The Mountain (1848–1851)
산악파 (1848–1851)
The group of radical republican and socialist deputies around Ledru-Rollin in the Constituent and Legislative Assemblies of the French Second Republic, also called the Democratic Socialists (démoc-socs), who stood for a "democratic and social republic". Named after the Mountain of 1793, it won about 25 percent of the vote in the 1849 election, but after the failure of the demonstration of 13 June 1849 its leaders went into exile or were prosecuted.
In depth
Its programme for the 1849 election called for abolishing the "45 centimes" tax, an income tax, the nationalisation of railways, mines, canals and insurance, an end to the death penalty, reform of military service, credit at 3 percent and wider education. Of the left's 41 percent of the vote about 79 percent (32 percent of the total) went to joint or homogeneous democratic-socialist lists, and its seats are given as 180 to 210 depending on the source. Its support lay with smallholders and farm labourers, artisans and minor officials in the Massif Central, the Toulouse region, Provence, the Dauphiné and Alsace, and it polled more than Ledru-Rollin and Raspail together in the presidential election of 1848. When its motion to impeach the president over the Roman expedition failed it called the demonstration of 13 June 1849, after whose defeat 34 of its deputies lost their seats. The secret society of the New Mountain then spread to some 700 communes of the south-east and became the network of the risings against the coup of December 1851. In The Eighteenth Brumaire Marx cast the Mountain of 1848–1851 as the farcical repetition of the Mountain of 1793–1795.