1848 (59 page)

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:

 

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 republican 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

Changarnier's intervention had been swift and decisive: the Mountain, according to the original plan, was to wait for the arrival of the protesters at the National Assembly, but they had been stopped short and dispersed. Ledru-Rollin and his colleagues were therefore isolated until a unit of left-wing National Guards arrived to protect them. They made their way to the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, arriving at 2.15 p.m., and began their deliberations behind a protective cordon of barricades. The left-wing caucus - initially numbering 119 - called the people to arms. Yet Paris did not explode as it had the previous June, not least because Changarnier had moved quickly to secure all the main intersections and strategic points. Some of the demonstrators who had been dispersed by Changarnier certainly ran home, gathered up their weapons and built barricades, but these hastily constructed defences - one of them merely a flimsy pile of wicker chairs plundered from a nearby café - were easily stormed by the government troops. As the forces closed in on the Conservatoire, the Mountain started to appoint a provisional government, but its futile work was interrupted when Changarnier's men broke into the courtyard. Some of the deputies, mistaking the soldiers for reinforcements, rushed out to greet them, but found themselves literally forced up against a wall. It seemed that they were about to be summarily shot when, for reasons that are not clear, the troops suddenly withdrew, allowing all but six of the deputies to flee through back doors and windows and from there into exile. Ledru-Rollin made good his escape to London, but first (it is said) he had to squeeze his corpulent body through one of the Conservatoire's windows. Herzen escaped arrest by picking up his passports and leaving France for Geneva.

The insurrection seems to have failed because its original plan - to be effectively a parliamentary coup backed by the threat of force - had been shattered by Changarnier's ruthless and decisive response. There was no contingency plan, so by the time the Mountain tried to set itself up as a revolutionary government in the Conservatoire, the forces of order had already taken the initiative and prevented the uprising from escalating. By contrast, the Mountain had to direct a full-blown insurrection of a type for which it had not planned. In this respect the absence of the battle-hardened Blanqui and other revolutionary leaders of the extreme left was a tactical weakness. It deprived the insurrection of the fierce leadership, seasoned in barricade fighting, which might have brought out a hard core of determined, working-class revolutionaries.
⁹⁵
As Tocqueville bluntly put it, ‘in June 1848, the leaders lacked an army; in June 1849 the army lacked leaders'.
⁹⁶
Herzen agreed: when the provisional government was being established, he saw workers wandering aimlessly about the streets, ‘with inquiring faces and finding neither advice nor leadership, [they] went home, convinced once more of the bankruptcy of the
Montagnard
fathers of the country'. He came across one man who, fighting back tears, sobbed, ‘All is lost!'
⁹⁷
The Parisian uprising had echoes in the provinces - in the Allier and the Rhône, an indication of the success of
démoc-soc
propaganda, but especially in Lyon, where barricades were thrown up by silk-weavers, only to be blown apart by artillery. In the fighting twenty-five people were killed on each side and afterwards twelve hundred insurgents were arrested. Some soldiers faced the firing squad for joining the uprising.
⁹⁸

Repressive legislation followed, in which the government was given the power to ban any political club or public meeting; a press law defined new offences, including insulting the president and inciting disobedience among soldiers, and ordered that hawkers of political literature (
colporteurs -
a traditional means by which the printed word reached the countryside) would henceforth require a permit from the local prefect. Some thirty-four Montagnard deputies were later condemned by a court meeting in Versailles, removing at a stroke some of the most experienced and recognisable leaders of the left. Yet the uprisings had been essentially urban phenomena, with the most serious outbreaks being in Paris and Lyon. With universal suffrage and with the constitution violated but still intact, the surviving left-wing militants, though temporarily demoralised by the defeats of June 1849, could still work with some confidence amongst the rural electorate.
⁹⁹