Power and Pleasure: Louis Barthou and the Third French Republic

Christopher English is a history lecturer at the Memorial University of
Newfoundland and a recent law-school graduate.

Barthou is probably known even to professional historians of France only
for the bizarre and futile circumstances of his death: as French foreign
minister, he was a collateral victim of the 1934 assassination in
Marseilles of King Alexander of Yugoslavia. Young’s widely researched
and attractively written portrait places Barthou firmly in the political
and cultural life of his times. It is interesting on at least three
levels. First, the author has read widely and imaginatively in the field
and among the sources that remain for reconstructing his subject’s
life and career. Barthou’s origins as the son of a modest hardware
merchant and grandson of an illiterate blacksmith made him an unlikely
candidate for eminent politician and grand bourgeois of the Third
Republic. However, ambition, a doctorate in law, and marriage to a
wealthy woman were a typical career path to political distinction in his
day. Thereafter, he never looked back, through a sustained series of
electoral victories beginning in 1887, a considerable corpus of
journalistic and historical publications, appointment as the youngest
cabinet minister of the Third Republic, becoming premier in 1913, and
being elected to the Académie franзaise in 1918. Status and wealth
permitted the pleasures of a comfortable domestic life, authorship,
travel, bibliophilia and cultural pursuits.

As a centrist in politics, Barthou championed a republic that was
anti-monarchical, anti-clerical, anti-socialist, and anti-German. It
must defend private-property rights, self-help, and order. He was
opposed to state intervention in private social or economic
relationships intended to soften the impact of industrialization,
modernization, and urbanization. Pride in being “progressive” or a
“man of the left” emanated from a willingness to address these
challenges only when a clear and dominant consensus had built to demand
them. At the same time he lobbied the state to win the local
improvements and lower taxes desired by his constituents. Young
characterizes an “inherent temperamental centrism” as reflecting
“moderation [and a] commitment to a gradual betterment of the human
condition” that employed pragmatism in the interests of principle. The
interpretation may be debated, but Barthou was undoubtedly typical of
the elite he emulated.

And yet contemporaries were reluctant to trust him, accusing him of
careerism, disloyalty, and inconsistency. Some impugned his personal
life and morals. With a somewhat fastidious reluctance, the author
canvasses the options and absolves Barthou or gives him the benefit of
the doubt. At this level Louis Barthou signals a real sympathy by its
author for his subject. Authors, of course, cannot be entirely separated
from their works, and Young may simply be more open than most. At
whatever level his portrait of Barthou is read, it proves an intriguing,
often beguiling, study.