Chapter 26. The Incomplete Revolution

The conflict over what kind of republic would follow the monarchy began almost at the very moment the king fled Paris. Some insurgents, to be sure, were content to occupy the Tuileries and caricature the nobility by sitting at Louis-Philippe’s vacated dining table and playfully addressing one another as “duke” and “marquis.” But thousands of others, armed with muskets, bayonets, pikes, and swords, raced to the Palais Bourbon, where the panicked Chamber of Deputies was in session, and to the Hotel de Ville, where Paris traditionally established its revolutionary governments. The city’s main streets and boulevards were clogged with people joyously shouting huzzahs, singing the “Marseillaise,” and calling for a republic. They waved red flags as well as the tricolor—symbolic portents of the differences that were soon to divide the capital between supporters of a conventional middle-class republic and those of a “democratic and social republic.”

THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT

For guidance, those insurgents who sought political direction in forming a new government turned to the editors of the two major republican newspapers. The more middle-class elements clustered around Le National, whose editor was the moderate but anti-socialist republican Armand Marrast; the workers gravitated toward the offices of La Reforme, whose editor, Ferdinand Flocon, exhibited more radical republican tendencies. The two periodicals had been bitter rivals before the uprising, but now the need to arrive at a common list of republicans who would make up a provisional government was imperative. According to Blanc, the job of negotiating such a list was undertaken by himself, representing La Reforme, and by one M. Martin of Strasbourg, for Le National.

The two men arrived at a mutually agreeable list that both newspapers found acceptable, and scarcely before the fighting had come to an end on February 24, Blanc read it out to the huge crowd gathered before the office of La Reforme. The list included several longstanding republicans, as one might expect, including the venerable Jacques Dupont de L’Eure, who had been politically active in the Directory during the dosing years of the Great Revolution; Francois Arago, whose principal credential was his reputation as an outstanding astronomer; Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, generally regarded as a radical republican; Louis Blanc, the socialist; and Marrast and Flocon, who represented the constituencies of their respective newspapers.

But the list also contained many erstwhile constitutional monarchists who had suddenly undergone a conversion to republicanism in the last day or two. Alphonse de Lamartine, a poet and aristocrat, had been a monarchist sympathizer until the evening of February 24 and perhaps later, but his name was placed on the list, as were the names of Alexandre Thomas Marie, a lawyer and opposition deputy whose conversion to moderate republicanism was as newborn and tenuous as Lamartine’s; Adolphe Cremieux, a deputy who had initially supported a monarchical regency to replace Louis-Philippe; Louis- Antoine Gamier-Pages, another opposition deputy, whose dubious republicanism represented the interests of the well-to-do middle classes. Gamier-Pages, in fact, had no sympathy for radical republicans, and whatever prestige he had among working people came from the reflected glory of his late brother, who had been an ardent republican leader.

Massive crowds gathered beneath the windows of the Reforme offices, Blanc recounts, and the names of the proposed government members were read out for their approval. Although the names of Blanc and Flocon pleased the crowd, they were disinclined to accept a government made up of so many former monarchists and moderate republicans. They recalled only too vividly how just such moderates had stolen their uprising of 1830, and they considered it a matter of the utmost urgency that the same thing should not be permitted to happen again. A cry went up to add the name of Albert, the nom de guerre of Alexandre Martin, a buttonmaker who was highly regarded by the Parisian workers for his revolutionary views and activities. A well-known socialist, he had close ties to the secret societies. With a worker like him sitting in the government, the crowd assumed, no measure detrimental to the interests of working people would go unchallenged. And when a rumor spread that over at the Palais Bourbon, the Chamber of Deputies was preparing to accept the regency of the Duchess of Orleans and her young son, the Count of Paris, the crowd flew into a rage and headed over to the palace to put an end to this prospecL

The rumor was more than justified. At the Palais Bourbon the Orleanists and the old dynastic opposition were still hoping that the old king could be replaced by a regency of the duchess and the count. It was during the debate over this regency that the insurgent crowd burst into the Chamber. Weapons in hand, they provocatively aimed some of them at the speaker’s rostrum. As Tocqueville tells us:

Loud blows were heard at the door of one of [the galleries,] and yielding to the strain, the door burst into atoms. In a moment the gallery was invaded by an armed mob of men, who noisily filled it and soon afterwards all the others. A man of the lower orders, placing one foot on the comice, pointed his gun at the President and the speaker; others seemed to level theirs at the assembly.[416]

Amid the melee, the duchess and her son extricated themselves from the scene as quickly as they could, followed by deputies of the Right and many moderate factions, leaving the chamber half empty. Almost all the remaining legislators were unnerved and tried to make themselves as inconspicuous as possible. The president of the Chamber, after trying in vain to formally close the session, simply handed over the palace to the crowd, which reconstituted itself as a popular legislature irrespective of any legalities.

Partly at the prompting of Tocqueville, the poet Lamartine had taken the speaker’s rostrum. Lamartine had initially favored the duchess’s bid for the throne, but ever pliable and adaptable, the elegant aristocrat was nothing if not a careerist. A former monarchist, this political flirt now exuded a spirit of fraternite—draping himself in the tricolor and applauding the republic, at a time when its ascendancy was clearly irresistible.

Tocqueville, who had momentarily left the Chamber to see to the safety of the duchess, returned to find that “confusion was at its height” Lamartine was conversing with the crowd around him rather than orating, and several speakers were trying to make their points all at once, so that “there seemed to be almost as many orators as listeners.” Finally someone, apparendy Ledru- Rollin, handed Lamartine the list of names that had been endorsed by the crowd before La Reforme a few hours earlier.[417] “In a moment of semi-silence,” recounts Tocqueville, “Lamartine began to read out a list containing the names of people proposed by I don’t know whom to take share in the Provisional Government that had just been decreed, nobody knows how.”[418] As each name was called, the crowd shouted its approval.

But wiser heads in the Palais Bourbon knew that this endorsement by what remained of the Chamber of Deputies could hardly suffice to consecrate an insurgent government in Paris. Revolutionary protocol required that any new government had to be sworn in at the Hotel de Ville and only at the Hotel de Ville. Moreover, in this situation, those who wished to harness the revolution and put it in a conventional middle-class bridle had not a moment to lose: in their absence a more revolutionary regime could establish itself at the Hotel de Ville at any time. From somewhere in the Palais Bourbon, as Tocqueville tells us, the cry went up: “To the Hotel de Ville!” To which “Lamartine echoed, ‘Yes, to the Hotel de Ville,’ and went out forthwith, taking half the crowd with him.”[419]

Lamartine’s own memoirs give us a slightly different account—one that self- flatteringly claims that the wiser head that initiated the departure was his own. Consistendy referring to himself in the third person, he writes with impeccable hindsight,

Lamartine had intuitively felt that if this provisional government were installed at the Chamber of Deputies, or at the office of the minister of the interior, it would probably be attacked and annihilated before night. The civil strife which had been extinguished by the proclamation of this government would be rekindled in the evening between two rival administrations. The Hotel de Ville, the head quarters of the revolution, the Palace of the People, the Mount Aventine of sediuons, was occupied by innumerable multitudes of people from the surrounding quarters, and from the armed faubourgs. These masses, directed by the most enterprising and intrepid men, would not fail, on hearing the defeat of royalty, the flight of the regency, and the triumph of the revolution, to name a government for themselves. The sanguinary anarchies and tyrannies of the Commons of Paris under the first republic naturally occurred in the thoughts of Lamartine. He instandy saw them afresh in all their horror, still further augmented by those elements of social strife which the absurd doctrines of communism, socialism, and expropriation were causing to ferment, and would cause to burst forth in these masses of workmen, destitute of food, but possessed of arms.[420]

On the other side of the Seine a new insurrecdon was indeed brewing in the Place de Greve, the huge square that opened out before the Hotel de Ville, as well as inside the labyrinthine city hall itself. Huge crowds of armed workers, brandishing muskets, bayonets, pikes, and swords, carrying torches, and waving red flags, had massed in the area, occupying the building and the square and spilling over into the nearby streets, in order to complete their revolution with a government of their own choosing.

Hardly anyone at this “Mount Aventine of seditions” seemed aware that at the Palais Bourbon, “the revolution”—that is, Lamartine and the others on the list, some of whom had been trying to install the duchess as regent only a few hours earlier—had established a provisional government in their absence and without their consent Moreover, had they known of it, the immense number of insurgents surrounding the sprawling city hall, their clothing spattered with blood and their faces smeared with gunpowder, might well have dispersed the Chamber of Deputies with their weapons. It was the prospect of forming a social republic, or at least a broader democratic republic, that held the attention of the workers, who seem to have formed the great bulk of the crowd.

Meanwhile, the new members of the Provisional Government, en route from the Chamber to the Hotel de Ville, had to push and shove their way through this crowd to reach their destination. The diminutive Louis Blanc, a virtual dwarf in stature, actually had to be carried on the shoulders of brawny workers. In fact, setting out as a single group from the Palais Bourbon, they and their escorts soon lost contact with one another and finally arrived in small groups of twos or threes.

Upon their arrival at the city hall a large meeting of insurgents was under way in an assembly chamber known as the Salle Saint-Jean. When the news got out that a provisional government had been selected, the new ministers, as they arrived, were obliged to submit themselves and their principles to the crowd in the Salle for its approval. Gamier-Pages, Ledru-Rollin, Dupont, Arago, and Lamartine arrived first, whereupon they came before the generally orderly assembly and were pilloried by often argumentative queries. Their responses were written down and passed out through the windows to the crowd in the Place de Greve. The people, both inside the city hall and in the square, constituted a remarkable mass jury, as it were, questioning and disputing with the various would-be ministers and roaring their approval where they agreed.

This mass jury was far from sympathetic to Lamartine, especially since he refused to commit himself to declaring a republic immediately. Shordy before Blanc was borne into the Salle by “muscular workmen,” as he calls them, Lamartine had explained his refusal. “Strikingly cautious and involved was his exordium,” Blanc notes dryly. Lamartine

said that the question [of declaring France a republic] was one of paramount importance, one which the nation would naturally be called upon to examine, and which he, Lamartine, did not mean to prejudge. These words gave rise to a violent tumult. A tremendous shout of Vive la Republique! shook the walls of the building.

Amid the tumult, one of the militants managed to interrupt Lamartine, warning the poet that he must not “cheat the people of what they had so dearly paid for,” if he was to serve as a republican minister. Nimbly Lamartine modified his position, and when he resumed his speech, says Blanc, “he took great care to deviate by degrees from the path he had got into, and he concluded by declaring for the Republican form of Government, whereupon he was warmly applauded.”[421] When it came to be Blanc’s turn to speak before the insurgents, he called not only for a formal republic but for the abolition of economic as well as juridical injustice. His own speech, Blanc tells us, was greeted with the cry “Vive la rcpublique sociale!”

Once the first group of government members—Lamartine, Ledru-Rollin, and the others—had been approved, they were led by a sympathetic guide through endless passages in the mazelike Hotel de Ville to a small chamber in another part of the building. Here they shut the door and convened to assert their authority, posting a group of armed students from the Ecole Polytechnique outside to stand guard. Meanwhile Blanc, Flocon, and Marrast, who had arrived later, were obliged to find their own way to the remote chamber. “It was not without difficulty,” Blanc notes, “that we succeeded in finding [the government members] out, through the winding passages of the Hotel de Ville.”[422] The absence of their more radical colleagues had not prevented Lamartine and his clique from proceeding without them, and their arrival was not received cordially. In his memoir Lamartine writes of Blanc’s arrival as if he were an alien being who had suddenly intruded. Although the poet greeted them with his characteristically “radiant” expression, to use Blanc’s adjective, others glared at them sullenly or even with hostility. They could scarcely bring themselves to accept Blanc, Marrast, Flocon, and Albert (who arrived still later) as part of the government. But then, the new ministers could ignore the radical members only at their peril, as it would have produced a storm in the crowd outside. At the bright suggestion of Garnier-Pages, the late arrivals were designated as “secretaries,” leaving their status in the government ambiguous.[423]

Yet even Lamartine leaves no doubt that the legitimacy of the government as a whole was arguable. Lacking any real foundation apart from the sheer effrontery of its members, the Provisional Government, at this point, could have been dispersed by any resolute body of armed men, such as the workers milling around in the square below their window. And before the night was over, the challenges to the new government’s authority would come thick, fast, and furious.

The first issue of contention was whether the Provisional Government would declare the republic that the crowd outside was demanding so vehemendy, a step that the moderate majority were not eager to take. The thought of a republic still evoked images of the Great Revolution, with its mass mobilization of the poor and dispossessed. There can be little doubt that, fearing the influence of the urban workers, the majority of the ministers wanted rural France, particularly the reactionary peasantry, to decide the question of the governmental form. Accordingly, the ministers offered a tepid statement of intention written by Lamartine, declaring that the government “prefers” a republic, which Blanc altered to say that the government “stands by” a republic.

By now, the delays and equivocations on this crucial question were beginning to anger the masses in the square below. Accordingly, the government finally promulgated its first decree. It proclaimed that the Provisional Government existed “in the name of the French people” and declared that “the government desires a republic, pending ratification by the people, who will be immediately consulted.”[424] But a statement of “desire” was not enough. In short order, the popular revolutionary socialist Francois Raspail “commanded the Provisional Government to proclaim a republic,” observes Marx; “if this order of the people were not fulfilled within two hours, he would return at the head of 200,000 men.”[425] Blanc was obliged to go out to the Place de Greve and assure the people that “the Provisional Government will[s] the Republic”—which they took to mean that the government had actually proclaimed the republic.

The grim faces I had before me, made still more terrible by the glare of numberless torches, expressed on a sudden a feeling of indescribable satisfaction, and this feeling burst out into a triumphant roar.... Some workmen having found in a comer of the Hotel de Ville a large piece of linen, took a bit of charcoal and traced on it in colossal letters: La Re’publique une et indivisible est proclamee en France.[426]

The banner was hoisted up to a window in the Hotel de Ville, where it was illuminated by torches for all those below to see.

Having made this declaration, the Provisional Government parceled out the ministries among its various members. Although most histories of 1848 treat Lamartine as the head of state, officially he was merely the minister of foreign affairs. Nonetheless he was certainly the most conspicuous figure in the new government, even in the eyes of his opponents. The elderly Dupont de l’Eure was made the official president of the ministerial council, his name lending the government an aura of the First Republic, in which he had participated, and an air of republican virtue. Cremieux acquired the ministry of justice, and Marie public works. Arago became minister of the navy, and Ledru-Rollin was made the minister of the interior, while the so-called “secretaries” received no ministerial pordolios at all.

The remaining ministries were allotted to men who had not been on the lists compiled by the two republican newspapers. The banker Michel Goudchaux was made minister of finance (to be replaced a few days later by Gamier-Pages); Baron Subervie, an Empire general, became minister of war; Eugene Bethmont, a liberal republican lawyer well known for defending left-wing republicans, was given the ministry of agriculture and trade; and the Vicomte de Courtais became the commander of the National Guard. Finally, one Hippolyte Samot was granted the ministry of education.

Marrast took over the mayoralty of Paris without further ado. Marc Caussidiere, a Jacobin who had been close to Blanqui in the 1830s and then became a journalist for La Reforme, simply went to the prefecture and boldly declared himself chief of police, a declaration that aroused no opposition from the tremulous occupants of the police headquarters. He obliged all the officers to swear their allegiance to the republic, warning them that they would be shot if they violated their oath, then issued a proclamation urging the people to retain their arms, since they had been betrayed in the past by those who had ridden to power on their backs. In short order Caussidiere created a small army, called the “Montagnards,” who were pledged to protect the revolution from its enemies, including potential opportunists in its ranks. Finally, Etienne Arago (brother of the astronomer Francois) became minister of the post, bringing another Reforme journalist into the govemmenL

The Provisional Government now engaged in a marathon night of decree- writing, abolishing monarchical institutions and creating new republican ones. One decree simply eliminated the Chamber of Peers; another guaranteed the freedom of speech and the press, ending the censorship that had vexed so many opposition periodicals, while another established the rights of free assembly and association. Still another “democratized” the National Guard by opening its ranks to all adult males and by providing uniforms for those who could not afford them. As the ministers scrawled out decree after decree, the documents were recopied a hundredfold by hand, then tossed out of the windows to the waiting crowd below. A while later, printing presses were brought to the dty hall to publish the decrees, which were then placarded all over Paris. Overnight, the government seemed to become a machine for producing one decree after another. Indeed, more than sixty decrees, by Lamartine’s count, were written on that night of February 24.

THE STRUGGLE FOR THE HOTEL DE VILLE

In the meantime, during the evening, people continued to stream into the Place de Greve from the neighborhoods and suburbs—according to Lamartine, their numbers soared to about 200,000 men and women in all. By the thousands they flooded into the huge Hotel de Ville itself, packing its salons, halls, and vestibules. At every turn a different orator, it seemed, exhorted the masses— primarily workers—to assert their rights.

Lamartine apdy calls the Hotel de Ville on the night of February 24 a “field of batde.”[427] Especially to the workers newly arrived from the faubourgs, the earlier rounds of queries and debates in the Salle Saint-Jean had by no means endowed the ministers with the right to function as the chief officers of the republic. In fact, the new arrivals, red flags fluttering from the points of their bayonets, seemed on the point of expelling the government members from the Hotel altogether, and perhaps thrashing them in the bargain.

Their most persistent sentiment was the fear that they would be cheated of a revolution they had made at the sacrifice of their own blood and lives. When they learned that the government radicals—Blanc, Flocon, and Albert, men whom they had come to respect during the years of agitation against the monarchy in favor of a “democratic and social republic”—were to serve only as secretaries tn the government, while those who had the real power were moderates or even former monarchists, they were outraged and demanded that the title “secretary” be struck from their names on all decrees. Just as surely as Lamartine and his clique feared the demands of the huge crowd in the Place de Greve, so the workers feared the intentions of the small clique that had installed itself as the Provisional Government. And both sides behaved as though they were girding themselves for a confrontation.

Finally, by the sheer thrust of their bodies, some members of the crowd reached the doors of the remote chamber where the new government was meeting. They beat on the doors insistently, demanding that the ministers inside heed their wishes and carry out their demands, repeatedly charging the entryway with muskets and swords in hand. But the new ministers had pushed furniture up against the doors and in the vestibules to keep the crowds out Somehow, despite the urgency of their demands, the surging crowd was rebuffed—partly by the furniture, but partly too by persuasion, as periodically Lamartine would emerge from the room to soothe them with his rhetoric. Then, to the sounds of muskets firing, the government members relumed to work, churning out decrees and signing them, as if each one were a brick in a wall that could safeguard them from the assault of the plebeian crowd. One decree abolished the death penalty for political crimes (apparently the government wished to demonstrate its intention of avoiding a Jacobin terror), and another repealed the Le Chapelier Law, giving the workers the right to form associations and trade unions. Another called for a national Constituent Assembly, to be composed of nine hundred “representatives of the people” endowed with the authority to write a new, presumably republican constitution. Still another proclaimed universal suffrage for all males over twenty-one years of age, the broadest franchise France had ever seen. (Like the call for a Constituent Assembly, this decree was certain to diminish the political influence of the urban workers in favor of the peasantry.)

In the Place de Greve the threats and knock-down fights between workers and supporters of the government continued up to midnight and beyond. Finally, exhausted, the crowds departed from the square, and the entire quarter fell silent. All the clamor, threats, and pushing notwithstanding, the ministers had held their own, and they steadfastly refused to leave the Hotel de Ville, rotating their sleeping hours until daybreak, lest it be reclaimed by radical workers.

As moming dawned on February 25, groups of fifteen to twenty men drifted from the working-class quarters back into the Place de Greve, each group carrying a red flag. Armed with muskets and swords, they distributed red strips of cloth to the rest of the people as they arrived, until a large crowd had assembled, flecked with red. When other groups of workers showed up bearing the tricolor, they skirmished, but red triumphed over the tricolor.

The fighting that continued on this day was over the issue of which flag would be adopted as the symbol of the Second Republic. The government, the propertied classes, and the middle classes, as well as the more nationalistic of the workers, wanted to retain the old tricolor, with its overtones of the Great Revolution, the First Republic, and French national pride. To the politically aware minority of workers, however, the tricolor had been sullied by its association with Louis-Philippe’s July Monarchy. Instead, they demanded the red flag as the symbol of the “democratic and social republic.”

Finally, just when the crowd attacking the Hotel de Ville to establish the red flag seemed on the point of overcoming his guards, Lamartine emerged to deliver an oration in defense of the tricolor as the symbol of the republic The red flag, he intoned, was the flag not of France but of “a party,” one composed of “Terrorists and Communists.” It was the “flag of terror,” the flag of blood and strife,[428] and had been “dragged through the mud and blood around the Champ de Mars” (a reference to Lafayette’s massacre of 1791). But the tricolor was the accepted national flag of France among nations, having “gone around the world in triumph.”[429] Largely as a result of Lamartine’s rhetoric, the tricolor finally carried the day as the republican standard, if only because most of the people succumbed to his appeal to national glory. As a concession to the sizable minority of militants who were still unappeased, the government agreed to add a red rosette to the staff of the national flag and require all members of the government to wear one in their buttonholes.

Even now, however, the victory of the tricolor did not seem certain to Lamartine, and to play it safe, he decided he needed a large crowd that would demonstrate its warm enthusiasm for the established national flag. That evening he sent out his young guardians and other students from the Ecole Polytechnique to mobilize support for the government. They, aided by other middle-class elements, fanned out through the capital, calling upon the propertied classes to rally with arms in hand at the Hotel de Ville the next moming. On the moming of February 26, when workers with red flags reappeared to resume their batde, they found the Place de Greve filled with conventional republicans waving tricolors, not to speak of at least 5000 men surrounding the Hotel de Ville with bayoneted muskets. As the day wore on, by Lamartine’s account, the red flags virtually disappeared in the sea of tricolors.

With or without a red flag as an adornment, the workers’ desire for the “democratic and social republic” was very real, and even under the tricolor their hopes persisted. All day on the twenty-fifth they pressured the government to establish the “right to work”—that is, to guarantee employment—and a Ministry of Labor and Progress to look after the workers’ interests.

Around noon, the people chose as their spokesman a young workman, a militant named Marche—“the Spartacus of this army of the intelligent poor,” Lamartine calls him—to head a delegation to impress their demands upon the ministers. According to Lamartine, Marche entered the government chamber,

a man of twenty or twenty-five years of age, of middle stature, but erect and strong, with limbs firmly knit and strongly molded; his face, partially blackened with powder, appeared pale with emotion; his lips trembled with anger, and his eyes, sunk under his projecting forehead, darted fire. In his look the electricity of a whole people was concentrated.... He waved in his left hand a strip of red ribbon or cloth, and in his right held the barrel of a carbine, the butt-end of which, at every word he spoke, he caused to ring upon the pavement.... He spoke not as a man, but as a people, who will be obeyed, and will brook no delay.... He repeated, in accents of increasing energy, all the conditions of the manifesto of impossibilities, which the vociferations of the people enjoined it to accept and to realize on the instant—the overthrow of all known social order, the extermination of property, and of capitalists, spoliation, the immediate installation of the destitute in the community of goods, the proscription of bankers, of the rich, the manufacturers, the bourgeois of every condition.[430]

Marche appears to have said no such things; Lamartine’s crassly tendentious account is valuable primarily as a reflection of the extreme polarization that existed between the workers of Paris and the privileged classes. Blanc’s account of the incident is almost certainly closer to the truth: speaking briefly and firmly, Marche simply

presented himself in the name of the people, pointed with an imperious gesture to the Place de Greve, and making the butt of his musket ring upon the floor, demanded the recognition of the “Droit du Travail” [right to work], ... I [Blanc] drew [him] aside, and showed him a paper on which, while M. de Lamartine was speaking, I had written the following decree:—“The provisional Government ... engage themselves to guarantee labor to every citizen.”[431]

To this overture, officially establishing the “right to work,” Marche replied to Blanc, “The People offers the Republic three months of poverty”—by which he clearly meant that they would endure three more months of hardship to give the government time to make significant changes. Then, presumably, if their demands were not met, the workers would rise in earnest.[432]

THE PARADOXES OF 1848

Marche’s warning is evidence of an unprecedented turn in France’s revolutionary behavior by comparison with earlier uprisings. “How thoroughly things had changed since 1830 was made clear in 1848,” observes William H. Sewell, Jr., in his account of the workers’ movement in that remarkable year.

Whereas the July revolution of 1830 had caught the workers unaware and incapable of articulating an independent program until it was too late, the February revolution of 1848 immediately provoked a massive classconscious workers’ movement, not only in Paris, but in cities throughout France. From the beginning, the workers of Paris pushed the revolution to the left, forcing the provisional government to proclaim a republic on February 24, to proclaim the “right to labor” and the establishment of National Workshops on February 25, and set up the famous Luxembourg Commission on February 28.[433]

The National Workshops and the Luxembourg Commission will be discussed presently. What is important to note here is that, generally speaking, the French Revolution of 1848 was the most class-oriented civil conflict of the entire nineteenth century. The workers and the propertied classes confronted each other with greater directness and a stronger sense of their social identity and their conflicting interests than was to be the case even in the Paris Commune of 1871, which socialists and anarchists have, for generations, erroneously depicted as a classical proletarian revolution. In contrast to the sans-culottes of 1793, who had vaguely thought of themselves as “the people,” the workers of 1848 were far more aware of themselves as a social class, distinct from “the people” as a whole. And as a class, they had very specific social and economic demands. Although few of them were actually industrial proletarians, these artisans who formed the majority of the working class in the French capital did not hesitate to call themselves proletaries or, more commonly, ouvriers and travailleurs, who opposed a distinct class enemy, les capitalistes or la bourgeoisie.

The militant ouvriers of 1848 had two demands of historic proportions: the right to form associations, and the “right to work” The right to form associations, as we have seen, meant the repeal of all laws curtailing or banning associations, including producers’ cooperatives, mutual aid societies, and trade unions. With the repeal of the Le Chapelier Law, the government had granted the first part of this right; it remained to be seen whether it would cany out the second by encouraging the growth of associations. The “right to work” meant that workers who could not find employment in their own trade should be provided with the means of life until such employment was to be acquired. This demand was particularly urgent in 1848, since Paris was filled with unemployed workers who lived from hand to mouth, pawned or sold even their most necessary possessions, stole, prosdtuted themselves, slept in parks, and huddled against inclement weather in doorways, sewers, and under the bridges of the Seine. And workers who fled local famine conditions in the provinces to seek work in the city often had the appearance of scarecrows. Hunger was pervasive in the working-class districts. One of the ministerial council’s most important decrees established the right of the poor to reclaim articles from pawnshops for which they had been paid less than ten francs. But it was manifesdy necessary for the Provisional Government to do more and translate the “right to work” into pracdcal reality.

These rights were not simply ordinary demands that might be raised in demonstrations and riots. The workers who raised them, rather, conceived them as inherent natural rights, comparable to the inalienable rights of “liberty, equality, fraternity” demanded by the radicals in the Great Revolution. The workers saw themselves as claiming rights that gready expanded society’s concepts of justice, revealing how far beyond the juridical rights of 1789 their consciousness had advanced. Politically, the militants wanted representation, by universal manhood suffrage, in all organs of government, largely to ensure that the “democratic and social republic” would satisfy their economic demands. However unclear the structure of this republic may have been, they keenly desired that working men with “calloused hands” (as they put it) should occupy many, if not most, of the seats in the Palais Bourbon and the Hotel de Ville. Despite the large number of radical intellectuals who rallied to their cause and whose support they accepted willingly, they were eager to see trusted proletaires in the new government, such as Alexandre Martin (to use Albert’s real name), who came out of the workshops and the secret societies.

At the risk of repetition, however, it cannot be emphasized too strongly that the Parisian workers of 1848 did not oppose the existence of private property as such. Lamartine’s effort to paint them as enemies of “property,” not to speak of “society,” was knowingly demagogic, intended to curry favor with the bourgeoisie and, later, to justify repressive measures against the working class. Parisian workers themselves were still rooted economically in the preindustrial age, and as artisans, many were small proprietors in their own right. The majority of artisans who worked for master craftsmen generally aspired to establish small workshops of their own, which they could run with or without hired labor.

But the demand for the “right to work” left open the question of what institutional form this inalienable right would take. How would society be organized to give it material reality? Other rights could be given tangibility in relatively obvious and straightforward ways, within the framework of the republic’s legal system. Liberty could be institutionalized by passing laws to protect freedoms of the press, speech, and assembly. Equality (of opportunity, not condition) could be embodied in a juridical process that regarded everyone as equal before the law, irrespective of wealth or status. But what would it actually mean to institutionalize the “right to work”?

The theorist whose ideas seemed to answer this question best was Louis Blanc, who advanced a notion of social workshops (as we saw in Chapter 23) that were oriented toward production to meet human needs rather than toward the acquisition of profit, and that would federate in associations of mutual support to create a cooperative society. His Organization of Work had been immensely popular, and in the weeks following the February Revolution, militant French workers regarded him as their most outstanding spokesman. It was to Blanc, in fact, that many workers looked for practical direction in creating a cooperative alternative to industrial capitalism and from whom they received a fairly workable scheme.

On February 28, three days after Blanc wrote the “right to work” decree in response to Marche’s demand, the Provisional Government established a Government Commission of Labor to develop various projects on behalf of workers and to study the means to provide workers with the fruits of their labor. To gild this Commission with pomp, the government housed it in the distinguished Luxembourg Palace, which had formerly accommodated the Chamber of Peers, ostensibly to convey the impression that the Commission was labor’s “upper house,” and that the workers had a major institutional place in the new republic.

The Luxembourg Commission, as it came to be known, was essentially an executive committee composed of a number of notable economists, socialist theorists, and publicists, including, among others, the Fourierist Victor Considerant, the economist Charles Dupont-White, and the Saint-Simonian Constantin Pecqueur. In addition to the Labor Commission, Blanc established what he pompously called the Labor Parliament, which was actually an ad hoc Labor Assembly, composed of three delegates from every trade corporation or union. Of the three delegates, one was to function as part of the Labor Commission itself, while the other two would attend the meetings of the Labor Assembly.

On March 1, the first meeting of the Luxembourg Commission drew about 200 deputies (in time they were to number more than 700) from “various trade unions,” as Blanc says, to take “places formerly occupied by the peers of France,”[434] an allusion to the Luxembourg Palace. Almost immediately after opening this first official session, however, Blanc came up against militant workers’ demands for an appreciable reduction in the length of the work day and for the abolition of the marchandage, a system in which parasitic middlemen, standing between the employers and the workers, distributed jobs to workers in return for a slice of their earnings. Fearful of antagonizing the propertied classes, Blanc says in his memoir, he did not want to act on these two demands right away, “without having previously appealed to the employers for their advice on so delicate a subject.”[435] He tried to persuade the workers to drop their demands, an effort, he confesses, that was not “warmly received.”

There was a gloomy silence, forerunner of some coming struggle, and indeed, scarcely had a minute elapsed, when a great number of workmen, rising altogether and talking loud, declared that no kind of labor should be resumed until the two demands had been conceded.[436]

Indeed, Blanc tried earnestly to get employers to participate as equals in discussions with workers at the Luxembourg Palace. Over the next months he successfully negotiated agreements to end strikes, which had become fairly commonplace in France. Blanc appears to have had virtually no understanding that capitalists and workers were irreconcilable opponents, and he consistently opposed class conflicts as socially harmful. Nevertheless, the Luxembourg Commission, with the Labor Assembly, was the nearest thing to an institutionalized counterpower against the Provisional Government that the Parisian working class had. In William Sewell’s judgment the Commission constituted the “focus and organizational center of the workers’ movement in 1848.”

Although its official function was only advisory, revolutionary workers saw its role in much loftier terms. In the words of the cabinet makers’ delegates, its task was nothing less than elaborating “the constitution of labor,” and Louis Blanc himself characterized the commission as “the Estates General of the people.”[437]

Indeed the Labor Assembly ultimately was able to compel the Provisional Government not only to abolish the marchandage but to adopt a ten-hour day for Parisian workers and eleven for those in the provinces. (The Provisional Government, to be sure, resisted these demands, but when the delegates threatened to leave the Labor Assembly en masse—which would have eliminated the Assembly altogether—it submitted.) Moreover, the Commission could celebrate its role in successfully initiating several social workshops, most notably a journeymen tailors’ cooperative at the abandoned Clichy prison, which turned out cloaks for the National Guard. But despite much talk about its function as France’s second legislative house, the Luxembourg Commission had none of the power, let alone the resources possessed by the old Chamber of Peers. In the early days of the February Revolution, Blanc had initially proposed the creation of a Ministry of Labor and Progress as part of the government itself, with full authority to carry out the policies it deemed necessary. But the other ministers had found the prospect of Blanc playing a significant role in the government to be intolerable, despite his basically moderate views. Minister of Public Works Mane later celebrated the fact that, in response to Blanc’s proposal, the government had been

sufficiendy energetic to refuse this claim, behind which it saw clearly both the dictatorship of this man and the complete and immediate upheaval of the sodal order, yet was unable to do otherwise than accord him the foundation of the [Luxembourg] Commission.[438]

Created by Lamartine and his cronies, the Luxembourg Commission was soon reduced to a largely decorative and insubstantial entity whose purpose was to appease militant workers who wanted a social republic Moreover, by making Blanc its chairman and Albert its vice-chairman, Lamartine shrewdly shunted the two radicals out of the cabinet and marooned them in the palace, a powerless if massive showpiece. As Marx was to put it, through the Luxembourg Commission,

the representatives of the working class were banished from the seat of the Provisional Government, the bourgeois part of which retained the real state power and the reins of administration exclusively in its hands; and side by side with the ministries of Finance, Trade and Public Works, side by side with the Bank and the Bourse, there arose a socialist synagogue whose high priests, Louis Blanc and Albert, had the task of discovering the promised land, of preaching the new gospel and of providing work for the Paris proletariat. Unlike any profane state power, they had no budget, no executive authority at their disposal— While the Luxembourg sought the philosopher’s stone, in the Hotel de Ville they minted the current coinage.[439]

Nonetheless it should be noted that with the Luxembourg Commission, Blanc was genuinely trying to create the only socialistic alternative that a predominandy artisanal economy could have adopted to countervail the growth of industrial capitalism. Blanc’s “socialist synagogue” sought to create producers’ cooperatives, nationalize the Bank of France and the railroads, provide financial aid to a few experimental social workshops, encourage labor associations, and guarantee the “right to work”. In its report to the government, clearly prepared by Blanc, the Luxembourg Commission proposed to establish agricultural colonies in every department of France, each to be composed of a hundred families, with common kitchens and laundries, and also model housing complexes with their own schools, nurseries, libraries, baths, and gardens. Long anticipating reforms that were to be adopted generations later, Blanc hoped to see all workers provided with old-age pensions and state- sponsored insurance for the ill and financially deprived. Reformist and modest as these goals seem today, such proposals were innovative and even radical in 1840s France.

No other kind of socialism could have constituted an alternative to capitalism during the middle of the nineteenth century, when France was in a transition from a preindustrial economy to a modem industrial capitalist one. Socialism in the later sense of a nationalized economy would have been out of the question: few substantial branches of production existed, apart from railroads and banks, that could be taken over by a republican state. Nor was a factory-based socialism feasible: the factory system, while it had grown by leaps and bounds in Britain, had not yet rendered the French artisanal workshop a marginal and subordinate form of productive activity. Silk textiles were still made mainly in small workshops in Lyon; and although cotton goods were spun and woven by machine in large factories, the industry was still of secondary importance. As for Proudhonism, that alternative amounted to retreating to an economy that was already obsolete. If any cooperative economy was to come to France, it could not have been in a Marxist, Proudhonist, or Cabetian form; it would have to be a scheme that, like Blanc’s, was suited to an artisanal economy, all its weaknesses and statism not withstanding.

But at best, the social workshops could have been only a brake on the growth of the factory system—they could hardly have been a substitute for it Once England had introduced machinery for mass production, no country could compete with British goods. To create a cooperative economy, France’s only alternative would have been to isolate itself from the world market, on which many of her artisans, especially her silk workers, depended for their prosperity. By the nineteenth century, the ascent of capitalism was all but impossible to arrest, and nothing short of complete economic isolation—a ruinous economic autarchy—could have prevented cheaply manufactured commodities from ultimately subverting most preindustrial systems of production.

In any case, Blanc’s social workshops, although the most important plan to slow the advance of industrial capitalism, were never seriously adopted. As we will see in the next chapter, a scheme of “National Workshops” was introduced that, despite its similarity in name to Blanc’s social workshops, bore no relationship whatever to his own socialist goal and, if anything, was used to discredit it.

Even before the February Revolution, as we have seen, Paris had been the center of secret societies and illegal working-class organizations. The success of the revolution produced a politically active club movement that was unprecedented in France since the heyday of the Great Revolution. Clubs, as well as workers’ corporations, educational societies, and rudimentary trade unions, emerged everywhere. Located in all the neighborhoods of Paris, many of these clubs bore a superficial resemblance to the old sectional assemblies of 1793, and they quickly became thriving centers for educating, discussing, and mobilizing the city’s most militant workers and intellectuals, often with a view toward direcdy intervening in the city’s political life.

In the weeks following the February barricades, few people understood the potentiality of the club movement more clearly than Auguste Blanqui, who had been freed from his domestic exile in Blois on February 24 and was hastening to Paris as the Provisional Government was being formed. On February 25, scarcely a day after the king’s abdication, Blanqui spoke before the Club de Prado in a large dance hall, where he forcefully declared that under the new Provisional Government,

France is not republican. The Revolution that has just passed is nothing more than a happy surprise ... Leave the men in the Hotel-de-Ville to their impotence; their feebleness is a sure sign of their fall. Their power is but ephemeral: we—we have the people and the clubs, where we shall organize them in revolutionary fashion, as was the way of the Jacobins of old.[440]

For a time it seemed that this prediction of club empowerment might soon be fulfilled. Shordy after the monarchy fell, at least 203 political clubs were formed in the greater Paris area, 149 of which belonged to a common federation. Peter H. Amann, in his study of this mass democracy, conservatively estimates that total membership in the Parisian clubs numbered from 50,000 to 70,000, but “a somewhat higher figure in the neighborhood of one hundred thousand seems more likely.” So avidly involved were workers in the club movement that in mid-March, when the novelist George Sand found herself locked out of her apartment, she had the greatest difficulty finding a locksmith. They were all attending club meetings. As Amann puts it, “Within a few weeks a mass movement had taken root”— and an organized mass movement at that.[441]

By mid-April, every neighborhood and arrondissement in the capital had clubs, mainly workers’ clubs, whose meetings often drew thousands of members and informal participants. The larger clubs usually met in school buildings, churches, dance halls, municipal buildings, and even in cafes. They varied considerably in structure: some were very formally organized, such as the Societe des Droits de I’Homme, while others were quite informal and even free-wheeling. A few clubs consciously maintained continuities with the past. Some had members who had belonged to the secret societies: of seventeen dub presidents in mid-March 1848 whose political backgrounds are known, ten were veterans of the prerevolutionary secret societies, most notably Blanqui and Barbes, who had been the leading figures in the Saisons during the 1830s. The more radical clubs tended to subdivide themselves into “sections” or “cells,” just as the illegal societies under the monarchy had done, despite the fact that such subdivisions were now superfluous. Other clubs consciously invoked names drawn from the Great Revolution, such as Jacobins, Montagnards, Amis du Peuple, Egalite et fraternite, and Commune. Among the revolutionary periodicals that appeared were those tided Pere Duchesne and Vieux Cordelier, invoking the memory of Hebert’s and Desmoulins’s papers of more than a half century earlier.

But most of the clubs had no roots in the earlier secret societies. Significandy, a large number of them had names including the words Work and Workers. Moreover, the class composition of the clubs was striking. Among half of the 178 club presidents whose occupations are known,

23 percent were workers, 22 percent intellectuals (writers, journalists, professors), 21 percent bourgeois (employers, proprietors, managers, rentiers—though this last category is ambiguous); 18 percent white-collar workers (ranging from clerk through bookkeeper to priest): 9 percent members of the “popular bourgeoisie” of wineshop owners, rooming house operators, modest greengrocers; and 5 percent university students.[442]

At least half of the club presidents thus consisted of workers and intellectuals, if students are included among the latter. This high proportion of workers and intellectuals is classical in revolutionary situations; in later uprisings revolutionary groups were often marked by even more radical intellectuals, in fact, than workers. Indeed, the intelligentsia—mainly public individuals and professionals—supplied the leaders of organizations that were predominandy working class in composition and orientation.

In 1848 the clubs held their meetings with extraordinary frequency. It was not uncommon for them to convene as often as four or five nights a week, a frequency redolent of the numerous section meetings during the Great Revolution. Most of the clubs still formally limited their meetings to twice a week, but this semiweekly schedule was commonly ignored during February and March. Blanqui’s Central Republican Society—or Club Blanqui, as it was familiarly called—met every evening with the exception of Sundays. Rules were often honored in the breach; many clubs functioned with minimal formality, especially those whose meetings were packed with thousands of tumultuous workers, and attendance in the more important clubs often ran into the thousands.

In addition to the numerous clubs, the radical political culture of 1848 included a burgeoning revolutionary press, which formed a vital lifeline between the clubs and the people. The clubs used both posters and periodicals, especially neighborhood ones, to announce their meetings and publish their minutes. The avidly read journals also published passionate orations. According to an official count, there were 171 newspapers in the capital, although only a minority were able to survive more than a few weeks. Working- class neighborhoods in particular were flooded with posters voicing a host of opinions, pamphlets advancing criticisms and demands, and the speeches of lecturers and street orators. Along with organized club meetings, this electrifying level of discussion produced a delirium of radical fervor. To the privileged classes it seemed that the Revolution had unleashed a social monster that only force could finally subdue.

Several of the clubs enjoyed enormous prestige, pardy because famous radical leaders had helped to create them, and pardy because of their radical views. Among the most important was Blanqui’s Central Republican Society, which attracted hundreds, possibly thousands to a single meeting, including many spectators curious to see the notorious black-coated and black-gloved revolutionary par excellence. By shifting its meeting places to various locations in the capital, the Club Blanqui managed to reach a large cross-section of the Parisian working class. Its meetings were notable for their open and often heated discussions of ideas, and for the profusion of oratory that, as Amann observes, “Blanqui made no attempt to dominate.”[443] But to join the Club Blanqui was no frivolous affair: a prospective member had to have two members as backers and sign a written oath of support.

Etienne Cabet’s Central Fraternal Society, on the other hand, was notable for the formality of its proceedings and the authoritarian behavior of its founder. Cabet had created a dogmatic sect—the Icarians—based on his immensely popular novel, Voyage to Icaria, and his widely read periodical, Le Populaire. Some 4000 men and 1000 women belonged to the club, the majority of whom were working people and were apparently mesmerized by their famous leader. In the weeks immediately following the February uprising, the Central Fraternal Society drew enormous working-class audiences, possibly larger than any other club. By this time the word communiste was being used throughout Paris, and as a term of opprobrium it was replacing anarchiste, which had been used so promiscuously in the Great Revolution. Although Cabet himself was anything but a militant, communisme terrified the respectable strata of society, much to the glee of the workers. Cabet’s Central Fraternal Society was basically nonrevolutionary and his views were surprisingly tepid, but in the spring of 1848 Parisian workers revered him. In March and April the sect’s discipline would temporarily propel Cabet and communisme to the forefront of events. Comparable in its didactic tone to Cabet’s club was Frangois Raspail’s Sodete des Amis du Peuple (Friends of the People), which was more an educational forum than a political arena. Raspail was widely respected by the workers for his tested commitment to their interests, but unlike Blanqui he tended to lecture his audiences rather than listen to them. At times his “courses,” as he called them, drew as many as 4000 people. But none of these clubs compared in size with the older Societe des Droits de I’Homme, which claimed nearly a 100,000 members, 34,000 of them in Paris. The club, reborn in 1848 after its suppression in the 1830s, was a neo-Jacobin association that vaguely espoused the ideals of political equality contained in Robespierre’s Preamble to the Constitution of 1793, tinged with quasi-socialistic 1840s concepts of justice. Its central committee included Armand Barbes, and it received subsidies from Ledru-Rollin’s Ministry of Interior. Despite its attempt to make itself into a disciplined military organization, the Droits was marked more by ideological confusion than by coherence. In addition to his role in the Droits club, Barbes also collected a following in the Club de la Revolution, or Club Barbes, which gained a measure of fame mainly because he was its leader.

Apart from these “big name” clubs, many smaller and more transient clubs abounded everywhere. Attempts to unite them into a common revolutionary movement gave rise to various organizational alliances, but the effectiveness of these alliances was limited. The most famous was the Revolutionary Committee of the Club of Clubs, which played an important role in bringing various clubs into contact with one another, both within Paris and without. Like the Droits, the Club of Clubs took subsidies from the Ministry of Interior and was strongly inspired by Ledru-Rollin, but its most important function seems to have been to bring republican ideas and propaganda to the provinces, and to provide information about the provinces to Paris. Indeed, the many accounts of provincial revolutionary activity that appeared in the Club’s reports provide the historian with one of the main sources of information about political activity outside Paris. Other federative clubs, like the Central Democratic Society and its rival, the Central Committee for the General Elections, were little more than temporary electoral coalitions, mainly designed to promote the middle-class republican candidates to the Constituent Assembly.

With all its many rivalries, coalitions, interactions, functions, and secret supporters, what is important about the club movement is that, in conjunction with the Luxembourg’s Labor Assembly, it formed part of an independent working-class power that was emerging against the Provisional Government. As Amann observes, the clubs “constituted the apex, the revolution en permanence, the popular will organized, institutionalized, hardened.’’[444] Indeed, some of the clubs saw themselves as performing precisely this sort of role. The Democratic Club of Blancs Manteaux, for example, openly declared:

The members of the [Constituent] Assembly are our delegates, yet the sovereign people does not relinquish its powers and must watch over the discussions of the deputies. The clubs must necessarily be the voice of the people and the expression of its will.[445]

The strong implication of this statement is that the clubs were indeed a separate power, counterposed to the Provisional Government, as were the workers’ corporations whose delegates gathered in the Luxembourg Palace. Nor did the government itself fail to ignore the danger that the clubs, together with the Luxembourg’s Labor Assembly, posed to its sovereignty. WUliam H. Sewell, Jr., in fact, has argued that the “workers’ corporations were the closest equivalent, in 1848, to the secuons of 1792–94.”[446] Whether the workers’ corporations and the clubs could have actually become a dual power is arguable. Eventually, the Luxembourg Assembly was dissolved (in fact, it was always a completely powerless body), and the corporations that made it up ceased to constitute “units of government,” as Sewell has called them, comparable to the sections of the Great Revolution.[447] Many clubs, on the other hand, remained rooted in the neighborhoods of Paris, as the earlier sections had been, and discussed a wide range of political as well as economic issues.

Proudhon made the bright suggestion, in his periodical Le Representant du peuple (April 28, 1848), that the mass democracy of the clubs could become a popular forum where the social agenda of the revolution could be prepared for use by the Constituent Assembly—a proposal that would essentially have defuzed the potency of the clubs as a potentially rebellious dual power. Owing to the intransigence of the government, which refused to yield the least amount of its power to any popular authority, Proudhon’s suggestion came to nothing.

The Revolution, patently incomplete, was being pulled in two directions: by distincdy working-class demands on one side and a conventional middle- class republic on the other. This growing tension between mutually suspicious classes could not continue to exist for long, but could easily ignite into an open conflict at any time. In the days and weeks following the February barricades, the government had secretly built up its military forces, while the workers, for whom the passage of time without victory was an enemy, girded themselves for a renewed confrontation. In revolutions, where weeks telescope months and months telescope years, the confrontation was to come with rapidity and fury.