Demonstration of 13 June 1849 (Paris)
1849년 6월 13일 시위 (파리)
A demonstration held in Paris on 13 June 1849 by the Democratic Socialists of the French Assembly, the Mountain, in protest against the French attack on the Roman Republic. It invoked the constitution, which forbade the use of force against the liberty of any people, but was dispersed at once by Changarnier's troops. Its leaders, among them Ledru-Rollin, fled abroad or were put on trial, and it counts as the last "revolutionary day" of the Second Republic. Marx saw it as the defeat of the petty-bourgeois democrats.
In depth
The preamble of the Constitution of 1848 declared that the French Republic "never employs its forces against the liberty of any people". Yet the expeditionary corps sent to Italy under General Oudinot in April 1849 turned, under the pressure of Catholic opinion, from its stated aim to a campaign to overthrow the Roman Republic and restore papal rule. When the French attacked Rome again on 3 June, the Mountain's leader Ledru-Rollin moved on 11 June to impeach the president and his ministers. The motion was rejected by 361 votes to 202, and the next day the Mountain decided on a street demonstration.
Around noon on 13 June some 6,000 people gathered at the Château-d'Eau, among them 600 National Guards led by Étienne Arago, and marched towards the National Assembly crying "Long live the Constitution!" An hour later troops under Changarnier, commander of the army of Paris, dispersed them without difficulty. Ledru-Rollin and some thirty deputies went to the Conservatoire des arts et métiers and drew up a proclamation setting up a provisional government, but when a few barricades were taken and shots rang out they fled through the gardens. Ledru-Rollin escaped to London and an exile of more than twenty years, and Félix Pyat, Victor Considerant and others did the same. In Lyon a workers' rising broke out on 15 June.
The failure was costly. Bonaparte declared that "it is time for the good to be reassured and the wicked to tremble". Six newspapers were suppressed, a law of 19 June allowed the government to suspend freedom of association for a year, and a press law of 27 July and a law on the state of siege of 9 August followed. The leaders were tried before the High Court at Versailles from 12 October to 15 November: only 31 of the 67 accused were present, and the 36 absent and 17 of those present were sentenced to deportation. The republicans went underground, and the seats of the deputies who lost their mandates were refilled in the by-elections of 10 March 1850.
In The Eighteenth Brumaire Marx summed up the period as "May 28, 1849, to June 13, 1849. Struggle of the petty bourgeoisie with the bourgeoisie and with Bonaparte. Defeat of the petty-bourgeois democracy." He wrote: "The demonstration of June 13 was, above all, a demonstration of the democratic National Guards." Whereas in June 1848 bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie had united against the proletariat, this time, he argued, the bourgeoisie let the petty-bourgeois National Guard be dispersed by the army.