Risings against the coup of December 1851
1851년 12월 쿠데타 반대 봉기
Part of French coup d'état of 2 December 1851
The armed risings by republicans across France against Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte's coup of 2 December 1851, above all in the rural districts and small towns of the south-east (Basses-Alpes, Var, Drôme) and of the centre and south-west. They were spontaneous and unplanned, yet involved perhaps close to 100,000 insurgents, and at Digne the rebels briefly held the prefecture. After the army crushed them, thirty-two departments were placed under a state of siege and more than 20,000 people were sentenced by mixed commissions.
In depth
In Paris, on 2–4 December, deputies of the Mountain such as Hugo, Schœlcher and Baudin formed a resistance committee and built barricades, but the workers, who had not forgotten the massacres of June 1848, mostly held back. When troops fired on the crowds on the boulevards on 4 December, resistance in Paris was over. In the provinces the news spread slowly. Lyon did not stir under the precautions of General de Castellane, demonstrations in big cities such as Marseille, Lille, Bordeaux and Toulouse were easily dispersed, and arrests of workers' leaders earlier in the year also hindered resistance.
Some municipal councils, however, invoked Article 68 of the constitution, under which a president who dissolved the Assembly forfeited his office, and proclaimed Bonaparte deposed, setting off risings "to defend the Republic". The resistance was spontaneous and without any overall plan, yet there may have been nearly 100,000 insurgents across France. The west, north and north-east, which had voted for the Party of Order, stayed largely quiet. The heart of the movement was the south-east, with risings also in places of the centre and south-west such as Clamecy, Mirande, Bédarieux, Le Donjon and Millau. The south-east rose on 5 December, and on 7 December the garrison of Digne capitulated and the republicans took the prefecture of the Basses-Alpes, the only prefecture in France to fall into their hands, governing the department through a "departmental resistance committee".
The Bonapartist prefects, who controlled the telegraph, and the army soon struck back. Digne was retaken on 13 December, and in the Var the poorly armed republican columns were easily dispersed, with about fifty killed in a few days; Martin Bidouré, captured and shot twice, became the hero and martyr of the Var resistance. From 8 December thirty-two departments were placed under a state of siege, and summary executions and mass arrests went on until January 1852. Of 26,884 people arrested, 21,000 were sentenced by mixed commissions of prefect, general and magistrate, 9,530 of them to transportation to Algeria and 239 to the penal colony of Cayenne. Morny's propaganda, inflating tales of pillage and murder, won over Legitimist and liberal notables who had hesitated until then.
In The Eighteenth Brumaire Marx saw the risings as an awakening of the peasantry: "In the uprisings after the coup d'état, a part of the French peasants protested, arms in hand, against their own vote of December 10, 1848. The school they had gone to since 1848 had sharpened their wits." Yet the majority was still caught in its illusions about Bonaparte, he added, so that in precisely the reddest departments the peasants voted openly for Bonaparte in the plebiscite of 20–21 December.