Lottery of the Gold Ingots (1850–1853)
금괴 복권 (1850–1853)
A political lottery run in France by the "Society of the Gold Ingots" created by decree on 3 August 1850. With a 116 kg gold ingot as first prize, its proceeds were to send 5,000 unemployed Paris workers to the Californian goldfields. Its real aim was to rid Paris of people the authorities distrusted, such as revolutionaries of 1848 and former Mobile Guards, and of the destitute, and between 1851 and 1853 more than 3,300 French emigrants were shipped to San Francisco. Marx counted it among the swindles of Bonaparte's clique.
In depth
The lottery was organised under the Second Republic by the Paris Prefect of Police Pierre Carlier at the suggestion of the shipowner Jules Langlois, at a time when the California Gold Rush of 1848 had spread tales of gold across Europe. The authorities were particularly wary of penniless Parisians who knew how to use weapons: former members of the Mobile Guard and the Republican Guard, revolutionaries of 1848 and rioters. The first prize was a gold ingot of 116 kg worth over 400,000 francs, displayed in the Passage Jouffroy at the corner of the Boulevard Montmartre.
Would-be emigrants signed registers at the prefecture, which chose among them arbitrarily. Nearly all were Parisians, about a tenth poor provincials. In July 1851 the transport contract went to the Le Havre shipowner Marziou at 795 francs per adult. From 1851 to 1853 more than 3,300 French gold seekers went to San Francisco, but those who survived Cape Horn and yellow fever arrived disappointed in a city where prices had soared. The lottery was abolished in 1853. Alexandre Dumas fils published a pamphlet on it in 1851, and Isidore Boudin, founder of the Boudin bakery in San Francisco, won his passage to California through it.
In chapter V of The Eighteenth Brumaire Marx recorded that on 20 December 1850 Pascal Duprat interpellated the Minister of the Interior about the lottery: "This lottery was a 'daughter of Elysium.' Bonaparte with his faithful followers had brought her into the world and Police Prefect Carlier had placed her under his official protection, although French law forbids all lotteries except raffles for charitable purposes." Seven million tickets were sold at a franc each, and Marx wrote that Bonaparte's clique printed false tickets, ten, fifteen and even twenty with the same number. The vagabonds who wanted to open up the Californian gold mines without leaving Paris, he said, were Bonaparte himself and his debt-ridden round table. Although the Assembly could have caught him breaking not the constitution but the criminal code, it passed over Duprat's interpellation to the order of the day.