Léon Gambetta

French politician

• Born: April 2, 1838
• Birthplace: Cahors, near Toulouse, France
• Died: December 31, 1882
• Place of death: Ville-d'Avray, near Paris, France

One of the most vocal critics of the Second Empire of Napoleon III during the 1860’s, Gambetta became the virtual dictator of France in 1870 during the resistance to the Prussian invasion. He was one of the most prominent and the most popular republican politicians of the period.

Early Life

Léon Gambetta (gahm-BEHT-ah) was born in southern France, where his Italian grandfather had settled his family in 1818. There the Gambettas became shopkeepers. In 1837, Gambetta’s father, Joseph, married Marie Magdeleine Massabie, the daughter of a local chemist; Gambetta’s family, on both sides, might best be described as lower middle class. Gambetta’s father wished him to follow in the family business, but in 1857 Gambetta went to Paris to study law. He had long been an opponent of the Second Empire of Napoleon III, and during the 1860’s he began to write and speak against the regime. He made his mark during that decade in his defense of various individuals accused of political crimes against the empire. In 1869, he was elected to the French Legislative Assembly, representing the southern city of Marseilles though he had also been victorious in the working-class Parisian district of Belleville. Though young, he was already a recognized leader of the opposition.

Throughout his life, Gambetta suffered from various medical problems, including the loss of an eye as a child. He was of less than average height and put on substantial weight as a young man, but his long hair and his pronounced nose gave him a dramatic appearance, especially in profile. This imposing physical presence was complemented by a charismatic rhetorical style.

Life’s Work

In 1870, France and Prussia went to war as a result of Otto von Bismarck’s Machiavellian diplomatic machinations. The French public demanded war, and although Napoleon III’s own inclinations were toward peace, he led France against its enemy from across the Rhine. This action proved disastrous. Napoleon was captured and soon abdicated, French armies were defeated, and in Paris on September 4, 1870, the former regime was replaced by a republic and a government of national defense was established. The new government was composed primarily of those elected to represent the various Parisian districts in the previous year’s election. Gambetta, who had been elected from Belleville, became minister of the interior. As Prussian troops approached Paris, it was decided to establish another governmental presence in Tours, and soon the decision was made to reinforce the Tours government with Gambetta, the youngest member of the cabinet. In Tours, he became minister of war as well as minister of the interior and became the most powerful individual in France.

Earlier, Gambetta had joined with a number of his fellow republicans to warn against the war with Prussia, but, unlike some of his republican allies, Gambetta was no pacifist. He fervently believed in France and was willing to resort to arms to save France and the republic. In Tours, Gambetta faced what he considered internal treason as well as foreign invasion; the result was that by the end of the year Gambetta had become in effect dictator of France. Some of his critics had their doubts.

Although impressively assembled, the French troops were no match for the Prussians. Gambetta wished to continue the war, but as the winter elapsed the opinion of the French public turned toward peace. Eventually, Gambetta was forced to give way, and he resigned on February 6, 1871. He had both saved France’s honor and left a residue of considerable controversy.

In the elections to the National Assembly that followed, Gambetta was victorious in ten different constituencies but chose to represent a department in Alsace, fated to be lost, along with Lorraine, to Germany as a result of the peace. When the treaty was accepted, Gambetta resigned in protest, the cause of the lost provinces remaining of paramount concern to Gambetta and to France. In the following months, Gambetta attempted to recover his damaged health, and in July he was again elected to the assembly, choosing to represent working-class Belleville.

In the years that followed, Gambetta’s prestige and influence remained widespread. Fully committed to the ideals of the republic, he initially demanded that the assembly be quickly dissolved and a new one elected with the clear objective of producing a republican constitution. He feared, along with many other republicans, that the existing assembly was too monarchist in sentiment, intent on restoring either the house of Bourbon or that of Orléans. He particularly feared a Napoleonic revival. Gambetta was also concerned about the power of the Church. Sympathetic to the positivism of Auguste Comte, he had few orthodox religious feelings. His animosity toward the Church was based less on its claims to spiritual truth than on its institutional influences on French society, particularly in education.

In time, Gambetta began to believe that the assembly could in itself become safely republican and that there might be no need to call a new constituent assembly. That attitude required compromise on his part, particularly in his acceptance of a senate, that many conservatives demanded as a curb on the democratically elected Chamber of Deputies. Accepting a senate not chosen directly by the voters, he argued that democratic reforms could be made in the future, but his willingness to compromise gained for him a reputation as an opportunist.

The future of the republic remained problematical during the early 1870’s. In 1875, the assembly adopted, by a narrow vote, a method to choose the eventual successor to the president of France, the conservative Marshal MacMahon, thus transforming the provisional republic into a more permanent one. There was no formal constitution, merely the acceptance of a series of laws that established the powers of the president, a senate, and a Chamber of Deputies.

Gambetta, as he had done earlier, pushed for Republican Union, the name of his bloc in the Chamber of Deputies, but there were more radical republicans to the left and more conservative republicans to the right. Although no socialist, Gambetta did believe in the right of labor to organize and the necessity for some government regulation of business. Unlike many of his fellow republicans on both the right and the left, Gambetta, the nationalist, believed in the need for a strong government, both internally and externally.

In 1876, Gambetta was chosen head of the important Budget Committee of the Chamber of Deputies. In early 1879, he became president of the chamber, a position of considerable prestige but one that compromised Gambetta’s political leadership. Many argued that the president of the chamber should remain above the party fray, but it was difficult for Gambetta to distance himself. Soon some claimed that Gambetta was wielding hidden power. Many predicted that Gambetta would soon become premier and form his own government, but MacMahon’s successor, the conservative republican Jules Grevy, refused to summon Gambetta, a longtime rival, until November, 1881.

Only then did Gambetta form his long-awaited Grand Ministry. There were great expectations, but, for both personal and political reasons, Gambetta was unable to fulfill his ideal of republican unity. Many of the most prominent of his republican colleagues refused to join his government, and he was forced to rely upon his own often young and untried supporters. He himself often acted too imperiously when several years earlier he might have been more accommodating. In attempting to strengthen the central government, he alienated various local interests; in advocating railroad regulation, he caused consternation among some conservative republican businesspeople. He took the Foreign Affairs ministry himself and was particularly concerned to ally France with England in Egypt.

The issue that caused his downfall was an issue with which he was long associated. Gambetta, in order to create a stronger unity among republicans, had long urged that deputies should be selected not from individual districts but collectively representing larger areas. For once, Gambetta’s opportunism failed him, and the legislature, elected by individual districts, was unwilling to adopt a different system, especially so early in its term of office. Also, many were suspicious of Gambetta’s possible dictatorial bent, and when he lost a key vote in the chamber, his government resigned after only seventy-four days.

Significance

Léon Gambetta was only forty-three years old when he resigned. His health had long been poor, and after resigning he took time away from politics to recover his strength. When he returned, he took up the cause of military reform. Gambetta’s reputation ever since 1870 had been connected to the fortunes of the military, and many accused him of being too adventurous, particularly in his desire to regain Alsace and Lorraine. Gambetta was conscious of those accusations, and while he never forgot the lost provinces he remained hopeful that someday Germany might be willing to exchange them for overseas territory. Unlike many of his countrymen, Gambetta was interested in colonial development, both in Africa and in Southeast Asia. A colonial empire would add to France’s strength; in addition, colonies might someday be traded for Alsace and Lorraine.

On November 27, 1882, while handling a revolver, Gambetta accidentally shot himself in the hand. The wound, itself minor, became infected. Gambetta gradually weakened, dying on the last day of the year. He was given a state funeral, and his body, at his father’s demand, was buried in Nice. In 1920, with the return of Alsace and Lorraine after World War I, Gambetta’s heart was placed in the Pantheon in Paris, coinciding with the golden jubilee of the Third French Republic, the republic to which he had been so committed.

An oft-expressed criticism of Gambetta was that he was too closely tied to the working classes of Belleville and that they would ensure that his words and actions would remain too radical for the moderate inclinations of most French voters. However, he did not see himself as representing only the working classes. He did speak of the “new social strata” that would come to power under the republic, but for Gambetta that controversial phrase referred not to the working classes exclusively but rather to the majority of the French population, including the middle classes, who, he argued, had been excluded from power under the kings and emperors of France’s past. Gambetta was always more a political than an economic radical, committed to majority political rule instead of advancing the claims of particular economic classes. In that he was a nineteenth century liberal, not a Marxist. Nevertheless, his opponents accused him of revolutionary radicalism.

Léon Gambetta’s career had been full of paradoxes: a half-Italian who personified French patriotism; a moderate republican who in the eyes of many epitomized revolutionary radicalism; a pragmatic politician accused of being both an ideologue and an opportunist; a representative of the proletariat, or the middle classes, who wished to become dictator. When he died, some argued that he was still posed between Left and Right, and it is impossible to say in which direction he might have turned. What can be said is that he dominated French politics from 1870 until his death in 1882 as did no one else of that time.

Bibliography

Brogan, D. W. France Under the Republic: The Development of Modern France, 1870-1939. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1940. Brogan’s elegantly written study of the Third Republic is considered one of the classic historical accounts of the subject. Gambetta plays a significant role in the first part of the work, sometimes published separately under the title From the Fall of the Empire to the Dreyfus Affair.

Bury, J. P. T. Gambetta and the Making of the Third Republic. London: Longman, 1973. The author is the major English biographer of Gambetta. In Gambetta and the National Defense (1970), he analyzed Gambetta’s role during the Prussian invasion of France in 1870-1871. Here he carries the story of Gambetta and the Third Republic through 1877.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Gambetta’s Final Years: “The Era of Difficulties,” 1877-1882. New York: Longman, 1982. Bury concludes his exhaustive study of Gambetta. The author is sympathetic toward his subject, finding Gambetta to be perhaps the crucial figure in the founding of the Third Republic. Bury is not uncritical, however, suggesting that in his later years Gambetta’s judgment was corrupted by his power and popularity.

Deschanel, Paul. Gambetta. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1920. Written by a later president of the Third Republic. Well written and sympathetic to the subject. Less a scholarly work than an interpretation of Gambetta’s contributions to later French history.

Horne, Alistair. The Fall of Paris: The Siege of the Commune, 1870-71. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965. The author is a specialist in modern French history. Horne presents a readable story of the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, in which Gambetta plays a central role.

Lehning, James R. To Be a Citizen: The Political Culture of the Early French Third Republic. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001. A history of the early years of the republic, in which the French government worked to implement political reforms, including universal male suffrage.

Mayeur, Jean-Marie, and Madeleine Reberioux. The Third Republic from Its Origins to the Great War, 1871-1914. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1984. This valuable work is more analytical and more structured than Brogan’s work, which was published a generation earlier. Gambetta plays a major role in the early chapters.

Stannard, Harold. Gambetta and the Foundation of the Third Republic. London: Methuen, 1921. Like Deschanel’s, this study of Gambetta was also written soon after Germany’s defeat in World War I. In contrast to Deschanel, however, Stannard is not French, and although he admires Gambetta, Stannard is more critical. Suggests that regardless of Gambetta’s own motives, some of his statements and actions did seem to imply, to others, the turn toward dictatorship.

Taithe, Bertrand. Citizenship and Wars: France in Turmoil, 1870-1871. London: Routledge, 2001. Information about Gambetta, including his role in assembly during the Third Republic, is included in this examination of the concept of citizenship during this period of social and political upheaval in France.