Chapter 24. The Revolution of 1830

None of the leading liberals, still less the ultras, had any suspicion that Charles’s coup d’etat would induce Paris to explode in revolution. Nor did the opposition factions in the Chamber of Deputies have any desire to see the return of armed masses—so redolent of the journees of the Great Revolution— with their capacity for violence against the well-to-do and against property. In 1830, bourgeois and nobles were still alive who could vividly recall the great masses of sans-culottes who had stormed the Bastille, battled the king’s troops in the Luxembourg Garden, and roared approvingly at the drop of the guillotine’s blade. Yet despite rumors that the king might use his Article 14 powers to act sternly against the new, more liberal Chamber of Deputies, the full scope of his repressive plans was virtually unknown to anyone outside the circle of his closest ministers. The new ordinances had been composed in such complete secrecy that Polignac kept the sole copy of them on his own person, even refusing to place them in a locked drawer in his desk.

Nor did Charles need to be convinced by any of his ministers that he had to act forcefully against the opposition in the Chamber. According to one recollection, the king, who soon left for his summer residence at Saint-Cloud, firmly declared on signing the ordinances: “The more I think about it the more I am convinced that it is impossible to do otherwise.”[379]

“THREE GLORIOUS DAYS”

But if the king was resolute, his liberal opponents were not. For them, the official publication of the ordinances—in the Moniteur on July 26—arrived like a thunderclap, sending them scurrying around, disoriented, to the homes and editorial offices of their allies. Even the commander of the Parisian Gendarmerie was taken completely by surprise; no one in the ministry had seen fit to inform him that his police forces might soon be needed to curb public violence. Many liberals and royalists in their country homes learned about the king’s coup d’etat from visitors streaming in panic from the capital. The public that did not subscribe to the Moniteur heard the news in reading rooms and cafes. The leading and lesser lights of the Parisian business, journalistic, and political communities nervously gathered—in small numbers or large—to discuss the implications of the king’s action, fearful of acting in a manner that would destabilize the monarchy.

Reports that were later published stated that owners of printing establishments had closed their shops to protest the restrictive press ordinance, but these accounts have no basis in reality. The establishments that did close down seem to have done so more because they feared prosecution by the authorities than as a “strike” against the king’s directives. In short, the middle classes behaved with the characteristic cowardice that marked their behavior in the face of any assault on their freedoms.

Initially, in fact, the Parisian public seemed to be quite indifferent to the coup. Monday, July 26, was a very hot day and, for workers in certain trades, a holiday. Large crowds flocked out of doors, seeking relief from the sweltering weather. They were not protesters, let alone insurgents, and seemed completely indifferent to the king’s ordinances, which, after all, affected only a small well- to-do minority of the population. Journalists and editors from a variety of periodicals, to be sure, did flock to the offices of the moderate National, which published a protest calling upon the people of France to refuse to pay taxes (a futile gesture that was not obeyed). Once the excited gathering at the National’s offices managed to sort itself out, it established a committee to draw up a protest against the ordinances. Written by the young Adolphe Thiers, a constitutional monarchist, it vaguely called for disobedience in response to the king’s action. After a great deal of bickering, the document was signed by journalists and editors of eleven leading periodicals in the capital, but beyond this gesture, none of the meetings that ensued in the late afternoon and evening, or even the following day, could produce agreement on a concrete form of action.

In the meantime, the king, his ministers, and officials in various governmental departments rested in the serene belief that the ordinances would evoke very little public response. None of the commanding generals in the country’s military districts were ordered to mobilize any troops, nor were any special measures taken to prepare the police for public disorders. On Monday the king, confident that the country was indifferent to his coup, followed his normal daily routine: he attended morning mass and then went hunting with the dauphin. In the evening the royal party returned to the palace, where they dined and spent the evening playing cards.

As for the holiday crowds in the streets, they too were quiescent for most of that Monday, July 26. Not even printers, faced with the loss of work, who took to the streets in angry protest, could persuade passersby to join them. But whatever catalyst it is that turns mildly curious crowds into protesters and protesters into insurrectionaries was very much at work on Monday evening. In the garden of the Palais Royal, a small crowd gathered before a print shop to read some verses posted in the window, when police officers arrived to close down the establishment, presumably because of an offense it had committed against the new press restrictions. As the curious crowd multiplied in number, it became unruly, booing the officers and shouting, “Long live the CharteV’ and, striking a new and dangerous note, “Down with the Bourbons!” An entirely spontaneous demonstration sprang up. The gendarmes, trained for crowd control, arrived in force, arrested eight resisting demonstrators, and cleared the garden and closed its gates.

But the crowd did not disperse—indeed, it reformed in the square of the Palais Royal. A number of rioters ran up the Rue de Rivoli, breaking streetlamps and shouting denunciations of the ministry, singling out Polignac in particular for condemnation. When the crowd reached the Ministry of Finance, it became violent, throwing stones at the guards and breaking office windows. Still another group, chanting denunciations of the ordinances, marched past the Ministry of Justice, where Polignac and four of his ministers were conferring on how to control the growing unrest. After moving off to the main boulevards, it dispersed. By midnight, in fact, the city was deceptively calm, and the Prefect of Police reported that tranquility had been restored. Small-scale riots had been seen before in Paris, and the authorities thought they had no reason to view these ones with any alarm.

But a major insurrection was in the offing. On the morning of Tuesday, June 27, crowds more menacing than those of the day before began to collect in the streets and squares of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, the crucible of Parisian journees during the Great Revolution, while bands of printers roamed the streets of the capital, calling on workers to support their protest. As the Palais Royal filled once again with angry crowds, the police tried to close the gates, scattering protesters into the surrounding squares and streets. The mounted gendarmes, whom the authorities had sent to the square to prevent further trouble, themselves provoked unrest: irritated by the heat and losing patience with the taunting crowds, they began to fire on the people. Fatally, the government had spilled blood, and the bodies of the revolution’s first martyrs were paraded through the streets with cries of “Death to the ministers!” and “Death to Polignac!”

What had begun as protests and scattered riots soon turned into an armed confrontation between the government and especially the workers of Paris. The king reacted to the gendarmerie’s shootings by appointing Auguste de Marmont, Duke of Raguse, to command the security forces. Among most Parisians, Marmont was particularly detested for abandoning Napoleon in April 1814 and defecting to the Allies. In fact, his very name had become a synonym (a “Ragusard”) for “opportunist” and “traitor.” The duke reacted forcefully to the shootings by sending out the entire Parisian garrison—royal guards, gendarmes, and troops of the line—to occupy the capital’s major squares and avenues—a provocative action that only stoked the crowd’s fury.

Finally, on Tuesday, July 27, the sporadic demonstrations ignited into a widespread insurrection. To slow down the movement of Marmont’s columns toward their prescribed destinations, barricades were reared all over the working-class districts in the central part of the right bank, where most of the government buildings were located. By seven o’clock in the evening, the troops were indiscriminately using their firearms against crowds that pelted them with stones, adding to the toll of the revolution’s martyrs. At twilight, far from diminishing, the crowds swelled, using the cover of night to ransack gun shops. Systematically blotting out the streetlamps, they plunged the insurrectionary parts of the capital into total darkness, enabling them to build their defenses and find weapons with impunity.

The crowd behaved with remarkable judiciousness and discrimination toward the various armed forces deployed against them, probably because many of the older insurrectionaries were veterans of the Napoleonic Wars and were possessed of a degree of political consciousness. They realized that in this situation the loyalties of the troops of the line—ordinary soldiers—were uncertain, as those of the hated gendarmes and royal guards were not. If the crowd behaved well toward the soldiers, they might cross over to the side of the people. Shrewdly they raised the cry, “Long live the line! Down with the gendarmes and the guard!” Demonstrators stayed at their barricades until around ten o’clock, when they began to return home for the night. By midnight, the crowds had all but disappeared. The authorities, thinking the lull meant the end of resistance, reduced their troop levels to mere street patrols near the Tuileries and the Place de la Bastille, while Marmont assured the imperturbable king that the uprising had been snuffed out.

But on Wednesday moming, July 28, the crowds reappeared in full force in the central districts. Indeed, they were even more numerous and threatening, as Marmont nervously reported, than they had been before. They were building ever more elaborate barricades in ever greater earnest—felling trees, pulling up paving stones, and overturning wagons and market stalls to construct them. Troops that tried to pass through the insurrectionary arrondisscments met with furious resistance. In the narrow streets adjoining the squares and boulevards, the columns were blocked by one barricade after another along their lines of advance. Each time they were halted, they were exposed to fire from insurgent muskets in adjacent houses and to barrages of paving stones, furniture, and tiles from the rooftops. Even when the troops succeeded in demolishing a barricade, a new one would quickly spring up in their rear, trapping them, so that they were sandwiched within the narrow streets and caught in murderous crossfire.

At around eleven a.m. a crowd in the Place de Greve overwhelmed the guard post before the Hotel de Ville, forced open the gates, and invaded the aged labyrinthine building, causing the prefect to flee. The National Guard, which Charles had disbanded in 1827 as a politically unreliable force, reappeared and occupied the city hall. Atop the building, in the central cupola, they replaced the white Bourbon flag with the oudawed tricolor as a symbol of revolutionary victory. Indeed, in one of their most inspired actions, the insurgents raised the tricolor on a tower of Noter Dame as well, where it could be seen by most residents of the city. The soldiers of the line, surrounded by friendly crowds, began to fraternize with the workers. By noon Marmont, hearing reports of this dangerous development, sent out his troops in larger units, in order to prevent small groups of soldiers from defecting. Battalion- and regiment-sized columns supported by artillery thus sallied forth to reclaim the city’s center, its strategic avenues, and the Hotel de Ville. Despite some short-lived advances, the results were disastrous for the Bourbon monarchy.

The Napoleonic veterans seem to have provided the insurgents with a degree of tactical flexibility that was lacking among their opponents’ officers. A direct confrontation on an open battlefield would have surely led to their defeat, but from the roofs and windows of their own apartment buildings, the insurgents could rain tiles and paves as well as bullets onto the hated guards and gendarmerie. With their intimate knowledge of their mazelike neighborhoods, they could establish communication links between barricades and strong- points, transforming large parts of the city into one vast revolutionary fortress. Troops were lured into confusing blind alleys and intricate passages where, despite their superior arms and training, they were placed on the defensive against the knowledgeable and agile insurgents. By July 29, a traveler who walked from the northern part of Paris toward the center of the city would have encountered barricades on nearly every street, at intervals of thirty feet or so, some of formidable size. Rareties during the Great Revolution, more barricades were reared in July 1830 than in any Parisian insurrection before or since.

Everywhere insurgent sniper fire took its demoralizing toll. Some commanders, especially those of the Swiss mercenary units in the Royal Guard, were unfamiliar with the winding streets, alleys, and cul-de-sacs of Paris, so that their forces lost nearly all communication with nearby troops. Even protective structures proved to be traps. The Swiss Guards seeking to retake the Hotel de Ville from the National Guards found themselves hopelessly surrounded by armed crowds in the Place de Greve and fired upon from the building. When the Swiss finally succeeded in taking the city hall, they soon found that they could get no reinforcements or supplies. Ordered to depart, most of the Swiss had to fight their way back to the outskirts of the city, once again barraged by fire from nearby buildings and narrow streets.

Finally, lacking food, drink, and even ammunition, Marmont’s forces grew ever more demoralized. The widespread revolt of the populace now seemed beyond their power to vanquish. At length, before Wednesday was out, nearly all the key government areas had fallen into insurgent hands, leaving only a single route open to troop movements. The columns that Marmont had sent into strategic areas during the previous day were thinned out not only by casualties but—perhaps more importandy—by a steady flow of defections. The loyalty of entire regiments was now totally unreliable. Units that had managed to pass through the barricaded streets found that they were confined to mere plazas, a few broad avenues, and government buildings, while the maze of streets surrounding them were held fast by the insurgents. Attempts by Marmont’s troops to subdue the densely populated areas that surrounded the seats of government were met with fierce but calculated resistance, and even the neighborhoods that Marmont’s troops had apparendy conquered were quickly reclaimed after the soldiers moved on.

By Thursday, July 29, the army had essentially been defeated. Even units of the normally reliable Royal Guards now refused to fight the populace. Moreover, any fears that loyal troops from the provinces would arrive to reinforce the Parisian garrison were dispelled as the provincials en route not only refused to supply the troops with food and drink but even attacked them along the roads. What remained of Marmont’s forces on this last day of the insurrection were either withdrawn to the outskirts of the city or fled of their own accord.

Some 2,000 people had died during the “three glorious days,” from Tuesday to Thursday. The overwhelming majority, some 1,800, were artisans, principally carpenters and joiners, cabinetmakers, stonemasons, shoemakers, locksmiths, jewelry makers, printers, and tailors. The middle classes do not seem to have played a consequential role in the fighting, judging from claims for compensation that wounded insurgents put in to the Commission des Recompenses Nationales after the uprising. During the street fighting class divisions had been marked, even in single buildings, let alone neighborhoods. Well-to-do royalists who rented apartments on the lower floors of the tenements, for example, provided food and drink for the troops trying to suppress the insurrection, while the workers who lived on the upper floors fought the same troops with weapons and stones from their windows and roofs. As David H. Pinkney sardonically observes:

In the so-called Bourgeois Revolution of 1830 the middle and upper bourgeoisie were either immune to bullets or absent from the firing line. Immunity is improbable, however, for some bourgeois met their ends as uninvolved bystanders.... On the ... list of dead [compiled by the Commission des Recompenses Nationales) were one doctor and one teacher but no bankers, no lawyers, no deputies, no publishers or journalists, although one source listed one journalist dead. A few from this class do figure among the wounded and other combatants—four doctors, one lawyer, and eight teachers but no journalists, no publishers, no deputies— and all combined their numbers do not even approach the number of masons or of cabinetmakers alone. The top-hatted bourgeois on the barricade in Ferdinand Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People” scarcely deserves his conspicuous place, certainly not as a symbol of his land in this perilous spot.[380]

THE UNRESOLVED REVOLUTION

In the week that followed the uprising, the defeated king and his entourage departed Paris, drifting slowly to the Channel ports and exile in England. To replace him, journalists, publishers, deputies, and, above all, dispossessed Bonapartist bureaucrats and officers were only too eager to use the popular uprising carried on and won by the workers of Paris to erect a regime that would be sympathetic to their own interests and prestige.

As we have seen, the Parisian liberals were republicans of various hues, some of them ostensibly Jacobin in spirit. Onjuly 29 they were still nervously debating the course of the revolution, rather than leading it on the barricades. But with the collapse of the royal defense of the city, they hastily draped themselves in the old tricolor and, joining with the constitutional monarchists, took the step of choosing a Municipal Commission, with members including Perier, the banker. Charged by the subdued Chamber of Deputies to provision and defend the capital and maintain order, this Commission—and it noticeably did not call itself a Commune, as revolutionary tradition prescribed—installed itself in the Hotel de Ville and began to sort out the extent of its authority.

The military power in Paris now consisted of two forces: the unorganized armed workers and the National Guard. As the only organized military force in Paris, the Guard was commanded by a constitutional monarchist, the Marquis de Lafayette, who, in his dubious transformation into a republican leader, had assiduously undertaken the job of holding at bay the more radical tendencies among the republican students, workers, National Guards, and Bonapartists. Among the disorganized forces of the worker-insurgents, there was no potential leader who could match Lafayette’s prestige and reputation. Thus when Lafayette ordered the muskets of the National Guard to back up the Municipal Commission, he ensured that the Commission was the sole administrative power in Paris. Like the Chamber of Deputies, the Commission favored the establishment of a liberal constitutional monarchy along the British parliamentary model. But who would fill the required role of monarch? The choice was made not by the insurrectionaries but by the banker Laffitte, his journalist colleague Thiers, and the historian Francois Guizot, who formed a cabal to promote the candidacy of Louis-Philippe, the Duke of Orleans. The duke was the son of Louis XVl’s rival, Philippe Egalite, who during the Great Revolution had abandoned his lofty tide to support the First Republic

Egalite’s renunciation, however, had not saved him from the guillotine, a fate that made his son, Louis-Philippe, all the more prudent. The Orleanists, as his supporters were called, and the republican “men of order” such as Lafayette, who upheld the leadership of the Municipal Commission, feared that any republic would necessarily become a terroristic Jacobin regime. Laffitte and Thiers thereupon entered into negotiations to bring Louis-Philippe to the throne under the tide “citizen king” or, more absurdly, the “king of the barricades”—despite the fact that during the street fighting the Duke of Orleans had abandoned the embatded capital for his safe retreat at Neuilly. In the political labyrinth after the insurrection, posters all over Paris were hailing him as the most suitable successor to Charles—a propaganda enterprise guided by Thiers and apparendy financed by Laffitte. Finally, with the guidance of his liberal advisers, none of whom had been active participants in the uprising, the duke began to sidle his way toward the throne.

What finally validated Louis-Philippe as a king “surrounded by republican institutions” (as his supporters were to put it) was Lafayette’s public embrace of him at the Hotel de Ville on July 31. Lest the crowd that gathered outside— which seemed to prefer a republic—get out of control and act on its own, Lafayette, as Chateaubriand tells us in his memoirs, “gave the Due d’Orleans a tncolor flag, went out on the balcony of the Hotel de Ville, and embraced the Prince before the eyes of the astounded crowd, while the Duke waved the national flag.” One of the more principled royalists, Chateaubriand sardonically concludes: “The republican kiss of Lafayette created a king.”[381]

Far from exhibiting any reluctance, Lafayette was only too willing to accept the duke as a monarch, a crass betrayal of the hopes of many of the workers who had made the 1830 Revolution. Indeed, Chateaubriand’s account takes note of the astonishment of the crowd at the action, not the “cheers” that some historians attribute to them. Thus, Lafayette once again showed himself to be a constitutional monarchist whose commitment to a republican government was largely rhetorical. Soon thereafter, nearly everyone in the new government apparendy wanted to be rid of this relic of 1789. After being granted the vacuous tide of “Honorary Commanding-General of the National Guard of the Kingdom,” which the seventy-three-year-old marquis considered an insult, he resigned from his command and virtually disappeared from the political scene.

On August 9, scarcely a week after Lafayette’s demonstrative blessing, Louis-Philippe, with the agreement of the Chambers of Deputies and Peers, was crowned sovereign. The coronation, which took place at the Palais Bourbon (the seat of the Chamber), was deliberately marked by an almost puritanical simplicity, in stark contrast to Charles’s ornate ceremony at the Cathedral of Rheims. In a largely civil ceremony that referred to “the will of the people” rather than “divine right,” the new monarch pledged to uphold the Charte, which itself was liberalized by the removal of the noxious preamble stating the document was a “voluntary” gift from the crown. The revisions also limited hereditary membership in the Chamber of Peers, lowered the voting age from 30 to 25, and reduced the tax qualifications for the franchise from 300 francs to 200. The Chamber of Deputies was instructed to pass laws to abolish press censorship and require jury trials instead of arbitrary judgments for journalistic malfeasances. Even education was made a state rather than a Church affair throughout the country, when the Chamber of Deputies appropriated funds to afford secular primary schools to communes instead of churches.

In deference to romantic nostalgia, the tricolor was made the official symbol of France. Louis-Philippe, in turn, pledged to “govern only by the laws and according to the laws.”[382] Amid cries of “Long live the king!” and “Long live Louis-Philippe I,” the duke accepted the crown, the scepter, and the royal sword from the peers and deputies, dutifully signing in triplicate the declarations endowing him with his new status, much as though they were a commercial contract. In this prosaic businesslike fashion, which presumably represented the triumph of republican virtue over absolutism, the duke accepted the throne as “king of the French” rather than “king of France.”

A calculating man, Louis-Philippe had traveled widely during his years of exile, even to the United States, and had spent his time patiently waiting for events to unfold on his behalf. When Villele’s compensation law was passed in 1825, he had duly regained the considerable landed properties that had been expropriated from his family, recouping much of his family fortune, and he rose to high position in the Bourbon regime. Indeed, the king’s behavior reflected a new kind of Frenchman that Honore de Balzac was depicting in his novels. Despite his aristocratic pedigree, in his habits Louis-Philippe was a parsimonious and stolid bourgeois, cautious about advancing himself; indeed, even after he was established as king, he retained a cordial attitude toward ordinary people, who freely visited the royal palace as though it were a public institution. In his dress the “citizen king” was plain, and his reign—the July Monarchy, as it was called—was free of ostentation. Fortunately for the new monarch, moreover, France began to recover from the economic depression that had plagued her in the late 1820s and early 1830s and began to enjoy a period of relative prosperity.

But the new electoral law of April 1831, heralded as an Orleanist reform measure, still deprived the vast majority of adults of the franchise: only 166,000 out of 9 million adults were able to meet the 200-franc cens that made them eligible to vote. “The situation may have been even worse than the figures show,” notes Priscilla Robertson, “but at any rate small and middling businessmen were excluded along with the learned and professional classes and, of course, the workers and peasants.”[383] Disqualified Frenchmen could look with envy across the Channel, where the Reform Bill of 1832, for all its shortcomings, had expanded the English electorate by about 50 percent to some 750,000. Although 32 per thousand now had the franchise in Britain, a mere 5 per thousand could vote in France. To demands for a more representative suffrage, Guizot, the king’s premier, arrogantly responded, “Enrich yourselves; then you can vote,” with the result that as late as 1836, the Chamber of Deputies contained only 45 bankers, industrial capitalists, and merchants, as against 116 landed proprietors and parasitic rentiers.

Indeed, Marx’s analysis of the 1830 Revolution as a shift in power from the landed nobility to the financial bourgeoisie is not supported by the reality that, apart from a few individuals, the financial and certainly the industrial bourgeoisie gained litde power from the July Monarchy. The same landed nobility, especially local notables, who had formed the base of the Bourbon Restoration continued to constitute the base of the new monarchy, although their numbers were augmented by ex-Bonapartist officials and a few bourgeois. As William L. Langer remarks,

It is true that the July Revolution of 1830, which was started by Paris printers and fought out by craftsmen and artisans, was taken over by a group of adroit bankers, of whom Laffitte, Casimir-Perier, and Delessert were the most prominent But when the excitement was over, it turned out that for the next eighteen years France was to be ruled not by bankers and industrialists but by provincial notables, by lawyers and by bureaucrats, many of whom were officers or officials of the Napoleonic regime. In 1837 there were hardly more than forty deputies who could be fairly described as members of the new industrial class.[384]

And as Pinkney tersely observes,

The new regime did differ from its predecessor in that there was a larger place in it for businessmen like Laffitte and Perier.... Nonetheless, political power was still firmly in the hands of the landed proprietors, the officeholders, and the professional men.[385]

On the other hand, the workers who had done all the fighting gained nothing whatsoever, politically or materially, from the very uprising that made possible the Orleanist regime. Having shattered Marmont’s army in an insurrection, the “heroes of July” (as the artisans were called) were saddled with an electoral law that, in 1831, slammed the political door in their faces. Indeed, from the July days onward, the Orleanist regime was wary of working people, not only in Paris but in the rest of France as well. Actually, in December 1830 the heated conflict over the fate of the former Bourbon ministers, who were treated fairly benignly by the new monarchy, nearly threw the capital into another insurrection. By putting up a strong show of force, mobilizing the National Guard, and placing ordinary troops on alert, the government showed that it was quite prepared to use all the military force at its disposal to control the “anarchistes” (a word that cropped up in ministerial deliberations) who threatened public order. Following the crisis of the ex-ministers’ trial, a rash of strikes and economic dislocations obliged the Parisian Municipal Commission to provide public works for thousands of unemployed, in order to allay public unrest.

Indeed, as radical republican groups began to conspire against the Orleanist regime and as assassins stalked the king, the government became more and more conservative. In April 1831, in response to riots and demonstrations, the Chamber of Deputies enacted legislation against unlawful meetings or so-called attroupements and resumed the prosecution of oppositional leaders. That most sacred cow of the liberals, namely freedom of the press, which had been affirmed by Louis-Philippe on accepting the throne, was repeatedly abridged from the autumn of 1830 until September 1834, when press limitations forbade not only the use of the word republic but even political caricatures. A Law on Association passed in 1834 required most societies—even those that contained fewer than twenty members, which the Bourbons had tolerated—to be authorized by the state before they could function legally. This law effectively quashed not only republican societies but even early trade unions seeking higher wages and better working conditions, as well as mutual aid societies. As Pamela Pilbeam observes, the Orleanists pursued “a policy of surveillance, prosecution and ultimately changes in the law on associations which made the new liberal regime even less tolerant than the Restoration.”[386] Between ministries headed alternately by Guizot, the ever-adaptable Nicolas Soult (formerly a marshal of Napoleon), and the perennial enemy of rebellious workers Thiers, Orleanist commitments to freedom were steadily abridged.

Inasmuch as “political power was still firmly in the hands of the landed proprietors, the officeholders, and the professional men,” Pinkney concludes,

.. the July Days had effected no revolution in France.” But the uprising had made “one revolutionary change, one that its principal beneficiaries had not intended and thoroughly deplored. It had brought the people, particularly the people of Paris, back into politics in a way they had not been involved since the 1790s.”[387]

THE SECRET SOCIETIES

The crowds who watched Lafayette embrace the Duke of Orleans at the Hotel de Ville chafed at the incompleteness of the July events, whose victory they reasonably felt was being brazenly snatched from them. Having risen against the detested Bourbon monarchy and defeated it once, working people were now acutely aware of their power. It was almost certainly the Revolution of 1830 that created the sizable French public for Buonarotti’s account of the Babouvist conspiracy, which was published only two years before the July days. Buonarotti’s book now fed a growing desire to turn to conspiratorial methods to overthrow the July Monarchy—and among the French revolutionaries of the period, none embodied this tendency more consistendy and militandy than Blanqui. When the July insurrection exploded, Blanqui may already have been a republican—in any case, he abandoned his moderate journalist colleagues at the Globe and threw himself into the street fighting, brandishing a musket in one hand and a tricolor in the other. He was wounded, for which the Orleans government awarded him a decoration, but he emerged from the fighting as a red republican and rapidly evolved into a socialist.

In January 1832, while defending himself at a highly publicized trial for his radical views, he delivered a passionate speech that J. Tchemoff describes as “the first socialist manifesto of this epoch.”[388] The July Monarchy, Blanqui said, was “the government of the bourgeois classes,” and society was in “a state of war between rich and poor.”[389] Asked by the president of the court to name his own “estate,” or class, Blanqui answered forthrighdy, “Proletaire.” When the president denied that the proletariat was an estate, Blanqui roared, “How is it not an estate! It is the estate of thirty million Frenchmen who five by their labor and are deprived of political rights!”[390] The language of socialism was already very much in his mind as well as in the minds of a growing number of ordinary republicans in France.

An early arena for generating socialists was the secret republican society Societe des Amis du Peuple (Society of the Friends of the People), inspired by the republican publicist Godefroy Cavaignac. The Amis, who were organized on July 30, immediately after the Paris street fighting, demanded that France be permitted to elect a new constituent assembly to decide the nature of the state, instead of restoring the old Chamber of Deputies. The many republican banquets and oratorical tournaments the society held challenged the legitimacy of the new monarchy, even attracting as many as a thousand people to their meetings. In reality the Amis had only 150 committed members in Paris— Buonarotti was among them, as was Blanqui, although how intimate they were remains unclear. More radical and larger than the Amis was the Societe des Droits de I’Homme (Society for the Rights of Man), a highly disciplined offshoot of the Amis that, after 1832, managed to collect a considerable working-class following and extend its reach throughout the arrondissements of Paris and into some of the provinces. Hierarchically structured, the top level of the Droits was an eleven- man central committee, below which came twelve commissioners, one for each arrondissement, and below them another forty-eight commissioners, one for each of the four quarters into which each arrondissement was divided. The quarters, in turn, were subdivided into sections, whose clubs claimed to be independent in order to evade government restrictions on membership in societies.

Clubs like the Amis and the Droits, which proliferated throughout France, were expressly republican and sometimes even socialistic in outlook. By 1833 the Droits claimed a total membership of 4000 in Paris, while its branch in Chalons, one of several outside the capital, had as many as 1500. Nor were these republican clubs mere debating societies. A number of them, including certain sections of the Droits, were armed, while others, particularly in the provinces, drilled and held target practice. The mushrooming of such revolutionary societies among artisans provided the upper classes with the excuse—and the need—to accept the repressive measures on association imposed by the Orleanist government

On June 5, 1832, a funeral was held for Maximilien Lamarque, an immensely popular Bonapartist general on whom the exiled Napoleon had looked with such favor that he bequeathed upon him, on his deathbed at St. Helena, the honorific title of marshal. Now a cortege of thousands, led by several distinguished military men, including Lafayette, followed Lamarque’s coffin as it wound its way to the Pantheon. Many who followed behind in the procession were members of revolutionary societies who expected, in the aftermath of the funeral, to stage a full-scale republican insurrection against the monarchy.

One of a party of students having exclaimed, “But, after all, whither are they leading us?” “To the republic,” replied a person, wearing the July decoration, who was acting as chief of the troop, “and make yourself sure of this, that tonight we will sup in the Tuileries.”[391]

The cortege stopped before a specially prepared scaffold to hear dignitaries deliver solemn eulogies to Lamarque, when suddenly, as Louis Blanc recounts,

a stranger came up, mounted on a horse, which he had great difficulty in getting through the immense concourse. The appearance of this man was most sinister; he was dressed in black, and held in his hand a red flag, surmounted by a cap of liberty. It was the symbol of ’93 that was thus revived before the eyes of the bourgeoisie.

The flag so disconcerted Lafayette that, although he was a close associate of Lamarque’s, he abruptly left the funeral.

The indignation which this spectacle excited, was extreme, especially on the part of the republicans, whose principles this fearful apparition tended to misrepresent and throw a slur upon. One shout of reprobation burst from all present, with the exception of a few, who applauded, either with imbecile fanaticism, or with the treacherous purpose of throwing odium on the cause of the republic.

The man’s appearance, in Blanc’s view, succeeded in turning many members of the cortege against the prospective insurrection, by associating republicanism with “sanguinary jacobinism.”

The red flag had produced its effect: he who bore it immediately disappeared; and from that moment, the republicans had to renounce the hope of drawing after their steps the bulk of the bourgeoisie.[392]

We will never know whether the horseman was a police provocateur or not, but his action did succeed in preventing a wide-scale insurrection that day.[393] The more militant republicans in Paris, however, were not to be deterred: they went on, in spite of the horseman, to stage an uprising, raising huge barricades at some of the capital’s key cross sections (vividly described by Victor Hugo in Les Miserables), exhibiting exceptional courage and panicking many members of the government. As it turned out, however, Louis-Philippe was well prepared to confront any insurrection: he had about 24,000 troops at his disposal, as well as most of the National Guard On June 6, after two days of valiant but futile street fighting on the part of the rebels, the uprising was crushed.

Following the June 1832 uprising, societies that had enjoyed a semilegal status were driven completely underground, but the more stringently the societies were repressed, the more broadly socialistic ideas spread among the red republicans. Soon the newly formed socialist societies were collaborating with the older republican societies, interpenetrating one another with joint conspiracies and actions. By hounding these republican and socialist groups alike, the Orleanist regime forced them to take desperate and often adventuristic actions. But perhaps the most memorable of the underground societies, serving pardy as an inspiration and pardy as a model, were those created by Blanqui and his supporters. In the summer of 1834 (or 1835, according to some sources), Blanqui founded the Socidte des Families (Society of the Families), a secret conspiratorial organization that was avowedly committed to orchestrating a coup d’etat against the Orleanist monarchy. By 1836, the membership of the society, it has been estimated, numbered about 1200.

The structure of the Families, again, was hierarchical, patterning itself on the classical organizational forms of the charbonnerie. Its basic unit was a six- to-twelve-member “family”; five or six families constituted a “section” under a chief; three or four sections made up a “quarter,” led by a commandant de quartier several quarters were led by an agent revolutionnaire. Finally, guiding this apparatus from above was a Comite secret, or central committee, whose membership was unknown to the rest of the organization. Actually, the central committee was more or less a fiction. The real command of the society consisted of three “revolutionary agents,” the most notable of whom were Blanqui and Armand Barbes. Barbes, whom Max Nomad describes as “young, rich, enthusiastic, good-natured, and heroic—the idol of the student youth and popular with all the republic opponents of the regime,”[394] long remained, in his revolutionary career, a perpetual adolescent and reckless romantic. In fact, the Families did not acquire much significance until Blanqui joined it around 1835.

Each member of a “family” was expected to join the National Guard, in order to gain military training, propagandize among the Guards, and if possible acquire a weapon and gunpowder. This typically Blanquist society had its own gunpowder laboratory (possibly two) in the very heart of Paris, as well as arms caches in different parts of the capital, and before the police learned of its existence, it had even begun to infiltrate two regiments of the Paris garrison. Upon its discovery Blanqui was arrested and jailed, but a year later he was released under a general amnesty and sent into a rather pleasant semibanishment near Paris, where he had a brief period of domestic happiness with his beloved wife, Amelie-Suzanne (whose early death only a few years later cast a pall over Blanqui’s many remaining years).

In exile Blanqui formed still another secret network, the Societe des Saisons (Society of the Seasons), in collaboration with, once again, Barbes, and the printer Martin Bernard. More than the Families, its membership grew to consist of a large percentage of workers. (Marx, in fact, regarded the society as exclusively proletarian, but this is probably a simplification.) Once again the Saisons, following the Charbonnerie, was organized into a hierarchy of levels of groups. This time individual conspirators were each named after a weekday, six of whom together constituted a “week,” led by “Sunday.” Four weeks formed a “month”—under the command of “July”—and three months formed a “season,” led by “spring.” All four seasons together constituted a “year,” which was directed by a “revolutionary agent” Since the society had about a thousand members, it consisted of three “years,” each of which was led by a “revolutionary agent”—who happened, in fact, to be Blanqui, Barbes, and Bernard. This elaborate system of small units and centralized control was meant to neutralize any police infiltration and at the same time maximize the organization’s coordination during the coup that it intended to stage, the date of which was known to no one but the top leaders.

Members of the Saisons engaged in training exercises for the coup amid the unknowing Sunday-aftemoon crowds of Parisians who were enjoying their day off out of doors. These insurrectionary exercises were conducted under the close supervision of Blanqui, who, in his black coat and black gloves, would calmly assess the strengths and weakness of his future insurgents, often from a cafe window as they passed by. The moment of truth for the Saisons finally came on the morning of May 12, 1839, when the conspirators raided gunsmith shops and seized the Palais de Justice and the Hotel de Ville, proclaiming a republic and wildly singing the “Marseillaise.” The National and Municipal Guards were quickly mobilized, driving the insurgents behind barricades in the workers’ districts. Despite the Saisons’ largely working-class following, ordinary working people remained passive, abstaining from participation in the uprising. Two patently hopeless days later, the entire enterprise collapsed, with no impact upon the Parisian working class.

After five months of hiding in cellars and attics, Blanqui was caught and condemned to death, a sentence that was commuted to life imprisonment. The conspirator was confined to the island fortress of Mont Saint-Michel and later to a prison hospital at Tours, from which he was released in 1844 because of his fragile health. Although he had planned the May uprising in every detail, he seems to have developed doubts about its chances for success once it was under way. In any case, when it became clear to Blanqui that the uprising would be a failure, he prudendy but reprehensibly withdrew himself from the action—an act that led to an irreconcilable break between himself and the more adventurous Barbes, who had been wounded in the fighting.

Despite its failure, the Saisons conspiracy was to seize the imagination of later revolutionaries, including anarchists, and it may have supplied the conspiratorial atmosphere for novels on anarchist terrorism written by distinguished authors from Dostoyevsky to Conrad. Blanqui, to be sure, was no anarchist; indeed, the leaders of the Saisons hoped ultimately to preside over a highly centralized revolutionary state. But the Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will or People’s Freedom—the Russian word volya has both meanings), the populist and terrorist organization that assassinated Czar Alexander II in 1881, was influenced by Peter Tkachev, one of Blanqui’s collaborators. The notion that small groups, if not individual conspirators, could initiate sweeping revolutionary events through heroic actions is a legacy of early Blanquism—however much Blanqui himself, over time, arrived at a more realistic appraisal of the limits of secret conspiratorial organizations.

In fact, by the 1840s, in the face of repeated defeats, arrests, and repression, popular belief in the effectiveness of Blanquist conspiratorialism was diminishing. The regime shrewdly exploited the conspiracies and various attempts to assassinate Louis-Philippe in order to arouse public opinion against republicanism and socialism. Whether because of this repression or for other reasons, the secret societies awakened no mass movement against the July Monarchy. For the most part, the workers of France had a traditional agenda of their own—to retain control over their working conditions, indeed to establish cooperative workshops that implicitly challenged the legitimacy of the property system itself, as well as to live decently and with self-respect. In time, once sweeping transformations had occurred in the economic and political landscape of Western Europe, they were to flock into socialistic organizations that sought to create a better society by other means.