Remembering the Second Empire: Building National Identity in Third Republic France

The Franco-Prussian War lasted barely more than half a year – France declared war against Prussia in July of 1870, and by late January of 1871, it had been disastrously defeated. Despite its relatively brief duration, however, the war wrought large changes in the political, social, and cultural landscape. It not only left the country territorially dismembered and in debt to Germany: it also brought about a political revolution and a subsequent civil war that left the country deeply internally divided. In the wake of these disasters, republican politicians and intellectuals, recently restored to power, found themselves trying to construct a new, untainted sense of French national identity. 

This proposed paper contends that one of the key ways that republican thinkers tried to define this new identity was by looking backwards - towards empire and the Franco-Prussian War. By explicitly linking the events of 1870-71 to the Second Empire, writers like Alphonse Daudet, Victor Hugo, Paul and Victor Margueritte, and Emile Zola tried to disassociate both the war and the Commune from the contemporary French state. Moreover, this positioning enabled them to situate the Third Republic – however loosely defined – as the savior of the French nation. But if these writers agreed that the Second Empire was to blame for the events of 1870-71, they offered different explanations for the regime’s culpability, which in turn led them to construct distinct visions of the Third Republic and the contemporary French nation. By performing a close analysis of the variations in these authors’ narratives, this paper provides insight into the internal contestations that defined nineteenth-century republican politics and the process of reconstructing national identity after defeat and civil war.