The Exiled Revolutionaries and the French Political Police in the 1850's

Abstract

THE defeat of the French ultrarevolutionary movements of I848-I849 created group of activists who were deracines. Socialists, Communists, Jacobins, and Red Republicans were reduced to the status of journalists without newspapers, speakers without rostrums, politicians without parties, and patriots without country. Unable to accept revolutionary defeat, many of the most brilliant and most dedicated of these men were forced into exile. Embittered and frustrated, they lived abroad as outcasts and professional revolutionaries, pledged to the destruction of old France and the creation of new society built upon its ruins. These radicals were influenced by nineteenth-century revolutionary ideologies recently characterized by J. L. Talmon as political messianism. Never united and differing in ideology and in tactics, the leaders and members of various revolutionary sects expressed common faith in a universal gospel, based on vision of the oneness of history and the unity of mankind. They expected to realize this vision by vast proletarian act of social regeneration that would transcend national boundaries and fulfill the purposes of history. The result would be the fusion of individual liberty and collectivist social harmony symbolized by the battle cry la republique democratique et sociale!' The inconsistencies, vagueness, and organizational weakness of messianism now seem obvious. But in the years immediately following the I848 Revolution, two opposing groups kept alive the red specter. By far the larger of these groups, believing itself and the traditional arrangements of French society menaced by the revolutionary doctrines, supported the repressive policies of the Second Republic and, during the first decade of the Second Empire, the Bonapartist dictatorship. A smaller group, the defeated, continued to fight for the revolutionary ideas. Most of them had fled; some carried on within France. Each group believed in the red specter, the one