The French Revolution of 1848 and the Second Republic

The "bankers' monarchy": the July Monarchy and its crisis (1830–1847)

When the July Revolution of 1830 drove out Charles X, Louis Philippe of the House of Orléans took the throne as "King of the French" rather than "King of France". The banker and liberal politician Jacques Laffitte, who had helped raise him to the throne, declared: "From now on, the bankers will rule." The regime of the "Bourgeois Monarch" rested on the "financial aristocracy" of bankers, stock exchange magnates, railway barons and owners of coal and iron mines and forests, while the industrial bourgeoisie tended to side with the middle and labouring classes in opposition in the Chamber of Deputies. Only men paying at least 200 francs in direct taxes could vote, so the electorate grew merely from about 94,000 under Charles X to just over 200,000 by 1848, roughly one percent of the population. Guizot, who dominated the government from 1840, supposedly told those who wanted the vote to "enrich yourselves". 1 2 3 4

The regime was challenged from both sides from the start: on the right by the Legitimists who wanted the senior Bourbon line back, on the left by the republicans and, later, the socialists. In November 1831 the silk-workers (Canuts) of Lyon took control of the city until 20,000 troops put them down, and after the second Canut revolt and the Paris rising of April 1834 more than 2,000 people were arrested. That year the government passed an association law aimed at the republican Society of the Rights of Man, and in 1835 the "September laws" muzzled the press. Republican revolutionaries went underground: Blanqui and Barbès built the secret Society of the Seasons, and on 12 May 1839 some 400 of its roughly 900 members seized the Paris town hall and the Palace of Justice for a few hours before being crushed. The feud between the two men over the blame for this failure would split the far left in 1848. 2 5 6

The economic crisis of the late 1840s shook the regime. The bad harvests of 1845–1846 had doubled the price of wheat by 1847, and falling domestic consumption led to a crisis of industrial overproduction. By the end of 1847 failures in metallurgy and railway building had thrown some 700,000 workers out of work, and in the northern industrial town of Roubaix 60 percent of the workers were unemployed. Three men were sentenced to death after the food riot at Buzançais in 1847, and by one estimate perhaps a third of Paris lived on relief. The same year the Teste–Cubières bribery scandal involving former ministers and the suicide of the Duke of Choiseul-Praslin after murdering his wife exposed the corruption of the elite. This was also when slogans such as Louis Blanc's "right to work" and Proudhon's "property is theft" spread. 2 3 1

With political meetings banned, the opposition seeking electoral reform borrowed the form of the banquet. Beginning with a gathering of 1,200 guests at the Château Rouge in Paris on 9 July 1847, some seventy banquets across the country drew about 17,000 participants. At first Odilon Barrot's "dynastic opposition", which wanted the tax qualification lowered, set the tone, but increasingly the moderate republicans of Le National and the radical democrats of La Réforme took over the platform, and Ledru-Rollin and Louis Blanc raised the social question at working men's banquets in Lille, Dijon and Chalon. Engels, in Paris from October 1847, reported on the banquets for La Réforme, the Northern Star and the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung. On 14 January 1848 the Guizot government banned the next Paris banquet, and its organisers decided to hold it on 22 February together with a demonstration. Tocqueville observed: "We are sleeping together in a volcano." 3 1 7

Three days in February 1848: from Guizot's fall to Louis Philippe's abdication

When the government banned the banquet again on 21 February the organising committee called it off, but the workers and students who had been mobilising for days refused to back down. Around noon on 22 February crowds from the eastern suburbs and the Latin Quarter filled the Place de la Concorde and the Place de la Madeleine and almost invaded the Palais Bourbon, seat of the Chamber of Deputies. Reinforcements cleared the squares in the afternoon, but the crowds spread out around the Champs-Élysées and south-eastern Paris and built the first barricades. On 23 February the government mobilised the National Guard, whose men refused to engage the crowds and joined them in shouting "Down with Guizot" and "Long live reform". In the afternoon Louis Philippe summoned Guizot to the Tuileries and asked for his resignation, and charged Molé with forming a new cabinet. Thiers and Barrot of the dynastic opposition congratulated themselves on changing the ministry while saving the monarchy. 1 8

At about half past nine that night, in front of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the Boulevard des Capucines, soldiers of the 14th Line Regiment fired a volley into a crowd of more than six hundred. The death toll varies by source: the English Wikipedia article on the revolution gives 52 killed and 74 wounded, its article on Thiers sixteen killed. Workers paraded the bodies through the streets on carts calling for vengeance, and during the night of 23–24 February more than 1,500 barricades went up across Paris. On the morning of the 24th the king asked Barrot to form a government but gave command of the Paris troops to Marshal Bugeaud, hated for his brutal repression; revolutionary National Guards took the Hôtel de Ville, and heavy fighting broke out at the Château d'Eau guard post. Thiers advised withdrawing the army from Paris to crush the revolution from outside, but the plan was rejected. 1 9

Around noon, realising that no further defence was possible, Louis Philippe called off all resistance, abdicated in favour of his nine-year-old grandson the Count of Paris, and left the city by carriage with the queen, fleeing to England. Revolutionaries entered the deserted Tuileries and wrote on the throne: "The People of Paris to All Europe: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity"; the throne was burned on the Place de la Bastille the next day. The Duchess of Orléans brought her son to the Chamber to secure a regency, but the crowd that broke into the hall demanded a republic, and Lamartine read out a list of a provisional government. Following cries of "To the Hôtel de Ville!", Lamartine and Ledru-Rollin went to the town hall, where a compromise between Le National and La Réforme fixed the eleven members of the Provisional Government. On 25 February a delegation led by Raspail gave the government two hours to proclaim a republic, and that day Lamartine proclaimed it from the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville. 1 10 11

The Provisional Government and the promise of a "social republic" (February–April 1848)

The Provisional Government was a coalition of two different kinds of republican. Its president was the revolutionary veteran Dupont de l'Eure, and the moderate republicans of Le National formed the majority: Lamartine (foreign affairs), Crémieux (justice), Arago (navy), Marie (public works), Garnier-Pagès (mayor of Paris, finance from March) and Marrast. Above all they wanted a political revolution. The minority came from La Réforme: the radical democrat Ledru-Rollin (interior), the socialist theorist Louis Blanc, La Réforme's editor Flocon, and the machinist Albert (Alexandre Martin), the only worker in the government and the first member of the industrial working class to sit in a French government. On 25 February Lamartine faced down a crowd demanding the red flag, telling them that it "has only toured the Champ-de-Mars, dragged in the blood of the people", and kept the tricolour, conceding a red rosette in return. 11 8 12 13

The same day armed workers burst into a session of the government demanding "the organisation of labour" and "the right to work", and on Louis Blanc's motion the Provisional Government decreed that it undertook "to guarantee the existence of the workmen by work" and "to guarantee work for every citizen". Blanc's demand for a ministry of labour to carry this out was refused; as a compromise a Government Commission for Workers was set up in the Luxembourg Palace on 28 February, with Blanc as president and Albert as vice-president. This "labour parliament", without budget or executive power, banned the subcontracting practice of marchandage and cut the working day by an hour, to ten hours in Paris and eleven in the provinces. Meanwhile, on 26–27 February the government opened the National Workshops under the minister of public works Marie; they were not the self-managed "social workshops" Blanc had imagined but a relief scheme modelled on the charity workshops of the old regime. 14 15 16 17

Political reform was swift and sweeping. The death penalty for political offences was abolished (26 February), freedom of the press and of assembly proclaimed (4 March), and on 5 March universal manhood suffrage raised the electorate from about 250,000 to nine million. On 8 March the property qualification for the National Guard was abolished, arming the workers, and on 27 April slavery in the colonies was abolished on the work of a commission set up on 4 March. But as depositors emptied the savings banks and banks and businesses failed, the finance minister Garnier-Pagès on 16 March imposed a surtax of 45 percent on direct taxes, the "45 centimes". Marx wrote that where 1789 had begun by freeing the peasants, 1848 began by taxing them, and the tax turned the countryside against the Republic of Paris. Wage strikes broke out in industrial towns and machine-breaking around Rouen, and the propertied began to fear the "sharers" and the "communists". 11 8 18

More than 250 political clubs sprang up in Paris, the best known being Blanqui's Central Republican Society, Cabet's Central Fraternal Society, Raspail's Club of the Friends of the People and Barbès's Club of the Revolution, and nearly 450 new newspapers appeared. Released from prison, Blanqui demanded the red flag and the indefinite postponement of elections. A mass workers' demonstration on 17 March won a delay of the elections from 9 to 23 April, but the demonstration of 16 April demanding a second postponement was stopped by National Guards called out by Ledru-Rollin, and Barbès, as a Guard colonel, was among those who blocked it. Around the same time the "Taschereau document" appeared in the press implying that Blanqui had betrayed his comrades in 1839, and Barbès's belief in it split the left deeply. Abroad, Lamartine's manifesto of 4 March ruled out exporting the revolution, and volunteer legions that crossed into Belgium and Savoy failed. In these weeks Marx and Engels came from Brussels to Paris before leaving for Germany, and Bakunin and Herzen also hurried to revolutionary Paris. 11 19 6 5 20 21 22

The April elections and 15 May: universal suffrage isolates Paris

On 23–24 April 1848 France voted by universal manhood suffrage for the first time since 1792; the electorate was forty times that of the property franchise, and turnout reached some 81 to 84 percent. Department-wide list voting favoured moderate candidates who appeared on several lists, and in the countryside the local notables held sway. Counts of the 900 seats differ: Agulhon gives about 500 moderate republicans, 250 conservatives and 150 radical republicans; Huard 280 moderate republicans, 250 Orléanists, 60 Legitimists, 80 democratic and socialist republicans and 200 without a known political past; Aprile 450 moderate republicans, 200 Orléanists, 50 Legitimists and 200 radicals. On any count the radical "republicans of the eve" were heavily beaten, and the Assembly filled with "republicans of the morrow" who had been monarchists before February. Lamartine was elected in seventeen departments. 23 11 24 25

The Constituent Assembly met on 4 May, proclaimed the Republic again, dissolved the Provisional Government and on 9–10 May entrusted power to a five-member Executive Commission of Arago, Garnier-Pagès, Marie, Lamartine and Ledru-Rollin; Louis Blanc and Albert were left out. On 10 May the Assembly rejected Blanc's proposal for a ministry of labour and progress, and on 12 May it forbade the clubs to send delegations to read petitions at the bar. Paris radicals were also angered by a diplomacy that abandoned the Polish rising in Posen to the Prussian army. On 15 May a demonstration for Poland marched from the Bastille into the Palais Bourbon, where Raspail read the petition from the tribune. In the confusion someone cried "The National Assembly is dissolved", and the crowd went to the Hôtel de Ville and drew up an insurrectionary government listing Blanqui, Albert, Louis Blanc, Raspail, Cabet and others. Blanqui and Barbès had been reluctant about the demonstration but were swept along. 26 8 27 6

National Guards rallied by Lamartine and Ledru-Rollin surrounded the Hôtel de Ville and drove the demonstrators out; Barbès and Albert were captured there, and Blanqui and Raspail were soon taken too. The prefect of police Caussidière resigned, and the commander of the National Guard, General Courtais, was arrested. The leaders were tried before the High Court at Bourges from 7 March to 3 April 1849: Barbès and Albert were sentenced to deportation (Barbès to life imprisonment), Blanqui to ten years and Raspail to six. On 16 May, the day after the demonstration, the Luxembourg Commission was abolished. In The Class Struggles in France Marx judged that the proletariat had sought to regain its revolutionary influence but had only delivered its most energetic leaders to the bourgeoisie's jailers, and the historian Duveau called it a "tragic and absurd farce" with no prospect of success. Stripped of its leaders, the Paris left lay open to the conservative offensive. 26 28 5 12 16

The June Days of 1848: "the first great battle" between bourgeoisie and proletariat

Registrations at the National Workshops rose from 6,000 on 15 March to 30,000 on 30 March and 64,000 on 16 April, reaching 117,000 on 30 April, and more than 20,000 women also worked in them. The workshops were organised on military lines from squads of eleven to companies of 901, but there was too little work: the men worked about one day in four and drew an allowance of 1.5 francs on the others. Their real cost was about one percent of the government budget, yet the Count of Falloux attacked them as "an organised strike at 170,000 francs a day" and a hotbed of permanent agitation. On 24 May the minister of public works Trélat demanded their closure, on the 26th he dismissed their director Émile Thomas, and on the 30th the Assembly decided to send workers resident in Paris for less than three months back to the provinces. On 20 June the Assembly voted the closure, and on the 21st the Executive Commission decreed that men aged 18 to 25 must enlist and the rest leave for the provinces, for instance to dig a canal in the Sologne. 15 19 8

After the decree appeared in the Moniteur on the 22nd and Marie turned a workers' delegation away, barricades went up on the morning of the 23rd, signalled by the worker Louis Pujol's speech on the Place de la Bastille. Workers of the National Workshops made up about half the insurgents. Engels wrote that east of a line running from Montmartre down the Porte and Rue Saint-Denis, across the Île de la Cité and along the Rue Saint-Jacques the city was held by the workers, while the bourgeoisie attacked from the west. On the 23rd the Executive Commission charged the minister of war Cavaignac with the repression, and on the 24th the Assembly gave him dictatorial powers and disbanded the Commission. The government forces numbered 25,000 regulars, 17,000 National Guards including provincial contingents, 15,000 Mobile Guards recruited from poor young Parisians and 2,500 Republican Guards. Cavaignac advanced in three columns, breaking the barricades with cannon. The Panthéon was retaken on the 24th; on the 25th Archbishop Affre was shot on the barricade of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine while trying to mediate, and General Bréa was killed by insurgents at the Italie gate. The last barricade, in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, fell on the 26th. 19 29 30

Casualty figures differ widely between sources. The English Wikipedia gives about 1,500 troops and 3,000 insurgents killed or wounded, more than 4,500 in all, and more than 4,000 insurgents deported to Algeria. The French Wikipedia gives about 1,600 government dead (1,460 in the report of the prefect of police Ducoux of 8 October), 3,000 to 5,000 insurgents killed in combat plus some 1,500 shot without trial, about 25,000 arrests and 11,000 sentences of prison or deportation to Algeria. Cavaignac put the army's killed and wounded at 703 on 3 July; Lavisse and Sagnac give 800 soldiers killed and 1,500 wounded; Bauer and Soullez give 15,000 killed or wounded in all, including 1,800 dead among the forces of order and 4,000 insurgents. About 250 of the 11,000 accused were women. The gaps depend on how combat deaths, executions and the wounded treated at home are counted. 30 19

On 28 June Cavaignac gave up his dictatorial powers and the Assembly confirmed him as "head of the executive power". In July he closed the National Workshops for good, brought the clubs under control and suspended eleven left-wing papers, among them Le Père Duchêne; the club law of 27–28 July restricted the clubs and barred women and children from them. The Assembly decided to prosecute Louis Blanc, who escaped through Belgium to London. The French Wikipedia writes that the rising ended the hopes of a "democratic and social republic", the English that it marked the victory of the liberals over the radical republicans. Tocqueville called it "the greatest and the strangest [insurrection] in our history and perhaps in any other". The people of Paris turned away from a Republic that had fired on them, while the peasants, angered by the 45 centimes, and the bourgeoisie, frightened by the clubs and the slump, drifted away from it too. 29 19 30 17 8

The constitution of 1848 and the election of Louis Napoleon

The constitutional committee of eighteen, elected on 17–18 May, included Tocqueville, Marrast, Lamennais and Considerant. After the June Days the debate swung to the right. Republicans and socialists invoked article 21 of the constitution of 1793 to include the right to work, but Thiers objected that it was dangerous to promise work at all times, and Tocqueville called it the introduction of communism into France, "a new form of servitude". The right to work became a vague right to assistance, and the preamble added "the family, labour, property and public order" to "liberty, equality, fraternity" as the foundations of the Republic. The constitution passed on 4 November by a huge majority with only thirty votes against; Proudhon, one of the thirty, explained that he had voted against it "because it is a constitution". 31 32

The constitution created a single chamber of 750 members elected for three years and a president elected directly by universal manhood suffrage for four years and barred from re-election, and it made revision almost impossible, requiring three successive votes of three quarters in a special assembly. Jules Grévy, warning that a president might become a monarch stronger than a king, proposed a mere removable president of the council of ministers; the amendment was defeated by 648 votes to 158. Lamartine, sure that universal suffrage would choose him, pushed through direct election, and the Assembly did not even bar members of former reigning families. The rule that the Assembly would choose if no candidate won a majority seemed to favour Cavaignac, who had the Assembly majority behind him. 8 24 25

Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of Napoleon I, had attempted coups at Strasbourg in 1836 and Boulogne in 1840, been sentenced to life in the fortress of Ham and escaped. In 1844 he wrote a pamphlet of social colouring, The Extinction of Pauperism, and in the by-elections of June 1848 he was elected in four departments including Paris (five by some accounts), but resigned amid controversy and so kept his hands clean of the June repression. In the September by-elections he was elected again in five departments. The presidential candidates were he, Cavaignac, Ledru-Rollin, the imprisoned Raspail, Lamartine and Changarnier, who had withdrawn. The Party of Order gave no official endorsement, but Thiers called him "of all the candidates, the least bad". His manifesto proclaimed "religion, family, property" and promised "to give work to those unoccupied; to look out for the old age of the workers". 33 23 19 15 24 25

The result of the vote of 10–11 December surprised almost everyone. Louis Napoleon won 5,572,834 votes (74.2 percent of votes cast and 55.5 to 55.6 percent of registered voters), against 1,469,156 for Cavaignac (about 19.5 percent), 376,834 for Ledru-Rollin, 37,106 for Raspail and some 17,000 for Lamartine (another source says fewer than 19,000). Cavaignac carried only four departments, Finistère and Morbihan in Brittany and Bouches-du-Rhône and Var in Provence, and Louis Napoleon took 58 percent even in Paris. Turnout, about 75 percent, was lower than in April. Raspail's candidacy from prison, backed by socialist workers' organisations, was the first national candidacy in France in the name of a workers' socialist republic. The English Wikipedia attributes the landslide above all to the non-politicised rural masses, to whom the name Bonaparte meant something. Cavaignac refused an adviser's urging to stage a coup and handed over power peacefully on 20 December. 33 24 25 29 27

The Party of Order's republic: the Roman expedition, 13 June 1849 and the law of 1850

The president entrusted the government to the Orléanist Odilon Barrot, and the Party of Order, in which Legitimist and Orléanist monarchists and conservative republicans rallied around the Rue de Poitiers Committee under "Order, Property, Religion", set the course. On 29 January 1849 the Constituent Assembly bowed to pressure and voted its own early dissolution, and on 24 March the clubs were banned. Turnout in the election of 13–14 May fell to about 68 percent. The Party of Order took about 59 percent of the vote (53 percent according to the English Wikipedia) and some 450 of the 713 seats filled, or 64 percent; the Mountain (Democratic Socialists) led by Ledru-Rollin won about 25 percent and 180 to 210 seats, while the moderate republicans collapsed to some 75 to 100 seats and Lamartine lost his. Drawing votes from smallholders and artisans of the Massif Central and the south, the democratic socialists sketched for the first time a left–right electoral map of France that would last for a century. 34 28 35 36

After the assassination of Rossi in November 1848, Pope Pius IX fled to Gaeta, and when the Roman Republic was proclaimed in February 1849, Louis Napoleon's government, courting Catholic opinion and seeking to check Austria, decided on an expedition. General Oudinot's force of some 7,000 men (8,000 to 10,000 according to the English Wikipedia) sailed on 22 April and landed at Civitavecchia on 24–25 April. Its pretext was to protect Rome from Austrian intervention, but on 30 April it attacked the city and was repulsed by the republican army under Garibaldi. On 7 May the Constituent Assembly censured the government by 328 votes to 241 for misleading it about the aim of the expedition, but the president sent Oudinot a letter of support and 12,000 more men. The diplomat Lesseps reached an agreement with Mazzini on 31 May, but Oudinot disregarded it and renewed the siege in early June with 30,000 men. The French entered Rome on 3 July and restored the Pope's temporal power. The preamble of the constitution had promised that the Republic would "never employ its forces against the liberty of any people". 37 38 28 39

On 11 June Ledru-Rollin moved the impeachment of the president and his ministers for violating the constitution with the expedition, and was defeated. At noon on the 13th the Mountain held a demonstration of about 6,000 people, 600 National Guards among them, at the Château d'Eau to cries of "Long live the Constitution!", but General Changarnier's cavalry easily dispersed them from the Rue de la Paix. Ledru-Rollin and some thirty deputies gathered at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers and drafted a proclamation of a provisional government, but when a few barricades were quickly cleared they fled through the gardens. Ledru-Rollin escaped to London for more than twenty years of exile, followed by Félix Pyat and Victor Considerant. Six newspapers were suppressed, the club law of 19 June suspended freedom of association for a year, and the law of 9 August simplified the declaration of a state of siege. The High Court at Versailles tried 31 of the 67 accused who were present, sentencing the 36 absent and 17 of those present to deportation, and 34 deputies of the Mountain lost their seats. 39 35 7

When the left, including the novelist Eugène Sue, won by-elections on 10 March and 28 April 1850, the Party of Order went after universal suffrage itself. Drafted by a committee of seventeen convened by the interior minister Baroche, among them Thiers, Molé, Montalembert and Berryer (the "Burgraves"), the law of 31 May 1850 required proof of three years' residence in the same commune or canton through the direct tax rolls, striking off the workers and artisans who moved from job to job. Estimates of the excluded vary: about a third of the electorate (French Wikipedia), 3.5 of 9 million voters (the English Wikipedia's article on Napoleon III), some three million (Hugo's speech in the Assembly). Hugo charged that the law made "six million privileged men govern three million excluded men feudally". The Falloux law of 15 March 1850 restored church influence over education, and the law of 16 July brought back caution money for newspapers. Louis Napoleon criticised the electoral law and posed as the protector of universal suffrage, and in January 1851 he dismissed Changarnier. 40 33 8 24

2 December 1851: the coup and the republican resistance

The constitution ended Louis Napoleon's term in May 1852. He toured the provinces gathering petitions for revision, and in July 1851 the Assembly voted 446 to 278 for an amendment allowing his re-election, short of the qualified majority needed for revision. His half-brother Morny, Persigny and General Saint-Arnaud, brought from Algeria, prepared a coup from August. After the Assembly rejected his demands to restore universal suffrage and to reconsider revision in October and November, the Party of Order majority put forward a bill letting the president of the Assembly call on the army directly; the Mountain, fearing a royalist restoration, voted with the Bonapartists to defeat it, disarming the legislature. The anniversary of Napoleon I's coronation and of Austerlitz, 2 December, was chosen as the day of Operation Rubicon. 33 41 8 24

At dawn on 2 December Saint-Arnaud's troops occupied the Palais Bourbon, the national printing works and newspaper offices, and the prefect of police Maupas had 78 people arrested first, including Thiers, Cavaignac, Changarnier, Lamoricière and the Montagnard deputy Martin Nadaud. Posters announced the dissolution of the Assembly, the restoration of universal suffrage, new elections and a state of siege. Some 220 deputies who met at the town hall of the 10th arrondissement voted the president's deposition and were soon taken away. About sixty republican deputies, Hugo, Schoelcher and Carnot among them, formed a resistance committee declaring that the president had violated the constitution and "put himself outside the law", and on the 3rd the deputy Baudin was killed on a barricade. The insurgents numbered no more than 1,000 to 1,500, against 30,000 troops, and on the afternoon of the 4th Canrobert's division fired into the crowds on the Montmartre and Poissonnière boulevards. Deaths in Paris are put at 300 to 400; Hugo, citing no source, spoke of 1,200. 42 41 33 8

Resistance in the provinces was larger than in Paris. Some municipal councils proclaimed the president's deposition under article 68 of the constitution, and perhaps 100,000 people rose across small towns and villages of the south-east, centre and south-west, organised by the secret societies of the New Mountain and the village chambrées, in the most widespread popular rising of nineteenth-century France. At Digne the republicans took the prefecture on 7 December and the department of the Basses-Alpes was run by a "Committee of Resistance", but 32 departments were put under a state of siege and the army crushed the risings within days. In the Var alone 60 to 90 people were killed, and one estimate counts 127 summary executions. Some 26,884 people were arrested, and mixed commissions of prefect, general and magistrate sentenced 21,000, sending 9,530 to Algeria and 239 (250 in the English Wikipedia) to the penal colony of Cayenne. At least ten thousand people, Hugo and Edgar Quinet among them, went into exile. 42 41 35 36

Placing universal suffrage above the constitution, Louis Napoleon held a plebiscite on 20–21 December, with a third of the country still under a state of siege and only newspapers supporting the yes vote allowed to appear. The result was 7,439,216 yes to 640,737 no (provisional figures of 31 December), and 7,481,231 to 647,292 in the final figures of 14 January 1852; the English Wikipedia's article on the coup gives a different figure of 7,145,000 to 600,000. The constitution of January 1852 extended the president's term to ten years and gave him the legislative initiative, and after another plebiscite on 7 November 1852 he became "Napoleon III, Emperor of the French" on 2 December. Even the amnesty of 1859 excluded Ledru-Rollin. 42 41 33

Assessment: "the first great battle", Bonapartism, and the road to 1871

In The Class Struggles in France, serialised in 1850 in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung review and collected by Engels in 1895, Marx read the revolution through class analysis. The July Monarchy, for him, was a regime in which the financial aristocracy used the state as a "joint-stock company" for sharing out the national wealth, and the February Revolution was the product of the potato blight and crop failures of 1845–1846 and the commercial and industrial crisis that began in England in 1847. The Provisional Government was a compromise between the workers and several bourgeois factions, and "fraternity" abolished class relations only in the imagination. He saw the National Workshops as a plan for a reserve army to set workers against each other that instead created an army for insurrection, and called the June Days the "first great battle" between the two classes that divide modern society, the real birth of the bourgeois republic. Marx and Engels read the rising as the birth certificate of an independent workers' movement, and the June repression was one of the events that inspired his concept of the lumpenproletariat. The vote of 10 December 1848 was "the peasants' February". 18 43 19

In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, written between December 1851 and March 1852, Marx compared Napoleon I with his nephew and the Mountain of 1793 with that of 1848–1851 in the line that all great world-historic facts and personages appear twice, "the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce". He traced the divisions and alliances among the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, the peasantry, the revolutionaries and the social democrats, and argued that out of a deadlock in which no class could rule came a regime in which the state seemed to have made itself independent of society: Bonapartism. Its social base was the smallholding peasantry, scattered like "a sack of potatoes". The book also holds the line: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances". The political scientist Robert C. Tucker called the analysis a "prologue to later Marxist thought on the nature and meaning of fascism". 44 45

The experience of 1848 led on to the Paris Commune of 1871. Marx called Blanqui "the noble martyr of revolutionary communism" and identified revolutionary socialism with "Communism, for which the bourgeoisie has itself invented the name of Blanqui". Engels later criticised Blanquism as a model in which a small conscious minority imposes its will on the masses, and this reading hardened within Marxism. Blanqui himself spent ten years in prison after May 1848 and was arrested again on the eve of the Commune, but his followers played key roles in it. Delescluze, who founded La Révolution démocratique et sociale in 1848 founded Solidarité républicaine and patronised the New Mountain, went through prison and transportation to French Guiana to become a military commander of the Commune and died on a barricade in May 1871. Thiers, who had stood with the party of order in 1848, headed the government that crushed the Commune, while Louis Blanc, back from exile, did not support the Commune but carried the amnesty of the Communards in 1879. 6 46 35 17 9

Liberal accounts differ. Tocqueville, who had warned before February that France was "sleeping in a volcano", supported Cavaignac and the Party of Order, and as Barrot's foreign minister from June to October 1849 pressed for the state of siege to be restored in Paris after 13 June. He called the June Days the greatest and strangest insurrection in French history and perhaps in any other, and the right to work "a new form of servitude"; his private journal of 1848 appeared after his death as the Recollections. Oliver Cussen notes that the rise of cultural history in the 1990s replaced Marx's sense of the necessity of revolutionary change with Tocqueville's pessimism that popular revolt would only produce despots. The republican historian Agulhon described the June Days as "a class battle in its pure state" and Furet as poverty and unemployment joined to a revolutionary tradition, but Samuel Hayat replies that what the workers of the National Workshops sought to defend was not a hunger demand but "the Republic, as an inseparably social and political form". The revolution left the right to work as a slogan, universal suffrage and the abolition of slavery, but also the lesson that universal suffrage could, through a rural majority, legitimise reaction and plebiscitary dictatorship, which is why the republicans of 1875 refused a directly elected presidency. 47 19 44 24 31 1