French Second Republic
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French Republic République française (French) | |||||||||
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1848–1852 | |||||||||
Motto: Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" | |||||||||
Anthem: Le Chant des Girondins "The Song of Girondists" | |||||||||
President | | ||||||||
• 1848–1852 | Prince Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte | ||||||||
Vice President | |||||||||
• 1849–1852 | Henri Georges Boulay de la Meurthe | ||||||||
Jacques-Charles Dupont | |||||||||
• 1851 (last) | Léon Faucher | ||||||||
Legislature | Coup d'état | 2 December 1851 | |||||||
• Establishment of the Second Empire | 2 December 1852 | ||||||||
Currency | French Franc | ||||||||
ISO 3166 code | FR | ||||||||
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Today part of | France Algeria |
The French Second Republic (French: Deuxième République Française or La IIe République), officially the French Republic (République française), was the second republican government of France. It existed from 1848 until its dissolution in 1852.
Following the final defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte at the Battle of Waterloo, France had been reconstituted into a monarchy known as the Bourbon Restoration. After a brief period of revolutionary turmoil in 1830, royal power was again secured in the "July Monarchy", governed under principles of moderate conservatism and improved relations with the United Kingdom.
In 1848,
Under the Second Republic's constitution, the president was restricted to a single term. Louis-Napoléon overthrew the republic in an 1851 coup d'état, proclaimed himself Emperor Napoleon III, and created the Second French Empire.
Revolution of 1848
France's
The
But to the left of the dynastic parties, the monarchy was criticized by Republicans (a mixture of
On 14 February 1848, Guizot's government decided to put an end to the banquets, on the grounds of constituting illegal political assembly. On 22 February, striking workers and Republican students took to the streets, demanding an end to Guizot's government, and erected barricades. Odilon Barrot called a motion of no confidence in Guizot, hoping that this might satisfy the rioters, but the Chamber of Deputies sided with the premier. The government called a state of emergency, thinking it could rely on the troops of the National Guard, but instead on the morning of 23 February, the Guardsmen sided with the revolutionaries, protecting them from the regular soldiers who by now had been called in.
The industrial population of the
On 23 February 1848 Premier François Guizot's cabinet resigned, abandoned by the petite bourgeoisie, on whose support they thought they could depend. The heads of the more left-leaning conservative-liberal monarchist parties, Louis-Mathieu Molé and Adolphe Thiers, declined to form a government. Odilon Barrot accepted, and Thomas Robert Bugeaud, commander-in-chief of the first military division, who had begun to attack the barricades, was recalled. In the face of the insurrection that had now taken possession of the whole capital, King Louis-Philippe abdicated in favor of his nine-year-old grandson, Prince Philippe, Count of Paris, but under pressure from insurgents who invaded the chamber of the Chamber of Deputies, leaders leaned in favor of the insurrection and prepared a provisional government; a (second) republic was then proclaimed by Alphonse de Lamartine. [3]
The
But, in 1830, the republican-socialist party set up a rival government at the Hôtel de Ville (city hall), including Louis Blanc, Armand Marrast, Ferdinand Flocon, and Alexandre Martin, known as Albert L'Ouvrier ("Albert the Worker"), which bid fair to involve discord and civil war. But this time the Palais Bourbon was not victorious over the Hôtel de Ville. It had to consent to a fusion of the two bodies, in which, however, the predominating elements were the moderate Republicans. It was uncertain what the policy of the new government would be. [3]
One party seeing that despite the changes in the last sixty years of all political institutions, the position of the people had not been improved, demanded a reform of society itself, the abolition of the privileged position of property, which they viewed as the only obstacle to equality, and as an emblem hoisted the
The first collision took place as to the form which the
The result of the general election, the return of a predominantly moderate, if not monarchical, constituent assembly dashed the hopes of those who had looked for the establishment, by a peaceful revolution, of their ideal socialist state. but they were not prepared to yield without a struggle, and in Paris itself they commanded a formidable force. In spite of the preponderance of the "tricolor" party in the provisional government, so long as the voice of France had not spoken, the socialists, supported by the Parisian proletariat, had exercised an influence on policy disproportionate to their relative numbers. By the decree of 24 February, the provisional government had solemnly accepted the principle of the "right to work," and decided to establish "National Workshops" for the unemployed; at the same time, a sort of industrial parliament was established at the Luxembourg Palace, under the presidency of Louis Blanc, with the object of preparing a scheme for the organization of labor; and, lastly, by the decree of 8 March, the property qualification for enrolment in the National Guard had been abolished and the workmen were supplied with arms. The socialists thus formed a sort of state-within-a-state, complete with a government and an armed force.[3]
1848 uprisings
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On 15 May, an armed mob, headed by Raspail, Blanqui and Barbès, and assisted by the proletariat-aligned Guard, attempted to overwhelm the Assembly, but were defeated by the bourgeois-aligned battalions of the National Guard. Meanwhile, the national workshops were unable to provide remunerative work for the genuine unemployed, and of the thousands who applied, the greater number were employed in aimless digging and refilling of trenches; soon even this expedient failed, and those for whom work could not be invented were given a half wage of 1 franc a day.[3]
On 21 June, Alfred de Falloux decided in the name of the parliamentary commission on labour that the workmen should be discharged within three days and those who were able-bodied should be forced to enlist in the armed forces.[5]
After this, the
Constitution
The
Presidential election of 1848
The election was keenly contested; the democratic republicans adopted as their candidate Ledru-Rollin, the "pure republicans" Cavaignac, and the recently reorganized Imperialist party Prince
Presidency of Louis Napoléon
For three years, there was an indecisive struggle between the heterogeneous Assembly and the President, who was silently awaiting his opportunity. He chose as his ministers men with little inclination towards republicanism, with a preference for
This looked like a declaration of war against the Catholic and monarchist majority in the Legislative Assembly, which had been elected on 28 May in a moment of panic. But the president again pretended to be playing the game of the Orléanists, as he had done in the case of the Constituent Assembly. The complementary elections of March and April 1850 resulted in an unexpected victory for the republicans which alarmed the conservative leaders, Thiers,
A conservative electoral law was passed on 31 May. It required each voter to prove three years' residence at his current address by way of entries in the record of direct taxes. This effectively repealed universal suffrage: factory workers, who moved fairly often, were thus disenfranchised. The law of 16 July aggravated the severity of the press restrictions by re-establishing the "caution money" (cautionnement) deposited by proprietors and editors of papers with the government as a guarantee of good behaviour. Finally, an interpretation of the law on clubs and political societies suppressed about this time all the republican societies.[5]
Coup d'état and end of the Second Republic
The president had only joined the cry of "Down with the Republicans!" in Montalembert in the hope of effecting a revision of the constitution without having recourse to a coup d'état. His concessions only increased the boldness of the monarchists, who had only accepted Louis-Napoléon as president in opposition to the Republic and as a step in the direction of the monarchy. A conflict was now inevitable between his personal policy and the majority of the Chamber, who were divided into legitimists and Orléanists in spite of the death of Louis-Philippe in August 1850.[5]
Louis-Napoléon exploited their projects for a restoration of the monarchy, which he knew to be unpopular in the country, and which gave him the opportunity of furthering his own personal ambitions. From 8 August to 12 November 1850 he went about France stating the case for a revision of the constitution in speeches which he varied according to each place; he held reviews, at which cries of "Vive Napoléon!" showed that the army was with him; he superseded
His reply to the votes of censure passed by the Assembly, and their refusal to increase his civil list was to hint at a vast communistic plot in order to scare the bourgeoisie, and to denounce the electoral law of 31 May 1850, in order to gain the support of the mass of the people. The Assembly retaliated by throwing out the proposal for a partial reform of that article of the constitution which prohibited the re-election of the president and the re-establishment of universal suffrage (July). All hope of a peaceful issue was at an end. When the questors called upon the Chamber to have posted in all barracks the decree of 6 May 1848 concerning the right of the Assembly to demand the support of the troops if attacked, the Mountain, dreading a restoration of the monarchy, voted with the Bonapartists against the measure, thus disarming the legislative power.[10]
Louis-Napoléon saw his opportunity, and organised the
See also
References
- ^ "Second Republic | French history | Britannica". www.britannica.com. Retrieved 14 July 2022.
- ^ "Les couleurs du drapeau de 1848". Revue d'Histoire du Xixe Siècle – 1848 (in French). 28 (139): 237–238. 1931.
- ^ a b c d e f g h Wiriath 1911, p. 867.
- ^ a b Mona Ozouf, "Liberté, égalité, fraternité", in Lieux de Mémoire (dir. Pierre Nora), tome III, Quarto Gallimard, 1997, pp. 4353–4389 (in French) (abridged translation, Realms of Memory, Columbia University Press, 1996–1998 (in English))
- ^ a b c d e f g h Wiriath 1911, p. 868.
- ^ Arnaud Coutant, 1848, Quand la République combattait la Démocratie, Mare et Martin, 2009
- ^ Maurice Agulhon, The Republican Experiment, 1848–1852 (1983)
- ISBN 9780141941516.
- ^ Wiriath 1911, pp. 868–869.
- ^ a b Wiriath 1911, p. 869.
- ISBN 9781134734689.
Sources
- public domain: Wiriath, Paul (1911). "France: History". In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 10 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 867–869. This article incorporates text from a publication now in the
Further reading
- Agulhon, Maurice. The Republican Experiment, 1848–1852 (The Cambridge History of Modern France) (1983) excerpt and text search
- Amann, Peter H. "Writings on the Second French Republic." Journal of Modern History 34.4 (1962): 409–429.
- Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848–1849. Penguin Random House.
- Furet, François. Revolutionary France 1770–1880 (1995), pp 385–437. survey of political history by leading scholar
- Guyver, Christopher, The Second French Republic 1848–1852: A Political Reinterpretation, New York: Palgrave, 2016
- Price, Roger, ed. Revolution and reaction: 1848 and the Second French Republic (Taylor & Francis, 1975).
- Price, Roger. The French Second Republic: A Social History (Cornell UP, 1972).
In French
- Sylvie Aprile, La Deuxième République et le Second Empire, Pygmalion, 2000
- Choisel, Francis, La Deuxième République et le Second Empire au jour le jour, chronologie érudite détaillée, Paris, CNRS Editions, 2015.
- Inès Murat, La Deuxième République, Paris: Fayard, 1987
- Philippe Vigier, La Seconde République, (series Que sais-je?) Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967