ABSTRACT
This chapter recounts the process leading up to the infamous June Days, which saw the deaths of thousands of Parisians. Often interpreted as being motivated by hunger, they were the culmination of a confrontation between two conceptions of republicanism. After the failure of the demonstration on 15 May, the Assembly and the Parisian crowd found themselves face to face, with no intermediary body. The gap between the two quickly widened. Deprived of the means of representation, the Parisian workers invented new, autonomous ways of asserting their political identity, through radical newspapers and a new Workers’ Committee, with a single slogan: the democratic and social Republic. Led by the most conservative deputies, who repeated that ‘it must end’, the Assembly undertook to close the National Workshops and empty Paris of its unemployed. What followed was an uprising in defence of social-democratic republicanism. It was brutally repressed by General Cavaignac, in the name of the republic.
