Hello and welcome to Revolutions.

Last time, we began the Revolutions of 1848 with an Italian prologue, and watched as years of simmering discontentment on the peninsula blew up in a series of sharp insurrections that saw most of the various Italian Dukes and Kings grant their subjects a constitution by about mid-February. Well, meanwhile, up in France, years of simmering discontentment were also about to blow up into a sharp insurrection. But since France already had a constitution, the issue at stake was not do we get a constitution?, but how representative should our constitution be? And as sudden and surprising as the insurrections in Italy were, the insurrection in France was even more sudden and surprising. It proceeded so quickly and so uncontrollably that the July Monarchy had fallen before anyone even knew what happened. And as I said last week, it was the news of this revolution in Paris that truly triggered the year of revolution. You can more or less mark the beginning of each revolution in Europe by about how long it took to get mail from Paris.

So we will actually spend the next couple of episodes walking through the February revolution in France, a revolution that no one, not even the men who carried it out, ever saw coming.

The stage for the revolution in France was set in the elections of 1846 that saw the government led by François Guizot win a solid majority in the Chamber of Deputies. As we discussed two episodes back, there were two problems with this quote unquote solid majority. First, thanks to a tiny electorate, the deputies only represented a thin sliver of the population. And second, the voting districts were riddled with corrupt rotten boroughs. So the government of François Guizot commanded a solid voting majority, despite being broadly unpopular. To the opposition, that just didn’t seem right, and one member claimed that “representative government is in danger, it is no longer as an 1830 threatened by violence, but undermined by corruption.”

This was all further confirmed in March of 1847, when two reform bills were floated by the opposition Deputies. The first proposed to cut in half the minimum amount of tax a man had to pay to qualify to vote. This would double the voter rolls to about 440,000, still a hilariously small fraction of the more than 30 million people who lived in France, but better than it had been.

The other bill would have made it illegal to serve as both a Deputy and a functionary, that is, to hold down some post inside one of the various government ministries. In charge of hiring and firing, Guizot was able to use these cushy jobs to bribe Deputies to stay with him, because if Guizot went down, bye bye, cushy job. Somewhere between 100 and 150 of the Deputies simultaneously held such government posts, and could be counted on to vote Guizot’s way no matter what.

So after some spirited debate, the suffrage expansion bill was defeated 252 to 154, and the anti-functionary bill went down 219 to 170. These were large enough majorities to thoroughly demoralize the opposition. They wondered if the Chamber of Deputies was even a viable battlefield for political change. If they wanted to win the larger war, they might have to take the fight outside the narrow confines of the Chamber of Deputies into the realm of public opinion.

So before we proceed, let us ask who exactly is the opposition? Well, by 1847, it was a mixture of two broad camps. The first is called the dynastic left, and the second is alternatively called the radicals or the republicans. Now, by the dynastic left, we mean left-leaning constitutional monarchists. They wanted to broaden suffrage and take down Guizot’s government, but they did not want to topple the monarchy. They were, in this sense, the loyal opposition. But they did mostly believe in the old maxim that the King reigned, but he did not rule. And if they took power, they planned to put the King in a box and invoke Lafayette’s old formula that the King should be surrounded by Republican institutions.

Leading the dynastic left was a man named Odilon Barrot. Barrot had been born in 1791 and was the son of one of the delegates to the National Convention. But though a member of the Convention, Barrot’s father voted against the death of King Louis. When he grew up, Barrot followed in his father’s mostly revolutionary footsteps. After nearly 15 years of being a left-leaning lawyer in Paris, Barrot joined the Help Yourself and Heaven Will Help You party that was organizing resistance to Charles X in the late 1820s. He actually presided over a major banquet for the 221 in March of 1830, and then when the revolution actually hit, he joined the National Guard. So unlike many of his respectable liberal colleagues, Barrot actually carried a gun. He was a participant in the July Revolution in a number of capacities, the most famous of which was that he was one of the three commissioners sent to tell Charles X that it was time to get out of the country. You remember that? After the three glorious days had come and gone when that Parisian mob was led on a long march out to find the King, and those commissioners rode out ahead to tell Charles, there’s a mob coming and we can’t control them, so you have to go. Barrot was one of those three commissioners. And then he traveled on the slow funeral march to the coast to make sure the ousted King Charles X left the country.

But after the Revolution of 1830, Barrot was among those disappointed by the July Monarchy, and he was sympathetic to those who wanted more. He personally appealed to the King for leniency for the insurrectionaries of the revolt of 1832. After that, he continued to serve in the Chamber of Deputies on the far left of the Chamber, but always on the dynastic left. He was not a republican, and he did not want the monarchy overthrown. He just wanted it to be better, more representative of, and more responsive to, the people of France.

Further to the left of the dynastic left were the radicals, who believed that suffrage should be universal, and that a King had no place in a modern state. They basically wanted to follow the lead of the United States, which had by then achieved universal manhood suffrage, at least white universal manhood suffrage, and labored not under the tyranny of Kings. Of particular note in this group of radicals was Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin. Ledru-Rollin was 15 years younger than Barrot. Born in 1807, he grew up not under the revolution and Napoleon, but the Restoration. He was just entering into a new legal practice at the age of 23 when the July Revolution hit. His politics took a very radical turn very early, and Ledru-Rollin made a career as the on-call lawyer for arrested radicals, whether those picked up in police sweeps or those caught up in the various insurrections of 1832 or 1834 or 1839.

In addition to this work, his legal practice prospered mightily, and by the early 1840s, he was a rich man, rich enough to be elected Deputy in 1841. But the radical Ledru-Rollin was so radical and so combative in his speeches that he ran afoul of the government and was arrested and convicted of breaking speech laws. He spent four months in jail until he cleverly got his conviction overturned thanks to a technicality.

Taking an interest in newspaper work, Ledru-Rollin found that he was too radical for even the supposed radicals running the National, and so he used his wealth to found his own paper, Reform. And this new paper published the outer edge of the political left, and that included Louis Blanc, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and young Karl Marx.

By the spring of 1847, both the dynastic left and the radicals concluded that no one was getting anywhere in the Chamber of Deputies, and they needed to find some other means of putting pressure on Guizot and the King. So they joined together to pursue a common public agenda. There were obviously stark differences between the dynastic left and the radicals, so to keep the alliance simple and intact, they settled on a single issue, electoral reform. Both agreed that the voting base needed to be enlarged. Now, it’s true that the dynastic left thought that it only needed to be enlarged, while the radicals thought it needed to be universal, but both could agree that the current electorate was simply not big enough.

In May of 1847, an assembly of opposition Deputies and journalists representing both the dynastic left and the radicals agreed to launch the Banquet Campaign. The idea of the campaign was to take their cause out into the wider world and galvanize public opinion and support. To sidestep the laws against political clubs larger than a certain number of members, they would instead organize a series of ostensibly apolitical private banquets. If these banquets happened to attract reform-minded attendees and speakers who just so happened to say reform-minded things, well, that was out of anyone’s control.

The first banquet was held in Paris on July 9, 1847, and it attracted 1,200 guests. With the price of admission set at 10 francs, the banquet was attended only by the bourgeois upper middle class. And that price of admission was meant to exclude the shiftless rabble who may want to open the floor to more than just extending the vote, perhaps addressing real social issues. Skipping the banquet, though, were men on the more moderate side of the opposition who did not like Guizot’s government, but who also didn’t want to get involved in extracurricular nonsense that might get out of hand. Among those skipping the event were Alexei de Tocqueville and Adolphe Thiers. Though Thiers’ role in all this is murky. de Tocqueville says that Thiers and Barrot were now working in alliance, but that Thiers had his eye squarely on becoming prime minister again after Guizot went down, and for that reason didn’t want to be tainted by these controversial banquets. So instead he pushed Barrot to take the lead. As de Tocqueville observed, Thiers wanted the result of the banquets, that is the fall of Guizot, without the responsibility.

Also not attending though were the really radical radicals. The proto-socialist Louis Blanc and the radical editor Ledru-Rollin, who both refused to attend, believing the whole thing to be a contrived farce that would not go nearly as far as they thought necessary. So the banquet wound up being attended by a very particular group that included radical moderates on the one side and moderate radicals on the other.

When the first banquet got under way, it was controversial, but just this side of inviting the government to crack down. The attendees sang Les Marseillaise and toasted the nation, the Revolution of 1830 and the city of Paris. Barrot capped things off with a keynote address where he stated unequivocally what they had all known for 17 years, that the July Monarchy had betrayed the July Revolution.

The banquet received plenty of glowing coverage in the opposition newspapers, and this first show in the capital being so successful, the production was taken on the road. A central committee in Paris helped cities across France organize their own banquets, and over the next six months, there would be somewhere between 50 and 60 of these banquets with about 20,000 total attendees. With tickets to get in still priced high, these were all strictly upper middle class affairs, and mostly attended by local notables, mayors, members of the local National Guard, and prominent businessmen. A few of the more committed opposition Deputies made trips out to these provincial banquets, with Odilon Barrot being the most conspicuous speaker out on the banquet circuit.

One of the first banquets thrown outside of Paris was also one of the best attended. In the city of Mâcon, about 40 miles from Lyon, a banquet was thrown in honor of the city’s deputy, Alphonse de Lamartine. Born in 1790 to a family of minor provincial nobles, Lamartine skipped all the drama of the revolution and Napoleonic era, but emerged in the 1820s as one of the most celebrated authors and poets in France. A member of the Chamber of Deputies since 1832, Lamartine was a member of the left opposition, but remained aloof from any particular faction. The banquet in his honor was thrown in July of 1847 to celebrate the runaway success of his History of the Girondins, which was the first major rehabilitation of the Girondins, and who Lamartine portrayed as noble liberal moderates unjustly sacrificed at the altar of Madame La Guillotine. His banquet sprawled over two acres and 500 tables with over 3,000 attendees and 3,000 more paying to sit in bleachers and listen to the speeches. When the man of the hour took the stage, he rose and delivered a memorable speech about the future of the July Monarchy, which ended,

“it will fall this royalty. Be sure of that. And having had the Revolution of Freedom and Counterrevolution of Glory, you will have the Revolution of Public Conscience and the Revolution of Contempt. Contempt being the only reasonable response to the bitterly inert conservatism of François Guizot and King Louis Philippe.”

But though the high subscription fee tended to keep these affairs on the precariously balanced line between radical moderates and moderate radicals in the upper bourgeoisie, a few were organized with much more explicitly radical, radical agendas. These were banquets that those who had skipped the inaugural event in Paris did attend, Louis Blanc and Ledru-Rollin among them.

The dynastic left leader, Odilon Barrot, was once set to attend a banquet in Lyon, but he was told that more radical elements had gotten hold of the agenda and were planning to skip the obligatory toast to the King. This was no mere formality either. Barrot was scrupulously maintaining the dynastic part of the dynastic left, and he did not want to open himself to charges that he wanted to topple the monarchy, so he canceled his appearance. Later on, a similar radical banquet in Dijon saw Ledru-Rollin attack Barrot right alongside Guizot as a force for conservative injustice.

By the end of the year, the banquet campaign was beginning to run out of steam. Historians are still mixed about how effective or important the whole exercise was. 20,000 attendees is a lot, but it’s also about half a stadium’s worth of fans at a single baseball game on a Tuesday night. Many contemporaries, even those who were sympathetic to its aims, were caustically dismissive of the banquets as silly and pointless. It was a bunch of impotent politicians paying good money to eat bad food and listen to bad speeches.

The banquets did, however, have some morale-boosting effect. Over the past six months, well over 100 of the delegates had participated in at least one of the banquets and were joined by new friends and allies who encouraged them to do all they could to reform the electoral system. So I think it’s fair to say that the opposition entered the new session of the Chamber of Deputies in December of 1847 with a spring in their step. But all that said, the general consensus among modern historians is that the banquet campaign likely would have come and gone as a minor footnote in the political history of France had the government not decided to make an issue out of the very last banquet that was planned for January 1848. It is entirely likely that had the government let this one final banquet come and go, the July monarchy would not have fallen, or at the very least, it would not have fallen in February 1848.

But we’ll come back to that fateful final banquet in a minute because before the showdown over the banquet, the government had already ratcheted up tensions with the King’s annual address to the Deputies on December 28, 1848. The King had been getting updates about the progress of the banquets and the kinds of things being said, and he was not happy about it one bit. But there was a degree to which he also just didn’t care. When friends came to him and said, hey, you know, Guizot is actually really unpopular and you should replace him. Or hey, you know, broadening the franchise might be inevitable, so you should probably just do it. Even Guizot admitted this might be sound counsel and that if the franchise did need to be expanded, he would voluntarily step down so that it could proceed.

The King responded by saying that Guizot had his confidence and still commanded a majority in the Chamber of Deputies, so what was everyone talking about? This wasn’t like Louis Philippe was Charles X and Guizot was Polignac, where the King was holding on to a favorite minister in the teeth of literal votes of no confidence. Keeping Guizot adhered to both the spirit and the letter of the Charter of Government. So the opposition could say what they wanted to, but the King was not obliged to listen to the wishes of a minority faction if he chose not to.

And though we’ve only briefly touched on the foreign policy of the July Monarchy, one of Louis Philippe’s biggest reasons for sticking with Guizot is that he rightly assumed that Adolphe Thiers would become prime minister if Guizot resigned, and Thiers was aggressively bellicose in foreign affairs. Above all, the King wanted to keep the peace in Europe, and that was simply not a priority that Thiers shared. As I very briefly mentioned two episodes back, Thiers had been prime minister once and had nearly sparked a pan-European war over Egypt. This was no small thing. And the King said,

“I don’t have any absolute, and therefore stupid, hostility to electoral reform in itself, but it can only be judged at any given moment by what its results may be. In the short term, the consequence will be a Molé ministry, but that will always end in giving way to Thiers. Now, Thiers means war, even more certainly than in 1840, and that is the overthrow of my policy. It means adventure and ruin. That’s what your reform will lead to. I repeat, you are not having it.”

Indeed, far from removing Guizot, the King doubled down on the polarizing minister. Though he was the acknowledged power behind the throne, through the 1840s, Guizot technically ruled from his position as foreign minister, with the actual prime minister being old Marshal Soult. Well, Soult told the King in September of 1847 that he was too old for the job now, and he wanted to retire. Louis Philippe immediately tapped Guizot to be his new prime minister, to bring him out of the shadows and to put him front and center.

The opposition Deputies who had just spent the last few months roundly criticizing Guizot and demanding his ouster now discovered that far from removing Guizot, the King was promoting him. So they came into the session in December 1847 with a spring in their step, yes, but also now with an extra chip on their shoulder. And then when the King addressed them on December the 28th, they were left dumbfounded with rage by what he said.

The speech was mostly full of dull banalities that saw the King argue that the worst of the economic crisis was behind them and that his ministers deserved a thousand thanks for the good work they had done extracting the kingdom from the recent economic crisis. But at the very end, the King concluded with a fateful closing passage. He said,

“In the middle of the agitation which blind and hostile passions are fomenting, one conviction upholds me. It is that we possess in the constitutional monarchy the certain means for satisfying for everyone the moral and material interests of our dear country.”

But most everyone had stopped listening by the time that he was talking about the interests of our dear country. They stopped listening after the words “blind and hostile passions“. The opposition Deputies, especially those of the dynastic left, led by Odilon Barrot, had gone out of their way to make it clear they wanted reforms, but were steadfastly loyal to the regime. They were men of conscience, asking their King to do the right thing. They were not bomb-throwing anarchists trying to turn the world upside down. And here the King was saying that they were “blind and hostile“, but that the power of the constitution would defeat them. It was massively offensive, and the opposition took massive offense.

Now I must mention here that so far as any modern historian can tell, the opposition Deputies misunderstood the King’s point. The King was almost certainly referring to the more radical banquets that even Barrot himself thought to recklessly revolutionary. And in particular, the King was probably talking about one such banquet that had recently been held in Limoges. But those words, “blind and hostile“, now took on a life of their own. Whether the King meant it or not, the left now believed a gauntlet had been thrown down, and they prepared to fight the King’s agenda every step of the way, beginning with a fight over whether the Deputy should accept the King’s address at all.

Just days after riling up the opposition, King Louis Philippe was then dealt a heavy personal blow. His beloved sister Adelaide died. Now you will remember Adelaide from the episodes on the Revolution of 1830, devoted to her brother and bearing a sharp and resolute political mind, she gets most of the credit for convincing a wavering Louis Philippe to seize the crown in July of 1830. You remember that line from Adolphe Thiers, “Today madame, you have won a crown“. Well, for the last 18 years, she had served as the King’s personal and political confidant. Each night, brother and sister retired to their own beds only after spending an hour or two alone together, discussing the day’s news and business. This was well known enough that there was an entire genre of political cartoons that depicted the King as the puppet of Madame Adelaide. But approaching her 70th birthday, Adelaide began to deteriorate and she caught a bad cold at the end of December, slipped into a coma, and died on New Year’s Eve 1847.

The death was a personal and political blow for Louis Philippe. He was robbed of his beloved sister, but also the sole constant in his political life. And unlike other advisors, her advice was untainted by ulterior motives. Her only agenda was his success. So his bearings were constantly checked by and corrected by her. Louis Philippe was not a mere puppet, but it’s fair to say that half his mind, half his heart and half his soul were ripped out when she died.

Historians still debate the impact of her death. That is to say, had she lived, would the monarchy have fallen just seven weeks later? It’s hard to say, but it is certainly not a stretch to say that Louis Philippe was severely handicapped on the eve of the crisis of 1848.

But while the King in court went into mourning, politics continued. The opposition decided to go through the King’s address line by line and find cause to complain about everything. Of particular interest to us was the debate over the monarchy’s policy in Italy, where the opposition felt that a liberal constitutional monarchy like France should be supporting the cause of constitutional liberalism in Italy, not cutting side deals with the tyrannical Austrians.

But of even greater interest for us is that it was during the course of these debates that Alexei de Tocqueville rose and gave the speech that I opened this series with, the speech that gave us our operating metaphor of the volcano upon which Europe slept. Now by de Tocqueville’s own admission, this was all hyperbole. And even he didn’t know how squarely he had nailed things on the head when he said that revolutionary social passions would soon swamp the narrow political arguments of the day.

The poet Lamartine then followed this up two days later with a speech where he accused Guizot of being a force for reactionary conservatism everywhere in Europe. That across Europe, in Spain, Italy, Poland and Germany, their liberal brothers and sisters faced the oppressive weight of counterrevolution and France was nowhere to be found. These debates wrapped up on February the 12th with the predictable result that the Deputies voted to bring the speech in anyway, and all of this appeared to be just a bunch of grandstanding. But the end of this fight simply marked the beginning of the next fight, as it was now time for the showdown over the final banquet.

The planning for this last and most infamous banquet began back in December 1847. Unlike most of the previous banquets, this one was meant to be a bigger and more populist affair, with tickets only costing three francs. But more alarming to the government than the low price of admission was the location of the event and the character of the organizers.

Planned by radical officers in the Paris National Guard, the event was scheduled to take place on January 19 in the heart of the 12th arrondissement, a quarter around the pantheon of mostly students and working class artisans. This was a hotbed of radical republicanism, real radical republicanism, revolutionary republicanism. So on December 30, the prefect of the Paris police flat out denied the permit to hold the banquet.

Undeterred, the radical organizers refused to cancel the event, and they tried to enlist opposition Deputies to attend. But at the moment, the opposition deputies were focused on the King having besmirched their honor and were getting ready to do battle over his inflammatory address. Besides, most of them were not exactly sympathetic to working class radicals.

Meanwhile, a whole different radical stream was forming at the same time, because in the same quarter where the final banquet was scheduled to be held was also the Collège des France. Over the years, battles had been waged between students, faculty and government over what was to be taught there, and the government had, on occasion, stepped in to dismiss professors believed to be leading the students to seditious conclusions. A recent controversy surrounded the now legendary French historian Jules Michelet.

For you trivia buffs out there, Michelet was the first one to coin the term Renaissance to mean the rebirth of arts and culture and philosophy, which has obviously had a permanent effect on how we think about the course of western civilization. Now, during the 1840s, Michelet was also working on what became a monumental cornerstone of French Revolutionary historiography called The History of the French Revolution. Michelet was set to deliver a series of lectures about his work starting on December the 16th, 1847, but the lectures were so staunchly anti-clerical and pro-republican that Michelet only got three lectures into his series before the government dismissed him from his seat in the college on January the 2nd.

His firing set 3,000 students marching through the streets. Now the students then tried to organize their own banquet in support of Michelet, but when they too could not get permits or permission, they decided to join with the organizers of the 12th arrondissement banquet and make it a joint affair. And it was shaping up to be quite an affair!

Now as I said, it is quite likely that this event would have come and gone as a sub-sub footnote in the political history of France had the government left well enough alone. But instead, the government decided to make a thing of it. As the planned January 19 date for the banquet approached, the organizers again said, we’re going to do this, and the government said, oh no, you better not. And then the organizers finally managed to get a radical member of the Deputies to ask the Minister of Interior whether private banquets like this were a protected right or whether the government had been merely tolerating the 50 or 60 odd previous banquets that had been held over the past six months. And the Minister of the Interior replied, oh yes, we have been merely tolerating the banquets, and we reserve the right at any time to withhold permission. And that made the entire left opposition drop what they were doing and go, say what now? No, no, no, these banquets are legal, and we have the right to organize and attend them. We’re not doing it just because you let us. We do it because we have the right to.

And just like that, we have a major constitutional principle on the line. So after ignoring the organizers of the banquet, with the opposition Deputies now said, okay, postpone the event until after we have wrapped up this business about the King’s address, and we will join you in force and make the government recognize our collective right to free assembly. The organizers agreed and moved the banquet to Sunday, February the 20th, though they would soon come to regret letting the Deputies into their party.

The debates over the King’s address ended on February the 12th, and good to their word, the opposition Deputies and the most prominent opposition journalists met at a cafe on February the 13th and agreed to form a new organizing committee for the controversial final banquet. The next day, a committee was formed and began organizing. But it was clear immediately that the original organizers and the newly arrived opposition Deputies had very different agendas.

For the Deputies, this was now a matter of constitutional principle, and they did not really care about the original point of the event, the ideals it was going to a spouse, or even the location. They certainly didn’t care about honoring the vision of a mass meeting of working-class Parisians, radical National Guard officers, and ticked-off students. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the opposition Deputies hijacked the events, and were now using it for their own purposes.

Now using this banquet merely as a vehicle to test the legality of the banquets in general, the new organizing committee, led by Barrot, started making changes left and right. First, now no longer wanting the affair to be too large or to attract the wrong sorts of people, they doubled the price of admission from 3 to 6 francs. Then they moved the event from Sunday, February the 20th to Tuesday, February the 22nd, when most people would be at work.

They also moved the location from the lower class 12th arrondissement to the richer neighborhood around the Champs-Elysées. Finally, they issued a call to the opposition newspapers to print up advertisements about the banquet and a planned march that highlighted that this was about exercising their legal and constitutional rights, and that was it. The original organizers, the radical National Guardsmen, the students, the local artisans, they were furious at how thoroughly they had been co-opted and pushed aside.

The fact that this was all now merely about testing a constitutional principle was made even starker when the opposition Deputies and police more or less worked out a deal to turn it into nothing more than a bit of public theater. It was agreed that the demonstrators would be allowed to gather at a church and from there walk peacefully to the site of the banquet. There, the police would make a show of blocking the entrance but then allow the demonstrators to enter the banquet anyway. Once inside, the demonstrators said they would drink a single toast to reform and the right of assembly and then disperse peacefully.

The idea on both sides was to use this as a test case in the courts and force the judiciary to make the call about whether it was all legal or not. With both sides confident of victory, there was no reason not to go through with it.

But despite all this being worked out between the Deputies and the police, the government stepped in and took a much harder line. The National printed up a large advertisement on February the 20th, announcing the event with all the planned details, including a list of the Deputies who were planning to attend, and the fact that the National Guard would be there to show solidarity and help maintain order. But this advertisement was written up in pretty combative language, and the bit about the National Guard set off alarm bells in the government.

Now all that was really going on here is that individual members of the National Guard would participate as individuals, not that the National Guard as an institution was being officially mobilized. But that’s not what it sounded like to Guizot. It sounded a lot like a bunch of opposition leaders were trying to call out the National Guard to support an illegal political assembly.

So Guizot sent out word on February the 21st. No deals, no theater, no banquet. Posters went up threatening consequences for those who attended. National Guard officers reminded their men they were not to participate, and they threatened extra super consequences for any National Guardsmen who did.

With the peaceful test case threatened, and unsure whether they could control events if more agitated demonstrators clashed with the police, the organizers met at Barrot’s house on the night of February the 21st and decided to call the whole thing off. None of them wanted bloodshed. None of them wanted a revolution. The members of the National Guard that had been planning to attend found out they had lost the support of the Deputies and figured it’s all futile now. Even Reform, the staunchly radical newspaper, advised its readers to watch events on February the 22nd carefully, but with their hands in their pockets.

A very satisfied King Louis Philippe remarked to a friend that night, “I told you this would all disappear in smoke.” And I’m sure I do not need to remind you what King Charles X said to a nervous Duke on the night of July the 27th, 1830, when they first heard about the disturbances in Paris. The King said, I repeat to you for the hundredth time that there is nothing to do or to fear. It is a straw fire that will make only smoke.”

But while the respectable political elites, government and opposition alike, were getting ready to walk away from the field. In the streets of Paris, a different mood was in the air.

Next week, we will see the betrayed radicals, students and artisans who did not want to quit the field. The smoke that King Louis Philippe detected was not just smoke, but the output of the fires being set in the lower class quarters. And in one lovely little anecdote from the eve of the Revolution of 1848, a landlady became convinced that revolution was in the air because everywhere she went, people were singing. Then she apparently saw her water carrier with five loaves of bread under his arms. It was enough for three days, he said. “We always do these things in three days.”

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