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).  

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-- Lucien Leuwen by Stendhal, 1836, unpublished in his lifetime because he feared that his critical irony would cost him his job as a government official.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

Faceless poor and bourgeois heroes