ABSTRACT
The proclamation of a Republic in Paris evoked an extraordinary variety and intensity of emotion both in France and throughout Europe, emotion which ranged from the deepest alarm and anxiety to the most extravagant hopefulness and enthusiasm. The young Prince de Broglie, then a diplomat in Rome, was one of those who heard the news with alarm: ‘Country, family, honour,’ he wrote later, ‘ambition, interests, personal security all seemed to be threatened at once and to fall engulfed in the same abyss. Men could think only of 1793. The Republic meant bloodshed, confiscation, terror and war.’1 All those who had possessions were indeed anxious. Within a week, more than 1300 English people had hurried home. Business, already slack, came almost to a standstill; unemployment increased and there were outbreaks of machine smashing. Stocks fell; rich people sold their effects, while at the same time there was a run upon banks, many of which were obliged to suspend payment; even the gold reserve in the Bank of France sank to such a low level that on 1 March 1848 dealings in paper money had to be stopped. This was one side of the picture, the gloomy side. On the other we see an extraordinary Romantic ebullience manifest in many ways: in the sudden emergence of workers’ corporations and of clubs-no less than 450 appeared within a month in Paris and its suburbs, clubs with names that echoed those of the Great Revolution, clubs of Jacobins and Montagnards, and clubs for the emancipation of European peoples or of the feminine sex; in an abundance of banquets, banquets of ‘the Federation of European Peoples’, of the ‘Friends of Poland’, of ‘Democratic Women’, of ‘Les travailleurs de la pensée’ and a hundred more, banquets which always ended with some resounding toast-‘To the Mountain of 1793’—‘To Mistrust, sister of Vigilance’—‘To Jesus Christ’—‘To democratic Germany’—‘To Jean-Jacques Rousseau’—‘To the oppressed peoples’—and to many others; in the spate of newspapers and pamphlets which poured forth as soon as the new rulers abolished the stamp duty and removed the restrictions imposed by the law of 1835 on the liberty of the Press, papers and pamphlets which abounded not with news but with social and political programmes and doctrinaire declarations; in the planting of Trees of Liberty and their blessing by the clergy-for the Church, too, had been swept by liberal enthusiasms since the election in 1846 of a Liberal Pope; and in the cult of ‘the people’, as instanced by the opening words of the preamble to the Government’s proclamation of 26th February announcing its intention to abolish the death penalty: ‘The Provisional Government, convinced that generosity is the supreme part of policy and that each revolution effected by the French people owes it to the world to consecrate yet one more philosophic truth, considering that there is no principle more sublime than that of the inviolability of human life; considering that, in the memorable days in which we are living, not a cry of vengeance has arisen from the mouth of the people….’2 In short, among the people, the gens du peuple of Paris, Limoges, Rouen and elsewhere, the
Revolution was hailed as the dawn of a new era. It was not long before their hopes were to be bitterly disappointed.
