ABSTRACT
Chamber 1906-09 Prime Minister Clemenceau con-
fronts strikes and syndicalism 1907 Britain and Russia agree entente 1909-11 Prime Minister Briand continues
firm policy and splits Republican bloc
1911-14 Government instability
The collapse of the Second Empire through military defeat at the hands of the Prussians left a power vacuum. When the newly proclaimed Republic was also defeated, the Communards tried to seize power, and parallels may be drawn with both the Jacobins in 1793 and the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917. The Third Republic was shaken by war, defeat and the suppression of the Commune, and to start with it seemed that it would be replaced quickly by a constitutional monarchy. But the Monarchists’ hopes came to nothing, and
conservatives and even radical Republicans found they had common ground and a constitution was approved in 1875. ‘It was the first constitution’, Theodore Zeldin writes, ‘not to require an oath of loyalty from those who served it, with the result that it excluded no one unnecessarily from the start. It was essentially a compromise’. The relatively open nature of the constitution permitted great political instability to occur with ‘an endless succession of barely distinguishable ministries’, yet the crises and arguments failed to provoke revolution (T. Zeldin, France 1848-1945: Politics and Anger, Oxford University Press, 1984, pp. 206-7).
