There is a vital French tradition of political and social action in the name of the people and popular sovereignty, and French leaders and citizens have continually invoked popular sovereignty to claim political legitimacy and make demands for different political and social ends. At times the concept has been used to support a liberal ideal of the nation, at other times it has buttressed far-right claims to the nation. This chapter considers the concept of popular sovereignty within French politics and society at key historical moments – the Revolution, the brief second Republic, the Paris Commune, the interwar internal battles of the Third Republic, to populist street protests of the twenty-first century that do not adhere to a strict spectrum of left or right. The chapter does not simply track the historical existence of claims to popular sovereignty, but shows its uses across the political spectrum, the impact of couching political and social claims in the language of popular sovereignty and the demands of the people, and the malleability of that concept across centuries of a national politics and society.

Defeat in the Franco-Prussian War stimulated an overhaul of the fiscal-military system, but in a way that largely suited the notables. The government rebuffed considerable pressure for an income tax, instead largely opting to raise indirect taxes and a new tax on securities; the post-Revolutionary tax system survived, minimising the burden on the landed classes. The greatest changes were for the army, with the imposition of universal military service. Thus, this concluding chapter underscores the durability of the post-Revolutionary fiscal system that emerged in the early nineteenth century.

This chapter explores the close, if often vexed, relationship between the novel and the Republic towards the end of the nineteenth century. It examines how the dominant aesthetic of prose fiction in this period, naturalism, framed itself as an ally of democracy – most directly with its expansion of the novel’s horizons to include, and do justice to, the experience, idiom, and political claims of the working classes. The political use of the naturalist novel as a critical document of social life resided, as Émile Zola saw it, precisely in its declared objectivity. But the form of naturalist fiction produced more contradictions than its theory allowed. This chapter returns the evolution of the naturalist novel to its political context, while tracking the rise of its rival forms (Symbolist and Decadent literature; the psychological novel), which often repudiated those central tenets of the Republic: positivism, scientism, democracy, anti-clericalism. Maurice Barrès and Paul Bourget scrutinised the academic and intellectual principles of a generation schooled by the Third Republic, in ways which offered an alternative pedagogy. By the time of the Dreyfus Affair, the novel had become a prime vehicle for conflicting ideological visions of a nation that was increasingly divided against itself.

This chapter is centred on what was widely seen as the sale of the nineteenth century- the 1893 dispersal of the Spitzer collections. Austrian-born Frédéric Spitzer in many ways was the inheritor of the salvage crusade begun in earlier generations, building up a brilliant array of medieval and Renaissance artefacts (including some faked and composite pieces created on his commission). This chapter explores the visibility of Spitzer in French print culture in order to interrogate the claims for private collectors as patriots, and the attempt by the Third Republic to make collectors into auxiliaries of national policy. The scandal surrounding his sale exposes the anxieties about the interplay of private interest and public institutions, the sensitivity about curators like Émile Molinier when they operated in the market, as well as the virulence of anti-Semitic hostility to Jewish dealers. Most pervasive was the wider fear that French heritage was increasingly snapped up and repatriated by foreign buyers, so that the 1893 sale could be alternately depicted as a triumph, a swindle or a defeat for French culture.

The Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune 1870-71 exercised a dramatic impact on the rhetoric around private collecting, this chapter suggests. It examines why conservative collectors such as baron Jérôme Pichon felt that they were personally under attack as the city was shelled and burned during the année terrible, and suggests that heritage became intensely politicised, as radicals were blamed for repeating the vandalism previously seen in the Revolution of 1789. The chapter emphasis the emergence of a belligerent branch of art history written by Pichon’s associations- like Louis Courajod and baron Charles Davillier- and stresses that conservative collectors took their vision of the past into the public sphere through the vibrant culture of temporary exhibitions which emerged under the Second Empire. Through the figure of baron Léopold Double, it explores the cult of the old regime created by royalists but also argues that this cult proved very unstable in the new political and economic circumstances of the 1880s.

This chapter calls into question a widely held historiographical perception that the failure of the Commune marked the end of a French revolutionary tradition inaugurated by the Revolution of 1789 and perpetuated by the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848. It reassesses the contexts in which the word ‘revolution’ was used and shows that this dominant interpretation conflicts with the actual writings of ex-Communards on the subject. Activists referred frequently to the events of the recent revolutionary past, but these references were not indicative of the desire to create a static and prescriptive ‘French revolutionary tradition’. Revolutionaries were preoccupied with placing events since 1789 within a longer and broader French genealogy in order to define revolution as a social movement rather than a political event. This was partly a response to moderate Republican efforts to claim and historicise the French Revolution after 1871, but was not solely a product of circumstances. Using the work of Louis Auguste Blanqui, I demonstrate that neutrality regarding the Revolution (1789 and the more radical 1793) had been an element of revolutionary thought since the 1850s. Consequently, I also suggest that the intellectual differences between revolutionaries and more moderate republicans during this period have been overstated.

The introduction highlights the significant role that revolution played in French political thought during the nineteenth century and identifies the historiographical gaps that this study will fill. Rather than fading into obscurity after 1871, revolutionaries remained active and sought, relatively successfully, to re-establish a viable ‘revolutionary’ position in French politics and society. This was achieved through intellectual experimentation rather than unifying behind a single revolutionary voice. From 1789 to the mid-1880s, successive generations of activists sought to reinvent continuities with their predecessors, drawing upon new ideas to invest familiar terms such as equality and solidarity with fresh meanings more appropriate to their circumstances. There was no fixed ‘revolutionary tradition’ in France during the nineteenth century: rather, it was a process of perpetual intellectual adaptation.

The final part of the book considers the reactions of ex-Communards to the ‘imperial turn’ of the French Third Republic in the 1870s and 1880s. This chapter appraises the thought of some of the 4,500 ex-Communards who were deported to the French penal colony of New Caledonia during the 1870s. Historians have often sought to discover a stance on imperialism in their work, but even after many years in a colony most deportees remained theoretically unconcerned with imperial and colonial questions. Their focus was instead the French Republic, and they primarily used their experiences of deportation to criticise the established order and legitimise their renewed participation in political discussions after the 1880 Communard amnesty allowed them to return to France. The chapter also draws attention to the similarities between the deportees’ ideas in the 1870s and 1880s and socialist critiques of protectionism and free trade from the 1840s, reinforcing earlier chapters’ claims that there was much more continuity in revolutionary thought before the mid-1880s than previously suspected.

This chapter demonstrates activists’ continued commitment to the concept of revolutionary action after the Commune, and locates it in discussions of religion and nature. The first part of the chapter examines revolutionary activists’ attempts and ultimate failure to expand their appeal outwards from Paris and regional cities to the French countryside by characterising revolution as a religious experience. The willingness of increasingly atheistic revolutionaries to resurrect religious rhetoric both demonstrated their commitment to acquiring new support and also exposed fatal limitations. The second part discusses a new definition of revolution as resulting from natural evolution rather than subjective will, focusing primarily on the work of Elisée Reclus. By presenting revolution in these terms, activists minimised the importance of their own recent failures and redefined revolution as the practice of everyday life. In the changed circumstances of the Third Republic, this broader revolution was more accessible and appealing than traditional forms of action; however, it also stripped revolution of specific meaning. The chapter also links these two definitions of revolution and rhetoric around the 1848 Revolution. The chapter ultimately argues that revolution was and always had been a process of constant adaptation rather than a tradition.

This chapter suggests that, rather than deportees, it was the revolutionaries who remained in Europe that produced more clearly elaborated theories on empire and international questions. It contrasts two post-Communard newspapers embodying two divergent attitudes, La Bataille and Le Travailleur. Both newspapers condemned imperial conquest in principle, but the more nationalist La Bataille approved of efforts to spread French civilisation on a global scale, while the more universalist Le Travailleur enjoined its readers to empathise with Europe’s new colonial subjects. These two approaches had radically different implications for revolutionaries’ wider thought. La Bataille’s protectionism exposed limits to its supposedly universalist thought that had not been visible in purely Western contexts, while Le Travailleur’s stance was both consistent with its universalist claims and broadened the scope for revolutionary action, highlighting practical ways in which small groups of revolutionaries could bring about meaningful social change. The chapter concludes by using the example of revolutionary thought to rethink the value of ‘empire’ as a category of historical analysis.

This chapter calls into question a widely held historiographical perception that the failure of the Commune marked the end of a French revolutionary tradition inaugurated by the Revolution of 1789 and perpetuated by the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848. It reassesses the contexts in which the word ‘revolution’ was used and shows that this dominant interpretation conflicts with the actual writings of ex-Communards on the subject. Activists referred frequently to the events of the recent revolutionary past, but these references were not indicative of the desire to create a static and prescriptive ‘French revolutionary tradition’. Revolutionaries were preoccupied with placing events since 1789 within a longer and broader French genealogy in order to define revolution as a social movement rather than a political event. This was partly a response to moderate Republican efforts to claim and historicise the French Revolution after 1871, but was not solely a product of circumstances. Using the work of Louis Auguste Blanqui, I demonstrate that neutrality regarding the Revolution (1789 and the more radical 1793) had been an element of revolutionary thought since the 1850s. Consequently, I also suggest that the intellectual differences between revolutionaries and more moderate republicans during this period have been overstated.

The final part of the book considers the reactions of ex-Communards to the ‘imperial turn’ of the French Third Republic in the 1870s and 1880s. This chapter appraises the thought of some of the 4,500 ex-Communards who were deported to the French penal colony of New Caledonia during the 1870s. Historians have often sought to discover a stance on imperialism in their work, but even after many years in a colony most deportees remained theoretically unconcerned with imperial and colonial questions. Their focus was instead the French Republic, and they primarily used their experiences of deportation to criticise the established order and legitimise their renewed participation in political discussions after the 1880 Communard amnesty allowed them to return to France. The chapter also draws attention to the similarities between the deportees’ ideas in the 1870s and 1880s and socialist critiques of protectionism and free trade from the 1840s, reinforcing earlier chapters’ claims that there was much more continuity in revolutionary thought before the mid-1880s than previously suspected.