After more than twenty-five years of revolution and war, France settled down to a long era of reconstruction. More than a million people had died in the maelstrom of political violence, and French society remained deeply divided. France lagged behind other powers, especially Britain, in exploiting the potential of the Industrial Revolution and international trade. The French economy, especially its rural economy, had to be rebuilt. All of these challenges were managed for a bit more than thirty years by the restored kings of France, until the rash decision to ban a banquet finally extinguished the French monarchy for all time. Royalists who had become accustomed to depriving the French people of their political and civil rights neglected to consider the danger in encroaching on an even more fundamental liberty for the French: the right to share a meal with one’s friends and neighbors.
Banquets had long been a serious business in France, and not just because they were an enjoyable way to eat and be merry. They had performed various social functions since the Gallo-Roman era, implicitly conveying identity, social norms, and power relationships.1 This was even more true during the revolutionary era, when banquets became a useful means of encouraging fraternité among the different social classes. For the Fête de la Fédération in 1790, for example, more than fifteen thousand people from all three estates feasted in the Parc de la Muette in Paris. In the ensuing years, smaller banquets were organized by local communities across France, so that citizens could socialize with one another regardless of class, share their food and wine, toast the revolution, and sing the new revolutionary songs. Robespierre made great use of outdoor banquets during the Terror, but not everybody shared his enthusiasm. Louis-Sébastien Mercier explained: “Under the threat of being a suspect, or to declare oneself the enemy of equality, everybody came to eat with his family next to the man he detested or despised.”2 Grimod de La Reynière abhorred the “fraternal meals staged in the gutters of every street, where the prevailing tone, as signs on every building proclaimed, was one of ‘fraternity’—presumably that of Cain and Abel, since there was never less liberty or equality in France than when signs on every wall proclaimed those virtues.”3
Banquets remained popular under the restored monarchy, and they began to be held in newly fashionable restaurants. In an era of unbridled factionalism, they continued to serve a political function, offering the royalist and republican camps a chance to converse and socialize with their fellow adherents. Sometimes things went too far, as in May 1831, when two hundred republicans attended a banquet at the restaurant Aux Vendanges de Bourgogne. During the banquet, Évariste Galois, a brilliant young mathematician and activist, offered a toast to King Louis-Philippe—a glass in one hand, a knife in the other. This regicidal reference caused a huge and mostly approving uproar, but it unsettled some of the guests, including Alexandre Dumas (in his memoirs, he claims to have escaped out of a restaurant window into the garden to avoid being implicated in the incident). Galois was arrested the next day but later acquitted. He died in a duel the following year at the mere age of twenty, thus securing his status as one of the most romantic figures in the history of mathematics.
To understand why Galois and his republican friends were so agitated about the king, we should return to the manner in which Louis-Philippe ascended the throne in the first place. The first restored Bourbon, Louis XVIII, died in 1824 and was succeeded by his younger brother, Charles X. While Louis had been a relatively moderate ruler, allowing some republican liberties to remain in place, Charles was an ultraroyalist who wanted to erase all traces of revolutionary reform. As he grew increasingly despotic, raising the specter of the absolutist ancien régime, popular discontent grew. Charles tried to improve his reputation by invading Algeria, thus commencing a long and torturous history between the two nations. Algiers and the coast were swiftly taken, but it took more than fifteen years to defeat the Algerian insurgency, as its skilled commander, Abd al-Qadir, exploited the vast interior terrain and the popular support of his people.4 French methods of suppression were brutal and led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Algerians over the course of two decades.
By then, Charles was long gone. In July 1830, his government suspended the freedom of the press, dissolved the legislative assembly, and further restricted the already small number of people who had the right to vote. This triggered an uprising known as the July Revolution, which ended when Charles abdicated and his cousin Louis-Philippe claimed the kingship.
Louis-Philippe was essentially a compromise between reformers and royalists: the monarchy was preserved, but the new king was more amenable to guaranteeing political liberty and reinstating a constitutional monarchy. Louis-Philippe was the son of Philippe Égalité, Duke of Orléans, who had been a revolutionary hero (even voting for the execution of his cousin Louis XVI) before being sent to the guillotine himself. Louis-Philippe had also supported the revolution, but he was forced to flee France after being associated with a counterrevolutionary plot (a key reason for his father’s arrest and execution). During his exile, Louis-Philippe traveled and made a living as a teacher throughout Europe, and he even moved for four years to the United States. In 1796, he lived and taught on the second floor of a building in Boston that later housed the Union Oyster House, the oldest continuously operated restaurant in the United States (est. 1826). He returned to France only after the fall of Napoleon, and while he recouped his family’s wealth, he continued to live a “simple” bourgeois life. This made him rather popular at the beginning of his reign, and he was nicknamed the “Citizen King.”
During Louis-Philippe’s reign, France embraced the great advances in production and transportation that were transforming European commerce and society. The French textile, metallurgy, and banking industries were developed, the railroad was introduced, and more roads and canals were built. Freedom of the press was granted and newspapers flourished, a great benefit for the ongoing republican opposition to the king, which occasionally flared into small-scale revolts (as in the June 1832 Parisian uprising, memorialized in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables). As the 1840s progressed, the republicans were joined on the left by the emerging socialist movement, which found great inspiration in the tumultuous Parisian scene. It was in Paris that Engels met Marx, in 1844, at the old Café de la Régence in the Palais-Royal. During his two years living in Paris, Marx developed much of his theory on the class struggle, then so evident in the French political landscape. Three years after leaving Paris, he and Engels published The Communist Manifesto, on the eve of a tremendous revolutionary surge across Europe.
By the mid-1840s, the Citizen King was no longer so popular. In the opposition press, he was caricatured to resemble a pear (poire), which is what the French call someone who is naïve or simpleminded. He was not royalist enough for the royalists, nor reform-minded enough for the republicans. The bourgeoisie chafed at their continued lack of political power and the corruption afflicting the regime. The working class and the poor suffered from deplorable living and working conditions. To make things worse, poor cereal harvests in 1845–46 led to bread riots, and economic crisis in 1847 left hundreds of thousands of people out of work. Increasingly violent demonstrations were punctuated with cries of “Work and bread!”
Charles Philipon, manager of the newspaper La Caricature, and Honoré Daumier created this image of the king transforming into a pear (poire). Its publication caused an uproar, but Philipon managed to avoid imprisonment. He sparked another furor with his drawing of a proposed monument titled Expia-poire: a giant pear on a pedestal in the Place de la Concorde. The title is a play on the French word expiatoire (atoning), and its setting is a clear reference to the execution of King Louis XVI. Philipon rejected charges that he had published a provocation to regicide, arguing that it was at most a provocation to make marmalade. Caricature by Charles Philipon and Honoré Daumier, in Arsène Alexandre, L’art du rire et de la caricature (Paris: Libraires Imprimeries Réunies, 1892), 169. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Numérique de Lyon.
This was the context for the “banquet campaign,” which began on July 9, 1847, with more than a thousand people attending the Banquet du Château-Rouge in Paris. At the time, meetings of more than twenty people required approval from the authorities, which was never granted to political meetings critical of the regime. But a banquet was not a meeting. How could the authorities possibly forbid a gathering of friends over a delicious meal? And so these banquets became the most effective way for critics of the regime to legally meet and sustain their cause. They were fairly expensive to attend, so they excluded the poorer classes of society, and women were still not welcome in the political sphere. In its early stages, the banquet campaign was a vehicle for the male bourgeoisie.
A series of seventy banquets was organized in 1847–48, throughout France, and more than twenty thousand people attended.5 Banquet organizers originally focused on reform of the electoral system, as voting was still limited to landowners and the very rich. Not everyone wanted universal suffrage, a truly radical idea—some merely wanted voting privileges expanded to their own class. But as the banquets continued, they grew more radically populist in their goals and membership. This disparity became evident in the toasts that were given: the toasts of the moderate reformist might include “to the revolution of 1830,” “to national sovereignty” or “to the parliamentary and electoral reform”; the radicals toasted “to the sovereignty of the people,” “to the workers,” or “to the improvement of the working class.”6
There was a certain risk in the banquet campaign, as noted by Alexis de Tocqueville, then serving as a parliamentary deputy for Valognes, in Normandy. In Recollections, his vivid firsthand account of the events of 1848, he explains, “I refused to take part in the affair of the banquets. I had both serious and petty reasons for abstaining.” The petty reasons, which he admits to be “bad reasons,” were the “irritation and disgust aroused in me by the character and by the tactics of the leaders of this enterprise.”7 More seriously, he argued that as the banqueters increasingly appealed to the masses, they risked alienating the middle class, who would then renew their support for the regime. There was also the possibility that populist agitation would spiral out of control, to unpredictable extremes. By his account, even the banquet organizers worried over the latter scenario, and indeed their fears would come to pass.8
After more than six months of banquets, the last one of the campaign was scheduled for February 22, 1848, in Paris. The date was not accidental: it coincided with the birthday of George Washington, a revered figure for republicans in France. But the regime decided that enough was enough and rashly banned this particular banquet. The press called for demonstrations, and barricades went up in the Parisian streets. Louis-Philippe remained stalwart, saying, “The Parisians know what they are doing; they are not going to trade the throne for a banquet.”9 But two days later, as violence and rebellion spiraled, Louis-Philippe did what he felt best for the country and abdicated. He was the last king of France.
This new French revolution in 1848 helped kick-start what became known as the Spring of Nations, when republican revolts broke out across Europe. In most countries, a combination of reform and repression contained the rebellions, which proved to be a false spring for the pursuers of democracy and socialism. European monarchism endured.
In France, however, a provisional government declared the establishment of the Second Republic. At first, things looked promising: universal suffrage was instituted; slavery and capital punishment were abolished; and freedom of the press, assembly, and religion was guaranteed. Socialists won the concession of a “right to work,” although dissatisfaction with government efforts to assist the unemployed led to another small rebellion in June. The Second Republic would be led by a popularly elected president, who would hold office for four years and serve only one term.
The political banquets continued in these unsteady days and became more inclusive. They were organized to be cheaper so that the lower classes could attend (although people complained that this only made the food more disappointing). Women began to be admitted to some of the banquets, usually those hosted by socialists. But even on the left, not everyone was happy to allow women into their privileged political spaces, and so some socialist women started organizing their own banquets. This threatened traditionalists even more, and they directed vitriolic propaganda at these depraved women, whom they labeled (in a nice bit of wordplay) les femmes saucialistes.
But this revolutionary banqueting was reaching its end. In December, the first presidential election was won by Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, one of the late emperor’s nephews, in a victory for conservative forces. Over the next four years, the initial achievements of 1848 were rolled back, and authoritarian rule restored. Finally, in 1852, Louis-Napoleon crowned himself Emperor Napoleon III, and the Second Empire was born. For nearly twenty years, he would preside over a vast project of modernization and foreign adventurism. But republican and socialist opposition endured, and as we shall see, it was only a matter of time before the Second Empire followed the First into obsolescence.