French Revolution of 1848
French Revolution of 1848 | |||
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Part of the Revolutions of 1848 | |||
Date | 22–24 February 1848 | ||
Location | Paris, France | ||
Resulted in |
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Non-centralized leadership Thomas Bugeaud
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The French Revolution of 1848 (
The revolution took place in
Background
This section needs additional citations for verification. (March 2022) |
Under the Charter of 1814, Louis XVIII ruled France as the head of a constitutional monarchy. Upon Louis XVIII's death, his brother, the Count of Artois, ascended to the throne in 1824, as Charles X. Supported by the ultra-royalists, Charles X was an extremely unpopular reactionary monarch whose aspirations were far more grand than those of his deceased brother. He had no desire to rule as a constitutional monarch, taking various steps to strengthen his own authority as monarch and weaken that of the lower house.[citation needed]
In 1830, Charles X of France, presumably instigated by one of his chief advisers,
Nicknamed the "Bourgeois Monarch", Louis Philippe sat at the head of a moderately liberal state controlled mainly by an educated elite. He was supported by the Orléanists and opposed on his right by the
During the reign of Louis Philippe, the privileged "financial aristocracy", i.e. bankers, stock exchange magnates, railroad barons, owners of coal mines, iron ore mines, and forests and all landowners associated with them, tended to support him, while the industrial section of the bourgeoisie, which may have owned the land their factories sat on but not much more, were disfavored by Louis Philippe and actually tended to side with the middle class and laboring class in opposition to Louis Philippe in the Chamber of Deputies.[4] Land-ownership was favored, and this elitism resulted in the disenfranchisement of much of the middle and working classes.[citation needed]
By 1848, only about one percent of the population held the franchise. Although France had a
Alexis de Tocqueville observed, "We are sleeping together in a volcano. ... A wind of revolution blows, the storm is on the horizon." Lacking the property qualifications to vote, the lower classes were about to erupt in revolt.[8]
Economic and international influences
The French middle class watched changes in Britain with interest. When Britain's Reform Act 1832 extended enfranchisement to any man paying taxes of £10 or more per year (previously the vote was restricted to landholders), France's free press took interest. Meanwhile, economically, the French working class may perhaps have been slightly better off than Britain's working class. Still, unemployment in France threw skilled workers down to the level of the proletariat. The only nominally social law of the July Monarchy was passed in 1841. This law prohibited the use of labor of those children under eight years of age, and the employment of children less than 13 years old for night-time work. This law was routinely flouted.[citation needed]
The year 1846 saw a financial crisis and bad harvests, and the following year saw an economic depression. A poor railway system hindered aid efforts, and the peasant rebellions that resulted were forcibly crushed. According to French economist
Bastiat, who was one of the most famous political writers of the 1840s, had written countless works concerning the economic situation before 1848, and provided a different explanation of why the French people were forced to rise in the revolt. He believed that the main reasons were primarily the political corruption, along with its very complex system of monopolies, permits, and bureaucracy, which made those who were able to obtain political favors unjustly privileged and able to dictate the market conditions and caused a myriad of businesses to collapse, as well as protectionism which was the basis for the French foreign trade at the time, and which caused businesses along the Atlantic Coast to file for bankruptcy, along with the one owned by Bastiat's family. Indeed, most of Bastiat's early works concern the situation in Bayonne and Bordeaux, two large merchant harbors before the Napoleonic Wars, gradually devastated first by Napoleon I's continental blockade, and later by the protectionist legislation of the nineteenth century. According to Bastiat's biographer, G.C. Roche, just prior to the revolution, 100,000 citizens of Lyon were described as "indigent" and by 1840 there were at least 130,000 abandoned children in France. International markets were not similarly troubled at the time, which Bastiat attributed to the freedom of trade. Indeed, a large part of French economic problems in the 1830s and 1840s were caused by the shortage and unnaturally high prices of different products which could have easily been imported from other countries, such as textiles, machines, tools, and ores, but doing so was either outright illegal at the time or unprofitable due to the system of punitive tariffs.[citation needed]
Bastiat has also noted that the French legislators were entirely unaware of the reality and the effects of their radical policies. One of the members of the French Chamber of Deputies reportedly received a standing ovation when he proposed that the depression of 1847 was due primarily to "external weakness" and "idle pacifism". Nationalist tendencies caused France to severely restrict all international contacts with the United Kingdom, including the ban on importing tea, perceived as destructive to the French national spirit.[10] As the United Kingdom was the largest economy in the world in the nineteenth century, France deprived itself of its most important economic partner, one that could have supplied France with what it lacked and bought surplus French goods.[citation needed]
Such governmental policies and obliviousness to the real reasons of economic troubles were, according to Bastiat, the main causes of the French Revolution of the 1848 and the rise of socialists and anarchists in the years preceding the revolution itself.[citation needed]
Because political gatherings and demonstrations were outlawed in France, activists of the largely middle class opposition to the government began to hold a series of fund-raising banquets. This campaign of banquets (Campagne des banquets), was intended to circumvent the governmental restriction on political meetings and provide a legal outlet for popular criticism of the regime. The campaign began in July 1847. Friedrich Engels was in Paris dating from October 1847 and was able to observe and attend some of these banquets.[11] He wrote a series of articles on them, including "The Reform Movement in France" which was published in La Rèforme on 20 November 1847; "Split in the Camp—the Rèforme and the National—March of Democracy" published in The Northern Star on 4 December 1847; "Reform Banquet at Lille—Speech of LeDru-Rollin" published in The Northern Star on 16 December 1847; "Reform Movement in France—Banquet of Dijon" published in The Northern Star on 18 December 1847; "The Réforme and the National" published in the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung on 30 December 1847; and "Louis Blanc's Speech at the Dijon Banquet" published in the Deutsche-Brusseler-Zeitung on 30 December 1847.[12]
On 14 January 1848, ahead of the highly awaited next banquet in Paris, the government of prime minister François Guizot outlawed it. Nonetheless, the banquet's organizers decided that it would still be held, alongside a political demonstration, and scheduled it for 22 February.[13]
Revolution
22 February
Aware of the political gatherings scheduled for the following day, the French government banned the political banquets for the second time on 21 February. The ban succeeded in pressuring the organizing committee to cancel the events. However, the workers and students, mobilising in the previous days, refused to back down over the demonstrations.
The crowds, mostly unarmed, easily overcame the few Municipal Guardsmen, filling the squares and nearly invading the
23 February
On 23 February, the
Upon Guizot's resignation, the leaders of the Movement Party (known as the "dynastic opposition"), Adolphe Thiers and Odilon Barrot, congratulated themselves on achieving a change of ministry while preserving the monarchy.[15] After news of Guizot's resignation spread through Paris, fighting gradually ceased and the crowds began to celebrate.[15] However, despite the fall of an unpopular government, underlying social pressures remained, and republicans still sought to secure a change of regime.[15]
At around 9:30 pm, a crowd of over six hundred gathered outside the
News of the massacre soon sparked anger among Parisians. After the crowd regrouped on the Boulevard des Capucines, some of the dead were loaded on to horse-drawn wagons and paraded through the streets by workers calling for vengeance, as a general call to arms.[15][13] During the night between 23 and 24 February, over 1,500 barricades were erected throughout Paris, and many railways leading to the city were sabotaged.[14]
24 February
By 24 February, Paris was a barricaded city, and King Louis Philippe remained without a government, as first Molé, then Thiers, failed to form a cabinet.
During the morning, heavy fighting broke out in several parts of Paris, with the largest combat taking place at the Place du Château d'Eau.[13] There, armed insurgents attacked the Château d'Eau, a guard post on the way to the Tuileries held by about one hundred men of the Municipal Guard and the despised 14th Line Regiment. After intense fighting, the Château d'Eau was overrun and set on fire, with the surviving soldiers throwing away their weapons in surrender.[15]
With the insurgents closing in on the royal palace, Thiers advised Louis Philippe to leave Paris and crush the revolution from outside with an overwhelming force of regular troops; however, this strategy was soundly rejected by Thiers' colleagues, including Barrot.
Louis Philippe and
Later political developments
After Louis Philippe's abdication, his daughter-in-law
Responding to cries of "To the Hôtel de Ville!", Lamartine, along with the left-wing republican deputy
Impact abroad
The February Revolution had a major impact in Europe, sparking a revolutionary wave known as the Revolutions of 1848.[19][15] The American chargé d'affaires to the Austrian Empire, William H. Stiles, reported the Revolution "fell like a bomb amid the states and kingdoms of the Continent", and that "the various monarchs hastened to pay their subjects the constitutions which they owed them".[15] As one of its immediate effects, it sparked a wave of revolutions in the German states.[15] The outcome of the Revolution in France pressured the monarchs of Prussia, Bavaria, Austria and Sardinia into granting liberal reforms.[19]
In fiction
- Rudin, the protagonist of Ivan Turgenev's 1856 novel of the same name, dies at the barricades of the revolution in the epilogue.
- Gustave Flaubert's 1869 novel L'éducation sentimentale uses the 1848 revolution as a backdrop for its story.
- The character of Piotr Alejandrovitch Miusov, uncle and tutor of Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 1880 novel The Brothers Karamazov, hinted that he himself had almost taken part in the fighting on the barricades in the 1848 revolution.
- Choses vues by Victor Hugo includes passages concerning the author's actions during the time of the revolution in Paris. It was published posthumously in 1887.
- Alexis de Tocqueville's 1893 Recollections (also known as Souvenirs) provides primary insight from a moderate liberal as he saw events unfold.[20]
- Sylvia Townsend Warner's 1936 novel Summer Will Show uses the 1848 revolution as a primary part of the plot.
- Rachel Field's novel All This and Heaven Too (1938) uses unrest leading up to the 1848 revolution as a backdrop for its story.
- Laura Kalpakian's 1995 novel Cosette uses the 1848 revolution as a primary part of the plot.
- Kurt Andersen's 2007 novel Heyday begins with one of the protagonists witnessing and unintentionally participating in the 1848 revolution.
- L'Autre Dumas (English: The Other Dumas), a 2010 French film directed by Safy Nebbou, depicts Alexandre Dumasin a fictitious involvement with a young female revolutionary.
- The 2015 videogame Aviary Attorney is set in 1848 Paris, with the revolution kicking off during the game's third act. Depending on the player's actions, the revolution can turn out more or less violent than it did in real life.
See also
- Proclamation of the abolition of the monarchy
- Charles de Choiseul-Praslin
- History of the French Left
- Bourgeois revolution
- Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848–1849 by Christopher Clark
References
- ^ Albert Guèrard, France: A Modern History, p. 286.
- ^ Agnes de Stoeckl, King of the French: A Portrait of Louis Philippe, 1773–1850 (New York: G.P. Putnam & Sons, 1957) pp. 146–160.
- ^ Albert Guèrard, France: A Modern History p. 289.
- ^ a b "Class Struggles in France" in Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Volume 10, p. 48.
- ^ "The Reform Movement in France" in Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Volume 6 p. 380.
- ^ Georges Duveau, 1848: The Making of a Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1968) p. 7.
- ^ "Class Struggles in France" in the Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Volume 10, p. 54.
- ^ See Arnaud Coutant, Tocqueville et la Constitution démocratique, Mare et Martin, 2008.
- ^ F. Bastiat, A Negative Railroad, 1845
- ^ G.C. Roche, Frederic Bastiat, A Man Alone, p. 63
- ^ Heinrich Gemkow et al., Frederick Engels: A Biography (Dresden: Verlag Zeitim Bild, 1972) p. 131.
- ^ These articles are contained at pp. 375, 385, 393, 396, 406 and 409, respectively in Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Volume 6.
- ^ ISBN 0521289882.
- ^ NYU Press. pp. 56–57.
- ^ ISBN 9780748124350.
- ^ "Revolution in Paris" in Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Volume 6, p. 556.
- ^ "Château de Neuilly (couvent des Soeurs de St-Thomas de Villeneuve)". www.neuillysurseine.fr. Retrieved 7 February 2023.
- ^ Marquis de Flers (1891). Le Roi Louis-Philippe: Vie Anecdotique 1773-1850. Librairie de la Société des Gens de Lettres. p. 167-168.
- ^ a b Alban Dignat. "22 février 1848 Insurrection républicaine à Paris". Hérodote. Retrieved 13 March 2022.
- ISBN 9781412832786– via Google Books.
Bibliography
- Agulhon, Maurice (1983). The Republican Experiment, 1848–1852. The Cambridge History of Modern France. OL 3503110M.
- Amann, Peter H. (2015). Revolution and Mass Democracy: The Paris Club of 1848. Princeton University Press.
- Ankersmit, Frank (2016). "Tocqueville and Flaubert on 1848: The Sublimity of Revolution". Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal. 37 (2): 253–271. .
- Beecher, Jonathan (2021). Writers and Revolution: Intellectuals and the French Revolution of 1848. Cambridge University Press.
- Castleton, Edward (2018). "Untimely Meditations on the Revolution of 1848 in France". Opera Historica. 19 (2): 244–270. .
- Clark, Timothy J. (1999). Image of the people: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 revolution. University of California Press.
- Collins, Ross William (1923). Catholicism and the second French republic, 1848-1852. Columbia University Press. OL 16350140M.
- Coutant, Arnaud (2009). 1848, Quand la République combattait la Démocratie (in French). Mare et Martin.
- Crook, Malcolm (2015). "Universal Suffrage as Counter‐Revolution? Electoral Mobilisation under the Second Republic in France, 1848–1851". Journal of Historical Sociology. 28 (1): 49–66.
- Duveau, Georges (1966). 1848: The Making of a Revolution.
- Fasel, George (Autumn 1974). "The Wrong Revolution: French Republicanism in 1848". French Historical Studies. 8 (4): 654–677. JSTOR 285857.
- Fortescue, William (2005). France and 1848: The end of monarchy. Psychology Press. OL 22622246M.
- Heywood, O. E.; Heywood, C. M. (1994). "Rethinking the 1848 Revolution in France: The Provisional Government and its Enemies". History. 79 (257): 394–411. JSTOR 24422386.
- Kim, Richard (2012). "Virtue and the material culture of the nineteenth century: the debate over the mass marketplace in France in the aftermath of the 1848 revolution". Theory and society. 41 (6): 557–579.
- Loubère, Leo (1968). "The Emergence of the Extreme Left in Lower Languedoc, 1848–1851: Social and Economic Factors in Politics". American Historical Review. 73 (4): 1019–1051. JSTOR 1847387.
- Merriman, John M. (1978). The Agony of the Republic: The Repression of the Left in Revolutionary France, 1848-1851. Yale University Press.
- Moss, Bernard H. (1984). "June 13, 1849: the abortive uprising of French radicalism". French Historical Studies. 13 (3): 390–414. JSTOR 286299.
- Price, Roger, ed. (1975). Revolution and reaction: 1848 and the Second French Republic. Taylor & Francis.
- OL 13342684W.
- Takeda, Chinatsu (2018). "The Reception of Considerations: A Constitutional Historiography of the French Revolution (1818–1848)". Mme de Staël and Political Liberalism in France. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 261–279.
Primary sources
- De Tocqueville, Alexis(1896). Recollections: French Revolution of 1848.
- Marx, Karl (2003). The Class Struggles in France: From the February Revolution to the Paris Commune. Resistance Books.
External links
- "Encyclopedia of 1848 Revolutions" new articles by scholars
- Media related to French Revolution of 1848 at Wikimedia Commons