1848 (60 page)

On 10 March 1850 by-elections were held for the seats left vacant by the expulsions and arrests of deputies after 13 June. Only eleven were retained by
démoc-socs
, indicating that the left may have passed its electoral high-water mark. Yet the conservatives were still alarmed that three of those seats were in Paris, suggesting that all the blows delivered against the radicals had not sapped their vitality in the capital. They interpreted the results not as a sign that the left was weakening, but that it was stubbornly persistent. Still, the right asserted its strength in the legislature by voting through a law on education on 15 March. Produced by the education committee, which included Thiers, and sponsored by the royalist Comte de Falloux, it reduced the curriculum in primary schools to religious education and basic reading, writing and arithmetic. While expanding the role of the Catholic Church in the state education system, it also permitted the establishment of privately run schools, which meant, primarily, Catholic institutions. The parish clergy were to keep watch on the state schoolteachers and to report on them to the prefect. This law was a product of conservative anxieties: republican schoolteachers were seen as notorious disseminators of subversion. Falloux himself wrote that the law, by reinforcing the role of the Church and of religious instruction, was an urgent remedy to the ‘existence of social peril'.
¹⁰⁰
It aimed to inculcate conservative values in the young, and the government had already begun its assault by dismissing twelve hundred teachers whom it considered unreliable. On 28 April, however, a further by-election in Paris returned an outspoken opponent of the Falloux law, Eugène Sue.

This clear protest vote further suggested that the left was still a danger, so the Assembly passed the electoral law of 31 May. This disenfranchised all men with criminal records, all those who had lived less than three years in their constituency and all who could not prove their residence from the tax registers. These provisions again reflected the social fears of the conservatives: this time of a rootless, criminal underclass whom they had held responsible for all the political instability since the June days. Approximately 2.8 million men lost their right to vote, accounting for 30 per cent of the electorate, although that figure was higher in some areas, including Paris (62 per cent) and the industrial department of the Nord (51 per cent), since workers tended to move about in search of affordable housing. Many on the left saw this law as a deliberate provocation, an attempt by the right to force the
démoc-socs
into insurrection in defence of universal male suffrage, the more easily to crush and outlaw the opposition. The left and moderate republicans alike urged their supporters to act with restraint. The
démoc-socs
organised a petitioning campaign, gathering fifty thousand signatures, most of which were those of rural inhabitants, a further sign that radical republicans were making inroads into the French countryside. None the less, it is hardly surprising that the republicans at the grass roots returned to their old habits and went underground. A network of secret republican societies, centred on Lyon and extending across south-eastern France, was discovered by the police in August 1850, but they found no evidence of plans for an insurrection. Still, the trial of three of the leaders in the spring of 1851 caused a sensation because of the harshness of the sentences - deportation to the distant Marquesas.

The conservatives, however, were still alarmed by the buoyant mood of the
démoc-socs
as ‘their year' of 1852 approached. Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte's term of office was coming to an end and, according to the constitution, he could not be re-elected. Yet he was the only right-wing candidate who could gather enough of the vote to be certain to deny the
démoc-socs
victory in the presidential election. Victor Hugo listened to a friend who told him that she had a nightmare in which bolting horses dragged a flaming coach over a precipice, to which the great writer remarked: ‘You have dreamt of 1852.'
¹⁰¹
For conservatives, Bonaparte was the only figure who stood between order and catastrophe. Many of them therefore supported his campaign to have the constitution amended to allow him a second term of office. Tocqueville, who as an intelligent conservative feared Louis-Napoleon as much as he feared the ‘reds', remarked caustically that the very people who were angry at ‘the people' for violating the constitution (a reference to 13 June) were now trying to do the same themselves.
¹⁰²

Bonaparte himself, meanwhile, had been working tirelessly to garner popular support and, above all, to distance himself from the reactionary policies of the right. On 7 September 1849 he had leaked a telegram that he had sent to the French commander in Rome. In it he denounced the cardinals' repressive regime and lamented that French foreign policy had taken a reactionary turn. When Odilon Barrot, facing a hostile reaction among the majority in the Assembly, had failed to defend the president, Bonaparte dismissed his ministry on 31 October 1849. Explaining his actions to the National Assembly, he presented himself as being above party politics, as the man who represented the will of the people and who could provide the firm leadership that the country needed:

 

The conservatives were learning that Bonaparte was not their passive tool, but had ideas of his own. Some of them, such as Falloux, were beginning to wake up to the dangers of ‘Caesarism'. Tocqueville noted that Louis-Napoleon constantly met with the leaders of the monarchist parliamentary majority, but that ‘he none the less bore their yoke impatiently, that he was humiliated to appear to submit to their tutelage and that he secretly burned to escape from it'.
¹⁰⁴
Nevertheless, most of the right was still more afraid of the ‘reds' than they were of Louis-Napoleon's authoritarian populism. Conservative resistance to him, as he appointed a new government of his own and insisted that ministers were responsible to him, not to the National Assembly, was therefore feeble. Moreover, the conservatives could not agree on an alternative to Bonaparte, as the Orléanists wanted to support the heirs of Louis-Philippe, while the Legitimists insisted on the Bourbon Comte de Chambord. Meanwhile, Bonaparte travelled around the country as if on campaign, making no fewer than fourteen tours in 1849-51. He distributed generous quantities of wine and sausages to soldiers, whom he inspected in their barracks. Some were heard shouting, ‘
Vive l'Empereur!
' He stopped to talk to peasants working in the fields and he addressed public meetings, shamelessly telling audiences precisely what they wanted to hear. To republicans he offered his support of the constitution of 1848 (an implicit condemnation of the May 1850 electoral law), while to conservatives he hinted that he might support a restoration of the monarchy. He used his presidential patronage to appoint his supporters as prefects, army commanders and government officials. Within the National Assembly the right was fragmenting between Legitimists, Orléanists and those who had opted to support Bonaparte as the best man to maintain order.

This last group began to press for constitutional revision in the spring of 1851, buoyed by a petition bearing 1.5 million signatures. At the end of July the amendment was defeated in parliament by an alliance of republicans and Orléanists, for whom the Bonapartes were now dangerous competitors as claimants to the throne. The Legitimists supported Bonaparte because they wanted to revise the constitution anyway, but their backing was not enough to obtain the three-quarters of the votes needed to carry the amendment. Louis-Napoleon therefore turned away from legal means and started to think in terms of a
coup d'état
. He prepared the ground when, on 4 November, he proposed the restoration of universal male suffrage to the National Assembly. His bill was rejected, which simply undermined the democratic legitimacy of parliament while allowing Bonaparte to pose as the champion of popular sovereignty.

The date chosen for the coup was 2 December, the anniversary of Napoleon I's greatest military victory at Austerlitz. That night police arrested leading opposition leaders, including Orléanists like Thiers,
démoc-soc
deputies, republican army officers (including Cavaignac) and eighty popular militants identified as possible leaders of a counter-insurrection. The coup succeeded partly because it was not aimed at seizing power - Louis-Napoleon already had it, and he had made sure that the key ministries of police, war and interior were in loyal, if unscrupulous, hands - but simply at consolidating it. The National Printers had already been quietly taken over the previous night, and it was from there that Bonaparte's proclamation was produced and then posted up by police patrols. It justified dictatorship through a direct appeal to the ‘people', over the heads of their allegedly corrupt and fractious representatives. The National Assembly, Bonaparte declared, was ‘making a bid for power which I wield directly by virtue of the people's will. It fosters every wicked passion. It is jeopardising the stability of France. I have dissolved the National Assembly and I invite the whole people to adjudicate between it and me'.
¹⁰⁵
To pre-empt parliamentary resistance, the chamber was occupied by troops. This did not stop some 220 deputies - including Tocqueville, Barrot, Falloux and Rémusat - from holding an improvised session in the
mairie
of the 10th Arrondissement (roughly corresponding with today's Sixth), from where they denounced the coup. They were expelled by soldiers and briefly arrested. Some republican deputies tried to organise resistance in the artisanal districts and some barricades went up on 3 December, but Bonaparte's shrewd proclamation restoring universal male suffrage made even the republican movement hesitate. By 4 December what Parisian resistance existed had been overwhelmed.

In the provinces, however, the coup was challenged by the ‘largest provincial uprising in nineteenth-century France'.
¹⁰⁶
Nearly seventy thousand people - including women, who stood guard in the villages when the men marched off - recruited from at least 775 communes took up arms against the government. Of those, some 27,000 were involved in violent clashes with troops or the gendarmerie. The focus of the armed resistance was in the rural districts of south-eastern and central France. The uprising usually began in the small market towns, but the surrounding villages were rapidly drawn in too. By comparison the inhabitants of the larger towns tended to protest peacefully. In over a hundred villages and market towns the insurgents expelled the local officials and put their own candidates in their place. These seizures of power were frequently a direct response to orders from
démoc-soc
leaders, suggesting that their organisations had succeeded in forming a radical republican network extending into the countryside. In the end, however, the uprising was too distant from the centres of power - Paris in particular - to pose a threat. The insurgents seized power only in the small
bourgs
, where the only armed forces were the tiny brigades of gendarmes. Only in the Basses-Alpes did the rebels succeed in capturing a departmental
chef-lieu
(capital), and they did not hold on to it for long. Once the authorities managed to marshal their forces and bring their troops to bear on the insurrection, it was easily crushed.
¹⁰⁷

In the short term the uprising justified Bonaparte's coup retrospectively, allowing his supporters to discredit the
démoc-socs
as dangerous enemies of order and stability. Charlemagne de Maupas, the prefect of police in Paris, proclaimed: ‘Robbery, pillage, assassination, rape, arson, nothing was wanting to this mournful exhibition of the programme of 1852.'
¹⁰⁸
The repression was efficient and sweeping: almost 27,000 people were arrested. Of these, 239 were sent to the living hell of Devil's Island in French Guiana, known as the ‘dry guillotine' because of its fatal, disease-ridden conditions. A further 9,500 were exiled to Algeria, 3,000 were jailed and another 5,000 were kept under police surveillance. Ever the populist, Bonaparte, who had no stomach for such widespread recrimination, commuted the sentences of several thousand others. Although he had committed the coup in the name of universal male suffrage, the unexpected violence that it unleashed shrouded his new regime with the sulphurous odour of repression, ensuring that many republicans would never be reconciled to the new order.
¹⁰⁹
None the less, the violence of the ‘red threat' had been graphically displayed, and when Bonaparte put his actions to the people in a plebiscite on 20 December, conservatives rallied to his support. Comte Charles de Montalembert wrote in the Orléanist newspaper
Constitutionnel
that ‘to vote against Louis-Napoleon is simply to give in to the socialist revolution . . . It is calling in the dictatorship of the reds to replace the dictatorship of a prince who over the last three years has done incomparable good in the causes of law and order and of Catholicism.'
¹¹⁰
The referendum approved the coup by an overwhelming 7.5 million votes against 640,000, although there were 1.5 million abstentions and martial law imposed in some thirty-two departments undoubtedly discouraged a much wider expression of opposition.

None the less, the Second Republic had been resoundingly rejected. Louis-Napoleon was now officially addressed as ‘Your Imperial Highness'. In November 1852, with the blessing of a further plebiscite, he was made ‘Emperor of the French' and was crowned Napoleon III on the first anniversary of his
coup d'état
. Victor Hugo caustically labelled him ‘Napoleon le Petit' to distinguish him derisively from the ‘great' Napoleon. For such impudence he was obliged to flee Paris and seek exile in the Channel Islands. His was a witty, bitter cry of protest: the revolutions of the mid-nineteenth century were well and truly over.