SOCIAL CLASSES WHOSE INTERESTS DIVERGE

ALL THE REBELS OF 1830 WANTED A REPUBLIC — WITH CONTRARY GOALS 

A painting the new government commissioned shows the humble and the middle class united:

The Duke of Orleans, on the way to City Hall, crosses place du Châtelet on July 31 1830 by Prosper Lafaye, toward 1830 

 For more on this work of propaganda, please click.

That would not last. For students, journalists and intellectuals a "republic" meant government without a king, with universal male suffrage, a free press and legal but not social equality.

•  Many assumed that the poor must work so that an elite (that is, themselves) could create.

-- Writers against the Commune by Paul Lidsky, 1999

• Their models were figures of Antiquity, whose societies were based on slavery. 

For "the people," who were usually shopkeepers, artisans and employees...* 

* Opponents call them the dregs of humanity ("la lie du peuple") but police records show that marginals were rare ( The crowd in the French Revolution by Georges Rudé (1959). That conclusion applies to later times as well.

• It meant a more just society.

• Their models were egalitarian jacobins of the French Revolution, who might be their grandparents. 

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

• Republicans are "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." 

-- Memories of the year 1848 by Maxime du Camp, 1876 (in French)

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

• They associate republicans with anarchy and monarchy with 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-- Lucien Leuwen by Stendhal, 1836, unpublished in his lifetime because he feared that his ironically critical novel would cost him his job as a government official.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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Next,

Faceless poor and bourgeois heroes