THE Revolution of 1848 in France was extraordinarily swift, entirely unexpected, and extremely radical. "Though the February Revolution," says de Tocqueville, "was of all our revolutions the shortest and the least sanguinary, yet far more than any other it filled the minds and hearts of men with the idea and feeling of its omnipotence." Beginning as a moderate demand for a larger electorate, it soon passed far beyond this into the realm of the new and the uncertain. A revolution of three days, it was made without premeditation, without definite plan or accredited leaders. The day of the 24th of February was made. memorable by events crowding upon each other with irresistible pressure. On the morning of that day there was no public demand for a republic; by sunset a republic, the second in the history of France, had been proclaimed. This spectacular outcome was the one least imagined, as it had seemed for the past few years that the republican party which had so troubled Louis Philippe's early years as king was now moribund. Suddenly under the pressure of circumstances it awoke, and, though the party of a small Parisian minority, it won the triumphs of the day and established its régime.

The Second Republic lasted nominally nearly five years, from February 24, 1848, to December 2, 1852, when the Second Empire was proclaimed. Practically, however, as we shall see, it came to an end one year earlier, December 2, 1851. During this period the state was administered successively by the Provisional Government, chosen on February 24th, and remaining in power for about ten weeks, then for about a year by the National Constituent Assembly, which framed the Constitution of the Republic, and then by the President and Legislative Assembly, created by this constitution. The history of the Republic was to be a very troubled one.

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The Provisional Government was from the first composed of two elements. The larger number, led by Lamartine, were simply Republicans, desirous of a republican form of government in place of the monarchical. "I regard the republican government," says Lamartine, "that is to say, the government of peoples by their own reason and their own will, as the sole aim and the sole end of the great civilizations, as the sole means of realizing the great general truths that a people desires to inaugurate in its laws. Other forms of government are states of tutelage, confessions of the eternal minority of peoples, imperfections in the sight of philosophy, humiliations in the sight of history." The other element of the Provisional Government was represented by Louis Blanc, Flocon, Albert, men who believed in a republic, but as a means to an end, and that end a social, economic revolution; men who wished primarily to improve the condition of the laboring classes, to work out in actual laws and institutions the socialistic theories propounded with such effectiveness during the later years of the reign of Louis Philippe, and particularly the principles represented in Louis Blanc's famous phrase, "the right to labor." What these men most desired was not a mere political change, but a thoroughgoing reconstruction of society in the interest of the largest and weakest class, the poor, the wage-earners. Blanc's conception of the republic he thus expressed: "It has always been my opinion that the republican form of government is not the sole object to be aimed at, even by politicians of the republican school, if their love for the commonwealth be sincere and disinterested. I believed then, as I do now, that the chief end to be kept in view is to make him that works enjoy the fruits of his work; to restore to the dignity of human nature those whom the excess of poverty degrades; to enlighten those whose intelligence, from want of education, is but a dim, vacillating lamp in the midst of darkness; in one word, to enfranchise the people, by endeavoring to abolish this double slavery, ignorance and misery." Blanc was a convinced Socialist, intelligent and thoughtful. The interests of the working classes constituted, in his opinion, the supreme problem of government. He wished to replace private property by public property in the interest of the greater number. He would do this by co-operative societies. Production should not be carried on by capitalists, employing laborers

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1 Quotations are from Dickinson, Revolution ana Reaction in Modern France, pp. 176, 178.

for wages and retaining profits for themselves. The laborers should manage the various industries themselves, reaping whatever rewards there were. To start these co-operative societies the aid of the state, furnishing capital, would be necessary. But in the end, gradually and without violence, the whole process of production would be transferred from the control of the few to that of the many.

A scheme so novel and so opposed to the habits and institutions of the ages was bound to be misconceived and misrepresented. Believers in the existing order would denounce every economic change as robbery; believers in change would be more dominated by passion, by hatred of the rich, by a desire for a division of property, than by moderate or equitable plans of economic reform.

The Provisional Government, divided as it was into Socialists and Anti-Socialists, ran the risk of all coalitions, that of being reduced to impotence by internal dissensions, as was to be immediately shown. Certain great reforms were, however, carried with practical unanimity. The death penalty for political offenses was abolished. Universal suffrage was proclaimed, and thus political power passed suddenly from the hands of about two hundred thousand privileged wealthy persons to over nine million electors. Negro slavery throughout the French colonies was abolished, as it had been in the first French Revolution. The freedom of the press was established, as were the freedom of public meeting and association and the right of all citizens to become members of the National Guard. The results were almost instantaneous and completely changed the character of political life in Paris. Newspapers and party pamphlets, sold cheaply, appeared in profusion, expressing the most varied and in many cases most radical ideas, and influencing far greater numbers than the French press had previously done. Political clubs, similar to those of the Revolution, were opened and formed additional clearing-houses for opinion and debate, and the National Guard rose in a few weeks from 50,000 to about 200,000. In other words, the masses of Parisian workmen now had weapons in the hand, as members of the Guard, and means of self-expression and propaganda in clubs and newspapers.

Conflicts between the two great currents of opinion began on the very day of the proclamation of the Republic. Armed workmen came in immense numbers to the Hôtel de Ville and demanded that henceforth the banner of France should be the red flag, emblem of Socialism. Lamartine repelled this demand

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in a brilliant speech. "You desire," he said, "to replace a revolution marked by unanimity and fraternity with one of revenge and suffering. You demand that the Government raise as a sign of peace the standard of war to the bitter end among citizens of the same country. Never will I sign such a decree. I will repel to the last moment of my life this bloody flag, and you ought to reject it more than I, for the red flag has never been borne elsewhere than around the Champ-de-Mars, imbrued with the blood of the people in 1791 and 1793, while the tricolor has made the circuit of the world with the name, the glory, and the liberty of France." Lamartine's eloquence was overwhelming. The workmen themselves stamped upon the red flag.

But the Government, achieving an oratorical victory, saw itself forced to yield to the Socialist party in two important respects. On motion of Louis Blanc, it recognized the so-called right to labor." It promised work to all citizens, and as a means to this end it established, against its own real wishes, the famous National Workshops. Blanc demanded that a Ministry of Progress be established, to organize co-operative associations of the kind which he had advocated. But, instead, the Government established a Labor Commission, with Blanc at its head and with its place of meeting the Luxembourg Palace. This was a mere debating society, a body to investigate economic questions and report to the Government. It had no power of action, or of putting its opinions into execution. Moreover, by removing Louis Blanc from the Hôtel de Ville to another part of Paris, the Government really reduced his influence and that of his party. Yet this Labor Commission, thus lamed at the start, set loyally to work. It was composed of delegates of workingmen representing different crafts, of political economists, and even of employers. Declaring that "manual labor too prolonged ruins the health of the laborer, and by preventing the cultivation of his mind, undermines the dignity of man," it demanded the reduction of the working day from eleven to ten hours in Paris, and from twelve to eleven throughout the country. The Provisional Government then decreed this change, but the decree remained a dead letter, as employers ignored it. The Commission persuaded the Government to abolish the "sweating system. It also acted as a court of arbitration in certain labor disputes with some measure of success. But as time wore on it became irritated over its general lack of achievement, which contrasted so lamentably with the endless hopes it had aroused. The irritation constantly deepened, and the Commission became

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in the end a center of much inflammatory talk. Looked to for leadership by tens of thousands of workmen, it was a source of danger to the Government. Deprived of all modes of legal action, it might become the seat of conspiracies and illegal proceedings.

The National Workshops, too, were a source of ultimate disappointment to those who had looked to them to solve the complex labor problems of the modern industrial system. Conceded by the Provisional Government against its will, and to gain time, that Government did not intend that they should succeed. Their creation was intrusted to the Minister of Commerce, Marie, a personal enemy of Louis Blanc, who, according to his own admission, was willing to make this experiment in order to render the latter unpopular and to show workingmen the fallacy of his theories of production, and the dangers of such theories for themselves. The scheme was represented as Louis Blanc's, though it was denounced by him, was established especially to discredit him, and was a veritable travesty of his ideas. Blanc wished to have every man practise his own trade in real factories, started by state aid. They should be engaged in productive enterprises; moreover, only men of good character should be permitted to join these associations. Instead of this, the Government simply set men of the most varied sorts cobblers, carpenters, metal workers, masons, to labor upon unproductive tasks, such as making excavations for public works. They were organized in a military fashion, and the wages were uniform, two francs a day.

It was properly no system of production that was being tried, but a system of relief for the unemployed, who were very numerous owing to the fact that many factories had had to close because of the generally disturbed state of affairs. The number of men flocking to these National Workshops increased alarmingly: 25,000 in the middle of March; 66,000 in the middle of April; over 100,000 in May. As there was not work enough for all, the number of working days was reduced for each man to two a week, and his total wage for the week fixed at eight francs. The result was that large numbers of men were kept idle most of the time, were given wretched wages, and had plenty of time to discuss their grievances. They furnished excellent material for socialist agitators. This experiment wasted the public money, accomplished nothing useful, and led to a street war of the most appalling kind.

The Provisional Government was, as the name signified, only