republicans, anxious to promote further democratisation and far-reaching social reform, were dismayed. A clash was unavoidable. The decision in June to close the Parisian National Workshops provided the occasion. These had been established by the Provisional Government as a means of providing work relief for the mass of unemployed. Recovery from the extremely severe crisis caused by successive poor cereal harvests and potato disease from 1845, and intensified by declining demand for manufactured goods and lack of confidence among investors, had been well underway by February 1848. However, the economic situation had deteriorated sharply again as a result of the crisis of confidence caused by the revolution itself.
The Workshops, which had been for the new moderate republican ministers a
temporary expedient, were viewed by socialist intellectuals and many workers as the first step in a thorough re-casting of society, resulting from the creation of a network of producer cooperatives. Their dream was to eliminate the capitalist employer and the exploitation of labour. The government’s decision to close the National Workshops in order to secure financial savings and balance the budget as well as to eliminate large and increasingly threatening daily gatherings of workers thus had enormous symbolic as well as practical significance. The final effort in Paris to resist the ‘reactionary’ tendencies of the government took the form of the June insurrection in which political radicals and workers, drawn mainly from the ranks of the skilled artisanal crafts, sought to seize power. Their rising was crushed brutally by military forces mobilised by the moderate republican government and commanded by its defence minister, General Cavaignac. Even then, the threat to social order which had so frightened the propertied classes did not disappear entirely. Democrats and socialists continued to organise. Economic conditions remained depressed. There was widespread fear of another attempted insurrection.
Conservative publicists combined historical experience with myth to create a nightmare vision of social revolution involving not only a repetition of the Terror of 1793, but also the total dispossession of the propertied classes. This
unmistakably informed their political behaviour. In this situation, it appeared essential to most of the deputies engaged in preparing the new constitution that the country be provided with a president possessing wide powers and the authority derived from popular sovereignty. The result would be the election on 10
December 1848 of the nephew of the great Emperor as President of the Republic.
13
The Presidential elections
When he first stood as a candidate in by-elections in June and September 1848, Louis-Napoléon had enjoyed substantial success in spite of little press support or organisation. Conservative leaders and journalists had ridiculed him initially, but this contempt for the Bonapartist pretender turned into an opportunistic and qualified adherence as it became evident that he was likely to attract substantial popular electoral support often, and alarmingly, in spite of the advice to voters from their social ‘superiors’. The British ambassador Lord Normanby wrote that
‘history affords no parallel to this spectacle of all the eminent men of all former political parties uniting in support of a man whom not one of them would personally have selected. They, in fact, follow whilst they assume to direct, a popular impulse which they could not resist’ (Normanby 1851 II: 361). Social elites were largely divided between squabbling monarchist factions – the Legitimist supporters of the Bourbons driven into exile following the July Revolution of 1830 with their ideological commitment to absolutist, hierarchical, paternalistic and theocratic political and social systems, and the Orleanist supporters of Louis-Philippe, deposed in February 1848, equally conservative in terms of their attitudes towards social reform, but liberal in their greater individualism and confidence in the virtues of parliamentary representation based on a restricted suffrage. The leaders of these factions were unable to reach agreement on a candidate likely to defeat Louis-Napoléon and came increasingly to support his candidature. This tactic would at least reduce the impact of their divisions and allow them to take advantage of his popularity. It would additionally facilitate the struggle against what they believed was a growing socialist menace. Most conservative politicians saw the Bonapartist prince as a weakling, a clown they could use. Thiers quipped
contemptuously ‘We will give him women and we will lead him’ (quoted by
Dansette 1961: 243). In the absence of a significant group of Bonapartist notables, it seemed certain that if elected he would continue to depend upon their support.
Moreover, he appeared to be committed to the restoration of social order. At the very least his election would prevent the consolidation of the republic. Influential figures among the former leaders of the ‘loyal’ or ‘dynastic’ opposition to Louis-Philippe such as Molé, Barrot and, most notably, Thiers played an especially important role in rallying conservatives. The only real alternative, the moderate republican General Cavaignac, possessed the merit of having suppressed the June insurrection, but he was still too much of a republican for most conservatives. He attracted support from the port cities in which the ‘black’ legend of the economic 14
Table 2.1 Results of Presidential elections, 10 December 1848
Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte
5, 534, 520 (74.2%)
General Cavaignac
1, 448, 302
Ledru-Rollin (radical republican)
371, 431
Raspail (socialist)
36, 964
Lamartine (moderate republican)
17, 914
General Changarnier
4, 687
disaster caused by the British maritime blockade during the Empire was still strong, and from some Legitimist and clerical regions, e.g. Morbihan and Finistère in Brittany and Bouches-du-Rhône in the south-east which remained bitterly hostile to Bonapartism. As if to illustrate the complexity of voting behaviour, these same groups in departments like Tarn and Tarnet-Garonne voted for Bonaparte against Cavaignac, who was condemned by both his republicanism and the support of local Protestant elites. Many of the more radical republicans also felt unable to support the major republican candidate. In their eyes he would remain the ‘butcher of June’.
Frequently, they appear to have believed that Napoléon I had continued the work of the revolution and failed to see a vote for his self-proclaimed heir as entirely incompatible with their own republican principles. This was the great strength of the Bonapartist legend. It allowed Louis-Napoléon to
