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Part 1
Social and Political History
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After the Plebiscite: Cafés and Conf lict in Nice
and Savoy during the 1860s
At 11:45 p.m. on 6 April 1861, police inspector Helder Delafont and police-
man Denis Landrin came across an extremely drunk Barthélemy Math-
eudi, a 50-year old fisherman residing in the Rue de l’Arc in Nice. In a
high voice, Matheudi cried out, ‘Merde pour la France, vive Garibaldi! La
police française sont tous des mendiants, des brutes, des carognes, j’y chie
sur la face!’ All of his screams were uttered in the local dialect, Niçard, ‘que
nous avons néanmoins parfaitement compris’, the two of ficers reported.
They were not inclined to be too forgiving of Matheudi, who swung his
fists wildly and even attempted to bite them as they made their way to the
police station. But even as he struggled, Matheudi modified his drunken
cries to ‘Vive la France!’, prompting Delafont and Landrin to conclude in
their report that he must have been sober enough to understand the sedi-
tious nature of his words. The following day, a tearful Matheudi said that
he was sorry and that he did not remember anything that had happened,
but his reputation spoke volumes: he had been arrested on three previous
occasions in the preceding seven months for similar of fences.1
At the time Matheudi was picked up in the streets of Nice, the city
had been French for less than one year. In March 1860, the French emperor
Napoleon III had concluded a treaty with the northern Italian state of
Piedmont-Sardinia, acquiring Piedmont’s two transalpine territories, the
Duchy of Savoy and the County of Nice (which included both the city
1 Archives départementales des Alpes-Maritimes (hereinafter AD followed by the
name of the department), 1 M 347, Report no. 144 by the police commissioner of
the 1st arrondissement of Nice to the Prefect, 7 April 1861. Due to the handwriting,
it is dif ficult to tell whether the culprit’s name was spelled Matheudi or Mathendi.
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and the rugged Alpine foothills to its immediate north and east). France
took formal possession of the provinces the following June, transform-
ing Savoy into two departments, Haute-Savoie and Savoie, and adding
the much smaller County to territory taken from the neighbouring Var
department to create a new Alpes-Maritimes department. On the surface,
the annexation of Nice and Savoy presented few of the cultural dif ficul-
ties that would have confronted Napoleon III had he managed to acquire
other territories, notably the Rhineland, considered necessary to secure
France’s ‘natural borders’.2 Geographically, the two provinces are located
in the western side of the Alps, which was said to be the ‘French slopes’.
Though part of the Piedmontese state from medieval times, Nice and
Savoy had been among the first continental territories annexed to France
during the French Revolution, and had only been restored to Piedmont
by the treaties of 1815. Linguistically and culturally, the territories also
appeared predominantly Gallic in character. Savoy’s own patois, a form of
Franco-Provençal, persisted in common use, but the territory was largely
French-speaking in 1860. Together with the Aosta Valley, Savoy had been
the only French-speaking component of Piedmont-Sardinia and had looked
increasingly out of place in a state that was progressively nationalising along
Italian lines. In the County of Nice, Niçard, an Occitan-Ligurian mélange,
was comparatively more widespread, particularly among the working classes
and in the mountainous, isolated arrière pays. Nevertheless, many of the
County’s elites spoke both French and Italian, newspapers were published
in both languages, and by 1860 a sizeable number of Frenchmen had made
Nice their home. They were known as the ‘French colony’ in a city whose
mild climate had already begun to attract large numbers of af f luent for-
eigners during the winter months.
Napoleon III’s primary reasons for acquiring Nice and Savoy were
strategic, but he bolstered French claims to the territory by appealing to
nationalist principles. The March annexation treaty had been followed
2 For a discussion of the significance of this concept in French history, see Peter Sahlins,
‘Natural Frontiers Revisited: France’s Boundaries since the Seventeenth Century’,
The American Historical Review 95:5 (December 1990), 1423–51.
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in April 1860 by plebiscites employing universal male suf frage, in which
the vast majority of Niçois and Savoyards voted to approve the treaty and
join France. The unanimity of the operation (which surprised even some
of those involved in planning it) provided Napoleon III with the evidence
he needed to claim that the inhabitants’ opinions about the annexation
had been consulted. As the crowning expression of public opinion, the
plebiscites permanently closed formal debate about the annexation, and
were held up as the of ficial moment of identity creation, or identity af fir-
mation. For having joined France, Nice and Savoy became subject to the
restrictions on freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly imposed
by the Second Empire on the rest of the country. Less than two weeks after
overseeing preparations for the plebiscite in the County of Nice, Napoleon
III’s personal envoy in the province, Senator Pierre Piétri, made this point
explicitly. Reporting on the subversive activities of the province’s pro-Italian
minority, known as the Italianissimes, he complained: ‘On a pu voter non,
on a pu s’abstenir. Aujourd’hui que l’arrêt est rendu, une opposition légale
n’est plus possible. Ailleurs, on n’aurait pas toléré, une heure, cette entreprise
d’émeute contre la volonté exprimée par tout un pays’.3 The moment for
opposition had passed, and the government expected no further deviations
from this universally expressed opinion.
During the following decade, there were few available legal avenues
through which ordinary Savoyards and Niçois could express any kind of
critical ref lection about their change of nationality. Instead, such senti-
ments normally remained unexpressed, were confined to private settings,
or have been lost to history. Nevertheless, the ef ficient and widespread
reach of the police during the Second Empire has made it possible to get
a glimpse into one space where Niçois and Savoyards pondered what the
annexation of their territories meant: the café. As the historian Susanna
Barrows has argued, the cafés, cabarets, taverns and other establishments
collectively known as débits de boisson, were ‘arenas of everyday life’ in the
nineteenth century, places where ordinary people, including the uneducated
3 Archives Nationales de France (hereinafter AN), F1c I 129, excerpt of a report from
Senator Piétri in Nice to the Minister of Foreign Af fairs, 27 April 1860.
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and those of modest means, discussed their hopes and fears, joys and dis-
appointments.4 They also discussed politics, and in Nice and Savoy, that
meant the annexation. In contrast to the formality and of ficial importance
of the plebiscite (the government inf luence over which naturally raises
questions as to the genuine extent of its ‘plebeian’ character) the café was
an unof ficial site of identity negotiation and debate for Savoyards and
Niçois in the decade after the annexation.
Of course, cafés and taverns were not necessarily antithetical to the
government. In the months leading up to the plebiscite, the campaign to
win supporters to the cause of the annexation in the two mountainous and
remote territories had, in fact, often been waged in the informal, localised
world of the neighbourhood café. Pierre Fontaine, a liberal from Magland in
northern Savoy who opposed the annexation for political reasons, recorded
in his diary on 4 February 1860 that the annexation had been the main
topic of discussion that day in the café Jean Revuz in nearby Cluses.5 In both
provinces, local notables were the primary shapers of public opinion: they
formed annexationist committees in most of the largest urban areas, and
visited small villages and towns in person. The bills and receipts that these
notables submitted to the government for reimbursement in the months
after the plebiscite demonstrate that many of their expenditures were occa-
sioned in café settings. In October 1860, Alfred Borriglione, the mayor
of the town of Sospel (Alpes-Maritimes) – who would go on to become
one of the most inf luential mayors of Nice – submitted an invoice for 201
francs that he had authorised a local businessman, a M. Bonfanti, to make
‘afin que la votation fut unanime pour la France’. Thus Bonfanti had spent
30.75 francs on wine for Giacomo Goiron, 34.70 francs on wine and bread
for Stefano Viarru, and 10.40 francs on cigars for Gioanni Imbert (to say
4 See Susanna Barrows, ‘Parliaments of the People: The Political Culture of Cafés in
the Early Third Republic’, in Drinking: Behavior and Belief in Modern Society, eds
Susanna Barrows and Robin Room (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991),
87–97; and Susanna Barrows, ‘Nineteenth Century Cafés: Arenas of Everyday Life’,
in Pleasures of Paris: Daumier to Picasso, ed. Barbara Shapiro (Boston: Museum of
Fine Arts, 1991), 17–26.
5 Diary of Pierre Fontaine, 4 February 1860, excerpted in the Revue Savoisienne 101:1–2
(1961), 102–42; and 101:3–4 (1961), 208–307, 214.
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nothing of the 19.65 francs he had spent on the intriguing if cryptic activity
of ‘distribuzione di denaro ai forni’ [‘money distribution at the bakeries’].
One of the names on the list, Jean-Baptiste Raibaut, on whom Bonfanti
had spent 19 francs, was himself a cabaret owner in Sospel.6
Prior to the plebiscites, the French government itself was fully aware
of the importance of appealing to public opinion locally and informally
through conversations in local banquet halls animated by a glass of wine or
eau-de-vie. In the spring of 1860, the government found volunteers among
the 50,000 Savoyard emigrants then settled in Paris willing to return to
Savoy in March and April, armed with government funds, as emissaries of
the annexation.7 They were dispatched into the areas where the annexation
had encountered the most resistance, particularly in the northern provinces
of the Chablais and the Faucigny, where the pro-French movement was
competing with a pro-Swiss movement founded on fears that the annexa-
tion would disrupt economic relations with Geneva. One such emissary,
M. Delacquis, a native of Saint-Roch, made a tour through the Faucigny,
stopping at numerous towns along the way. On 9 April, he participated
in a banquet for 200 people in Sallanches, where ‘voyant qu’ils n’avaient
que très peu à boire je fis apporter du vin assez pour les mettre de Bonne
humeur’, he reported. At Chamonix, reputed to be one of the most pro-
Swiss towns in Savoy, Delacquis invited the syndic (mayor) and the entire
municipal council to dinner at his hotel:
‘Au Bout de trois heures de débats,’ he recalled, ‘je les avais tous réunis à mon point de
vue. C’est à dire qu’ils me promirent de voter une adresse à Sa Majesté l’Empereur dès
le lendemain et que je pouvais compter sur la votation en faveur de la France. Enfin
nous nous mîmes à table et je les traîtai bien, car j’étais sûr que je venais d’obtenir
un succès inspiré’.
6 AN, F1c III (Alpes-Maritimes Nouveau) 2, Letter from Alfred Borriglione, mayor of
Sospel to the Prefect, 25 October 1860; Bill for ‘the total spent by the undersigned
at the moment of the voting for the annexation by order of the mayor of this city’,
24 October 1860.
7 Though the government does not seem to have done likewise in the County of Nice,
government representatives from neighbouring departments attended similar ban-
quets and festivals there as well.
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In Saint-Gervais, one of the towns where Delacquis had dif ficulty convinc-
ing some of the town notables of the merits of annexation to France rather
than to Switzerland, Delacquis treated the mayor and the judge, as well as
the bell-ringer of nearby Cluses, to drinks the night before the plebiscite.
He also arranged for alcohol to be served the following day during the vote
itself. All the alcohol did not come cheap: Delacquis had spent over 2,000
francs during his trip through the province.8
The success of the plebiscite must be attributed at least in part to the
ef fectiveness of the government and local elites at spreading the annexation-
ist gospel in Nice and Savoy’s cafés and dining halls. As Matheudi’s arrest
on the streets of Nice the following year demonstrated, however, cafés
could just as easily become sites of opposition. On 8 April 1861, François
Bouvéry, an itinerant peddler originally from Les Echelles in the Savoie
department, got into a heated discussion in a café in Annecy, the prefec-
ture of the Haute-Savoie. By his own admission, the conversation turned
to the subject of the annexation, about which Bouvéry had little good
to say. ‘Les Suisses avaient bien fait de brûler l’Empereur en ef figie parce
qu’il se conduit indignement envers eux qui l’avaient reçu dans son exil’,
he announced, referring to Napoleon III’s period of exile in Switzerland
prior to his return to France to stand for the election to the presidency of
the Second Republic. Bouvéry pursued: ‘Victor-Emmanuel et Garibaldi
lui reprendront bientôt la Savoie et en chasseront les Français. Les Suisses
ont bien fait de s’emparer du drapeau Français à Gex et de le jeter dans le
lac’. This was a reference to a major diplomatic incident from the autumn of
1860 when a delegation of Frenchmen from Gex (Ain) who had come to see
Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie on their tour through Savoy had been
attacked by a mob of Swiss ruf fians and had been robbed of their f lag.9
Bouvéry later admitted that he had been drunk, but claimed that he
had only uttered these words as a reprisal to insults directed at him by
8 AN, F1c I 129, Letter from Delacquis (to the Minister of the Interior?), 20 May
1860.
9 AN, BB24 687–709 S 63 5613, Report no. 60, Imperial appellate court of Chambéry,
of fice of the Public Prosecutor to the Minister of Justice, re: request for a pardon, 2
February 1864.
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another café patron. Unfortunately for Bouvéry, the man sitting opposite
him at the table happened to be a plainclothes police of ficer, who accord-
ing to Bouvéry, was ‘silencieux jusque-là, et semblant en quelque sorte
tolérer la discussion, il n’en fit pas moins son rapport’.10 The other café
patrons were not so tolerant: they threw Bouvéry out of the café. He was
promptly arrested by the police of ficer, but managed to escape from his
holding cell and f led into Switzerland for protection. Bouvéry’s references
to the Italian monarch Victor-Emmanuel, to Garibaldi, and to Switzerland
were clearly seditious. While he did not complain about the ef fects of
the annexation, he did suggest that the ultimate revenge on Napoleon III
would be France’s losing the provinces that it had just acquired. In fact, the
administration had been surveying Bouvéry’s activities carefully since just
after the annexation. In addition to an impressive record of previous arrests,
Bouvéry was all the more suspicious because he had no fixed residence. Due
to his frequent trips across the Savoyard-Swiss border, the police suspected
him of smuggling anti-Imperial brochures from Geneva into France. He
was condemned in absentia by the criminal court of Annecy to a year of
prison, a 500-franc fine and the cost of the trial. Two years later, having
been expelled from Switzerland for fraud, Bouvéry was finally arrested in
Saint-Julien and imprisoned in September 1863.11
As this incident suggests, the opposition that manifested itself in sedi-
tious speech could be both politically and personally motivated. Niçois
and Savoyards often deployed national or regional identities as a type of
epithet, solely for the purpose of creating conf lict or confronting other
patrons of the café. On 1 October 1861, François Bruchon and his friend
Jean-François Reverchon entered the Laverrière café in Etrembières, a vil-
lage close to Annemasse (Haute-Savoie), where they ordered a bottle of
white wine and quickly became drunk. Several French railway employees
10 AN, BB24 687–709 S 63 5613, Petition from François Bouvéry to the Emperor for
a pardon, 26 December 1863.
11 AN, BB24 687–709, S 63 5613, Report no. 60, Imperial appellate court of Chambéry,
Public Prosecutor to the Minister of Justice, re: request for a pardon, 2 February
1864; Letter from the Minister of the Interior, General Direction of Public Security
to the Minister of Justice, 20 February 1864.
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were sitting at a nearby table when Bruchon raised his voice and began to
make insulting remarks, declaring ‘Badinguet [an offensive term for Napo-
leon III] a joué de bonheur jusqu’à présent, mais il succombera comme
son oncle, on a bien vu les alliés à Paris! Les annexés sont des imbéciles, les
Français sont des coquins, et quant à moi, je suis satisfait d’être Suisse’. Eye-
witnesses claimed that Bruchon’s remarks were pronounced loud enough
for the other people in the establishment to hear, and particularly seemed
to be addressed to a conducteur des ponts et chaussés. The conducteur got
up, went over to Bruchon and Reverchon, and politely asked them to stop
their behaviour, noting that most of the people who were in the café were
French and that he would not allow them to insult the Emperor or France.
Bruchon continued to shout insults at the conducteur and the conflict began
to escalate. Sensing that things might get out of control, Reverchon tried
unsuccessfully to calm down Bruchon, and even tried to drag him out of
the café. Overcome with anger, the conducteur moved to forcibly remove
them from the café, with the help of his fellow railway workers. Bruchon
threatened them that he and Reverchon were not alone, crying, ‘Si nous
avions notre brigade, leur af faire serait bientôt faite!’ One of the employees
ran to nearby Annemasse to request assistance from the gendarmes, but
before they arrived, Bruchon’s brigade had already intervened: five men
burst into the café, attacked the railway workers with stones and clubs, and
then ran out. Two of the railway workers, Rey and Bolon, were injured.12
The Tribunal of First Instance of Saint-Julien arrondissement found
Bruchon and Reverchon guilty of insulting the Emperor and ‘inciting hate
and enmity between citizens,’ although the court found that there was
insuf ficient evidence to convict them for the injuries to Rey and Bolon.
They were each condemned to six months of prison, 500 franc fines, and the
12 AN, BB24 637–52 S 61 7749 and S 62 203 (these files are tied together, but are mis-
filed: Bruchon’s file is inside the folder labeled Reverchon, and vice versa), Report on
Bruchon, Imperial appellate court of Chambéry, Public Prosecutor to the Minister of
Justice, 5 February 1862; report on Reverchon, 6 February 1862; Ministry of Justice,
analysis of the request for a pardon, 26 February 1862.
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costs of the trial.13 The two men, who began their prison sentences at the
end of December, both applied for a pardon from the Emperor, includ-
ing a cancellation of the prison sentence and the fine. Bruchon blamed
his conduct on the ‘qualité capiteuse du vin de 1861’ he had consumed of
a wine ‘réputé pour irriter les nerfs, et porter aux actes de violence’ and
noted that the two Frenchmen in the café had partaken in the same liba-
tion. But he also expressed regret for having insulted the sovereign and
the French, ‘un peuple auquel la Savoie est si heureuse d’être annexée’.14 In
support of their request for a pardon, both men submitted certifications
from the mayor of Annemasse that testified to their good character and
devotion to the Emperor and to France. Bruchon, in addition, received
the support of Hippolyte Pissard, one of the Haute-Savoie’s deputies to
the legislature. Bruchon’s insults in the café illustrate the complexities of
identity politics in Savoy in the years after the annexation. They were cal-
culated to have maximum impact, as they took aim not only at the French
but also, through the use of the pejorative term annexés, at Savoyards. This
was a term invented by the Swiss and employed throughout the 1860s, a
period when tensions on the Franco-Swiss border ran high. Yet Bruchon
could not have been satisfied to be Swiss, as he was not and never had been
a citizen of that country. He was himself an annexé, a naturalised French
Savoyard, having been born in nearby Arthaz. Moreover, the mayor’s letters
testified that, contrary to the seditious speech uttered in the café, the two
had actively worked to promote the annexation. Both had taken part in a
pro-French demonstration, and Bruchon had, in the words of the mayor,
‘engagé d’autres jeunes gens à voter comme lui’. For his part, Reverchon
even claimed to have gotten into a fistfight with one of his own brothers
who had planned to cast an oppositional vote in favour of Switzerland.15
13 AN, BB24 637–52 S 61 7749 and S 62 203, Excerpt of minutes of the Tribunal of 1st
instance for the arrondissement of Saint-Julien, 28 November 1861.
14 AN, BB24 637–52 S 61 7749 and S 62 203, Petition of François Bruchon to the
Emperor for a pardon, ca. 18 December 1861; Petition of François Bruchon to the
Emperor for a pardon, 14 August 1862.
15 AN, BB24 637–52 S 61 7749 and S 62 203, Letter from Hippolyte Pissard, 16
December 1861; letter from the Mayor of Annemasse, 13 December 1861; letter from
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The two episodes related above, both of which occurred in the Haute-
Savoie, the northern of the two Savoyard departments, underscore the fact
that in Savoy, Switzerland played a notable role in anti-governmental café
discourse. This can be attributed not just to its border position, but also
to unresolved tensions arising from the annexation. In 1860, the pro-Swiss
movement in northern Savoy had been seconded by the Swiss government,
which made territorial claims to three of Savoy’s northern provinces, and
initially even Napoleon III had intimated that he was prepared to of fer
territorial concessions to Switzerland in the area. Though the economic
foundations of the pro-Swiss movement had been seriously weakened by
the French government’s concession of a free-trade zone with Geneva, the
movement did not disappear entirely. Switzerland remained an attrac-
tive beacon for the disgruntled in Haute-Savoie. Those who disliked the
authoritarianism of the Empire praised Switzerland’s liberties, and those
who opposed French centralisation and wished to preserve some measure
of regional autonomy for Savoy were attracted to Switzerland’s decentral-
ised structure of autonomous cantons. For the government, the problem
of pro-Swiss feeling was compounded by the porous nature of the Franco-
Swiss border. When a group of Swiss nationals trooped through the town
of Monnetier-Mornex carrying the Swiss f lag in 1864, the local gendarme
reported that ‘quelques habitants de Monnetier trouvent de la part de cette
société suisse un fait vexatoire, tandis qu’au contraire, ceux du Parti Suisse,
qui est assez nombreux dans cette commune et y trouve ses intérêts, n’y ont
vu qu’un amusement agréable et inof fensif de la part de cette société’.16
In the Alpes-Maritimes, the attractions of a foreign state (in this case,
the new Italy) also animated discussions in cafés. The pro-Italian faction
in the former County was comparatively coherent and was a major preoc-
cupation of French administrators during the 1860s. On the evening of 2
March 1863, a Niçois carter named Jean-Baptiste Maïssa and his friends
the Mayor of Annemasse, 14 December 1861; Petition of Jean-François Reverchon
to the Emperor for a pardon, ca. 25 December 1861.
16 AD Haute-Savoie, 4 M 12, report no. 167 from the Gendarmerie Impériale, 26th
legion, company of the Haute-Savoie, to the Prefect, 21 May 1864.
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Passeron and Chabaud, entered the café of M. Lacoste in the Rue de la
Préfecture, where a number of French workers were already drinking.
Maïssa cheerfully proceeded to sing a little song that included the verse,
‘Garibaldi est le seul homme qui puisse délivrer notre chère Italie. Les
Niçois et les Italiens sont à même de couper la barbiche de ce mannequin
qu’on appelle Napoléon III’. Lacoste immediately asked Maïssa to leave his
establishment, but Maïssa refused to go gracefully, shouting ‘Je ne sortirai
pas sans avoir mis en pièces un Porc de Français!’ A violent brawl ensued,
with Maïssa assisted by Passeron and Chabaud, who added fuel to the fire
by crying, ‘Vive Garibaldi! Vive Emmanuel [Victor-Emmanuel]! A bas la
France!’ In the ensuing struggle to detain Maïssa until the police arrived,
Lacoste’s clothes were torn and tiles on the façade of the shop broken. This
incident may actually have been premeditated, as it was reported that Maïssa
had friends stationed outside the café as reinforcements in the event of a
fight.17 Tried in the police court for seditious cries and rebellion, Maïssa
and Gastaud each received a one-month prison sentence and Passeron
received twenty days.18 As with Bruchon in Savoy, Maïssa’s behaviour did
not correspond to his legal citizenship; he had not opted to adopt Italian
nationality at the time of the annexation.
As the incidents involving Matheudi and Maïssa suggest, part of what
made Nice more troublesome than Savoy during the 1860s was the emerg-
ing power of the Garibaldian myth. While Garibaldi was a romantic figure
throughout Europe, Italy’s great national hero had been born in Nice to par-
ents from Liguria, and had publicly opposed the cession of his home town to
France. Prior to the ratification of the annexation treaty, Garibaldi had even
made an impassioned plea in the Piedmontese Chamber of Deputies not
to ratify the handover of the County. His subsequent exploits in Sicily and
17 AD Alpes-Maritimes, 1 M 348, Central police commissioner of Nice to the Prefect,
8 March 1863; AN, F1c III (Alpes-Maritimes Nouveau), Copy of excerpt of report
from the Prefect of the Alpes-Maritimes on the state of the department, 7 March
1863.
18 AD Alpes-Maritimes, 1 M 348, Note from the central police commissioner of Nice
to the Prefect, 21 March 1863; draft letter from the Prefect to the Ministry of the
Interior, 25 March 1863.
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his contributions to the final making of the Italian state inspired awe and
enthusiasm in Nice, where the pro-Italian minority adopted Garibaldi as
a quasi-mythical revisionist figure (the actual Garibaldi carefully distanced
himself from Niçois irredentism). In February 1863, one of the most vocal
opponents of French rule, Abbé Albert Cougnet, updated the tradition
of peddling relics for the age of nationalism when he made the rounds of
several cabarets in Nice showing of f rags that he claimed had been dipped
in Garibaldi’s blood.19 Throughout the decade, whenever rumours spread
about Garibaldi’s activities in Italy and Europe, the administration steeled
itself for trouble. No sooner had a rumour begun to circulate that Garibaldi
was to pass through the town of Sospel in September 1863 than the police
commissioner there reported that the Italians (by this he meant the pro-
Italian faction) in the village ‘ont l’air de comploter’, and had paraded
through the city at night singing patriotic Italian songs.20
Not all incidents in Nice and Savoy’s débits de boisson were animated by
the tensions arising from the negotiation of regional or national identities.
Much of the hostility directed to France took aim directly at the political
authoritarianism of the Empire, which was why Napoleon III and Empress
Eugénie were so frequently the targets of insults. In the two newly-French
provinces, this kind of political opposition occurred especially in Savoy,
which had a stronger liberal political tradition. In addition to the inf luence
of neighbouring democratic Switzerland, many of those Savoyards who had
opposed the annexation in 1860 had done so out of their attachment to
liberalism. Many had been reluctant to leave a Piedmont that they believed
to be embarking on liberal reforms under Cavour in favour of an explic-
itly authoritarian state. As the decade wore on, political opponents of the
Empire grew more numerous, even as Napoleon III himself attempted to
reform the state along more democratic and representative lines. On 29
March 1868, Ferdinand Habert, a mail service inspector, was playing with
19 AD Alpes-Maritimes, 1 M 348, Letter from the Ministry of the Interior, General
Direction of Public Security, to the Prefect, 15 February 1863.
20 AD Alpes-Maritimes, 1 M 348, Report from the Police Commissioner of Sospel to
the Prefect, 26 September 1863.
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via Victoria University of WellingtonAfter the Plebiscite: Cafés and Conf lict in Nice and Savoy during the 1860s 39
his firearm in the parlour of the Hôtel Impérial in Lanslebourg (Savoie).
Taking the bust of the Emperor from its place on the mantelpiece, Habert
placed it on the dining room table and fired a gunshot through its left
chest, shouting, ‘Si personne ne le tue s’il venait à passer à Lanslebourg,
je le ferais moi-même!’ Others reported him speaking to the bust, saying
‘Tiens, con, je ne t’ai pas manqué’. He then proudly showed of f his handy
work to the others in the room. One observer, a M. Laugier, suggested that
Habert repair the statue with cement, to which Habert replied, ‘Non, non,
je veux y mettre un pain à cacheter rouge [some red sealing wax] pour imiter
le sang’. The owner of the establishment was so upset by the scene when
she returned that she grabbed the bust and turned it over to some local
children to break up and use for chalk. When the police became involved,
they then had to retrieve the bust from the children.21
Though employed in Savoy, Habert may not have been Savoyard, as
he had served in French armies prior to the annexation. His exact origins
notwithstanding, this incident demonstrated that opposition to the Second
Empire was now spreading from what administrators called l’ancienne
France to the Savoyard departments, a troubling development in a province
that had been optimistically (though probably not accurately) described
in the early 1860s as having ‘point de partis politiques comme le reste de
la France. Nos dissensions intestines lui sont étrangères’.22 This was exactly
what the authorities feared. Whether those mentioned in the police reports
covering cafes were French, Savoyard or Niçois in origin, the government
worried about the ef fect that seditious speech would have on the assimila-
tion of Nice and Savoy’s populations into France. To put it dif ferently, the
issue of public morale was as much at stake as the issue of public morality.
Take the case of Joseph Boutal, a soldier from l’ancienne France who was
in Chambéry on leave in 1863. While stumbling around town drunk, he
21 AN, BB18 1762 A4 7930, Letter from the Public Prosecutor of the Imperial appellate
court of Chambéry to the Minister of Justice, 9 April 1868; Letter from the Public
Prosecutor of the Imperial appellate court of Chambéry to the Minister of Justice,
18 May 1868.
22 AN, BB30 3752, Trimester report no. 273 from the Public Prosecutor of the Imperial
appellate court of Chambéry to the Minister of Justice, 9 May 1863.
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via Victoria University of Wellington40 Mark Sawchuk
shouted out ‘A bas les Français! Vive la République!’ The public prosecutor
in Chambéry found that while this of fence would not have been too grave
by itself, it became serious because the of fending speech had been uttered
in a city only recently annexed to France.23 The fact that the emergence of
political opposition in Savoy closely mirrored the rest of France ironically
pointed to the province’s increasing ties to the national whole – though
this was a development that the Emperor and his administration would
not have appreciated.
Café conf licts in Nice and Savoy during the 1860s also illustrate the
uneasy relationship between the inhabitants’ desire for better governance
and the desire to preserve longstanding local autonomy. As scholars such as
Eugen Weber have shown, nineteenth-century peasants throughout France
often complained about what they saw as meddling and interference into
their local af fairs by representatives of centralised French government.24
This established pattern was magnified in Nice and Savoy, whose inhabit-
ants had been accustomed to being governed from the other side of the
Alps by a more distant and generally less ef fective central government. In
December 1861, M. Joseph Agnelli of Isola (Alpes-Maritimes) was arrested
with four other young men for ‘rebelling against the gendarmerie’. They
had got into a fistfight with the gendarmes, who claimed that the men were
making too much noise during a party held in the town’s maison commune
in honour of several townsmen who had recently returned from service in
the Italian armies. Agnelli’s grandfather Jean Vera wrote a brave and remark-
ably candid letter to Napoleon III requesting a pardon for his grandson,
in which he explained that the young men had not meant to revolt against
the authorities, and had certainly drunk too much, but that the conf lict
was also due to ‘l’ignorance des nouvelles lois qui nous requièrent et un
service de police pas trop élastique auquel on était habitué sous l’ancien
Régime’. Vera’s use of the term ‘old regime’, normally reserved to refer to
23 AN, BB18 1666 A3 8259, Letter from the Public Prosecutor of the Imperial appellate
court of Chambéry to the Minister of Justice, 4 February 1863.
24 See Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France,
1870–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976).
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via Victoria University of WellingtonAfter the Plebiscite: Cafés and Conf lict in Nice and Savoy during the 1860s 41
the French government before 1789, may well have been an intentional
rhetorical attempt to underline the extent to which the inhabitants of Isola
experienced the annexation as a profound change in their daily lives.25
Yet even as complaints emerged in Nice and Savoy about the strict
enforcement of law and order by the new French government, notably in
the regulation of festivals, taverns and public morality, others begged the
government to do more. The County of Nice had been French less than
six months when the mayor of the small mountain village of Berre (Alpes-
Maritimes) wrote to the Prefect, explaining that his commune was virtually
ungovernable and asking for assistance.
Soit pour cause de bonne foi, soit pour malice, soit parce que la loi n’est pas exécutée
dans les environs, soit pour la bonhomie, à la négligence de mes prédécesseurs, le fait
est, que pendant la nuit ici, les jeunes gens surtout ont toujours chanté, fréquenté les
cabarets, les boîtes, et les jours fériés, aussi pendant la messe paroissiale, et au temps
des vêpres, et en sortant souvent enivrés; voilà la source de rixes et disputes accom-
pagnées d’ameutements [sic] dans les rues, et d’outrages, et de blessures.
He requested that the Prefect assign him a ‘zélé’ police commissioner and
two rural guards, and also asked that he arrange for the gendarmes of the
canton to patrol the town undercover on Sunday nights.26 Other complaints
ref lected the inevitable irritation that some felt when the expected benefits
of the annexation did not materialise as quickly as had been hoped. In M.
Liautaud’s inn in Saint-Martin-d’Entraunes (Alpes-Maritimes), doctor
Florentin Salicis, put out by the terrible state of the roads he had just tra-
versed between Guillaumes and Saint-Martin, had little complementary
to say about French administration. ‘Le Gouvernement français est un
Gouvernement de rien du tout; ses employés sont tous des propres à rien.
Ils sont bons à rester chez eux à boire la bouteille, ils sont incapables de
fonctionner’, he snif fed. Having detained Salicis, the arresting gendarme
25 AN, BB24 653–73, S 62 1749, Letter from the Public Prosecutor of the Imperial
appellate court of Aix-en-Provence to the Minister of Justice, 24 April 1862; Petition
of Jean Vera to the Emperor for a pardon for Joseph Agnelli, 28 February 1862.
26 AD Alpes-Maritimes, 1 M 346, Letter from the mayor of Berre to the Prefect, 2
October 1860; Letter from the mayor of Berre to the Prefect, 24 October 1860.
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via Victoria University of Wellington42 Mark Sawchuk
noted that Liautaud had tolerated this speech passively without interrupt-
ing it or informing the authorities, and suggested to his superior that they
shut down the establishment for a time as an example to others.27
To what extent did the opposition or frustrations expressed by ordinary
Niçois and Savoyards in cafés indicate a real undercurrent of separatist sen-
timent in the two regions? The answer is complex. Throughout the decade,
reports on the state of public opinion composed by the prefects and public
prosecutors in Aix-en-Provence and Chambéry tended to downplay the
existence of anti-governmental or anti-French opposition, especially agita-
tion that opposed the settlement of 1860. In both provinces, the administra-
tors did not deny the existence of pro-Swiss or pro-Italian factions, but did
not view them as serious threats, although they did view ‘drunkenness’ as
endemic to the area. They preferred to see café conf licts as a sign of oppo-
sitional weakness, not strength. In his report of July 1862, the Procureur
Général in Aix-en-Provence characterised the pro-Italian party in Nice as
negligible: ‘Quelques bruyantes manifestations de Cabaret, aussitôt suivies
d’une répression énergique, sont les seuls symptômes de son existence et
c’est presque exclusivement après les libations du dimanche que ces scènes
isolées se produisent au milieu d’une population indifférente’, he scof fed.28
Nevertheless, administrators also referred constantly to what they saw as
the insularity of Niçois and Savoyards and the resilience of their provincial
character. Ultimately, the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–1 would serve as a
turning point. In both the Haute-Savoie and the Alpes-Maritimes, small
but nonetheless real separatist movements emerged following the collapse
of the Empire at the hands of Prussia. And in both areas these lingering
movements had all but evaporated by the end of the 1870s.
This brief glimpse into the ephemeral world of nineteenth-century
Niçois and Savoyard cafés shows that instead of settling the questions of
national or political identity in the two provinces, the plebiscites of 1860
27 AD Alpes-Maritimes, 1 M 343, Letter from the Imperial gendarmerie, 16th legion,
company of Alpes-Maritimes, arrondissement of Puget-Théniers, to the Sub-prefect
of Puget-Théniers, 16 April 1862.
28 AN, BB30 3703, Trimester report from the Public Prosecutor of the Imperial appel-
late court of Aix-en-Provence to the Minister of Justice, 4 July 1862.
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via Victoria University of WellingtonAfter the Plebiscite: Cafés and Conf lict in Nice and Savoy during the 1860s 43
served rather as their point of departure. Nowhere else in France had the
question of national belonging been posed so recently, nor (by virtue of the
ballot box) in such explicit terms. The plebiscites had forced the populations
of Nice and Savoy to consider weighty matters of political, national and
cultural identity, questions that remained salient well after the ballots had
been removed from the last electoral urn and tallied. Behind the unanim-
ity of the plebiscite, and under the surface calm imposed by the repressive
world of the Second Empire, the annexation left ordinary Savoyards and
Niçois to sort out their national, regional and political loyalties. They would
continue to do so over the course of the decade, in the same cafés and tav-
erns in which they had discussed the coming of the annexation in 1860. In
Nice and Savoy, cafés were a site where identities met, collided, fused, and
were tempered into that elusive whole that we call the nation.
References (other than police archives)
Barrows, Susanna, ‘Nineteenth Century Cafés: Arenas of Everyday Life’, in Pleasures
of Paris: Daumier to Picasso, ed. Barbara Shapiro (Boston: Museum of Fine
Arts, 1991), 17–26.
Barrows, Susanna, ‘Parliaments of the People: The Political Culture of Cafés in the
Early Third Republic’, in Drinking: Behavior and Belief in Modern Society, eds
Susanna Barrows and Robin Room (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1991), 87–97.
Sahlins, Peter, ‘Natural Frontiers Revisited: France’s Boundaries since the Seventeenth
Century’, The American Historical Review 95:5 (December 1990), 1423–51.
Weber, Eugen, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976).
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via Victoria University of WellingtonBarbara Lebrun and Jill Lovecy - 9783035300444
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via Victoria University of WellingtonLouisa Zanoun
From the Second Reich to the Third Republic:
Identities and Politics in the Moselle département,
1918–19361
Introduction
At a party congress in Strasbourg in June 1935, Maurice Thorez, the leader
of the French Communist party (PCF), declared, ‘La situation en Alsace-
Lorraine est […] particulièrement complexe. [L]a question nationale […]
est et reste la question sensible’. Six months later, in line with Moscow’s
new anti-fascist tactics, the PCF claimed that there was no such thing as a
question nationale and that all French people, including those from Alsace,
Lorraine and the Moselle, the subject of this essay, should stand united
behind the one and indivisible Republic. For Maurice Thorez, the principle
of la question nationale was based on his understanding that the people of
Alsace-Lorraine were a national minority living under French oppression.
It was the PCF’s decision to abandon the issue of la question nationale and
the accession to power of the left-wing coalition of the Popular Front in
1936 (of which the Communist party was a leading member) that sealed
the fate of this hitherto defining principle in the Moselle’s interwar poli-
tics. The national question or, as it has also been referred to, the question
identitaire or in the case of the Moselle, the particularisme mosellan, crossed
party, class and ideological divisions and permeated all aspects of local
1 The author would like to thank the University of London’s Central Research Fund
and the London School of Economics and Political Science’s Research Travel Fund
for funding some of the research presented in this article.
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via Victoria University of Wellington46 Louisa Zanoun
politics. By and large the manifestos of all the political organisations that
existed in the département ref lected, to some extent, this particularisme:
they either rejected it or they accepted it and used it for political ends.
The most prominent rejectionists were the French Socialist party and the
Radical-Socialist party. Those who accepted it were principally the PCF,
the conservative Catholic Union Républicaine Lorraine and the autono-
mist Heimatbund.
As many historians have argued, the period of the Popular Front
marked the culmination of the radicalisation and polarisation of French
politics between left and right.2 In the Moselle this polarisation led the
population to look beyond the boundaries of their region and identify
themselves within the wider national and international political context.
Consequently, the question of political identity took precedence over that
of regional identity. This was seen in the results of the national legislative
elections with the slow decline of the centre-right particularist Catholic
Union Républicaine Lorraine at the national elections and the rise of the
Communist party and new parties of the far right. In light of all this, this
chapter will seek to answer two questions: (a) what was the particularisme
mosellan and (b) to what extent did this particularisme shape the Moselle’s
interwar politics and vice versa? In order to answer these questions, the
first part of this chapter will of fer a brief overview of the origins of the
particularisme mosellan. The second part will explore its exploitation by
local political organisations, namely the Union Républicaine Lorraine, the
autonomist Heimatbund and the regional federation of the PCF. Then
brief ly, the third part will examine how the issue of regional identity gave
way to that of political identity during the first years of the Popular Front
in the mid-1930s.
2 For an examination of politics in the period of the Popular Front France, see Julian
Jackson, The Popular Front in France: Defending Democracy, 1934–1938 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985) and Serge Wolikow, Le Front populaire en France
(Bruxelles: Editions Complexe, 1996).
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via Victoria University of WellingtonIdentities and Politics in the Moselle département 47
The Particularisme Mosellan: An Overview, 1918–1924
Following the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian war (1870–1) and the
Frankfurt peace treaty of May 1871, France ceded to a victorious Germany
provinces on its eastern frontier: Alsace and parts of eastern Lorraine,
which consisted of the southern area of the Meurthe département and a
large section of the Moselle département.3
Henceforth part of Lorraine became Lothringen and was admin-
istratively attached to Alsace, despite previously having had no substan-
tial historical, cultural or political relations with it. It became part of the
Reichsland Elsass-Lothringen province of the new German Reich, and
remained under German rule for the next forty-seven years. As the new
rulers began ‘germanising’ the provinces, they required the local population
to choose between French and German citizenship. Those who opted for
French citizenship had to leave the territory by 1 October 1872. Accord-
ing to Carolyn Grohmann, only 6 per cent of Lorrainers opted for French
citizenship.4 By comparison, Metz, the capital of the Moselle which had
been Francophone for centuries, lost 20 per cent of its population includ-
ing the notables who had occupied prominent positions in the region’s
political and economic spheres.5 Consequently, Metz, the old capital of
the Moselle département, lost much of its inf luence when the Germans
chose Strasbourg, Alsace’s largest town, as the Reichsland ’s new administra-
tive, institutional and political capital. The Moselle’s dual subordination
3 The exact territories ceded to Germany were the Bas-Rhin, the Haut-Rhin except
Belfort, three quarters of the Moselle, one third of the Meurthe and two cantons
of the Vosges, Saales and Schirmeck. For further reading, see Richard Hartshorne,
‘The Franco-German Boundary of 1871’, World Politics 2 ( January 1950), 209–50.
4 Carolyn Grohmann, ‘The Problems of Integrating Annexed Lorraine into France,
1918–1925’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Stirling (1999), 7; Hélène Sicard-
Lenattier, Les Alsaciens-Lorrains à Nancy, 1870–1914 (Haroué: Gérard Louis, 2002),
56. See also Alfred Wahl, L’Option et l’Emigration des Alsaciens-Lorrains, 1871–1872
(Paris: Editions Ophrys, 1974).
5 Grohmann, op.cit., 8.
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via Victoria University of Wellington48 Louisa Zanoun
to German and Alsatian authority left many Mosellans feeling resentful;
this sentiment largely contributed to shaping the region’s particularisme,
which began to emerge in the 1870s.
During World War One, the region was put under strict military rule:
the press was controlled, any action deemed anti-German was severely
repressed and many among the local Francophile elites were interned in
Germany.6 After the war, the provinces returned to French sovereignty
and the German Lothringen became the Moselle département. Alongside
Alsace, it was put in the care of three départemental commissions (com-
missariats) located in Metz, Strasbourg and Colmar. All three reported
to the high commission (haut-commissariat) of Alsace-Lorraine based in
Strasbourg, which reported directly to the of fice of the Prime Minister
in Paris. It is worth noting that the Moselle was once more put under the
direct authority of Strasbourg. When Alexandre Millerand took of fice as
High Commissioner in Strasbourg in March 1919 he knew of the various
problems facing the three départements and their reintegration within
French sovereignty as he wrote, ‘It is certain that the transition from one
rule to another and from one code of laws to another will cause many
problems. For it must be remembered that half a century means much in
the life of a people’.7 Millerand was a keen supporter of a transitory regime
that should use persuasion to bring Alsace and the Moselle into the French
Republic. He recommended, in his own words, ‘de ne pas précipiter les
choses’.8 Like General Mangin and Marshall Foch before him, he prom-
ised Mosellans that ‘la République respectera vos croyances, vos coutumes
et vos traditions’.9
In her study of the francisation of the Moselle, Carolyn Grohmann
reveals that between December 1918 and late 1921, 100,000 Germans left
6 For an examination of the Great War in the Moselle, see Pierre Brasme, Moselle 1918
– Le Retour à la France, (Paris and Sarreguemines: Pierron, 2008), 13–61.
7 Alexandre Millerand, ‘Alsace-Lorraine, The Touchstone for Victory, Plans for the
Future’, The Times (6 September 1919), 40.
8 Alexandre Millerand, ‘L’Alsace-Lorraine’, Le Temps (16 April 1919), 45.
9 Archives Nationales de France (AN), Millerand papers, speech notes (May 1919),
470AP44.
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via Victoria University of WellingtonIdentities and Politics in the Moselle département 49
the Moselle; around 20 per cent of the population.10 Although the major-
ity of the 100,000 who left the region did it of their own accord, some
were forcibly expelled to Germany. Indeed, in order to purge the region
of German elements and identify the level of ‘Frenchness’ of the local
population the French setup a four-tier system which classified the local
population on account of their blood origin rather than their place of birth,
thus contradicting the traditional Republican principles of citizenship. But
Mosellans felt ill at ease with the deportations and what they considered
an unjust and arbitrary system that had condemned Germans but also
Mosellans to exile. As Carolyn Grohmann duly notes, the commissions
‘had caused untold damage to the reputation and perceived integrity of the
new French regime’.11 Consequently, the euphoria that had welcome French
troops when they entered the region in November 1918 was replaced by a
disaf fection that even had its own name: the malaise mosellan. Perhaps the
most noticeable expression of this malaise was the resurgence of a strong
regional identity, formed of socio-linguistic, religious and political ele-
ments and forged in earlier times. Charles Beckenhaupt, a contemporary
journalist who studied the Autonomist movement in Alsace in the interwar
period, argued that this malaise was a reaction to the German annexation
in 1871. As he wrote, ‘c’est à 1870 et non à 1918 que remonte l’origine du
malaise’.12 This view is shared by François Roth who argues that Mosellans
developed a strong regional identity after 1871 when their patriotism based
on local customs and myths devoid of any Teutonic reference was repressed
by their new German rulers. Like Grohmann, he argues that this regional
identity resulted from a strong resentment towards Germany and France
but also towards Alsace.
Unlike Alsace, which presented a rather homogenised linguistic land-
scape with largely German and dialect speakers, the Moselle was split into
two large linguistic zones: German- and Platt-speakers in the eastern half
10 Carolyn, Grohmann, ‘From Lothringen to Lorraine: Expulsion and Voluntary
Repatriation’, Diplomacy and Statecraft 16:3 (2005), 583.
11 Ibid., 580.
12 Charles Beckenhaupt, Race, Langue ou Patrie? (Strasbourg: Libraire Istra, 1930),
10.
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