Hello and welcome to Revolutions.

Last week saw the ignoble and abrupt fall of King Louis Philippe, who we spent an entire Revolutions podcast series putting in power in the first place. So thanks a lot, man. After years of increasingly out-of-touch conservatism, patience with the July Monarchy finally ran out in late February 1848, and after a few days scrambling to stay afloat, the King’s mood turned fatalistic, and he abdicated on February 24, 1848.

As de Tocqueville later wrote, “one of the oddest features of this singular revolution was that the incident that started it was brought about and almost desired by those who were ousted from power, and it was only the future victors who foresaw and feared it“.

This is to say that like most overthrown regimes, the King and his former Prime Minister François Guizot had wildly overestimated their own popularity and strength. They had put their foot down on the banquet issue, assumed that they would win, and that the weakness of the opposition would be revealed for all to see. Meanwhile, that opposition had been pushed by the government’s extreme stubbornness into realms they neither anticipated nor desired. The government canceling the banquet became an existential threat to constitutional liberties, which opened room for a revolutionary insurrection that the opposition leaders had never sought.

So on February the 24th, the shell-shocked King headed into exile, and the equally shell-shocked opposition now had to figure out what to do with the victory they had so feared.

If we stick with de Tocqueville for just one more minute, he later devoted a section of his recollections to trying to figure out how things had gone so wrong so fast for the July Monarchy. And he wrote a little passage that will be eminently intelligible to all listeners of the revolutions podcast, and is indeed a point that I myself have made less eloquently and less succinctly over the course of all of our series, going all the way back to the English Revolution. He wrote,

“One could make a weird collection of all the utterly dissimilar mistakes that have been fathered one by the other. There is Charles I being driven into arbitrary behavior and violence by seeing how the spirit of opposition flourished under the kindly rule of his father. Louis XVI determined to put up with everything because Charles I had perished unwilling to put up with anything. Then Charles X provoking a revolution because he witnessed Louis XVI’s weakness. And finally, King Louis Philippe, the most perspicacious of them all, who imagined that all he had to do to remain on the throne was to corrupt it without violating the law, and that provided he himself observed the letter of the charter, that the nation would never go beyond it.”

And this does get at one of the enduring themes of our show, with each overthrown King so determined to not make the mistakes of his unfortunate predecessor that he was led to make entirely new and entirely opposite mistakes. And so having determined that the cardinal mistake Charles X had made was flagrantly violating the charter of government, Louis Philippe was convinced that as long as he did not do that, he would be inoculated from revolution. And he never did violate the charter of government. But by 1848, that wasn’t the problem. The problem now was overscrupulous adherence to a document everyone now thought in need of revision. Louis Philippe’s stubborn commitment to the charter of government became a weakness, not a strength. And so he fell.

But as I said at the end of last week’s episode, the fall of King Louis Philippe did not necessarily guarantee the fall of the July monarchy. Remember, Louis Philippe did not abdicate and say, hey, France is a republic now. He abdicated rather in favor of his nine-year-old grandson Philippe, styled at that moment the Count of Paris. Now to understand why the crown was being passed to this nine-year-old Count of Paris, we need to go back to a tragic moment in the history of the July Monarchy, a tragic moment I skipped over because I didn’t want to complicate things at the time and knew I’d be able to revisit it now. The tragic moment came in 1842, and it was the death of Ferdinand Philippe, the firstborn son and heir to the throne.

Ferdinand Philippe had been born on the island of Sicily in 1810, and when his father suddenly became king of the French in 1830, 20-year-old Ferdinand Philippe had inherited his father’s old title and become the new Duke d’Orléans. Bright, popular, and a great lover and patron of the arts, Louis Philippe’s health and intelligence made the succession issue a non-issue for the first 12 years of the July Monarchy. The line of succession was then further secured in 1838 with the birth of Ferdinand Philippe’s son, Philippe, now the Count of Paris. So the line of the July Monarchy looked secure practically to the end of the century.

But tragedy struck on July 13, 1842, when a light carriage Ferdinand Philippe was riding in spun out of control, pitched him out onto the street, and fractured his skull. He died a few hours later at the age of just 32. It was a crushing blow for both the King and Queen, and plenty of historians of the July Monarchy point to the death of Ferdinand Philippe as a crucial turning point in the life of the aging Louis Philippe as the King moved from being nimble and engaged to stubborn and withdrawn.

The death of the heir to the throne also opened up a new battleground in the fight between the government and the opposition. The line of succession goes firstborn son to firstborn son. So even though King Louis Philippe had other sons, the first in line for the throne was now the three-year-old toddler Philippe. With the King himself approaching 70, it was entirely likely that he would die before the boy reached adulthood, which meant that a plan for regency would have to be established. For regent, the King favored his next eldest son Louis, the Duke of Nemours. But Nemours was widely known to be even more conservative than his father. So the left opposition rallied around Ferdinand Philippe’s widow, Helena of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. The young Duchess d’Orléans was popular with the people and known to have a lively liberal outlook on life, so the opposition tried to have her written in as regent. But the king would not have it. His daughter-in-law may have been popular with the people, but she was not super popular inside the French royal family, being both German and a Protestant.

So with the King insisting and his government commanding a slim majority in the Chamber of Deputies, a regency bill passed naming the Duke de Nemours as regent if the king died. Did you follow along with all that? Good. The crucial point to take away is that the battle over the regency in 1842 featured almost all the same players as the Revolution of 1848, and those who lost the battle on regency in 1842 were now the victors in the Revolution of 1848. So when Louis Philippe abdicated in favor of his now 9-year-old grandson Philippe, the regency question was suddenly back in play.

Now, if you’ll recall from last week, the moment Louis Philippe abdicated was actually fraught with menacing danger. Mobs were surrounding the palace, there were firefights out in front of the Palais Royal, all the streets in central Paris were barricaded. The former King and Queen made their way out to the Place de la Concorde and hooked up with carriages that spirited them away to exile, but they necessarily had to leave behind in the palace the Duchess d’Orléans and her two children, one of whom was now allegedly King of the French.

Staying with them was the 28-year-old Duke de Nemours, who was now, according to the 1842 law, the regent of France. But Nemours had little interest in fighting to save his job. All the men who had backed him were running out of Paris as fast as they could, leaving behind only those who had supported his sister-in-law. It was quite clear that if the monarchy and the royal family were going to be saved, it would be through the regency of the Duchess d’Orléans.

Left in charge of defending the palace, Nemours was also, like his father, not interested in fighting to the death and shedding unnecessary blood. So with the crowds pressing in, Nemours ordered his guards to retreat and let the mob have the run of the place. So, just as they had in 1830, the Parisians rushed in and indulged in the visceral thrill of smashing up glass and china and hauling off the spoils of war just about anything that wasn’t nailed down. As this mob ransacked the palace, a similar mob was doing the same thing to the Palais Royale, the old home of the Orléans family. As harbinger of the ultimate fate, not just of Louis Philippe, but the whole monarchy, the King’s throne was carted off down to the Place de la Bastille and burned at the foot of the July Column. Liberty, not order, was now once again leading the people.

With the monarchy collapsing and the insurrectionary Parisians driving events, the purported opposition leaders, who might now step into the breach, were having quite a bit of trouble keeping up. Odilon Barrot, leader of the dynastic left and the banquet campaign, had tried to pull back on February 21st and settle for a strongly worded petition. When the violent upheaval he had tried to avoid broke out anyway on February 22nd, he accepted an invitation to serve in a government with Adolphe Thiers on the night of February 23rd. Barrot then spent the morning of February 24th collaborating with Thiers, and probably had had a hand in deciding to withdraw the regular army and hand the capital over to the National Guard. Then, in the flurry of activity that fateful morning, Thiers had been dismissed, and Barrot invited to form a government stocked with dynastic left reformers. But no sooner had the King offered this invitation than the king himself abdicated the throne.

Having probably not slept for days, Barrot was now in a frantic state. As a member of the dynastic left, he was now determined to save the monarchy, and by the early afternoon of February the 24th, an impromptu meeting of opposition leaders was convened in the offices of the Interior Ministry. There, the alliance of convenience between the dynastic left and the radical republicans broke down. Having been held together only by the single issue of electoral reform, the King’s abdication put them on opposite sides of the crucial issue of the moment. Barrot and the dynastic left argued that the crown was now on the head of 9-year-old Philippe. The radicals said, dude, forget that. We’ve got these bastards on the run. It’s time to declare our republic.

At that same moment, there were two other crucial meetings going on besides the one Barrot was quote-unquote leading at the Interior Ministry. One was in the newspaper office of the National, the other in the offices of Reform. And the National we are all intimately familiar with. Remember, the National under Adolphe Thiers was ground zero for the Revolution of 1830. Well, since the July Revolution, most of the writers who had been there for the Revolution either left the paper to head off into government, like Adolphe Thiers, or retreated into disillusioned opposition, and then remained in disillusioned opposition through the 1840s. And the National became an outlet for moderate republicanism, read by exactly the kind of oxymoronic moderate radicals that had been so central to the banquet campaign. They still supported private property, had a bourgeois outlook on life and government, and they believed that the state should be by and for the educated middle classes. The only thing really separating Odilon Barrot was that Barrot wanted to keep the monarchy, and the guys currently convening in the offices of the National did not.

The other meeting was held down the street at the offices of Reform. I introduced Reform two episodes back when I introduced Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, one of the leading radical voices of the day. Remember, he had grown disenchanted with the moderation of the National, and so had gone off and founded his own paper that, as I mentioned, published some of the most radically fringe voices around, including the socialist Louis Blanc, who we’ll talk about more here in a second, the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and budding communist Karl Marx. To draw a clumsily simplistic line between the Republican National and the Republican Reform, the National was focused narrowly on the political question, while Reform covered the wider social question. But whether you were at the National or Reform, your object now was the same. How do we ditch the dynastic left and make sure that the Revolution of 1848 does not turn out like 1830, where the people of Paris died in the street simply for the sake of replacing one Bourbon with another?

While Barrot was trying to convince his colleagues to save the monarchy, the Duchess d’Orléans resolved to make a direct appeal to the Chamber of Deputies. Showing a bit of courage, courage that seemed to be lacking among the Orléans at the moment, she bundled up her two kids when the mob stood poised to ransack the palace, and she made her way on foot to the Palais Bourbon, where the Chamber of Deputies would be holding a session. She helped to convince the Deputies to ratify the King’s abdication and recognize her son as King and herself as regent.

Now, as you can imagine, the only Deputies who showed up for the session that day were members of the opposition. There may have been one or two stubborn supporters of the former government of Guizot, but other than that, nearly every Deputy there was an opposition Deputy. Word had already gone round of the King’s abdication, and the dynastic left had delivered the first round of speeches trying to steer the Deputies toward accepting King Philippe and his mother, the duchess d’Orléans, as regent. Then the duchess herself dramatically arrived with the would-be King, and the pitiful sight of them might hopefully strengthen the hand of the dynastic left. Shortly after they all arrived, Barrot came bursting in, and he mounted the tribune and tried to seal the deal by saying, “The crown of July now rests on the head of a child and a woman.”

But in the sudden vacuum opened by the abdication of Louis Philippe, many of the opposition deputies who had been allies of the dynastic left for practical reasons, now decide there was an opportunity here to seize the day. So they ignored Barrot’s call to save the monarchy, and instead joined with the radicals who were calling for a republic. The most decisive of these converts without question was Alphonse de Lamartine.

Lamartine was incredibly popular with the whole literate population of France. I introduced him when we were talking about the first couple of banquets that were thrown in the summer of 1847, with one of the biggest being thrown in his honor. Lamartine had been a beloved poet since the 1820s, and he was still riding high from his massively successful History of the Girondins, which was among the first French histories of the revolution to not roundly denounce the horror and terror of the Republic, and was instead sympathetic to the decisions made in the emergency days of 1792 and 1793, and he treated the fall of the republic as a tragedy, not a triumph.

Lamartine had been among those who had supported the regency of the Duchess d’Orléans in 1842, but in the swirl of events in February 1848, Lamartine decided there was an opportunity here that could not be missed, and so he joined with radicals like Ledru-Rollin in haranguing the Deputies to support not another king, but instead a provisional government, a self-appointed ministry without a King, the first step towards bringing the republic back.

There was for a brief moment a balance in the chamber between those supporting regency and those supporting a radical provisional government, but that balance was shifted decisively by the weight of the people. Well, the presence of the people anyway. While all of these speeches and arguments were unfolding in the chamber, insurrectionary Parisians had begun streaming into the galleries. Now, if you remember from way back in the French Revolution days, one of the defining aspects of politics in that era was the constant presence in the various assemblies of loud and boisterous crowds. Speakers would openly play to them, and they would heckle those who displeased them. Well, since the coup of Napoleon in 1799, those galleries had been quieted, and for the whole run of the Restoration and July Monarchies, those who bothered to sit in the galleries at the Chamber of Deputies sat silently and respectfully. They were there to watch, not participate. Well, for the first time in 50 years, that silence was shattered in February 1848. Those who entered the Chamber did so quite loudly. Then they ceased to bother with even confining themselves to the galleries. They started to push their way out onto the Chamber floor, occupying seats and just generally filling up the room. And they were flanked by armed National Guardsmen.

Most of the dynastic left, who still supported the monarchy, slipped out of the room rather than run afoul of this mob, leaving behind only radicals in favor of the provisional government. Recognizing that it certainly wasn’t safe for them anymore, the Duchess d’Orléans and her children ran out of the building, escorted by some still loyal guardsmen. The brief few hours when the February Revolution might have ended with the regency of the Duchess d’Orléans had now passed. The course of history raced right past her, and she departed from France with her family and headed back home to Germany.

With regular order having broken down completely, the president of the Chamber tried to formally end the session, but those Deputies still present refused to be denied their prize. Radical deputies like Ledru-Rollin ignored the president’s attempt to shut down the session and continued giving speeches. They did all this with vocal support from Lamartine, who at that moment was the only guy in the room who commanded everyone’s attention, including the people in the galleries. These radical Deputies moved on to announcing the formation of a provisional government and then naming the men who would serve on it.

It was later determined that this list of names that spontaneously appeared out of nowhere had been drawn up by the men meeting in the offices of the National and had then been sent down to the members in the Chamber. I won’t bother with the whole list since it’s just going to be a bunch of names, but at the top were Lamartine and Ledru-Rollin, both of whom were considered absolutely necessary to consolidating the radicals. The one other new name I will mention in passing is François Arago, a very popular polymath, physicist and astronomer who was justly famous in the history of science for his contributions to the study of light and magnetism. He also happened to be a popular and outspoken liberal radical during both the Restoration and the July Monarchy. The addition of his name lent considerable gravitas to the provisional Government. And then I will also mention one name that is not on the list, Odilon Barrot. Though he was still trying to keep his head about him and keep the monarchy in play, just like the Duchess d’Orléans, the course of history was racing right past him.

Having announced the provisional government in the Chamber of Deputies, the name members then agreed to quite consciously follow the pattern of 1830 and move the center of action to the Hôtel de Ville, which they planned to make the headquarters for the provisional government. With the streets still barricaded and with confusion still raining everywhere, they did not, though, make one grand procession and instead made their way individually and in small groups, with everyone arriving by about 4 p.m. and we’re still on February 24, 1848.

The scene at the Hôtel de Ville was even more chaotic than the Chamber of Deputies. Having been occupied by the National Guard on behalf of the people, Parisians of every class had flooded in, and the building had become a makeshift hospital, staging point for National Guard units, shelter for those trying to stay out of the chaos in the streets. With every room and hallway crammed with noisy people, the self-declared provisional government of France had a hell of a time just finding a place to meet, finally settling on a small unoccupied room that someone tracked down.

After cramming themselves uncomfortably inside, they then literally blockaded the door with furniture to prevent the crowd outside from interrupting their work. The meeting they had just convened would last for the next fifteen hours, and with the Revolution of 1848 having proceeded thus far pretty leaderlessly, it was time to craft a meaning to it all, and decide what this had all really been about.

Outside the door, a group of workers camped out to make sure that things did not go the way they had in 1830, with one Bourbon replacing another. But they need not have worried about that. Every man in the provisional government was a committed republican.

So after spending a few minutes hashing out between themselves who would take over what ministry, Lamartine then drew up a declaration that he personally delivered from the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville. He praised the heroism of the people of Paris, denounced the July Monarchy as corrupt and reactionary, and then declared that the monarchy was dead and the provisional government was in charge.

With the dynastic left successfully tossed overboard, splits among the victorious republicans opened up in yet another example of the irresistible entropy of victory. The group of 40 or so radical journalists and leaders who had gathered in the offices of Reform got the list of men named to the provisional government and said, well, yes, this is a good start in the presence of Ledru-Rollin is great, but we do not feel sufficiently represented. As constituted, the provisional government meant sweeping political reform, but what about social reform? So to the list already in place, the guys at Reform added four new names, and the one I want to focus on right now is the popular socialist, Louis Blanc.

Now, the name Louis Blanc has come up a few times so far in our series. As I mentioned, him is one of the early socialists, and that’s exactly what he was. And for sure, he’s one of the very first socialists in history to get a chance to put his theories into practice.

Blanc had been born in Madrid in 1811. He was the son of a functionary in the regime of King Joseph Bonaparte that was then failing to contain Napoleon’s bleeding ulcer. The fortunes of the family understandably took a turn for the worse after the collapse of the empire, and after graduating from university, Blanc had a hard time making a living, and he was among those educated but struggling fringe bourgeoisie who would be drawn into radical politics. Indeed, from an early age, he was a republican and a radical democrat. But he also became interested in solving not just the political question but the social question.

After working as a tutor and political journalist, Louis Blanc hit it big in 1839 with a short pamphlet called The Organization of Labor. Always a gifted writer, Blanc was one of the first socialists to successfully spread his ideas not just among other disaffected intellectuals, but also out to the artisans and the working classes. His simple and concise style contained ideas that were not original, but they were intelligible. He said that the principal problem was economic competition, which was inefficient and unjust, and that cooperation needed to define the next step in modern economic development.

He then outlined social workshops as the new basis of the economy, basically trade union co-ops that would be owned by and run for the benefit of the labor that produced the profit. He also laid out the very simple to understand slogan that

“everyone had a right to work.”

If we’re going to live in a world where you need to work to eat, then it was madness to let employment be dictated by the treacherous whims of the market.

Riding the success of the organization of labor, Louis Blanc then wrote a scathing takedown of the July monarchy called the History of Ten Years, 1830 to 1840, that denounced the regime for failing to serve anyone but a corrupt clique of bourgeois capitalists. And he was among the first to coin that term, capitalist. It was a pejorative meant to describe those who appropriated the wealth of the nation to the exclusion of everyone else. And I might also add here that Blanc is also famous for popularizing the socialist maxim, “from each according to his ability and to each according to his means.”

After the founding of Reform, Blanc became a contributing editor and he banged the socialist drum harder than ever during the economic crisis years of the mid-1840s, which made his ideas more viscerally relevant than ever. He was for sure the most popular socialist on the eve of the Revolution of 1840. And he capped his pre-revolutionary career by publishing his own history of the French Revolution, which offered the first sympathetic account of Gracchus Babeuf and the Conspiracy of Equals, about which I will have more to say next week.

Through all of this though, Blanc was on the outside looking in. He was never a Deputy and he never served in any government post. But with the February Revolution having toppled the monarchy, his inclusion in the provisional government now seemed like his destiny. And making his first major contribution to the course of events, Blanc refused to accept his nomination unless he was accompanied by a working class leader known to history simply as Albert.

Albert had been a long-standing working class leader in the various revolutionary secret societies that had risen and fallen over the 1830s and 1840s. Albert’s entrance into the provisional government would mark the first member of the working class to ever serve in a French government.

So this little crew of reform candidates for the provisional government then picked their way through the barricades and entered the Hôtel de Ville. There they received a warm greeting from the people who lifted Blanc onto their shoulders and carried him up to the provisional government where they banged on the door until they were admitted. And the members of the provisional government were initially very put out by the arrival of these men saying they had a right to be here because they really represented the will of the people. But it was hard to deny that the people outside the room really did seem to support them, and so trying to send Blanc and the others away risked killing the provisional government before it even had a chance to live.

But not having been ratified by the Chamber of Deputies and with all the ministries having already been doled out, a compromise was reached whereby the new arrivals would be admitted as secretaries of the provisional government. This compromise was accepted by all and the debate over the fate of France began in earnest.

The entrance of the new radicals, and Louis Blanc in particular, opened up a fierce debate over the first great issue before them. Should the provisional government declare a republic to be in existence right now, or should they announce that a referendum would be held to determine whether or not the republic existed? The more cautious members led by Lamartine argued that Paris was not France, and to do this right, they had to respect their own democratic principles. We have to ask the people what they want.

Blanc and the Radicals, on the other hand, said, no, we should just do it now, and have France accept it as a fait accompli. Otherwise, we risk all on a vote that we are not at all sure to win. Over the hours of debate, however, Lamartine and the more cautious members carried the day, and on the morning of February 25, 1848, they emerged with yet another declaration. This declaration read,

“The Provisional Government wants the Republic, on condition that it is approved by the people, who will be immediately consulted.”

So just as it had taken three days to transform the restored Bourbon Monarchy into the constitutional July Monarchy, it had taken three days to transform the July Monarchy into a kingless republic. Now, of course, the republic still had yet to be ratified, but we know how this all turns out, and the February Revolution of 1848 marks the beginning of the Second French Republic.

Over the three revolutionary February days, about 50 soldiers had been killed, along with 22 municipal guards. On the other side, it was just shy of 300 insurgents. And though the respectable quarters of Paris were now at the mercy of their worst nightmare, the unwashed and armed mobs of Paris, it was universally remembered by everyone in the capital on February the 25th that the streets were mostly empty and calm, and those who were out were happy and full of love, rather than angry and full of wrath. There was very little looting and almost no violence.

But this calm turned out to be simply a honeymoon, because the question that lay before the provisional government was the same question that had lain before the victors of the July Revolution. Was the revolution the momentous final step, or merely the promising first step?

With political victory achieved, they would have universal manhood suffrage and a kingless republic, would there be any desire among those in the government to move on to the social question and introduce even more reform? And frankly, the victors of 1848 would find themselves just as flummoxed by this question as the victors of 1830. And it would not take long for the streets of Paris to realize that even the expulsion of the monarchy and a victory for so-called radicals still did not mean a victory for them. And so, in just a few months, Paris would erupt once again.

Next week, we are going to take a brief digression from the main plot. We will take this digression first of all because with a two-week hiatus coming up, the time is just not right to launch ourselves into a new plot just to have to hit the pause button. So next week, what we are going to do is explore how the memory of the first French Revolution was going to affect everyone’s reaction to this revolution in France, a revolution that the rest of Europe was now about to find out about.

As you may have noticed, there are a lot of histories of the French Revolution now floating around out there, and all of them have their own list of heroes and list of villains. And how far you want the Revolution of 1848 to go depends a lot on what version of the French Revolution you believe in.

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