The National Guard, created on July 13, 1789, crossed almost the entire XIXe century. Is it the memory of the Revolution, the incarnation of the superior interests of the Nation, an instrument in the hands of the bourgeoisie? ? A look back at an institution disputed as much by the riot as by the power.
The National Guard hardly lends itself to synthesis. Created at the start of the French Revolution, it is a law enforcement force, essentially responsible for public peace, armed and in uniform, but unpaid, non-professional, and under civil authority. Over the century of its existence (1789-1871), it experienced ebbs and flows, different organizations depending on the regimes, sometimes on one side of the barricade, sometimes on the other, opening or closing its ranks to workers. and peasants, central or marginal in political life. Louis Girard fortunately attempted it, and his work remains a reference, but it excludes the French Revolution and essentially questions the guard in its relationship to the State, to central power. Georges Carrot, more recently, left a useful sum to know the developments of the organization, its functioning, in an approach of the history of law and institutions. A conference in 2005 provided the necessary nuance that the more local, more social approach allows, enriching many of the questions outlined ; but above all it gave pride of place to the French Revolution (out of three days of conference, only half a day addressed the XIXe century) and had the flaws of the genre (pointillism, gray areas). The work of Roger Dupuy, professor emeritus at the University of Rennes II and great specialist in the French Revolution, therefore offers the first synthesis, over the century, of the history of the Guard.
A civic and bourgeois institution
On July 13, 1789, the bourgeois of Paris created a “ national guard », responsible both for containing the popular riot and protecting the city surrounded by the king’s troops. On July 14, the guard, which had just adopted a new blue-white-red cockade, participated in the storming of the Bastille. This glorious baptism gave it a revolutionary aura that it would keep throughout the century. The institution persists under all regimes, but taking variable forms: bourgeois public order militia at times (1789-1792, Restoration and July Monarchy, Second Empire), citizen, popular and democratic guard at others ( 1793, 1848).
On the eve of the siege of Paris, in 1870, the Guard was moribund, an astonishing survival that was only brought together for a few solemnities. But the war and the memories of the mass uprising of the French Revolution brought it back to life. In besieged Paris, 190 battalions were organized, armed and assembled 300,000 men. Now, with peace, they are neither dissolved nor disarmed. During the 72 days of the Commune, the national guards, then called the Federates, defended the city against the Versaillese. Born from the first revolution of the great XIXe century, the National Guard dies after the last: the conservative Assembly will be keen to definitively suppress this institution, which is too revolutionary and dangerous. In July 1871, the Guard was disbanded.
Despite this long history, the work is lopsided in favor of the French Revolution – which should not be surprising from one of its leading historians. Regarding the XIXe century, Roger Dupuy mainly focuses his attention on the highlights of the history of the militia, on its times of awakening, when citizen enthusiasm swells the numbers and motivates the service, that is, with the exception of the years 1814-1816, the times the revolutions of July, of 1848 and finally of the Commune. Consequently, this prevents him somewhat from understanding how and why a revolutionary institution persists once the Revolution is over, and from grasping, behind the impression of being put to sleep, the reasons for maintaining a civic and bourgeois institution.
But it is above all because what interests the author is above all to understand revolutions, to “ complete, he writes, knowledge on the social alchemy of revolutionary insurrection », which the Guard proves to be a perfect observatory, since its battalions bring together all social classes, all professions and all opinions. What’s more, in this century where each revolution cites the previous ones, to legitimize itself, define itself, justify itself in continuity as well as in overcoming, the maintenance of the institution born on July 13, 1789 and which awakens with each revolution of the century is an opportunity to study the transmitters of memories, gestures, rituals, revolutionary experiences. It is therefore rather a history of the Guard in revolution(s) that Roger Dupuy offers.
Certainly, the work addresses the classic questions in the histories of the militia (and the forces of order in general): analysis of successive organizations, evolution of personnel, place of the Guard in relation to the army (with the central question of the Guard as a possible reserve), recurring hesitations between two conceptions of the institution, force “ national » with broad recruitment and extensive missions, or local, bourgeois, public order militia. But he is much more interested in the political uses of the institution.
It reinforces the idea that the Guard remains, throughout the century, an essential body of political legitimization. “ It is up to the Guard alone to distinguish a revolution from a riot », proclaimed the Democratic Electoral Committee of the Seine on February 24, 1848, after the Paris Guard had refused to help Louis-Philippe remain on the throne. It must be seen that the participation of the Guard in the storming of the Bastille gives it a mythical dimension. It immediately becomes the embodiment of the fundamental interests of the Nation.
For this, the attitude of the Guard can legitimize either the change of power, or its maintenance ; it is also constantly contested by riots and power. This is indeed the ambiguity and the interest of this institution: as an agent of order, it has always been a potential source of disorder, because it embodies the limit of the State’s monopoly on legitimate violence, in the name of the right to resist oppression. Certainly, universal suffrage from 1848 deprives the Guard of part of its legitimizing force, but Roger Dupuy clearly shows the competition between the two legitimacies, in June 1848 as during the Commune.
Play Guard Divisions
However, the work makes it clear, the Guard has always been divided. Nothing surprising in this, since it brings together men with multiple opinions. But, because men often follow their officers, or when a majority wins, entire battalions switch to one faction or another. Also, instead of mixing opinions in its ranks, the National Guard ends up presenting politically coherent bodies, radical battalions on one side, moderates on the other. The history of the Guard in Revolution(s) then becomes that of competing attempts to control the institution by different political forces, relying on the battalions that support them. Thus Lafayette managed, from 1789 to 1791, to contain the most radical companies thanks to the most moderate battalions. The situation was reversed in 1792: the most radical battalions were used by the insurrectional committee to succeed and even legitimize the revolutionary days of June 20 and August 10. But, on 9 Thermidor, the activist minority this time failed to neutralize the moderate battalions and, despite the support of radical companies, it did not manage to save Robespierre.
Dupuy’s work thus sheds light on the highlights of revolutionary history by following on the ground, sometimes hour by hour, how, with the help of one part of the Guard which imposes itself on the other, revolutionary days play out and overturn. Above all, it precisely analyzes the institutional solutions used to exploit the militia by playing on its divisions. In doing so, it goes beyond the sometimes heavy litany of corps organizations (presence/absence of a general commander ; with/without elite companies ; centered on the neighborhood/electoral constituency/deterritorialized) by rightly interpreting them as so many means of control and orientation which succeed (and sometimes fail) in making the Guard side with the riot or its repression, the challenge being to establish itself in the major theater of political expression that the street has been in this long century of revolutions.
An instrument in the hands of the bourgeoisie ?
Beyond this precise analysis of the divisions of the guard, of the strategies of competing actors in the manipulation of men and myths, Roger Dupuy imposes a reading in terms of classes, and the institution, and the revolution. In his introduction as in his conclusion, he insists on the fact that the Guard would be the meeting place between the bourgeoisie and the working classes – and in fact, even in times of closed census recruitment, the threshold has always been sufficiently low to include the upper layers of the common people, an interclassist component which also explains the legitimizing force of the institution. This meeting would involve reciprocal concessions, but would mainly work for the benefit of the middle classes.
In other words, and with a few exceptions, the National Guard would be at XIXe century the means used by the bourgeoisie to ensure its authority over the working classes, while regulating its association with them when the need arises. This thesis, as stimulating as it is, struggles a little to articulate with the contributions of development which shows factions, opinions and not classes at work in the control of the Guard and the street. No detailed sociology of the guard battalions, moderate or radical, supports the final interpretation.
It must be seen that Roger Dupuy does not lose sight of the historiographical debate within which he opposes the school “ revisionist “. The chapter on federations of 1790, in which he demonstrates the ambiguity of a dynamic which gives rise to revolutionary federations as well as to Catholic and anti-revolutionary federations, is explicitly a wedge driven into the idea of a “ happy new year » (François Furet). His precise and nuanced analysis of the radicalization of 1792 (i.e., at the same time, the new social and democratic orientation of the Revolution, but also the increasing recourse to violence against counter-revolutionaries) is also there to reject the idea of a “ skid » (Ferret).
There is therefore, of course, for Dupuy, no “ Good » then “ bad »revolution – a « Good » bourgeois revolution and a “ bad » popular revolution. Rather, there is an alliance that is always renegotiated between the bourgeoisie and the popular classes, notably within the National Guard, and which leads the bourgeoisie, in the context of 1792, to make concessions to the people and to follow them in their fight against the calotins, the aristocrats and the hoarders. His permanent attention to the context, to the concrete and protean translation of this radicalization into action, also obviously rejects all interpretations of the revolution and then the Terror as ideocracy. More unexpected, Roger Dupuy leads throughout the work a rehabilitation of General Lafayette, recurring commander of the militia (1789-1791, then 1830), again against Furet and Gueniffey for whom the man is only a mediocre .
The National Guard, 1789-1872 by Roger Dupuy demonstrates the interest in the analysis, over the course of a century, of revolutionary institutions, and invites us to enrich the conceptual history of political modernization by looking at the practices, the political strategies bequeathed by the Revolution French and reworked with each revolution.