Napoleon III and the French Second Empire Roger Price (novels to read .txt) 📖

electoral victory in 1852 drew closer, as the ‘red spectre’ became ever more real and rumours of socialist plots were given greater credence, the willingness of notables to accept more extreme measures to preserve ‘order’ became increasingly pronounced. In this anxious and economically depressed climate more and more people looked to the President of the Republic for a solution. As head of state, Louis-Napoléon controlled the government machine and the army which was,

before the creation of a modern police, the essential means of securing internal order. His position was reinforced by the inability of Legitimists and Orleanists, as in 1848, to agree on an alternative candidate for the 1852 presidential elections.

Bonaparte’s problem was that provisions of the constitution barred him from standing for a second successive term in office and there were a sufficient number of republicans in the Assembly to prevent constitutional revision by the necessary two-thirds majority. His utter determination to retain power left him with little choice but to attempt a third coup d’état and, on this occasion, from a position of strength.

The Presidential coup d’état

The coup, which took place on 2 December 1851, was directed against both the republicans and the monarchist groups represented in parliament. The fact that only the former offered armed resistance, and that conservatives tended to

welcome the President’s seizure of power, gave it an overwhelmingly anti-

republican character. Thus, it might be seen as the culmination of a long period of political repression, with the extension of martial law to the entire country facilitating the final destruction of the démoc-soc movement. Mounting the coup proved to be relatively easy for the head of government of a centralised state in which army officers and officials were committed to passive obedience. It had been carefully planned by the President and his closest advisors. Trusted personnel had been moved into key positions, notably the President’s half-brother, the Comte de Morny, to the Interior Ministry and General Saint-Arnaud to the War Ministry. In implementing the coup, the semaphore telegraph system, reserved for official use, allowed the government a considerable time advantage for the despatch of

instructions and receipt of information. Preventative arrests of monarchist leaders like Adolphe Thiers, the Generals Changarnier, Bedeau and Lamoricière, and

republicans who might be tempted to organise resistance, had been carefully planned. On 30 November a practice alert had even allowed a military rehearsal.

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The tactic was to concentrate troops in the major urban centres and garrison towns and, once their security had been assured, to deploy mobile columns into the countryside. The practical disadvantage of this plan was that it would allow time for insurrections to develop in some disaffected and under-policed small towns as well as in surrounding rural areas.

In Paris there was only very limited resistance to the coup. This was because of obvious military preparations and partly due to preventative arrests. Conservative deputies vied with each other for the privilege of being arrested and absolved of any further responsibility in the affair. There were appeals to rally to the defence of republican institutions launched by a small group of republican deputies including such luminaries as Victor Hugo, Hippolyte Carnot, Jules Favre, Michel de Bourges and Victor Schoelcher, and additionally by Jules Leroux and August Desmoulins on behalf of workers associated with a comité central des corporations. None the less, few workers were prepared to risk a repetition of the slaughter which had followed the June insurrection, particularly in defence of the sovereignty of a parliament dominated by monarchists who had deprived many of them of the right to vote. Moreover, the President still enjoyed the personal prestige of his Bonapartist inheritance and, in the proclamation which justified the coup,

promised the immediate restoration of manhood suffrage. Nevertheless, on 3 and 4 December, demonstrations (mainly involving workers) occurred and some 70

barricades were constructed in the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Antoine and in the old centres of popular revolution in the streets adjoining the rues Saint-Denis, Rambuteau and Transnonain. The army did not repeat the mistakes of February 1848 and again, as in June, deployed large, concentrated formations, well supplied with provisions and ammunition. Around 30, 000 troops faced some 1,200

insurgents. This unequal struggle was inevitably short lived. Subsequently, the official newspaper, the Moniteur universel announced that 27 soldiers and 380

civilians had been killed, although the second figure was inflated by the casualties caused when panicking soldiers fired volleys at peaceful, and mainly middle-class, spectators along the boulevards Bonne-Nouvelle, Poissonnière, Montmartre and des Italiens.

Short-lived demonstrations also occurred in many other towns. In Lille, the republican newspaper Messager du Nord on 3 December launched a call for resistance and, in the evening, workers gathered on the grande-place. They were easily dispersed. News of the failure of resistance in Paris discouraged further action. To take another example, in eastern France, Dijon, a crowd of 400–500

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people gathered outside the railway station in the afternoon of 3 December to wait for news from Paris. The local démoc-soc leadership was, however, mostly arrested while waiting at a printer’s for leaflets calling for resistance to be printed. Militants in Dijon itself and in Beaune and other small towns in the region who habitually followed their lead remained inactive. Their hesitancy was in marked contrast with the obvious determination of the authorities. From the government’s point of view, the situation was, unexpectedly, to become far more serious in the provinces than in the large towns. Some 100, 000 men from around 900 communes were involved in various forms of protest; as many as 70, 000 from at least 775 communes actually took up arms and over 27, 000 participated in acts of violence (Margadant 1979).

Insurrections occurred where démoc-soc militants had succeeded in appealing to popular conceptions of justice, linking their political programme to widespread practical grievances and, above all, where organisational structures centred on small towns and market villages had survived repression. Risings occurred in the centre (Allier,