The Unexpectedly Peaceful French Revolution of 1848
By: Peter Lang
Tags: France, History, Revolution

Lamartine in front of the Town Hall of Paris rejects the red flag on 25 February 1848 By Henri Félix Emmanuel Philippoteaux, Public Domain

By Paul Ewenstein, Ph.D., author of the forthcoming Realism and Revolution: Why (Some) Revolutionary States Go to War

Perhaps no modern revolution initially appeared more alarming than the one that took place in France in 1848. The wars following the great revolution of 1789 had convulsed Europe for a generation, so when the Second Republic was proclaimed, the continent held its breath. Conservatives dreaded and radicals dreamed that once more, the conquering armies of the levee en mass would march forth, an outcome that only appeared more likely when the revolutionary wave spread across Europe. As revolts engulfed Vienna, Berlin, Rome and many other cities, the great battle between monarchy and republicanism seemed to be at hand.

The leaders of the old order certainly thought so. Prince Metternich of Austria anticipated the outbreak of war within days, predicting, “France will become a vast camp of anarchy. Moderate democracy is in that country a dream, a snare, a phrase.”[i] Many of the German states including Prussia mobilized their armies, while Tsar Nicholas of Russia is said to have informed his officers of the revolution by declaring, “Saddle your horses, gentlemen, a republic has been proclaimed in France.”[ii] Nor was it only the champions of absolutism who felt this way. British foreign secretary Viscount Palmerston was “Revolted by the thought of ‘A nation of thirty-three millions… despotically governed by eight or nine men who are the mere subordinates of 40,000 or 50,000 of the scum of the fauborgs of Paris.’”[iii]

This alarm stemmed from both the history of French revolutions and the ideology of this particular one. The revolutionaries’ adoption of universal manhood suffrage shocked even many liberals,[iv] and more alarming still, the provisional government contained not only republicans but socialists such as Louis Blanc. Blanc and other leading members of the French left wing had criticized the pacific foreign policy of the July Monarchy and wanted the Second Republic to actively support republican revolutions abroad. Even more than in 1789, Paris became a gathering place for nationalist agitators from across Europe, some of whom, abetted by elements within the French government, mounted armed expeditions into Poland, Savoy, and Belgium.

In spite of these provocations, France didn’t go to war in 1848, an unexpected outcome that reveals an important truth about the nature of post-revolutionary conflict. Although many revolutionary wars have proven to be prolonged and bloody, they generally began with the belief that the revolutionary state was an easy target for either regime change or territorial predation. That wasn’t the case with France, not after the experience of 1792. Then, an advisor to the King of Prussia had written, “The comedy will not last long. The army of lawyers will be annihilated in Belgium and we shall be home by the autumn,”[v] but now all of Europe knew better. While the Austrians and Prussians had only mobilized 110,000 soldiers to invade the First Republic, the Tsar planned to send 300,000 to contain the second.[vi] However, he and his monarchial counterparts, preoccupied with internal problems and knowing the high price of such a conflict, preferred to avoid war unless it was absolutely necessary. Louis Blanc argued that “Whether taught by experience or paralyzed by internal difficulties, even the governments most hostile to it [the French Republic] gave no sign of a disposition to attack, if not attacked.”[vii]

The French didn’t launch such an attack. This wasn’t due to a lack of motivation; not only was the new government keen to see republicanism spread across Europe, it was dissatisfied with the territorial status quo. Most Frenchmen regarded the final 1815 settlement of the Congress of Vienna, which had returned their country to its pre-1789 borders, as a humiliation and the left-wing press called for a new people’s war to overturn it.

Yet continuing domestic unrest supplied a powerful reason for France to avoid war. Although the revolution seemed radical to much of Europe, it didn’t go far enough for the poor of Paris and their sympathizers, who wanted to address not merely political questions but social and economic ones as well.[viii] After the election of a Constituent Assembly dominated by free market liberals, tensions in the capital escalated, brought to a boiling point by the issue of the National Workshops. The provisional government had opened them in order to supply jobs to the unemployed masses of Paris but the taxes that funded the program were unpopular and when the assembly closed the workshops, a major uprising followed. The so-called June Days killed over 1,500 soldiers and 5,000 rebels, with thousands of other suspected insurrectionaries deported to Algeria.[ix]

For the provisional government’s Executive Committee, this class warfare was more important than mounting an expedition against foreign enemies. In his history of the revolution, Foreign Minister Lamartine explained “Foreign affairs could wait without inconvenience until France was calmed.”[x] Rather than confronting the rest of Europe, he issued a statement declaring that the Second Republic didn’t desire conflict with any other power, making the case that “Monarchy and republicanism are not, in the eyes of wise statesmen, absolute principles, arrayed in deadly conflict against each other.”[xi]

Though the new government could not, in the face of popular hostility, express approval for the treaties of 1815, neither did it challenge them. Instead, it declared that although it didn’t recognize their legal force, it had chosen to abide by them anyway. This might have been doubletalk, but it avoided the war that would surely have followed any attempt to regain the cherished “natural borders” of the First Republic. The monarchies of Europe returned the favor, drawing a distinction between rhetoric and action. They may have derided the Second Republic and denounced its support for foreign radicals, but neither did they use that support as a pretext for war.

This peace didn’t last. The adoption of a revisionist foreign policy, not the perception of vulnerability, is the most important predictor of long-term international conflict for revolutionary states, and that was what happened here. The victor in France’s post-revolutionary struggles was Louis Napoleon, nephew of the great conqueror, and although domestically, his Second Empire advocated moderation and order, its foreign relations proved contentious. The emperor was convinced that nationalism was destined to reshape the map of Europe and he aimed to help this process along, even when such changes required violence. He also felt that a Bonaparte had to cover himself in military glory in order to rule, and over the next 22 years, these two beliefs would lead France into a series of wars: with the Roman Republic, Russia, Austria, Mexico, and, finally and fatally, Prussia. In 1848, however, all of those conflicts lay in the future. At that time of its revolution, France was too powerful for the crowned heads of Europe to attack and too distracted by its internal problems to invade them in turn, subverting the almost universal expectations of another major war.