Drapeyron’s remark that “Germany after 1815 needed only to continue on the path down which France had pointed it” clearly invokes the old loser rationale that the opponent’s victory is undeserved because it is based on appropriated superiority.144

After 1871 the notion of Prussian-style military reform as a continuation of “French achievement” certainly served to sooth France’s wounded self-confidence but that was a secondary motive.145 The primary concern was to promote Prussia’s path out of defeat as a model for France. According to Ernest Renan, the real cause of France’s exhaustion, decadence, and ultimate defeat was the humanist universalism to which the nation had subscribed since 1789.146 The Prussian example showed that this decline could be reversed by focusing one’s energies inward. The Prussian model was ideal for imitation because, as the philosopher Elme Carlo had pointed out even earlier than Renan, German culture, too, had gotten stuck in the illusion of humanist cosmopolitanism before the defeat of 1806 had set it straight.147

Most military reformers after 1871 entertained similar ideas. General Louis Trochu, for example, having already staunchly advocated thorough military reform after Königgrätz /Sadowa, characterized his country’s traditional esprit guerrier as inadequate to the demands of modern warfare and contrasted it with the more up-to-date Prussian military spirit, “a constant, effective, disciplined, and reliable force … itself capable of holding together the army in the nation’s hour of need and preparing it spiritually and morally for revanche.”148 Just as France, to survive as a nation, would have to give up the ideal of saving humanity, so too the army would have to renounce its anachronistic warrior ethos. This was the lesson of Sedan, distilled to its essence, and it was embodied in a figure who, with Joan of Arc and Roland, completed the triumvirate of France’s personifications of defeat.

Vercingetorix

The hero of the unsuccessful Gallic resistance to Roman conquest had a genealogy that differed from that of the two medieval martyr figures. While Roland and Joan of Arc were already legends in the collective imagination before 1871, the entire Gallic period had been relegated to the prehistory of French national memory. It was the post-1879 republican republic that rediscovered Vercingetorix and made him a symbol of Gallic France, that is, the France of the people, as opposed to the “Frank” France of kings and aristocrats. Vercingetorix was seen as the progenitor of a long line of revolutionaries fighting against seigneurial France, with the 1789 Revolution serving as “the high point of a long battle between Franks and Gauls and the successful revanche of the second against the first.”149

More important than this class-specific interpretation, however, was that Vercingetorix embodied a more complex experience of defeat than had either Joan of Arc or Roland. While they essentially filled the role of martyr-heroes of an ultimately successful cause, Vercingetorix posed the question of defeat as historical necessity. Gaul, the answer ran, had to be vanquished by Rome, more civilized and thus superior, so that France could be born. The demise of the Gauls was the “creative defeat” and “cruel necessity” of modernization.150 Or, in the language of the republican reformers, “The Gauls lacked the quality of discipline essential to national greatness. They were incapable of following orders and subordinating their personal and group interests to the greater good.… Rancor and anarchy destined the Gauls to fall prey to a better organized and more disciplined nation. Rome’s victory over the Gauls, thus, was ultimately the triumph of civilization over barbarism.”151 The lesson of 1870–71 could not have been drawn with greater clarity in regard to discipline, the one quality that Prussia was traditionally thought to possess in abundance. Of course, no one went so far as to demand the Germanization of France; the country still felt morally and culturally superior to its conqueror. Instead, the challenge resided in the old and recurring tightrope walk: how to adopt the discipline, knowledge, technology, and organization of the victor without damaging the national soul, indeed while strengthening it for future conflicts.

Educational Reform and the Black Hussars of the Republic

“Education is the concern of everyone. Society must do everything in its power to encourage the development of reason among the people and give every citizen the instruction necessary for it.”152 As article 22 of the First Republic’s 1793 constitution makes clear, the French people did not need the Prussian model to appreciate the importance of popular education. A state that considered reason the highest virtue was naturally committed to spreading it even to the nation’s most remote corners. What was lacking, however, was a plan for disseminating knowledge in an organized way. In practice, article 22 was never taken as seriously as other basic rights and duties of citizens. Education was always defined merely as a concern and not an obligation, the reason perhaps being that it did not have a natural place in the triad of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Indeed, compulsory education seemed to contradict the human right to freedom. Ernest Renan saw the contradiction as one reason France lagged behind Prussian Germany in popular education.153 Another was the comparatively low prestige of institutions for practical education—as opposed to the idea of reason—in a revolutionary republic that saw itself, despite its celebration of democratic egalitarianism, as a primarily heroic undertaking.154 With every military victory, the sword seemed more decisive and commanded more respect, while the chalk and the schoolmaster’s switch seemed ever more irrelevant and base.

Thus, the cause of compulsory public education gained momentum only after the Napoleonic defeats of 1812–15. The famous adage that the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton emphasized for the first time the superiority of nonmilitary thought, training, and organization over their military equivalents. The stereotype of the Prussian schoolmaster was essentially an updated version of the playing fields of Eton. Significantly, Victor Cousin, who planned sweeping school reforms during the 1830s and 1840s, had justified his campaign in terms of the battlefield: “Adopting the Prussian education system would be a greater triumph than the trophies of Austerlitz and Jena.”155

In their long struggle against monarchist restorations and Bonapartist coups d’état, French republicans were motivated by a different sort of defeat to reevaluate all aspects of public education. After the failed Revolution of 1848, they recognized that any revolutionary action in Paris was bound to be more flash than substance as long as the masses outside Paris remained under the control of the established powers. One instrument of this control was the public school. Hence the attempt in 1848 by republican minister Hippolyte Carnot (whose father organized the levée en masse of 1792) to introduce compulsory education with a secular, republican syllabus. This project, like that of the entire Second Republic, fell apart: in 1850, one year before his coup d’état, Louis Bonaparte reconfirmed the traditional leading role of the church in education and even revoked Cousin’s nascent reforms. After this setback, republicans placed free compulsory education at the center of their political platform. Biding their time on the political margins throughout the Second Empire, they laid the foundations for a “counterculture” in which popular education would become the republican substitute for religion.156

The most important association created to support this goal was the Ligue de l’enseignement. Both the time (autumn 1866) and the place (not Paris, but Alsace) of the Ligue’s founding underscored its reliance on the German model. Not only was the shock of Prussian victory at Königgrätz/Sadowa still fresh, but France’s easternmost province was also the most open to German ideas and culture. It was hardly coincidental that French military attaché Stoffel, who repeatedly warned of the threat posed by the Prussian synthesis of militarism and education, came from the Alsatian border region. Stoffel’s reports from Berlin languished in ministerial desk drawers until 1871. After France’s defeat, however, they were published and soon came to serve as the basis for discussions about military and school reform. One of Stoffel’s rhetorical questions asks: “What general would think twice if asked to choose between two armies, each with a hundred thousand men, one composed of graduates of the Ecole polytechnique and the military academy at St. Cyr and the other of peasants?”157

The vigorous public educational reform that began in 1879 astonished international observers.158 It proceeded on three levels, the first in terms of secular subject matter and content.159 On the structural level, the republicans instituted obligatory teacher-training seminars (écoles normales) in all regions and “cleansed” the Conseil supérieur de l’instruction publique of all “confessional” (that is, Catholic) members, transforming it into a professional committee for planning and decision making on national educational policies.160 Finally, on the symbolic level, the status of the teacher was redefined. The old schoolmaster, as Balzac depicted him in the figure of Père Fourchon in The Peasants, had traditionally occupied the lowest rung on the village social ladder. Often barely literate himself, the schoolteacher was a kind of seasonal laborer hired by the community after the autumn harvest and let go again in the spring, as well as a factotum who filled in as gravedigger, village chronicler, surveyor, and sometimes cobbler and tailor—in short, more a pariah than a role model. By the early 1880s, republican school reform and its attendant propaganda had transformed this pathetic figure into the shining instituteur républicain. Like the commissar in post-1917 revolutionary Russia, the instituteur républicain became the figurehead for the new regime. “Solide, virile, austère”—these were the characteristics demanded of teachers by Jules Simon, education minister of the provisional government, and the schoolteacher soon became known popularly, on account of his standardized uniform, as the Black Hussar of the Republic.161 A similar spirit of virile austerity drove the reform of higher education. The superficial elegance of the French esprit was contrasted unfavorably with the scholarly seriousness of the German Geist and found to be too flighty (that is, insufficiently “masculine”). As one reformer wrote, “French higher education exists only in order to prepare a people of dilettantes and bon vivants, fluent conversationalists, salon thinkers, and elegant writers. Modern knowledge has never even knocked on the door of our universities.… From this stems the superficial spirit that spreads throughout French society from top to bottom.”162

It would be misleading to cite the Prussian model as the explanation for the militaristic associations of the hussar-teacher since what was considered worthy of imitation in the Prussian model was never its “militaristic” quality but rather its pedagogical excellence. The image of the Black Hussar of the Republic can be better understood as another expression of anti-Catholic agitation: the teaching profession functioned as a kind of Praetorian Guard in the republicans’ fight against the Catholic monarchist camp. As with revanche, where one said “Germany” but meant the domestic enemy, republican educational reform was also a combination of external and internal considerations. The instituteur républicain played a double role as standard-bearer of the nation’s educational renewal and hussar in the fight against the dark forces of church and crown attempting to block that renewal.

The “school battalions” that appeared in the 1880s embodied the republican military ethos at its most extreme. Equipped with wooden rifles and trained by professional soldiers from the regional garrison, these squadrons of uniformed schoolchildren marched on Bastille Day and on other representative republican occasions, to the consternation of local priests, who protested against such calculated acts of provocation as the banging of drums and the singing of republican songs outside church services. Disavowed by contemporary critics as a “childish and dangerous” institution and seen by historians as a “game of military adventure” and a “military masquerade,” the school battalions served for several years as a miniature band of propagandistic storm troopers.163 Reaching their zenith during the years of Boulangism, they soon disappeared as quickly as they had risen, failing to become a permanent institution because participation was voluntary and their activity confined to traditional republican, urban strongholds. Another reason for their decline was the development of an institution that proved far more suitable for the militarization of the schools—and of society with them.

Gymnastique

As early as Rousseau’s Emile, republican pedagogy insisted that the education of the child into a future citizen must address the body as well as the mind. The First Republic had included physical education along with intellectual pursuits in its catalog of citizens’ rights and duties but had done little, aside from military training for the levée en masse, to put the idea into practice.164 Nonetheless, its inclusion marked the beginning of a close connection between gymnastique, the military, and the nation that would continue throughout the nineteenth century. In Prussia, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, following the French model, would systematically develop the idea of physical education into a movement that has been rightly termed the “mobilizing capacity” of the masses but that could perhaps be more accurately described as their “nationalizing capacity.”165 Patriotically inflected physical education, with its accompanying institution, the gymnastics club, or Turnverein, played an important role in the formation of national consciousness not only in Germany but in Central and Southern European national movements as well.166 Gymnastique finally made its way back to France after 1871 as a pedagogical movement of national renewal patterned on Jahn’s example and propagated by the Ligue de l’enseignement. Clubs with names like La Régénératrice, Le Réveil, La Patriote, France!, La Sentinelle, and La Revanche sprouted up all over the country, and by 1880 physical education had become a mandatory part of the school curriculum. One historian cites the human pyramids made by hundreds of gymnasts at the national competition in 1900 as a vivid expression of national unity, and he quotes a contemporary commentator: “The gymnastics clubs show how their members are united by the same discipline, by the same method, regardless of whether they come from north or south, east or west.”167 What the republic expected to gain from gymnastique was, in the words of Gambetta, “the education of schoolchildren who are physically fit and courageous. The teacher is to be supplemented by the gymnaste and the military man. Only thus will our children learn later in life as citizen soldiers to wield the sword, use the rifle, and endure long marches.”168

By the 1890s, gymnastique as a mass movement was on the wane, as were Boulangism, the Ligue des patriotes, and the school battalions, and the slogan of revanche was giving way to the aim of colonial expansion. That all these developments occurred around the same time suggests they were related, as does the simultaneous rise in popularity of another form of physical activity.

Le Sport

If gymnastique was practiced not for its own sake but for strengthening and disciplining the nation, sports, which had arisen in England, were initially an entirely self-referential activity, sport pour le sport. A concept like fair play was absent in gymnastique because there was nothing to be played for. Sports, by contrast, were organized as competitions for records and victories and thus were a sublimated form of warfare—with set rules, to be sure, but also with winners and losers to be determined in hard-fought if playful fashion. Furthermore, just as gymnastique gave physical expression to old-style republican nationalism, sports seemed to give physical expression to social Darwinism and imperialism. The concurrent appearance of sports and imperialism and the frequency of sports terms in imperialist language are too conspicuous to be coincidental. The English provenance of both is also significant since by the 1890s Great Britain had become the preeminent role model for the colonial and imperial aspirations of nations across the Continent—aspirations that pushed old rivalries over national borders, including the conflict between France and Germany, into the background.

The fact that imperialism in Europe from 1890 to 1914 was in many ways a utopian ideology has been lost in the emphasis on the crimes committed in its name. Yet that’s what it was: the imperialist vision of salvation was to resolve conflicts in Europe once and for all by projecting them abroad; formerly irreconcilable differences would be forgotten in the wide-open spaces of the non-European world. For the French and Germans, this meant that their two nations would no longer pursue the endlessly murderous struggle over the Rhine but would instead divide up the rest of the world in the English fashion, that is, with minimal military involvement, each erecting an Augustan empire without disturbing or being disturbed by its neighbor, who was engaged in similar activities. Should conflict arise, however, it would be settled not through martial bloodshed, as on the European battlefields of the past, but through peaceful, sporting, commercial competition. Competition (for territories and markets) was one of imperialism’s central images. With the world understood as an arena or a racetrack, there was little room to imagine battles, victories, and defeats as anything other than sporting events. As one contemporary, illustrating what Norbert Elias calls the “sportification” of culture, put it, “Ultimately war is nothing other than a sporting contest, a match between two nations, indeed the one true sport.”169 Only against this backdrop can one understand the sporting élan with which the generation of 1914 marched into the First World War. Henri Desgrange, founder of the Tour de France, spoke of a “grand match” to be won or lost: “Our soldiers at the front, aren’t they in a familiar situation, like those international meets in which men measure their strength against that of the opponent?”170 Some, like the English captain who led a charge by kicking a soccer ball across the line, held to the idea of war as sport to the very end, when they went down in a hail of machine-gun fire. The Christmas 1914 soccer matches between English and German soldiers in the no-man’s-land between the trenches belong to the same tradition.

It is no surprise, then, that the father of the modern Olympic revival subscribed to the view that the conflation of sports and war was a step forward for civilization. One year before the outbreak of World War I, Pierre de Coubertin wrote in the Revue Olympique: “The idea of a sporting war—the phrase is carefully considered—seems to be increasingly taking hold: a contest of weapons that is no less harsh but that leaves behind less hatred and bitterness. People are beginning to learn from sports how despicable hatred is without physical contest.… An army of sportsmen will be humane and fair during wartime and calm and collected thereafter.”171

The enthusiasm for sports in Belle Epoque France has been explained as arising from “the inexactible revanche”—the result of France’s military inferiority to Germany.172 This does not mean that France simply transferred revanche from the battlefield to the sports field. On the contrary, France’s sports efforts were never directed against Germany, and they were characterized not by a revanchiste fixation but rather by internationalism and universalism. Yet compensation often takes indirect forms. Just as post-1815 Saint-Simonism, with which France sought to overtake England in the Industrial Revolution, explicitly reinterpreted industrialization as a human ideal rather than a national ambition, so France appropriated the English idea of competitive sports, refashioning it as a celebration of humanity and brotherhood. The revival of the Olympic Games in 1896, in which Paris took a leading role, cast the grande nation not only as the true heir to the original cultural nation, Hellas, but also as the director of the entire international sports movement.

Internationalism and universalism also marked the athletic events held within France itself, above all those that were considered typically French. Until 1914, all the leading international automobile races and aviation competitions began and ended in Paris, and the Tour de France, named after a famous French children’s book, soon became the most important event in international bicycle racing. The enthusiastic embrace of technology in these competitions touches on yet another compensatory function of sports in the Third Republic. As already observed, the French between 1890 and 1914 favored machine and motor sports rather than purely physical games. At the center of their fascination was not the athlete but the homme machine, energized and given wheels and wings by the motorized vehicle. This preference was not as immediately apparent with the bicyclist, who moved the machine with his muscles, as it was with automobile drivers and airplane pilots; on the other hand, the vélo (bicycle) most vividly represented a synthesis of man and machine, in which the two worked together, enhancing each other. The popularity of bicycles in 1890s France—truly a vélomanie—can perhaps therefore be understood as a collective longing for release from the physical laws of the real world. Like the airplane, the petite machine ailée (little winged machine) and the fée bicyclette (magic bicycle) became the means “of freeing oneself from the laws of gravity,” in the words of novelist Maurice Leblanc, a vélo enthusiast and the creator of Arsène Lupin.173 “Riding. Riding. Movement transported them into an indescribable state,” he says of two of his characters. “They seemed to themselves to be supernatural beings equipped with new capabilities and unknown powers, birds flying high above the heavens who simultaneously touched the ground with their wings.”174

Clearly the French enthusiasm for sports, while internationalist in tone, fulfilled a national function. As the premier event of international cycling, the Tour de France has been described as a “forum for the nation in which the characteristics of the race are put to a public test” and as a “three-week-long national epic that glorifies France and Frenchmen.”175 One could also call it the most successful form of compensation for the real revanche that was never able to get off the ground.176

The Path to Africa

Every nation has a mythology centered on the idea of two fronts. In France that mythology was based on two bodies of water on its borders: the Atlantic Ocean (including the English Channel) and the Rhine. Beyond both were spaces for potential exploration as well as sites of potential threat. In the late Middle Ages, modern France unified in the face of an English (Atlantic) threat, and it soon discovered a taste for overseas expansion. The result was two hundred years of competition against England in the New World, ending in 1763 after the Seven Years War with the closing of the Atlantic “frontier.” It was not until 1870–71, when the “across the Rhine” option became not only unfeasible but distinctly dangerous, that the French gaze once more turned to distant lands. History, however, seldom repeats itself: this time, the French looked not across the Atlantic but over the Mediterranean.

The idea that the nation’s future lay in Africa was not new. In 1830, French troops had occupied part of Algeria in a punitive expedition that lacked any advance planning or vision.177 On an ideological level, the utopian socialists had long assigned Algeria a role comparable to that of the American West for the United States: Fourier wanted to found the first of his phalansteries there, Proudhon envisioned an agrarian colony, and Etienne Cabet imagined a communist collective.178 Later on, French expansionists planned giant technological projects, like irrigation of the Sahara and the construction of a trans-Saharan railroad line (modeled on the American Union Pacific). The railway was intended not only to join North and Equatorial Africa and connect both to Europe but also, in competition with the Anglo-American monopoly on the North Atlantic, to prepare for a “Latin” connection across the South Atlantic to South America. It is difficult to imagine a more fantastic revanche for the defeat of 1763 than the reconquest of the transatlantic world via the Mediterranean.179

The coherent concept of a greater France extending across the western Mediterranean to Africa was first formulated in the decadence debates during the Second Empire. Lucien Prévost-Paradol, for example, believed that for France to survive in the competition with other great powers, it had to achieve the territorial integration of Algeria. In that way, the French population would be tripled, and eighty to a hundred million Frenchmen, he thought, would be capable of matching the United States, England, Russia, and Prussia.180 Henri Verne laid out a similar argument in 1869, a year before Sedan. Referring to France’s dim prospects in Europe, he recommended concentrating all of the nation’s energies on developing Algeria: “Once this beautiful country has been settled, cultivated, and made economically useful, we will have made a much more important contribution to regaining our hegemony than by annexing the Rhineland and Belgium, which could only be accomplished with a bloody and ruinous war.”181

These and similar projects never really caught on, owing to a lack of public interest. Flaubert’s entry in his Dictionary of Accepted Ideas reads: “Colonies (ours): upsetting to talk about.” Particularly after Napoleon III’s unhappy adventure in Mexico, where he tried to establish an empire, anticolonial sentiment grew to such an extent that even a successful endeavor like Francis Garnier’s exploration of Indochina and conquest of the Mekong region in the 1860s was greeted with “profound indifference,” as a disappointed Gamier noted on his return.182

* * *

IN 1881, THE French military occupied Tunisia and declared it a protectorate. While Tunisia seemed to be a one-shot colonial acquisition much like Algeria fifty years earlier, it was, in fact, the opening move in a carefully considered and well-planned political campaign, one that demonstrated that republican France, after ten years of forced passivity, was once more testing itself in the fields of military action and foreign influence. The occupation also revealed where the future emphasis of such activities would lie.183 With this act, the newly elected government of Jules Ferry clearly showed that, instead of rattling the old European cage locked by Bismarck, France was determined to kick open the door to Africa, upon which the country had so long fixed its eye.

There were two obstacles, however, to the transition from a European to an overseas orientation. One was the anticolonial tradition of republicanism, which remained committed to the ideas of equality and the universal brotherhood of man. The second was the lingering demand for revanche against Germany. How could a republican regime nullify both of these principles? Once again, Léon Gambetta, appointed premier in 1881, proved to be the great integrator, able to unite the moral demands of the Radicals with the pragmatism of the Opportunists. Just as the anti-Communist Richard Nixon may have been the only man capable of restoring diplomatic relations with China, so it was “only possible for the man of revanche to introduce republican patriots to the idea that France could go down the path of colonialism without burying its other hopes,” as one historian puts it.184 Just as Gambetta’s défense nationale had been militarily pointless but of great stabilizing importance psychologically and mythologically, so colonialism now served to create a complementary myth of a glorious new national mission.

During the 1870s, while in the opposition, Gambetta had been an orthodox anticolonialist, ready to trade French possessions overseas for the return of Alsace-Lorraine. “Is it better to preserve France’s faraway territories or her future generations?” he asked. “Let us confront this anguishing dilemma: the lives of French youth or portions of our colonies. Wouldn’t it be better if we profited from the German taste for colonies?” The idea of exchanging colonies for Alsace-Lorraine, although rejected by some as a “jeu d’imagination”—an intellectual game—attracted many adherents. As early as 1871, at the negotiations over the treaty of Frankfurt, Adolphe Thiers supposedly offered Bismarck Indonesia in exchange for the two provinces. (The colony most often put on the table was Madagascar.)185

With the republican takeover of the government, Gambetta would make a complete about-face. The man who had once advocated a policy of recueillement (self-containment) as the only possible course now warned against the dangers of provincialization. “The most important thing for France right now is to break out of the narrow circle in which the timid of heart want to confine it. We must learn to take a deep breath, puff out our chest, and, most importantly, march forward.” He continued: “France lies not just between the Atlantic and the Alps, the Vosges and the Mediterranean, but wherever there are French interests and wherever French industry and trade are active.”186

That the father of the défense nationale and revanche had given his support to the colonial project was of great importance, but Gambetta’s blessing did not spell the end of anticolonialist opposition. On the contrary. Anticolonialism had never been more than a vague sentiment; now its champions organized themselves into a determined force of resistance and, having learned a few propaganda skills from the colonial party, sought to reduce the debate to a single question: How would turning France’s attention overseas serve to overcome defeat and regenerate the nation?

Three positions crystallized in the “great colonial controversy” that followed the action in Tunisia.187 According to the first, France’s role in continental Europe was over and the “continental strategy” was a waste of energy; the future, in emulation of England, lay overseas. The leading advocate of this position, Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, even described French continental policy since Louis XIV as one gigantic mistake that only the path of colonialization could rectify. The loss of Alsace-Lorraine appeared from this perspective to be not only a necessary evil but almost a nod from destiny. “Colonial or continental policies—how can we hesitate for a minute?” Leroy-Beaulieu wrote. “Would not France today be immeasurably richer and more respected if it had pursued a determined colonial policy in the past two centuries? Canada, Louisiana, Mississippi, and the Pacific Coast as part of our possessions … could hardly be dismissed as contributions to France’s prestige, its material and spiritual power.… What prevents us from recapturing this sort of position in the world? Nothing but the continental policy.”188

The second position was that of the ruling Opportunists, who could not afford the political costs of openly renouncing Alsace-Lorraine. Thus, they depicted the turn overseas as a tactical detour directed toward the ultimate strategic goal of revanche. The Parisian daily Le siècle summed up the concept as keeping “one eye on Tunisia and one eye on the Vosges.”189 Responding to the accusation that the government was seeking to substitute a colonial empire for Alsace-Lorraine, which it had given up as lost, cabinet minister Paul Bert retorted: “A substitute is as unimaginable as a consolation. But if the colonies cannot serve as a replacement for the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, they could be a means of bolstering national energy so that when the time is ripe we can win back the two provinces. Colonialism must not be allowed to distract us from what is sacred to every Frenchman, nor should it be allowed to heal the wound that still bleeds. If anyone can prove to me that our colonial undertakings undermine either of these aims, I will be the first to say adieu to the colonies.”190

Finally, the third position was one of complete rejection. Its advocates dismissed on all counts the upbeat message put forth by Gambetta, Ferry, and Bert. The colonial strategy would not strengthen the nation, lead to revanche, and restore Alsace-Lorraine but hopelessly postpone all those goals. Rejectionists voiced moral reservations as well: “How can we, as republicans, who know ourselves what it is the conquered suffer,” asked one skeptic, “do the same thing to weaker peoples?” They also recalled Napoleon III’s Mexican fiasco, alluded to an ominous political mistake (“an additional weakening of the nation, already ruined by defeat”), and often resorted to incendiary rhetoric: “The breach in the Vosges can never be filled with the desert sands of Africa and the mud of Asia.”191 For these radical opponents, colonial policy was not only a mistake but a crime: high treason. Colonialism’s main representative, Jules Ferry, who was already known as Ferry the German for his conciliatory stance toward Bismarck, became the chief target of attack. “For a couple of dubious mines in Indochina, Ferry is pawning off to Germany our security, our dignity, and our hopes,” editorialized La justice, the Radicals’ main organ. The young Radical deputy Georges Clemenceau said in Parliament: “I see before me no ministers, only traitors.” And Henri Rochefort, the nemesis of the Commune, opined: “Ferry has gotten the order from Bismarck to send fifty thousand men to Indochina.” The goal of such an action, Rochefort alleged, was to disarm France so it could be easily handed over to its enemy.192

Clearly, then, nationalism and anticolonialism went hand in hand, and since nationalism was largely represented by the political left at the time, it could be combined with economic and social concerns as well. One major theme was the “gold and blood of the nation,” which were being sucked up by high finance and invested in distant lands to maximize profit and manipulate the citizenry at home: “A successful colonial expedition,” wrote one Radical sardonically, “is worth as much as a suppressed insurrection.”193 The journalist and Radical representative Charles Anne Laisant declared: “First, one distracts the people in this fashion from politics at home.… Second, one creates sinecures for civil servants under the pretext of opening up new markets.… And third, the bourgeoisie believes that a regular bloodletting among the people is the best form of political hygiene.”194

It was no accident that the most implacable anticolonialism emanated from the Boulangist camp. Nor was the fact that the fall of the Ferry government (and the political rise of General Revanche) began with a colonial setback in Indochina. Since most of the corruption scandals had colonial roots, the soon-to-be universal catchphrase “affairisme colonial” (colonial flimflam) came to be seen as a pure redundancy. In the end, however, Boulangism and anticolonialism would go down together, defeated by the liberal republic and the appealing idea of France as an imperial power. Like all fundamental opposition to the republic, resistance to colonial expansion also ceased around 1890. A kind of role reversal had taken place: the national mission had been transposed from revanche to colonialism. The latter had always been cast as the servant to the former, but now brimming with newly won self-confidence, colonialism boldly announced itself as indispensable to the nation’s revitalization. Instead of having to justify its every initiative as a means toward the ultimate end of revanche, colonialism had become legitimate on its own terms. Increasingly, to object that colonialism had failed to win back the lost provinces seemed tantamount to complaining that a runner had failed to catch up with the runner in front, when in fact he had just passed him. Not only had colonial expansion led France out of the narrow confines of Europe into the vast arena of the overseas world, it had also proved that “the glory of the tricolor, planted in distant soil” was just as worthy as the concept of honor entailed in revanche. Indeed, as colonialism’s stature rose, the idea of revanche came more and more to be seen as antiquated and provincial.195

The various reconceptions of Algeria in this period reveal the shift in France’s geographical and psychological focus away from Europe. Even while the Franco-Prussian War was still going on, Charles Lavigerie, who had been the bishop of Algeria since 1867 and a driving force behind France’s overseas mission, had suggested to the provisional government that the potential flow of refugees from Alsace-Lorraine should be channeled toward North Africa. In 1871, he addressed the people concerned directly, offering them “la France africaine” as “a home no less French than the one you have lost. It awaits you, and its love is as great as your misfortune.”196 Although the number of immigrants who eventually moved to Algeria from Alsace-Lorraine was no greater than from any other part of France, the propagandistic, psychological, and ultimately mythological significance of Algeria as the promised land after the flight from Egypt was firmly established.197 The author of the patriotic children’s book Le Tour de la France par deux enfants even dedicated a novel to the topic of Algeria as the new Alsace-Lorraine. The novel, Les enfants de Marcel, which depicts an Alsatian family in its Algerian home, was quickly adopted as mandatory school reading. “Blessed land,” says the old grandmother, “you have become almost as precious to me as the motherland. After so many trials and tribulations, my children owe you their safety, their happiness, and their health. When my time has come, I will take my final rest in your soil without regrets, my new Alsace.”198

The second myth connected with Algeria was that of national regeneration, the idea that provided the underpinning for the entire program of colonial expansion. Because of its psychological and geographical proximity, Algeria would become the main forge in the production of myths for the whole colonial enterprise. The “desert sands of Africa,” dismissed so disparagingly by the anticolonialists, began in the regeneration rhetoric of the 1890s to represent a place of preservation, renewal, discipline, and masculinization (virilisation).

The national institution that was changed most profoundly by regeneration through colonialism was the army. The colonial successes of the 1880s and 1890s restored its sense of honor, lost at Sedan and only pitifully regained by the victory over the Commune. The military had won back its prestige, both in its own eyes and in those of the public. This rehabilitation, however, was available only to that part of the armed forces which had actively participated in colonial battles. While the regular domestic army, condemned to inactivity at home in the face of a superior enemy, sleepwalked its way through regimental routine, the colonial army was able to relive the drama of Napoleonic conquest. Its élan ultimately gave birth to the esprit de l’offensive that the regular army, led by former colonial army officers like Gallieni, Mangin, Gouraud, and Joffre, would bring to the First World War in 1914.199

* * *

ANOTHER IMPORTANT CONCEIT in overcoming resistance to overseas expansion was the idea that French colonialism, or, as we can now safely say, imperialism, would spread civilization throughout the world. While not quite as compelling as the argument for national regeneration, the French notion of the “white man’s burden” provided a significant counterweight to those on the home front who rejected colonialism and imperialism as the antithesis of fraternity and equality. At the same time, the civilizing mission revealed a peculiarity within French imperialism that distinguished it from its English, German, and Belgian counterparts. Even the earliest French forays into colonialism, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, had been primarily concerned with the prestige of the state, in contrast to the commercial aims of the English and Dutch. The trauma of 1870–71 only heightened that tendency, as did the other major aspect of the French tradition, the liberation ideology inherited from the Revolution, which was transferred to the colonial movement. In the words of Eugène Etienne, one of the main colonial propagandists of the 1890s, French imperialism saw itself as a successor to the Revolution, the only difference being that it was no longer European peoples but the overseas oppressed who needed to be liberated: “Our goal was always one of liberation, and we have liberated them. For black Africans were the booty of Arab conquerors who robbed them and sold them into slavery.”200

The Opportunists of the Third Republic invested the same missionary zeal in their program of universal compulsory education. As Raoul Girardet rightly points out, “the republic’s colonialism, at least in the minds of its theoreticians, [was] inseparable from educational reform. More precisely, the former [was] the expansion and universalization of the latter.”201 The link between colonialism and educational policies gave rise to an utterly novel function for government: the production of cultural propaganda for foreign consumption. As we have seen, after great defeats nations tend to seek consolation in cultural rather than in political or military power. For the first time in history, a nation—the Third Republic—created an institution precisely for the purposes of exporting its cultural superiority. The Alliance française, founded in 1884 by leading colonial politicians, combined the goals and methods of mass education with the drive toward external expansion. Its cultural mission—or, as modern-day critics might say, its cultural imperialism—was directed not solely at the colonial world but also at the wider circles of the European–North American nations where France hoped to regain culturally the hegemony it had forfeited politically in 1871.202

* * *

FRANCE’S COLONIAL UNDERTAKING thus served to distance the nation—psychologically and spatially—from defeat, to provide compensation, to stimulate regeneration, and to forge a new national mission. But it also led to new conflicts and confrontations. The territory France was entering was not, after all, a Garden of Eden, new, pristine, unclaimed. Everywhere except Algeria, France bumped into its old colonial rival and archenemy, England. Bismarck’s calculation that encouraging and supporting French colonialism would deflect desires for revanche onto England was entirely correct, right down to the level of rhetoric. In the 1890s, while the movement for revanche against Germany was at its ebb, the concept experienced a sudden renaissance in the colonial conflict with England. France’s repeated retreats in Egypt provoked fears over “our colonial Sedan” and “Egypt, our Alsace-Lorraine with England.” The near war over Fashoda in 1898 prompted many to lament “this defeat, which is almost as complete and humiliating as anything we have experienced in Europe,” and to rue “a catastrophe along the lines of Alsace-Lorraine.”203

The application of revanche rhetoric to colonial politics shows how quickly and thoroughly the colonial enterprise had become a pillar of the new national self-image, shedding its controversial origins. Indeed, colonialism even stoked the ambitions of an extreme nationalist and neo-revanchiste like Maurice Barrès: “I love Morocco because it provides us … with thirty or forty thousand excellent soldiers.”204 In the end, of course, the “Sedan” of Fashoda led not to a Franco-German alliance against England but to an Anglo-French entente cordiale against Germany, the results of which are well known. Less so is the story of the first French-German confrontation under these new circumstances. Perhaps the most critical type of crisis in the age of mass society results from the stirring up of emotions around a collective trauma from the past. The Moroccan crises of 1905 and 1911 produced such a situation in both France and Germany: all the events and phantasms since the summer of 1870 came flooding back—kaleidoscopically and overwhelmingly—and were reexperienced anew.

Like no other point on the map, Morocco became the place where the consequences of France’s overseas reorientation for its relationship with Germany would be played out. For France, Morocco represented the last piece needed to complete its North African empire and confirm its national revival. For Germany, Morocco represented the model and touchstone for its goal of participating in the division of the colonial world, as well as a locus for fears that France would succeed there in exacting the revanche it could not realize along the Rhine.205 No one in either France or Germany—or anywhere else—doubted the supremacy of the German empire on the European continent. Yet there was growing German skepticism as to whether Bismarck’s continental orientation had been the correct course of action or whether it had ruled out or even fatefully delayed the nation’s entry into world politics. No less astute an observer than Max Weber considered Bismarck’s colonial-imperialist reticence, especially his support for French overseas expansion, a serious mistake since it ceded to France a promising arena for the future. When Germany finally and belatedly jumped aboard the imperialist bandwagon, “the noise that resulted,” Weber wrote, “was out of all proportion to our truly moderate demands” and put the expansionists “in a disadvantageous position at home.”206

Weber was describing the classic fall from grace of victors who, believing their superiority to have been confirmed by history, continue along the tried and tested path. Meanwhile the vanquished, forced to reorient themselves, are quicker to spot new paths they can follow. “Morocco” was a paradigmatic historical reversal in this sense. Most immediately, it represented a local victory for France over Germany. The French navy had achieved a standoff with its German counterpart, and France got the better part of the agreement that settled the crisis, exchanging territory in the Congo for the far more valuable Morocco. More important, however, France had maneuvered Germany into a corner and concluded an alliance with England that would allow it, finally, to exact revanche for the Franco-Prussian War and regain Alsace-Lorraine. In 1866 and 1870, Napoleon III’s Second Empire had, in contrast to Bismarck’s Prussia and its sober Realpolitik, broadcast its demands with bombastic—yet hollow—rhetoric. During the Moroccan crisis of 1911, in turn, it was the German politicians who, with their equally melodramatic and empty talk of “a panther’s leap to Agadir,” fell into the trap of performing “bad theater atop a grandiose stage.”207

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2戰敗文化：法國

🧩 一、文章重點摘要

1️⃣ 戰敗的起點與心理重建

2️⃣ 「報復（Revanche）」觀念的文化根源

3️⃣ 神話人物與集體心理重塑

4️⃣ 教育改革與民族再生

5️⃣ 復仇的轉向──殖民與文化擴張

6️⃣ 文化補償與現代性象徵

❓二、文章提出的主要問題

🧩 一、文章重點摘要

1️⃣ 戰敗的起點與心理重建

2️⃣ 「報復（Revanche）」觀念的文化根源

3️⃣ 神話人物與集體心理重塑

4️⃣ 教育改革與民族再生

5️⃣ 復仇的轉向──殖民與文化擴張

6️⃣ 文化補償與現代性象徵

❓二、文章提出的主要問題

一、三位人物的「原型」意義

二、各時期的「再詮釋」動機

（1）舊制度與絕對王權時期

（2）法國大革命與共和時代

（3）拿破崙與第三共和時期

（4）維琪政權與戰後

三、再詮釋的深層機制

四、結論

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