General Conclusion: Popular Nationhood — A Companion of European Modernities

Abstract

When Raymond Poincaré was elected President of the Third French Republic in January 1913, he honoured the custom to grant amnesty to some categories of prisoners. Poincaré’s initiative did not satisfy the Parisian socialist deputy Marcel Sembat. In the Chamber of Deputies, Sembat urged the new government to extend the measure to deserters and draft evaders (the so-called ‘disobedient’, insoumis). After the press broadly publicized Sembat’s announcement, he received dozens of letters from deserters and draft evaders expressing their gratitude and encouraging him to continue his action. One of these deserters, Léon Morel, who lived in exile in Brussels (like most of them), alleged that Sembat had gained ‘the sympathies and the recognition of the 80,000 Frenchmen, deserters and draft evaders’. Their desertion, as this sentence suggests, had not deprived them of the will or the right to claim French nationhood. This was further substantiated in that same letter by a strong expression of repentance: ‘There is not one among us whose eyes do not become wet at the tones of the Marseillaise or at the sight of the three colours of that flag that we abandoned in a moment of aberration; we adore it as an idol, and we would all be present, please believe, when it ought to be defended!’¹