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October 7, 1870: "150 years ago, Gambetta left Paris in a balloon: a model of resistance"

2020-10-06T17:09:01.186Z


FIGAROVOX / TRIBUNE - The glory of Gambetta is to have stood up against defeatism, says Jean-Loup Bonnamy. But his courage was unfortunately not enough to prevent the defeat of the improvised French armies after Sedan.


A former student of the École normale supérieure, Jean-Loup Bonnamy is a specialist in political philosophy.

150 years ago, the Prussians, after having crushed the French army in Sedan, besieged Paris.

The Government and the deputies are trapped.

On October 7, 1870, Léon Gambetta, Republican politician and Minister of the Interior, managed to flee from Paris to reach Tours and lead the resistance there against the invader.

Since you couldn't go by river or road, how could he outsmart the enemy's watch?

Quite simply by using a simple and daring means: a hot air balloon, which allowed him to go through the air.

Gambetta was thus part of a very French tradition, that of resourcefulness and panache, like d'Artagnan, Murat or Cyrano de Bergerac.

This epic gesture and this relentlessness in the patriotic struggle made a lasting impression since today there are 1501 Gambetta streets in France, which makes it the sixth proper name most given to our streets.

Who was Gambetta?

Born in 1838 in Cahors (Lot), where his father, of Italian origin, ran a bazaar, nourished by ancient history, a lawyer, Gambetta was elected deputy in 1869, under the Second Empire.

Republican militant, he was a frenzied opponent of the regime of Napoleon III.

In 1869, in the popular Parisian district of Belleville, he presented the "Belleville program", which included a number of proposals strongly marked on the left.

On the announcement of the defeat of Sedan and the capture of Napoleon III, he proclaimed the Republic at the Hôtel de Ville in Paris on September 4, 1870. Appointed Minister of the Interior in the Government of National Defense, he led the fight for four months.

Pragmatic, Gambetta probably drew his idea of ​​the balloon from two sources: on the one hand, Jules Verne's novel

Five Weeks in a Balloon

(1863), on the other hand, the recent Civil War in the United States (1861- 1865), where Northern General Ulysses Grant successfully used this technology, notably at the Battle of Wilderness.

.

Gambetta was thus part of a very French tradition, that of resourcefulness and panache, like d'Artagnan, Murat or Cyrano de Bergerac.

The making of the ball was no easy task.

As the Avionslegendaires.net site indicates: “

However, Paris had a big flaw in September 1870. It did not shelter any balloon likely to reach Tours.

So Gambetta, newly appointed Government High Commissioner for National Defense, will put Parisians to work.

While sailors and gendarmes make and tie the ropes, workers make wicker nacelles to accommodate three people.

Photographer Félix Tournachon, known worldwide by his pseudonym Nadar, lends his Montmartre workshops to weave the balloon envelopes which are then transported to Orléans station (now Gare d'Austerlitz) where they are varnished and sewn.

The gas factories at Clichy and La Villette fill the machines

. ”

At that time, there were still workers and factories in Paris ...

To read also:

Pierre Vermeren: "The elites of the Republic of 1900 felt a social responsibility, today they are seceding"

Victor Hugo witnessed the scene by chance.

In his journal, entitled

Choses Vues

, Hugo, who returned less than a month ago from a 19-year-old exile, recounts: “

October 7.

- This morning, while wandering on the Boulevard de Clichy, I saw a balloon at the end of a street entering Montmartre.

I went.

A certain crowd surrounded a large square space, walled up by the sheer cliffs of Montmartre.

In this space were inflated three balloons, one large, one medium and one small.

The large, yellow, the medium, white, the small, ribbed, yellow and red.

They whispered in the crowd: Gambetta is going to leave.

I saw, in fact, in a big overcoat, under an otter cap, near the yellow balloon, in a group, Gambetta.

He sat down on a pavement and put on lined boots.

He had a leather bag slung over his shoulder.

He took it off, got into the balloon, and a young man, the aeronaut, tied the bag to the ropes, above Gambetta's head.

Suddenly the yellow balloon was removed with three men including Gambetta

Victor Hugo

It was half past ten.

It was sunny.

A weak southerly wind.

A soft autumn sun.

Suddenly the yellow balloon was removed with three men including Gambetta.

Then the white ball, with three men too, one of whom was waving a tricolor.

Below Gambetta's balloon hung a tricolor flame.

We shouted: Long live the Republic!

"

Arrived in Tours, the energetic Gambetta improvised armies "with absolutely incredible speed" (in the words of his enemy, the Prussian General Moltke).

In four months he raised armies of several hundred thousand men.

The German command was completely surprised by this improvised resistance, which reminded them of the bad memories of 1792-93, when revolutionary France, invaded, had flared up and had waged an all-out struggle that was ultimately victorious.

To read also:

Guillaume Perrault: "Flaubert, Michelet and Renan facing the war of 1870"

After the war, the Prussian General von der Goltz wrote: "If ever, God forbid, our country should suffer such a defeat as that which France suffered at Sedan, I would very much like a man to come. who, like Gambetta, knew how to set it ablaze with the spirit of resistance pushed to its limits. "

These improvised armies, badly equipped and badly supervised, temporarily had the advantage of numbers.

They achieved some great success.

For example, Orleans was taken back, the Battle of Coulmiers was won.

General Faidherbe, who had conquered Senegal under the Second Empire, alternated defeats and victories in the north.

But the decision of General Bazaine, who capitulated while he was besieged in Metz, delivering 130,000 of our men to the enemy (October 27 and 28, 1870), freed the bulk of the Prussian and Bavarian troops, who were able to surge on the country and crush the armies of Gambetta.

Inexperienced in the military field, Gambetta hesitates, procrastinates, loses time, makes mistakes

Inexperienced in the military field, Gambetta hesitates, procrastinates, loses time and makes mistakes.

Its troops are plagued by epidemics, poorly trained and poorly supplied.

On January 12, they were defeated at Le Mans.

The same month, in the east, after having lost 65,000 men (out of 150,000 men), General Bourbaki, to escape capture, retreated and sent his army to Switzerland.

Our soldiers will be disarmed and provisionally interned there, but assisted by the Red Cross, of which this is one of the first actions.

Even today, in the Swiss city of Lucerne, there is a building, the Panorama Bourbaki, dedicated to this memory.

In this circular building, one can see on the walls a cylindrical painting 10 meters high and 35.6 meters in diameter (i.e. 112 meters of painted perimeter), a gigantic work that the painter Edouard Clastres dedicated to this episode.

To read also:

Philip Mansel: Louis XIV, a certain idea of ​​France?

At the same time, in the elections for the National Assembly (February 1871), Gambetta was elected in nine departments.

He symbolically opts for Bas-Rhin (Alsace), because the enemy had made known his desire to annex Alsace and Moselle, which Gambetta fiercely opposes.

He also joins in the protest of the other elected officials of these departments.

When Adolphe Thiers, who described Gambetta as a “berserk”, and the Assembly decided to conclude peace by abandoning Alsace-Moselle and paying five billion gold francs to the enemy, Gambetta resigned and retired for a while in Spain.

After the war, under the Third Republic, Gambetta actively contributed to anchor the republican regime.

Tireless "salesman of the Republic", extraordinary political animal, endowed with a sure eye and a powerful quality of analysis, powerful orator, sometimes trivial, he crisscrosses the country to rally the rural masses, who constitute then the majority of the population.

He launches formulas that have remained famous, such as: "You will have to submit or resign" or "The republic is inevitable and you should accept it".

Gambetta launches formulas which have remained famous, such as: "You will have to submit or resign" or "The republic is inevitable and you should accept it"

The other Republicans (Favre, Grévy, Ferry, etc.), sometimes closely linked to business circles, relied on him whenever they felt that the Republic was threatened, but as soon as they reassured themselves, they marginalized him and he were putting spades in the wheels.

They found him too ambitious, they feared his name would upset Germany.

After having presided over the Chamber of Deputies for more than two years (1879-1881), he succeeded in becoming President of the Council in November 1881. But "the Grand Ministry" only lasted two and a half months.

The failure of his government shows the refusal by the House of a strong executive.

Shortly after, in 1882, after injuring his arm while cleaning his pistol, he died in Sèvres of an intestinal disease.

Allow us to present here a personal thesis.

Certainly Gambetta was a fierce opponent of the Second Empire and Napoleon III, qualifying the Bonapartists as “a counterfeit of democracy”.

But behind the opposition, behind the violence of invective, there is a form of invisible proximity, of continuity between Bonapartism and Gambettism.

The two currents share the same patriotic and militaristic tendencies.

They will irrigate the tradition of French nationalism.

It was also Gambetta who encouraged Déroulède to found the League of Patriots.

To read also:

"September 4, 1870: the improvised Republic"

The two opposing currents claim to be part of the French Revolution, believe in universal suffrage and in the need to rely on the peasant masses.

There is also in Gambettism a form of Caesarist temptation, which is not found among the other republicans of the time, much more civilized than Gambetta.

Gambetta, like the two Napoléons, presents himself as a charismatic leader, as a providential man, who would lean on the people and who should be entrusted with authoritarian personal power.

This is what the historian Jacques Bainville clearly saw when he said of him that he possessed "a tribunitian temperament and a penchant for the Consulate (...) He was suspected of aspiring to dictatorship".

Many departments which had been strongholds of Bonapartism swung into Gambettism before becoming bastions of radicalism.

Gambetta also shares with Bonapartism the same mistrust of old elites (for example the lords) and the same desire to promote, by merit and competence, new elites (what Gambetta calls "capacities" or " the new layers ”and which for him are lawyers, journalists, teachers, doctors, veterinarians, entrepreneurs…, categories on which he intends to rely).

There is a form of invisible proximity, of continuity between Bonapartism and Gambettism

The two political currents attach great importance to the role of the State, to centralization, to the administration and to the figure of the prefect.

If Gambetta replaced in 1870 the former prefects of the Second Empire by his republican comrades, often inexperienced, he precisely keeps the prefectural institution and relies on it.

Besides, hadn't Gambetta himself confided, "don't repeat it, but the real Constitution is that of the year VIII", that is to say that of the Consulate, drawn up by Napoleon Bonaparte?

Even in his private life, we find traces of Bonapartism and this unacknowledged ambiguity: his partner and advisor, Léonie Léon, who fell in love with him while attending a trial where he was the lawyer of anti-Bonapartist Republican militants, n hadn't she already been the mistress of Louis-Alphonse Hyrvoix, inspector general of police of the residences of the Emperor Napoleon III?

To read also:

Guillaume Perrault: "The defeat and the invasion of 1870 seen by an intellectual in Nancy"

In June 1940, when General de Gaulle left France by plane to join the United Kingdom by plane and animate the Resistance there against the Germans, there was Gambetta in his gesture.

It is highly unlikely that de Gaulle did not think of Gambetta's balloon and was not inspired by it.

Moreover in 1947, according to the testimony of Claude Mauriac, while he corrects the name of Gambetta misspelled in an address on a letter, the eyes of de Gaulle are then lost in the vague and the General murmurs "Gambetta, Gambetta "Before correcting the name of the one he describes as" excellent French ".

But the situation of de Gaulle in 1940 is even worse than that of Gambetta in 1940. Where Bismarck "will be satisfied" with an annexation of Alsace-Moselle, Hitler will occupy more than half of the metropolitan territory (and even all of it). from November 1942).

Where Gambetta could still win the province, this option is no longer even left to General de Gaulle as the military situation is degraded.

Where Gambetta was an official member of the French government, de Gaulle had to become a rebel, standing up against the Vichy regime and building with his hands the legitimacy of Free France.

A tribunitian temperament and a penchant for the Consulate (...) He was suspected of aspiring to dictatorship

Jacques Bainville

Unlike Gambetta on September 4, 1870, de Gaulle refused to proclaim the Republic in 1944, because he considered that it never ceased to be and lived through Free France, Vichy being null and void.

But in his conduct of the Resistance, de Gaulle will have a double advantage that Gambetta did not have: foreign allies in the context of a world war and time (four months for Gambetta against four years for de Gaulle).

Moreover, de Gaulle decides alone, without having to deal with an assembly or colleagues.

But above all, if he displayed the same determination as Gambetta, de Gaulle was not hesitant and displayed much superior organizational skills.

Indeed, throughout its history, our great country is regularly threatened by two evils: disorganization (the Covid-19 crisis has shown it again) and defeatism.

Gambetta's glory is to have stood up against defeatism and to have, by his audacity, his energy and his tenacity, saved the honor of France.

But, of rough temperament, he partly lacked the qualities necessary to overcome the hydra of disorganization.

The very one over which de Gaulle triumphed ... for a time.

Source: lefigaro

All news articles on 2020-10-06

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