Economic and political discontent came to a head in France in early 1848. Since the previous summer, French citizens had circumvented a ban on political demonstrations by organizing a series of banquets at which diners could voice their criticisms of the regime. Against the banqueters stood Louis Philippe, the so-called July Monarch. Louis Philippe had come to the throne as the result of a popular uprising in 1830, and presided over a constitutional monarchy for almost two decades. Despite the liberal aspirations of his supporters, Louis Philippe had turned out to be a staunch opponent of democracy, and had restricted the franchise so that it included just 1 percent of the French population by 1848. Faced with the growth of dissent, the July Monarch chose to ban the political banquets in February of 1848.
The revolution began on February 23. The spark came when French soldiers fired on a crowd of Parisian protesters, killing fifty-two. Citizens from all classes of Parisian society flooded into the streets and, in homage to the French revolutionary tradition, began to build barricades. When huge crowds began to approach the royal palace, Louis Philippe chose to abandon his throne and flee to England. The July Monarchy had fallen at the first serious challenge from below.
With the monarch gone, the liberal opposition came together to declare France’s Second Republic. With a major social and political crisis convulsing the nation, the republic would have two central goals: expanding the democratic elements of the government, and providing aid to the thousands of unemployed workers. On March 2, the new government declared the advent of universal suffrage, adding nine million French men to the voter rolls but continuing the exclusion of women from the right to vote. A relaxation of censorship and repression allowed for the flowering of a new political culture, with hundreds of newspapers and political clubs springing up all across France. The system of National Workshops, or government-run businesses, expanded to employ tens of thousands of French workers and guarantee the right to work.
But the Second Republic faced a growing polarization in French society. On the one hand, throughout the spring and early summer, the working classes of Paris mobilized to attempt to push the government of the Second Republic to the left. On the other hand, however, French business owners and farmers were beginning to resent the increased taxation necessary for the National Workshops, and had begun to worry that the current government was incapable of restoring order.
Conservative and moderate candidates triumphed in the elections of April 1848, and began to shift the government of the republic along a more right-wing course.
On June 23, the government announced the closure of the National Workshops, and immediately deployed troops to the most rebellious working-class neighborhoods of Paris. The three days of fighting that followed came to be known as the June Days. Although workers and artisans resisted heroically, they fought without any allies and suffered defeat at the hands of the National Guard.
The defeat of the workers’ insurrection left what Marx called the “pure bourgeois Republicans,” or what we might think of as liberals, in charge, and they set to work drafting a new constitution through a Constituent Assembly. The overall trend in French politics remained to the right, however. In particular, the election of Louis Bonaparte as president in December of 1848 signaled the growing conservatism of the French bourgeoisie. The ensuing debate over the nature of the French Constitution led to a set of laws that were much more conservative than might have been expected—leaving the educational establishment in the hands of the Catholic clergy, for example.
In this context, the elections for the Legislative Assembly in May of 1849 gave a majority to the conservative Party of Order, albeit one that would face strong opposition from a sizable minority of radical Republican and Social-Democratic legislators, known as the Montagne faction. The struggle between the radicals and conservatives in the Legislative Assembly came to a head the following month, when representatives of the Montagne organized a peaceful demonstration, leading to the arrest and expulsion from the Assembly of their leaders.
Despite its victory over the Montagne, the Party of Order became increasingly subservient to Louis Bonaparte, and in November 1849, the president felt strong enough to dismiss the royalist ministry and appoint a government of men loyal only to him. At this point the Party of Order might have attempted to mobilize all the pro-democracy forces against the growing executive power of President Bonaparte. In fact it did just the opposite. In March 1850, elections were held to replace the radical leaders who had been expelled from the Legislative Assembly the previous June. When Parisian voters handed a sweeping victory to the Montagne and Social Democrats, the Party of Order moved to abolish universal suffrage, disenfranchising 30 percent of the French electorate.
From this point on, the Party of Order began to collapse as a political force. Having lost its majority in the Legislative Assembly, it was forced to rely on a coalition with the radicals of the Montagne—the very force it had just been in conflict with. The weakness of the conservative parliamentarians allowed Louis Bonaparte to consolidate his power over the course of the summer and fall of 1850, wresting control of the army away from the Assembly and appointing an even more conservative and sycophantic ministry. In October, he undermined the Legislative Assembly still further by declaring his intention to restore universal male suffrage. Finally, on December 2, 1850, Bonaparte carried out a coup and dispersed the Legislative Assembly—he would soon go on to declare himself emperor of France.