In the Chamber two major factions emerged, known by the rather imprecise labels right-centre and left-centre. The former group, led by the historian François Guizot, shared the king’s political doctrines; it saw the revised Charter of 1814 as an adequate instrument of government that needed no further change. The left-centre, whose ablest spokesman was the kingmaker Adolphe Thiers, saw 1830 as the beginning rather than the culmination of a process of change. It favoured restricting the king’s active role and broadening the suffrage to include the middle strata of the bourgeoisie. These differences of viewpoint, combined with the king’s tendency to intrigue, contributed to chronic political instability during the 1830s.
The decade of the 1830s was marked also by repeated challenges to the regime by its enemies on the right and the left and by a series of attempts to assassinate the king. Both the ultras (who now came to be called Legitimists) and the republicans refused to forgive “the usurper” of 1830. In 1832 the duchesse de Berry, mother of “the miracle child,” landed clandestinely in southern France in an effort to spark a general uprising; but the scheme collapsed, and most Legitimists withdrew into sullen opposition. More serious was the agitation in the cities. Economic distress led to the November 1831 insurrection in Lyon, in which armed workers seized control of the city for a week. In June 1832 a republican demonstration in Paris drew 100,000 participants. Again in 1834 there were serious disturbances in Lyon and Paris that had to be put down by the army. In 1836 it was the turn of the Bonapartist pretender to challenge the regime. Since Napoleon’s death in 1821, a legend had taken shape around his name. No longer detested as a ruthless autocrat who had sacrificed a generation of young Frenchmen on the battlefield, he became transmuted into the Little Corporal who had risen to the heights by his own talents and had died a victim of British jealousy. The emperor’s nephew Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte presented himself as the true heir; he crossed the frontier in 1836 and called on French troops in Strasbourg to join his cause. The venture failed ignominiously, as did also a second attempt on the Channel coast in 1840. Louis-Napoléon was condemned to prison for life but managed in 1846 to escape to England. Interspersed with these attempts at political risings were individual attacks on the king’s person; the most elaborate of these plots was the one organized by a Corsican named Giuseppe Fieschi in 1835.
By 1840, however, the enemies of the regime had evidently become discouraged, and a period of remarkable stability followed. François Guizot emerged as the key figure in the ministry; he retained that role from 1840 to 1848. One of the first Protestants to attain high office in France, Guizot possessed many of the moral and intellectual qualities that marked the small but influential Protestant minority. Hardworking and intelligent, Guizot was devoted to the service of the king and to the defense of the status quo. He was convinced that the wealthy governing class was an ideal natural elite to which any Frenchman might have access through talent and effort. To those who complained at being excluded by the property qualification for voting and seeking office, Guizot’s simple reply was “Enrichissez-vous!” (“Get rich!”). His government encouraged the process by granting railway and mining concessions to its bourgeois supporters and by contributing part of the development costs. High protective tariffs continued to shelter French entrepreneurs against foreign competition. The result was an economic boom during the 1840s, beginning the transformation of France from a largely rural society into an industrial one.
François Guizot, 1855.Archives Photographiques, Paris
Guizot shared with Louis-Philippe a strong preference for a safe and sane foreign policy. The king, from the beginning of his reign, had cautiously avoided risks and confrontations and had especially sought friendly relations with Britain. In 1830, when the revolution in Paris inspired the Belgians to break away from Dutch rule, Louis-Philippe avoided the temptation of seeking to annex Belgium or of placing one of his sons on the Belgian throne. Again in 1840, when a crisis flared up in the Middle East and Thiers (then head of the government) took an aggressive stance that threatened to coalesce all of Europe against France, the king had found an excuse to replace his firebrand minister. Guizot continued this cautious line through the 1840s, with the single exception of an episode in Spain. A long contest involving rival suitors for the Spanish queen’s hand finally tempted Guizot, in 1846, to try for a cheap diplomatic victory; it infuriated the British and helped to destroy the Anglo-French entente. One problem Guizot inherited from his predecessors was that of Algeria. Since 1830 the French had maintained an uneasy presence there, wavering between total withdrawal and expanded conquest. The decision to remain had been made in the mid-1830s; during the Guizot era, Thomas-Robert Bugeaud" class="md-crosslink">General Thomas-Robert Bugeaud used brutal methods to break Algerian resistance, pushed the native population back into the mountains, and began the process of colonizing the rich coastal plain. The Second Republic and Second Empire revolution of 1848" class="md-crosslink">The revolution of 1848
The overthrow of the constitutional monarchy in February 1848 still seems, in retrospect, a puzzling event. The revolution has been called a result without a cause; more properly, it might be called a result out of proportion to its cause. Since 1840 the regime had settled into a kind of torpid stability; but it had provided the nation with peace abroad and relative prosperity at home. Louis-Philippe and his ministers had prided themselves on their moderation, their respect for the ideal of cautious balance embodied in the concept of juste-milieu. France seemed to be arriving at last at a working compromise that blended traditional ways with the reforms of the Revolutionary era.
There were, nevertheless, persistent signs of discontent. The republicans had never forgiven Louis-Philippe for “confiscating” their revolution in 1830. The urban workers, moved by their misery and by the powerful social myths engendered by the Revolution of 1789, remained unreconciled. For a decade or more they had been increasingly drawn toward socialism in its various utopian forms. An unprecedented flowering of socialist thought marked the years 1830–48 in France: this was the generation of the Saint-Simonians (followers of utopian thinker Henri de Saint-Simon [1760–1825]) and of Charles Fourier, Auguste Blanqui, Louis Blanc, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Étienne Cabet, and many others. Most of these system builders preached persuasion rather than violence, but they stimulated the hopes of the common man for an imminent transformation of society. Women also began to question existing social arrangements; the first French feminist groups grew out of the Saint-Simonian movement in 1831–32. Within the bourgeoisie as well, there was strong and vocal pressure for change in the form of a broadening of the political elite. Bills to extend the suffrage (and the right to hold office) to the middle bourgeoisie were repeatedly introduced in parliament but were stubbornly opposed by Guizot. Even the National Guard, that honour society of the lesser bourgeoisie, became infected with this mood of dissatisfaction.
Other factors, too, contributed to this mood. In 1846 a crop failure quickly developed into a full-scale economic crisis: food became scarce and expensive; many businesses went bankrupt; unemployment rose. Within the governing elite itself there were signs of a moral crisis: scandals that implicated some high officials of the regime and growing dissension among the notables. Along with this went a serious alienation of many intellectuals. Novelists such as Victor Hugo, George Sand, and Eugène Sue glorified the common man; the caricaturist Honoré Daumier exposed the foibles of the nation’s leaders; and historians such as Jules Michelet and Alphonse de Lamartine wrote with romantic passion about the heroic episodes of the Great Revolution.