French by-elections of 10 March 1850
1850년 3월 10일 보궐선거
Part of French Second Republic
The by-elections to the Legislative National Assembly held in sixteen French departments on 10 March 1850 to fill the seats of 31 deputies of the Mountain who had lost their mandates by judgment of the High Court after the demonstration of 13 June 1849. An alliance of moderate republicans and Democratic Socialists won 21 seats, and Paris elected the June 1848 insurgent Paul de Flotte, Vidal and Carnot. The alarmed Party of Order responded with the electoral law of 31 May 1850, which disfranchised some 2.8 million voters.
In depth
After the collapse of the demonstration of 13 June 1849 the High Court stripped 31 deputies of the Mountain of their seats. To fill them, by-elections were held on 10 March 1850 in sixteen of the 83 departments. For the republicans, driven underground after 13 June, it was a chance to show their strength again. The moderate republican Association of the Friends of the Constitution backed the candidates of the Democratic Socialist central committee so as not to split the republican vote.
The result was a republican victory. The republican alliance won 21 seats, including all ten in Saône-et-Loire and the three in Paris. Paris elected Paul de Flotte, who had fought in the June insurrection of 1848, the economist François Vidal and Hippolyte Carnot, Minister of Public Instruction after the February Revolution. Six deputies of Saône-et-Loire were unseated on a technicality but re-elected on 28 April, and on the same day Paris elected the novelist Eugène Sue.
The propertied classes panicked. The 5 per cent rente fell sharply, savers withdrew their money from the savings banks, and some, like Montalembert, sent their families abroad. The Party of Order struck back at once, entrusting a new electoral law to seventeen leaders known as "the Burgraves", and on 31 May its law with a three-year residence requirement struck some 2.8 million voters off the rolls.
Marx treated the elections at length in chapter IV of The Eighteenth Brumaire: "We mean the by-elections of March 10, 1850. These elections were held for the purpose of filling the representatives' seats that after June 13 had been rendered vacant by imprisonment or exile. Paris elected only social-democratic candidates. It even concentrated most of the votes on an insurgent of June, 1848, on De Flotte." When even the army voted for a June insurgent against Bonaparte's minister La Hitte, Bonaparte hid behind the party of Order. But the democrats frittered away the people's passion in sham movements: "In a word, it made an April Fool of March 10." He concluded: "On March 10 universal suffrage declared itself directly against the domination of the bourgeoisie; the bourgeoisie answered by outlawing universal suffrage."