First Gr Battle

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The first two articles in our series on the re volutionary history of France have dealt with the 1789 Revolution and the period after the reactio 1 of Thermidor (1794), as well as the international wars which followed the French Revolution.

This third articie, in two parts, deals with the class forces which worked together to bring about the upheavals of the 1848 revolution. The final article will deal with the 1871 Paris Commune.

To understand properly the French revolution of 1848, it is first necessary to cast an eye over the forces which had dominated France since the earlier revolution of July 1830.

The regime brought into office by that revolution was a constitutional monarchy with the "bourgeois king" ', Louis Philippe at its head.

His ascension to power was part of a general European upheaval which lasted from 1829-34, and which had been directed mainly against the aristocratic, landowing classes who had ruled Europe from 1815 onwards.

In 1829, for example, the Catholic Emancipation Act was passed in Ireland; in 1830, Belgium WOn its independence from Holland; from 1830-31 an unsuccessful uprising took place in Poland; and in 1832, the first Reform Act, which allowed the industrial bourgeoisie a greater share of political power, was passed in Britain.

BOURGEOIS POWER

The 1830 revolution in France overthrew the Bourbon monarchy, and like Britain was an effort by the bourgeoisie to secure political power for itself.

Yet the government which emerged in France did not represent the interests of the bourgeoisie as a whole. On the contrary, it represented only the interests of one section of that bourgeoisiethe financiers and bankers, as opposed to the industrialists.

The new regime was based on an oligarchic parliamentary system with very restricted franchise.

Throughout all France there were only 166,000 votes-a smaller electorate than in 1791, during the moderate phaswe of that revolution.

Those allowed to vote had to possess substantial wealth, and this regulation excluded not only the artisans, peasants and workers, but the great majority of industrialists as well.

NO REFORM By 1846, the electorate had grown to 241 ,000, but this increase wasn't the result of electoral reform; it merely meant that a few more people met the property qualification. As we shall see, this political rigidity was to prove an important cause of the 1848 upheaval.

1830 in France thus meant the triumph of one section of the bourgeoisie over the landowning aristocracy. But it also marked the emergence of the French working class as an independent, self-conseious political force.

Needless to say, the working class were as yet incapable of exercising their own class rule, but they were clearly beginning to act in their own self-interest. attempted republican ins met an in Paris; in April 1834, the Lyons workers, under the leadership of the Society of the Rights of Man, rose up against Louis Philippe's rule; and in May 1839, Blanqui and Barbes attempted a revolutionary putsch in Paris.

TOLPUDDLE MARTYRS Parallel developments were taking place in England. In 1834, Six Wesleyan labourers (remembered in working class history as the Tolpuddle Martyrs) were transported for trying to agricultural workers' union.

By April 1839 the Chartist paper the Northern Star, had a circulation of 60,000 and that same year saw a Chartist insurrection in Newport.

Jacobinism, which for so long had been merely a spectre of the past, was now taking visible bodily form before the bourgeoisie's very eyes. And it was this, more than anything else, which prevented Louis Philippe from introducing the electoral reforms demanded by the industrial bourgeoisie.

France on the eve of 1848 was thus riven apart by this contradiction between a rigid and inflexible political structure on the one hand, and a fast growing industrial bourgeoisie and a proletariat clamouring for change on the other.

ECONOMIC CRISIS

This contradiction was exacerbated by the world economic crisis of 1846-7. This crisis began first in agriculture, with the potato blights of the mid-forties, which sent the price of basic foodstuffs soaring in the years 1846-7.

This inflation hit hardest at rural artisans and day-labourers in the country, and at workers in the towns. The latter were hit doubly hard since the crisis in agricultre gave rise to a crisis in industry, which at this stage was dominated by textile manufacturing.

Wages were driven down and sackings imposed as the crisis deepened.

In the town of Roubaix, for example, 8,000 out of 13,000 workers were jobless. As in the country, food riots and attacks on specuiators and merchants broke out.

The bourgeoisie lob attacks National Assembiv 15th May 1848 also enmeshed in the crisis. From June 1846 to January 1847 reserves at the Bank of France fell from 201 million francs to 45 million francs.

This put the State, which already had a huge budgetary deficit, under immense pressure.

RAILWAYS

One result of this was that railway construction, which had been part-financed by the State, and which had been exploited to the nth degree by rapacious French speculators, virtually ceased.

Large scale unemployment ensued, and many small manufacturers supplying parts to the railways went to the wall. In 1845 there were 691 bankruptcies in Paris; for_ the year ending July 31 st 1847, there were 1139.

These few figures show how the 1846-7 crisis made itself felt in every nook and cranny of French society.

The effect of this was to bring together-momentarily-all those excluded from the franchise, and to direct their anger and frustration against Louis Philippe's monarchy. Events in other European countries boosted their confidence.

'LIBERAL' POPE

In 1846, a 'liberal' Pope. Pius IX, was elected; in 1847, the Liberats deleated the Catholics in the Belgian elections; in November of that year the Swiss Liberals triumphed in the Sonderbund (or separatist) war; and on January 12, 1848 an uprising took place in the Sicilian capital of Palermo.

Spurred by this upsurge in their European neighbours, the French industrial bourgeoisie, began an led by Thiers and Barrot, agitation for electoral reform in mid-1847. This campaign. was known as the Banqueting Campaign because it used public dinners to rally support.

it took as its central demand a slight lowering of the property qualification in order to admit certain sections of the bourgeoisie into the electorate, Admission to these dinners cost 10 Francs-a wore designed ta Keep dange us working class and artisans.

'NON DINERS'

Yet despite that, the banquets speeches denouncing the government, and despite the paltriness of the political leadership, the working class rallied behind them.

On February 22, 1848 a monster banquet, with reduced rates. to attract elements of the petty-bourgeoisie, was to be held in Paris.

At first the government prohibited it altogether, but then relented, allowing it to be held under strict police supervision in a well-to-do neighbourhood near the Champs Elysee.

A section of the opposition leadership wanted to call the whole affair off, but a group around Ledru-Rollin, decided to press ahead.

As it was, the banquet was held relatively peacefully, although a few sporadic disturbances occurred that evening.

The next day, however, the Paris masses assembled on the streets in force, and called with one voice for the resignation of Louis Philippe's Prime Minister, Guizot.

Terrified by this mass action, Louis Philippe tried to appease the crowds by dismissing Guizot. This gesture was a sign of weakness, and the masses saw it as such for they were soon calling for the overthrow of Louis Philippe himself.

TROOPS

That evening a surging mob collided with a detachment of troops on the Boulevard des Capucines. The soldiers panicked and opened fire, leaving forty to fifty people dead or wounded on the pavement.

Enraged by the killings, the Paris masses flooded onto the streets that night. Over 1 million paving Ledru-Rollin addresses crowd stones were ripped up, and over 4,000 trees were felled to form the more than 1,500 barricades which studded the city on the morning.

By 1.30pm ог February 24th, the court at the Tuilleries Palace had been overthrown; Louis Philippe had been ejected and a republic proclaimed.

That same day a Provisional Government, with working class representatives such as Louis Blanc and Albert, was formed. The July monarchy had come to an end, and the 1848 revolutions had begun.

COALITION

From very outset the the Provisional Government was nothing but a temporary coalition of conflicting class interests. The February revolution had been made by an alliance of industrialists, petty-bourgeois artisans and workers, and the political structure

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it gave birth to necessarily this temporary alliance.

The : Provisional Government thus saw workers sitting alongside bourgeois, and calls for the establishment of a proletarian Ministry of Labour alongside the bourgeois Ministries of Trade and Finance.

But as Marx points out, alongside such Ministries, "a proletarian Ministry of Labour was bound to be a Ministry of impotence, a Ministry of pious wishes" (Class Struggle in France, Pelican Marx Library, vol2. p.45).

And that was exactly what it proved to be, for instead of establishing a Ministry, the Provisional Government set up the Luxembourg Commission.

This Commission was designed, in Garnier-Pages's words, "to keep the people quiet" , and instead of organising labour, it functioned as a giant arbitation board. For when it met on March 17 1848, there were 242 representatives from the working class and 231 from the employers!

• The workers did achieve certain reforms, —a ten- hour day in Paris (12 hours in the provinces); and the abolition of the worst features of the "marchandage" system, whereby subcontractors organised labour for employers.

NOT CAPABLE In a sense these gains were the most the French. working class could achieve at this moment, for "it was still incapable of carrying out its own revolution" • Many workers imagined that by overthrowing Louis Philippe and the finance bourgeoisie they had overthrown the bourgeoisie once and for all.

They saw the republic as their own creation and so swore undying allegiance to it. It was only through a series of defeats that they saw the true nature of that republic; that it signified, not their emancipation, but merely the ground on which the struggle for emancipation would take place.

On May 4, 1848, the Constituent National . Assembly, which had been elected by universal manhood suffrage, met.

MAJOR VOICE

The extension of the franchise after February had meant that France's peasantry were to have a deciding voice in the progress of the bourgeoisie. The result was an assembly dominated by bourgeois republicans.

The first act of the Assembly when it met was to reward the Paris workers for their previous exertions by excluding the proletarian representatives Louis Blanc and Albert from the Executive Commission which it appointed, and by rejecting out of hand the suggestion for a Ministry of Labour.

Ibs 2003 sec of the revolutes: =5 perios-"= "Februas #.x= a second phase.

The period from February 24th formed only the prologue to the real results of the revolution: the establishment of unfettered and unchallenged bourgeois rule. May 4, 1848 marks the reduction of the February revolution to bourgeois scale: that date, and not February 24, marks the real foundation of the bourgeois republic.

The working class were quick to respond to these attempts to exclude them from political power.

ASSAULT

On May 15, Blanqui led a mass assault on the National Assembly, aiming to overthrow it and to set up a new Provisional Government in its stead. This attack was crushed by the National Guard and Blanqui, Barbes, Albert and Rasparl were all arrested.

The bourgeoisie capitalised on their momentary success to launch a new attack on the proletariat, an attack which culminated in the "June days" , 22-24 June, 1848.

In Marx's words, these events:

"mark the first great battle.

Louis Bianc between the two great classes which divide modern society"

(Class Struggles, p.58).

On one side stood the proletariat "without leaders, without a common plan, without supplies, and for the st stepat as cained a ponted TO SL front of the finance aristocracy, industrial bourgeoisie, landowners, petty-bourgeoisie, lumpen proletariat and peasantry, organised in the Mobile and National Guard.

MASSACRE

1,500 workers fell in the street fighting; and after securing their victory, the bourgeoisie massacred another 3,000 • proletariants and deported 12,000 to Algerian labout camps. Any spark of revolutionary 2e2] shown by the bourgeoisie in February was now sharply extinBusted 12 100e SiE- to have Barricade fighting 1848.

disastrous European consequences as well. Just as February had sounded the tocsin of a general European upheaval, now June sounded the knell of European reaction.

The Austrian revolution which had begun in March, was crushed with the seizure of Vienna by Windischgratz and Jellacic in November. 4,000 workers and students were killed in the fighting.

In Prussia, Frederick William IV carried out a coup d'etat with the "dictated constitution" of December 5. This step marks the end of the revolution there. And on December 10, 1848, Louis Bonaparte-alleged nephew of the Emperor Napoleon-was elected President of the French Republic, a victory which set him on the road to the liquidation of that republic and the installation of the Second Empire.

DISSOLUTION

The period from June 24 to December 10 is the period of exclusive bourgeois republican rule in France. But with the election of Bonaparte as President, the situation was changed and the first six months of 1849 mark the dissolution of the republican faction of the bourgeoisie.

On December 20, 1848, General Cavaignac, who had supervised the crushing of the June insurgents, resigned his office. That same day, the Ministry of Olion Barrot, an opposition leader during the July monarchy, was established.

The republican bourgeoisie had accomplished its historical tasks. By crushing the proletariat and silencing the petty-bourgeoisie it had paved the way for the big bourgeoisie.

The republicans had played out their historic roles, and were now supplanted by the royalist wing of the bourgeoisie: the Orleanists. or financiers who had ruled from 1830 under Louis Philippe; and the Legitimists, OI Bourbons-those landowners Louis Philippe had overthrown in 1830.

PARTY OF Hitherto enemies, by virtue of the different property forms on which they were based, these two strands now came together in the infamous Party of Order.

And together with Louis Bonaparte, who relied on an amalgam of peasant and lumpenproletarian elements for support, they succeeded in forcing the dissolution of the Constituent National Assembly.

On January 29, 1849 deputies arriving at the Assembly were alarmed to see it surrounded by a massive military presence. The general in charge, Changarnier, said this was to protect the Assembly against radical or socialist attacks. The conservative forces within the Assembly acquiesced in this obvious lie. while the petty-bourgzois elements were too terrified to do zarthing about it Aed siese the Assembly had performed its major work-the drafting of a constitution -it hurriedly agreed to dissolve itself.

VICTORY

The elections which followed on May 13, 1849 for the new Legislative National Assembly resulted in a victory for Bonaparte and the party ot Order. All told, they secured almost 500 seats to the combined figure of 200 secured by the radical and democratic elements.

These latter, organised as a democratic-socialist force called the "new Montagne" , (ie the 'new Mountain', , recalling the Jacobins of 11934), were elated at their electoral success.

But what they saw as the revival of strong anti-conservative feeling was in reality nothing but a last gasp effort from a proletariat and petty-bourgeoisie demoralised by defeat.

This fact revealed itself in the rout of the Montagne on June 13, 1849. At this time the question of French intervention on behalf of the Pope was being hotly debated in the Assembly. On June 11, Ledru-Rollin, on behalf of the Montagne, moved the impeachment of Bonaparte and his cabinet for violation of Article V of the Constitution, which forbade the use of French armed forces "against the liberty of any other people" . And in moving the impeachment, LedruRollin declared that he and his party would defend the Constitution to the last, "if necessary by arms".

INSURRECTION

On the defeat of his motion, he and the deputies of the Montagne left the Assembly and, on June 13, attempted to stage an insurrection. They seized the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers in the crowded workers' section of Paris, and called on the people to throw up barricades.

The rising was a fiasco. Distrustful of these democrats who had fought against them the previous June, and demoralised by that and other defeats, the proletariat failed to respond.

The Montagne were isolated, and General Changarnier had no trouble dispersing the handful of demonstrators on the streets. Ledru-Rollin and the rest managed to escape from the Conservatoire through a back-door.

Just as the second phase of the revolution-the period of the Constituent National Assemblyhad opened with an uprising in June, so now did the third phasethe period of the Legislative National Assembly-open with a June • rebellion, June 1848 had marked the beginning of the bourgeois republic; June 1849 was to prove the beginning of its end.

For this third period of the revolution was to culminate in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte -the coup d'etat of December 2, 1851.

The Legislative National Assembly existed for 242 years, and this time is dominated by the incessant struggles between Bonaparte and the Party of Order, and within the Party of Order itself. On October 31. 1849 Bonaparte dismissed the Legitims Orearie Barrot, and appointed the fautpowd Ministry in its place. By this stage the Party of Order was beginning to dissolve into its component parts, those who swore by finance and those who swore by land.

At certain moments, in the face of a common enemy, their unity was restored, as, tor example, when the new electoral law of 31 May 1850 was passed. (This law disenfranchised up • to 29% of the countryside and almost 70% of Paris, and was the bourgeoisie's response to the by elections of March 10, 1850 when radical demo crats won roughly 30% of the vote).

But the relative economic pros perity and the gradual ebb of the revolution meant that each group in the Party of Order could now pursue its own sectional interests rather than the interests of their class as a whole.

CONSPIRACIES

The Legislative Assembly was in recess from August 11 to November 11, 1850 and this withdrawal from national politics saw each wing of the party conspire against the other, and agitate for the return of its own favourite as monarch of Bonaparte, a dab-hand at conspiratorial politicking, took advantage of the parliamentary recess and the division within the bourgeois ranks to consolidate and extend his own rule.

By January 10, 1851 he felt sufficiently strong to secure the dismissal of General Changarnier. With his dismissal, Bonaparte finally achieved what he had been striving for during the previous year-the disarming of the Assembly and the severance of all links between it and the military.

The next three months saw the Party of Order desperately trying to regain control of the army and the administrative power. On January 18, 1851 the Assembly passed a vote of no-confidence in the Ministry which Bonaparte had established after his dismissal of Changarnier.

RESIGNED

Iwo days later, the Ministry resigned. It, and not Bonaparte. had been offended by the vote of no-confidence. Bonaparte then seized on the pretext that no party had a parliamentary majority, and appointed a so-called transitional Ministry, which contained not a Barricades in the streets 1848.

single member of parliament, anc which consisted entirely unknown and insignificant indiv iduals.

In this Bonaparte merely humil itated further the already debased Assembly. This transitional Ministry continued to vegetate unti mid-April, by which time the extra parliamentary bourgeoisie were howling for a "strong government" to pursue resolute measures which would rescue France from the economic.crisis.

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The mass picket at Saltley was a major turning point of capitalist class can get away with it, will include the working class.

But, you might say, the use of in surrounding Heathrow by a joint Army/police "ring of steel' just before the 1974 miners' strike to

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attracted large numbers of 'non- diners' • who came to hear the