page_title: Armand Barbès
section_title: The treason of Barbès
hierarchical_section_title: Armand Barbès / The treason of Barbès
caption_attribution_description: English: Armand Barbès (1809 - 1870), french politician, Republican revolutionary. Français&#160;: Armand Barbès (1809 - 1870), homme politique français, républicain révolutionnaire.
context_page_description: Armand Barbès was a French Republican revolutionary and a fierce and steadfast opponent of the July monarchy. He is remembered as a man whose life centers on two days:
  12 May 1839, the day of the uprising in which the Republicans tried to overthrow the king, Louis Philippe. His ill-considered actions on this day led to a sentence of life imprisonment; he was, however, released by the revolution of 1848; and
  15 May 1848, the day when demonstrators invaded the Assemblée Nationale, where Barbès had been serving, for only about three weeks, as a deputy. The demonstrators' ostensible aim was to urge the government to exercise whatever influence it could in support of the liberation of Poland. Things got out of hand, however, and Barbès got caught up in what was perceived to be a coup d'état through the imposition of a provisional government.
  Barbès was again imprisoned, but he was pardoned by Napoleon III in 1854. He fled into exile in the Netherlands, where he died on 26 June 1870, only weeks before the end of the Second Empire in France.
  A most colorful character, he was nicknamed the Bayard of Democracy, presumably in honor of the chevalier, Pierre Terrail, seigneur de Bayard.
context_section_description: Released from prison in 1848, Barbès seemed to his contemporaries to be obsessed with thwarting Blanqui. Elected to the Constituent Assembly of 23 April 1848, Barbès, at the extreme left of the chamber, represented his native department of Aude. His parliamentary career was brief, however, since, on 15 May, demonstrators invaded the Assembly, under the pretext of presenting a petition urging the government to become more involved in the liberation of Poland. Barbès, initially opposed the demonstration, and he tried to disperse the crowd, but he seemed to lose his head when he saw Auguste Blanqui in the assembly chamber.
  In an effort to seize the demonstration as a tool to bludgeon his enemy, he sparked a riot in front of the city hall, where a new, and more radical, republic was proclaimed. The insurgency was 'deflated' by itself when National Guard arrived to stop Barbes. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in April 1849 by the High Court of Justice, after he was found guilty of two major charges, an attack that aimed to overthrow the government, and incitement to civil war.
  Later, Karl Marx wrote in Class Struggles in France: "On 12 May [1848, the proletariat] sought unsuccessfully to regain its revolutionary influence, but only managed to deliver to the bourgeoisie's jailers their most energetic leaders." Modern historians have been even less kind: George Duveau, the historian, described the event as a "tragic and absurd farce which had, from the beginning, no prospect of success".
  Barbès showed an indomitable courage and chivalry, a taste for sacrifice, and an acceptance of his responsibilities.  This certainly explains the charisma that was undeniably his; this view was common to all of his contemporaries, even his opponents. There is, nonetheless, an element of irrationality in the man that defies analysis, a "mythe Barbès" that continues to fascinate readers of history.
  Sentenced to life imprisonment in 1849, Barbès was released by Napoleon III in 1854. However, he never returned to France. He had spent all but a few weeks of the previous fifteen years in confinement as a political prisoner. He realized that returning to French society would only tempt him to further political intrigues, so he withdrew into voluntary exile at the Hague, where he died on 26 June 1870, aged 60, just weeks before the Second Empire fell, the event that would, no doubt, have delighted him beyond all else.
  He is buried in the private domain of Fourtou at Villalier, Aude.
caption: Photograph of Armand Barbès in Holland, 1869
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