lecture 14, "trench warfare"
john merriman
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the war up through 1916, today
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on the last day of his life, jean jaures was troubled by what he was going to write about WWI--whether workers of France should fight workers of Germany.
his decision reflects what is called the "sacred union" between all political parties in the war effort. he wrote, then, an article with the headline "Forward/Let's Go," and he went out to a cafe after writing it--and a right-winger put a pistol through a curtain into the restaurant and blew him away. there was tremendous turmoil in the street, a sense that things would never be the same again.
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the way the war started, the way the military planners wanted it to start. german soldiers were going to put Paris/France into a headlock--they would march into Belgium (netrual since 1830s), and wrap around France. Germany is under pressure, again, to win the war quickly.
on the 2nd of August, however, the Belgian government rejected German demands--they fought against overpowering German stregnth. eventually Liege falls after a huge bombardment on the 16th. and once the Germans get through the hills of Eastern Belgium, they move fairly quickly.
the German commander, however, uses some divisions to try and pin down the Belgians. and he has some concerns with regards to the home front (how far the French will go into Alsace). and they have to transfer some troops to the home front, there. so they have fewer troops than in the original plan. and sure enough, the British expeditionary force finally arrives on the 20th of August, in Southern Belgium. but everyone is fairly sure that the war will be over, relatively soon. four divisions, also, are sent to Russia, where the Tsar has advanced far more quickly than had been anticipated.
despite huge losses, on both sides. German forces soon come within 35 miles of Paris (so close that they bombard Paris on Easter Day 1918)--and you can hear the fighting in the city. if someone wants an explanation for how the French home front is able to hold, "spectacularly", throughout the war, there are two key factors: (1) pressure is obvious, and response is heroic; (2) the "sacred union" is extremely effective in mobilizing people across France. (this is unlike Berlin, which is another story).
so, as Germans are trying to drive to Paris, we're also seeing the dawn of air warfare (attempts to drop small bombs from planes). there's a recon pilot, however, who's noting that the Germans are leaving a flank open--at that point the French rush every available soldier to exploit this weakness in the Battle of the Marne (5th September to 12th September 1914). Even the Parisian taxis are conscripted to take soldiers to the front. The British help, pouring through another gap, forcing a 40 mile retreat. And that is the largest exchange of real estate that will take place until 1918. And, without question, this saves Paris.
this is the beginning of trench warfare (a race to the sea to capture ports). the Germans start to dig trenches to fortify themselves. the famous "Western Front."
it had been noted that in the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War, this had been seen. and this is what happens here, the spade, shovel, the machine gun, artillery, and gas/flame-throwers become the weapons of the war--two armies facing each other across no-man's land. trenches all the way from Switzerland to the English Channel.
attempts to break through don't work. and it's not difficult to understand why--the trenches have very strong defense lines behind them.
the strategy that they adopt is what is known as "creeping barrages"--you try and soften up your opposition by killing as many people as possible, in the area you're going to charge. and all this does is alert your opponent where you are going. thus, besides killing lots of people, these creeping barrages simply kill a lot of people--they create craters on no-man's land where you try and hide, but you are inevitably taken out by the line of machine-guns. horrific.
there's a vigorous historical debate on "did they know what they were doing?"--image of higher-ups drinking champagne in a Chatauex, sending young people to their deaths. it was clear, to the soldiers, that there wasn't going to be a break-through--but there isn't one until the Germans break through in the Spring of 1918. (real estate is exchanged in yards. gains of a couple kilometers are rare.)
a huge discontinuity between soldier and civilian life--popular press exaggerates virtues, bravery, etc., whereas soldiers obviously enormously jaded and scarred. impossible for soldiers to discuss their experiences with those who believe that they wake up every morning and shout "Long Live France."
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by the end of 1914 (half-year of fighting), German and French troops had combined casualties of 300,000 (600,000 wounded--terribly wounded, generally).
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story of Christmas Day, 1914, where they sung songs and played football with each other. in 1915, a British soldier suggested that they do it again--his officers put him against the wall and shot him, for treason. there was a rumor in the trenches that there were troops from both sides with light wounds who were surviving happily in an underground cavern.
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new ways of dying, new ways of going nuts--living amongst mice, lice, dead bodies, fallen comrades, etc. new miseries.
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there are countless atrocity stories that circulate on both sides. most of the atrocities on the western front were committed by the Germans. 500 Belgian civilians executed; rape, limited, not yet a weapon of war.
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why do the Germans try and push through, at Verdun, from February to December 1916. prof is contending that they believe that they can do so by virtue of their greater birth rate--i.e., they will win any battle of attrition, and can therefore afford greater casualties. "we will bleed them."
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what made this war "total warfare"? the mobilization of an entire society--its entire productive capacities--for an extended period of time, towards these martial aims.
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Germany losing this war, after being far inside France for an extended period of time, made it easy for Hitler and other right-wing leaders to say, "we were winning? how did we lose it? we were stabbed in the back by the anti-nationalists--the communists, the socialists, the jews."
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
lecture 5, "telling a free story"
david blight
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slaves, of course, are the greatest witnesses to this context and this war, in many ways--if it is somehow all about them, "what did they think?"
douglass' 1845 narrative is perhaps the greatest of the literary narratives. he was an almost mystically great writer, for someone who escaped so young (he learned literacy from his white mistress).
the book is full of metaphor--of one kind of tale after another.
for a fugitive slave to write his story and publish it in the western world was to say "i am free, i am somebody--i am claiming my idenity."
douglass spoke in london, at one point, before 10,000 people in london, in 1846.
the most beautiful metaphor in anti-slavery literature--Douglass seeing white sailboats on the Chesapeake Bay. acts of language that made Douglass free; a form of liberation.
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abolitionism--its roots, its characters, barriers they faced. and its chronology--stages of its development.
the first of the four eras of reform the prof identified earlier (very suspect--what about strike era, pre-taft/hartley?)
this was an age, the 1830s, for a small group (never exceeded 15% of the population of the Northern states--concentrated in upstate NY, MA, CT, etc.). BUT: like most highly organized reform groups, their significance is much greater than their numbers.
what were they up against?
the American abolitionists has to deal, by the 1820s, with the new generations being born who did not experience the revolution. that revolution had at least a two-fold legacy: (1) it was an event that ushered in/stood for those great Enlightenment principles; (2) fostered an intensification of slavery in the South (whereas it had abolished slavery in the North by the 1820s), and, as corollary, had to develop a defense to deal with this Great American Contradiction (prof of course not mentioning the other Great American Contradictions).
any abolitionist would have to deal with the Constitution, which is rooted deeply in Federalism. States' rights doctrine. Then you take the 3/5 clause, the Fugitive Slaves Cause, and the postponing of the question of banning the slave trade for 20 years--and you see that the Constitution is complicit in this great American sin. put another way: abolitionism would have to become extra-legal.
and then of course, they were up against the deep defense of slavery rehearsed in the South. they would have to call for social, economic, and legal revolution in a society that did not want it (and a society to which they did not belong!). to be an abolitionist in the 1830s was to take on an issue that no one saw resolving itself for generations.
anti-slavery in America, though, takes stages:
first, the idea of colonizing black people, elsewhere, as a resolution to slavery at home. colonization as an idea is not new, by 1816, when the American Colonization Society was formed (had Congressional funding--founded by James Monroe, Henry Clay (slave-holder from Kentucky), John Marshall (chief justice of the Supreme Court). but in the wake of the War of 1812, the idea was that in the boundless West, the problem of slavery might have to be faced. and the idea was that it may be solved by ridding America of black people--and they would begin with free people, who would be "asked not coeerced." the ACS founded the nation of Liberia in 1820/1822--it would ship approximately 1500 free African-Americans to Liberia, between 1821 and 1831. and they would found a capital at Monrovia (named after James Monroe, president of USA!).
but colonization, of course, had all kinds of flaws at its root. essentially rooted in the assumptions that racial equality in America was never going to happen. a fear of the rising free black population, that had really boomed in the aftermath of the American Revolution (manumissions in the Upper South, and emancipations in the North). a fear of slave insurrections, of course.
there was this idea, too, that colonization would be a safety-valve--it might only remove 5 or 10%, but even that would ameliorate tensions in the South.
a strange attractiveness, but mainly to white folk. roundly opposed by free blacks in the North.
"gradualism" fueled the proposal--and it was "gradualism" that was white America's first response to slavery, prof is arguing. example of CT, passing a law in 1790s, saying that every slave born in that state after this date would be free on their 21st birthday. (this is Abraham Lincoln's proposal, in fact, on the eve of the Civil War! and he would even compensate the slave-holders!)
BUT: several things begin to happen in the 1820s and 1830s, that radicalize anti-slavery thinkers. the roots of a more radical abolitionism--of "immediatism." four roots, prof is arguing:
(1) evangelical christianity--some of their radicalism they took from their faith, at the time of the Second Great Awakening (1790s-1840s) it was their duty to save souls. it was only one step further, to save society as well. (if it can happen in a person, why can't it happen in society?).
(2) perceptions of Southern intransigence/truculence--in the 1820s, a lot of these young anti-slavery advocates were gradualists until they began to realize how deeply committed the South actually was--morally, economically, socially, philosophically-- to slavery. and that leaving it to the South was never going to solve anything. by 1829, William Lloyd Garrison used metaphors of icebergs to characterize what he perceived as Southern intransigence.
(3) British influence--abolitionists were deeply influenced by the two or three decades-old anti-slavery crusade in England. which had first been a crusade against the slave trade, which succeeded in an act of Parliament in 1807, and then ultimately the movement against slavery itself (and the British empire will free its slaves, by 1833).
(4) "immediatism" also, prof is arguing, stems from events--in the 1810s, 1820s and 1830s there were events that informed this posture. (a) famous insurrections in the South (insurrection in SC in 1822, and the 28/30 ppl executed in its wake; (b) Negro Seamen's act passed in SC in 1822, which said that any ship sailing into the harbor, if it had black sailors, those sailors would be jailed in Charlestown while the ship was in harbor; (c) the Ohio Resolutions in 1824, State legislature suggested that a gradual plan for emancipation be put in to place over generations, and they sent it to all the Southern legislatures (they were rebuffed--letters from Southern governers saying "mind your own business");(d) massive growth of the domestic slave trade; (e) Nat Turner's insurrection in 1831, which had a radicalizing effect, no question.
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now who was William Lloyd Garrison? by no means the whole abolitionist movement (he did found, edit and publish the longest-running anti-slavery newspaper, from 1831 to 1865, nine months after the end of the Civil War, the week of the ratification of the 13th amendment).
he was the real thing--a professional, radical reformer. born into utter poverty! raised by his mother; he was apprenticed out at the age of 12, because his mother couldn't raise him, to a printer.
if you want to understand Garrison, you have to understand him through his ideas. here, you see the contours of "immediatism," which will begin to garner support, for sure, particularly among free blacks in the North. but it will also, of course, begin to garner widespread enemies.
but, here, his seven ideas (what "immediatism" became, in his hands):
(1) moral perfectionism: a stern, demanding call for abolitionists to remove themselves personally from any complicity in the slave system. deeply religious, of course.
(2) pacificsm, or non-resistance: he rejected all forms of violence, in any form (well, until the war broke out)
(3) anti-clericalism: opposition to what he saw as the hypocrisy of the American churches, and the Protestant clergy. (remember: Garrison was Douglass' mentor, father-figure, etc.)
(4) disunionism: no union with the slave-holders. he advocated a personal secession from the Union. that northern states not participate in the same constitution.
(5) not voting: to vote in an American election, he believed, was to be morally complicit in slavery. he advocated political non-participation.
(6) women's equality (another form of radicalism that made him a lot of enemies)
(7) civil rights advocate: a tremendous early demander of civil rights, at a time when there really weren't any advocates.
------------
what happens with this anti-slavery activism?
in a sense, two kinds of abolitionism emerged: one "white" and one "black"
the former: thousands and thousands across the North writing petitions, starting slave societies, etc. even fledgling political parties, though Garrison wouldn't touch this.
the latter: free blacks in the North, who couldn't risk the theoretical abstractions that the white abolitionists would waste time on (what are we doing for my children, who don't have a school, etc.?)
by the 1840s, a division will evolve between these two groups.
------------
amidst all this, fugitive slaves kept coming from the South (though there is a myth/legend problem, here--next lecture).
david blight
-------------
slaves, of course, are the greatest witnesses to this context and this war, in many ways--if it is somehow all about them, "what did they think?"
douglass' 1845 narrative is perhaps the greatest of the literary narratives. he was an almost mystically great writer, for someone who escaped so young (he learned literacy from his white mistress).
the book is full of metaphor--of one kind of tale after another.
for a fugitive slave to write his story and publish it in the western world was to say "i am free, i am somebody--i am claiming my idenity."
douglass spoke in london, at one point, before 10,000 people in london, in 1846.
the most beautiful metaphor in anti-slavery literature--Douglass seeing white sailboats on the Chesapeake Bay. acts of language that made Douglass free; a form of liberation.
----------
abolitionism--its roots, its characters, barriers they faced. and its chronology--stages of its development.
the first of the four eras of reform the prof identified earlier (very suspect--what about strike era, pre-taft/hartley?)
this was an age, the 1830s, for a small group (never exceeded 15% of the population of the Northern states--concentrated in upstate NY, MA, CT, etc.). BUT: like most highly organized reform groups, their significance is much greater than their numbers.
what were they up against?
the American abolitionists has to deal, by the 1820s, with the new generations being born who did not experience the revolution. that revolution had at least a two-fold legacy: (1) it was an event that ushered in/stood for those great Enlightenment principles; (2) fostered an intensification of slavery in the South (whereas it had abolished slavery in the North by the 1820s), and, as corollary, had to develop a defense to deal with this Great American Contradiction (prof of course not mentioning the other Great American Contradictions).
any abolitionist would have to deal with the Constitution, which is rooted deeply in Federalism. States' rights doctrine. Then you take the 3/5 clause, the Fugitive Slaves Cause, and the postponing of the question of banning the slave trade for 20 years--and you see that the Constitution is complicit in this great American sin. put another way: abolitionism would have to become extra-legal.
and then of course, they were up against the deep defense of slavery rehearsed in the South. they would have to call for social, economic, and legal revolution in a society that did not want it (and a society to which they did not belong!). to be an abolitionist in the 1830s was to take on an issue that no one saw resolving itself for generations.
anti-slavery in America, though, takes stages:
first, the idea of colonizing black people, elsewhere, as a resolution to slavery at home. colonization as an idea is not new, by 1816, when the American Colonization Society was formed (had Congressional funding--founded by James Monroe, Henry Clay (slave-holder from Kentucky), John Marshall (chief justice of the Supreme Court). but in the wake of the War of 1812, the idea was that in the boundless West, the problem of slavery might have to be faced. and the idea was that it may be solved by ridding America of black people--and they would begin with free people, who would be "asked not coeerced." the ACS founded the nation of Liberia in 1820/1822--it would ship approximately 1500 free African-Americans to Liberia, between 1821 and 1831. and they would found a capital at Monrovia (named after James Monroe, president of USA!).
but colonization, of course, had all kinds of flaws at its root. essentially rooted in the assumptions that racial equality in America was never going to happen. a fear of the rising free black population, that had really boomed in the aftermath of the American Revolution (manumissions in the Upper South, and emancipations in the North). a fear of slave insurrections, of course.
there was this idea, too, that colonization would be a safety-valve--it might only remove 5 or 10%, but even that would ameliorate tensions in the South.
a strange attractiveness, but mainly to white folk. roundly opposed by free blacks in the North.
"gradualism" fueled the proposal--and it was "gradualism" that was white America's first response to slavery, prof is arguing. example of CT, passing a law in 1790s, saying that every slave born in that state after this date would be free on their 21st birthday. (this is Abraham Lincoln's proposal, in fact, on the eve of the Civil War! and he would even compensate the slave-holders!)
BUT: several things begin to happen in the 1820s and 1830s, that radicalize anti-slavery thinkers. the roots of a more radical abolitionism--of "immediatism." four roots, prof is arguing:
(1) evangelical christianity--some of their radicalism they took from their faith, at the time of the Second Great Awakening (1790s-1840s) it was their duty to save souls. it was only one step further, to save society as well. (if it can happen in a person, why can't it happen in society?).
(2) perceptions of Southern intransigence/truculence--in the 1820s, a lot of these young anti-slavery advocates were gradualists until they began to realize how deeply committed the South actually was--morally, economically, socially, philosophically-- to slavery. and that leaving it to the South was never going to solve anything. by 1829, William Lloyd Garrison used metaphors of icebergs to characterize what he perceived as Southern intransigence.
(3) British influence--abolitionists were deeply influenced by the two or three decades-old anti-slavery crusade in England. which had first been a crusade against the slave trade, which succeeded in an act of Parliament in 1807, and then ultimately the movement against slavery itself (and the British empire will free its slaves, by 1833).
(4) "immediatism" also, prof is arguing, stems from events--in the 1810s, 1820s and 1830s there were events that informed this posture. (a) famous insurrections in the South (insurrection in SC in 1822, and the 28/30 ppl executed in its wake; (b) Negro Seamen's act passed in SC in 1822, which said that any ship sailing into the harbor, if it had black sailors, those sailors would be jailed in Charlestown while the ship was in harbor; (c) the Ohio Resolutions in 1824, State legislature suggested that a gradual plan for emancipation be put in to place over generations, and they sent it to all the Southern legislatures (they were rebuffed--letters from Southern governers saying "mind your own business");(d) massive growth of the domestic slave trade; (e) Nat Turner's insurrection in 1831, which had a radicalizing effect, no question.
------------
now who was William Lloyd Garrison? by no means the whole abolitionist movement (he did found, edit and publish the longest-running anti-slavery newspaper, from 1831 to 1865, nine months after the end of the Civil War, the week of the ratification of the 13th amendment).
he was the real thing--a professional, radical reformer. born into utter poverty! raised by his mother; he was apprenticed out at the age of 12, because his mother couldn't raise him, to a printer.
if you want to understand Garrison, you have to understand him through his ideas. here, you see the contours of "immediatism," which will begin to garner support, for sure, particularly among free blacks in the North. but it will also, of course, begin to garner widespread enemies.
but, here, his seven ideas (what "immediatism" became, in his hands):
(1) moral perfectionism: a stern, demanding call for abolitionists to remove themselves personally from any complicity in the slave system. deeply religious, of course.
(2) pacificsm, or non-resistance: he rejected all forms of violence, in any form (well, until the war broke out)
(3) anti-clericalism: opposition to what he saw as the hypocrisy of the American churches, and the Protestant clergy. (remember: Garrison was Douglass' mentor, father-figure, etc.)
(4) disunionism: no union with the slave-holders. he advocated a personal secession from the Union. that northern states not participate in the same constitution.
(5) not voting: to vote in an American election, he believed, was to be morally complicit in slavery. he advocated political non-participation.
(6) women's equality (another form of radicalism that made him a lot of enemies)
(7) civil rights advocate: a tremendous early demander of civil rights, at a time when there really weren't any advocates.
------------
what happens with this anti-slavery activism?
in a sense, two kinds of abolitionism emerged: one "white" and one "black"
the former: thousands and thousands across the North writing petitions, starting slave societies, etc. even fledgling political parties, though Garrison wouldn't touch this.
the latter: free blacks in the North, who couldn't risk the theoretical abstractions that the white abolitionists would waste time on (what are we doing for my children, who don't have a school, etc.?)
by the 1840s, a division will evolve between these two groups.
------------
amidst all this, fugitive slaves kept coming from the South (though there is a myth/legend problem, here--next lecture).
lecture 13, "the origins of WWI"
john merriman
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showing a map of "the new imperialism"--from the mid 1880s to 1914. (in particular, the "scramble for Africa")
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so, just to put this in context--the diplomatic origins of WWI
the traditional image is not a bad one: entangling alliances that create a house of cards, ready to collapse.
how does it happen? (for France, this is also the story of a shift from England seen as France's greatest rival, to Germany)
much of the diplomatic history of this period revolves around the rivalry of France and Germany--one can debate the extent to which revenge played a role (most people in the 1890s would have likely said France were more likely to go to war with Britain).
the other major issue upon which WWI hinged on was the hatred between Russia and Austria-Hungary--Russia sees itself as the protector of the Slavic peoples, and that Austria-Hungary is a polyglot Empire (about 15 national communities--a perpetual destabilizing factor in their national politics). particularly when Russia is fanning the flames of pan-Slavism and Slavic nationalisms within the A-H Empire (which had become the dual empire in 1867).
by 1900, Russia is fanning the flames of pan-Slavic fervor in the mountainous territories of Bosnia-Herzogivina, which includes Serbs, Muslims, and Catholic Croats.
now, the alliance system of the late 19th century hinges on German and French antagonism, and the competing interests of A-H and Russia in the Balkans, and Germany's fear of being attacked from both East and West by Russia and France. you have two potential free agents, Italy (which goes to highest bidder in 1915), and Great Britain (it wasn't a given that it would ally with France and Russia, remember--Britain and Russia and Britain and France had been fighting each other for ages).
so, how does it happen that it in 1914 that France finds it with these bizarre bedfellows? (remember, if you're a republican/socialist, how do you explain an alliance with the Tsar, represser of the peoples and encourager of vicious pogroms against the Jews).
later on, i will make the case that, most of the people who looked at such things expected a war in their lifetimes. they're had not been a major conflagration since Waterloo, basically. you have wars, but basically this period is referred to as the Pax Britannica. but most people thought there would be a war in their lifetime--and many people wanted one.
but nobody wanted one that would carry away four empires, a million lives, and last for four years, and unleash the demons of the 20th century.
in 1879, Bismarck forges the cornerstone alliance, between Germany and Austria-Hungary, against Russia's activity in the Balkans. and this is one of the continuities of the entire period.
and this explains why, in July 1914, the Germans give the famous blank cheque to Austria-Hungary--you can do whatever you want to Serbia, and we will back you all the way (even if it involves going to war with "these guys"). (they all know that it will take Russians two weeks to mobilize--furthermore they had lost badly to Japan in 1905, remember).
this is the first chip, the first block.
a year later, 1n 1880, Italy allies itself with these two, but there are all sorts of conditions, and it's more of a free agent.
the last thing that Bismarck wants (remember he's out of it by 1894) was to see Germany attacked from both sides. they don't want France, in other words, to ally with Russia.
so how does that happen?
well, it has to do with a fear of Germany (aside from some scattered cultural tries; some Russian elite spoke French). other facts: tied together by economic investment (French investors are frequently investing outside of France, remember, and they have invested heavily in Russia--particularly in railroads). these economic ties help solidify the arrangements of Great Powers. think of the irony of the Russian Tsar being received France in 1892, when they sign a military treaty! there is a formal alliance in 1894--and everybody knows the rough outlines of this. this ends what Bismarck had intended, which was the diplomatic isolation of France.
how does Britain get into this?
because Germany becomes a much bigger economic rival than anyone else--the German economy grows rapidly (nipping at British heels in terms of steel production, they're producing huge battleships, and that sort of thing). they go way ahead, in chemistry. so, with this economic rivalry (expressed in Africa, as well), goes the naval rivalry, that heats up after the turn of the century. industrialists, of course, love to build big ships. Britain's control of the seas has persisted for centuries, don't forget.
so the last thing the British think they can do, is lose control of the seas.
for a long time, Britain has not seen the need for an alliance, but now looking towards the French in the face of this economic and naval tension. again, in the 1890s, people in Bourdeaux/London, etc. had expected to go to war with Britain/France (people were writing future war novels at this time, don't forget--and one of the more ridiculous ones was a novel in England that predicted a war with France, after the French arrive in Dover, digging a tunnel under the English channel!).
events in 1905--the first Moroccan crisis, followed by, in 1911, the second Moroccan crisis--demonstrate German saber-rattling in Morocco. and this convinces the British that maybe allying with the French isn't such a dumb idea after all. they begin to have informal military talks, that develop into a military understanding viz-a-viz Germany (French on Mediterranean, England on North Sea).
so this explains how these two unlikely allies came together. moreover, the birth-rate--the French realize, that if it's more than just a short encounter, their birth-rate is so miniscule that they'd better have allies. and military planners know this stuff. that means that it's all that more important, if they're contemplating that war, to rely on allies.
remember: when the Tzar orders Russia to mobilize, it is well-known that it will take two weeks. So: the Germans know, then, that they have two weeks to defeat France. they're sure that they can do it, but then they'd better get ready for the Russians on their Eastern frontier. and the only way that they can do that is by violating Belgian and Dutch neutrality (Alsace-Lorraine is not a viable place to launch invasion from). That guarantees, above all else, that the British will go to war--it's bad enought hat they have the French across the Channel. now they have the Germans, as well. you can't have that, so you're going to go to war.
why was that a risk that the Germans were willing to take? because the English do not have a conscript army, but only an expeditionary force. it would take them a month to raise an army that could make any difference, in effect.
these are the competing alliances/considerations that precede 1914, essentially. and this is why the assasination of the Archduke triggers the Great War (prof recounting putting his feet where the 16-yr old gunner had killed Franz Ferdinand). this leads to the blank cheque, and it brings this dreadful war.
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now, like revolutions, wars don't entirely break out according to the hydraulic model--that things get worse and worse and worse and then BOOM, war. but there are moments that raise tensions, and make it possible for the popular press to target potential enemies.
and that's why the incident of Zabern is interesting to discuss, says prof.
the German empire doesn't really trust its Alsatians--residents of the area are not allowed to vote on certain key policy matters (war, treaties, constitutional amendments), for example. Alsace-Lorraine, though, at the same time--is basically German-speaking. 77% of the communes in Alsace-Lorraine are German-speaking, YET, many people consider themselves French. (multiple identities, etc.).
Alsace, is, of course, terribly important, strategically/military.
and what this incident in 1913 does is it confirms the image of German aggressiveness (there are other reasons, too, that Germany does not trust Alsatians--Bismarck is terribly anti-Catholic, don't forget, and this region is overwhelmingly Catholic).
this incident, then: a German officer, speaking to some Alsatian soldiers that were there, refers to them in very scatalogical terms. then, someone else says, "I don't care if you kill these bastards..." And word spreads. tensions build--some German officer slept with a 14 year old Alsatian girl, he's beaten up. the French and German press picks this up and inflames the tensions on both side. they don't go to war, but it confirms the stereotypes that take off during the first years of the war.
so this minor incident, essentially a shouting match, a rape, and a fight, has huge implications. it confirms these military plans. it confirms, for the French, that when the war starts, you'd better get into Alsace-Lorraine and take it back (they're not really going to go into Belgium, are they?).
1914-1944 becomes a new, terrible Thirty Years War. and there were anti-war sentiments, but it was unclear what could be done to stop it.
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in conclusion: it's not just these diplomatic factors and military planning, of course, but really there are deeper, underlying factors. the imperial rivalry helps create this culture of popular imperialism, and popular aggressive nationalism. and the Other, becomes an object of perpetual disdain. jingoism explodes--feeds this expectation that war with come. everyday people dreaming of the next war. social darwinist rivalries, almost. have to pay attention to the popular imaginaire, prof is arguing--public jingoism. only this can help us explain the initial, public, urban enthusiasm for the war (and of course people did not know what it would portend).
john merriman
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showing a map of "the new imperialism"--from the mid 1880s to 1914. (in particular, the "scramble for Africa")
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so, just to put this in context--the diplomatic origins of WWI
the traditional image is not a bad one: entangling alliances that create a house of cards, ready to collapse.
how does it happen? (for France, this is also the story of a shift from England seen as France's greatest rival, to Germany)
much of the diplomatic history of this period revolves around the rivalry of France and Germany--one can debate the extent to which revenge played a role (most people in the 1890s would have likely said France were more likely to go to war with Britain).
the other major issue upon which WWI hinged on was the hatred between Russia and Austria-Hungary--Russia sees itself as the protector of the Slavic peoples, and that Austria-Hungary is a polyglot Empire (about 15 national communities--a perpetual destabilizing factor in their national politics). particularly when Russia is fanning the flames of pan-Slavism and Slavic nationalisms within the A-H Empire (which had become the dual empire in 1867).
by 1900, Russia is fanning the flames of pan-Slavic fervor in the mountainous territories of Bosnia-Herzogivina, which includes Serbs, Muslims, and Catholic Croats.
now, the alliance system of the late 19th century hinges on German and French antagonism, and the competing interests of A-H and Russia in the Balkans, and Germany's fear of being attacked from both East and West by Russia and France. you have two potential free agents, Italy (which goes to highest bidder in 1915), and Great Britain (it wasn't a given that it would ally with France and Russia, remember--Britain and Russia and Britain and France had been fighting each other for ages).
so, how does it happen that it in 1914 that France finds it with these bizarre bedfellows? (remember, if you're a republican/socialist, how do you explain an alliance with the Tsar, represser of the peoples and encourager of vicious pogroms against the Jews).
later on, i will make the case that, most of the people who looked at such things expected a war in their lifetimes. they're had not been a major conflagration since Waterloo, basically. you have wars, but basically this period is referred to as the Pax Britannica. but most people thought there would be a war in their lifetime--and many people wanted one.
but nobody wanted one that would carry away four empires, a million lives, and last for four years, and unleash the demons of the 20th century.
in 1879, Bismarck forges the cornerstone alliance, between Germany and Austria-Hungary, against Russia's activity in the Balkans. and this is one of the continuities of the entire period.
and this explains why, in July 1914, the Germans give the famous blank cheque to Austria-Hungary--you can do whatever you want to Serbia, and we will back you all the way (even if it involves going to war with "these guys"). (they all know that it will take Russians two weeks to mobilize--furthermore they had lost badly to Japan in 1905, remember).
this is the first chip, the first block.
a year later, 1n 1880, Italy allies itself with these two, but there are all sorts of conditions, and it's more of a free agent.
the last thing that Bismarck wants (remember he's out of it by 1894) was to see Germany attacked from both sides. they don't want France, in other words, to ally with Russia.
so how does that happen?
well, it has to do with a fear of Germany (aside from some scattered cultural tries; some Russian elite spoke French). other facts: tied together by economic investment (French investors are frequently investing outside of France, remember, and they have invested heavily in Russia--particularly in railroads). these economic ties help solidify the arrangements of Great Powers. think of the irony of the Russian Tsar being received France in 1892, when they sign a military treaty! there is a formal alliance in 1894--and everybody knows the rough outlines of this. this ends what Bismarck had intended, which was the diplomatic isolation of France.
how does Britain get into this?
because Germany becomes a much bigger economic rival than anyone else--the German economy grows rapidly (nipping at British heels in terms of steel production, they're producing huge battleships, and that sort of thing). they go way ahead, in chemistry. so, with this economic rivalry (expressed in Africa, as well), goes the naval rivalry, that heats up after the turn of the century. industrialists, of course, love to build big ships. Britain's control of the seas has persisted for centuries, don't forget.
so the last thing the British think they can do, is lose control of the seas.
for a long time, Britain has not seen the need for an alliance, but now looking towards the French in the face of this economic and naval tension. again, in the 1890s, people in Bourdeaux/London, etc. had expected to go to war with Britain/France (people were writing future war novels at this time, don't forget--and one of the more ridiculous ones was a novel in England that predicted a war with France, after the French arrive in Dover, digging a tunnel under the English channel!).
events in 1905--the first Moroccan crisis, followed by, in 1911, the second Moroccan crisis--demonstrate German saber-rattling in Morocco. and this convinces the British that maybe allying with the French isn't such a dumb idea after all. they begin to have informal military talks, that develop into a military understanding viz-a-viz Germany (French on Mediterranean, England on North Sea).
so this explains how these two unlikely allies came together. moreover, the birth-rate--the French realize, that if it's more than just a short encounter, their birth-rate is so miniscule that they'd better have allies. and military planners know this stuff. that means that it's all that more important, if they're contemplating that war, to rely on allies.
remember: when the Tzar orders Russia to mobilize, it is well-known that it will take two weeks. So: the Germans know, then, that they have two weeks to defeat France. they're sure that they can do it, but then they'd better get ready for the Russians on their Eastern frontier. and the only way that they can do that is by violating Belgian and Dutch neutrality (Alsace-Lorraine is not a viable place to launch invasion from). That guarantees, above all else, that the British will go to war--it's bad enought hat they have the French across the Channel. now they have the Germans, as well. you can't have that, so you're going to go to war.
why was that a risk that the Germans were willing to take? because the English do not have a conscript army, but only an expeditionary force. it would take them a month to raise an army that could make any difference, in effect.
these are the competing alliances/considerations that precede 1914, essentially. and this is why the assasination of the Archduke triggers the Great War (prof recounting putting his feet where the 16-yr old gunner had killed Franz Ferdinand). this leads to the blank cheque, and it brings this dreadful war.
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now, like revolutions, wars don't entirely break out according to the hydraulic model--that things get worse and worse and worse and then BOOM, war. but there are moments that raise tensions, and make it possible for the popular press to target potential enemies.
and that's why the incident of Zabern is interesting to discuss, says prof.
the German empire doesn't really trust its Alsatians--residents of the area are not allowed to vote on certain key policy matters (war, treaties, constitutional amendments), for example. Alsace-Lorraine, though, at the same time--is basically German-speaking. 77% of the communes in Alsace-Lorraine are German-speaking, YET, many people consider themselves French. (multiple identities, etc.).
Alsace, is, of course, terribly important, strategically/military.
and what this incident in 1913 does is it confirms the image of German aggressiveness (there are other reasons, too, that Germany does not trust Alsatians--Bismarck is terribly anti-Catholic, don't forget, and this region is overwhelmingly Catholic).
this incident, then: a German officer, speaking to some Alsatian soldiers that were there, refers to them in very scatalogical terms. then, someone else says, "I don't care if you kill these bastards..." And word spreads. tensions build--some German officer slept with a 14 year old Alsatian girl, he's beaten up. the French and German press picks this up and inflames the tensions on both side. they don't go to war, but it confirms the stereotypes that take off during the first years of the war.
so this minor incident, essentially a shouting match, a rape, and a fight, has huge implications. it confirms these military plans. it confirms, for the French, that when the war starts, you'd better get into Alsace-Lorraine and take it back (they're not really going to go into Belgium, are they?).
1914-1944 becomes a new, terrible Thirty Years War. and there were anti-war sentiments, but it was unclear what could be done to stop it.
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in conclusion: it's not just these diplomatic factors and military planning, of course, but really there are deeper, underlying factors. the imperial rivalry helps create this culture of popular imperialism, and popular aggressive nationalism. and the Other, becomes an object of perpetual disdain. jingoism explodes--feeds this expectation that war with come. everyday people dreaming of the next war. social darwinist rivalries, almost. have to pay attention to the popular imaginaire, prof is arguing--public jingoism. only this can help us explain the initial, public, urban enthusiasm for the war (and of course people did not know what it would portend).
Monday, March 30, 2009
lecture 4, "a northern world view: yankee society, antislavery ideology..."
david blight
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from a northern point of view, how do we get to this passage? story of a yale college junior, abolitionist, who enlisted in the first regiment he could get into--the sixth new york cavalry. had denounced the gov't he's serving in 1861 and 1862 for its failure to explicitly make the war a war against slavery. by march 1863, he had concluded that emancipation would indeed be achieved by the war (january 1863 is the emancipation proclamation). killed in april 1865, in the last major engagement of the civil war.
how do you get to this man? bright, connected-enough--but he gave it all up for a cause he saw more worthy. and if, in general, you can come to understand white, young, Northern, Yankee, Anglo-Saxon fighters, who believed strongly in the War of 1861 (and who, despite racism in the North against immigrants and African-Americans, eventually supported a war that came to be waged on slavery).
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if the South was a slave society, the North was a market society--booming by the 1820s/1830s/1840s (this began, even, in the late 18th century). this booming commercial, consumerist society with its faith and defense in free labor--that ideology would be something that a lot of white Southerners would actually fear.
a time of roads, railroads, technological innovation--1800/1810/1820, you can actually find, in the North, a fear of technology.
the "market revolution", of course, was driven by the growth of cities, which became centers of economic activity. it's that time when 18th century subsistence farmers (who engaged in "mixed agriculture", growing all kinds of foodstuffs for themselves) gave way to commercial farmers producing for a much larger market (cities on the East coast, and even a global market). it's a time when the home and farm became their own domestic factory--the vast majority were still farmers, but they began to buy things on the market (from a peddler, or a store in town).
this all, of course, leads to a change in "mentalitites"--brought about fundamental alterations in aspirations, habits, activities, in conceptions and definitions of work and leisure. it would fundamentally change the conception of a "laborer"--becoming part of a collective force, put into opposition against Capital and manufacture.
there's a habit in the US to think that the idea of "individual rights" began with the Bill of Rights--but this got profoundly shaped by the "market revolution"
it's going to change the idea of mobility, where you can go and how.
and--this is crucial--it's going to change, for Northern people (and immigrants), people's conception about what they can give their children. the idea that if labor is left free, the small guy has a chance--rooted in "free labor" ideology is this idea of social mobility. especially in a society that had this thing called "the West."
even such American concepts as "self-reliance" is changed by the Market revolution--people keep seeing evidence that shows them that, in the face of the market, their individualism is not so powerful.
the level of ideas, thinking, and common behaviour, would bring about a combination of tremendous, broad optimism (possibly like we've never experienced since), simultaneous to a certain sense of anxiety/dread/despair. it will lead to great wealth (fortunes in railroads by the 1840s and 1850s, and the textile industry, and on Wall Street), but, also, inequality will grow.
the workplace would become less personal, as factories emerged. women went to work, most famously in Lowell factories in MA. for the first time, in significant numbers, young girls and young women left the realm of domesticity.
the market revolution would also lead to environmental degradation--people worried a lot about the destruction of natural habitats (rivers, etc.)
it came, also, with boom and bust cycles--a crisis in 1837, and in 1857 (which would play a part in the story of the Civil War).
even the idea of what a child is (of childhood), and the family, undergoes a revolution in 20 or 30 years. by the 30s and 40s in an immigrant family, a child meant a wage. in the growing middle-class of course, there was a more modern definition of childhood--the child was to be a protected youth. "parenting", as moral guardianship.
the market revolution was a tremendous engine for the idea of "progress"--America was growing, and it was now going to be the nation of "progress". it looked like it could expand, forever. as walt whitman wrote, in poem after poem, America would be the beginning of a "new man". a new start for humankind.
AND: "if you come to believe we are the hope for humankind--we are "progress", and our creed is written down in the constitution--what have you done? you've said, we are really special, and we are really important, and we are really good. you've kind of set yourself up, haven't you?" the doctrine of progress, prof is arguing, has always bred its contradictions.
1820s New York, 1820s/1830s Philadelphia, 1850s Chicago (railroad capital of the world).
part of the change to the North, of course, was immigration--in the 1830s, 600,000 immigrants came to the US, almost all from western Europe. in the 1840s, 1.5 million. in the 1850s, almost 3 million more. by 1852/1853, Boston and New York had 50% foreign-born populations. it's close to this in Philadelphia.
all this, of course, was fueled by the transport revolution. the eerie canal, which was profitable from 1820-1880s. 300 such canals built in the 1850s. steamboats became the romantic symbol of this revolution (though they too brought dread; 1/3 of all steamboats built in the 1850s, exploded!).
and then, of course, railroads--no continent, you could argue, had ever been as ready-made as the US for railroads. they revolutionized an American sense of time, ability to travel, manufacturing--and it made Chicago, Chicago. it made the first multimillionaires, the first great fortunes. and it became a great example of the relationship between the Federal Government and Business--they were built, by and large, by government subsidies, and a tremendous amount of corruption. had a lot to do with linking northeast with northwest, which created a certain sense of isolation in the South.
and, at this time, we can identify also the idea of manifest destiny--which prof is calling an inherently white supremacist idea, that was a part of American culture from the outset. the idea that we have to expand, colonize, and civilize this continent.
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NOW, in any society changing this much, this fast (doubling its population, in 20 years; if the rate of population growth from 1820-1850 had been sustained, over time, we'd have today roughly 1.5 billion people in the US), both reform/change and anxiety are inevitable.
four major reform periods of American history (a period in which people became professional reformers; whole movements, magazines, etc.), in prof's opinion. the first is this era, 1820s-1850s, ante-bellum America (emphasized most obviously by the anti-slavery movement). the second great era is the progressive era, a great response to urbanization/industrialization/immigration. the third is, in all likelihood, the New Deal (incredible emergency/crises over question of what government owes its people, etc.). the fourth is the 60s--civil rights movement, vietnam war, etc.
in Am. history, reform crusades have had to do with one of several objects/purposes/problems.
the first is the industrializing process: we've been leaving the history of this reform ever since our first market revolution.
the second is racial equality: and we're still having that reform movement.
the third is gender equality.
the fourth is peace.
the fifth kind of American reform is religious and individual morality--and here it takes on some distinctly American characteristics.
-----------
to be anti-slavery in America by the 1820s and 1830s was to face a host of barriers: sanctity of US constitution, depth of pro-slavery argument. abolitionists did not believe they would see the end of slavery in their lifetime.
and last point: one of the barriers for an anti-slavery activist, whatever your reasons, is the simple fact that the United States was a republic, and that the sides that owned those slaves, their leaders were free to defend their system. they were free to dissent--they were republicans (small R), as well. the greatest tragedy of American history, perhaps, is that this struggle could not be resolved politically.
david blight
----------
from a northern point of view, how do we get to this passage? story of a yale college junior, abolitionist, who enlisted in the first regiment he could get into--the sixth new york cavalry. had denounced the gov't he's serving in 1861 and 1862 for its failure to explicitly make the war a war against slavery. by march 1863, he had concluded that emancipation would indeed be achieved by the war (january 1863 is the emancipation proclamation). killed in april 1865, in the last major engagement of the civil war.
how do you get to this man? bright, connected-enough--but he gave it all up for a cause he saw more worthy. and if, in general, you can come to understand white, young, Northern, Yankee, Anglo-Saxon fighters, who believed strongly in the War of 1861 (and who, despite racism in the North against immigrants and African-Americans, eventually supported a war that came to be waged on slavery).
----------
if the South was a slave society, the North was a market society--booming by the 1820s/1830s/1840s (this began, even, in the late 18th century). this booming commercial, consumerist society with its faith and defense in free labor--that ideology would be something that a lot of white Southerners would actually fear.
a time of roads, railroads, technological innovation--1800/1810/1820, you can actually find, in the North, a fear of technology.
the "market revolution", of course, was driven by the growth of cities, which became centers of economic activity. it's that time when 18th century subsistence farmers (who engaged in "mixed agriculture", growing all kinds of foodstuffs for themselves) gave way to commercial farmers producing for a much larger market (cities on the East coast, and even a global market). it's a time when the home and farm became their own domestic factory--the vast majority were still farmers, but they began to buy things on the market (from a peddler, or a store in town).
this all, of course, leads to a change in "mentalitites"--brought about fundamental alterations in aspirations, habits, activities, in conceptions and definitions of work and leisure. it would fundamentally change the conception of a "laborer"--becoming part of a collective force, put into opposition against Capital and manufacture.
there's a habit in the US to think that the idea of "individual rights" began with the Bill of Rights--but this got profoundly shaped by the "market revolution"
it's going to change the idea of mobility, where you can go and how.
and--this is crucial--it's going to change, for Northern people (and immigrants), people's conception about what they can give their children. the idea that if labor is left free, the small guy has a chance--rooted in "free labor" ideology is this idea of social mobility. especially in a society that had this thing called "the West."
even such American concepts as "self-reliance" is changed by the Market revolution--people keep seeing evidence that shows them that, in the face of the market, their individualism is not so powerful.
the level of ideas, thinking, and common behaviour, would bring about a combination of tremendous, broad optimism (possibly like we've never experienced since), simultaneous to a certain sense of anxiety/dread/despair. it will lead to great wealth (fortunes in railroads by the 1840s and 1850s, and the textile industry, and on Wall Street), but, also, inequality will grow.
the workplace would become less personal, as factories emerged. women went to work, most famously in Lowell factories in MA. for the first time, in significant numbers, young girls and young women left the realm of domesticity.
the market revolution would also lead to environmental degradation--people worried a lot about the destruction of natural habitats (rivers, etc.)
it came, also, with boom and bust cycles--a crisis in 1837, and in 1857 (which would play a part in the story of the Civil War).
even the idea of what a child is (of childhood), and the family, undergoes a revolution in 20 or 30 years. by the 30s and 40s in an immigrant family, a child meant a wage. in the growing middle-class of course, there was a more modern definition of childhood--the child was to be a protected youth. "parenting", as moral guardianship.
the market revolution was a tremendous engine for the idea of "progress"--America was growing, and it was now going to be the nation of "progress". it looked like it could expand, forever. as walt whitman wrote, in poem after poem, America would be the beginning of a "new man". a new start for humankind.
AND: "if you come to believe we are the hope for humankind--we are "progress", and our creed is written down in the constitution--what have you done? you've said, we are really special, and we are really important, and we are really good. you've kind of set yourself up, haven't you?" the doctrine of progress, prof is arguing, has always bred its contradictions.
1820s New York, 1820s/1830s Philadelphia, 1850s Chicago (railroad capital of the world).
part of the change to the North, of course, was immigration--in the 1830s, 600,000 immigrants came to the US, almost all from western Europe. in the 1840s, 1.5 million. in the 1850s, almost 3 million more. by 1852/1853, Boston and New York had 50% foreign-born populations. it's close to this in Philadelphia.
all this, of course, was fueled by the transport revolution. the eerie canal, which was profitable from 1820-1880s. 300 such canals built in the 1850s. steamboats became the romantic symbol of this revolution (though they too brought dread; 1/3 of all steamboats built in the 1850s, exploded!).
and then, of course, railroads--no continent, you could argue, had ever been as ready-made as the US for railroads. they revolutionized an American sense of time, ability to travel, manufacturing--and it made Chicago, Chicago. it made the first multimillionaires, the first great fortunes. and it became a great example of the relationship between the Federal Government and Business--they were built, by and large, by government subsidies, and a tremendous amount of corruption. had a lot to do with linking northeast with northwest, which created a certain sense of isolation in the South.
and, at this time, we can identify also the idea of manifest destiny--which prof is calling an inherently white supremacist idea, that was a part of American culture from the outset. the idea that we have to expand, colonize, and civilize this continent.
------------
NOW, in any society changing this much, this fast (doubling its population, in 20 years; if the rate of population growth from 1820-1850 had been sustained, over time, we'd have today roughly 1.5 billion people in the US), both reform/change and anxiety are inevitable.
four major reform periods of American history (a period in which people became professional reformers; whole movements, magazines, etc.), in prof's opinion. the first is this era, 1820s-1850s, ante-bellum America (emphasized most obviously by the anti-slavery movement). the second great era is the progressive era, a great response to urbanization/industrialization/immigration. the third is, in all likelihood, the New Deal (incredible emergency/crises over question of what government owes its people, etc.). the fourth is the 60s--civil rights movement, vietnam war, etc.
in Am. history, reform crusades have had to do with one of several objects/purposes/problems.
the first is the industrializing process: we've been leaving the history of this reform ever since our first market revolution.
the second is racial equality: and we're still having that reform movement.
the third is gender equality.
the fourth is peace.
the fifth kind of American reform is religious and individual morality--and here it takes on some distinctly American characteristics.
-----------
to be anti-slavery in America by the 1820s and 1830s was to face a host of barriers: sanctity of US constitution, depth of pro-slavery argument. abolitionists did not believe they would see the end of slavery in their lifetime.
and last point: one of the barriers for an anti-slavery activist, whatever your reasons, is the simple fact that the United States was a republic, and that the sides that owned those slaves, their leaders were free to defend their system. they were free to dissent--they were republicans (small R), as well. the greatest tragedy of American history, perhaps, is that this struggle could not be resolved politically.
lecture 12, "french imperialism"
charles keith (john merriman's course)
----------
topic of lecture: French imperialism from 1871-1914
citing a novel from an army officer who speaks about his expedition to Sudan as compensation/consolation for the anger at Alsace-Lorraine's annexation.
during the period we're discussing, the French empire exploded: at the outset, had been little more than outposts in Algeria, military presence in parts of North Africa, Southeast Asia, few "small spits of land" in the Pacific and the Carribean--exploded to include large swathes of North Africa, West Africa, most of mainland Southeast Asia, parts of the Middle East, and territories in the Pacific/Carribean.
by the end of WWI, the French Empire exercised sovereignty over 100 million inhabitants--twice as many people as lived in metropolitan France at that time, roughly.
the passage captures the two central themes at this juncture in French imperial history
(1) serving in the army to recapture prestige lost in the disastrous war with Prussia. officer sees the site of revenge overseas--French nationalism, in this sense, became increasingly inseparable from the idea of a strong, healthy French empire. the fusion of a more modern, French nationalism was new to French history at this period.
(2) the passage comes from a novel, a part of popular culture--during the late 19th century, Empire became something that more and more French people experienced directly, either through popular culture, serving in the army or colonial administrations, or settling lands for the motherland.
take-away from the lecture: Empire, during the Third Republic, became central to French nationalism--it was in the national curriculum, in the national newspapers, and in political discussion. in many ways, it became a "common experience." Empire was a central part of making people French, in sum.
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Empire, of course, had a long past in French history.
during the 17th and 18th centuries, French had a colonial history in the Caribbean and in North America, though many of these possessions were lost around the time of the French revolution. one of the revolution's powerful legacies, in fact, was a conviction to carry the revolution across French borders--to bring the rights of man to the monarchies of the continent. Napoleon of course, continued this--who carried the reach of the Empire across Europe, all the way to Russia.
at the turn of the 19th century, in fact, Napoleon even tried to colonize Egypt--an event which spoke to his messianic belief in science/progress and French civilization. an absence of any real knowledge, of course, about the non-Western world (and a predisposition to the idea of non-Western inferiority). This potent combination, the mission civilizatrice, was to drive French empire until the end.
at the birth of the Third Republic, however, the various tumult in French history prior meant that the Empire was pretty small. it was, correspondingly, fairly marginal in national imaginary. in the years before the French defeat to Prussia, the main urge to expand often came from soldiers/sailors and/or missionaries. even the bulk of Algerian expansion after 1830 was largely the work of Generals, who defied the national government in Paris. at this stage, in a way, the French empire was a giant system of relief for the French military (something to "occupy" them).
BUT: after the loss to Prussia, an acute sense of national inferiority prevailed. Critics attacked the Republic as a cesspool of corruption, etc. Emasculated militarily, slumping economically, shrinking demographically--at this juncture, many people obviously turned to colonial expansion. Jules Very was perhaps the most prominent advocate of this belief.
in his words, "colonial policy was the daugher of industrial policy... export is an essential factor in public prosperity" -- colonies were essential to a strong national economy. France needed exclusive access to new markets and raw materials. furthermore, closely tried to these objectives were political-strategic ones--a policy of abstention was "the road to decadence". Expansion in Africa and Asia was necessary to make France great in the panoply of nations, according to Very.
he also believed in the civilizing mission: "superior races have a right, but also a duty" to bring civilization to other nations. it was the colonial empire that would save France, and elevate their subjects.
----------
So: colonial objectives were brought into national politics, big-time, especially after Very and the Republicans came to power in 1879.
first attempt to expand was in Vietnam, where the endeavored to take over what is now its Northern half (then called Tonkin--had failed on several occasions before). on the pretext of protecting catholics and prosecuting pirates; the campaign was unpopular and failed. general's head ended up on a pike-staff.
nevertheless, this prefigured Empire's future prominence--colonial expansion accelerated from this point on, as France rushed to compete with Britain and Germany.
debates over colonial policy would become a standard part of French political discourse in the 1890s. every government after Jules Very presided over a steadily expanding colonial Empire.
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this new prominence was, in many ways, due to the influence of a growing colonial lobby in French society--this lobby was very influential in spreading the idea of Empire as national redemption. it was a diverse group of individuals, who put forth the idea for expansion in many different ways (it was not particularly organized)--included men like informal group of explorers/geographers, shipbuilders, railway magnates, factory owners (path to material wealth), missionairies (converts in the heathen races--declining religiosity in the homeland, don't forget), writers and journalists.
so they weren't united by the same interests--but it is precisely their diversity that shows how compelling Empire had become, for France.
the assumption had become, indeed, that Empire served France, as a whole. Empire as a solution to domestic, national problems ("colonies as a laboratory for modernity"). before the Third Republic, the social value of colonies was little more than a way to get rid of people that the State considered undesirable (French penal colony in New Colony, where over 4,000 of the communards had been sent). but toward the end of the 19th century, this began to change--a potential home for landless peasants, unemployed workers, etc, even.
French engineers, and social planners, came to see colonies as a vast work-site--building from scratch, in a sense. Colonies:France, as what Far West:America (says a colonial administrator in Morocco). a "training ground", for many of these bureaucrats.
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in popular culture: schoolchildren began reading about colonies in textbooks (Ministry of Education directive: "it must not be forgotten that France is a world power... Let us not have any scruples about...giving them as rich an image of their country... the mother country and her distant daughters"). the urban middle-classes visiting the Museum of Natural History began to see objects collected in the colonies. and in the massive expositions (in 1900, colonies given their own staging grounds--entire buildings were transported from the Empire).
the Empire was more than a periodic spectacle--crept into the most mundane forms of everyday life. in newspapers, day-in day-out--articles focused on military encounters, of course (vs. a "savage enemy"). captured in novels, as well.
the French encountered an Empire in cafes, dance halls, etc. even goods that people bought evoked the Empire (the yellow "banana" box). even in Church--the last third of the 19th century was a time of intense missionary activity, and people heard financial pleas from these missionaries.
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of course, no better way to experience it than go there. though, by the late 1880s and 1890s, there were few Frenchpeople in the colonies (with the exception of Algeria: 300,000 French settlers in 1871)--little more than administrators and garrison--gradually, though, more and more came.
the most drastically affected, of course, were soldiers in the military, as France attempted to expand, and consolidate her Empire (in the face of fierce resistance). long sea journeys, tropical diseases, and miserable pay.
missionairies, too, went overseas more and more.
settlers went to the colonies in order to stay--often committed for life. took to the colonies whatever Capital and possessions they may have had. distance from home, hostility from natives, etc., were all serious obstacles. many were drawn by inducements from people who owned large tracts of land (land-owners also sought Italian and Spanish immigrants, when they couldn't find enough Frenchfolk).
-----------
as Empire grew, life in the colonies became more regularized. administrators/civil service generally took over from soldiers/military, and started to collect taxes, keeping law and order--often having to sanction violence against deviants and those who resisted. increasingly, these people came not from the military, but from civilians who were trained at specific schools in the metropole (Ecole Colonial, for example--founded in 1877).
French government also did its best to draw professionals to the colonies (lawyers, doctors, etc.). Paris offered subsidies.
more and more women came, as well, to these places. in a way, this reflected the taming and the "making domestic" of the colonies--the regularization. women going to seek husbands, etc. many women worked in humanitarian capacities, which is ironic considering what their husbands would be doing.
----------
by WWI, there would be almost 500,000 French citizens scattered throughout the French empire. what was life like? few people found adventure, of course. disease took a large toll (malaria, yellow fever, etc.). attack/accidents were almost always a concern. medical care was often inadequate. colonial goods were often susceptible to rapidly changing market conditions, meaning that settlers didn't always thrive. social life, in the colonies, was fairly limited--in many places (presumably rural), some citizens might even spend months without seeing other Europeans (!).
most never relinquished their sense of superiority. these attitudes were reinforced by French laws and institutions, and well-established spatial and social segregation.
-----------
to WWI--when "Guns of August" began to roar in 1914, the French empire was at its peak (second only to the British). colonial promoters lauded the benefit of the colonies: (1) prestige, (2) secure site of investment, (3) captive markets, (4) raw materials/cheap labor, (5) reserve army of soldiers. Empire had become a popular part of popular culture. in short, Empire had become a fundamental part of national identity/hubris (as in the rest of Europe).
few French people in 1914 could see few things that might threaten this happy equilibrium. for many people, France had recovered from the loss of Alsace-Lorraine (and Empire was central to this national revival). "The renewal of France," in the words of a colonial official in 1912.
----------
of course, not all was well in the Emipre. haven't spoken about the effect of French colonialism on those in the colonies. needless to say, French imperialism didn't coincide with the "best of French civilization"
few accepted French expansion without struggle; but few, of course, could match the technology of the French, at the same time.
as French police, legal systems, etc., replaced the overtly military presence of the earlier age--occupation and repression paraded as "integration"/"assimilation"
by 1914, cracks began to appear in the edifice. not everyboy had been swept up by French dreams. a small anti-colonial lobby in the homeland began to appear. for some, expansion seemed a dangerous overextension of French power. others, seeing that promised financial concerns were underwhelming, began to criticize it practically. others yet protested on moral grounds--at a protest in 1906, the famous novelist Anatole France thundered, "whites do not communicate with blacks and yellow men but through arms... the people we call barbarians know us through" our barbarism. Jean Jaures went even further--refuting the mission of the civilizing mission (in this case, in Morocco)--arguing that a civilization existed, in Morocco, that had hope for the future. "And I cannot pardon those who have crushed this hope."
during the 1920s and 1930s, anti-colonialism would become a more potent voice in the metropole. (in 1931, a famous anti-colonial exposition would be organized, in opposition to the colonial expo--nothing similar had happened in 1900).
however: it was not the French themselves who would eventually succeed in crumbling the edifice of Empire. ultimately, it collapsed, first and foremost, because of the many forms of resistance waged by those under their yoke.
in many ways, WWI was a tipping point--the myths sustaining French rule had been very powerful, many in the colonized world had asked themselves whether colonial power was unchallengable and inevitable (and, for some intellectuals, maybe a "good thing"). during the war, about a half a million colonial subjects were conscripted--donning the blue uniform and fighting for France. many others came to the metropole to work. those who came saw religious, economic, political rifts at the home--and they saw a war that gave the lie to French civilization.
for countless people across the world, the Great War showed that France could not and did not correspond to its lofty myths. it dealt a terrible blow to their moral standing; Europeans savagely killing each other, for four years. the contrast between savagery and civilization was now reversed.
after WWI, for growing numbers in France, Emipre seemed to expensive (especially during the depression), immoral, and unwieldy to retain. what had been a source of unification became a source for disunion.
the opposite was true in the colonies. in the 1930s and 1940s, an anti-colonial nationalism was born--in the years after WWI, this would culminate in widespread liberation.
charles keith (john merriman's course)
----------
topic of lecture: French imperialism from 1871-1914
citing a novel from an army officer who speaks about his expedition to Sudan as compensation/consolation for the anger at Alsace-Lorraine's annexation.
during the period we're discussing, the French empire exploded: at the outset, had been little more than outposts in Algeria, military presence in parts of North Africa, Southeast Asia, few "small spits of land" in the Pacific and the Carribean--exploded to include large swathes of North Africa, West Africa, most of mainland Southeast Asia, parts of the Middle East, and territories in the Pacific/Carribean.
by the end of WWI, the French Empire exercised sovereignty over 100 million inhabitants--twice as many people as lived in metropolitan France at that time, roughly.
the passage captures the two central themes at this juncture in French imperial history
(1) serving in the army to recapture prestige lost in the disastrous war with Prussia. officer sees the site of revenge overseas--French nationalism, in this sense, became increasingly inseparable from the idea of a strong, healthy French empire. the fusion of a more modern, French nationalism was new to French history at this period.
(2) the passage comes from a novel, a part of popular culture--during the late 19th century, Empire became something that more and more French people experienced directly, either through popular culture, serving in the army or colonial administrations, or settling lands for the motherland.
take-away from the lecture: Empire, during the Third Republic, became central to French nationalism--it was in the national curriculum, in the national newspapers, and in political discussion. in many ways, it became a "common experience." Empire was a central part of making people French, in sum.
----------
Empire, of course, had a long past in French history.
during the 17th and 18th centuries, French had a colonial history in the Caribbean and in North America, though many of these possessions were lost around the time of the French revolution. one of the revolution's powerful legacies, in fact, was a conviction to carry the revolution across French borders--to bring the rights of man to the monarchies of the continent. Napoleon of course, continued this--who carried the reach of the Empire across Europe, all the way to Russia.
at the turn of the 19th century, in fact, Napoleon even tried to colonize Egypt--an event which spoke to his messianic belief in science/progress and French civilization. an absence of any real knowledge, of course, about the non-Western world (and a predisposition to the idea of non-Western inferiority). This potent combination, the mission civilizatrice, was to drive French empire until the end.
at the birth of the Third Republic, however, the various tumult in French history prior meant that the Empire was pretty small. it was, correspondingly, fairly marginal in national imaginary. in the years before the French defeat to Prussia, the main urge to expand often came from soldiers/sailors and/or missionaries. even the bulk of Algerian expansion after 1830 was largely the work of Generals, who defied the national government in Paris. at this stage, in a way, the French empire was a giant system of relief for the French military (something to "occupy" them).
BUT: after the loss to Prussia, an acute sense of national inferiority prevailed. Critics attacked the Republic as a cesspool of corruption, etc. Emasculated militarily, slumping economically, shrinking demographically--at this juncture, many people obviously turned to colonial expansion. Jules Very was perhaps the most prominent advocate of this belief.
in his words, "colonial policy was the daugher of industrial policy... export is an essential factor in public prosperity" -- colonies were essential to a strong national economy. France needed exclusive access to new markets and raw materials. furthermore, closely tried to these objectives were political-strategic ones--a policy of abstention was "the road to decadence". Expansion in Africa and Asia was necessary to make France great in the panoply of nations, according to Very.
he also believed in the civilizing mission: "superior races have a right, but also a duty" to bring civilization to other nations. it was the colonial empire that would save France, and elevate their subjects.
----------
So: colonial objectives were brought into national politics, big-time, especially after Very and the Republicans came to power in 1879.
first attempt to expand was in Vietnam, where the endeavored to take over what is now its Northern half (then called Tonkin--had failed on several occasions before). on the pretext of protecting catholics and prosecuting pirates; the campaign was unpopular and failed. general's head ended up on a pike-staff.
nevertheless, this prefigured Empire's future prominence--colonial expansion accelerated from this point on, as France rushed to compete with Britain and Germany.
debates over colonial policy would become a standard part of French political discourse in the 1890s. every government after Jules Very presided over a steadily expanding colonial Empire.
----------
this new prominence was, in many ways, due to the influence of a growing colonial lobby in French society--this lobby was very influential in spreading the idea of Empire as national redemption. it was a diverse group of individuals, who put forth the idea for expansion in many different ways (it was not particularly organized)--included men like informal group of explorers/geographers, shipbuilders, railway magnates, factory owners (path to material wealth), missionairies (converts in the heathen races--declining religiosity in the homeland, don't forget), writers and journalists.
so they weren't united by the same interests--but it is precisely their diversity that shows how compelling Empire had become, for France.
the assumption had become, indeed, that Empire served France, as a whole. Empire as a solution to domestic, national problems ("colonies as a laboratory for modernity"). before the Third Republic, the social value of colonies was little more than a way to get rid of people that the State considered undesirable (French penal colony in New Colony, where over 4,000 of the communards had been sent). but toward the end of the 19th century, this began to change--a potential home for landless peasants, unemployed workers, etc, even.
French engineers, and social planners, came to see colonies as a vast work-site--building from scratch, in a sense. Colonies:France, as what Far West:America (says a colonial administrator in Morocco). a "training ground", for many of these bureaucrats.
----------
in popular culture: schoolchildren began reading about colonies in textbooks (Ministry of Education directive: "it must not be forgotten that France is a world power... Let us not have any scruples about...giving them as rich an image of their country... the mother country and her distant daughters"). the urban middle-classes visiting the Museum of Natural History began to see objects collected in the colonies. and in the massive expositions (in 1900, colonies given their own staging grounds--entire buildings were transported from the Empire).
the Empire was more than a periodic spectacle--crept into the most mundane forms of everyday life. in newspapers, day-in day-out--articles focused on military encounters, of course (vs. a "savage enemy"). captured in novels, as well.
the French encountered an Empire in cafes, dance halls, etc. even goods that people bought evoked the Empire (the yellow "banana" box). even in Church--the last third of the 19th century was a time of intense missionary activity, and people heard financial pleas from these missionaries.
----------
of course, no better way to experience it than go there. though, by the late 1880s and 1890s, there were few Frenchpeople in the colonies (with the exception of Algeria: 300,000 French settlers in 1871)--little more than administrators and garrison--gradually, though, more and more came.
the most drastically affected, of course, were soldiers in the military, as France attempted to expand, and consolidate her Empire (in the face of fierce resistance). long sea journeys, tropical diseases, and miserable pay.
missionairies, too, went overseas more and more.
settlers went to the colonies in order to stay--often committed for life. took to the colonies whatever Capital and possessions they may have had. distance from home, hostility from natives, etc., were all serious obstacles. many were drawn by inducements from people who owned large tracts of land (land-owners also sought Italian and Spanish immigrants, when they couldn't find enough Frenchfolk).
-----------
as Empire grew, life in the colonies became more regularized. administrators/civil service generally took over from soldiers/military, and started to collect taxes, keeping law and order--often having to sanction violence against deviants and those who resisted. increasingly, these people came not from the military, but from civilians who were trained at specific schools in the metropole (Ecole Colonial, for example--founded in 1877).
French government also did its best to draw professionals to the colonies (lawyers, doctors, etc.). Paris offered subsidies.
more and more women came, as well, to these places. in a way, this reflected the taming and the "making domestic" of the colonies--the regularization. women going to seek husbands, etc. many women worked in humanitarian capacities, which is ironic considering what their husbands would be doing.
----------
by WWI, there would be almost 500,000 French citizens scattered throughout the French empire. what was life like? few people found adventure, of course. disease took a large toll (malaria, yellow fever, etc.). attack/accidents were almost always a concern. medical care was often inadequate. colonial goods were often susceptible to rapidly changing market conditions, meaning that settlers didn't always thrive. social life, in the colonies, was fairly limited--in many places (presumably rural), some citizens might even spend months without seeing other Europeans (!).
most never relinquished their sense of superiority. these attitudes were reinforced by French laws and institutions, and well-established spatial and social segregation.
-----------
to WWI--when "Guns of August" began to roar in 1914, the French empire was at its peak (second only to the British). colonial promoters lauded the benefit of the colonies: (1) prestige, (2) secure site of investment, (3) captive markets, (4) raw materials/cheap labor, (5) reserve army of soldiers. Empire had become a popular part of popular culture. in short, Empire had become a fundamental part of national identity/hubris (as in the rest of Europe).
few French people in 1914 could see few things that might threaten this happy equilibrium. for many people, France had recovered from the loss of Alsace-Lorraine (and Empire was central to this national revival). "The renewal of France," in the words of a colonial official in 1912.
----------
of course, not all was well in the Emipre. haven't spoken about the effect of French colonialism on those in the colonies. needless to say, French imperialism didn't coincide with the "best of French civilization"
few accepted French expansion without struggle; but few, of course, could match the technology of the French, at the same time.
as French police, legal systems, etc., replaced the overtly military presence of the earlier age--occupation and repression paraded as "integration"/"assimilation"
by 1914, cracks began to appear in the edifice. not everyboy had been swept up by French dreams. a small anti-colonial lobby in the homeland began to appear. for some, expansion seemed a dangerous overextension of French power. others, seeing that promised financial concerns were underwhelming, began to criticize it practically. others yet protested on moral grounds--at a protest in 1906, the famous novelist Anatole France thundered, "whites do not communicate with blacks and yellow men but through arms... the people we call barbarians know us through" our barbarism. Jean Jaures went even further--refuting the mission of the civilizing mission (in this case, in Morocco)--arguing that a civilization existed, in Morocco, that had hope for the future. "And I cannot pardon those who have crushed this hope."
during the 1920s and 1930s, anti-colonialism would become a more potent voice in the metropole. (in 1931, a famous anti-colonial exposition would be organized, in opposition to the colonial expo--nothing similar had happened in 1900).
however: it was not the French themselves who would eventually succeed in crumbling the edifice of Empire. ultimately, it collapsed, first and foremost, because of the many forms of resistance waged by those under their yoke.
in many ways, WWI was a tipping point--the myths sustaining French rule had been very powerful, many in the colonized world had asked themselves whether colonial power was unchallengable and inevitable (and, for some intellectuals, maybe a "good thing"). during the war, about a half a million colonial subjects were conscripted--donning the blue uniform and fighting for France. many others came to the metropole to work. those who came saw religious, economic, political rifts at the home--and they saw a war that gave the lie to French civilization.
for countless people across the world, the Great War showed that France could not and did not correspond to its lofty myths. it dealt a terrible blow to their moral standing; Europeans savagely killing each other, for four years. the contrast between savagery and civilization was now reversed.
after WWI, for growing numbers in France, Emipre seemed to expensive (especially during the depression), immoral, and unwieldy to retain. what had been a source of unification became a source for disunion.
the opposite was true in the colonies. in the 1930s and 1940s, an anti-colonial nationalism was born--in the years after WWI, this would culminate in widespread liberation.
lecture 11, "paris and the belle epoque"
john merriman
----------
the belle epoque was not "good," for most people of France--the image of nostalgia for this period's France is really a creation of post-WWI France.
we have to look, of course, at the reconfiguration of Paris by Baron Haussmann in the 1850s and 1860s (the "Alsatian Attila"). he only went back to Paris three times after he left in scandal at the end of the 1860s.
the great boulevards that became identified with modern Paris can only be understood during this "urban renewal" project--it was the largest, in history (only comparable were the re-building of Tokyo, after the fire; or London (when?)).
----------
pre-1860 Paris, the first thing you notice, of course, is its small size (prof is showing map). tremendously over-crowded place--and the most densely populated parts of the city were the Isle de Cite, and the Marais (central right-bank districts). their population density was three times what it is today.
in 1851: 1,053,000
in 1861: 1,696,000
in 1872: 1,825,000 (minus the 25,000 slaughtered)
in 1881: 2,269,000
in 1896: 2,500,000
European cities only grow in the first 2/3 of the 19th century through migration (otherwise more people die than are born--disease, infanticide, infant morality, etc.). large-cities replenish themsleves only through immigration. this produces a hyper-density in the central districts of Paris. it's not until the 1880s that you have the huge wave of Breton migration (from Brittany).
so you have an extraordinarily crowded city, the ranks of the poor swollen by immigration.
one of the differences between the 19th century and now is that the people coming into paris, then, the people coming into Paris were people who were poorer than those already there. this is different than middle-class immigration in the immediate aftermath of WWII (not well-explained...)
Haussman himself was born in the Western, prosperous parts of Paris (he was a law student there). in 1852, Napoleon the III orders Haussman to build him great boulevards--it was a time when the gap between the rich and the poor was increasing.
you see, as a consequence of the re-configuration/demolition of the centre and eviction by high rents, the flight of working-class populations from the center to the periphery (the growth, then, of working-class, poor suburbs).
the principle of the planning, itself, is built upon classical principles associated with absolute monarchs--"the imperialism of the straight line." if you think of St. Petersburg, Madrid, Berlin, or Versailles--there were power alleys, down which you marched troops. very different from the cities that had grown organically from the middle ages (Strasbourg, as an example).
the problematique, of course--how do you build this magnificent boulevard from point A to point B? you simply take a ruler, and barge through!
three reasons that Paris is re-built:
(1) more light and air--make it healthier
(2) to liberate Capital, for business--it's not a coincidence that all the major department stores sit on the boulevards.
(3) how do you build a barricade across the boulevards? Haussman says this in his memoirs--"we want to build barricade-proof boulevards"
---------
now, what about the people chased from the central districts?
if you rented (and almost everyone did), and you were kicked out, you were given the equivalent of about a day's wages, and that was it.
---------
freeing the flow of Capital, of course, was a "worthy goal", and it came with a massive exhibition in 1864, and a proliferation of department stores. and what this does, of course, is destroy local craftsmen/businessmen. (there are some dept stores already by the 1820s, and even before that, but it is the 1850s and 1860s that brings to Paris THE Department Store).
it creates jobs for working-class and peasant women (in terrible conditions, of course), and it attracts the rich to consume. in that sense a re-organization of the economy.
----------
Haussman is not a terribly interesting man--he's technocrat. but he was very good at what he did; he frees up the flow of circulation of Capital, etc. and there are visual effects of the reorganization--imperial order is re-inforced, in a sense.
but the effects on the Parisian poor were horrific, again; all of this makes the West-East/Center-Periphery contrasts more important.
----------
to be sure, there were boulevards in European cities, before Haussmann. but they had been built on the peripheries, mainly, on the outskirts (where walls once used to be). Vienna is an example of this. and there is some of this in Paris, too.
Renoire described the Boulevards as soldiers. (prof is showing pictures, at this point)
paintings portraying the anomie of boulevard life--the isolation of modern city-life. one can over-emphasize this theme too much, perhaps, but it's still critical to keep in mind.
----------
you still have traditional work done in Paris--so there is some conversion of old buildings into new industries, and there is some re-organization of work, in a sense (unclear, this point)
but prof is again stressing the marginaliztion of poor and working-class life (and culture). the contrast between what happened to the Western periphery and the Eastern periphery. the Western half of Paris was very different (though one shouldn't over-estimate this).
working-class industrial suburbs became the source of serious support for the communists during the 1920s and 1930s, partly because of how badly they were housed. and they become places feared by the center. the growth of these industrial suburbs is an important feature of large-scale industrialization (many of the "dirty" industries are forced toward the periphery--that's where the factories are, etc.)
-----------
why are European suburbs so different from American suburbs?
in 1992, at the time of the Rodney King riots in LA, prof was writing an edited book on the "Red Suburbs" in Paris (and their identification with radical politics). and people on France kept asking, as they couldn't understand the concept of wealthy suburbs and poor interiors, as prevails in Paris.
in the early 1830s, one of Louis Phillippe's ministers called the industrial periphery the "cord that will one day wring our neck." fear of the periphery, not fear of the center.
in 1831 and 1834, silk workers from Lyon poured down into the city and were kept out of invading the center by Police. prof describing, as contrast, 1968 Detroit, and the riots and fire--one of the suburbs tried to change the street patterns so that the poor of the center couldn't come out to the suburbs.
how did this happen? the pattern is just the opposite--can't be exaggerated, but these spatial tensions do count for something.
Haussmann was part of setting this trend, ultimately--factory owners look for cheap labor on the periphery, prices in the center get higher and higher.
the sense of not belonging to the center, in a sense, offers hope to peripheral activism.
john merriman
----------
the belle epoque was not "good," for most people of France--the image of nostalgia for this period's France is really a creation of post-WWI France.
we have to look, of course, at the reconfiguration of Paris by Baron Haussmann in the 1850s and 1860s (the "Alsatian Attila"). he only went back to Paris three times after he left in scandal at the end of the 1860s.
the great boulevards that became identified with modern Paris can only be understood during this "urban renewal" project--it was the largest, in history (only comparable were the re-building of Tokyo, after the fire; or London (when?)).
----------
pre-1860 Paris, the first thing you notice, of course, is its small size (prof is showing map). tremendously over-crowded place--and the most densely populated parts of the city were the Isle de Cite, and the Marais (central right-bank districts). their population density was three times what it is today.
in 1851: 1,053,000
in 1861: 1,696,000
in 1872: 1,825,000 (minus the 25,000 slaughtered)
in 1881: 2,269,000
in 1896: 2,500,000
European cities only grow in the first 2/3 of the 19th century through migration (otherwise more people die than are born--disease, infanticide, infant morality, etc.). large-cities replenish themsleves only through immigration. this produces a hyper-density in the central districts of Paris. it's not until the 1880s that you have the huge wave of Breton migration (from Brittany).
so you have an extraordinarily crowded city, the ranks of the poor swollen by immigration.
one of the differences between the 19th century and now is that the people coming into paris, then, the people coming into Paris were people who were poorer than those already there. this is different than middle-class immigration in the immediate aftermath of WWII (not well-explained...)
Haussman himself was born in the Western, prosperous parts of Paris (he was a law student there). in 1852, Napoleon the III orders Haussman to build him great boulevards--it was a time when the gap between the rich and the poor was increasing.
you see, as a consequence of the re-configuration/demolition of the centre and eviction by high rents, the flight of working-class populations from the center to the periphery (the growth, then, of working-class, poor suburbs).
the principle of the planning, itself, is built upon classical principles associated with absolute monarchs--"the imperialism of the straight line." if you think of St. Petersburg, Madrid, Berlin, or Versailles--there were power alleys, down which you marched troops. very different from the cities that had grown organically from the middle ages (Strasbourg, as an example).
the problematique, of course--how do you build this magnificent boulevard from point A to point B? you simply take a ruler, and barge through!
three reasons that Paris is re-built:
(1) more light and air--make it healthier
(2) to liberate Capital, for business--it's not a coincidence that all the major department stores sit on the boulevards.
(3) how do you build a barricade across the boulevards? Haussman says this in his memoirs--"we want to build barricade-proof boulevards"
---------
now, what about the people chased from the central districts?
if you rented (and almost everyone did), and you were kicked out, you were given the equivalent of about a day's wages, and that was it.
---------
freeing the flow of Capital, of course, was a "worthy goal", and it came with a massive exhibition in 1864, and a proliferation of department stores. and what this does, of course, is destroy local craftsmen/businessmen. (there are some dept stores already by the 1820s, and even before that, but it is the 1850s and 1860s that brings to Paris THE Department Store).
it creates jobs for working-class and peasant women (in terrible conditions, of course), and it attracts the rich to consume. in that sense a re-organization of the economy.
----------
Haussman is not a terribly interesting man--he's technocrat. but he was very good at what he did; he frees up the flow of circulation of Capital, etc. and there are visual effects of the reorganization--imperial order is re-inforced, in a sense.
but the effects on the Parisian poor were horrific, again; all of this makes the West-East/Center-Periphery contrasts more important.
----------
to be sure, there were boulevards in European cities, before Haussmann. but they had been built on the peripheries, mainly, on the outskirts (where walls once used to be). Vienna is an example of this. and there is some of this in Paris, too.
Renoire described the Boulevards as soldiers. (prof is showing pictures, at this point)
paintings portraying the anomie of boulevard life--the isolation of modern city-life. one can over-emphasize this theme too much, perhaps, but it's still critical to keep in mind.
----------
you still have traditional work done in Paris--so there is some conversion of old buildings into new industries, and there is some re-organization of work, in a sense (unclear, this point)
but prof is again stressing the marginaliztion of poor and working-class life (and culture). the contrast between what happened to the Western periphery and the Eastern periphery. the Western half of Paris was very different (though one shouldn't over-estimate this).
working-class industrial suburbs became the source of serious support for the communists during the 1920s and 1930s, partly because of how badly they were housed. and they become places feared by the center. the growth of these industrial suburbs is an important feature of large-scale industrialization (many of the "dirty" industries are forced toward the periphery--that's where the factories are, etc.)
-----------
why are European suburbs so different from American suburbs?
in 1992, at the time of the Rodney King riots in LA, prof was writing an edited book on the "Red Suburbs" in Paris (and their identification with radical politics). and people on France kept asking, as they couldn't understand the concept of wealthy suburbs and poor interiors, as prevails in Paris.
in the early 1830s, one of Louis Phillippe's ministers called the industrial periphery the "cord that will one day wring our neck." fear of the periphery, not fear of the center.
in 1831 and 1834, silk workers from Lyon poured down into the city and were kept out of invading the center by Police. prof describing, as contrast, 1968 Detroit, and the riots and fire--one of the suburbs tried to change the street patterns so that the poor of the center couldn't come out to the suburbs.
how did this happen? the pattern is just the opposite--can't be exaggerated, but these spatial tensions do count for something.
Haussmann was part of setting this trend, ultimately--factory owners look for cheap labor on the periphery, prices in the center get higher and higher.
the sense of not belonging to the center, in a sense, offers hope to peripheral activism.
lecture 3, "a southern world-view: the old south and proslavery ideology"
david blight
----------
in a speech before the Virginia secession convention in late-April 1861, the newly-elected, vice-president of the confederacy Alexander Stevens (a slave-holder) argues that the cornerstone of their movement/their freedom was "American Negro slavery." ("as a race, the African is inferior to the white man... he is not equal to the white man... and cannot be made so by the actions of humankind.")
you always have to worry, in history, when people begin to invoke "Nature"
but how do we get to 1861, and Alexander Stevens declaring that it's all about slavery?
today, then, the Southern defense of slavery (and its evolution).
(of course, what caused this war, remains a question--it cannot be "soundbyted" away.)
----------
professor is relating de Tocqueville's account of the "indolent" South. (the enervating effects of slavery on the society, etc. -- his own aristocratic complexes shining through.) "you see few churches and no schools." not accurate, in his estimations of Southern stagnation. but he did predict the Northern domination of the South. ("Man is not made for servitude").
----------
in the South, what developed was one of the world's true "slave societies." what does this mean?
essentially, any society where the relationship between ownership and labor is defined by slavery--where slavery affected everything about social relations in society (where people were socialized by it, married/reared children, and conceived of the idea of property around the institution). other slave societies in human history (controversial this), were Ancient Greece and Rome, Brazil (by 18th and 19th century), the whole of the Carribbean (the West Indies sugar-producing empires of the Dutch, French, British, Spanish, etc.), and the American South.
there were other, localized slave societies, to be sure. particularly in Africa, even before the Europeans arrived (though really consolidated after the regularization of the Atlantic slave trade). East Africa, in the Muslim world (well before Atlantic slave trade, actually).
BUT: the five "great" slave societies were the above. All were enormously profitable. Technological innovation was generally slow (cheap value of labor). High ratio of slaves to free-people. In those societies, slaves as an interest were both a political and great, economic institution--one which defined regular ways of life.
When exactly did the American South become a slave society. Circa 1820, perhaps. Or maybe even more the 1830s, when you have booming cotton crop. Or in the aftermath of the Mexican War. Prof is arguing, surely by the early part of this period.
One aspect of that slave society is that, as Americans ended the foreign slave trade (in 1808, remember, though it didn't entirely end--there were some people in Georgia, South Carolina, Louisiana still wanted to reopen it up until the 1850s). as the foreign trade was closed off, for a variety of reasons, the domestic American slave trade absolutely boomed. one of the reasons that the cotton boom could be the cotton boom, prof is arguing, was because one of the unique features of N. American slavery, it was the only slave society in the New World where the slaves naturally reproduced themselves (Brazil managed it, a bit)--this has to do with climate, sex ratio, diet, and movement. (prof emphasizing the latter--the "safety valve" of the West, to move to)
between 1810 and 1820 alone, 137,000 American slaves were forced from N. Carolina and Chesapeake States to move to Alabama, Missisippi.
from 1820 to 1860, roughly 2,000,000 American slaves were sold to satisfy the need of slave labor in the great cotton kingdom of the growing south-west. roughly 2/3 of those 2,000,000 slaves moved from the North/East to the south-west--outright sale. a massive, huge American business.
by the 1830s, there were over 100 men in Charleston, SC making their livings, full-time, as slave traders. many of them owned their own "shops." other cities became major ports--Richmond, Virginia, for example (2-3 major, full-time slave traders--slave, auction-house jail, and kept exact account books). One trader, Hector Davis, made about $120,000 in a week!
the South, in this sense, was part of a Western movement. for slave children, between 1820 and 1860, living in the Upper South or Eastern Seaboard, they had a 30% chance of being sold, outright, away from their parents, before the age of 10.
ads in newspaper would read: "Negros wanted... good front teeth" (book on this: Walter Johnson, "Soul by Soul"). amazing to read the language/letters of slave traders: the complacency, pure racism, business-language on the other.
-------
how was slavery defended, then? (and how did the pro-slavery argument develop? and who made them?)
best way to begin, prof is saying, whether in the early defenses of the 1820s, or later, is within the framework of a deeply conservative, organic world-view; a Burkean conservatism--a set of beliefs that says the world is ordered as it is, for reasons. and that human beings ought not to tinker with that order--a set of beliefs in the sustenance of the social order as it was. that people were conceived, by God/Evolution, in line with a certain order--some born to do this, others born to do that (it's "natural"). an obsession with "stability"--the threat of upsetting the social order. bound up with notions of "honor" and "duty"--respect for "tradition."
white, Southern defenders of slavery were, in some respects, products of the Enlightenment--some of them come to really believe in the intellect, in the "power of reason" to figure out the Universe (but, figure it out in different ways). you can be a product of Enlightenment, and still be profoundly conservative. deep, organic forms of conservatism are not antithetical to the Enlightenment, at least not entirely.
many of pro-slavery ideologues will argue that ideas of liberty/freedom, which they constantly referred to, were never absolute. many of them would directly reverse Thomas Jefferson's declaration will argue that "no one is born equal"--many of them would argue that "freedom" must always be balanced with "order and tradition." with the world as it is, not as it ought to be.
southern pro-slavery arguments were much more likely to stress "duty" than to discuss individual "liberty."
edward brown: "slavery" had been the stepping-ladder by which nations had passed from "barbarism" to "civilization"--that slavery was a way in which you built an economy, which would be propserous and benefit those who "mattered."
pro-slavery writers had, in many ways, a fundamentally different conception of how history happened than northern writers (even abraham lincoln--"never a real abolitionist, but at least grew up with anti-slavery in his heart").
categories of the pro-slavery argument:
(a) the biblical: almost all pro-slavery writers would dip into the Old or New Testament--every society has had it, it's always been around. you can read some prophets as justifiying it, thereby concluding that it was divinely sanctioned. (of course it can breath anti-slavery, as well)
(b) the historical: not just the venerability of slavery, but that it has been crucial to the development of all great civilizations. it has been the engine of wealth, of greatness, etc. how would you have had cicero? how would you have had the playrights of greece, etc.? at the base of all societies there has to be a labor system.
(c) natural rights: both part of and resistance to the "greatest product" of the Enlightenment--the idea of rights from birth, rights from God. being born with certain capacities. pro-slavery writers used this, stripping it of its universalism--the real rule of the world is not "natural equality", but "natural inequality."
(d) economic arguments: the cynic, of course, goes straight here--one of the greatest of these writers was James Henry Hammond, who had plenty of mixed-race children. he was the epitomy of pro-slavery activism--ultimately his argument was that it was amoral. a property defense of the institution: roughly, the means by which African-Americans have been made our property are irrelevant--they are our property, and our right to them is sacrosanct. this, in particular, was a "potent" argument, says prof--"it is what it is, deal with it."
(e) some would get guilty/worried, and defend it as a "necessary evil" (and some of these folk were deeply sincere). one man to his fiance: "i am undecided whether i ought to hold slaves... it is unjust... but the question is, in my present circumstances, would the general interest of the slaves be promoted best by emancipation?" (develops a theory of how he will emancipate blacks, within the institution itself).
(f) the racial defense: cf. Alexander Stevens' speech--but all of them went here, and one time or another. George Fitz-Hugh, of course, famously made this case: "the Negro is but a grown-up child... some men are born with saddles on their backs, and others with boots/spurs"
(g) utopian slavery: Henry Hughes, "one strange duck"--a loner who wrote an amazing diary. "Warrenteeism"--he argued that slaves were charges put into the world who were there for slaveholders to protect/take care of. he wanted a strong central state to perfect the slave into a perfect worker. he was also obsessed with racial purity--any intermixing would destroy the master race. he wasn't that widely read, prof admits; but it shows us how far pro-slavery could ultimate good. it wasn't only a positive good, but it was perfection.
--------
all of that is only to argue that there was a deep, abiding, well-rehearsed defense of slavery. and if you want to understand why so many white Southerners went to such great extents to save their society, you need look no further than these arguments and sentiments.
--------
a few final comments, which come at the beginning of lecture 4--when slaveholding politicians begin to organize toward some sort of secession, over this slave society they want to protect, they are writing hundreds and hundreds of pages in defense of their world. pro-slavery anthologies, etc. also, this wasn't all about "abstract" ideology--in 1857, francis ellen watkins harper, said, in the wake of the dred scott decision, "if men had not found out a fearful alchemy by which this blood can be transformed into gold..."
david blight
----------
in a speech before the Virginia secession convention in late-April 1861, the newly-elected, vice-president of the confederacy Alexander Stevens (a slave-holder) argues that the cornerstone of their movement/their freedom was "American Negro slavery." ("as a race, the African is inferior to the white man... he is not equal to the white man... and cannot be made so by the actions of humankind.")
you always have to worry, in history, when people begin to invoke "Nature"
but how do we get to 1861, and Alexander Stevens declaring that it's all about slavery?
today, then, the Southern defense of slavery (and its evolution).
(of course, what caused this war, remains a question--it cannot be "soundbyted" away.)
----------
professor is relating de Tocqueville's account of the "indolent" South. (the enervating effects of slavery on the society, etc. -- his own aristocratic complexes shining through.) "you see few churches and no schools." not accurate, in his estimations of Southern stagnation. but he did predict the Northern domination of the South. ("Man is not made for servitude").
----------
in the South, what developed was one of the world's true "slave societies." what does this mean?
essentially, any society where the relationship between ownership and labor is defined by slavery--where slavery affected everything about social relations in society (where people were socialized by it, married/reared children, and conceived of the idea of property around the institution). other slave societies in human history (controversial this), were Ancient Greece and Rome, Brazil (by 18th and 19th century), the whole of the Carribbean (the West Indies sugar-producing empires of the Dutch, French, British, Spanish, etc.), and the American South.
there were other, localized slave societies, to be sure. particularly in Africa, even before the Europeans arrived (though really consolidated after the regularization of the Atlantic slave trade). East Africa, in the Muslim world (well before Atlantic slave trade, actually).
BUT: the five "great" slave societies were the above. All were enormously profitable. Technological innovation was generally slow (cheap value of labor). High ratio of slaves to free-people. In those societies, slaves as an interest were both a political and great, economic institution--one which defined regular ways of life.
When exactly did the American South become a slave society. Circa 1820, perhaps. Or maybe even more the 1830s, when you have booming cotton crop. Or in the aftermath of the Mexican War. Prof is arguing, surely by the early part of this period.
One aspect of that slave society is that, as Americans ended the foreign slave trade (in 1808, remember, though it didn't entirely end--there were some people in Georgia, South Carolina, Louisiana still wanted to reopen it up until the 1850s). as the foreign trade was closed off, for a variety of reasons, the domestic American slave trade absolutely boomed. one of the reasons that the cotton boom could be the cotton boom, prof is arguing, was because one of the unique features of N. American slavery, it was the only slave society in the New World where the slaves naturally reproduced themselves (Brazil managed it, a bit)--this has to do with climate, sex ratio, diet, and movement. (prof emphasizing the latter--the "safety valve" of the West, to move to)
between 1810 and 1820 alone, 137,000 American slaves were forced from N. Carolina and Chesapeake States to move to Alabama, Missisippi.
from 1820 to 1860, roughly 2,000,000 American slaves were sold to satisfy the need of slave labor in the great cotton kingdom of the growing south-west. roughly 2/3 of those 2,000,000 slaves moved from the North/East to the south-west--outright sale. a massive, huge American business.
by the 1830s, there were over 100 men in Charleston, SC making their livings, full-time, as slave traders. many of them owned their own "shops." other cities became major ports--Richmond, Virginia, for example (2-3 major, full-time slave traders--slave, auction-house jail, and kept exact account books). One trader, Hector Davis, made about $120,000 in a week!
the South, in this sense, was part of a Western movement. for slave children, between 1820 and 1860, living in the Upper South or Eastern Seaboard, they had a 30% chance of being sold, outright, away from their parents, before the age of 10.
ads in newspaper would read: "Negros wanted... good front teeth" (book on this: Walter Johnson, "Soul by Soul"). amazing to read the language/letters of slave traders: the complacency, pure racism, business-language on the other.
-------
how was slavery defended, then? (and how did the pro-slavery argument develop? and who made them?)
best way to begin, prof is saying, whether in the early defenses of the 1820s, or later, is within the framework of a deeply conservative, organic world-view; a Burkean conservatism--a set of beliefs that says the world is ordered as it is, for reasons. and that human beings ought not to tinker with that order--a set of beliefs in the sustenance of the social order as it was. that people were conceived, by God/Evolution, in line with a certain order--some born to do this, others born to do that (it's "natural"). an obsession with "stability"--the threat of upsetting the social order. bound up with notions of "honor" and "duty"--respect for "tradition."
white, Southern defenders of slavery were, in some respects, products of the Enlightenment--some of them come to really believe in the intellect, in the "power of reason" to figure out the Universe (but, figure it out in different ways). you can be a product of Enlightenment, and still be profoundly conservative. deep, organic forms of conservatism are not antithetical to the Enlightenment, at least not entirely.
many of pro-slavery ideologues will argue that ideas of liberty/freedom, which they constantly referred to, were never absolute. many of them would directly reverse Thomas Jefferson's declaration will argue that "no one is born equal"--many of them would argue that "freedom" must always be balanced with "order and tradition." with the world as it is, not as it ought to be.
southern pro-slavery arguments were much more likely to stress "duty" than to discuss individual "liberty."
edward brown: "slavery" had been the stepping-ladder by which nations had passed from "barbarism" to "civilization"--that slavery was a way in which you built an economy, which would be propserous and benefit those who "mattered."
pro-slavery writers had, in many ways, a fundamentally different conception of how history happened than northern writers (even abraham lincoln--"never a real abolitionist, but at least grew up with anti-slavery in his heart").
categories of the pro-slavery argument:
(a) the biblical: almost all pro-slavery writers would dip into the Old or New Testament--every society has had it, it's always been around. you can read some prophets as justifiying it, thereby concluding that it was divinely sanctioned. (of course it can breath anti-slavery, as well)
(b) the historical: not just the venerability of slavery, but that it has been crucial to the development of all great civilizations. it has been the engine of wealth, of greatness, etc. how would you have had cicero? how would you have had the playrights of greece, etc.? at the base of all societies there has to be a labor system.
(c) natural rights: both part of and resistance to the "greatest product" of the Enlightenment--the idea of rights from birth, rights from God. being born with certain capacities. pro-slavery writers used this, stripping it of its universalism--the real rule of the world is not "natural equality", but "natural inequality."
(d) economic arguments: the cynic, of course, goes straight here--one of the greatest of these writers was James Henry Hammond, who had plenty of mixed-race children. he was the epitomy of pro-slavery activism--ultimately his argument was that it was amoral. a property defense of the institution: roughly, the means by which African-Americans have been made our property are irrelevant--they are our property, and our right to them is sacrosanct. this, in particular, was a "potent" argument, says prof--"it is what it is, deal with it."
(e) some would get guilty/worried, and defend it as a "necessary evil" (and some of these folk were deeply sincere). one man to his fiance: "i am undecided whether i ought to hold slaves... it is unjust... but the question is, in my present circumstances, would the general interest of the slaves be promoted best by emancipation?" (develops a theory of how he will emancipate blacks, within the institution itself).
(f) the racial defense: cf. Alexander Stevens' speech--but all of them went here, and one time or another. George Fitz-Hugh, of course, famously made this case: "the Negro is but a grown-up child... some men are born with saddles on their backs, and others with boots/spurs"
(g) utopian slavery: Henry Hughes, "one strange duck"--a loner who wrote an amazing diary. "Warrenteeism"--he argued that slaves were charges put into the world who were there for slaveholders to protect/take care of. he wanted a strong central state to perfect the slave into a perfect worker. he was also obsessed with racial purity--any intermixing would destroy the master race. he wasn't that widely read, prof admits; but it shows us how far pro-slavery could ultimate good. it wasn't only a positive good, but it was perfection.
--------
all of that is only to argue that there was a deep, abiding, well-rehearsed defense of slavery. and if you want to understand why so many white Southerners went to such great extents to save their society, you need look no further than these arguments and sentiments.
--------
a few final comments, which come at the beginning of lecture 4--when slaveholding politicians begin to organize toward some sort of secession, over this slave society they want to protect, they are writing hundreds and hundreds of pages in defense of their world. pro-slavery anthologies, etc. also, this wasn't all about "abstract" ideology--in 1857, francis ellen watkins harper, said, in the wake of the dred scott decision, "if men had not found out a fearful alchemy by which this blood can be transformed into gold..."
Sunday, March 29, 2009
lecture 9, "general boulanger and captain dreyfus"
john merriman
--------
today, two very well-known crises in the third republic (Boulanger and Dreyfus affair). the latter is perhaps more poignant given that dreyfus' granddaughter died at auschwitz.
Boulanger affair portends the rise of the far-right in France--parallels the rise of the far-right in austria, etc.
--------
the background to all this, of course, is the rise of anti-semitism.
in a way, WWI released the demons of the twentieth century, to a great extent. for adolph hitler, it transformed his anti-socialism/anti-communism into a frenzy, but it added this dimension of anti-semitism.
but, of course, anti-semitism was already out there. not invented by the third republic, either.
but, certainly, the political dimensions of anti-semitism in the 1880s and 1890s made these two affairs so salient (it preoccupied dinner-table discussions, etc.).
the continued growth of anti-semitism also needs to be explained in the context of two further dynamics: (1) there was the question of revenge--the re-capture of Alsace-Lorraine from the german empire; by the end of the 1880s, this is an important part of French discourse; (2) the perceived weakness of French republicanism; in order to protect France from further Caesarism, they create a constitutional framework that vested a lot of authority in the Chamber of Deputies (and this chamber is basically a "political club", of swinging door ministries and the same people--the accomplishments are rather "pale," prof is arguing).
----------
All this frustration gave rise to an anti-parliamentarian movement--and a temptation to find a strong man who will right these wrongs, and re-attach Alsace-Lorraine to France. Impression that the Republic was at the end of its rope.
In May of 1882, the League of the Patriots is created--an anti-parliamentarian, ultra-nationalist movement. Quickly has 180,000 members(!). With this began the rapidly rising career of General Boulanger, born in 1837. He was a veteran of four campaigns (Africa, Italy, Vietnam/Indochina). He was a brave, heroic figure, and wasn't associated with the reprisals after the Paris commune as he had been injured earlier. Lots of energy/bravery, though not many brains.
He fit the image of what many people believed France needed. He was sent to the US to celebrate the centennial of the revolution (and caused a stir by refusing to get off the boat until the German flags were taken down)--this makes him the darling of the press (right-wing press, which dominates the newspapers). On good terms with Georges Clemenceau, an electoral leader of the Radical Party--both had graduated from the same high school. Boulanger had an anti-clerical streak, which he would have to temper later as he sought right-wing support. Saw the civilian population as meddlesome, prof is saying. Took every possible opportunity to be seen in front of his troops--it was his idea to paint all the sentry boxes red, white, and blue.
In 1886, during a miners' strike, he said that French soldiers were sharing their rations with workers--so he gave the impression of a kind of Napoleonic figure who had broad interests at heart. People start writing songs about him (General "Victory"). Tensions with the German empire increase his popularity; Bismarck himself was aware of Boulanger, and he uses Boulanger's popularity for his own support. One of the few ways the Reichstag could reign in the authority of the Kaiser.
This begins to worry people--Jules Grevy says that he's got to go. But this threatened to make Boulanger a martyr. He is not allowed to run for office--but as a write-in candidate, he gets something like 39,000 votes. So they opt to send him away, away from Paris--huge crowds block the tracks of the train on which he's on (singing the Marsellaise--a mix of people...)
In the early days he got some votes from the Left, and a lot of money from the Right and the Monarchists).
Clemenceau, then, dumps Boulanger as a friend.
---------
This is the stage at which the crisis re: Grevy's son-in-law takes place (trafficking medals of honor). And who comes along to become President of France, but Sadi-Carnot, who will be assasinated in 1894 (elected by the deputies). Arguably voted in because he was the stupidest(!).
The contrast between Boulanger and the impotent republic, then, become more and more marked. One thing leads to another, but it comes down to the fact that he's sitting in a restraunt in Paris, in 1889 (he's already a member of the chamber of deputies)--and there's a crowd that gathers in the street, shouting for him to take action. To go out, greet his adorers, and who knows? To end the impotent republic, perhaps. But he just sits there--finishes his elaborate meal. And then goes upstairs with his mistress. And the opportunity is passed. (And while he hesitates, his enemies do not--the electoral procedure that allowed him to be elected is eliminated). He flees to Belgium, which makes him seem less brave/dashing.
There's a committee working for him in France, but he remains aloof. His mistress, whom he loves, dies in 1891, after a long illness--on the 30th of September, 1891, he goes alone to her grave, and blew his brains out.
The republic emerged strengthened, by this crisis. But that's only one aspect--what's very interesting, is what was happening to the Right, at this time.
The crisis (and response to it), prof is arguing, is one of the best examples of this new world of mass politics. The question of how the message got out? How did people know about Boulanger, in different regions across France. For centuries, one of the only ways in which people imagined religious/military/political events, was by reading "comic strips"--they would show you pictures of Saints, Generals, etc. These were peddled to villages, through an elaborate distribution network. And so Boulanger is plugged into this popular library, at a time when most people could read, anyway--and his pamphlets, etc., get distributed via these networks (and, of course, assisted by trains). These images just inundated these places.
---------
Two things are particularly interesting, then, about the Boulanger affair:
(1) origins of the modern right.
(2) the beginnings of mass politics, even in rural areas. (and we see, with Boulanger's images, the beginnings of an enormous propaganda campaign against Jews--departments without Jews used to denounce this "Other." They flood the countryside with images, messages, etc.).
This anticipates the 1920s and 1930s in the sense that this is the first time that the Right is out in the streets--Paris is changing, with this, it's no longer the Paris of the radical sans-culottes. Until 1968, the big demonstrations are of the right (for the canonization of Joan of Arc, for the end of the Republic in 1934).
Of course, you can't always look through hindsight--if you want to explain Auschwitz, or the arrests of Jews in Paris in 1942/1943, but we can, at the very least, say that this was all out there. It was part of the mythology of Boulanger, of course.
----------
The Dreyfus Affair--more obvious, in some senses, than the Boulanger affair--reflects the anti-semitism that had been exacerbated by the economic crisis that begins in the mid-1870s. Where it was easy to blame it on the Jewish bankers, etc.
Edward Drumont's newspaper had been at the forefront of denouncing the scandals of the Republic (arguing that it was inherent in the structure of the Republic, and that the Jews were prominent). He had published a book in which he had argued that Jewish financiers were conspiring to dominate France.
He is at the forefront of this affair, which pits the Right, the Church, and the Army against the Republicans, Socialists, etc. (who supported Dreyfus). He was the son of an old Jewish family from Alsace--his family had been peddlers, and became textile manufactures. But they were well assimilated, and considered themselves French. But, in 1871, of course, they move to Paris, to a wealthy part of the city.
At this time, you have a huge contrast between assimilated Jews and poor immigrants from Russia/Poland, etc., who settle in Paris (And some of the former don't want the latter, because they "fit the stereotype").
In 1894, evidence surfaced that someone was passing secret information to the Germans, about German military operations on the new frontier. Circumstantial evidence pointed to Dreyfus (looked like his handwriting). Presented him with a pistol! He said, "it's not me." But a court-martial found him guilty of treason--sent to Devil's Island, off the coast of South America.
However, more documents were leaked in the aftermath of his sentencing. The new chief of army intelligence, Picard, came to the conclusion that it wasn't Dreyfus. That the handwriting was the same--he was an unlikely hero, actually, because he himself was a vicious anti-Semite. He comes to the conclusion that they were penned by another immigrant, a Hungarian. BUT: high-ranking officers come together, and argue that it's better to have this Jew, imprisioned, than to admit we made a mistake. The Right and the Catholic Church say the same thing; he's a Jew, and he's guilty. Picard is sent to Tunisia.
At this point, Zola takes up the case. He writes a famous article on the cover-up. This is where the controversy explodes.
Soon, some more documents are "discovered." A man called Henry had forged them, actually, to try and make it more clear. Finally, however, Henry slits his throat, where he had been condemned for this forgery. They bring Dreyfus back, however. And find him guilty! Send him back to Devil's island.
He's finally pardoned in 1899/1900, but not fully exonerated until 1906. Reinstated in the French army, left after his health deteroriated in 1907--but returned to serve during WWI!
This was another moment for the anti-Republican right, who had convicted him essentially on the basis of his Jew-ness. Dreyfus retreated to his own life; amazingly forgiving for all that had happened (and one of the ironies, of course, is the fact that his granddaughter dies at Auschwitz).
john merriman
--------
today, two very well-known crises in the third republic (Boulanger and Dreyfus affair). the latter is perhaps more poignant given that dreyfus' granddaughter died at auschwitz.
Boulanger affair portends the rise of the far-right in France--parallels the rise of the far-right in austria, etc.
--------
the background to all this, of course, is the rise of anti-semitism.
in a way, WWI released the demons of the twentieth century, to a great extent. for adolph hitler, it transformed his anti-socialism/anti-communism into a frenzy, but it added this dimension of anti-semitism.
but, of course, anti-semitism was already out there. not invented by the third republic, either.
but, certainly, the political dimensions of anti-semitism in the 1880s and 1890s made these two affairs so salient (it preoccupied dinner-table discussions, etc.).
the continued growth of anti-semitism also needs to be explained in the context of two further dynamics: (1) there was the question of revenge--the re-capture of Alsace-Lorraine from the german empire; by the end of the 1880s, this is an important part of French discourse; (2) the perceived weakness of French republicanism; in order to protect France from further Caesarism, they create a constitutional framework that vested a lot of authority in the Chamber of Deputies (and this chamber is basically a "political club", of swinging door ministries and the same people--the accomplishments are rather "pale," prof is arguing).
----------
All this frustration gave rise to an anti-parliamentarian movement--and a temptation to find a strong man who will right these wrongs, and re-attach Alsace-Lorraine to France. Impression that the Republic was at the end of its rope.
In May of 1882, the League of the Patriots is created--an anti-parliamentarian, ultra-nationalist movement. Quickly has 180,000 members(!). With this began the rapidly rising career of General Boulanger, born in 1837. He was a veteran of four campaigns (Africa, Italy, Vietnam/Indochina). He was a brave, heroic figure, and wasn't associated with the reprisals after the Paris commune as he had been injured earlier. Lots of energy/bravery, though not many brains.
He fit the image of what many people believed France needed. He was sent to the US to celebrate the centennial of the revolution (and caused a stir by refusing to get off the boat until the German flags were taken down)--this makes him the darling of the press (right-wing press, which dominates the newspapers). On good terms with Georges Clemenceau, an electoral leader of the Radical Party--both had graduated from the same high school. Boulanger had an anti-clerical streak, which he would have to temper later as he sought right-wing support. Saw the civilian population as meddlesome, prof is saying. Took every possible opportunity to be seen in front of his troops--it was his idea to paint all the sentry boxes red, white, and blue.
In 1886, during a miners' strike, he said that French soldiers were sharing their rations with workers--so he gave the impression of a kind of Napoleonic figure who had broad interests at heart. People start writing songs about him (General "Victory"). Tensions with the German empire increase his popularity; Bismarck himself was aware of Boulanger, and he uses Boulanger's popularity for his own support. One of the few ways the Reichstag could reign in the authority of the Kaiser.
This begins to worry people--Jules Grevy says that he's got to go. But this threatened to make Boulanger a martyr. He is not allowed to run for office--but as a write-in candidate, he gets something like 39,000 votes. So they opt to send him away, away from Paris--huge crowds block the tracks of the train on which he's on (singing the Marsellaise--a mix of people...)
In the early days he got some votes from the Left, and a lot of money from the Right and the Monarchists).
Clemenceau, then, dumps Boulanger as a friend.
---------
This is the stage at which the crisis re: Grevy's son-in-law takes place (trafficking medals of honor). And who comes along to become President of France, but Sadi-Carnot, who will be assasinated in 1894 (elected by the deputies). Arguably voted in because he was the stupidest(!).
The contrast between Boulanger and the impotent republic, then, become more and more marked. One thing leads to another, but it comes down to the fact that he's sitting in a restraunt in Paris, in 1889 (he's already a member of the chamber of deputies)--and there's a crowd that gathers in the street, shouting for him to take action. To go out, greet his adorers, and who knows? To end the impotent republic, perhaps. But he just sits there--finishes his elaborate meal. And then goes upstairs with his mistress. And the opportunity is passed. (And while he hesitates, his enemies do not--the electoral procedure that allowed him to be elected is eliminated). He flees to Belgium, which makes him seem less brave/dashing.
There's a committee working for him in France, but he remains aloof. His mistress, whom he loves, dies in 1891, after a long illness--on the 30th of September, 1891, he goes alone to her grave, and blew his brains out.
The republic emerged strengthened, by this crisis. But that's only one aspect--what's very interesting, is what was happening to the Right, at this time.
The crisis (and response to it), prof is arguing, is one of the best examples of this new world of mass politics. The question of how the message got out? How did people know about Boulanger, in different regions across France. For centuries, one of the only ways in which people imagined religious/military/political events, was by reading "comic strips"--they would show you pictures of Saints, Generals, etc. These were peddled to villages, through an elaborate distribution network. And so Boulanger is plugged into this popular library, at a time when most people could read, anyway--and his pamphlets, etc., get distributed via these networks (and, of course, assisted by trains). These images just inundated these places.
---------
Two things are particularly interesting, then, about the Boulanger affair:
(1) origins of the modern right.
(2) the beginnings of mass politics, even in rural areas. (and we see, with Boulanger's images, the beginnings of an enormous propaganda campaign against Jews--departments without Jews used to denounce this "Other." They flood the countryside with images, messages, etc.).
This anticipates the 1920s and 1930s in the sense that this is the first time that the Right is out in the streets--Paris is changing, with this, it's no longer the Paris of the radical sans-culottes. Until 1968, the big demonstrations are of the right (for the canonization of Joan of Arc, for the end of the Republic in 1934).
Of course, you can't always look through hindsight--if you want to explain Auschwitz, or the arrests of Jews in Paris in 1942/1943, but we can, at the very least, say that this was all out there. It was part of the mythology of Boulanger, of course.
----------
The Dreyfus Affair--more obvious, in some senses, than the Boulanger affair--reflects the anti-semitism that had been exacerbated by the economic crisis that begins in the mid-1870s. Where it was easy to blame it on the Jewish bankers, etc.
Edward Drumont's newspaper had been at the forefront of denouncing the scandals of the Republic (arguing that it was inherent in the structure of the Republic, and that the Jews were prominent). He had published a book in which he had argued that Jewish financiers were conspiring to dominate France.
He is at the forefront of this affair, which pits the Right, the Church, and the Army against the Republicans, Socialists, etc. (who supported Dreyfus). He was the son of an old Jewish family from Alsace--his family had been peddlers, and became textile manufactures. But they were well assimilated, and considered themselves French. But, in 1871, of course, they move to Paris, to a wealthy part of the city.
At this time, you have a huge contrast between assimilated Jews and poor immigrants from Russia/Poland, etc., who settle in Paris (And some of the former don't want the latter, because they "fit the stereotype").
In 1894, evidence surfaced that someone was passing secret information to the Germans, about German military operations on the new frontier. Circumstantial evidence pointed to Dreyfus (looked like his handwriting). Presented him with a pistol! He said, "it's not me." But a court-martial found him guilty of treason--sent to Devil's Island, off the coast of South America.
However, more documents were leaked in the aftermath of his sentencing. The new chief of army intelligence, Picard, came to the conclusion that it wasn't Dreyfus. That the handwriting was the same--he was an unlikely hero, actually, because he himself was a vicious anti-Semite. He comes to the conclusion that they were penned by another immigrant, a Hungarian. BUT: high-ranking officers come together, and argue that it's better to have this Jew, imprisioned, than to admit we made a mistake. The Right and the Catholic Church say the same thing; he's a Jew, and he's guilty. Picard is sent to Tunisia.
At this point, Zola takes up the case. He writes a famous article on the cover-up. This is where the controversy explodes.
Soon, some more documents are "discovered." A man called Henry had forged them, actually, to try and make it more clear. Finally, however, Henry slits his throat, where he had been condemned for this forgery. They bring Dreyfus back, however. And find him guilty! Send him back to Devil's island.
He's finally pardoned in 1899/1900, but not fully exonerated until 1906. Reinstated in the French army, left after his health deteroriated in 1907--but returned to serve during WWI!
This was another moment for the anti-Republican right, who had convicted him essentially on the basis of his Jew-ness. Dreyfus retreated to his own life; amazingly forgiving for all that had happened (and one of the ironies, of course, is the fact that his granddaughter dies at Auschwitz).
lecture 1, "southern society: slavery, king cotton, and antebellum america's 'peculiar' region"
david blight
--------
question of how peculiar/distinctive/different is the American South? "the dixie difference"
the "South" of course, is many many things, many many people--this question, in some ways, is irrelevant, though of course, not. Presidential elections are won/lost in the South (name me a president who won without some success in the states of the Old Confederacy).
the question, of course, is fraught with stereotypes. and the idea of Southern stereotypes--the "South" as an idea--is a very old concept, definitely precedes the civil war, very salient through the colonial period.
Thomas Jefferson in the 1780s: Northerners "cool", "sober", "persevering", "independent", "superstitious", "jealous of their own liberties", etc.; Southerners "fiery", "voluptuous", "indolent", "zealous of their own liberties", "generous", "candid", "without pretentions"
Note the refrain on "liberties" -- everyone in the civil war will say that they're fighting for liberty.
Wilburt Cash, 1940, "The Mind of the South" -- he did something similar to Jefferson, though he focuses only on Southerners; deeply critical of his beloved South. Argues in this book that the South has "no mind", in a sense. Chock-a-block of stereotypes, his characterizations--prof is reading them out.
Shelby Foot, on white Southerners and the South: unable to express themselves in Art.
Why does the South have such a long memory? "Because we lost the war." (Toni Morrison, though, in "Beloved"--"me and you Sethie, we got too much yesterday, we need more tomorrow")
David Girganus: "attempting the impossible at great cost, proudly celebrating the failure, and then getting admiration for the performance."
One could go on and on... Every major African-American poet and writer of the 20th Century was from the South--and has certainly always been reflecting on the South, in one way or another.
-------
Back to the Old South, though.
First of all, it's worth remembering, there are a lot of clear, undeniable similarities between South and North in the 40 years before the war.
(a) Roughly the same geographic size.
(b) Spoke the same language, though in different dialectics.
(c) a certain common heritage, of the American Revolution (John C. Calhoun, a key intellectual architect of the "South", was very much an American nationalist). And you can find a deep American nationalism in many of the young leaders of the Southern secessionists.
(d) shared the same Protestant Christianity.
(e) similar political ideologies, born of the American Revolution (when you hear about a slaveholder preach about political liberty, and individual liberties, you think "Come On"--but this was a history informed by the American Revolution, can't forget.)
(f) a strong localism. State's rights was not unique to the South--some of the most open demonstrations of State rights were in the North (Wisconsin refused, for example, to enforce the Fugitive Slaves' Act).
(g) Shared a belief in progress -- lingered in America's air of the 1840s and 1850s
(h) Both the South and the North shared the reality and spirit of the Western expansion.
(i) Both North and South and their political-economic leadership were comprised of hard-boiled, believing, practising capitalists (Southern slaveholders were not pre-capitalists). Both sides, in a sense, had the same kind of oligarchies, it could be argued: less than 1% of the real and personal property was held by 50% of free adult males. The richest 1% held 27% of the wealth (the North had budding oligarchies, even if they were based on different things--which is where the rub comes in, of course).
---------
Nevertheless, back to the notion of the distinctiveness of the South.
Travelers from Europe came to the South and remarked on the "indolence" and "drinking" of Southerners--the idea of the South as "exotic", "different", and "dangerous". The North as independent and free republicans, in contrast to what these travelers saw in the South.
Trying to understand how "difference" boils into "disunion" -- this does have some roots in these distinct caricatures. But, prof is saying, as one of my friends warned me, "don't leave out the politics."
---------
One kind of Southern distinctiveness, above all: if there were one distinct feature that eventually evolved in the South, in prof's opinion, it was what we might call its anti-modernism. A disdain for what was determined to be the corruption of modern commercialism--Southern slaveholders were skeptical of the democratization slowly beginning in the North (spreading literacy, etc.). Democracy was a threat to hierarchy, and the South became, quite distinctively, a very hierarchical society. Rooted very deeply in open conceptions of class and race; some were born to rule, in the opinions of the planter class of the 1840s and 1850s ("deal with it", was their attitude).
They became inflamed with their own peculiar sense of "honor." A set of values, or form of behavior--signed a particular kind of gentleman's behavior (property, class, rank, status that must be recognized). Reputation and recognition were critical. There must, indeed, be a ritual of that recognition. (James Henry Hammond, of SC: "Reputation is everything. Everything depends upon the estimation in which I'm held")
When they started encountering these Northerners, who spoke of a "politics of law", or "conscience", they're not always on the same page.
Then there's this issue of Conservatism--why is the US South a seat of modern American conservatism? There is this overall claim, of course, of anti-reform, anti-intellectual defense of a hierarchical civilization in white supremacy--and, indeed, in one of the biggest slave systems that had ever been created (there's the corollary issue of violence--why is cock-fighting more popular, etc.?)
South, though, eventually "liberated" from this burden of being the site of all of America's sins, by:
(1) the Civil Rights' Revolution
(2) the discovery of Northern racism
(3) the loss of the Vietnam War, in the sense that the Southerners were now not the only Americans who had ever "lost" a war.
(4) the last 20-25 years of political-economic history; the Sun-belt migration, massive immigration to the South (Vietnamese in Louisiana, Hispanics in N. Carolina/Texas), and the political culture will have to respond to that.
Yet America seems unable to forget the Confederate flag...
----------
There's another kind of burden, though, which is more directly historical (rather than "cultural")
Let's remember, the South had a distinctive history.
The antebellum Southern economy became, by the 1820s, a slave economy--it became the fifth/sixth slave society in human history. For a long time, in American scholarship, one of the deep mythologies about the Old South was that the plantation economy in the run-up to the Civil War was dying out (lots have argued it). But a generation of scholars have looked at the Southern economy and have discovered that the Southern economy was booming (greatest cotton crop in 1860). Slavery was extraordinarily profitable.
And, lo and behold, the idea of the Southern planter as a "backward-looking" "inward-looking" oligarch--completely false. The average American planter was a raging capitalist--they understood profits and markets (they were men of rational choice--and the way to wealth, even before the cotton gin but especially after Eli Whitney's cotton gin, was "slavery"). In Faulkner's words, "a house, land, and some niggers."
How powerful was the cotton boom once it took hold? By the 1820s, within a decade of the War of 1812, cotton's future seemed limitless--one of the best analogies is to the oil-rich regions of the world in the post-WWII era. If you're an oil rich country today, you have the world at your knees, in a sense. And that is how the Southern leadership began to see itself, as early as the 1820s and 1830s. For four decades in a row, the production of American cotton doubled every decade. Became, without question, the country's largest export. Already, by 1825, the South was the world's largest supplier of cotton--fueling the industrial revolution in textile production in Britain and elsewhere.
Southern political power by the 1850s and 1860s was no longer based in Virginia or even South Carolina, it's out in the Mississippi valley--this is the region Jefferson Davis, from Mississippi, becomes the President of the Confederacy.
Fortunes were made in an instant.
The slave-holding population was fluid, though, prof is arguing. There were about 400,000 slave-holders in the South in the 1860s. About 1/3 of white families, at one time or another, had at least a toe-hold in slave ownership. 2/3 remained yeoman farmers, poor whites, etc. (in many regions, these were 40-50% of the population). Jefferson Davis is an excellent example of the cotton boom planter; though born in humble circumstances, he made millions in cotton.
What is the relationship between the spread of cotton and the spread of power?
By 1860, there were roughly 4 million slaves in the US South (the second largest slave society in the world, only larger one was Russian serfdom, Brazil was close)--American slaves, as a financial asset, were worth approximately 3.5 billion dollars, just as property (in today's dolllars, that is roughly 75 billion dollars). In 1860, slaves, as an asset, worth more than all of the manufacturing, than all of the railroads--than all of the productive capacity of the US put together. The single largest financial asset in the American economy. The only thing more valuable than the slaves was the land itself.
If you're looking to understand why the South will look to defend this system, this social structure--look no further. What would you compare that to today?
david blight
--------
question of how peculiar/distinctive/different is the American South? "the dixie difference"
the "South" of course, is many many things, many many people--this question, in some ways, is irrelevant, though of course, not. Presidential elections are won/lost in the South (name me a president who won without some success in the states of the Old Confederacy).
the question, of course, is fraught with stereotypes. and the idea of Southern stereotypes--the "South" as an idea--is a very old concept, definitely precedes the civil war, very salient through the colonial period.
Thomas Jefferson in the 1780s: Northerners "cool", "sober", "persevering", "independent", "superstitious", "jealous of their own liberties", etc.; Southerners "fiery", "voluptuous", "indolent", "zealous of their own liberties", "generous", "candid", "without pretentions"
Note the refrain on "liberties" -- everyone in the civil war will say that they're fighting for liberty.
Wilburt Cash, 1940, "The Mind of the South" -- he did something similar to Jefferson, though he focuses only on Southerners; deeply critical of his beloved South. Argues in this book that the South has "no mind", in a sense. Chock-a-block of stereotypes, his characterizations--prof is reading them out.
Shelby Foot, on white Southerners and the South: unable to express themselves in Art.
Why does the South have such a long memory? "Because we lost the war." (Toni Morrison, though, in "Beloved"--"me and you Sethie, we got too much yesterday, we need more tomorrow")
David Girganus: "attempting the impossible at great cost, proudly celebrating the failure, and then getting admiration for the performance."
One could go on and on... Every major African-American poet and writer of the 20th Century was from the South--and has certainly always been reflecting on the South, in one way or another.
-------
Back to the Old South, though.
First of all, it's worth remembering, there are a lot of clear, undeniable similarities between South and North in the 40 years before the war.
(a) Roughly the same geographic size.
(b) Spoke the same language, though in different dialectics.
(c) a certain common heritage, of the American Revolution (John C. Calhoun, a key intellectual architect of the "South", was very much an American nationalist). And you can find a deep American nationalism in many of the young leaders of the Southern secessionists.
(d) shared the same Protestant Christianity.
(e) similar political ideologies, born of the American Revolution (when you hear about a slaveholder preach about political liberty, and individual liberties, you think "Come On"--but this was a history informed by the American Revolution, can't forget.)
(f) a strong localism. State's rights was not unique to the South--some of the most open demonstrations of State rights were in the North (Wisconsin refused, for example, to enforce the Fugitive Slaves' Act).
(g) Shared a belief in progress -- lingered in America's air of the 1840s and 1850s
(h) Both the South and the North shared the reality and spirit of the Western expansion.
(i) Both North and South and their political-economic leadership were comprised of hard-boiled, believing, practising capitalists (Southern slaveholders were not pre-capitalists). Both sides, in a sense, had the same kind of oligarchies, it could be argued: less than 1% of the real and personal property was held by 50% of free adult males. The richest 1% held 27% of the wealth (the North had budding oligarchies, even if they were based on different things--which is where the rub comes in, of course).
---------
Nevertheless, back to the notion of the distinctiveness of the South.
Travelers from Europe came to the South and remarked on the "indolence" and "drinking" of Southerners--the idea of the South as "exotic", "different", and "dangerous". The North as independent and free republicans, in contrast to what these travelers saw in the South.
Trying to understand how "difference" boils into "disunion" -- this does have some roots in these distinct caricatures. But, prof is saying, as one of my friends warned me, "don't leave out the politics."
---------
One kind of Southern distinctiveness, above all: if there were one distinct feature that eventually evolved in the South, in prof's opinion, it was what we might call its anti-modernism. A disdain for what was determined to be the corruption of modern commercialism--Southern slaveholders were skeptical of the democratization slowly beginning in the North (spreading literacy, etc.). Democracy was a threat to hierarchy, and the South became, quite distinctively, a very hierarchical society. Rooted very deeply in open conceptions of class and race; some were born to rule, in the opinions of the planter class of the 1840s and 1850s ("deal with it", was their attitude).
They became inflamed with their own peculiar sense of "honor." A set of values, or form of behavior--signed a particular kind of gentleman's behavior (property, class, rank, status that must be recognized). Reputation and recognition were critical. There must, indeed, be a ritual of that recognition. (James Henry Hammond, of SC: "Reputation is everything. Everything depends upon the estimation in which I'm held")
When they started encountering these Northerners, who spoke of a "politics of law", or "conscience", they're not always on the same page.
Then there's this issue of Conservatism--why is the US South a seat of modern American conservatism? There is this overall claim, of course, of anti-reform, anti-intellectual defense of a hierarchical civilization in white supremacy--and, indeed, in one of the biggest slave systems that had ever been created (there's the corollary issue of violence--why is cock-fighting more popular, etc.?)
South, though, eventually "liberated" from this burden of being the site of all of America's sins, by:
(1) the Civil Rights' Revolution
(2) the discovery of Northern racism
(3) the loss of the Vietnam War, in the sense that the Southerners were now not the only Americans who had ever "lost" a war.
(4) the last 20-25 years of political-economic history; the Sun-belt migration, massive immigration to the South (Vietnamese in Louisiana, Hispanics in N. Carolina/Texas), and the political culture will have to respond to that.
Yet America seems unable to forget the Confederate flag...
----------
There's another kind of burden, though, which is more directly historical (rather than "cultural")
Let's remember, the South had a distinctive history.
The antebellum Southern economy became, by the 1820s, a slave economy--it became the fifth/sixth slave society in human history. For a long time, in American scholarship, one of the deep mythologies about the Old South was that the plantation economy in the run-up to the Civil War was dying out (lots have argued it). But a generation of scholars have looked at the Southern economy and have discovered that the Southern economy was booming (greatest cotton crop in 1860). Slavery was extraordinarily profitable.
And, lo and behold, the idea of the Southern planter as a "backward-looking" "inward-looking" oligarch--completely false. The average American planter was a raging capitalist--they understood profits and markets (they were men of rational choice--and the way to wealth, even before the cotton gin but especially after Eli Whitney's cotton gin, was "slavery"). In Faulkner's words, "a house, land, and some niggers."
How powerful was the cotton boom once it took hold? By the 1820s, within a decade of the War of 1812, cotton's future seemed limitless--one of the best analogies is to the oil-rich regions of the world in the post-WWII era. If you're an oil rich country today, you have the world at your knees, in a sense. And that is how the Southern leadership began to see itself, as early as the 1820s and 1830s. For four decades in a row, the production of American cotton doubled every decade. Became, without question, the country's largest export. Already, by 1825, the South was the world's largest supplier of cotton--fueling the industrial revolution in textile production in Britain and elsewhere.
Southern political power by the 1850s and 1860s was no longer based in Virginia or even South Carolina, it's out in the Mississippi valley--this is the region Jefferson Davis, from Mississippi, becomes the President of the Confederacy.
Fortunes were made in an instant.
The slave-holding population was fluid, though, prof is arguing. There were about 400,000 slave-holders in the South in the 1860s. About 1/3 of white families, at one time or another, had at least a toe-hold in slave ownership. 2/3 remained yeoman farmers, poor whites, etc. (in many regions, these were 40-50% of the population). Jefferson Davis is an excellent example of the cotton boom planter; though born in humble circumstances, he made millions in cotton.
What is the relationship between the spread of cotton and the spread of power?
By 1860, there were roughly 4 million slaves in the US South (the second largest slave society in the world, only larger one was Russian serfdom, Brazil was close)--American slaves, as a financial asset, were worth approximately 3.5 billion dollars, just as property (in today's dolllars, that is roughly 75 billion dollars). In 1860, slaves, as an asset, worth more than all of the manufacturing, than all of the railroads--than all of the productive capacity of the US put together. The single largest financial asset in the American economy. The only thing more valuable than the slaves was the land itself.
If you're looking to understand why the South will look to defend this system, this social structure--look no further. What would you compare that to today?
lecture 8, "dynamite club: the anarchists"
john merriman
--------
life and death of one man, emile henry (guillotined in 1894, when he was 21)
--------
anarchists, unlike socialists, did not want to seize control of the state, but wanted to "destroy" it. they saw political life as irredeemably bourgeois and corrupt.
first anarchist, prof is saying, was prodhoun (from east of france, active in 1850s and 1860s). he wrote a pamphlet titled "property is theft" (he meant, prof argues, that "unearned" property is theft)--"to be governed is to be...checked, valued, estimated, commanded...that is government, that is justice, that is its morality"
followed by two russian anarchists, peter kropotkin and mikael bakunin. both were nobles(!). the former was once toasted by the king of england--he was among those that came up with the term, "propaganda of the deed", which was premised on the idea that the masses were like a tinder-box, and all that was needed was a spark.
depending on how one counts, anarchists assasinated about 6 or 7 heads of state.
---------
begin with a bomb in the cafe terminus. february 12, 1894, a pale, thin man named emile henry hid a bomb in his clothes, and headed for the elegant boulevards near the paris opera. he wanted to kill as many peopole as possible. he stopped before the opera itself, where there was a fancy ball going on, but he didn't think he could get past the guards. he was a flanuer, an intellectual who had been a bit of a dandy--but if he was, he was an impoverished flanuer, who hated and killed.
at 8pm he reached the cafe terminus--as it was filling up he ordered two beers and a cigar (paying for them, in an un-anarchist gesture). an hour later, he lit the fuse with his cigar, and he threw the bomb into the packed cafe (paris had become a staging ground for the belle epoque, prof is saying--the "cathedrals of modernity").
rebuilding of paris by hausman had chased thousands of workers to north-eastern paris, don't forget, to make way for these boulevards packed with dept stores. indeed, paris seemed no longer the capital of revolution--"boulevards lined up like soldiers"--but the capital of Capital, in a sense. a centralized state, with strong police and army presence. (on may day 1891, troops fired on protestors.)
it was in this context, in the 1890s, that the anarchists began to organize. above all in mont matre, and in industrial regions and worker suburbs.
this was a time of scandal--the memory of the paris commune loomed large for the anarchists. they "hated" paris, and admired bakunin and the others. the modern state had erected itself on the corpses of the communards.
a wave of anarchist bombings swept the capital from 1892-1894--assasination noted by the king of italy as a "professional risk".
prof is arguing that many of the anarchists, however, were people of peace--for propotkin and proudhoun the goal was to create communities, to survive away from the state.
at the same time, propotkin had accepted the phrase "propaganda by the deed" (and maybe even coined it). the belief that a single act of violence would be the spark. he did later have his doubts, but he refused to condemn those driven by despair (he had celebrated the permanent revolution of the word and pen)
dynamite was invented by alfred nobel in 1868--it seemed, in some sense, to level the playing field. a german anarchist had written that it was "within the power of dynamite to destroy capitalism", just as it was "within the power of gunpowder to destroy feudalism."
rabba scholl(sp.?) took this to heart--born into poverty, shamed in school as someone wearing beggar's clothes. he took to crime and anarchism. he was arrested, escaped the police wagon, and made it to paris. after the police firings and arrests in 1891--rabba scholl's two "deeds" followed these incidents, when he bombed the homes of two magistrates. he was subdued later by 10 policemen, and was guillotined the next year.
he so terrified contemporaries, that his name became a verb. after his death the anarchists of paris debated the wisdom of his attacks. some sympathizers thought of him as a martyr, a violent jesus christ (both were 33 when they were executed).
in his eulogy of scholl, an art critic warned that the murder of scholl was going to act as a trigger. someone else penned, "what do the victims matter if the gesture is beautiful"(!).
people of means were afraid to go to fancy restraunts, to rent to magistrates, etc. (a climate of fear). hundreds of scrawled threats arrived to property owners, people of means, etc. (signed by the avengers of rabba scholl, etc.--"finally the day when social justice will arrive"). "the dynamite polka."
on the 9th of december 1893, an unemployed worker who couldn't feed his family tossed a small bomb full of thumbtacks into the chamber of deputies--his goal was not to kill, but to call attention to the plight of the poor. he was guillotined almost immediately, after a brief trial. "long live anarchy," he shouted.
--------
emile henry's father had been a communard--he fled, under the sentence of death, to spain, where he worked in the mines (turning from republican socialism, to anarchism--in spain anarchists were terribly influential). he had two brothers--following his father's death in 1882 from mercury poisoning, his mother and the kids returned to paris. his mother had a bit of family land, and started up an inn (in the countryside, basically). he is very smart, becomes a scholarship student. the last report on his scholarship reads "he will become a student at one of the best schools in paris" (but he failed the oral exam, alas--though he could have taken it again).
he precipitously returned to paris. he lost his footing, a friend said, and became attracted to spiritism, trying to contact the dead soul of his father. worked here and there while living on the margins of urban life. his brother became an anarchist, and was a prominent orator in smoky cafes (he went to jail in 1894, for things that he had written). emile, now 20 years of age, was called "microbe." he was devoted to his mother, and would walk/take the train to go visit her. gave about a third of his monthly earnings to his mother.
began meeting with some anarchist groups, read some propotkin and other counterparts. his two targets were "private property" and "authority", two cancers he believed had to be destroyed. though he remained detached from the intellectual anarchist scene, he did fancy himself an intellectual. he was different from the man that through the tack bomb (malatoun(sp.?)), in that emile only loved the "idea"--didn't love the people, but the "deed", according to prof. (this was a common thread amongst elite anarchists, whose hate for bourgeois society could translate into a hate for the "people").
emile was a loner--he never spoke in public, allegedly. arrested with his brother after his brother was mistaken for having dynamite in his coat-pocket (it was actually a pen case). emile lost his job after his arrest/release--he bounced between bad jobs (once working as an apprentice to a watch-maker...). in 1892, he briefly served as a manager for an anarchist literary newspaper. but all this while he was preparing his bombs.
police informers, remember, were everwhere! (g.k. chesterton's book). he was overheard saying something about nitro-glycerin. a police spy reported that the old ways of the anarchists no longer seemed in play--the ones that you had to worry about were not the speech-makers, but the ones lurking in the shadows with evil "deeds" in mind.
they reflected, of course, a debate within anarchism--between the associanists and the believers in individual autonomy of the dynamiters.
---------
this lecture's title, "dynamite club", reflects the police's misinterpretation that all these bombings were co-ordinated.
---------
on the 11th of november, 1892, an employer of a mining company found a suspicious looking package outside the company door. they carried it downstairs quite stupidly, and policemen came along and decided that they had to take it to the police station (it was a bomb that would explode after chemical reaction). when they put it down on a table in the police station it exploded! the bomb was wrapped in a newspaper that related the arrest of emile henry!
emile fled to london--a friend of oscar wilde's remembered meeting him there. he was proud. he had exterminated 6 enemies. the policemen, however, didn't think of him as a serious suspect--a policemen didn't believe that his routine of the day was possible (i.e., that he had an alibi...)
anyway, emile is in london, now. what converts him to anarchism, of course, is the appaling gap between the poor and the rich in paris. never had people lived it up in such egregious ways, as in the "belle epoque." everywhere he lived had been on the edge of paris--and from where he lived, he could see the monuments/buildings he hated in paris (notre dame, for example).
he once wrote that "love" could lead you to "hate"--he loved humanity in the abstract, and hated society in very concrete ways.
---------
the explosive device that emile henry threw into the terminus injured 20 people and killed one. henry had been seen, and so he wouldn't be caught, he said, "where's the scoundrel that did this?" but then he ran, and then was finally caught--he fired with his pistol, hitting a policeman's wallet(!).
he's put in a prison--the prison guards were trying to get information out of him, even as he's trying to convert the guards to anarchism. his friends actually broke into the prison and stole dynamite, putting paris on high alert.
at his trial he says you have "shot us in spain, hung us in germany... but what you can never do is extinguish anarchy, because its roots are too deep."
he was executed on the 21st of may, 1894. (the last public execution, actually, was 1936 (people bought tickets to sit on neighboring roofs!)--the last execution in france was in 1972, with the guillotine, of course).
these guillotine scenes were important to anarchists, as well, as scenes of martyrdom, of course.
---------
was this a form of indirect suicide? (some have argued this, presumably?)
he had fallen in love with a woman, the wife of a fellow anarchist. he proclaimed his love, but was blown off. she, after his execution, gives interviews to journalists--"oh, he loved me so much..."
no, not indirect suicide.
--------
how did this represent the origins of modern terror, prof is asking? what was new about it? a couple of things.
(1) most of the anarchists in western europe had been ordinary workers, but emile henry was an intellectual--instead of targeting a head of state, he threw a bomb at the petty-bourgeois that sustain capitalism. that's really new about it, prof is saying.
(2) in modern terrorism you have an alliance between intellectuals/students and the down-and-out, which is reflected in emile henry's life.
(3) you have revolutionary immorality--martyrdom.
(4) they all set out to attack the state/capitalism, imperialism/state--an institution that stands for a whole system/ideology.
(5) again, seen as leveling the playing field--you proved you were strong, even when, in reality, you were weak.
(6) not a centrally organized, massive conspiracy--yet individuals and small groups were critical.
(7) when you think of the word "terrorism" -- this was originally applied to describe the violence of the state. it is often forgotten, professor is saying, that the vast majority of victims of terror are victims of state terror. and the anarchists, in this sense, had obvious grievances. you cannot understand it without this. anarchists killed perhaps up to 60 people in this era; the state, of course, many more (260:1, in someone's estimates).
terrorism has thus become part of the political process, in a sense. mutual need, in a sense--dissidence stoked and encouraged the overzealous response of the State (when States take tactics that swell hatred for them).
john merriman
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life and death of one man, emile henry (guillotined in 1894, when he was 21)
--------
anarchists, unlike socialists, did not want to seize control of the state, but wanted to "destroy" it. they saw political life as irredeemably bourgeois and corrupt.
first anarchist, prof is saying, was prodhoun (from east of france, active in 1850s and 1860s). he wrote a pamphlet titled "property is theft" (he meant, prof argues, that "unearned" property is theft)--"to be governed is to be...checked, valued, estimated, commanded...that is government, that is justice, that is its morality"
followed by two russian anarchists, peter kropotkin and mikael bakunin. both were nobles(!). the former was once toasted by the king of england--he was among those that came up with the term, "propaganda of the deed", which was premised on the idea that the masses were like a tinder-box, and all that was needed was a spark.
depending on how one counts, anarchists assasinated about 6 or 7 heads of state.
---------
begin with a bomb in the cafe terminus. february 12, 1894, a pale, thin man named emile henry hid a bomb in his clothes, and headed for the elegant boulevards near the paris opera. he wanted to kill as many peopole as possible. he stopped before the opera itself, where there was a fancy ball going on, but he didn't think he could get past the guards. he was a flanuer, an intellectual who had been a bit of a dandy--but if he was, he was an impoverished flanuer, who hated and killed.
at 8pm he reached the cafe terminus--as it was filling up he ordered two beers and a cigar (paying for them, in an un-anarchist gesture). an hour later, he lit the fuse with his cigar, and he threw the bomb into the packed cafe (paris had become a staging ground for the belle epoque, prof is saying--the "cathedrals of modernity").
rebuilding of paris by hausman had chased thousands of workers to north-eastern paris, don't forget, to make way for these boulevards packed with dept stores. indeed, paris seemed no longer the capital of revolution--"boulevards lined up like soldiers"--but the capital of Capital, in a sense. a centralized state, with strong police and army presence. (on may day 1891, troops fired on protestors.)
it was in this context, in the 1890s, that the anarchists began to organize. above all in mont matre, and in industrial regions and worker suburbs.
this was a time of scandal--the memory of the paris commune loomed large for the anarchists. they "hated" paris, and admired bakunin and the others. the modern state had erected itself on the corpses of the communards.
a wave of anarchist bombings swept the capital from 1892-1894--assasination noted by the king of italy as a "professional risk".
prof is arguing that many of the anarchists, however, were people of peace--for propotkin and proudhoun the goal was to create communities, to survive away from the state.
at the same time, propotkin had accepted the phrase "propaganda by the deed" (and maybe even coined it). the belief that a single act of violence would be the spark. he did later have his doubts, but he refused to condemn those driven by despair (he had celebrated the permanent revolution of the word and pen)
dynamite was invented by alfred nobel in 1868--it seemed, in some sense, to level the playing field. a german anarchist had written that it was "within the power of dynamite to destroy capitalism", just as it was "within the power of gunpowder to destroy feudalism."
rabba scholl(sp.?) took this to heart--born into poverty, shamed in school as someone wearing beggar's clothes. he took to crime and anarchism. he was arrested, escaped the police wagon, and made it to paris. after the police firings and arrests in 1891--rabba scholl's two "deeds" followed these incidents, when he bombed the homes of two magistrates. he was subdued later by 10 policemen, and was guillotined the next year.
he so terrified contemporaries, that his name became a verb. after his death the anarchists of paris debated the wisdom of his attacks. some sympathizers thought of him as a martyr, a violent jesus christ (both were 33 when they were executed).
in his eulogy of scholl, an art critic warned that the murder of scholl was going to act as a trigger. someone else penned, "what do the victims matter if the gesture is beautiful"(!).
people of means were afraid to go to fancy restraunts, to rent to magistrates, etc. (a climate of fear). hundreds of scrawled threats arrived to property owners, people of means, etc. (signed by the avengers of rabba scholl, etc.--"finally the day when social justice will arrive"). "the dynamite polka."
on the 9th of december 1893, an unemployed worker who couldn't feed his family tossed a small bomb full of thumbtacks into the chamber of deputies--his goal was not to kill, but to call attention to the plight of the poor. he was guillotined almost immediately, after a brief trial. "long live anarchy," he shouted.
--------
emile henry's father had been a communard--he fled, under the sentence of death, to spain, where he worked in the mines (turning from republican socialism, to anarchism--in spain anarchists were terribly influential). he had two brothers--following his father's death in 1882 from mercury poisoning, his mother and the kids returned to paris. his mother had a bit of family land, and started up an inn (in the countryside, basically). he is very smart, becomes a scholarship student. the last report on his scholarship reads "he will become a student at one of the best schools in paris" (but he failed the oral exam, alas--though he could have taken it again).
he precipitously returned to paris. he lost his footing, a friend said, and became attracted to spiritism, trying to contact the dead soul of his father. worked here and there while living on the margins of urban life. his brother became an anarchist, and was a prominent orator in smoky cafes (he went to jail in 1894, for things that he had written). emile, now 20 years of age, was called "microbe." he was devoted to his mother, and would walk/take the train to go visit her. gave about a third of his monthly earnings to his mother.
began meeting with some anarchist groups, read some propotkin and other counterparts. his two targets were "private property" and "authority", two cancers he believed had to be destroyed. though he remained detached from the intellectual anarchist scene, he did fancy himself an intellectual. he was different from the man that through the tack bomb (malatoun(sp.?)), in that emile only loved the "idea"--didn't love the people, but the "deed", according to prof. (this was a common thread amongst elite anarchists, whose hate for bourgeois society could translate into a hate for the "people").
emile was a loner--he never spoke in public, allegedly. arrested with his brother after his brother was mistaken for having dynamite in his coat-pocket (it was actually a pen case). emile lost his job after his arrest/release--he bounced between bad jobs (once working as an apprentice to a watch-maker...). in 1892, he briefly served as a manager for an anarchist literary newspaper. but all this while he was preparing his bombs.
police informers, remember, were everwhere! (g.k. chesterton's book). he was overheard saying something about nitro-glycerin. a police spy reported that the old ways of the anarchists no longer seemed in play--the ones that you had to worry about were not the speech-makers, but the ones lurking in the shadows with evil "deeds" in mind.
they reflected, of course, a debate within anarchism--between the associanists and the believers in individual autonomy of the dynamiters.
---------
this lecture's title, "dynamite club", reflects the police's misinterpretation that all these bombings were co-ordinated.
---------
on the 11th of november, 1892, an employer of a mining company found a suspicious looking package outside the company door. they carried it downstairs quite stupidly, and policemen came along and decided that they had to take it to the police station (it was a bomb that would explode after chemical reaction). when they put it down on a table in the police station it exploded! the bomb was wrapped in a newspaper that related the arrest of emile henry!
emile fled to london--a friend of oscar wilde's remembered meeting him there. he was proud. he had exterminated 6 enemies. the policemen, however, didn't think of him as a serious suspect--a policemen didn't believe that his routine of the day was possible (i.e., that he had an alibi...)
anyway, emile is in london, now. what converts him to anarchism, of course, is the appaling gap between the poor and the rich in paris. never had people lived it up in such egregious ways, as in the "belle epoque." everywhere he lived had been on the edge of paris--and from where he lived, he could see the monuments/buildings he hated in paris (notre dame, for example).
he once wrote that "love" could lead you to "hate"--he loved humanity in the abstract, and hated society in very concrete ways.
---------
the explosive device that emile henry threw into the terminus injured 20 people and killed one. henry had been seen, and so he wouldn't be caught, he said, "where's the scoundrel that did this?" but then he ran, and then was finally caught--he fired with his pistol, hitting a policeman's wallet(!).
he's put in a prison--the prison guards were trying to get information out of him, even as he's trying to convert the guards to anarchism. his friends actually broke into the prison and stole dynamite, putting paris on high alert.
at his trial he says you have "shot us in spain, hung us in germany... but what you can never do is extinguish anarchy, because its roots are too deep."
he was executed on the 21st of may, 1894. (the last public execution, actually, was 1936 (people bought tickets to sit on neighboring roofs!)--the last execution in france was in 1972, with the guillotine, of course).
these guillotine scenes were important to anarchists, as well, as scenes of martyrdom, of course.
---------
was this a form of indirect suicide? (some have argued this, presumably?)
he had fallen in love with a woman, the wife of a fellow anarchist. he proclaimed his love, but was blown off. she, after his execution, gives interviews to journalists--"oh, he loved me so much..."
no, not indirect suicide.
--------
how did this represent the origins of modern terror, prof is asking? what was new about it? a couple of things.
(1) most of the anarchists in western europe had been ordinary workers, but emile henry was an intellectual--instead of targeting a head of state, he threw a bomb at the petty-bourgeois that sustain capitalism. that's really new about it, prof is saying.
(2) in modern terrorism you have an alliance between intellectuals/students and the down-and-out, which is reflected in emile henry's life.
(3) you have revolutionary immorality--martyrdom.
(4) they all set out to attack the state/capitalism, imperialism/state--an institution that stands for a whole system/ideology.
(5) again, seen as leveling the playing field--you proved you were strong, even when, in reality, you were weak.
(6) not a centrally organized, massive conspiracy--yet individuals and small groups were critical.
(7) when you think of the word "terrorism" -- this was originally applied to describe the violence of the state. it is often forgotten, professor is saying, that the vast majority of victims of terror are victims of state terror. and the anarchists, in this sense, had obvious grievances. you cannot understand it without this. anarchists killed perhaps up to 60 people in this era; the state, of course, many more (260:1, in someone's estimates).
terrorism has thus become part of the political process, in a sense. mutual need, in a sense--dissidence stoked and encouraged the overzealous response of the State (when States take tactics that swell hatred for them).
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