Burgraves (Party of Order)
성주들 (질서당)
Part of Party of Order (1848–1851)
The mocking name for the aged leaders of the Party of Order under the French Second Republic, above all the commission of seventeen that drafted the electoral law of 31 May 1850. It came from Victor Hugo's play Les Burgraves (1843). Its members included Thiers, Molé, Montalembert, Berryer and Victor de Broglie, and in The Eighteenth Brumaire Marx portrayed them as the leaders of the parliamentary republic who were outmanoeuvred by Bonaparte.
In depth
A Burgrave was the title of a medieval German lord who governed a castle or a town. In 1843 Victor Hugo staged Les Burgraves, a play about old castle lords on the Rhine. Around 1850 Parisians applied the name to the aged leaders of the Party of Order, men who had run politics since the July Monarchy.
After the Mountain won the by-elections of 10 March and 28 April 1850, the Interior Minister Baroche set up in early May a commission of seventeen majority leaders to draft a new electoral law. Thiers, Molé, Montalembert and Berryer were its core, joined by Benoist d'Azy, Beugnot, Victor de Broglie, Louis Buffet, Chasseloup-Laubat, Napoléon Daru, Léon Faucher, Jules de Lasteyrie, Montebello, Piscatory, Aurélien de Sèze, Saint-Priest and Vatimesnil. The law they produced, with Faucher as rapporteur, was the electoral law of 31 May, which struck some 2.8 million voters off the rolls. The Burgraves also deliberately provoked the Mountain so that the moderates would not vote with the left, and on 24 May Thiers called the people "the vile multitude".
In The Eighteenth Brumaire Marx wrote that after the elections of 10 March 1850 Bonaparte implored "the Orleanist and Legitimist party leaders, the Thiers, the Berryers, the Broglies, the Moles, in brief, the so-called burgraves" to take the helm of state themselves, and that the party of Order failed to seize the moment. "Its seventeen burgraves ... drew up a new electoral law." Yet before Changarnier's dismissal in January 1851 "Messrs. the Burgraves" went to the Élysée on the evening of 6 January to dissuade Bonaparte, and so recognised him as master of the situation. Of Bonaparte's courting of the market women of Paris Marx remarked that "one fishwife outweighed seventeen burgraves in real power".