French coup d'état of 2 December 1851
1851년 12월 2일 쿠데타
The self-coup staged on 2 December 1851 by Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, president of the French Second Republic, to stay in power despite the ban on his re-election. He dissolved the Assembly, restored universal suffrage and had the army crush resistance in Paris and in the south-east and centre. About 26,000 people were arrested; a plebiscite on 20–21 December ratified the coup, and the Second Empire was proclaimed in December 1852.
In depth
The coup was prepared from August 1851 by Louis Napoleon's half-brother Morny, Persigny and General Saint-Arnaud, and timed for the anniversary of Napoleon I's coronation and of Austerlitz under the code name Operation Rubicon. At dawn on 2 December troops occupied the Assembly and the printing works and arrested Thiers, Cavaignac, Changarnier and others, and some 220 deputies who met at the town hall of the 10th arrondissement were taken away. About sixty deputies of the Mountain, Hugo and Schoelcher among them, formed a resistance committee, and on 3 December the deputy Baudin was killed on a barricade. On 4 December troops fired on the crowds of the boulevards; deaths in Paris are put at 300 to 400. In the provinces 32 departments were placed under a state of siege, and in the Basses-Alpes a resistance committee briefly held the prefecture. Mixed commissions sentenced 21,000 people, sending 9,530 to Algeria and 239 to 250 to Cayenne. The plebiscite gave about 7.44 to 7.48 million yes to 640,000–650,000 no. Marx analysed the coup in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.