Napoleon III and the French Second Empire by Roger Price (read e books online free txt) 📕

Moreover, the Parisian press circulated far more widely throughout France due to the railways. It now included such overtly revolutionary 47

newspapers as Rochefort’s La Lanterne (May 1868) and its successor La Marseillaise (December 1869), Delescluze’s Le Réveil (‘The Awakening’ – July 1868) and Victor Hugo’s Le Rappel (‘The Reminder’). One feature of their attacks on the regime was condemnation of its origins in a coup d’état. Republicans were able to use the ammunition provided by the journalist Eugene Ténot whose

damning accounts of the brutality involved – in Paris en décembre and La Province en décembre – attracted widespread interest. Such a regime, according to the Indépendent du Midi (1 January 1869), might accord ‘ liberties but never genuine liberté’. In contrast, a republican alternative was presented based upon interpretations of the Declarations of the Rights of Man, revised since the 1840s to take account of manhood suffrage and the need for social reform.

Another feature of this propaganda was its often virulent anti-clericalism: an outpouring of the hatred accumulated in reaction to two decades of militant and politically reactionary clericalism. This was one of the themes of the well-attended public meetings organised in the popular quarters of Paris. In these, and in spite of the obligatory presence of a police commissaire, all the doctrines of the clubs of 1848 were re-iterated. Yet, although it was the most extreme revolutionary

meetings and newspapers which made the greatest impression on public opinion, most republican papers and gatherings were more moderate. They desperately

sought to avoid identification with the threat of violent revolution. Instead, they pressed for continued political reform, confident that the free working of a system of manhood suffrage must inevitably lead to eventual electoral victory. Beyond this, they held out hope of social justice. In this respect, radicals like Gambetta promised tax reductions following cuts in wasteful government expenditure, the introduction of free and secular primary education and, in even vaguer terms, an improvement in the lot of the poor. It was these particular proposals which distinguished them from both the moderate republicans and socialists. Writing early in 1870, Gambetta typified a determination to attract support from all social groups and to avoid social conflict:

we must re-state . . . that for us the victory of democracy with its free institutions means security and prosperity for material interests, everybody’s rights

guaranteed, respect for property, protection of the legitimate and basic rights of labourers, the raising up morally and materially of the lower classes, but without compromising the posi tion of those favoured by wealth and talent. . . . Our single goal is to bring forth justice and social peace.

(Gambetta, Indépendent du Midi, 19 May 1869)

48

Most bourgeois republicans, even if aware of the need to promise social reform in order to win over the mass electorate, remained totally committed to the interests of private property and a liberal economic system. Furthermore, they were

desperately anxious not to frighten the large numbers of small property owners, artisans and peasants. Their fundamental commitment was to ‘progress without revolution’.

Although there was considerable overlap between radicals and socialists, the former appear to have been less committed to social reform than their predecessors, the démoc-socs of 1849–51. Moreover, they were always afraid of losing control over the urban masses who provided them with the bulk of their popular support.

Ideologically, the lines of division between radicals and socialists were clearer than they had been during the Second Republic. There were few disciples of utopian socialism left by the late 1860s, although among artisans cooperative aspirations remained influential. In Paris, the most prominent spokesmen for a complex of revolutionary and socialist ideas were the disciples, mostly intellectuals and students, of Louis-Auguste Blanqui (‘Blanquists’), proponents of a violent seizure of power by revolutionary secret societies, together with the far less extreme and largely working-class members of the Workers’ International. The latter was founded in London in 1864 and initially tolerated by a government which

welcomed its moderation and mutualism. Toleration wore thin when, in 1867, its members sought to support strikers and became involved in political

demonstrations. Reports which grossly exaggerated its membership increased

official alarm. In reality, with a nominal membership of around 30, 000 nationally at its peak early in 1870, its influence was limited outside Paris, Lyon, Rouen and Marseille (Rougerie 1964: 112). Its main impact was to add to conservative and to moderate republican fears of a red revolution, already heightened by the virulence of the left’s propaganda and especially by the ways in which this was reported in the conservative press.

Paradoxically, most politically conscious workers, while suspicious of the

motives of the bourgeois republicans, continued to vote for radical electoral candidates like Gambetta. The desire for working-class political autonomy was very much a minority phenomenon. In 1864, when three worker candidates –

Blanc, Coutant and Tolain – had stood for election in Paris in support of social reform, they had been bitterly attacked by established republican politicians and accused of being Bonapartists. They obtained 342, 11 and 500 votes, respectively.

Clearly, working-class milirants still lacked political authority within their own 49

class. It was to middle-class politicians that workers looked to satisfy their aspirations for greater equality and dignity. Far more widespread than adherence to any ideological position in the working-class quarters of Paris was a diffuse sense of injustice which could certainly awaken sympathy for demands for revolutionary change among the large crowds attending political meetings during 1869–70.

Speakers who denounced the bourgeoisie for ‘living off the sweat of the people’ as vampires devouring ‘those who work’ and who condemned those who had

‘assassinated’ the people in June 1848 and the despotism established by the ‘crime of December 1851’, were warmly applauded. Many speakers looked forward to an imminent revolution which would allow a settling of accounts and ‘the

emancipation of the workers’. Nevertheless, it is difficult to judge to what degree this hostility towards employers and a repressive government, evident in the strike