Everything about L On Gambetta totally explained
Léon Gambetta (
April 2,
1838,
Cahors,
Lot -
December 31,
1882,
Paris) was a
French statesman prominent after the
Franco-Prussian War.
Youth and education
He is said to have inherited his vigour and eloquence from his father, a Genoese grocer who had married a Frenchwoman named Massabie. At the age of fifteen, Gambetta lost the sight of his left eye in an accident, and it eventually had to be removed. Despite this handicap, he distinguished himself at school in
Cahors, and in
1857 went to
Paris to study
law. His southern temperament gave him great influence among the students of the
Quartier Latin, and he was soon known as an inveterate enemy of the imperial government.
Career
He was called to the bar in 1859, but, although contributing to a Liberal review, edited by
Challemel-Lacour, didn't make much of an impression until, on
November 17 1868, he was selected to defend the journalist
Delescluze, prosecuted for having promoted a monument to the representative Baudin, who was killed while resisting the
coup d'état of 1851. Gambetta seized his opportunity and attacked both the
coup d'état and the government with a vigour which made him immediately famous.
In May
1869, he was elected to the Assembly, both by a district in Paris and another in
Marseille, defeating
Hippolyte Carnot for the former constituency and
Adolphe Thiers and
Ferdinand de Lesseps for the latter. He chose to sit for Marseille, and lost no opportunity of attacking the Empire in the Assembly. At first opposed to the war with
Germany, he did not, like some of his colleagues, refuse to vote for funds for the army, but took a patriotic line and accepted that the war had been forced on France. When the news of the disaster at
Sedan reached Paris, Gambetta called for strong measures. He proclaimed the deposition of the emperor at the
corps législatif, and the establishment of a republic at the
Hôtel de Ville. He was one of the first members of the new
Government of National Defense, becoming
Minister of the Interior. He advised his colleagues to leave Paris and run the government from some provincial city.
This advice was rejected because of fear of another revolution in Paris, and a delegation to organize resistance in the provinces was despatched to
Tours, but when this was seen to be ineffective, Gambetta himself (
October 7) left Paris in a balloon - the "
Armand-Barbès" - and upon arriving at Tours took control as minister of the interior and of war. Aided by
Freycinet, a young officer of engineers, as his assistant secretary of war, he displayed prodigious energy and intelligence. He quickly organized an army, which might have relieved Paris if
Metz had held out, but
Bazaine's surrender brought the army of the crown prince into the field, and success was impossible. After the French defeat near
Orléans early in December the seat of government was transferred to
Bordeaux.
Early in his political career, Gambetta was influenced by
Le Programme de Belleville, the seventeen statutes that defined the radical program in French politics throughout the
Third Republic. This made him the leading defender of the lower classes in the
Corps Législatif. On (
January 17) (
1870), he spoke out against naming a new Imperial Lord Privy Seal, putting him into direct conflict with the regime's de facto prime minster,
Emile Ollivier. (see Reinach, J.,
Discours et Playdories de Léon Gambetta, I.102 - 113) His powerful oratory caused a complete breakdown of order in the Corps. The Monarchist Right continually tried to interrupt his speech, only to have Gambetta's supporters on the Left attack them. The disagreement reached a high point when M. le Président Schneider asked him to bring his supporters back into order. Gambetta responded, thundering "l'indignation exclut le calme!"(Reinach,
Discours et Playdories, I.112)
Exile to San Sebastián
Gambetta had hoped for a republican majority in the general elections on
February 8,
1871. These hopes vanished when the conservatives and Monarchists won nearly 2/3 of the six hundred Assembly seats. He had won elections in eight different
départements, but the ultimate victor was the Orléanist
Adolphe Thiers, winner of twenty-three elections. Thiers's conservative and bourgeois intentions clashed with the growing expectations of political power by the lower classes. Hoping to continue his policy of "guerre à outrance" against the Prussian invaders, he tried in vain to rally the Assembly to the war cause. However, Thiers' peace treaty on
March 1,
1871 ended the conflict. Gambetta, disgusted with the Assembly's unwillingness to fight - neither for nation nor honor - resigned and quit France for
San Sebastián in
Spain.
While in
San Sebastián, Gambetta walked the beaches daily, the warm sea winds of early spring doing little to refresh his mind. The
Paris Commune had taken control of the city. Although often cited as another iteration of 'urban revolt' in Paris, especially by Roger V. Gould (see Gould R.,
Insurgent Identities), the Commune was supported almost entirely by the working class and the "petit bourgeoisie", as seen in "arrondissement" election charts. (Tombs, R.,
The Paris Commune, 1871, p. 110) Judging by his early career, one would expect Gambetta to have been a supporter of the Commune. However, in a letter from Gambetta to
Antonin Proust, his former secretary while Minister of the Interior, he referred to the Commune as "les horribles aventures dans lesquelles s’engage ce qui reste de cette malheureuse France". (Gambetta, L.,
Lettres de Gambetta, no. 118 (a Antonin Proust, 24 Mars 1871)
The reason for his change of heart still eludes us. However, a combination of conflicts may be ultimately responsible. As a lawyer, Gambetta was a part of the new republican tradition of the Paris bar, which had its foundation in the naming of
Jules Favre to the governing Council of the Paris Bar. As a republican lawyer, Gambetta had fought oppression and authoritarianism with rhetoric rather than rifles, from the bar instead of the barricade. This meant that Gambetta could neither philosophically comprehend nor actively participate in the bloody street fights that, coming from the
"sans-culottes", created the lower class revolutionary identity (see Joly, M., "Le Barreau de Paris"; Debré, J.-L.,
Les Républiques des Avocats).
It is also arguable that Gambetta's ideas were shaped by his father being a grocer in
Marseille. As a small-scale producer during the decades of the
Second Industrial Revolution in France, Joseph Gambetta had chain groceries taking business away from his establishment. This added a measure of resentment to the "petit bourgeois" identity. This resentment wasn't only directed at bourgeois industrial capitalism, but also at the worker, who was now proclaimed as the backbone of the French economy, stripping the title from the small, independent shopkeeper (see Nord, P.,
Paris Shopkeepers and the Politics of Resentment). This resentment may have been passed down from father to son, and manifested itself in an unwillingness to support the lower-class Communards usurpation of what rightfully belonged to the "petit bourgeoisie".
Return
On
June 24 1871, a letter was sent by Gambetta to his Parisian confidant, Dr. Édouard Fieuzal:
November 5 1871 he established a journal,
La Republique française, which soon became the most influential in France. His orations at public meetings were more effective than those delivered in the Assembly, especially the one at
Bordeaux. His turn towards moderate republicanism first became apparent in
Firminy, a small coal-mining town along the
Loire River. There, he boldly proclaimed the radical republic he once supported to be "avoided as a plague" (
se tenir éloignés comme de la peste) (Discours, III.5). From there, he went to
Grenoble. On
26 September 1872, he proclaimed the future of the Republic to be in the hands of "a new social level" (
une couche sociale nouvelle) (Discours, III.101), ostensibly the petite bourgeoisie to whom his father belonged. When
Adolphe Thiers fell in
May 1873, and a Royalist,
Marshal MacMahon, was placed at the head of the government, Gambetta urged his friends to a moderate course. By his tact, parliamentary dexterity and eloquence, he was instrumental in voting in the
French Constitutional Laws of 1875 in
February 1875. He gave this policy the appropriate name of "opportunism," and became one of the leader of the "
Opportunist Republicans."
It wasn't until
May 4,
1877, when the danger of reactionary intrigues was strong and the clerical party had begun a campaign for the restoration of the temporal power of the pope, that he delivered his famous speech denouncing "clericalism" as the enemy. On
May 16, Marshal MacMahon, in support of the clerical reactionaries, perpetrated his
parliamentary coup d'état, and on
August 15 Gambetta, in a speech at
Lille, gave him the alternatives,
se soumettre ou se démettre. He then undertook a campaign to rouse the republican party throughout France, which culminated in a speech at Romans (
September 18,
1878) formulating its programme. MacMahon, unwilling to resign or to provoke civil war, had no choice but to dismiss his advisers and form a moderate republican ministry under the premiership of
Dufaure.
When the downfall of the Dufaure cabinet brought about MacMahon's resignation, Gambetta declined to become a candidate for the presidency, but supported
Jules Grévy; nor did he attempt to form a ministry, but accepted the office of president of the chamber of deputies in
January 1879. This position didn't prevent his occasionally descending from the presidential chair to make speeches, one of which, advocating an amnesty to the
communards, was especially memorable. Although he directed the policy of the various ministries from behind the scenes, he evidently thought that the time wasn't ripe for asserting openly his direction of the policy of the Republic, and seemed inclined to observe a neutral attitude as far as possible. However, events hurried him on, and early in
1881 he headed off a movement for restoring
scrutin de liste, or the system by which deputies are returned by the entire department which they represent, so that each elector votes for several representatives at once, in place of
scrutin d'arrondissement, the system of small constituencies, giving one member to each district and one vote to each elector. A bill to re-establish scrutin de liste was passed by the Assembly on
May 19, 1881, but rejected by the Senate on
June 19th.
This personal rebuff couldn't alter the fact that his name was on the lips of voters at the election. His supporters won a large majority, and
Jules Ferry's cabinet quickly resigned. Gambetta was unwillingly asked by Grévy on
November 24,
1881 to form a ministry, known as
Le Grand Ministère. Many suspected him of desiring a dictatorship; unjust attacks were directed against him from all sides, and his cabinet fell on
January 26,
1882, after only sixty-six days. Had he remained in office, he'd have cultivated the British alliance and cooperated with Britain in Egypt; and when the succeeding
Freycinet government shrank from that enterprise only to see it undertaken with signal success by Britain alone, Gambetta's foresight was quickly justified.
On
December 31,
1882, at his house in Ville d'Avray, near
Sèvres, he was killed by an accidental discharge from a revolver. Five artists,
Jules Bastien-Lepage, a realist painter,
Antoni Proust, defensor of the vanguard who Gambetta had named Minister of Beaux-Arts,
Léon Bonnat, an academic painter,
Alexandre Falguière, who did his mortuary mask, and his personal photographer
Étienne Carjat all sat at his death-bed, making five widely different representations of him which were each published by the press the following day . His public funeral on
January 6 1883 evoked one of the most overwhelming displays of national sentiment ever witnessed.
Gambetta rendered France three inestimable services: by preserving her self-respect through the gallantry of the resistance he organized during the
German War, by his tact in persuading extreme partisans to accept a moderate Republic, and by his energy in overcoming the usurpation attempted by the advisers of Marshal MacMahon. His death at forty-four cut short a career which had given promise of still greater things, for he'd real statesmanship in his conceptions of the future of his country, and he'd an eloquence which would have been potent in the education of his supporters.
Personal life
The romance of his life was his connection with
Léonie Leon, the full details of which were not known to the public till her death in
1906. She was the daughter of a French artillery officer. Gambetta fell in love with her in 1871. She became his mistress, and the liaison lasted until he died. Gambetta constantly urged her to marry him during this period, but she always refused, fearing to compromise his career; she remained, however, his confidante and intimate adviser in all his political plans. It seems she'd just consented to become his wife, and the date of the marriage had been fixed, when the accident which caused his death occurred in her presence. Contradictory accounts of this fatal episode exist, but it was certainly accidental, and not
suicide. Her influence on Gambetta was absorbing, both as lover and as politician, and the correspondence which has been published shows how much he depended upon her.
However, some of her later recollections are untrustworthy. For example, she claimed that an actual interview took place in 1878 between Gambetta and Bismarck. That Gambetta after 1875 felt strongly that the relations between France and Germany might he improved, and that he made it his object, by travelling incognito, to become better acquainted with Germany and the adjoining states, may be accepted, but M. Laur appears to have exaggerated the extent to which any actual negotiations took place. On the other hand, the increased knowledge of Gambetta's attitude towards European politics which later information has supplied confirms the view that in him France lost prematurely a master mind, whom she could ill spare. In April 1905 a monument by
Dalou to his memory at Bordeaux was unveiled by
President Loubet.
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