Napoleon's chief legacy to France was a very centralized, authoritarian and efficient bureaucracy that put Paris in firm control of the rest of the country. For the rest of the nineteenth century after his demise, France was left to fight out, literally in the streets, the contradictions and unfinished business left behind by the Revolution of 1789.

 

On the one hand, there was a tussle between the class that had risen to wealth and power as a direct result of the destruction of the monarchy and the old order, and the survivors of the old order, who sought to make a comeback in the 1820s under the restored monarchy of Louis XVIII and Charles X . This conflict was finally resolved in favour of the new bourgeoisie. When Charles X refused to accept the result of the 1830 National Assembly elections, Adolphe Thiers - who was to become the veteran conservative politician of the nineteenth century - led the opposition in revolt. Barricades were erected in Paris and there followed three days of bitter street fighting, known as les trois glorieuses , in which 1800 people were killed (they are commemorated by the column on place de la Bastille). The outcome was the election of Louis-Philippe as constitutional monarch, and the introduction of a few liberalizing reforms, most either cosmetic or serving merely to consolidate the power of the wealthiest stratum of the population. Radical republican and working-class interests remained completely unrepresented.

The other, and more important, major political conflict was the extended struggle between this enfranchized and privileged bourgeoisie and the heirs of the 1789 sans-culottes , whose political consciousness had been awakened by the Revolution but whose demands remained unsatisfied. These were the people who died on the barricades of July to hoist the bourgeoisie firmly into the saddle.

As their demands continued to go unheeded, so their radicalism increased, exacerbated by deteriorating living and working conditions in the large towns, especially Paris, as the Industrial Revolution got underway. There were, for example, twenty thousand deaths from cholera in Paris in 1832, and 65 percent of the population in 1848 were too poor to be liable for tax. Eruptions of discontent invariably occurred in the capital, with insurrections in 1832 and 1834. In the absence of organized parties, opposition centred on newspapers and clandestine or informal political clubs in the tradition of 1789.

In the 1840s, the publication of the first socialist works such as Louis Blanc's Organization of Labour and Proudhon's What is Property? gave an additional spur to the impatience of the opposition. When the lid blew off the pot in 1848 and the Second Republic was proclaimed in Paris, it looked for a time as if working-class demands might be at least partly met. The provisional government included Louis Blanc and a Parisian manual worker. But in the face of demands for the control of industry, the setting up of co-operatives and so on, backed by agitation in the streets, the more conservative Republicans lost their nerve. The nation returned a spanking reactionary majority in the April elections.

Revolution began to appear the only possible defence forthe radical left. On June 23, 1848, working-class Paris - Poissonnière, Temple, St-Antoine, the Marais, Quartier Latin, Montmartre - rose in revolt . Men, women and children fought side by side against fifty thousand troops. In three days of fighting, nine hundred soldiers were killed. No-one knows how many of the insurgés - the insurgents - died. Fifteen thousand people were arrested and four thousand sentenced to prison terms.

Despite the shock and devastation of civil war in the streets of the capital, the ruling classes failed to heed the warning in the events of June 1848. Far from redressing the injustices which had provoked them, they proceeded to exacerbate them. The Republic was brought to an end in a coup d'état by Louis Napoleon , who within twelve months had himself crowned Emperor Napoleon III.