Realm
Government of France from 1848 to 1852
The French Second Republic, officially the French Republic, was the second republican formation of the government of France. The republic existed from 1848, when the monarchy fell, until its dissolution only four years later in 1852 upon the proclamation of the Second French Empire.
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Text from the Wikipedia article “French Second Republic”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
The French Second Republic (French: Deuxième république française or La IIe République), officially the French Republic (République française), was the second republican formation of the government of France. The republic existed from 1848, when the monarchy fell, until its dissolution only four years later in 1852 upon the proclamation of the Second French Empire.
Following the final defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte at the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815, France had been reconstituted into a monarchy known as the Bourbon Restoration. After a brief period of revolutionary turmoil in 1830, royal power was again secured in the "July Monarchy", governed under principles of moderate conservatism and improved relations with the United Kingdom.
In 1848, Europe erupted into a mass revolutionary wave in which many citizens challenged their royal leaders. Much of it was led by France in the February Revolution, overthrowing King Louis-Philippe. Radical and liberal factions of the population convened the French Second Republic in 1848. Attempting to restore the French First Republic's values on human rights and constitutional government, they adopted the motto of the First Republic; Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. The republic was plagued with tribalist tendencies of its leading factions: royalists, proto-socialists, liberals, and conservatives. In this environment, Napoleon's nephew, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, established himself as a popular anti-establishment figure and was elected president in 1848.
Under the Second Republic's constitution, the president was restricted to a single term of four years. To avoid this restriction and remain in power, President Louis-Napoléon overthrew the second Republic in a process beginning with the 1851 self-coup d'état; he became known as Emperor Napoleon III of the Second French Empire from 1852.
France's "February Revolution" of 1848 was the first of the Revolutions of 1848. The events of the revolution led to the end of the 1830–1848 Orleans Monarchy and led to the creation of the Second Republic.
The July Revolution of 1830, part of a wave of similar regime changes across Europe, had put an end to the monarchy of the Bourbon Restoration and installed a more liberal constitutional monarchy under the Orleans dynasty governed predominantly by Guizot's conservative-liberal center-right and Thiers' progressive-liberal center-left.
But to the left of the dynastic parties, the monarchy was criticized by Republicans (a mixture of Radicals and socialists) for being insufficiently democratic: its electoral system was based on a narrow, privileged electorate of property owners and therefore excluded workers. During the 1840s several petitions requesting electoral reform (universal manhood suffrage) had been issued by the National Guard but had been rejected by both of the main dynastic parties. Political meetings dedicated to this issue were banned by the government, and electoral reformers therefore bypassed the ban by holding a series of 'banquets' (1847–1848), events where the political debate was disguised as dinner speeches. This movement began overseen by Odilon Barrot's moderate center-left liberal critics of Guizot's conservative government but took on a life of its own after 1846 when the economic crisis encouraged ordinary workers to demand a say over the government.
On 14 February 1848, Guizot's government decided to put an end to the banquets, on the grounds of constituting illegal political assembly. On 22 February, striking workers and Republican students took to the streets, demanding an end to Guizot's government, and erected barricades. Odilon Barrot called a motion of no confidence in Guizot, hoping that this might satisfy the rioters, but the Chamber of Deputies sided with the premier. The government called a state of emergency, thinking it could rely on the troops of the National Guard, but instead on the morning of 23 February, the Guardsmen sided with the revolutionaries, protecting them from the regular soldiers who by now had been called in.
The industrial population of the faubourgs was welcomed by the National Guard on their way toward the center of Paris. Barricades were raised after the shooting of protestors outside the Guizot manor by soldiers.
On 23 February 1848 Premier François Guizot's cabinet resigned, abandoned by the petite bourgeoisie, on whose support they thought they could depend. The heads of the more left-leaning conservative-liberal monarchist parties, Louis-Mathieu Molé and Adolphe Thiers, declined to form a government. Odilon Barrot accepted, and Thomas Robert Bugeaud, commander-in-chief of the first military division, who had begun to attack the barricades, was recalled. In the face of the insurrection that had now taken possession of the whole capital, King Louis-Philippe abdicated in favor of his nine-year-old grandson, Prince Philippe, Count of Paris, but under pressure from insurgents who invaded the chamber of the Chamber of Deputies, leaders leaned in favor of the insurrection and prepared a provisional government; a (second) republic was then proclaimed by Alphonse de Lamartine.
The provisional government, with Dupont de l'Eure as its president, consisted of Lamartine for foreign affairs, Crémieux for justice, Ledru-Rollin for the interior, Carnot for public instruction, Goudchaux for finance, Arago for the navy, and Burdeau for war. Garnier-Pagès was made mayor of Paris.
But, in 1830, the republican-socialist party set up a rival government at the Hôtel de Ville (city hall), including Louis Blanc, Armand Marrast, Ferdinand Flocon, and Alexandre Martin, known as Albert L'Ouvrier ("Albert the Worker"), which bid fair to involve discord and civil war. But this time the Palais Bourbon was not victorious over the Hôtel de Ville. It had to consent to a fusion of the two bodies, in which, however, the predominating elements were the moderate Republicans. It was uncertain what the policy of the new government would be.
One party seeing that despite the changes in the last sixty years of all political institutions, the position of the people had not been improved, demanded a reform of society itself, the abolition of the privileged position of property, which they viewed as the only obstacle to equality, and as an emblem hoisted the red flag (the 1791 red flag was, however, the symbol not merely of the French Revolution, but rather of martial law and of order). The other party wished to maintain society on the basis of its traditional institutions, and rallied around the tricolore. As a concession made by Lamartine to popular aspirations, and in exchange for the maintaining of the tricolor flag, he conceded the Republican triptych of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, written on the flag, on which a red rosette was also to be added.
The first collision took place as to the form which the 1848 Revolution was to take. Lamartine wished for them to maintain their original principles, with the whole country as supreme, whereas the revolutionaries under Ledru-Rollin wished for the Republic of Paris to hold a monopoly on political power. On 5 March the government, under the pressure of the Parisian clubs, decided in favor of an immediate reference to the people, and direct universal suffrage, and adjourned it until 26 April. This added the uneducated masses to the electorate and led to the election of the Constituent Assembly on 4 May 1848. The provisional government having resigned, the republican and anti-socialist majority on 9 May entrusted the supreme power to an Executive Commission consisting of five members: Arago, Pierre Marie de Saint-Georges, Garnier-Pagès, Lamartine, and Ledru-Rollin.
The result of the general election, the return of a predominantly moderate, if not monarchical, constituent assembly dashed the hopes of those who had looked for the establishment, by a peaceful revolution, of their ideal socialist state. but they were not prepared to yield without a struggle, and in Paris itself they commanded a formidable force. In spite of the preponderance of the "tricolor" party in the provisional government, so long as the voice of France had not spoken, the socialists, supported by the Parisian proletariat, had exercised an influence on policy disproportionate to their relative numbers. By the decree of 24 February, the provisional government had solemnly accepted the principle of the "right to work", and decided to establish "National Workshops" for the unemployed; at the same time, a sort of industrial parliament was established at the Luxembourg Palace, under the presidency of Louis Blanc, with the object of preparing a scheme for the organization of labor; and, lastly, by the decree of 8 March, the property qualification for enrolment in the National Guard had been abolished and the workmen were supplied with arms. The socialists thus formed a sort of state-within-a-state, complete with a government and an armed force.
On 15 May, an armed mob, headed by François-Vincent Raspail, Auguste Blanqui, and Armand Barbès, and assisted by the proletariat-aligned Guard, attempted to overwhelm the Assembly, but were defeated by the bourgeois-aligned battalions of the National Guard. Meanwhile, the national workshops were unable to provide remunerative work for the genuine unemployed, and of the thousands who applied, the greater number were employed in aimless digging and refilling of trenches; soon even this expedient failed, and those for whom work could not be invented were given a half wage of 1 franc a day.
On 21 June, Alfred de Falloux decided in the name of the parliamentary commission on labour that the workmen should be discharged within three days and those who were able-bodied should be forced to enlist in the armed forces.
After this, the June Days uprising broke out, over the course of 24–26 June, when the eastern industrial quarter of Paris, led by the worker Louis Pujol, fought the western quarter, led by general Louis-Eugène Cavaignac, who had been appointed military dictator. The socialist party was defeated and afterwards its members were deported. But the republic had been discredited and had already become unpopular with both the peasants, who were exasperated by the new land tax of 45 centimes imposed in order to fill the empty treasury, and with the bourgeoisie, who were intimidated by the power of the revolutionary clubs and disadvantaged by the economic stagnation. By the "riots" of the June Days, the working classes were also alienated from it. The Duke of Wellington wrote at this time, "France needs a Napoleon! I cannot yet see him..." The granting of universal suffrage to a society with Imperialist sympathies would benefit reactionaries, which culminated in the election of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte as president of the republic.
The new constitution, proclaiming a democratic republic, direct universal suffrage, and the separation of powers, was promulgated on 4 November 1848. Under the new constitution, there was to be a single permanent Assembly of 750 members elected for a term of three years by the scrutin de liste. The Assembly would elect members of a Council of State to serve for six years. Laws would be proposed by the Council of State, to be voted on by the Assembly.
The executive power was delegated to the president, who was elected for four years by direct universal suffrage, i.e. on a broader basis than that of the Assembly, and was not eligible for re-election. He was to choose his ministers, who, like him, would be responsible to the Assembly.
Revision of this constitution was made practically impossible: it involved obtaining three times in succession a majority of three-quarters of the deputies in a special assembly. It was in vain that Jules Grévy—on behalf of those who perceived the obvious and inevitable risk of creating, under the name of a president, a monarch and indeed one who was more than a king at that—proposed that the head of the state should be no more than a removable president of the ministerial council. Lamartine, thinking that he was sure to be the choice of the electors under universal suffrage, won over the support of the Chamber, which did not even take the precaution of rendering ineligible the members of families which had reigned over France. It made the presidency an office dependent upon popular acclamation.
The election was keenly contested; the democratic republicans adopted as their candidate Ledru-Rollin, the "pure republicans" Cavaignac, and the recently reorganized Imperialist party Prince Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte. Unknown in 1835, and forgotten or despised since 1840, Louis Napoleon had in the last eight years advanced sufficiently in the public estimation to be elected to the Constituent Assembly in 1848 by five departments. He owed this rapid increase of popularity partly to blunders of the government of July, which had unwisely aroused the memory of the country, filled as it was with recollections of the Empire, and partly to Louis Napoléon's campaign carried on by means of pamphlets of socialistic tendencies. Moreover, the monarchists, led by Thiers and the committee of the Rue de Poitiers, were no longer content even with the safe dictatorship of the upright Cavaignac, and joined forces with the Bonapartists. On 10 December the peasants gave over 5,000,000 votes to a name: Napoléon, which stood for order at all costs, against 1,400,000 for Cavaignac. Henri Georges Boulay de la Meurthe was elected vice president, a unique position in French history.
Text from the Wikipedia article “French Second Republic”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.