Campaign of Banquets (1847–1848)
개혁 연회 운동 (1847–1848)
Some seventy political banquets held across France from July 1847 by the opposition, which demanded a wider franchise while political meetings were banned under the late July Monarchy. Led at first by Odilon Barrot's dynastic opposition, they increasingly became a platform for republicans, and the Guizot government's ban on the Paris banquet of 22 February 1848 led to the February Revolution.
In depth
The bad harvests of 1845–1846 had doubled food prices by 1847, and failures in metallurgy and railway building put some 700,000 workers out of work by the end of the year. Only men paying 200 francs in direct taxes could vote, and a 1847 proposal to halve the qualification to 100 francs was rejected by the Guizot majority. The first banquet, at the Château Rouge in Paris on 9 July 1847, brought together 1,200 guests, and some seventy more followed with about 17,000 participants. The campaign spread to provincial towns such as Lille, Dijon and Chalon, where speeches by Ledru-Rollin and Louis Blanc raised the labour question. Engels, in Paris from October 1847, reported on the banquets for La Réforme and the Northern Star. The government banned the Paris banquet on 14 January and again on 21 February 1848, but workers and students came out on 22 February, the first day of the revolution. The model inspired the Russian banquet campaign of 1904.