The revival of interest in liberal ideas that began in France in the 1970s has garnered considerable attention from scholars; so much in fact that it has been given not one but several names by them. Editors of a recent volume on the subject explained their decision to describe it as a liberal—rather than antitotalitarian—moment, on the ground that suspicion of state power and its potential abuse was just one element in a broader rekindling of interest in more positive theories of freedom and democracy at that time.Footnote 1 Much of this work on liberalism as a historical phenomenon was carried on a wave of writing about the French Revolution and its afterlives that crested in the years leading up to the bicentenary of 1989. Taking shape in the decade prior in a political context defined by the growing prospects of the left taking power in Europe—electorally or otherwise: the Portuguese Revolution in 1975 came three years after the Union de la gauche in France—it was led by a group of intellectuals who criticized the very conceptions of power to which the revolutionary left had laid claim since 1789.
Searching for a more stable and tolerant political culture than Rousseau or his Jacobin or Marxist heirs seemed to offer, many found inspiration in a succession of nineteenth-century French liberals: if Alexis de Tocqueville was the most influential, by the end of the 1980s he was joined by a host of others, including François Guizot, Louis Blanc, Jules Michelet, Edgar Quinet, and Hippolyte Taine.Footnote 2 Yet in the process of recovering this canon, something went missing: the historians among them tended to cut empire out of their pictures of a usable liberal past.
Other scholars have noted this absence. For Gregory Mann, it was “little short of fantastic” that the most influential publishing project of the era—Pierre Nora’s Les lieux de mémoire (1984–92), whose 127 essays surveyed a wide array of symbolic sites of French national identity ranging from food to festivals—contained so little by way of explicit reference to the colonial.Footnote 3 The Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution française in 1988 was another collective effort of encyclopedic scope, helmed by François Furet and Mona Ozouf, in which empire figured incidentally or not at all: “slavery,” mentioned three times in passing, was not among the listed articles; nor was “colonies,” to which the index referred to once, as connected to the French deputy Barnave; under “Events,” not a word about the Haitian Revolution.Footnote 4 “It is striking that neither colonization nor decolonization were ever central elements of the discussion for authors within this liberal moment,” Stephen Sawyer has observed more recently.Footnote 5 But the historical novelty of this marginilzation of empire from liberals’ purview at this time has not been fully appreciated.
What follows attempts to better understand how and why empire went missing from this moment by excavating the history—and historiography—of one of the late nineteenth-century liberals these historians rediscovered: an homme d’état of the Third Republic whom they portrayed as embodying a successful synthesis of liberalism and republicanism in France.Footnote 6 Jules Ferry not only occupied a string of major political posts over three decades starting in the 1860s: member of the Assembly, mayor of Paris during the Commune, minister of public instruction, président de conseil, foreign minister, and senator. He also has a claim to be the most significant of the whole period as author of the two policies that defined the republic he came to lead: the educational laws, or lois Ferry, creating free compulsory secular schools for boys and girls to age fourteen, and a huge burst of imperial expansion, tripling the size of French overseas holdings during his stints in office. Ferry thus stages as perhaps no other figure the tensions—as well as interconnections—between French liberalism as a governing ideology and imperialism at home and abroad.
My focus in this paper is on the ways historians have presented Ferry’s imperialism in relation to his liberal republicanism. Passing briefly over his career as lawyer, journalist, and politician under the Second Empire, I indicate how the domestic and imperial were enmeshed in the state he and his fellow opportunists went on to build after 1875. I then examine in detail Ferry’s reception since his death, dividing it into two broad phases. In a first, running from the 1890s to the early 1960s, empire was the dominant motif in the biographies and studies of him as a fondateur de la république—albeit with shifts in emphasis depending on the political contexts in which these texts tended to cluster. At the turn of the 1980s, however, when Ferry became a reference for historians of the liberal revival, this was inverted. His imperial record was at first scanted in favor of his domestic lois scolaires: of the twenty-five books that appear first on Worldcat, the most on a single theme since the 1980s deal with l’école de Jules Ferry.Footnote 7 Recent biographies of Ferry, from the 1980s, also make it a focal point.Footnote 8 Such moderate, incremental reforms served as counterpoints to the violent extremes that had—so it was claimed—riven French politics since 1789. If François Furet exemplified the tendency to sideline empire, a seminar he organized on Ferry in 1982 set the stage for Mona Ozouf, Charles Ageron, Pierre Nora, and others to reassess the imperial side of his project in a more positive light. These historians were therefore revisionist in a double sense: not simply for undermining Marxist shibboleths about the class character of the French Revolution, but for reconfiguring—in ways not always made clear—the place of empire in the liberal tradition to which they laid claim.
I not only argue that mainly liberal republican historians drawn to Ferry across both periods have shaped understandings of liberalism and empire more broadly. I also venture explanations for the shift between these moments. In the first, empire was considered an ongoing achievement of the liberal republic: not just an extension of its values, but a source of its longevity, often written by figures with a direct stake in empire building, whether as ministers or members of colonial societies, or among academics, political economists, and journalists. If they tended to downplay the extent of opposition to colonial policy at the time—including from an older school of free-trade liberals, radicals, socialists, and some monarchists and Bonapartists—they nonetheless made empire a pillar of liberal republicanism.Footnote 9 For intellecutals of the later liberal moment, decolonization did not simply take empire off the table. Furet and Ozouf were indeed formed politically by the struggles over it: both joined the PCF after the Second World War in part on grounds of anticolonialism. Rather, in the aftermath of 1968, they came to see opposition to empire as itself a link in the chain connecting the radical left to the opening acts of the French Revolution. It is no coincidence, I argue, that imperialism was minimized in the history of la république du centre as founded by Ferry—which Furet hailed as the end of the revolutionary process, la fin de l’exception française.
Liberal formations: Ferry from the Second Empire to the Third Republic
If Jules Ferry was not exactly the “héros Romanesque” described by one enthusiastic biographer, his life was far from the colorless—even willfully unheroic—one that many histories of the period depict as a common trait of the precarious political leaders of the early Third Republic.Footnote 10
Ferry came from Lorraine, where his family had once been farmers in the Vosges mountains. In the seventeenth century they had taken up bell founding, and by the end of the eighteenth they were embedded as notables and manufacturers at Saint-Dié, whence they took an active part in the revolution. Ferry was born into this bourgeois republican milieu in 1831. His father, a lawyer on the conseil général of the department, sent him to Paris to finish his law degree in 1851, just as Louis-Napoleon staged his coup on 2 December. The clashes Ferry witnessed marked his subsequent development as a liberal and republican; swearing “hatred and death to this dictatorship,” he also displayed an abiding suspicion of insurrections propelled from below.Footnote 11
At twenty, with a political career for the moment closed to him, Ferry spent the next decade practicing law; at the same time, he traveled, painted, and steeped himself in the intellectual life of Paris, hosting a salon with his brother Charles, to which the likes of Émile Littré and Léon Gambetta were invited.Footnote 12 Ferry emerged from this context as a leading liberal publicist by the turn of the 1860s, when the advent of the Liberal Union gave rise to a vast literature purporting to explain its ideals and aims. Spanning from “conservative liberals” such as Adolphe Thiers and François Guizot to “liberal democrats” such as Jules Favre and Jules Simon, it was both a product of the liberal turn of the Second Empire and a rallying point for its moderate opponents.Footnote 13 In 1861 Ferry began writing for Le Temps, a paper founded to promote the alliance, and in 1863 he penned La lutte électorale, coinciding with the legislative elections that delivered fifteen seats to its candidates.Footnote 14 His reading of John Stuart Mill fired an interest in political economy, suffusing his writings on “the origins of the modern industrial system” in Europe and North America, as well as his criticisms of the self-dealing financial gimmickry involved in Baron Haussmann’s reconstruction of Paris.Footnote 15 On the back of this journalistic reputation, he was himself elected to the corps législatif in 1869.
Less than two years later, this entire political edifice collapsed in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War. After Napoleon III’s capture at Sedan, the Second Empire disintegrated, and a republic was proclaimed from the capital, even as Prussian armies began to encircle it. Ferry became a leader of the government of national defense that took shape after 4 September in Paris, as one of its moderate republican deputies, and then mayor and prefect.Footnote 16 By January, he had broken with Gambetta to back an armistice with Prussia; in March he joined Thiers, the newly elected executive, in the decision to disarm the Paris national guard by force, which sparked the Commune. Ferry saw this uprising as a proving ground: he wrote from Versailles of the “return of the furies of 1793,” of Jacobin “scoundrels” whose “intense hatred” it had “always been my privilege to have.” Reentering Paris at the head of a column of soldiers during the semaine sanglante, he declared in a tone of solemn awe the principles that made this repression necessary: “I have seen them, dear friend, the reprisals of the avenging soldier, of the peasant chanting in good order; liberal, jurist, republican, with my eyes I saw these things, and I bowed, as if I saw the sword of the archangel.”Footnote 17
Ferry slowly returned to frontline politics after 1875, joining the first government made up entirely of republicans four years later, as minister of public instruction and fine arts. It was in this role that he began work on what would prove his most important domestic achievement: the creation of free compulsory state education for all children, alongside a network of normal schools to recruit and train their teachers; this was the keystone of the so-called république des instituteurs, amounting to a direct assault on the powers of the Church. But his reforms went beyond this to encompass the judiciary, and the codification of the “necessary freedoms” articulated by Thiers, including of assembly and of the press. Poised as before between left and right, the opportunists Ferry led rejected more sweeping changes to the electoral system or the Constitution, to make these more democratic or social.Footnote 18 Ferry connected the turn to formal imperialism over the same period to this vision of a restrained republic: securing foreign outlets for its goods was an absolute necessity for France if it wished to avoid a social revolution arising out of mass unemployment—which appeared to him to be an endemic feature of the competition between industrializing states after 1873.Footnote 19
France’s empire trebled in size from 1880 to 1885 to include all or parts of Tunisia, Annam, Tonkin, Madagascar, Congo, Upper Senegal, Sudan, Somaliland, points along the West Coast of Africa, and islands in the Pacific. If he did not always initiate these interventions, Ferry played a key role in negotiating the interests surrounding them—from the so-called colonial lobby in France and the ministries of the marine, army, or foreign affairs; to French settlers, traders, missionaries, commanders, and administrators on the spot; to the native peoples whom these efforts were meant to conquer, convert, displace, or subdue.Footnote 20 Ferry’s ministries both fell amidst violent clashes with the Assembly over blowback from the two most significant of these episodes, in Tunisia and Tonkin.
In Tunisia, an operation meant to quickly coerce the bey into signing a treaty of protectorate with France eventually required the dispatch of 28,000 troops. Yet the government’s initial demand for a vote of credits made no mention of a protectorate, citing the need to secure the border with Algeria, after alleging that Kroumir tribes in Tunisia had crossed it. Ferry only acknowledged other motives once war was underway, faced with the ire of deputies taking their lead from the press.Footnote 21 As the war dragged into 1881, Ferry’s government fell; only Gambetta’s last-minute intervention led to a vote to approve the Treaty of Bardo in November.
The war to add northern Vietnam, or Tonkin, to French holdings in Cochin China and Cambodia was even more complex and costly. Here, an expedition up the Red River led to an undeclared war with China, which Ferry demanded ever more resources to prosecute: deploying over 25,000 men by the end of 1884, attempting to impose a rice blockade on China, ordering raids on its southern coast and as far afield as Formosa. Yet the Treaty of Tientsin was signed too late to save Ferry, whose ministry crashed in torrents of recrimination after news reached Paris of a military reversal at Langson near the Chinese border. Shouted down as he addressed the Assembly to request funds to “avenge” this defeat, he resigned on 30 March and fled the Palais Bourbon, chased down the banks of the Seine by an angry crowd crying, “À l’eaux! À l’eaux!”Footnote 22 The ensuing election dealt a heavy blow to the opportunist republicans, returning “the most anti-colonialist parliament in the history of the Third Republic.”Footnote 23 The party recovered. Ferry did not. Four years later, it swept back into power without the author of its politique colonial, who lost in a stinging repudiation of him in the family seat in the Vosges.Footnote 24
Bottled messages: Ferry’s historians
It is perhaps unsurprising, given his unpopularity at the time, that Ferry appealed to posterity to give him a fair hearing. “I ask of this impartial historian, this unknown judge, who may be reading me now, to carefully note all my faults, but not to blame me for those that others have made.”Footnote 25 He even pretended to be that historian at times, posing counterfactual questions about his decisions to seize Tunisia or Tonkin, attempting to “redo history after the fact.”Footnote 26 Yet these daydreams were far from innocent. Overlain by a deep sense of grievance at those he held responsible for toppling his ministry and slandering its work, his self-justifications were also justifications for the imperial mission to which he had tied the liberal republic.
The scholarship on Ferry has from the start generally functioned in a similar manner—extending and elaborating these justifications across republican regimes starting with the origins of colonial history as a discipline under the Third Republic. Pierre Singaravélou argues that this process was characterized by a simultaneous “institutionalization” of the subject in universities alongside the ongoing work of “amateurs” in colonial societies and research centers;Footnote 27 if so, it is striking not only that historians of both sorts were drawn to Ferry from the start, but also that so many were his colleagues, friends, and relations. Taken together, their work amounted to the construction of a quasi-official memory, commencing with the opportunist republicans who regained their parliamentary majority four years after his fall from power, in 1889.
Two years later, one of their number, a young constitutional lawyer named Paul Robiquet, began to collaborate with Ferry on his collected works. When Volume 1 of Discours et opinions appeared in 1893, it announced it would, “with pious care,” give to “future historians the documents that would permit them to assign to Jules Ferry his true place among our national worthies, between Gambetta and Thiers.” In practice, it did more than collate and edit his speeches and writings. It offered context and commentary, so that readers could “capture firsthand the admirable unity of Ferry’s political acts, the indomitable firmness of his attitude in the face of attempts at monarchical restoration, and the intrigues of the majority of the National Assembly.”Footnote 28 Framing Ferry’s politics in this way meant devoting as much attention to the 50,000 new primary schools making “universal education the corollary of universal suffrage … as his other claim to glory, the development of our colonial empire.”Footnote 29
The first stand-alone biography exemplified the imbrication of the republican state in the practice of colonial history, when it appeared in 1903 soon after the final volume of Discours et opinions. Its author, Alfred Rambaud, had served as Ferry’s chef du cabinet from 1879 to 1881, later succeeding him as education minister after becoming a senator in 1896. By then Rambaud was perhaps better known as a historian, whose career after graduating from the école normale in 1864 had veered from Byzantium to modern Germany and Russia before turning to France, when he was appointed to the first chair of contemporary history at the Sorbonne in 1883. While he had long promoted an entente with Russia as crucial for French security, at this point he turned to empire overseas as the necessary complement to that continental alliance.Footnote 30
To this end, Rambaud wrote or contributed to two books promoting the imperial vocation of the French. The first was a long introduction to The Expansion of England, first given as lectures by historian J.R. Seeley at Cambridge, published in book form in 1883, and translated into French in 1885. Rambaud viewed Seeley’s central proposal for reorganizing the British Empire into a vast confederation as a logical outgrowth of imperialism in its liberal form. It also served as a model: for Greater Britain, he read plus grande France. Rambaud did more than recapitulate Seeley’s argument, however. He put the book in context for French readers, moving through the main debates between Conservatives and Liberals in Britain over the value of colonies, to show the continuity that existed in practice between both political parties in office.Footnote 31 The reception of Seeley’s ideas in England clearly reminded Rambaud of the domestic political battles over empire in France: a professor of modern history, “known for his liberal leanings,” Seeley gave his original lectures just after Disraeli’s fall, “at a moment when the excess of imperialism had provoked a reaction in public opinion.” British liberals had, moreover, been sharply split on its argument: if some radicals attacked it, the “new liberals”—including the MP William Forster, “author of the Primary Education Act of 1870”—“were full of praise for the publication.”Footnote 32
This not only put into perspective the backlash against Ferry in 1885, when a similar overreaction on the part of moderate republicans had brought down the government over the defeat at Langson. It pointed to another area in which the French would do well to imitate the English: ignoring temporary setbacks abroad and parliamentary skirmishes at home to focus on the continuity of imperial policy, regardless of the party in power.Footnote 33 In Seeley, then, Rambaud found not just a template for Greater France, but a domestic political realignment capable of constructing it—a new liberalism that found its echo in the career of Ferry. Here and in 1886’s Colonial France: History, Geography, Commerce Rambaud made the most expansive possible case for empire, as much on racial, linguistic, and geostrategic grounds as on economic grounds.Footnote 34 The latter volume aimed at a popular audience, pairing blue and white maps of each colony with an essay from “a writer who has studied it on site”—an explorer in Madagascar, an artillery commander in Senegal, a deputy from Martinique, merchants in Tahiti and Guinea.Footnote 35
Empire was also the terrain on which Rambaud sought to rehabilitate Ferry, first in an obituary in 1893, then in his biography a decade later. Rambaud acknowledged Ferry’s services to the republic at home, but, by the turn of the new century, he could write, “there is a part of his work, the colonial work, on which opinions are set and for which his memory can benefit from almost general assent.” This was emphatically not the case for “his education laws, where slumbering passions were suddenly awakened … by a policy of gratuitous provocation.”Footnote 36 Ferry’s role as empire builder made him unique among the founders of the Republic.Footnote 37 Nor was there any doubt as to where to situate him ideologically. The author of “so many generous and liberal laws on freedom of the press, assembly, education, the emancipation of municipalities, the nomination of mayors returned to the voters,” Ferry “was a true liberal.”Footnote 38
1930s: the farsighted republican
Yet despite detecting signs of renewed interest in Ferry among a younger generation by the fin de siècle, Rambaud’s portrait remained a solitary one for nearly three decades. A signal that Ferry might be newly relevant came at the turn of the 1930s from an unlikely source: his fiercest critic and rival, the eighty-eight-year old Georges Clemenceau, in an interview with his secretary from 1929. Some fifty years earlier le tigre had accused Ferry of betraying France over Indochina: had Clemenceau repented of this “‘crime’ of which you are often accused,” given the imperial contribution to the war effort Clemenceau himself had led from 1917? “It cannot be denied,” the interviewer added, “that colonies have kept up in us the sense of struggle, of national honor, and that they have given us men.”Footnote 39 While insisting he had been right to oppose overseas expansion at the time, Clemenceau acknowledged that even “the stupidest of operations have their good side” by pointing to “all these blacks, these Malagasy, these Senegalese” who during the Great War “I saw passing by in trucks, simple, calm, smiling, and who were fighting like mad lions.” For a moment he became moved recounting a trip towards the front where a group of black soldiers began to spontaneously play the Marseillaise for him, “with I don’t know what, by tapping on bits of wood, stones.”Footnote 40
Clemenceau may have been unique in his personal animus to Ferry. But his attitude to the colonial troops who fought in and for France would not have been out of place in any of the texts written at the time in appreciation of the latter. Indeed, Clemenceau’s portrait of the childlike simplicity and courage of the tirailleurs sénégalais and malgaches—over 180,000 West Africans and 40,000 Madagascans served in combat between 1914 and 1918—tapped into the racism and paternalism mixed with public gratitude that marked both the official pronouncements and the popular culture of the interwar years.Footnote 41 La plus grande France was then at its grandest, swollen by territories in the Middle East and West Africa acquired from the defeated Germans and Ottomans at Versailles. As Elizabeth Buettner and Martin Thomas have shown, this new territorial reach also came with a stronger ideological investment in the civilizing mission itself.Footnote 42 Clemenceau’s recollection of the impromptu performance of the French national anthem gives a sense of the reevaluation of his former rival that was a feature of this moment: here, Clemenceau concluded in his winding and indirect answer, was “the response to my attacks against Ferry.”Footnote 43
A number of new works over the next decade reprised this theme of Ferry as the stolid, farsighted republican whose colonial policy had saved the nation in its hour of need: a biography by Maurice Pottecher, poet, novelist, and playwright who hailed from the Vosges, where his father had been a disciple of Ferry as mayor of Bussang, and owned a currycomb factory; Martin Aldao’s Les idées coloniales de Jules Ferry, in 1933, originally a thèse de droit under sociologist René Maunier, at the University of Paris, that examined the evolution of colonial doctrines from the ancien régime to the Third Republic; and a popular pamphlet in 1931 from Georges Froment-Guieysse, the director of the Encyclopédie coloniale et maritime, whose previous entries were devoted to Pierre-Savorgnan de Brazza and the Comte de La Pérouse.Footnote 44
Pottecher viewed the return of Alsace and Lorraine at the end of the war as a retroactive vindication of Ferry against his critics on both the left and the right who claimed that in pursuing colonies overseas he had fallen into a trap set by Bismarck. Rather than distracting or denuding the metropole, the colonies had given it “the material and moral strength” without which it could not have reclaimed the “lost provinces” from Germany.Footnote 45 For Aldao, it was the attachment of colonized peoples to it that had tipped the scales to France by 1918, and could do so again in any new conflict: “the great war of 1914, during which a million indigenous fighters rushed to the aid of France, their motherland, proves this beyond a doubt. Man must never despair of the future.”Footnote 46
This was informed by more than a conception of the civilizing mission as a project of binding and elevating native peoples, however. Aldao stressed that Ferry had seen earlier than other republicans that for “economic liberalism” to remain viable in and outside France, it needed modifying in the altered conditions of the first Great Depression. Ferry achieved this by setting it within a growing imperial ecumene, protected by trade barriers from industrial competitors, whose capitalists faced the same problems of saturated home markets, falling profits, and social unrest. There was, Aldao maintained against “the socialist or pseudo-socialist” critics, nothing inherently exploitative about the colonial relationships that had grown out of this phase of simultaneous industrial and imperial expansion.Footnote 47 If colonial policy was the daughter of industrial policy, as Ferry had famously put it, then both were not just compatible in the eyes of his main interpreters in the 1930s, but a distinguishing feature of liberal republicanism as they understood it.
Nor was this vision confined to his colonial and economic policies as intertwined elements of his foreign policy: the importance they accorded to both also implied a certain view of the power of executive as against legislative authority in domestic politics. For Pottecher it was “the cowardice of the Assembly” that had led to his defenestration as premier in 1885; while Froment-Guieysse went further, defending both his conduct of the undeclared war against China—“magisterially led, as much from the political as the military point of view”—and attacking the reactivity of the Assembly, where “the majority, in a moment of panic, had lost its position and endangered the very existence of the Republic.”Footnote 48 In other words, all advanced an argument about the proper limits of democratic oversight of foreign policy under a liberal republic. In their accounts, the biggest danger to it was myopia, which a strong, independent executive had tried to correct. Rather than the representative elements of the Constitution that had emerged in 1875, their histories sided with a premier that had sought to insulate his conduct of diplomacy, war, and treaty making from it.
Ferry in the age of decolonization
This mode of presenting Ferry’s imperialism in relation to the Assembly, press, and public opinion dominated the field until after the Second World War, when it received its first real challenge. In an edited volume from 1949, Ferry was placed in a wider frame, as one of several statesmen who conceived or set in motion policies of overseas expansion in the industrial states in the last third of the nineteenth century, with chapters on Leopold II in Belgium, Joseph Chamberlain in Britain, Francesco Crispi in Italy, and Theodore Roosevelt in the United States. Les politiques d’expansion impérialistes was an innovation: comparative and scholarly, rather than straightforwardly apologetic. Pierre Renouvin, preeminent French historian of the Great War, laid out the conceit of the book in his introduction. The leaders it profiled were not “conquerors” who knew “this exhilarating form of action” but men who “oriented the policy of their countries along new paths.” Without claiming that overseas expansion could not have gone ahead without them—nationalism and economics were more important—the aim was to understand their role in putting imperialism into practice.Footnote 49
Among these essays on the domestic politics shaping the turn to empire, the entry on Ferry stood out. Renouvin acknowledged as much by distancing himself from it in a volume he conceived as “an homage to the strength of will, to the tenacity, to the civic courage of these statesmen, who all had a sense of greatness.” The criticisms to be found in the chapter on Ferry were hardly consistent with that aim, since it focused on his deceptions of the Assembly. “An interesting interpretation, suggestive, which can hardly fail to generate debate,” Renouvin wrote, before capping this polite praise with an extenuating interrogative. “But what would have happened if Jules Ferry had told the Chambers the truth?”Footnote 50
The portrait of Ferry in Les politiques d’expansion impérialiste remains in some ways the most critical of any devoted to him by an academic historian in France. The unusual profile of its author, Charles-André Julien, doyen of colonial studies at the Sorbonne in the heyday of decolonization in the 1950s, helps to explain its stand-alone quality. Rather than hailing from the political center ground, Julien was formed outside it, in a double sense: born in Caen, in 1906 at age fifteen he moved to Algeria when his father took up a school post in Oran; three years later Julien joined the SFIO, based on his work at the prefecture, where he witnessed the role of authorities in aiding big French landholders to dispossess Algerian peasants.Footnote 51 The carnage of the Great War made him sympathetic to the Bolsheviks: at Tours in 1920 he voted for adhesion to the Third International, and was present for the debates on colonialism at its third congress in Moscow.Footnote 52 Leaving the PCF just a few years later, he worked on The History of North Africa (1931), before joining the Popular Front in 1936 when Léon Blum appointed him to the High Committee for the Mediterranean and North Africa to draw up reforms; after the war Julien took up a similar position with an expanded remit in the Union française.Footnote 53
In contrast to other historians interested in Ferry, then, Julien was not only politicized because of his criticisms of the empire; he viewed his political project as the construction of a republican and socialist alternative, based on a reimagined relationship between it and the metropole. If the League trusteeship system seemed to offer a viable path towards these goals before the Second World War, after it Julien invested his hopes in the federative form of the French Union. He did so in common with politicians and colonial activists of the era from the Antilles to West Africa who viewed the 1946 constitution that created the new union as flexible: granting autonomy to the territories and peoples that made it up, while preserving the benefits of imperial association.Footnote 54 It also made Julien attentive to problems that empire had generated for republican government in the past: less (in his view) because it introduced unequal or differential claims to status or citizenship than for the extra-constitutional means used to acquire and rule it. By the time he wrote on Ferry in 1949, the danger that colonial conflicts could pose to the fledgling Fourth Republic were quite apparent.Footnote 55
How to hide an empire?
Republican institutions stood at the heart of Julien’s account. The need to consider parliament and public opinion—if only to conceal things from them—explained the apparent reversals and sudden shifts in Ferry’s imperialism; it was the source of his “authoritarian and ambiguous attitude, which exasperated his adversaries, worried and tired his supporters, and was the essential cause of his unpopularity.”Footnote 56 In Tunisia, Ferry had rejected entreaties to seize the kingdom in March from his foreign minister as too risky in an election year. Three weeks later he had changed his mind, once Quai d’Orsay officials convinced Gambetta that a quick campaign would deliver a “brilliant victory for the republic.” Ferry, concluded Julien, “only took a position when he was sure of being able to take action without fear for his majority.”Footnote 57 Obtaining credits for “military operations on the frontiers of Tunisia,” Ferry instead launched a full-scale invasion in April. These manipulations eventually led his government to collapse when deputies came close to voting down the Treaty of Bardo.Footnote 58
The annexation of Tonkin was a still more spectacular example of the simultaneous blundering and cunning that defined the relationship between the président de conseil, the diplomatic and military corps, and the colonial lobby on the one hand, and parliament on the other. In sending an expeditionary corps to the region, Ferry and his cabinet were adamant that it would neither annex territory nor make war on China itself. “The conquest of Tonkin is not even dreamed of,” Challemel-Lacour, the Foreign Secretary, told the Senate. In a secret note to Ferry in August, he acknowledged, “China will only give in to a serious threat or force: we cannot and must not resort to either. The Chamber would not follow us.” “We are not in a state of war with China, and I do not think we are on the eve of such an event,” Ferry told the Assembly months later. Yet Challemel-Lacour had just written him, “In my opinion, peace hangs by a thread.”Footnote 59 With each new vote of credits, it became more difficult to deny that a war with China was underway, leading Ferry to force the pace in botched negotiations with Peking.Footnote 60
The loss at Langson in March 1885 that toppled his ministry was not, in other words, a bolt from the blue. It was the product of years of growing dissatisfaction, in which many on the left, right, and center accused him of abuse of pouvoir personnel.Footnote 61 The rout of the centrists in the election that followed showed how vulnerable the state that had grown out of 1871 still seemed to military defeat. “Ferry, whom we are accustomed to presenting as a victim of the parliamentary opposition,” was to blame. Rather than explaining his project in a way that “could have united parliament and country,” his actions “recalled the Mexican invasion, and the entire colonial policy of the Third Republic suffered.”Footnote 62
End of empire: family reunion
The last significant book dedicated to Ferry that made empire a pillar of his liberal republicanism appeared just as the cornerstone of that empire broke away under the Fifth Republic, when Algeria gained independence in 1962. This work was a return to form after the searing criticisms of Julien—albeit one that registered these with its own sifting of diplomatic evidence. Ferry was not just in sympathetic hands once again, but in those of a descendent, whose name conjured up the continuity of the republican order across generations: Fresnette Pisani-Ferry, granddaughter of Ferry’s brother Charles, daughter of radical deputy Abel Ferry, who died in 1918 inspecting the front at Aisne; she was named for an earlier battle in which her father had fought with distinction at Fresne-en-Woëvre.
Jules Ferry et le partage du monde was the first in a sequence of Pisani-Ferry’s works on the Third Republic as it intersected with her family; marrying Edgar Pisani in 1950 ensured that the latter extended into the life of the Fourth and Fifth—in both of which he served as an haut functionnaire, senator, minister of agriculture, and minister of housing. Joseph Paul Boncour prefaced the book, and was another reminder of the lineal descent of these republics from the one he briefly led at the turn of 1933. Evoking its founders as Gambetta, Waldeck-Rousseau, and Ferry, Boncour regretted not only that they were “almost unknown to the new generations” but that the Third Republic as a whole “did not enjoy a good press.” Pisani-Ferry aimed to change that perception, which reflected “the dramatic circumstances in which, in 1940, it foundered,” but not its achievements up to 1918: “born from a terrible defeat, it was able to avenge this defeat, create a militant democracy, found a colonial empire, the second in the world, and affirm a certain number of principles which remain part of our civilization today.”Footnote 63
While Pisani-Ferry dealt with individual episodes of imperialism, her approach—and her riposte to Julien—was to relate these to the larger lineaments of France’s foreign policy, concerned above all with Europe. Ferry’s record needed to be judged with respect to this theater, where two features defined it: a rapprochement with Berlin, and deterioration of relations with London. Bismarck not only encouraged France to expand overseas with the openly avowed aim of turning it away from its eastern border; he also actively backed its claims against European rivals in North Africa, while refusing requests for aid from its victims, the Malagasy or Chinese.Footnote 64 At the same time, the turn to empire with German help inevitably meant a “renaissance of the old Franco-English animosity.” Tensions flared in the Îles Sous-le-Vent, Nouvelles Hébrides, and Terre Neuve, as well as newer zones of French penetration: over commercial concessions in Tunisia; over religious missions in Madagascar; in Indochina, where French moves in Tonkin prompted Britain to seize Burma; and over the protracted struggle for political and financial control of Egypt and the Suez Canal.Footnote 65
In Pisani-Ferry’s telling, however, the government managed these pressures with diplomatic skill and tact, not the bumbling depicted by Julien. For neither the entente with Germany nor friction with Britain were ever allowed to go past certain limits, to upset the peace of Europe.Footnote 66 If France continued to be isolated there, this was because the Bismarckian alliance system linking Austria, Russia, and Italy worked to lock it in place. What Ferry did was to create conditions for a future breakout, as Pisani-Ferry’s chapter progression indicated, moving from “France alone” to “France alone, but strong.” Colonial throw weight put an end to its isolation by the fin de siecle—as Paris forged an alliance with Russia in 1893, and an entente with Britain in 1904, partly out of a shared desire to protect their empires from a newly assertive Germany. Ferry viewed a potential alliance in global and imperial terms, writing to a Danish diplomat just after his fall in 1885, “It is my deep conviction that France and Russia are destined to get along because they have common interests, not only in Europe, but also in Egypt, China, and the Pacific.”Footnote 67
In the end, the risks France had run in embarking on a project of colonial expansion were to pay off handsomely: from the vantage point of 1918—to say nothing of 1945—Ferry had had the last laugh. This “Conquistador in a frock coat” gave to France “overseas, the power Bismarck had forbidden it in Europe. Germany came too late to this division. England and France had already taken the lion’s share. Bismarck would only dominate Europe, and this is why Ferry’s work was slated to be more valuable and lasting than that of the Chancellor.”Footnote 68 Ferry had indeed sidelined parliament at home. But here too he had a strong case against his detractors: the longevity of the republic he had, at times, taken shortcuts around. “It is undeniable that Ferry deliberately deceived Parliament. Could he have done otherwise?” The drift of her response was clear. “Truth be told, Parliament was not mature enough to understand the importance of colonial conquests, unaware the era of the division of the world had begun.”Footnote 69
The bicentennial moment: Ferry as antitotalitarian
The Ferry that emerged from the liberal revival of the 1980s was unrecognizable from this empire builder of the preceeding hundred years. It is striking that the two historians who did most to recast Ferry in this new mold were themselves formatively shaped by decolonization.Footnote 70 François Furet and Mona Ozouf joined the PCF in 1949 and 1952 respectively, in part because of its opposition to the ongoing French war in Indochina. In her memoirs, Ozouf speaks of joining just after the Ridgeway riots—noting the role of the American general in the Korean War, among other signs of her immersion in that era’s left-wing language of anti-imperialism.Footnote 71 Indeed, their commitment to the issue was greater than to the party itself. Even after quitting the PCF in the late 1950s, Furet continued to back decolonization in Algeria as a step towards “socialist revolution” in metropolitan France, and to write on Tunisia and Morocco in the PSU-aligned France-observateur until the mid-1960s.Footnote 72 To figure out why empire went missing from their initial engagement with Ferry—and broader conception of liberalism—we need to examine how their view of anticolonialism itself changed in the subsequent period. This was a process intimately bound up with Furet’s analysis of the modern left born out of the French Revolution.
The end of the war in Algeria altered the intellectual, political and professional landscape in which Furet operated. France-observateur, suffering a steep drop in sales as the debates around the war receded, took on new investors and journalists to relaunch itself as Le nouvel observateur—an advertising-driven weekly aimed at a much broader center left audience. At the same time, Furet broke with Marxism even as he moved from journalism to history by way of the subject he would reshape in opposition to it, starting with La Révolution française in 1965.Footnote 73 Here he joined with other revisionists to question the “social interpretation” of the French Revolution. By 1971, Furet had accused the leading historians of the PCF associated with this view of being more Jacobin than Marxist: seen as the precursor to a future proletarian uprising by them, historians such as Albert Soboul had celebrated the bourgeois character of 1789 rather than cooly analyzing it. Furet would turn this identification on its head. For when it finally came in 1917, the Russian Revolution had descended into a similar morass of persecution and paranoia as the French in the Year II: “today the gulag is leading to a rethinking of the Terror by virtue of an identity in their projects,” he wrote in Penser la révolution française in 1978—saluting the intellectual center left for a willingness to “criticize its own ideology, interpretations, hopes, and rationalizations.”Footnote 74
If his interest in empire receded as he became the leading critic of the Marxist interpretation of the revolution, it did not just disappear, however. On the road to rediscovering liberalism, Furet came to view anti-imperialism as itself one of the hopes of the left in need of critical analysis. In 1971, the year of “Le catéchisme révolutionnaire,” for example, Furet dismissed a post-1968 wave of enthusiasm among radical students for Third World revolutionaries: this vogue for Mao, Guevara, or Castro was a “matter not of real historical leaders, but of myths” created by Parisian youth, as disconnected from the working class at home as from actual liberation movements in Latin America or Asia.Footnote 75 At the same time, he developed a passionate interest in Israel beginning with the Six Day War, which he was sent to cover for Le nouvel observateur in 1967, and visited at least twelve times over the next two decades.
The writings that arose from these trips and contacts contain some of his most revealing statements about decolonization as it related to left-wing political thought in France.Footnote 76 Approving of the state created in 1948 so long as it fit a stereotype of Jews as “exemplary victims,” the 1956 Suez crisis inverted this image, tarnishing Israel in the eyes of the left as “the ally, the accomplice, of the old colonial powers.” But this was a category error; uniquely combining “religion, nation, and socialism,” Israel was no cat’s paw of European empires, nor on the wrong side of some scientific historical law. “Having been obsessed with Jacobin narcissism, the left made anti-imperialism into the central interpretive concept of a history that has become global. Through this prism, Zionism appears to run counter to this history, ‘objectively’ colonial in an era of general decolonization.”Footnote 77 As the communist “illusion” began to fade in 1991, Zionism, by way of contrast, stood out as “one of the most politically brilliant undertakings of a twentieth century that had not known many.”Footnote 78 For Furet, the radical left’s “misunderstanding” of Israel seemed to flow from—and follow—that of 1789.
Furet did more than demolish what he perceived as neo-Jacobin apologies for terror or Marxist misconceptions of class or colonialism, of course. In elaborating his own interpretation of the ideological dynamics of 1789, he embarked on a quest for a liberal alternative tradition. Nineteenth-century historians of a liberal, philosophical bent were a leitmotif of this phase of his collaborative research and writing—given added weight by his leadership of the EHESS, as well as Fondation Saint Simon in 1982 and the Institut Raymond Aron in 1985. Tocqueville was the keystone of the revival of interest in liberalism. He not only supplied Furet with an argument for the continuity between the old regime and the revolution based on the centralization of state power, but also served as a kind of compass for navigating the equalitarian dangers posed to individual liberty in democratic societies. Indeed, his appeal to a generation of thinkers, including Louis Dumont, Marcel Gauchet, Gilles Lipovetsky, and Pierre Manent, as well as Furet, meant that the antitotalitarian moment of the 1980s was also a veritable renouveau tocquevillien français.Footnote 79
But if the image of Tocqueville to emerge from this moment possessed common traits, one of the most arresting is what was generally missing from them: his fervent support for the conquest and settlement of Algeria, and reflections on empire and democracy more generally.Footnote 80 While scholars have noted distortions in the readings of Tocqueville from this era, they have not explored how symptomatic these were. “Rediscovered” at the same time, Ferry is arguably at least as significant for understanding the liberal moment in relation to empire, for two reasons. Ferry was more deeply and directly involved in the implementation and justification of a policy of imperial expansion on a truly global scale during the long-lived Third Republic (and thus the relative neglect of empire in work on him is all the more striking). Ferry also served a key narrative function in the history that Furet, Ozouf, and others constructed about that liberal republic as the end point of the revolution: if in 1978 Penser la révolution provocatively announced “the French Revolution is over,” it was Ferry who literally made good on that claim in the best seller Furet published ten years later, La Révolution: De Turgot à Jules Ferry; with Ferry, he wrote more than once, “la révolution entre au port.” How and why did Ferry come to play this role in “ending” the revolution in the form of a liberal republic—and what can the absence of empire from their histories of it tell us about the version of liberalism Furet and his collaborators fashioned at this time?
Furet’s interest in Ferry began at least as early as a seminar at the EHESS between 1972 and 1975, issuing a year later in Lire et ecrire: L’alphabétisation des français de Calvin à Jules Ferry. If Furet and co-author Jacques Ozouf relativized the watershed-quality of les lois Ferry, pointing out that most children in France had access to some form of public schooling before the 1880s, they also clarified the laws’ achievement in equalizing regional and sexual disparities in access to it.Footnote 81 In this study, however, they considered the ideological dimension—“the secularization and republicanization of schools”—beyond their remit. Not so in 1982, when Furet convened a seminar on Ferry to mark the laws’ centenary with backing from the Délégation générale à la recherche scientifique and the minister of industry and research, Jean-Pierre Chèvenement.Footnote 82 In 1985 the contributions appeared as an edited volume, Jules Ferry, fondateur de la république.
The colloquium papers aimed to “deepen a certain number of problems of political and intellectual history in nineteenth-century France” by looking again at “one of the principle figures involved in founding the Third Republic.”Footnote 83 For Furet, Ferry had ensured the success of the latter thanks to a conception of politics that broke the revolutionary republican mold: under the Second Empire, Ferry’s “strange mix of intransigence and moderation” helped the liberal opposition to Napoleon III to hold firm on “liberty and democracy,” while rejecting “the Jacobin tradition of doctrinal blackmail.”Footnote 84 Once in power, Ferry authored “the republican synthesis,” in which the “liberal ideal” and “democratic ideal” were “reconciled,” and popular sovereignty, located in parliament, could “move beyond a strictly individualistic conception of the social pact as it had been elaborated in the thought of Constant to Guizot.” The scientific positivists Ferry admired, such as Émile Littré, instead grounded natural rights in “historical activity,” and understood progress as taking place in incremental stages. The republic thereby “gave itself at the same time the guarantee of order and the permission of reformism, by which it exorcised the fear of revolutionary violence.”Footnote 85
In the first chapter, Furet illustrated this point by examining the role Ferry had played in the debate over the publication of Edgar Quinet’s The French Revolution in 1865–6. Quinet had come under attack from radicals to his left for criticizing the Terror, as arising from the Jacobins’ “authoritarian conception of power” inherited from the absolutist state.Footnote 86 Ferry, then a journalist close to the Liberal Union, defended Quinet in print. The radicals’ “celebration” of the Terror, Ferry wrote in Le Temps, was a “hideous sophism,” a “theory of the efficacity of the guillotine,” that had no place in 1860s France, where “the ancien régime is only a dim memory” and democracy “has more flatterers than enemies.” In this context, “Jacobinism is no longer a weapon of war, but a standing danger, for it symbolizes something sadder than the memory of the scaffolds: a prejudice in favor of dictatorship.”Footnote 87 Furet implicitly identified not just with this condemnation of the Terror and its causes—but with the kind of controversy Ferry’s intervention had generated on the left.
Empire and imperialism were nowhere to be found in this Furetian reconstruction of Ferry as the practical statesman inching towards progress, nor in his actual relations with parliament. But it was not entirely overlooked by the other contributors. In “Jules Ferry et la colonisation,” Charles-Robert Ageron, historian of French Algeria, offered incisive observations about Ferry’s influence on colonial administration and disputed the suddenness of his conversion to a politique coloniale in office. He nonetheless confirmed the revisionist aim of the volume as a whole. Rejecting the economic rationale Ferry himself had articulated as superficial, Ageron argued that the turn to empire was about politics and ideology, not surplus capital. This led to a conclusion similar to the older history, which argued that Ferry had executed the only foreign policy open to France, doing it a good turn by avoiding a direct conflict with Germany to which some radicals and socialists were committed. “Was it not the only great undertaking left to France, the only one which stopped it from being hypnotized by dangerous fantasies of revenge?”Footnote 88 Ageron thus hinted at the centrality of empire as a condition of possibility for the “republican synthesis,” without pursuing this thread—apparently at odds with Furet’s ideological explanation for the success of the Third Republic, itself based on a narrowly national reading of 1789–94. Three years later, this was even more pronounced. In Furet’s The Revolution: From Turgot to Jules Ferry, Ferry served to close out the revolution on the basis of a liberal republican compromise. Neither here—nor in the Critical Dictionary nor the Republic of the Center, both from 1988—was there any substantive engagement with the role of empire in the construction of this national republican consensus.Footnote 89
The absence is remarkable not just because of Furet’s general interest in historiography, which had made the empire a keystone of republican stability, but because his argument rested on the claim that Ferry and his fellow opportunists had learnt to eschew the violent extremes that stood at the heart of Jacobinism.Footnote 90 Liberalism may have looked more attractive by way of contrast, but could the idea that it was defined by slow, peaceable change be squared with the campaigns in North Africa, East Asia, and Madagascar? The historiography to that point had made few bones about this, assimilating wars and repression to forms of economic and civilizational progress that were seen as eminently liberal. Ferry may have practiced subterfuge—more than one author, from Rambaud to Pisani-Ferry acknowledged it—but in the triumph of the republic in the First World War, to say nothing of its reemergence as a power after the Second, he had shown more foresight in its defense than many of those who had attacked him as an adventurer in the style of Napoleon III undermining parliamentary democracy inside France.
“The heroism of moderation”: Ferry and empire in the new millennium
Mona Ozouf, editor with Furet of the Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, seemed to take up the question that he and Nora had blanked, in a series of books and talks that owed much to his initial exposition. Her interventions between 2001 and 2019 ensured that the appreciation of Ferry that began in the 1980s outlived the bicentennial moment, to contribute to an enduring shift in French public life towards the liberal center ground in the following decades.Footnote 91
Ozouf followed Furet in structuring her assessment of Ferry around “the republican synthesis,” to describe a political project built on the combination of “unity and liberty,” and later “tradition and liberty.” This had nothing to do with the juste-milieu, “as if inspired by lukewarm prudence,” she explained in a talk at the Bibliothèque nationale in 2001. It was not negative in the manner of classical liberalism, but a “republican liberty,” a “positive liberty.” “One faces an uphill battle,” she lamented, in arguing for the “grandeur” of Ferry: “our age loves only ‘rebels’ and ‘troublemakers,’ whereas”—in what amounted to a sort of mission statement—“the fate of Jules Ferry is a timely reminder of the heroism it takes to be moderate.”Footnote 92 Here, staying close to the spirit of the seminar at EHESS, Ozouf gave empire a single, passing mention, whose tenor was positive. Seeing the same productive tension between liberty and unity in his school laws as in the “colonial enterprise,” she cited Ageron to argued that the latter was “far more political in aim than economic, and a lot more concerned with the rights of the indigenous than the black legend would have it.”Footnote 93
In 2014, Ozouf offered a fuller portrait of Ferry, which carried forward this defense of his imperial role, in part under pressure from a body of scholarship that had grown more critical of its omission from the celebrations of the 1980s. Some of this backlash had been immediate. The absence of any mention of the Haitian Revolution in the Critical Dictionary was shocking enough to merit a disclaimer from Furet in the reedition of 1992, complete with a newly commissioned article on the subject.Footnote 94 Other criticisms set in gradually with the arrival in France of postcolonialism; according to Émile Chabal, this took direct and effective aim at “neo-republican narratives” of the nation that Ozouf and other historians of the liberal moment had written. Fought out in the social, cultural, and academic spheres and in law and legislation, these so-called guerres de mémoires reached a head in 2005.Footnote 95 The very terrain on which Ferry had first been revived—l’école républicaine—now became the center of a débat national over the legacies of colonialism—with the law of February 2005 requiring “programmes scolaires” to include “le rôle positif de la présence française outre-mer, notamment en Afrique du Nord.”Footnote 96
Ozouf incorporated some of these criticisms while vehemently rejecting others in her second book on Ferry, in an attempt to fit the “positive role” of empire into the liberal narrative built around the Third Republic. She now conceived the “singularity” of Ferry’s contribution to it as “incarnating at once the authority of the state and the autonomy of the individual, the fulfillment of the republican promise and a critique of republican maximalism,” the nation “as heritage and as will—of tradition and liberty.” One reason for the displacement of the earlier “unity” with “tradition” soon became apparent. In this more detailed history, empire appeared as one of the props of the liberal republic, allowing it to “take root in a divided country.” As the book synopsis enticingly explained, “Thanks to the secular school system and local suffrage, politics would irrigate the poorest villages; thanks to the colonial adventure, the Republic as a civilization would shine across the vast world.”Footnote 97
Ozouf discussed the imperial side of this synthesis by way of the parliamentary duel between Ferry and his outspoken radical opponent, the future premier George Clemenceau. How did she evaluate the latter, as a voice raised against the Treaty of Bardo with Tunisia in 1881, and whose speech after Langson had helped to bring down Ferry’s ministry in 1885? While both men were admirably devoted to love of country, her sympathies went to the latter:
here it was the exaggerated one who showed himself to be circumspect, the troublemaker who preached a cautious policy; it was the cautious man who showed audacity. The one who claimed never to look back, but always forward, behaved like a man of the past. When he who venerated the wisdom of tradition thought of his great-nephews, of the century that was dawning, of the vast world to be explored, where French culture could shine.Footnote 98
Her focus on Clemenceau and Ferry was itself a response to the 2005 moment, when a short book reprinted the exchanges between them and other parliamentary voices from 1883 to 1885. In prefatory remarks in this volume, the historian Gilles Manceron argued that it made little sense to reject all criticism of France’s colonial past as communitarisme undermining universal republican values—since, these debates showed, more than a few republicans had objected to imperial expansion at the time precisely as a violation of its basis in the Universal Rights of Man of 1789.Footnote 99 Ozouf acknowledged Clemenceau’s excoriation of Ferry for his view of the French as a “superior race” with “a right vis-à-vis inferiror races.” But she demurred from sounding any note of sympathy with it, at the risk of anachronism: Clemenceau’s counterarguments today “earn a sympathetic hearing,” finding in us “an ear already seduced.” Yet, she maintained, Ferry’s humanitarian rationale for empire was more than mere “imposture,” and if he had been a “colonizer” (colonisateur), he was no “colonialist, in the full sense of the term.”Footnote 100
To support this distinction drawn from Jacques Juillard, she pointed to the work Ferry had done after his time as premier, on a senatorial commission on Algeria. As the lead author of its report in 1892, Ferry could be seen as a reformer: far from approving the exploitation of fellah by colons, or believing that Algeria could be made into France, he defended different laws for Arabs, Kabyles, and Berbers—in terms of forestry rights to reflect Arab customs, or local government, and the teaching of Algerian history in schools. Ozouf credited this flexibility to his knowledge of French peasant customs as resistant to social change from above, and his suspicion of the tendency in republican thought to uniformity and centralization.Footnote 101 The implication that these mooted reforms were in tension with—or mitigated—his reputation as a hardened imperialist was ambiguous, however. For even if he anticipated the shift from assimiliationist to associationist visions of empire, his advocacy of separate laws for native inhabitants of Algeria was quite consistent with the racial hierarchies he defended as grounds for its conquest and ongoing control.Footnote 102
In the liberal intellectual landscape of the time, this presentation nevertheless counted as a form of engagement with the imperial legacies of Ferry and the Third Republic. In a Festschrift for Ozouf in 2019, historians who had played key roles alongside her in the liberal revival of the 1980s singled out this aspect of her work for praise. In “The Jules Ferry of Mona Ozouf,” Michel Winock accepted that, “to the republic, it was also necessary to give a grand design to restore France to the first rank of great powers: the policy of colonial expansion had to be the main tool.” Ozouf had pushed back against the fashion to denigrate this “work of colonization” and “invites us to consider it without blinders or anachronism.” If “for a long time we praised Ferry for the conquest of these territories,” today “we put the colonialist on trial.”Footnote 103
Pierre Nora replied with a still more categorical endorsement. Not only did he see Ozouf as having “the immense merit” to “show that it was the same man, it was also for the same reasons, that he was in favor of education reform and colonialism.” Her presentation of the debate between Clemenceau and Ferry confirmed Nora’s sense that the latter had shown a firmer grasp of his time and place. “Personally, on the colonial problem, I agree with Ferry. There was a petty-bourgeois nationalism in Clemenceau, a lack of openness to the world. The great way to divert the French from Revenge was to open them up to the wider world.” In an atmosphere they saw as uniformly critical of this colonial inheritance in France in the new millennium, “this defense and illustration of a colonialism of the Enlightenment was strong.”Footnote 104
* * *
From ignoring the stakes of empire to an outright defense of it, the historiography on Ferry had come full circle by the turn of the new millennium in France: if more sheepishly than in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, given the rise not just of postcolonial studies but also of a large and growing literature on empire and slavery, decolonization and race, the historians of the liberal turn of the 1980s rediscovered the virtues of empire. If Furet had simply sidelined the topic, then Ozouf, Nora, Ageron, and others came to emphasize certain of its progressive qualities in an era of US-led globalization as “openness to the world.” Their work to recover a liberal tradition in France thus reproduced its imbrication with empire, a feature of this tradition that was much more significant than they recognized. In fact, the same could be said of some of their critics. For the issue was less to incorporate colonial memories into the history of liberal republicanism for the first time than to figure out why these went missing from it in the 1980s.
Furet, Ozouf, and Nora’s dismissal of the uprsurge of critical interest in the legacies of empire as simply a form of identity politics imported from the US is not very convincing. For one thing, it makes their own relationship as historians to imperial questions seem too reactive. Furet in particular had already elaborated a critique of anticolonialism by the turn of the 1970s; his hostility—along with other neo-republicans—to the “political correctness” of American academia at most confirmed this earlier viewpoint, formed in opposition to marxisant radicals in France in the aftermath of 1968, not US college campuses at the turn of the new millennium.Footnote 105 That critical reconsideration of anticolonialism was, moreover, bound up with a simultaneous drive to demolish the “myths” of the revolutionary left that had their source in 1789. In their revisionist account, the violent logic of the Terror was inscribed from the very start in the revolutionaries’ unitary, unmediated conception of power; as Eric Hobsbawm pointed out at the time, earlier French liberals had never distanced themselves from the revolution to this extent.Footnote 106
It is not trivial that the tradition of liberal republican politics that Furet and Ozouf presented as a viable antidote to the violent pathologies of the Jacobins and their heirs failed to reckon with its violence abroad, if only because they themselves ended up acknowledging—as had earlier historians—that a foreign policy diverted from direct confrontation with Germany and towards expansion overseas was a condition for the existence of the Third Republic. Rejecting the thèse de circonstances as an explanation for the Jacobins’ recourse to terror, how to explain the turn of the “founders of the Republic,” including Ferry, to annexations in the 1880s? It is enough to raise these points to suggest that doing so would have posed problems for their notion of a liberal and republican “synthesis,” in which the first term served quite literally to “pacify” the second. Once pressure became intense around 2005, Ozouf and others tried to reintegrate empire into their story—but in a flatly positive and often euphemistic rather than detailed discussion of its role in combining “unity” or “tradition” with “liberty” into a stable republican compound. Despite the growth of a rich historical literature on French liberalism, there is more to say about the importance of overseas expansion to it under the Third Republic. In the recurring cycles of engagement with Jules Ferry lies one route for further research—taking the historiographical record as so many clues to the shifting place of empire in the ongoing constructions of liberalism in France.
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