19th-Century France

Assassination of the duc de Berry

On 13 February, leaving the Opéra in the rue de Richelieu, the king's nephew the duc de Berry is stabbed to death by the saddler Louvel — a lone Bonapartist who hoped to extinguish the dynasty. Decazes is dismissed; the Villèle ministry of ultras takes office; the press is muzzled and the franchise narrowed.

The last anointed king of France

On the death of Louis XVIII in September, his brother the comte d'Artois becomes Charles X. He has himself anointed at Reims with the old chrism in May 1825 — the last French king crowned by the medieval rite. His reign opens with a billion-franc indemnity to the émigrés and a law of sacrilege punishing desecration with death.

Algiers falls; the July Ordinances overthrow Charles X

On 5 July, a French expeditionary force takes Algiers — the prestige victory Charles hopes will save his ministry. On 26 July he issues the Saint-Cloud ordinances dissolving the new Chamber, suspending the press, and restricting the franchise. Paris answers with the barricades of the Trois Glorieuses (27-29 July). On 2 August, Charles abdicates and sails for England.

Some eighteen hundred Parisians and two hundred soldiers died on the barricades; Delacroix would paint Liberty Leading the People before the year was out. The conquest of Algiers, begun as a court diversion, would draw France into a century of colonial war in North Africa. The settlement was an act of revolution — the elder Bourbon line was overthrown — but its political conclusion was not a republic.

Louis-Philippe, King of the French

On 9 August, on the recommendation of Lafayette and the bankers around Casimir Périer, the Orléans cousin Louis-Philippe d'Orléans accepts the crown — no longer as 'King of France' but as 'King of the French'. The tricolore returns. The Charter is revised, the franchise widened to about two hundred thousand voters, and France becomes a constitutional bourgeois monarchy.

Cholera in Paris and the funeral of General Lamarque

The Asiatic cholera reaches Paris in March and kills nearly nineteen thousand by autumn, including the prime minister Casimir Périer. At the funeral on 5-6 June of the republican general Lamarque — himself dead of cholera — students and workers throw up barricades in the Saint-Merri quarter. The National Guard crushes them within thirty-six hours.

Among the witnesses at the funeral was a young Victor Hugo, who would build the central scenes of Les Misérables on the memory of these barricades. The rebellion confirmed the regime's bourgeois character: the franchise was based on the property tax; the working classes had no political voice. It would be the first of half a dozen risings before 1848.

Napoleon is buried at the Invalides

Recovered from Saint Helena by a mission of the prince de Joinville, Napoleon's coffin is borne on 15 December in a colossal funeral car along the Champs-Élysées and laid under the dome of the Invalides. Hugo, Berlioz, the old marshals and a crowd of a million watch in the snow. The Napoleonic legend is officially adopted by the Orleanist monarchy.

By 1840 the romantic generation — Hugo, Balzac, Stendhal, Lamartine, Vigny, Michelet — had made the Napoleon of Saint Helena's memoirs into the great myth of the century. The same year Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the emperor's nephew, landed at Boulogne with a few dozen supporters, hoping to overthrow Louis-Philippe. He failed and was sentenced to perpetual imprisonment at Ham. Eight years later he would be president of France.

The barricades overthrow Louis-Philippe

After the prohibition of a reform banquet on 22 February and a fusillade on the boulevard des Capucines on the 23rd that kills more than fifty, the city rises. On 24 February Louis-Philippe abdicates and flees to England disguised as 'Mr Smith'. Lamartine, on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville, proclaims the Second Republic before the red flag of the workers and the tricolore.

Within weeks universal manhood suffrage was decreed — nine million voters, where four years earlier there had been a quarter million — slavery in the colonies abolished a second time (this time for good, on the initiative of Victor Schoelcher), and 'national workshops' opened to provide employment for the Parisian unemployed. The 1848 revolution in Paris triggered the springtime of peoples across the continent — in Vienna, Berlin, Milan, Venice, Budapest, Rome.

Cavaignac crushes the workers' insurrection

On 22 June the closure of the national workshops drives the workers of eastern Paris to the barricades. General Cavaignac, given dictatorial powers, smashes the rising in four days of fighting. Some five thousand insurgents are killed and four thousand transported. The Republic of the bourgeoisie has fought the Republic of the workers and won.

The June Days haunted the political imagination of the nineteenth century. Tocqueville called them 'the greatest and the strangest insurrection in our history… a struggle of class against class'. Marx, watching from Cologne, drew from them the proletarian revolution of his Communist Manifesto. The new constitution of November installed a single-chamber assembly and a directly elected president for a four-year non-renewable term.

The nephew of the emperor wins the presidency

On 10 December, the first direct presidential election in French history gives Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte 5,434,000 votes against Cavaignac's 1,448,000. He owes his victory to the name, to the peasants' Bonapartism, and to the readers of his pamphlet on the extinction of pauperism. He swears to the Republic on 20 December.

Louis-Napoleon dissolves the assembly

Forbidden by the constitution to stand for re-election, the president strikes. On the night of 1-2 December — the anniversary of the coronation and of Austerlitz — his half-brother Morny seizes the printing-presses, the assembly is dissolved, two hundred deputies arrested, and the rump of the republican left massacred on the boulevard Montmartre on the 4th. A plebiscite of 20 December ratifies the coup.

Hugo, who had tried to organise resistance, fled to Brussels and then to Jersey and Guernsey, where he would spend nineteen years in exile and write Les Châtiments and Les Misérables. 'Because they have been great,' he wrote of the coup-makers, 'you are made small.' A year later the prince-president would become Napoleon III, Emperor of the French.

The Empire is restored

A second plebiscite restores the imperial dignity. On 2 December — the third anniversary — Louis-Napoleon is proclaimed Napoleon III, Emperor of the French. The next month he marries the Spanish countess Eugénie de Montijo at Notre-Dame. The Second Empire — authoritarian then liberal, prosperous, expansive — will last eighteen years.

Haussmann begins the rebuilding of Paris

Napoleon III appoints Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann prefect of the Seine. For seventeen years he will gut and rebuild Paris: the great boulevards driven through the old quarters, the water and sewer systems, the parks of Buttes-Chaumont, Monceau, the Bois de Boulogne, the new opera, the markets of Les Halles, the standardised cream-coloured apartment blocks of six storeys with their iron balconies.

The wider boulevards served strategic purposes — easier to move troops, harder to barricade — but also turned Paris into the showcase capital of Europe. Half a million people were displaced; the old central neighbourhoods of the popular classes disappeared. The city of the Impressionists, of Manet and Baudelaire, of the cafés-concerts and the department stores — the city Haussmann left — is in essential outline the Paris of today.

France leads the Concert of Europe at Paris

The Treaty of Paris of 30 March ends the Crimean War (1853-1856), in which the French army of MacMahon and Bosquet — alongside the British and the Sardinians — took the Malakoff and forced Russia to terms. The conference of plenipotentiaries meets at the Quai d'Orsay; Napoleon III is the arbiter of Europe.

Magenta and Solferino

Allied since the Plombières meeting with Cavour, France marches into northern Italy against Austria. At Magenta (4 June) and the bloody Solferino (24 June), the French and Sardinians defeat Franz Joseph. Horrified by the carnage of Solferino, the Swiss businessman Henri Dunant will found the Red Cross. The Armistice of Villafranca gives Lombardy to Piedmont.

By the Treaty of Turin of March 1860, Piedmont in turn ceded Nice and the Duchy of Savoy to France in compensation. Garibaldi's red shirts and the plebiscites of central and southern Italy completed the unification within two years. The free-trade treaty of January 1860 with Cobden's Britain — designed to bind the two liberal empires together — opened France to British industry and dismantled the protectionist tariffs of the previous half-century.

Maximilian shot at Querétaro; Universal Exposition in Paris

On 19 June, the Austrian archduke Maximilian — installed by Napoleon III as emperor of Mexico — is shot by a firing-squad of Benito Juárez's republicans. Manet paints the execution. In Paris that same summer, the second Universal Exposition draws fifteen million visitors. The Empire is at its dazzling apogee and on the edge of disgrace.

Bismarck's Ems despatch and the declaration of war

Provoked by the Hohenzollern candidature to the Spanish throne and the inflammatory edited despatch from the spa of Ems, the French chamber votes war on Prussia on 19 July to roars of À Berlin! In fact the Prussian general staff under Moltke is ready; the French army of Bazaine and MacMahon is not.

Napoleon III surrenders at Sedan; the Empire falls

On 2 September, encircled at Sedan with eighty thousand men, Napoleon III surrenders his sword to William I of Prussia. The news reaches Paris on the 3rd. On 4 September a crowd invades the Corps législatif; Gambetta proclaims the Republic at the Hôtel de Ville. The Empress Eugénie flees to England in a dentist's carriage; the Empire is over.

By 19 September Paris was under siege. The 'government of national defence' under Trochu and Favre held the capital while Gambetta — having escaped Paris by balloon — raised improvised armies in the provinces. The city ate its zoo and most of its horses through a winter of bombardment before surrendering on 28 January 1871. The provincial armies were defeated; Bourbaki's Army of the East was interned in Switzerland.

The Bloody Week

Refusing to accept the conservative National Assembly elected at Bordeaux in February and the humiliating peace it ratified at Frankfurt — losing Alsace and most of Lorraine, paying five billion francs — the Parisians proclaim the Commune of 1871 on 18 March. For seventy-two days the city governs itself. From 21 to 28 May the Versailles army of Thiers and MacMahon retakes it street by street.

Some twenty to thirty thousand Communards were killed in the fighting and the summary executions of the Mur des Fédérés in Père Lachaise; another forty thousand were tried and seven and a half thousand transported to New Caledonia. The Tuileries palace was burned; the Vendôme column, pulled down at the urging of the painter Courbet, was rebuilt at his expense. The Commune entered socialist mythology — Marx wrote The Civil War in France within weeks — and ten thousand bullet-marks remained on the walls of Paris.

The Wallon amendment establishes the Republic

The royalist majority of the Bordeaux assembly cannot agree on a king — the legitimist comte de Chambord will not abandon the white flag — and on 30 January the amendment of the moderate Wallon passes by one vote: 'the President of the Republic is elected by an absolute majority of the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies'. The Third Republic is, almost by accident, a republic.

The Third Republic — a regime no party had asked for — would prove the longest French regime since the Ancien Régime, surviving until the German invasion of 1940. The crisis of 16 May 1877, when President MacMahon dismissed the republican Jules Simon and was defeated in the snap elections that followed, established the convention that the cabinet answers to the chamber and not to the president. France became a parliamentary republic in fact.

Free, compulsory, secular schooling

Jules Ferry, twice prime minister of the new republican parliament, carries the laws that establish free public primary education (1881), make it compulsory and lay (1882), and remove the right to teach from the unauthorised religious congregations. The 'hussars of the Republic' — the schoolteachers in their black smocks — go out to make the peasants French.

Ferry was also the chief architect of the second French colonial empire — the protectorate over Tunisia in 1881, the conquest of Tonkin and the war with China in 1884-1885, and the encouragement of the Conquest of the Western Soudan. By 1914 France would rule eleven million square kilometres and fifty million colonial subjects, second only to Britain. The Republic that had refused empires at home built one of the largest abroad.

The Eiffel Tower opens at the Universal Exposition

On 6 May the great Exposition Universelle opens on the Champ de Mars to mark the centenary of the Estates General. Its centrepiece, Gustave Eiffel's three-hundred-metre iron tower — built in two years and condemned by Maupassant and Garnier — becomes overnight the symbol of the modern republic.

Captain Dreyfus convicted of treason

On 22 December a closed-door court martial finds Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer from Alsace, guilty of selling secrets to the Germans. The Affaire begins. On 5 January 1895 he is publicly degraded in the courtyard of the École militaire and shipped to Devil's Island in French Guiana.

Zola accuses the army

On 13 January the front page of L'Aurore carries Émile Zola's open letter to the President of the Republic — J'accuse — naming the officers and ministers who have covered up the Dreyfus forgery. Three hundred thousand copies sell. France splits down the middle: Dreyfusards against anti-Dreyfusards, intellectuals against army, republic against church.

The army's case unravelled over the next three years: the real traitor, Esterhazy, was identified; Colonel Henry confessed his forgeries and committed suicide; the radical government pardoned Dreyfus in 1899 and the Court of Cassation finally rehabilitated him in 1906. The Affair turned the Third Republic decisively to the left, broke the political power of the army and the Church, and produced the Combes ministry — and the law of separation.

The law of 9 December ends the Concordat

Pushed by Aristide Briand and the Bloc des Gauches, the law of 9 December 1905 abrogates the Napoleonic Concordat of 1801. The Republic 'recognises no cult, salaries none, subsidises none'. Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish institutions become private associations; ecclesiastical property is inventoried, in some places amid resistance.

Pius X condemned the law in the encyclical Vehementer Nos, but the regime of separation has remained — with the local exception of Alsace-Moselle, which was German in 1905 and kept the Concordat on its return to France in 1918. The principle of laïcité, the daughter of the Revolution, the Ferry laws, and the Dreyfus Affair, became one of the foundations of the French republican constitution.

Jaurès is assassinated at the Café du Croissant

On the evening of 31 July, three days after Austria's declaration of war on Serbia, the socialist leader Jean Jaurès — the great voice against the war — is shot dead at the Café du Croissant in Paris by the nationalist Raoul Villain. The last European resistance to the conflict dies with him. The next day France orders general mobilisation.

France goes to war

On 1 August the church bells ring the general mobilisation. On 3 August Germany declares war on France; on the 4th, in the Chamber, René Viviani reads the message of President Poincaré: the Union sacrée — a national truce of all parties — is proclaimed. Within four weeks the Germans will be on the Marne. The long nineteenth century is over.