CHAPTER 4

The Republic of Universal Suffrage

The republican idea acquired a far more complex significance in France after 1830. It no longer designated a particular type of political system that referred only to the memory of 1792 or evoked the government of ancient cities. Identified with the theme of universal suffrage, reference to the republic neatly concentrated a whole ensemble of social and cultural aspirations into a single word. The republic of universal suffrage implied, above all, the search for a society without divisions. Indeed, the central problem of the first years of the July monarchy was that of social division. The onset of industrialization widened schisms in the social fabric at the same time that the disappointment of the hopes raised by the 1830 Revolution aggravated political tensions. Such was the context in which the figure of the proletarian emerged. “The proletarian remains excluded,” summarized Auguste Blanqui in 1832. “Cease then, oh noble bourgeois, to repulse us from your breast, for we too are men and not machines,” demanded one of the first workers’ journals, the Artisan,¹ in 1830, while Alphonse de Lamartine wished that the name of the proletariat, “this base, injurious, pagan word, [should] disappear from the language as the proletarian himself must disappear little by little from society.”²

The demand for universal suffrage, which emerged at the beginning of the July monarchy, was linked to the demand for social inclusion. In 1789, the demand for political equality had derived simply from the primary principle of civil equality; the essential struggle had been waged in the realm of civil rights, around the destruction of privilege and the suppression of legal distinctions between individuals. At that time, suffrage merely extended the new society of equal individuals into the political realm; by 1830, however, social distinctions and differences of status were no longer expressed in the civil domain. The idea of universal suffrage acquired a directly social dimension, while the problem of integration was displaced accordingly: henceforth, the question of equality among men would be played out on the social and political stage. This explains the centrality of the figure of the proletarian after 1830, just as in 1789 all struggle had been organized around the figure of the individual. But the question of universal suffrage was not only subject to a political shift between these two periods; it was also accompanied by new anxiety about the social. In 1789, suffrage had been understood in terms of the dominant abstract universalism; at the beginning of the July Monarchy, in contrast, it assumed a class dimension. In less than half a century, the emergence of the issue of the workers profoundly altered the terms in which social relations were understood. Those excluded from political rights would in future be identified as a social group. “Are the powerful and rich worth more than we are?” asked Achille Roche in his Manuel du prolétaire, a question that summarized the basis of his political claim.³ By 1830–34, reflection on universal suffrage was no longer a general philosophical interrogation of the modern individual citizen, nor a fortiori a questioning from above of the relationship between number and reason; it was being expressed from below.

Throughout the July Monarchy, the theme of universal suffrage played exactly the same role as had the demand for civil equality in 1789. Both cases reveal the same struggle against feudalism and the Old Regime. The critique of feudalism and the denunciation of the electoral system functioned in exactly the same way during the two periods, the same words and the same expressions returning to denounce caste and privilege. The 200,000 eligible voters were assimilated to the old aristocrats, just as those who were excluded from suffrage became the new Third Estate. Now, however, political monopoly took the place of the former social privileges. The Journal du peuple wrote in 1840, “Bad legislatures, bad laws, and the anguish of the proletariat are the results of the monopoly. What then is a free people among whom only 200,000, out of 30 million, are called upon to name their representatives? There is an anomaly here that must end.”⁴

Such words spilled forth from all the pens of the day, repeating ad infinitum this condemnation of limited suffrage as a remnant of the old figure of privilege in the new France. Thus, the struggle for universal suffrage is a direct descendant of the revolutionary movement. Moreover, it is striking that this same period witnessed the popular reappropriation of the French Revolution. All republicans and social reformers of the period shared the same outlook. It is significant that in 1839, Pagnerre, the publisher of the republican causes, put out a cheap edition of the Abbé Sieyès’s What Is the Third Estate?⁵ Étienne Cabet’s Popular History of the French Revolution (1839) was enormously successful, and Albert Laponneraye’s History of the French Revolution was reissued several times between 1838 and 1840. From the earliest days of the 1830 Revolution, the Society of Friends of the People, then the Society of the Rights of Man and Citizen, nourished the memory of the great moments of the Revolution. They circulated the works of Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Jean-Paul Marat, and sold small plaster busts of illustrious deputies to the Convention. Certainly, more radical circles celebrated 1793 and Robespierre’s declaration of rights above anything else, but the sense of parallels between the conquest of civil equality in 1789 and the conquest of political suffrage in the 1830s was omnipresent even in the most moderate circles. The term parallel is almost inappropriate if it implies only resemblance; there was in fact a deeper identity between the two movements: in both cases, the principle at stake was that of social inclusion. Hence, the striking specificity of the history of universal suffrage in France.

This convergence was also the source of the divorce between French society and the monarchy. The monarchical idea in France had been overburdened with an accumulation of negative images until, in the end, it came to be associated with every possible form of inequality and social division: fiscal exemptions, social privileges, inequalities of status, electoral barriers, even economic differences. The divorce was definitively accomplished in the 1830s: the monarchy ceased to be conceived of as a simple political regime whose essence might survive its more or less fortunate historical instantiations. Identified with privilege, the monarchical idea would, in the future, represent a totally negative principle, economic as well as social. The image of the monarchy was superimposed on that of the Old Regime just as it was on that of capitalism. The pamphlets and booklets of 1831–35 make this quite clear, in terms that scarcely vary between republicans as moderate as Timon Cormenin and reformers as radical as Laponneraye. The Lettre aux prolétaires, which the latter published in 1833, is entirely representative of this Manichaean vision, which led to attributing to the republic every conceivable virtue. “With the monarchy,” he wrote, “there are privileged and proletarians; with the republic there are only citizens who possess equal rights, and all of whom participate in forming laws and electing public officials.”⁶

The socialist idea, in turn, remained wholly rooted in republicanism, seeming only to implement it in the specific domains of the economic and the social. This becomes very clear upon leafing through the Revue républicaine (1834–35), the first publication of the left whose theoretical quality was equal to that of the great liberal reviews. It was in particular Martin Bernard, a printer, who published there two articles with the suggestive title: “On the Means of Bringing the Republic into the Workshop.” He wrote:

It is impossible to deny the analogy of the relationship between today’s man of the workshop and the former man of the castle, the serf…. Prejudice has so distorted the consciousness of the masses that we find the proletarian who well understands that a king is a dispensable cog in the political order, and yet who refuses to believe that the same can be accomplished in the industrial order…. In the 18th century, politics displayed the same character as does industry today…. Isn’t the workshop a monarchy in miniature?⁷

These brief phrases say everything, prefiguring Alexandre Ledru-Rollin and Louis Blanc, Marc Sangnier and Jules Guesde. The demand for universal suffrage, in its association with the generic critique of monarchy, formed the original and constitutive basis of modern French political culture. Consequently, in the 1830s the idea of universal suffrage evoked a form of society more than it defined a precise technique of political participation; it was nourished by singularly powerful images and undergirded by violent rejections, while remaining institutionally vague.

Apart from its demand for social inclusion, the theme of electoral reform catalyzed a whole ensemble of political and economic claims. Electoral reform played the role of a universal political remedy, which should provide answers to the great problems of the moment: the suppression of corruption, the erection of affordable government, respect for the general good, the need for social peace. Criticism of the electoral system encompassed and explained all: political monopoly was believed to be the source of all evils and disturbances.⁸

One of the central themes of republican literature under the July Monarchy is the association of limited suffrage with corruption. Cormenin ably summarized the argument in his highly influential pamphlet, Ordre du jour sur la corruption électorale et parlementaire.⁹ Corruption, this scourge that ate away at “the heart and bowels of France,” originated, he believed, in the electoral system. As he saw it, individual disorder and the absence of public morality logically derived from the narrow base of the electoral system: they simply extended the initial corruption of political representation. “Seeking to sweep away corruption without introducing universal suffrage is to attempt a useless exertion,” concluded Ledru-Rollin for his part; “it will restrict evil, but will not eliminate it.”¹⁰ Universal suffrage, wrote the Journal du peuple, “renders corruption impossible or impotent; it will substitute compact masses for the fat bourgeois cliques, for these minorities of privilege.”¹¹ The people, on the other hand, were essentially incorruptible, in so far as they constituted a social unity. They were not corruptible in the sense of possessing moral virtue, as Saint-Just and Robespierre understood it, but in a more trivial, economic sense: the broadening of suffrage no longer permitted the distorted distribution of public goods, but led almost automatically to equal distribution. “Elections are corrupted with crosses and posts, but one cannot buy the masses,” says Stendhal.¹² The number of 200,000 electors was often paralleled to that of 200,000 officials, as if the ministry were implicitly accused of having bought each vote with the offer of a job.

The theme of affordable government almost naturally elaborated upon the theme of corruption. Here again, Cormenin gave a classic formulation in his Lettres sur la liste civile, published for the first time in 1832. Throughout the July Monarchy, republicans were convinced that representative government could be nothing more than economic government. Moderates and radicals agreed in their assessment that bureaucracy was not a natural phenomenon, that it was only a perverse effect engendered by insufficiently democratic power. “Be republican because under the republic, you will have no more taxes to pay, the rich alone will pay them; because you will elect your deputies and your officials; because you will have an affordable government”: Laponneraye used expressions very much like those of Cormenin in his Lettres aux prolétaires.¹³ The rejection of the monarchy inherent in this approach was of a very different nature from the rejection characteristic of the revolutionary period. Here the monarchy was not only challenged as a political form: it was also denounced as a social form. The consequence of this was the veritable reinvention of the republican idea in 1848. The republic of universal suffrage that emerged at that time was not a direct continuation of the Marquis de Condorcet’s rational republic or of Robespierre’s avenging republic. It was inscribed in a new understanding of the relationship between the social and the political.

On March 5, 1848 a decree of the provisional government instituted direct universal suffrage. All men over the age of twenty-one would henceforth be called upon to elect their deputies, without property qualifications or restrictions of capacity. One name symbolized the accomplishment of this revolution: Ledru-Rollin. Since February 22, La Réforme, which he advised, had simultaneously demanded Guizot’s resignation and the institution of the universal vote. Ledru-Rollin’s contemporaries considered him to be the true founder of universal suffrage; Louis Blanc, Adolphe Crémieux, and Victor Hugo would all recall this at his graveside.¹⁴ Throughout the 1840s, he made himself the tireless apostle of popular sovereignty, proliferating pamphlets, petitions, and depositions of legislative projects, at the very moment that the July Monarchy seemed to have disarmed its critics and achieved stability. Ledru-Rollin incarnated an entire generation of progressive writers for whom the republican ideal was inextricably linked with universal suffrage, championing this “sacred ark of democracy” of which Louis Blanc, Jules Ferry, and Léon Gambetta were also singing the praises.

In urging the provisional government to proclaim universal suffrage without delay, Ledru-Rollin only continued his earlier struggle; his role was hardly surprising. More unexpected, however, was the general approval with which the decision was greeted. All doubts, hesitations, objections were swiftly swept away; even as many partisans still believed it to be a proposal for the long term, universal suffrage abruptly imposed itself with a force of truth. Cormenin, charged by Ledru-Rollin with preparing the decree to establish the new electoral system, raised only the question of soldiers’ and domestics’ rights to vote. But the members of the provisional government swept away his hesitations almost without discussion.¹⁵ Technical objections against the possibility of rapidly reading millions of ballot papers bearing several names each—the principle of the list system had been retained—were quickly dismissed as well. Seizing upon the problem, this Academy of Sciences initially urged caution, calculating, for example, that the reading of the Paris lists by traditional means would take 354 days! But it later revised its opinion, putting its methodological uncertainties to rest.¹⁶

Not a single voice within the public was raised in protest or uncertainty; no questions were asked; the cautious and the critics miraculously disappeared. Reform was no longer the issue: the principle of universal suffrage was immediately evident in all of its simplicity and radicalism. Acceptance and enthusiasm were also universal; no one even dreamed of discussing or commenting upon means of implementing the new law. Neither the departmental list system, the abandonment of the second ballot, nor the vote for soldiers was contested. These procedures seemed to be simple details, overshadowed by the magnitude of the event. The dominant sentiment everywhere was that something great had just taken place. Every one spoke of universal suffrage in lyrical and emotional terms: country curés and bishops, petits bourgeois of the towns and great landed proprietors, journalists and intellectuals, conservatives and traditionalists.¹⁷

How are we to make sense of this striking conversion and abrupt reversal? Many historians have described this “spirit of 1848” as extraordinarily enthusiastic and optimistic, a singular crossbreeding of republican utopias and Christian sentiment; but they have generally done so in order to circumscribe it by squeezing it into the frame of exceptional circumstance, underscoring with a kind of relief the resumption of the “normal” course of history in May, as political and social conflicts intensified under the pressure of the critical economic conditions. And yet, far from constituting a sort of parenthesis in the history of French democracy, the months of March and April 1848 reveal some of its most deep-seated characteristics.

The Bulletin de la République, the provisional government’s official newspaper, directed by Ledru-Rollin, with the assistance of George Sand, aptly describes the tone of general enthusiasm and the meaning that the inauguration of universal suffrage had for contemporaries. According to the editorial the first number, dated March 13, 1848: “The Republic opens a new era for the people. Deprived of their political rights until now, the people, above all the people of the countryside, counted for nothing in the nation.” Universal suffrage was not believed to be a technique of popular power so much as a kind of sacrament of social unity, as the provisional government’s Déclaration of March 19, 1848, written by Lamartine, made vividly clear. “The provisional electoral law that we have drawn up is the most extensive law of any time or place to call the people to the exercise of man’s highest right, his own sovereignty,” it stated. “The right of election belongs to all without exception. From the promulgation of this law, there is no longer a proletariat in France.”¹⁸ This last expression is extraordinary, revealing the fundamental association between the suffrage question and the issue of social division. Universal suffrage was seen as a rite of passage, a ceremony of inclusion. As the first elections drew near, the Bulletin de la République noted thus, “The Republic, which excludes none of its sons, calls you all to public life; it will be like a new birth, a baptism, a regeneration.”¹⁹

For two months, in Paris as well as in the provinces, numerous festivals celebrated the new social unity, while trees of liberty were planted everywhere. Unfortunately, there is no good synthesis of the ceremonies and national festivals of the Second Republic that would permit an assessment comparable to that of Mona Ozouf on the revolutionary period.²⁰ But the accounts of the main local studies, as well as the readily available iconography, reveal a few general tendencies, most notably their diffuse religiosity. In all cases, it is clear that the essence of this religiosity lay in the celebration of social unity. Numerous engravings represent allegories of fraternity that bring together workers, peasants, and intellectuals, or show parades that unite all trades and social conditions in a single procession. Some testify to extraordinary gestures; in Millery, in the Lyonnais countryside, we see bourgeois serving a table of peasants as a sign of fraternity during a democratic banquet.²¹ In Avignon, the representatives of two rival groups pardon one another, and embrace solemnly during a ceremony organized by the local republican committee.²² On April 20, an enormous festival of fraternity crowned this movement, bringing almost a million people together in Paris. No such gathering had been organized since the Festival of Federation in 1790. In La Cause du peuple, George Sand offers an account of unbridled lyricism and shares the general enthusiasm. A rapid survey of the Paris press bears witness. La Réforme spoke of a “baptism of liberty”; Le Siècle celebrated the unanimity that reigned; Le National rejoiced in the hundreds of thousands of voices joined together in a single cry proclaiming “that there was no longer any kind of division within the great French family.” Even the austere Constitutionnel found warm words to speak of a “real family delight.”

The demonstration of April 20 clearly expressed the belief that social division had been overcome by universal suffrage, that unity had been rediscovered. Far from being treated as a condition of pluralism, which permitted the expression of professional differences, or the diversity of social interests, the advent of universal suffrage in France was interpreted as a symbol of national concord and of entry into a new political era. Ledru-Rollin explained this in the Bulletin de la République in striking terms that are worth recording:

All living forces of this multiplicitous being that is called the people joined together on the historical stage on April 20 to announce to the world that the solution of all political problems weighs no more than a grain of sand in its powerful hand. Political science is now known to us. It has not revealed itself to a single individual, but reveals itself to all, on the day that the Republic proclaims the principle of the sovereignty of all. This political science will henceforth be one of great and simple application. It will involve nothing more than convoking the people in great masses, the total sovereign, and calling upon unanimous consent to those questions about which the popular conscience speaks so eloquently and unanimously by acclamation.²³

It is easy to mock such illusions. Since Marx, there has been no shortage of outside witnesses or historians to speak of these sentimental feelings and aspirations toward unity with disdain or condescension. While it is easy and tempting to share their judgment, we must refrain. Far from suggesting a passing rhetorical illusion, or a simple overflowing of good feeling, the statements of Ledru-Rollin express, on the contrary, something profoundly constitutive of French political culture. In their romantic or utopian fashion, they express the essential illiberalism of French democracy. This aspiration to unity was founded on the idea that pluralism was divisive. Certainly, after May 1848, economic difficulties and political confrontations removed all visible consistency from this theme. But the spirit of 1848 did not lose its character of revelation: for a short time, and in its own language, it incarnated the republican utopianism that was the basis of French democracy in the postrevolutionary context. The first universal elections, which took place on April 23, 1848, strikingly illustrate this belief that the object of voting was more to celebrate social unity than to exercise a specific act of sovereignty or to arbitrate between opposing points of view.

By an accident of the calendar, election day fell on Easter Sunday. This coincidence gave rise to a multitude of images and metaphors. Crémieux, a member of the provisional government, spoke of the “day of social regeneration,” and everywhere homilies and political declarations alike associated the resurrection of Christ with the resurrection of the people. The sacramental dimension of the advent of universal suffrage was thus reinforced. Lamartine recalled this, using the words of his contemporaries:

The dawn of salvation rose over France on the day of the general election. It was Easter day, a period of pious solemnity chosen by the provisional government so that the people’s work would neither distract nor offer any pretext for shirking the popular duty, and so that the religious reflections, which hover over the human spirit during these days consecrated to commemorating a great cult, make their way into public reflections and give the sanctity of religion to liberty.²⁴

The unfolding of the elections themselves helped to reinforce this religious character. Balloting having been arranged to take place at county seats, voters from villages often traveled to the polls together in great processions that crisscrossed the countryside.²⁵ Many witnesses have described these lay processions, preceded by drums and flags, led by mayors and, in some cases, accompanied by curés. Tocqueville gave the classic description in the celebrated pages of his Recollections. Significantly, contemporary images often represent the ballot boxes of the occasion placed upon altars that are flanked by republican symbols, as if the box were the political equivalent of the sacred altar, sign of the invisible but active spirit of the people united by the Eucharist of the ballot. This symbology struck a number of foreign travelers.²⁶ The calm and order that reigned over these first elections can only underscore this dimension of unanimity that was associated with universal suffrage. On the day after the ballot, newspapers commented that all had gone quietly and smoothly. “This first effort at universal suffrage,” noted La Réforme on April 24, “took place everywhere with great ease—one can even say, with the greatest regularity.” Universal suffrage was immediately legitimated. “This test is conclusive,” one reads in the Bulletin de la République, “and if a few timid spirits still had doubts about the easy and complete application of universal suffrage, those doubts have been alleviated by the admirable spectacle just witnessed in Paris.”²⁷ Almost seven million electors went to the polls on April 23, representing about 83.5 percent of registered voters.²⁸ Electoral participation had broken all records.

The images of social communion that were tied to the entry of the masses into political life extended into the association of universal suffrage with the idea of social peace. A famous engraving of the period represents a worker with a ballot paper in one hand and a rifle in the other. While putting the former into a ballot box, he pushes away the latter. “This is for a foreign enemy,” reads the legend, referring to the rifle; “this is how we loyally fight adversaries at home,” it explains, designating the ballot paper. The idea was widely shared at the time that the inclusion of everyone in political life, by the extension of the right to vote, would suppress revolutionary ferment. This theme had already appeared, albeit in a precocious fashion, at the beginning of the July Monarchy period. Charles de Coux, a close associate of Félicité Lamennais, had used this argument in 1831 to justify electoral reform:

Those who refuse the right of suffrage to the working classes spread a disorder throughout the country that will sweep them away. Deprived of such a right, the working classes can only make their presence felt in the city by entering it as a live force, like a devastating flood or an all-consuming fire. With this right, they will have residence there, something to lose if that residence is violated, hearths to defend, homes for which to plead.²⁹

At their strongest, in the campaign of 1839–40, the republicans permanently took up this arithmetic of conflict; they were certain that the universal vote was the only means to truly end revolution. The central committee of Paris from the 1841 session, for example, concluded with this theme. “Universal suffrage, far from weakening guarantees of tranquility, will, on the contrary, have the certain effect of closing the era of revolutions forever.”³⁰ Ledru-Rollin, Armand Marrast, Étienne Arago, Lamennais: all celebrated suffrage during these years as “eminently pacificatory.” Seen in this light, universal suffrage has an undeniably utopian aspect; it symbolized the dawning of a thoroughly homogeneous, nonexclusive society, which would constitute a sort of end to history. Social divisions were conflated with geographic frontiers, and the foreigner was construed as the figure who would, from that point on, simply be outside the political community.

Universal suffrage also had a cathartic function; it was a practical means by which politics could be transformed. At the beginning of the 1870s, the founding fathers of the Third Republic would resume the struggle to defend universal suffrage, and denounce the threats that called it into question. Marx is known to have ferociously denounced the “magnanimous intoxication of fraternity” of the spring of 1848 and to have disdained Lamartine, who said that the provisional government had deferred “this terrible misunderstanding that exists between the different classes.”³¹ But his critique was more than a simple expression of his aversion for moderation. Marx was among those who best understood at that time that the specific character of French democracy found expression in the denial of conflict and division. On this point, he precisely distinguished between French and English political experience. “Universal suffrage, which was regarded as the motto of universal brotherhood,” he writes, “has become a battle cry in England. There universal suffrage was the direct content of revolution; here [in England], revolution is the direct content of universal suffrage.”³² The statement well illustrates the particularity of the relationship between the political and the social in French politics. The political sphere was both institution and set-up of the social; it did not function only, as in England and the United States, to guarantee liberties and to regulate collective life.

How to take further this singular characteristic that we have encountered since the revolutionary period? How may we understand the curious amalgam of the aspiration to unanimity and the egalitarian formalism that was associated with the idea of universal suffrage in France? What is at issue here is the manner in which pluralism is understood. All conflict seems to be a threat to social unity because it is understood solely as radical division, like that between the old and new, between the Old Regime and the Revolution. Pluralism is unthinkable without a suspension of the original rupture; it is interpreted as the result of misunderstanding or else as the simple conflict of personal ambitions.

Class conflict itself was, in a certain sense, interpreted in terms of the revolutionary cleavage, of the confrontation between republic and monarchy that stretched across the whole of the nineteenth century. The consequence was the permanent oscillation between the fantasm of consensus and the menace of civil war that structured nineteenth-century political life. There was little room within this framework for a pluralist democracy of interests, just as there was little room for reformist strategy. Universal suffrage was by no means believed to be the instrument of a pluralist debate. Elections were not expected to effect arbitration or choice, at least not as long as the Revolution was believed to be over and the Old Regime definitively abolished. Nor were elections expected to bring social diversity into the sphere of politics. Rather, in 1848, the act of voting was understood to be a gesture of adherence, a symbolic expression of membership in the collectivity. On April 23, there was no distinction between collective arrivals at country seats and individual voting. At that time, suffrage had a power equal to that found in one-party states.³³ Even if events quickly gave popular expression to its dimension of arbitration,³⁴ the utopia of suffrage as communion continued to constitute the limiting horizon of the French representation of politics.

For the same reason, the relationship between “formal” democracy and “real” democracy acquired a very specific character in France. Beyond the always difficult articulation of law and practice and the always impure coincidence of interests and good intentions—which constitute the normal field of democracy—democratic formalism played a role that was both more central and more ambiguous. More than anywhere else, formal democracy in France constituted the horizon of real democracy: it was not only its origin or juridical foundation. In addition, French democracy endlessly aspired to an abstraction to a realizable form of the political ideal: it aspired to a society without class, without personal conflict, without misunderstanding, freed of all attachment to the past, and eternally devoted to celebrating its unity. Economic competition was soundly rejected for these same reasons, and opposed with regulatory models that were based on collective organization and centralized cooperation. Thus, the same illiberal threat—in the philosophically precise sense of the rejection of pluralism—runs through several dimensions of French culture. Criticism of political parties, denunciation of economic competition, and suspension of social division constituted three facets of the same political vision. In this sense, the spirit of the spring of 1848 remained faithful to the spirit of Jacobinism: only it was a pacified and sentimental version.

The connivance between the Catholic Church and the republican spirit of the spring of 1848 also had its origin here. The clergy blessed liberty trees, and commemorated the victims of the February days, because it was in agreement with the aspirations to unanimity and union that were being expressed in society. Paradoxically, then, the Church accepted in the emerging republic only that which was both its most archaic and its most utopian: its radical illiberalism. Similarly, republicans and socialists made Jesus Christ the “first republican” or “the brother of all proletarians” because of an exactly symmetrical ambiguity, as the iconography of the period profusely illustrates.³⁵ This also explains the rejection of Protestantism by all the social writers of the period. Cabet or Pierre Leroux, Philippe Buchez or Louis Blanc, shared the same point of view: they hated the individualist and rationalist character of Protestantism, and saw in the Catholic spirit, taken in its broadest sense, the religious matrix of socialism, and the modern republic.

In 1848, the “utopian republic” lasted only the spring. But one cannot judge it by this fugitive appearance. In effect, it expressed, with as much candor as ardor, one of the most profound traits of French political culture: the aspiration to unity and consensus in the political transfiguration of the social bond.