Napoleon III and the French Second Empire by Roger D. Price Page A

autonomy was very much a minority phenomenon. In 1864, when three worker candidates –
    Blanc, Coutant and Tolain – had stood for election in Paris in support of social reform, they had been bitterly attacked by established republican politicians and accused of being Bonapartists. They obtained 342, 11 and 500 votes, respectively.
    Clearly, working-class milirants still lacked political authority within their own 49
    class. It was to middle-class politicians that workers looked to satisfy their aspirations for greater equality and dignity. Far more widespread than adherence to any ideological position in the working-class quarters of Paris was a diffuse sense of injustice which could certainly awaken sympathy for demands for revolutionary change among the large crowds attending political meetings during 1869–70.
    Speakers who denounced the bourgeoisie for ‘living off the sweat of the people’ as vampires devouring ‘those who work’ and who condemned those who had
    ‘assassinated’ the people in June 1848 and the despotism established by the ‘crime of December 1851’, were warmly applauded. Many speakers looked forward to an imminent revolution which would allow a settling of accounts and ‘the
    emancipation of the workers’. Nevertheless, it is difficult to judge to what degree this hostility towards employers and a repressive government, evident in the strike waves of the late 1860s, was translated into a desire for revolutionary change. In general, it seems that, although many among the younger generations of worker militants rejected the utopian socialism of their fathers’ generation in favour of collectivism and syndicalism, the widespread desire for social reform was
    successfully channelled by republican politicians into a vague reformism redolent of February 1848.
    The republican movement, united in opposition to the Empire and on the
    principle of popular sovereignty, was otherwise bitterly divided over questions of personality, tactics and principle. For most of its leaders, winning over and then retaining mass support was the major objective. Socialism was seen as a threat to this and to the liberal economic and social principles to which both moderate and radical politicians alike subscribed. They rejected forcefully what they regarded as the extremist propaganda of the left, which by its re-creation of the ‘red spectre’
    threatened to frighten the electorate and to alienate in particular the property-owning lower middle classes and peasants. In addition, they were afraid that it would provoke a repressive government response. Moderate republicans like
    Favre, Carnot, Simon and Picard, accustomed to working within the institutions of the Second Empire, seem to have been willing to rely entirely upon legal,
    parliamentary methods of securing concessions into the indefinite future, insisting upon their commitment to social order and arousing suspicion that they too, like Ollivier and Darimon, might eventually rally to the regime. These hommes de 1848 , who had failed once already, were criticised by younger men like Gambetta, Spuller, Allain-Targé and Vermorel. The latter also opposed the violent rhetoric of revolutionaries such as the influential journalist Rochefort, and future leaders of 50
    the Paris Commune in 1871 such as the Blanquist Raoul Rigault and the neo-
    Jacobin Delescluze, both committed to the organisation of a revolutionary coup.
    Relationships between these republican factions were extremely poor and in the 1869 elections in Paris and Lyon, republicans would stand against each other for election.
    Support for the republicans cannot be defined easily. It was present in all social groups, but was particularly strong in urban centres, in both the major cities and numerous small towns like Beaune, Gevrey or Nolay in the Côte d’Or, for example, where little groups of activists had been at work since the 1830s. In part, it was the product of the continuing competition for local