PART VI. THE BARRICADES OF PARIS

Chapter 25. The Revolution of February 1848

The French Revolution of 1830 sent shock waves throughout Europe. In Britain, Belgium, Portugal, and Spain, as well as a number of states in the German Confederation, movements for the reform of dynasties or monarchies flared up, sometimes taking the form of insurrections. But most of these reforms were nationalist in character, or liberal—seeking to broaden political rights—or both, rather than social uprisings, in which the masses fought for a radically new economic as well as political dispensation. In time, nagging problems of national unification were resolved, not by popular insurgencies but by forceful statesmen, such as Cavour in Italy and Bismarck in Germany, who fulfilled the aspirations of established monarchs rather than those of quasi- democratic popular movements.

It was almost exclusively in France, in the nineteenth century, and usually in Paris, that mass armed revolts transcended essentially nationalist goals and focused on the “social question” of economic exploitation, class rule, and property ownership. As we have seen, the Great Revolution had by no means eliminated all of the social arrangements of the ancien regime. Ironically, in fact, it was not only the traditions of 1789 but France’s very economic backwardness, at least by comparison with England, that made it a hotbed of revolution and radical ideologies.

THE PERSISTENCE OF OLD FRANCE

Despite the economic and technological changes that took place very noticeably in the 1840s, the propertied classes of France—the middle classes as well as the nobility—still equated prestige and power with the ownership of land. Even the bourgeoisie, with or without titles, aspired to the ownership of large estates, which alone would gain it a privileged position in the management of the country. Admittedly, this high regard for land ownership was diminished in French cities, particularly in Paris, where commerce and banking flourished. Certainly in the capital, talented men with fairly plebeian origins such as Jacques Laffitte, Casimir Perier, Adolphe Thiers, and Francois Guizot—bankers, journalists, and academics—attained positions of prominence in national affairs; nor were these men denied entry into aristocratic circles, or even the opportunity to marry into the nobility, as trade and finance became ever more lucrative sources of income.

But in the rural areas and the small towns, French provincial and municipal affairs were almost completely controlled by landed notables, who despised urban businessmen and ruled over the peasantry and craftsmen of their districts with prerevolutionary arrogance. Together with the clergy, they dispensed favors and issued directives as though the Revolution of 1789 had never occurred. Nor were their claims to local sovereignty seriously challenged by the peasantry and lesser urban classes, who viewed tides and the ownership of landed property with subservient awe, especially in the royalist hotbeds of the west and south.

That a great deal of power was exercised on the provincial and even the local level was not politically trivial. During the 1830s France was still a comparatively decentralized country—in some respects barely a modem nation-state. Travel conditions outside the great urban hubs were very primitive, leaving many parts of the country isolated and under the dominion of local landowners. Despite a considerable amount of road and canal construction during the Restoration, “in the 1830s the nation’s transportation system ... was still that of the eighteenth century,” as David Pinkney pointedly observes.[395]

In 1830, for example, stagecoaches still moved at an average speed of four miles per hour, and it took ten to twenty days for freight wagons to move from Paris to Orleans. A steamship journey up the Rhone from Arles to Lyon required three to four days, and even more if the river was swollen by flooding or shrouded in fog. In winter, when ice clogged the waterway, traffic might be suspended entirely for a week. Travel along canals, whose construction tripled under the Orleans monarchy, still faced all the riverine difficulties of weather, flooding, and drought Rural France thus had only limited, and usually very little, contact with the capital. The affairs of large areas of the country were necessarily left in the hands of the local aristocracy—many of whom remained Legitimists, that is, supporters of the old Bourbon dynasty to which Louis XVI and his brothers belonged.

The continuities with the past, it should be emphasized, encompassed not only regional isolation, poor roads, and strong feelings of provincialism but a fairly primitive banking system. By continuing to invest mainly in safe government bonds and low-risk securities that brought short-term returns, this system impeded the growth of more mechanized, capital-intensive enterprises. Even small enterprises such as the production of iron in charcoal-fueled furnaces (which still supplied most of the country’s iron) had to rely on overly cautious local banks or else be self-financed. The larger coal-fueled plants, so necessary for the production of iron for locomotives and railroad tracks, required large capital investments that vastly exceeded the capacity of most local financial institutions. Indeed, not until the Paris—Saint-Germain Railroad proved to be a financial success were the large Parisian banks prepared to invest heavily in railroad construction or trade in railroad shares on the Paris Bourse.

Finally, any attempt by a peasant household to improve its lot beyond subsistence farming came up against the resistance of local financial institutions, which were extremely reluctant to make low-interest loans to small-scale food cultivators. French peasant agriculture consequently stagnated, imprisoned in quasi-medieval forms of finance, such as high-interest loans from small-town notaries, with the result that peasants were still easy prey to their traditional vicissitudes, such as bad harvests and droughts. Indeed, even in an age of railroads, steamships, and factories, food shortages, so redolent of the ancien regime, were still serious problems.

For those who had wealth, the purchase of land usually left insufficient capital for industrial growth or even sophisticated agricultural techniques. The real measure of a family’s wealth continued to be the amount of acreage it owned rather than the level of its agricultural productivity. “The values and aspirations of the bourgeoisie were still predominantly those associated with landowners and not those of businessmen or the English captains of industry,” notes Pinkney, “fully committed to the pursuit of profit and to a regimen of work.”[396]

Nevertheless France could not resist change altogether, least of all during the latter decade of the July Monarchy. Economically, despite the overwhelmingly artisanal nature of the manufacturing economy, industrial advances could not be avoided, but by no means could they be instituted on a scale comparable to English industry. The north was home to the mechanized production of cotton cloth; the Loire basin was greatly expanding its production of coal; and the small forges that had formerly accounted for much of the country’s iron output were consolidated into large-scale foundries, presaging the Industrial Revolution that had already swept over parts of Britain.

Perhaps of greatest significance, railroads began to come into their own, reaching isolated regions that had previously been all but completely closed off to trade. The passage of the 1842 Dufaure railway law mandated the formation of a national railway network, in which land, track, and stations were to be supplied by the government, then leased to private companies that would provide the necessary operating equipment and rolling stock. Between 1842 and 1848, the amount of track in France tripled from roughly 600 to 1800 kilometers. It was a first step in overcoming the isolation of the French regions and at the same time provided a stimulus to the metallurgical industry, so indispensable to modernization.

Politically, however, the regime of Louis-Philippe was closed to everyone but a few wealthy citizens; by the election law of 1831, only those Frenchmen could vote who paid taxes of at least 200 francs—a franchise qualification that effectively barred all but 250,000 out of 9 million adult males from voting. Such franchise reforms as were proposed in the Chamber of Deputies did not apply to the working class, which all parties in the government seemed to assume should be barred from electoral participation. Morally, the regime had become scandalously corrupt, with bribery and dishonesty rampant at all levels of government, including the military. The July Monarchy was, in effect, a huge holding company, as Marx called it, for stockbrokers and financiers who had been reaping immense fortunes ever since Louis-Philippe ascended the throne. It baldly justified its existence by the extremely favorable and privileged environment it created for the rising bourgeoisie and rural nouveaux riches. Commercialism had become the ruling ethos of the elite, and the propertied classes proceeded to gorge themselves financially, through shamelessly lucrative contracts, reckless speculation, and shady loans, generating enormous discrepancies in wealth throughout the country.

THE ASSOCIATIONS DEMANDS OF THE 1840s

In the years direcdy following the Great Revolution, France had preserved its predominandy artisanal economy, so that the manufacturing sector of the French economy was still overwhelmingly made up of craftsmen. Although their economic position had changed somewhat between 1789 and 1840, the interests and status of artisans had remained surprisingly constant. Even Paris, as we have seen, had hardly changed during the fifty years that passed since the Bastille was taken, and the methods of manufacturing production, even working-class lifeways, were remarkably similar to those of two generations earlier.

Master artisans usually owned their own tools and managed their own shops, using the labor of their families, apprentices, and journeymen for assistance in production. Allowing for differences among individuals, they shared certain basic values, habits, and hopes. Those who did not own property aspired, in time, to acquire their own workshops and enjoy the status of master craftsmen. The more well-to-do master artisans worked side by side with apprentices, journeymen, and hired workers, who not only shared their ideas, hopes, and lifeways but often lived in their homes and shared their meals.

Toward the middle of the nineteenth century, social forces emerged to threaten these independent artisanal lifeways: new technologies, most notably rail transportation, opened hitherto isolated markets to cheap mass-produced goods from abroad and at home. Merchant capitalists were becoming more central figures in economic life, especially those who paid for the artisans’ products at a given rate, then traveled elsewhere to sell them. Increasingly these merchants began to control the allocation of jobs and the prices that artisans received for their goods, often with little or no concern for the needs of their producers. As the merchants’ role became even more pronounced with the expansion of trade, they threatened to reduce the artisans to a lowly, dependent status, at the beck and call of bourgeois masters. At the same time the industrial capitalist world was poised to invade their craft world, threatening to replace it with the factory system.

These looming changes raised several basic questions that urgendy had to be addressed. What would be the place of artisanal workers in the changing economic and political life of France? How could they deflect the cruel impact of a harshly competitive market economy? Could they, as artisans, create an alternative to the emerging predatory and competitive capitalist economy?

A spate of communist and socialist books and pamphlets were published that tried to address these searing questions. But following the Revolution of 1830, experience and need counted almost as much as theory in persuading militant French workers to join together in organizations of associated or cooperative production that were known as “associations.” The popularity of the word association, instead of the more archaic, prerevolutionary word corporation, was due in no small part to the writings of Fourierists, and especially Buchez, in his very popular public lectures in the autumn of 1830.

Precisely when French workers began to form associations differs from one historian to another. According to Bernard Moss, “Associationism was bom during the wave of strikes and organized protests provoked by the Revolution of 1830”—specifically, with the large wave of strikes that swept over French cities, particularly Paris, in 1833.[397] William Sewell, on the other hand, dates associations back to workers’ philanthropic societies of the previous century, which were then revived after 1831. What is clear is that in 1833 an economic upswing, and an accompanying strike wave, began to generate a strong associationist movement among French workers. Idled by work stoppages, the strikers formed cooperative associations simply in order to earn an income.

It was worker-militants who formulated the organizational contours of these new entities. In 1833 a militant shoemaker known to us only as Efrahem called upon the “workers of an etat [to] form a corps among themselves; they must choose, from the midst of that society, a commission charged with representing it in debates with the masters, to fix wages according to tarifs [contracts specifying wage rates], discussed and decreed by its members.”[398] The words etat and corps are evidence of the archaisms that persisted in artisans’ language and thinking, but the intention of an association like Efrahem’s is patendy clear: essentially it was to be a labor union. Although such associations were often marked by initiation ceremonies, rites, secret signals, and shared festivities, they were hardly socialistic entities.

Indeed, associations seem to have emerged out of the simple trade unions that workers formed to advance their interests during the course of the strikes. To conduct a strike, workers had to eat and provide their families with the means of life. Associations that functioned as labor unions or mutual aid societies could make some such provisions for their survival. But as strikes intensified, striking workers took the function of their associations further. Striking shoemakers, tailors, and cabinetmakers in various French cities actually formed producers’ associations or cooperative workshops, by which they could gain employment to support themselves during strikes, until their masters or the merchants to whom they sold their goods agreed to an acceptable tarif. Most of these producers’ cooperatives were not long-lived; as Sewell tells us, they

were not envisaged as continuing beyond the end of the strike. Even the most ambitious—such as the “national workshop” that was formed by the Parisian tailors during their long strike of October and November [1833], which they saw as becoming a permanent part of the tailors’ corporation— were conceived of as stricdy a subordinate arm of the overall workers’ corporation [Le., trade union of a single trade].[399]

Significantly, a limited form of association, that had been little more than a prototypical trade union, had mutated under strike conditions into a collectivistic producers’ association. In response to the discontent of workers expressed in such strikes and associations, the government passed a Law of Association in 1834 that prohibited associations of all but the most innocuous sort For the rest of the 1830s and the 1840s, producers’ cooperatives and collectivist associations, which had been formed only during strikes in actual practice, were elevated to a major component of the ideology of artisanal socialism. This ideology envisioned a socialist society based on cooperative production and distribution, whose economy would be structured around producers’ associations.

Moreover, these associations would be confederally interlinked into a “fraternity” of all trades. In a pamphlet tided On the Association of Workers of All Trades, the shoemaker Efrahem cast his sights beyond one particular etat to a confraternity of the working class as a whole. Without broader association, he warned, individual “corporations” would “dissipate and dissolve ... annihilate themselves in the individualism and egoism of isolation.” Associations, this remarkable worker went on to write, should instead elect delegates to represent all trades in a coordinating “central committee.” When strikes took place, the central committee would collect and disburse funds among strikers.[400]

That practical structure seems to have been about as far as Efrahem was prepared to take his proposed confraternity. But it was one that the most revolutionary Parisian workers came to regard as the alternative structure to industrial capitalism: a central committee of workers’ delegates from all trades that would coordinate the funding of collectivist producers’ associations and the distribution of their earnings in as egalitarian a manner as possible. In the years to come, they would debate further aspects of this artisanal socialism. Would the earnings in such collectivist cooperatives be shared among the workers in an individual association, or among the members of a trade, or among the working class as a whole? Would they be shared according to work performed (socialism) or according to the needs of the worker and his or her family (communism)? Would producers’ cooperatives depend upon the state for startup credit, or on contributions from the pockets of its members? Would the confraternity of the associations be supervised—temporarily or permanently—by the state (in what later socialist movements might call a “workers’ state”) or by confederal councils of delegates from the workshops themselves?

In the 1840s, in addition to these expressly associationist forms of socialism, Parisian workers also encountered the highly individualistic, so-called “anarchistic” scheme proposed by Proudhon, which, as we have seen, was based on the personal ownership of property and the use of contracts to knit producers and consumers together. A bitter foe of collectivism of any kind, Proudhon was nonetheless obliged in 1851, in the wake of the associationist ferment of 1848 and after, to acknowledge that association of some sort was unavoidable for large-scale enterprises:

Association has indeed its use in the economy of nations. The workmen’s associations are indeed called upon to play an important part in the near future; and are full of hope both as a protest against the wage system, and as an affirmation of reciprocity. This part will consist chiefly in the management of large instruments of labor, and in the carrying out of certain large undertakings, which require at once minute division of functions, together with great united efficiency; and which would be so many schools for the laboring class if association, or better, participation, were introduced. Such undertakings, among others, are railroads.[401]

Proudhon’s large-scale associations were to be owned by the men who worked in them, and their components were to be bound together by contracts rather than by ethical or fraternal sentiments.

By 1848, all of these associations—be they trade unions, cooperatives, or producers’ associations of a socialistic or communistic type, and their confraternities or confederations—were part of the variegated but passionately held ideology of artisanal socialism: they were to constitute the economic infrastructure of the “democratic and social republic.” The most revolutionary militants in Paris adopted a vision of a republic based on the “organization of work,” consisting of producers’ associations that were socialistic or communistic in nature. The less socially sophisticated workers adopted a vision of a republic that would be managed by associations ranging from mutual aid sociedes and simple producers’ associations to confederations of trade associations.

In general, in the 1830s and 1840s, it was the sophisticated militants who set the tone for working-class demands, and it was Louis Blanc’s Organization of Work, that synthesized many of these ideas, which became what G.D.H. Cole calls “the rallying cry for the main body of the Paris workers.”[402] So nearly did the “organization of labor” into associations acquire quasi-mystical proportions that even republican societies such as the Droits de VHomme called for a republic whose primary task would be to hand over to workers the means by which they could refashion their trades into cooperative associations that they themselves controlled.

By the winter of 1848, the social cauldron of France was already boiling over with the menace of revolution. In January of that year, Alexis de Tocqueville warned his colleagues in the Chamber of Deputies that the revolution they feared was already looming on the horizon:

See what is passing in the breasts of the working classes, who, 1 grant, are at present quiet.... Do you not see that there are gradually forming in their breasts opinions and ideas which are destined not only to upset this or that law, ministry, or even form of government, but society itself, until it totters upon the foundations on which it rests today? Do you not listen to what they say to themselves each day? Do you not hear them repeating unceasingly that all that is above them is incapable and unworthy of governing them; that the present distribution of goods throughout the world is unjust; that property rests on a foundation which is not an equitable foundation? And do you not realize that when such opinions take root, when they spread in an almost universal manner, when they sink deeply into the masses, they are bound to bring with them sooner or later, I know not when nor how, a most formidable revolution?[403]

Nor was Tocqueville wrong in this warning that France was faced with a social as well as a political revolution. Having been robbed of their victory in the 1830 uprising by a clique of constitutional royalists and liberals, French workers were not eager to mount barricades and spill blood once again for mere changes in government. The majority of veterans of 1830 were determined, at a minimum, to gain the freedom to form associations, which had been prohibited by the Le Chapelier law of 1791, and by the 1834 Law of Associations. Their demand seemed to threaten in the minds of the bourgeoisie a sweeping social revolution against property and wealth as such. Moreover, workers were listening more intently to the ideas that the militants proffered in working-class cafes and sifted them through with greater care, while reading and discussing works by Blanc, Cabet, and Proudhon, as well as lesser-known socialists. It was their debates that Tocqueville urged the Chamber to heed when he rose to address it, barely a month before Paris exploded in the February Revolution of 1848.

PRELUDE TO REVOLUTION

Nevertheless, despite the debates among Parisian workers about social change, it is doubtful that socialistic ideas alone would have sufficed to plunge Paris into insurrection. In February 1848 what certainly primed the people of the capital for a new revolutionary upheaval was the prolonged economic crisis that had begun two years before. Reaching serious proportions between 1846 and 1848, it significandy threatened the well-being not only of the working classes but of the middle classes, especially the multitude of small shopkeepers who formed an integral part of the mass movements in the cities. The depression began with agricultural shortages, such as had been so common during the ancien regime—namely, a potato blight in 1845, followed by a bad wheat harvest in 1846—inciting food and tax riots. It soon extended to commerce, finance, and industry, producing major social instability among ordinarily moderate sectors of French society. Unemployment soared among the working class, seriously affecting the well-being of the petty bourgeoisie as well. As Mark Traugott notes:

the crisis was more severe in Paris than in France as a whole. The annual total of bankruptcies in the capital rose from 691 in 1845 to 931 in 1846 and 1,139 in 1847. A disproportionate share of these failures occurred in small businesses.[404]

In the absence of work, the artisans and the poor suffered enormously, as can be judged by the fact that petty thefts in Paris rose “by more than 60 percent and arrests for begging nearly trebled.”[405] During the winter of 1846–47 about a third of the capital’s million residents were obliged to rely on some form of charity to maintain themselves, while the number of children abandoned by their parents soared. By far the greater number of conscripts for the army had to be rejected because they were too undernourished and physically unfit to be suitable as soldiers. Astonishingly, the ministry did little to alleviate the human suffering; as a result, when the crisis abated at the end of 1847, it not only left thousands of paupers in its wake but, among ordinary Parisians, an ominous mistrust of the regime.

Adding to these dissatisfactions were the restrictive policies of the July Monarchy itself. Indeed, the most pressing issue that the government faced in the Chamber was the demand for extending the suffrage. The Legitimists deputies, who considered Louis-Philippe a usurper, tried to embarrass his regime and attempted to curry public favor by calling for nothing less than universal suffrage. No one in the Chamber took this spiteful demand seriously except for the most radical republican deputies, whose number, because of the suffrage restrictions, was insignificant. But the numerically much larger Orleanist Center—the so-called “dynastic opposition,” those who, like Odilon Barrot, were loyal to Louis-Philippe although not to his minister, Guizot— advocated broadening the electorate to include talented and educated as well as wealthy men, in the hope of widening the electoral base for the monarchy among a politically reliable sector of the population. Finally, in March 1847, Prosper Duvergier de Hauranne, a protege of Thiers and a constitutional monarchist, presented a reform proposal that would have added 200,000 “men of talent” to the electoral rolls. So well received was this proposal that it even gained the enthusiastic support of Barrot, the leader of the dynastic opposition, as well as other deputies.

Increasing the urgency of these demands, Frangois Guizot, a conservative Calvinist, had for some eight years been presiding over the government of Louis-Philippe, creating an impressive record of reactionary obduracy and public distrust. With mindless provocation, the minister consistently opposed all the suffrage proposals, with the result that virtually the entire Chamber galvanized against him. Collectively, the opposition deputies and their extraparliamentary supporters resolved to remove him from his position and demand a broadened franchise.

The proponents of electoral reform resolved to take their concerns to the people of France, to gain a base of popular support for their goals. But inasmuch as it was illegal to hold large-scale political assemblies without the permission of the authorities, they devised a stratagem to skirt the law. Starting in June 1847, they organized and conducted a series of public banquets, whose purpose was ostensibly apolitical, to promote civic fraternity, but during the lengthy “toasts” participants in the banquets freely used the occasion to air their grievances and even excoriate the government policies on suffrage and other questions. At least fifty such banquets were held throughout France in the second half of 1847, stirring up public sentiment in favor of limited electoral reform. Although largely attended by the middle class—the price of admission, six francs, excluded the poor—the sullen and desperate workers, suffering bitterly from the economic crisis, closely followed reports of the speeches in their cafes and in the press.

Notwithstanding the popularity of the banquet campaign, the government adamandy resisted demands for reform. As if to fan the flames stirred up by the banquet movement, Guizot, who composed the king’s customary addresses to the legislature, added an incendiary passage to Louis-Philippe’s otherwise innocuous speech to the Chamber of December 28, 1847:

In the midst of the agitation fermented by blind or hostile passions one conviction animates and sustains me, that we possess in the constitutional monarchy, in the union of the great powers of the State, the sure means of surmounting these obstacles and of satisfying all the moral and material interests of our dear country.[406]

Guizot could have conveyed the same message—notably, that the government would countenance no reforms—without openly insulting the opposition deputies. But his reference to “blind or hostile passions” induced by “agitation” not only affronted the opposition deputies but was entirely gratuitous. Neither the Legitimists, nor the liberals, nor the dynastic opposition—all the alleged bearers of these “passions”—had the least intention of challenging the constitutional monarchy, nor, for that matter, were most of them trying to unseat Louis-Philippe as king. However much they wanted the franchise extended, deputies such as Thiers and Barrot were equally fearful of instability, which might well have given the surly working classes the opportunity to impose themselves on the political scene. In fact, the greater part of the Chamber’s hostility was directed against Guizot, not against Louis-Philippe, who remained in their eyes a tolerable monarch.

Ironically, it was precisely in the month that the speech was made— December 1847—that a banquet was planned for Paris for February 20 of the following year. This banquet was intended to be somewhat different from the others: in the first place, it was organized not by the opposition deputies but by officers from the twelfth legion of the National Guard, the legion recruited from the twelfth Parisian arrondissement, which included the working-class neighborhoods of Saint-Victor and Saint-Marcel. And not only was the planned banquet to be held in this volatile neighborhood, but it was to occur on a Sunday, a day of rest, precisely to enable working people to attend. The price of admission, moreover, was set at a mere three francs, a sum that was within the means of many craftsmen. Finally, the banquet was to be preceded by a (hopefully) dignified demonstration winding through the streets of Paris. Almost provocatively, the organizers planned for unarmed but fully uniformed National Guards—most of whom, to be sure, were shopkeepers and members of the lower middle classes—to maintain order during the occasion.

Needless to say, when permission for this dangerous banquet was requested, the authorities flatly refused to grant it The city had already seen “hunger demonstrations” by the poor, portending trouble and possibly uprisings. Despite this rejection, the organizers proceeded with their plans to hold the banquet, even if it was to be done illegally. The royal administration was by no means alone in its unease about having a banquet in a working-class neighborhood: the opposition deputies, fearful that the banquet would air radical views, themselves intervened to sidetrack the plan by persuading the twelfth-arrondissement organizers to allow a new organizing committee to be formed.

Conveniently for the deputies and the royal administration, the new committee contained a majority of more respectable members, who succeeded in shifting the venue of the demonstration and banquet to the middle-class Champs-Elysees dislricL Moreover, the price of admission was raised from three to sue francs, and the date of the affair was rescheduled for Tuesday, February 22, a work day, which—together with the higher admission price— would hopefully keep working people from attending. A government official was to be stationed at the opening of the banquet tent to advise the banqueters that they were engaging in an illegal action. Despite these significant changes in the plan, however, the government, fearing that danger still lurked, proceeded to strengthen the Paris garrison by 50,000 troops.

Had the demonstration and banquet been publicized merely as the tepid, informal protest that the opposition intended, the entire charade might have succeeded. But Armand Marrast, a moderate but erratic republican who edited the widely read opposition newspaper Le National, decided to publish the details of the next day’s demonstration in his February 21 issue, and in a way that made it seem like a veritable battle plan. Indeed, to the readers of Le National, the plan must have seemed more like orders for a journee than a call for a mild protesL Peremptorily, Marrast spelled out every feature of the demonstration in detail: its assembly point (the Place de la Madeleine), its line of march to the Champs-Elysees, the order of the procession, and even the exact positions to be taken by units of the National Guard. The plan was published not only in Marrast’s own paper but in La Reforme, the most radical of the republican periodicals, and even in the Fourierist La Democratic pacifique.

Marrast almost certainly acted on his own initiative, apparently with the support of his fellow republican journalists, but without consultation with the opposition deputies. The banquet program, according to de Tocqueville,

was resolved upon, drawn up and published without the participation or the knowledge of the members of Parliament who considered themselves to be still leading the movement which they had called into existence. The program was the hurried work of a nocturnal gathering of journalists and Radicals, and the leaders of the Dynastic Opposition heard of it at the same time as the public, by reading it in the papers in the morning ... M. Odilon Barrot, who disapproved of the program as much as anyone, dared not disclaim it for fear of offending the men who, till then, had seemed to be moving with him.[407]

The fat was now in the fire. Marrast’s batde plan, wittingly or not, had provocatively transformed the affair from a domesticated demonstration into a confrontation with the regime, indeed a direct challenge to the legitimacy of the government. To the ministry, it must have sounded like an ultimatum. Moreover, by summoning the National Guard, an authority that the government regarded as its own exclusive prerogative, the banquet committee had ostentatiously preempted the state’s own police powers.

The government reacted accordingly—and with characteristic stupidity. On the afternoon of Monday, February 21, the ministry forbade the banquet by suspending all public meetings in Paris. The police chief of the capital declared that if a demonstration took place the next day as planned, it would be viewed as an effort to create an illegal governmental power, which amounted to declaring a state of siege. That evening, the unnerved opposition deputies met fearfully in Barrot’s home and voted unanimously to submit to the ban by calling off the entire affair.

But by now the plans for the next day were no longer in their hands: their immediate and abject surrender utterly disappointed, among others, the many students who had their hearts set on the banquet and were resolved to hold a demonstration the next day regardless of the consequences. The many republican and socialistic groups that were intent not only on dislodging Guizot but on toppling the monarchy were no less disgusted; indeed, that evening, as the socialist Marc Caussidiere recalls,

Committees of insurrection sat constandy in the secret societies, and in the offices of the Republican journals. We are ignorant of what passed there. They were probably rather engaged in observation than in action. The limited power of the conspirator, who has but scanty numbers at his disposal, only possesses influence as it ministers to a sentiment generally entertained, or a preexisting passion.

In reality, the aggrieved sentiment upon which activists depended was present among ordinary people as well. In the editorial offices of La Reforme a hundred people anxiously gathered to discuss what was in the offing when daylight broke, and as Caussidiere puts it, each man resolved to

betake himself separately, and with his hands in his pockets, to the Place de la Madeleine, to watch the course of events, and to gain over public opinion against royalty. In case of an outbreak, each member was to repair immediately to the office of La Reforme, to organize the movement with vigor, and to give it a Republican character.[408]

Despite its military precautions, the government radically underestimated the consequences of the ban. In an eerie reprise of Charles’s nonchalance some eighteen years earlier, Louis-Philippe, peering out the windows of the Tuileries on the cold, rainswept streets of the capital, nonchalandy remarked that Parisians never made revolutions in the wintertime, taking comfort in the hope that the calendar would assure his safety.

On February 22 the banquet did not, in fact, take place. Most workers took the day off to walk through the streets, sometimes gathering in small crowds to discuss the events of the previous week. In some areas, barricades were actually built, but no republican luminaries led these efforts; indeed, one of the most strikingly consistent features among the eyewitness accounts was the absence of any prominent leader among the radicals. Blanqui, most notably, was still in semibanishment in Blois, some distance from the main theater of events. Other stories have it that, during the night, secret societies gathered to plot insurrectionary acts, but there is no substantial evidence that they were quite as active as police agents claim or that they played a leading role in the events.

Actually, during the morning, a large crowd of students assembled in protest at the Place du Pantheon, on the Left Bank, infuriated mainly because three popular teachers—the historians Jules Michelet and Edgar Quinet and the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz—had been banned from lecturing. After a while the students set out for the Palais Bourbon, where the Chamber of Deputies normally convened, on a route that passed through the working-class districts across the Seine. Singing the “Marseillaise” and “Mourir de la Patrie” (a Girondin chorus from a popular play by Dumas) and shouting “Down with Guizot!” and “Long live reform!” they were joined by workers, forming a huge crowd that made its way through the streets to the Chamber of Deputies. When they arrived at the Palais Bourbon, a small group tried, unsuccessfully, to invade the building, but that morning it was empty. A serious assault was made on the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, but also without success.

That afternoon, almost inexplicably, a frenzy of spontaneous barricade building swept over the city, inducing the government to send troops out to occupy key positions and buildings to abort any incipient uprising. At the Palais Bourbon a unit of dragoons advanced with drawn swords against a crowd. But before they reached the people, they abruptly halted and, probably on the orders of their officers, sheathed their weapons, to the ecstatic cheers of the people. It would not have required a very perceptive observer to see in this behavior by the king’s most reliable forces a portent of his downfall. Although the troops did capture one barricade, at dusk the fighting, such as it was, seemed to subside, and the government, confident that it was in control of the city, ordered the soldiers to return to their barracks. Yet whatever Louis- Philippe might suppose Parisians did during the winter, his regime, so thoroughly despised after nearly two decades of misrule and demagogy, was now on the verge of an insurrection that would shake the foundations of the established order in all of Europe.

THE BARRICADES OF FEBRUARY

The next day, Wednesday, February 23, a deep sense of expectation still pervaded Paris, since the previous day had seen neither the banquet nor a major protest. Shops remained closed and shuttered; the streets were empty; and the Comedie-Frangais bolted its doors—a sure sign that trouble was afoot. The journalists of La Rejorme kept their “hands in their pockets,” meaning that they were scattered through the city, more as observers than participants. The clubs of the Right were rife with ominous fears of impending massacres and “communist” conspiracies—a “red specter” that was becoming a highly fashionable object of fear among the upper classes. Generally, deputies of all factions sought the safety of their homes or the Palais Bourbon, which was well guarded by troops and artillery.

But even more barricades now began to appear—in all, more than 1500 were erected throughout Paris, some of which reached stupendous heights in the main boulevards and squares. Priscilla Robertson’s account of these traditional barriers is too colorful not to quote at length:

Enthusiastic Paris citizens had used barricades ever since 1588 (against the Duke of Guise) and now they went methodically to work with crowbars to dig up the foot-square paving stones. They politely stopped omnibuses, untied the horses, assisted the passengers to alight, and turned the vehicles over to be weighted down with stones. They tore iron railings from houses, cut down four thousand trees along the boulevards and destroyed nearly as many lampposts, so that afterwards the streets looked as if they had been swept by a tornado. Between the barricades men crouched around huge fires casting lead balls [for muskets]. All over town, houses had been ransacked for arms, and chalked on doors one could read, “Arms Given Up”—some added, “With Pleasure.” Through the incessant tocsin, the Marseillaise sounded everywhere, or Mourir pour la Patrie.[409]

The vast heaps of paves, vehicles, furniture, trees, and lampposts with which the insurgents blocked entire boulevards far surpassed in size all previous barricades. Lithographs of the time show barricades as tall as multistoried buildings, generally surmounted by a tricolor and armed citizens clutching muskets over their heads.

During the morning the government, mindful that there might be disturbances in the capital, called out its forces to occupy strategic places such as the Place de la Concorde, the Hotel de Ville, the Porte de Saint-Denis, and the Porte Saint-Martin—traditional trouble spots in times of unrest. Drummers were ordered to different parts of the city to beat out the rappel, to summon to arms the National Guard from the various arrondissements. The National Guard was a force in which the government felt it could have confidence: it had been revived for the express purpose of protecting and defending the July Monarchy. The Guards had been “the chosen, especially created instrument of bourgeois ascendancy and defense,” as John Plamenatz puts it.[410] Every citizen between the ages of twenty and sixty who paid a property tax, however modest, was required to enroll in this legendary citizens’ militia. Inasmuch as a Guard was required to buy his own uniform and, if he wished to be in the cavalry, supply his own horse, most Guards were necessarily of bourgeois origin, in order to be able to cover these expenses. Notwithstanding the costs of belonging to the Guard, however, its members included a sizable number of shopkeepers, professionals, and other members of the lower middle class.

Ironically, however, for want of paying the 200-franc cens, many of the Guards were denied the franchise under the very monarchy they were expected to defend, and except for the elite units of well-to-do members, they would have benefited from the electoral reform proposed by the Chamber opposition. Hence any plan to quell disturbances that relied on their support rested on very questionable foundations. In fact, when the rappel summoned the Guards on the morning of February 23, only a few units responded. The Cavalry Legion, whose members were relatively wealthy, answered the call, and so did a mere three of the twelve infantry units, but the remaining units mustered on their own, hostile to the purpose for which the government now sought to use them.

In the Chamber, meanwhile, the dynastic opposition, to the catcalls of the conservative majority, was demanding the resignation of Guizot and the enactment of moderate electoral reform. Louis-Philippe now realized that he had to heed the cry of “Down with Guizot!” if the dynasty was to survive. On Wednesday afternoon the sovereign, tears freely flowing down his cheeks, informed a sullen Guizot that he and his ministry were dismissed This concession to popular pressure appalled—and thoroughly alienated—the conservative deputies, who had wrongly decided that the uprising could easily be put down by the military.

The news that Guizot had been forced to resign, however, brought plaudits from the liberal leaders. They were quite prepared to live with the monarchy, which, having fulfilled the wishes of the middle classes, seemed to distance them further from giving support to any uprising. But the news was greeted with joy by the working classes, bringing crowds into the streets, jubilant at the demise of the hated minister. In fact, Paris was enraptured by a spirit of fraternite, as people of different classes embraced each other in the streets, while the National Guard fraternized with the population. It seemed that a new dawn was breaking upon the country, and many found reason to hope that the republic for which they had longed was not far off, even though the king still occupied the throne; indeed, if Guizot could fall, then perhaps the “democratic and social republic” itself was on the horizon.

But this festive atmosphere did not last long. Around nine-thirty in the evening, according to the Countess d’Agoult, an acute eyewitness, a joyous “long column, waving torches and a red flag, appeared on the heights of the rue Montmartre.”[411] Almost certainly a working-class column, accompanied by enthusiastic children, it had come from the plebeian Faubourg Saint-Antoine. The column was soon joined by popular processions coming from other directions. The merged crowds stopped outside the offices of the republican National, where they were greeted by Armand Marrast, the paper’s editor, who “by turns delighted as a wit and hurled in thunder the sarcasms and the indignation of the republican opposition”[412]—but also lauded the pacific nature of the journee. Then they continued on their way, reinforced by still more demonstrators, until they arrived before the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, on the Boulevard des Capuchins. There they encountered a guard consisting of some 200 men of the fourteenth regiment of the line.

The commander of the guard, one Lieutenant-Colonel Courant, was apparendy panicked by so large a crowd and ordered his troops to form a firing square, which thoroughly astonished the festive merrymakers. Worse still, as the resdess people were pressed forward against the troops by their own numbers, an order was given for the soldiers to fix bayonets. Suddenly an unforeseeable event occurred that transformed the demand for Guizot’s removal into a demand for the removal of the monarchy. The Countess d’Agoult tells us what happened:

Amid the movements occasioned by the execution of this order, a shot went off; a soldier was hit. Instandy, without any preliminary summons, without any drum roll, without anyone later being able to recall having heard the command, ... a volley of murderous firing hit the mass of the people.

It was unclear whether the first shot was an accident or a deliberate provocation by one side or the other; most likely it was an accident But whatever the cause,

it was enough to make the soldiers feel themselves under attack. No one had given the order for their volley. When the cloud of smoke cleared, it revealed a spectacle whose horror nothing can convey. A hundred men were lying on the pavement; some were dead, others mortally wounded; a great number had been knocked over by the commotion; several had been thrust face-down in an instinctive flight for safety. Blood flowed in torrents. The groaning of the wounded, the choked murmurings of those who were trying to move away from the melee of the dead and dying, tore at the heart of the soldier who was the innocent author of this massacre, who watched it with eyes of dismay.[413]

Fifty-two were killed, and the wounded were not even counted. News that the soldiers had fired on the people spread like wildfire. Blame was instandy placed on the ministry—and on the king himself, the very sovereign who had come to power as a result of the people’s uprising in 1830. Numb with horror and disbelief, working people collected the bodies of the dead, piled them onto wagons, and paraded them through the streets of the capital, to display the results of the government’s brutality to everyone. D’Agoult tells us that “a worker in bare arms” —aux bras nus—led a white horse by the bridle, pulling a wagon, atop which

five corpses are arranged in a horrible symmetry. Standing on the shaft [of the wagon] a child of the people—of pallid complexion, his eyes ardent and staring fixedly, his arms extended, almost immobile, as one might portray the spirit of vengeance—is illuminating with the reddish glow of his torch, the body of a young woman whose neck and bruised chest have been stained by a long trail of blood. From time to time another worker, at the rear of the wagon, embraces the inanimate corpse with his muscular arms, lifting iL From his shaking torch escape sparks, and he exclaims, as they make their way through the crowd, “Vengeance! Vengeance! They are slaughtering the people!” The crowd responds, “To arms!” and the corpse falls back to the bottom of the wagon, which continues on, followed by silence.[414]

Such scenes were probably repeated throughout the city as wagons passed from neighborhood to neighborhood. In the working-class neighborhoods, armed men appeared at the doors of homes, summoning the residents to vengeance, and joined by members of the lower middle classes, thereby forming the key alliance between the workers and the lower petty bourgeoisie that turned the uprising into a popular movement. “Soon the dry noises of pick axes could be heard on the pavements,” d’Agoult tells us, “and the heavy felling of trees on the boulevard.”[415] The people were pulling up paves, erecting more barricades, and sounding the tocsin. The peaceful journee of February 22 had become the February Revolution.

THE COLLAPSE OF THE MONARCHY

With the massacre on the Boulevard des Capuchins, the very fate of the monarchy hung in the balance. Oblivious to the seriousness of the situation, however, that Wednesday Louis-Philippe was still making ministerial changes: having dismissed Guizot, he was searching for a minister to replace him. His first choice was a vacuous and reactionary Empire courtier, Count Mole, who around midnight refused the offer, mindful that no conservative could handle the situation that was exploding in the streets. A few hours later, in desperation, Louis-Philippe turned to Thiers, the indubitable leader of the dynastic opposition, whose appointment, the king hoped, would conciliate the people. He seems not to have considered that Thiers himself was despised by the masses for his willingness to suppress insurrections. (Thiers had been primarily to blame for perpetrating an infamous massacre at the Rue Transnonain in 1834.) Before he would agree to form a ministry for Louis-Philippe, Thiers laid down a number of demands for reform, among which was that his fellow opposition leader Odilon Barrot be brought into the government. Despite his distaste for Barrot, the king finally had no alternative but to yield, whereupon Thiers became the last minister of the July Monarchy.

Meanwhile, the troops of the line as well as the National Guards who were ordered to occupy strategic parts of the city were becoming uneasy; they were not eager to crush a resolute and vociferous public insurgency. Although some accounts put their number at 50,000, Alphonse de Lamartine, the poet who later became head of government, held that there were no more than 25,000. Whatever their number may have been, the troops of Louis-Philippe, like those that Charles X had sent out to quell the July 1830 uprising, were hungry, fatigued, and demoralized from having huddled in the February cold for forty-eight hours—and they were deeply torn by doubts about their purpose.

Late Wednesday evening the king was informed of the massacre and the escalating insurrectionary situation in the streets. The reports coming into the Tuileries now seemed to justify decisive military action by the monarchy against its citizens. Early on the morning of February 24, the king placed all the city’s military forces under the command of the ruthless Marshal Thomas Bugeaud, who was also loathed by the people for his leading role in suppressing the 1834 Parisian riots. Accordingly, in the early hours of Thursday morning, at one- thirty a.m., Marshal Bugeaud held a council of war at the Tuileries in which he laid out a plan to sweep the capital clean of all insurgents. Four columns of line troops, artillery, and Municipal Guards were ordered, within hours, to leave their barracks and try to cut through the barricades, taking the sleeping insurgents by surprise. Setting out at five in the moming, the first column, under the command of General Sebastiani, was to make its way past the Hotel de Ville, eliminating any obstacles in the main streets and occupying the area around the Bank of France. At the same time, a second column, led by General Bedeau, was to march through the Grands Boulevards and the Bourse to the Bastille area. Both columns, in turn, were expected to provide cover for a third column that was to clear away any barricades that might be raised again in the aftermath of their passage, while a fourth was dispatched to occupy the strategic Pantheon area.

Allowing for minor losses, all the columns reached their destinations except for Bedeau’s, which was stopped short by a large and well-defended barricade that stretched across the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle, not far from the Bank of France. To avoid bloodshed, the general entered into parley with the insurgents, with the aid of an intermediary National Guard officer, one Fauvelle-Delabarre, a local businessman who had gone over to the insurgents. But Bedeau could think of no better argument to persuade the insurgents of the government’s good intentions than to tell them that Barrot had ascended to power.

Fauvelle-Delabarre shrewdly got the two sides to agree to a delay, so that he could go to the Tuileries and seek a compromise with Marshal Bugeaud. When the wily merchant met with the marshal, however, he got more than he bargained for: Bugeaud wearily consented to withdraw his column entirely. In the meantime, most of the waiting troops, already demoralized and lisdess, began to go over to the insurgents, while others handed over their weapons and withdrew to the Tuileries. The king, having agreed to Thiers’s condition to recall the troops, ordered all the columns that had been sent out that moming to return to their barracks. Eventually the entire army was obliged to withdraw from Paris. The capital was placed in the hands of the National Guard, which by now openly supported the insurrection.

The February Revolution was far from bloodless. Serious fighting occurred between workers and Municipal Guards (a militarized police force that should not be confused with the citizen National Guard) at the Chateau d’Eau and the Palais-Royal. Both conflicts ended with a victory for the insurgents. Demonstrators fought Municipal Guards before the Hotel de Ville, while General Sebastiani merely stood by and watched; at around eleven a.m, the city hall was taken over effortlessly by a National Guard officer and a small group of students, whereupon General Sebastiani and his column returned to their barracks. For all practical purposes, Paris had fallen to the insurgents without any serious resistance from the government. The main problem the insurgents now faced was the capture of the monarch and his remaining followers.

Louis-Philippe, ensconced in the Tuileries, could hear firing muskets steadily approaching the palace, the scene of so many memorable civil conflicts. Surrounded by despairing ministers, courtiers, and princes of the blood, he took one last step to save his crown. At eleven o’clock in the morning on Thursday, February 24, bedecked in a general’s uniform and accompanied by his two sons and a small retinue, he decided to review the troops and National Guards that were lined up in the square outside the palace. Initially, the troops greeted the king with supportive cheers. But amid cries of “Long live the king!” one rebellious contingent of National Guards thrust itself before the sovereign with cries of “Long live reform!” and “Down with the system!”—even brandishing their weapons in the monarch’s face. Instandy the discouraged king veered his horse back toward the palace and disappeared into its interior. The collapse of the monarchy was now complete.

Before the day was out, Louis-Philippe, his family, and his retinue had left Paris for England, and never again did any member of the Bourbon or Orleans dynasty occupy a throne in France. The barricades had prevailed and the nation would soon declare itself a republic. But what kind of republic would it be—a conventional, formal republic, or the “democratic and social republic” for which the artisans longed? The remaining months of the 1848 revolution saw an intensifying and finally explosive conflict over this issue, between the working classes of Paris and the upper classes who tried to contain them.