Introduction to 19th Century France

1. 'Democratization' - Centralisation and republicanism

2. Nationalism

- Republic refers to the 1789 revolution being left incomplete and unstable until a number of social and political change - implemented the 19th Century in stages

-1890s - Male franchise, liac education system, citizen conscription army, one single language, stable Republic colonial expansion

1789: Revolution

1815-1830: Restoration - Constitutional Monarchy

1830: Revolution

1830-1848: July Monarch - Constitutional Monarchy

1848: Revolution and Second Republic

1851: Second Empire - Napolean III

1870: Franco - Prussan War/Pan Commune

1870-1940: The Third Republic

- Three revolutionary periods are the ideas of 1789: liberty, equality democracy, law, rights and national citizenship, asserted and framed into the modern world

- A century of progress, achieved through stages of and through either public enmity towards the government or in the case of 1870 after military defeat

- Royalism and Bonapartism 'failed', while Republican values were maintained and only begun to be implemented fully after 1870

- None the less the values and ideas of 1789 shaped the century and were waiting to be 'completed'; this was not only a neat or linear trajectory but, by 1870 it was only political tradition capable of holding popular assent 

- Church and State separated: French education becomes 'liac' national curriculum, national language centralised education to make citizens who shared valued and experiences and were judged based on universal educational attainment

- National service/conscription. Insured citizens forged their experiences together

- Railway expansion facilitated movement and trade between regions

- Colonial expansion exported this universalism while exploiting natural resources/ people's rights

- Upper middle-class democrats, sympathetic to 1789

- Teachers, Journalists; novelists

- Industrialists, factory owners, managers, scientists, geographers

- Historians of the revolution

- Republic provided consensus, stability and rights to representation regulated trade/banking expanded markets through colonial control or diplomatic relations

- Slower than, UK

- Major specialist and advanced technology (Renault; chemical, technology) 

- Social political claims of the rising industrial peer

- Voice in radical politics ranging from anarchism to syndicalism to Marxist socialism

- Regional identities that had become more loyal to the monarchy

- Local 'world' colonial society, who contrary to the theory were not waiting to become 'democratic French'

- Gender equality in voting - French women gain the vote in 1945 

- France - Prussian Defeat left Alsace - Lorraine abandoned to Prussia

- Instigated a long-running culture or 'Revanchisme' and War fears/goals

- By the 1880s fed into a growing culture of nationalism and nationalist political figures - General Boulanger (General 'Revenge')

- Added to by the colonial expansion and colonial rivalry with Great Britain captured at Fashoda

- Celebrating the French Republic

- Celebrated the democratic nature of citizenship

- Celebrated colonial expansion as a source of universal educational duty and scientific development

- Commemorated the heroes of the 1789 Revolution as birth of the modern French Nation

- Xenophobic, racist and anti-democratic

- Militarist

- Yearned for a pre-1789 France

- Anti-Semitic 

- Dreyfus Affair (1898)

- Never restored monarchy proved constant political and cultural tradition through 1940s