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Page 23 of 28 Article Outline
The collapse of the First Empire led to a quick succession of regimes and revolutions until 1875. This instability was rooted in the deep political divisions left by the French Revolution, divisions relating to the structure of government, the role of the church, and the distribution of wealth generated by the Industrial Revolution.
The First Empire was followed by the Bourbon Restoration under Louis XVIII. It is often said that the leaders of the Restoration tried to “turn the clock back to 1789,” but they were well aware that that was impossible. Too many institutions of the Old Regime had been destroyed, and too many new ones had survived Napoleon’s passing. Not only was a new system of law and administration in place, but a double-chambered legislature henceforth provided at least some balance to executive authority. Instead, the leaders of the Restoration sought to reinstitute the power and authority of the nobility and the elite clergy, groups that had suffered grievous losses during the previous quarter of a century. They also wanted to make the new institutions work to their advantage. Louis realized that he had to make some concessions to those who had supported the French Revolution. Thus in 1814 he proclaimed—not as a matter of natural right but as the concession of a divine-right king—a charter with weak guarantees of basic civil liberties. But after the Hundred Days, the brief period in 1815 when Napoleon returned to office, extreme ultraroyalists convinced Louis to purge the administration of its revolutionary personnel. At the same time, conservatives unleashed a wave of terror against political undesirables in the countryside. Ultraroyalists decisively won the first round of elections, but their hold was broken in the elections that Louis called in 1816. These elections were won by a loose coalition of liberals, who supported the moderate reforms of the revolution but not popular democracy. They continued to increase their influence until 1820, when the king’s nephew was assassinated. Then the ultraroyalists, who blamed the assassination on the liberals, returned to power, where they remained for most of the Restoration. Their position was enhanced when a supporter of their agenda, Charles X, became king in 1824 upon Louis’s death. Sponsored Sites Charles’s coronation at Reims in 1825 with most of the medieval trimmings was followed by other gestures that recalled the Old Regime, including legislation (never enforced) to punish sacrilegious acts. A relatively modest law was passed compensating émigrés for property confiscated during the revolution. But disputes over leadership and the role of the papacy in the French Catholic Church split the ultraroyalists, allowing moderate royalists and liberals to gain seats in the elections of 1827. Charles made temporary concessions to the moderates, but in 1829 he installed an ultraroyalist ministry under the hated chief minister, Jules de Polignac. Polignac offended both the center and the left, leading to a fight in the Chamber of Deputies, the lower legislative house, in 1830. When the king called for new elections, the ministry was decisively repudiated at the polls. Charles responded by signing the July Ordinances, which dismissed the new Chamber of Deputies even before it met, restricted the right to vote, and limited freedom of the press. Despite a military victory in Algeria that led to its annexation by France, Charles’ government was doomed. The July Ordinances touched off a revolution in Paris that drove Charles from the throne. The Restoration was over.
The Revolution of 1830 led to a new regime, known as the July Monarchy because of the month of its birth. It was headed by Louis Philippe of the house of Orléans, who ruled from 1830 to 1848. His supporters in the Orléanist Party were largely drawn from the notable class of wealthy landowners and businessmen. The Orléanists were prepared to endorse the political heritage of 1789 to the extent that they broke with the idea of divine-right monarchy and waved the three-color flag created in the early 1790s. But they did not endorse popular democracy. The Orléanist regime was challenged on the left by radical republicans and on the right by former ultraroyalists, but it was devoted to maintaining political and social stability. It did so with brute force, as when it put down revolts of the Lyonnais weavers in 1831 and 1834. Although not marked by great new initiatives, the July Monarchy did pass a law in 1833 laying the foundation for a national system of primary schools. The sponsor of this measure, François Guizot, a Protestant, became chief minister in 1840, lending a slight anticlerical cast to the regime. Under the July Monarchy, the social problems arising out of the Industrial Revolution became matters of increasing debate. The regime itself, however, tended to a laissez-faire, or hands-off, policy and did little to solve social problems. Félicité de Lamennais, a philosopher who later became a priest, led an ultimately unsuccessful campaign to interest the pope in the cause of social reform. The left developed a number of sweeping plans of reform to save humanity from the perils of modern industrial society. Among the more grandiose were the plans of Charles Fourier and those of the followers of Saint-Simon. Fourier wanted to replace modern cities with utopian communities, and the Saint-Simonians advocated directing the economy by manipulating credit. Although few of these programs had much support, they did expand the political and social imagination of their contemporaries, including a German-born exile in Paris named Karl Marx. They also increased dissatisfaction with the bland policies of the July Monarchy, and in 1848 the regime was overthrown. An economic recession in 1846 and 1847 had already spread discontent in the population. Then in February 1848 opponents of the regime provoked it into ordering a crackdown on dissent. The government failed to master the situation, and crowds in Paris drove out the king. Louis Philippe abdicated on February 24. A new republic was declared, a provisional government was organized, and the call went out for fresh elections. France was once again in revolution.
The Second Republic lasted only four years, due chiefly to the inability of the regime to reconcile widely divergent political agendas. The provisional government responded to the crisis of unemployment by establishing national workshops to provide jobs in Paris. But the workshops were quickly dismantled after a relatively conservative government was elected in April 1848. This election was the first held in France on the basis of true universal male suffrage, and France was still overwhelmingly a country of relatively conservative peasants. Parisian workers rose in revolt, barricading themselves in the streets. The government responded by sending in troops, who bloodily repressed the revolt in what is known as the June Days of 1848. This repression marked a major breakdown in the loose alliance of workers and bourgeois that had underpinned revolutionary movements since 1789. A new republican constitution was enacted in November, but it left unclear the respective powers of the unicameral assembly and the executive president. In the presidential elections of December 1848, the overwhelming winner was a nephew of the great Napoleon, Louis Napoleon, who had previously tried to overthrow the July Monarchy and had served time in jail for it. Louis Napoleon’s appeal lay not only in his prestigious dynastic background but also in his fuzzy political platform, which allowed people of different parties to see in him a fellow spirit. In May 1849 a new legislature was elected. The big winners were right-wing monarchists and, to a lesser extent, left-wing radicals; moderate republicans went down to defeat. Exploiting ambiguities in the constitution regarding the limits of his power, Louis Napoleon at first favored the right. He agreed reluctantly to a restriction of the suffrage and to a law that increased church influence in education. But by 1851, the president fell out with the assembly over his demands for funds to pay his debts and for a constitutional revision that would allow him to serve a second term. On December 2, Louis Napoleon had assembly leaders arrested and then altered the constitution so that he could have a ten-year term. This change was approved overwhelmingly by the voters, and a year later he followed in his famous uncle’s footsteps by making himself emperor as Napoleon III. This move was also approved by a wide margin, demonstrating what many liberals, such as the historian Alexis de Tocqueville, feared—namely that democracy in France would lead to the end of liberty. The republic had given way to the Second Empire.
Napoleon III enjoyed the political benefits of ruling during a period of rising prosperity, but his success was due equally to his considerable political talents. He built a well-oiled political machine that made him master of France, and he had sufficient insight to see that his success depended on distributing patronage widely. Moreover, he had the unusual foresight to anticipate and forestall opposition before it became a real threat. Recognizing that the authoritarianism of his early reign would eventually be challenged, he gradually liberalized his regime, relaxing controls on the press, allowing workers to organize, and widening the power of the legislature. Although the opposition exploited these concessions and grew stronger, Napoleon III continued on his liberalizing course. In 1870 he proposed a new constitution that further increased the power of the legislature. It was heartily endorsed by the electorate, thereby lending fresh authority to the regime. Had Napoleon III shown as much wisdom in foreign affairs, France might well have evolved fairly smoothly into a regime resembling the Third Republic, with the emperor assuming a supervisory role above party politics. As it happened, Napoleon III’s regime, like that of his uncle, died of battle injuries. Since 1815 France had pursued a cautious foreign policy, surprising the rest of Europe, which had expected France to continue being a disruptive force in international affairs. Although allied loosely with Britain, France remained isolated under the July Monarchy. Napoleon III conceived of a grander French role in Europe and elsewhere. Between 1854 and 1856 he joined forces with England to fight Russia in the Crimean War. Imagining himself the godparent to Italian and German nationalism, he supported the efforts of Piedmont to form a northern Italian league, and in 1866 he helped arrange an Italian-Prussian alliance. In the 1860s he also backed an ill-fated effort to put a Habsburg prince, Maximilian, on the throne of Mexico. This venture ended in 1867 with the withdrawal of French troops, the execution of Maximilian, and the insanity of Maximilian’s wife. But his fatal blunder was to engage militarily the growing power of Prussia under the able leadership of Otto von Bismarck. Napoleon III allowed a dispute with Prussia over the Spanish succession to become a matter of national prestige. Bismarck used the issue to elicit from France a declaration of war (see Franco-Prussian War). Vastly underestimating Prussian military strength and overestimating his own, Napoleon III saw his army beaten soundly at the Battle of Sedan in September 1870, and he became a prisoner of war. Sedan set off political demonstrations in Paris that ended the Second Empire. On September 4, 1870, a new provisional government was declared. As minister of interior in the new government, the republican leader Léon Gambetta worked vigorously to mount patriotic opposition to the advancing Prussian troops, which laid siege to Paris. He escaped from besieged Paris in a balloon in order to organize provincial defenses. But French resistance crumbled. During the winter of 1870 to 1871, starving Parisians were reduced to eating zoo animals. In January, some members of the provisional government split with Gambetta and sued for peace. A hastily called election in February 1871 produced a legislature that was overwhelmingly monarchist, largely because the right favored a quick end to the war, as did most French people. The left, on the other hand, called upon a weary nation to keep on fighting. The new assembly chose Adolphe Thiers, a seasoned Orléanist politician, to be executive of the provisional government. Thiers negotiated the peace terms for ending the Franco-Prussian War. France was required to pay 5 billion francs, allow Prussian forces to temporarily occupy eastern France, and cede to Prussia all of Alsace and part of Lorraine. Although the assembly reluctantly approved the terms, the republicans disavowed them. In March 1871 Paris rose in the revolt of the Commune, which turned a foreign war into a civil one (see Commune of Paris, 1871). Lasting 72 days, the revolt was largely motivated by opposition to the peace terms and to the monarchist assembly. But to the radical left, it became a symbol of proletarian insurgency against the ruling classes. In May Thiers unleashed troops against the Commune and crushed it. The result was 20,000 people dead and 50,000 sent to trial. Such repression had not been seen since the Reign of Terror, and bitter memories of the atrocities committed by both sides endured.
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