“Le Talent Et L'illustration” : a Contribution to The
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- 315 - “LE TALENT ET L’ILLUSTRATION” : A CONTRIBUTION TO THE PROSOPOGRAPHY OF THE SENATE OF THE FRENCH THIRD REPUBLIC Paul Smith (University of Nottingham) Writing in 1961, François Piétri remembered his former cabinet colleague Louis Barthou as one of : The last champions of that form of conservative democracy that was, until 1936, the hallmark of the Third Republic, and which was built upon the wisdom and continuity of the Senate. […] Barthou willingly professed the view that the Senate represented the strength and good health of a Republic that owed to its upper chamber its longevity of nearly seventy years, which no other regime since the Revolution had come even close to emulating. He even went so far as to regret, and not without reason, that the Senate no longer included, as it had done at its beginning, a significant number of life members, chosen for their renown or their experience. And when the question was raised, under the Doumergue ministry [of 1934], of revising the constitutional law of 1875 with regard to dissolution [of the Chamber of Deputies], not only was Barthou utterly opposed to the Tardieu camp that advocated dissolution without the approval of the Senate, but went as far as to envisage a reform, which he had mentioned to me on a number of occasions, that included re-introducing life senatorship by creating thirty or so seats for ex officio and co-opted members1. Barthou was one of the most prominent politicians of his generation. He was first elected deputy in 1889 for a department then known as the Basses-Pyrénées, down in the far southwestern corner of France, and which comprises the French Basque country in the west and the Béarn of Henri IV in the east. Minister on several occasions between 1894 and his death in 1934, head of the government from March to December 1913, he moved to the Senate in 1922. Barthou was, moreover, a bibliophile of international reputation, a writer and a 1 François Piétri, ‘Souvenir de Barthou’, La Revue des Deux Mondes, 1er mars 1961, p. 65-75, 74-5. - 316 - patron of the arts and sciences. Edmond Rostand, one of his many literary friends, called him the ‘ministre des poètes’ and in 1918, Barthou became one of the immortels in the Académie Française. To Barthou’s mind there should be no separation between the worlds of art, science and politics. According to one of his biographers, he believed ‘that France, and the French state in particular, should be in service to Art’, but he also believed that ‘Art should serve France1‘. His views on co-opted or nominated members of the Senate emanated, then, from both his long practical experience and from a profound sense that, in shutting out its most talented and illustrious men, the Republic had denied itself access to one of the very elements that made France both great and distinguished. Barthou’s regret was by no means isolated : similar sentiments had been voiced by moderate republicans since the abolition of life senatorships in 1884. In January 1894, commenting on the latest Senate renouvellement, an editorial in the Journal des Débats complained that the upper chamber was ‘an assembly where men of talent become rarer by the day and mere hack politicians more and more numerous2‘. Auguste Scheurer-Kestner, a life senator himself, made a similar comment in his Mémoires d’un sénateur dreyfusard, and in 1903 Le Temps expressed the fear that the growing trend for deputies to move on to the upper house was transforming the Senate into nothing more than a Chamber of Deputies bis3. Each of these views carries the obvious hallmark of political nostalgia for the ‘heroic’ age of the early Third Republic, a sentiment intensified rather than dissipated by abolition of life senatorships. At their origin lies a misguided belief that life senators, who were supposed to ensure the representation of ‘le talent et l’illustration de la nation’, really were talented and illustrious, and that their presence in and leadership of the embryonic upper chamber lent it greater moral authority, raised the Senate above the mundane level of daily politics and, in so doing, elevated the purview of their fellow ‘departmental’ senators. Now, although there were undoubtedly men of outstanding talent and ability among the 116 inamovibles elected between 1875 1 Robert J. Young, ‘Cultural Politics and the Politics of Culture : The Case of Louis Barthou’, in id., An Uncertain Idea of France. Essays and Reminiscence on the Third Republic, (New York, Peter Lang 2005), p. 140-153, 146-7. 2 Le Journal des Débats, 8 janvier 1894 (‘une assemblée où les hommes de talent deviennent chaque jours plus rares et les simples politiciens de plus en plus nombreux’) 3 Le Temps, 7 janvier 1903. - 317 - and 1884 – an Emile Littré, an Edouard de Laboulaye, a Marcellin Berthelot or a Paul Broca, for example - each was elected primarily because of his political position, seldom for his ‘brilliance’ alone. Most of ‘les immortels du Sénat’ were, themselves, provincial politicians1. The upper chamber was the keystone of the compromise struck in 1875 between republicans and moderate constitutional monarchists to give the Third Republic permanent institutions. It has been described as a present given by the republicans to the conservatives2, but it was certainly the sort of present the republicans would have liked to receive themselves. The conservatives proposed a Grand Council of Notables, a mixed assembly of approximately 350, comprising ex officio members (cardinals, marshals and admirals), 150 government nominees, 10 seats in the personal gift of the head of state and a further 150 elected by departmental colleges comprising bishops, senior officers, local councillors and higher rate tax payers. The provision of so many ex officio and nominated seats underlined the monarchists’ wishes to see the upper house represent not just local notabilities, but also the great and the good. The political and social tide had turned against them, however, by 1875, and the conservatives were bargained down by moderate republicans to a Senate of 300, comprising 75 life senators and 225 departmental members who would sit for nine years. Despite conservatives’ attempts to have the life seats nominated by the government and/or the head of state, the republicans successfully insisted that these should be elected, in the first place by the National Assembly (the single chamber elected in 1871) and thereafter, as vacancies arose, by the Senate itself. The departmental seats were shared out in a very uneven and pseudo- federal manner. Each of France’s 87 metropolitan departments was allocated a minimum of two senators, except for the tiny territory of Belfort, which had one3. The more populous departments received extra seats, though in a rather arbitrary way, up to a maximum of five, 1 Mathias Bernard, ‘Le poids de la province’ in Jean-Marie Mayeur, Alain Corbin and Arlette Schweitz (eds.), Les Immortels du Sénat – Les cent seize inamovibles de la Troisième République, (Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 1995), p. 115-124. 2 Robert Gildea, The Third Republic from 1870-1914, (London, Longman 1988), 11. 3 Adolphe Thiers, the head of state, negotiated with Bismarck for France to retain the town of Belfort and its hinterland, which had previously been part of the Alsatian department of Haut-Rhin. In exchange, the victorious German army was allowed to parade down the Champs-Elysées. - 318 - so that the balance of power lay overwhelmingly with rural France1. The colleges were comprised of two categories of electors : members of the departmental (or general) council, the district councils and its deputies were ex officio members, while the nearly 37,000 municipal councils elected delegates. In 1876, when the first full election took place, and at the first two renouvellements in 1879 and 1882, each commune elected just one delegate, irrespective of its size. In 1884 the republicans made the first and last changes to the Senate. The life seats were abolished, though they were only phased out as their incumbents died, and were re-allocated to the departments. At the same time a sliding scale was introduced to determine the number of municipal delegates, based not on the population of the commune but on the size of the municipal council. The same principle is still used today2. In most respects the Senate’s powers were the same as those of the Chamber of Deputies. The two met together, as the National Assembly, to elect the President of the Republic and to revise the constitution (under the title of Congress). The Senate had the same legislative powers as the Chamber, except that the budget must be presented in the first place to the lower house and voted on there before being presented to the upper. It was unclear whether the Senate had the right to amend the budget, but senators claimed the right anyway. The Senate could not be dissolved : its members were elected by thirds every three years in what were known as ‘series’ of departments, organized in alphabetical order. The Chamber, in contrast, could be dissolved, but only upon the Senate’s approval (avis conforme) of a Presidential writ, a power that was exercised just once in the lifetime of the Third Republic. Senators also had to be aged 40 or over, compared to 25 for the Chamber. The Senate, Léon Gambetta declared, would not be a Grand Council of Notables, but a Grand Council of the Communes of France, the ‘very guts of French democracy3‘. And to those who still doubted, in 1876 he promised 1 There was also one seat each for the three Algerian departments of Alger, Constantine and Oran and for the ‘vieilles colonies’ of Réunion, Martinique, Guadeloupe and French India, though not for Guyane.