Educational Pressure Groups and the Indoctrination of the Radical Ideology of Solidarism, 1895–1914

On a previous occasion, I have argued that during the two decades preceding the First World War, the French Radical Party, under electoral pressure from the separate and then united Socialist parties of Jaurès and Guesde, began to look for a doctrine around which they could rally to defend their recently acquired hold on power against both the individualists to their right and the collectivists on their left. It was the six-month duration of Léon Bourgeois' purely Radical government of 1895–6 and hisLettres sur le Mouvement Socialof 1895, republished in 1896 as a book and entitledSolidarité, that marked the beginning of thebelle époqueof Radical-socialism and of the Third Republic. It was argued that during the next two decades, Bourgeois' doctrine of Solidarism became for platform, and to a lesser extent, practical political purposes, the official social philosophy of the régime, probably reaching its apotheosis at the time of the Paris World Exhibition of 1900. This pre-eminent position in the doctrinal firmament of France was not achieved without an intensive campaign through a variety of mainly educational pressure groups – to be anticipated in a lay “République des professeurs.” It is the principal channels and people through which this indoctrination was propagated that will be our concern in the pages that follow. However, the activities of the “Universités Populaires”, which were closely allied to the movements discussed here, have been passed over because they have formed the subject-matter of a separate study.