The Second Empire and the Revival of the Labour Movement

An emperor made by plebiscite: the authoritarian empire (1852–1859)

After the coup of 2 December 1851 Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte restored the universal male suffrage the Assembly had restricted, and the referendum of 21–22 December endorsed the coup by 7,481,231 votes to 647,292. The constitution of 14 January 1852 gave the president a ten-year term, all executive power and the sole initiative of laws, with ministers answerable to him alone. Touring the provinces from September he promised that "the Empire means peace"; after a senatus consultum of 7 November and a plebiscite on 21–22 November (7,824,129 yes, 253,149 no) he became "Napoleon III, Emperor of the French" on 2 December 1852, the anniversary of the coup, of Napoleon I's coronation and of Austerlitz. 1 2

Universal suffrage survived but politics did not. The Legislative Body elected by it could neither propose laws nor elect its president nor vote the budget in detail, and its debates were not published. Prefects put the whole administration, from justices of the peace to road-menders, behind the "official candidates", and constituencies were drawn to drown the liberal vote of the towns in the rural population. Newspapers had to lodge caution money and could be suspended or suppressed after official "warnings". In the first elections of 1852 official candidates won 5.2 million votes to the opposition's 800,000, and the three republicans elected refused the oath of loyalty and never took their seats. 1 2

Resistance to the coup had been costly. At first 26,884 people were arrested; "mixed commissions" of prefect, general and magistrate in each department sentenced 21,000, sending 9,530 to Algeria and 239 to the penal colony of Cayenne, and 66 deputies, Victor Hugo among them, were proscribed. From exile Hugo attacked the emperor in Napoléon le Petit and Les Châtiments. In the elections of 1857 official candidates took 85 percent of the votes cast, and the republicans elected refused the oath and left their seats empty; "the Five" who entered at the by-elections of 1858, Jules Favre, Ernest Picard, Hénon, Darimon and Émile Ollivier, were the only republican opposition to swear and sit. 3 1 2

On 14 January 1858 the Italian nationalist Felice Orsini threw bombs at the imperial couple's carriage outside the Opera, killing eight to twelve people and wounding more than 150. The regime used the attempt to tighten its grip. General Espinasse became minister of the interior and general security and ordered the prefects to arrest a fixed quota of "the most dangerous men" in each department, and the law of general security of February 1858, the "law of suspects", allowed anyone convicted after June 1848, June 1849 or December 1851 to be interned or transported to Algeria without trial. The Legislative Body passed it by 221 to 24; in the Senate only MacMahon voted against. About 450 people were sent to prison or Algeria, most of them freed by the general amnesty of August 1859 that celebrated the victories in Italy; Hugo and Edgar Quinet refused it. 4 5 6 1

Railways, banks and Haussmann's Paris

The Second Empire almost exactly coincided with the international boom between the depressions of 1817–1847 and 1873–1896. Under a state-led policy inspired by Saint-Simonianism the railway network grew from 3,500 km in 1851 to nearly 20,000 km in 1870, reaching nearly every town, and the Pereire brothers' Crédit Mobilier and the Crédit Foncier financed railway, gas and omnibus companies. The Anglo-French commercial treaty of 23 January 1860, negotiated in secret by Michel Chevalier and Richard Cobden, cut tariffs sharply and angered industrialists who had relied on protection. Paris held universal exhibitions in 1855 and 1867; the second drew ten million visitors. 1 2 7

Appointed prefect of the Seine on 22 June 1853, Georges-Eugène Haussmann was charged by the emperor to "aerate, unify and embellish" Paris. Broad boulevards cut through the narrow streets of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, the Hôtel de Ville quarter and the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, where seven risings had broken out between 1830 and 1848. Of the Boulevard Sébastopol Haussmann wrote with satisfaction in his memoirs that it was "the gutting of old Paris, of the neighborhood of riots, and of barricades, from one end to the other". On 1 January 1860 Paris annexed the suburbs inside the fortifications, among them Belleville, Montmartre, La Villette and Charonne, growing from twelve to twenty arrondissements and at once to 1.6 million people. 8 1

The works pulled down 19,730 buildings containing 120,000 dwellings and put up 34,000 buildings with 215,300. But the cost grew to 2.5 billion francs over seventeen years, rents rose by 300 percent over the period, and the poor were pushed out of the centre. Defenders note that the division into a working-class east and a wealthy west had begun before Haussmann; still, Belleville and Montmartre, the strongholds of the Commune in 1871, were precisely such newly annexed working-class districts. In The Housing Question (1872) Engels used "Haussmann" as the name for a method: driving boulevards through workers' quarters to make barricade fighting harder, creating a Bonapartist building-trades proletariat dependent on the government, turning the city into a city of luxury, and, as the bourgeois solution in general, moving the housing problem elsewhere instead of solving it. 8 1 9

The opposition went after Haussmann's books. In 1867 Jules Ferry mocked the vouchers Haussmann had issued without parliamentary approval as Les Comptes fantastiques d'Haussmann; once the Court of Accounts ruled them official debt, a law of 18 April 1868 placed the city's finances under the Legislative Body's oversight. In the elections of 1869 opposition candidates in Paris won 234,000 votes to 77,000 for the government's. At the demand of the new prime minister Émile Ollivier, the emperor dismissed Haussmann, who had refused to resign, on 5 January 1870. 8 1

"The Empire means peace": Crimea, Italy and Mexico

The empire that promised peace soon went to war. In the Crimean War (1853–1856), fought with Britain and the Ottoman Empire against Russia, French troops took the Malakoff redoubt in September 1855 at the end of the eleven-month siege of Sevastopol, and the Treaty of Paris of 30 March 1856 forbade Russia a fleet in the Black Sea. France counted 95,615 dead. The birth of the Prince Imperial that year seemed to secure the dynasty. 10 2

After the Orsini attempt Napoleon III met the Sardinian prime minister Cavour secretly at Plombières in July 1858 and agreed to help drive Austria out of Italy in return for Savoy and Nice. In the war of 1859 French and Sardinian forces won at Magenta on 4 June and Solferino on 24 June, and by the armistice of Villafranca in July Austria ceded Lombardy to France, which passed it to Sardinia; by the Treaty of Turin of 24 March 1860 Savoy and Nice passed to France. But Italian unification threatened the temporal power of the pope, and the Catholics, the empire's firmest supporters, turned against it. 11 2

France's overseas empire grew greatly in these years: Cochinchina was conquered in 1861–1863, Cambodia became a protectorate in 1863, and French rule was established in New Caledonia, the colony to which Communards would later be deported. The largest venture was Mexico. Landing in January 1862, the French army was beaten at Puebla on 5 May and delayed a year, but took the capital and set up Maximilian, brother of the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph I, as emperor of Mexico. When the United States, its civil war over, demanded withdrawal and the Prussian threat grew, French troops began to leave in 1866, and Maximilian was shot by the republicans on 19 June 1867. 2 12

Towards the liberal empire: concessions and labour policy in the 1860s

Having lost the Catholics and the protectionist industrialists, the emperor looked for other support. The decree of 24 November 1860 and the senatus consulta of 1861 restored the Chambers' right to answer the speech from the throne, published their debates and had the budget voted by sections. In the elections of 31 May 1863 the opposition won 1,954,000 votes and 32 seats (17 republicans and 15 independents including Thiers), and most large towns voted against the government; Thiers demanded the "necessary liberties" in the Chamber. The emperor dropped his interior minister Persigny and made Eugène Rouher a prime minister in all but name, the "vice-emperor". 1 2

Napoleon III also courted the workers. In 1862 the government sent a delegation of some 550 workers to the London International Exhibition, where the bronze chaser Henri Tolain and others met British trade unionists. The socialist Albert Thomas later wrote that "if the working class had rallied to him, Caesarian socialism would have been realised and the road to the Republic barred; never was the danger so great as in 1862". Standing at a by-election, Tolain published on 17 February 1864 the Manifesto of the Sixty, signed by sixty workers. It observed that the equality written into law did not exist in fact, argued that workers must put up their own candidates apart from the republicans, and made seven demands, among them repeal of article 1781 of the Civil Code, which made the master's word decisive in wage disputes, abolition of the law on combinations, and trade-union chambers. 1 13 14 15

The emperor took up the demand for the right of combination. A bill prepared by Émile Ollivier passed the Legislative Body by 221 to 36 and the Senate by 74 to 13 and was promulgated on 25 May 1864. The "Ollivier law" abolished the offence of combination dating from the Le Chapelier law of 1791 and for the first time allowed peaceful strikes, but it still punished violence and any infringement of "the freedom of work", and trade unions themselves remained illegal. Union chambers were tolerated only from 30 March 1868 and legalised in 1884; in 1869 the Council of State rejected the abolition of the workers' passbook (livret), which the emperor had repeatedly asked for. 16 1

In January 1867 the emperor announced "useful reforms", replacing the right of address with the right of interpellation. The press law of 11 May 1868 abolished prior authorisation and warnings, and the law of 6 June 1868 abolished prior authorisation for public meetings that did not deal with politics or religion. Opposition papers multiplied. Henri Rochefort's paper La Lanterne, founded in May 1868, sold 100,000 copies on the strength of its first editorial: "France contains, says the Imperial Almanac, thirty-six million subjects, not counting the subjects of discontent." Charles Delescluze's Le Réveil opened a subscription for a monument to Alphonse Baudin, the deputy killed on a barricade in the 1851 coup, and at the trial that followed the young lawyer Léon Gambetta made his name with a plea attacking the very foundations of the Empire. 1 17 18

The First International and the French labour movement

The ties formed between British and French workers at the London Exhibition of 1862 and at a meeting in solidarity with the Polish rising in July 1863 led to the meeting at St Martin's Hall, London, on 28 September 1864. Some 2,000 workers attended this joint affair of the British trade-union leader George Odger and the Frenchman Tolain, and the meeting resolved unanimously to found an International Working Men's Association with its central committee, later the General Council, in London. Karl Marx, elected to the committee, drafted the Inaugural Address and the Provisional Rules. The Address recalled how, after the failure of the Revolution of 1848, all the party organisations and journals of the working classes on the Continent had been "crushed by the iron hand of force", and concluded that "to conquer political power has become the great duty of the working classes". The preamble of the Rules declared that the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves. 19 15 20

A Paris office opened in the rue des Gravilliers in January 1865. Tolain and his colleagues who led the French section were mutualists, followers of Proudhon, who sought emancipation through free credit and producers' cooperatives and distrusted strikes, trade unions and political action. To the first congress at Geneva in 1866 Paris sent eleven delegates led by Tolain, among them Camélinat, Malon and Varlin. The mutualists' memorandum kept away from politics and condemned "strikes, the collectivist associations of 1848, public education and women's work", while the bookbinder Eugène Varlin defended women's right to work against most of the delegates. The congress affirmed the importance of trade unions and the eight-hour day. In February 1867 the International helped the bronze workers led by Camélinat win their strike, and the Lausanne congress of 1867 declared that the social emancipation of the workers must go together with their political emancipation. 14 19 15 1 21

From late 1867 the government moved against the International. At the first prosecution in February 1868 Tolain's Paris commission resigned, and under the new leadership of Varlin and Benoît Malon the French section moved beyond mutualism towards collectivism, trade unionism and "political revolution". The Brussels congress of 1868 voted for the common ownership of mines, railways and land. Three trials of the International were held between 1868 and 1870; at one, fifteen members were sentenced to three months in prison and a 100-franc fine for forming a "prohibited association of more than twenty persons". Varlin, imprisoned several times, had led the bookbinders' strike of 1864–1865; he founded the cooperative restaurant La Marmite with 8,000 members in 1868, created the Federation of Paris Workers' Societies on 14 November 1869, and organised sections at Lyon, Le Creusot and Lille. 15 1 19 21 22

In 1869 France saw 72 strikes with 40,600 strikers, and the army fired on them. On 16 June at La Ricamarie near Saint-Étienne, where miners were striking for higher wages, the eight-hour day demanded by the International and a single relief fund, troops escorting arrested strikers opened fire on the families blocking their way and killed fourteen civilians, among them a seventeen-month-old baby. On 8 October at Aubin in the Aveyron soldiers fired on miners of the Paris-Orléans company, killing fourteen and wounding twenty-two. In January 1870 a strike broke out at the Schneider works at Le Creusot when Adolphe Assi, chairman of the committee by which the workers sought to run their own relief fund, was dismissed, and Malon reported on it for Rochefort's paper. Émile Zola later noted that for Germinal he had drawn on "all the strikes that bloodied the end of the Empire, around 1869, particularly that of Aubin and La Ricamarie". 23 24 25 22

The Blanquist revival and the last crisis of the Empire (1869–1870)

Released by the amnesty of 1859, Louis Auguste Blanqui was arrested again in June 1861, sentenced to four years and held at Sainte-Pélagie. There he became the mentor of young radicals such as Gustave Tridon, Émile Eudes, Raoul Rigault and the future prime minister Georges Clemenceau, who formed the core of the Blanquist party in the late 1860s. Escaping from a prison hospital with his followers' help in August 1865, Blanqui went into exile in Brussels and in 1866 wrote his Instructions for an Armed Uprising, which took account of the failure of June 1848, the better weapons of the forces of order and the Paris that Haussmann had remade, and planned a rising organised like an army under a competent staff. Meanwhile the Blanquists in Paris organised themselves in sections. 26 27 1

The elections of 24 May and 7 June 1869 brought the first street fighting in fifteen years. The government won 4.6 million votes and the opposition 3.3 million and the large towns, and for the first time a majority of workers voted for republican candidates. Léon Gambetta was elected after taking up the "Belleville programme" drawn up by voters in Belleville, which demanded full freedom of the press, separation of church and state, an income tax, the election of officials and the abolition of standing armies. Émile Ollivier, beaten in Paris, was elected in the Var, and Henri Rochefort won Gambetta's vacated Paris seat at a by-election in November. A senatus consultum of 8 September gave the Legislative Body the initiative of laws and an unrestricted right of interpellation, and on 2 January 1870 a ministry led by Ollivier of the "Third Party" took office. 1 28 29 30 17

On 10 January 1870 at Auteuil in Paris, the emperor's cousin Pierre Bonaparte shot dead Victor Noir, a journalist of Rochefort's paper La Marseillaise who had come to him over a duel. Some 100,000 people gathered at the funeral at Neuilly on 12 January, among them future Communards such as Varlin, Louise Michel and Jean-Baptiste Millière. Gustave Flourens wanted to carry the body into Paris to start a rising, and Blanqui attempted one, but the International's men thought it would ruin the revolution to rush it, and Charles Delescluze urged calm. The government lifted Rochefort's parliamentary immunity, arrested him on 7 February and had him sentenced to six months. 31 27 17

On Ollivier's advice the emperor put the senatus consultum of 20 April, which made ministers responsible to the Chamber, to a plebiscite. Republicans called for a "no" vote or abstention, and on the eve of the vote the government arrested leaders of the International in Paris, Lyon, Rouen, Marseille, Brest and elsewhere on the pretext of a plot to kill the emperor; on 30 April the arrest of "all the individuals who constitute the International" was ordered. On 8 May the "yes" won 7,350,142 votes against 1,538,825. Only the Seine, which contained Paris, and the Bouches-du-Rhône had a "no" majority, and the large towns, Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Bordeaux and Toulouse, voted against. Gambetta admitted that "the Empire is stronger than ever". Marx wrote that the French branches of the International had warned that voting for the plebiscite meant "despotism at home and war abroad", and that in all the industrial centres the working class rose like one man to reject it. 28 1 32

The Ems dispatch and a war begun "with a light heart" (July–September 1870)

When Prussia defeated Austria at Königgrätz (Sadowa) on 3 July 1866 and set up the North German Confederation, the cry of "revenge for Sadowa" spread in France. Prussia's population had grown to some 24 million, still fewer than France's 38 million. The Luxembourg crisis of 1867 made imperial diplomacy ridiculous, and the Niel law, a military reform meant to end the inequalities of conscription, was so altered by the Chamber that it became ineffective. Early in 1870 Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen was offered the Spanish throne and withdrew on 11 July after French protests, but the foreign minister Agénor de Gramont had the ambassador Benedetti demand of Wilhelm I a guarantee that no Hohenzollern would ever be a candidate again. 33 1

On 13 July, on the promenade at Bad Ems, Wilhelm I politely refused Benedetti's demand. Receiving the report telegraphed by the councillor Heinrich Abeken, Otto von Bismarck cut out the king's conciliatory phrases and that evening released to the press and the embassies a statement that kept only the demand and the refusal. When the government announced war to the Legislative Body on 15 July, Ollivier obtained a war credit of 500 million francs and said he accepted the responsibility "with a light heart". The Empress Eugénie is credited with the remark, "If there is no war, my son will never be emperor." France declared war on Prussia on 19 July. In the General Council's First Address of 23 July Marx called the war plot "but an amended edition of the coup d'état of December 1851". 33 34 1 28 32

The International opposed the war. The Paris section published a manifesto "to the workmen of all nations" in Le Réveil on 12 July declaring that "war for a question of preponderance or a dynasty can, in the eyes of workmen, be nothing but a criminal absurdity", and the workers of Neuilly declared the war "merely dynastic". In Germany a workers' meeting at Brunswick on 16 July and a delegates' meeting at Chemnitz representing 50,000 Saxon workers said the same, and August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht abstained in the first vote on the war credits. Marx wrote: "Whatever may be the incidents of Louis Bonaparte's war with Prussia, the death-knell of the Second Empire has already sounded at Paris. It will end, as it began, by a parody." 32 15 19

The war ended the Empire within six weeks. The first defeats of August brought down the Ollivier ministry, and on 14 August Blanqui led about a hundred men, Jules Vallès among them, in an attack on the fire brigade barracks at La Villette to seize arms; the people did not follow and he dispersed them. Émile Eudes, captured, was sentenced to death and saved by the defeat at Sedan. In the first days of September Napoleon III was taken prisoner at Sedan, and on 4 September the Republic was proclaimed in Paris. The siege that followed and 18 March 1871 continue in the event "The Paris Commune". 27 26 35 2 28

Assessment: Bonapartism completed, and what carried over to 1871

In his 1869 preface to the second edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx compared two books on the same event. Victor Hugo's Napoléon le Petit saw in the coup only the violent act of a single individual and so made him great by ascribing to him a personal power of initiative unparalleled in world history; Proudhon's Coup d'État sought to explain it as a historical development and slid into an apologia for its hero. Marx himself, he wrote, had demonstrated "how the class struggle in France created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero's part". He also rejected the fashionable German analogy of "Caesarism", since in ancient Rome the class struggle took place only within a privileged minority, with the slaves as its passive pedestal. The book's closing prophecy, that when the imperial mantle fell on Louis Bonaparte's shoulders the bronze statue of Napoleon would come crashing down from the Vendôme Column, had in Marx's view of 1869 already been fulfilled by the French historical research and satire that had made an end of the Napoleon legend. On 16 May 1871 the Commune brought the column down in fact. 36 37

In The Civil War in France (1871) Marx described the Second Empire as the regime with "the coup d'état for its birth certificate, universal suffrage for its sanction, and the sword for its sceptre". It professed to rest on the peasantry, the mass of producers not directly involved in the struggle of capital and labour, to save the working class and the propertied classes alike, and to unite all classes by the chimera of national glory. In reality it was "the only form of government possible at a time when the bourgeoisie had already lost, and the working class had not yet acquired, the faculty of ruling the nation". Under it industry and commerce expanded to colossal dimensions, financial swindling celebrated cosmopolitan orgies and the misery of the masses was set off by shameless luxury. Marx saw in it the ultimate form of the state power that full-grown bourgeois society had turned into a means for the enslavement of labour by capital, and wrote that "the direct antithesis to the empire was the Commune". 38

Historians' verdicts have swung. In the 1930s and 1940s the Second Empire was disparaged as a precursor of fascism; by the late twentieth century some re-evaluated it as a modernising regime. Its foreign policy is widely judged a failure, while its domestic record, the railway network, the rebuilding of Paris and the liberalisation after 1858, is assessed more kindly. Maurice Agulhon called its economic and cultural history that of "a prosperous and brilliant period", and workers' purchasing power did rise. Yet the "Caesarian socialism" that was to win the workers for the Empire visibly failed when they voted republican in 1869. 2 1

Most of the protagonists of 1871 were formed in these eighteen years. About a third of the members of the Commune's council belonged to the International, Varlin, Malon and Leó Frankel prominent among them. Rigault, Blanqui's pupil at Sainte-Pélagie, took charge of the Commune's police, and the Blanquists held the key posts in police, justice and the military. The strikes allowed by the law of 1864, the Federation of Workers' Societies, and the public meetings and newspapers opened up by the laws of 1868 gave the movement its organisational frame. Belleville and Montmartre, annexed under Haussmann, became the Commune's strongholds, and New Caledonia, taken by the Empire, became the Communards' place of deportation. Tolain, by contrast, the leader of the mutualists, was elected to the National Assembly in February 1871, disowned the Commune and was expelled by the Paris federation of the International on 12 April. Gambetta and Jules Favre, the Empire's republican opponents, led the Government of National Defence from September 1870, and Thiers, proscribed for opposing the coup of 1851, became head of the government that crushed the Commune. 19 26 39 14 2 40 41 3 42