Mobile Guard (France, 1848–1850)
기동대 (프랑스, 1848–1850)
Part of French Second Republic
The paid armed force that the French Provisional Government raised after the February Revolution of 1848 from young Parisians aged fifteen to twenty: twenty-four battalions of a thousand men each. In the June insurrection it crushed the workers' rising alongside the army and the National Guard, and it was disbanded on 31 January 1850. Marx called it "the lumpen proletariat organized as the Mobile Guard". It is distinct from the reserve of the same name created by the Niel law of 1868.
In depth
When the February Revolution drove the army out of Paris, the only armed power left in the capital was the bourgeois National Guard. In The Class Struggles in France Marx argued that the Provisional Government formed the Mobile Guard to play off one part of the proletariat against the other. Its men came for the most part from the lumpenproletariat, which in all big towns forms a mass sharply differentiated from the industrial proletariat, and at their youthful age were as capable of the most heroic deeds as of the basest banditry. The government paid them 1 franc 50 centimes a day, that is, it bought them, and gave them their own uniform, making them outwardly distinct from the blouse-wearing workers. Their officers were partly regular army officers and partly young sons of the bourgeoisie whom they elected themselves.
At first the Paris workers cheered the Mobile Guard as their foremost fighters on the barricades, the proletarian guard as against the bourgeois National Guard; Marx called their error pardonable. The repression of the demonstration of 16 April 1848 by the Mobile Guard blurred the differences between the army, the National Guard and the Mobile Guard, and the National Guard lost its character as the people in arms to become a united, obedient force devoted to keeping order.
In the June insurrection the government side had 25,000 regular soldiers, 17,000 National Guards and 15,000 Mobile Guards recruited from the poorest and youngest parts of the Paris proletariat. Under General Cavaignac the Mobile Guard lost 100 dead and 600 wounded. Engels wrote that the organised lumpenproletariat had given battle to the working proletariat, and in The Eighteenth Brumaire Marx listed "the lumpen proletariat organized as the Mobile Guard" among the forces on the side of the bourgeois republic. He also observed that the Society of December 10 was to Bonaparte the party fighting force that the National Workshops had been to the socialist workers and the Mobile Guard to the bourgeois republicans.
Distrustful of the National Guard, President Louis-Napoléon suppressed half its battalions in January 1849, and the Mobile Guard was finally disbanded on 31 January 1850, charged with indiscipline and with causing more disorder than it settled. The "garde nationale mobile" that War Minister Niel created in 1868, late in the Second Empire, was a reserve for training men not drafted into the army: a different body with the same name.