It is said that on the evening of his abdication Louis-Philippe walked up and down in a trance, repeating: ‘Like Charles X! Like Charles X!’ He was not mistaken: the revolution of February 1848 was a reprise – though far less bloody – of the revolution of July 1830. A single spark against a background of growing discontent: the ban on a great banquet arranged by the opposition, which, for Tocqueville, ‘invited the entire population to form an immense political demonstration … One might have taken it for a decree of the Provisional Government, which was formed three days later.’1 The demonstration went ahead, and on the morning of 22 February a great procession got under way from the Madeleine towards Chaillot, the place chosen for the banquet, with students, workers and even opposition deputies mingling together. The column reached the place de la Concorde, singing the Marseillaise and shouting: ‘Down with Guizot!’2 Some young people entered the courtyard of the Palais-Bourbon, but they were swiftly expelled by dragoons and gendarmes. It was steadily raining, and the journée was over.
The morning of the 23rd saw the erection of the first barricades, first of all in the old insurrectionary area between the rue Saint-Martin and the rue du Temple, then throughout the central part of the city. Workers looted armouries and helped themselves to the rifles of the National Guard. The majority of the National Guard legions refused to attack the barricades, and joined in with the shouts of ‘Long live reform, down with Guizot!’ Informed of these events, Louis-Philippe, who had up to then been very confident, suddenly lost his sang-froid: he dismissed Guizot and replaced him with Molé.3 This news spread rapidly through the city, greeted with joy by the liberal bourgeoisie but less welcomed by the republicans. At ten in the evening,
a long column of workers advanced down the boulevards by torchlight, a red flag at its head. On arriving outside the ministry of foreign affairs,4 the unarmed crowd … found two companies of the line drawn up against them; then, without summons or warning, rifles were lowered and a steady fire was directed against this compact and unarmed mass.5
What followed is an image from revolutionary legend: the cart pulled by a white horse, the heap of bodies lit up by a torch held by a child, the circuit round the centre of Paris to shouts of ‘Revenge! They’re butchering the people!’ The tocsin was sounded throughout the city and the insurrection became general.
On the morning of the 24th, ‘the troops, who had bivouacked in the rain with their feet in the mud, their minds troubled and their bodies numb with cold, perceived with the first glimmers of dawn a bold and resolute multitude, flocking to the rues Saint-Martin, Rambuteau, Saint-Merry, du Temple and Saint-Denis, where barricades had been raised in several places.’6 These troops would rapidly break up, and the only serious fighting took place around the water-tower that stood at the southern corner of the place du Palais-Royal. This was of course the moment described by Bakunin, who had just arrived on foot from Belgium:
This enormous city, the centre of European culture, had suddenly become a wild Caucasus. In each street, almost everywhere, barricades erected like mountains and rising to the rooftops; above these barricades, between stones and damaged buildings, like Georgians on their rooftops, workers in blouses, black with powder and armed to the teeth … And in the midst of this unbounded joy, this intoxication, all had become so gentle, so human, pleasant, honest, modest, polite, kind and intelligent, that such a thing can be seen only in France, and even here only in Paris.7
On the afternoon of the 24th, Louis-Philippe signed his abdication in favour of his son, and left for England. So ended the first phase of the revolution of 1848, ‘the shortest and least bloody that the country had known’, wrote Tocqueville. Certainly the shortest, but a revolution that would spread from Denmark to the Adriatic, from the Rhine to the Vistula, from Mecklenburg to Croatia.
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1Alexis de Tocqueville, Recollections (London: Macdonald, 1970), p. 47. Tocqueville was elected a deputy in 1848. His account of the events of February and June is one of matchless lucidity.
2François Guizot had headed the government since 1840.
3Comte Molé had already been prime minister from 1836 to 1839. There was hardly any difference politically between him and Guizot, but a great personal animosity.
4This ministry was situated on the boulevard des Capucines, at the corner with the street of that name.
5Louis Ménard, Prologue d’une révolution [1848] (Paris: La Fabrique, 2007), p. 89.
6Daniel Stern (comtesse d’Agoult), Histoire de la révolution de 1848 (Paris: Librairie Internationale, 1850), p. 74.
7Mikhail Bakunin, Confessions (Paris: PUF, 1974), pp. 79–80. Cited in Jean-Christophe Angaut, La Liberté des peuples: Bakounine et les révolutions de 1848 (Paris: Atelier de création libertaire, 2009).