Late on New Year’s Eve 1882, the charismatic statesman Léon Gambetta died unexpectedly at the young age of 44. 1 All France had followed his illness since he had accidentally discharged his revolver and injured his hand a month earlier, but his doctors—seven of France’s leading professors of medicine—had announced that morning that his ‘general condition [was] satisfactory’. 2 The next morning, on the news of his death, the Prefect of Police in Paris reported that ‘People are weeping for the patriot, the orator’; everywhere, there was ‘very great, very profound and general emotion [émotion]’. ‘We were dumbfounded at first’, reported a patriotic journalist, ‘and then there was an explosion of immense grief.’ His death ‘has left us forever inconsolable’. 3

Gambetta had captured the public imagination in 1868 as a republican orator opposing the Second Empire. He had entered into legend in 1870 as a patriot leading the resistance to Prussia when all other leaders despaired, escaping by balloon from besieged Paris, arriving at Tours, assuming control of the government and raising a new army of 100,000 men. When nevertheless the peace treaty ceding Alsace and parts of Lorraine to Germany was signed in February 1871, Gambetta resigned from the National Assembly in protest. For Alsatians and Lorrainers, he became the symbol of resistance to German occupation. 4 The war over, he led the campaign to make France definitively a Republic. He negotiated the Constitution of 1875, ending the instability that had plagued France since the Revolution of 1789. Criss-crossing the country to rally people to the Republic—he became known as ‘the traveling salesman of the Republic’—and led the republicans to victory in the 1877 elections. 5 This victory, as it turned out, confirmed the Republic as France’s default regime. At the time of Ganbetta’s death, however, the Republic still appeared to be hanging by a slender thread, born as it was in defeat and tarred with the loss of Alsace and Lorraine. 6 Bereft of his charisma and leadership, republicans faced the task of translating their political victory into cultural hegemony. For this, his death proved extraordinarily helpful, enabling republicans to channel the emotion of grief into affirmation of his Republic through commemorative rituals focused on his body.

Emotion and Ritual

Drawing on Bourdieu, Monique Scheer has argued that emotion is not simply a ‘mental event’; it ‘is always embodied’ and ‘cannot exist ‘without a medium for experience’. 7 While in English emotion is defined as ‘a strong feeling deriving from one’s circumstances, mood, or relationships with others’, 8 in French it is defined in bodily terms as ‘conduct that is reactive, reflexive, involuntary, experienced simultaneously at the level of the body in a more or less violent nature and affectively on the mode of pleasure or grief’ or as a ‘state of consciousness that is complex, generally abrupt [brusque] and of short duration, accompanied by physiological turmoil [troubles]’. 9

Individual emotion is shared and channelled through ritual, bodily outpourings of emotion in public performance. In a classic study published a century ago, Émile Durkheim argued that ritual was essential in developing and consolidating the bonds between the individual and society. ‘There can be no society’, he concluded, ‘that does not feel the need to uphold and reaffirm at regular intervals the collective sentiments and collective ideas which make its unity and its personality’. 10 As Scheer notes, such events are a ‘means of achieving, training, articulating, and modulating emotions for personal as well as social purposes’. They have ‘performative effects on the constitution of feelings and the (gendered) self’. 11 The rituals that followed Gambetta’s death, both in the immediate mourning and in commemorations during the next four decades, reconstituted and enlarged what I will call (borrowing Barbara Rosenwein’s term) the ‘emotional community’ of republicans. 12

For Rosenwein, ‘emotional communities … are precisely the same as social communities’, whose pre-existing ‘systems of feeling’ the historian seeks ‘to uncover’. 13 But although republicanism and the Republic had social bases, 14 they were not social communities, but—in Benedict Anderson’s term—imagined communities. 15 The construction of such imagined communities depends, I suggest, on emotion shared through a common discursive economy, both of body (largely through ritual) and of language (largely through speech and, in our period, the press). 16 After the short-lived First Republic (1792–1804), the Republic became an imagined community, a mythic alternative to the problematic monarchic and imperial regimes that followed. 17 Gambetta’s death introduced a new and powerful emotion into this imagined community, an emotion that the republicans used to foster and develop this imagined community into an emotional community. This enabled them to reinforce and extend the existing republican community by drawing in those less enthusiastic for, or indifferent to, the Republic, but touched by the emotion Gambetta aroused, to bring in dissidents, particularly workers attracted to the nascent socialist movement, and especially to ward off a new threat from the right.

Gambetta incarnated both the Republic and the Nation. While these emotional communities overlapped significantly, they were nevertheless distinct: republicans were virtually all patriots, but some patriots were not republicans, or at least not committed republicans. From these, a new right-wing authoritarian nationalism emerged in the mid-1880s to contest republican nationalism. Continuing rituals around Gambetta’s memory enabled republicans to reinforce and enlarge the republican nationalist emotional community and thus marginalise this new authoritarian nationalism. The Republic’s victory over Germany in 1918 completed the emotional work which rituals built upon Gambetta’s body had begun. With the ‘lost provinces’ (Alsace and Lorraine) returned to the Republic and the Republic secure, all that Gambetta stood for was accomplished. Elaborate, highly ritualised ceremonies celebrated Gambetta one last time and brought an end to these rituals, the need for which had now passed. Initiated in 1883, they ceased in 1920, a life cycle of only 37 years.

Mourning and Ritual

Upon Gambetta’s death, journalists and police reported widespread grief. This was the golden age of mass-circulation newspapers. Despite vicious partisan rivalries, all reported Gambetta’s death with sadness, even the hostile conservative press. Le Temps’ front-page obituary began: ‘Democracy has lost a good servant, the tribune an incomparable orator, and France a great citizen’. Across the world, newspapers reported in similar terms. 18

Within France, a highly developed, pioneering system of police surveillance kept the government informed of the public’s ‘state of mind’. 19 The police distinguished emotional communities in both social and geographical terms, noting that Gambetta’s death united vastly different neighbourhoods of Paris in a transcendent emotional community. ‘From impressions gathered across different neighborhoods’, even in working-class Belleville, where most thought Gambetta should have held out for a more radical or socialist republic, the police noted, locals were ‘frightened at his death, which they consider disastrous [funeste] for the Republic’. In shopping areas, ‘grief is profound’. In the wealthy seventh arrondissement, ‘the emotion seems even keener than anywhere else’; ‘it was an irreparable loss for the party of order’, which had depended on Gambetta to moderate social demands. 20

Grief was all the greater because of the intensely personal nature of Gambetta’s bond with the people of France, a bond forged through his countless speeches across the country. He had an extraordinary ability to communicate with, and to rouse emotion, in the huge crowds to which he spoke so often. ‘Gambetta had such a power of enthralling mobs, he was so thoroughly a man after the people’s own heart’, wrote The Times’ correspondent. 21 The conservative historian Pierre de la Gorce, a contemporary of Gambetta, decried a lack of polish and finish in Gambetta’s oratory, but admitted that he won crowds over with:

sudden surges [élans] of passion, something familiar and vehement, a remarkable force and sometimes a remarkable finesse as well; and, with that, a voice both profound and sonorous, large, inclusive gestures, and an engaging, spontaneous manner in which all the minor failings disappeared, as dross is carried away in the frothing of a torrent. 22

The modern historian Pierre Barral concludes that ‘everyone who heard [his speeches] witnessed to the extraordinary impression they felt’. 23

The bond Gambetta thus created was deeply emotional. The hard-headed Georges Clemenceau—later the architect of victory in the Great War, then a young politician—kept Gambetta’s death mask in his study 24 and recalled the ‘irresistible power of attraction’ Gambetta exercised over his audience. 25 Reporting an 1876 speech by Gambetta, a journalist wrote: ‘The fragrance of his burning eloquence penetrated every heart, everyone was moved, tears even came to the eyes’. 26 Stenographers constantly reported cries of ‘Hear! Hear!’, usually followed by ‘Salvo of applause. —Lengthy interruption’, and at least once in most speeches: ‘The excitement of the audience prevents the orator from speaking for several minutes!’ 27 The grief that followed Gambetta’s death was based not only on republican and patriotic sentiment but also on profound personal emotion.

To express their grief, people sought refuge in ritual, much of it focused on les Jardies, the weekend cottage where Gambetta had died. 28 On New Year’s Day 1883, his body lay on his bed. All day long, a crowd filed into the modest house and up the narrow staircase to pay their respects; many more were turned away. 29 From these beginnings, ritual came increasingly into use to express and share grief. The only available source of ritual lay in Catholic culture and practice, so long traditional in France.

The republicans were, to be sure, fervent anti-clericals. Gambetta himself was famous for his rallying call: ‘Clericalism! There is the enemy’. 30 The medical practitioners who had cared for Gambetta shared these strong anti-clerical beliefs, but they were not immune from quasi-religious practice. 31 Indeed, their preserving of Gambetta’s body parts betrays a profound need to embody the emotion they felt, a need reflected in the Catholic practice of keeping and venerating the body parts of saints. The day after the body was displayed, the doctors performed an autopsy on the body while it lay on the deathbed. They removed the brain, the heart, the bowel and the appendix. (During a 1909 re-inhumation, others removed the skull and the right arm.) After analysis, instead of discarding these body parts or returning them to the coffin, they treasured them, like pious Catholics (see the parallel discussion in Chap. 11). 32 Paul Bert, one of Gambetta’s doctors and devoted friends, kept Gambetta’s heart in a crystal jar, apparently on the mantel in his home. This was religious veneration, not science. 33

After the autopsy, what remained of Gambetta’s body was placed in a closed coffin, still in his bedroom at les Jardies. The next day, another 4,000 mourners came to pay their respects. That evening, the coffin was manoeuvered down the cramped spiral staircase and taken to the Palais Bourbon, seat of the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house elected by universal male suffrage, of which Gambetta had been President. 34

Funeral Rites

Spontaneous ritual now gave way to planned ceremony. A committee of republican politicians worked with Jules Bastien-Lepage, the noted artist, and Charles Garnier, the architect of the Paris Opera, to prepare the funeral and to decorate the Palais Bourbon and its surrounds. Opposite the Palais across the Seine, black crepe veiled the statue of Strasbourg (the capital of Alsace) on the Place de la Concorde, recalling Gambetta’s commitment to the ‘lost provinces’. 35 This was not the first time that the statue had been so draped, but it was the first and only time it was draped as an act of quasi-personal mourning.

To symbolise Gambetta the republican orator, nothing could serve better than the Palais Bourbon. It was Gambetta who had, only three and a half years earlier, engineered the return of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate from Versailles, where they had met since 1871. As President of the Chamber and its leading orator, Gambetta was intimately linked with the Chamber in the popular imagination. Indeed, a Paris clockmaker sold clocks representing the Chamber Tribune surmounted with a bust of Gambetta, his arm wielding the speaker’s gavel, which struck the hours. 36 Following Gambetta’s death, the Palais Bourbon was draped in an enormous crepe veil, echoing the crepe over the statue of Strasbourg, as if the building of which Gambetta had been the heart and soul was itself mourning his loss. (Fig. 8.1 shows the cortege about to depart from the veiled building). Inside, customary mourning ritual was further adopted by the transformation of the ceremonial hall into a chapelle ardente, a candlelit shrine, though of course without religious symbols. Anne Martin-Fugier describes this practice as a traditional bourgeois ritual: ‘a mortuary chapel lit with tapers would be set up in [the deceased’s] home. Visitors came to pay their respects’. On 4 January, an estimated 150,000 mourners filed past the coffin; still more came the following day. 37

Fig. 8.1
figure 1

The Late Léon Gambetta—the funeral procession leaving the Palais Bourbon, which housed the Chamber of Deputies. Contemporary engraving. Courtesy look and learn. Reproduced by permission

Full size image

The state funeral followed traditional mourning ritual too. The planners assumed that the body was required for a secular republican funeral, just as for a Catholic funeral, but Gambetta’s father insisted that the body be returned to Nice for burial in the family vault. A veritable Who’s Who of the republican elite tried to persuade him to relent, using language usually associated with Catholicism. ‘In the name of our great dead one, I beseech you, to leave his body to our worship’, wrote one. ‘Leave your son to Paris’, wrote Victor Hugo. After Gambetta’s lover, Léonie Léon, intervened, Gambetta’s father accepted that the body be interred ‘provisionally’ in Paris, making the funeral possible. 38

‘The funeral will be the greatest since the body of the First Napoleon was taken to the Invalides’ in 1840, predicted the Paris correspondent of the New York Times. In fact, it was far greater, equalled only by Victor Hugo’s funeral in 1885. Gambetta’s casket was surrounded by more than 5,000 bouquets and wreaths and was followed by an immense procession. Some 1,500 delegations, many of them including hundreds of individuals, formally took part. They represented not only Paris and national organisations, but also groups from every town where Gambetta had spoken. Delegates from Alsace and Lorraine led the cortege. It left the Palais Bourbon at 10 am (see Fig. 8.1) to the sound of cannon fired from the nearby Invalides, a monument to the army to which Gambetta had been deeply attached. 39

The cortege crossed the Seine to the Place de la Concorde, where some 150,000 people were waiting for a glimpse, and then proceeded to the Place de la République, where it was halted by the thick crush of onlookers. Using the telegraph to keep track of the procession, the police estimated that 800,000 people followed the formal procession; the number of spectators was ‘incalculable’. The cortege finally reached Père Lachaise Cemetery at 4 pm. Speakers were so numerous that, in order to finish, the eulogies had long since begun. Everyone had to have a say: parliamentarians, ministers, generals, representatives of Gambetta’s local political committee, of the ‘lost provinces’ of Alsace and Lorraine, and of the Paris bar. The official delegations then filed past and placed flowers on the tomb, followed by regiments of infantry, artillery and cavalry. Cannon fired interminably. It was dark by this time. The coffin was dropped into the vault by torchlight, along with soil from Lorraine in a black bag inscribed (in Latin): ‘Lotharingia [the old name for the Duchy of Lorraine] remembers, violated not dominated’.

James Lehning suggests that the leaders of the government focused on Gambetta the patriot to avoid focus on Gambetta the republican because they had cut short his term as Prime Minister only ten months before. But the presence of hundreds of republican political groups and the texts of the many speeches attest to the funeral’s emphasis on Gambetta as leader of the republican movement. Gambetta’s newspaper responded to general sentiment in declaring that it was impossible to separate the republican from the patriot. Gambetta’s death, like his life, conflated the Republic and the Nation. 40

The body remained six nights in the ‘provisional’ tomb. On 11 January, a delegation made a last unavailing attempt to persuade Joseph Gambetta to leave it in Paris. The next day, the coffin was taken to a special train. Loaded with friends and dignitaries, it stopped at many towns and cities. At each stop, a civic ceremony with speeches, wreaths and bands was held. The train finally arrived in Nice 24 hours later. There, another ceremony was held. Late on Saturday 13 January, Gambetta was placed alongside his mother in the modest family tomb. 41

Meanwhile, initial spontaneous visits to les Jardies were creating new ritual. Only days after Gambetta’s death, a leading republican suggested publicly that ‘the place where the great patriot died must become a sacred place where those who remember will henceforth go in pilgrimage’. 42 In 1884, on the first anniversary of Gambetta’s death, more than 1,000 people made what Gambetta’s newspaper termed ‘a pious pilgrimage’ to les Jardies. 43 The term ‘pious pilgrimage’ was soon adopted universally to describe what became annual events. 44 The irony of anti-clerical republicans making ‘pilgrimages’ to ‘a sacred place’ went unremarked. In 1900, the police still counted more than 800 participants. 45 As a result of the pilgrimages—not only the annual group walks but also individual and family excursions—les Jardies became famous. An enterprising printer even produced a popular cut-and-construct cardboard model of the house. This was new ritual, born spontaneously, built on familiar rituals and discourses of sharing emotion. 46

Emotional Communities and Monuments

The emotional community around Gambetta’s death was soon challenged by the emergence of an authoritarian right, which also laid claim to patriotism. This was a new right. Monarchists had never accepted patriotism: for them, the French people were not citizens, but subjects of the king. By the mid-1880s, however, monarchists despaired of imposing a king and sought instead to salvage their core values—a hierarchical society based on tradition and ties to the land—and to preserve hierarchical institutions—nobility, Army and Church. For this project, patriotism offered a welcome if unexpected opportunity.

The conservatives and populists who combined to form this new authoritarian and patriotic right argued that regaining the lost provinces required not democracy, but authority and obedience. In the late 1880s, the charismatic General Boulanger emerged as a potential authoritarian leader to achieve revanche (revenge). 47 While Boulanger’s movement failed, it provided a catalyst for a new anti-parliamentary nationalism. The Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s reinforced this authoritarian nationalism with populist anti-Semitism. Thus, patriotism as a uniquely republican virtue gave way to two contested forms of nationalism, one republican and the other anti-parliamentary or authoritarian, before becoming, in the twentieth century, a virtue associated more with the right than the left. 48

Gambetta, in death, became a major factor in the power struggle between these two patriotisms, played out in another ritual in which the French nation was well schooled: the construction of monuments to harness the power of image to incarnate and legitimate authority. Since the Renaissance, the monarchy had put up statues of the king. The Republic put up statues of its ‘great men’, none more than Gambetta. In both cases, the erection of statues, often at central locations as part of grandiose monuments, was a major tool to demonstrate power and legitimacy by arousing emotion. Each monument was inaugurated with a major ceremony following a civic liturgy involving not only speeches, but also the ritual participation of various groups which paraded, presented wreaths and played music. Onlookers often commented on the intense emotion aroused. Each statue, once inaugurated, incarnated not only Gambetta in a dramatic pose, reflecting the drama and emotion he had aroused, but also the emotion which surrounded the inauguration. And that emotion was perpetuated as the monument became the focus of more civic rituals: annual commemorations of the inauguration, of Gambetta’s death and of other great occasions. 49

For the republicans, Gambetta’s memory, incarnated in such statues, became a tool of legitimization (see discussion of similar iconography of monarchy in Chap. 6). The monarchy had often portrayed the king as a mighty warrior through equestrian statues. The republicans had a choice. On the one hand, they could portray Gambetta as the fearless patriot, the leader of national defence in the Franco-Prussian War. On the other hand, they could portray him as the inspirational republican orator, the architect of the Constitution of 1875 and the founder of the Republic. In the struggle between the two forms of patriotism, each monument to Gambetta became a contested site: which Gambetta to celebrate, or rather how much of each—the patriot or the republican? Ultimately, the republicans sought to combine the two, emphasising their commonality; their opponents sought to portray the leader of the armed resistance to the invader, excluding any reference to the founder of the Republic.

The monument in Paris, the spearhead of republicanism since the great Revolution, combined ‘national defense and the foundation of the Republic’, as the appeal for funds put it. Some 250,000 subscribers raised 360,000 francs, making it the most expensive monument ever built in Paris. 50 The monument took the form of a truncated pyramid 23 metres (75 feet) high, incorporating an array of symbolic tributes to the Republic and to Gambetta’s role in creating and defending it. Atop the pedestal was not Gambetta, but a female figure riding a lion and holding the ‘Rights of Man’, an allegory of democracy as realised in the Republic Gambetta had founded. An immense stone statue on the front face of the pyramid presented Gambetta, simultaneously, if improbably, leaning on a cannon, holding a sword, supporting a ‘citizen’ about to fire a rifle and protecting a group of children.

The choice of a ‘citizen’, that is, a civilian in the voluntary militia, emphasised the democratic nationalism originating in the great Revolution. Half a dozen secondary sculptures jostled on the sides of the pyramid, including youths representing fraternity, an infantryman and a naval commando, all decorated by an array of symbols: the cock (symbol of France); crowns of laurel and oak (trees associated with Alsace and Lorraine); the hand of justice; and shields inscribed with republican ideals that Gambetta had championed—‘compulsory military service’ and ‘instruction for all’. 51 All remaining space was filled with lengthy quotes from Gambetta’s speeches (see Fig. 8.2). 52 The result was less an artistic creation than an ‘altar of the religion of the fatherland’, as the deputy Eugène Spuller, Gambetta’s comrade in struggle since 1868, called it in his speech inaugurating the monument on 13 July 1888. It was, Spuller added in religious discourse typical of these speeches, ‘a monument of grateful piety and immortal glory’. 53

Fig. 8.2
figure 2

Monument to Gambetta—Place du Carroussel. Contemporary photograph. Courtesy look and learn. Reproduced by permission

Full size image

The placement of monuments in Paris was always symbolic. As Benno Gammerl notes, ‘certain spatial styles or landscapes induce specific emotions’. 54 The Louvre, begun in 1190 as a royal palace, had a long association with the monarchy. Gambetta’s monument was set in the Carrousel courtyard of the Louvre, near where I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid now stands, directly opposite Napoleon’s Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, on an axis running directly through this small arch up the Champs-Élysées to the large Arc de Triomphe nearly seven kilometres (more than four miles) away. Gambetta’s monument was thus at the base of Paris’ most famous vista. Its placement carried a clear political message. Erecting the statue of Gambetta in this space claimed it for the Republic, as Spuller declared at the inauguration: ‘In the midst of the architectural splendors of the monarchy, the stone erected to the glory of this plebeian is in its rightful place, at the center of our history and our city’. 55 The monument implanted republicanism at the symbolic heart of power over France.

In the provinces, the monuments sometimes gave greater emphasis to Gambetta the patriot, particularly that in Cahors, Gambetta’s birthplace. Its monument, inaugurated on 14 April 1884, depicted him as a defiant military leader, his right hand on a cannon, looming over an infantryman and a naval commando. The pedestal was inscribed with his 1870 proclamation calling on the nation to rise up against the invader. 56 In most cases, however, the republicans won out. A more typical mix characterised the choices of an Alsatian group which planned a monument to Gambetta. They sought to celebrate him as defender of the lost provinces, but by invoking him as inspirational republican leader. The renowned sculptor Auguste Bartholdi, whose Liberty Enlightening the World had just been inaugurated in New York harbour, represented Gambetta ‘holding to his chest a torn tricolor flag on a broken staff’. The tricolor was a clear allusion to the Republic; it had been the flag of the Revolution and the monarchy had always rejected it. Gambetta’s right arm was outstretched, ‘seeking’, as explained at the inauguration, ‘to reverse destiny’. Beneath the pedestal were sculpted an Alsatian woman and a Lorraine woman, each protecting a child. The sentimentality of this sculptural group is reminiscent of the statues of the Virgin Mary and Infant Jesus so common in Catholic churches and suggests an intentional link to the profound emotion surrounding the ‘lost provinces’. That powerful emotion was ultimately judged too intense for a highly visible Parisian location, which might, it was feared, lead Germany to take umbrage. As a result, the monument was finally erected not in Paris, but at les Jardies. However, this had the result of linking the monument to what was already a popular pilgrimage site, thus enabling les Jardies to fulfil its role as a complete shrine. 57

The shrine even included a relic. Paul Bert, who had kept Gambetta’s heart after the autopsy, died in 1886. His widow, perhaps less fond of it than her late husband, gave it to the state for others to venerate. 58 Encased in metal, then in a box of Alsatian wood, it was sealed inside the statue on 6 November 1891, two days before the monument was inaugurated. With a relic of the saint, les Jardies indeed became a ‘sacred place’, a worthy shrine for the annual pilgrimage. Republican veneration of body parts matched that of Catholics. 59

Apotheosis

To contest the emerging authoritarian right, republicans increasingly evoked Gambetta as a ‘saint for the Republic’. From the inauguration of the monument at les Jardies to the height of the Dreyfus Affair a decade later, the number of pilgrims to les Jardies grew steadily. 60 And, more significantly, after a 15-year pause, a second wave of monument building summoned Gambetta’s legacy to reassert the republican message and to ward off the resurgent ultra-nationalist threat. The two most significant of these new monuments were great successes for the republican cause. Bordeaux led the way in 1905 with a huge monument by Dalou, most famous for the sculptures on the Place de la République in Paris. He set Gambetta alone, atop a three-metre pedestal, not in military or oratorical mode, but thoughtful and pensive, an implicit rebuke to hotheads who sought to provoke a disastrous war in the name of revanche.

At the inauguration, the President of the Chamber of Deputies outlined the lessons that the monument would present to citizens, lessons combining republicanism and patriotism: ‘The statue … will tell them that they must cultivate the virtues that create the useful man, the enlightened citizen, the watchful soldier; that they must be attached to liberty, to the republican regime that assures it for everyone; that they must love the fatherland before all and above all’. 61 The proceedings constituted a now-familiar civic ritual, with speeches from all the dignitaries interspersed with music and rituals such as parades and wreath laying. In the presence of the President of the Republic and nine ministers, the famous composer Camille Saint-Saëns conducted the premiere of a patriotic cantata he had composed during the Franco-Prussian War, thus further linking the emotions of the ceremony and of the monument itself to Gambetta’s glorious role as leader of the Republic during that traumatic past. 62

The republicans were also successful in Nice. In April 1906, the city raised a monument to the ‘Great Patriot’ buried there, at the same time replacing his tomb with one ‘more worthy of the eminent statesman’. A huge pedestal four metres high was surmounted by a much taller but narrower pedestal, around which were grouped weeping women and soldiers grasping a huge flag, symbolism linking emotion and patriotism. On the upper pedestal, an enormous statue depicted Gambetta not in military mode, but as republican orator in full rhetorical flight.

At the inauguration, Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau emphasised the need to mobilise Gambetta’s memory against the anti-parliamentary right, calling for vigilance against ‘the enemies’ of the Republic, against ‘the reactionary, who wants to return to superseded [déchues] forms of government, and the demagogue … who will make use of hard-won liberties to dragoon sections of the population who are not sufficiently enlightened and launch them on violent enterprises’. 63 The emotional community of patriots was fractured, but Gambetta’s memory was still a potent symbol to mobilise them against the authoritarian right. As in other inaugural ceremonies, such speeches were interspersed with leaders paying respects, delegations laying wreaths and bands playing music while parading around the monument. The net effect of this ritual, as of the others we have discussed, was to arouse emotion that could be harnessed to the power of the Republic against its internal enemies as well as against potential external enemies (see also Chap. 6).

Victory in the Great War of 1914–18 brought the ‘lost provinces’ back to France, completing Gambetta’s historic mission. When French troops entered Strasbourg in triumph on 9 December 1918, one house displayed a banner reading: ‘Sleep content, Gambetta! Finally the proud dawn of the day you dreamed of has risen for us’. 64 Victory gave full cultural hegemony to the Republic. Not only had the Republic successfully prosecuted the war, but also the whole spectrum of political opinion had joined in the government of union sacrée, fully and finally legitimising the Republic. Though challenged subsequently, the Republic now became France’s default regime. The political and cultural struggle which Gambetta had led was now at an end.

Gambetta’s memory was, however, powerfully invoked to celebrate victory in two significant rituals in 1920. On 28 March, a large delegation proceeded to les Jardies, led by the past and present Presidents of the Republic, the Presidents of the Senate and Chamber, the Prime Minister, ten ministers, Marshal Joffre, several generals and those of Gambetta’s companions who were still alive. A large crowd heard a succession of speeches celebrating him as the one who had ‘never given up on France, even in the darkest days of defeat’. The President of the Republic then took a French flag captured by the Germans in 1870 and recaptured in 1918. He climbed the stairs to Gambetta’s room, knelt and deposited the flag on Gambetta’s deathbed. 65

Later that year, Gambetta reached his apotheosis, achieving something like sainthood. The government decided to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Republic not on 4 September, the date in 1870 when it had been proclaimed, but on 11 November, the date of the armistice concluding the war that had restored the lost provinces to the Republic, thus ‘symbolically linking’, as government’s spokesman put it, ‘the Republic and France’ and corresponding to their ‘indissoluble unity’. 66 How better to celebrate such an anniversary than to invoke Gambetta? The Chamber of Deputies voted overwhelmingly to transfer Gambetta’s heart to the Pantheon.

The deputy reporting on this bill made clear the quasi-religious significance of the move: ‘the faithful’, he argued, already ‘celebrate his memory in pious pilgrimages. It is not without a wrench that they will see the relic removed from the reliquary’. This was intensely religious language used by a leading anti-clerical. It was one thing to speak of ‘pious pilgrimages’; it was quite another to speak of ‘the faithful’, ‘relics’ and ‘reliquaries’.

Several times since its construction in the eighteenth century, the Pantheon had passed between religious and republican hands, from church to monument. The republicans took it over in 1885 for the burial of Victor Hugo, and kept it as a tomb and shrine for ‘the great men of the Republic’. Gambetta’s heart was now to be placed alongside Hugo’s remains. And at the same time as Gambetta’s heart was to be translated to the Pantheon, an Unknown Soldier would be buried beneath the Arc de Triomphe, to which the Gambetta monument in the Louvre courtyard was visually linked. 67

The double ceremony took the veneration of the Republic’s relics to new heights and constituted one of France’s grandest civic rituals since the 1789 Revolution. Late in the evening of 10 November 1920, ‘the heart of a patriot, this heart which beat so strongly for the fatherland’, as the speaker put it, was removed from the monument at les Jardies and taken in procession to Paris, to the Place Denfert-Rochereau. This site was highly symbolic. It was named after the Governor of Belfort, the only city that had withstood the siege and remained undefeated during the Franco-Prussian War. There, the heart was placed in a glass-sided reliquary and set on a table in a chapelle ardente. The table, draped with linen, looked like an altar in the candlelight. 68

The next morning, the reliquary containing Gambetta’s heart and the coffin containing the body of the Unknown Soldier were each placed on a catafalque and taken in procession to the Pantheon, where the President of the Republic, accompanied by Raymond Poincaré (who was President in 1914), Marshals Joffre, Foch and Pétain, plus numerous generals, all knelt before the relics, while a band played Saint-Saëns’ ‘Marche héroїque’ (originally part of his patriotic cantata) and the ‘Marseillaise’. The kneeling posture, the emotional music and the very symbolism of the heart made this, so onlookers reported, a particularly moving moment. 69

The dignitaries then led a long cortege to the Arc de Triomphe, following in reverse the exact route of Victor Hugo’s funeral procession in 1885. A huge crowd looked on. At the Arc de Triomphe, the relics of the two heroes were placed on display. The crowd filed past to pay their respects. 70 That evening, the body of the Unknown Soldier was transferred to the hall in the top of the Arch to await its final burial in January. Gambetta’s heart was taken to the Pantheon, where it remained on display in its reliquary for three days. A year later, it was finally laid to rest in a porphyry urn, giving symbolic closure and bringing veneration of Gambetta in line with that of the other ‘great men of the fatherland’, as the pediment of the Pantheon still proclaims. 71

With Alsace and Lorraine restored to France and with the Republic firmly established as the natural expression of the nation, Gambetta’s mission was accomplished. The emotional community built upon his death made a final evolution, growing to include virtually the whole of the nation, but by the same token losing its specificity as it merged into the broad, normative expression of the nation, from which only a small segment of the extreme right remained aloof. The rituals born with Gambetta’s death came to an end after this apotheosis. The pilgrimages to les Jardies never resumed. During the Second World War, most of the statues were demolished by the occupying forces and many of the monuments were dismantled after the war. Gambetta ceased to figure in republican rhetoric. The emotional work done in his name accomplished, he slipped from active memory into passive history.

Conclusion

The picture we have traced is of nationwide harnessing of emotion through ritual. The rituals surrounding Gambetta’s death—the funeral, the pilgrimages—were perpetuated by an unbroken series of rituals around the anniversaries of his death and around the inauguration of the many monuments erected to his memory. I have discussed only a few of these major monuments. There were many in small towns, and every town and most villages in France still have a street named after Gambetta. Each of these was inaugurated or opened with a powerful ritual.

A major factor in the power of these rituals was their use of the body. As Scheer reminds us, emotion ‘is always embodied’. 72 Gambetta’s body provided the requisite ‘medium for experience’. The doctors’ appropriation of body parts and the use of Gambetta’s heart are evidence of the continuing emotional need for tangible remains. The many statues erected to Gambetta’s memory stood in for his body, providing a tangible focus for emotion around which successive rituals coalesced like so many mini-funerals. Even Gambetta’s house, les Jardies, provided a focus like a shrine for the body which had been there and whose heart had been enshrined there.

During nearly four decades, these rituals were a significant force in arousing emotion and linking it to the Republic, reconstituting and enlarging the ‘emotional community’ of republicans. They were significant factors in the legitimisation of the Republic. Struggling to obtain the emotional engagement of its citizens after its birth in defeat and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, tossed by the renewed authoritarianism of the 1880s, challenged by a series of scandals culminating in the Dreyfus Affair, besieged anew by the authoritarian forces incorporating anti-Semitism, the Republic struggled for legitimacy from its proclamation in 1870 to its victory in the First World War.

A republic, a democracy, does not have (or did not have at the time) the emotion of fear as an authoritarian state does. A republic requires some form of positive emotional commitment from its citizens. The powerful emotions aroused by Gambetta’s memory and channelled through ritual, through the bodily outpouring of emotion, provided that emotional commitment and played a major role in mobilising popular support for the Republic that he founded. Modern polities are not immune to the needs for ritual to uphold and reaffirm their sentiments as a collectivity, to paraphrase Durkheim, or, we might say, to foster and develop emotional communities to uphold their collective identity.

Notes

  1. 1.

    See Susan K. Foley and Charles Sowerwine, A Political Romance: Léon Gambetta, Léonie Léon and the Making of the French Republic, 1872–1882 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 200–46.

  2. 2.

    La République française, 31 December 1882. The doctors hid the truth because Gambetta was still reading newspapers.

  3. 3.

    ‘Préfecture de Police. Intérieur’, 1 January 1883, Archives Nationales (hereinafter AN) F7 15.9582. ‘Chroniques’, Revue alsacienne, January 1883, 140. Other reports: ‘very moved [très ému]’ (M. Mouquier, Archives de la Préfecture de Police, Paris [APP] B/a 924); ‘moved and saddened [émus et attristés]’ (M. Féger. ibid.); ‘a cruel loss [perte cruelle]’ (M. Evrard, ibid.).

  4. 4.

    For the war of 1870–1, see Charles Sowerwine, France since 1870: Culture, Society and the Making of the Republic, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 12–15. J.P.T. Bury’s remains the best account of Gambetta’s role: Gambetta and the National Defence: A Republican Dictatorship in France (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1971 [1936]), esp. 116–39.

  5. 5.

    For Gambetta’s career, see Foley and Sowerwine, A Political Romance; Bury, Gambetta and the National Defence; John P.T. Bury, Gambetta and the Making of the Third Republic (London: Longman, 1973) and Gambetta’s Final Years: ‘The Era Of Difficulties’, 1877–1882 (London: Longman, 1982); Jean-Marie Mayeur, Léon Gambetta: la patrie et la République (Paris: Fayard, 2008); Jérôme Grévy, La république des opportunistes, 1870–1885 (Paris: Perrin, 1998).

  6. 6.

    Sowerwine, France since 1870, 29–38.

  7. 7.

    Monique Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and is that What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion’, History and Theory 51 (2012): 193–220 (at 195, 209).

  8. 8.

    Oxford Dictionary of English. Cf. William Reddy’s definition of emotion: ‘goal-relevant activation of thought material that exceeds the translating capacity of attention within a short time horizon’, that is, feeling too powerful for words. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 128.

  9. 9.

    ‘Émotion’, B, Trésor de la langue française informatisé, http://atilf.atilf.fr (accessed 14 October 2016); ‘Émotion’, 2, Grand Robert de la langue française: dictionnaire alphabétique et analogique de la langue française (2nd edn, 9 vols, Paris: le Robert, 1985): III, 903.

  10. 10.

    Émile Durkheim, Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse: le système totémique en Australie (Paris: Librairie Felix Alcan, 1912), 427; cf. E. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995).

  11. 11.

    Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice’, 210, citing Victor Turner.

  12. 12.

    Barbara H. Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about Emotions in History’, American Historical Review 107 (2002): 821–45 (at 842).

  13. 13.

    Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about Emotions’.

  14. 14.

    See Sowerwine, France since 1870, 39–52 and 472–3; and Charles Sowerwine, ‘Revising the Sexual Contract: Women’s Citizenship and Republicanism in France, 1789–1944’, in Confronting Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle France: Bodies, Minds and Gender, ed. Christopher E. Forth and Elinor Accampo (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 19–42.

  15. 15.

    Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edn (London: Verso, 1999), 13.

  16. 16.

    See further the discussions in Chaps. 3, 5 and 11.

  17. 17.

    See Sowerwine, France since 1870, 39–52 and 473–4; Maurice Agulhon, Marianne into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France, 1789–1880, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); The Republic in the Village: The People of the Var from the French Revolution to the Second Republic, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). See also, more broadly, Francois Furet, Revolutionary France, 1770–1880, trans. Antonia Nevi II (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992); and Peter McPhee, A Social History of France 1780–1880 (London: Routledge, 1992).

  18. 18.

    See, e.g., New York Times, 3 January 1883, 1; The Times (London), 2 January 1883, 1.

  19. 19.

    A.R. Gillis, ‘Crime and State Surveillance in Nineteenth-Century France’, American Journal of Sociology 95 (1989): 307–41; Fredric Zuckerman, ‘Policing the Russian Emigration in Paris, 1880–1914: The Twentieth Century as the Century of Political Police’, French History & Civilization 2 (2009): 218–27.

  20. 20.

    ‘La Mort de M. Gambetta’, 1 January 1883, AN F7 15. 9582; ‘Gambetta’, M. Féger, 1 January 1883, APP B/a 924. Reports on the mourning occupy three cartons: AN F7 15. 9581–2 and APP B/a 924.

  21. 21.

    ‘Gambetta Reminiscences’, New York Times, 15 January 1883.

  22. 22.

    Pierre de la Gorce, Histoire du Second Empire, (Paris: Plon, 1900), V: 413.

  23. 23.

    Pierre Barral, Léon Gambetta: tribun et stratège de la République, 1838–1882 (Toulouse: Privat, 2008), 127.

  24. 24.

    It can still be seen there, in his residence, now the Musée Clemenceau (Paris).

  25. 25.

    Quoted in Paula Cossart, ‘L’émotion: un dommage pour l’idée républicaine. Autour de l’éloquence de Léon Gambetta’, Romantisme 33 (119): 47–60, at 50.

  26. 26.

    Petit Lyonnais, 1 March 1876, quoted in Cossart, ‘L’émotion’, 51. Cf. Jacques Chastenet, Gambetta (Paris: Fayard, 1968), 69.

  27. 27.

    Gambetta, ‘Discours prononcé le 26 septembre 1872 à Grenoble’, in Discours et plaidoyers politiques de M. Gambetta (hereinafter Discours), 11 vols (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1880–85), III: 100–1.

  28. 28.

    On the spatiality of emotion, see Benno Gammerl, ‘Emotional Styles—Concepts and Challenges’, History 16 (2012): 161–75 (at 164).

  29. 29.

    ‘Aux Jardies’, 1 January 1883, AN F7 15. 9582.

  30. 30.

    ‘Discours sur les menées ultramontaines’, Discours VI: 284–362 (at 354). Cf. Foley and Sowerwine, A Political Romance, 143–7; Jérôme Grévy, Le cléricalisme, voilà l’ennemi: une guerre de religion en France (Paris: Colin, 2005).

  31. 31.

    Professors Charcot, Verneuil, Trélat, Brouardel and Cornil; Doctors Siredey and Lannelongue (‘Blessure et mort de M. Gambetta’, Gazette hebdomadaire de médecine et de chirurgie no. 3, 19 January 1883: 33–46). Other doctors, such as Paul Bert, came as friends, but offered medical opinions. See Foley and Sowerwine, A Political Romance, 200–22.

  32. 32.

    Avner Ben-Amos, ‘Monuments and Memory in French Nationalism’, History and Memory 5 (1993): 50–81 (at 60–1); Mona Ozouf, ‘The Panthéon: The École Normale of the Dead’, in Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, ed. Pierre Nora and trans. Arthur Goldhammer, 3 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), III: 325–40; Lorraine Ward, ‘The Cult of Relics: Pasteur Material at the Science Museum’, Medical History 38 (1994): 52–72; Véronique Magnol-Malhache, Patrick Chamouard and Denis Lavalle, Léon Gambetta: un saint pour la république? (Paris: Caisse nationale des monuments historiques et des sites, 1996), 46.

  33. 33.

    Foley and Sowerwine, A Political Romance, 218–22; ‘Blessure et mort’; P.B. Gheusi, La vie et la mort singulières de Gambetta (Paris: A. Michel, 1932), 300, 305; Odilon Lannelongue, Leçons de clinique chirurgicale (Paris: Masson, 1905), 318, 323; Magnol-Malhache et al., Léon Gambetta, 43–6, 70–6; Letter, Léonie Léon to Mme Marcellin Pellet, 17 November 1886, in Émile Pillias, Léonie Léon, amie de Gambetta, 3rd edn (Paris: Gallimard, 1935), 215. Cf. P.B. Gheusi, ‘Le nouveau tombeau de Gambetta’, L’Illustration, 10 April 1909, 239–42.

  34. 34.

    La République française, 3 January 1883.

  35. 35.

    La République française, 3, 4 January 1883.

  36. 36.

    For an example, see http://www.musees-midi-pyrenees.fr/musees/musee-de-cahors-henri-martin/collections/collection-gambetta/anonyme/pendule-representant-gambetta (accessed 15 October 2016).

  37. 37.

    La République française, 3, 4 January 1883; Anne Martin-Fugier, ‘Bourgeois Rituals’, in From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War, ed. Michelle Perrot, vol. 4 of A History of Private Life, ed. Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, 5 vols (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991), 261–337, at 333.

  38. 38.

    Discours XI: 236–9; Pillias, Léonie Léon, 187; Archives d’histoire contemporaine, Sciences Po Centre d’Histoire, Paris, 2EP 6, Dr 2, sdr a: ‘Lettres à sa famille’, Joseph Gambetta to Victor Hugo, 12 January 1883; Magnol-Malhache et al., Léon Gambetta, 54–7.

  39. 39.

    ‘The Death of Gambetta: France Preparing to Bury Her Greatest Statesman’, New York Times, 6 January 1883; ‘Ordre du Cortège et Liste des Couronnes’, ‘Compte-Rendu des Obsèques’, La République française, 7, 8 January 1883; Discours XI: 282–92; APP B/a 924, ‘Mort et Funérailles de Gambetta’, January 1883. For the complete funeral, see Le Figaro, 6–7 January 1883; and La République française, 1–7 January 1883. For the role of Léonie Léon, see Foley and Sowerwine, A Political Romance, 226.

  40. 40.

    ‘Ordre du Cortège et Liste des Couronnes’, ‘Compte-Rendu des Obsèques’, La République française, 7, 8 January 1883; Cf. James R. Lehning, ‘Gossiping about Gambetta: Contested Memories in the Early Third Republic’, French Historical Studies 18 (1981): 237–54 (esp. 240–1).

  41. 41.

    Magnol-Malhache et al., Léon Gambetta, 63–5; ‘Obsèques à Nice’, La République française, 12–14 January 1883.

  42. 42.

    L. Delpech to E. Spuller, La Presse, 7 January 1883, 2; cf. Magnol-Malhache et al., Léon Gambetta, 105.

  43. 43.

    La République française, 2 January 1884.

  44. 44.

    Odile Sassi, ‘Léon Gambetta: Destin et mémoire (1838–1938)’, 2 vols (thèse de doctorat d’histoire, Université Paris IV-Sorbonne, 1998), 373–92, 385 (Spuller); APP, B/a 924: dossier Gambetta: 6 January 1884; ‘Discours de Eugène Étienne’, in Émile Labarthe, Gambetta et ses amis (Paris: Les Éditions des Presses modernes, 1938), 324.

  45. 45.

    APP B/a 924, ‘C[ommisionnai]re Sèvres à Préfet de Police’, 7 January 1900.

  46. 46.

    ‘Image d’Épinal N° 1316’, fig. 7, in Magnol-Malhache et al., Léon Gambetta, xiv.

  47. 47.

    See Foley and Sowerwine, A Political Romance, 55–9; and Charles Sowerwine, ‘Boulangism’, in Europe 1789 to 1914—Encyclopedia of the Age of Industry and Empire, ed. John Merriman and Jay Winter, 5 vols (Philadelphia: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2006): I, 281–3.

  48. 48.

    See Sowerwine, France since 1870, 64–69, and Sowerwine, ‘The Dreyfus Affair’, in Europe 1789 to 1914, ed. Merriman and Winter: II, 683–6.

  49. 49.

    See Neil McWilliam, ‘Conflicting Manifestations: Parisian Commemoration of Joan of Arc and Etienne Dolet in the Early Third Republic’, French Historical Studies 29 (2004): 381–418 (at 381–2 and notes).

  50. 50.

    Magnol-Malhache et al., Léon Gambetta, 111; June Hargrove, The Statues of Paris: An Open-Air Pantheon (New York and Paris: Vendome Press, 1989), 162.

  51. 51.

    For images, see Hargrove, The Statues of Paris, 108–9, 256, 316.

  52. 52.

    Magnol-Malhache et al., Léon Gambetta, 112; Sassi, ‘Léon Gambetta’, 441–59; Georges Poisson, ‘La première pyramide érigée dans la cour du Louvre: La pyramide de Gambetta’, Historia 520 (1990): 70–6; ‘The Gambetta Monument’, New York Times, 3 July 1887; Hargrove, The Statues of Paris, 162.

  53. 53.

    ‘Discours de M. E. Spuller’, in Labarthe, Léon Gambetta, 243, 249.

  54. 54.

    Gammerl, ‘Emotional Styles’, 164.

  55. 55.

    ‘Discours de M. E. Spuller’, in Labarthe, Léon Gambetta, 252–4.

  56. 56.

    ‘The Statue of Gambetta’, New York Times, 11 April 1884; Sassi, ‘Léon Gambetta’, 422–38.

  57. 57.

    Sassi, ‘Léon Gambetta’, 464; Magnol-Malhache et al., Léon Gambetta, 111–12.

  58. 58.

    Magnol-Malhache et al., Léon Gambetta, 46, 111–12.

  59. 59.

    Sassi, ‘Léon Gambetta’, 464; Magnol-Malhache et al., Léon Gambetta, 111–12; Ward, ‘The Cult of Relics’, 52–72.

  60. 60.

    Magnol-Malhache et al., Léon Gambetta, 107–8; Sassi, ‘Léon Gambetta’, 397–403, 409–11; Labarthe, Gambetta et ses amis, 307–9; ‘Discours de Joseph Reinach’, Labarthe, Gambetta et ses amis, 331.

  61. 61.

    ‘Discours de Paul Doumer’, in Labarthe, Gambetta et ses amis, 262.

  62. 62.

    ‘M. Saint-Saëns à Bordeaux’, La Revue musicale 5(9) (1 May 1905): 266–7. Cf. Sabina Ratner, Camille Saint-Saëns 1835–1921: A Thematic Catalogue of His Complete Works, I: The Instrumental Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 278–82; Sassi, ‘Léon Gambetta’, 471–81; Magnol-Malhache et al., Léon Gambetta, 112–15; Labarthe, Gambetta et ses amis, 311.

  63. 63.

    Sassi, ‘Léon Gambetta’, 484–5; Labarthe, Gambetta et ses amis, 311.

  64. 64.

    Magnol-Malhache et al., Léon Gambetta, 81–2.

  65. 65.

    Sassi, ‘Léon Gambetta’, 412–16; Le Temps, 29 March 1920, 1–3.

  66. 66.

    Paul Strauss, speaking in the Senate (Annales du Sénat et de la Chambre des députés, Documents parlementaires, Sénat, Débats, 8 November 1920 Session, 13–15); cf. Magnol-Malhache et al., Léon Gambetta, 79–86.

  67. 67.

    Annales, Chambre des députés, Débats, 31 July 1920 Session, 2943; Magnol-Malhache et al., Léon Gambetta, 81–2; Sassi, ‘Léon Gambetta’, 505.

  68. 68.

    Magnol-Malhache et al., Léon Gambetta, 86–8; Sassi, ‘Léon Gambetta’, 507–8.

  69. 69.

    Rémi Dalisson, 11 novembre: du souvenir à la mémoire (Paris: Colin, 2013), 31–55.

  70. 70.

    Magnol-Malhache et al., Léon Gambetta, 89–94; Sassi, ‘Léon Gambetta’, 508–9.

  71. 71.

    The delay resulted from difficulties in finding the desired stone for the urn. Magnol-Malhache et al., Léon Gambetta, 94.

  72. 72.

    Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice’, 195.