Chapter 27. “Defeat of the Revolution!”

Every revolution that fails to complete its social tasks immediately opens the way to counterrevolution and finally its own bloody annihilation. This principle can be taken as absolutely fixed. The vacuum that an unfinished revolution leaves behind is quickly filled by its enemies, who, sometimes presenting themselves as “compromisers,” “realists,” and “reasonable” men, try to harness the revolution and steer the energy it has churned up toward its own destruction. In the English Revolution irresolute Levelers such as Lilbume failed to use their influence with the army to move decisively against Cromwell; and in the Great French Revolution the enrages, lacking any coordinating leadership, were manipulated by Marat and delivered over to the Committee of Public Safety. A hesitant revolution is a doomed revolution.

The moment when a revolutionary situation crests and the insurgents are psychologically prepared to take control of society is therefore crucial. Even a delay of several days may result in the ebbing of the revolutionary tide. Few revolutionary leaders understood this more clearly than Lenin, who on the eve of the October Revolution demanded an immediate insurrection, in opposition to most of his own colleagues, and threatened to resign from the Bolshevik Central Committee because of its dilatory behavior.

The Parisian workers of 1848, having overthrown the monarchy, had arrived at just such a moment, yet their leaders were unwilling to seize it and replace the government that Lamartine and his allies had set up with a truly social republic. Like the July Monarchy, the Provisional Government had been brought to power by an insurrection, and its principal leaders—with the exception of Blanqui, Raspail, and possibly the weary Caussidiere—were once again committed gradualists. Blanc, with his hazy notions of fraternity between employers and their employes, was wholly unwilling to try to match the growing armed forces of the government with an independent working- class force. Mesmerized by the ideal of la Republique, hamstrung by a limited notion of socialism—artisanal associationism—and led by the irresolute Blanc, the revolution that the workers made in February was left tragically incomplete.

To be sure, ordinary Parisian workers understood the need to continue the revolution, or at least to accumulate their own stores of weapons, in anticipation of a struggle to defend it In turn, the new government and the classes it represented realized that the arms possessed by the working people constituted the greatest potential threat they faced. On the moming of February 25, the day of the conflict over the red flag, a group of workers in the Place de Greve had demanded that the immense arsenal of the old regime at Vincennes be turned over to the people—a demand the government firmly opposed: convinced that the workers must not be permitted to accumulate even more weapons than they had, Lamartine sent out Flocon to quiet them. Flocon then accompanied a group of workers to Vincennes, where he allowed them to take only a few thousand muskets, carefully withholding the great bulk of the weapons and ammunition that were stored in the fortress. Lamartine, it is worth noting, afterwards clasped Flocon’s hands and fervendy thanked him for “preserving the national arsenals”—and for using his radical credentials to pacify the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.[448] Once in power, Flocon, ostensibly a radical only days before, made every effort to control the masses and to place the reins of government securely in the hands of the privileged classes.

REVOLUTION AND COUNTERREVOLUTION

The new ruling classes also realized that to retain power they would have to create a reliable military force superior to anything the working class could organize. From the very moment they took office, even as Blanc was naively echoing Lamartine’s appeals to fraternite, class cooperation, and republican unity, the rest of the Provisional Government’s ministers began to systematically assemble a variety of military forces that could be used to control the working-class movement Lamartine, in particular, had noticed that unruly working-class boys and teenagers played a major role in the barricade fighting; owing to their youth, they were the boldest and most reckless of the insurrectionaries. Sensing that their adventurous behavior could propel any popular unrest into an armed insurrection, the foreign minister shrewdly decided to harness them into a special force in the government’s service. In one of his earliest decrees during the early moming of February 25, Lamartine established the Mobile Guard, a force to be composed of youths between sixteen and thirty years of age. In the next few weeks, some 25,000 youths, almost entirely from the working class, were recruited into twenty-four battalions and placed at the disposition of the government.

The Mobile Guard, unlike the National Guard, was no citizens’ militia: on the contrary, its members were single men housed in their own barracks and isolated as much as possible from the general population. The government took every precaution to keep them from fraternizing with their fellow citizens in the neighborhoods. They were given distinctive uniforms and were armed and equipped at the state’s expense. Carefully trained in urban fighting, they were treated as an elite corps, flattered as the government’s pretorians, and slowly weaned from any loyalty to their own social class. They were even paid a wage of a franc and a half daily—a relatively comfortable sum for single young men. Although they were allowed to elect their own officers, the officers they elected had to be approved by the commanding general and the minister of war, who were professional military men detached from the regular army.

Almost alone among the republican leaders, Blanqui recognized that the mobiles were precisely the pretorian guard of the privileged classes and that they constituted a sword pointed at the very heart of working-class resistance. From the first meetings of his Central Republican Society, he vigorously denounced the recruitment of this extremely dangerous force, calling not only for its disbandment but for that of all other professional military forces. For their part, the ruling classes knew that they were taking a dangerous gamble in creating the Mobile Guard. As working-class “children” or youths in the main, their political allegiances were uncertain. In the event of a working-class insurrection, would these young men stand with their families and neighbors in their districts? Or would they obey their officers? This ambiguity was heightened precisely by their youthful bravado, which had verged on uncontrollable elation in the face of batde. Whoever gained the loyalty of the mobiles, it was suspected, would control Paris. Upon viewing a parade of the Mobile Guard and other military units on the Champ de Mars, Tocqueville nervously opined:

The battalions of the Garde Mobile uttered various exclamations, which left us full of doubt and anxiety as to the intention of these lads, or rather children, who at that time more than any other held our destinies in their hands.[449]

The workers, for their part, uneasily observed the Provisional Government sequestering their “children” in barracks, then using regular army officers to Indoctrinate them. They tried, as best they could, to reach their sons and restore their sense of class identity. But for the first months of the force’s existence, their political ideas—if they had any—remained hidden in their barracks.

As for the social aims of the Revolution, the workers, who knew their enemies well, were becoming guarded, even as Blanc tried to establish a few token social workshops. They viewed with alarm not only the formation of the Mobile Guard but the resistance and increasing arrogance of the well-equipped bourgeois National Guards toward the common people. And they took note of the growing belligerence of the employers and the seething hatred of the privileged classes toward the workers’ social aims. Even if Blanc did not, workers of the Luxembourg and the militant workers in Paris generally realized they might well be thrown into a serious collision with the privileged classes of the realm.

THE NATIONAL WORKSHOPS

Shortly after the Place de Greve had been cleared of insurgents in February, a young engineer, Emile Thomas, formerly a student at the Ecole Centrale, approached the minister of public works, Marie, with a proposal. Thomas, an ambitious man, had a fanciful vision of a new France in which all workers would eventually become prosperous enough to become members of the bourgeoisie. As a step in the realization of this utopia, he suggested that the unemployed be rounded up and given temporary employment in public works through a state- subsidized and state-controlled system of “National Workshops.”

To Marie, a member of the erstwhile dynastic opposition, the prospect of neutralizing unrest among the unemployed by transforming them into clients of the state was irresistible. On March 23 the minister of public works advised the young engineer (Thomas was only twenty-six at the time) that the government was prepared to accept his proposal and give a five-million-franc subsidy to establish the Workshops.[450] The minister then took Thomas aside and told him to take the unemployed “in hand” and “attach them” to himself. He should spare no expense in creating his workshops, he advised Thomas, and he placed the ministry’s “secret fund” at his disposal.

Naively, the new director asked Marie, “What object, other than public calm, have your recommendations?” To which the minister replied: “Public safety. Do you think you can manage to command your men altogether? It may be that the day is near when it will be necessary to march them into the streets”—that is, against their fellow workers. In fact, Thomas proceeded to follow Marie’s recommendation and organize the Workshop enrollees, numbering some 120,000 at their peak, into military-style units—such as companies, battalions, and brigades—under his own command, with subordinate officials composed of his middle-class student friends. In effect, with Thomas’s assistance, Marie had created still another potentially counterrevolutionary army.

The immediate impact of the announcement of the National Workshops was to draw a 100,000 unemployed Frenchmen from the provinces into the capital, seeking temporary work Those who were given jobs were paid two francs daily, a very modest wage for men with families and other expenses. But an additional 50,000 provincials arrived for whom there were no National Workshop jobs at all. Once in Paris, they lingered in the city, adding to the hunger and resdessness that existed among the working class generally. Some Nauonal Workshop enrollees were given no actual work to perform, as Georges Duveau observes:

The workers enrolled in the National Workshops spent most of their time playing billiards and making speeches in praise of the social-democrat Republic. Here and there a few were to be found carting one or two barrowloads of sand on the Champ de Mars or the heights of Belleville. They did a bit of digging and then went back to their games or talk.[451]

Duveau’s description more closely reflects the image of the National Workshops fostered by the bourgeois press than reality; thousands of National Workshop employes were, in fact, fully occupied with useful jobs. They replanted the trees that had been felled to form the February barricades, leveled the Champ de Mars into an attractive public mall, manufactured clothing and shoes for other unemployed workers, and, in Marseilles, helped to dig a much- needed canal. Nor were the unemployed artists of Paris neglected; they were put to work painting republican propaganda posters and creating other politically inspirational artwork.

Yet the invidious image of the Workshops as a dole for idlers soon became prevalent among the middle classes, an image that, like the Luxembourg, was pointedly used against the radicals. “Marie told me,” says Thomas,

that it was the determined intention of the Government to allow the experiment (of the Luxembourg) to have its run; that in itself it would have the good result of convincing the workmen of the emptiness of Louis Blanc’s inapplicable theories; ... that in this manner the working classes would be disabused by the experience; that their idolatry of Louis Blanc would of itself crumble to pieces, and that he would lose for ever all his influence, all his prestige, and cease to be a danger.[452]

Predictably, the press had a field day with the National Workshops, sneeringly identifying them with the Luxembourg Commission and socialism. Indeed, the project was given the name National Workshops in a calculated move to confuse it in the public mind with Blanc’s social workshops. Marie and the bourgeoisie spared no effort to turn the workers’ demands for the “right to work” into a socialistic chimera. By vitiating this major demand, Marie divested the uprising of February 24 of much of its social meaning.

Blanc, for his part, responded with vitriol against Marie’s cynical debasement of his socialistic plans. He condemned the National Workshops as a

rabble of paupers, who it was enough to feed, from the want of knowing how to employ them, and who had to live together without any other ties than a military organization, and under chiefs who bore the name, at once so strange and yet so characteristic, of sergeant-majors—brigadiers.[453]

But his attacks against the National Workshops as cesspools of idleness and militarism were as inept as they were self-defeating. To Marie’s delight, Blanc’s denunciations served to pit the Luxembourg Commission and its Labor Assembly against the tens of thousands of workers who were drawing their sole livelihood from Thomas’s brigades, thereby opening a dangerous rift within the ranks of the working class itself.

Yet the normally employed workers had reason to resent the National Workshops, which had become a mercenary military force intended for use on behalf of the privileged classes. In fact, by mid-spring, Emile Thomas had effectively rallied the sympathies of most of the National Workshop workers behind the Provisional GovemmenL Materially, he purchased their support by paying them a regular wage; psychologically, he gained their enthusiasm by staging celebratory festivals that were carefully designed to inculcate a strong military spirit that could be placed at the service of the state. A little more than a month after the February barricades were dismantled, the Ministry of Public Works and the Provisional Government generally were lavishly spending public funds to create a counterrevolutionary army that could be deployed against the same Parisian workers who had shed their blood to bring the Republic into existence.

THE JOURNEE OF MARCH 17

By no means had the Republic as yet sunk deep roots into the country’s middle classes, still less into people at all levels of rural society. Royalism was still widespread in France, and the masses in the countryside and in a few provincial capitals viewed the events in Paris, and the radical working class that propelled them, with deep hostility. Yet with each month that passed after the February Days, the influence of radical ideas in Paris itself receded, and the workers’ faith even in a “formal” democratic republic, let alone a social republic, began to wane. At the same time the forces of reaction were regaining their confidence and mobilizing against the limited social achievements of the February republic. In the opening passage of his Class Struggles in France, a remarkable work that has been the point of departure for many historians of the 1848 Revolution, Marx observed that, “with the exception of only a few chapters, every more important part of the annals of the revolution from 1848 to 1849 carries the heading: Defeat of the Revolution!”[454]

Marx appropriately identified the various stages that led to this defeat with four major journees that the Parisian working dass carried out that spring, at almost one-month intervals: namely, those of March 17, April 16, and May 15, culminating in the working-class insurrection of June 23. With each journee, the influence of the radicals declined, and the power of the counterrevolution became stronger and its policies more resolute.

The first journee, which took place on March 17, began when the clubs and the various trade organizations made plans for a demonstration against the government, in support of three demands that the clubs had generally agreed upon. First, they wanted to postpone the date for the national elections to the Constituent Assembly. The Provisional Government had originally set these elections for April 9, but the close proximity of that date did not give the republicans in the cities sufficient time to bring the message of the Revolution to people in the countryside, least of all to the peasantry, which was still strongly influenced by the country priesthood and fearful of the local gentry. The republicans strongly felt that before the national elections were held—and especially since the new assembly would be authorized to write a new constitution for France—the Republic should have the opportunity to establish its legitimacy in the provinces and to educate the peasantry about republican ideas. The election date of April 9 was little more than three weeks away. A revolution that had yet to fully define itself even in progressive Paris could hardly be expected, in so short a time, to gain the support of illiterate peasants, most of whom looked to highly reactionary clerics for leadership.

In fact, the Republic itself, far from reaching out to the peasants for support, had taken a step that grievously and irreconcilably alienated them. On March 16, strapped by mounting financial problems, it had voted to impose a levy of forty-five centimes on every franc due not in income taxes but in property taxes. Agreeable as this measure was to the bankers of Paris, the levy increased by nearly fifty percent the tax burden on small landholders, effectively turning poor, hardworking peasants against the cities.

Nor was the peasantry sympathetic with the workers’ demands for a social republic. The press was largely succeeding in turning public opinion in the provinces against the “reds” in Paris, and the National Workshops in particular were used by periodicals and pulpits to stoke deep resentment among the peasants. Goaded by the propaganda of rural reactionaries as well as urban ones, these small parochial proprietors were convinced that the new property tax was meant to subsidize idlers in the Workshops. Blanqui, realizing that the tax would be “the death sentence of the republic,” fought it vigorously.[455] As Priscilla Robertson observes,

The 45-centime tax may have saved the republic from bankruptcy, but it also killed it by arousing the hatred of the countryside. From that day all the propagandists, including Louis Napoleon, who tried to win the peasants, promised its repeal.[456]

Thus it was imperative that the Left and even moderate republicans gain more time to win over the country as a whole to republicanism, lest reactionary represen tadves gain the majority in the Consutuent Assembly. The demonstrators of March 17, on Cabet’s suggestion, made it a cardinal demand that the elections be postponed to May 31, although even that delay was clearly too short to get rural voters to shed their well-entrenched rural prejudices and adopt views advanced by urban radicals.

An issue of almost equal importance—and in Blanqui’s eyes, of more importance—was the date for the election of National Guard officers. In accordance with the new policy of democratizing the Guard, its amiable commanding general in Paris, the Viscount de Courtais, had offered to open fourteen positions on his staff exclusively to workers. But from the radicals’ perspective, the date of the election of these officers, like the date of the Assembly elections, was set too early. It did not allow sufficient time for fraternization between the newly enlisted workers and the veteran middle-class Guards to make possible the election of authentic republican officers. More fully than any of his associates, Blanqui, the most class-conscious and able tactician among the club leaders, grasped that more time would be needed for the new working-class Guards to overcome the traditional class prejudices of the bourgeois veterans. The demonstrators of March 17, again on Cabet’s suggestion, demanded that the National Guard elections be postponed from late March to April 5, which was still a minimal and ineffectual delay.

The third and final issue for the planned demonstration involved the presence of regular army contingents in Paris, which deeply vexed the workers. Although these residual troops, according to Ledru-Rollin, numbered only about 2000, the workers were wary of the government’s reasons for keeping them in the capital at all. Moreover, they had reason to suspect that Lamartine was in secret communication with the commander of regular army troops in Lille and with other officers who commanded full-sized brigades, some of which could quickly arrive at the capital by rail. The size and position of the military forces at the government’s disposal thus was a troubling issue in the minds of the militant workers, who had no well-organized force of their own to defend their interests. They wanted the army contingents to be removed.

All of these concerns were reinforced on March 9, when a demonstration of three thousand businessmen marched from the Bourse, or Parisian stock exchange, to the Hotel de Ville, threatening to lock out their workers if their maturing notes were not granted a three-month extension. Although their demonstration was followed by a crowd of students who voiced their support for the government against the Bourse, it was apparent that reactionary discontent was now migrating from private homes and cafes to the streets, vitiating the fraternite that had prevailed during the February barricades.

Blanqui, mindful of the gravity of the situation, tried on March 14 to bring the republican clubs together to make a common public show of strength. At a meeting in the home of Benjamin Flotte, he helped form a central committee that consisted of representatives of 14 clubs and 300 labor organizations, with the goal of petitioning the government for the satisfaction of their three demands. When the council of ministers refused to receive the committee’s spokesmen, the working-class leaders decided that the time had arrived to give open expression to their demands by calling a mass demonstration in the capital.

This demonstration probably would have been held later than March 17, but it was precipitated by a parade of elite units of the National Guard who were determined to protest what they regarded as the excessively egalitarian principles of the Revolution. By the Provisional Government’s decree of February 24 opening the Guard to all able-bodied adult males, some 90,000 newcomers were now poised to enter the militia’s ranks. Most of them were workers, raising the possibility that they might outnumber the middle-class Guards. Mass pressure from the workers, moreover, compelled the Provisional Government to dissolve the Guard’s elite bourgeois grenadier battalions— distinguished by their ornate uniforms and high bearskin hats, or bonnets a poil—and disperse them among socially mixed legions. These disbanded “bearskins,” as they were called, were now faced with the socially humiliating prospect of having to serve in units composed of members of the lower classes—and the prospect of marching alongside shabby workers with calloused hands made them shudder.

On March 16, in protest of this threatened degradation, some 30,000 bonnets a poil, resplendendy uniformed, marched through the streets of the capital to the Hotel de Ville. En route, when the “bearskins” reached the Pont au Change (near Noter Dame), they encountered an angry group of cabinetmakers, mechanics, and typographers who vigorously shouted: “Down with the bonnets a poil!” This counterdemonstration of the workers may not have been entirely spontaneous; some reports have it that Caussidiere, the police prefect and a close associate of Ledru-Rollin, had rallied the working-class hecklers to humiliate the elite Guards and give them a public tongue-lashing.

Nonetheless, the demonstration of the “bearskins” in support of their elite status revealed once again that, less than a month after the February Days, reaction was already openly mobilizing its supporters. To the heckling of the workers on the Pont au Change, the Guards flung back, with equal hostility, “Down with the communists!” and “Down with Ledru-Rollin!” These imprecations were peculiarly hollow: the word communist at this time denoted the followers of the pacifist ideas of Cabet, who in February, despite his communist beliefs, had enjoined the insurgents to scrupulously respect private property and support the middle-class republic. Indeed, in the opinion of the Countess d’Agoult and even Lamartine, Cabet’s generally moderate views had played a role in restraining the Parisian workers from challenging the Provisional GovemmenL Even more absurdly, Ledru-Rollin, a founder of the moderate La Reforme, was drifting steadily to the right and trying to shed his image as a radical. Nonetheless, that thousands of Guards would openly denounce the tepid acolytes of Cabet and the left-leaning liberalism of Ledru- Rollin would have been inconceivable a few weeks earlier. As Georges Duveau notes, the cry “Down with Ledru-Rollin!” is “worth remembering, for it was the first time the reactionary element had raised its voice.”[457]

The March 16 demonstration of the elite Guards failed to alter the ministers’ decision to eliminate their special status: the Provisional Government was still republican enough to stand by its own decree and the egalitarian principles it embodied. The Guards were informed that the democratization of their ranks would proceed as planned, and they had no choice but to submit to the government’s changes. But the Parisian working class could not permit the arrogant behavior of the elite Guards to go unanswered, and on the night of March 16, the clubs were feverishly planning for a massive counterprotest against the “bearskins” and in support of their three basic demands.

The next morning, on March 17, an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 people, mainly workers, rallied in the Place de la Concorde. The leadership of the march belongs not only to Cabet but also to Blanqui, who more than any single individual articulated the deeply felt concerns of the workers. The demonstrators carried a petition, drawn up by Cabet, to withdraw the remaining regular troops from Paris and postpone the National Guard and Constituent Assembly elections. Beating drums, singing the “Marseillaise,” and chanting slogans, the crowd wound its way through the very center of bourgeois Paris to the Hotel de Ville. In a solemn and orderly fashion, they strode behind the banners of their various trade organizations and clubs—indeed, a sea of banners, denoting the tide of associationism that had swept over the Parisian workers since the February Revolution—as well as a multitude of tricolors, and the national flags of all the exiles in Paris, including the Russian flag, for among the exiles in the march were the novelist Ivan Turgenev and the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin.

The procession was massive. Indeed, the enormity of the crowd and its very orderliness were redolent of the great journees of 1792–93 and testimony to the latent power of the working classes and their extraordinary capacity for organization. Yet the demonstration struck panic into the hearts of the notables and bourgeoisie, who long associated republicanism with bloodthirsty mobs, riots, and terror. Ironically, although many of the demonstrators were merely expressing their support for the new Republic, this massive turnout stunned not only the middle classes but even moderate socialists who fancied the demonstration too massive for their liking. Indeed, Blanc panicked at the size of the journee and began to tilt toward the government’s side as soon as the first demonstrators reached the Place de Greve.

In retrospect, the March 17 demonstration was the largest show of republican strength in 1848. Moreover, it may well have been the only moment that spring when the working classes could actually have taken over the government with very litde bloodshed. Such an insurrectionary plan, in fact, does seem to have existed: police chief Caussidiere was eager to enlist Ledru- Rollin, the darling of the lower middle class, and Armand Barbes to join their old Saisons colleague Blanqui and mobilize the workers for an uprising. The revolt he envisioned was to purge the government of its conservative members and turn the Revolution leftward.

Such an attempt, had it been made, could well have succeeded, since no military force yet existed in Paris that was strong enough to prevent it. But Ledru-Rollin was too eager to curry favor with the moderate republicans to collaborate with Blanqui. Nor would Barbes even think of joining forces with his old coconspirator, who he had come to hate with an almost manic frenzy. Indeed, in Max Nomad’s judgment, “the fate of the Revolution of 1848 was sealed by the contemptuous attitude toward Blanqui of Ledru-Rollin and Blanc, and the growing hatred of Barbes.

The moment was very favorable for a well-nigh bloodless revolution which would have removed the Right from the Provisional Government. But such a victory would have meant the ascendancy of the Richelieu of the Revolution, as some historians have called Blanqui.... As a result, not only near radical- Liberals like Ledru-Rollin, and moderate socialists like Louis Blanc, but even revolutionary communists like Armand Barbes, who incidentally had a personal grudge [against Blanqui], preferred to remain passive—thus paving the way for a complete victory of the Right.[458]

Blanqui, whose strategic sense of revolutionary possibilities had become more sophisticated over the years, may well have been unwilling to do more than purge the Provisional Government of reactionaries. But if Nomad’s speculations are correct, then it would seem that the Revolution of 1848 was doomed to failure in part, at least, by the pettiness and irresolution of its key radical leaders. The result was that the demonstration did nothing but terrify the bourgeoisie without gaining much for the workers.

When the parade reached the Hotel de Ville, the meeting that took place between the workers’ delegation and the Provisional Government ministers was a study in pathos. The ministers, including Blanc, were obliged to leave the safety of the Hotel de Ville and descend its steps to face the crowded Place de Greve as a visible acknowledgment of the demonstrators’ petition. The more militant workers in the square were hardly deceived by this gesture. As Blanc was to later recount, “a man of energetic mein, and whose flashing eyes lit up the extreme paleness of his face, rushed impetuously towards me, and seizing me by the arm, wrathfully exclaimed, ‘You are then a traitor, even you!’”[459]

This angry accusation was not without justification. To be sure, the ministers did accede to some of the demonstrators’ demands. Mainly on the insistence of Blanc and Albert, they agreed to postpone the National Guard elections to April 5, and they agreed to postpone the national elections—although not to May 31, as the demonstrators had wanted, but to April 23, leaving committed republicans and socialists with little more than a month to produce a sea change in the peasantry. But the ministers adamandy refused to budge on the demand for the removal of the remaining army troops, ostensibly on the grounds that the bulk of the army was outside the capital—which in itself was very unnerving to the workers.

Thus, in retrospect, the March 17 journee was a failure. It had achieved only a few concessions from the Provisional Government, and it left the split within the National Guard unhealed. The revolution remained incomplete, not only in a social sense but even in a formal sense. The democratic gains of the February period had been extremely fragile to begin with and could easily be swept away by a reactionary Constituent Assembly. Finally, having frightened the bourgeoisie and notables by its size and force, the journee propelled them into taking serious action against any prospective working-class challenge. The history of revolutions shows repeatedly that there is nothing more dangerous than a terrified middle class, whose vindictiveness is matched only by its cowardice. The militant workers in the clubs seemed to understand this, and for nearly a month after March 17, they placarded the city with warnings that Lamartine and his ministers were risking a serious confrontation with the masses.

THE JOURNEE OF APRIL 16

If the March 17 journee was “the last glorious day of the democratic party,” to use the words of Louis Menard,[460] thereafter the shaky bloc of moderate republicans, radical republicans, socialists, and communists—of workers and middle classes—who had supported the republic despite their mutual distrust, began to fall apart as each divided against the others, along not only class but even vocational lines.

This process of disintegration was accelerated two weeks after the journee, when a sensational effort was made to defame Blanqui and to divide the radical movement. Almost ten years earlier, according to one Jules Taschereau, Blanqui, while in police custody, had confessed confidential information about the Saisons putsch of May 1839. This seemingly compromising “confession,” which Taschereau published in his La Revue retrospective, contained information about the alleged plot that only Blanqui and a few of his coconspirators could have known. Barbes, whom Blanqui had dragged from his sybaritic lifestyle at his estate in the south to participate in the 1839 uprising, was now only too eager to corroborate Taschereau’s questionable claims and thoroughly blacken his old comrade’s name.

In Paris the sensational document became a widely discussed topic in cafes and salons, even leading to street brawls. Appearing as it did in the aftermath of the March 17 journee, its authenticity might reasonably have been viewed with deep suspicion. Taschereau himself had been a suspected police informer under Louis-Philippe, while Barbes was by now Blanqui’s sworn foe. Above all, the “revelation” came at a very convenient time for the government: it knew only too well that its greatest danger came from Blanqui and his associates. Nothing could have served its purposes better than to defame the old revolutionary and thereby foment a serious division in the radical camp.

There is no compelling evidence, however, that Blanqui actually made the confession published by Taschereau. The document was not written in his hand, nor was his name even mentioned in it. Moreover, even if Blanqui had made it, he certainly gained absolutely nothing from doing so—neither the police nor the judicial system treated him with any leniency whatever. A close study of the document, in fact, revealed that it contained very litde that was not already known to other people in the Saisons or to the police spies who had infiltrated the organization.

Blanqui’s reply, as logical and powerful as it was, might have blasted his opponents to the lower depths and laid to rest most of the accusations against him, had he not been beleaguered by so many opponents who were eager to believe the document, discredit him personally, and above all divide the revolutionary movement that he had done so much to organize. Although the Taschereau document cast a shadow over him that persisted to the end of his days, it did litde to diminish Blanqui’s influence with the workers, many of whom all but revered him for his dedication and sacrifices.

While the Taschereau document was generating mistrust and inciting acrimony among the various republican factions, the government was busily engaged in bolstering the military forces at its command, bringing the Mobile Guard up to full strength. At the same time it tried to fan the prejudicial flames that divided the working-class and bourgeois units of the National Guard. The privileged classes, frightened by the March 17 journee, were soon spoiling for another confrontation. When it finally came, it was under circumstances that were so idiosyncratic that, were its effects not so tragic, it might well have constituted a comedy of absurd errors.

On April 5, the general elections for the National Guard officers were held as scheduled. But for a variety of reasons, republican and working-class candidates who were challenging the veteran Guard officers did not receive enough votes to prevail. The commander of the National Guard, Courtais, thereupon decided to allocate fourteen staff officer positions specifically for working-class members, in a special election that was to take place at the Champ de Mars on the morning of April 16.

Moreover, apparendy on Blanc’s inspiration, the workers at the Champ de Mars were also expected to express their goodwill toward the republic by taking up a monetary collection in the government’s behalf. It was then planned that they would march in a peaceful procession along the Right Bank to transport this “patriotic donation” to the Hotel de Ville, carrying tricolors and trade banners in an orderly array. There they were also expected to present the government with a petition that mildly appealed for more socially oriented policies. The ministers were not in the dark about these plans: Blanc had advised them the day before that they should expect a peaceful march, and that the crowd would bring them not only a “patriotic donation” but a number of social demands as well.

The conservative ministers, however, were only too eager to treat this planned march as an insurrectionary journee. Feeding this strategy was a particularly reckless article in the Bulletin de la Republique on April 14, published while its editor was absent from his office. Written by George Sand, the article’s provocative language threatened insurrection unless the upcoming Constituent Assembly elections, only a week away, returned a radical majority. As the famous novelist luridly put it:

Unless the elections bring about the triumph of social truth, if they are no more than an expression of the interests of one class, wrenched from the loyal and trusting people, then the elections which should be the salvation of the Republic will be its destruction, of that there can be no doubL Then there will be only one road to the salvation for the people who set up the barricades, and that will be to demonstrate their wishes for a second time and put off the decisions taken by a false national representation.[461]

In anticipation of an insurrection, Lamartine says in his memoir, he frantically prepared his will and burned his secret papers, while still other ministers scurried around the capital, making preparations to counter a working-class uprising.

Sand also alleged that Blanqui was conspiring (this time without Barbes, Caussidiere, and Flocon) to use the upcoming “insurrection” to forcibly replace Lamartine with—of all people—that paragon of wayward radicalism, Ledru- Rollin. The month before, of course, Ledru-Rollin had contemptuously rejected any collaboration with Blanqui and was himself moving steadily toward the right. Indeed, that Blanqui was conspiring to overthrow the government at all on April 16 is hardly credible. As Blanc has convincingly documented, on the day before the march the revolutionary spent several hours conversing in a rather amiable manner with Lamardne in the minister’s home, who apparendy was trying to use his irresistible charms—as he supposed—to win the radicals to his side. Marx, more realistically, writes that the government needed “an excuse for recalling the army to Paris,” which seems the most probable reason for its show of hysteria in reaction to the proposed demonstration.[462]

When the morning of April 16 arrived, tens of thousands of unarmed workers gathered at the Champ de Mars, wholly unaware that insurrectionary intentions were being imputed to them. In a festive but organized mass, they cast their ballots for their fourteen Guard officers, then took up the “patriotic donation” and began their march to the Hotel de Ville. The demonstration was entirely peaceful, indeed almost solemn. Their trade banners and signs called for the “organization of labor” and an end to “the exploitation of man by man,” general slogans that were anything but provocative, still less menacing. Finally, the tone of their petition was anything but belligerent:

Citizens, the re-action raises its head; calumny, the favorite weapon of unprincipled and dishonorable men, is on all sides assailing with its venomous falsehoods the true friends of the people. It is for us, the men of the Revolution, men of action and devotedness, to declare to the Provisional Government that the people decree the Democratic Republic; that the people desire the abolition of man’s servitude to man; that the people desire the organization of labor by association. Vive la Re’publique! Vive le Gouvemement Provisoire![463]

Despite this exclamatory closing endorsement of the Provisional Government, a rumor was spread through Paris during the march that the workers were planning to seize the city hall and proclaim a “communist” government Precisely who spread this rumor remains a mystery, but one of the ministers immediately authorized that the National Guard be summoned to arms, not by the usual rappel but by a “general alarm,” a rare drumbeat and bugle call that was sounded only in an extreme emergency or general state of siege.

The peaceful, mostly placid and unarmed demonstrators made their way from the Champ de Mars across the Pont Royal. As they moved toward the Hotel de Ville, however, they suddenly ran up against some 50,000 armed and extremely hostile National Guards with muskets and brisding bayonets. The city hall was surrounded by a veritable army of Guards and even hostile workers from the National Workshops. Indeed, to reach the city hall, the demonstrators were obliged to file through a gaundet of jeering Guards, who derided them as “communists,” while Mobile Guard units, which had been interspersed among the marchers, sectioned off the demonstrators into small groups, ostensibly to prevent a coup.

Who had ordered the provocative mobilization? Although several ministers later claimed this very dubious honor, it was actually none other than Ledru- Rollin, in consultation with Lamartine, who had placed the capital in a state of siege. The minister of the interior had now definitively cast his lot with Lamartine against the workers. Nor was he the only prominent radical to thoroughly discredit himself on April 16: Barbes, as a colonel in the National Guard, marched in full uniform at the head of his unit, prepared to defend the Hotel de Ville against an attack by workers.

The workers were astonished by this reception, and they were no less astonished to leam that their delegation, bearing the “patriotic donation” for the Provisional Government, had been received not by the council’s ministers but by the deputy mayor of the city. They were humiliated, even degraded by this behavior and by the large show of military force, which treated an orderly march as a virtual insurrection. It was now clear that two distinct worlds had emerged out of the February barricades—the masses of people who worked with their hands and the privileged population that lived off their labor. The government could no longer be trusted to defend the workers’ interests, nor did the presence of Blanc and Albert alleviate the fact that it was bourgeois to the core. As Duveau metaphorically puts it,

The shop counter had carried the day over the factory bench, and from April 16 onward a great wave of social reaction began to spread over the country. “All devoted republicans,” wrote Caussidiere, “are lumped together under the name of communists.”[464]

After April 16, the “party of order”—the privileged classes and the small shopkeepers, united in common hostility to the workers’ demands—emerged with increasing strength and confidence. In fact, five days later, on April 21, the government predictably used the specious journee as an excuse to bring five army regiments—three infantry and two cavalry—into Paris. Although Albert, at the council of ministers, vehemendy protested this provocative move, the ministers refused even to record their decision in the official Moniteur. Thus the decision to bring in army troops was legally withheld from the public at large, but ordinary citizens could soon see troop contingents and cavalry patrols at various strategic places in Paris. If the militants of April needed any evidence that the revolution was slipping from their hands, the steady tramp of line troops and the clatter of cavalry hooves on the cobbled streets was an everpresent reminder of their loss of power.

THE GROWING CRISIS

In the days before the election of representatives to the Constituent Assembly, delegates from the Club of Clubs began to send to the capital ominous reports on the political state of mind in the rural areas of France. Writing on April 13 from Saint-Cloud, outside Paris, one delegate’s report provided a remarkable description:

The farther I go from the big cities the more I come across memories of the past and incomprehension of the present ... In Paris among those great enlightened people who overturned the government of vested interests it is appreciated that social inequality is a thing of the past. People hope for the future that was proclaimed by the man from Nazareth. In the principal towns of the various departments you also find noble, loyal hearts, spirits that foresee the future opened up for us by the coming of the Republic. But in the smaller places everything is different The citizens are the victims of their own selfishness, or narrow-mindedness and of deplorable prejudices.

The writer then went on to emphasize that the

bourgeoisie, nobles and money-grubbers, who yesterday were divided into many different camps, today make common cause in order to change the nature of the Revolution and to stem the tide of reform.... The workers who are still dependent on these people—and who feel it—do not dare to lift up their heads. In public or in the clubs they protest only by their silence against the anti-liberal sentiments expressed by the aristocrats.[465]

On April 23, Easter Sunday, adult males all over France went to the polls, most of them for the first time, to elect a Constituent Assembly. In accordance with the Provisional Government’s decree mandating universal manhood suffrage, eighty-two percent of Frenchmen over twenty-one years of age participated in the elections. As Blanqui had warned most of the provincial voters followed the guidance of their social betters, such as the notables, clergy, and employers, and in some backward areas peasants were marched in troops by priests to polling places or voted under the watchful eyes of local notables.

If the April 16 demonstration was a humiliating failure for the Parisian radicals, the results of these elections were a disaster for all conscientious French republicans. The new Constituent Assembly, a body of 900 representatives, was composed mostly of men from provincial France; in fact, it contained a larger proportion of landowners, priests, and nobles than any assembly that had been elected even under the highly restrictive suffrage permitted by Louis-Philippe. At least half of the new Assembly consisted of “moderate republicans”—in many cases, a euphemism for former monarchists who, while voicing support for the republic, had not forsaken their reactionary convictions. Less than ten percent of the seats were gained by radical republicans (who thenceforth called themselves “Montagnards,” after the Jacobins of 1793), and at least a third of the representatives were expressly monarchist in their leanings, mosdy Orleanists and a small number of Bourbon Legitimists.

By no means was this reactionary Assembly willing to let Louis Blanc and Albert retain leading positions in the government, although both men did win seats in the Assembly. Indeed, however fainthearted Blanc may have been in advancing the interests of the workers, the new government wasted no time, after it convened on May 4, in eliminating him and Albert from its executive body. It dispensed with the Provisional Government’s council of ministers and created a new council, the Executive Commission, to manage the country’s affairs. Like the Directory during the First Republic, the Commission was composed of five men (a “Pentarchy,” as its critics labeled it disdainfully) and was placed completely under the thumb of the reactionary Assembly.

The members of the five-man Commission were all representatives of the ruling classes: Lamartine, Arago, Marie, Gamier-Pages, and Ledru-Rollin. (The once-radical Ledru-Rollin was made a member of the government only on the insistence of Lamartine, as an expression of appreciation for the minister’s betrayal of the workers on April 16.) The Parisian workers, who had carried the brunt of the February fighting and, more than any other part of the population, had created the republic, had no representatives on the Commission at all. On May 4, as if to declare that the February Revolution was definitively over so far as the ruling classes were concerned, the Assembly officially proclaimed that France was merely a “formal” rather than a “social” republic, thus ending any hopes among the workers that their economic needs would be satisfied.

But the election of the predominandy reactionary Assembly cannot be blamed exclusively on the provincial vote alone. All of petty-bourgeois and bourgeois Paris—indeed, all men of property—had come out in force to defeat the working-class candidates, and their numbers were considerable. Out of the twenty radical candidates nominated by the Luxembourg Labor Assembly, Parisians elected only one, while Blanqui was defeated with a humiliating vote. Even the generally amiable and theatrical Barbes lost out in Paris and acquired a seat in the Assembly only because he was chosen by voters from a different departmenL As a whole, the Parisian electorate gave more votes to conservative ministers like Gamier-Pages and Marie than to Louis Blanc. Although Blanc was elected as a representative, he received less than half the vote that was given to Lamartine, while Cabet, the darling of March 17, and the Fourierist Considerant suffered crushing defeats. The result was an Assembly that had litde sympathy for the Parisian workers. As Samuel Bernstein observes,

A no-man’s-land lay between the Assembly and workers. The Chamber was heavily committed to abide by the status quo. Consequently it made no advances to the workers, did nothing to ease their pains or to disarm their wrath. Theirs were fallen hopes. The illusions that had mantled the National Workshops were dispelled. Only their charitable character remained to chide human dignity; and even this source of relief, rumor had it, would soon stop.... Workers were dispirited, nearly desperate.[466]

After the elections, popular participation in the club movement dropped precipitously; out of 200 clubs in the greater Paris area during March and April, fewer than sixty continued to meet in May and June, and clubs that had formerly attracted thousands of members shriveled to only a few hundred or less. Perhaps one reason for the decline was that many workers had regarded the clubs primarily as a means of preparing for the elections, abandoning them once the voting, with its disappointing results, was over. But the decline in the clubs also seems to have reflected the sense of defeat that the workers felt after the April 15 journee. But the clubs that remained were radical ones: they held discussions that ranged far beyond issues of parliamentary power to more social issues, giving greater attention than before to wealth differentials, the organization of work, and the need for a “democratic and social republic.” The reactionary complexion of the Constituent Assembly nurtured their radicalism enormously. Militants felt they had little reason to follow a parliamentary course of action, and they increasingly sensed that Blanc’s and Cabet’s balms offered no possibility for improving their miserable condition. Even the cautious Blanqui returned to favoring organizations that resembled the secret societies of the 1840s. The demimonde that gained renewed vigor in the slums of Paris was one that favored armed working-class resistance.

THE JOURNEE OF MAY 15

The working-class radicals in the clubs made one last desperate effort to retake the initiative from the growing counterrevolution—notably, in the journee of May 15.

This journee centered on two issues. The most important was the question of Polish liberation, a cause that was very popular in the capital. At that moment Prussia was occupied with brutally mopping up a bloody insurrection in Polish Posen, while Austria had been bombarding the venerable Polish city of Cracow. A Polish Emigre committee petitioned France for help, since immediate assistance by French troops would be able to prevent serious reprisals against the rebels. The clubs demanded urgendy that, unless Russia and Prussia freed Poland in the next twenty-four hours, France should declare war against the two countries.

But the Constituent Assembly was continuing a policy of nonintervention abroad, a policy that had been established by the Provisional Government shortly after the February Days. Lamartine, as minister of foreign affairs, had then informed the European powers that

the proclamation of the French Republic is not an act of aggression against any sort of government in the world. There are differences between forms of government which are as legitimate as the different sorts of character, of geographical situation, and of intellectual, moral and material development seen in various nations.[467]

With this reassurance to the continent’s despots of their legitimacy, Lamartine had reduced the February Revolution to a purely national affair, peculiar to France in character and geography. But to militant French republicans, his statement stood in sharp contrast to the universalistic claims of the Great Revolution. It seemed to deny that France was the “mother of republics” and hence the foremost defender of liberty everywhere in the world. By all rights, they insisted, France must intervene to assist the cause of Polish liberty.

The second issue that gave rise to the journee was the demand, originally made by Blanc and Albert, that the Constituent Assembly create a Ministry of Labor and Progress. The demand had considerable support among the clubists, for whom it constituted a basic test of the Assembly’s politics, determining whether the Second Republic would go beyond a purely formal republic to create a social republic as well. On May 11, when the Assembly flady, indeed derisively, refused to create such a ministry, the workers knew that their interests had no place on the government’s agenda.

Another journee was now unavoidable. The Parisian clubs, particularly infuriated by the refusal to help Poland, scheduled a demonstration for May 15, the day the Constituent Assembly was expected to debate French policy toward the desperate Polish situation. But did they also plan an insurrection? The increasingly reactionary Le National decided in retrospect that an uprising had indeed been planned. The day after the journee, the newspaper fumed that, under the cover of a demonstration “in support of Poland,” a “plot was being mounted against the assembly, against the whole nation, whose life, essence, thought, and energy is expressed by the assembly.”[468] But the closest anyone came to making a public call for an insurrection was Joseph Sobrier, a socialistic republican who was actively involved in organizing the demonstration.

Sobrier had briefly occupied the position of prefect of police in February and, shordy after the February uprising, had helped Caussidiere organize the auxiliary “Montagnards” force (not to be confused with the Montagnards in the Assembly). He was now editor of the important club newspaper La Commune de Paris. On May 11, after the constituent assembly rejected Blanc’s Ministry of Labor and Progress, Sobrier editorially declared that “the time of vain hopes has passed.” “Will the hour of justice perhaps soon strike?” he asked ominously, ending his warning with the same batde cry that had been voiced by insurgent silk workers in Lyon in 1834: “Live working or die fighting!” Moreover, Sobrier’s house seems to have served not only as the editorial offices of the Commune de Paris but as an informal headquarters for a journee, where weapons were deliberately stockpiled to arm the demonstrators in the event of an insurrection. Seven draft decrees, written by a journalist for La Commune de Paris, one Seigneuret, were later discovered in Sobrier’s home, announcing that representatives in the Assembly were “excluded from all power” and that a Committee of Public Safety was to be appointed. One decree irresponsibly listed as committee members individuals who had no truck whatsoever with his plans.[469]

Although accusations were made afterwards that Blanqui had played a key role in planning the insurrection, his admonitions against rash action and his call for patience clearly belie such charges. The draft decrees found in Sobrier’s house provide no evidence of his involvement in any attempted uprising. Nor does the fact that he appeared in the crowd on May 15 constitute evidence that he planned even to participate in a coup, let alone lead one. In fact, Blanqui was quite convinced that an attempted coup at that time would be a failure. Loyal to his club, he seems to have obeyed its decision to participate in the journee only reluctandy. Indeed, according to one newspaper account, Blanqui argued fervendy for restraint. In response to a speaker who

demanded that the people should take action immediately,... the president of the club, M. Blanqui himself, has spoken out against him two days running, declaring that it would be imprudent to embark on matters in so hasty and drastic a fashion, that the working masses have so far no firm principles, and that by trying to press on so fast there was a risk of bringing everything into jeopardy.[470]

Whatever plans for an insurrection were afoot, not only did Blanqui oppose them but so did Barbes and even Sobrier, who was reported to have soon been depressed about its prospects for success.

When May 15 came, a crowd assembled at the Place de la Bastille and began a solemn march to the Palais Bourbon. Estimates of the size of the column range from about 10,000 to 20,000. The actual number was likely somewhere in between, probably toward the lower end of the numerical spectrum. In any case, it was substantially smaller than the huge journee of March 17, and few of the demonstrators carried any arms. According to the plan, such as it may have been, if the crowd was fired upon, the demonstrators were expected to rush home to retrieve their weapons, and only then return to fight—a logistically difficult if not absurd scenario.

No sooner did the demonstrators reach the Palais Bourbon than they came up against contingents of the Mobile Guard and National Guard, which had been deployed to protect the Assembly. General Courtais, who still commanded the National Guard, was disposed, because of his republican sentiments, to treat the demonstrators in a genial, if firm, manner. He tactfully ordered the Guards not to fire on the crowd and instead agreed to admit into the Chamber a delegation of twenty-five demonstrators, bearing a petition that called for a war in support of the Poles. But once the doors to the Palais Bourbon were opened thousands of agitated demonstrators burst through, flooding the galleries to a point where the floors began to collapse. Some of the insurgents were forced to drop to the floor below, while others were swept direcdy into the assembly hall, where the deputies sat in frozen silence. Whether Blanqui cried “Forward!” to the surging crowd, as he is alleged to have done, is arguable; if he did, the old insurrectionist may have been temporarily carried away by the excitement of the moment. In any case, if there is any truth to the allegation, he seems to have quickly regained his composure and selfpossession and behaved with considerable prudence.

Although the mayhem that followed this invasion seemed, to all appearances, like the kind of insurrectionary journee that had marked the Great Revolution, the appearance was entirely deceptive. Since the crowd was neither armed nor voiced any intention of disbanding the Assembly, it obviously had no plans to take over the government. It was moved more by a generous passion to aid the Poles than by any clearly formulated putschist intentions. If anything, the club leader Frangois Raspail, an ardent revolutionary, read the petition on behalf of the Poles with deliberate and monotonous slowness (as he later told the court that tried him for his role in the May 15 events) in order to calm the crowd. Indeed, so much was Poland on the crowd’s mind that when Blanqui, all but swept up to the dias of the Assembly, attempted to shift its attention from Poland to the organization of labor, he was quickly interrupted by Sobrier with the cry; “No, this is not what matters. Poland! Tell us about Poland!” This cry was echoed throughout the Chamber, compelling Blanqui to return to the main subject of public interest. As Duveau emphasizes, what the crowd wanted, despite its economic desperation, “was to sweep oppressive kings and oppressed peoples from the face of Europe. They wanted Ireland, Italy, Poland to be free.”[471] Even the British ambassador Lord Normanby, a bitter enemy of the insurgents, noted that the crowd was anything but ill-humored and dangerous. In no way did they threaten the immobilized deputies who remained behind many of whom, like Tocqueville, calmly sat out the Assembly’s session with dignified imperturbability.

But the clubists who called the journee did not count on the emotional instability of one of their leaders, Aloysius Huber, a fixture from the old demimonde of the secret societies, who seems to have been completely carried away by the uproar. Shoving Blanqui aside, Huber almost hysterically declared that the Constituent Assembly was dissolved. His declaration was echoed by calls from unknown individuals calling on the crowd to march to the Hotel de Ville. This was indeed an open call for an insurrection. The excited crowd instandy set off for the city hall, with memories of the February uprising and its itinerary still fresh in their minds. In the background, they could hear the rappel being beaten, summoning the National Guard to arms to quell their action.

The journee was part mayhem, part farce—part, perhaps, the work of government agents as well—while the “takeover” of the Parisian city hall verged on opera bouffe. Barbes, notwithstanding his initial opposition to the whole affair, rushed to the forefront of the march, probably to upstage his old rival Blanqui—who, in fact, wisely lingered behind and soon drifted away. Under Barbes’s leadership, and with Albert’s support, the demonstrators arrived at the Hotel de Ville and took over one wing of the building. They encountered no resistance: the officer commanding the guard of the huge structure, one Colonel Rey, was an old friend of Barbes and made no attempt to forcibly prevent the unarmed crowd from occupying the city hall.

Meanwhile the mayor of Paris, Marrast, simply shifted over to the other wing of the Hotel de Ville, where he printed counterstatements against the “insurrection” and dropped them from windows to the crowd below. Barbes, from his own wing, proceeded to issue two decrees. “The people having dissolved the National Assembly, there remains no power but that of the People itself,” announced one, so the existing Constituent Assembly was replaced with a new “Commission of Government.” A second decree declared that “the Russian and German governments” were faced with war if they failed “to reconstitute Poland.”[472]

What emerges from the various conflicting accounts of this event is that, after an hour of such operatics, a National Guard artillery officer arrested Barbes, and he, together with Raspail, Sobrier, Albert, and other working-class leaders, were carted off to jail. Blanqui managed to elude the police for ten days until he too was jailed. As to the crowd, it quickly dispersed once the Guard arrived, and its leaders were hauled away without resistance.

The demonstration of May 15 and its farcical “insurrection” provided the government with exacdy the pretext it needed for curtailing working-class activities. Caussidiere, who had stayed out of the entire adventure, was compelled to surrender his strategic position as chief of police to a “moderate republican,” and his armed “Montagnard” forces were disbanded. Blanc, who had barely escaped serious injury at the hands of the National Guards in the Palais Bourbon, had to use all his eloquence to retain his seat in the Assembly. In all, several hundred people were temporarily rounded up. All the militant clubs and even the moderate ones were dosed down for a time, and leaders such as Blanqui and Raspail, whose guidance would have been invaluable to the workers in the batdes that lay ahead, were imprisoned.

Early in June, the Assembly passed a general law banning all street gatherings. This law, as Robertson observes, was so “ferocious” that “to stand unknowingly next to a person bearing a concealed weapon became a crime. The monarchy’s decrees seemed mild in comparison.” But the ban on gatherings did not subdue the workers of Paris. Indeed, having been pricked by the thorns of a reactionary parliamentary republic, the workers, Robertson adds, “began making cartridges again in their suburbs.”[473]

In the weeks before the May 15 journee, the Executive Commission decided to prodaim a “Festival of Concord,” summoning all Parisians and provincials to the Champ de Mars in order to publidy express their feelings of national fraternite— and, above all, their solidarity with the government. The date had been set for Sunday, May 14. But when the fourteenth came around, the government and the Luxembourg Commission were locked in an angry batde, which obliged the Executive Commission to defer the festival to the following Sunday, May 21. On that blessed day, the festival finally took place. Lanterns lined the buildings from the Place de la Concorde to the Arc de Triomphe, and floats representing arts and industry were paraded before a huge crowd of onlookers. But fraternite was the sentiment most notably absent from the festival. Many Parisians ridiculed the floats and the pageantry, especially deriding the slogans supporting the government. As the Countess d’Agoult notes,

People laughed at the float that depicted agriculture, which the program described as being drawn by oxen with gilded horns. In fact it was pulled by twenty carthorses. They hooted at the five hundred maidens crowned with oak leaves who followed the cart. They jeered at the statue of the Republic with four lions crouched at her feet, and they generally regarded the Festival of Concord as a bad imitation of the Festival of the Supreme Being [which had been staged by Robespierre shordy before his fall from power].[474]

The climax of the festival was to be a huge military review before the new Executive Commission, headed by Lamartine, and the Assembly representatives. But the review miscarried woefully. When the resplendently uniformed National Guards paraded by shouting “Long live the National Assembly!” their fellows in working-class blue blouses (or smocks) responded with the cry. “Long live the democratic and social republic!” Alongside the silent troops of the line marched the strangely unpredictable Mobile Guard, whose political loyalties aroused such concern in Tocqueville.

Thus, within a span of only three months, the veneer of fraternite’ that had existed in February had been replaced by a spirit of furious class hatred. The liberals had behaved true to form: having patronized the working class when they needed their support against the July Monarchy, they quickly turned against the “blue blouses” once the workers demanded minimal social improvements for themselves and their families. Nor were the bourgeoisie and the notables prepared to permit any modification of the status quo. The pleas of the more decent elements of society—-journalists, professionals, and even clerics like the Archbishop of Paris, who was deeply sensitive to the miserable lives of the workers—had no credibility with the employing and privileged classes. It was now apparent that there could be no reconciliation between the possessing and dispossessed classes of society. An explosion was looming on the horizon, one that would be the workers’ last attempt to establish a “democratic and social republic” in 1848.