Although Napoleon III’s reign made some progress in reducing antagonisms between classes, the Franco-Prussian War undid these efforts. The patriotic republicans who proclaimed the Third Republic in Paris after the military disaster at Sedan refused to admit defeat by the Germans. They defended Paris with great heroism for weeks, until they were starved into submission by German armies in January 1871.

When the next national elections sent a large majority of conservatives and monarchists to the National Assembly and France’s new leaders decided they had no choice but to surrender Alsace (al-SAS) and Lorraine to Germany, Parisians exploded in patriotic frustration and proclaimed the Paris Commune in March 1871. Vaguely radical, the leaders of the Commune wanted to govern Paris without interference from the conservative French countryside. The National Assembly, led by Adolphe Thiers (TEE-ehr), ordered the French army into Paris and brutally crushed the Commune. Twenty thousand people died in the fighting.

Out of this tragedy, France slowly formed a new national unity, achieving considerable stability before 1914. How do we account for this? Luck played a part. Until 1875 the monarchists in the ostensibly republican National Assembly had a majority but could not agree on who should be king. In the meantime, Thiers’s destruction of the radical Commune and his other firm measures showed the fearful provinces and the middle classes that the Third Republic could be politically moderate and socially conservative. France therefore reluctantly retained republican government.

Another stabilizing factor was the skill and determination of moderate republican leaders in the early years. By 1879 the great majority of members of both the upper and the lower houses of the National Assembly were republicans, and the Third Republic had firm foundations after almost a decade.

The moderate republicans sought to preserve their creation by winning the hearts and minds of the next generation. The Assembly legalized trade unions, and France worked to expand its colonial empire. More important, a series of laws between 1879 and 1886 greatly encouraged the state system of public, tax-supported schools and established free compulsory elementary education for both girls and boys. The expansion of public education served as a critical nation-building tool because the public schools emphasized and reinforced secular republican values.

Although the educational reforms of the 1880s disturbed French Catholics, many of them rallied to the republic in the 1890s. The election of the moderately liberal Pope Leo XIII (pontificate 1878–1903) eased tensions between church and state. Unfortunately, the Dreyfus affair changed all that.

In 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the French army, was falsely accused and convicted of treason. His family never doubted his innocence and fought to reopen the case. In 1898 and 1899, the case split France apart. On one side was the army, which had manufactured evidence against Dreyfus; it was joined by anti-Semites and most of the Catholic establishment. On the other side stood civil libertarians and most of the more radical republicans.

Dreyfus was eventually declared innocent, but the battle revived republican animosity toward the Catholic Church. Between 1901 and 1905, the government severed all ties between the state and the church. Suddenly on their own financially, Catholic schools soon lost a third of their students, greatly increasing the state school system’s reach and thus its power of indoctrination. In France, only the growing socialist movement, with its very different and thoroughly secular ideology, stood in opposition to republican nationalism.