People :
Author : Murray Bookchin
Text :
Although the immediate cause of the insurrection of June 23 to 26 was the government’s decision to terminate the National Workshops, it was a profound underlying class conflict that brought it about. Militant and class conscious, women as well as men, the June insurgents had reached a complete impasse with the Assembly, and they were left with no recourse but to rise up in armed revolt
In an extraordinary statement that appears to date from June, the workers of the nineteenth brigade of the National Workshops warned the Assembly.
Do not forget, Monarchists, that it was not that we could remain your slaves that we brought about a third revolution. We fought your social system, the sole cause of the disorder and poverty that devours and swallows contemporary society.[475]
The first revolution had overthrown the absolute monarchy in 1789; the second, in 1830, had given rise to a royal constitutional system In the third, the uprising of February 1848, the workers had hoped to achieve their “democratic and social republic,” a hope that had gone unfulfilled because of the usurpers at the Hotel de Ville. The workers had now exhausted every legal and moral means at their disposal to gain that republic, but the demand for the “third revolution” still persisted—that is, for the historical realization of the promise of the February barricades.
Many, perhaps the majority, of those who rose to complete the “third revolution” of June were essentially demanding basic economic changes, which they regarded as constituting a social republic: the expansion of the National Workshops into cooperatives with state assistance, universal compulsory education, living standards commensurate with their work, and free associations to govern their own economic and political affairs. As a placard on the Porte Saint-Marceau pronounced on June 23, the “democratic and social republic” was “democratic in that all citizens are electors, ... social in that all citizens are permitted to form associations for work.”[476]
To be sure, among the insurgents, there were undoubtedly many workers with broader social aspirations—socialists and communists, including Fourierists, Saint-Simonians, and Cabetists—who dreamed that the insurrection would usher in the public ownership of property in one form or another. Bu these men and women were probably a minority. Radical legends to the contrary notwithstanding, many of the insurgents thought of themselves as good republicans, and the tricolor was at least as conspicuous on the barricades as the red flag. Individuals from different walks of life participated in the June Days (even the poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire fought with the insurgents), but it was above all a historic and desperate working-class uprising—the first in revolutionary history.
Indeed, however limited were the immediate goals of the June insurrection, its implications were far broader, and again, no one saw them more clearly than Tocqueville:
What distinguished [the June insurrection], among all the events of this kind which have succeeded one another in France for sixty years, is that it did not aim at changing the form of government, but at altering the order of society. It was not, stricdy speaking, a political struggle, in the sense which until then we had given to the word, but a combat of class against class, a sort of Servile War. It represented the facts of the Revolution of February in the same manner as the theories of Socialism represented its ideas; or rather it issued naturally from these ideas, as a son does from his mother....
It must also be observed that this formidable insurrection was not the enterprise of a certain number of conspirators, but the revolt of one whole section of the population against another.[477]
The fact is that the “servile war” that broke out on the barricades of June 23 was overwhelmingly a class war, indeed the first selfconscious and explicit working-class insurrection in history, and it was seen as such by the workers as well as by their opponents. It dissolved the myth of fraternite, which the conventional “formal” republicans had emblazoned together with their most sacred claims to egalite and liberie, and it added to them a right born of the social question. Or as Marx put it: “Only after being dipped in the blood of the June insurgents did the tricolor become the flag of the European revolution—the red flag.”[478]
If the workers were trying to achieve a “third revolution,” the counterrevolutionary Constituent Assembly was trying to turn back the clock of history to the state of affairs that had existed prior to February 24. How far back they wanted to turn it varied from one Assembly representative to another, a difficulty that sometimes confused the train of events. But the deputies, however much they disagreed with each other, were united in the conviction that the Parisian workers had to be suppressed. First, the Assembly officially disbanded the Luxembourg Commission, although the Luxembourg Labor Assembly continued to exist on its own as an extralegal body under the name Societe des Corporations Reunies; indeed, adding insult to injury, the Executive Commission proceeded to occupy the Luxembourg Palace for its own sittings.
Once the Luxembourg was out of the way, the remaining clubs and trade corporations were next in line for repression. In the second week of June, Marrast, as mayor of Paris, took systematic steps to close down the corporations as well as the clubs by eliminating their municipally controlled meeting places. “Between June 12 and 16,” notes Peter H. Amann,
clubs still meeting in schools, hospitals, asylums, and palaces had their municipal authorization canceled. In some instances they simply found the school building where they met locked and barred.... The fact that organized craft workers were being denied public meeting places while employer groups were not, or that a displaced conservative club like the Democratic Club of the National Guard could turn to Marrast for help in finding a new home, lends weight to the charge of class discrimination.[479]
Ironically, Marrast’s restriction was counterproductive from his own perspective because many of the clubs, which had recovered after the repression following May 15, were actually calling upon the workers for restraint. These clubs had constituted an arena for the peaceful expression of working-class grievances, in contrast to open areas such as the Portes Saint-Martin and Saint- Denis, where workers who still congregated during the evenings voiced their anger in more vitriolic phrases, sometimes leading to violent arguments and near riots.
Meanwhile, late in May, behind closed doors, the government had begun its most consequential act of repression: the assault on the National Workshops. The Executive Commission ordered Emile Thomas to “invite” young unmarried male workers to either enlist in the army or be dropped from the Workshops’ rolls. Older or married workers who could not “formally prove residence in Paris for six months before May 24” were to be dismissed. Employers, in turn, were free to “requisition any number of employes” from the Workshops—apparently at whatever wage rates they chose—and a worker’s refusal to accept such a job would result in dismissal. The rates, moreover, that the workers were obliged to accept were not hourly wages but piecework rates, which they hated as unduly exploitative. Finally, “brigades of workers” were to be sent to provincial departments, there to engage in “public works under the direction of the Engineers of Bridges and Roads.’’[480]
Thomas, apparendy appalled by the massive transformation in his project, asked that the issuance of the decree be delayed. On May 26, for this insolence, the young director was arrested by the minister of the interior and bundled off to Bordeaux under an armed escort. The explanation given to the public was that Thomas had been assigned to study canals in the provinces. So sudden and surreptitious was this “reassignment’’ that Thomas was denied any opportunity to visit with or even write to his mother before his departure. The director had, by then, become a thorn in the side of the Executive Commission. Although no friend of Blanc’s, Thomas was idealistic and seems to have come around to the Luxembourg’s way of thinking about the “organization of labor.” Had he remained in Paris, he might even have stirred up the workers. Once he arrived in Bordeaux, the government kept him under surveillance until late June—“a procedure so highhanded,” notes Priscilla Robertson, “that Louis- Philippe’s police would never have dared to try it’’[481] In its arrogance and indifference to the rights of its citizenry, the Second Republic had outdone even the July Monarchy.
Before the decree of the Executive Commission could actually be issued, however, a second assault on the Workshops was being prepared from another governmental quarter a group of Catholic reactionaries in the Assembly led by Count Falloux, a believer in a theocratic government who had been disposed to defend the Inquisition until political circumstances obliged him to veil his real views in a republican veneer. Falloux now proposed to close down the National Workshops completely, without the elaborate arrangements detailed in the Pentarchy’s plan.
Incredibly, Falloux’s proposal gained the support of Proudhon, as well as of the naive Victor Hugo. Proudhon later acknowledged that he had behaved like an imbecile, yet the content of the Falloux decree was consistent with his own hatred of doles, which was how he saw the National Workshops; hence his support for the proposal would have been no great departure for him in principle. In any case, the majority of the Assembly rejected Falloux’s proposal as too provocative, yet the rejection made littie difference to the workers. The proposal had already been widely publicized, and the workers were only too aware that the workshops would be abolished by one means or another.
The measures against the National Workshops, however, could not have occurred at a worse time for the Parisian working class. Their economic straits were now desperate. Not only was a cholera epidemic raging in the city, afflicting its poorer districts more severely than the wealthier ones, but unemployment had produced a desperate situauon. In the Faubourg Saint- Antoine, about two-thirds of the workers were without jobs. Many of them relied entirely on their two-franc wage from the National Workshops to feed their families. Almost three-quarters of the furniture makers in the Faubourg, a very important craft in that area, were without regular work and were faced with outright starvation. These men and women were the most revolutionary people in Paris. Among the most active participants in the February rising, the men were probably the best trained in the use of arms and in street fighting, and later, as members of National Guard legions, National Workshop battalions, clubs, and trade unions, they had grown accustomed to acting with discipline and forethought. When Marrast closed the municipal buildings that had housed their club meetings, the workers of the Saint-Antoine held their own “open-air clubs,” as they called them, to listen to orations, engage in debates, and formulate and discuss practical decisions.
In the meantime, the Luxembourg workers and the National Workshops workers, who had formerly been divided against each other, finally recognized their common grievances as a class. On June 18, the extralegal Luxembourg Assembly, led by Pierre Vincard and August Blum, now united with working- class leaders of the National Workshops and issued a joint statement declaring that “nothing is possible now in France but the Democratic and Social Republic.”[482] Although their statement was intended to calm the workers, their declaration was doubdess regarded as a challenge to the Constituent Assembly. As Blanc observed, the “three months” grace period that the workers, in February, had given to Lamartine to introduce major social changes “was past!”[483] Finally, on June 21 the Executive Commission’s sweeping decree dissolving the National Workshops was finally issued and published in Le Moniteur, producing a sensation among the workers. Crowds gathered throughout the poorer quarters of the city, debating, demonstrating, and slowly gathering into ever larger groups that clearly portended an uprising. Even the reactionary Le Constitutionnel belatedly (on June 23) disapproved of the government’s handling of the decree.
More effort could have been made, in our view, to prepare opinion for the announcement; more prudence could have been shown. Because the announcement was sudden and because there was a lack of reassuring comment, there is a danger of jeopardizing this decision which has been staved off for so long.[484]
Nevertheless, even if the government had behaved more prudendy in dissolving the Workshops, it is extremely unlikely that the result would have been significandy different.
On Thursday morning, June 22, nearly 300 workers marched toward the Place du Palais-National carrying banners with the insignia “National Workshops” and singing the stirring “Chant du depart.” Other crowds marched to the Hotel de Ville, denouncing plans to ship former Workshop workers off to drain the unhealthy marshes of Sologne.
They appear to have chosen a spokesman in the person of a lieutenant from the National Workshops, Louis Pujol. Pujol was an apocalyptic mystic, whose scriptural-sounding Prophecy of Days oj Blood seemed like a proletarian Book of Revelation. At nine o’clock that morning, he and four working men were delegated to question the Executive Commission about its plans for the workers under the newly published decree. Pujol asked Marie what the government would do if the workers resisted the decree. As Blanc tells the story, Marie responded that
“The workmen ... who do not submit to the decree will be sent out of Paris by force.”...
The reply of M. Pujol ... was as follows: “Citizen Representatives, you insult men invested with a sacred character as delegates of the people; we withdraw with the profound conviction that you neither desire the organization of labor, nor the prosperity of the French people.”[485]
By late afternoon, after the story of the interchange had circulated, thousands of workers from all parts of the city gravitated toward the Place du Pantheon and assembled there by torchlight, in great agitation. As if to add even greater drama to the events, the dark sky flashed with lightning and resounded with thunder. At the Palais Bourbon, Blanc could hear one continuous chant: “Du pain ou du plomb!” (Bread or lead!) By nine o’clock, according to police reports, the crowd before the Pantheon numbered in the tens of thousands. Pujol told the newly arrived workers what Marie had said and called upon them to swear vengeance, which they solemnly did. On the initiative of radical National Guards from the Twelfth Legion, they agreed to return to the Pantheon at six the next morning, Friday, June 23.
Despite the inclement weather, a huge crowd gathered again at the Place du Pantheon the next morning. There, at Pujol’s direction, they marched with grave determination through the rain to the Place de la Bastille, their numbers swelling along the way. At the site where the Bastille had been besieged some sixty years before, the great mass of men and women uncovered their heads and kneeled in homage to the revolutionary heroes and heroines who had fallen on July 14, 1789. Then, breaking up into columns and groups, they scattered to all the working-class neighborhoods and began to build barricades.
Over the next few days more than a 1000 barricades were built, according to a count made after the hostilities came to an end. They were concentrated mainly in the northeast, in the traditional working-class areas of Paris: the Faubourgs Saint-Martin, du Temple, and Poissoniere, extending into the heights of Montmartre; the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and the Place de la Bastille. But others sprang up in the Faubourg du Pantheon, the Latin Quarter, and Gentilly in the south; and in the Faubourg Saint-Jacques and the Cite in the center—with its well-guarded prize, the Hotel de Ville. Thirty-eight were erected in the Rue Saint-Jacques alone, and nearly thirty along the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine.
Although many of them were little more than tentative barriers to obstruct the movement of the government’s troops, a large number were imposing structures, in some cases reaching as high as fifteen feet, with portholes for muskets, strongly reinforced by bulky objects, even trams and wagons. Tocqueville marveled at the workers’ meticulousness in preparing their defenses:
In all the little streets surrounding [the Hotel de Ville], 1 found people engaged in making barricades; they proceeded in their work with the cunning and regularity of an engineer, not unpaving more stones than were necessary to lay the foundations of a very thick, solid and even neady-built wall, in which they generally left a small opening by the side of the houses to permit of ingress and egress.[486]
The grim determination, self-discipline, and courage with which the Parisian workers set about their task is attested by virtually all honest observers on both sides of this desperate social war. Walking along the right bank of the Seine at four o’clock on the afternoon of June 23, Alexander Herzen, the Russian revolutionary exile, noticed that as “the shops were shutting, columns of the National Guard with sinister faces were marching in different directions.” A bell sounded from Saint-Suplice, summoning the workers to arms.
On the other side of the river, barricades were being thrown up in all the streets and alleys. I can see now those gloomy figures dragging the stones, women and children helping them. A young Polytechnic student climbed one barricade that apparenUy was finished, unfurled the flag and began singing the Marseillaise in a mournfully solemn voice, all who were working joined in, and the chorus of the grand song resounding over the stones of the barricades made the heart throb.... The alarm bell still rang out Meanwhile, there was the thud of artillery over the bridge, and General Beguot on the bridge scanned through a field-glass the enemy’s position.[487]
A coalescence was taking place among the crowds roaming around the capital, chanting slogans that grimly vowed to resist the government’s decrees and policies. Had any coordinated leadership created this coalescence? Certainly various organizations spoke for various strata within the working population, such as the Union of Brigadiers of the National Workshops and the now-semimilitary Societe des Droits de I ’Homme, which lived on memories of the great journees of 1792–93. But there was no overall plan for an insurrection, and no guiding military strategy or organization—still less a party that had a strategy for taking over the government With their ablest leaders jailed in the Vincennes, the workers rose up mainly on their own, and local militants— usually men with military training, such as insurgent National Guards— provided them with leadership. Every serious account of the June insurrection indicates that the insurgents acted with extraordinary spontaneity and ingenuity. Tocqueville notes that they “fought without a war-cry, without leaders, without flags, and yet with a marvelous harmony and an amount of military experience that astonished the oldest officers.”[488] About half of the insurgents seem to have been National Workshop workers.
Within a given street or its environs, the spontaneous coordination of the workers was astonishing. Women and children took over noncombative tasks, such as repairing damaged barricades, provisioning supplies and water for the combatants, caring for the wounded, and the like. Each neighborhood tried to cast lead and zinc bullets for its fighters, and to produce black gunpowder— often compelling reluctant local chemists to help them. But even as the neighborhoods coordinated their activities peacefully and efficiendy, no coordination existed between the quartiers or even between barricades only a few streets distant. In its structure, the insurrection almost seemed a matter of individual neighborhoods rising up, rather than large sections of the city as a whole. As Blanc tells us,
This insurrection, so general in its causes and in its spirit, assumed at almost every point the character of a local protest In many districts, the inhabitants reserved to themselves exclusively the guard of their own barricades, rejected the assistance of strangers, and after closing all access to their streets, refused to cooperate in the general attack,[489]
Even barricades that could have easily spared men commonly refused to send them to support insurgents in other faubourgs who were being hard pressed by government troops.
This orientation was not the result of myopia, or of a failure to understand that the fate of each barricade depended ultimately on the fate of all. It was due in great part to recent radical history, as Amann notes, which associated coordination and strategy with failure, as exemplified by impotent conspirators like Barbes and Blanqui and with the abortive conspiracies of secret societies like the Satsons.
Successful revolutions, on the contrary, were assumed to be spontaneous (and therefore unplannable) upheavals of the masses—witness July 1789, July 1830, and February 1848. By June 1848 everyone foresaw violence, widespread popular violence provoked by a hostile government. But no revolutionary organization dreamed that it could control the direction, intensity, and timing of that violence.[490]
The insurgents, fearing any degree of coordination that might demand even a modest sacrifice of local autonomy, veered to the extreme of almost pure spontaneity and independent decision-making. This highly anarchistic mentality was to make the uprising disastrously vulnerable to attacks by the government and its troops, which carefully coordinated its strategy on a citywide scale. The June insurgents seemed unwilling to take conscious control of the coming storm and draw up plans for dealing with it on a wider scale so that their uprising, while retaining considerable local flexibility, could make systematic headway against the well-disciplined troops that confronted them. This fetishization of untempered localism and spontaneity sealed the fate of the insurrection.
Nevertheless, for a time the question of whether the government would be able to hold Paris at all was very much in question. The Mobile Guard, the army, and the bourgeois units of the National Guard were placed under the command of General Eugene Cavaignac, who had acquired a reputation for ferocity in campaigns against Algerian tribesmen. Cavaignac decided not to attack the insurgents or obstruct their barricade building until he had completely equipped and massed his own troops. As a result of his inaction, on Friday, fully half of Paris fell into the hands of the insurgents.
Tocqueville, amazed that the army had permitted this to happen, asked General Lamoriciere why his troops had not engaged the insurgents.
“What are you doing?” 1 asked him. “They have already been fighting at the Porte Saint-Denis, and barricades are being built all round the Hotel de Ville.”
“Patience,” he replied, “we are going there. Do you think we are such fools as to scatter our soldiers on such a day as this over the small streets of the suburbs? No, no! we shall let the insurgents concentrate in the quarters which we can’t keep them out of, and then we will go and destroy them. They sha’n’t escape us this time.”[491]
Shrewdly, Cavaignac aimed to avoid a guerrilla war against numerous elusive bands of workers. In such fighting, in the capital’s intricate streets and alleys, even his well-disciplined troops would dearly have been at a disadvantage. Rather, he preferred to corral as many of the insurgents as he could into fixed positions that could be easily encircled and fight them like one field army opposing another, striking annihilating blows against a relatively small number of well-defended positions.
Despite their desperation, the insurgents behaved with exemplary decency, respecting the well-being and property of people whose neighborhoods they occupied. They committed no serious crimes; even jewelry shops remained untouched, and Victor Hugo could report that although his house was searched, probably for arms and ammunition, all his personal belongings remained in place, including his manuscript for Les Miserables. The workers were eager to show that they were not the riff-raff that their enemies had depicted them as being. They continued to collect the usual taxes at the city’s tollgates, permit anyone to use the semaphore telegraph (as long as they did not report on the batde), and even set free a number of prisoners, who were duly permitted to cover their uniforms with workmen’s blouses.
At around ten o’clock on Friday morning, June 23, Cavaignac finally put his troops into action, starting a conflict that lasted until Monday, June 26, when the last barricade in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine was taken. For much of that time, the insurgents held their own, with astonishing boldness, against substantially larger and better-equipped military forces. Barricades were taken and retaken as the fighting surged and ebbed furiously in the squares, boulevards, and narrow streets.
As described by the novelist and Assembly member Victor Hugo, the first skirmish took place at a barricade near the Porte Saint-Denis. When the loyalist National Guards ordered its defenders to surrender, the barricade fighters responded by opening fire, killing thirty Guards. Soon “a young woman, beautiful, disheveled, and terrible” climbed to the top of the barricade.
The girl, who was a woman of the streets, hoisted her skirts up to her waist and yelled at the National Guards, “Cowards, fire, if you dare, at the belly of a woman.” A volley of fire hurled the unfortunate creature down. She gave a loud scream and fell. Immediately, a second woman appeared. This one was younger and lovelier still, little more than a child, seventeen at most She too was a woman of the streets. Like the other she showed her stomach and screamed, “Fire brigands!” They fired and she fell, riddled with bullets, on the body of the first.[492]
The novelist’s judgment that the women were prostitutes may well have been the product of a middle-class prejudice, but his account decidedly reveals the incredible courage and bravery of the insurgents.
To reconquer the city, Cavaignac divided his forces into three columns, sending the first and largest, under the command of General Lamoriciere, into the heart of the insurgent center, between the Faubourg Poissoniere and the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. It made slow progress and encountered such furious resistance that at least part of the column had to retreat. The second column, under General Bedeau, was dispatched to relieve the troops at the Hotel de Ville, which the insurgents had nearly succeeded in capturing. The third, commanded by General Damesme, was ordered into the Left Bank to march toward the Pantheon and take the twelfth arrondissement.
Surrounded by mazes of barricades, the three columns were soon isolated from each other, easy prey to insurgent sniper fire. As the city setded down to a relatively quiet night, the commanders were obliged to hold a council of war to reassess their strategy, while the insurgents repaired existing barricades and built new ones.
On the second day, Saturday, the fighting was bloody and inconclusive but generally went even better for the insurgents than it had the day before. The government’s attempts to take the northern districts met with more failures than successes. The insurgents captured the local city halls (mairies) of the eighth and ninth arrondissements, coming within striking distance of the Hotel de Ville. Indeed, after expelling the eighth arrondissement mayor, the seemingly ubiquitous Victor Hugo, they set up a revolutionary government in its place. Here the able leadership of Leon Lacollonge, the president of the club named L’Organization du travail and editor of its eponymous newspaper, was essential, organizing the efforts of the members of the Club des Antonins. The revolutionary government issued a manifesto calling for a “social and democratic Republic; Free association of Labor, aided by the State; the impeachment of the Representatives of the People and of the ministers, ... the immediate arrest of the Executive Commission,” and “the removal of troops from Paris.”[493] Only the Mobile Guards, on the Left Bank in the Pantheon area, made significant progress for the government Their political loyalties were no longer indeterminate—they fought eagerly on behalf of the generals. Meanwhile the Assembly used the uncertain military situation—what it called a “state of siege”—to unseat Lamartine and the rest of the Pentarchy and to make Cavaignac dictator, endowing him with extraordinary powers to crush the insurrection.
The third day, Sunday, started out badly for the government troops once again, when Lamoriciere’s forces failed to make any advances against the insurgents in the northern sector. Nor could the army, at first, dislodge the insurgents from the eighth arrondissement. But by the late afternoon, the captured mairie had fallen to regular army troops, and the tide of battle turned against the insurgents. In vigorous fighting supported by artillery, government forces overcame the barricades in nearly every district, leaving only the Bastille and the Place du Trone in insurgent hands. Meanwhile, on Sunday night, eager National Guards from the provinces flocked into Paris in great numbers. (Apart from Marseilles, most other French cities, including Lyon, remained quiet during the June insurrection.) As a result of the railroads, Tocqueville notes, it was possible to bring rural Guards—mainly young nobles, shopkeepers, and peasants—from distances of about a 150 miles to the capital only a day after the fighting had begun. By Monday moming, June 26, the defeat of the insurrection was imminent Troops were closing in on the Place de Bastille and the Place du Trone, while insurgent resistance in other pockets of the city had become sporadic. At some barricades the insurgents fought to the last but most of the remaining workers, owing pardy to spurious promises by the army of an honorable surrender, laid down their muskets. The Faubourg Saint-Antoine was the last holdout, but finally it too surrendered.
Apart from General Bedeau, who eamesdy tried to negotiate an honorable surrender with the insurgents, and General Duvivier, who expressed genuine compassion for the material plight of the workers as he lay dying from his wounds, there is no evidence that the bourgeois National Guard or the Mobile Guard felt any sympathy for their opponents. The regular soldiers, by contrast, seem to have fought with no strong conviction, and in all likelihood some individual Guards acted with a modicum of decency toward their insurgent captives. But the nearly crazed young Mobile Guards killed workers as wantonly as they had risked their lives in batde. To these “children” of the working class, a batde was a festival, and they killed members of their own class without remorse.
The behavior of the Mobile Guards has always been a puzzle to historians of the Revolution. Marx dismissed them as members of the lumpenproletariat, whose services were for sale to any purchaser, but this view, as recent research has shown, can no longer be supported. In fact, their occupational background closely parallels that of Parisian workers as a whole. Recruited from the February barricades, their working-class identity seems to have been dissolved into a stricdy military identity, reinforced by decent pay, strict training, isolation, and above all a strong esprit de corps. By June, their sense of belonging was to a corps rather than to a class. As for their ardor, it is perhaps more explicable by their youth—their average age was about twenty-one—than by any social or political convictions.
By contrast the National Guards who fought for the government functioned as the armed force of a class—specifically, merchants, retailers, professionals, some artisans, and outright capitalists—for whom the defeat of the insurgents would be a victory over “communism.” Unlike the Mobile Guard units, however, a number of National Guard units, especially from the eastern sector of Paris, did defect to the insurgents, while others were politically ambivalent and therefore untrustworthy in the eyes of their officers.
The workers who fought on the barricades were nothing if not bold. They certainly numbered no more than 50,000—that is to say, barely a quarter of the more than 200,000 male workers in Paris. Against them were arrayed at least an equal or greater number of well-trained and well-equipped troops of all kinds, supported by devastating artillery, with provincial forces flowing into the capital to support them. In fact, the willingness of these forces to slaughter as many of the defeated Parisian workers as they could is a shocking testimony to the provincial hatred of Paris—or to rural idiocy.
Pardy as a result of the provincial infusion, the June insurrection became one of the bloodiest of all Parisian journees. Statistics on the number of insurgents who were killed vary widely. Some claim that only 1500 workers were killed in all, including about 150 insurgent prisoners. But contemporary accounts make this overall figure difficult to accept. The most plausible toll comes from Georges Duveau:
Only four or five hundred of the rebels appear to have perished on the barricades, but more than three thousand were massacred by the soldiers of the garde mobile and the regular army after the fighting was over. In all, 11,671 persons were arrested. A few of these were executed and some were sentenced to forced labor, but by far the most common penalty was deportation [to Algeria].[494]
Alexander Herzen, the famous Russian revolutionary, witnessed the June uprising with his family, noting the brutality of the counterrevolution in his diary;
On the evening of the 26th of June, after the victory of the Nationale over Paris, we heard shots being fired at short regular intervals.... We glanced at one another, all our faces were livid.... “They are shooting prisoners,” we said with one voice, and turned away from one another. 1 pressed my forehead against the window-pane. Such moments provoke ten years of hatred, a lifetime of revenge: woe to him who forgives at such moments![495]
And according to Louis Blanc:
Prisoners were being shot in the plain of Grenelle, at the Montparnasse Cemetery, in the racecourse of Montmartre. Prisoners were being shot in the Place du Pantheon. Prisoners were being shot at the Cloister of St. Benedict and in the court of the Hotel de Cluny. A wounded rebel was stretched on a bed of straw. Some monsters fired it and burnt the dying man alive.[496]
The Luxembourg Gardens had to be dosed until rain could wash away the blood of the unknown number of prisoners who had been executed there.
Histories of 1848, the most revolutionary year of the entire nineteenth century, usually recount, in addition to the events in Paris, the revolutionary upheavals that occurred in Hungary, Austria, Germany, Italy, and elsewhere in Europe. But it was above all in France that the revolution’s aims went far beyond the nationalistic goals that marked other insurgencies, as a revolution made in the name of universal principles. In this sense the June insurrection in Paris marks both the beginning of the revolutionary year and its finale.
Even after the June uprising, however, insurgencies of workers and even peasants continued in other parts of France for a few more years. The most important urban working-class uprising of 1849 occurred in Lyon, which was the silk-producing center of Europe.
Predominandy artisanal in its production methods, Lyon had begun to seriously feel the impact of commercial capitalism almost a century earlier, when the silk trade had been taken over by merchants who distributed jobs and bought the produce of master craftsmen and journeymen—many of whom yearned for the guild-type corporate society that had existed before the Great Revolution. In 1831, the silk-weaving artisans, or canuts, rose in armed conflict to gain a better tarif, or contract, from the merchants. For a brief time they actually took control of the city, under red and black flags—which made their insurrection a memorable event in the history of revolutionary symbols. Their use of the word mutuellisme to denote the associative disposition of society that they preferred made their insurrection a memorable event in the history of anarchist thought as well, since Proudhon appears to have picked up the word from them during his brief stay in the city in 1843–44 to describe his own essentially contractual vision of a just society.
In 1834, the Lyon canuts rose once again—this time led mainly by the journeymen rather than the master weavers—to gain better working conditions both from the merchants and from their employers. This short-lived revolt probably inspired a republican uprising in Paris in the same year. In 1848, however, although the silk workers were the target of considerable socialistic and communistic propaganda, the June insurrection in Paris did not provoke a corresponding uprising in Lyon. Whatever revolutionary sympathy the canuts might have felt for their Parisian fellow workers was undermined by the local government’s carrot-and-stick policy of permitting the clubs to continue to meet while blanketing the city with troops—and the clubists were not eager to suffer the repression inflicted upon their counterparts in Paris. In the main, the preoccupation of many canuts with harmless cooperatives absorbed much of their energy, leaving the city’s political sphere in the hands of moderates and outright reactionaries.
Meanwhile, in the Paris of June 1848, once the smoke and debris had been cleared away and the shattered bodies removed from the barricades, the Revolution began a journey backward, from its “red” peaks, over its republican plain, and ultimately back down toward its monarchical swamp, made even more odious by the presence of a Bonapartist adventurer whose “repulsive face” (in Marx’s words) was covered with the “iron mask” of the original emperor.
General Cavaignac’s brief dictatorship—technically a “state of siege”— remained in force all summer, until October 29. In July a decree was issued permitting clubs to meet—but only under conditions that prevented any significant political activity. Any club that wished to meet had to provide the police with a “declaration” of its intention twenty-four hours in advance. Club members could engage in discussions only under the surveillance of “a judicial or administrative official”—that is, the police—and they had to desist from talking about “any proposition contrary to public order or public morality.” After the meeting the club had to hand over to the police a summary of the meeting’s actions and discussions and provide a list of the members in attendance. It also had to provide “reports, addresses and all other communications between clubs.” The organization of “secret societies,” of course, was stricdy forbidden.[497] The decree, in fact, struck at the very heart of one of the workers’ most basic demands: the right to form associations. Revolutionary organizers were now obliged to go underground, where they had so often been since the Bourbon Restoration.
Additionally, Cavaignac required newspapers, in order to continue publishing, to deposit caution money (cautionnement) to guarantee their future “good conduct”—that is, to guarantee that they would avoid publishing politically offensive articles, such as those that discussed a “social republic” or criticized the government This was a revival of Louis-Philippe’s hated policy of suppressing dissident literature. In 1848 the cautionnements imposed were so high (up to 24,000 francs) that only papers like the conservative Constitutionnel could afford to pay. Finally, the ten-hour day was raised to twelve hours, returning the workers to the workday that existed before the February barricades. As the reactionary Memorial bordelais put it, “France needs moral order and material order, and any force determined to provide her with both is entitled to the sympathy and collaboration of right-thinking men.”[498] The Party of Order had openly emerged, not as an organization but as a coalition of Legitimists, Orleanists, and complete reactionaries—deputies and notables who would not have dared breathe a word about their views three months earlier.
In opposition there developed a coalition of diverse leftists, notably socialists and radical republicans who shifted increasingly to the left, as the “state of seige” became more repressive. Their numbers included the left-republican representatives in the Assembly, as well as militants who inhabited what was once the thriving club scene and who remained in the much-curtailed clubs and societies. They were collectively known as democ-socs, for democratic socialists, or interchangeably as Montagnards. Their political program centered on demands for a social as well as democratic republic. “The political problem is no longer the problem of the future,” even La Reforme—the liberal republican newspaper having moved to the left—declared in August, “A new problem has come to the fore, and democracy has had to emblazon its banner with the words: ‘The democratic and social Republic.’ ”[499] Despite the “caution” laws, the democ-socs managed to generate a huge amount of propaganda—political pamphlets, brochures, satirical engravings—with which they flooded the provinces, shipping it out by any means they could, including the sending of agitators to small towns and villages in all parts of France.
Moreover, despite the repression of strikes and the working-class political activity that followed the June insurrection—or perhaps because of it—the militant French workers took refuge in associationism. Producers’ associations and various mutual aid and cooperative activities were still legally permitted as economic and commercial enterprises, and they now proliferated in Paris and nearly all the cities of France. The fortunes of these associations changed with the shifting political moods of the Constituent Assembly: a Union of Associations was established in November 1849, embracing 104 member associations, that planned to provide credit and open channels for commercial exchange between its component entities. In May 1850, before the Union could carry out its plan to issue bonds toward these ends, a panicked government raided its headquarters, jailed its leaders, and made it illegal.
In Paris alone, an estimated 300 workers’ associations of various kinds emerged, in 120 trades with about 50,000 people. A typical association was open to any member of a trade who could make a nominal investment in its capital funds and was guided by the principles that had been oudined by Buchez and the producers’ cooperatives represented in the Luxembourg Labor Assembly.
In the years that followed, these associations failed to establish a cooperative and egalitarian system. More often than not, associations that could compete successfully with privately owned enterprises were those that became capitalistic themselves. Even those with the best intentions had to join the capitalist system as collective capitalistic enterprises, if only to remain viable. One of the most successful such enterprises was the association established by a group of Parisian masons in 1848, with shares valued at fifty-five francs apiece, and with visions of freeing all construction workers from wage labor. By 1852 these visions were all but dead, but the association was so successful economically that the value of its shares had soared to 3,000 francs each, and it finally closed its doors to new members. To meet the needs of its expanding operations, it hired 1,600 wage earners. To complete its capitalistic turn, during the masons’ strike of 1866, it took the side of the employers against the strikers.
Another problem that producers’ associations faced were the difficulties arising from the conditions of dire material scarcity in which they existed. Mismanagement, disputes over distributions of earnings, desultory attitudes toward work obligations, and even theft became cardinal problems in keeping the associations alive. As Bernard Moss observes:
For most associations life was hard and short. Lacking credit and customers, many were also beset with administrative problems and disputes. Elected managers did not always possess the requisite managerial and commercial skills. Internal disputes over managerial authority and the distribution of earnings often led to the dismissal of managers and exclusion and resignation of members. [Of those for which there are records], most remained marginal operations, comprising fewer members in 1851 than when they began.... Of forty-nine trades that started associations in 1849, only twenty-six had them in 1851. Since new ones were constandy being created, there were still 200 in that year.[500]
Understandably, workers in producers’ associations did not expect to receive the low wages that masters and capitalists typically paid; nor was the working class in an economic position to purchase the consumer goods produced by the associations, when associations tried to equalize the incomes of their members by raising their prices. No amount of ethical commitment or working-class solidarity could override the rumblings of empty stomachs.
But, in the end, it was the tugging and pushing of market forces which worked against the socialistic aspirations of the producers’ associations, cooperatives, mutual aid societies, workers’ credit institutions, and the like, and made it impossible for them to succeed in ending competition or replacing the hard core of the capitalist entrepreneurial and market system with a cooperative and egalitarian one, let alone with their vision of a socialistic society. The most the associations could finally hope to accomplish was to ease the working conditions of their artisan members, establishing federations of producers’ associations and reasonably endowed credit institutions through which the more successful enterprises could assist those in difficulty. But even this was something the government was not prepared to let them do on a large scale. Louis Bonaparte suppressed most workers’ associations when he became emperor, although in the 1860s the empire began to encourage a number of them (often with the aid of the more tepid Proudhonists). During the 1860s, too, to curry favor with the workers, even Orleanists, not to be outdone by Bonapartists and moderate republicans, established their own cooperative-oriented bank. Clearly, the state had nothing to fear from the assodationist movement; however large and mutualistic they became, associations could never have supplanted the capitalist and market system that was gaining increasing command over the French economy. Blanc’s assodationist vision could have led only to a slowed entry of the industrial system into France and a mitigation of its worst abuses. But in no sense could it have replaced the capitalist system in France.
In September a by-election finally injected a Bonaparte into the Assembly where, with appropriate modesty, he betrayed no inkling of any aspirations to greater power. “Napoleon le petit” (“the little Napoleon,” as Victor Hugo called him) was the son of Napoleon’s brother, Louis Bonaparte. Following the early death of Napoleon’s own son, Louis Napoleon had become head of the Bonaparte family, and with it he inherited all the Napoleonic pretensions that came with the name. His youth had been spent in Switzerland and Germany— like all Bonaparte notables, he spoke French with a foreign accent—after which he drifted to Italy and then France, where a comic attempt at insurrection obliged him to seek exile in the United States and England The “prince,” as he was known to his supporters, returned to France as a “dtizen” rather than as a pretender to the throne, and his ability to hold his tongue, to listen politdy, and to behave almost demurdy earned him support among the more guileless deputies of the Assembly, including Hugo and Proudhon. Having been in exile during the most hectic events of 1848, including the June Days, Louis—unlike the liberals who had so abjectly failed the workers—appeared untarnished and almost virginal politically. When it became apparent that his presence as an Assembly representative was an embarrassment to nearly all factions in the government, he politely withdrew from the Constituent Assembly and seemed to hold his peace, although no one could forget that he was waiting in the wings.
Prince Louis prudendy steered a course between all of the contending classes in France—a policy that was to be called Bonapartism—concentrating his efforts on restoring the Bonaparte dynasty and its fortunes. Indeed, the essence of his success was his ability to seem to be everything to everybody. To the workers, who began to vote for him in droves, he professed an interest in sodalism, even a willingness to make the rich pay the expenses of the government. To the bourgeoisie and notables, he promised order and an intention to disdpline the masses, particularly the working class. As for the peasants, they associated him with the original Napoleon, who had consolidated the gains of the Great Revolution on their behalf against feudal exactions. In fact, the forty-five-centime tax that had so infuriated the peasantry encouraged a revival of the mystique of Napoleon le grand, who had once provided the French with la gloire, internal stability, and decisive if authoritarian leadership. The original Napoleon’s victory at Austerlitz was remembered far more vividly than the terrible losses suffered by the Grand Army in its retreat from Moscow.
Meanwhile the Constituent Assembly had written a constitution for the tom and mutilated nation, which it finally proclaimed on November 21, 1848. It established the office of president, but in an effort to fend off the possible reemergence of monarchy, it stipulated that the president could not be reelected after the expiration of his single four-year term. It also created a singlechamber Legislative Assembly that, like the president, was to be elected by universal adult male suffrage. Nearly everyone could see that the constitution would inevitably self-destruct, since the authors had failed to establish any way in which the two branches of government could possibly adjudicate their differences in the event of a serious clash of authority.
Finally, on December 10, 1848, the nation went to the polls to elect the officials to inhabit this governmental structure—and the vast majority of Frenchmen seemed to want to take their revenge on the nearly moribund Second Republic. Of the three men of national stature who ran for the presidency, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte received 5.5 million votes out of 7.5 cast His most important opponent, General Cavaignac, the darling of the moderate republicans, received only 1.5 million, and Lamartine, a humiliating 18,000. A Bonaparte— Louis Napoleon—was now president of the French Republic.
In the meantime, the Left was still an active presence in France. In anticipation of elections for Assembly representatives in May 1849, the Montagnards and democ-socs went to work in earnest, holding banquets, creating electoral alliances, and offering joint candidacies for the Assembly. The country was sharply polarized politically. As Le National summarized it: “Today there are only two parties left in Europe—the Party of Revolution and the party of counter-Revolution.... The days for middle-of-the-road policies and hesitation have passed.”[501] Although die May election results packed the Palais Bourbon with monarchists—nearly two-thirds of them Legitimists—it also constituted a victory for the Left by returning 150 Montagnard representatives, a proportion that surpassed that of the moderates. The center was beginning to wither away, its constituents drifting to the Right or to the Left—a characteristic feature of a growing political crisis.
Meanwhile in Rome, a revolutionary republic, inspired by the French example, had emerged in February 1849, as a result of what was “the nearest thing to a social revolution in 1848 outside France.” Although the republic was presided over by the romantic republican nationalist Mazzini, it made social advances as well, particularly weakening the power of the Church; the carriages of cardinals, whose red robes were said to be the blood of the poor, were overturned and set ablaze, the offices of the Holy Inquisition were converted to housing for the poor, and most significandy, some of the landholdings of the Church were confiscated and distributed to the peasants as leaseholds. “Rome and Venice,” says Robertson, “were the only places in Europe that dared to carry their revolutions to the very limit set by France.”[502]
The Pope, horrified by this state of affairs, called upon Catholic France for assistance, and Louis Napoleon, who was courting the support of the Church and of French Catholics generally, was only too happy to come to his aid. Five months after the declaration of the Roman Republic, on April 30, he sent a French expeditionary force south to Rome, there to crush the insurgency.
Even the moderate Republicans in the Assembly exploded at this outrage. This use of military force was a violation not only of the Assembly’s wishes but of the constitution itself, which obliged the president to gain the Assembly’s consent before using the army abroad. On June 11, Ledru-Rollin—the last prominent, ostensibly republican leader in France—tried to bring a bill of impeachment against the president and his ministers. The next day the majority Party of Order placidly rejected this defense of its own constitutional power, in what can only have been an act of provocation against the Left The Montagnards fell for it and stormed out of the Assembly in petulant protest—a fatal tactic that left the government entirely in the hands of the Left’s opponents in the midst of a major crisis.
Two days later the Montagnards proclaimed that the government was “outside the Constitution,” and on June 13 they organized a peaceful demonstration to protest the Roman expedition. Thirty thousand people participated, mainly unarmed National Guards, as well as middle-class republicans and members of the workers’ secret societies, marching collectively to the cry of “Long live the Constitution!” But awaiting the demonstrators at the end of the Rue de la Paix were the dragoons and chasseurs of General Changamier, who swifdy scattered the crowd into the side streets. The more resolute Montagnards and workers tried to make an armed stand at the Museum of Arts and Trades, but it collapsed miserably when the National Guard failed to support them. Where the workers in the June 1848 insurrection had called for the “organization of work” under the slogan “bread or lead”— that is, for basic demands of the working class—the demonstration of June 1849 raised the formal republican demands of the middle classes. Or as Marx observed: “If June 23, 1848, was the insurrection of the revolutionary proletariat, June 13, 1849, was the insurrection of the democratic petty bourgeois, each of these two insurrections being the classically pure expression of the class which had been its vehicle.”[503] It marked the definitive defeat of the Left in French politics for more than a decade. The government used the occasion to declare a state of siege, pass a new law that banned the clubs completely, and tighten the press laws still further, until no paper more radical than Le National could appear. As repression dragged the Revolution backward, the “leaders” of the June 13 demonstration were tried, and the jails were filled with Montagnards and real or suspected socialists.
When news of the events in Paris reached Lyon, together with the news that the French army had been used against the Roman republicans, insurgency once again stirred the city. The Lyonnais rose in insurrection on June 14, 1849, erecting barricades and raiding gun shops, but the well-organized line troops of the government and particularly their artillery put an end to the uprising in only two days. As a historian of the revolt observes:
The carrot-and-stick approach of encouraging economic dependence and discouraging political opposition, initiated under the Second Republic and elaborated under the Second Empire [of Louis Bonaparte], seemed to have extinguished the radical movement of Lyon.[504]
The prince-president now made a tour of the provinces, drumming up support for his administration and, above all, himself, while the Legislative Assembly, completely controlled by Party of Order, prepared to restrict the franchise. On May 31, 1850, the Assembly disenfranchized some three million voters, mainly mobile workers who would have voted for the democ-socs, by requiring evidence of a three-year residence in a given electoral constituency. It also enacted an educational “reform,” proposed by the overzealous Falloux, that granted considerable power to the Church in the schools, while adherents of the prince-president circulated petitions to allow him to run for a second presidential term, again in flat violation of the constitution.
Bonaparte had garnered wide popular support among the peasants, and he had even lured many workers into his camp by calling for a return of exiled June insurgents and a restoration of universal suffrage. So confident was he of popular support that he now felt that he could dissolve the Assembly. On the fateful night of December 1,1851, assured of the army’s aid and the quiescence of the Parisian workers, he arrested the major Assembly leaders and ordered the military to occupy the Palais Bourbon. In a proclamation the next day, December 2, justifying this coup d’etat, he condemned the Assembly for being “a hot-bed of sedition,” for “forging weapons for civil war,” indeed, for “making a bid for the power which I wield direcdy by virtue of the people’s will.”[505] Louis Bonaparte, in effect, accused the Assembly of damaging the very constitution that he himself was in the process of jettisoning.
Police accounts report that, amid cries of “To arms!” barricades went up in the Rue Rambuteau, at the intersection of the Rue Saint-Denis and the Rue Saint-Martin. But by December 4, the army could laconically report: “Paris is quiet. The barricades that were erected last night were removed without difficulty.”[506] A staff captain of the National Guard tned to account for the lack of resistance to the coup:
the unpopularity of the chamber, the surprise and the remarkable way the arrests were timed to take place at the same moment—the attitude of the army, too, perhaps—meant that in the end nothing very nasty happened.... You know, moreover, that those gendemen [the deputies] were arrested without any show of resistance Among the workers—indifference, almost approbation.[507]
Even Lyon, which had risen on March 13 of the previous year, made virtually no effort to resist the prince-president’s coup, and reports from other provincial cities suggest that they had been awaiting news of resistance in Paris before undertaking it themselves.
It was mainly in more remote southern areas, such as Provence, that serious resistance to the coup occurred. Ever since June 1848, Montagnard and democ- soc agitators had been working hard to loosen the grasp of extreme conservatism on the French peasants. They succeeded, to a great extent, fulfilling Blanqui’s hopes from the spring of 1848 that the peasants, given enough time, could become receptive to the new political ideas. In fact, they had learned about the democratic-socialist ideas that had been popular in the Parisian neighborhoods and clubs of 1848, and they proved to be even more responsive than the Parisian workers could have expected. Peasants in about thirteen departments, particularly in southern and central France, actually took up arms in support of the Republic against Bonaparte and embattled themselves with the superior forces of the government.
But the regime struck back swifdy and effectively: approximately 27,000 people were arrested or prosecuted in absentia, of whom some 15,000 were sentenced to imprisonment and 9,000 deported. Many of the workers’ associations, including trade unions, were closed down. After two plebiscites (on December 21, 1851, and November 21, 1852) staged by Napoleon le petit, France became an empire, if nothing else than in name, and Louis Napoleon Bonaparte an emperor. In much of France, the events of 1848–49 faded from collective memory, opening two decades of mediocrity and banality in French history.
From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.
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October 22, 2021 : Volume 2, Part 6, Chapter 28 -- Added.
October 22, 2021 : Volume 2, Part 6, Chapter 28 -- Updated.
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