The Cult of the Modern: Trans-Mediterranean France and the Construction of French Modernity
336
The Cult of the Modern: Trans-Mediterranean France and the Construction of French Modernity
336Hardcover
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Overview
The Cult of the Modern focuses on nineteenth-century France and Algeria and examines the role that ideas of modernity and modernization played in both national and colonial programs during the years of the Second Empire and the early Third Republic. Gavin Murray-Miller rethinks the subject by examining the idiomatic use of modernity in French cultural and political discourse. The Cult of the Modern argues that the modern French republic is a product of nineteenth-century colonialism rather than a creation of the Enlightenment or the French Revolution. This analysis contests the predominant Parisian and metropolitan contexts that have traditionally framed French modernity studies, noting the important role that colonial Algeria and the administration of Muslim subjects played in shaping understandings of modern identity and governance among nineteenth-century politicians and intellectuals.
In synthesizing the narratives of continental France and colonial North Africa, Murray-Miller proposes a new framework for nineteenth-century French political and cultural history, bringing into sharp relief the diverse ways in which the French nation was imagined and represented throughout the country’s turbulent postrevolutionary history, as well as the implications for prevailing understandings of France today.
Gavin Murray-Miller is a lecturer of modern European history at Cardiff University.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780803290648 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2017 |
| Series: | France Overseas: Studies in Empire and Decolonization |
| Pages: | 336 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.30(d) |
About the Author
Gavin Murray-Miller is a lecturer of modern European history at Cardiff University.
Read an Excerpt
The Cult of the Modern
Trans-Mediterranean France and the Construction of French Modernity
By Gavin Murray-Miller
UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2017 Board of Regents of the University of NebraskaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-9064-8
CHAPTER 1
Imagining the Modern Community
In 1867, Raimond de Miravals arrived in Paris from the Var, a Provençal department nestled in the extreme southeast corner of the country. A journalist by trade, Miravals was serving as a correspondent for L'Echo du Var, a local newspaper that had assigned him to report on the Exposition Universelle being staged in the capital that year. Like so many others who attended the exposition, Miravals expressed admiration for the industrial and scientific exhibitions flanking the Champ du Mars and rhapsodized on the "new era of civilization and progress" opening for humanity. The exposition inspired an appreciation for the inventive spirit of the modern era, in his opinion, demonstrating the triumphs made by industry and scientific advancement in the nineteenth century. "Man is never satisfied," he wrote. "The thirst for the unknown, the passion for travel, the rage for discoveries which each day breed uncertainties and invite new problems: I succumb to this constant inclination which is especially the inclination of the current century."
Public reception of the exposition had been a chief consideration of the planning committee formed to organize the event. According to Victor Duruy, a leading committee member, the exposition was intended to bolster awareness of French industry and science and reveal to the world that "the innumerable riches of industry come out of the chemists' laboratory and the cabinet of physicians and naturalists like a river flowing from its source." Educated individuals hardly needed to be informed of this fact, however, because science, industry, and manufacturing had already come to comprise a new trinity of progress in their minds, conjuring up images of a world rife with promise and unimaginable potential. "It is not an exaggeration to say that science contains humanity's future," claimed the theologian Ernest Renan, "that it alone can speak the words of destiny to him and reveal the way in which to reach his end." Renan's veneration of scientific advancement epitomized the outlooks of many French intellectuals of the period. "Ask any good Frenchman what he understands by 'progress,'" wrote Charles Baudelaire. "He will answer that it is steam, electricity, and gas — miracles unknown to the Romans — whose discovery bears full witness to our superiority over the ancients."
Pronouncements on "the era of civilization and progress" at hand and its superiority over past models were a veritable mantra of the nineteenth century. They gave credence to the idea of a new world pregnant with innovative and unprecedented possibilities. Yet such expressions of novelty were not simply reflections of a world in transition or an awareness of la vie moderne distinct from the past. For all their exuberance and certitude, nineteenth-century critics and savants hardly surrendered themselves to "the inclination of the current century," as Miravals claimed. They actively promoted and publicized it, defending in the process certain value judgments and attitudes embedded within the tangle that was modernity. The fact that intellectuals and elites began to think and speak in terms of "new time" did not imply there existed some transcendental meaning or truth within their judgments or that modernity had simply arrived at a given time. The increasing penchant to interpret the world in qualitatively different terms from the past and identify certain features and sensibilities as inherently "modern" stemmed from broad social and cultural influences that encouraged such perceptions. In an age that celebrated the modern, modernity was as much imagined as it was real. The ways in which this new time was imagined and made manifest are part of the historical experience of the nineteenth century.
Customarily, the birth of modern society has corresponded with the evolution of social and cultural practices readily attributed to classes rising to predominance in the nineteenth century, most notably those deemed "bourgeois." This group, although diffuse and often quite nebulous, has been considered one of the primary actors in the making of modernity. Simply stated, it has been assumed that modernity has its roots in the efforts and activities of middle class groups which, although possessing limited political power under ruling regimes, nonetheless exercised a broad influence on nineteenth-century society. In this respect, la vie moderne has perennially amounted to la vie bourgeoise. This connection, however, deserves further scrutiny. Although modern society did connote a world defined by certain "bourgeois" interests and aspirations, the coupling of bourgeois life and modernity frequently obscures the more nuanced relationship that existed between social identity and time in the nineteenth-century French imagination, and to conflate the two concepts would be erroneous. As late as the 1840s, Prosper Enfantin could claim that modern society remained vague and ill-defined, and this at a time when "bourgeois" had become a common facet of public and social discourse in France. In Enfantin's estimation, modern society "demanded a new speech" if it was to become a salient and living idea. The development and elaboration of this "new speech" that would convey and discursively possess modern time and society was still in the making at midcentury, and it would not be until the bourgeois social order underwent a crisis that prevailing views of modernity and modern society would become staples of French public and cultural discourse.
This is not to claim that modernity was an empty concept prior to the mid-nineteenth century. The ability of men and women to imagine themselves as subjects situated within modern time was, ultimately, dependent on the capacity to differentiate between past and present and make qualitative distinctions between these concepts. It is generally accepted that the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars marked a critical moment in the making of this modern consciousness as violent political instability and military conflicts radically transformed European society within the span of a generation. Revolutionaries of the late eighteenth century set out to create a new order based on a division of "old" and "new" time that affirmed the French Revolution as a world-historical event. In rejecting the past and declaring the revolutionary republic a turning point in history, radicals conveyed both the regenerative promise and novelty of their cause. The Revolution was imagined as a rupture with the past that reoriented fundamental outlooks on the nature of time itself. Europeans now saw themselves as modern individuals existing in a world quite unlike the one they had previously known. They were conscious of what Peter Fritszche has called the "melancholy of history" and saw fit to make distinctions between "modern" and "pre-modern" subjects that had implications for how they understood both themselves and others. The years of revolutionary upheaval not only allowed for the recognition of modern time as such; it allowed for the possibility of divergent times that reinforced the very qualities of the modern individual, creating modern subjects just as much as "strangers" to modernity.
These dichotomies became the basis for social categories elaborated during the century and the power relationships that underpinned them. Distinctions between "then" and "now" were easily fungible with distinctions between "them" and "us," exhibiting a growing mindset evident in academic and scholarly discourse just as much as the general print culture and other media of the period. While the relationship between "bourgeois" and "modern" was not objective or even as clearly defined as has been supposed, groups associated with a nominal bourgeois class — journalists, writers, educators, and civil administrators — did, however, occupy important positions when it came to the capacity for transmitting information and knowledge. They possessed the means of dictating and shaping the representations and logic of what was meant by "modern," a term increasingly associated with a set of ideas and attitudes representative of a "new time" shared with others. If French writers and thinkers were not necessarily using a new vocabulary, they were inscribing a revolutionary concept with new symbols and values specific to the postrevolutionary social environment.
This new speech developed a common language for the expression of particular social and political concerns, entailing that modernity signified more than just the awakening of a historical consciousness or the recognition of discontinuity with the past. Claims to modernity translated into real forms of power and authority in the present, a feature that the French Revolution and subsequent upheavals of the postrevolutionary era made evident. In a period characterized by democratization and imperial expansion, elites confronted demands for equality and greater political participation that threatened their authority. These conflicts cut across metropole and colony, eliciting debates on the nature of citizenship and the relationship between nation and empire. Modernity progressively constituted a response to this crisis as desires for stability encouraged political experimentation and the reconfiguration of elite leadership. By the late 1840s, the various pressures stirred by revolutionary politics and colonialism would converge in a social and political discourse relevant to the needs of a French imperial nation-state.
Bourgeois Order and Its Limits
Writing in the early 1870s, the anarchist poet Arthur Rimbaud lampooned the pretense and smugness of progressive bourgeois society with his sarcastic remark that in France "one must be absolutely modern." This acknowledgment has been a familiar one: to be modern has entailed being bourgeois in some capacity. Yet was the bourgeoisie the historically consistent social group that such an assumption suggests? In France, the bourgeoisie never accommodated the strict social schema proposed by Marxist philosophy. Whereas Marx saw the bourgeoisie as an explicit class brought into existence by industrialization and the accumulation of capital, such socioeconomic interpretations did not necessarily gel with the realities of nineteenth-century French economic and social development. Over the course of the century, French industry progressed at a relatively slower pace in comparison to Great Britain and the United States, and the preservation of more traditional forms of artisanal manufacturing matched with a primarily agricultural economy entailed that a bourgeois class controlling the means of production was largely absent in France. This is not to suggest that the term bourgeois had no relevance. Indeed, the character and origins of the bourgeoisie were widely debated and speculated upon throughout the early nineteenth century. Yet "bourgeois" rarely constituted the class of producers and entrepreneurs that Marx believed to make up the new ruling class in industrial society. Rather, it connoted a mark of social distinction that encompassed a broad array of French property owners, men of affairs, and political elites. "The bourgeoisie is not a social class," the historian Jules Michelet aptly noted in 1846, "but a position within society."
The social pedigree associated with the rubric "bourgeois" was, by and large, a product of the political environment of the mid-nineteenth century. The revolutionary inheritance with its mix of democratic ideals and political violence was a conflicted one in France. The sanscoulotte radicalism of the First Republic had given way to the Reign of Terror, revolutionary plots, and counterinsurgencies. The Napoleonic Empire established in 1804 temporarily managed to impose order on the country through a series of illiberal and martial policies before succumbing to military defeat a decade later. In the aftermath of revolution and empire, both new and established elites harbored strong misgivings over the practicality of democratic government while retaining mistrust for the "tyranny" that personal rule encouraged. Yet if they desired neither Robespierre nor Napoleon, many postrevolutionary elites were equally cool to the restored Bourbon dynasty which, in the words of Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, appeared to have "learned nothing and forgotten nothing" during its years of exile. In July 1830, liberal opponents alarmed by the royal ministry's censorship policies and conservative manipulations rebelled against the government with the intention of establishing a progressive yet durable regime capable of balancing "liberty and order." These so-called Doctrinaires — Anglophilic politicians and journalists committed to constitutionalism and parliamentary government — found their representative in Louis Philippe, an heir to the Orléanist branch of the royal family who professed an attachment to the ideals of the Revolution and constitutional rule. Inviting Louis Philippe to ascend the throne and rule as a "citizen king," the Doctrinaires believed their modest revolution would inaugurate a new era of stability and reform as the so-called July Monarchy assumed power. To this end, new laws were enacted broadening the electorate to roughly a quarter of a million men, and the king exhibited an initial willingness to appease republican and royalist rivals in his public declarations. As the Doctrinaires wagered, only through a policy of moderation and reason would legitimacy be restored to French political institutions and royal authority.
From its inception, the July Monarchy was offered as a tenable solution to the political instability afflicting the nation. Seeking to curb the cycles of revolution and reaction that periodically destabilized French government, the Doctrinaires believed it essential to constrain popular participation and limit political power to a small class of moderate electors and office holders who, by virtue of their wealth, distinction, and education, would stand above the passions of le peuple and provide a bulwark against royal absolutism. This middle course empowered an exclusive class of property owners and taxpayers with the vote. Yet legitimating an electoral franchise in which only one adult male in twenty-five was allowed to vote while professing a dedication to revolutionary principles could and did appear contradictory, inviting liberals to explain why certain citizens should enjoy political rights to the exclusion of others. Liberal ideologues consistently warned of the inimical influence that universal suffrage and social leveling posed, recalling the savagery and bloodshed that the Revolution had unleashed. "It is false that all men are equal," François Guizot, one of the foremost Doctrinaire spokesmen, explained. "They are, on the contrary, unequal by nature as by situation, by spirit as by body." Emphasizing the "organic inequality" that existed in nature, liberals argued that not all possessed the necessary intellect and capacité to participate in public life. Education, wealth, and social distinction testified to an individual's ability to make judicious political decisions and conceptualize the greater social good outside of personal interest, and these qualities formed the basis of an open aristocracy that politicians and liberal critics associated directly with a new class rising to predominance in France, the bourgeoisie.
In the discourse of classical French liberalism, "bourgeois" demarcated an exclusive social group with political rights derived from wealth. The mandatory poll tax required for voting and holding political office effectively restricted political power to a small minority of the population, with references to the bourgeoisie serving to justify the type of elite rule prescribed by liberal ideology. "We are the government of the bourgeoisie," the pro-Orléanist journalist and deputy Charles de Rémusat candidly proclaimed in 1834. "Without doubt, the revolution of 1830 has elevated the middle classes to a civil church [and] their true social rank." Such pronouncements gave substance to claims of bourgeois primacy and power, defining a new aristocracy of probity and talent naturally suited for political leadership. "The bourgeoisie occupy the front of the stage in France," one critic bluntly put it in 1837, "just as democracy does in the United States." Much as Sarah Maza has indicated, the French bourgeoisie was the product of a particular style of political discourse and language employed by July Monarchy liberals, one that constructed an image of the moderate and rational "bourgeois" individual to justify exclusive claims to power and authority.
These claims to power, moreover, transcended social considerations in the nation proper. As a political philosophy, liberalism proved able to accommodate and adapt to existing social conditions in the greater French world where the principles of 1789 had been ambiguous at best. In the Atlantic colonies, slavery remained a linchpin of the Caribbean plantation economy. From the beginning of the French Revolution, the issue of slavery had been a prickly one, revealing inherent tensions between Enlightenment notions of natural rights and liberal perspectives on the sanctity of property enunciated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. In 1794, the revolutionary Jacobin regime issued an emancipation decree enfranchising the numerous slaves and hommes de couleur of the Atlantic colonies only to have Napoleon restore slavery once again in 1802. July Monarchy liberals were not averse to granting civil and political liberties to the property-owning free blacks and hommes de couleur of the islands, in essence extending the metropolitan régime capacitaire into the colonial domain. The gradual emancipation of slaves was not inconceivable either. The question, however, was how to implement such reforms without incurring the defiance of colonial slave holders and Creole elites fearful of any change to the racial hierarchies that structured colonial society?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Cult of the Modern by Gavin Murray-Miller. Copyright © 2017 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Cult of the Modern in the Nineteenth Century
1. Imagining the Modern Community
2. State Modernization and the Making of Bonapartist Modernity
3. Civilizing and Nationalizing
4. The Crucible of Modern Society
5. Old Ends and New Means
6. Republican Government and Political Modernization
7. Toward the Trans-Mediterranean Republic
Conclusion: The Second Empire and the Politics of Modernity
Notes
Bibliography
Index