French imperial patriotism and the lost départements in the 19th century
Aurélien LIGNEREUX
School of Political Studies Univ. Grenoble Alpes - FRANCE
aurelien.lignereux@iepg.fr
In 1814, invaded France ceded some forty départements, i.e. a third of its population, by the Treaty of Paris; defeated again at Waterloo, the French then lost the last gains of almost a quarter of a century of impressive territorial expansion. This was a considerable event which, despite its notoriety and in spite of studies on certain themes (the demi-solde, chauvinism, the glorious defeat of Waterloo), has hardly given rise to any work. The weight of defeat on national sentiment remains little analysed. Worse, but this explains why, the imperial component of French patriotism, as it developed over twenty years of conquests, is ignored, so that the historiography presents a double deficiency:
- Nothing is known about how French identity were enriched, and or challenged by imperial expansion;
- Little is known about the way in which the French mourned after 1815 for past conquests (both natural borders and the France of 130 départements).
In these conditions, a triple ambition leads this paper:
- Firstly, to find a missing link in order to rewrite the dialectical history of patriotism and its defeats. We already have excellent studies on the bitterness left by the Seven Years' War and the first treaty of Paris 1763; no one is unaware of the historical and historiographical importance of 1871, the cession of Alsace-Lorraine - the 'lost provinces' - to Germany by the Treaty of Frankfurt. However, the aftermath of the disasters of 1814 and 1815 is not well known.
- Secondly, the reactions observed in 1814-1815 are indicative of the dual tendency that polarised French patriotism from the contemporary period, split between the concern to preserve the hexagonal pré carré and the imperial temptation, as illustrated by the colonial conquests, which were initially rejected by the nationalists because they were suspected of distancing the French from the "blue line of the Vosges". To work on 1814-1815 is therefore to clarify this genealogy. On the one hand, a part of the country, royalist and traditionalist, applauded the ruin of the imperial edifice, in an identitarian reaction, relieved that France was returning to its old limits ; on the other hand, Bonapartist soldiers deplored the loss of only a part of the départements (Belgium, the left bank of the Rhine), while a liberal movement sought to transcend the end of the Napoleonic empire by claiming a universal mission, which no longer implied its imperial expansion.
- Finally, it is a question of clearly defining imperial patriotism. The expression has the appearance of an oxymoron: it is based on the idea that attachment to the homeland increases with the feeling of imperial belonging. This pride in being part of a larger whole is a priori at odds with the vulgate that has long interpreted nineteenth-century European nationalism as a response to imperial integration. It turns out that not only the French were proud of their empire, but also the Belgians and Rhinelanders, or the Genoese.
That’s why, this paper articulates
- the history of circulations. The aim is to follow the itineraries of the French who left beyond the old borders and returned in 1813-1814, full of foreign references but also full of resentment. The intra-imperial itineraries of the neo-French from one département réuni to another one (the Piedmontese in Rome, the Belgians in Holland) will also be discussed, as well as in the interior of France, before and after 1815.
- the social history, as the above itineraries are established on the basis of two prosopographical databases allowing for the study of 3,000 individuals.
- the cultural history, thanks to an inventory of the cultural productions which, after 1814, kept the memory alive.
The analysis will be structured in two parts
- Firstly, to measure the reactions provoked by the shock of the defeats and the dismemberment of the conquests, taking care to distinguish between what comes under the heading of the anti-napoleonic black legend and what is more a question of rejecting imperialism in itself.
- Secondly, assess the place of references to the départements réunis and then lost in the 19th century (up to 1870, and even 1919), based not only on key episodes (the revolution and Belgian independence, the Rhine crisis in 1840, the Treaty of Paris in 1856, Napoleon III's 'pourboires'), but also by taking into account the migrations of foreign-born civil servants, who became French thanks to a territorial reunion, and who became foreigners again in 1814 and finally asked to be naturalised as French!).