The Wrong Revolution: French Republicanism in 1848

Abstract

The regime produced by the French Revolution of 1848 ultimately failed to endure. The Second Republic passed into the hands of men who would emasculate and finally destroy it. But it did not fail, as Friedrich Engels thought, because the time was not ripe for revolution, or at least for significant social change.' The failure of the revolution was the fault of republican leadership, which in early 1848 made a political mistake of truly epic proportions. In brief, the republicans followed a policy in flat contradiction to the nature of the regime they were trying to construct and largely irrelevant to the society in which they lived. The first half of the nineteenth century in France witnessed one of the richest and most creative movements of social thought in modem history. A variety of theorists brilliantly anticipated the development of industrial capitalist society, found it wanting in crucial respects, and proposed any number of substantive modifications and radical alternatives. By the 1830s and '40s la question sociale had come to dominate discussion on the left, whose spokesmen mostly accepted (though in varying degrees) the responsibility of the state to preserve its citizens from at least the worst rigors of economic misery; the July Monarchy itself hewed closer to a classical laissez faire policy. While these facts are well known, it has less often been noted that, in actual practice, most writing on the social question encompassed a rather limited range of issues. First and foremost, social criticism on the left concerned itself with urban poverty-the plight of city artisans, unskilled laborers, and, where they existed, factory workers.