IN THE early 1870s, when the National Assembly couldn’t bring itself to
leave Versailles and monarchists held out against the official proclamation of
a republic, France was obsessed with parliamentary debate about this fun-
damental issue. The fact that politics could bother him, Flaubert wrote to a
friend in january 1873, was a sure sign of decadence. “I am exasperated
with the Right, to the point of understanding why the communards
wanted to burn down Paris.” Raving madmen were preferable to idiots in
his opinion, if only because their reign did not generally last as long.
What had parliamentary debate accomplished since the fall of the Com-
mune? Observers who thought that the entire left had been fatally com-
promised Were soon proven wrong. By-elections held on ]uly 2, 1871, saw
republicans emerge victorious, the most prominent among them being
Léon Gambetta. After five mute months he had found his voice again,
though civil war had meanwhile persuaded him that only a republic built
along conservative lines stood any chance of surviving opposition from
rnonarchist ranks. It soon became obvious that the fallen demagogue was
determined to find his account in making common cause with the adroit
strategist of conservative republicanism, Adolphe Thiers. These two formed
a tenuous marriage of convenience. Gambetta minded himself during par-
liamentary debate but felt freer outside the Assembly, and on campaigns
through provincial France he made speeches that could not fail to rattle
Thiers in Versailles. “Haven’t we seen laborers in the cities and fields win
the vote?” he asked a sympathetic crowd at Grenoble. “Don’t the omens
suggest that our land, which has tried every other alternative, intends at last
to risk a republic and call upon the new social reserves [now/elles souches so-
ciales]? Yes, I descry, I feel, I proclaim the emergence of new social re-
serves.” Thiers was later to complain that Gambetta never had the clear-cut
ideas of a real statesman, that he always retreated into the role of tribune,
which he played most naturally.
Lest the “new social reserves” emerge right away, the heterogeneous
right, which still greatly outnumbered the left, sought to act in concert. At
daggers drawn since 1830, Legitimists (supporting the Bourbon pretender,
Charles X’s childless heir Henri, comte de Chambord) and Orleanists (sup-
porting Louis-Philippe’s grandson, the comte de Paris) now agreed that
Chambord should reign as a constitutional monarch and be succeeded by
the comte de Paris. What this arrangement, called fusion, did not consider
was the obstinacy of Chambord, who lived in a castle near Vienna, as cut off
from the world as a Pirandellian solipsist. Chambord wanted all or nothing.
Either restoration would be a faithful restoration of the kingdom France had
abolished in 1830 along with Charles X, or it would enthrone someone
other than himself. His absolute proviso was that the country raise the white
lily-spangled flag, and rational heads tried in vain to make him compromise
when he came home after four decades abroad. “[That flag] has always been
for me inseparable from the absent fatherland; it flew over my cradle, I want
it to shade my tomb,” he declared in a statement published on July 6 by the
royalist paper Union. “[Under that flag] the unification of the nation was
achieved; with it your fathers, led by mine, conquered Alsace—L0rraine,
Whose loyalty will be the consolation of our misfortunes . . . I have received
it as a sacred trust from the old king, my grandfather, dying in exile . . . In
the glorious folds of this unblemished standard I shall bring you order and
liberty! Frenchmen! Henri V cannot abandon the flag of Henri IV!” Eighty
die—hard Legitimists in the parliament stood firm behind Chambord, but a
majority of conservative deputies dissociated themselves from his manifesto.
As patriotic gentlemen repelled by anachronism on the one hand and revo-
lution on the other, they pledged allegiance to the tricolor flag and
paigned for a state that would be neither lily-white nor republican blue_
an age of dumb ideas, Flaubert wrote to Sand in 1873, that of fusion was
crowning stupidity, an assertion upon which he enlarged two months
in a letter to his niece. “How ignorant of history can one be to believe 513111
in the efiicaciousness of one man, to await a Messiah, a Savior! Long live the
good Lord and down with Gods! Can one brush against the nap of a whole
nation? Deny eighty years of democratic development? Return to the age
charters granted by the high and mighty? Chambord’s partisans being ang
with their liege lord is a comic spectacle . . . No matter! Saint-Louis’s de_
scendant . . . spared us some major disasters.” The restoration of monarch
and the Commune were both historical inanities, he asserted. So he thou 112,
was a Napoleon IV l g ’
The schism in conservative ranks involved not only monarchical abSO_
lutism but Catholic orthodoxy, and here the manifesto that divided the par;
ties was a papal bull. Seven years earlier, in his Syllabus ofErro1/s, Pius IX had
declared war against secular Europe by denouncing the separation of
church and state; claiming for his church control of all culture and science;
rejecting freedom of faith, conscience, and worship; enumerating eighty
“errors” altogether; and insisting that the pontiff neither could nor should
make any concession whatever to progress, liberalism, and modern civiliza-
tion. The Syllabus marked France profoundly. Cultivated prelates resisted
Rome, but the lower clergy embraced popish obscurantism with fervor,
and in rural parishes, where miraculous visitations were regularly reported,’
it was the lower clergy who made themselves heard. “Of all the mysteries
that fill Church history, I don’t know any that equals or surpasses this swift
and complete transformation of Catholic France into a farmyard annex of
the Vatican’s anticamera,” one liberal Catholic wrote shortly before the Vat-
ican Council proclaimed the pope to be infallible and his episcopate uni-
versal. “I won’t immolate justice and truth, reason and history in a sacrificial
offering to the idol whom lay theologians have enthroned at the Vatican.”
While accumulating multifarious religious creeds for La Tlmtation de Saint
Antoine, Flaubert inveighed against Lamennais’s Essai sur l’indQ%rence, in
which the church is represented as the repository of all truth.
War did not halt the ultramontane movement. On the contrary, it gave it
further impetus, as Catholic clergy used France’s defeat to advance the view
that God had thus punished a wayward child. The imperial saturnalia was
over, repentance was in order, and devout souls, many of whom wore the
insignia of the Sacred Heart, flocked to holy sites throughout France.
Flaubert thought that Catholicism, with its worship of sacred entrails, had
come to resemble the cult of Isis. In 1873 a national pilgrimage sponsored
by the Assumptionists saw thousands descend upon Lourdes, La Salettfi,
Pontmain, Mont-Saint-Michel, Chartres, and Paray-le-Monial for eXpia-
gory demonstrations that became political rallies. “Suspended in midair,
equally incapable of adopting the republican format that promises terror
and the monarchical format that demands obedience and respect,” declared
Monsignor Pie at Chartres, “the French are a people [who] await a leader,
who invoke a master.” One hundred fifty deputies heard Pie preach this
message and soon afterward went farther afield to hear Monsignor de Lese-
leuc bless them at Paray-le-Monial. “Since assembling in Versailles, you
have often asked forgiveness of God for France’s crimes,” said the bishop.
“You have often made honorable amends to the Sacred Heart of Jesus for
the ingratitude shown him, especially during the last eighty years.” It did
not escape those present that eighty years earlier, in Year 1 according to the
Revolutionary calendar, Louis XVI had been guillotined.
Liberal Catholics as well believed that France would fall apart if she did
not harness herself to religious principles, and the quasi-official term for
the government they exercised, l’Ordre Moral, bespoke their staunchly pa-
triarchal agenda. Men like Albert de Broglie, who was eventually to replace
Thiers as prime minister, regarded the church as society’s frontline defense
against havoc wrought in the name of liberty, fraternity, and equality—
above all, equality Universal suffrage exasperated them. (But it also exas-
perated anticlerical elitists like Flaubert, who insisted that when the masses,
being collectively devoid of intelligence, ceased to believe in the Immacu-
late Conception, they would, none the wiser, vest their belief in the hocus-
pocus of spiritualist seances.)
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