The banquet had been announced for 22 February, and the news of its cancellation by no means reached everybody. The day dawned in drizzle, later setting into a steady downpour. This was not going to deter the crowds: as Georges Duveau has pointed out, it was the usual weather for great journées in French history.26 Students from the Left Bank, then workers from the faubourgs converged on the place de la Concorde and the place de la Madeleine from the morning onwards. There was no great air of crisis, rather of good humour – there were even some cheers for the army as its detachments moved to take up positions from which they could control events – but some street-boys amused themselves by making bonfires of the chairs and kiosks in the Champs Elysées. The Chamber of Deputies postponed debate on Barrot’s motion and turned to consideration of a charter for a bank in Bordeaux. Tocqueville was there, and observed that only the two speakers on the subject paid any attention to the order of the day: everyone else was preoccupied with what was going on in the streets. He himself was not yet alarmed: two days previously Duchâtel had assured him that everything was under control. He now repeated the assurance; but Tocqueville noticed that his habitual tic, a sort of wriggling of the neck and shoulders, was much worse than usual: ‘this small observation made me more thoughtful than anything else [that day].’27
Well it might. The next forty-eight hours were dominated by a series of almost inexplicable miscalculations by the government which, more than anything else, brought about the sudden collapse of the monarchy. On the morning of Wednesday, 23 February, the crowds were larger than ever, and more threatening. Tocqueville went down to the Chamber and found his colleagues in the same anxious, distracted mood as the day before; at length they got themselves to the point of asking the cabinet to make a statement on the situation. It was three o’clock; suddenly Guizot, coming from the Tuileries, walked into the Chamber with his usual steady step, mounted the tribune, and holding his head as high as possible – he did not want anyone to detect how deeply he felt humiliated – announced that he and his colleagues had been dismissed.28
Louis-Philippe had lost his nerve. He had chosen to rely on the National Guard, rather than the regulars, to restore and maintain order in Paris, and then suddenly discovered what, if he had had competent officers, he should have known long before, that the Guard was not to be relied on: it too, or most of it, hated Guizot and wanted reform. The Queen and his sons insisted that Guizot must go, and in a moment’s weakness which he seems almost immediately to have regretted,29 he acquiesced, and sent for Molé, who was certainly not the man of the hour: precious time was to be lost while he tried and failed to form a cabinet. In short, at a moment of serious crisis the King had deprived France of its government. The crisis immediately began to get worse.
Tocqueville sat in the Chamber and sardonically watched his colleagues’ reaction to the thunderbolt. It seemed to him that the conservatives of the majority were dismayed only by the loss of place and profit; that most of the opposition, as they exulted, were thinking chiefly of getting their hands on the loot; and that the leaders of the opposition had suddenly become discreet, thinking that they might soon need the support of the men who had just been dislodged. Dufaure’s behaviour to Tocqueville became shifty, as he prepared to break with him in order to get a ministry – which amused rather than angered Tocqueville, since Dufaure’s calculations were so transparent. He must also have thought them futile, for that evening, visiting Beaumont, he said that as the National Guard had been allowed to overthrow a ministry all authority was prostrate. Beaumont was not impressed. ‘You always take the gloomy view,’ he said. ‘Let us first enjoy our victory, and worry about the consequences later.’ Dining chez Lanjuinais, Tocqueville found much the same attitude: still no-one recognized the revolution. He went home early, and then straight to bed, and although he lodged very near the ministry of foreign affairs,* ‘did not hear the gunfire which was to shape so many destinies ... I slept without knowing that I had seen the last day of the monarchy of July.’30
For early that night some of the demonstrators tried to force their way into the ministry of foreign affairs. They were resisted by the guard. A shot was heard, fired probably by one of the crowd (such an incident must have been almost inevitable in the circumstances). In alarm the guard fired in their turn, with deadly effect: about fifty demonstrators were killed. The word flew through Paris; before long the citizens decided that Louis-Philippe must go; they determined to take control.
In the morning (24 February) Tocqueville was told by his tearful cook that the government was massacring the poor people. He did not believe it, but left the house to gather news and to consult his friends. He could not find Rémusat or Beaumont, who had both been summoned to the Tuileries, where the King was still trying to put a ministry together, Molé having failed.31 Dufaure too had disappeared, but as Tocqueville walked along the boulevards with Corcelle he saw revolutionary activity on every hand: barricades were rising all about him. He noticed a great contrast with the July Days. Then, Paris had been boiling, so that it had seemed to him like one vast steaming cauldron. Now the insurgents were merely businesslike. ‘This time they were not overthrowing a regime, they were letting it fall.’32 He set out for the Palais Bourbon, and on his way saw further evidence of the feeble bewilderment which had afflicted everyone in authority from the moment it became clear that the National Guard was unreliable. He was at first relieved to find the place de la Concorde occupied by regular troops, commanded by General Bedeau, whom he had got to know during his visit to Algeria in 1846; he supposed that they were there to protect the Tuileries and the Chamber of Deputies. But Bedeau had received orders not to fight, and not having the sense or the initiative to disobey could think of nothing to do but harangue the insurgents ineffectively. Tocqueville had to warn him to desist, and get back on his horse, or he would be lynched. Minutes later, a few yards away, the crowd massacred a detachment of gendarmes. Tocqueville himself was challenged as he made his way through the crowd: where was he going? ‘I replied, to the Chamber, and added, to show that I belonged to the opposition, “Vive la Réforme! You know that the Guizot ministry has been thrown out?” “Yes, Monsieur, I know,” said his challenger jeeringly, gesturing towards the Tuileries, “but we want more than that.”’33
Tocqueville reached the Chamber and found everything in disorder: the president, Paul Sauzet, was refusing to open the session. Tocqueville went to reason with him but found him in such a state – pacing to and fro, sitting down, standing up, sitting down again with one foot tucked under his big behind, ‘as was his custom in moments of great stress’, that it seemed likely he would do more harm than good if he did start proceedings. ‘It was very bad luck for the House of Orleans that it had an honest man of this kind in charge of the Chamber on such a day. A bold rascal would have done better.’ Worried about the defencelessness of the Chamber, Tocqueville started out for the ministry of the interior to see if anything could be arranged; on his way he met Odilon Barrot and Gustave de Beaumont coming along surrounded by a large crowd. Their hats were jammed down on their heads as far as they would go, their coats were covered in dust, their faces were haggard. It was their moment of triumph – they had been appointed ministers – but they looked as if they were on their way to be hanged. Beaumont whispered to Tocqueville that he had just seen Louis-Philippe abdicate.34
Beaumont had had an exceptionally trying morning. He had got to the Tuileries at nine o’clock to be told that a new ministry, led by Thiers and Barrot, had been formed, and that he was part of it. Marshal Bugeaud was to be put in command of all the military forces in Paris, and both decisions were to be published in the Moniteur. But that would take time, so Barrot and Beaumont were sent out to spread the good news through the city. They went as far as the Porte Saint-Denis and back, and at first all seemed to be going well: they were welcomed with enthusiastic cries of Vive la Réforme! and Vive Barrot! and were politely helped past the barricades, Barrot speechifying when he could. Beaumont not
iced that the barricades were formidably well-built. But the news of Bugeaud’s appointment changed the atmosphere: Bugeaud was bitterly hated by the Parisians for his part in the massacre of the rue Transnonain in 1834. Barrot and Beaumont began to hear cries of À bas Louis-Philippe! Mort à Louis-Philippe! Plus de Bourbons! and Are you sure you haven’t been lied to, M. Barrot?35
When Beaumont got back to the Tuileries, at about 11.15, he found that precious time was being wasted. Thiers wanted to withdraw as first minister in favour of Barrot, but Louis-Philippe, who still seemed to have no sense of urgency, threatened instead to recall Guizot, which took Beaumont’s breath away. Then the King went out to review his troops, and was booed by part of the National Guard. This appears to have been his moment of truth, and it broke him. Without even looking at the regular troops and the loyal guardsmen he went back into the chateau, and soon, to Beaumont’s horror, people began to talk of abdication. Beaumont at this point let himself be distracted by his pressing need for lunch, and when he rose from table he found that the fatal decision had been taken; he was only in time to see the King writing the actual act in the midst of an incessant scrimmage of coming and going. One anxious flunkey* hurried in, asking impatiently if the document was ready: the King replied patiently, ‘I can’t write faster, you know.’ Gunfire could be heard in the distance. Once the act was signed it was given to Marshal Gérard to proclaim; Beaumont went with him to the Palais-Royal, where another gendarmerie post was under fierce attack. General Lamoricière, who was trying to stop the fighting, received two bayonet wounds; Beaumont himself came under fire. He went back to the Tuileries with his brother-in-law, Oscar de La Fayette, and found the great palace utterly deserted – no King, no courtiers, no politicians, no servants, no soldiers. He thought this universal flight as unnecessary as it was unwise, but there was nothing to be done, so he too left and was just beginning to cross the gardens when Odilon Barrot (who had carefully kept out of sight for the past few hours) reappeared, with a crowd of cheering supporters. Beaumont joined him, and they went off to proclaim a Regency at the ministry of the interior, which was in the rue de Grenelle. Tocqueville met them just outside the Palais Bourbon. It was about 3.15. He wanted to know if they were going to do anything to make the Chamber safe. ‘Who cares about the Chamber!’ said Beaumont curtly. He thought that it had ceased to exist, whereas Tocqueville held that, as the last surviving political institution, it should be strongly supported if the people were to be recalled to the idea of the rule of law.36 Nevertheless he went with his friends to the ministry of the interior, but such was the noise and confusion that he despaired of doing any good, and returned to the Chamber, where on his arrival he was told that Sauzet had opened the session after all and that the duchesse d’Orléans had just appeared with her young son, the comte de Paris, in a last attempt to save the July Monarchy by getting the Chamber to acknowledge her son as King and herself as Regent. On hearing this Tocqueville ran up the stairs four at a time and rushed into the Chamber.37
The scene that followed was to be described in some of the most memorable pages of the Souvenirs, which will not be paraphrased here. It need only be said that after gazing at it all for a moment Tocqueville made his way to his usual seat on the upper benches of the centre left, ‘for it has always been my rule that in moments of crisis it is not only necessary to be present in the assembly that one belongs to, but to show oneself in the place where everyone is used to seeing one,’38 and settled down to watching the death of the monarchy and the rebirth of the republic. As he had feared, no-one was making the least attempt to protect the Chamber; at first the crowd came in a trickle, then in a flood; the duchesse and her party had to be moved from their seats below the tribune to benches at the back of the hemicycle, or they would have been crushed (Tocqueville helped them get to their new position). None of the great orators of the Chamber was present with the exception of Lamartine in his own accustomed place: waiting in the wings, so to say. Tocqueville went to him to suggest that he alone could make himself listened to and restore order; to his astonishment Lamartine merely replied, without looking at him, ‘I will certainly not speak while that woman and that child are present.’ Because of his late arrival Tocqueville did not know that a little earlier Lamartine had demanded, from his seat, that the session be suspended while the duchesse was unconstitutionally present; he had already decided that the monarchy could not and should not be saved (a conclusion with which it is hard to disagree). Tocqueville stared for a moment at Lamartine’s tall thin figure and trance-like air, and then went back to his place. A little later, after Odilon Barrot, abandoning his futile enterprise at the ministry of the interior, had arrived and made an equally futile appeal on behalf of the duchesse (who then disappeared), Lamartine mounted the tribune and in effect proclaimed the Republic. After a while he began to read out the names of various journalists and politicians who were to form a provisional government (a list concocted earlier by the radical newspaper Le National); the crowd by now was enormous and so was the uproar; finally he got agreement to the list and led everyone off to repeat the performance of the Hôtel de Ville, for want, Tocqueville supposed, of any better idea.* A moment later the Chamber was empty. Tocqueville decided to go home. As he left he met a large detachment of the National Guard under Marshal Bugeaud and General Oudinot coming to the rescue – half an hour too late. The July Chamber had dispersed for ever.39
Tocqueville had sat through the drama with a calm that surprised himself. He thought it was because there was no real danger; everyone was consciously playing a part. They had all read the Girondins or seen Le Chevalier de Moulin Rouge, a Dumas play about the great Revolution, and could sing the Girondin chorus; they knew what attitudes to strike. Yet this new revolution was real enough, and seems to have shaken Tocqueville more than he realized, although certainly not more than might have been expected. When he got back to the rue de la Madeleine he told Marie, he says, in a few words – can they really have been few? – what had occurred, and then sat down to be miserable. He was interrupted by Jean-Jacques Ampère, whom he had invited to dinner, though Tocqueville had forgotten. Ampère was full of enthusiasm for the fall of the monarchy; Tocqueville’s pent-up wrath and anxiety were suddenly emptied over him:
I spoke to him with a violence of language that I have often remembered with some shame; only a friendship as sincere as his could have pardoned it. I remember saying to him, among other things, ‘You understand nothing about what has happened; you are thinking like a Parisian loafer or a mere poet. You say it is the triumph of liberty; it is liberty’s last defeat. I tell you that this people which you admire so naïvely has just shown conclusively that it is incapable and unworthy of living in liberty. Tell me what it has learned from experience? What are the new virtues it has acquired? What are the old vices it has discarded? No, I tell you, it is the same as always: as impatient, as thoughtless, as contemptuous of the law, as easily led by bad example and as reckless as its fathers were. Time hasn’t changed it a bit, except that it is now as frivolous about serious matters as it was formerly about trifles.
Ampère was driven to shout back; they ended by agreeing to let the future decide between them – ‘that upright and enlightened judge who, however, always arrives too late, alas!’ – and Ampère forgave Tocqueville. It is difficult not to suspect that he had been paying for the sins of that other poet, Lamartine, who Tocqueville came to think had turned France upside down merely to amuse himself.40
Yet the incident tells us more than the state of Tocqueville’s temper. When he assailed ‘the people’ in his outburst he meant only the Parisians, and the Parisians of the lower orders at that. He had by now conceived a ruthless hostility to them which was to determine his behaviour for the rest of the year. It had deep roots. He had been brought up on the terrible legend of the revolutionary crowd, of which the Commune of Paris had been the embodiment. He had witnessed the July Days in 1830 and several of the riots and insurrections which had marked the life o
f the July Monarchy. As a prison reformer his concern had never been to understand the causes of crime so much as to discover means of turning criminals into respectable, docile citizens. His ostentatious disdain for material concerns did not help: before long he would compare 1848 unfavourably with 1789: ‘Then it was a revolution of hearts and minds, today it is one of the stomach.’41 (This remark about 1789 was historically far from accurate, as in calmer moments he knew, and his own intestinal troubles should have taught him to take the stomach’s problems seriously.) His removal to the countryside after his marriage not only cut him off, for much of the year, from his native city, but infected him with rural prejudice against Paris.
The events of February could hardly have engendered this hostility on their own. Tocqueville had never admired the regime which had been overthrown, and the people had not been the cause of its fall: it had destroyed itself. As these things go, the revolt had been comparatively bloodless, in part because of Louis-Philippe’s magnanimous refusal to save his throne by the use of force: he had seen revolution enough in his long life, and would rule by consent or not at all. And as Peter Amann once wittily remarked, ‘Postrevolutionary vandalism was hard on Paris street lights but easy on private property and persons.’42
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