1848
Page 25
The fighting continued into Sunday 25 June. A tragic casualty that day was Monseigneur Affre, the archbishop of Paris, who tried to intercede: he courageously stood in front of the barricade that blocked the entrance to the rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine, clutching copies of a conciliatory proclamation that Cavaignac, at the urging of both Caussidière and Sénard in the National Assembly, had drafted that morning. As Affre spoke, firing inexplicably erupted, and a bullet from the government side tore through his body. As he died, he uttered, ‘May my blood be the last to be shed’, then passed from this world into conservative iconography as a martyr, a victim of revolutionary brutality. Atrocities were certainly committed: as he tried to dislodge the last resistance centred on a formidable barricade on the Place d’Italie, General Jean de Bréa tried to parley, but he was seized and taken prisoner by the insurgents. When asked for advice on how to deal with this particular crisis, Cavaignac’s chilling response was: ‘The Republic cannot be sacrificed for the life of an imprudent general.’48 While the barricade was stormed, nothing could save Bréa’s life: the insurgents had heard rumours (which were only too true) that the Mobile Guards were executing prisoners and, in retaliation, they had already shot the general and his aide-de-camp dead.
The newspapers multiplied the scale and magnified the horror of such atrocities. The liberal, monarchist Constitutionnel told its readers that
rather than release their prisoners, the [insurgents] cowardly murdered them by cutting off their heads . . . hanged prisoners, cut off the heads of four officers of the Mobile Guard on a block with a hacking-knife, sawed another in half and wanted to burn alive several soldiers of that unit . . . Corpses were desecrated. It is true that they were not actually eaten; but, patience, that will come, if they continue to listen to the socialists.49
Provincial newspapers, which drew much of their information from the Parisian broadsheets, reprinted these stories as fact. That such tales were widely believed illustrated the depth of the divisions that had opened up in French society: between rich and poor, moderate and radical, Parisian and provincial. It was but a short step from demonising the insurgents to arguing that the street-fighting was nothing less than a struggle between ‘anarchy’ and ‘civilisation’. On 29 June, Le National gave its verdict: ‘on one side there stood order, liberty, civilisation, the decent Republic, France; and on the other, barbarians, desperados emerging from their lairs for massacre and looting’.50
Yet, while the insurgents certainly committed some atrocities, the forces of order similarly killed captured rebels in cold blood or (to use the official parlance) while the prisoners were ‘attempting to escape’.51 Estimates of those summarily slaughtered range from a conservative 150 to a socialist 3,000 (the guess of Karl Marx): the truth probably lies somewhere in between. Most of these killings were by the vengeful civilian militias, the Mobile Guard and the National Guard, rather than the regular army, whose officers did their best to protect the prisoners. Unlike the mass executions that followed the Communard uprising of 1871, they do not seem to have been official policy. Rather, Marx claimed that ‘the bourgeoisie compensated itself for the mortal anguish it underwent by unheard of brutality’.52 One of Flaubert’s characters, old Monsieur Roque, volunteering with the provincial National Guard, relishes his sentry duty outside the lock-up that lay beneath the riverside terrace of the Tuileries. The prisoners, ‘packed together chaotically in the filth, black with powder and coagulated blood, shaking with fever and shouting with rage’, beg for bread. Roque’s response is to fire his musket into the seething mass of humanity.53
At least 1,500 workers lay dead and some 11,727 more were arrested and held in hastily improvised jails while awaiting transportation or imprisonment. Some 6,000 were released within a few days, others were freed in a trickle over the next couple of years, and 468 were eventually deported to Algeria. Paris hospitals admitted 2,529 wounded people, but there were probably considerably more men and women who tried to tend to their wounds at home, for fear of capture. On the government side, the army, the National Guard and Mobile Guard lost over nine hundred men. For those on the left, the June days were the ‘victory of reaction’. Caussidière bristled at the ‘theatrical’ celebrations of the moderates in the National Assembly ‘while they were gathering the dead in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine’.54 The insurrection gave the left its martyrs. In the evening of 26 June Herzen and his friends
heard the sound of gunfire at short regular intervals . . . We glanced at one another, our faces looked green. ‘The firing squads’ we all said with one voice and turned away from each other. I pressed my forehead to the windowpane. Moments like these make one hate for a whole decade, seek revenge all one’s life. Woe to those who forgive such moments! 55
In this antagonistic climate it was natural for onlookers, some fearfully, others hopefully, to see the June days as a class conflict. Tocqueville later wrote:
I had suspected . . . that the whole of the working class was engaged in the fight, either physically or morally . . . In fact the spirit of insurrection circulated from one end to the other of that vast class and in all its parts, like blood in a single body . . . it had penetrated into our houses, around, above, below us. Even the places where we thought we were the masters were crawling with domestic enemies; it was as if an atmosphere of civil war enveloped the whole of Paris.56
He claimed that the June insurrection was different from all other uprisings since 1789 because ‘its aim was not to change the form of government, but to alter the social order. It was not, in truth, a political struggle . . . but a class conflict, a sort of “servile war”.’57 From the other side, Marx - naturally - agreed that the June days amounted to a class struggle: it was ‘the tremendous insurrection in which the first great battle was joined between the two classes that split modern society. It was a fight for the preservation or annihilation of the bourgeois order.’58 It is true that one of the main consequences of the June days was to sharpen antagonisms, but not necessarily those that existed between strictly defined ‘proletarian’ and ‘bourgeois’ classes. The insurgents were mostly craft workers in the small-scale, artisan trades such as tailoring, shoemaking, furniture-making and metalworking, but there were also clerks and shopkeepers - a lower middle class that made up some 10 per cent of those arrested. Large numbers of unskilled workers and builders fought too, as did some workers from modern industrial plants, such as railway workshops. The wide social base of the revolt indicates the extent of the economic distress that was shared by so many people in the mid-century crisis.59
On the other side the troops deployed by Cavaignac certainly included well-to-do ‘bourgeois’ among the units of the National Guard from the prosperous western districts of the capital, but they also numbered shopkeepers and workers who believed that they were defending their neighbourhoods from ‘anarchy’. Although the Mobile Guards came from the same unemployed masses as the insurgents they confounded all expectations by fighting ferociously for the government. Workers in other cities stirred - there was violence in Lyon and some tension in other manufacturing towns, such as Limoges - but the rural population generally supported the government, holding church services to remember the soldiers who had died ‘defending the republic’. In some small towns rumours flew that insurgents from Paris were pillaging the countryside. The struggle itself, therefore, was less one of bourgeois against worker than a broader antagonism between urban workers and a much wider cross-section of the French population. However, while the nineteenth-century rhetoric of class conflict obscures the complexities, the antipathy and the social fear were real enough. All those in the French population who felt that they had something to lose were alarmed at the prospect of social disintegration. Widespread dread of what the Parisian insurgents might do led to a dramatic response from the provinces. Cavaignac’s call for provincial help on 23 June was answered enthusiastically: in the end, some hundred thousand volunteers travelled to the capital, mostly too late to take part in the fighting a
nd mostly by train - the first time in France that this form of transport was used for military purposes.
The legacy of bitterness and anger left by the June days permanently split the supporters of the Second Republic between leftists and moderates. Among the former, Blanc and Caussidière, politically isolated and now under blistering attack in the National Assembly, thought it best to leave for exile in London. ‘The more I see of the representatives of the people,’ Lamartine is said to have remarked about his colleagues, ‘the more I like my dogs.’ Paris was officially under a state of siege until October, with fifty thousand men under arms tramping through its streets, or waiting in barracks. In August a new law forced the closure of several newspapers by reimposing the hated Stamp Tax and the payment of a deposit as a security against prosecution. The polarisation of left and right opened a wide gap into which stepped Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, who would prove to be the nemesis of the Second Republic.
II
Plenty of observers saw the Parisian June days as a crucial European moment. If Paris, with its great revolutionary traditions, could be brought to heel, then so too could Milan, Venice, Vienna, Budapest and Berlin. The young German democratic journalist Ludwig Bamberger was sitting in a tavern with some of his associates in Frankfurt when he heard the news of the insurrection. ‘We felt that a great decision would fall there, which had to change the course of the French revolution and with it the whole European situation. We had a clear premonition that a turning point had set in for the whole course of future political development.’60 Bamberger’s German contemporaries, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, agreed that the June days represented a turning point: ‘immediately, all over Europe’, wrote Engels, ‘the new and old Conservatives and Counter-Revolutionists raised their heads with an effrontery that showed how well they understood the importance of that event’.61 For Bamberger, who was no socialist, the great weakness of the Parisian workers was that they knew what they wanted (social justice), but they had no realistic way of achieving it. A principle, he argued, could be ‘right’ only if it was morally sound and could be applied in practice. By this time, Marx and Engels had already stepped forward to provide the ‘proletariat’ with a rational and clear prognosis for the future. The ‘Communist League’ was the name given in June 1847, at Marx’s urging, to an underground socialist organisation that had adherents in France, Switzerland and Germany. Its motto was internationalist - ‘Workers of the World Unite!’ - which appeared on all of its proclamations. Its aims were penned by Marx: ‘The overthrow of the bourgeoisie, rule by the proletariat, the abolition of the old bourgeois society based on class conflicts, and the establishment of a new society, without classes and without private property.’62 The Communist Manifesto, written by Marx and Engels, appeared early in 1848. It envisaged a class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as the driving force that would lead modern society through the crucible of a social revolution. This struggle would establish the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, which would forge an egalitarian society. The theory rested on the presumed existence of a class-conscious, forward-looking and cohesive proletariat that would take on and destroy bourgeois capitalism in the next revolution. Therein lay both the long-term strength of The Communist Manifesto and its short-term weakness in 1848. The potency of the argument lay in the fact that it offered a vision of the future that saw the ailments and inequalities of industrialising society as part of a historical process towards socialism. This process would be painful but necessary, because out of it the proletariat would emerge triumphant in the final reckoning of the inevitable revolution. History was therefore on the side of the working class. The Communist Manifesto offered not so much an analysis of society in 1848 as of developments to come. Yet the industrialisation that would create a proletariat was still far from its peak in 1848, and this was one of the reasons why the Communist League had so little immediate influence in Germany, or even in France: there was no cohesive, politically knowledgeable and class-conscious proletariat to carry out the new revolution. German and French workers were not factory hands but artisans and craftsmen labouring in small workshops - and they wanted to keep it that way. They were skilled, with aspirations to independence, and, as such, were fighting tooth-and-nail against industrialisation. They wanted to avoid becoming part of the industrialised proletariat, that growing mass of unskilled or semi-skilled workers whose only asset for sale was their labour in the service of the relentless factory machine and steam engine. The craft workers sought to defend their interests not in a class war but through traditional methods, such as guilds and confraternities of workers, which traditionally upheld craft standards, governed admission to the trade and created a sense of solidarity among the artisans. Consequently, articulate and literate workers found little in The Communist Manifesto that was immediately relevant to their circumstances.
One of Marx’s associates, Stephan Born, understood this because he himself had worked as a typesetter in a Berlin printing shop. Elected head of the printers’ union, he organised a successful strike for better wages and shorter hours, and his example was followed elsewhere in Germany. When confronted with the realities of organising German workers, he therefore shed the rhetoric of class conflict and concentrated on their immediate concerns. Thereafter, he felt ill at ease when facing his intellectual masters, Marx and Engels: ‘They would have laughed in my face or pitied me if I had presented myself as a communist. I was no longer one.’63
The Communist League did have some German adherents, particularly in the Rhineland, to where Marx moved from his London exile in 1848. He settled in Cologne, where he and Engels established their newspaper, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. The Communist League also had strong cells in Hamburg, Breslau and Nuremberg, and their agents were active across Germany in 1849, spreading propaganda produced by the league’s central committee in London. Yet in 1848 most Communists found that they had to water down their programme to appeal to the majority of German workers. One of them, Wilhelm Weitling, found his more extreme demands rejected by the German Workers’ Congress in Berlin in the summer of 1848 and thereafter he studiously avoided talk of class war. Marx and Engels themselves rapidly grasped that the full-blooded Communist Manifesto could not be applied convincingly to the Germany of the time: the ‘Demands of the Communist Party in Germany’, issued in Paris at the beginning of March, stopped far short of the root-and-branch egalitarianism envisaged for the future, calling instead (among other things) for ‘an aid for the organisation of labour’, national workshops, the abolition of all remaining feudal dues for the peasantry and a progressive income tax. Otherwise, the programme echoed the political demands of the German democrats: Germany would be a single republic with universal male suffrage, a citizens’ army, separation of Church and state, and universal and free education.64 But even this watered-down social programme still went too far for most German craftsmen. An attempt by Marx to create a central organisation of all the emergent workers’ associations in Mainz was rejected in April. He and Engels then changed their focus, devoting most of their energies to supporting the German republican movement.
It was not easy to tie the essentially economic concerns of the workers to the political struggle of the democrats, as Marx himself discovered when he tried to reshape the Cologne Workers’ Association. With eight thousand members by the summer, this organisation’s founder and first leader, the socialist Andreas Gottschalk, actively sought to steer the workers away from political action, concentrating on the more prosaic problems of social and working conditions. Gottschalk believed that the association’s main goal was to put moral pressure on the bourgeoisie, primarily through its newspaper. Ultimately, Gottschalk believed, the employers would be so worried by the chaos caused by the economic crisis that, recognising the willingness of so many unemployed people to work, they would be persuaded to take the side of the workers and, in a peaceful transition, would see the wisdom of a socialist society. Jonathan Sperber, the historian of the democrat
ic movement in the Rhineland, argues that Gottschalk’s efforts to raise a politically passive brand of class consciousness had a special appeal among the poorest workers, ‘schooled to passivity, to living from charity, by decades of un- and underemployment’.65 Marx at first joined the more political Cologne Democratic Society. Unlike Gottschalk’s organisation, which attracted journeymen and labourers, the society drew its members mainly from the more educated master-craftsmen and artisans. The differences between the two organisations were such that Marx and the democrats accused Gottschalk of being a reactionary stooge, ‘bribed by the government and the bourgeoisie to mislead the workers with pretty sounding words until the reaction was able to regain its strength’.66 The authorities themselves disagreed and arrested Gottschalk in early July, allowing Marx and his associates to take over the association and transform it into a harness by which the mass of poorer workers could be bound to the democratic movement. Yet, precisely because it no longer answered the needs of its members (and because it started to levy membership dues), the association withered. By the autumn, it counted its members in the hundreds, rather than the thousands.