Part I The Defeat of June 1848¶
Core Argument¶
Part I: The Defeat of June 1848
The July Monarchy of Louis Philippe was, in essence, a joint-stock company for the exploitation of France’s national wealth, ruled exclusively by the financial aristocracy—bankers, railway magnates, mine owners, and their allied landowners. The industrial bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, and peasantry were systematically excluded from political power. The state’s chronic deficit was the primary object of speculation for this elite, who enriched themselves through each new loan and by plundering smaller investors. The February Revolution of 1848, however, was not a revolution against the industrial bourgeoisie but against this narrow financial oligarchy. Two economic catastrophes accelerated its arrival: the potato blight and crop failures of 1845–46, which brought famine, and the English commercial crisis of 1847.
The Provisional Government that emerged from the barricades was a fragile compromise between antagonistic classes. The proletariat, which had dictated the republic, was granted only two representatives, Louis Blanc and Albert. Their social demands were confined to the impotent Luxembourg Commission, a “socialist synagogue” with neither budget nor executive authority. The revolution’s catchword was fraternité, an imaginary abolition of class antagonisms. The government shored up bourgeois credit by paying state creditors early, confiscating savings bank deposits, and guaranteeing the Bank of France’s notes, thereby strengthening the very bankocracy it was meant to overthrow. It imposed a hated 45-centime tax on the peasantry and created the Mobile Guard from the lumpenproletariat to contain the workers, while the National Workshops served as little more than workhouses.
The first skirmishes of class struggle erupted in March and April. On 17 March, the proletariat was forced to defend the government against a bourgeois National Guard demonstration, thereby strengthening its enemy. By 16 April, a fabricated rumour of a workers’ coup provided the pretext to recall the army to Paris. The National Assembly, elected by universal suffrage on 4 May, revealed the true class divisions of France: it proclaimed a bourgeois republic, shattered the social illusions of February, and expelled the proletariat’s representatives. The decisive struggle was provoked when the Assembly decreed the forcible expulsion of unmarried workers from the National Workshops or their enrolment in the army. On 22 June, the workers responded with a massive insurrection—the first great battle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, fought for the preservation or annihilation of the bourgeois order. After five days, the bourgeoisie crushed the uprising with unprecedented brutality, massacring over three thousand prisoners. The June defeat tore the veil from the republic, revealing it as the state perpetuating the rule of capital. It compelled the proletariat to replace its limited demands with the slogan: overthrow of the bourgeoisie, dictatorship of the working class. The defeat also forced France to maintain peace abroad in order to wage civil war at home, subordinating national revolutions to the proletarian revolution and creating the conditions for the next French revolution to become a European world war.