ABSTRACT
Classic interpretations of the overthrow of Louis-Philippe all view the 1848 revolution in France as a phase in a long-term revolutionary process which began in 1789. Daniel Stern1 claimed that February 1848 was not the result of an accident or a surprise, but rather the natural consequence of the legacy of the eighteenth century which had given the educated classes freedom of political thought and the working classes freedom of political action. This set in motion forces for democracy, rationalism and social inclusion which undermined monarchical, Catholic and aristocratic society. Alfred Delvau2 maintained that the great work of the revolution, which the overthrow of Robespierre had effectively interrupted in July 1794, had been briefly renewed in July 1830, only to be interrupted again by the bourgeoisie’s betrayal of the brave and heroic people of Paris through the establishment of the July monarchy. However, the revolutionary tradition was revived in February 1848 with the abdication of Louis-Philippe and the proclamation of the Second Republic. For Alexis de Tocqueville,3 the period from 1789 to 1830 had witnessed a struggle to the death between the Ancien Régime and the New France of the bourgeoisie, a struggle which the bourgeoisie had won through the revolution of 1830. However, the bourgeoisie and bourgeois values had thereafter so dominated the July monarchy of Louis-Philippe as to provoke a reaction in the form of a new struggle, this time between those who owned property and those who did not. Karl Marx4 similarly interpreted the revolution of 1789 as a class struggle between the feudal aristocracy and its allies on the one hand and the capitalist bourgeoisie on the other. The revolution of 1830 for Marx, though, witnessed the triumph of just one section of the bourgeoisie, the financial aristocracy of bankers, capitalists, railway barons and wealthy landowners. After 1830 this class pursued its self-enrichment with such greed, ruthlessness and success that the economic crisis which began in 1845 eventually provoked the explosion of February 1848 in which all of France’s other social classes united to overthrow the rule of the financial aristocracy. Once the revolution had begun, the traditions of past revolutions weighed ‘like a nightmare on the minds of the living’. The revolutionaries of 1848, however, ended up just parodying the revolutionaries of 1789-99, ‘For it was only the ghost of the old revolution which walked in the years from 1848 to 1851’.5 Thus the great events and characters of the revolutionary decade 1789-99 were re-enacted during the Second Republic not as tragedy, but as farce. While intending ridicule, Marx was also indicating the crucial role of historical memory and of political culture.
