The “Franco-Russian Marseillaise”: International Exchange and the Making of Antiliberal Politics in Fin de Siècle France
2017; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 89; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/690124
ISSN1537-5358
Autores Tópico(s)French Historical and Cultural Studies
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeThe "Franco-Russian Marseillaise": International Exchange and the Making of Antiliberal Politics in Fin de Siècle France*Faith HillisFaith HillisUniversity of Chicago Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn 1894, the Third Republic and tsarist Russia finalized a military alliance. In both countries, politicians and substantial segments of the public participated in elaborate performances of friendship celebrating this diplomatic milestone, which became known as the Dual Alliance. Appearing at a naval base to welcome a visiting French squadron, Tsar Alexander III shocked onlookers by standing at attention as an orchestra struck up "La Marseillaise," that hymn of revolution hitherto banned in Russia.1 Across France, republican politicians organized lavish feasts at which they toasted the health of the autocrat and his empire.2 Hundreds of thousands turned out to witness official exchanges, consumers eagerly acquired books, posters, and food products commemorating the alliance, and people from all walks of life wrote songs and poems celebrating the newfound amity between the two countries. One enterprising author even penned a "Franco-Russian Marseillaise," which saluted the autocracy as a steadfast friend of the republic.3The diplomatic historians who have long enjoyed a monopoly on the story of the Franco-Russian Alliance do not dwell on these striking attempts to reconcile the political cultures of Europe's first republic and its last autocracy. Their accounts trace how the two powers came to recognize their common interest in preventing German domination of the continent, and they reconstruct the secret exchanges between high-ranking military and diplomatic officials that ultimately produced an agreement. Focusing exclusively on the raisons d'état that motivated the rapprochement and the small circle of men who directed it, these studies suggest that diplomacy was driven by its own logic, protected from the pressures of domestic politics and public opinion.4 Yet it was not preordained that the general public would accept this diplomatic fait accompli. For much of the nineteenth century, French and Russian patriots saw their national traditions as diametrically opposed to one another; as late as the 1870s and 1880s, many would have dismissed the prospect of a friendship between the two countries as impossible.5 Why, then, did so many politicians and citizens enthusiastically celebrate the alliance in the 1890s? How did a long history of Franco-Russian conflict give way to efforts to write Russia into "La Marseillaise"?This article argues that the relationships between diplomacy and publicity, between foreign policy and domestic politics, were more interactive in the case of the Dual Alliance than previous accounts have suggested. It examines how a public campaign conducted by private citizens in favor of Franco-Russian friendship facilitated the rapprochement, and it connects the reconciliation of the two powers to profound changes in French politics. The idea of an alliance first coalesced in Paris's salon scene in the 1870s, when Russian defenders of the autocracy established a dialogue with prominent French republicans. Over the next several decades, the members of this network tirelessly agitated in pursuit of this goal. Using their personal connections, they lobbied high-ranking politicians who would go on to play key roles in the diplomatic rapprochement. At the same time, they fostered cultural and political exchanges and used the mass media to carry out a campaign of public diplomacy. All of these activities aimed to explain the values of the autocracy in terms that French citizens could find acceptable—and to convince Russian patriots that the Third Republic could be a valuable ally. This network did not create the strategic interests that drove the Franco-Russian rapprochement. Nor was it in a position to make policy, since it operated largely outside of formal government structures. It did, however, play a crucial role in creating a political climate in which politicians and citizens of the two countries could begin to see each other as allies rather than adversaries.The network that promoted the rapprochement was remarkably diverse, uniting elite aristocrats and self-made men and women, leftists critical of social injustice and conservatives terrified by revolutionary disorder. Yet through years of dialogue, its members managed to bridge their differences. They engaged in playful exchanges that identified points of convergence in seemingly divergent ideological systems. Many also reconciled contradictory ideas and experiences through the act of conversion, altering their creed, their citizenship, or their ideological views. Ultimately, the circle harnessed these cultures of transformation to benefit the cause of Franco-Russian friendship. Its Russian members came to admire—and even celebrate—the republican ideal of popular sovereignty. Its French associates became enamored with Russia's autocracy and with the organic bonds that supposedly linked the tsar to his people. By the early 1890s, the network had produced a new ideological hybrid that reframed republican mass politics in a distinctly antiliberal and authoritarian vein, creatively reconciling political platforms drawn from the left and right and models of governance originating from France and Russia. These exchanges created new entanglements between the political cultures of the two powers, producing ideological styles and modes of thought that both French and Russian patriots could embrace. More than mere rhetoric, the "Franco-Russian Marseillaise" and the other performances of friendship that celebrated the Dual Alliance were culminations of this sustained process of convergence.The curious ideological synthesis produced by the advocates of Franco-Russian friendship left an indelible mark on French political life. The boosters of the rapprochement played prominent roles in the antiliberal revolution that transformed France's domestic politics at the same moment that the Dual Alliance redirected its foreign policy. They were involved in the Boulangist agitation of the 1880s, which married nationalist and socialist ideas, authoritarian visions and populist rhetoric.6 They played prominent roles in the Panama and Dreyfus affairs, which unleashed a flood of antisemitism and xenophobia.7 Historians have identified a host of internal economic, political, and intellectual transformations that colluded to undermine parliamentary democracy in late nineteenth-century France.8 This article identifies another current that flowed into France's illiberal tidal wave: a Russian critique of liberal ideas that entered French culture via the campaign for the rapprochement. The "Franco-Russian Marseillaise" celebrated a new era of international exchange and friendship, but it also marked the emergence of novel challenges to liberal democracy in France.France's Third Republic and Russia's Old RegimeA mere decade before the Franco-Russian entente was formalized, the prospect of an alliance between the two countries would have seemed unthinkable to knowledgeable observers. The two countries had waged war on each other twice in the nineteenth century, and diplomatic relations remained tense at the birth of the Third Republic. Having remained neutral during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, Russia moved even closer to France's chief rival, Germany, in its aftermath. In 1873, the autocracy forged a formal alliance with Germany and Austria—a union of the continent's conservative dynastic powers that became known as the Dreikaiserbund.9The conflicting ideological foundations of the Third Republic and the tsarist regime intensified the geopolitical conflict between the two states. By the late 1870s, a democratic political culture that demanded the active engagement of the republic's increasingly literate and politically conscious citizenry had become firmly entrenched in France.10 Boasting the continent's broadest suffrage as well as its most developed mass media, the Third Republic presided over the birth of what one of its citizens called "the era of the public."11 The Russian Empire, by contrast, had neither a constitution nor a parliament nor a free press; its autocratic ruler was empowered to flout the rule of law on a whim. Remarking on the archaic structures of the tsarist regime, one French observer dismissed Russia as a living anachronism that had no place in the "civilized" world. "Even the [Ottoman] sultan has become, perhaps despite himself, a constitutional sovereign; the emperor of Russia has remained an autocrat."12Yet behind the facade of an unchanged autocracy, some Russian patriots had begun to use ideas and a lexicon inspired by Western mass politics to reinforce the power of the tsarist state. In the 1860s Mikhail Katkov, the publisher of the influential daily Moskovskie vedomosti, developed a program of "state nationalism." Katkov embraced the Western idea of national self-determination but stripped it of its liberal-democratic agenda. The journalist presented the autocracy as the defender of Russia's Orthodox believers, whom he argued needed protection from dangerous "internal enemies" lurking within the empire—namely, Poles and Jews.13 By the 1870s, Katkov's antiliberal nationalism developed an international agenda. The journalist became a prominent activist in Russia's Pan-Slavic movement, which demanded the "liberation" of the Orthodox believers of the Balkans from the Ottoman and Habsburg empires and their unification under Russian rule.14Pan-Slavic activists developed a complex relationship with the autocracy. On the one hand, the movement, which was dominated by aristocrats, provided a new means of enlisting the Russian elite in the service of the state and a novel response to the challenges that nationalism posed to the dynastic empire. As a result, tsarist officials offered moral and financial support to the movement at crucial junctures. On the other hand, Pan-Slavic leaders frequently criticized the foreign policy of Tsar Alexander II. They vigorously denounced the Dreikaiserbund, insisting that Germany threatened Russian interests in southeastern Europe. And when Orthodox uprisings began in the Balkans in the mid-1870s, they demanded that Alexander do more to assist these rebellions against Ottoman rule.15Paradoxically, the Pan-Slavic activists who hoped to change Russia's foreign policy benefited from the autocracy's reliance on personalized power. When they encountered resistance from imperial officials, they used their wealth and connections to circumvent formal bureaucratic channels. In the mid-1870s, Pan-Slavic committees organized an army of almost 5,000 volunteers to join the Balkan uprisings.16 Meanwhile, activists relentlessly lobbied the tsar's brothers. In response to growing pressure, a reluctant Alexander II declared war on the Ottoman Empire in 1877.17 Within a year, Russian military campaigns had won new spheres of influence in the Balkans. However, military victory did not satiate the Pan-Slavs' appetites. After the 1878 Congress of Berlin, which saw Otto von Bismarck strip Russia of some of its territorial gains, activists continued their crusade and intensified their anti-German agitation.18In their efforts to advance a more aggressive Russian foreign policy in the Balkans—and to challenge the unsatisfactory settlement of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78—Pan-Slavic activists looked abroad for help. Perhaps the most influential activist who operated outside of Russia was Olga Novikova, a representative of an elite noble clan and the London correspondent for Katkov's Moskovskie vedomosti.19 Novikova established a legendary salon at Claridge's Hotel and made frequent contributions to the British press. In both capacities, she worked to improve British opinions of the Russian Empire, ultimately earning a reputation as "the M.P. for Russia."20 For example, she denied that Pan-Slavism demonstrated Russia's lust for imperial expansion, reframing the movement as a Russian variation on the continent-wide struggle for self-determination—a cause that British liberals held dear.21 In Paris, Princess Liza Trubetskaia, another Pan-Slavic activist from an ancient family, operated a salon that cooperated closely with Novikova's. Capitalizing on France's vulnerability in the wake of the Franco-Prussian war, Trubetskaia sought to convince the republic's leaders that friendly relations between France and Russia could protect both from German aggression.22Novikova and Trubetskaia managed to sway several influential policy makers. William Gladstone, the once and future prime minister, was a regular at Novikova's gatherings. By 1876, under the influence of his Russian friend, he expressed interest in improving Anglo-Russian relations and echoed Pan-Slavic activists' views on the "Eastern Question."23 Adolphe Thiers, the second president of the Third Republic, became close to Trubetskaia and eventually endorsed the salonnière's arguments in favor of a Franco-Russian rapprochement.24 Several high-ranking French officials shared the president's interest in pursuing an alliance with Russia, including France's ambassadors to Russia in the 1870s (both generals) and Raoul de Boisdeffre, who served as a military attaché to the embassy in St. Petersburg.25Back-channel lobbying—a technique that Pan-Slavic activists had perfected in Russia—yielded encouraging results in western Europe. However, the negative opinions of Russia that prevailed among Europe's liberal powers constrained the political opportunities of Pan-Slavic activists. Critical of the tsarist regime's abuses of its growing legions of political prisoners, both Britain and France offered asylum to thousands of Russian socialists, populists, anarchists, and nihilists.26 (Indeed, France's 1880 refusal to extradite a refugee who had attempted to assassinate the tsar created a major diplomatic row with Russia.)27 A wave of pogroms in 1881–82 further damaged Russia's reputation, leading journalists to blame the tsarist regime for the violence and the Paris-based Alliance Israélite Universelle to assist the emigration of more than ten thousand Russian Jews.28 In light of these challenges, even the most ardent supporters of a rapprochement conceded that it was a lost cause. A frustrated Trubetskaia eventually disbanded her salon and returned to Russia.29Reviving the Prospects of a RapprochementIn the 1880s, two interlocking venues revived the campaign for Franco-Russian friendship initiated by Pan-Slavic activists. The first was the salon of Juliette Adam. Adam, the daughter of a provincial doctor, moved to Paris in the 1850s, where she became active in the capital's republican opposition and in the salon of the writer and political activist Madame d'Agoult (who published under the pen name Daniel Stern). Having penned a feminist critique of Proudhon while still in her twenties, she went on to write paeans to Kossuth, Mazzini, and Garibaldi as well as a novel that celebrated the erotic exploits of a self-professed "pagan woman" (païenne) who flouted religious and social conventions.30 After the death of her first husband in the 1860s, she married Edmond Adam, a financier, journalist, and rising star within republican circles.31By the late 1860s, the Adams had become one of Paris's most well-connected and politically active couples. In 1864, Juliette established a salon of her own on the Boulevard Poissonière.32 In 1870, at the height of the Franco-Prussian War, Edmond was appointed the prefect of the Paris police—a powerful position that reported directly to the minister of the interior. The Adams remained in the capital during the deadly German siege; both engaged in patriotic activism and established warm relations with the leaders of the Paris Commune.33 The couple was particularly close to the communard and radical journalist Henri Rochefort. In the aftermath of the war, when Rochefort was arrested for his participation in the commune, the couple defended him. Remaining in contact with him during his exile in New Caledonia, they raised money to assist him after he escaped from the island in 1874.34Juliette Adam's gathering flourished in the two decades after the war. In the grand tradition of the French salon, it was a center of cultural and intellectual exchange, frequented by figures such as George Sand, Anatole France, Gustave Flaubert, Alexandre Dumas fils, and Pierre Loti.35 Adam's salon also had an overtly political function as a brain trust for the republican politician Léon Gambetta, who served as prime minister and minister of foreign affairs in the early 1880s. It was in Adam's gathering that Gambetta's followers (the so-called Opportunists) crafted the strategy that allowed them to unite peasants and the urban bourgeoisie in a republican coalition—a success that forestalled the ongoing threat of a royalist restoration by producing a permanent republican majority.36 Although it is unclear whether the salonnière personally engineered the politician's rise to power, as she claimed, Adam's intimacy with Gambetta earned her gathering a reputation as the "premier political salon in Paris."37In spite of Adam's strong republican credentials, she expressed growing concern about France's future by the late 1870s and early 1880s. Noting that previous republican governments had struggled to navigate between revolutionary chaos and oligarchic self-interest, to strike a balance between popular democracy and the need for social order, she wondered if the Third Republic would manage to evade the pitfalls that had toppled its predecessors.38 Adam was even more alarmed by the defeatist attitudes that she believed had taken hold in France after Germany's victory in the Franco-Prussian War and Bismarck's annexation of Alsace and Lorraine. Questioning the value of the "internationalism, cosmopolitanism, humanitarianism" that republicans had long claimed to hold dear, she became one of France's most impassioned proponents of la Revanche, insisting that the republic should stop at nothing to reclaim its lost territories.39Adam maintained that the solution to France's present dilemmas could be found in its ancient traditions. She believed that the French had inherited a "sentiment of fraternity and a passion for liberty" from Latin civilization and a martial tradition of equality from Gaul. Rekindling both cultures, she argued, could strengthen a nation that faced a powerful external enemy as well as internal challenges.40 Although her ideas reframed republican traditions in a nativist vein, she insisted that France must seek help from abroad. Adam, who had befriended both Trubetskaia and Novikova in Paris's salon scene, was impressed by the Pan-Slavs' anti-German mettle, and she concluded that the tsarist empire could play a constructive role in France's regeneration.41 "Russia is the only force that can render us anything other than victims without dignity or dupes," she wrote.42 "A passionate and fierce foe of Germany," she explained elsewhere, "I was logically a Slavophile. I would even dare to call myself a pan-Slavist."43At first, Adam relied on Gambetta to promote a rapprochement between France and Russia.44 However, the salonnière's longtime friend, like most mainstream republicans, expressed misgivings about aligning France with an autocratic regime.45 After a bitter public dispute in which she denounced Gambetta as a Germanophile, Adam turned to a new tool of influence: the media. In 1879, she founded La Nouvelle Revue, a monthly journal that promised to carry on the "battle against Bismarck and for the Russian alliance by means of the pen."46 That publication would allow Adam to introduce her ideas to a broader public.The French security forces were the second actor that advocated for better relations between Russia and France in the 1880s. Juliette Adam was intimately connected to this world through her husband, Edmond, the ex-prefect of police, and through her relationship with Louis Andrieux, who headed the prefecture between 1879 and 1881. A veteran of the republican opposition under the Second Empire and the founder of Le Petit Parisien, Paris's most popular daily, Andrieux was a regular at Adam's salon.47 Sharing the salonnière's interest in improving relations with Russia, Andrieux systematically undermined the rights of the Russian revolutionaries who had sought refuge in Paris. Characterizing the émigrés as dangerous agitators who aimed "to overthrow all authority," he insisted that the French and Russian states shared a "common interest" in policing their activities.48 In 1880, at the request of the Russian government, Andrieux expelled from the French capital Russian subjects suspected of harboring revolutionary sympathies.49Collaboration between the prefecture and the tsarist state continued to deepen over the next decade. After the 1881 assassination of Tsar Alexander II, Andrieux assisted the Russian police investigators and conservative vigilantes who traveled to Paris to incapacitate the revolutionary circles that had sought asylum there; in addition to sharing intelligence, he offered the services of his agents to help the Russians.50 In 1883, the Russian Okhrana, or secret political police, opened a new office in Paris that was tasked with monitoring the activities of Russian radicals living abroad. The Paris Okhrana, which worked out of the Russian embassy, enjoyed substantial logistical support from the prefecture of police as well as from France's national security forces, the Sûreté.51 As we shall see, this agency did not limit its activities to monitoring and infiltrating revolutionary cells. It would become a key participant in the dialogues emerging from Adam's salon and would actively attempt to shape public opinion about the tsarist regime and the Russian émigrés who sought refuge in France.Conversion and ConvergenceThe culture of the French salon revolved around the salonnière's ability to forge harmony out of dissonance through the art of polite discussion.52 Juliette Adam excelled at this task. Having incorporated elements drawn from the left and the right in her own thought, which infused republican traditions with nativist and militaristic ideas, she continued the dialogue between these two poles in her salon, which attracted a diverse circle of associates. Rochefort, the left-wing firebrand, returned to Paris after Communards were granted amnesty in 1880, resumed his engagement with Adam, and founded a newspaper of his own, L'Instransigeant. He shared the salonnière's interest in rekindling French patriotism, although he tended to highlight social inequality and capitalist exploitation as the main causes of the republic's ills.53 Adam's gathering also attracted prominent conservatives, among them Lucien Millevoye, a lawyer with monarchist leanings who operated a network of provincial newspapers, and Alphonse Daudet, a fervent opponent of the republic.54 Finally, several members of the salon in the 1880s were, like Adam, former republicans who had begun to migrate to the right. In addition to Andrieux, Paul Déroulède belonged to this camp. A poet, a veteran of the Franco-Prussian war, and a one-time associate of Gambetta, he founded the arch-revanchist League of Patriots in 1882 with Adam's financial support.55Adam also boasted several international collaborators. She remained in close contact with Novikova, who visited the salon when she was in Paris and contributed to La Nouvelle Revue.56 Besides Novikova, Adam's most important international collaborator was Jules Hansen, a Dane who had fled to Paris and found work as an intelligence operative in the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs after Bismarck annexed his native Holstein.57 Hansen shared the salonnière's commitment to seeking revenge on Germany, and he too had an interest in Russia. A childhood friend of Princess Dagmar of Schleswig-Holstein, who went on to marry the future tsar Alexander III, Hansen maintained a cordial relationship with the tsar and tsarina and frequently visited them in Copenhagen, where they spent many of their vacations.58Adam's admirers marveled at the salonnière's ability to facilitate exchange between the diverse individuals who frequented her gathering, and they celebrated her skill at reconciling the public sphere of men and the private world of women, aesthetic beauty and the naked self-interest of politics.59 Her goal to cultivate a friendship between the Third Republic and the tsarist regime, which she would pursue tirelessly, might be read as her most ambitious effort to create a harmonious synthesis between divergent systems and ideas. She championed the common interests of the two countries in combating German aggression and the emergent threat of international terrorism in her salon as well as in the pages of La Nouvelle Revue.60 She organized banquets and lectures to educate French citizens about Russia and promoted authors who presented Russian history and politics in a positive light.61 Adam ultimately enlisted many members of her salon in her efforts to "sell" Russia and its culture to a republican audience. In addition to advancing her campaign of public diplomacy and cultural translation, Adam's associates worked to create new points of convergence in the political cultures of France and Russia. For example, Déroulède penned a Russian-themed play that enjoyed a successful run at Paris's Odéon theater. A celebration of the efforts of early modern Cossacks to free themselves from Polish domination, the play was also read by some observers as an allegory of the plight of the Alsatians under German rule. If the Alsatians could emulate the Cossacks' patriotic fervor and their willingness to sacrifice themselves for their homeland, Déroulède suggested, they could eventually triumph in their struggle for self-determination.62In the early 1880s, Adam added new Russian associates to her circle. Participating in her efforts to demystify Russia, they also influenced the ideological evolution of her network. One of these Russians, Princess Catherine Radziwill, was the product of an illustrious Polish noble family from Ukraine and a veteran of the Pan-Slavic movement. She spent the 1870s in Berlin, where her husband (also a Polish aristocrat) occupied an ancestral estate. A Catholic, she became an outspoken opponent of Bismarck's Kulturkampf. Radziwill moved to St. Petersburg in the 1880s and spent part of the 1890s in London, but she remained in contact with Adam through letters and visits.63Another addition to Adam's circle, Iustin'ia Glinka, had served for decades as a lady-in-waiting to the tsarina. In 1880, Glinka moved to Paris, where she launched a one-woman crusade to undermine its Russian radicals.64 She infiltrated nihilist circles, gathering compromising information on the émigrés; having befriended Andrieux, she used her access to the prefect to orchestrate a lobbying campaign against political "refugees."65 She contacted French media outlets as well as the prefecture to claim that nihilists had brazenly attacked her on the streets of Paris and to express her outrage that the republican government continued to offer the "right of asylum" to "a group of foreign malefactors."66The most crucial addition to the Adam circle in the 1880s was Il'ia Tsion. Born into a modest Jewish family in present-day Lithuania, Tsion went on to earn a medical degree in Germany. In the 1860s, he accepted a position in a prestigious Leipzig laboratory, where he discovered the nerve that stimulates the heart (still called "Cyon's nerve" in his honor). Having gained international acclaim while still in his twenties, Tsion accepted a professorship in St. Petersburg. (Jews were barred from the Russian professoriate, but Tsion had converted to the Russian Orthodox faith while living in Germany, which enabled him to accept the position.)67 Although he had been active in socialist groups as a student, he grew more conservative as a young professor.68 Sometime in the early 1870s he met Katkov, with whom he discussed his alarm about "the materialist and revolutionary current" that he saw as prevalent within the Russian intelligentsia.69In an 1873 lecture at his university, Tsion suggested that a whole series of subconscious stimuli affected the functioning of the heart, concluding that the human body was a divine creation whose mysteries would never be fully understood.70 Outraged young positivists initiated a public campaign against the professor, and in light of the controversy he had fomented, the institution refused to renew his contract.71 Tsion's efforts to appeal his case and to publicize his story failed, leading him to conclude that a liberal conspiracy had seized control of the Russian academy, press, and government.72 Declaring himself a "refugee" from Russian liberalism, Tsion fled to Paris, taking French citizenship in 1881.73Upon his arrival in France, Tsion—who henceforth would go by a rather affected French version of his name, Élie de Cyon—attempted to rehabilitate his scholarly career. He accepted a temporary position in the laboratory of the physiologist Paul Bert; colleagues promised that he would soon receive an appointment at the Collège de France. However, Cyon became embroiled in conflict with his new boss, who was a devoted positivist, an anticlericalist, and a republican delegate to the National Assembly. In 1878, Cyon learned that he would not receive an academic position in France after all—a development that he attributed to Bert's meddling.74 His academic dreams dashed, Cyon opened a private medical practice and began to work as a journalist on the side, becom
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