Part III Consequences of 13 June 1849¶
Core Argument¶
Part III: Consequences of 13 June 1849¶
The defeat of the Montagne on 13 June 1849 marked not merely a parliamentary setback but the consolidation of the royalist party of Order's legislative dictatorship. Marx characterises this event as the classic insurrection of the democratic petty bourgeoisie, fundamentally distinct from the proletarian June Days of 1848. The Montagne had attempted a purely parliamentary insurrection, hoping to break bourgeois power without unleashing the proletariat, who remained sceptical after the June 1848 massacre. When Ledru-Rollin's impeachment of Bonaparte for violating the constitution by bombarding Rome was rejected 377 to 8, the Montagne withdrew, issued a proclamation declaring the President and ministers "outside the constitution," and called for a peaceful demonstration. Changarnier's dragoons dispersed the 30,000-strong unarmed procession; Ledru-Rollin's attempted resistance at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers was abandoned by the National Guard, and many were arrested.
The epoch following 13 June was defined not by the fact of victory but by its principle: the brazen, aristocratic insult to the republic. Royalists competed to document their royalism, repenting of liberal sins. The cry "Long live the Social-Democratic Republic!" was declared unconstitutional; even "Long live the Republic!" was prosecuted as social-democratic. Paris was put under siege; the Montagne was decimated; the National Guard was purged; new repressive press, association, and state-of-siege laws targeted not only the proletariat but the middle classes.
The party of Order's victory proved self-defeating. By restoring the hated wine tax on 20 December 1849—defended by Montalembert as essential to government—it drove peasants, petty bourgeoisie, and middle classes into opposition. The peasantry, mostly free landowners increasingly indebted through mortgages and usury, paid not only ground rent and profit but part of their wages to capital. Their exploitation differed only in form from that of the industrial proletariat. The reintroduction of the wine tax, along with repressive laws against mayors, schoolteachers, and the press, localised and generalised revolution in every village.
Meanwhile, the counter-revolution forcibly centralised the state and France's gold reserves, preparing the mechanism and war chest for revolution. The March 1850 by-election, in which a coalition of the June insurgent Deflotte, the doctrinaire socialist Vidal, and the republican Carnot won in Paris—with the army voting for the June insurgent—was itself a revolution: it revoked June 1848, 13 June 1849, and the party of Order's majority. The constitutional republic entered its dissolution phase. The party of "social-democracy" or the "red republic" now ranged from bourgeois liberalism to revolutionary terrorism, with the proletariat increasingly rallying to revolutionary socialism or communism (Blanqui), which declared the permanence of revolution and the class dictatorship of the proletariat as a necessary transition to abolishing all class distinctions.