The French Revolution of 1848 (French: Révolution française de 1848), also known as the February Revolution (Révolution de février), was a period of civil unrest in France, in February 1848, that led to the collapse of the July Monarchy and the foundation of the French Second Republic. It sparked the wave of revolutions of 1848.
The revolution took place in Paris, and was preceded by the French government's crackdown on the campagne des banquets. Starting on 22 February as a large-scale protest against the government of François Guizot, it later developed into a violent uprising against the monarchy. After intense urban fighting, large crowds managed to take control of the capital, leading to the abdication of King Louis Philippe I on 24 February and the subsequent proclamation of the Second Republic.
Background
Under the Charter of 1814, Louis XVIII ruled France as the head of a constitutional monarchy. Upon Louis XVIII's death, his brother, the Count of Artois, ascended to the throne in 1824, as Charles X. Supported by the ultra-royalists, Charles X was an extremely unpopular reactionary monarch whose aspirations were far more grand than those of his deceased brother. He had no desire to rule as a constitutional monarch, taking various steps to strengthen his own authority as monarch and weaken that of the lower house.
In 1830, Charles X, presumably persuaded by one of his chief advisers, Jules, Prince de Polignac, issued the Four Ordinances of St. Cloud. These ordinances abolished freedom of the press, reduced the electorate by 75%, and dissolved the lower house. This action provoked an immediate reaction from the citizenry, who revolted against the monarchy during the Three Glorious Days of 26–29 July 1830. Charles was forced to abdicate the throne and to flee Paris for the United Kingdom. As a result, Louis Philippe, of the Orléanist branch, rose to power, replacing the old Charter by the Charter of 1830, and his rule became known as the July Monarchy.
Nicknamed the "Bourgeois Monarch", Louis Philippe sat at the head of a moderately liberal state controlled mainly by an educated elite. He was supported by the Orléanists and opposed on his right by the Legitimists (former ultra-royalists) and on his left by the Republicans. Louis Philippe was an expert businessman and, by means of his businesses, he had become one of the richest men in France. Louis Philippe saw himself as the successful embodiment of a "small businessman" (petit bourgeois). He and his government did not look with favor on the big business (bourgeoisie), especially the industrial section of the French bourgeoisie, yet Louis Philippe did support the bankers, large and small. At the beginning of his reign in 1830, Jacques Laffitte, a banker and liberal politician who supported Louis Philippe's rise to the throne, said "From now on, the bankers will rule."
During the reign of Louis Philippe, the privileged "financial aristocracy", i.e. bankers, stock exchange magnates, railroad barons, owners of coal mines, iron ore mines, and forests and all landowners associated with them, tended to support him, while the industrial section of the bourgeoisie, which may have owned the land their factories sat on but not much more, were disfavored by Louis Philippe and actually tended to side with the middle class and laboring class in opposition to Louis Philippe in the Chamber of Deputies. Land-ownership was favored, and this elitism resulted in the disenfranchisement of much of the middle and working classes.
By 1848, only about one percent of the population held the franchise. Although France had a free press and trial by jury, only landholders were permitted to vote, which alienated the petite bourgeoisie and even the industrial bourgeoisie from the government. Louis Philippe was viewed as generally indifferent to the needs of society, especially to those members of the middle class who were excluded from the political arena. Early in 1848, some Orléanist liberals, such as Adolphe Thiers, had turned against Louis Philippe, disappointed by his opposition to parliamentarism. A reform movement developed in France which urged the government to expand the electoral franchise, just as Great Britain had done with the Reform Act 1832. The more radical democrats of the reform movement coalesced around the newspaper, La Réforme; the more moderate republicans and the liberal opposition rallied around the Le National newspaper. Starting in July 1847 the reformists of all shades began to hold "banquets" at which toasts were drunk to "République française" (the French Republic), "Liberté, égalité, fraternité", etc. Louis Philippe turned a deaf ear to the reform movement, and discontent among wide sections of the French people continued to grow.
Alexis de Tocqueville observed, "We are sleeping together in a volcano. ... A wind of revolution blows, the storm is on the horizon." Lacking the property qualifications to vote, the lower classes were about to erupt in revolt.
Economic and international influences
The French middle class watched changes in Britain with interest. When Britain's Reform Act 1832 extended enfranchisement to any man paying taxes of £10 or more per year (equivalent to £1,000 in 2025, previously the vote was restricted to landholders), France's free press took interest. Meanwhile, economically, the French working class may perhaps have been slightly better off than Britain's working class. Still, unemployment in France threw skilled workers down to the level of the proletariat. The only nominally social law of the July Monarchy was passed in 1841. This law prohibited the use of labor of children under eight years of age, and the employment of children less than 13 years old for night-time work. This law was routinely flouted.
The year 1846 saw a financial crisis and bad harvests, and the following year saw an economic depression. A poor railway system hindered aid efforts, and the peasant rebellions that resulted were forcibly crushed. According to French economist Frédéric Bastiat, the poor condition of the railway system can largely be attributed to French efforts to promote other systems of transport, such as carriages. Perhaps a third of Paris was on social welfare. Writers such as Louis Blanc ("The right to work") and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon ("Property is theft!") proliferated.
Bastiat, who was one of the most famous political writers of the 1840s, had written countless works concerning the economic situation before 1848, and provided a different explanation of why the French people were forced to rise in the revolt. He believed that the main reasons were primarily political corruption, along with its very complex system of monopolies, permits, and bureaucracy, which made those who were able to obtain political favors unjustly privileged and able to dictate the market conditions and caused a myriad of businesses to collapse, as well as protectionism which was the basis for the French foreign trade at the time, and which caused businesses along the Atlantic coast to file for bankruptcy, along with the one owned by Bastiat's family. Indeed, most of Bastiat's early works concern the situation in Bayonne and Bordeaux, two large merchant harbors before the Napoleonic Wars, gradually devastated first by Napoleon I's continental blockade, and later by the protectionist legislation of the nineteenth century. According to Bastiat's biographer, G.C. Roche, just prior to the revolution, 100,000 citizens of Lyon were described as "indigent" and by 1840 there were at least 130,000 abandoned children in France. International markets were not similarly troubled at the time, which Bastiat attributed to the freedom of trade. Indeed, a large part of French economic problems in the 1830s and 1840s were caused by the shortage and unnaturally high prices of different products which could have easily been imported from other countries, such as textiles, machines, tools, and ores, but doing so was either outright illegal at the time or unprofitable due to the system of punitive tariffs.
Bastiat has also noted that the French legislators were entirely unaware of the reality and the effects of their radical policies. One of the members of the French Chamber of Deputies reportedly received a standing ovation when he proposed that the depression of 1847 was due primarily to "external weakness" and "idle pacifism". Nationalist tendencies caused France to severely restrict all international contacts with the United Kingdom, including the ban on importing tea, perceived as destructive to the French national spirit. As the United Kingdom was the largest economy in the world in the nineteenth century, France deprived itself of its most important economic partner, one that could have supplied France with what it lacked and bought surplus French goods.
Such governmental policies and obliviousness to the real reasons of economic troubles were, according to Bastiat, the main causes of the French Revolution of the 1848 and the rise of socialists and anarchists in the years preceding the revolution itself.
Because political gatherings and demonstrations were outlawed in France, activists of the largely middle class opposition to the government began to hold a series of fund-raising banquets. This campaign of banquets (campagne des banquets), was intended to circumvent the governmental restriction on political meetings and provide a legal outlet for popular criticism of the regime. The campaign began in July 1847. Friedrich Engels was in Paris dating from October 1847 and was able to observe and attend some of these banquets. He wrote a series of articles on them, including "The Reform Movement in France" which was published in La Réforme on 20 November 1847; "Split in the Camp—the Réforme and the National—March of Democracy" published in The Northern Star on 4 December 1847; "Reform Banquet at Lille—Speech of LeDru-Rollin" published in The Northern Star on 16 December 1847; "Reform Movement in France—Banquet of Dijon" published in The Northern Star on 18 December 1847; "The Réforme and the National" published in the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung on 30 December 1847; and "Louis Blanc's Speech at the Dijon Banquet" published in the Deutsche-Brusseler-Zeitung on 30 December 1847.
On 14 January 1848, ahead of the highly awaited next banquet in Paris, the government of prime minister François Guizot outlawed it. Nonetheless, the banquet's organizers decided that it would still be held, alongside a political demonstration, and scheduled it for 22 February.
Revolution
22 February
Aware of the political gatherings scheduled for the following day, the French government banned the political banquets for the second time on 21 February. The ban succeeded in pressuring the organizing committee to cancel the events. However, the workers and students, mobilising in the previous days, refused to back down over the demonstrations. 22 February started quietly, and at 9 a.m., members of the Municipal Guard who had been assigned to arrest the banquet leaders were recalled to their normal duties by the Prefect of Police. Only a small number of troops remained at critical points. Shortly before noon, large crowds began flooding out onto the streets of Paris, gathering from the eastern suburbs and the Latin Quarter towards the Place de la Concorde and the Place de la Madeleine. Their appearance came as a surprise to the authorities, after the events were supposedly cancelled, and led to a confused initial response.
The crowds, mostly unarmed, easily overcame the few Municipal Guardsmen, filling the squares and nearly invading the Palais Bourbon, the seat of the Chamber of Deputies. These demonstrations soon developed into a large-scale, popular revolt, making 22 February the first day of the Revolution. With the arrival of reinforcements in the afternoon, protesters were dispersed from the Place de la Concorde and the Place de la Madeleine. The crowds were too large to be arrested or contained, and so they spread out around the Champs-Élysées and back into southeast Paris, building the first barricades. In the evening, early skirmishes took place with the Municipal Guard.