V. CRADLE OF UPHEAVAL

 5. MENU: Cradle of upheaval

PARIS IS CALLED "THE CITY OF LOVE," BUT ITS UPRISINGS TELL ANOTHER STORY 

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The painting made a generation after the city's last 19th-century insurrection comes from records of adversaries that viewed the rebels with grudging respect. 

Mainstream accounts mention them as little as possible. These pages address that gap.

In brief

• "Objective history sticks to the facts:" Which facts? 

• The people fooled: 1830

• 1848: fooled again

• Workers' first conscious revolt and modern Europe's first great massacre

• The historical museum and the insurrections

•  Fear, promoter of urban grandeur

• Remaking the city

• Gifts of the repression

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Next,
5.1.

"Objective history sticks to the facts:" Which facts?

5.1. "OBJECTIVE HISTORY STICKS TO THE FACTS:" WHICH FACTS?

 MENU: 5.1. History: which facts?

ALL VIEWS ARE SUBJECTIVE BECAUSE ONE IS OBLIGED TO CHOOSE SOME FACTS AND LEAVE OUT OTHERS  

Choices are based on a point of view, such as identity (Washington crossing the Delaware, Bonaparte at the bridge of Arcole) and kinds of society (Lenin mobilizing the Proletariat, Washington at Mount Vernon). The listing of political facts, often brightened up by drama, is also an opinion, though narrators may not be aware of it.

These pages stress the determining role of economic forces, which transforms the meaning of events and gives readers a handle to understanding change. Is that why it is usually omitted? 

Take the French Revolution of 1789-94 and its conclusion in 1830, an upheaval that most foreigners have never heard of and that many French people have forgotten. 

       La Liberté guide le peuple by Eugène Delacroix, 1831 / zoom

France's great iconic painting is about the 1830 Revolution.

In brief

• "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" lets capitalism take wing   

• The Revolution of 1830: capitalism's neglected triumph 

• Boring history, a tool

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"Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" lets capitalism take wing

"LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY" LETS CAPTALISM TAKE WING

IN PRACTICE...

• Liberty means free enterprise. 

• Equality brings the end the nobles' privileges that limit business growth. 

• Fraternity calls up the rank and file to blow those privileges away.

Image gone from the web

Middle-class leader, underclass striking force

The French Revolution is usually explained as due to archaic systems of land ownership, taxation and government finance, plus exceptionally poor harvests, the cost of aid to American revolutionaries, the extravagance and short-sightedness of the royal court and new ideas. 

Not said: that economic growth made conflict between nascent capitalists and hereditary landowners inevitable — one way or another. 

• When the explorations and discoveries of roughly 1500 bring the unprecedented expansion of chains of production and new sources of income outside the West, more dynamic entrepreneurs threaten the ruling class of hereditary landowners, the nobles. 

That evolution leads in France to stronger monarchy, which contains the new interests; to associating nobles with the gods of mythology; to "Wars of Religion," that pit popular masses against entrepreneurs who challenge traditional protections.  

• Nobles' legal privileges and control of the State hamper but do not stop the growth of those interests. By the 1780's establishments employing hundreds of workers have grown up around Paris:

   Pillage of la Folie-Titon [Réveillon] on Fbg. Saint-Antoine, April 28 1789, anonymous, end 18th century / zoom

A riot at Réveillon, with 200 employees, takes place two months before the taking of the Bastille. By reacting against a rumored reduction of salaries rather than the cost of bread, it announces the struggle between capital and labor. 

Similar establishments: A company with 300 employees in what is now the 13th; several plants north of the Saint-Denis gate, one of which has 800 workers; manufactories in Orleans and Rouen... .

-- In the 13th:

Elements for a History of the Commune in the 13th Dstrict by Gérard Conte, 1981 (in French)

-- In the north:

The Crowd in the French Revolution by George Rudé, 1959

-- In Orleans and Rouen:

The Monarchy's Last Fires by Charles-Eloi Vial, ch. 1, 2016 (in French)

• Those entrepreneurs resent the nobles' privileges that block their expansion, and want political power that fits their economic clout. Nobles, whose revenues come from peasant dues that inflation reduces and whose values and upbringing make them ill-equipped for business, resist. 

The street provides the force that leads to them to hide, flee or be guillotined: "What had been pretension became tragedy."

-- Adolphe Thiers, History of the French Revolution,1834 (in French)

      Illustration in The Great French Revolution by Georges Soria (ed. Bordas) in French, 1988

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Marx's summary:

 "The dykes to capitalism had to be broken. 

They were broken." 

But not quite.

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The 1830 Revolution: capitalists' neglected triumph

THE REVOLUTION OF 1830, CAPITALISTS' NEGLECTED TRIUMPH

ITS THREE DAYS OF STREET FIGHTING ACCOMPLISHED THE GOAL OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION BY ELIMINATING THE POLITICAL HOLD OF THE NOBILITY FOREVER

That's not said. This schoolbook of 1966 presents a list of political facts that have no link with underlying issues.* 

*A translation appears at the end of the page.

Instead of a struggle between emerging capitalists and nobles weakened by economic growth, students learn of a political struggle that has no tangible base.  

Recent textbooks split the same facts into themes that are exclusively political. The economy appears in an unconnected chapter.  

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An economic approach:

The conflict between nascent capitalists and hereditary landowners, which has been gathering steam since the 16th century, comes to a head over five years of drama: the French Revolution (1789-1794). Nobles lose their legal privileges and if they leave, their lands. A business-friendly society replaces that based on hereditary rank. 

But Napoleon's wars absorb capital and energies (from roughly 1800 to 1815). Then the victorious foreign monarchies impose a government run by surviving nobles (the Restoration, 1815-1830). 

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Those developments slow growth but do not stop it:

• The Saint Martin canal, started in 1805 and stopped in 1809, is rebooted with peace in 1815 and finished in 1824: The industrialization of northern Paris, and the fortunes to be made from it, begin.  

Postcard, end of the 19th century / zoom

• The cemetery of the Holy Innocents undergoes a similar evolution. The plan to make it a full-time marketplace, launched just before the Revolution, is completed toward 1824.

• Developers build the maze of covered passages at the same time. "Vero-Dodat," is named after the two butchers who financed it:

     Zoom

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Capitalists' pressure on the government grows. When the king loses elections he "throws the monarchy from the towers of Notre Dame"* by suppressing their voting power and press. That is the point of the political measures the textbook mentions.

*René de Chateaubriand, a deeply royalist writer and one of the few perceptive members of the king's entourage.

Street fighting breaks out. Believing that the Virgin Mary has promised her help, the king plays cards in his château across the river until his famished troops are pushed back and thousands of Parisians threaten to attack him. He abdicates.

Combat devant l'Hôtel de Ville le 28 juillet 1830 by Jean-Victor Schnetz, official commission, 1830  / zoom  

Bankers make up the only organized force. They offer the throne to Louis-Philippe, head of the Bourbon monarchy's junior branch. 

Louis-Philippe quitte Palais-Royal pour les Tuileries le 31 juillet 1830 ("Louis-Philippe leaves Palais-Royal for the Tuileries July 31, 1830") by Horace Vernet / zoom

The new king is the son of despised Equality Philip, who voted for the death of his cousin Louis XVI. Without the legitimacy of heredity or election, he depends on the financiers who have handed him the throne.

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The king is associated with the Church and the past, that is, with economic immobility:

               La Mort de Charles X, print, 1836 / zoom

While a newspaper editor and pillar of the new regime expresses authority by his gaze, an armchair that underscores power and fingers that look like claws. That authority lies behind surging economic dynamism.

Portrait de Monsieur Bertin by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, 1832 / zoom

Calling the insurgency "The Three Glorious Days"

shows capitalists' jubilation at taking power at last.  

# # #

The schoolbook text:

"Did Polignac have to retire?The Charter did not oblige the king to choose his ministers among the Chamber's majority. Rather than cede, Charles X preferred dissolution, but the electors returned a hostile majority. Then the king, by the Four Ordinances pronounced the dissolution of the new Chamber, modified the electoral regime and the regime of the press by his own authority. It was a veritable coup d'état: the Charter did not allow the king to make up the law (July 25, 1830).

Pushed by secret societies where young republicans were numerous, by journalists, by patrons exciting their workers, the people of Paris revolted against the ordinances. The rebels flew the tricolor. After three days of street fighting (the "Three Glorious Days," July 27,28, 29 1830) in which the royal guard was engaged — the rest of the army abstained from fighting — the capital was lost for Charles X."

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 Boring history, a tool

BORING HISTORY, A TOOL

LISTS OF POLITICAL FACTS DIVORCED FROM TANGIBLE ISSUES ARE BORING BECAUSE IRRELEVANT

That leads to dismissing history itself, erasing a tool that helps decode the present.   

End of this section.

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Next section,

V.2.

1830: The people fooled

 

SOCIAL CLASSES WHOSE GOALS DIVERGE

THE REBELS OF 1830 ALL WANTED A REPUBLIC — BUT DID NOT MEAN THE SAME THING BY IT  

A painting the new government commissioned shows the humble and the middle class united: That lasted for about six months.

 For more on a work that the Musée Carnavalet prominently displays, please click.

By "republic" all meant a government without a king, but for...

• Students, journalists and intellectuals it meant universal male suffrage, a free press and legal but not social equality. Their models were figures of Antiquity, whose societies were based on slavery. Many assumed that the poor must work so that an elite (that is, themselves) could create.

-- Writers against the Commune by Paul Lidsky, 1999

• "The people," who were usually shopkeepers, artisans and employees* it simply meant a society that was more just. Their models were egalitarian jacobins of the French Revolution, who might be their grandparents. 

*George Rudé's analysis for the sans-culottes in the French Revolution applies to later times as well (The crowd in the French Revolution, 1959).  

# # #

Adversaries of both: The victors of 1830, who were bankers, industrialists, top officials and the privileged as a whole.

• Republicans were "those degraded offspring of the bourgeoisie, who to fruitful and calming work prefer deceptive political discussions in the taverns, and raising, exciting, guiding the worker who, without them, would stay quietly at his labor." 

-- Souvenirs de l'année 1848 by Maxime du Camp, 1876 

-- Nineteenth-century illustration, Internet, source not said

• A republic meant anarchy, monarchy meant order: "The dike against the torrent that will sweep us away is the king, only the king...

-- Lucien Leuwen by Stendhal, 1836, unpublished in his lifetime because he feared that his critical irony would cost him his job as a government official. 

 "44 francs for the frame and five for the lithograph"
Portrait of Louis-Philippe in Lucien Leuwen 

The young, honest, inexperienced protagonist is sent by his minister to the provinces, where his truthful remarks shock his interlocutors. But next day "Lucien was so tired that he said nothing out of place, and was found entirely acceptable."  

Knowing little about each other

and faced with a common enemy,

republicans with divergent goals ally.

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Faceless poor and bourgeois heroes

FACELESS POOR AND BOURGEOIS HEROES

THE HUMBLE APPEAR AS AN ANONYMOUS MASS, AS CLICHÉS OR AS THREATS

Paintings about the 1830 upheaval show bourgeois rebels full-faced and individual, and, as in traditional representations of war, the humble as part of a crowd.

• The profile of an underclass fighter appears on the left, while three middle-class figures emerge full-face in the right:

Combat à la rue Rohan, 29 juillet 1830 by Hypolyte Lecomte, 1831, zoom

 

• Figures with recognizable faces are two student leaders, a well-dressed corpse, someone with a top hat, a man in an elegant brown jacket fighting a guard and three guards. The white shirts of two plebeians* light up the center, but they themselves are seen from behind:

*For the association of those shirts with the working class, please click and scroll down to the drawing of the furious militant.

La Prise du Louvre, le 29 juillet 1830, massacre des gardes suisses ("The Taking of the Louvre, Massacre of the Swiss Guards") by Louis Bezard, 1832 / zoom

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In fiction "good poor" are saints, victims, devoted servants or grateful beneficiaries of upper-class charity.

• Les Misérables (1862). The hero is a former peasant and escaped convict, who has spent 14 years in the galleys for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sick and starving sister. He lifts a cart to save a victim, though he knows that will identify him and send him back to prison:

• Les Mystères de Paris (the first French crime novel, a best seller in 1848). The heroine, an angelic former prostitute, turns out to be the daughter of a prince. To atone for her former profession, which she exercised only for a week and under duress, she becomes a nun. Then she dies. ("Fallen women" are always punished, even if they repent.)

• Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). The hero is so notoriously docile that a Black that who "Uncle Tom" became an insult. 

• Little Women (1866). The girls give their Christmas breakfast, which a loyal servant has prepared, to a poor woman with small children and a newborn. "Angels!" she exclaims. "Funny angels in mittens and scarves," says the heroine, whose humor does not hide the author's complacency:

Zoom

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The poor who do not fit these stereotypes are threats:

• Les Mystères de Paris. The villainess who forces the heroine into prostitution represents the criminal poor, without background or nuance:

• L'Histoire de l'Hôtel de Ville ("The Story of City Hall"). A second-rate novel interesting for platitudes on the middle-class hero and underclass criminals:

# # #

The contempt of a middle-class battalion commander for his working-class colleague...

Citizen Varlin, allow me to tell you that the 193rd battalion forgives you, easily and without rancor, for the strange mind warp of which you are subject; we perfectly understand that the sudden transformation of a man who trades the tools that he never should have abandoned for a sword too heavy for his forces would confuse the most solid mind." 

-- Extract of a letter to Eugène Varlin (please scroll down) 

during the siege of Paris in 1870,

cited in My Paris Commune (in French)

The alliance between republicans

 cannot last. 

 

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More on bourgeois heros