Hello and welcome to Revolutions.

“Of what is revolt composed? Of Nothing and of everything, of an electricity disengaged little by little, of a flame suddenly darting forth, of a wandering force, of a passing breath. This breath encounters heads which speak, brains which dream, souls which suffer, passions which burn, wretchedness which howls, and bears them away.”

Does any of that sound familiar? No, it probably does not, but it’s from the beginning of Volume Four, Book 10, Chapter One of Les Misérables, just as Victor Hugo is getting ready to climax his massive tome with the tragically unsuccessful June Rebellion of 1832, a rebellion which he then recounts in vivid detail for the next 100,000 words or so.

Now this little uprising, excuse me, insurrection, would probably have been forgotten entirely had it not been for Hugo’s decision to make it the centerpiece of one of the great novels of the western canon. As so far as I can tell, he plucked the June Rebellion from obscurity for two reasons. First, the end of Les Mis really needed a tragic backdrop, not a triumphant one. But probably more importantly, Victor Hugo was there. In 1832, he was 30 years old and had just recently come into his own as the leading figure of French Romantic literature after the publication of The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1831.

On June the 5th, 1832, Hugo was sitting in the Tuileries Gardens when he heard the rapid fire crackle of gunfire coming from the east. Now doing something that you should never ever do, the curious young author got up and walked toward the gunfire. After observing frantic rebels building barricades, he pressed deeper into the center of Paris and was soon trapped on a street with insurrectionaries on one side and an advancing column of troops on the other. He had to duck into a shop and hide out as the two sides exchanged gunfire. So the end of Les Mis is not just a flight of romantic fancy, though it is a flight of romantic fancy. It is also an eyewitness account that deserves a measure of historical legitimacy as a primary source document.

Now, as Hugo understood it, the June Rebellion of 1832 was the tragic coda to the July Revolution of 1830, when it became clear once and for all that the Orléans monarchy was an agent of conservative order, not revolutionary liberation. So we too will use the June Rebellion as the coda to our run of episodes on the July Revolution, and at the conclusion of this episode, I will take a six-week hiatus to fully prepare to feed this story into the wider explosion that is the revolutions of 1848.

So to begin this coda, let us return to where we left off in Episode 6.07 in August of 1830 with the coronation of Louis Philippe I, King of the French. And you will recall from our run of episodes through the three glorious days that the revolution of 1830 was really two revolutions running parallel to each other. One was led by students, workers, Army veterans, and the people of Paris out in the streets. This was the barricades and the fighting and the dying. The other though, unfolded in the apartments and salons of the liberal opposition, the journalists and lawyers and the liberal bourgeoisie. Guided by men like Jacques Laffitte, Adolphe Thiers, François Guizot, and Casimir Périer, these respectable members of the Liberal opposition had closed ranks around the Duc d’Orléans and ensured that the result of the fighting and the dying and the barricades was the elevation of King Louis Philippe.

Now, if you will also recall, in the chaotic aftermath of the three glorious days, it was not at all guaranteed that the Parisian street fighters would accept that their fighting and dying had been in the service of simply exchanging one Bourbon for another. But at the critical moment of truth, Marquis de Lafayette had lent his name, reputation, and most importantly, command of the National Guard to the Orléanists and sealed the creation of the July Monarchy with his Republican kiss. Now, Lafayette believed he had secured promises from Louis Philippe that the new regime would be a monarchy surrounded by Republican institutions. But if Lafayette did believe it, he was soon disappointed, as were many of the younger and more radical street fighters who were at that moment still catching their breath from three days of fighting. 

As the smoke cleared and life went back to normal in the summer of 1830, many of these younger and more radical activists, charged by their time on the barricades, resented the new regime’s unwillingness to move France in a more Republican direction and really resented that the memory of their sacrifice was now being used to prop up the July Monarchy. The new party line was that the three glorious days had always been about the people rising up to put the Duc d’Orléans on the throne, as if that wasn’t some last-minute maneuver that wasn’t even brought up until the Parisians had already seized control of the Capital. But as the new regime sought to cement its legitimacy and rewrite the history of the July Revolution, it spared no expense honoring the martyred dead and ensuring that the widows and children of the heroes of July received pensions and scholarships and special treatment.

In October of 1830, the great, romantic painter, Eugène Delacroix, painted Liberty Leading the People, one of the most famous of all revolutionary paintings, which showed the personification of liberty leading a mix of social classes over the barricades and into freedom. You know the one I’m talking about. Google “Liberty Leading the People” you’ll instantly recognize it. Well, in early 1831, the government bought this painting and intended it for display in the throne room, but uh, well, we’ll come back to the fate of Liberty Leading the People at the end of today’s episode because I’m getting a little ahead of myself. 

Inside Paris, the grumbling about this wholesale appropriation of the memory of the martyrs of the three glorious days was most loudly heard in a new Republican club called the Society of the Friends of the People. As you might guess from the name, these guys, mostly students and young clerks, did not look back at the first Republic with terror and dread. They positively revered the names Robespierre, Marat, Danton, men who had stood for true liberty, and who had refused to compromise their principles.

The Society of the Friends of the People was founded on July the 30th, 1830, so just after Marshal Marmont’s troops had been driven out of Paris, these were the guys who would have heckled Louis Philippe as he led that procession to the Hôtel de Ville; these are the guys who would have been only reluctantly mollified by Lafayette’s promises about Louis Philippe’s promises as he became King. It is not accurate to say that they were ever disillusioned with the July monarchy because that would imply that they had once been illusioned in the first place.

But the rest of the summer of 1830 passed without incident, as Louis Philippe’s new regime found its footing. And, as you might expect, he was surrounded by the men who had conspired to put him there, among them Jacques Laffitte, François Guizot, Casimir Périer, all of whom had places in his Ministry. Lafayette, meanwhile, still ran the National Guard and remained, for the moment, steadfastly loyal to the new government.

But the initial honeymoon period was ended by the question of what to do about former Prime Minister Polignac and three other senior ministers from the regime of Charles X, who had been captured in the wake of the three glorious days. Now, Louis Philippe’s new government would have been happy to have just let them get away, but Polignac and his three colleagues had been captured, were presently in custody, and needed to be punished, if not for reasons of justice, then simple political expedience; the people would not accept a slap on the wrist for the authors of so much criminal bloodshed. But the King and his ministers agreed that the death penalty would be too harsh. They refused to inaugurate their new regime by presiding over the return of Madame la Guillotine. But how are they going to get Polignac through this with his head attached to his body without triggering another revolution? That was a tricky question, because, for example, the Society of the Friends of the People wanted blood for blood. These Ministers had committed treason. The enormity of their crime demanded the ultimate penalty, but the government seemed to be visibly flinching from doing the job. After keeping the prisoners at an indecisive limbo for a few months, in late September, the Chamber of Deputies voted to move the trial of the Ministers to the more conservative Chamber of Peers. And then came word that prior to the start of the trial, a bill was being prepared to abolish the death penalty entirely, so it wouldn’t be that Polignac was getting special treatment, just that the new order of things would be kinder and gentler.

But many in Paris did not want a kinder and gentler order of things, and there were protests that bordered on riots on October the 9th. Now this appears to have forestalled the general ban on the death penalty and left the regime still trying to deal with this dilemma of not wanting to execute Polignac while the streets of Paris really super wanted to execute Polignac. 

On October the 17th, the four prisoners were formally indicted on charges of treason in the Chamber of Peers, and while that was going on inside, a large crowd gathered outside the Luxembourg Palace, which is where the Chamber of Peers met and more small-scale rioting broke out; rioting that soon migrated over to the Tuileries Palace, where for a few tense hours, the royal family lived under something resembling a siege. Now that brief crisis resolved itself with the coming of darkness, but that was not the end of it. The very next day, October the 18th, what can only be described as a lynch mob gathered in the center of Paris. From this central meeting place, they then marched 6 miles east to the fortress of Vincennes, where Polignac and the other ministers were being held. The idea was to dispense the justice the government seemed so determined to avoid dispensing. But when they arrived at the fortress, they were greeted by the General in Charge, a grizzled, old veteran of the Napoleonic Wars. Unintimidated by the mob, the General told them, “Hey, did you know this fortress is also an armory and has a massive cache of gunpowder in it? If you try to force your way in, I won’t hesitate to blow us all to hell,” and he said then, “We can all meet in the air.” Not detecting a hint of bluff in this threat, the crowd dispersed. All this marching to and fro took all day, and the mob wasn’t back in the center of Paris till well after midnight, but again they dispersed without any full-scale rebellion breaking out.

But though no rebellion had broken out… yet, the government was understandably nervous about what would happen when the Chamber of Peers inevitably returned a verdict of “guilty of treason, but sentence of life imprisonment rather than death.”

The trial was unfolding slowly, though, and the verdict was not due to be delivered until December the 21st. In a final, anxious meeting the night before the verdict was due to be handed down, the Ministers finally settled on a plan. The defendants would be secretly removed from the Luxembourg Palace and returned to the fortress at Vincennes before the verdict was handed down. That way, when the inevitably hostile crowd inevitably looked to hang Polignac from the nearest lamppost, he would be nowhere to be found. Now the Ministers had tried to keep Lafayette out of the loop on this final plan, but the General of the National Guard managed to push his way into the final meeting, though when he got there, he agreed with the proposal and agreed that only regular troops of the line should be stationed in the garden of the Luxembourg Palace. Members of the National Guard might not be so keen to go along with this secret plan to save the hated Polignac.

So it came as quite a shock to the Ministers the next day when Lafayette went ahead and allowed companies of the National Guard into the gardens anyway. He later said that these companies had insisted and that their honor would be besmirched if they were not allowed to do their duty, but the other Ministers felt betrayed. With the Chamber set to retire for their final deliberations at 1:00 in the afternoon, they now had to think fast. Suddenly, one of them remembered that there was a little-used side door that they could access, and so just as the trial adjourned, Polignac and his three co-defendants were successfully hustled out the back and no one was the wiser. The whole rest of the day then passed in idleness, with the Peers not coming back with their verdict until 11 at night, and it was the expected provocative verdict: guilty of treason, with a sentence of life in prison. This was greeted by howls, but most people had gone home, so the verdict was not generally known in Paris until the next morning, by which point both the Army and National Guard were out in force to keep order. A few hundred gathered in protest, but despite the fear of some and the hope of others that the verdict would spark another rebellion, most people were ready to shrug their shoulders and move on. “So these guys spend the rest of their lives in prison. So what? I’m not going to risk my life just to make sure Polignac gets his head chopped off, you know?” So the crisis passed, though, the more dedicated radicals added it to their list of bitter grievances. 

The incident over the trial, though, did fatally rupture the accord between Lafayette and the regime. It was not just that many inside the government now did not trust Lafayette because he had let his National Guard into the Luxembourg Gardens, it was also that the National Guard had been done, well, nothing. They had done nothing. I mean, they had helped keep the peace the very next day. The belief that Lafayette was so critical to keeping the Guard loyal to the regime was now shattered. So on December the 23rd, allies of the government and the Chamber of Deputies announced that they were going to start enforcing Article 50 of the revised Charter of Government. What is Article 50? Article 50 says that no National Guard commander could lead anything larger than a single commune. This rule, which was a part of the Charter of Government, had been purposefully overlooked on Lafayette’s behalf, and since July he had operated as Commander in Chief of the whole program. But that was now over. If Lafayette was going to remain at his post, he would only be the commander of the troops in Paris.

Now, Lafayette still thought that he was indispensable, and he threatened to resign unless certain demands were met, demands that included Louis Philippe’s promise to dispense with hereditary rights for the Peers and also expand the franchise. But really what happened is the King accepted Lafayette’s resignation on the morning of December the 26th. To Lafayette’s surprise and delight of the government, the National Guard did not make any great show of protesting his departure. I mean, they were all upstanding bourgeois citizens. They were going to be loyal to a regime that promised peace, prosperity, and order. So Lafayette remained a Deputy, but the unique and independent power he had wielded for the last six months was now at an end.

With the ouster of Lafayette, it became clear that the more Conservative elements within the July monarchy were winning the internal battle for the July Monarchy and the politics of the day began shaking out into two broad parties: the Movement party and the Resistance Party. And this was all pretty informal, but the Movement party was led by Jacques Lafitte, who believed that the July Revolution was a step in the right direction, but only a step in the right direction, and that the King should continue to champion further democratic reforms to make it a monarchy surrounded by Republican institutions.

The Resistance Party, meanwhile, was led by Lafitte’s banking rival Casimir Périer and backed by Doctrinaires liberals like François Guizot. They believed everything that needed to be accomplished had been accomplished and that further reform was both unnecessary and dangerous. Lafitte had achieved a brief leg up on his rivals as he was appointed Prime Minister in November of 1830, but he was soon outmaneuvered. Baited into overcommitting himself on whether the regime should support the rising liberals in Italy, Lafitte threatened in March of 1831 to resign if the government did not assist the Italians. And when his advice was not followed, he had to resign. A few days later, he ran into Lafayette, who said to him, “Admit that you have been a great idiot,” whereupon Lafitte retorted, “I do, but if I’m Idiot I, you’re Idiot II, so we’re even.” 

Now, the upshot of all this for our purposes here today is that the July monarchy had just purged its two most prominent left-leaning members. And what’s more, King Louis Philippe tapped its most conservative member, Casimir Périer, to succeed Lafitte as Prime Minister.

All of this was denounced by the men who frequented the Society of the Friends of the People, and granted Lafitte and Lafayette were not going to pass any Republican purity tests, but they were by far the best of a bad lot. And with them gone, and Périer on the rise, it was clear that the July monarchy planned to be as hostile to the left as they were to the right. Now, in April of 1831, the government followed through on one of their promises to lower the tax minimums to stand for election to the Chamber of Deputies. They moved it from 1,000 francs to 500, and then they also lowered the voting minimums from 300 to 200. But this was still pretty thin gruel, this wasn’t like universal suffrage or anything. Slightly meatier chunks came when the regime went ahead and intervened in Belgium in August of 1831, obviously you remember we just talked all about that, and that was very popular in the streets of Paris. But most of this goodwill was then handed back in October and November, when silk workers in Lyon, angry over poor economic conditions and insecure wages, took to the street in November of 1831. To subdue the Lyon workers, Casimir Périer convinced the King to send in the army, which brought the budding insurrection to a screeching halt. Now, there was no overt bloodshed in Lyon, but the willingness of the government to send in troops to defend the interests of rich manufacturers against poor workers was further proof where their loyalties really lay.

So by the beginning of 1832, the left wing of French politics was getting pushed completely off the map, and so the Society of the Friends of the People began to engage in some active plotting. All they needed now was an opportunity to strike, and that opportunity presented itself in the spring of 1832. And not from some dramatic confrontation with the government or unpopular policy, but rather the scourge of cholera.

Now, I’m not a medical historian, but this appears to have been a part of a worldwide cholera pandemic that started in South Asia in 1829 and then followed trade and shipping routes up through India and into Russia and over into Europe before making its way across the Atlantic to the eastern coast of North America. Cholera patients started showing up in Paris hospitals in March of 1832, showing signs of the deadly infection. The cholera spread rapidly through the less sanitary parts of the city before consuming everyone in a cloud of death. Anyone rich enough to do so abandoned the city as every day thousands took ill and hundreds died. In one memorable incident, a society ball became an epicenter of infection, and women got sick and died before they even changed out of their dresses. The lower classes were of course hardest hit of all, and the bodies of the sick and dying and dead were everywhere.

In this fevered haze, Paris became paranoid, panicked, and angry. They accused the King of intentionally poisoning the wells to kill them all, which is of course nuts, but lynching mobs did kill some government officials. I mean, when the enemy is both omnipresent and invisible, you have to blame something tangible.

By the end of May, the death toll in Paris was approaching 20,000. The two most famous victims of the cholera pandemic of 1832 were, first of all, Prime Minister Casimir Périer. Making a rather daring tour of the hospitals in mid-May, he contracted the disease, displayed symptoms, took to his bed, and then died on May the 15th, 1832.

But the second and more famous death was General Jean Maximilien Lamarque. Now, unlike Périer, Lamarque had long been a popular figure in left-leaning populous circles. His father had been a third estate delegate to the Estates General, and young Lamarque had joined the army in 1791 and then fought all the way through the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, earning repeated praise and promotion. He was one of those poster boys for the French army success coming in part thanks to rapid promotion of men of merit. Throughout his career, Lamarque also displayed left-leaning, egalitarian, Democratic, and Republican principles. When the restoration came, he briefly went into exile, but then returned in 1818 and spent the next decade reforming and modernizing his own properties until he joined the Chamber of Deputies as a member of the Liberal opposition in the wave elections of 1828. After the July Revolution, he remained on the far left of politics and was probably the most popular General in the French army, at least among the common people. 

With Casimir Périer having received a grand state funeral, Louis Philippe fell under heavy popular pressure to give the same treatment to the People’s champion, General Lamarque, who after all was one of the most dedicated and popular officers in the French Army. So the King granted permission, and with the recent death of Périer leaving the government in a kind of leaderless confusion, the Society of the Friends of the People decided to use the funeral of Lamarque as a launching pad for an armed insurrection, one that would complete the work begun in July of 1830. They were going to overthrow the monarchy and inaugurate the second Republic.

Where the three glorious days of July 1830 had been a completely spontaneous affair, with the Parisians improvising their way to victory, there was much more active planning in 1832. Most of the participants had played some role in 1830 and reckoned that a better-organized version would work even better. So word went round from the Society to other adjacent groups to prepare for the call to arms on the day of Lamarque’s funeral and a total of about 3,000 men committed to action. The plan seems to have been to seize control of the procession and take Lamarque’s body to the Panthéon, and then another group would simultaneously grab Lafayette, spirit him to the Hôtel de Ville, and there likely declare a Republic with Lafayette as President. 

So on June the 5th, 1832, Lamarque’s funeral procession moved from the late General’s house through the streets of Paris, eventually winding up on the right bank across from the Austerlitz Bridge, where a stage had been set up and speakers scheduled to deliver eulogies. Most prominent among these eulogists would be Lafayette. And as the morning progressed, it was already rumored that Lafayette was going to use the occasion to proclaim a Republic. But whether this was a spontaneous rumor or an idea deliberately planted by the conspirators, it was not even remotely true. Lafayette planned to give a stirring speech, but he had no interest in proclaiming a Republic and had nothing at all to do with this brewing insurrection. But when the funeral procession arrived at the Austerlitz Bridge, Lafayette did indeed give a stirring speech, but he wanted no part of what happened next.

Shouts started coming out of the crowd, “Down with Louis Philippe! Down with the monarchy!” Then, apparently, a man dressed all in black rode through the crowd on a horse bearing a red flag that said, “Liberty or death.” The deliberate commotion created by the insurrectionaries sowed confusion in the crowd and suddenly a group of dragoons attached to the funeral procession were fired on and six of them dropped dead. This led to more direct shouts of, “To arms!” and, “To the barricades!” And then, of course, everyone simultaneously broke out in unified song that somehow everybody knew the lyrics to, even though they had never rehearsed. And then music started playing even though there was no orchestra. And yeah, no, I’m just kidding about all that…

But there was a lot of yelling and sporadic gunfire. Unfortunately for the insurrectionaries though, their initial aims were stymied. They were unable to effectively get Lamarque’s body across the river to the Panthéon, and Lafayette made himself scarce before anyone could grab hold of him, the old Marquis escaped being drafted into leading a Republican rebellion he wanted no part of.

But though their initial aims had been stymied, the insurrectionaries still had the drop on the authorities and a group headed for an arsenal, at what is today that big old Châtelet metro station, there they successfully liberated 4,000 guns while their comrades erected barricades that would soon give them effective control of central Paris between Châtelet and the Place de la Bastille. The insurrection now underway, the young Republican rebels hoped that it would follow the same pattern as July 1830, with the rest of the Parisians joining in the fight, opposition leftists in the Chamber of Deputies rallying to the cause, and the most especially, the National Guard defecting away from the government en masse. 

The reason the June rebellion is so little known today is because… not one of those three things happened. But that said, by the evening of June the 5th, they were pretty well entrenched and there were still reasons to believe this was all on track for victory. But the young radicals were not the only ones who had learned from 1830. The men who ran the military and the government knew what mistakes Charles had made in July of 1830, and they did not plan to repeat them. Now, as coincidence would have it, the King was at Saint-Cloud when he got word of the insurrection, where Charles had been when he found out about the insurrection of 1830. And unlike Charles, as soon as Louis Philippe found out about it, he got on his horse and rode to Paris as fast as he could. Now, the reason this is so critical is that he then rode around to all the various National Guard companies to personally thank them for their loyalty, which had the effect of securing their loyalty. The National Guard was not going to go over to the rebels, and the rebels now faced a combined force of Army and National Guard that numbered anywhere from 20,000 to 40,000 men, depending on the source you read. And that alone was practically the ball game for the rebellion of 1832. 

Now, just as the National Guard was deciding not to join the insurrection, so too were the respectable left-wing opposition members of the Chamber of Deputies. Despite having been shuffled to one side, Jacques Lafitte was still a Deputy and still had some influence, and he went with a small delegation to visit the King. Lafitte did encourage the King to defuse the crisis by making concessions to the left, but the King would not hear of it, and when pressed, Lafitte and the other delegates refused to do what they had done in 1830, and that is throw their lot in with the street fighters.

So, there would be no assistance from the politicians and there would be no assistance from the National Guard and then the rest of Paris pretty much refused to join the fight, too. Not feeling particularly threatened by the July monarchy, the way that the Four Ordinances had seemed so sinister, most Parisians refused to lend the insurrectionaries a hand, right down to specifically saying, “No, you cannot have my desk for your barricade. Get out of here.”

So on the morning of June the 6th, 1832, the insurrectionaries held their barricades, but the spark they believed they had struck the day before had clearly not caught fire. An air of tense desperation blanketed the men and women manning the barricades. The giddy rush of rebellion was now giving way to the ominous realization that it was probably likely they were all going to die. And nothing was going to come of it.

At around midday, the combined columns of National Guard and regular Army units began their assaults on the barricades and though the fighting was intense, the weight of their numbers was too great, and the rebel fortifications were breached. In some places, resistance crumbled as the rebels took flight, but the die-hards kept up an intense last stand on the rue Saint-Merri where it finally took heavy artillery to mow down the last pockets of resistance in something resembling a massacre. By about 6:00 in the evening on June the 6th, the fighting was over. 150 lay dead, more than 500 were wounded. The sudden June rebellion was over as quickly as it had begun, and like so many other aborted, broken-off, and crushed insurrections that have disappeared down the memory hole over the centuries, the June Rebellion of 1832 disappeared down the memory hole. 

Now, the great epilogue to all of this is that in the wake of this rebellion, the plan to hang Liberty Leading the People in the throne room seemed a bit unwise. Like it was one thing to come to power thanks to an armed insurrection, but now that the July monarchy had been forced to beat one back, the idea of glorifying the people crying “to arms!” and “to the barricades!”, the idea that they were led by the literal personification of liberty, that simply would not do. So the government instead kept the painting hidden in a backroom and then later returned it to Delacroix. He would then give it to his aunt and it would not see the light of day until 1848, when it would once again become time to celebrate Liberty Leading the People. 

So that is where I will leave you. I will return for the revolutions of 1848 on July the 16th. But the last thing I want to mention before I leave, and probably the first thing I’ll mention when I get back, is that The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic, my book, it has entered production. And it is right now available for pre-order at Amazon. So if you’re just sitting around twiddling your thumbs for the next six weeks, by all means take 30 seconds and go pre-order it. You can get it right now for the low, low price of just 16 American dollars. That is not that much. So just go do it. It’s a good book. I’m very proud of it and more than anything else, I need your help. I need your help to fulfill my dream of being introduced at parties as “New York Times bestselling author Mike Duncan,” which you got to admit, has a nice ring to it.

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