The Société d'Instruction Républicaine and the Propagation of Civic Republicanism in Provincial and Rural France, 1870–1877

Abstract

A momentous political transition occurred in France between 1869 and 1879. From principal opposition force to the Second Empire, the republicans became the main party of government and the single largest political group in the National Assembly. After a period of instability this transformation was given legal form in the constitutional laws of February 1875, which founded the Third Republic. In electoral terms, the 1870s were also a critical decade, witnessing the extension of the republican political base out of its traditional urban strongholds. In by-elections after 1871, municipal and cantonal elections, and in particular the legislative elections of 1876 and 1877, the republicans established a foothold in provincial and rural France, securing it further in 1879 by winning a decisive majority in the (indirectly elected) Senate. Confirmed and accentuated in the late nineteenth century, this political realignment was achieved in large part through the republicans’ effective appeal to provincial opinion—and especially to the peasantry, who represented the majority of the active population. And unlike earlier republican successes in capturing rural support in the nineteenth century, which were ephemeral, the realignments of the 1870s and 1880s proved irreversible. Indeed, the subsequent stability of the Third Republic—the most durable republican regime in France to date— essentially rested on the rural masses’ abiding loyalty to the political order that emerged after the 1870s. The reasons and underlying character of this republican political success