Children of the Revolution Read online

  This provoked popular revolt in Paris on 27 July, involving among others printworkers whose livelihoods were threatened. Gunshops were raided, barricades thrown up, and insurgents – workers, students and veterans of the Napoleonic wars – clashed with the troops of Marshal Marmont, military governor of Paris, who lost control of the situation when his own forces fraternized with the rebels. On 29 July Paris was in the hands of the insurgents, and cries went up to bring back the Republic or Napoleon II. At this point the liberal journalists and deputies tried to regain the initiative and impose a sensible solution. Meeting at Laffitte’s house they put Lafayette, based at the Hôtel de Ville or Paris Town Hall, in charge of the Paris National Guard, to defend against both royal troops and insurgents. He confirmed that ‘my conduct will be, at 73 years old, what it was at 32’, when he had fulfilled the same role.79 On 30 July Thiers led a delegation to the Neuilly residence of Louis-Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, head of a younger branch of the Bourbon family, to offer him the post of lieutenant-general of the kingdom.80 A rump of deputies under the chairmanship of Laffitte endorsed his acceptance on 31 July and Louis-Philippe came to the Hôtel de Ville where he was embraced by Lafayette; a lame Benjamin Constant was brought to the scene in a sedan chair.81 The main concern of the liberals was to prevent what Thiers called the ‘generous folly’ of a republic, and on 9 August the deputies and peers who remained on the scene invested Louis-Philippe, who swore to defend the Charter that Charles X had violated, as king of the French.82 Guizot in turn breathed a sigh of relief: ‘in a week the revolution was ended and the government established.’83

  The new leadership of France was composed of liberals who had been on the side of moderate reform since the last days of the Empire or early Restoration. Jacques Laffitte formed a ministry in November 1830 and saw through legislation in March and April 1831 lowering the parliamentary franchise to men paying 200 francs in tax instead of 300 francs, doubling the electorate to about 200,000, and making two million men eligible to vote in local elections. In March 1831 he was replaced by the more conservative liberal Casimir Périer, who dealt harshly with the revolt of the silkworkers of Lyon in November 1831 and disturbances in his native Grenoble, but died of cholera in May 1832.84 In October 1832 Napoleon’s former Marshal Soult fronted a powerful ministry which included Thiers at the Interior, Guizot at Education, and de Broglie at the Foreign Ministry and embedded the conservative liberalism of the July Monarchy.

  The new regime had to see off the threat of counter-revolution, but wanted to avoid the extreme measures of 1793. Charles X was taken by an American steamer from Cherbourg to England, but there was great pressure to try his ministers, especially Polignac, arrested on 15 August. During the trial of the ministers by the peers that December, crowds gathered shouting ‘Death to the ministers!’ and were angry when, found guilty of treason, they were merely deported to England.85 Showing more guts than the male members of her family the Duchesse de Berry, whose husband had been assassinated in 1820, landed near Marseille in April 1832 and tried to raise the Vendée in support of the claim of the heir she had borne her husband after his death, but to no avail. She was arrested in November 1832 on the orders of interior minister Thiers. Chateaubriand, who had attacked the ‘bastard monarchy’ stitched up by a parliamentary rump, which had banished the Bourbons and confiscated their estates, was arrested for complicity in the uprising but was defended by Pierre-Antoine Berryer, whose father had defended Ney in 1815, and was acquitted.86

  More serious for the July Monarchy was the threat from republicans who shared the view that the new monarchy was bereft of legitimacy, and claimed that revolutionary legitimacy required the restoration of the Republic. An amnesty was granted to the eighty regicide members of the Convention, exiled in 1816, who were still alive, but with the king’s blood on their hands they were seen as an embarrassment. ‘No one shook their hand. They reappeared as strangers in their own house: their shadow alone would have made more noise,’ noted the young republican Edgar Quinet.87 The republican torch was taken up by a new generation of law and medical students, who were the same age as liberals such as Thiers or Rémusat, but more radical in their commitment, sometimes for family reasons. Godefroy Cavaignac’s father had been exiled to Brussels as a regicide and died there in 1829. Blanqui’s father had been elected to the Convention in 1793 when his home city of Nice was annexed by France, although he was not a regicide. The father of François Raspail was no friend of the Revolution, which ruined his business, but François was influenced by a radical priest at his seminary and by the White Terror at Carpentras, where he was teaching philosophy. Slightly younger, born in 1809, were Armand Barbès, the son of a military surgeon who had served in Egypt and the West Indies, and Charles Delescluze, son of a republican soldier and Napoleonic police commissioner.88 These set up the Society of Friends of the People on 30 July 1830, saw themselves as heirs of Jacobins such as Robespierre, Saint-Just and Marat, demonstrated in favour of the death penalty for Charles X’s ministers and used the funeral of Napoleon’s Marshal Lamarque on 5 June 1832 to launch an insurrection in favour of the Republic. Dissolved, they reconstituted as the Society of the Rights of Man in 1833, and launched another insurrection in April 1834 in Paris and in conjunction with the silkworkers of Lyon.

  These risings were brutally suppressed on the orders of Thiers, including the so-called massacre of the rue Transnonain in Paris, when twelve residents thought to be hiding rebels were put to the sword.89 Some of the leaders of the insurrection, like Cavaignac, escaped, but 121 rebels of the Paris and Lyon movements were sent for trial for treason before the Chamber of Peers in April 1835. Armand Carrel, who had worked with Thiers on the National but had broken with him because he favoured the Republic, evoked the spectre of Marshal Ney, whom they had ‘assassinated’ in 1815, to call into question the peers’ legitimacy.90 Jules Favre, a Lyon barrister also born in 1809, attacked the government for provoking the rebels and made his name as one of the new generation of republican leaders.91 That said, the sentences effectively destroyed the republican leadership, with dozens deported or sent to prison. Republicans were reduced to counter-productive violence, such as the assassination attempt on Louis-Philippe on 28 July 1838 using a home-made multi-barrelled gun by a disgruntled former Napoleonic soldier from Corsica, Joseph Fieschi. The king survived but eighteen people watching the review of the Paris National Guard were killed. Fieschi and two other conspirators were executed and stringent laws against the press and carrying arms were enacted in September 1836. Former members of the Society of the Rights of Man, now reborn as the Society of Seasons, tried to seize control of the Palais de Justice and Hôtel de Ville on 12 May 1839. Armand Barbès who was wounded and Auguste Blanqui who fled were sentenced to death but had their sentence commuted to perpetual detention after a campaign against the death penalty led by Victor Hugo and were imprisoned in the medieval fortress of Mont Saint-Michel.92

  RE-RUNNING THE REPUBLIC

  By 1840 the July Monarchy had reached an enviable level of stability. There was no fighting in the streets of Paris between 1839 and 1848. Politics remained in the hands of a coherent body of notables, an electorate of 250,000 electing a body of deputies two-thirds of whom paid 1,000 francs in taxes in 1840. A single ministry led by Guizot remained in power from 1840 to 1848, supported by a government majority two-thirds of whom were civil servants, a majority strengthened by the elections of 1846. To those who protested at their exclusion from the political process because they were not propertied enough to pay sufficient taxes, Guizot simply replied, ‘Get rich.’ His social life revolved around the salon of the Princesse Lieven, whose international connections satisfied Guizot’s ‘puerile ambition’, in the opinion of Charles de Rémusat, ‘to be incorporated into the Metternich clique of every country’.93 Only electoral reform and in particular the introduction of universal suffrage would shift the government, but the Chamber of Deputies set its face against such reform in March 1847. Given the restrictions on pu
blic meetings the campaign for reform was confi ned to ‘banquets’ and Chartist-like petitions. At a banquet in Lille on 7 November 1847 the lawyer and republican deputy for Le Mans, Ledru-Rollin, called for universal suffrage. When the government banned another due in Paris it took place illegally on 22 February 1848 and violence broke out.

  Guizot was finally dismissed on 23 February and Thiers formed a government which included another opposition leader Odilon Barrot and Charles de Rémusat. When, however, regular troops fired on demonstrators, provoking insurrection, and the National Guard sided with the demonstrators, Louis-Philippe abdicated. His son, the Duc d’Orléans, had died in a carriage accident in 1842, and the attempt on 24 February by his widow, supported by Barrot, to have the Chamber endorse a regency in favour of her nine-year-old son, the Comte de Paris, came to nothing as crowds invaded the Chamber. Meanwhile decision-making had shifted to the Hôtel de Ville. Ledru-Rollin and Alphonse de Lamartine, a poet and Legitimist politician who moved sharply to the left in 1842, went from the Chamber to the Hôtel de Ville where a provisional government was set up ahead of elections to a constituent assembly. They hesitated to declare a republic, and François Raspail, determined that the mistake of 1830 should be avoided, marched at the head of a column of building workers to the Hôtel de Ville on 25 February, and proclaimed the Republic to the crowd.94

  Those who refounded the Republic on 24–25 February were clear that to succeed it must exorcize the demons of that of 1792, and not descend into another Terror. Raspail had emphasized as early as 1835 that ‘the republic we desire is not what you describe as that of 1793’. Universal suffrage would provide liberty for all and fraternity would replace persecution and civil war.95 Lamartine, having moved to the left, resurrected the Girondins, the moderate revolutionaries who in 1793 had been purged by Robespierre’s ‘Montagne’ (so called because they sat on the Assembly’s highest benches), as model republicans. ‘They adored liberty. They founded the Republic,’ he wrote. ‘They died for refusing to allow liberty to be soiled.’96 On 27 February, on behalf of the provisional government, he duly announced the abolition of the death penalty for political crimes, and there were no trials of Louis-Philippe’s ministers. Victor Hugo, who wrote an ode to the coronation of Charles X at twenty-three, was converted to the cult of Napoleon two years later and became a peer in 1845, stood as a candidate in the 8th arrondissement of Paris. He told his electors that the Republic should not ‘restart those two fatal machines… the assignat printing press and the pivot of the guillotine’ but should be ‘the holy communion of all French people… under the democratic principle’.97

  The Second Republic certainly did not usher in the Terror, but its dream of fraternity did not prevent civil war and it did not, unlike that of 1792, take measures tough enough to prevent the enemies of the Republic using against it the liberty it proclaimed. The commissaires of the Republic sent out by Ledru-Rollin, the new interior minister, in place of the prefects, were former colleagues of the late Godefroy Cavaignac – Félix Pyat, sent to the Allier, Charles Delescluze, sent to Lille – or sons of former colleagues in the case of the twenty-two-year-old lawyer Émile Ollivier, sent to Marseille, but were far from being as effective as the Convention’s representatives on mission during the Terror.98 Elections to the Constituent Assembly were scheduled for 9 April, which did not give enough time, argued Auguste Blanqui and his supporters, for citizens just given the vote to be educated in republican ways by the popular press and political clubs which sprang up as they had in 1789. They obtained a postponement till Easter day, 23 April, when, as they feared, the republican message was not sufficiently disseminated and old social hierarchies ensured the return of many of the old politicians as effectively under universal suffrage as under a limited franchise. The Comte de Falloux, a Legitimist from Anjou, urged his supporters to use the opportunities provided by ‘the government of all for all’ and was elected as in 1846, while the Orleanist Charles de Rémusat, meeting his Legitimist friend Berryer after they had been re-elected, recalled that ‘we could not stop ourselves laughing’, so little had been changed by the Revolution.99

  Ironically there were only a minority of confirmed republican deputies in the Constituent Assembly which opened on 4 May, much to the chagrin of the republican movement that was bubbling in the political clubs and popular press of Paris as it had in 1789, and confrontation was not long in coming. On 15 May the Assembly was invaded by Paris republicans led by Blanqui, Barbès and Raspail, who then attempted to set up a revolutionary government in the Hôtel de Ville. Overpowered by the National Guard, the leaders were arrested, tried and given long prison sentences. On 21 June unemployed workers who had been found work on building projects were suddenly thrown out of work when these ‘national workshops’ were closed down, the workers drafted into the army or sent back to their province of origin. Feared as hotbeds of socialist discontent, they were transformed into the base of a popular revolution which took control of the poorer, eastern half of the capital between 23 and 26 June, the so-called June Days. The Assembly handed over dictatorial power to the minister of war, Eugène Cavaignac, younger brother of the revolutionary Godefroy, who had made a career in the army conquering Algeria and now saw himself as a French Washington. The insurrection was brutally suppressed, with 500 deaths on the barricades, 3,000 summary executions and 12,000 men arrested and crammed into improvised prisons before 4,000 were deported to Algeria.100 This repression was a formative influence on a whole generation who would become socialists and anarchists, for whom the bourgeois state was exposed in all its brutality. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who had just been elected in a by-election, said that ‘the memory of the June Days will always weigh like a terrible remorse on my heart.’ He was ‘elected by the plebs, journalist of the proletariat’, but was unable to lead the 100,000 rebels – a ‘disastrous apprenticeship’ which he urgently had to put right.101 Jules Vallès, who came to Paris in 1848 to resit his baccalauréat, was appalled by the chain-gangs of rebels being led away to deportation. He resolved to write a book on the June Days but so awful were the memories he was never able to do so.

  The constitution of the Republic was voted by the Assembly on 4 November 1848 and the election of a president for four years by universal suffrage took place on 10 December. Cavaignac was the favourite as a man of order who had saved the Republic, but his reputation among the populace was as a butcher, while he was too much a republican for the combined Orleanist and Legitimist leaders of what was now known as the ‘party of order’ such as Thiers, Molé, Barrot, Berryer and Falloux who were looking for a way back into power. ‘Not for a single day had the infant republic ceased being attacked by republicans,’ said Falloux; it had to be entrusted to royalists who knew how to govern.102 The dark horse was Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, son of the emperor’s brother Louis and Joséphine’s daughter Hortense Beauharnais, who had been brought up in enforced exile in Switzerland and Italy, had fled to England after the failure of a military rising at Strasbourg in 1836, and had been captured and imprisoned, only to escape after a madcap landing at Boulogne in 1840. He had spent time thinking about how to reinvent his uncle’s legacy for modern times and published Napoleonic Ideas in 1839. Napoleon, he argued, ‘rooted the principal benefits of the great crisis of 1789 in France and introduced them all over Europe… he accelerated the reign of liberty by saving the moral influence of the Revolution and calming the fears it inspired.’ If liberty had been restricted under Napoleon it was because of ongoing war and counter-revolution; dictatorship was temporary, and, he quoted Napoleon, ‘a constitution is the work of time’. Napoleon had deferred to the people, said that his own fibre responded to theirs, and instituted a republican monarchy, legitimated by a popular vote. He had overcome the war of parties by bringing together those who had favoured the Revolution and those who had opposed it. ‘To govern through a party is to become dependent on it sooner or later,’ he had told the Conseil d’État. ‘No one will get the better of me that way: I am nationa
l.’ Louis-Napoleon paid homage to Napoleon I, but did not intend simply to copy him. ‘March at the head of the ideas of your century, and those ideas will follow you and support you,’ he said. ‘March beside them, and they will drag you along. March against them, and they will overthrow you.’103

  Elected to the Assembly in a by-election in Burgundy at the same time as Proudhon, on 4 June, and returning to France, he was an unknown quantity and thought mediocre by many who met him. ‘With his long face and heavy features, a sickly colouring, his large parrot’s nose, and awful mouth,’ said Charles de Rémusat, he looked not like a Bonaparte but like a Beauharnais. Some people said, ‘The man is an idiot,’ but Rémusat became aware that he ‘believed in the star of his dynasty’ and represented a ‘popular Bonapartism’.104 This was echoed by a Burgundy newspaper which argued that the rural populations who voted for him ‘focussed on the memory of the Emperor, whose name is still worshipped in our cottages’. This popular support was not an expression of peasant atavism, but a folk memory of the Napoleon of the Hundred Days who in 1815 had thrown out the Bourbons and their noble and clerical allies.105 On the day, Louis-Napoleon was elected president with a massive 5.4 million votes, as against 1.4 million for Cavaignac, 400,000 for Ledru-Rollin and 37,000 for Raspail.

  Despite this popular mandate the leaders of the party of order were persuaded, in Thiers’ words, that Louis-Napoleon was ‘a cretin we will manage’.106 His first ministry was headed by Odilon Barrot, who had been the last chief minister of Louis-Philippe. The Comte de Falloux replaced Hippolyte Carnot, son of the regicide Lazare Carnot, as education minister, ‘proof of an agreement’, said Charles de Rémusat, ‘between Bonapartism and the clergy, or rather the Catholic party’.107 Another Legitimist, Alexis de Tocqueville, was appointed foreign minister. Elections to the Legislative Assembly on 13 May 1849 gave a majority of 500 to the royalist party of order, seeing off a hard-fought campaign by the Montagne under Ledru-Rollin which wanted to install a democratic and socialist republic but won only 200 seats. On 13 June the Montagnards took to the streets in an attempted insurrection which was crushed, and Ledru-Rollin fled to London. Louis-Napoleon now reshuffled his government to include the hard men of the party of order, not those such as Thiers tarnished by association with previous regimes but men of the same vintage who were less politically compromised. These included Achille Fould, a banker of Jewish origin and deputy for Paris who had financed Louis-Napoleon’s presidential campaign and became minister of finance; Jules Baroche, a barrister from La Rochelle and protégé of Odilon Barrot, who as procurator-general tried the leaders of the 15 May and 13 June disturbances and became interior minister; and Eugène Rouher, a barrister from Riom and deputy for the Auvergne who became minister of justice.108 These new ministers took the opportunity to wrap up the democratic experiment, clamping down on the press and public meetings, and restricting universal suffrage by a law of 31 May 1850 which disfranchised a third of the electorate, characterized by Thiers as the ‘vile multitude’.