Modern times

History of Modern France

July Monarchy

Louis-Philippe's "July Monarchy" (1830-1848) is generally seen as a period during which the haute bourgeoisie was dominant. Louis-Philippe, who had flirted with liberalism in his youth, rejected much of the pomp and circumstance of the Bourbons and surrounded himself with merchants and bankers. Ruling as a constitutional monarch, Louis-Philippe left much of the governing to the parliament. The period was one of economic growth, and also major change in the Catholic Church, as it dropped much of its rigidly reactionary views. At the same time the church became seen as less of an enemy by the left.

Despite this, the July Monarchy remained a time of turmoil. A large group of Legitimists on the right demanded the restoration of the Bourbons to the throne. On the left, republicanism remained a powerful force. Late in his reign Louis-Philippe became increasingly rigid and dogmatic and his Prime Minister, Fran?is Guizot, had become deeply unpopular, but Louis-Philippe refused to remove him. The situation gradually escalated until the Revolutions of 1848 saw the fall of the monarchy and the creation of the Second Republic.

Second Republic

The Revolution of 1848 had major consequences for all of Europe: popular democratic revolts against authoritarian regimes broke out in Austria and Hungary, in the German Confederation and Prussia, and in the Italian States Milan, Venice, Turin and Rome.

The revolution in France had brought together classes of wildly different interests: the bourgeoisie desired electoral reforms (a democratic republic), socialist leaders (like Louis Blanc, Pierre Joseph Proudhon and the radical Auguste Blanqui) asked for a "right to work" and the creation of national workshops (a social welfare republic) and for France to liberate the oppressed peoples of Europe (Poles and Italians), while moderates (like the aristocrat Alphonse de Lamartine) sought a middle ground. Tensions between groups escalated, and in June 1848, a working class insurrection in Paris cost the lives of 1500 workers and eliminated once and for all the dream of a social welfare constitution.

The constitution of the Second Republic which was ratified in September 1848 was extremely flawed and permitted no effective resolution between the President and the Assembly in case of dispute. In December 1848, a nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, was elected as President of the Republic, and pretexting legislative gridlock, in 1851, he staged a coup d'?at. Finally, in 1852 he had himself declared Emperor Napoleon III of the Second Empire.

Second Empire

France was ruled by Emperor Napoleon III of France from 1852 to 1870. The era saw great industrialisation, urbanization (including the massive rebuilding of Paris by Baron Haussmann) and economic growth, but Napoleon III's foreign policies would be catastrophic.

After participation in the Crimean War, Napoleon intervened in the questions of Italian independence. He declared his intention of making Italy "free from the Alps to the Adriatic", and with the victories of Montebello, Magenta and Solferino France and Austria signed the Peace of Villafranca in 1859. Austria ceded Lombardy to Napoleon III, who in turn ceded it to Victor Emmanuel; Modena and Tuscany were restored to their respective dukes, and the Romagna to the pope, now president of an Italian federation. France received Savoy from Piedmont.

Napoleon also tried to establish the emperor Maximilian in Mexico, but in 1867 French troops were forced on a humiliating withdrawal before an ultimatum of the United States (see French intervention in Mexico).

A protracted conflict with Prussia lead to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. By the capitulation of Sedan the Empire lost its major source of support (the army), Paris was left unprotected and emptied of troops, and on September 4, 1870 the republican deputies of Paris at the h?el de ville constituted a provisional government. The Empire had fallen, the emperor was a prisoner in Germany, and France now embarked on the era of the Third Republic.

The Third Republic

With the humiliating defeat of Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the fall of the second Empire, the French legislature established the Third Republic which was to last until the military defeat of 1940 (longer than any government in France since the Revolution). The birth of the republic saw France occupied by foreign troops, the capital in a popular socialist insurection -- the Paris Commune (which was violently repressed by the new republic) -- and two provinces (Alsace-Lorraine) annexed to Germany. Feelings of national guilt and a desire for vengeance ("revanchism") would be major preoccupations of the French throughout the next half century.

The initial republic was lead by pro-royalists, but republicans (the "Radicals") and bonapartists scrambled for power. The Radicals eventually gained power in the last two decades of the century, but crises like the potential "Boulangist" coup d'?at (see Georges Boulanger) in 1889, showed the fragility of the republic. The Radicals' policies on education (supression of local languages, compulsory education), mandatory military service, and control of the working classes eliminated internal dissent and regionalisms, while their participation in the Scramble for Africa and in the acquiring of overseas possessions (such as French Indochina) created myths of French greatness. Both of these processes transformed a country of regionalisms into a modern nation state.

In an effort to isolate Germany, France went to great pains to woo Russia and the United Kingdom to its side, first by means of the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1894, then the 1904 Entente Cordiale with the U.K, and finally, with the signing of the Anglo-Russian Entente in 1907 this became the Triple Entente, which eventually led Russia and the U.K. to enter World War I as Allies.

Distrust of Germany, faith in the army and native French anti-semitism combined to make the Dreyfus Affair (the unjust trial and comdemnation of a Jewish military officer for treason) a political scandal of the utmost gravity. The nation was divided between "dreyfusards" and "anti-dreyfusards" and far-right Catholic agitators inflamed the situation even when proofs of Dreyfus' innocence came to light. The writer Emile Zola published an impassioned editorial on the injustice, and was himself condemned by the government for libel. Once Dreyfus was finally pardoned, the progressive legislature enacted the 1905 laws on la?it?hich created a complete separation of church and state and stripped churches of most of their property rights.

The period and the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century is often termed the belle ?oque. Although associated with cultural innovations and popular amusements (cabaret, cancan, the cinema, new art forms such as Impressionism and Art Nouveau), France was nevertheless a nation divided internally on notions of religion, class, regionalisms and money, and on the international front France came repeatedly to the brink of war with the other imperial powers, including Great Britain (the Fashoda Incident). World War I was an inevitabilty, but its human and financial costs would be catastrophic for the French.

French Colonialism

French colonial empires
French rule in Algeria
Scramble for Africa
French Indochina

From World War I to World War II

World War I (1914-1918) brought great losses of troops and resources . Fought in large part on French soil, it lead to approximately 1.4 million French dead including civilians (see World War I casualties), and four times as many casualties (see World War I#Aftermath). The stipulations of the Versailles treaty were severe: Alsace and Lorraine were returned to France; Germany was required to take full responsibility for the war and to pay war reparations; the German industrial Saarland, a coal and steel region, was occupied by France.

France in the 1920 and 1930s was torn on many fronts.

The French far right expanded greatly and theories of race and anti-semitism proliferated in many quarters. Numerous conservative political groups sprang up, including the Croix de Feu which, like its larger rival Action Fran?ise (founded in 1898, Action Fran?ise supported a restoration of the monarchy and of Roman Catholicism as the state religion) advocated national integralism (the belief that society is an organic unity) and organized popular demonstrations in reaction to the Stavisky Affair, hoping to overthrow the government.

In the congress of Tours in 1920, the French Socialist Party was split in two and the left-wing of the party broke away and formed the French Communist Party. The remaining Socialist Party, led by L?n Blum, regrouped as the French Section of the Workers' International (Section Fran?ise de l'International Ouvri?e or SFIO). In 1924 and again in 1932, the Socialists joined with the Radical Party in the "Coalitions of the Left" (Cartels des Gauches), but refused actually to join the non-Socialist governments led by the Radicals Edouard Herriot and Edouard Daladier. In 1934, the Communists changed their line, and the three parties came together in the Popular Front (1936-38), which won the 1936 elections and brought Blum to power as France's first socialist prime minister. Within a year, however, his government collapsed over economic policy and also over the issue of the Spanish Civil War.

In the 1920s, France established an elaborate system of border defences (the Maginot Line) and alliances (see Little Entente) to offset resurgent German strength and in the 1930s, the massive losses of the war lead many in France to choose a policy guaranteeing peace, even in the face of Hitler's violations of the Versailles treaty and (later) his demands at Munich in 1938; this would be the much maligned policy of appeasement. In some milieus in France, including people in the government and the army, there was also a defeatist movement which saw in Hitler's Germany not a rival that France should confront, but a force that France should accommodate.

In September, 1939 Hitler invaded Poland, and France and England declared war. Both armies were mobilized to the Western Front, but for the next 8 months neither side made a move: this would be called the "Phoney War". The German Blitzkrieg began its attack in May 1940, and in six weeks of savage fighting the French lost 130,000 (twice the number of American loses at Normandy in 1944) and the British army was routed (the Dunkirk boat lift). France surrendered to Nazi Germany on June 24, 1940. Nazi Germany occupied three fifths of France's territory (the Atlantic seaboard and most a France north of the Loire), leaving the rest to the new Vichy collaboration government established on July 10, 1940 under Henri Philippe P?ain. Its senior leaders acquiesced in the plunder of French resources, as well as the sending of French forced labor to Nazi Germany; in doing so, they claimed they hoped to preserve at least some small amount of French sovereignty. After an initial period of double-dealing and passive collaboration with the Nazis, the Vichy regime passed to active participation (largely the work of prime minister Pierre Laval). The Nazi German occupation proved costly as Nazi Germany appropriated a full one-half of France's public sector revenue.

On the other hand, those who refused defeat and collaboration with Nazi Germany, such as Charles de Gaulle, organized the Free French Forces in UK and coordinated resistance movements in occupied and Vichy France.

After four years of occupation and strife, Allied forces, including Free France, liberated France in 1944. Paris was liberated on August 25, 1944. On September 10, 1944, Charles de Gaulle installed his provisional government in Paris. This time he remained in Paris until the end of the war, refusing to abandon even when Paris was temporarily threatened by German troops during the Battle of the Ardennes in December 1944.

The Post-War Period

France emerged from World War II to face a series of new problems. After a short period of provisional government initially led by General Charles de Gaulle, a new constitution (October 13, 1946) established the Fourth Republic under a parliamentary form of government controlled by a series of coalitions. The mixed nature of the coalitions and a consequent lack of agreement on measures for dealing with colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria caused successive cabinet crises and changes of government. The war in Indochina ended with French withdrawal in 1954.

The May 1958 seizure of power in Algiers by French army units and French settlers opposed to concessions in the face of Arab nationalist insurrection led to the fall of the French government and a presidential invitation to de Gaulle to form an emergency government to forestall the threat of civil war. Swiftly replacing the existing constitution with one strengthening the powers of the presidency, he became the elected president in December of that year, inaugurating France's Fifth Republic.

In 1959, in an occasion marking the first time in the 20th century that the people of France went to the polls to elect a president by direct ballot, de Gaulle won re-election with a 55% share of the vote, defeating Fran?is Mitterrand.

However, French society grew tired of the heavy-handed, patriarchal Gaullist approach. This led to the events of May 1968, when students revolted, with a variety of demands including educational, labor and governmental reforms, sexual and artistic freedom, and the end of the Vietnam War. The student protest movement quickly joined with labor and mass strikes erupted. At one point, de Gaulle went to see troops in Baden-Baden, possibly to secure the help of the army in case it were needed to maintain public order. However, the June 1968 legislative elections saw a majority of Gaullists in parliament. Still, May 1968 was a turning point in French social relations, in the direction of more personal freedoms and less social control, be it in work relations, education or in private life.

In April 1969, de Gaulle resigned following the defeat in a national referendum of government proposals for the creation of 21 regions with limited political powers. Succeeding him as president of France have been:

Gaullist Georges Pompidou (1969-1974)
Independent Republican Val?y Giscard d'Estaing (1974-81)
Socialist Fran?is Mitterrand (1981-95)
neo-Gaullist Jacques Chirac (elected in spring 1995).

While France continues to revere its rich history and independence, French leaders increasingly tie the future of France to the continued development of the European Union (EU). During President Mitterrand's tenure, he stressed the importance of European integration and advocated the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty on European economic and political union, which France's electorate narrowly approved in September 1992.

Current President Jacques Chirac assumed office May 17, 1995, after a campaign focused on the need to combat France's stubbornly high unemployment rate. The center of domestic attention soon shifted, however, to the economic reform and belt-tightening measures required for France to meet the criteria for Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) laid out by the Maastricht Treaty. In late 1995, France experienced its worst labor unrest in at least a decade, as employees protested government cutbacks.

On the foreign and security policy front, Chirac took a more assertive approach to protecting French peacekeepers in the former Yugoslavia and helped promote the Dayton Agreement negotiated in Dayton, Ohio and signed in Paris in December 1995. The French have stood among the strongest supporters of NATO and EU policy in the Balkans.

French colonies

French colonial empires
Decolonization
Algeria
- French rule in Algeria
- Nationalism and resistance in Algeria
- Algerian War of Independence
French Equatorial Africa
French West Africa
French Indochina
- First Indochina War
- Colonial Cambodia
French Community