Author: Steve Jefferys

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Rue Notre-Dame des Champs

Arrondissement 6

Numbers: 19, 27, 34, 73, 115

First mapped in the 14th century, the road had five changes of name before it finally took the name Notre-Dame-des-Champs after the church of that same that in 1604 became the Carmelite Monastery of the Saint-Jacques area. During the French Revolution it was renamed La Montagne des Champs, in an attempt to exorcise the religious reference.

For three years, 1827 to 1830, Victor Hugo lived at the address 11 rue Notre-Dame des Champs, today in the area covered by Nos 23-35 but No. 27 was pulled down in 1904 when Bouevlard Raspail was built. While at No. 11 his wife, Adèle, had an affair with Augustin Sainte-Beuve, and Hugo wrote Hernani and Cromwell.

Sainte-Beuve lived at No. 19 in 1830.

Auguste Renoir had a studio at No. 34 from 1871 to 1873, while the art dealer Wilhelm Uhde’s gallery at No. 73, showed paintings by Braque, Dufy, Delaunay, Rousseau and Picasso between 1908 and 1910. The artists James Whistler (1892-1902) and Fernand Léger (1924) were among many artists who had studios at No. 86.

On his second trip to Paris in 1923 with his first wife Hadley, Ernest Hemingway lived at what is today No. 115, and was numbered No 113. They lived with their son John (known as Bumby) in a house within the courtyard where Hemingway wrote Paris est une Fête.

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Rue de Mézières

Arrondissement 6

Numbers: 3, 10,

Victor Hugo lived briefly at No. 10 in 1821 with his mother and his older brother, Eugène Hugo, in an apartment rented on their behalf by Abel Hugo, his eldest brother. His mother, Sophie Trébuchet, died there on June 27 1821.

The Catholic bookshop Le Procure has been based at No. 3 since 1919.

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Rue du Dragon

Arrondissement 6

Numbers: 7, 30

The road was renamed at the request of its inhabitants from the morbid-sounding rue du Sépulcre in 1808 following its association to the Dragon’s Courtyard that led into it. In the courtyard was an 18th century statue of a dragon, commissioned by Paul-Ambroise Slodtz for the new house built by the powerful Toulouse financier and slaver, Antoine Crozat.

A photograph of the Dragon’s Courtyard taken in 1908 by Eugène Atget

The actress Simone Signoret, whose Polish-Jewish father’s origins led him to join the Free French in London in July 1940, while she stayed in Paris with her mother, remembered the Gestapo visiting No. 7 in the search for a resistance letter box.

This was also the huge private residence occupied by Homeless Squatters in December 1994. Organised by the Droit au logement association it was supported by l’Abbé Pierre and many other campaigners against social injustice.

No. 30 has a plaque dedicated to Victor Hugo, who lived in a sunless top floor two-room flat there briefly in 1821, shared with a cousin. This is where he began his first poetry collection, Odes et poésies diverses, including all his largely monarchist prize-winning poetry.

Hugo lived in No.30 before his marriage to Adele Foucher when he moved to his in-laws home
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Rue Gozlin

Arrondissement 6

Rue Sainte-Marguerite-Saint-Germain

Renamed in 1864 after the 9th century Bishop of the Saint-Germain-des-Pres Abbey, who was known as the defender of Paris during the Vikings’ siege of Paris from 885 to 887, from 1637 it had been called rue Sainte-Marguerite or rue Sainte-Marguerite-Saint-Germain.

In January 1815 General Leopold Hugo got his sister to place his two youngest sons, Eugène et Victor-Marie, in the Pension Cordier boarding school that used to exist in a much longer No. 41 rue Marguerite.

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Rue Oudinot

Arrondissement 7

Numbers: 10

First created as the Rue Plumet in 1720, the road was renamed in 1851 after General Oudinot, who successfully led the French expeditionary force in 1849 under the orders of the Prince-President Louis-Napoleon to force the republicans out of Rome and restore the power of the pope. The pope then implemented a massive repression on the population.

Under the name Rue Plumet Victor Hugo placed his representative of ‘good’, Jean Valjean, there with Cosette in 1829 in Les Misérables.

The Paris hub of the Comet Line resistance escape network, specialising in saving Jewish children in 1942 and 1943, was based at the home of the nurse Aimable Fouquerel at No 10. Lucienne Laurentie was another resistance activist involved in the network and rescued some 40 airmen before being denounced in 1943. Imprisoned initially at Fresnes she was deported to Ravensbruck in 1944 and from there to Kommando d’Holleischen in Czechoslovakia where she was liberated in 1945.

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Rue St Antoine

Arrondissement 4

Numbers: 99-101, 104, 117, 133

A long old Roman road across Paris leading from the Bastille west towards the Saint-Antoine abbey that became a hospital in 1796. It now continues under the name Rue de Rivoli up to the Place de la Concorde.

The first office of the ‘German Pilot’ journal (Der deutsche Steuermann), a review produced by the Prussian Embassy in 1844 as a competitor to Marx and Engels’ bi-weekly Vorwärts was at No 100. At the time there were around 60,000 German workers in Paris.

In June 1848 a barricade across the road at No. 100 in front of the St Paul church saw considerable fighting as workers fought to defend the National Workshops established shortly after the February Revolution.

The president of the Luxembourg Commission that established the 1848 National Workshops for the unemployed, Jean-Baptiste Lagarde, a watchmaker, lived at No 99 (previously No. 124). He was sentenced to deportation for having participated in the June insurrection.

The Church of St Paul-St Louis was where Victor Hugo‘s daughter, Léopoldine, married Charles Vacquerie on February 15 1843. In thanks Hugo gave the Church two holy water fonts. The couple tragically drowned together the following year, and in 1862, when he published Les Misérables, Hugo placed the marriage of Cosette and Marius in the same church iten years earlier in 1833.

The Saint-Louis-des-Jésuites Church at No. 101 had hosted the training school of the Jesuits between 1580 and 1764, but in the Revolution in 1793 it became the storage centre of 1.2 million books confiscated from the monasteries and convents, and one of the major contributors to the National Library.

In 1802 with the re-establishment of the Catholic religion in France following the Concordat with the Vatican, the church was renamed the Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis Parish Church.

In 1818 Louis-August Blanqui attended the Charlemagne’s Royal School at No. 101. It had been renamed in 1815 after being refounded in 1804 as the lycée Charlemagne, and was again closely associated with the Church.

In May 1871 the Church was used to host the revolutionary Club Paul-Louis and saw the funeral of the commander of the 120th Batallion of the National Guard. The current

In 1870 Louise Michel attended public anarchist meetings in the White Queen room of the Rivoli Rooms at No. 117, the same venue that hosted a meeting of the Socialist Republican Alliance (ASR) on December 10 1880.

The Alliance socialiste républicaine (ASR) was made up of many surviving Communards and former followers of Proudhon who returned to Paris after Hugo and Louis Blanc‘s success in securing the 1879/1880 Amnesty. These including Albert Theisz, one of the witnesses to the 1872 marriage of Charles Longuet with Jenny Caroline Marx, as well as Charles Longuet himself and Georges Clemenceau. The ASR later split between various socialist groups and the Radical-Socialists led by Clemenceau.

The office of the Former Communards Mutual Aid Society (Société de secours mutuel des anciens combattants de la Commune) was set up in May 1882 at No 133.

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Pont Notre-Dame

Arrondissement 4

Bridge over the Seine from the Quai de Gesvres to the Quai de la Corse

Today’s Notre-Dame bridge was built in 1853, and reduced from five to three arches in 1912. But the Romans built the first bridge here as part of their North-South axis across the Seine. That bridge lasted until 886, when it was replaced by a bridge built on wooden piers, to which were attached flour mills. This survived until the floods of 1406, and its wooden replacement until the flood of 1499. Its stone pier follow-up was finally completed in 1512, and its 61 six-story houses became the most sought-after in Paris for shops, stores and prestigious living.

By 1786 the houses on the bridge were in such a bad state of repair that Louis XVI ordered their demolition. This did not make the bridge any safer for those on the river. The five arches were obstacles that gave the bridge its nickname: ‘Devil’s bridge‘.

It’s no surprise, then, that the end of the Bridge on the right bank (near the Town Hall) is where Victor Hugo decided to stage the suicide of Javert, the fictitious representative of law and order without any humanity, in Les Misérables.

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Rue des Filles du Calvaire

Arrondissement 3

Numbers: 6

The road gets its name from the former Convent of the Daughters of Calvary inaugurated in 1633, and whose first stone was laid by the niece of the Cardinal Richelieu. Dissolved in 1790, nationalised and then sold in 1796 it disappeared in 1804.

Number 6 was where in les Misérables Victor Hugo has the fictional Jean Valjean place the rescued Marius at his grandfather’s house with Cosette after the failed June insurrection of 1832.

On the night of the Daech/Islamic State murderous attacks of November 13 2015, a bar in the street was used as a medical centre close to the Bataclan.

The street was also the hiding place in the week of May 25 1871 of Gustave Lefrançais before he fled to Switzerland. He was a trained teacher who had joined Pauline Roland‘s Association of Socialist Teachers in 1848, lived in exile in London under Napoleon III, and after returning to Paris to fight on the barricades in 1871 was sentenced to death in his absence on 30 August 1872. After his return to Paris he worked with the anarchist geographer, Élisée Reclus.

Another Communard in hiding from the great repression of 1871, Eugene Pottier, wrote and dedicated his poem, L’Internationale, to Lefrancais. In 1888, a year Pottier’s death, the poem was set to musique one Sunday morning by the Belgian, Pierre Degeyter.

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Rue St Merri

Arrondissement 4

Numbers: 49

Built shortly after the construction of the Philippe Auguste wall around Paris in 1210, it was named after the nearby Saint-Merri church.

Charles Jeanne was one of the leaders of those defending the last barricade across the road at No. 49 to fall in the 1832 insurrection. His memoir of the revolt written in letters to his sister from his prison on Mont Saint Michel was used by Hugo in Les Misérables.

He had been awarded the July Medal by the government of Louis-Philippe for his bravery during the July Revolution of 1830.

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Rue Mondétour  

Arrondissement 1

Numbers: 1, 2

Now a short pedestrian-only street, it is one of Paris’ oldest, dating from the 11th century. Much of its original length has been eaten up by other roads, and the origins of its name are uncertain. Some believe it may come from ‘Mauvais Détour’, a wrong turning. Others that it refers to the revenues from the market on the Quai d’Orsay given to the Bishop of Paris in 1205.

The 1933 ‘Brown book on the Reichstag fire’ was published by Willi Münzenberg for the Comité d’aide et de secours aux victimes du fascisme hitlérien (International Committee in Support of the Victimes of Hitlerian fascism) at No 1. A German Communist who had become disenchanted with Stalin, he lived intermittently in Paris from 1933 to 1940 and was murdered or committed suicide in October that year while trying to escape the German invasion.

In Les Misérables Hugo placed the barricade where Gavroche on 6 June 1832 was killed outside the Café Corinthe at No. 2. Hugo was perhaps inspired to depict Gavroche by the painting by Jean-Victor Schnetz that, like Delacroix‘s much more famous painting, was commissioned by Louis-Philippe’s government in 1830 but which was never displayed in public until his overthrow in 1848 and the establishment of the Second Republic.

Schnetz painted a young boy passing a satchel of spent bullets up to the insurgents
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Rue Danielle Casanova

Arrondissements 1, 2

In November 1802 Victor Hugo‘s mother, Sophie Trébuchet Hugo, left her husband and three sons to live in Paris in the Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs. She spent three months lobbying in Léopold Hugo‘s favour to get him transferred somewhere more prestigious than Besançon. She begins a relationship with Victor de Lahorie (Victor Hugo’s godfather), recently forced into retirement from the army, who tried and failed to secure a better posting, and instead Hugo is sent to Corsica.

The street is also of interest since it was renamed in December 1944 as Des Coulam’s blog from Soundscapes shows:

Originally known as Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs, the street dates back to the early seventeenth century when it was then part of the rue des Petits-Champs. It acquired the name Danielle Casanova in December 1944.

She was a militant communist, a tireless activist, a member of the French resistance and a remarkable woman.

Danielle trained as a dentist in Paris and in 1928 joined the Communist Youth movement eventually becoming a member of its Central Committee. In 1936, she became the first president of L’Union des jeunes filles de France (UJFF).

The UJFF was founded partly as a response to the resentment of young communist militants who had little responsibility within the then young French Communist Movement, and partly as a way for the French Communist Party (PCF) to recruit young female members.

Danielle and the other founders of the organisation wanted to focus on issues related to all areas of gender equality: work (referring in particular to the difficulties encountered by Marie Curie in her career), education and leisure. They emphasised the double discrimination of women from the working class due to both gender and social background. The UJFF supported the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, participating in demonstrations of support and welcoming refugee children from Spain.

After the fall of France in 1940, the French Communist Party and its related organisations were banned and Danielle went into hiding. Working underground, she helped set up women’s committees in the Paris region, she wrote for the underground press, especially Pensée Libre (“Free Thought”) and she founded la Voix des Femmes (“Women’s Voice”). She also helped organise resistance against the occupying forces,

French Police arrested Danielle on 15 February 1942 and she was transported to Auschwitz where she worked in the camp infirmary as a dentist. While in Auschwitz, she continued campaigning and organising clandestine publications and events. She died of typhus on 9th May 1943.

Danielle Casanova was a heroine of the women’s movement and the French Resistance and she has lent her name to streets, schools, and colleges throughout France.

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Rue Bachaumont

Arrondissement 2

Numbers: 7-8

This road testifies to the internationalism of corrupt world elites as early as the mid-19th century. It was only named after an 18th century writer in 1900 but from 1853 it became part of the European estate created by Mahmoud Ben Aïad (1805-1880).

Aïad was a Tunisian who had personally benefited from his management of the finances of its Bey, Ahmed I. This role allowed Aïad to set up his own bank and along with a chateau and Parisian mansions in 1853 he also bought up the land that included the 175m long Passage du Saumon, its shops and the Théâtre Molière. and acquired French nationality.

The Passage du Saumon dated from 1763 and was first covered in 1828. It then linked the Rue Montmartre and the Rue Montorgueil.

Four years later the insurrection of June 5-6 1832 on the death of General Lamarque saw a barricade erected here, described by Victor Hugo in Choses Vues and in Les Misérables, where he places the policeman Javert spying on the largely student insurrectionaries.

During the Bloody Week of the 1871 Paris Commune, cellars in the Passage du Saumon were used to hide copies of the Blanquist news sheet, Père Duchêne. It had been banned by the Versailles General Vinoy after its fifth edition but it went on to produce 68 during the Commune up until May 22 1871. It was eight pages long and up to 70,000 copies were published each time.

Eventually the Passage became less profitable and it was largely demolished by Aïad’s son in September 1899. The shortened 90m passage was renamed as the Passage Ben-Aïad with access at Nos. 7-8 from the new road named in 1900 after the writer Louis Petit de Bachaumont (1690-1771).

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Place Vendôme

Arrondissement 1

Numbers: 1-2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 11-13, 24, 23-26

The Place Vendôme was built to celebrate France’s military might under Louis XIV, the Sun King. Begun in 1699 it was only finished in 1720. It was built on land that had belonged to the illegitimate son of Henry IV, the Duke of Vendôme.

Initially called the Place des Conquêtes (Conquests Square) it soon became the Place Louis-le-grand with a huge equestrian statue of Louis XIV in the middle.

During the French Revolution it was renamed the Place des Piques (Square of Pikes) and the statue was destroyed on August 16 1792 and replaced with a statue representing Liberty.

For most of the 18th century many of the flats in the square’s huge private mansions were occupied by financial speculators and/or tax farmers and relatives of the aristocracy, among whom were a handful of revolutionaries. The leadership of the 1796 Conspiracy of Equals, including Gracchus Babeuf and Philippe Buonarroti met at No. 6, the Hôtel Thibert des Martrais. This was also the address from which two years earlier the Tax Farmers Jacques Paulze and Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier were taken to the guillotine.

Another conspiracy, this time against Napoleon Bonaparte in 1812, two years after the construction of the Vendome Column, was ended when General Malet was arrested by Colonel Doucet and Lieutenant Colonel Laborde at No 7, the Hôtel Le Bas de Montargis. Among those executed a week later, on October 31 1812, was General Lahorie, the god-father of Victor Hugo and Hugo’s mother’s lover since 1802.

In 1871, under the Paris Commune, the square was renamed the Place Internationale.

Number 7 was the same mansion that under the siege of Paris saw the Versailles government’s Paris army General installing Louis d’Aurelle de Paladines as commander of the Paris National Guard against the wishes of the majority of its battalions on March 5 1871. With the failure of the Versailles attempt to remove cannons from Montmartre on March 18 1871, 2,000 men from the Batignolles and Montmartre battalions of the National Guard battalions then evicted de Paladines and took over the building.

This allowed Jules Bergeret to set up his staff headquarters at No. 7. On April 4, after being elected to the Commune’s Council, Bergeret was named Paris National Guard commander.

The square saw much blood spilt at its barricades defending these headquarters of the National Guard during the Paris Commune. On May 23 1871 a barricade at the angle between Nos 1 and 2 with Rue Saint-Honoré was finally captured after Versailles troops got into the square through No. 4 and attacked the barricade’s defenders from behind.

The Hôtel du Rhin at No. 4 was also where Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte had lived in 1848 after his return from exile in England and where he was visited by Victor Hugo who completely believed his assurances that he had no designs to become Emperor.

The second defensive barricade blocking access from the Rue de la Paix in May 1871, stretching across Nos 23-26, was also captured from behind. This was one of the just 18 barricades that had actually been defended with the Commune’s canons.

After the barricades were overwhelmed, the Versailles troops killed most of the survivors. On the following day a group of 30 Communard women were shot in the square.

The Hôtel de Chimay at No. 8 was a centre of the Saint-Jacques resistance network from the start of the 1940 occupation of Paris by the Germans. Radio communications from there to London by began in April 1941 after Maurice Duclos was parachuted into France in February.

During the French Revolution Nos 11-13 became the Ministry of Justice, with Georges Danton nominated as Minister in August 1792. A metre length was installed in the wall there in 1795. The only other remaining original metre length installed in Paris at the changeover to metric distancing is in the Rue de Vaugirard.

No 12, the Hôtel Baudard de Saint-James, was where Frédéric Chopin died supposedly of tuberculosis (although this diagnosis is now contested) on October 17 1849. He was buried in Père Lachaise cemetery. While from 1838 to 1847 Chopin had lived with George Sand, he had separated from her and spent just a month in the Place Vendôme before he died, thanks to a loan from Jane Stirling.

The former Hôtel de Gramont at No. 15 was transformed into a luxury hotel and opened by the Swiss hotelier César Ritz in 1898. During the occupation the most senior Germans lived there and had many ‘traitor lunches’ in its restaurant. On the 16 August 1944 Ernest Hemingway arrived at the Ritz and presented some American rifles to the resistance fighters who had just evicted the Germans. This was also where Coco Chanel lived for many years, including during the period she collaborated with the Germans.

The Hôtel de Boffrand at No. 24, has also become known outside France through its association with Anne Lister, the Gentleman Jack lesbian Calderdale landowner and diarist. She lived there with Maria Barlow in 1824-1825.

Changing statues

In 1806 Napoleon ordered the building of a huge column in the centre of the square to celebrate his military victory at Austerlitz. Ironically this military monument was situated at the end of the Rue de la Paix. Inaugurated on August 15 1810 it was covered in bronze plates featuring battle scenes made, it was said, from melting down foreign captured cannons.

Napoleon was put on top in Roman Emperor robes with a gold laurel wreath on his head. This lasted until April 4 1814 when the invading allies pulled Napoleon’s figure down. Four days later the white Bourbon flag fluttered over the renamed square.

In 1816 the Louis XVIII Restoration government melted Napoleon’s statue down to use its bronze for a new Henry IV statue on the Pont Neuf

For the following 15 years the position at the top of the column was not filled. But in 1833, after a Bonapartist demonstration on May 1 1831, the new King Louis-Philippe (the son of the executed Duke of Orléans, Philippe Égalité, a supporter of the French Revolution and a regicide), replaced Napoleon at the top. This time, however, not dressed as a Roman emperor, but as an army corporal, reflecting the new king’s desire to honour Napoleon, but not too much.

Napoleon did still not appeal to the revolutionaries of 1848, who took the corporal down and threw him into the Seine. Replacing the corporal did not appeal to nephew Louis Napoleon Bonaparte either. His third (and finally successful) military coup d’etat in 1851 led him to proclaim himself Napoleon III, Emperor of the French. In 1864 he placed a copy of the original Napoleon as Emperor statue back on the top of the column.

Karl Marx wrote one of his best political commentaries on contemporary events in 1852: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. In it he compares Louis’ coup of 1851 with Napoleon Bonaparte’s of 1799, and presciently concluded that ‘if the Imperial mantle finally falls on the shoulders of Louis Bonaparte, the bronze statue of Napoleon will fall from the height of the Vendôme Column‘.

This happened on May 16 1871 during the Paris Commune after the painter, Citizen Courbet, the President of the Federation of Artists that was formed on April 15, persuaded the Commune to authorise the dismantling of the column. He described it as ‘a monument devoid of all artistic value, tending to perpetuate by its expression the ideas of war and conquest of the past imperial dynasty‘.

Courbet’s attack on the column was not universally supported by other artists. Daumier, the head of the Beaux-Arts section of the Federation, believed it should not be taken down. Perhaps this was why the 425 spiralling bas-relief bronze plates carried out by a team of 30 sculptors were removed and stored.

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The column was replaced in 1874 with another copy of the imperial Napoleon at its top.

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Pont Neuf

Arrondissement 1

The oldest bridge in Paris, the Pont Neuf was its first bridge without houses and constructed entirely out of stone. It was also unique in having pavements and bastions to protect pedestrians from mud, horses and carriages. Hence it was always called ‘the New Bridge’.

Initial plans assumed it would be paid for by the owners of the houses built on it, as happened on the other mid-16th century bridges shown here in 1651. But it was eventually paid for by the founder of the Bourbon dynasty, Henry IV.

Building had begun in 1578 under Henry III, but was interrupted by the religious wars of 1588-1598 which, after Henry III’s murder, were finally ended by Henry IV’s conversion to Catholicism and his successful seige of Paris.

The bridge was finally completed in 1607. three years before Henry IV was assassinated by a Catholic opponent of the Edict of Nantes, guaranteeing religious liberty in France.

Henry IV’s widow, Marie de Medicis, ordered the erection of a statue to Henry IV to be erected on the bridge at the point where it crosses the Île de la Cité. The statue was finally put in place in 1614. It stood there until evidence appeared in 1792 during the French Revolution that the Bourbon king Louis XVI was corresponding with the Austrians encouraging them to invade France. It was then pulled down, the day after a similar fate happened to statues of Louis XVI.

In 1818 after the restoration of the Bourbons, Louis XVIII ordered a new bronze statue to be erected in the same place. It was claimed to have been made from a surviving original cast, although it is quite unlikely that one survived. The

The bronze for the new statue came from melting down two recent statues: the giant imperial statue of Napoleon on top of the Vendôme column and the statue of the French revolutionary general Louis Desaix on the Place Dauphine. Desaix was an aristocrat who had served in the Bourbon army before the Revolution who then supported the Republic and was killed in action in Italy in 1800. He was a model for the aristocratic but humane Republican general Gauvain in Victor Hugo‘s last novel, 1793.

The sixteen year old Victor Hugo joined a huge crowd cheering on the replacing of the Bourbon statue on the bridge. The next year he wrote a prize-winning poem celebrating the moment. It included the lines: Make no mistake, this august image’s aspect / Will lessen our ills and sweet our happiness.

On May 24 1871 a Versaillais agent was executed in the second niche from the right bank for accusing the Polish General Jaroslaw Dombrowski , the Commander in Chief of the Commune forces, of treachery. Dombrowski had been killed the previous day on the barricades.

Early in 1943 under the German occupation Marcel Rajman, the 19 year-old Jewish Communist member of the FTP (Francs-tireurs et partisans), held his first meeting with the leader of the FTP-MOI, the Armenian Missak Manouchian, in the fourth niche near the statue of Henry IV. Both were eventually caught by Vichy Government’s Brigades Spéciales and shot with 20 other resistance fighters on February 21 1944.

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Rue Cujas

Arrondissement 5

Numbers: 11, 16, 17, 22

Named after the 16th century lawyer, Jacques Cujas, who exceptionally refused to take sides in the century’s religious wars, the road runs next to the Sorbonne’s law faculty. Close to the Pantheon it was the scene of barricades in June 1848 and of particularly fierce fighting around ones erected during the bloody week that ended the Paris commune of 1871.

During the first decade of the 20th century the French police archives record that many exiled Russian revolutionaries. particularly those from Georgia, used to hang out at the restaurant at No. 11.

In the early 19th century the painter Jacques-Louis David had a studio in the closed and ruined Cluny College (roughly number 16) where over the following two years he painted Napoleon crowning himself in 1805.

On May 1 1898 Charles Péguy, Lucien Herr and Georges Bellais set up a socialist bookshop and publisher at No. 17. It became the headquarters of the Dreyfusard supporters. Within a year Herr had brought several other socialists together to form the Bookshop and Publishers New Society there. Those involved included Léon Blum, Hubert Bourgin, Albert Monot, Mario Roques, Désiré Roustan and François Simiand.

Number 22 is a café, now called the ‘Mad Maker’. Back in 1830 it extended to the corner of Boulevard Saint Michel and was called the Café Musain. This was where Auguste Blanqui organised the Société des Amis du peuple (The People’s Friends), the insurrectionary group that played a role in the July Revolution, les trois glorieueses.

When Victor Hugo wrote Les Misérables, he used this revolutionary sect as a model for an equivalent group behind the 1832 insurrection, the Amis de l’ABC. Their initiative, to begin the insurrection by raising the red flag during the funeral procession of the Republican leader General Lamarque, on June 5 1832, saw several hundred killed in just a few hours.

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Rue de Clichy

Arrondissement 9

Numbers: 21, 24, 39, 43, 54-68, 55

The present road follows almost exactly the old Roman ‘road to the sea’ to Harfleur (Caracotinum) in Normandy from Paris (Lutèce), and is named after the commune of Clichy to which it leads, some 6 km northwest of Paris.

Victor Hugo lived on the fourth floor of No 21 from 1874 to November 10 1878. He wrote his last great novel, Ninety-three, there before moving to the Avenue d’Eylau to live next door to his son’s widow and her children. Between 1804 and 1813 he had also lived with his mother and brothers at No. 24, while spending many months travelling to and then with his father in both Corsica and Madrid.

The Clichy prosecutor, Bulot, lived on the second floor of No. 39. Bulot had called for the death penalty against three anarchists who had been shot at by police in Clichy after protesting the May 1 1891 mass shooting of 8-hour day demonstrators at Fourmies. After the trial led to two of them being given prison sentences of five and three years, Ravachol, an anarchist and burglar, left a bomb outside Bulot’s door at 8 am on the morning of March 27 1892. The bomb exploded a few minutes later wounding seven people and destroying the flat. Ravachol was arrested on March 30 and executed on July 11 1892.

The deputy for the Ain department from May 1849, a former army doctor who treated the poor, Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Baudin, lived at No. 43 during the Second Republic. He was one of several deputies who accompanied Victor Schœlcher to the barricade in the Saint-Antoine district to try and persuade soldiers from supporting Louis Napoleon’s seizure of power on December 2 1851. That was where he was shot dead, becoming a symbol of republican resistance to despotism. Buried secretly in the Montmartre Cemetery (27th division), Baudin’s remains were transferred to the Pantheon on August 4 1889, part of the celebrations of the centenary of the 1789 French Revolution.

The Clichy prison, known as the Debtors Prison from 1834 to 1867, was situated between Nos. 54 and 68. The private mansion originally at No. 54 was where the Royal Coach was hidden before taking Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette to Varennes on their failed escape attempt of June 20 1791.

The Communard Sidonie-Marie Herbelin lived at No. 55. She was sentenced to deportation to a fortified prison in New Caledonia on May 13 1872. Witnesses said she had been carrying a red flag while encouraging others to loot the home of an absent Versaillais policeman. She was deported on the same boat as Louise Michel, but never returned to France, dying on March 24 1875

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Rue de la Roquette

Arrondissement 11

Numbers: 1, 17, 34, 75, 143-147,151

Probably named from the 15th century after the rocket plant that used to grow extensively hilly and rocky area, it became the place where many wealthy people built homes to be close to the capital.

The Roquette prisons were opened in 1830 and finally closed in 1974

A barricade from No 1 across the road to the Rue du Faubourg St Antoine saw bloody fighting on May 26 1871 when the defending Communards were attacked by the Versaillais soldiers. Their prisoners were systematically executed.

Another barricade crossed to the Rue Neuve de Lappe from No. 34. This was one of the very first barricades set up on the morning of March 18. In total 78 barricades were constructed in just the 11th arrondissement during the Commune.

Paul Verlaine lived with his mother on the 5th floor of No 17 from 1883 to 1896, writing ‘The accursed poets’ there, first published in 1884 and then extended in 1888. In it he called the tribe of poets ‘the race that will always be cursed by the powerful ones of the earth‘.

The office of the Federation of French Workers’ Theatre was based at No 75 in 1931. It saw itself as a propaganda tool for the French Communist Party and its trade union organisation, the CGTU.

The Little Roquette Prison at Nos 143-147 was initially for young prisoners and became a women’s prison in 1932 . Outside its walls four of the Commune’s hostages were executed on May 27 1871. Later, after the suppression of the Commune this was where hundreds of young Communards taken to the prison were then executed.

On 25 February 1961 six Algerian and French supporters of the FLN escaped from the Little Roquette during the Algerian War. The escape was organised by Michel Pablo, the Greek Trotskyist who spent most of his life in France.

Hubertine Auclert, the editor of the Womens’ Suffrage Society paper, La Citoyenne, lived at No. 151 from 1892 to 1914.

Paris révolutionnaire

Places
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Key days in 1871

Chronology from Le Maitron of Key Dates in French Labour History

Authors: Stéphane Sirot, complétée par Michel Cordillot, René Lemarquis, Claude Pennetier and Céline Lenormand; italicised additions by Steve Jefferys

January

A Meunier chocolate factory building with a metal frame is erected by the architect Jules Saulnier at Noisel-sur-Marne.

January 5 Southern districts of Paris begin to be shelled by the Prussians. The siege began on September 18 1870.

January 6-7 Overnight a red poster signed by the Central Committee of Paris’ 20 arrondissements appears on walls all over Paris. It calls for the creation of an all-Paris Commune.

January 18 The proclamation of the German Empire occurs in the Mirror Gallery of the Versailles Château takes place before William I and Bismarck.

January 22 Parisian revolutionaries try to seize power for a Commune in Paris as part of the ‘action day’ protesting against the government of National Defence’s decision to offer to surrender Paris to Bismarck. A decision is taken to order the troops to fire on the crowd outside the Town Hall, allegedly (and probably fake news) given by Gustave Chaudey, a friend of Courbet.

January 23 Jules Favre, a leading republican who was Foreign Minister of the Government of National Defence in Bordeaux, begins peace talks with Bismarck. It is agreed by the government two days later, and signed by Favre and Bismarck in Versailles on January 27.

January 28 The official journal announces a 21-day armistice with Bismarck to allow national elections to take place to create an Assembly to meet in Bordeaux that would ratify the peace. Paris is instructed to surrender and to allow the Germans into the defensive forts around Paris. The Germans would be allowed to march through Paris in early March. Paris would have to pay for the siege.

February

February 6 Opposed to the decision to cease fighting, and aware of the pro-peace monarchist majority being elected, Leon Gambetta resigns from the government.

February 8 Elections for the National Assembly provide a right-wing monarchist majority (214 Orleanists, 182 Bourbonists, 20 Bonapartists) who want peace and are opposed to the majority republican deputies from Paris and other major cities.

February 15 The Paris battalions of the National Guard decide to combine under a single command and decide to reject the surrender.

February 17 Adolphe Thiers is elected head of the Executive by the National Assembly meeting in Bordeaux.

February 22 Jules Vallès launches the daily newspaper ‘Le Cri du peuple’, critical of Thiers and the monarchist National Assembly. It sells at 5 centimes and its print run is between 50,000 and 100,000, making it the most read newspaper during the Commune. 65 issues are produced between February 22 and March 12, when it is banned, and from March 21 to May 23, when it ceases publication with the start of the Bloody Week that ends the Commune.

February 24 Several battalions of the Paris National Guard march from the Place de la Bastille in commemoration of the 1848 February Revolution. They demand the continuation of the war and oppose the disarming of Paris. The demonstrations continue over the next few days.

March

March 1

The National Assembly in Bordeaux confirms the abolition of Napoleon III’s Empire and agrees to ratify the peace treaty by 546 votes to 107.

March 1 – 3 Prussian troops symbolically occupy parts of western Paris and hold a victory parade on the Champs-Élysées.

March 3 The Paris battalions of the National Guard meet in the Tivoli-Vauxhall dance hall (in what since 1970 is the Rue Léon-Jouhaux) and draw up new rules.

March 9 Universal male suffrage is granted to two ‘French’ communes (Saint-Louis and Gorée and extended later to Dakar and Rufisque) in Senegal. Their deputies will sit in the National Assembly.

March 10 The Bordeaux National Assembly decides to move to Versailles.

March 11 Vinoy, the government’s military commander of Paris, bans six republican newspapers.

March 15

The National Guard elects a Central Committee whose members install themselves in the Hotel de Ville.

Thiers and his government return to Paris.

March 17 Auguste Blanqui, who had left Paris because he was unwell, is arrested staying with a friend in the Dordogne.

March 18

The Paris Commune begins in response to an attempt by the Thiers government’s army to take control of the 227 canons stockpiled at Montmartre and Belleville.

The 88th regiment is surrounded by National Guardsmen and the crowd. Louise Michel among them. The soldiers start to fraternise. The officers are disarmed and their general and another former general who had played a part in the vicious suppression of the June 1848 workers’ insurrection are arrested and taken to the Chateau Rouge. The generals are shot later, despite the intervention of several leading Communards.

Thiers and the members of his government flee to Versailles.

March 19 The Central Committee of the National Guard announce communal elections for Paris.

March 22 The Paris National Guard dispersed a ‘Friends of Order’ demonstration in the Place Vendome, killing around ten of the demonstrators.

March 23 Communes are proclaimed in Lyon and Marseille.

March 24 An attempt to declare a Commune in Nîmes fails. Other Communes are declared in Narbonne and in Toulouse.

March 25 The Lyon mayor is able to end the Commune there by welcoming the soldiers returning from the siege of Belfort, who then put an end to the Commune at the town hall.

March 26

The results of the election for the Paris Commune are declared. 229 167 men had voted out of the 484 569 entitled to vote. Of the 80 members elected, 25 are workers. Among them are Eugène Varlin, Zéphirin Camélinat, Benoît Malon and  Léo Frankel, leading members of the International Working Men’s Association. Others elected included Charles Delescluze, one of around 20 admirers of the Jacobins, and Théophile Ferré, one of a dozen followers of the absent Blanqui . So too were some Proudhonista like Pierre Denis and a handful of independents like Gustave Courbet and Jules Vallès. Twenty of those elected were free masons.

In Creusot a Commune is declared by Jean-Baptiste Dumay.

28 mars.

The Communes in Creusot and Toulouse are overthrown.

The elected Paris Commune declares itself the government of Paris at the Hotel de Ville. It is given this authority by the National Guard’s Central Committee.

March 29 The Commune adopts the manifesto drafted by Pierre Denis, based on Proudhon’s philosophy of communal federalism.

March 31 The Commune of Narbonne fails

April

The Versailles Government commands the support of some 130,000 troops under the orders of MacMahon, the general who had been defeated at Sedan. Perhaps as many as half of these had been prisoners of the Prussians who agreed to their release so they could assist in the battle against the Paris Commune. The Commune was defended by approximately 20-30,000 members of the National Guard, most of whom had never been involved in military action.

April 2 Some 9,000 regular Versaillais army soldiers attack around 600 men defending a barricade of carts and wooden barrels at Courbeovie, to west of Neuilly. The Commune’s Federal soldiers retreat under artillery fire. Casualties are 5 killed and 21 wounded among the Versaillais and 17 killed and 25 captured among the ‘Fédérés’. Five Communards killed were prisoners who were immediately shot on the orders of General Vinoy.

April 3

The Commune decrees the separation of the Church from the State and ends the statement payment of priests.

Under the Blanquist Émile Eudes three loosely connected column of 10,000 Communard soldiers and 8 canon march on Versaillais, largely hoping the regular army will fraternise with them. Surprised by the artillery fire directed against them the Versaillais win both the Battle of Meudon and the Battle of Rueil. Having surrendered at Chatillon, Emile Victor Duval, is shot at Petit-Clamart on the orders of Vinoy as he was being taken to Versailles the following day. Unarmed, one of the Communard leaders at Rueil, Gustave Flourens, is executed on the spot by a gendarme captain.

Aril 4

The Marseille Commune fails.

An insurrection in Limoges initially stops troops being taken by train to Versaillais, but is then defeated.

April 5 The siege of Paris by the Versailles army begins. The Versaillais start shelling Paris. The Commune declares that Theirs and his government will be held responsible.

April 6 Following the summary executions of Duval and Flourens, the Commune passed the hostage decree. This stipulates that for every one Communard executed, three hostages will be executed. This is only put into effect during the Bloody Week from May 21. On May 14 the Commune proposed exchanging all 74 hostages against one man, Blanqui. This proposal was rejected by Thiers and finally on May 24 six hostages were executed, the Archbishop of Paris Georges Darboy, four other priests and the judge Louis-Bernard Bonjean.

April 8

The Commune passed a law stating that municipal councillors in communes of populations less than 20,000 could elect their mayors.

Shells hit the Arc de Triomphe.

April 11 Nathalie Lemel and Elisabeth Dmitrieff set up the ‘Women’s Union for the Defence of Parris and Care of the Wounded’.

April 16 The Commune decrees that any workshop abandoned by their owner should be requisitioned by their workers in order to become workers’ cooperatives that would pay an indemnity to their former owners.

April 19 The Commune issued its Declaration to the French People. It stood for: the consolidation of the republic, an association of autonomous communes throughout France, each of which would vote its budget, taxes and other key issues; the election or selection by competition with the right to recall of all justices, magistrates and communal functionaries; the guarantee of individual freedom of conscience and of the freedom to work; the organisation of an elected national guard whose job was to keep order.

April 24 Abandoned houses by those who had fled Paris were to be requisitioned to house those made homeless by the shelling.

April 27 The Commune outlaws fines and withholding of wages by employers; it bans night work for bakers, it establishes a commission to examine how to organise secular primary and professional education in Paris.

April 30, May 7 Municipal elections take place.

May

May 1 The Jacobins and Blanquists win a majority of 45 to 23 on the Commune to establish a Committee of Public Safety of five elected delegates in response to the multiple dangers faced by the Communards. The Proudhonists are opposed to this step. The role of the Committee is not defined, and a new Committee is elected on May 9.

May 10 The Versailles government signs the Treaty of Frankfort. Under it Germany annexes the Alsace and a significant part (the actual Moselle departmnet) of Lorraine. Some 160,000 inhabitants who refuse to become German leave their homes and move to other parts of France.

May 15 Twenty-one Commune delegates protest the authoritarian turn of the Committee of Public Safety.

May 16 The statue of Napoleon on the Vendome Column is pulled down. The decision was confirmed/accepted by Gustave Courbet.

May 18 The National Assembly in Versailles ratifies the Frankfort Treaty.

May 19 The Commune issues a decree requiring the secularisation of education.

May 21 to May 28 The Bloody Week

May 21 The Versailles troops enter Paris through the Saint-Cloud gate, and then start attacking the over 500 barricades that block most of the main streets.

May 23 The Commune decides to set fire to several public buildings, including the Tuileries, the Hotel de Ville, the Cour des Comptes and the Conseil d’Etat on the ground floor of the Orsay Palace, and the Finance Ministry. Many other buildings are destroyed by shellfire from the Versaillais.

May 24 The six hostages, Darboy, Archbishop of Paris, four Jesuit priests and a judge, are executed at La Roquette prison.

May 24-May 25 484 Communard prisoners are executed by the Versailles soldiers in the Parc Monceau and in Montmartre.

May 26 In retaliation the Communards execute 52 Versaillais prisoners in the Rue Haxo.

May 27 The fighting ends in the Père-Lachaise cemetery.

May 28 The last barricade of the Commune at the Rue Ramponeau is overrun by the Versailles army.  Eugène Varlin, who lived in the Rue Dauphine, was totured and shot.

May 29 The Communards supporting garrison of the Vincennes Castle finally surrender.

By the end of this ‘bloody week’ the Versailles troops have retaken Paris. There are thousands of dead, tens of thousands of arrests. Many activists, followed by the police, flee Paris and try to escape in province or abroad. Estimates of those killed range from 6,000-7,500 (Robert Tombs) to 20,000-35,000 (Henri Rochefort).

June

22 military courts are set up in Versailles to try the 38,000 arrested insurrectionaries. 270 are condemned to death (23 death sentences are carried out); 410 are condemned to forced labour, 3,989 are sentenced to prison terms, 322 are exiled and 7,500 are deported to Algeria or New Caledonia. 56 children are jailed in houses of correction.

July

In partial elections in 47 departments the republicans secure support in 39, carrying 99 seats out of 114. These republican gains are repeated in municipal elections in Paris on July 23 and July 30.

August

August 7 The Versailles riding school sees the opening of the third military tribunal judging 17 leading Communards including Théophile Ferré and Gustave Courbet. Others tried included the elected Commune members Adolphe Assi, François Jourde, Paschal Grousset, Dominique Régère, Alfred-Édouard Billioray, Raoul Urbain, Victor Clément, Alexis Trinquet, Henry Champy, Paul Rastoul, Augustin Verdure, Baptiste Descamps and Ulysse Parent, as well as members of the National Guard’s Central Committee, Charles Lullier and Paul Ferrat.

September

September 2 The trial ended with sentences: two death sentences (Ferré was executed, Lullier spared); Urbain and Trinquet were given forced labour for life; seven were sentenced to deportation to overseas prisons, two to simple deportation, four to prison (six months for Courbet) and two (Descamps and Parent) were acquitted.

September 4 The 4th military tribunal trial opens of five women who were ambulance or canteen workers during the Commune. Élisabeth Rétiffe, Joséphine Marchais, Eugénie Suétens were sentenced to death, with the penalties commuted, Eulalie Papavoine was sentenced to deportation to a prison and Lucie Maris-Bocquin who with Rose Rétiffe had been seen building barricades in the Rue de Lille wearing a red scarf and carrying a rifle, was sentenced to ten years in jail and eventually released in 1878.

September 17-23 The International Workingmen’s Association (IWMA) meets in London. Karl Marx wins a vote to create a working class political party in all countries affiliated to the IWMA. The opposition comes from supporters of the more libertarian views of Proudhon and Bakunin.

October

The huge disinvestments that followed the payments of the war debt (25% of France’s GDP had to be borrowed) to Germany create a monetary crisis.

Émile Zola publishes the first of his 20 volume Rougon-Macquart series of books attacking the values and morality of France under the Empire. It’s called La fortune des Rougon.

October 8, October 15 Regional elections confirm the success of the Republicans.

November

November 7 Gambetta founds what became the most influential French newspaper, La Republique Francaise.

November 28 The only army officer to support the Commune, Louis Rossel, is executed at the Satory military camp at Versailles, along with Sergeant Pierre Bourgeois and Théophile Ferré.

November 30 Gaston Crémieux, a leader of the Marseille Commune, is executed after six months in prison.

December 23 The Circles of Catholic Workers come into existence.

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Key days in 1848

Chronology from Le Maitron of key dates in French labour history

Author: Stéphane Sirot, additional material by Michel Cordillot, René Lemarquis and Claude Pennetier with Steve Jefferys (italicised)

January 14 The government bans a reformist banquet in the 12th arrondissement of Paris. The organisers postpone it to February 22.

January 28 The Seine freezes over, Hugo wrote that ‘People are skating beneath the Pont des Arts‘, the footbridge crossing to the Louvre.

February 3 The advance guard of 69 Icarian settlers set sail from Le Havre to found a Cabetist colony in Texas.

February 21 The government bans the last reformist banquet of the franchise campaign planned for the 22nd, and the demonstration that was to precede it. The organising committee decided it was forced to obey.

February 22-24 

An Insurrection in Paris overthrows Louis-Philippe. A republican provisional government is proclaimed that includes Louis Blanc and the worker Albert.

February 22 Responding to anger at the ban and to calls from several secret societies, students from the Latin Quarter on the left bank and workers from the districts just outside the city centre converge on the Place de la Concorde. Troops push them back but turmoil continues. The chief minister Guizot calls on the National Guard to disperse them and in the late afternoon a demonstrator is killed. Many guardsmen then fraternise with the demonstrators who are demanding reform and Guizot’s resignation.

February 23 Lots of confrontations take place between the crowd and the National Guard in different parts of Paris. Gradually whole battalions of guardsmen fraternise with the demonstrators and join the call for reform. Guizot’s resignation is announced at the Palais-Bourbon in the afternoon and accepted by Louis-Philippe. A massive crowd arrive outside the Foreign Ministry where Guizot is holed up to celebrate the victory. Suddenly gunfire breaks out killing 52 people in the Boulevard des Capucines. Their bodies are then taken through the streets by the demonstrators and barricade building erupts, particularly in the east and centre of Paris.

February 24 With 1,500 barricades across Paris a declaration by the ‘Sovereign People’ posted across the city declares a republic by midday. The Tuileries Palace is attacked. Louis-Philippe abdicates in favour of his nine-year-old grandson, but when the boy’s mother arrives at the Palais-Bourbon to claim the regency the deputies present have already decided to form a provisional republican government. Louis-Philippe and the royal family flee France. The provisional government that meets at the Hotel de Ville that evening comprises the republicans Ledru-Rollin, Louis Blanc, Albert and Arago, as well as Lamartine and seven other well known campaigners for the extension of the franchise.

February 25  Huge workers’ demonstrations take place in front of the Hôtel de Ville in Paris. Lamartine persuades the crowd not to take the Red Flag as the flag of the new republic. Under the influence of Louis Blanc the government commits itself ‘to guarantee workers can survive through work, ‘the right to work’ as well as the freedom of association, and universal manhood suffrage.

25-26 February. In Lyon, under pressure from the workers of Croix-Rousse led by J. Benoît, a large place is given to workers in the provisional municipal commission. Several workshops are ransacked by silk workers and services are held by religious communities.

26 February. Opening of National Workshops to ensure work for the unemployed.

28 February. Popular demonstration assembles thousands of workers at the place of the strike in Paris to demand a Minister for Labour. Creation of a Commission of the Government for the Organisation of Labour presided over by Louis Blanc: the Commission of Luxembourg, made up of workers and owners.

1st March. Proclamation of universal suffrage.

2 March. Decree limiting the working day to 10 hours in Paris and 11 hours in the provinces. Abolition of marchandage – the recruitment of labour by intermediaries.

6 March. Organisation of National Workshops in the Seine, entrusted to Émile Thomas.

16 March. Demonstration in Paris organised by the clubs before the Hôtel de Ville to demand, inter alia, the bringing forward of the elections; the National Guard from the bourgeois districts shout: “Down with the Communists!”

17 March. Vigorous popular counter-demonstration in support of the “bearskins,” who had shouted “Down with the Communists!”

24-25 March. Restrictive regulation of work carried out in prisons and old people’s homes.

31 March. Publication of “Taschereau Document” in the revue Revue Rétrospective, putting Auguste Blanqui in the position of the accused.

26-28 April. Workers’ insurrection in Rouen is severely repressed shortly after the legislative elections which saw the triumph of the reaction. In Limoges, on April 27, further incidents occurred during the counting of votes in the legislative elections, a new municipal committee is formed under the pressure of the street, which includes several porcelain workers and loggers. Over several weeks, the city will administer itself in a quasi autonomous manner.

8 May. Louis Blanc closes down the Commission of Luxembourg.

10 May. Parliament refuses Louis Blanc the creation of a Ministery for Progress, but names a Board of Enquiry of the fate of workers, which will publish The Investigation of 1848 into Industrial and Agricultural Labour.

15 May. Riot in Paris. The crowd invades Parliament with the cries of “Vive Poland!” The majority of the leaders, A. Huber, Francois, Vincent Raspail, Armand Barbès, the worker Albert, Benjamin Flotte, are arrested.

16 May. Suppression of the Commission of Luxembourg.

22 May. Arrest of militant workers, and then of Auguste Blanqui.

27 May. The workers gain voting rights on the Conciliation Boards. Parity of representation is established.

4 June. Complementary elections to the Constituent Assembly. Pierre Leroux, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon are elected, at the same time as Victor Hugo, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte and Thiers.

21 June. Dissolution of the National Workshops.

22-23 June. Workers’ riots in Marseille.

23-26 June. The “June Days.” Workers’ insurrection in Paris after the dissolution of the National Workshops. Bloody reprisals, with thousands of victims. Troops will carry out approximately 25,000 arrests, of whom 10,000 will be detained.

30 June. Abolition of the decree of 2 March: the working day is increased to 12 hours minimum.

31 July. Parliament rejects the proposition of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon to form a Bank of Exchange.

21 August. Publication of the first number of L’Opinion des Femmes (Jeanne Deroin).

4 September. Beginning of the discussion on the Constitution (which will carry on for two months altogether), in particular concerning the “Right to work,” which is rejected, to be replaced by a “fraternal assistance for needy citizens.”

9 September. An Order in Council limits the law of March 4, 1848 on the duration of the work and fixes at twelve hours the maximum length of the working day.

17 October. Banquet for the Democratic and Social Republic (with toasts to Cabet, Pierre Leroux, P.J. Proudhon, etc..).

4 November. Formation of Solidarité républicaine (Martin Bernard, Charles Delescluze, Agricol Perdiguier, etc..).

3 December. Banquet of the Socialist Workers at the maine Gate, placed under the presidency of Auguste Blanqui, still imprisoned at Vincennes.

10 December. Election of the President of the Republic. Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte is elected with more than 5,400,000 votes; the candidate of the extreme left, François-Vincent Raspail gets only 37,000 votes.

PLACES

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Les Invalides

Arrondissement 7

In 1670 the Sun King Louis XIV was forced to order the building of the hospital the L’hôtel des Invalides to get some of the huge numbers of wounded ageing soldiers from his Thirty Years War off the streets of Paris. What was then a district outside Paris today still treats some of the wounded from France’s continuing militaristic and imperial legacy, and for others is still a retirement home.

At 7 am on the morning of July 14 1789, a huge crowd stormed the building. The governor ordered his troops to fire, but none did. The Invalides’ gates were raised by the retired and wounded soldiers inside and those outside armed themselves and marched on the Bastille.

Early on July 14 1789 Jean-Baptiste Lallemand paints the moments when Parisians take 27 canons and 32,000 rifles from Les Invalides and then march on the Bastille.

Even more significant in French iconography, Les Invalides since 1840 also houses the tomb of Napoléon Bonaparte.

Wikipedia

PLACES

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Key Dates 1849-1870

Chronology from Le Maitron of key dates in French labour history

Author: Stéphane Sirot, additional material by Michel Cordillot, René Lemarquis and Claude Pennetier with Steve Jefferys (italicised)

1849

7 March-3 April. Trial of the accused of 15 May before the High Court in Bourges. Deportation for Barbès and the worker Albert; prison for Auguste Blanqui, François-Vincent Raspail, Sobrier and B. Flotte.

15 March. Law against workers’ and owners’ combinations.

13 June. Demonstration of the Montagne (the extreme left) against the despatch from Rome on the boulevards of Paris; it is treated as an insurrection and there are many arrests. Many leaders of the republican left are detained for exile. The democratic socialist press is muzzled.

14-15 June. The same popular movements in Lyon, here a real street battle takes place, and in other provincial towns. State of siege in the 1st and 6th military areas.

August-September. Meeting of delegates of 43 associations to found the Union of the Workers’ associations.

October. The Almanac of workers’ associations for 1850 counts 211 workers’ associations in Paris and the suburbs.

27 November. A law against strikes is enacted.

1850

31 May. Electoral law restricting universal suffrage: to get on the electoral rolls, one must have been registered in the canton or the commune for at least three years, removing de facto the voting rights of many workers.

PLACES

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Key dates 1831-1847

Chronology from Le Maitron of key dates in French labour history

Author: Stéphane Sirot, additional material by Michel Cordillot, René Lemarquis and Claude Pennetier with Steve Jefferys (italicised)

1831

January 15 Blanqui and other student leaders are arrested for organising violent demonstrations near the Sorbonne and judged by its Academic Council.

February 8 The clockmaker Charles Béranger‘s ‘A proletarian’s petition to the Chamber of Deputies’ was published by Le Globe, established by Pierre Leroux.

February 14-15 Anticlerical and anti-Bourbon riots take place in Paris after a Legitimist commemoration of the murder of the Duke de Berry at the Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois church opposite the Louvre. This was occupied by republican demonstrators who then marched on the Archbishop’s palace near Notre Dame, pillaging and wrecking it. These riots were followed later in provincial France.

March 2 Republican riots break on in Paris after the acquittal of prisoners charged with infringing restrictions on press freedom. Protesting workers march on the Palais Royal, the Louvre and on the Town Hall. The Russians eventually take Warsaw on September 8.

March 9 Republicans riot in Paris on hearing the false news that the Russians had seized Warsaw. The windows of the Russian Embassy were stoned and the crowd sang the Marseillaise.

March – June Demonstrations take place against the introduction of machines in factories in Nantes, Saint-Étienne, Bordeaux and Le Havre.

April 6-10 Trial of 19 republican members of the Friends of the People Society, including Godefroi Cavaignac, arrested during the December 1830 riots. They are all acquitted by the jury on April 15/16, giving rise to several working class demonstrations.

April 9-12 Riots of Lyon silk workers (canuts).

May 5 A Bonapartist demonstration takes place at the Place Vendome on the anniversary of Napoleon’s death.

June Serious rioting in the Saint-Denis district resulting from the tough economic situation. The repression was very severe with many victims.

June 1 The Philanthropic Society of Parisian Working Tailors is established.

June 14-16 Riots in Paris put down by the National Guard and regular soldiers. Particularly heated fighting takes place in the Faubourg Saint-Denis and Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle.

July 14 Working class riots. Republican attempt is made to plant an Equality Tree in the Place de la Bastille, at the Pantheon, in the Place de Grève and in the Place de la Concorde. The more than 1,500 demonstrators are dispersed by police dressed in disguise as workers. The publication Au Peuple is seized.

September 7 1,500 textile workers organise a demonstration, followed by riots in Paris that don’t end until September 17.

October The Saint-Simonian manifesto is published with a big propaganda campaign in the provinces.

October 30 The first issue of the Factory Echo (L’Écho de la Fabrique) appears in Lyon.

November The Saint-Simonians split. The most faithful will follow Prosper Enfantin to Egypt. Others, like Abel Transon and Jules Lechevalier, publicly turn to Fourierism.

November 14 Philipon draws and then publishes a cartoon of King Louis-Philippe as a pear. He is charged with ‘insulting behaviour towards the king’.

November 20-22 The Lyon silk workers revolt; the negotiations conducted by the prefect fail; an insurrection takes place. Hard repression led by Marshal Soult with 10,000 troops takes place and the revolt finally ends on December 3.

December 15 Daumier‘s cartoon of Louis-Philippe Gargantua is published in La Caricature.

1832

January 10-12. Trial of “The Fifteen” leaders of the SAP (Societe des Amis du Peuple). The accused (Auguste Blanqui, Bonnias, François, Guillaume Gervais, François-Vincent Raspail, Antony Thouret) defend themselves; they are found guilty and sentenced on 27 February, Blanqui was sentenced to a year in prison. The SAP was officially dissolved but it continued its activities.

February. Several newspapers are put on trial. A workers’ commission is set up within the SAP made up of Auguste Caunes senior, Gaussuron-Despréaux, François Sugier). Pierre Leroux and Jean Reynaud take over editorship of the Revue encyclopédique, organ of the neo-Saint-Simonians

February 6 The first cholera epidemic victim dies in Paris.

February 23 Daumier is sentenced to six months in prison and fined 500 francs for his Gargantua cartoon.

February 26 Chopin gives his first concert in Paris in the Pleyel‘s salon in the Rue Cadet.

March 29. Official announcement of a cholera epidemic in Paris.

April 1 Revolt by prisoners at Sainte-Pélagie, supported by several sections of the SAP. One death. A protest by Parisian chiffoniers (rag collectors) begins against the official collection of refuse introduced by the authorities to try to halt the spread of cholera.

April 20 Leroux’s newspaper Le Globe ceases publication.

End April. Commissions for the Rights of Man are set up within the Friends of the People Society (SAP).

May 16 The banker, mine owner and President of the Council of Ministers (Prime Minister) since March 13 1831, Casimir Perier, dies of cholera. He had visited ill patients in Paris’ principal hospital next to Notre-Dame, the Hotel Dieu. A conservative right-winger who had tried to keep Charles X in power he had accepted the position of prime minister only after Louis-Philippe had agreed to allow him to have more freedom of manoeuvre in government than the king.

June 1 Jean-Maximilien Lamarque dies of cholera at his house in the Rue St Honore. Promoted to General by Bonaparte in 1801, he again served with him during the Hundred Days of 1815. Exiled until 1818, he supported the liberal opposition to Louis XVIII and then Charles X. Elected a deputy in 1828, he reluctantly accepted the July Monarchy. His reputation was as someone who had fought both for the Republic and the Empire.

June 2 A large gathering of members of the Friends of the People (SAP) takes place at the funeral of the 20-year-old republican who posthumously become known as one of France’s leading mathematicians, Évariste Galois. He had been mortally wounded in a duel, and was buried in Montparnasse Cemetery.

June 5-6. Popular insurrection in Paris on the occasion of the funeral of General Lamarque. The last group of insurgents fight heroically around the cloisters of Saint-Merri in the Rue de St Martin. Casualities are very heavy: at least 150 are killed on the side of the insurgents, more than 400 are wounded and more than 1,500 arrested; 134 deaths and 326 wounded on the side of the police. A state of siege is declared in Paris that lasts until June 29.

Summer. Birth of the Society for the Rights of Man (SDH).

August 15 The first issue of La Femme libre (the Free Woman) appears. It was an answer by working class women to the Saint-Simonian ‘silence’ on the women’s question imposed by Prosper Enfantin. ‘Written and published by women’ from No. 17 Rue du Caire, it only gives the first names of one founder and one editor, .Jeanne-Désirée (Véret-Gay) and Marie-Reine (Guindorf). One other name appears in the single article in the first issue, that of Jeanne-Victoire (Deroin), a washerwoman who had become a teacher. Thirty-one issues of the paper appear until it ceases publication in 1834.

August 27 Daumier is imprisoned in Sainte-Pélagie.

August 27-28 Trial of the Saint-Simonians in the Court of Assizes in Paris for organising an illegal association and of publishing material offensive to public morality. Prosper Enfantin, Michel Chevalier and Charles Duveyrier are sentenced to one year in prison. Enfantin and Chevalier are imprisoned in Sainte-Pelagie on December 15.

October 23-31 Trial of the 22 charged with fighting on the barricade at cloisters of Saint-Merri. Charles Jeanne, who had been awarded the July 1830 decoration for his part in that insurrection, told the court he took full responsibility for his actions. He was sentenced to be deported, but instead, after being moved successively between various prisons he died in 1837.

November-December  Several groups of Saint-Simonian missionaries (40 altogether) move from Paris to Lyon to build a ‘workers peaceful army’ there.

December 1 Charles Philipon sets up Le Charivari, an illustrated daily satirical paper that later served as a model for Punch.

December 15. Opening of the trial of “The Association of Rights” against the SAP (Friends of the People). The SAP is definitively dissolved, but the acquittal of the accused enables it to survive for a little longer.

1833

January 25  La Tribune publishes a list of five great ‘patriotic’ (Republican) associations in Paris, including the Society of the Friends of the People (SAP) and the Society for the Rights of Man (SDH). With the exception of the Société Aide-toi, le Ciel t’aidera (Help yourself, God will help you) distant from the workers’ movement, the other associations for free public education and for press freedom played a significant part in encouraging republican ideas in working class areas of Paris.

February 1  Already imprisoned in Sainte-Pélagie for having published four lessons of a course on the history of France from 1789 to 1830 that ‘attacked the authority of the King, spread hatred of the government and of a class of people, calling for civil war and the pillage of private property and for an insurrection’ Albert Laponneraye publishes his Lettre aux prolétaires. It wil be followed by Deuxième lettre aux prolétaires dated 26 March. (The first of these letters will see the author be condemned on 27 June following). As a result he was only finally released in June 1837.

May 17-27  Insurrection of the Anzin coalminers after the launch of their ‘Four Sous’ strike which is put down by the army.

July 28 Napoleon’s statue is put back on top of the Vendome column.

September 1 Étienne Cabet publishes the weekly newspaper, Le Populaire that appears until October 1835.

September-October  Reorganization of the Société des droits de l’homme (SDH) with the far left ‘Montagnards’ becoming predominant after several months of internal conflicts. These were between the ‘Girondists’ (following Francois-Vincent Raspail) and the “Montagnards” (following Napoleon Lebon).

Within the Society, a Propaganda Committee in charge of education and organisation of workers, is founded. It gathers Neo-Babouvists like Lebon, Buonarroti and Marc Voyer d’Argenson, as well as workers like the tailor Alphonse Grignon and shoemaker Zael Efrahem.

Several of its members will be imprisoned in November as ‘instigators of combinations of workmen’. Important movements of the carpenters in Paris, tailors (who create a “national workshop” to provide work for the strikers), shoemakers and bakers. Creation of a Lyons section of the SDH. The SDH publishes its “Manifesto” in the La Tribune. Publication of Reflections of a Tailor by Alphonse Grignon, and On the Association of Workers of all Trades by Efrahem.

October 1  Creation of the Philanthropic Society of Tailors in Nantes. It will play an important part in the creation of a network of correspondents from Brittany to Bordeaux, as in Marseille. Its leadership were arrested and organisation destroyed on 20 February 1837.

December 11-22. “Trial of the 27” leaders of the Société des droits de l’homme (SDH) including Raspail are accused of having planned a riot in July to mark the third anniversary of the “Three Glorious Days.” They are all acquitted.

1834

1834 saw the founding of an Association of Goldsmiths that survives until 1873.

January 25 A republican François-Charles Dulong caustically heckled another deputy who was defending the government’s military severity in a debate in the Chamber of Deputies. Four days later he was mortally wounded in a duel in the Bois de Boulogne. His funeral at Père-Lachaise was attended by large numbers of republicans.

February 2  The first and only issue of Auguste Blanqui’s newspaper, Libérateur, appears.

February 14-24 A solidarity strike of workers who were members of mutual aid associations takes place in Lyon following wage cuts for coat makers. The general strike lasts approximately 10 days. Seventeen master silk weavers and three apprentices are arrested.

February 16 A law is passed suppressing town criers unless they had prior permission from the local authorities.

February 20-24 After a new press law and the suppression of unofficial town criers is passed, scuffles take place at night with the police in Paris, especially in the workers’ districts of Montmartre, Montorgueil, Saint-Martin, Bonne-Nouvelle and the Faubourg Saint-Denis. In the Place de la Bourse, one man is killed when the police and cavalry break up a demonstration.

February 22  Towards the end of the general strike in Lyon, a law is passed prohibiting associations organised in branches of less than 20 persons.

February 25 Nearly all the members of two republican clubs (Gracques and Cincinnatus) are arrested at the Café des Deux Portes on the Boulevard Saint-Denis. the next day saw the arrests of 73 members of the Society for the Rights of Man.

February 28 Étienne Cabet is sentenced to two years jail for breaking the press laws. For the next five years he lives in Britain.

April 6 A funeral procession in Lyon of a protestant master workman is followed by nearly 10,000 people.

April 9-14 After wages are lowered in response to falling demand, an essentially working class  insurrection breaks out in Lyon and Saint-Étienne, taking forms in Arbois, Épinal, Lunéville, Chalon, Grenoble, Vienne, Clermont-Ferrand, Marseille and Toulon.

April 10  A new law is passed limiting the right to form associations, in particular threatening workers’ mutual aid societies. It requires them to get official approval and only permits their existence if they are split into associations with fewer 20 members.

April 11 A massacre takes place in the rue Projetée in Lyon. More than 300 are killed and 600 wounded in Lyon with over 500 arrests during the insurrection.

April 12 150 republicans, including the leadership of the SDH, are arrested in Paris. La Tribune newspaper does not appear again until August 11.

April 14 Troops carry out the massacre of the Rue Transnonain. Riots are quickly repressed with very heavy causalities. Scores were killed in Paris and of the 2,500 arrested across France, half are in Paris.

June-September  Disorder and revolts in Sainte-Pélagie prison.

July-August.  Creation of the Société des Familles by Hadot-Desages, probably while he was imprisoned with other member of the SDH at Sainte-Pélagie, where he had recorded his profession as ‘proletarian’ . In order to avoid mass arrests of republicans in future, each ‘family’ had only five members, and only its head would know the heads of another family. It soon had between 900 and 1,600 members in Paris, including workers, students and some National Guard volunteers.

July 28 The Vatican adds the songs of Pierre-Jean de Béranger and Victor Hugo‘s Notre-Dame de Paris to the Catholic Index of forbidden books. The Index was begun in 1559 and was finally abandoned as an obligation on Catholics in 1966. Among others who were put on the list and who feature in LeftinParis are De Beauvoir, Sartre, Sand, Proudhon and Zola.

October 8 Raspail publishes the first issue of Réformateur.

1835

February 6 Members of the House of Lords (Chambre des Pairs) sign arrest warrants for more than 420 republicans over the 1834 insurrections. Defence committees are set up in Paris (Godefroi Cavaignac, Guinard, Auguste Blanqui, Vignerte…) and in Lyon (Baune, Lagrange, Caussidière…). There are disagreements between those taking a traditional defence (Jules Favre, Ledru-Rollin) and those who want to use the trial to build a movement.

April 17 The list of the lawyers chosen by the defendants appears in the press.

5 May  The ‘monster trial’ begins before the court of the Chamber of Peers. 121 are charged, of whom 59 are from Lyon, 5 from Saint-Etienne and the rest from Paris. after the withdrawal of charges, according to the Tableau drawn up by Caussidière. The defendants meet at Auguste Blanqui’s apartment.

May 8  A letter with several signatures defending the accused is published by the republican Ulysse Trélat who, with others who had defended the accused, was then tried by the court of the Chamber of Peers on May 29.

June 4  The sentence of the Chamber of Peers on Trélat is three years imprisonment, while Michel de Bourges. who had redrafted the letter first drafted by George Sand, is given one year.

July 13  The Society of Families organises the escape from Sainte-Pélagie prison of 25 to 27 prisoners accused of leading the 1834 insurrection.

July 28 Joseph Fieschi is arrested after an attempt to kill Louis-Phillippe on the anniversary of the 1830 Glorious Revolution. He missed the King but killed 18 others. His accomplices, Theodore Pepin and Pierre Morey, were dedicated republicans. All three were guillotined on February 19 1836.

August 13 The Chamber of Peers court convicts 72 (of whom 22 in their absence) with the sentences announced over the next five months.

September 9  Three laws are passed to ensure the security of the state. Called the September laws they strongly restrict the freedom of the press and the theatre to make any comment that could encourage attacks on the king or the government, making it an offence to declare oneself a republican. They increase the powers of the prosecutors in cases of rebellion or of holding illegal weapons and reduce the two-thirds jury majority needed to find accused people guilty to a simple majority of 7 to 5.

December 7 and 28 The Chamber of Peers court convicts 25 of the accused from Lunéville, Saint-Étienne, Grenoble, Marseille, Arbois and Besançon.

1836

January 23 The ‘monster trial’ finally ends with 40 Parisian republicans found guilty by the Chamber of Peers.

February 19  Fieschi, Pépin and Morey are guillotined.

March 8  The government uncovers an ‘Explosives Conspiracy’. Eustache Beaufour is arrested with five other republicans in the Saint-Marceaux district while making gun powder. Two days later Armand Barbès and Auguste Blanqui are arrested followed by another 200 republicans.

June 2 A secret gunpowder store in the Rue Dauphine is raided and several members of the Society des Familles who were making cartridges were arrested.

July 11 Louis Alibaud, a militant republican, is executed for an attempt to kill the King on June 25.

August 2-11  The ‘Explosives Conspiracy Trial’ of 43 Family Society members takes place, ending with Armand Barbès, Auguste Blanqui and Beaufort being sentenced to two years in jail.

October 17-23 Most of those convicted in the ‘Explosives Conspiracy Trial’ have their appeals rejected.

December 27 A 22-year-old republican Meunier shoots at Louis-Philippe but misses. His plea for mercy is accepted by the King in April 1837 and he is exiled to the United States.

1837

January 6-18 The jury in the trial of those who had supported the failed October 30 1837 uprising in Strasbourg organised by Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte acquits all the accused.

April-July  Republicans organise a campaign, with 7 posters from the ‘Printworks of the Republic’. The first was called ‘To the People’ (Au Peuple). They announce the Reorganization of the Société des Familles into teams called ‘Pelotons’

May 8 An amnesty is granted to political prisoners to mark the marriage of the King’s son, the Duke of Orléans. Those convicted in their absence or who had escaped prisoners are excluded.

June The clandestine republican Family Association (Société des Familles) is replaced by the Seasons Association.

August 7 The 17-year-old Eugène Fombertaux is arrested for putting up the seditious poster, To the People, calling of a workers’ uprising and announcing the imminent appearance of the Moniteur républicain.

November  First issue of the Moniteur républicain appears. It is dated ‘3 frimaire an XLVI’ according to the Revolutionary Republican calendar The 8th and last number was published in July 1838.

December  A plot against the government is uncovered involving Seasons Association members Aloys Huber, Jacob Steuble and one of the leading women republicans, Laure Grouvelle. Convicted on May 25 1838, Huber is sentenced to deportation. The others to five years in prison. Steuble commits suicide at Mont-Saint-Michel prison on December 30 1838; Grouvelle eventually goes from prison to being held in a lunatic asylum that in 1844 also held Auguste Blanqui, but where she dies.

1838

August 24 The Paris municipal police is set up. It comprises 1,444 men and 432 horses with its object the maintenance of order in Paris and the repression of riots and uncovering of anti-government plots.

August-September. Publication of four numbers of L’Homme libre, followed by the arrest of Antoine Fomberteaux and of the printers Eugène Fombertaux, Jean-Baptiste Guillemin and Lecomte Minor, who was sentenced to five years at Mont-Saint-Michel in June 1839.

1839

May 12-13  An attempted insurrection led by Armand Barbès, the printworker Martin Bernard and Auguste Blanqui through the Société des Saisons fails. Barbès, who was wounded in the fighting is arrested; the other two manage to elude the police until June 21 and October 14 respectively. There were 77 killed and at least 51 wounded on the side of the insurgents, 28 and 62 on the other side. More than 750 republicans are brought to trial.

June 11-July 12  The trial takes place of the first 19 of the May insurgents. Faithful to the Carbonari and secret society traditions, Armand Barbès and Martin Bernard refuse to defend themselves. Bernard is condemned to deportation and Barbès to death. Without his knowledge, Barbès’ sister gets the commutation of his sentence from the king to forced labour for life and then on December 31 to deportation .

October 14  Blanqui and five others are arrested. Charges against the five are not pursued.

November  Saint-Simonian workers (including the singer song-writer Jules Vinçard, L.-J. Vannostal, and others) set up La Ruche populaire (‘The working class beehive’) with the Fourierists (like Henri Fugère) and the ‘Democrats’ (like the worker-poet J. Gilland) although these soon withdraw from the newspaper. Its publication will be stopped in 1842, before being followed by L’Union from 1843 to 1846.

November 28 A bomb explodes near the Palais-Royal. The police already held republican suspects including Pierre Béraud who had been arrested following the discovery on October 29 of 80kg of gunpowder at another recently released republican prisoner’s house, that of Mathieu d’Épinal. The accused are sentenced to two years imprisonment for possession of gunpowder on May 16 1840.

December The Nouvelles saisons society is set up by Henri Dourille and Lucien Delahodde, a police informer.

December 4 The second trial of the May insurgents opens in the court of the Chamber of Peers.

1840

January First edition (without the name of the author) of Voyage en Icarie by Étienne Cabet. It gives birth to the Icarian utopian Communist movement that attracts increasing support leading to the decision to leave France to found a Communist colony in Texas is taken at the end of 1847.

Formation of the ‘Egalitarian Workers’, a neo-Babouvist communist tendency.

January  1 The definitive change from the old systems of measurement to the metric system (first introduced on August 1 1793, then reestablished by Napoleon on February 12 1812, and finally passed into law on July 4 1837.

January 13-31 Trial by the Chamber of Peers of 34 of the May 1839 insurrectionaries. Auguste Blanqui refuses to defend himself. He is condemned to death on 31 January. On February 1, after the intervention of his wife and without his knowledge (like Barbès and because of the precedent set by Barbès), his sentence is commuted to forced labour for life and then to deportation. He will join Barbès and the others in Mont-Saint-Michel prison.

April 27  Those tried in their absence or were prisoners who had escaped like Godefroi Cavaignac and Édouard Colombat had not been amnestied in May 1837 are now amnestied.

June 

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon pronounces his celebrated maxim: ‘Property is theft.’

An important strike movement by tailors led by André Troncin, the republican and president in 1833 of the Philanthropic Society of Working Tailors, begins against the workers’ passbook (livret ouvrier). The strike became more extensive over the following months extending to other trades. Troncin is jailed on October 14 for possessing strike funds and sentenced to five years in prison. He dies just days after his release on December 24 1845. Some 2,000 workers attend his funeral.

July 1  A communist banquet is organised in Belleville by a member of the Society of Seasons, Jean-Jacques Pillot. Police spies reported that 1,200 attended, mainly members of secret societies.

September 

The utopian Christian socialist newspaper L’Atelier, written entirely by workers influenced by Philippe Buchez, is launched. It appear regularly until July 1850.

Louis Blanc publishes his book The Organisation of Work (L’Organisation du travail) that has nine editions up to 1850. It sparks furious debates that continue right up to the end of the Second Republic.

Early September  Almost 30,000 workers are on strike against the workers’ passport, the hated livret ouvrier. Over 400 arrests take place.

September 4 A riot takes place around the Place de La Bastille with a gun shop being pillaged by unemployed workers.

September 7 Woodworkers in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine district erupt in response to the severe economic situation and meet with government repression.

October 15  Edmond Darmès, a 43-year-old communist republican, tries to kill Louis-Phillipe in his carriage on the Tuileries Terrasse. quai. Overloaded, his pistol exploded. A member of the Egalitarian Workers since 1839 he had participated in Pillot’s communist Belleville banquet. His trial highlights the existence of secret societies of revolutionary repubicans. Darmes is sentenced to death by the Chamber of Peers and executed on May 31 1841.

December 15 Napoleon’s ashes are taken to Les Invalides in the presence of Louis-Philippe and his family.

1841

March 14  Étienne Cabet relaunches Le Populaire. He had first founded this newspaper in 1833, but was exiled for five years in 1839. The paper survives until 1850, but its name is revived in 1916 by socialist opponents of the First World War, including Jean Longuet.

March 22  Following the 1840 publication of Louis René Villermé‘s report on the physical and moral state of workers in the cotton, wool and silk factories, a law is passed limiting child labour in factories. Children under the age of eight are forbidden to work in factories employing 20 or more workers, the working day is restricted to eight hours for 8 to 12 year-olds and to 12 hours for 12 to 16 year-olds. Night work (9pm-5am) is forbidden for children under 13 years, and for all ages, two nightwork hours will count as three. A child labour inspectorate is established comprising well-heeled and financially needy upper class friends of the employers.

May

Richard Lahautière launches the neo-Babouvist newspaper, La Fraternité.

July 11 The first edition of L’Humanitaire, a materialist-communist journal is launched by the hat-maker brothers turned book sellers, Jean and Gabriel Charavay. This was the first libertarian communist publication in France. The paper was supported by the former young farm workers, Jean Joseph May, and the jewelry worker Antoine Pierre Page. Page was among the 20 arrested on September 12 and jailed for six months for illegal association.

A letter to L’Humanitaire by the Robert Owen-influenced Jules Gay found by the police when they arrested Charavay attacked the historical obsessions of ‘the altar the throne, private property and the family’ and criticised anti-equality and non-fraternal Republicans for substituting the throne for a new fetish, the fatherland (la patrie). This letter was used to promote a witchhunt against all Republicans as anti-patriotic extremists.

August 1  The daily Fourierist newspaper, La Démocratie pacifique, that appears from 1843 to 1851, begins life as a newssheet appearing three times a week. It does so thanks to a wealthy British backer, Arthur Young.

September 11 300 mainly young demonstrators gather in the Place du Châtelet chanting republican anti-royalist and anti-government slogans. The demonstrations continue over the following week.

September 13  Francois Quénisset uses a pistol to shoot at the Duc d’Aumale, the fifth son of the King Louis-Philippe, who at the age of eight had inherited France’s biggest fortune. The Duke was riding at the head of his troops in the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine returning from a stint in the Algerian war. Two horses were wounded. His trial in front of the House of Lords was turned into a trial of the Société des Travailleurs égalitaires (The Association of Workingmen for Equality) that he had joined in August. Condemned to death his sentence was commuted to life-long exile.

October

A petition initiated by Armand Barbès‘ sister and drafted by Fulgence Girard with the agreement of Auguste Blanqui and other prisoners protests the cell confinement regime for poltiical prisoners at Mont-St-Michel. The press campaign is picked up in the Journal du Peuple, Le National, and later La Réforme. The issue culminates in a debate in the Chamber of Deputies.

November 1  The 300-page monthly Revue indépendante  (1841-1848) based in the rue des Saints-Pères is set up by Pierre Leroux, George Sand and the art critic and theatre director Louis Viardot. In December 1842 it becomes a fortnightly publication and early in 1844 its editorial address moves to the Rue de Richelieu.

1842

November

Théodore Dezamy finishes his Code de la Communauté that is published in full the following month. Influenced by Robert Owen and Buonarroti, a critic of Fourier, he broke with the utopianism of Cabet. He was credited by Marx as having developed the most advanced theoretical work of French materialist communism at the time. Others argue that his summary arguments about property, work and the family helped convince many Parisian workers of the merits of a communist solution to their problems.

December

There is a spike in unemployment leading to some 150 000 Parisian workers having no work.

1843

May 

Six months after the success of her ‘Walks in London‘ that was dedicated ‘To the working classes’, Flora Tristan publishes L’Union ouvrière, making the case for a united working class response to capitalism. Influenced by the ideas of Fourier and Owen, she made contact with a large number of workers and with people like the song-writer Jules Vinçard and the carpenter Agricol Perdiguier. Flora Tristan was actively preparing for a Tour of France destined to popularise her project to set up local circles of the L’Union ouvrière. Exhausted, she died at Bordeaux in November 1844.

July 5  Alexis de Tocqueville reported on French prisons supporting the use of solitary confinement.

July 10  The Parisian Typographers’ Society, founded in 1839, signed the first wage agreement with the print employers association. This was effectively the very first French collective agreement.

July 29  Alexandre Ledru-Rollin funds the La Réforme newspaper. for which virtually every French leftist contributed during the mid and late 1840s. It was banned after the 1850 coup d’etat.

1844

February-December

The press campaign in support of political prisoners is buoyed by debates in the Chamber of Deputies in April and May around the prison laws. It continues until December,

February 25 The first issue of Annales franco-allemandes for which Karl Marx had moved to Paris to co-edit with Arnold Ruge is published.

March 31  A miners’ strike begins in Rive-de-Gier on the Loire as a response to an employers’ coalition aiming to reduce wages and increase working time.

April 5 300-400of the Loire striking miners try to free 17 arrested miners being transferred to another prison. The troops open fire and kill one 18-year-old miner. The strike ends after two months in a failure for the miners except in one small mine.

August 14 French occupying forces defeat the Algerians at the Battle of Isly.

October 8-14 Louis-Philippe visits Queen Victoria in England.

October 18 To counter the unpopularity of his foreign policy, Louis-Philippe grants most political prisoners limited pardons. Armand Barbès, Martin Bernard, Auguste Blanqui and some 32 others are excluded. These ‘pardons’ are, however, only ‘remise de peine‘, sentence reductions rather than a full amnesty. Those released would be denied the possibility of recovering their full rights as citizens. The government additionally hints that an amnesty would be proclaimed on November 25 when the Louis-Philippe’s fifth son gets married, although this does not actually happen.

December 9  Auguste Blanqui in the Tours hospital prison is finally given a pardon but he rejects it and it is never ratified by the Court. Blanqui stays a prisoner.

December 29  Conseils des prud’hommes ( a cross between Conciliation Boards and Employment Tribunals) are set up in Paris to over the engineering sector.

1845

January

La Réforme newspaper launches ‘The Workers’ Petition’ in the workshops of Paris.

January 9 The first issue of a communist newspaper, La Fraternité, appears in Paris. Its first editor is Brige, an activist who had been involved in the Owenite-Communist group around Jules Gay and Desiree Viret-Gary and with Flora Tristan. André Savary becomes the paper’s editor in 1846.

February 3 Marx is ordered to leave Paris because of his revolutionary activities. He moves to Brussels.

March 11 A Paris-wide employment tribunal/conciliation board (Conseil de prud’hommes) is set up in the Palais de Justice.

June 9 A strike of Parisian carpenters for a wage rise begins. For the first time, the military are placed at the disposal of the employers.

June 18-19 In Algeria General Pélissier murders a thousand men women and children by smoking them to death while they were hiding in caves in the mountainous area of Dahra on Algeria’s Mediterranean coast.

July 5 Victor Hugo, who had just been elevated to the Peerage on April 13 1845, was discovered in bed with Léonie d’Aunet, the wife of a painter who has her followed after she asks him to agree a ‘separation of they body’ – divorce still being illegal. She is jailed for adultery in Saint-Lazare prison, while Huge is released because as a peer he cannot be arrested.

October 5 Pierre Leroux publishes the first issue of the ‘Revue sociale, ou Solution pacifique du problème du prolétariat’ (A labour review, or a peaceful solution to the proletariat issue).

1846

March 30   Without being ordered, troops fire on a demonstration of strikers in front of the Outre-Furan town hall near Saint-Étienne. The strike was to get a wage increase for the miners carrying out the hardest and most dangerous work in the local pits. The official prosecutor had arrested five of the miners. Four men and two women are killed and many are wounded by the 400-500 rounds fired. The strike then spread rapidly but the movement ended nearly three weeks later.

May 22  Textile workers at Elbeuf in Normandy demonstrate calling for the destruction of machines that are causing unemployment. Since 1667 the works there had been supported by Colbert who set up the Royal Elbeuf Sheet Making Factory.

June 20-21 Troops kill three people during bread riots in Nancy.

July 

Théodore Dezamy dissolves the Communistes égalitaires. They are still arrested and tried for their views the following year.

July 29 A metal worker whose trade is making fantasy objects in steel, Joseph Henry, fires his pistol at Louis-Philippe, who was standing on the balcony of the Tuileries Palace with his family, but misses. Henry was sentenced to hard labour for life in his August 25-27 trial before the House of Lords where Hugo had spoken in favour of leniency.

August

A new economic crisis moves towards creating starvation.

September 30 Troops restore order after demonstrators in the Saint-Antoine district protest against increases in the price of bread. The protest continue until October 3. Some rioters are jailed.

October 15 Proudhon‘s ‘Poverty of Philosophy’ subtitled ‘The System of Economic Contradictions’ is published.

November 21-23  Bread riots in Tours are accompanied by the arrest of several members of workers’ unions such as Jean-François Béasse, Étienne Bonnin, Pierre Boucher, Louis Desmoulins and Eugene Vieillefond.

November 25 A potato riot takes place at Boulogne.

1847

January 13-14 Peasant riots in Buzançais (Indre) as starvation bites. A crowd seizes corn and one of them is killed by a landowner. Two of the landowners are then killed by the crowd. The government demands exemplary punishment. 26 villagers are arrested and tried between February 25 and March 4. three are condemned to death and executed on April 16. Four others are sentenced to a life of forced labour and 12 are given prison terms of five to ten years. Those jailed are freed during the 1848 Revolution.

April 26-29  Blanqui is tried at Blois for alleged involvement in the Buzançais corn riots and acquitted. But he refuses to be set free and remains in Blois, staying at a friend (Édouard Gouté) until February 25 1848 when he returns to Paris.

June 8  The democratic opposition, arguing for the extension of the suffrage, issue an initial manifesto prior to the Banquet Campaign. Having huge meals across France would enable them to get round the ban on holding political meetings by having speakers give highly political toasts.

June 27  The ‘Bakers’ Party’ riot takes place in Mulhouse after increases in bread prices. Several bakeries are pillages and several soldiers and police are hit by the crowd throwing stones. The troops open fire killing four people and wounding 11. The agitation goes on until August 9, when a trial of those arrested takes place.

July 9  2,200 people attend the first reformist banquet in the democratisation campaign held in the garden of Montmartre’s Château Rouge. Between July and December some 70 banquets are held throughout France.

July 18 Lamartine speaks at a literary banquet in Mâcon as part of the campaign.

August 31 – September 7 A week of working class riots break out in therue Saint-Honoré in Paris.

October 10 A meeting of 150 people in the office of Le Populaire votes in favour of the Icarian Constitution, and elect Cabet as their president with an Icarian Immigration Office

November 7 At a republican banquet in Lille, Alexandre Ledru-Rollin demands universal suffrage.

November 21 At a reformist banquet in Dijon, Ledru-Rollin proposes a toast to the sovereignty of the people and speaks about the symbols of ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité’. 

PLACES

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Key days in 1830

Chronology from Le Maitron of key dates in French labour history

Author: Stéphane Sirot, additional material by Michel Cordillot, René Lemarquis and Claude Pennetier with Steve Jefferys (italicised)

January 19 The first extreme cold period of the year that began on December 6 1829 ends.

February 7 The government decides to seize Algiers.

February 8 The second extreme cold period of the year that began on January 24 ends.

February 15 The Globe set up by Paul-François Dubois and Pierre Leroux becomes a daily.

February James Fazy and Antony Thouret‘s newspaper La Revolution first appears.

May 16 Charles X dissolves the Chamber of Deputies after 221 deputies voted against his ministers.

May 25 The French expeditionary force of 38,000 soldiers embarks at Toulon to attack Algiers.

June 23-July 19 The new elections give outright majority to the liberal opposition to Charles X with 274 deputies out of 428.

July 5 Algiers is taken and Algeria becomes a French colony. This colonisation without consulting the British leads their ambassador to not give support to Charles X during the July Revolution; the expedition also weakens the number of loyal troops based in and around Paris. The news reaches Paris on July 9.

July 25 Under Article 14 of the 1814 Constitutional Charter that allowed the King to rule by decree, Charles X signed four decrees at St Cloud to restrict press freedom to cut the number of voters (by excluding patents from the possessions that counted towards taxable wealth), to dissolve the new Chamber of Deputies and to set up a new reactionary government.

July 26 The new ordinances were published, sparking a protest letter signed by 44 journalists from 12 newspapers who met in the National office in the Rue St Marc. They included Leroux of the Saint-Simonian Le Globe and Thiers of the constitutional monarchist Le National. Four newspapers (Le National, Le Temps, Le Globe and Le Journal du commerce) decide to go ahead and publish the protest letter, Thousands of copies are then distributed in the streets.

July 27-28-29 The ‘Glorious Three days’. Barricades across Paris. Louis-Philippe replaced Charles X in August.

July 27 The Commerce Law Court declares the ordinances restricting the electorate of the merchant and commercial classes was contrary to the 1814 Charter and was not obligatory. In the printing districts a large number of print workers found themselves unemployed, and angry, unleashed a Paris-wide insurrection threatening the government and ministers. A big crowd gathered in the gardens of the Palais-Royal and are cleared by mounted troops. In the early afternoon, after troops killed one man and wounded three others, the first barricade was built in the Rue Saint-Honoré, turning over a builders’ rubble cart that had been waiting for the troops to pass.

That night barricades were built across Paris, using paving stones and tree trunks where they could be cut. Meanwhile Charles X’s new military commander, Marmont, the hated Duke of Raguse, dispersed his 15,000 troops to key places such as the Place du Carrousel, the Place Louis XVI (Concorde), the Bastille square, the Place Vendome and the Pont Neuf.

July 28 As Paris students, workers and shopkeepers armed themselves fighting took place near the Town Hall that Marmont attempted to retake, and in the Rue Saint-Denis and Rue Saint Martin in an effort to clear Rue St Honoré. By early afternoon the troops were cornered and fraternisation was beginning. But Charles X rejected proposals to negotiate.

The Town Hall was occupied and the fearful government ministers escaped back to the Tuileries Palace. At nightfall Marmont organised a difficult retreat to a defensive rectangle stretching from the Place de la Concorde to the Louvre, with the Rue St Honoré and the Seine its north and south limits. Altogether some 800 insurgents had been killed and 4,500 wounded in the fighting, while 200 soldiers were killed and 800 wounded.

Large numbers of Parisians spent the night building still more barricades which in some places were every 20 metres apart, making it very difficult for the troops to move their artillery. Eyewitnesses suggested after the event that there were 4,000 barricades built in total during the July revolution.

July 29 The Louvre, the Tuileries Palace, the Rue de Babylone barracks are all taken by the insurgents. Printworkers destroy the mechanical presses of the Royal Printworks. The kings’ troops retreat to the Bois de Boulogne. Lafayette is named commander of the National Guard (that had been dissolved in 1827). At the Town Hall he declares that ‘the Royal family has ceased to reign’.

July 30 The republican club called Friends of the People is set up by Étienne Arago, Auguste Blanqui and others as a response to the call made by the constitutional monarchists Laffitte, Thiers and nearly all the 50 deputies still in Paris for the Duke of Orleans to become the ‘lieutenant-general’ of France.

July 31 The last attempt to prevent Lafayette from transferring power to Louis-Philippe fails. Lafayette gives his support for the new Orleans monarchy from the balcony of the Town Hall.

August 7 The Chamber of Deputies voted 219 to 33 to offer the vacant throne to Louis-Philippe d’Orléans on condition that he undertakes to respect an amended 1814 Charter which he does at the Palais-Royal that evening.

August 9 The official proclamation of the establishment of the July Monarchy and Louis-Philippe 1 takes places two days at the Palais Bourbon in front of the two chambers of deputies and of lords.

August 14 The new Charter becomes law. The suffrage is extended to another 250,000 French men, of whom 58,000 pay the higher taxes required to become eligible to stand as a deputy.

July-November Strikes take place for higher wages and the reduction of the working day in Rouen, Darnetal, Paris, Roubaix and Limoges. Some printing and weaving machines are borken.

October 17-20 Considerable unrest in Paris breaks out as the trial of Charles X’s ministers is announced. Posters appear on the walls again in the workers’ districts inciting citizens to arm themselves to reconquer the rights they have again been denied. Demonstrators occupy the Palais-Royal and then march on the Vincennes Chateau where the four ministers were imprisoned.

November 4 Charles Philipon launches the weekly satirical newspaper La Caricature that becomes increasingly critical of the July Monarchy for failing to live up to its promises, and published many of Daumier’s drawings.

December 15-21 The trial of the ministers takes place before the Chamber of Lords at the Luxembourg Palace. They are sentenced to life imprisonment.

December 21-22 A new wave of poster proclamations aimed at ‘the People’ and calling on the workers’ districts to take action and demanding an elected assembly representing these districts renewable every year. Some very violent worker and student demonstrations take place followed by a large number of arrests.

Wikipedia

PLACES

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Key Dates 1816 – 1829

Chronology from Le Maitron of key dates in French labour history

Authors: Stéphane Sirot, additional material by Michel Cordillot, René Lemarquis et Claude Pennetier and Steve Jefferys (italicised)

1816

May 8 Divorce abolished (only to be re-established in 1884) by the ultraroyalist chamber of deputies elected in august 1815 by a majority of 225 to 11.

1817

January 8 An order forbidding introduction of black slaves into French colonies was issued

January/February Rural unrest as bread shortages and local famines hit the Brie and Champagne areas of France.

February 5 A new electoral law restricts the electorate to those who pay 300 francs in taxes, to about 90,000 men, and to become a deputy requires paying 1000 francs in taxes, limiting eligibility to about 15,000. Elections take place at meetings of electors who have constituted themselves as an Electoral College.

February 12 A law permits those suspected of plotting against the royal family or state security can be arrested and held without being taken to court.

April 1 The coalition powers agree to a reduction in the numbers of occupying soldiers from 150,000 to 120,000, reducing the cost of supporting them to the treasury.

June 8 An insurrection breaks out in Lyon and the surrounding area, leading to the first executions of workers on June 13.

September 20 Elections for the Chamber of Deputies see some liberal deputies elected and the formation of an Independent Party in the Chamber.

October Trials take place in Lyon of the Lyon workers arrested in June.

1818

March 20 A fire takes place at the Odeon Theatre.

October 20-26 Partial elections in which the Independents gain 20 seats.

November 30 The occupying troops leave France after it paid war indemnities,

1819

February 26 Weaving machines are destroyed in Vienne and later in the year at Mortagne and Limoux.

September 11-20 The liberals have some success in the elections

1820

February 13 Assassination of the Duke de Berry, King Louis XVIII’s nephew and son of the future Charles X provoking a government shift towards repression and the start of the second wave of White Terror. Censorship is reestablished and individual liberty suspended.

June 3 A 17-year-old student Nicolas Lallemand is killed by a palace guard in the Place du Carrousel during a demonstration against giving two votes to the tax payers who pay the most tax.

June 9 Lallemand’s funeral procession to Pere Lachaise cemetery was swollen to 6,000 people by large numbers of workers from the Saint-Antoine area.

August 19 The French Bazar conspirators of the Rue Cadet try to initiate a Bonapartist conspiracy, at the same time as in Lyon and Colmar.

1821

May 1 The French Carbonari movement is founded by Philippe Buchez, Saint-Arnand Bazard and Jacques-Thomas Flotard. Support for secret societies is in part a response to the gradual elimination of liberals in the National Assembly as the 1820 law of the double vote takes effect.

May 5 Napoleon dies on Saint Helena. The news reaches Paris on July 5.

December 24-28 A Carbonari insurrection is Saumur fails to take off.

France: Population is 30,461,875, of which Paris is 713,000 and the next two largest towns are Marseille with 116,000 and Lyon with 115,000.

1822

January 1 La Fayette arrives in Belfort but the Carbonari plan for an insurrection is discovered.

February 24 Carbonari insurrection led by General Berton fails at Thouars. His march on Saumur is stopped and he is executed on October 5.

Spring Charles Fourier published the first abridged 700-page version of his Grand Treatise, proposing the establishment of ideal communities and moved from Besancon to Paris with most of the 1,000 copies to sell them to as many people as possible. Initially only having a handful of followers, the Fourierist movement developed rapidly in the 1830s under the leadership of Victor Considerant.

March 19 Four sergeants based at La Rochelle are arrested for planning a Carbonari insurrection.

July 1-3 A Carbonari insurrection at Colmar aiming to release the Belfort prisoners and to bring Napoleon II to power, fails. It was led by Colonel Caron, who was executed in Strasbourg on October 1.

September 21 The Four Sergeants of La Rochelle are executed in the Place de Grève in front of the Paris Town Hall. The executions are witnessed by the young Auguste Blanqui.

1823

March 3-4 Jacques-Antoine Manuel, a minority liberal deputy and friend of Beranger, is thrown out of the Chamber of Deputies for opposing Louis XVIII’s proposed invasion of Spain to ‘restore a grandchild of Henry IV to the throne of Spain’ and with him, royal despotism. Some rioting in Paris followed.

1824

February 25 – March 6 The ultra royalist right secure 415 deputies out of 430 after rigged elections that follow the victory of the French army over the Spanish democratic movement.

August 6-8 A strike and demonstrations involving over 1,500 spinners at Houlmes, near Rouen, and neighbouring villages demands parity with wages and conditions in all the factories in the region.

September 16 Louis XVIII dies. Charles X becomes king.

1825

May 19 Death of Saint-Simon, author of the Catechism of Industrials and New Christianity. Few knew of them during his life, but his ideas were popularised by his disciples Olinde Rodrigues, Prosper Enfantin and Saint-Amand Bazard., who brought together between 1826 and 1830 a philosophical school comprising a brilliant and active group. Saint-Simon is buried at Pere Lachaise.

October 1 The first issue is published of the Saint-Simonian Producer journal, whose final issue is published on December 12.

November 30 Between 60,000 and 100,000 people attend the funeral of the former Napoloeonic General and liberal deputy Maximilien Sébastien Foy, who is buried at Pere Lachaise.

December 24 A strike takes place in the coal mines and mirror factories of Commentry in central France. This small town became the first in France to elect a socialist mayor in 1882, and hosted the September 1902 unity congress that created the short-lived Socialist Party of France with the merger of the ‘Marxist’ French Workers Party (POF) of Jules Guesde, with the Blanquiste Revolutionary Socialist Party of Eduard Vaillant and its semi-autonomous Revolutionary Communist Alliance led by Arthur Groussier.

1826

November 1 The Law Gazette appears for the first time.

1827

February 7 Nine miners are killed in a coal mine in Aniche.

March 30 The funeral of La Rochefoucault-Liancourt sparks a riot after the police charge the students carrying the casket in the Rue Saint-Honore, and it falls to the ground and breaks open.

April 29 A republican demonstration takes place against the new press censorship laws. The Parisian National Guard is disbanded.

August 24 Some 100,000 people attend the funeral of the liberal deputy Manuel who had earlier opposed the French army intervention to restore absolutism in Spain.

September The royalist Pierre Charnier founds the earliest Lyon mutual aid society among the silk weavers of Lyon. It watches prices and allows the master workers to support each other.

October 4 The French start fighting the Dey of Algiers following the alleged insult to the French consul on April 30.

November 17-20 After the electoral success of the opposition (180 government absolutism-supporting deputies are re-elected with an opposition of 170 liberals and 80 right/conservative deputies) violent demonstrations, met with severe repression, take place across France but especially in Paris. Many workers are killed and wounded. For the first time since the 17th century Fronde barricades appeared on the streets. Blanqui was shot in the neck on the corner of the Rue aux Ours and the Rue Quincampoix on November 19.

November 30 The Lyon Mutual Aid Society founded by Jacques Lacombe is authorised by the mayor.

1828

Bazard publishes the Doctrine of Saint-Simon. Buonarroti publishes in Brussels his historic Conspiracy of Equals. This action, and the success of this book, stimulate the emergence after 1830 of a communist neo-Babeufian movement that will inspire the secret societies of the first decade of the July Monarch, that will develop further during its second decade.

Journalists associated with ‘Young France’ and the La Tribune des départements which is launched the following year, becoming the official voice of the Rights of Man society, form a Republican Society.

1829

January 1 Gas lights are lit for the first time in the Rue de La Paix (10) and in the Place Vendôme.(4). By the end of the year 12 gas lights lit up the night at both the Place de l’Odeon and the Rue de Catiglione, as well as the galaries of the Palais Royal.

May 25-30 The ‘War of the Maidens’ (Guerre des Demoiselles) breaks out in the Ariège department in the Pyrennees in protest against the 1827 Forestry Code that prohibited peasants from collecting wood, cutting it and keeping their animals in pastures in the forests. The rebellion continued off and on for three years, and then sporadically until 1872.

June 8 The republican daily newspaper, La Tribune des départements, is published

December The newspaper Le Globe moves under the control of the Saint-Simonians under the influence of Pierre Leroux.

PLACES

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Key Dates 1795-1815

Chronology from Le Maitron of key dates in French labour history

Author: Stéphane Sirot, additional material by Michel Cordillot, René Lemarquis et Claude Pennetier and Steve Jefferys (italicised)

1795

April 1-2 A workers’ insurrection repressed in Paris.

May 20, May 23 Another workers’ insurrection in Paris ending in the Army occupying the militant Saint-Antoine district. The revolt is finally over after three days of fighting. The slogan of the revolutionaries was ‘Bread and the Constitution of Year 2‘.

December Workers strikes in Paris

1796

March 30 Gracchus Babeuf and his comrades establish the Insurrectionary Committee of the Equals. Sylvain Maréchal drafts the Manifesto of the Equals.

May 10 Babeuf, Buonarroti and 245 ‘Equals’ supporters arrested.

September 9, 10 Equals plot to win over the Grenelle soldiers for a revolution foiled. Many arrests.

October 10 30 of the Equals condemned to death by a military court.

1797

May 27 Babeuf and others in the Conspiracy of the Equals guillotined.

November 16 Carpenters strike in Paris

1798

September 19 110 inventors and industrialists participate in the opening ceremony of an Industrial Exhibition in the Champs de Mars organised under the 1795-1799 Directorate.

1799

November 9 Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte stages a Coup d’État that overthrows the Directorate and opens a period of social calm with regulations highly favourable to employers. This took place on the 18 Brumaire an VIII in the revolutionary calendar.

1802

December 24 Chambers of Commerce and Industry are created by the 1799-1804 Consulate that replaces the Directorate.

1803

April 12 A law is passed regulating work in factories and workshops and at the same time renewing the illegality of workers’ combinations.

December 1 The workers’ passbook (livret ouvrier) is introduced. It is a kind of identify passport that allows the police and employers to know the exact situation of each worker. Any worker travelling without their passbook is declared to be a vagabond and can be treated as such.

1804

March 21 The Civil Code (article 1781) states that in the case of a dispute about a worker’s salary the word of the master takes precedence over the worker’s statements in front of a tribunal. This article is only abolished in 1866. The Code provides for divorce, but within a marriage the wife is treated as a minor, and her property is given to her husband. On his death the property is divided equally between the children, abolishing the right of the oldest male child to inherit all the property.

December 2 Napoléon is crowned Emperor at Notre-Dame Cathedral by Pope Pius VII.

1808

March 18 Establishment of the first industrial tribunals called Conseils de prud’hommes (Wise Men Councils) to arbitrate where there were disputes between employers and their skilled workers. The first one appeared in Lyon.

1809

June 11 Decree passed to finalisie the 1806 Industrial Tribunal law.

1810

February 10, 22 A decree outlining a new Penal Code was passed into law. It codified all the penal laws passed between 1791 and 1800. Its articles 291, 292, 414, 415 and 416 required all associations of 20 or more people to secure government approval for their existence and confirmed the illegality of all combinations of workers aiming to stop work or modify wages.

1812

March 2 Hunger riots in Caen; an order is passed organising the distribution of 2 million soups.

1813

January 3 A decree fixes the minimum age a child can go down a mine to ten.

1814

March 31 Coalition armies enter Paris. Napoleon abdicates at Fontainebleau on April 5 in favour of his son, and then unconditionally on April 11.

May 3 Louis XVIII enters Paris.

June 4 Louis XVIII rejects the Constitutional Charter proposed by the Senate and issues his own. Instead of the Three Estates, it provides for a house of peers nominated by the King and an elected chamber of deputies, elected by approximately 100,000 men who pay over 300 francs a year in tax and are aged 31 or more. Only the King can propose laws and he can dissolve the chamber of deputies. Its eighth article states: ‘The French have the right to publish and to print their opinions, provided they confirm to laws making sure this freedom is not abused‘. But the Chartre also reaffirms that ‘complete authority over France rests in the person of the King‘ which is ‘inviolable and sacred‘. .

October Saint-Simon and his then secretary, Augustin Thierry publish De la réorganisation de la société européenne. It proposes the extension of English parliamentary rule under a constitutional monarch to every European state with a European parliament above them. It escapes the restoration censor, unlike its second edition.

1815

February 25 Napoléon Bonaparte leaves Elba for France.

June 18 Napoléon defeated at the Battle of Waterloo.

June 24 Napoléon leaves Paris.

July 8 Louis XVIII returns to Paris.

July 15 Napoléon surrenders to the English on the Bellerophon that sails for Plymouth

August 7 The Northumberland leaves for Saint-Helena with Napoléon on board. It arrives there on October 16.

November Pierre-Jean Béranger published his first book of songs, Chansons morales et autres in which he celebrated the victories of the Revolution and the Empire, attacked the ancien regime and the supremacy of the clergy.

December 7 Marshal Ney is executed in the Luxembourg Garden for having supported Napoléon during the 100 Days.

PLACES 1795-1815

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Key dates 1787-1794

Chronology from Le Maitron 1791-1794 of key dates in French labour history

Authors: Stéphane Sirot, additional material by Michel Cordillot, René Lemarquis et Claude Pennetier, and from 1787 to 1790 by Steve Jefferys

1787

May 25 Assembly of Notables called by Louis XVI to support his proposals to raise taxes and put pressure on the 13 local Parlements to endorse them was dissolved after failing to agree to them.

1788

May 5-6 Paris rioted when its Parlement was surrounded by troops after refusing to register the new tax laws and called for the King to call an Estates-General meeting.

1789

January 24 Louis XVI called for elections to the Estates-General, the only body with the power to advise the King to raise taxes directly.

April 28 After a candidate in the Paris elections argued that deregulating the price of bread would allow wage cuts a riot took place around his wallpaper factory and home in the Rue de Montreuil, during which some 25 people were killed by the troops.

May 5 The deputies from the nobility, clergy and Third Estate (everyone else) met in Versailles near the royal chateau.

June 17 The Third Estate deputies voted to declare themselves a National Assembly, representing the people of France.

June 20 After the King ordered the closure of the Assembly’s meeting place the delegates met in a nearby Tennis Court and swore ‘The Tennis Court Oath‘ not to disperse until they had agreed a new French Constitution.

July 13 After Louis XVI began to move troops into Paris, the new Paris Assembly of Voters and its Third Estate deputies decided to create a militia of male voters to defend order and their property.

July 14 When the militia were prevented from taking gunpowder from the Bastille fort/prison for the muskets they had seized from the Invalides shots were exchanged and a short siege took place before the Bastille governor surrendered.

August 4 The National Constituent Assembly passed the first of 19 decrees carried in just one week that ended the privileges of the nobility and went on to abolish taxes to be paid to the Church and then to end serfdom.

August 26 The Assembly passed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

October 5-6 After some 10,000 women marched from Paris to Versailles, under great pressure the royal family agreed to go back with them the next day to live in the Tuileries Palace in Paris.

1790

May 21 The Constituent Assembly established the Paris Commune with each of 48 administrative sections sending three delegates to the new municipal government, voted in by ‘active’ citizens – men aged 25 and over who paid taxes.

June 19 Hereditary peerage abolished by the Constituent Assembly.

July 12 A new Civil Constitution for the Clergy was passed, requiring the clergy to give an oath of fidelity to France.

1791

March 2, March 17 The Allarde Law outlaws corporations and proclaims the principles of the freedom of work, business and industry.

May 22, June 14 The Le Chapelier law outlaws combinations of tradespeople/workers and strikes.

July 20 All agreements on wages and prices are banned.

1792

June 20 The Parisian Sans-Culottes (trouser wearing workers) storm the Tuileries Palace and force King Louis XVI to wear the red phrygian bonnet.

August 10 The Sans-Culottes create a insurrectional commune (Paris government) invade the Tuileries Palace and overthrow the monarchy.

August 11 Universal suffrage is enacted by the Legislative Assembly.

1793

April 6 Committee of Public Safety established by the National Convention.

May 24 The Girondins arrest the ‘Enragés’ Jacques Hébert.

May 31 A Paris insurrection takes place against the Girondins.

July 27 Maximilien Robespierre is elected to the Committee of Public Safety.

September 5 The leader of the Enragés, Jacques Roux, is arrested.

1794

March 13, March 24 The remaining Enragés leaders, known as Hébertists, are arrested, tried and then executed.

July 28 Robespierre is executed in the Place de la Concorde.

PLACES 1791-1794

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Daniel Stern (Marie d’Agoult)

1805-1876 • Germany

Romantic author • Historian

Places Map

Daniel Stern, her pseudonym, was a republican whose salon was visited by Marx in 1844. She lived with Lizst and wrote the History of the 1848 Revolution.

More info

Wikipedia

DANIEL STERN PLACES

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Ouvrier Albert / Alexandre Martin

1815 – 1895 • France

Revolutionary • Socialist

Places Map

Alexandre Martin, known to everyone in Paris as the ‘Worker’ Albert, was the first working class man to enter a French Government in February 1848.

Revolutionary and socialist, ‘Worker Albert’ served on the 1848 Labour Commission before being jailed in May 1848.

Locations

  • 15, rue Neuve-de-Ménilmontant (now rue de Commines). In 1839 Albert lived here when he was one of the leaders of the Four Seasons Club organised by Blanqui and Barbes, .
  • 131, rue Vieille-du-Temple Albert was arrested in January 1841 after the assassination attempt on Louis-Philippe on 15 October 1840, when he lived at this address. finding communist pamphlets at the house he was jailed for a month for belong to a Communist club.
  • 64 rue Léon Frot. Albert worked in the button manufacturer Batperosses from 1845 to 1848.
  • 11 rue des Bourdonnais. Offices of ‘Reform’ journal and meeting place on 21 February 1848 of republicans about their attitude to the ban on the Paris banquet. Albert attended as did at least two police spies. On 24 February this was where a left list for the government was drawn up. Albert’s name was added when the offices were invaded by a delegation of workers was there along with those of Ledru-Rollin and Louis Blanc.
  • Luxembourg Palace. On February 28 the Luxembourg Commission was established and moved in. It included Albert and Louis Blanc as well as Victor Considerant, a follower of Fourier. One of the police spies was arrested in Albert’s office in the palace on March 14 1848.
  • 10 place de l’ Hôtel de Ville. Paris Town Hall. On 15 May 1848 among the demonstrators who seized the Town Hall were Albert, Blanqui, Louis Blanc, Cabet, Pierre Leroux and Raspail, Shortly afterwards they were evicted by the still selective (wealthier) National Guard on the orders of Ledru-Rollin and Lamartine. Raspail was arrested at about 6 pm and transferred to the Vincennes Prison.

More Info / Plus d’informations

Wikipedia
Maitron
Paris révolutionnaire

OUVRIER ALBERT PLACES