by Mike Rapport
The National Assembly flexed its muscles by insisting that it would not separate until it had voted ten ‘organic laws’ (concerned with harmonising existing institutions with the new constitution). Moreover, it thrust a stick into the government’s spokes when, in the last days before the New Year, Barrot resorted to traditional fiscal policies to weather the continuing financial crisis: he reimposed the unpopular taxes on salt and wine that had been abolished earlier in the year. As indirect impositions, they fell with disproportionate weight on the poor. Bonaparte appears to have let his populist mask slip, revealing a president who was looking to support the interests of the old elites more than those of the peasant masses. As Karl Marx put it (in a terrible pun), ‘with the salt tax, Bonaparte lost his revolutionary salt’.72 The republicans mutilated the bill as it passed through parliament, slashing the two taxes - the salt tax to a third of its original value. On 26 January, it also rejected a government motion to ban all political clubs, with the deputies of the left going so far as to introduce a bill of impeachment against Léon Faucher, the minister of the interior responsible for the suggestion. Although the conservative government was clearly struggling to command a majority in what was still primarily a republican assembly, Bonaparte insisted that the cabinet retained his confidence. In other words he was suggesting that ministers were accountable to him, not to the legislature - an alarming claim for anyone who believed in parliamentary government.73 It was also becoming obvious that the president and his ministers supported the idea of dissolving the difficult Assembly as soon as was possible to allow for new elections.
The radical Parisian movement began to stir once again in response to the conservative challenge. Ledru-Rollin urged calm, but he also suggested in an article in La Réforme on 28 January that violations of the people’s fundamental liberties ‘have always sounded the hour of revolution’.74 This thinly veiled threat of insurrection illustrated how polarised the government and the republican movement had now become. However, as Karl Marx perceptively saw, an uprising at that moment would have played directly into the hands of Barrot and Bonaparte, since it would have allowed them, ‘under the pretext of public safety . . . to violate the constitution in the interests of the constitution itself’.75 The day after Ledru-Rollin’s article appeared, the government put forward its motion for an early dissolution of the Assembly. It was supported by the intimidating appearance of troops led by the royalist General Changarnier, who surrounded the Assembly under the pretext of defending it against a popular insurrection. To be fair, the prospect of an uprising was not merely the figment of overheated conservative imaginations: the radical left mobilised the armed sections of the old insurrectionary society, the Rights of Man, while the Sixth Legion of the National Guard offered the deputies an alternative meeting-place in the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers (which in itself was a revolutionary gesture, since it meant that the Assembly would continue to meet in defiance of the government and the military). None the less, the very threat of a new insurrection was enough to fracture the delicate unity of moderate and radical republicans, and the parliament agreed to a quick dissolution. Elections were to be held on 13 May. In one of its last significant acts, on 7 May the Assembly forbade the government from pursuing its campaign against the Roman republic.
The elections were held in the same atmosphere of political polarisation and social fear that had prevailed since the June days of 1848. The middle way charted by the moderate republicans would end in ‘shipwreck’.76 Conservative notables used their finances and their local influence to ensure that candidates whom they favoured led the electoral lists. Although few published openly monarchist views, it was clear that the republican experiment since February 1848 was being derided in these circles, and these attitudes were printed in election literature aimed at a wider, peasant readership. ‘Socialism is Famine’, warned one leaflet intended for the rural electorate. The provisional government in particular was demonised, blamed especially for the ‘forty-five centimes’ tax. Republicans associated with social reform - democratic humanitarians like Ledru-Rollin and reforming socialists like Blanc, along with firebrand revolutionary ‘communists’ like Raspail and Blanqui - were indiscriminately lumped together as ‘reds’. The conservatives were helped by government officials, who obstructed the publication and distribution of left-wing literature and ‘advised’ voters to choose candidates opposed to ‘doctrines destructive of society’. Some moderate republicans, while also emphasising the need for ‘order’, condemned excessive government power and repression. Their voices were drowned out as the middle ground crumbled beneath their feet.
The radicals expected to do well in these elections. They had woken up to the fact that they could not expect to win anything more than a small rump in the new National Assembly unless they won the peasant vote. ‘Thanks to universal suffrage,’ wrote the socialist journalist Pierre Joigneaux (who edited La Réforme for a year while a deputy in the old Assembly), ‘we must, whether we like it or not, take into account the populations of our countryside. That is where the big battalions now lie.’77 He wrote those words in January 1850, but he was merely re-emphasising a strategy that the radicals had already begun to apply in 1849: the elections of April 1848 and their aftermath had shown that it was not enough to rely on the support of the urban workers and artisans. La Réforme admitted: ‘No one had given a thought to the countryside since the First Republic. From now on we shall have to.’78 They were helped in this by the ongoing economic crisis, which bit deep in the countryside, since those agricultural regions that depended heavily on selling their produce to the market were suffering from a collapse of prices in wine, silk, grain and hemp. Economic distress was almost certainly not enough, in itself, to radicalise the peasantry and to make them support the démoc-socs (who by this stage were coming to be known simply as ‘socialists’). The countryside had been ravaged with poverty and famine in the past, yet this had not turned the peasants into revolutionaries. Indeed, some historians have argued that the evidence of peasant politicisation under the Second Republic has been misread: the peasantry, argues Eugen Weber, were merely reacting to their own local economic concerns, or to village feuds, and followed the lead of the rural notables, some of whom were certainly ‘reds’. The point Weber makes is that the sincerity and depth of peasant radicalisation were rather superficial, merely dressing up traditional loyalties, conflicts and concerns in modern political clothing.79 But in a sense, as Weber himself argues in a later article, this does not matter: the politics of universal male suffrage empowered the peasants at least to choose sides between rival local politicians, and this was expressed in political terms, marking a start in bringing the rural community into national politics.80
This was achieved in no small part by radical propagandists who not only followed the obvious tactic of exploiting peasant economic distress and disillusionment with President Bonaparte but did so in ways that slotted easily into rural life. Rural almanacs interspersed advice on farming, climate and remedies with political articles, sometimes taking the form of a dialogue between a knowledgeable (for which read démoc-soc) peasant successfully convincing one of his less enlightened associates of the wisdom of the radical, republican way. Though subscribers to the radical press tended to be those literate villagers who had some cultural ties with the wider world - teachers, café-owners, the village mayor, postal workers, doctors and veterinarians - they acted as ‘culture brokers’ who disseminated the ideas to a wider audience. Café-owners, in particular, had a strong sense of grievance because business was hit by the wine tax, so they had good reason to marshal their customers against the government.81 In the electoral campaign of 1849 the démoc-socs did not merely harp on about some golden, utopian future, but rather offered practical solutions to the immediate rural crisis. They promised reductions in taxation and cheap credit, both of which would appeal to despairing peasant smallholders. In some areas ‘red’ candidates lent their weight to peasant resistance against the ‘f
orty-five centimes’ tax. In Paris a démoc-soc committee was elected from workers, shopkeepers and intellectuals from the surviving political clubs and workers’ associations, representing a broad spectrum of left-wing opinion. In April this committee tried, for the first time, to forge what had been lacking in the previous year: a truly nationwide electoral organisation, corresponding with other provincial committees and coordinating policies with the left-wing members of the outgoing National Assembly. It also issued a single electoral programme for all démoc-soc candidates standing in Paris and its environs, declaring that deputies would resist all violations of the constitution and that ‘the right to work is the most important of all human rights; it is the right to life’.82 Perhaps the notoriously fractious French left managed to keep its unity until the elections because much of the extremist leadership had been in prison since the previous summer, so there was less pressure from them.
When the elections came, 500 of the 750 seats were taken by conservatives, most of them monarchists with 200 of them ultra-royalist Legitimists. The centre, as expected, collapsed, with only seventy seats falling to the moderate republicans. The radicals and the démoc-socs took an impressive 180 seats. Moreover, this success - which was remarkable, given the official hostility and obstruction that left-wing candidates faced - was not restricted to the traditionally militant districts of Paris and Lyon (in the latter city, the démoc-socs secured almost 70 per cent of the vote). They did well in certain rural regions, capturing more than 40 per cent of the vote in the Massif Central, the Rhône and Saône valleys and Alsace, and performed impressively in the Midi and the far north. Thus, ‘a “red France” was revealed’.83 The diffusion of démoc-soc propaganda proved to be most effective in those areas where there was a high proportion of small plots of land, where the peasants were vulnerable to the desperate economic conditions of the later 1840s and where the influence of large landowners was weak. This was especially true of the vine- and olive-growing regions of the south, where the smallholders did not live on isolated farmsteads but together in the village, where they socialised, allowing for both the exchange of ideas and cooperation. Such a social environment often had a small middle class of ‘culture brokers’ who were eager to challenge the local notables. The démoc-socs made a particular impact in villages that enjoyed regular interaction and interdependence with towns. In south-eastern France the small towns and bourgs (rural towns with markets) provided regular meeting- and trading-places for the inhabitants of the outlying hamlets and villages. They therefore proved to be important conduits for the dissemination of radical republican ideas into the countryside, through low-level political organisations that quietly flourished without attracting unwelcome attention from the authorities. In some of these areas the left sowed seeds that bore political fruit for over a hundred years.84 In the nearer future the démoc-socs hoped to build on their success of 1849 and win the next national elections, when both the three-year term of the new legislature and Bonaparte’s presidency expired. The left dared to believe that 1852 was going to be ‘their year’.
As left-wing ambitions flourished, so conservative fears grew. ‘Terror’, wrote Tocqueville, ‘was universal.’ The monarchists understood that the continuing republican vigour did not allow the new National Assembly to abandon the republic altogether. As Tocqueville put it, the conservatives ‘rediscovered tolerance and modesty, virtues which they had practised after February [1848], but which they had largely forgotten in the last six months’.85 That, though, did not stop them from looking for ways to defeat the radicals once and for all. Short-term repression coupled with harassment was one answer, but so too was a more permanent, authoritarian solution. As early as 16 May, Charles, Duc de Morny - and Louis-Napoleon’s half-brother - wrote to a friend that ‘the Empire is the only thing that can save the situation. Some of the leading politicians have been nibbling at the idea.’86 The conflict between conservatives and the republican left could only become more intense.
The first clash came when Oudinot’s troops attacked the Roman republic in June. This action was illegal, as it ignored the parliamentary decree forbidding the use of force against Rome. It also broke the constitution, which loftily declared that the Second Republic ‘respects foreign nationalities, as she intends to have her own respected; she will not undertake any war of conquest or employ her forces against the liberty of any other people’.87 Tocqueville, who had recently taken office as foreign minister, was horrified by the predictable domestic consequences of such a bare-faced breach of the law:
The first thing I learned when I joined the cabinet [on 2 June] was that the order to attack Rome had been sent three days previously to our army. This flagrant disobedience against the injunctions of a sovereign Assembly, this war begun against a people in revolution, because of its own revolution, and despite the very terms of the constitution . . . made inevitable and very close the conflict which everyone feared . . . All the letters from the prefects which we saw, all the police reports which came to us, were of a kind which threw us into a deep sense of alarm.88
Writing here with hindsight, Tocqueville was being a little disingenuous, since he agreed that the war on Rome was essential for French prestige. But he did not exaggerate when he wrote that the intervention set the battle lines for the next domestic political clash. Paris in the summer of 1849 was feverish, both politically and literally, for an outbreak of cholera was sweeping murderously through the city. The démoc-soc committee’s April programme, with precisely the Roman expedition in mind, had proclaimed that ‘Nations like men have mutual obligations - the use of French troops against the liberty of another people is a crime - a violation of the constitution.’89 Shortly after the May elections, the same group sent a delegation to the parliament to warn that if the government insisted on using force against Rome, it would be overthrown. While the orders to Oudinot were kept secret, news of the first attack reached Paris on 10 June. The ‘Mountain’, or the left of the Assembly, exploded in anger in the next day’s session. Ledru-Rollin - who had emerged as leader of the left-wing opposition - rose in the National Assembly to denounce the war, declaring that he and his colleagues would defend the constitution by all means, even by taking up arms. He called for the impeachment of President Bonaparte and the cabinet. A furious debate followed,90 but, facing an overwhelming conservative majority, there was little the parliamentary left could do but hurl its best rhetoric against the government. The impeachment motion, inevitably, was easily defeated.
The attack on Rome, however, became a cause around which Parisian radicalism could mobilise its supporters. Prior to the parliamentary debate, on the morning of 11 June, delegates from the démoc-soc committee had discussed tactics with the editors of the republican press. They agreed on a mass demonstration, knowing full well - as one of their number, Victor Considérant, pointed out - that it would be met with violence. Only Émile Girardin of La Presse stood against it, arguing that the cholera outbreak had weakened the popular movement. The plan was for a peaceful, unarmed protest to march on the National Assembly, where the deputies of the Mountain would declare the government and existing parliament incompetent and proclaim themselves as a new ‘National Convention’. That same morning the Montagnards - the nickname for the démoc-socs, recalling the days of the 1789 revolution - met in caucus in the chamber. They agreed to this plan, so by the time Ledru-Rollin issued his call for impeachment, he and his colleagues had already committed themselves to support what was, in effect, a revolutionary (albeit hopefully bloodless) coup d’état. This was no sudden impulse, but it flowed from a sincere belief that they were defending democracy in France and abroad. It was also, frankly, a bid for power where electoral politics had failed, justified by the left to themselves on the basis of the April programme’s rather ambiguous claim that ‘the Republic is superior to the right of majorities’.91
On the morning of 13 June, the people of Paris awoke to read three proclamations pasted on street walls and published in the repub
lican press. The Mountain declared that the Assembly and the government, by violating the constitution and siding ‘with the kings against the people’, had abdicated power; the second, issued by the démoc-soc committee, called on the National Guard and the army to support the popular protest; the third summoned all the people to a ‘calm demonstration’ in defence of the constitution.
Led by Étienne Arago, a crowd of 25,000, including some 5,000 National Guards, gathered on the boulevards in the morning. Marx, summoned from his lodgings on the rue de Lille by a fellow German exile, may have been among the demonstrators. Herzen, who certainly was there, left a graphic eyewitness account. The crowd marched down the boulevards, singing ‘The Marseillaise’ and chanting, ‘Vive la constitution! Vive la république! ’ ‘One who has not heard the Marseillaise,’ wrote Herzen, ‘sung by thousands of voices in that state of nervous excitement and irresolution which is inevitable before certain conflict, can hardly realise the overwhelming effect of the revolutionary hymn.’92 Marx, though, was unimpressed: sceptical about the Montagnard leadership, which he saw as ‘petty bourgeois’, and certain that ‘the memory of June 1848 surged through the ranks of the Parisian proletariat more vigorously than ever’, he thought that the slogans were ‘uttered mechanically, icily, and with a bad conscience’.93 As the column reached the rue de la Paix, they were confronted by infantry and cavalry led by Changarnier, who succeeded in separating the demonstrators into two sections and driving some of them northwards, away from the boulevards. Some of the protesters bared their chests to the bayonets, daring the troops to impale their brothers; others called on the soldiers to defend the republic and pleaded the cause of Rome. Herzen found himself ‘nose to nose with a horse which was almost snorting in my face, and a dragoon swearing likewise in my face and threatening to give me one with the flat [of his sabre] if I did not move aside’. He ran into Arago, whose hip was dislocated as he tried to escape the cavalry.94