Society of 10 December
12월 10일회
A Bonapartist organisation founded in France in 1849 in the form of a mutual-aid society, named after 10 December 1848, the day Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte was elected president. It gathered crowds to force cheers on the president's returns from tours of the provinces and beat up opponents, and it was dissolved on 7 November 1850. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Marx called it Bonaparte's private army, recruited from the Paris lumpenproletariat.
In depth
After the demonstration of 13 June 1849, a law of 19 July banned clubs and public meetings likely to endanger public safety. The Society of 10 December escaped it by registering as a mutual-aid society: it applied to the prefecture of police on 20 August, was authorised on 29 August and 24 September, and published its statutes on 1 October. It took its name from a Bonapartist newspaper of the same title, whose offices served as its headquarters. Its president was General Piat, but its real director was Claudius Gallix. A year later it claimed 6,500 members, and a splinter group broke away to form the "Society of 15 August".
As the conflict between the royalist majority of the Assembly and the president sharpened in 1850, members gathered at the stations where the president returned from the provinces, forcing passers-by to cheer for Bonaparte and beating those who refused, while the police looked on. At the end of October an informer's report reached the Assembly that the splinter group had plotted to assassinate the Assembly's president Dupin and General Changarnier; when a newspaper made the affair public, the interior minister Baroche drafted a decree of dissolution, which the president signed on 7 November. Daumier drew the members in Le Charivari as club-wielding thugs and created the figure of Colonel Ratapoil.
In chapter five of The Eighteenth Brumaire Marx wrote that under the pretext of founding a benevolent society the Paris lumpenproletariat had been organised into secret sections: decayed roués and adventurers, vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, swindlers, pickpockets, ragpickers and the rest of the "bohème". He saw it as the party fighting force peculiar to Bonaparte, which was to remain his private army until he succeeded in transforming the public army into a Society of December 10. The First Address of The Civil War in France called the war-fever crowds masqueraded in workers' blouses and let loose on the streets of Paris in July 1870 "the Band of the 10th of December", and noted that the real workmen answered with peace demonstrations.