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Napoleon III had become the second Emperor of France
in 1852, following in the footsteps of his uncle
Napoleon I. However, the French Second Empire lasted
only eighteen years because of the emergence of
another world power, one that was to profoundly
transform the balance of power in Europe - the German
Empire.
Chancellor Bismarck of Prussia, who sought to bring
his state to ascendancy in Germany, realized that if a
German Empire was to be created, the French Empire,
which would never tolerate a powerful neighbor at its
borders, must fall. Through clever manipulation of the
Ems Dispatch, Bismarck goaded France into the
Franco-Prussian War, which led to the French emperor's
defeat and overthrow.
After Napoleon's
capture by the Prussians at Sedan, France became a de
facto conservative republic, although the
revolutionary Paris Commune held out until its bloody
suppression in May 1871.
In
the aftermath of the collapse of the regime of
Napoleon III, the clear majority of French people and
the overwhelming majority of the French National
Assembly wished to return to a constitutional monarchy.
In 1871, the throne was offered to the Comte de
Chambord, alias Henry V, the Legitimist pretender to
the French throne since the abdication of Charles X,
who had abdicated in favour of him, in 1830. Chambord,
then a child, had had the throne snatched from his
grasp in 1830.
In 1871 Chambord had no
wish to be a constitutional monarch but a
semi-absolutist one like his grandfather Charles X.
Moreover - and this became the ultimate reason the
restoration never occurred - he refused to reign over
a state that used the Tricolore that was associated
with the Revolution of 1789 and the July Monarchy of
the man who seized the throne from him in 1830, the
citizen-king, Louis Philippe, King of the French.
However much France wanted a restored monarchy, it was
unwilling to surrender its popular tricolour.
Instead a "temporary"
republic was established, pending the death of the
elderly childless Chambord and the succession of his
more liberal heir, the Comte de Paris.
In February 1875, a series of parliamentary Acts
established the organic or constitutional laws of the
new republic. At its apex was a President of the
Republic. A two-chamber parliament was created, along
with a ministry under a prime minister (named "President
of the Council") who was nominally answerable to
both the President of the Republic and parliament.
Thoughout the 1870s, the issue of monarchy versus
republic dominated public debate.
On May 16, 1877, with public opinion swinging heavily
in favour of a republic, the President of the Republic,
Patrice MacMahon, duc de Magenta, himself a monarchist,
made one last desperate attempt to salvage the
monarchical cause by dismissing the republic-minded
prime minister and appointing a monarchist duke to
office. He then dissolved parliament and called a
general election (October 1877).
If his hope had been to
halt the move towards republicanism, it backfired
spectacularly, with the President being accused of
having staged a constitutional coup d'etat, known as
le seize Mai after the date on which it happened.
Republicans
returned triumphant, finally killing off the prospect
of a restored French monarchy. MacMahon himself
resigned on January 28, 1879, leaving a seriously
weakened presidency, so weakened indeed that not until
Charles de Gaulle eighty years later did another
President of France unilaterally dissolve parliament.
To mark the final end of French monarchism as a
serious political force, in 1885 the French Crown
Jewels were broken up and sold. Only a few crowns,
their precious gems replaced by coloured glass, were
kept.
Though France was clearly republican, it was not in
love with its Third Republic. Governments collapsed
with regularity, rarely lasting more than a couple of
months, as radicals, socialists, liberals,
conservatives, republicans and monarchists all fought
for control. The Republic was also rocked by a series
of crises, none more notorious that the Dreyfus Affair
in 1894, when a Jewish officer in the French Army was
wrongly jailed on charges of spying for Germany.
This claim played on
all the fears and perspectives of all sides.
Monarchists and right-wing Roman Catholics, many of
whom were anti-semitic, and in some cases blaming a
"Jewish plot" for the triumph of
republicanism, immediately attacked Dreyfus and
refused to consider the possibility that he was
innocent.
Others on the left,
still fighting the 'monarchy versus republic' battle,
championed his cause, irrespective of his guilt or
innocence. When it became clear that he was indeed
totally innocent and the victim of a conspiracy, the
state itself failed to accept his innocence straight
away, and even when he was released from his exile,
whispering campaigns still suggested he was actually
guilty.
In the aftermath of the
affair, when the truth finally did come out, the
reputations of monarchists and conservative catholics,
who had expressed unbridled anti-semitism were
severely damaged. So too was the state by its
unwillingness to right what had clearly been a major
wrong visited on an innocent and loyal officer.
Despite this turmoil, the midpoint of the Third
Republic was known as the belle epoque in France, a
golden time of beauty, innovation, and peace with its
European neighbors. New inventions made life easier at
all social levels, the cultural scene thrived,
cabaret, cancan, and the cinema were born, and art
took new forms with Impressionism and Art Nouveau. But
the glory of this turn-of-the-century time period came
to an end with the outbreak of World War One.
Throughout
its seventy-year history, the Third Republic stumbled
from crisis to crisis, from collapsing governments to
the appointment of a mentally ill president. It
struggled through the German invasion of World War One
and the inter-war years.
When the Nazi invasion
occurred in 1940, the Republic was so disliked by
enemies on the right - who sought a powerful bulwark
against Communism - and on the far left - where
Communists initially followed their movement's
international line of refusing to defend
"bourgeois" regimes -that few had the
stomach to fight for its survival, even if they
disapproved of German occupation of northern France
and the collaborationist Vichy regime established in
the south.
When France was finally liberated, few called for the
restoration of the Third Republic, and a Constituent
Assembly was established in 1946 to draft a
constitution for a successor, established as the
Fourth Republic that December.
Adolphe Thiers, the first president of the Third
Republic, called republicanism in the 1870s "the
form of government that divides France least."
France might have agreed about being a republic, but
it never fully agreed with the Third Republic.
France's longest lasting régime since before the 1789
revolution, the Third Republic was consigned to the
history books, as unloved at the end as it had been
when first created seventy years earlier. But its
longevity showed that it was capable of weathering
many a storm.
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