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EMPIRE AND INTERNATIONALISM IN FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALIST THOUGHT, 1871–1885

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 May 2016

JULIA NICHOLLS Open the ORCID record for JULIA NICHOLLS [Opens in a new window]
JULIA NICHOLLS*
Affiliation:
Queen Mary University of London
*
School of History, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London e1 4nsj.nicholls@qmul.ac.uk
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Abstract

This article explores the role of empire and internationalism in French revolutionary socialist thought at the beginning of the Third Republic. Whilst French revolutionary socialists frequently employed colonial examples and operated within wider traditions of either imperialism or anti-colonialism, the concept of ‘empire’ itself remained vague and undefined in their thought. Previous literature on the subject has focused overwhelmingly on the writings of Communards deported to New Caledonia in the 1870s; however, this article argues that the deportees in fact remained theoretically unconcerned with imperial and international questions. Rather, it was those who remained in Europe that produced more clearly elaborated theories on empire and international engagement. Such ideas subsequently served to demarcate the limits and possibilities of universal equality and solidarity, which were central to revolutionary socialist thought during this period. Consequently, it will be suggested that despite their recent rise in popularity, empire, and colonialism are not the best categories of analysis for approaching such themes, for they cannot be isolated from broader concerns with international and transnational thought.

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Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 59 , Issue 4 , December 2016 , pp. 1051 - 1074
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

1 ‘Ce qui se passe’, Citoyen, 10 June 1883.

2 See P. Leroy-Beaulieu, De la colonisation chez les peuples modernes (Paris, 1882; first publ. 1874).

3 A. L. Conklin, A mission to civilize: the republican idea of empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford, CA, 1997), p. 2.

4 R. Aldrich, Greater France: a history of French overseas expansion (Basingstoke, 1996); Conklin, A mission to civilize; A. L. Conklin, S. Fishman, and R. Zaretsky, France and its empire since 1870 (Oxford, 2011). For exceptions to this rule, see M. K. Matsuda, Empire of love: histories of France and the Pacific (Oxford, 2005); S. A. Toth, Beyond Papillon: the French overseas penal colonies, 1854–1952 (Lincoln, NE, 2006); Eichner, C. J., ‘ La citoyenne in the world: Hubertine Auclert and feminist imperialism’, French Historical Studies, 32 (2009), pp. 63–84 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 The closest Girardet comes are several mentions of Henri Rochefort. R. Girardet, L'idée coloniale en France de 1871 à 1962 (Paris, 1972), pp. 54, 61.

6 The first socialist text presented by Ageron dates from 1885. C.-R. Ageron, L'anticolonialisme en France de 1871 à 1914 (Paris, 1973), pp. 38, 70–1.

7 G. Manceron, 1885: le tournant colonial de la République: Jules Ferry contre Georges Clemenceau, et autres affrontements parlementaires sur la conquête coloniale (Paris, 2007).

8 M. Cordillot, Aux origines du socialisme moderne: la Première Internationale, la Commune de Paris, l'exil: recherches et travaux (Paris, 2010); R. C. Stuart, Marxism at work: ideology, class and French socialism during the Third Republic (Cambridge, 1992).

9 J. Baronnet and J. Chalou, Communards en Nouvelle-Calédonie: histoire de la déportation (Paris, 1987); G. Mailhé, Déportations en Nouvelle-Calédonie des communards et des révoltés de la grande Kabylie (1872–1876) (Paris, 1994); A. Bullard, Exile to paradise: savagery and civilization in Paris and the South Pacific, 1790–1900 (Stanford, CA, 2000).

10 J. E. Sessions, By sword and plow: France and the conquest of Algeria (Ithaca, NY, 2011), pp. 324–5.

11 For ‘braided concerns’, see U. S. Mehta, ‘Edmund Burke on empire, self-understanding, and sympthy’, in S. Muthu, ed., Empire and modern political thought (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 155–83, at p. 166.

12 For more on this, see, for example, Conklin, A mission to civilize; Conklin, Fishman, and Zaretsky, France and its empire, pp. 67–8.

13 D. Armogathe, ‘Le testament de Louise Michel’, in L. Michel, Souvenirs et aventures de ma vie, ed. D. Armogathe (Paris, 1983; first publ. 1905–8), pp. 11–20, at p. 11.

14 Bullard, Exile to paradise, p. 130.

15 For more on Algerian political prisoners in New Caledonia, see M. Ouennoughi, Algériens et maghrébins en Nouvelle-Calédonie: anthropologie historique de la communauté arabo-berbère de 1864 à nos jours (Algiers, 2008).

16 Baronnet and Chalou, Communards en Nouvelle-Calédonie, p. 333; Mailhé, Déportations en Nouvelle-Calédonie, p. 359. See also ‘Débat: “La Commune: utopie ou modernité?”’, in G. Larguier and J. Quaretti, eds., La Commune de 1871: utopie ou modernité? (Perpignan, 2000), pp. 407–24, at p. 422.

17 Bullard, A., ‘Self-representation in the arms of defeat: fatal nostalgia and surviving comrades in French New Caledonia, 1871–1880’, Cultural Anthropology, 12 (1997), pp. 179–212 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 205, see also p. 188.

18 J. Allemane, Mémoires d'un communard, des barricades au bagne (Paris, 1880), p. 239.

19 Ibid., p. 426

20 Ibid., p. 419.

21 Contrast, for example, the ‘egalitarian’ attitude in Amsterdam, International Institute of Social History (IISH), Fonds Louise Michel Moscou, 233/5–2, fos. 4, 17; with Michel, Souvenirs et aventures de ma vie, p. 75.

22 A. L. Stoler, Along the archival grain: epistemic anxieties and colonial common sense (Princeton, NJ, 2009), pp. 248–9.

23 Mailhé, Déportations en Nouvelle-Calédonie, p. 403.

24 See Ouennoughi, Algériens et maghrébins, pp. 55ff; Mailhé, Déportations en Nouvelle-Calédonie, p. 77.

25 See, for example, ‘Rochefort! Found at last’, San Francisco Chronicle, 23 May 1874.

26 ‘Ce qui se passe en Nouvelle-Calédonie’, Intransigeant, 1 Sept. 1880. For a similar criticism, see E.-A. Ballière, La déportation de 1871: souvenirs d'un évadé de Nouméa (Paris, 1889), pp. 256–7.

27 ‘Appel des transportés de la Commune aux comités républicains de Paris’ (undated), IISH, Fonds Lucien Descaves, 135, fo. 5.

28 P. Grousset and F. Jourde, Les condamnés politiques en Nouvelle-Calédonie: récit de deux évadés (Geneva, 1876), p. 41. For a similar criticism, see H. Rochefort, L’évadé: roman canaque (2nd edn, Paris, 1880), p. 3.

29 Others such as Tocqueville and Leroy-Beaulieu also made comparisons with British colonialism. For Tocqueville, see J. Pitts, A turn to empire: the rise of liberal imperialism in Britain and France (Princeton, NJ, 2005), pp. 219ff; for Leroy-Beaulieu, see Todd, D., ‘A French imperial meridian, 1814–1870’, Past and Present, 210 (2011), pp. 155–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 183.

30 Ballière, La déportation de 1871, p. 177.

31 For more, see Conklin, Fishman, and Zaretsky, France and its empire, pp. 67–8.

32 Pitts, J., ‘Liberalism and empire in a nineteenth-century Algerian mirror’, Modern Intellectual History, 6 (2009), pp. 287–313 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 312.

33 Toth, Beyond Papillon, p. 37.

34 Matsuda, Empire of love, p. 16.

35 For demands, see Grousset and Jourde, Les condamnés politiques, pp. 57–8.

36 Allemane, Mémoires d'un communard, p. 501.

37 K. Marx, The civil war in France: address of the General Council of the International Working-Men's Association (London, 1871), p. 15. See also D. Stafford, From anarchism to reformism: a study of the political activities of Paul Brousse within the First International and the French socialist movement, 1870–1890 (Toronto, 1971), p. 26.

38 G. Agamben, The coming community, trans. M. Hardt (Minneapolis, MN, 1993; first publ. in Italian, 1990), p. 86.

39 J. Favre quoted in J. T. Joughin, The Paris Commune in French politics, 1871–1880 (2 vols., Baltimore, MD, 1955), i, p. 67.

40 L. Godineau, ‘Retour d'exil: les anciens communards au début de la Troisième République’ (Ph.D. thesis, Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2000), p. 513.

41 Bullard, ‘Self-representation in the arms of defeat’, p. 193.

42 For the theatre, see Baronnet and Chalou, Communards en Nouvelle-Calédonie, p. 357; for newspapers, see p. 360.

43 Allemane, Mémoires d'un communard, p. 472. See also L. Michel, Je vous écris de ma nuit: correspondance générale, 1850–1904 (Paris, 1999), p. 220.

44 See, for example, Allemane, Mémoires d'un communard, p. 237; ‘Rochefort: his lecture at the Academy of Music’, New York Herald, 6 June 1874.

45 For the appropriation of deportee experiences, see Joughin, The Paris Commune in French politics, i, p. 88. For an example, see Travailleur, Sept. 1877, p. 32. For relations between revolutionary socialists and radical republicans regarding Rochefort's escape, see ‘European life’, New York Herald, 26 Apr. 1874, p. 8; Matsuda, Empire of love, p. 121. On the amnesty campaign, see Allemane, Mémoires d'un communard, p. 497.

46 ‘Rochefort’, New York Herald, 30 May 1874, p. 3. For further comparisons, see Messager to Blanche, 17 Oct. 1871, Château d'Oléron, in H. Messager, 239 lettres d'un communard déporté: Ile d'Oléron – Ile de Ré – Ile des Pins (Paris, 1979), pp. 92–3, at p. 93.

47 Grousset and Jourde, Les condamnés politiques, pp. 54–5.

48 For the Saint-Simonians and Algeria, see O. W. Abi-Mershed, Apostles of modernity: Saint-Simonians and the civilizing mission in Algeria (Stanford, CA, 2010); Ouennoughi, Algériens et maghrébins, pp. 63–7.

49 For the Icariens, see Bulletin de la Fédération jurassienne, 20 May 1877, pp. 3–4; for Oneida, see Travailleur, Oct. 1877, pp. 16–20.

50 Bulletin de la Fédération jurassienne, 15 Mar. 1874, 5 Apr. 1874, 18 Oct. 1874, 21 Mar. 1875, 28 Mar. 1875, 27 June 1875, 31 Oct. 1875, 28 Nov. 1875, 11 Nov. 1877.

51 ‘Souscription permanente, ouverte à Londres, pour les condamnés politiques à la Nouvelle Calédonie’, 1874, Archives de la Préfecture de Police (APP), Ba427, fo. 93; Intelligence report, 16 Feb. 1877, London, APP, Ba429, fos. 2128, 2314. For instances of its international advertisement, see Travailleur, May 1877; Bulletin de la Fédération jurassienne, 9 Dec. 1877.

52 Travailleur, May 1877, p. 30.

53 Police report, 5 Dec. 1878, APP, Ba430, fo. 3170.

54 Bulletin de la Fédération jurassienne, 24 Dec. 1876. See also ‘Bulletin politique’, Citoyen & La Bataille, 7 May 1883.

55 For similarities with the International, see Bulletin de la Fédération jurassienne, 26 Dec. 1875; for links to Berne, see Bulletin de la Fédération jurassienne, 10 Dec. 1876.

56 Intelligence report, 28 May 1876, Belgium, APP, Ba427, fo. 385; Intelligence report, 16 Jan. 1874, Geneva, Ba432, fo. 953. For mention of Cluseret's visit to China, see Intelligence report, 12 Mar. 1873, Geneva, APP, Ba431, fo. 580.

57 Bataille, 4 Jan. 1886.

58 For more on Le Travailleur's links to the Jura Federation, see Stafford, From anarchism to reformism, p. 107.

59 Travailleur, Nov. 1877, p. 1.

60 From Oct. 1882 to May 1883, it became La Citoyen & La Bataille, but retained Bataille's staff and style rather than Citoyen's.

61 Bataille, 29 May 1883.

62 For more on the widespread criticism of Ferry's colonial ventures, see T. Zeldin, France, 1848–1945: politics and anger (Oxford, 1979), p. 267.

63 Bataille, 12 Dec. 1883.

64 Bataille, 24 Dec. 1885.

65 Bataille, 8 Aug. 1883.

66 Bataille, 4 Jan. 1886.

67 Bataille, 12 May 1885.

68 For a similar historical view, see Eichner, ‘La citoyenne in the world’, pp. 71–2, 75.

69 Bataille, 12 Dec. 1883. Emphasis mine.

70 Bataille, 12 May 1885.

71 Eichner, ‘La citoyenne in the world’, p. 71.

72 Travailleur, May 1877, p. 12.

73 Travailleur, Feb.–Mar. 1878, p. 2.

74 Travailleur, Oct. 1877, p. 9. Emphasis mine.

75 Travailleur, Sept. 1877, p. 17.

76 Travailleur, Sept. 1877, p. 19.

77 Travailleur, Mar.–Apr. 1878, p. 24.

78 Travailleur, Oct. 1877, p. 15.

79 K. Mantena, Alibis of empire: Henry Maine and the ends of liberal imperialism (Princeton, NJ, 2010).

80 Travailleur, Sept. 1877, p. 21.

81 Travailleur, May 1877, p. 2.

82 See, for example, Travailleur, Mar.–Apr. 1878, p. 28.

83 Travailleur, Apr.–May 1878, p. 17. Emphasis original. See also Travailleur, Mar.–Apr. 1878, p. 29.

84 Travailleur, Sept. 1877, p. 22. Emphasis mine.

85 Travailleur, Mar.–Apr. 1878, pp. 28–9.

86 Travailleur, Mar.–Apr. 1878, p. 31.

87 Travailleur, Sept. 1877, p. 24. This was a fairly regular criticism; for example, see also ‘Tong-king’, Citoyen & La Bataille, 11 Dec. 1882. On Locke and colonialism, see D. Armitage, ‘John Locke: theorist of empire?’, in Foundations of modern international thought (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 114–31.

88 Travailleur, Oct. 1877, p. 16. See also Travailleur, Mar.–Apr. 1878, p. 27.

89 For this differentiation, see Armitage, ‘John Locke: theorist of empire?’, p. 115.

90 On Khodja, see Pitts, ‘Liberalism and empire in a nineteenth-century Algerian mirror’.

91 D. Diderot, Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, ed. P. Jimack (London, 1988; first publ. 1772).

92 Travailleur, Apr.–May 1878, p. 19.

93 Regnard, A., ‘Les mensonges conventionnels de notre civilisation’, Revue Socialiste (1886), pp. 697–706 Google Scholar, at p. 697.

94 ‘Colonies et travailleurs’, Citoyen & La Bataille, 18 May 1883.

95 Bataille, 12 May 1885.

96 Bataille, 5 Jan. 1886.

97 See, for example, ‘Les naufrageurs’, Citoyen, 12 Nov. 1881, ‘Gaspillage partout’, Citoyen, 19 Dec. 1881, ‘L'alliance avec Arabi’, Citoyen, 26 July 1882; Anon., Les déportés civils de Gomen: Nouvelle Calédonie (Paris, 1871), pp. 15–16.

98 J. Pitts, ‘Republicanism, liberalism, and empire in post-revolutionary France’, in Muthu, ed., Empire and modern political thought, pp. 261–91, at p. 264.

99 Regnard, ‘Les mensonges conventionnels’, p. 697.

100 Travailleur, Mar.–Apr. 1878, p. 30. Emphasis mine.

101 Travailleur, Oct. 1877, pp. 15–16.

102 Ballière, La déportation de 1871, p. 125; ‘Discours des citoyens Paschal Grousset et Francis Jourde, ex-membres de la Commune de Paris, prononcés au banquet qui leur a été offert par des républicains de San Francisco le 24 mai 1874’, 1874, IISH, Fonds Lucien Descaves, 205; O. Pain, Henri Rochefort (Paris – Nouméa – Genève) (Paris, 1879), pp. 614–15. For the New York Herald, see, for example, ‘The Rochefort manifesto’, New York Herald, 2 June 1874, ‘Rochefort's manifesto’, New York Herald, 3 June 1874.

103 Mailhé, Déportations en Nouvelle-Calédonie, p. 403; ‘L'amnistie pour les Arabes’, Intransigeant, 8 Aug. 1880.

104 ‘Rochefort’, New York Herald, 30 May 1874, p. 3; Pain, Henri Rochefort, p. 617.

105 See, for example, ‘En Afrique’, Émancipation, 22 Nov. 1880; ‘La politique coloniale’, Citoyen, 21 Sept. 1882, ‘N'oublions pas le but’, Citoyen, 7 Oct. 1881, ‘L'internationale bourgeoise et l'internationale ouvrière’, Citoyen, 13 Mar. 1882.

106 G. Dening, Readings/writings (Melbourne, 1998), p. 158.

107 Travailleur, Mar.–Apr. 1878, p. 30.

108 Manceron, 1885: le tournant colonial de la République.

109 Stoler, Along the archival grain, pp. 248–9. See also A. L. Stoler and F. Cooper, ‘Between metropole and colony: rethinking a research agenda’, in F. Cooper and A. L. Stoler, eds., Tensions of empire: colonial cultures in a bourgeois world (Berkeley, CA, 1997), pp. 1–56, at p. 36.

110 See, for example, V. I. Lenin, Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism (London, 2010; first publ. in Russian 1917).

111 Girardet, L'idée coloniale; Ageron, L'anticolonialisme en France. See also Aldrich, Greater France; Conklin, A mission to civilize.

112 See, for example, S. Muthu, Enlightenment against empire (Princeton, NJ, 2003); Pitts, A turn to empire; Mantena, Alibis of empire; Muthu, ed., Empire and modern political thought.