Hello and welcome to Revolutions.
On July 28, 1831, a suitably solemn but enthusiastic ceremony was held in the Place de la of Bastille. In the wake of the July Revolution, the new government of Louis Philippe worked overtime to cement the official story that the Three Glorious Days had been about the people of Paris rising up to make Louis Philippe their Citizen King. As a part of the general PR campaign, the government wanted to erect a monument to the over 500 martyred insurgents who had fallen on the barricades.
As a site for this monument, they decided to claim the Place de la Bastille for the July Monarchy, consciously linking the new monarchy to the memory of that most famous of popular revolutionary memories. So, you know, despite what you may hear, we are in fact the true heirs of that great legacy. To celebrate the first anniversary of the Three Glorious Days, the bodies of the martyred dead were exhumed and brought to the Place de la Bastille, where they were reinterred in a mass grave upon which King Louis Philippe personally laid the first stone of a great Corinthian column that would bear the names of the dead and be topped with a statue of the Genius of Liberty, a winged figure holding the torch of civilization in one hand and broken chains in the other.
But despite the attempt to claim the legacy of the French Revolution and the memory of the martyred dead, the true face of the new July Monarchy would soon be revealed. Because the men who ran the July Monarchy actually loathed and feared both the French Revolution and the kind of person who might mount a barricade against a regime he or she has deemed tyrannical. The events that led up to the June Revolt of 1832 were proof enough that the July Monarchy was not exactly the People’s Monarchy.
And in the wake of the June Revolt, the great romantic painting, Liberty Leading the People, so recently purchased by the government to further exalt the regime as the People’s Monarchy, was carried to a basement never to see the light of day. There was a place for liberty in the July Monarchy, there was. But it would have been more fitting had the July Column really been two columns, one dedicated to liberty, the other dedicated to order, because liberty and order were co-equal partners in the July Monarchy.
Now before we get going though, I do have one bit of cleanup, because I tripped on my way out the door last week. I was most regrettably sloppy about the mix of quotes from Alexei de Tocqueville that I used to launch the series. Everything I quoted comes from his book Recollections, which is amazing and everyone should read it, but that quote where he lambast the July Monarchy as descending into nothing but “languor, impotence, stagnation and boredom“, I didn’t mean to imply that that was from the speech. That actually just came from a passage in Recollections. But where I really blundered was that the first part of the quote unquote speech, the one that went, “the time will come when the country will find itself once again divided between two great parties”, well I totally said that was a part of the speech, but actually it came from an unpublished pamphlet de Tocqueville wrote in 1847 and was then quoted in Recollections alongside his January 1848 speech to show the consistency of his own developing thoughts in the lead up to the February Revolution. Now the last and longest quote that ends with him talking about how we are all sleeping on a volcano, well that is from the speech, but I mashed all the excerpts together in my notes under the general heading January 1848 speech and so biffed right out of the gate.
I’m sorry about that. But, like that time Caesar fell on his face as he climbed off that boat in Africa in 47 BC, you know when he face planted on the beach, I too shall rise now and without missing a beat say to you all, Africa, I hold you now!
Okay, so back now to our history of France. We cut out, as I mentioned, in Episode 6.8e with the June revolt of 1832, when the new regime efficiently and ruthlessly suppressed an uprising by radical Republicans already disillusioned with Louis Philippe. This decisive victory helped shore up the Orléanist left flank, but there were still two other major threats the fledgling regime had to worry about, and that would also be dealt with in 1832.
The first were the partisans of the exiled Bourbons, now called the Legitimists. They recognized young Henry V as the real King, and fervently desired to reverse the July Revolution as they had once, eventually, reversed the French Revolution. The leading light of the Legitimists was the Duchess de Berry, mother of Henry V.
After a few years conspiring from her exile in England, the Duchess de Berry, against the rest of the family’s advice, organized and funded what she thought was going to be a mass insurrection that would revive the old Catholic and Royal armies of the French Revolution. She arrived in France in 1832 and ran around trying to stir up a counterrevolution, but while she found Legitimists grumbling, she also found no real support for active insurrection. For her trouble, the Duchess was captured in November of 1832, and the whole embarrassing incident seemed to decisively shut down attacks on the Orléanists from the right.
The other great threat was from the Bonapartists, those who still dreamed of reviving the Napoleonic Empire. They had been thoroughly outmaneuvered and co-opted in 1830, but as long as Napoleon’s son sat healthy and safe in Vienna, the threat of a Bonapartist coup would always be present, because no less than the Republicans, these old Bonapartists believed that all the July Revolution had done was swap one bourbon for another. So, it was much to the regime’s relief to learn in July of 1832 that Napoleon II was dead.
He had been living in comfortable exile with his mother, the Austrian Archduchess Maria Louise, but young Napoleon II was felled by a mix of tuberculosis and pneumonia on July 22, 1832, at the age of just 21. So it was that his cousin, Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, then living in exile in Switzerland, became head of the extended Bonaparte clan in exile. The slightly ridiculous, if supremely self-confident and self-important 24-year-old Louis Napoleon instantly seized on the death of his cousin as the work of fate, and he believed himself to be, like his uncle Napoleon, a man of destiny. But that said, with the son of Napoleon now dead, the leaders of the July Monarchy could breathe a sigh of relief that Bonapartism had just been severely kneecapped.
Okay, so if there was no place for radical Republicans or imperial Bonapartists or conservative absolutists, who were the Orléanists? What was the July Monarchy? What did it stand for? Who did they stand for? Well, if we harken back to last week’s discussion of the classes and ideologies in play in 1848, the July Monarchy in a nutshell stood for the economic bourgeoisie and the political liberals. But even more specifically, the upper strata of the bourgeoisie and a fairly conservative brand of liberalism.
Even though the Orléanists expanded suffrage and lowered some property qualifications for the vote, only about 250,000 men had the vote under the July Monarchy. Yes, that was up from the 100,000 or so under the restored bourbons, but still nothing even remotely resembling democratic suffrage. And of those, the true ruling class were the men known as the Eligibles, men whose additional wealth qualified them not just to vote, but also to stand for office. During the reign of the Bourbons, only 18,000 names filled the roles of the Eligibles. The Orléanists expanded this to 56,000, but that’s your pool of leaders. That’s it. And even then, something like two-thirds of the men who served in the deputies and the peers and in the ministries were drawn from that original pool of 18,000. So the July Monarchy is called the Bourgeois Monarchy, or the Middle Class monarchy, but really, it was a very specific sliver of the bourgeoisie.
Now, the political factions that emerged during the July Monarchy were all thus founded on the shared values of that upper bourgeoisie. So when you read histories of the period, you will often see shorthand labels attached to various figures. Like Francois Guizot, he’s a conservative. Odilon Barrot, he leads the far left. Adolphe Thiers, he ping-pongs around, but was generally in the center left. But what you have to understand is these guys were all a part of a very narrow band of affluent liberals.
The real conservatives, old-style absolutist conservatives that say like Metternich might like to talk to, they’d all gone into retirement. And the real left, the real left wing, the radicals and the rising socialists, they had no place in the political system at all. It’s why they will keep trying to mount the barricades every few years. So center, left, right, these are all very, very relative terms.
What this meant was that the politics of the July Monarchy could be pretty petty and personality driven. They were all in agreement on the big issues, so that’s kind of all they had left to fight about. They were all constitutional monarchists. They all believed in standard liberal doctrines, participatory government for the rich and educated, individual civil rights, protection of private property, and defense of the rule of law.
They also agreed that liberalism, with all its rights and freedoms, had limits. Too many rights and too much freedom might lead to revolution, and revolution meant the reign of terror, which in France was not just an abstraction. I mean, Francois Guizot’s father had been guillotined in 1794. Guizot’s determination to not let that happen again, his opposition to Republicans, his hatred of leaps and bounds attempts to remake society, was very personal.
Their shared liberal worldview also led them all to generally discount the social side of the great questions of the age, so they were not much interested in addressing the social fallout from the changing economic systems, and almost uniformly supported policies that favored the employer class against the rising working class. It was rooted in their notion that it was a freedom to work, rather than a right to work, and things like unions and strikes were unfair infringements on an owner’s ability to run his business as he saw fit. So in the July monarchy, both unions and strikes were illegal.
So the disagreements inside this small liberal ruling clique came down to what you might call futzing around the edges, and there were arguments between the party of movement and the party of resistance. The movement guys would have extended the franchise still further while the resistance was happy right where it was, but none of them were democrats. They could also disagree about the extent of the King’s personal authority and initiative. Some wanted the Chamber of Deputies to be the dominant body. They would determine who the ministers would be, and then the ministers would run the country, these guys wanted to make France a parliamentary monarchy, but others defended the King’s prerogatives, which were, after all, written into the charter of government, that the King as executive and head of state would have a wide latitude to shape his own policies and pick his own ministers. But this, like I say, is just futzing around the edges. This was a regime built by and composed of upper bourgeois liberals. They had no truck with conservative absolutists. They had no truck with radicals or socialists. They ignored both noble claims to ancient privileges and working class claims to new rights. In the July Monarchy, the smart way was the middle way. The middle way was the liberal way, and it was the liberal way or the highway.
So, what about the rest of France? The other 30 or so million people not included in this pool of 250,000 voters and 50,000 leaders running the show? Well, to take the same basic framework of the social and economic classes we introduced last week, what we can say is first of all, thanks to being the epicenter of the French Revolution, that the classes and economic structure of France had evolved a bit ahead of the rest of Europe.
So, like if you remember all the way back to the first couple of episodes on the French Revolution, we talked about the broken system of overlapping political and legal jurisdictions, different taxes in different areas, different regulations in different areas, there were guild rules and internal tariffs, seigneurial dues and obligations, and then church tithes. Almost all of that had been swept aside during the Revolution. And then further, the consolidation of a centralized government during the Napoleonic era had led to a more rational and uniform treatment of people, goods, and services. So a lot of what the Germans are going to be fighting for in 1848 has already been achieved in France.
So France in the 1830s and 1840s was still mostly peasant and rural. But the peasants, again thanks to the French Revolution, were the freest in Europe. They did not have goofy feudal obligations anymore, and they lived under uniform laws, paid into a fairly rational tax system, and understood that they had something resembling rights, as long as they didn’t trash the King or suggest that private property might be the artificial construct of bourgeois scum.
But though the French Revolution had loosened a few of their chains, like their eastern, central, and southern European brethren, French peasants still often lived on the knife’s edge of subsistence, and took piecework home manufacturing jobs to supplement their income, and when necessary, moved to the cities to look for work, as looming industrialization both impacted their rural livelihoods and seemed to simultaneously beckon with an urban solution. But as we also talked about last week, we shouldn’t yet overstate the impact of industrialization, as it was just getting going in the north of France, so the Lower Seine River, the city of Lille, the region of Alsace, and the Rhine frontier.
As I mentioned in Episode 6.8b, Belgium was also industrializing pretty rapidly on the northern border during this same period, so that whole geographic region is all kind of a piece. To spur development, the liberal leaders of the July monarchy were pretty happy to sponsor initiatives and public works projects that would combine private profit with public utility, and in particular the emergent railroads would become a focal point for such activity, as the government would join with commercial banks and private corporations to start building up rail lines in the north. But again, this is all pretty nascent and embryonic. It’s not until the era of the Second Empire, after the Revolutions of 1848, that industrialization really hits France.
So that means that when it comes to the workers, the artisans were still a force to be reckoned with in France, and in fact more of a force to be reckoned with than nearly anywhere else, despite the fact that they were among the first to have lost the kind of guild protections that their eastern counterparts were still trying to defend. This was because they had now 50 years worth of cultivated political consciousness under their belts, because the artisans in France are just the old sans-culottes, one of the defining groups of the French Revolution.
The only reason they’re not still called the sans-culottes is because everyone else stopped wearing culottes. So in terms of their political consciousness, they also drew not just from the old days of the original French Revolution, but also the very recent experience of the July Revolution. These guys had fought and died on the barricades. They were heavily represented among the martyred dead, and they were among those who felt most betrayed by the fact that their blood had been shed so that rich bankers and spineless liberals could seize power behind their backs. They were also among the strongest keepers of the old nationalist flame and the memory of the glory of the empire.
While in Germany and Italy, nationalism was mostly an intellectual pursuit, in France, the Revolution and the Napoleonic era had sunk a deep populist root into the common people. The urban working artisans were amongst the most fiercely patriotic of any group in the country, and now they had too this emerging threat of industrial competition to worry about. And we’re going to talk about one particular subset of the artisans in a minute when we wrap up this episode with the discussion of the cycles of insurrection and repression that marked the July Monarchy.
So if the artisans were ambivalent to hostile to the July Monarchy, the feelings of the middle-class bourgeoisie varied depending on where they were in the social and economic scale. To wit, the lower you were on the scale, the less impressed you were. Now the lower rungs of the French bourgeoisie, the Petite Bourgeoisie, had a huge claim to being one of the key groups of the old French Revolution, since they were the ones who had filled out the ranks of the National Guard, who as much as the sans-culottes came to define what the French Revolution was. This group of mostly small-time merchants and professionals might join with the sans-culottes style artisans to attack an existing regime, as they did in 1789 and 1792 and then most recently in 1830.
Or they could break with the sans-culottes and side with the regime, as they did after Thermidor and then most recently during the June Revolt of 1832, when they attacked the barricades rather than defend them. In the course of French Revolutionary history, the National Guard could make or break a regime. In fact, as we saw in the episodes on the July Revolution, the Orléans considered the National Guard, which is to say the Petit Bourgeoisie, to be absolutely essential to their legitimacy.
But though this group was down with both liberty and order, and thus made a perfect constituency for the July Monarchy, they were increasingly miffed about what one might call a huge mistake. Not all of them were enfranchised or allowed to participate directly in politics. The wealth required to serve in the National Guard was far short of the wealth required to vote. And for all their talk about a rational liberal middle way, guys like Guizot and Thiers opposed the growing movement to make service in the National Guard qualify a man for suffrage. In 1839, a petition with 188,000 signatures was just rejected out of hand. Extending the franchise to all the National Guard seems like kind of a no-brainer to me. But rather than make this fairly banal extension of rights, the guys running the July Monarchy just honked off a bunch of families that they themselves considered absolutely essential to maintaining the regime’s stability and legitimacy. It’s frankly a bizarre decision.
Now, slightly higher up the socioeconomic scale, but still in there with the other disaffected middle classes, were the lower rungs of the professional classes. Unless you were prosperous enough to make investments in land, these educated professionals, the doctors and the lawyers and the journalists, were able to intelligently observe politics and form intelligent opinions about politics, but they were not allowed to participate in politics.
And then, of course, also heavily represented among the martyred dead of 1830, and every subsequent barricade insurrection, were law students and medical students, who combined their educations with romantic, youthful zeal and were always spoiling for a fight.
So if the July Monarchy wasn’t really working for the lower class peasants or the new industrial workers or old-style artisans or even the lower middle class bourgeoisie, who were they working for?
Well, the upper class bourgeoisie, the most powerful component of which was the bankers, a growing group of commercial financiers who had played a critical role in the July Revolution and now had the run, with a few exceptions, of the July Monarchy. Jacques Lafitte and Casimir Périer were simply the richest and most visible of a new class of financiers. Both by circumstance and by choice, one of the most critical revenue streams for the July Monarchy was government bonds.
These bonds came with a very high interest rate because both lender and borrower knew that the funds were indispensable. Since the bankers were simultaneously the funders of the regime and a powerful chunk of men who qualified to vote and serve in office, it was natural that one attuned to the other. The National Bank of France, which had been founded during the Napoleonic era, grew in both size and scope during the July Monarchy.
But we should be careful about being too one-to-one about this, as politics could occasionally get in the way. As it did in 1836, when the Ministry and the Chamber of Deputies got into a fight about whether to lower the interest rates on the bonds. But in the main, as one of the Rothschilds once wrote home, “Louis-Philippe’s door is always open when I come to call.”
So that’s the general structure of France under the July Monarchy. And though it appeared from the outside that the monarchy was stable, and the talk was about a middle way that secured both order and liberty for the benefit of everyone, its foundations were in fact narrow and shallow. It could not claim the ancient legitimacy of the absolutists that we rule by the grace of God and a millennium of history, nor could they claim a popular mandate that they ruled on behalf of the people from whom their legitimacy sprang, because fear of revolution kept them from ever trying, or even ever wanting to try, to tap those popular roots.
The one thing the monarchy really had going for it was that they were a bulwark against revolution, and most people in France, from impoverished peasant on up, didn’t really want another revolution. But there were those who did not feel much of the liberty that was supposedly going around, and instead felt mostly the order that was going around. And the most persistent class of men targeted for order rather than liberty were the radical republicans and proto-socialists who thought France deserved better than liberty for the bankers to hell with everyone else.
As these guys kept pushing the July Monarchy, the July Monarchy kept pushing back until the column of liberty seemed very much overshadowed by the column of order.
After triumphing over the republicans and the legitimists and the Bonapartists in 1832, the July Monarchy enjoyed about two years of peace. But in the spring of 1834, they had to deal with a rash of new insurrections. And of principle concern during these insurrections was that subset of the artisans that I wanted to tell you about, and that is the silk workers of Lyon. They are a perfect example of the revolutionary, or at least insurrectionary, artisans of the period.
Silk products from Lyon were world famous. They were lucrative goods, and they now operated through a tiered system where a tiny group of just about a thousand principal businesses contracted work to about 10,000 masters, who then employed about 30,000 apprentices to fill the orders. The masters owned all their own equipment and managed their own small shops of usually less than 10 people. We very briefly touched on these Lyon silk workers in Episode 6.8e, because they had already gone into revolt once in 1831, when the economy took a downturn, the prices those principal business owners paid plummeted, and the silk workers agitated the local municipal government to pass a law guaranteeing a minimum price for their work. When the business owners refused to pay the minimum price, the silk workers took up arms and flooded into the streets. After a few tense days, they were beaten back by 20,000 soldiers. And this suppressed uprising in Lyon was one of the first signs that the July Monarchy was not really by and for the people in any meaningful sense.
Well, two years later, the economic situation had improved dramatically, and now demand was so high that the silk workers were able to command much higher wages than before. So the same group of business owners who had balked at paying a minimum price now got together and agreed that they were paying way too high of a price. The conspiracy to suppress wages was infuriating, but it was joined by a new set of laws passed by the Chamber of Deputies that were aimed at clamping down on seditious political clubs. Laws stipulating that clubs and societies couldn’t have more than 20 members or engage in particular political activity threatened the silk workers’ mutual aid societies, basically groups where everyone contributes dues to cover for the sick or disabled, or cover pensions and funeral expenses in case of death.
The mutual aid societies had become an obvious structure for worker organization, and the silk workers believed that the government was coming after them, just as the large purchasing houses were trying to force through a wage decrease. So all of this led to a strike in the first week of April 1834. The strike quickly fizzled and led to a sweep and arrest of all the leaders, but when those leaders were arraigned on April 9th, Lyon exploded. Demonstrations in front of the courthouse got boisterous, soldiers opened fire on the crowd, and in response somewhere between 3,000 and 6,000 men took up arms. The small army garrison made a strategic withdrawal from the city, and the insurgent workers held Lyon for four days. But on April 13th, the army stormed back in and took back the city with the old whiff of grapeshot. Death toll was 130 soldiers and 170 workers.
Now though the Lyon silk workers suspected that their mutual aid societies were being targeted, the real target was a radical group called the Society of the Rights of Man. This group was simply the successor to the Society of the Friends of the People that we talked about in Episode 6.8e. Those are the guys who organized the June revolt. They had the same leaders and the same members, the same group. Believing that the Society of the Rights of Man to have affiliates all over France, the government cracked down just as the Lyon silk workers were going on strike. The government ordered preemptive arrests in Paris to hit the radical leadership, and in response the Society, which didn’t really have more than about 2,000 members, took to the streets.
On April 13, 1834, just as Lyon was being subdued, armed radicals in Paris built and manned barricades in the same neighborhood around the Rue Saint-Denis and Rue Saint-Martin that had been the epicenter of the 1832 revolt. But this 1834 revolt was even more quixotic than the 1832 uprising. Expecting trouble, the government already had 40,000 troops massed in the vicinity of the capital, and they just rolled in and cleared the barricades out. The enduring scene came at a neighborhood house where a shot had allegedly been fired out of one of the windows, and in retaliation a company of soldiers rushed in and shot, bayoneted, and killed everyone inside. All of them innocent bystanders.
In the aftermath of the 1834 insurrection, something like 2,000 people were arrested, and the entire leadership of the radical republicans was decapitated with a stroke. The crackdown was so effective, and the horror at the insurrection so acute, that King Louis Philippe immediately dissolved the Chamber of Deputies and called for new elections that turned out anyone with even a hint of radicalism in their rhetoric. The swift collapse of republican fortunes meant that when the old Marquis de Lafayette died just a few weeks later on May 20, 1834, the government’s fear that his funeral would play out like Lamarck’s had in 1832 was unfounded.
There were no demonstrations, let alone an insurrection. Those radicals left standing were already pretty disgusted with Lafayette anyway since he had given the regime his republican kiss in 1830 and thus screwed them all over big time. Now Lafayette has been with us since episode, let’s see, 2.9, and the retrospective of his revolutionary career that might normally accompany a death as momentous as this one will have to wait for another time as it would balloon way out of hand and consume the entire episode. So a Lafayette retrospective will be a thing, but for now it’s just something I can tease you with. Sorry about that.
So in June of 1835, the trial of the massive arrested radicals began and the republicans hoped to use the whole thing as a way to rebuild their fortunes by ginning up sympathy as victims of a regime that no one really liked anyway. And it was kind of starting to work too. But then the whole project was massively undermined on July 28, 1835, the fifth anniversary of the Three Glorious Days. While the King’s entourage rode splendidly through the streets of Paris, a massive hail of gunfire hit them broadside. Massive! Now, thanks to his reinforced carriage, the King himself was not hit. But 18 people fell dead and another 22 wounded. The assassin was quickly apprehended. And yes, there turned out to be only one assassin for this whole hail of massive gunfire. Massive!
That was because he and two accomplices had built what was later dubbed the Infernal Machine. It was 25 musket barrels rigged together so that they could all be shot simultaneously. When it came out that this little gang of assassins were all radical republicans, the political classes closed ranks and the non-political classes sympathized with the King. Nobody sympathized with the radicals.
So seizing on the assassination as an excuse to instill a little bit more order, the government and the Chamber of Deputies got together a month later and passed what are known as the September Laws, a group of three laws aimed squarely at anything to their left. Stiffer controls on the press were put in place to censor writing and cartoon and put out of business radical newspapers.
The laws also made it easier to secure indictments for treason, and then made it easier to secure convictions of those indicted. Among the seditious ideas now banished under strict force of law were questioning the legitimacy of the King, criticizing the King’s political policies, suggesting a republic might be good, suggesting that private property might be bad. Now though it was nearly impossible to enforce the September laws in any kind of universal way, from 1835 on it was basically illegal to be a republican or a socialist. It was now liberty for us and order for you!
But remember, the radical republicans were not the only threat to the regime, and there were still Bonapartists out there that seemed to be scheming on the edges to affect a coup and topple the narrow foundations of the July Monarchy. Though when the threat of an actual Bonapartist coup manifested in October of 1836, it was so ridiculous that it was more of a comfort than a concern.
Young Louis Napoleon, now 28 years old, got it into his head that he could lead a mutiny in the garrison at Strasbourg, and then like, I don’t know, 100 days his way all the way to Paris. Wearing an artillery officer’s uniform that he had procured, you know, uncle Napoleon started as an artillery officer, he arrived in Strasbourg and tried to convince the garrison to follow him. But the garrison just laughed at him and refused to mutiny, and instead the would-be Napoleon III skipped his way back to Switzerland. After some belligerent saber rattling from King Louis Philippe, Louis Napoleon chose voluntary exile and departed for the United States. Such was the miserable failure that was the first coup attempt of Louis Napoleon.
So while the July Monarchy was fending off these assaults from the outside, they were routinely at odds with each other internally, but again over some generally small-time stuff, or just because two guys didn’t like each other.
In 1836 Louis Philippe appointed a prime minister that nobody really liked from the conservative side to the liberal spectrum, and then kept him on in the face of the Chamber of Deputies disapproval. The King dissolved the chambers in 1837 and 1839, trying to secure a better majority for his government, but the returns kept coming back with a bare plurality in the government’s favor. And in the majority was an opposition coalition that included the left, right, and center of the respectable liberal classes.
Adolphe Thiers was now openly comparing this to the crisis over Polignac. After another disappointing election for the government in 1839, the disliked prime minister successfully resigned, and the King had to form a new government, but it proved almost impossible to form a ministry from the disparate factions of the coalition, because none of the leaders liked each other.
The impasse was broken on May 12, 1839, when the reformed radicals decided to launch yet another revolt. After the disasters of 1834, they formed themselves into a new group called the Seasons to skirt the laws about how big a political club could be. So they were divided into little sections. One leader and six followers was called a week. Four weeks would then be linked into a month, three months would be linked into a season, and four seasons into a year. By 1839, they had recruited about three years’ worth of members, and then, possibly led astray by agents provocateur who had infiltrated the group, they launched a revolt in Paris, and managed to seize the Hôtel de Ville and the Palace of Justice. But the whole thing stalled out after just a few hours, and everyone was rounded up and arrested. As we will see when we get into the guts of 1848, there was a lot of bad blood among the radicals over this debacle in 1839.
Now the upshot of this for the regime was that it snapped everybody back to attention. And a new government was successfully formed under Marshal Soult, an old Napoleonic marshal, making his second tour now as prime minister. But the ministry was still very unstable, and in March of 1840, Adolphe Thiers managed to push his way into the prime ministership. And that was also his second run as prime minister. I just kind of blew through the revolving door of July Monarchy ministries. They change places all the time, and it’s not actually as interesting as it sounds. But I just want to get us to a place where Adolphe Thiers is prime minister when everyone re-gathers at the Place de la Bastille to inaugurate the completed July column.
It is the tenth anniversary now of the Three Glorious Days. But with a decade of the July Monarchy now under everyone’s belt, the July column now struck many as a bit absurd, certainly nakedly self-aggrandizing. The ceremony was neither as solemn nor as triumphant as the first ceremony had been. And while the July column still stands in Paris, the regime that the martyr dead supposedly died for would itself be dead and buried by the time the twentieth anniversary of the Three Glorious Days came along.
Okay, so that settles us now for the basic makeup of the July Monarchy. Liberal bourgeoisie and only liberal bourgeoisie. Got it? Good. Next week, we will move over to Germany to investigate the disunited Germans and the state of society and politics in central Europe, where the politically conscious classes would kill to have even an ounce of the liberty their French counterparts had, because all they had was order.
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