France during the 19th Century

Throughout the 19th century, France was a troubled country.  It remained a Great Power even after the destruction of the Napoleonic Empire.  But it was unable to find a stable political system.  Monarchists, Bonapartists, and Republicans warred with each other throughout the century and were unable to reach a consensus on an agreed-upon form of government.

After Napoleon's first abdication in 1814 and then again after the 100 Days, Louis XVIII was installed as king of France until his death in 1824.

Louis XVIII was the younger brother of Louis XVI, who was executed during the French Revolution.   Louis XVIII was born at  Versailles on 17 November 1755 and died in Paris 16 on September 1824.  He was baptized under the name of Louis Stanislas Xavier de France.  He was King of France and Navarre from 1814 to 1824.  He spent 23 years in exile, from 1791 to 1814.

When the Bourbons were restored in 1815, France enjoyed a moderate regime. Louis XVIII issued a Charter providing a two-house legislature elected through a system of restricted suffrage. Louis XVIII pursued relatively moderate policies.  Many of the exiled aristocrats who had returned with the Restoration of the Bourbon dynasty wanted more extreme policies to return to the status quo ante.  Louis' younger brother  Charles, the Comte d'Artois, represented the views of these ultra-royalists. 

Charles X was the brother of Louis XVI and XVIII.  He became king in 1824 and ruled for six years until the July Revolution of 1830 swept him aside.  He was the last of the senior line of the House of Bourbon.  His reactionary policies triggered the Revolution. 

The right wing, known as the Ultras, was led by Louis’s brother, Charles, the Count of Artois. When Louis died in 1824, Charles came to the throne as Charles X (1824-1830). He and his fellow Ultra Royalists acted as if they would restore the type of society existing under the Old Regime, prior to the Revolution. An indemnity was voted for those nobles who lost their land in the Revolution; and the influence of the Catholic clergy increased. In the elections of 1830, the liberal opponents of the King were victorious in the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house. They voted no confidence in the royalist government. The king’s response was to issue the July Ordinances (on the 26th) without seeking legislative approval. If these ordinances had been implemented, the recently elected Chamber would have been dissolved. A new Chamber would have been elected under voting rules excluding much of the middle class.

            The popular reaction was swift. On July 27th, barricades were thrown up in Paris by groups of workers and intellectuals who wished to overthrow the king and establish a republic. Charles X abdicated and fled to England.

    The middle-class liberals who had led the opposition in the Chamber of Deputies preferred a constitutional monarchy to a republic. With the help of Talleyrand and Lafayette, they placed Louis Philippe of the house of Orleans (related to the Bourbons) on the throne of France. Louis Philippe (1830-1848), making sure he appealed to this bourgeois constituency, adopted the tri-color flag of the revolution and went around Paris wearing the forerunner of a business suit and carrying an umbrella. He scrupulously honored the constitution. There was no appearance of kingly absolutism in his dress or his pronouncements.  Louis Philippe is known at the bourgeois king.  Even though he was a king, he represented the interests and mind-set of the upper middle class.

During his eighteen years of rule, France became an industrialized country.  Most of the French industry was concentrated around Paris.  Industrialization brought with it all the social ills associated with that process.  Child labor, exploitation of women, slum housing, boom and bust cycles of employment.

            There were food shortages, rising prices, and widespread unemployment in the now industrialized country. The government itself was noted for its corruption and its restricted franchise. Approximately one man in thirty could vote. François Guizot, the king’s first minister, insisted that voting should be restricted to men of substantial property. Unrelenting in the face of opposition, Louis Philippe and his minister stoutly resisted pressures for change. Though political rallies of the type commonly used in the United States were forbidden by law, the cause of electoral reform was pushed at political banquets. In the winter of 1847, there had been a series of banquets throughout France, with a large one scheduled for February 22, 1848, in Paris. The Guizot government banned the dinner on the day it was scheduled. This action prompted the revolt. The National Guard refused to disperse the crowds; the workers took up paving stones from the streets and began to erect barricades. Guizot was dismissed on the 23rd, and the king, who abdicated on February 24th, went into exile in England.

    A ten-man provisional government was formed, headed by Alphonse de Lamartine (1790-1869). Lamartine was a poet turned politician who favored what might be termed moderate republicanism. He wanted a republican form of government with extensive political rights for the average person. The majority of the Provisional Government were moderate republicans. There was a smaller three-person faction, led by Louis Blanc, the socialist, which was further to the left. Blanc and his followers favored a more radical republic that would emphasize social rights, especially the right of wage earners to work in the newly industrialized nation.

            As a carrot for Blanc, the Provisional Government established National Workshops that seemed to mimic the producer’s cooperatives, run by workers, that Blanc envisioned. But they put in charge of these workshops an admitted anti-socialist who had no intention of cooperating in the implementation of Blanc’s vision. The workshops simply became welfare projects, providing pay and little real work to the Parisian masses. The numbers enrolled in the National Workshops jumped from 10,000 in March to about 120,000 in June.

            In April 1848, elections were held throughout France for a Constituent or National Assembly that was to write a new republican constitution. This Assembly was elected by universal manhood suffrage. Suddenly the electorate, which under the Orleanist Monarchy had been about 200,000, had risen to nine million. Nobody had fully anticipated what the outcome would be. The result of this election was that the country regions outside Paris found a voice. That voice was much more conservative than in the city! When the Assembly met in May, it replaced the Provisional Government with a five-person executive board headed by Lamartine. No socialists were included in the new executive. Some workers responded by trying to dissolve the Constituent Assembly, but the National Guard supported the Assembly. There was bloodshed during the June Days Riots from June 23-26th. These riots were a response to the dissolution of the National Workshops. To regain control of the streets, martial law was proclaimed under General Louis Cavaignac (1802-1857). The army won. Some ten thousand were killed or wounded, and eleven thousand were captured and deported to the colonies. This example of class warfare deeply frightened the rest of France and sent shudders throughout Europe.

            In December 1848, elections were held for a President of the Second Republic, using universal manhood suffrage. The man elected had the advantage of good name recognition and symbolized the restoration of effective government. He was Louis Napoleon, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte. He beat his nearest opponent, General Cavaignac, in a landslide of 5,317,345 votes to 1,879,298. By December 1852, the first president of the Second Republic had succeeded in establishing, by plebiscite, still another form of government¾the Second Empire.

The material below is copyrighted and may not be copied without permission of the authors.  It is taken from:
Thomas J. Kehoe, Harold E. Damerow, and Jose Marie Duvall, Exploring
     Western Civilization:  1600 to the Present:   A Worktext for the Active
     Student, Revised Edition.  (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Co.,
      1999.)

            Louis Napoleon had been elected president of the Second French Republic in 1848. In December of 1851, he arranged for a plebiscite that gave the president the power to draw up a new constitution. Napoleon’s new constitution provided for the establishment of the Second French Empire. He became Napoleon III (supposedly Napoleon Bonaparte’s son, who never ruled, had the right to the title of “Napoleon II”). The Second Empire lasted from 1852-1870.

            The French Empire of the 1850’s was authoritarian rather than democratic. Napoleon III undertook an extensive building program in and around Paris. He found in Baron Georges Haussman (1809-1891) a city planner who could complete a massive public works program—building wide boulevards, railroad stations, etc. Not so incidentally, the widened roads made it much more difficult for revolutionaries to construct barricades as had happened in 1789, 1830, and 1848. He also created a mortgage bank, the Crédit Mobilier, to encourage large industrial undertakings. Napoleon negotiated a lowering of tariff barriers to make French enterprises more competitive. This was not particularly popular, and to gain new support he liberalized his regime in the 1860’s, giving more budgetary control to the legislature.

            Napoleon generally lacked foreign policy shrewdness. His contributions to unifying Italy gained little for France. During the American Civil War, he sent French troops to Mexico to support a Hapsburg (Archduke Maximilian) as Emperor of Mexico. When the Civil War ended, the U.S. forced him to withdraw the troops, leaving Maximilian to be killed by the Mexicans. Indeed, his foreign policy ultimately did in Napoleon III. As we saw, his defeat in the Franco-Prussian War led to the collapse of the Second Empire in 1870.

            The Second French Empire was replaced by the Third French Republic. The sentiment for a republic was strong in Paris, but not in the countryside. When a constitutional assembly met, the majority were monarchists. Since the assembly was split among Orleanist and Bourbon supporters, the republic was the result of the failure of the monarchists to reach an agreement.

            It was only over time that the republic built up real support. One of the incidents that helped the republicans was the BOULANGER CRISIS. Georges Boulanger (1837-1891) was a popular general who attracted the support of the monarchists and frightened the republicans, who thought they saw another Napoleon on the rise. The republican government dismissed him from the army. He then ran for political office and won several elections. On January 27, 1889, he won an election in Paris and the expectation among supporters and enemies was that he would use the momentum to initiate a coup. Instead he spent the night with his mistress. When he heard he might be arrested for treason, he fled to Belgium. Two years later, he committed suicide at the grave of his mistress. The whole affair was a disaster that served to discredit the monarchists and the military.

            The Catholic Church, another anti-republican body in France, as well as the military lost prestige in the DREYFUS AFFAIR. Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935) was a Jewish army captain who served on the French general staff. He was falsely accused of spying for Germany. In late 1894 he was tried and convicted of treason. Stripped of his rank, he was sent to Devil’s Island in French Guiana for life imprisonment.

            After Dreyfus’s imprisonment, the leaks to the Germans continued and evidence began to point the finger at another man, Major Ferdinand Esterhazy, who was in financial distress. It was with great difficulty that the case was reopened and Esterhazy brought to trial in 1898. Despite the preponderance of evidence against him, Esterhazy was acquitted and the dignity of the military preserved. In reaction to the acquittal, Émile Zola (1849-1902), a novelist, published an open letter to the president of the republic on January 13, 1898. In the letter, he exposed those on the army’s general staff who were involved in the cover up. Each paragraph naming those responsible began with the French phrase J’accuse, “I accuse.” Zola had to flee to England to avoid imprisonment. Then it was discovered that a document used to obtain Dreyfus’s conviction was a forgery. The forger admitted his guilt. Under these circumstances, Dreyfus was retried by court-martial in 1899 and again found guilty. The army did not want to lose face and admit its mistake. Dreyfus was granted a presidential pardon the same year. In 1906, the court-martial was finally voided by order of a higher court, and Dreyfus was returned to the army with the rank of major. But it was not until 1995 that the army publicly admitted the innocence of Dreyfus.

            The whole affair discredited the army, the anti-Semites, the Catholics, and the monarchists who were among the anti-Dreyfusards. The affair contributed to the movement for the separation of church and state, which was achieved in December of 1905 by a French law renouncing the Concordat of 1801 that Napoleon I had signed with the pope.