France and 1848

The End of Monarchy

William Fortescue

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134379224
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia europea

An extensive and authoritative study that examines the economic, social and political crises of France during the revolution of 1848. Using analysis of original sources and recent research, Fortescue here offers new interpretations of events leading up to and after the second republic was declared. Looking at Louis Philippe's overthrow, the proclamation of manhood suffrage and the unexpected success of the right-wing in the subsequent elections, this book evaluates the political history of France in 1848 and the French political culture of the time. This should be read by all students of nineteenth century history, political scientists and all those with an interest in the historical development of French political culture.

Chapter 1

The French revolutionary tradition from 1789 to the July monarchy

The revolutionary legacy

Classic interpretations of the overthrow of Louis-Philippe all view the 1848 revolution in France as a phase in a long-term revolutionary process which began in 1789. Daniel Stern¹ claimed that February 1848 was not the result of an accident or a surprise, but rather the natural consequence of the legacy of the eighteenth century which had given the educated classes freedom of political thought and the working classes freedom of political action. This set in motion forces for democracy, rationalism and social inclusion which undermined monarchical, Catholic and aristocratic society. Alfred Delvau² maintained that the great work of the revolution, which the overthrow of Robespierre had effectively interrupted in July 1794, had been briefly renewed in July 1830, only to be interrupted again by the bourgeoisie’s betrayal of the brave and heroic people of Paris through the establishment of the July monarchy. However, the revolutionary tradition was revived in February 1848 with the abdication of Louis-Philippe and the proclamation of the Second Republic. For Alexis de Tocqueville,³ the period from 1789 to 1830 had witnessed a struggle to the death between the Ancien Régime and the New France of the bourgeoisie, a struggle which the bourgeoisie had won through the revolution of 1830. However, the bourgeoisie and bourgeois values had thereafter so dominated the July monarchy of Louis-Philippe as to provoke a reaction in the form of a new struggle, this time between those who owned property and those who did not. Karl Marx⁴ similarly interpreted the revolution of 1789 as a class struggle between the feudal aristocracy and its allies on the one hand and the capitalist bourgeoisie on the other. The revolution of 1830 for Marx, though, witnessed the triumph of just one section of the bourgeoisie, the financial aristocracy of bankers, capitalists, railway barons and wealthy landowners. After 1830 this class pursued its self-enrichment with such greed, ruthlessness and success that the economic crisis which began in 1845 eventually provoked the explosion of February 1848 in which all of France’s other social classes united to overthrow the rule of the financial aristocracy. Once the revolution had begun, the traditions of past revolutions weighed ‘like a nightmare on the minds of the living’. The revolutionaries of 1848, however, ended up just parodying the revolutionaries of 1789–99, ‘For it was only the ghost of the old revolution which walked in the years from 1848 to 1851’.⁵ Thus the great events and characters of the revolutionary decade 1789–99 were re-enacted during the Second Republic not as tragedy, but as farce. While intending ridicule, Marx was also indicating the crucial role of historical memory and of political culture.

Recent studies have tended to confirm these classic interpretations. François Furet, Robert Gildea, Pierre Rosanvallon and Robert Tombs⁶ also emphasise the importance of placing the 1848 revolution in France in the context of France’s revolutionary tradition. Furet quotes at the beginning of his book the following observation by Ernest Renan, which appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1869:

The French Revolution is such an extraordinary event that it must serve as the starting-point for any systematic consideration of the affairs of our own times. Everything of importance which takes place in France is a direct consequence of this fundamental event, which has profoundly altered the conditions of life in our country.⁷

Furet interprets French history between 1789 and the end of the 1870s as a successively renewed confrontation between the Ancien Régime and the revolution, a confrontation which did not end until 1876–7, when republicans and republican values finally gained an ascendancy in the Third Republic. Gildea has similarly studied the importance of a longstanding political culture, defined by him as ‘the culture elaborated by communities competing for political power’, with particular emphasis on ‘the relationship between political culture and collective memory’.⁸ He argues that the importance of France’s revolutionary and counter-revolutionary cultures, and the enduring appeal and legacy of Bonapartism, contrasted with the fragility of France’s liberal political culture. This helps to explain the failures of the July monarchy and the fate of the February 1848 revolution. Moreover, within French revolutionary political culture, liberal republicanism conflicted with Jacobin republicanism, as was violently demonstrated during the June Days of 1848. Further left still was the anarchist revolutionary tradition represented by the followers of Auguste Blanqui. Rosanvallon stresses two aspects of the French revolutionary legacy, the concept of popular sovereignty and the fundamental illiberalism of French political culture. The former was anti-monarchical and militated against the role of the monarch as a neutral arbiter, while the latter discouraged problem resolution through compromise and concession.⁹ Further, the institution of monarchy became saddled with an accumulation of negative associations—fiscal exemptions, social privileges, legal inequalities, electoral property franchises and an inequitable distribution of wealth.¹⁰

‘The Revolution and the State are what modern French history is about’, Tombs declares.¹¹ The two were linked because the revolution had given the French State greater powers than in other western societies and because ‘the Revolution had left a nagging problem of legitimacy: who should rule and by what right?’¹² The revolution had also generated hatreds, engrained fears, manufactured myths, aligned Catholicism with conservatism and anti-clericalism with republicanism, consolidated a system of smallscale peasant agriculture and bequeathed France a tradition of aggressive nationalism and war. So many people had suffered so much during the revolutionary decade that revenge featured on many political agendas, as did fear. ‘What the Holocaust and the Gulag are for us,’ Tombs observes, ‘the violence of the French revolution was for the nineteenth century.’¹³ For historical explanation and political justification, French people often turned to myths which were illustrated and elaborated in every conceivable medium throughout the nineteenth century. Thus conservatives might blame the outbreak and continuation of the revolution on a conspiracy of Freemasons, Protestants and Jews, and dwell on images such as those of the tricoteuses knitting at the foot of the guillotine, while the left had their own conspiracy theories, such as that of the Congregation and the Jesuits secretly plotting reaction, and their own images of heroic popular revolt, such as the storming of the Bastille. The astonishing durability of Jesuit conspiracies in the leftwing French mentality illustrates the enduring division between the Roman Catholic Church and its opponents created by the revolution’s assault on the Church and many of its priesthood. On the other hand, the consolidation through the revolutionary land settlement of a system of small-scale peasant agriculture tended to promote conservatism, at least in social and economic matters. Also, memories of military victories, foreign conquests and martial glory derived from both the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras could appeal to both left and right, thus providing some sort of national consensus. Nevertheless France, despite being one of the wealthiest countries in the world, had developed ‘a uniquely revolution-prone political culture’.¹⁴ Politically, the French people were divided on fundamental issues, while regimes and governments could not tolerate political opposition and constantly sought to exclude their political opponents permanently from power.¹⁵

It is clear that the revolutionary decade from 1789 to 1799 fundamentally and permanently changed the political and social landscapes of France. The key institutions of the monarchy and Catholic Church were subjected to an unprecedented assault. The Ancien Régime system of privilege was abolished forever. The nobility suffered a traumatic eclipse with the abolition of its titles and privileges, the confiscation of much of its wealth, and the ordeals of emigration, imprisonment and execution suffered by many of its members. The royal army of Louis XVI was transformed into an agent of social mobility and an instrument of mass patriotic mobilisation. New traditions were established, of legal equality, uniform administration, professional service to the State, and parliamentary government, as well as of popular militancy and political republicanism. Despite the formal replacement of the Republic in 1804 by the Napoleonic Empire, the increasing conservatism of Napoleonic rule, and the restorations of the Bourbon monarchy in 1814 and 1815, the impact of the revolution lived on. The revolutionary changes were too profound to be obliterated and the collective memories of the revolutionary decade were retained and transmitted from one generation to another, so that the whole political culture of France became steeped in the experience of the revolutionary decade of the 1790s.

The restored Bourbon monarchy

The overthrow of the monarchy in February 1848 occurred within the context of an antimonarchical French political culture. Even before 1789, the institution of the monarchy had been undermined by a barrage of scurrilous publications directed particularly at Queen Marie Antoinette. The policies of the Crown were continuously frustrated by court intrigue and the obstructive opposition of powerful institutions and interest groups within the French elite. Louis XVI’s inability to cope with the challenges of the revolution, his forced removal from Versailles to Paris by a revolutionary crowd in October 1789, his ignominious flight to Varennes in June 1791, his treasonous correspondence with the Habsburg Court after the outbreak of war in April 1792, his desperate escape from the Tuileries Palace on 10 August 1792, and finally his trial and execution (21 January 1793), brought the French monarchy to its nadir. While Napoleon eventually established in France a new kind of monarchy from 1804, it was a monarchy that was anti-Bourbon, ‘meritocratic’ and associated with exceptional military achievements. Moreover, Napoleon’s monarchy was finally overthrown and the Senate’s declaration of 3 April 1814, declaring Napoleon to have lost his throne and releasing the French people from their oath of allegiance to Napoleon, clearly stated the principle that in a constitutional monarchy the monarch existed only by virtue of the constitution and of the social contract, and that a monarch who failed to observe the constitution and the social contract forfeited his right to rule. Louis XVI’s brothers (unlike his sons) survived the revolution and Napoleon, but their prolonged residence in exile on enemy territory and their identification with émigré armies and counter-revolution associated the Bourbons with France’s enemies.

The association of France’s monarchs with France’s enemies was reinforced by the restorations of 1814 and 1815. On both occasions the Bourbons were restored following French military defeats and with the support of France’s national enemies. The constitution of the Restoration monarchy, with its Chamber of Peers and Chamber of Deputies allegedly replicating the British House of Lords and House of Commons, was judged by many to be a foreign ‘English’ implant, in contrast to the ‘French’ constitutions of the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods. Further, despite the liberal promises made by Louis XVIII in the Proclamation of St Ouen (2 May 1814), the attempt to create a fusion between the elites of the Ancien Régime and the Napoleonic regime, and the establishment of a parliamentary constitution, Louis XVIII was rapidly identified by many of his subjects with royal absolutism, aristocratic privilege, seigneurial rights, clerical reaction and with at least a potential threat to all those who had acquired land confiscated during the revolution. The return of Napoleon to France in March 1815, and the whole Hundred-Day episode, made the situation very much worse. While almost the entire French army rallied to Napoleon, active resistance was confined to outbreaks of lawlessness in the Vendée region. Louis XVIII himself was forced to make a rapid and humiliating flight from Paris to Belgium, to witness many of his appointees accept office under Napoleon and to await salvation in the form of an Allied military victory over Napoleon. Yet Waterloo, although it permitted Louis XVIII’s second Restoration, was a millstone for the Bourbon monarchy which became inescapably associated with one of the most decisive military defeats in the history of France.

Equally crippling for the Bourbon monarchy was the aftermath of the Hundred Days. News of the French defeat at Waterloo provoked explosions of popular violence, fuelled by frustrated nationalism and fears of political reaction, which in turn helped to encourage a ‘white terror’ in which the victims of popular violence were those identified as the enemies of Catholic royalism (Bonapartists, Jacobins and Protestants). The ‘white terror’ had its official counterpart. A handful of army commanders (notably Marshal Ney), who had betrayed Louis XVIII during the Hundred Days, was executed. Other traitors to the Bourbon cause, as well as those considered responsible for the execution of Louis XVI and all members of the Bonaparte family, were exiled. There was a massive purge of office-holders, in which some 50,000 to 80,000 people, together with approximately 15,000 army officers, representing between a quarter and a third of all those in official posts, lost their jobs. Finally, the new peace treaty further reduced France’s frontiers, subjected sixty-one French departments to military occupation by over a million Allied troops, imposed an indemnity of 700 million francs, and forced France to return many of the works of art looted during the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars to their former owners.

Despite the unfavourable circumstances of the Bourbon restorations of 1814 and 1815, the Bourbon monarchy still enjoyed a number of advantages. Centuries of rule by Bourbon kings meant that the restored Bourbon kings could count on at least some popular acceptance and personal loyalty based on tradition and custom. Whereas the pre-1789 monarchy had been weakened by noble and aristocratic revolts, and by an occasionally uncooperative Roman Catholic Church, the shared experience of suffering and displacement under the revolution and Napoleon helped to renew traditional alliances between the old monarchy and the old nobility and aristocracy, and between throne and altar. Ironically, the creation after 1789 of legal and institutional structures which were uniform and efficient ensured that the kingdom was far easier to administer than it had been before 1789. Similarly, the Restoration monarchy inherited a system of taxation and tax collection which freed it from the financial problems which has so plagued its Ancien Régime predecessor. Moreover, by establishing an imperial system with monarchical institutions and symbols, Napoleon had made monarchy and hierarchy familiar once more in France, and Napoleon had greatly extended the scope and scale of official patronage. Abroad, the Allied sovereigns were generally supportive and there were no serious diplomatic difficulties. Within France, after the upheavals and traumas of the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, the majority of the population wanted peace and stability. Republicanism for many in France was associated with the Terror and the guillotine, and had been effectively suppressed by Napoleon. A revival of republicanism did occur during the Hundred Days, to the extent that manifestations of revolutionary Bonapartism involved anti-Bourbon, anti-Allied, anti-aristocratic and anti-clerical sentiments. However, Waterloo, the ‘white terror’ and the political reaction of 1815–16 prevented any significant republican movement from developing. Bonapartism suffered a similar fate, and was further handicapped by Napoleon’s exile in St Helena and early death (5 May 1821). Some form of monarchy was the constitutional norm for nearly all European states during the first half of the nineteenth century, and among the French elite there was a considerable degree of consensus over acceptance of the principles of 1789— a constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary system representing the propertied classes, civil equality, religious toleration, the inviolability of private property, and limited freedom of the press.

Louis XVIII, and to a lesser extent his successor Charles X, enjoyed some measure of success in building on these advantages. The charters of 1814 and 1815 established a reasonably satisfactory constitutional system for France. An attempt was made to reconcile the often conflicting legacies of the Ancien Régime, the revolution and Napoleon and to achieve some sort of fusion between France’s pre-1789 and post-1789 elites. The regime survived the economic recession caused by the poor cereal harvests of 1816 and 1817. The indemnities imposed by the Allies were paid off by 1818, enabling the withdrawal of all foreign troops from France two years ahead of schedule. Saint-Cyr’s army reforms of 1818 helped to create a more professional army. On the whole, Louis XVIII chose wisely when making ministerial and official appointments, and even Charles X could select the sensible Martignac to head a ministry in January 1828. Above all, the Restoration monarchy could claim successes in the field of foreign affairs—the intervention in Spain from 1823, participation in the battle of Navarino (20 October 1827) and in the Greek war of independence against the Turks, and the beginning of the conquest of Algeria (June 1830).

The Restoration monarchy, nevertheless, suffered from many important weaknesses. As with any royal dynasty, the competence and behaviour of its members were crucial. Louis XVIII was quite intelligent, had considerable charm, and was willing to salute crowds and common people. At the same time, though, he was indolent, physically overweight, forty-nine years old in 1814, and had lived in exile for twenty-three years. He has been described as ‘a twilight monarch’, lacking the energy and the imagination for a dynamic policy of national reconciliation.¹⁶ He was also guilty of avoidable acts of political provocation. The tricolour could have been retained as France’s national flag, with the Bourbon flag becoming the monarch’s personal standard. The insistence on being styled Louis XVIII (thereby assuming that Louis XVI’s son had actually reigned between 1793 and 1795), the re-adoption of the pre-1789 royal title ‘King of France and Navarre’ (implying dynastic rule over inherited territories) instead of ‘King of the French’ (the title bestowed on Louis XVI by the 1791 constitution, implying ruler of the French people), the assertion that 1814 was the nineteenth year of his reign, the refusal to wear the Legion of Honour, the restoration of the etiquette of the Versailles court, the excessive deference paid to the British and, particularly, to the Duke of Wellington, the holding of religious services to commemorate royal victims of the revolution and even would-be assassins of Napoleon, were all unnecessary and provocative acts. Yet they were principally symbolic in nature and, though damaging, were far from being fatal to the monarchy.

Charles X, sixty-seven when he succeeded to the throne in September 1824, even more obviously than his brother was too old to be an effective monarch. He had been one of the most prominent figures in the counter-revolution and he had become a devout Catholic, so that Catholic and ultra-royalist extremism dominated his political outlook. Moreover, he invariably interpreted political opposition as disloyalty to the Crown, instead of accepting the principle that the king should reign but not govern. Like his brother Louis XVIII, Charles X was attracted to unnecessary and provocative symbolic acts, such as his Ancien-Régime style coronation at Reims (29 May 1825) and his personal participation in the elaborate public celebrations of a Papal jubilee in Paris (3 May 1826).

To compound the situation, the Bourbon monarchy suffered from an overall lack of adequate support. Between 1814 and 1830 the Roman Catholic Church probably provided the staunchest support for the Bourbon monarchy. However, the Church had lost most of its wealth and much of its influence, and, because of the strength of anticlericalism, this resurrection of the traditional alliance between throne ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Notes
• Bibliography