Why did the Second Republic only last for 4 years?

            France is currently on its Fifth Republic. Each Republic has lasted for a varying length of time, some much shorter than others. The First Republic officially lasted 12 years, the Second 4 years, the Third just under 70 years, the Fourth 12 and the Fifth to be determined. Given that the Second Republic lasted a mere 4 years it’s worth asking why it was so short-lived and whether it was doomed for failure from the start.

            The Second Republic was born out of the February 1848 Revolution against constitutional monarch Louis-Philippe. While he initially came to power as the laid-back, compromise candidate, Louis-Philippe’s government had become increasingly autocratic and limited the rights of the rising middle-class. On 22 February mass protests broke out across Paris along with the construction of barricades. The following day crowds demanded reform and the resignation of the prime minister François Guizot. The government called for the Paris-based National Guard to put down the uprising but the Guards sided with the Parisians. Recognizing how volatile the situation was, Louis-Philippe had Guizot sacked even as he brought in hundreds of soldiers from outside the city. Just as the situation looked to calm down the soldiers met with protestors on the Boulevard des Capucines. A shot was fired prompting the soldiers to loose a volley into the crowd, killing 52 people and injuring 74. Parisians were outraged by the massacre and the city went into open revolt. On 24 February Louis-Philippe abdicated and a member of the National Assembly, Alphonse de Lamartine, declared that France would become a republic.

            Lamartine and his associates formed a government of moderate reformers. However, they were not alone. Radicals led by democratic socialists like Louis Blanc set up their own government whose individual members called for universal male suffrage, guaranteed employment and even the abolition of property. The radical government succeeded in pressuring the moderate government to call for popular elections wherein roughly ten million adult males were eligible to vote. This was a major political error. While the democratic socialists were popular in urban, industrializing Paris, most of France was rural, conservative and Catholic. The elections that took place in late April resulted in 600 seats going to the Moderate Republicans, 200 seats going to the monarchist Party of Order and 80 seats going to the democratic socialists.

The democratic socialists had been trounced on the national stage. However, they maintained a large following in Paris from which they exerted pressure on the government. Simultaneously, monarchism remained a strong force. While moderate republicans formed the majority this was partly because there was no strong candidate for the kingship. The Bourbons had been expelled from power in the 1830 Revolution while the House of Orléans had just been expelled in the 1848 Revolution. This left only one remaining house that had ruled France: House Bonaparte.

Which brings us to Louis-Napoleon, nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte. Louis-Napoleon was by this point a fairly popular writer and a repeat failed conspirator. In the 1830s he published a series of political treatises aimed at solving France’s problems and justifying his own future power grabs. Louis-Napoleon believed that monarchies were often unresponsive to the people and did not arouse the same level of national enthusiasm as popular republics. In contrast, he criticized republics as being unstable and without dynamic leadership. Louis-Napoleon claimed that the ideal government would combine the best attributes of a monarchy and a republic by having a strong central monarch who reflected the will of the people which would be exercised through universal manhood suffrage. These ideas brought Louis-Napoleon support among monarchists and some republicans but he also held a number of left-wing populist ideas which appealed to urban workers. In his essay “The Extinction of Pauperism” he wrote that the French people were over-taxed and the government spent money ineffectively. Instead of using tax revenues to enrich the rich he advocated for proactive government initiatives to combat poverty. These vague and populist ideas won Louis-Napoleon a following from across the political spectrum. Monarchists hailed him as a modern alternative to the Houses of Bourbon and Orléans. Republicans appreciated his calls for regular elections and stability. Socialists praised his calls for anti-poverty measures and universal suffrage.

In 1836 Louis-Napoleon attempted to launch a coup, which failed and he was forced to flee to England. In 1840 he tried to launch another coup which also failed. This time he was captured and imprisoned. In 1846, after spending six years in prison, Louis-Napoleon escaped and fled back to Britain. When the 1848 February Revolution broke out he returned to France. The leaders of the Second Republic were wary of Bonaparte, believing he might try another coup and suggested he leave Paris, which he did for a time, and he missed out on the April elections.

With Louis-Napoleon in the background, the national government set about governing the country. The moderate republicans had power and largely opposed the programs of the democratic socialists. However, the left-wing managed to get one major program started: the national workshops. These government-funded workhouses were meant to provide regular employment and pay for the masses of urban poor, particularly in Paris. However, the workshops initially only employed a few thousand workers even as over one hundred thousand Parisians needed regular work. Furthermore, the national workshops struggled to organize productive labor, and some workers were assigned to dig trenches only to fill them up again. Ministers could not justify paying thousands of people to dig and fill holes all day while they struggled with the budget. For all these reasons the government decided to shut down the workshops on 21 June.

The sudden closure of the workshops combined with general economic anxieties and anti-government anger led workers to form barricades. Parisians called for a new government which would address their economic concerns with some waving the red flag of socialism. On 24 June the National Assembly voted to give the former general and Minister of War Louis-Eugène Cavaignac dictatorial power to put down the revolts. The former general treated the Parisians like enemy combatants, using cannons to blast apart barricades. Over the course of a few days nearly 5,000 soldiers and civilians were killed. Thousands more were injured and 4,000 were deported to Algeria.

On 28 June Cavaignac gave up dictatorial power. This earned him widespread praise among republican politicians who viewed him as the savior of the republic. However, outside of the halls of power support for the republicans was collapsing. The workers of Paris and the left-wing in general accused the republicans of butchering workers and ruling as tyrants. The monarchists believed that the republicans were losing control of the country and feared that the Second Republic was on track to follow the First’s descent into chaos and possibly even The Terror. Just months after the birth of the Second Republic the republicans were massively losing support while the democratic socialists were crushed in the streets and their leaders struggled to win elections. Monarchism quickly became the dominant political ideology but without a Bourbon or Orléanist candidate they lacked a formal leader.

Enter Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte. After biding his time for so long, Bonaparte participated in the December 1848 presidential election. The monarchists rallied behind him due to his support of monarchism. Many workers supported him because of his promises to address urban poverty. The Catholic, conservative countryside overwhelmingly voted for him against the republicans and socialists. Louis-Napoleon ended up winning roughly 74% of the popular vote, compared to just 20% for Cavaignac and 5% for the socialist candidate Ledru-Rollin. On 20 December Louis-Napoleon became the first (and only) president of the Second Republic.

Louis-Napoleon quickly set about appointing monarchists into his cabinet to the exclusion of republicans. With a monarchist leader and a disorganized National Assembly the country could only wait for the May 1849 elections to deliver a working government. This time the Party of Order won half of the vote while the democratic socialists won 30%. With some votes going to smaller parties the republican moderates took less than 13% of the popular vote.

The May 1849 elections clearly demonstrated that a new political order had taken place in the Second Republic. It is likely that most of the country had been monarchist in February 1848 but with no viable candidate available the people voted for the moderate republicans. The rise of Louis-Napoleon meant that the majority of French people living in the countryside renewed their support for monarchism. In contrast, urban workers hated the rise in power of conservatives and vehemently supported the democratic socialists. The moderate republicans under Louis-Eugène Cavaignac were without popular support. Their entire appeal was that they formed a stable middle ground between the right and left. Given their brutal crushing of the June Days Uprising and their inability to stave off Louis-Napoleon’s presidential victory they had lost their raison d’être.

            While the monarchists led the government many among their number feared the rise of socialism as a threat to the entire social order. It was clear that these two sides would fight for control of France and Louis-Napoleon set about appealing to Catholics. That Spring he sent a force to quash the Roman Republic and restore the Pope to power. This action prompted the leader of the democratic socialists, Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin, to call for Bonaparte’s impeachment. To no one’s surprise the motion failed on 12 June. The following day Ledru-Rollin led a demonstration against Louis-Napoleon, which the monarchists claimed was an attempted uprising. The government arrested a number of left-wing leaders and Ledru-Rollin fled to England.

            With the republicans and socialists in a state of disarray, in 1850 Louis-Napoleon was able to tour the country and call for a new constitution which would give him more power. Louis-Napoleon’s actions began to worry many monarchists. They had initially supported him thinking that they could manipulate him to get their programs passed. However, Bonaparte surrounded himself with loyalists and pursued his own agenda. While most monarchists supported Bonaparte a faction allied with the socialists to block constitutional reforms which would have allowed him to run for a second term in office. They hoped that when his term ended he would voluntarily step down from power, which is an odd hope considering he had previously launched two coups to make himself dictator.

            The anti-Bonaparte political alliance also blocked the passage of universal manhood suffrage as they believed that most poor, uneducated peasants would vote for Louis-Napoleon. This was a disastrous move as it meant that when Louis-Napoleon attempted to seize power he could claim that he was acting as a liberator fighting for the rights of the politically oppressed.

            On 2 December 1851, on the anniversary of Napoleon Bonaparte’s victory at the Battle of Austerlitz, Louis-Napoleon’s supporters launched a coup. Soldiers occupied strategic parts of Paris and arrested anti-Bonapartists. Louis-Napoleon dissolved the National Assembly and inaugurated a new constitution. News of the coup spread across the country and uprisings broke out in major cities. But Louis-Napoleon was broadly popular and the Second Republic was not. Furthermore, he controlled the military, which restored order relatively quickly.

In late December Bonaparte held a referendum to ask voters if they approved of his new constitution which gave him near-unlimited power. 92% of the votes answered in the affirmative. Corrupt elections aside, it was clear that Louis-Napoleon was in command of the country. On 7 November 1852 Louis-Napoleon held another referendum asking the French people if they wanted the Second Republic dissolved in favor of an empire with himself as its head. The vote came back with almost 97% supporting the measure, at which point the Second Republic died and its president became Emperor Napoleon III.

Nothing in history is inevitable but some things are more probable than others. Following that logic, the Second Republic was not doomed for failure but perhaps it was not properly set up to succeed. Interestingly, the Second Republic’s progression is almost an inverse of the Third Republic. The first election that the Second Republic held gave republicans a strong majority. In contrast, 2/3rds of seats went to monarchists in the Third Republic’s first election. Thus, the majority of politicians that initially controlled the Second Republic wanted it to work but failed to do so. The majority of elected leaders in the Third Republic wanted it to fail but could not agree on which monarch should take over when the republic was overthrown.

The difference in viability of the Second and Third Republics does offer an interesting lesson in civics and history. No matter how unpopular or ineffective a government is so long as there is not a viable alternative that government can remain in place. In contrast, relatively effective governments can fall if there is a more dynamic alternative. To bring up a historical example, the Roman Empire reached its most chaotic period during the Crisis of the Third Century. Disease, constant civil wars and political corruption wreaked havoc on the country. Yet, it survived for hundreds of years and even stabilized. While the Late Roman Empire had its problems it was often more politically-cohesive and better-administered than during the Crisis period. During the Third Century there were not as many strong opponents on Rome’s borders which meant that it survived despite its internal problems. In the 4^th and 5^th centuries the Germanic and Gothic migrations followed by the Huns and other Central Asian groups meant that Rome faced a more powerful opponent and the western half fell, even though it arguably had a superior political system.

In some ways the Second Republic was initially stronger and better-poised to succeed than the Third Republic. The Second Republic came into existence quickly and with limited bloodshed. The country was at peace and the majority of its leaders supported the existence of the Republic, with the republicans supporting it because, obviously, the monarchists grudgingly accepting it until they could find some alternative, and the socialists supporting it to stave off a monarchist coup. In stark contrast, the Third Republic had been born in the midst of a losing war. It suffered a humiliating treaty which saw it pay a large indemnity and give up its eastern territories of Alsace-Moselle. The majority of its elected officials wanted to abolish it and replace the republic with a monarchy. Finally, it faced a revolution in Paris as the radical socialists refused to recognize the national government.

On paper, the Second Republic should have succeeded while the Third Republic failed. Yet, what happened in both cases was that those in power turned against each other while those out of power bided their time, grew stronger and formed a unified front for their preferred system of government. In the Second Republic republicans and socialists killed each other over the issue of national workshops and poor relief while the monarchists put aside their differences to support Louis-Napoleon in the following election. In the Third Republic the Legitimists, Orléanists and Bonapartists fought each other over who should become the next monarch and over how much power that monarch should have. Meanwhile, the republicans coordinated, administered where they could and then swept into power in the subsequent elections. Taken this way, France was ready for a republic in 1848 but decisions by individual politicians disillusioned voters who looked for an alternative.