Repression and Persistence of Leftist Opposition in the Countryside

The "agony of the republic"—the progressive destruction of left republican and démoc soc opposition groups that accompanied the decline of the Second Republic—touched the Aude just as it touched the rest of provincial France in 1849–1852.^[46] Between November 1849 and the summer of 1851, thirty-five republican mayors lost their posts, and in 1851 both Raynal and Marcou fled to Barcelona.^[47] Nonetheless, in the countryside, continued economic depression created a climate in which popular democratic socialism survived. When police arrested agricultural workers for singing revolutionary songs such as the "Marseillaise" and shouting "seditious slogans," workers adopted new symbols of opposition. They wore red sashes while working, and when the police seized their sashes, they made new ones. Dress functioned to articulate political solidarity in the fields or at the worksite. In the fields just outside Narbonne, a group of fifty workers bearing a red flag marched to tend the vines of a comrade imprisoned for his left-wing political activities; others used funerals as occasions for political demonstrations. Even after the

coup d'état of December 2, 1851, démoc soc activities continued underground.^[48]

The same kinds of secret societies that John Merriman and Ted Margadant have described in other areas of rural France proliferated in the Audois countryside in the early 1850s, and survived by means of common symbols, rituals, and rhetoric.^[49] Republican secret societies comprised rural artisans (shoemakers and tailors), agricultural workers, and small landowners; men who read Marcou's La Fraternité , Proudhon's Le Peuple , and tracts by Armand Barbès. Their political discourse reflected a general concern for the well-being of the worker, including increased wages and lower taxes. They also served as mutual aid societies and provided benefits such as sickness insurance. Members underwent an initiation ceremony in which they knelt blindfolded and, touching the blade of a knife, pledged to defend "la république démocratique et sociale" and to keep the secrets of the society. Special greetings involved a question and response: "République?" "Universelle." "Bientôt?" "Arrivera."^[50]

These rituals and the language of ritual, reproduced in secret societies all over France, were part of a forging of national left republicanism as yet unmediated by institutional structures.^[51] The societies showed that rural dwellers had begun to develop modern forms of political organization as they used meetings, newspapers, and political pamphlets to disseminate their ideas. They also signaled the decline of older forms of personal influence that had determined the politics of the countryside for generations.

The growth of republican opposition politics was also aided as the Aude was opened more fully to the national market by the Second Empire's railway-building program of the 1850s. Vignerons and farmers could now have closer contact with the larger world of national politics. The amnesty of 1859 allowed exiled republican leaders Marcou and Raynal to reenter the political arena, and the restoration of press freedoms under the liberal Empire enabled republicans to reconstitute the left in the Aude—as the legislative elections of 1869 proved.^[52] Just weeks after the plebiscite of 1869 on the emperor's reform program, in which vinedressers and rural artisans in the winegrowing Nar-

bonnais returned a majority of "no" votes (the only district in the Aude where this was so), republicans won the municipality of Narbonne.^[53] The collapse of the Empire, the Prussian invasion, and the Paris Commune, however, accentuated already existing divisions between left republicans (heirs of the démoc socs of 1848) and moderates, further changing the political map of the Aude.