Contenu du sommaire : Faire autorité dans la France du XIXe siècle

In early nineteenth-century monarchical France, discourses concerning the weakening of paternal authority flourished. The father was presented as deprived of the means to make himself obeyed, and as increasingly challenged by his children. At fault was the French Revolution, which had inserted the principles of equality and freedom into the very heart of family relations, thus undermining one of the most solid institutions of the Ancien Régime. Also to blame were the authors of the Civil Code who had failed to restore authority to the father; younger generations who had refused paternal law; as well as new social and economical conditions. If these ideas were the province of a small group of conservative thinkers and jurists under the Restoration, they subsequently gained currency and range. The unjust exercise of paternal authority was criticized in the case of both a father's excessive weakness towards his children and his abuse of authority. These accusations against the weakness of paternal authority were intimately linked to a larger denunciation of French society generally as suffering from a loss of political and moral authority.

In the years after the French Revolution, an ever-increasing number of villagers contested the authority of the parish clergy. After 1860, this challenge became more radical. The priest's authority suffered further erosion from the progressive secularization of the village notion of belonging: religious life no longer played a central role in the matrix of village sociability. Beginning in the 1840s, men of the Church became aware of the practice of local parish history and how it could reinforce the prestige and local influence of the clergy. The curé who wrote an historical account of the village contributed to the emergence of local historical consciousness, itself a powerful cohesive influence. In addition, the historian-priests endeavored in their work to promote a definition of the local community in a way that could legitimate their own authority: the parish was compared to a large patriarchal family and the authors emphasized the religious dimension of village identity.

If the gendarme is central to understanding the nature and exercise of authority in the nineteenth century, it is not because he is a primary, emblematic figure but because his position is so difficult to define. Does he represent authority? Does he possess authority? Is he simply an agent of authority? Is his authority invested in him individually or does it derive from his status as a member of an institutional whole? Because the gendarmerie failed to be acknowledged by civil and judicial authorities, its officers created a phrase –“the moral force” – to describe the specific kind of influence they were claiming. The phrase is judicious because it allows the gendarmerie to overcome two contradictions: first, that they are a public force which struggles to impose its will on legitimate forms of violence, and second, that they are an armed force which cannot make use of their arms. The gendarmerie benefits from their exploitation of a “moral force” which transcends mere authority. At the same time, however, it demonstrates its submission to the law, in order to better enforce it.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, the suppression of corporations in which the master was defined as a paternal authority, and the crumbling of the traditional hierarchy of the artisanal workshop, necessitated a complete reconfiguration of workplace authority. The progressive emergence of the figure of the foreman resulted from these transformations. While the term pre-existed the French Revolution, it was industrialization and its new technical and disciplinary demands which generalized the function of the foreman. Little by little he emerged in the textile industry to supervise the workers, stimulate productive flows, and support mechanization. Although the employers represent the foreman as a competent, intelligent worker, and as the guarantee of good manufacturing order, an examination of daily interactions in the workshop suggests that his position was ambivalent. In the first wave of industrialization, the factory remained defined by weak hierarchical structures of authority, as well as by the preservation of pockets of worker autonomy. Because of this fact, the position of the foreman was often precarious, and the exercise of his authority uncertain.

How to reconcile the freedom of business with the maintenance of a certain market order? Which authorities can discipline merchants and factory owners after the end of corporations? These questions were posed throughout the French nineteenth century, and particularly by official and unofficial institutions which arbitrated or judged economic disputes. Drawing on their own personal qualities, these judges constructed a new equilibrium in which formal and informal forms of authority complemented each other, and in which judicial decisions were balanced by wider attempts to construct a moral, communal order.

The myth of the public intellectual or l'écrivain engagé who derives political power from his literary authority gained enormous traction in the nineteenth century. The case of Eugène Sue allows us to take a closer look at this figure. Indeed the author of Mystères de Paris saw literature as a “poetic representation” of the working classes which would make up for their lack of political representation. After his election to the Assemblée in 1850, Sue was a silent representative of the working classes, unable to speak in public. His socialist supporters began to doubt his candidacy and what increasingly appeared to be an élection romantique deprived of any real political significance. Sue's disappointing political career allows us to address both the origin and nature of writers' participation in the public debates of 1848, and also to consider writers apart from their glorious image as “the romanticist Magi”. Sue's case also reveals that, as early as the mid-1840s, the meaning of writers' involvement in politics was bitterly debated by Socialists.

This article seeks to define the authority of the mayor vis à vis the highly symbolic question of food provisioning. During the food crises of the first half of the nineteenth century, the mayor had the authority to enforce the rights of urban or village communities against greedy merchants or agitators, and sometimes even representatives of the State who wanted to impose unrestricted commercial freedom. The mayor had the prerogative to police the markets, keep an eye on the bakers, and fix the price of bread. After mid-century, however, food supply no longer played a primary role in the construction and expression of mayoral authority. There are several reasons for this development. Political change made the mayor an elected official of universal suffrage. This fact had the effect of cutting his ties with a central sovereign power and bringing into question his authority to manage business. In addition, tensions in subsistence markets relaxed at the same time that questions of food were less and less dealt with at the local level. This trend is seen in the disappearance of the octroi, once an essential source of municipal revenue, as well as in matters of quality control, health and even price levels.

A productive comparison can be made between nineteenth-century French schoolmasters and warrant officers. Both were entrusted with what this article describes as “first-degree authority”. Such a comparison illuminates in both groups a twin obedience to democratic rule and patriotic discipline. Before 1880, their common subaltern position found expression in their low standard of living, their unflattering public image, and their frequent recourse to brutality in daily relations with students/recruits. In the wake of the French defeat and the Paris Commune in 1870-1871, the nation underwent an examination of conscience which triggered contradictory expectations. On the one hand, the army was expected to become a school for the nation, but on the other hand, schoolmasters had to distinguish themselves from warrant officer instructors. It was their duty to inculcate proper moral and civic values in children of modest backgrounds, keeping in mind that the majority of them would one day be drafted into the army. Compulsory school attendance finally succeeded in confronting the problem of literacy. As military service shortened, the role of warrant officers changed. Their first duty was to act as intermediaries with those in charge of the recruits' first technical training sessions; at the same time, they took up a “social role” which complemented that of the officers. The First World War both demonstrated and undermined the power of this national pedagogical approach. After 1918, schoolmasters increasingly contested the ideological and social functions of authority which they had embraced, and which had linked them to army training for working-class children.