For the Soul of France : Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus

by Brown, Frederick

• ISBN13: 9780307266316
• ISBN10: 0307266311
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-01-26
• Publisher: Knopf

Summary

Frederick Brown, cultural historian, author of acclaimed biographies of Émile Zola ("Magnificent"-The New Yorker) and Flaubert ("Splendid . . . Intellectually nuanced, exquisitely written"-The New Republic) now gives us an ambitious, far-reaching book-a perfect joining of subject and writer: a portrait of fin-de-siècle France. He writes about the forces that led up to the twilight years of the nineteenth century when France, defeated by Prussia in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, was forced to cede the border states of Alsace and Lorraine, and of the resulting civil war, waged without restraint, that toppled Napoléon III, crushed the Paris Commune, and provoked a dangerous nationalism that gripped the Republic. The author describes how postwar France, a nation splintered in the face of humiliation by the foreigner-Prussia-dissolved into two cultural factions: moderates, proponents of a secular state ("Clericalism, there is the enemy!"), and reactionaries, who saw their ideal nation-militant, Catholic, royalist-embodied by Joan of Arc, with their message, that France had suffered its defeat in 1871 for having betrayed its true faith. A bitter debate took hold of the heart and soul of the country, framed by the vision of "science" and "technological advancement" versus "supernatural intervention." Brown shows us how Paris's most iconic monuments that rose up during those years bear witness to the passionate decades-long quarrel. At one end of Paris was Gustave Eiffel's tower, built in iron and more than a thousand feet tall, the beacon of a forward-looking nation; at Paris' other end, at the highest point in the city, the basilica of the Sacré-Coeur, atonement for the country's sins and moral laxity whose punishment was France's defeat in the war . . . Brown makes clear that the Dreyfus Affair-the cannonade of the 1890s-can only be understood in light of these converging forces. "The Affair" shaped the character of public debate and informed private life. At stake was the fate of a Republic born during the Franco-Prussian War and reared against bitter opposition. The losses that abounded during this time-the financial loss suffered by thousands in the crash of the Union Génerale, a bank founded in 1875 to promote Catholic interests with Catholic capital outside the Rothschilds' sphere of influence, along with the failure of the Panama Canal Company-spurred the partisan press, which blamed both disasters on Jewry. The author writes how the roiling conflicts that began thirty years before Dreyfus did not end with his exoneration in 1900. Instead they became the festering point that led to France's surrender to Hitler's armies in 1940, when the Third Republic fell and the Vichy government replaced it, with Marshal Pétain heralded as the latest incarnation of Joan of Arc, France's savior . . .

Author Biography

Frederick Brown is the author of Flaubert, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography, and Zola, named an Editor’s Choice by The New York Times Book Review as one of the best books of the year. Brown has twice been the recipient of both Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships. He lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. ix
Chronology	p. xi
Preface	p. xxiii
From The Life of Jesus to the Sacré-Coeur	p. 3
Birth Pangs of a Secular Republic	p. 39
The Crash of the Union Générale	p. 59
France on Horse	p. 81
The Ogre of Modernity: Eiffel's Tower	p. 124
The Panama Scandal	p. 155
The Dreyfus Affair	p. 175
The Burning of the Charity Bazaar	p. 231
Two Banquets	p. 251
Acknowledgments	p. 267
Notes	p. 269
Index	p. 283
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

France’s internal divisions found a new theater in which to speak when, only days after the proclamation of papal infallibility, war broke out with Germany. Since 1866 Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian prime minister, whose grand design was to forge a German Empire in the heat of war, with Wilhelm of Prussia as its sovereign, had been carefully devising a casus belli against France. History abetted him when the Spanish throne fell vacant. Bismarck persuaded King Wilhelm’s relative Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern to present his candidacy, knowing full well that France could not allow itself to be pinned between two of that family. Leopold subsequently withdrew his bid at Wilhelm’s urging, but his gesture did not mollify France’s foreign minister, the Duc de Gramont, who insisted that Leopold should never again be allowed to come forward. Wilhelm refused, and the matter might have rested there had Bismarck not made the refusal sound contemptuous by mischievously editing a telegram from Wilhelm to Louis- Napoléon. Inflamed by the press, which geneally denounced Prussia’s “slap in the face,” Frenchmen mobbed the streets of Paris. On July 14, 1870, an order to mobilize was issued. Two days later, deputies voted funds for war, with only 10 of 255 in parliament dissenting. The huge crowd outside the Palais Bourbon was jubilant.  One witness thought that the scene might have been not much different at the Colosseum in Rome when frenzied spectators climbed the Vestals’ tribune to demand the execution of a gladiator, little realizing that France herself was the doomed combatant.


Gramont, a militant Catholic, may have been animated by hatred of Protestant Prussia. In any case, war had no sooner erupted than it spilled into the realm of religious politics. French pontifical troops garrisoned in Rome, the last enclave of papal power, were immediately pulled from the city to join battle with Germany. As a result nothing impeded the triumphal entry of Victor Emmanuel’s army.  Although Gramont declared that France could not lose its honor on the Tiber (by leaving the pope undefended) and preserve it on the Rhine, his well- turned phrase rang hollow, for it quickly became evident that Louis- Napoléon’s army was outnumbered, outgeneraled, and outgunned. On September 1, some six weeks after hostilities began, the emperor, under relentless German shell fire, hoisted a white flag over the river town of Sedan. On September 20 the pope, also under shell fire, hoisted a white flag over the Castel Sant’ Angelo. While Louis- Napoléon was abdicating in the Ardennes, Pius IX was declaring himself a prisoner in the Vatican. To French no less distressed by the fall of Rome than by the prospect of enemy troops besieging Paris, it was the consummation of the pope’s martyrdom. “Let us pray that God hasten the moment when France, delivered from the Prussians, but above all from itself, shall deliver Rome from the Italian slough and restore to degraded humankind a Godgiven benefaction it cannot forsake without perishing,” wrote Louis Veuillot. The “Government of National Defense” formed by republicans on September 4 deepened his gloom.


God was in no rush to deliver France from the foreign enemy or from the enemy within, though it seemed for a moment that Veuillot’s prayers had been answered. There would be far more killing, of French by Germans, and of French by one another.
 
Having quickly fought through the Vosges mountains and occupied the belt of country between Alsace- Lorraine and the Île-de-France, General Helmuth von Moltke felt certain that his men could safely camp around Paris until the besieged city surrendered to hunger. Neither he nor Bismarck anticipated one of the more valiant second efforts in the history of warfare. On October 7, 1870, Léon Gambetta, a dynamic orator se

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Excerpted from For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus by Frederick Brown
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