Félix Milliet, born on July 19, 1811, in Valence and died on October 22, 1888, in the 5th arrondissement of Paris, was a French officer and then republican activist, poet and chansonnier. He campaigned alongside his wife Louise Milliet, who was born on January 28, 1822, in Le Mans and died on July 10, 1893, in the 5th district of Paris.
An orphan from Drôme, Félix Milliet developed his republican ideas after the July Revolution in 1830. He pursued a military career, which led him to Maine, and practised the art of poetry. There he met Louise de Tucé, a teenager from a wealthy noble family. They married and moved to Le Mans.
It was in Le Mans that Félix Milliet's political career reached its peak. He rubbed shoulders with important republicans in town, such as Auguste Savardan, Marie Pape-Carpantier and Jacques François Barbier. After leaving the army, he became known for his politically committed songs, which he published in newspapers that were regularly banned by the July monarchy and then by the republican regime of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte. He described himself as a socialist, although in practice he was very moderate, and shared the anti-clerical and Fourierist ideas of his friends. He supported the Parisian insurrection of the June days in 1848 and then stood in the legislative elections the following year among the candidates of the Montagne.
After the coup of December 2, 1851, he was implicated in an attempted insurrection in the Manche region and condemned to exile in Nice at the beginning of 1852. He took refuge in Geneva, brought his family back to him and continued his commitment. He continued to write and publish songs, until one of them, Chansonnier impérial pour l'an de grâce 1853, led to him being sentenced to exile again, this time to London.
Félix Milliet took refuge in Savoie, which was then attached to the kingdom of Sardinia. He stopped his political publications and devoted himself to painting and his family. Still a Fourierist, he considered joining the Phalansterian project of La Réunion in Texas, before the project collapsed; he saw in these small communities the possibility of a utopian "world harmony". He did not return to France until 1866, seven years after the amnesty law for politically convicted people and fourteen years after the beginning of his exile.
He spent the last twenty years of his life retired in Paris, then at La Colonie, a phalanstery located in Condé-sur-Vesgre (Seine-et-Oise). His wife Louise Milliet took an active part in the organisation of the community, but he was not very active. He died in 1888. He owes his fame in part to his son Paul Milliet, who recounts his life in a family biography published in Charles Péguy's Cahiers de la Quinzaine in 1910.
Family life
Studies and the beginning of the republican commitment Jean Joseph Félix Milliet was born in 1811 in Valence to Élisabeth Vialet and Joseph Milliet, a doctorActe de mariage de Joseph Milliet et Élisabeth Vialet at Valence, . and landownerActe de naissance de Félix Milliet , on July 20, 1811, at Valence, . from Cluses (Haute-Savoie) who had been living in Valence since the year IX. He was orphaned at the age of nine and his only family was a sister, Célie Milliet, five years older than him,Acte de mariage de Denis Laurent de Montlovier et Françoise Élisabeth Célie Milliet , on Fébruary 2, 1829 at Valence, . and a maternal uncle, an artillery colonel and director of the arms factory in Saint-Étienne, who had retired to the family property in Saint-Flour (on the banks of the Rhône and in the municipality of Guilherand-Granges). He was brought up by family friends and studied at the college of Valence, then at that of Lyon. He obtained his baccalauréat ès lettres on October 16, 1829, at the age of eighteen.
The following year, Félix Milliet went to Paris to study at the Law school. The first performance of Victor Hugo's play Hernani on February 15, 1830, made a political impression on him; he admired Hugo and was enthusiastic about his ideas. However, a republican, he took part in the July Revolution and, according to his son Paul Milliet, more particularly in the "Rambouillet expedition".
Taken by surprise by the political events, he stopped his law studies, in which he had little interest, in order to start a military career. He studied at Saint-Cyr, then at the Cavalry School of Saumur. He became a second lieutenant in the chasseurs à cheval.
Wedding with Louise de Tucé
Having joined the regiment of the 7th Lancers, Félix Milliet was sent to garrison in Vendôme and Montoire-sur-le-Loir (Loir-et-Cher). It was there that he met Louise de Tucé, a sixteen-year-old girl, in 1838. He wished to marry her, and during that year wrote many poems praising his budding love.Read on line ou on Wikisource.
However, her social background blocked their possible union for a time. Louise de Tucé descended from a wealthy family from the provincial nobility of Maine, whereas Félix Milliet had no title of nobility and only a few modest properties. Tucé's mother, Aimée Hüe de Montaigu, did not want her daughter to be married until she was eighteen and to a wealthy, highborn man; so she wrote to Félix Milliet on December 8, 1838, that her "daughter belongs to one of the oldest families in Maine, who would find it inappropriate for me to make Louise form an alliance in which she would find neither birth nor title". In spite of this, she took into consideration the love that Félix Milliet had for her daughter. She then demands that he wait, and that he acquires a title of nobility on his marriage. He had the possibility of doing this by adding the name of his property in Saint-Flour to his own. He refused because of his political convictions.
Louise de Tucé and Félix Milliet finally became engaged in January 1839. Their wedding took place three months later, on 13 April in Le Mans; he was twenty-seven years old, she was seventeen.
Family man
Félix and Louise Milliet had their first child in 1840, on 6 August, named Fernand. He was followed less than two years later by Alix, on May 18, 1842.
When he married, Félix Milliet was in garrison at Vendôme and a second lieutenant in the 8th Lancers. He continued his military career and in the following years became a cavalry officer. With his regiment, he changed garrisons several times, joining Pontivy in Morbihan or Alençon in Orne. However, he suffers from a larynx disease and wishes to be closer to his family and to devote himself fully to poetry. He resigned from the army and joined his wife and children in Le Mans. Their third child, Paul, was born on 6 March 1844, followed by their fourth, Jeanne, in 1848.
Until then, Louise Milliet had been living near her mother Aimée Hüe de Montaigu in Le Mans. When they got back together, the couple moved into a house that they had built, with a courtyard and garden, near her mother's house. They took advantage of a house she had built in Montoire-sur-le-Loir for their holidays.
Félix Milliet regularly writes poems about his life and paintings. He participates in the education of his children. Louise Milliet abandoned her religious practices and became involved in the arts, literature, philosophy and politics. She develops a political thought similar to that of her husband.
Republican activism in Le Mans
Progressive group of friends
During the first years of their marriage, the young couple settled in Le Mans, the capital of Sarthe. This was a republican department, which was conducive to his making friends with republican and liberal activists. His circle of friends included the pedagogue and feminist Marie Carpantier, then director of the salle d'asile, an early form of nursery school, the writer Louis Clément Silly, the Phalanstrian couple Trahan, the radical publicist Napoléon Gallois, the republican Édouard Prudhomme de La Boussinière, director of a workers' reading circle, Julien Chassevant, a fervent follower of Charles Fourier, and Dr. Jacques François Barbier. With the families of the latter two, the Milliets met regularly at picnics where they developed their republican and Fourierist ideas - the latter being mainly transmitted by Julien Chassevant.
Considering himself "liberated" from the dogmas of religion and under the influence of the theses of Charles Fourier, Félix Milliet was initiated into Freemasonry on May 25, 1846. He became a speaker at the Manche lodge "des Arts et du Commerce". Dr Barbier joined him a few years later; Paul Milliet described him as his father's "most intimate" friend.
Activities A new revolution broke out in Paris in 1848, the so-called February Revolution, in which King Louis-Philippe I and his regime of the July Monarchy, established after the 1830 Revolution, were overthrown in favour of a Second Republic. Presidential elections on the basis of universal male suffrage were held and Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon I's nephew, took power.
Under this new Republic under construction, Félix Milliet became a committed republican figure in Le Mans alongside Barbier. They were so-called "advanced" republicans, supporters of the left-wing parliamentary group La Montagne and its leader Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, a candidate in the presidential election. A Republican Central Committee of the Sarthe was founded in 1848, with Barbier as its chairman and Milliet as its secretary. Milliet was a candidate, along with a man named Silly, in the 1849 legislative elections in Sarthe, where the members of the sole legislature of the National Legislative Assembly of the Second Republic were elected. There were twenty-seven candidates for ten deputies to be elected and 3,118 voters. Milliet obtained 1,113 votes, Silly 1,115, but they withdrew to leave the seat to Ledru-Rollin.
Félix Milliet was particularly active as a songwriter. He had his collections published in Le Mans, where they were successful. Others were published through Bonhomme Manceau, democratic sentinel of Sarthe, Orne and La Mayenne,; a weekly newspaper published from 1849 to 1850 and regularly seized, co-founded by Édouard Prudhomme de La Boussinière and Jean Silly, and edited by Napoléon Gallois. He was succeeded in 1851 by the more moderate Jacques Bonhomme,; within which Félix Milliet, Doctor Barbier and a Silly wrote. Montagnard newspaper, it claimed to denounce the "dynastic and dictatorial pretensions that dared to threaten the Republic"; however, its publication was short-lived, from February to April 1851, and it only had eight issues. The reason for this was a conviction by the Correctional court in Angers on 29 March 1851. It was then recreated under the name Le Petit Bonhomme manceau.;
In his verses, Félix Milliet confirmed his commitment to the Republic and his anti-monarchist, anti-clerical and socialist ideas. During the first months of the Second Republic, he defended the defeated workers of the national workshops, notably through his song Courage and faith, written after the deadly repression of the June Days in 1848 in Paris; a "cry for mercy", in the words of his son Paul.Read online. On April 15, 1849, he dedicated one of his texts to one of the most popular songwriters, Pierre-Jean de Béranger, then at the end of his career. Béranger wrote an encouraging letter back to him on 18 April.
In the preface to a collection published in 1850 by Propagande Démocratique et Sociale, in which Félix Milliet included the letter Béranger had sent him, Napoléon Gallois described his friend's songs as an expression of "hatred of tyranny, pity for those who suffer, aspiration towards a more equitable organisation of society, faith in a future of peace and world harmony". In the same year, Félix Milliet published a song, Marchons en frères, with music by P. Garreaud, dedicated to Doctor Auguste Savardan, an important Fourierist from the Sarthe region with whom he was in contact.;