The rise of Republicanism, Socialism and Feminism. Key dates
The 1830 July Revolution transformed a generation and the next two hundred years of French history.
Many of the largely young men and women who had risen up against Charles X and absolutism lived the rest of their lives with the certainty that revolutionary change was possible. They knew that direct action by the few and supported by the many could change the course of history.
If the Bourbon family dynasty whose first king had been crowned in 1272 could be overthrown by popular revolt, then why couldn’t women achieve equality with men?
Why couldn’t wealth and privilege be abolished? Why couldn’t both political and economic democracy replace elite rulers everywhere?
The next eighteen years saw Paris become the centre of European left thinking. The great left movements of the later 19th and most of the 20th centuries, women’s liberation, mass unionism, communist utopianism, insurrectionism, internationalism, anarchism and socialism, were all conceived and theorised in Paris during these electrically charged two decades.
Bakunin, Blanc, Blanqui, Buronarroti, Buchez, Cabet, Engels, Leroux, Marx, Proudhon, Roland, Sand, Tristan and Veret-Gay along with thousands of lesser known social optimists from Paris, France and the whole of Europe met and discussed together how the world could be made better now it was clear that the old order could and should be overthrown.
From revolution to repression
On August 7 1830 Louis-Philippe agreed to a new Constitutional Charter. This promised freedom of the press and declared that censorship would never be re-established. Within weeks there was an explosion of papers with political cartoons.
On November 4 1830 Charles Philipon launched a weekly newspaper, La Caricature, whose four pages of text were accompanied by two of lithographs.
A month later the government reacted. On December 4 1830 it restored the stamp duty tax on newspapers and re-introduced censorship. Philipon’s response in the Foam of July cartoon above showed Louis-Philippe blowing bubbles of many of the unfulfilled promises in the Charter: popular elections, mayoral elections, an end to ‘jobs for the boys’.
Philipon was acquitted for this cartoon but was arrested again. On November 14 1831 he first drew Louis-Philippe as an image transformed into a pear. He was jailed for a year in January 1832 at Sainte-Pelagie prison, where he was joined by Daumier for his cartoon, Gargantua.
The Orléans monarchy deceived those who had hoped the relatively bloodless July Revolution would lead to a constitutional monarchy and deeply angered the Republicans who had been sceptical from the outset. At the same time, industrialisation was beginning to transform small bits of France, particularly its major towns and Paris. The scene was being set for the re-emergence of French radical republicanism and its more edgy components, socialist and feminist thought and organisation.
The slow growth of an increasingly impoverished urban working class, the much more rapid growth of a wealthy upper class of merchants, financiers and of the lawyers on whom they depended, coupled with the spread of literacy and connectivity through railway travel all occurred against living memories of revolutionary democracy, secularism and of Napoleonic modernity.
The young who had been the first to support the insurrection and even to die in 1830 were the first to experience disillusion. The change of King had neither removed aristocratic privilege nor did it guarantee a free critical press.
Many workers were resisting the commodification of their lives that followed the development of huge workplaces in which they had no rights to collectively resist or to make collective demands.
Many young middle and working class women not only experienced the same disenfranchisement that their male peers did, but considered that the enlightenment and French Revolutionary calls for full male franchise, freedom and democracy should also apply to their gender.
