ABSTRACT

A nation’s political thought is a reflection of its history and the political turmoil of the age in which it is written. This is particularly true of French political thought in the twentieth century. The century began with a society riven in two by the Dreyfus Affair. The wrongful imprisonment of Captain Alfred Dreyfus for high treason led not only to the subsequent publication in 1898 of novelist Emile Zola’s open-letter condemning the miscarriage of justice but also to bitter and sustained polemic among writers on politics who remained sharply divided between those who held and wished to advance the values associated with the Revolution of 1789 and those who sought a return to the “true France” of the Roman Catholic religion, the army and the monarchy. The Third Republic, born out of humiliating defeat by Prussia, the loss of Alsace and Lorraine, the trauma of the Paris Commune and its bloody repression, found itself challenged by those convinced that the republic’s sustaining ideology of solidarité was little more than a hollow sham hiding bourgeois self-interest. Theorized by the philosophers Célestin Bouglé and Alfred Fouillée and by sociologist Emile Durkheim, this doctrine sought to reconcile the claims of individual liberty and social justice and did so by placing an equal emphasis upon rights and duties. The overriding ambition was to secure social peace (Spitz 2005; Blais 2007). Yet, as disillusionment spread among those who had supported the Dreyfusard cause, the republic and its politicians appeared to embody little else but corruption and mediocrity.