The history of France after 1814 is a catalogue of instability, fear, hope, and failure. This instability is a constant theme in the literature of the period, and contemporaries often yearned for more heroic eras. Many of those who lived through this period hated it. Historians can take the very different view that this was one of the most fascinating periods to study. Many of the themes beloved of historiansâcontinuity, change, the enacting of revolutionary ritual, violence, and fearâleap out from this epoch.
The revolutionary destruction of the ancien rĂ©gime after 1789 and the succession of constitutions did not solve the problem of how to rule France. This problem did not go away with the either the Terror, the coup of Thermidor, the coup of Brumaire, the coronation of Napoleon as Emperor, or his abdication in April 1814 when the Bourbons were recalled to France. The compromise of July 1830 pleased the ruling class of notables (a term that came into usage under Napoleon to designate the new ruling class, an amalgam of the pre-revolutionary nobility and the new men who made up the âmasses of graniteâ of society).
We now know that France has been a Republic ever since 1870, with the important exception of the period 1940â44. This was not, however, inevitable as there were other traditions that had a strong grip on loyalties within the political class, and as the suffrage extended, among all (male) voters. Royalism was divided between fidelity to the elder branch of the Bourbons (legitimism) or to the cadet branch (Orleanism). Both branches had had their time in the sun: the senior branch ruled from 1814, interrupted by the Hundred Days of 1815 and fell in 1830, to be replaced by the junior branch of the OrlĂ©ans family, which fell in turn in 1848. Even after these two revolutions, there was still a strong possibility that France could have become a monarchy once more in the early 1850s. The last and, in 1852, triumphant political tendency was Bonapartism, which was itself a product of the Revolution of 1789 and fed as much on bitterness against the monarchies of 1814/15â48 as any variant of republicanism. Even after the proclamation of the Republic in September 1870, it took nearly half a decade for the republican form of government to be given definitive constitutional form.
After the bloodshed of the First Republic, the founders of the Second wanted the world to see that the republican form of government was profoundly humanitarian and a break with the corruption of the monarchical form of government. Of all the regimes of the period 1814â70, the Second Republic (1848â52) has left the greatest legacy in France: not least of which was the abolition of slavery in the colonies and the abolition of the death penalty for political offenses. The introduction of universal manhood suffrage involved millions of Frenchmen in the political decisions of their nation. The novelty of this system gave the Second Republicâs elections a greater urgency than they had before in the period of restricted suffrage. Understanding the fear that the word âdemocracyâ caused to the political elites requires a leap of historical imagination. But although the stakes were higher, decisions made at the top were still just as important: thus five-and-a-half million votes may have opened the doors of the ĂlysĂ©e Palace to President Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte in December 1848, but the decision to have a coup dâĂ©tat three years later in December 1851 was his, and his alone.
For the majority of the Second Republicâs existence, France was not governed by convinced republicans. If Pierre Rosanvallon has qualified the constitutional monarchy of 1814â48 as the âimpossible,â the Republic of 1848 was no less impossible. 1 Republicanismâs capital was the highest during periods of revolutionary instability, as was seen in 1830, 1848, and 1870, but as a system of government it only scraped through third time lucky when all other possibilities had been exhausted.
This bookâs focus is the fears and plans of the political elite displaced in February 1848 but absorbed back into power in the following months and years, and why suspicion of and indifference toward the Republic as a form of government and fear and hatred of the new ideas of socialism were what divided them the least. We are offered the intriguing, if unedifying, spectacle of men and women often described as liberals being ready to sacrifice all the principles they had tended before 1848 in order to preserve society as they knew it during the longest political crisis of the nineteenth century.
The general trend in historiography over the last century and a half has been first to dismiss the Republic as a futile endeavor and later to embrace it as the harbinger of social democracy. Its futility was most powerfully illustrated by three of the most influential works written on it: two were written during its short existence and the third soon after its extinction: Tocquevilleâs Souvenirs, Marxâs The Class Struggles in France, and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Marxâs true fame was to emerge in the 1860s at the time of the First International and the publication of Capital. Tocqueville, who had served as Minister of Foreign Affairs during the summer of 1849 and had already written the two books of Democracy in America, needed no such introduction to contemporaries, but his Souvenirs were written in the seclusion caused by the early stages of the tuberculosis that was to kill him in 1859.
Having produced the Communist Manifesto with Engels in January 1848, which eagerly predicted the impending revolution of the proletariat, Marx needed to explain why the outcome of the revolutions of 1848 had been so different from his confident forecast. Unlike his conservative contemporaries, for whom the 1848 revolution was a meaningless interlude, Marx had to tread the line of emphasizing both why it was important in the history of the class struggle (a concept he borrowed from the liberal French historians Thierry and Guizot) and why its failure was historically necessary, through building up a powerful counterrevolution that could in turn produce a stronger revolutionary force. The Class Struggles in France, 1848â1850, was Marxâs first historical work and was published first in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in 1850, based on his own reporting for that newspaper. 2 The ultimate answer to Marxâs conundrum of how to account for the failure of a necessary revolution was in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, produced straight after the coup dâĂ©tat of 2 December 1851. In what is generally reckoned to be his most brilliant political pamphlet, he developed the themes already latent in the earlier work, namely, the conservatism of the peasantry and the cravenness of the bourgeoisie, as well as the divisions of the ruling class. 3 Much of his account was based on his own firsthand observations, correspondence with people on the spot, and on a wide-ranging reading of the daily press.
Tocquevilleâs Souvenirs, written partly while he was convalescing from tuberculosis, have been equally influential on our understanding of the Republic. Tocqueville had a satiristâs eye for the foibles of his contemporaries (and very often for those of his close friends). Although he came to very different conclusions, Tocqueville had drunk from the same historical springs as Marx: he, too, believed in the role of class struggle in history; where he, the aristocratic liberal and the exiled socialist journalist Marx agreed, it could be powerful, for instance in their analysis of the June Days.
Marie dâAgoult, famous to posterity as the mistress of Franz Liszt and mother of Cosima Wagner, writing as Daniel Stern, quickly produced her Histoire de la RĂ©volution de 1848, based on eyewitness testimony, written sources from newspapers, and help from leading republicans and socialists. It covered the period of the Republic to the presidential election of 10 December 1848 (and as the third and final volume was published in the very different world of the France of Napoleon III of 1853, it is not surprising that the history ended at that point). The first volume of the three-volume history was published in 1850, when it was clear that the democratic and social Republic she had welcomed in February 1848 was dead, if not formally buried. This was a work of faith in the people, whose ânaive enthusiasm of fraternity, a proud disinterest, delicate courtesy, natural generosity, and humanityâ had been betrayed by the old Orleanist political class and a minority of secret society members. 4 As she admitted in the preface to the second edition in 1862, this was a work that was written in the heat of the moment. 5 So well written was this book (her account of the February Revolution is still the most gripping to date), and so forgotten its author, that subsequent historians have had little scruple in lifting sections of her work (she, in turn, lifted passages from Charles Robinâs Histoire de la RĂ©volution française de 1848). 6 Her grand philosophical theme that the Revolution was an ineluctable historical process (she was well read in German philosophy, Hegel above all, something that was rare among her French contemporaries) would have to be put on hold by the election of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte in December 1848, when the history ended.
The first wave of semi-official publications on the Republicâs history that soon followed were nearly all written from a standpoint almost unknown today: the triumph of authority embodied in Prince Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte against socialist anarchy and parliamentary intrigue. Many of these were rushed into print in December 1851 and January 1852 as justifications of the coup or biographies of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte. Granier de Cassagnacâs later histories were the official, almost monolithic history of the Republic, published by Henri Plon, which boasted its patronage by the Emperor. Not till EugĂšne TĂ©notâs critical accounts of the coup were published in France in the 1860s could an alternative voice be heard. 7
We are lucky that the Second Republicâs history is abundant in primary sources. Among the most important are newspapers. France had one of the liveliest public spheres of the nineteenth century, even in periods of censorship. The importance of these dailies is in their ownership and political allegiance: the Journal des DĂ©bats littĂ©raires et politiques (often shortened to the DĂ©bats, a usage which this book follows) had been the most prominent newspaper to support Guizotâs government in the 1840s; the Constitutionnel was owned by Thiers till early 1849, when it ...