University of Notre Dame Du Lac On Behalf of Review of Politics, Cambridge University Press The Review of Politics

A New Look at the French Revolution of 1830
Author(s): David H. Pinkney

Source: The Review of Politics, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Oct., 1961), pp. 490-506
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A New Look at the French Revolution
of 1830
David H. Pinkney
A MONG the revolutions in France since 1789 one, the Revo-

lution of 1830, has been singularly neglected by historians
in this century, and neither in this century nor the preceding
one has it attracted much attention from any but the political his-
torians.* No monograph on the whole story of the Revolution
has ever been published, and the standard account, in Lavisse's
Histoire de France contemporaine, appeared nearly forty years
ago.1 The economic and sociological dimensions of the event have
been generally ignored. Consequently, the Revolution of 1830 is
ordinarily seen as a political movement arising out of the unpopu-
larity of Charles X and his ministers and out of their attempt to
arrogate the sovereign power to the crown.
In the spring of 1830 a majority in the parliament had de-
manded that Charles dismiss his ministry, so runs the usual story
of the revolution, because it was unacceptable to them. The King
refused, rejecting the implication that the government was respon-
sible to parliament; and after he failed to defeat the majority in
the elections of 1830 he issued the "Five Ordinances," which,
had they been enforced, would have established the personal rule
of the King. To this veritable coup d'e'tat the liberal deputies
contemplated only passive resistance, but Parisian workers, directed
by students and republican leaders, resisted violently and in three
days wrested control of the capital from the royal government.
The sudden upheaval took the opposition deputies by surprise,
and they were unprepared to pick up the ball of sovereignty that
the precipitous withdrawal of the government had left rolling
around in the streets of Paris. The workers, according to the tradi-
tional account, had fought for a republic, but they, too, lacked
plans for a new government. Only the supporters of the Duke of
Orleans were prepared. They had a candidate for the throne.
* This article was originally presented, in somewhat different form, as a
University Lecture at the University of Michigan on February 12, 1959.
1 S. Charlety, La Restauration (1815-1830) and La Monarchie de Juillet
(1830-1848) (Ernest Lavisse, ed., Histoire de France contemporaine, Tomes
IV et V) (Paris, [c. 1921]).
490
FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1830 491
They won over the opposition deputies and Lafayette, who swung
popular support to them, and on August 9, 1830, Louis, Duke of
Orleans, became Louis Philippe, King of the French. All this
was accomplished in Paris, and, we are told, the provinces passively
accepted it.
France had a new ruling house, and the constitutional issue
posed by the conflict of king and parliament was settled in favor
of parliament. The Revolution of 1830 was, then, in this ordin-
arily accepted account a political revolution, accomplished in its
final result by the middle class deputies of the opposition. Republi-
can historians have viewed it as no less a political event but as a
revolution incomplete, a prelude to 1848, when republicans would
achieve their goal.
This conventional history, written in the single dimension of
politics, leaves much unexplained, many questions unanswered.
Why did the workers of Paris risk their lives in July 1830?
To defend the Charter of 1814 as many contemporaries fatuously
pretended to believe? To defend the abstract principles of 1789?
To re-establish the Republic, which was to some a distant memory,
to most only a hazy ideal?
Why did the same limited electorate of substantial property
owners change from strongly pro-royalist and pro-government in
1824 to pro-liberal and anti-government in the next general elec-
tion less than four years later and become revolutionaries in 1830?
Was this startling reversal owing solely to the ultra-royalists' poli-
tical policies? Even in 1824 the electorate knew pretty well what
these policies were, and then it approved them.
Why did the provinces accept the Revolution so readily?
Why did Charles not appeal to the provinces to support him
against revolutionary Paris? The history of the Great Revolution
would certainly suggest this course.
And a final question - was this revolution really revolutionary?
Was it no more than a change of dynasty and the settlement of
a constitutional issue?
Since the recent war a handful of French economic and social
historians - notably Ernest Labrousse, Paul Gonnet, Louis Che-
valier - have been re-examining the years around 1830. They
have not been concerned specifically with the Revolution itself,
but they offer to the historian of the Revolution new views of it.
This article, drawing on the work of these French scholars and
492 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS
on my own research into the shift in the governing elite of France

effected by the Revolution, presents three new views of the Revo-
lution. The first is economic.
I
The basic fact seen from the vantage point of economic history
is that the Revolution of 1830 occurred during a depression that
wracked the French economy from 1828 to 1832. The popular
resort to violence came when food prices in Paris, and in the prov-
inces, too, were at a level that tens of thousands of workingmen
could not afford to pay.2
The reversal of the prosperity that France had enjoyed after
1817 was first evident in 1826. In that year industrial prices, mov-
ing upward for nearly a decade, fell off. Wages in industry de-
clined as much as 10 per cent. In some places unemployment was
considerable - 11,000 looms were idle in Lyon in the spring of
1826; in the same year 3000 construction workers unable to find
work in Paris returned to their homes in central France. These
economic reverses although locally serious produced no widespread
distress, but in 1828 and the following years a crisis stemming from
a succession of bad crops, turned recession into grave depression.
From 1827 through 1830 there was but one good crop of wheat,
only two of potatoes. In 1828 the price of wheat was 40 per cent
above the price in 1825, in 1829 60 per cent above, and it never
dropped below that level in the next three years. The price of bread
to the consumer rose even more - as much as 125 per cent between
1825 and 1829.
The French workingman in the 1820's spent a third to a half
of his income on food, and bread was the staple of his diet. A rise
in the price of bread cut sharply into his budget and forced him to
reduce other expenditures. One of the few other expenditures that
his meager budget could afford was on clothing, and reduction of
that expenditure, in turn, affected the textile industry. The cotton,
wool, and silk industries, all fell into doldrums that continued
through 1831. The iron industry was affected in 1829. The demand
for coal declined. For the first time since the beginning of the
2 This section of the article, unless otherwise noted, is based on Ernest
Labrousse, Le Mouvement ouvrier et les iddes sociales en France de 1815 a la
fin du XIXe sidcle (Les Cours de Sorbonne, Paris, [1948], Fascicule II) and
Labrousse, "Comment naissent les revolutions," Actes du Congres historique
du Centenaire de la Revolution de 1848 (Paris, 1948), pp. 1-20.
Restoration the middle class saw prices and profits drop and stay
depressed.
Middle class opinion blamed the government for the crisis. One
might infer this from the experience of our own time, our own
practice of holding our government responsible for depression or
recession, but proof of it can be found in the parliamentary debates
and the press of the time. This dissatisfaction seems to have found
expression, too, in the parliamentary elections. In 1824 in a period
of full prosperity the electorate chose a large majority of rightists,
supporters of the government. Essentially the same electorate in
1827 returned a majority on the left, strongly hostile to the govern-
ment. In 1830, with the depression much worse, the same voters
elected an even larger majority of leftists. A few weeks later they
calmly sanctioned a violent revolution that ended the regime that
they blamed for their economic difficulties. The depression surely
had something to do with this political reversal.
Urban workingmen suffered much more than their employers
from the depression. Not only did their cost of living rise disastrously
but their wages dropped, and the curse of unemployment fell upon
thousands. There were many variations from industry to industry
and from region to region, but in general, Labrousse maintains, be-
tween 1826 and 1830 wages declined from a quarter to a third.
Unemployment was common by 1827-28 and in the summer of
1828 and the following years it assumed serious proportions. Police
reports, prefectoral and procureur-general reports in these years all
attest to the generalization and persistence of unemployment
throughout the nation. The large foundry at Chaillot in Paris cut
its force from three to four hundred to one hundred. The royal
tapestry factory, La Savonnerie, let go half its workers. In October,
1828, the Minister of the Interior instructed the prefects to dis-
courage workingmen from coming to Paris in search of employment.
The worker found his standard of living under triple pressure
from rising prices, declining wages, and unemployment. The result
was want, distress, and, as the depression continued and deepened,
dark and desperate poverty for tens of thousands of Frenchmen. In
Paris the police reports of the time are unanimous that when the
price of a four livre loaf of bread exceeded 12 or 13 sous, most of
the working population of the city was underfed. The price had
been at 11/2 sous in 1826. By the end of 1828 it stood at 19 sous,
and it never fell below that high level until 1832, when the govern-
ment fixed the price by law. News of each rise in price was received
in the poor quarters of Paris as a veritable sentence of death. Death
from starvation was not unknown in the city, and certainly many
deaths attributed to other causes really stemmed from prolonged
privation.3 The great cholera epidemic in 1832 had its heaviest
incidence in the poor, starved quarters of the capital.4 In October,
1828, the Commissioner of Police in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine
wrote: "Rise in the price of bread . . . produced . . . bitter com-
plaints; the approach of winter frightens the people and with good
reason..... Soon the father of a family will not earn enough to buy
bread and how can he provide for clothing his children and for
payment of his rent?"5
To thousands in Paris the difference between life and death
was the bread card distributed by the police and by relief offices
that entitled the holder to bread at reduced prices. In July, 1830,
(significant date!) 227,000 Parisians applied for this relief. The
population of the city was only 755,000. This figure of 227,000
was probably not swollen by deadbeats looking for an easy sou,
for the authorities enforced rigorous rules to eliminate the unde-
serving, and workers generally considered it humiliating to apply
for a card. An estimate based on the number of deaths in municipal
charity hospitals placed the number of Parisians living in poverty
and misery in 1830 at the staggering total of 420,000!6
What was the connection between misery and revolution? This
is a question debated for more than a hundred years by historians
of the Revolution of 1789, and they have not yet found a uni-
versally accepted answer. One is not readily discoverable here, but
it is certain that les miserables in the depression of the late Restora-
tion blamed the government, the King, and the Jesuits for their
plight. A police report of October 21, 1828, recorded:
A hand lettered poster has been put up at the port of entry to the
rue Saint-Nicolas, quarter of Quinze-Vingts: 'Vive Napoleon! War
to the death on Charles X and the priests who want to starve us to
death.' Several workers applauded it. . . . The same signs have
SLouis Chevalier, Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses a' Paris pendant

la premiere moitid du XIXe siecle (Paris, [c. 1958]), pp. 314-21.
4Chevalier, Classes laborieuses, p. 438; Louis Chevalier, ed., Le Cholera;
le premiere dpidemie du XIXe siecle (Biblotheque de la Revolution de 1848,
XX) (Roche-sur-Yon, 1958), 31-34.
5 Chevalier, Classes laborieuses, pp. 315-16.
B Chevalier, Classes laborieuses, pp. 444, 446-47.
been distributed in the rues de Charenton and de Charonne, in the

faubourgs Saint-Marceau and Saint-Martin. In cabarets and shops
there is talk that the people must join to march on the Tuileries to
ask for work and bread.7
Paul Gonnet has made a study of the depression and its conse-
quences in provincial France. .Distress and misery were generally
less concentrated outside the capital, but they were no less real and
scarcely less significant for the Revolution. Statistics gathered in
1830 showed that 26,000,000 Frenchmen among a population of
31,000,000 had no more than 11 sous of income a day. Municipal
pawnshops, which throughout France lent modest sums of money
on the security of personal property, saw their sales of articles un-
redeemed by their owners rise from less than a million in a pros-
perous year, 1825, to more than a million and a half in 1831. The
number of births in the country decreased, but the number of
infants abandoned by their parents (surely a sign of desperation)
increased.
Distress and desperation found overt expression in riots, demon-
strations, concerted violence scattered over all France, especially
in the departments north of the Loire River. After 1827 food riots
and rebellion against tax collectors became the principal subject of
reports from the procureurs-general. In the eighteen months ending
in December, 1827, only three incidents were mentioned, but in
1829 ninety incidents were reported, twenty-five in the month of
May alone. These included holding up grain convoys, extortion of
grain from peasants and tenants, forced sales of grain at "fair"
prices, destruction of octroi barriers, and the sacking of offices of
tax collectors. At the same time the number of labor disturbances
increased - strikes, petitions, demonstrations for higher wages or
more work. This agitation was most intense in the spring, summer,
and fall of 1829 and again in the spring of 1830.
Gonnet's picture of France in 1829 and 1830 is of a country
in popular distress and ferment. The dike against civil disorder
erected by Napoleon after 1799 seemed to have been broken, and
France was again in a flood of disobedience.
The political significance of this is unmistakable. Everywhere
the government was blamed for the troubles of the time. "The King
7Chevalier, Classes laborieuses, p. 319.

8 Paul Gonnet, "Esquisse de la crise tconomique en France de 1827 A
1832," Revue d'histoire economique et sociale, XXXIII (1955), 249-92.
and the Jesuits," cried the rioters, "force up the price of wheat."
At Saint-Germain-en-Laye a crowd gathered to protest the high
cost of bread shouted, "Vive la Ripublique" and "Vive Napoleon !"
In the same years rioters in two villages raised the tricolor. Signs
and handbills demanding bread insulted the King and acclaimed
the days of the Revolution, when the Law of the Maximum had
kept the price of bread low.
The prolonged depression created a situation favorable to revo-
lution. It exasperated bourgeoisie, workers, and peasants alike with
the Bourbon government, and in producing popular disorder it ac-
customed men to violent resistance to authority. Economic distress
alone would probably not produce a political revolution, but the
height of economic distress coinciding with a political crisis and a
provocative act by the king did, Labrousse suggests, produce the
revolution in Paris, and without all three elements it might never
have occurred. The outbreak came only in Paris, but the threat of
revolution in the provinces helps to explain the rapid collapse of
the Bourbon regime throughout the country. Charles X made no
appeal to the provinces to support him against Paris, and there was
no rising in his support. Was this not because prolonged distress had
alienated the country from the regime? Growing violence in the
countryside made this alienation clear, and Charles surely knew
that he commanded no loyalty or respect and that the army could
not cope with universal defection.
II
Sociology provides a second vantage point from which to view

the Revolution. Louis Chevalier, Professor of the History of Paris
in the Collkge de France, director of historical research in the Na-
tional Institute of Demographic Studies, and the author of two
brilliantly provocative books on the population of Paris,9 has pointed
out that social disorganization in Paris as measured by such indices
as mortality, homicide, suicide, illegitimacy, mendicity, and inci-
dence of crime has reached its high points at times following rapid
growth of the city from an influx of immigrants. The disorganiza-
tion occurred even if economic conditions were good. On the other
9 This section is based on Chevalier's Classes laborieuses et classes danger-

euses. His earlier book on Paris is La Formation de la population de Paris
au XIXe siecle (Institut national d'Etudes demographiques, Travaux et docu-
ments, Cahier No. 10) (Paris, 1950).
hand, the indices declined when the rate of population increase

was slower even though economic conditions were less favorable.
Closer correlation can, therefore, be established between social dis-
organization, including all manner of civil disorders, and a rapid
increase in population than between social disorganization and
fluctuations in the economy. In his new book, Classes laborieuses
et classes dangereuses, Chevalier points for illustration to the crisis
of the Popular Front years in the 1930's following the precipitous
increase in the population of Paris after the War of 1914; to the
seething Paris on the eve of 1914 following the unusual rise in
population during the preceding two or three decades; and to the
social malaise and the succession of disorders of the 1830's and
1840's following the unprecedented growth of the city after the
end of the Revolution of 1789.
In each instance the capital suffered from a social disequilibrium

produced by an influx of population greater than the city could
assimilate into its normal life. There were not enough jobs for all.
Thousands were forced into the most menial, most unstable jobs
and obliged to live in part at least on public relief and private
charity. Housing capacity fell far short of needs; newcomers and
many others were forced to live in garrets and cellars, in teeming
apartments and crowded furnished rooms. All the essential urban
equipment lagged behind the growing needs of the waxing popu-
lation; streets were inadequate for the growing traffic; there were
not enough sewers, not enough water, not enough schools, not
enough hospitals.
A consequence of this imbalance was the development of a
population living on the margins of the city's life - insecure,
wretchedly housed, undernourished, in poor health, even physically
inferior, and resentful against the society that had no place for it.
Resentment readily became overt, and it was ordinarily expressed
in crime.
What do these generalizations of Chevalier signify for the
Revolution of 1830? The first three decades of the nineteenth
century brought a formidable increase in the population of Paris,
coming after centuries of very slow growth. Between the censuses
of 1801 and 1817 the number of inhabitants rose more than 30
per cent; between 1817 and the next census in 1831, more than
10 per cent. If the latter census had been taken in 1830 before
the Revolution, the second percentage would certainly have been
notably higher. In 1830 at least a quarter of a million more

people lived in Paris than had lived there just thirty years earlier.'0
In those thirty years neither the city's economy nor its urban
equipment expanded to accommodate so explosive an increase.
Few houses were built in the workers' quarters. No major street
construction was completed in the old and crowded districts. Few
streets had underground sewers, and the river still served as the
principal collector sewer. Not one house in five had running water.
The meaning of all this in human terms is eloquently expressed
in statistical records and in literary evidence. In July, 1830, the
number of persons aided by public relief, we have seen, exceeded
225,000; more than one person in every four in Paris was living
on the very edge of subsistence. Swarms of beggars were a con-
stant reminder of shocking poverty. The Journal des Debats for
November 27, 1828, reported: "Beggars pursue passers-by in the
streets, besiege the doors of churches, penetrate into houses, impose
on storekeepers, and everywhere present the striking contrast of
abject misery beside wealth and abundance." The death rate for
all France in the 1820's was about 25 per 1000. In Paris it was
32 per thousand in 1828, 33 in 1829, 35 in 1830. In the age
group of twenty to thirty-nine years, which included most of the
immigrants, the death rate between 1826 and 1830 averaged a
frightening 48 per 1000, almost double the rate for the country
as a whole. These figures would be even higher in the crowded,
poverty-stricken quarters of the center of the city. The death
rates in the various arrondissements of Paris in the 1820's varied
directly with the degree of poverty in each. Infant mortality in
the Rue Mouffetard, for example, was double that of the fashion-
able Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honor6.
Balzac wrote that when the Prussian commander, Bliicher,
arrived on the heights of Montmartre in 1814, one of his generals
exclaimed, "Now, we'll burn Paris!" "Bliicher," Balzac went on,
10 Most of the immigrants to Paris in this period came from the traditionally
revolutionary northern part of France, and G. de Bertier de Sauvigny has
suggested that this strong admixture of belligerent republicans in the popula-
tion may in part explain Parisians' frequent resort to violence against the
monarchy. By the end of the century all parts of France including the royalist
south and west contributed to the population of the capital; then Paris' poli-
tical sympathies, revealed in election results, showed a conservative, even a
reactionary trend. - G. de Bertier de Sauvigny, "Population Movements and
Political Changes in Nineteenth-Century France," Review of Politics, XIX
(January 1957), 44-5.
"pointed to the great ulcer that they saw spreading out below
them, burning and smoking in the valley of the Seine," and an-
swered, "'Wait a while; France will die from that!' "
The number of suicides and the number of homicides increased
sharply in the final years of the Restoration, and both were ex-
pressions of the growing sickness of Parisian society. Most involved
the poor and the miserable of the city. Between 1830 and 1835
nearly two-thirds of the bodies brought to the Morgue remained
unidentified and unclaimed. In death as in life, these unfortunates
were on the margins of society - unwanted and rejected in life,
unknown and unmourned in death.
The high percentage of illegitimate children is another evidence
of a large part of the population living beyond the law, unassimi-
lated to society. More than one third of the births in Paris in the
latter 1820's were illegitimate.
This pathological behavior becomes more comprehensible if
one looks at the housing in which these people were obliged to live.
About half the city's population crowded into the central quarters
comprising only about one-fifth of the city's area. Here hundreds
of houses of about twenty feet frontage, five stories, and no court-
yard, housed thirty, forty, even sixty persons. Here deaths from
cholera in 1832 were double the average rate for the entire city.
In 1828 a guidebook to Paris reported on these slums: "For
10 francs a month an entire household composed of husband, wife,
and a brood of children huddle into a room 8 feet square, fur-
nished with a tattered bed and canvas sheets. The single worker
pays 6 francs monthly to use one of 30 or 40 beds in a common
sleeping room." Those who could not afford to pay six francs at
one time could get a bed for the night for 40 to 60 centimes.
"Such is the price," continued the guidebook, "of a refuge that
the police may raid at any moment. Not a minute passes when
they are not seeking out someone in these holes and for good
reason."
Not only did this substantial part of the population live on the
fringes of the legal and respectable life of Paris, but they were
regarded by middle class Parisians as an almost separate and
frightening race of men, without morals, without religion, lost in
crime. They were commonly referred to as barbarians, savages,
nomads. One need not look far in the literature and art of the
time to find evidence of this attitude.
The novelist Eugene Sue, in his Mysteries of Paris, declared

that everyone had read James Fenimore Cooper's descriptions of
the American savages and shuddered for their victims. Sue wrote:
We are going to try to put before the eyes of the reader some
episodes of the life of other barbarians as much outside civiliza-
tion as the savages painted by Cooper. Only the savages of which
we speak are in the midst of us; we can rub elbows with them
by venturing into haunts where they live; . . . where they gather
to plan murder and robbery, to divide the spoils from their victims.
These men have customs of their own, women of their own, a
language of their own.
The use of the term savage and barbarian was not limited to
criminals but was spread indiscriminately over all the poor, work-
ing class of Paris even by those sympathetic to them. Hugo re-
ferred to the people of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine as "savages."
Proudhon wrote: "These barbarians to which we give the name
of proletarians." Balzac's descriptions of lower class Parisians
evoked the same terms even though he did not use them directly.
He referred to the women on the Place Maubert in the poverty-
stricken Twelfth Arrondissement as a "horrible assemblage, which
at first inspired disgust that quickly turned to terror....D"
Daumier and his contemporary illustrators almost always
showed the poor of Paris not like the sterling individuals in Dela-
croix's painting of "Liberty Leading the People," but darkly hideous
and repulsive. Daumier's "Parisian Types" might have been drawn
as illustrations of one of Balzac's descriptions: "This people hor-
rible to see, . . . , these cadaverous faces - this people emerged
from the grave."
Paris in 1830 had a fourth, perhaps even more, of its popula-
tion living both physically and morally on the edges of civilized
life - thousands were beyond the edge and most passed readily
from one side to another. In this mass crime was normal - a
kind of settling of accounts between the outcasts and the society
that had no place for them. It was only another step to revolu-
tion - a mass settling of accounts.
The connection in 1830 between misery, both economic and
moral, and rejection by society, on the one hand, and revolution
on the other, has not been conclusively proved, but there are a
number of significant links. Geographically there is a close corre-
lation between the worst slums where the Parisian savages lived
out their miserable lives and the bitterest street fighting in 1830.
A similar correlation exists between the areas of high incidence
of cholera in 1832, which attacked the poorest quarters, and the
street fighting in June of that year.
Contemporaries saw the connection between misery and insur-
rection and feared it. In 1830 one wrote of the people of the
Faubourg Saint-Antoine: "It is impossible to suffer more than
most of them. . . . They have not taken vengeance; they only
suffer and complain. . . . They await the last straw. The last
straw - it is a woman, a child dying of hunger and misery. Look
out when the terrible moment comes." Another writing of the
Revolution of 1830 declared: "The people in rags guarded the
gates of the palace- although hastily contrived blue smocks
covered their hideous nudity their appearance was no less sinister."
A little later but still applicable to an earlier scene an observer
wrote: "The hospital, prison, the morgue - that is the fate of
the poor and the ex-convict, and you ask that . .. these men who
cling to life should not rebel against society."
Here we are face to face with insurrection that sprang not
from simple economic distress. It was the protest of the outcast
against a society that had no honorable place for him and his
children. Perhaps, too, it was the action of the rootless, amoral
individual who in existing society could find self expression only
in violence.
One product of the sickness of Parisian society that we can
say with certainty contributed to the Revolution of 1830 is the
gamin, the homeless and often abandoned young street urchin of
Paris. They were always in the front of the street fighting in the
city. Tocqueville said it was they who ordinarily started the revo-
lutions. A prefect of police wrote that they always carried the
first paving stones to the barricades and almost always fired the
first shot. Hugo gave the type literary immortality in the character
of Gavroche in Les Miserables. Delacroix in his "Liberty Leading
the People," put a typical gamin at the side of the heroic figure
of Liberty. On her right is a bourgeois in top hat; on her left the
young boy, a pistol in each hand.
III
Following two views of the origins of the Revolution of 1830
the third view is of its consequences. Here is posed the question
- was there a revolution in France in 1830? Did the events of

1830 effect any fundamental changes in the government and the
life of the nation? The query has had many negative answers.
Casimir Perier, who became prime minister in 1831, declared
shortly after the July Days: "The trouble with this country is that
there are many men who imagine there has been a revolution in
France. No, sir, there has been no revolution. There has been
simply a change in the person of the chief of the State."" Indeed,
the chief of the State was still a Bourbon, and although he was
committed to respect the wishes of the majority in the Chamber,
he was as anxious as his predecessor for personal rule. The old
constitution was retained without substantial change except on the
crown's authority to legislate under emergency powers. The elec-
torate was enlarged only slightly, and Sherman Kent in his Elec-
toral Procedure under Louis Philippe showed that the new regime
was still, as far as voting rights were concerned, a monarchy of
the landed gentry.12
Republicans hold that Casimir-PCrier and his party misunder-
stood the Revolution, that it was really a democratic movement, a
prelude to the Revolution of 1848. But certainly in its results it
was no republican revolution, and it is doubtful that more than a
handful of leaders were even motivated by republican ideas.
Certainly also no revolution occurred in the economy nor in
the conditions of the working class. The economic depression con-
tinued after July, and the great mass of les miserables in Paris
remained the outcasts of society, still savages in the eyes of the
middle class.
Conventional histories, which treat the events in Paris as a
revolution, usually emphasize that in the provinces there was no
revolution. It was an import from Paris - a revolution sent out
by mail from the Ministry of the Interior. When word reached
local authorities they hauled down the white flag of the Bourbons
and ran up the Tricolor, changed the royal arms on official signs
and public buildings, and had prayers altered in the churches.
This view is scarcely compatible with Gonnet's picture of a coun-
tryside seething with unrest, on and frequently over the brink of
violence. The news of the happenings in Paris in July was not
"i Quoted in Charlety, Monarchie de Juillet, p. 5.

12 Sherman Kent, Electoral Procedure under Louis Philippe (New Haven,
1937).
always passively received. In many departments it was a signal

for attacks on chateaux and for pillaging houses of Carlist sympa-
thizers.13 But these disorders effected no significant change not
achieved in Paris.
One consequence of the Revolution does, however, seem to
have been revolutionary. That was the purge and replacement
of officeholders. The new government made a clean sweep of the
administrative and military personnel of the Restoration. Almost
all the prefects were replaced or reassigned; new sub-prefects were
appointed by the score, new mayors, new procureurs-general.
Royalist officers were replaced in the army. Everyone who played
a role in the days of July demanded a reward in the form of a job.
Lafayette alone was said to have endorsed 70,000 requests for'
jobs.14
Saint-Marc-Girardin, the literary critic, described the scene in
Paris in those post-revolutionary days: ". .. from seven o'clock
in the morning on, battalions of men in dark suits hurried forth
from all quarters of the capital. On foot, in cabs, in carriages,
perspiring, panting; the cocade in their hats, tricolor ribbon on
their lapels, they converged on the ministries."15
Le Vaudeville Theater in Paris presented a show called "La
Foire aux Places."16 The curtain arose on a waiting room of a
ministry filled with job seekers, and they sang in chorus:
Qu'on nous place

Et que justice se fasse.
Qu'on nous place
Tous en masse.
Que les places
Soient chass's.17
The official journal, the Moniteur universel, in the weeks fol-

lowing the revolution was filled with notices of the removal of
old officials and the appointment of new. In the first week of
13 Gonnet, "Esquisse de la crise Cconomique," p. 291.

14Jean Capefigue, Le Gouvernement de Juillet, les partis et les hommes
politiques, 1830 a 1835 (Paris, 1835), II, 208, 209, 224-26, 229; Jacques
Boucher de Perthes, Sous dix rois: souvenirs de 1791 a 1860 (Paris, 1863-66),
VI, 498; C. J. Gignoux, La Vie de Baron Louis (2d ed.; Paris, [1928]), 230.
15 Quoted in Gignoux, Vie de Baron Louis, p. 231.
16 Le Moniteur universel (Paris), Sept. 26, 1830, p. 1130.
17 Quoted in Gignoux, Vie de Baron Louis, p. 231.
August alone the Moniteur printed ordinances naming twenty-

nine new prefects, eleven new sub-prefects, eleven procureurs-
general, and new appointments continued to hold a large place
in the columns of the paper through the remainder of the year,
often long lists of new men in a single ordinance.
The key administrative and military posts and hundreds of
places of less importance but whose holders, nonetheless, were part
of the elite that governed France, all of these were by 1831 held
by quite different men than those who held them a year earlier.
A glance at the names of some of the purged prefects suggests what
social class was going out of office: Comte de Puymaigre, Comte
Frottier de Bagneux, Comte de Brosse, Comte de Brancas, Comte
de Mural. These were the landed aristocracy, the mainstay of the
old monarchy.
Who were the new men? What political sympathy did they
represent? From what social class did they come? Some examples
suggest the answer.
The new prefect of police in Paris, Girod de l'Ain, was the
son of a member of the Legislative Body under the Empire whom
Napoleon had raised to the nobility. The son began his career in
the imperial law courts, and he was successively imperial procureur
in Turin, imperial procureur in Alessandria, and assistant pro-
cureur-general in Lyon. After the fall of the Empire he entered
private law practice, and in 1827 he was elected an opposition
member of the Chamber of Deputies.'s
The new prefect of the Department of the Seine-et-Oise, Victor
d'Aubernon, was the son of an administrative official in the
Napoleonic armies, who had served in the Netherlands, in Ger-
many, and in the Illyrian Provinces.'9
Simon Bernard, a newly appointed lieutenant-general, was
another child of the Empire. Graduated from the Ecole poly-
technique in 1797 he immediately saw service with the army in
Germany and northern Italy. By 1813 he was a colonel and aide-
de-camp to the Emperor. He kept his commission in the army
of the Restoration in 1814, but he rejoined Napoleon on his return
from Elba and fought with him to the end at Waterloo. Then
with a recommendation from Lafayette he secured an appoint-
18 Nouvelle Biographie Ginerale (Paris, 1855-70), XX, 726-28. Hereafter

cited as N.B.G.
19 N.B.G., III, 559.
ment with the United States Corps of Engineers, and for the next
fifteen years he planned and supervised the construction of coastal
defenses along the eastern seaboard of the United States. (Fortress
Monroe is part of his legacy to this country.) On hearing of the
Revolution of 1830 he hurried back to France. He was promptly
restored to the army, promoted to the rank of lieutenant-general,
and appointed aide-de-camp to the king. From 1836 to 1839 he
was minister of war.20
Georges Eugene Haussmann, prefect of the Department of the
Seine under Napoleon III, got his start in the prefectoral service
as a consequence of the Revolution of 1830. His father was a
Commissaire de Guerre in the imperial armies from the beginning
of his career in 1806. His maternal grandfather was an imperial
general and served as military governor of Vienna in 1809. Hauss-
mann's godfather was Prince Eugene Beauharnais, the Emperor's
step-son, and his middle name, Eugene, was given for the prince.
The collapse of the Empire was a blow to the family. Haussmann's
father, his career interrupted at age twenty-nine, went into journal-
ism and eventually joined the staff of the opposition newspaper,
Le Temps. In 1830 Georges, owing to this connection, played a
minor role in the Revolution and fortunately received a slight
wound. When he completed law school in October of that year
he appealed for his reward- a sub-prefecture would be appro-
priate, he believed. The following spring he was appointed secre-
tary-general of the perfecture at Poitiers.21
These four are typical. All were Bonapartists, officials of the
First Empire or sons of officials, all out of power and out of favor
after 1815. In 1830 they returned and became the elite of the
July Monarchy. The Revolution of 1830 appears to have been
a Bonapartist revival, - not a prelude to 1848, as republican his-
torians have seen it, but a step toward the Second Empire.
Can this new administrative and military elite be identified and
characterized socially? Were they the middle class notables--
the substantial, well-to-do middle class citizens who governed
France under the Legislative Assembly in 1791-92, under the Con-
20 N.B.G., V, 594-95; Dictionary of American biography (New York,

1928- ), II, 223.
21 George Eugene Haussmann, Mimoires, (3d edit.; Paris, 1890), I, 10-14,
21-22, 37-48; J. M. and Brian Chapman, The Life and Times of Baron Hauss-
mann (London, 1957), pp. 6-19.
sulate and the Empire, again in the latter years of the Second
Empire and the first years of the Third Republic, and apparently
again under the Fifth Republic? There are those perhaps who
would answer, yes, but a definitive answer awaits more research
into the origins and status of individual members of the new elite
that emerged in August 1830 and the succeeding months.
This new look at the Revolution of 1830 first emphasized the
importance of the economic depression and of social disorganiza-
tion in the origins of the revolution, then pointed out a neglected
but significant consequence of the revolution. It has raised more
questions than it has answered definitively, but it does demonstrate
clearly that the Revolution of 1830, long the preserve of the poli-
tical historians, can be fruitfully re-examined with the aid of the
concepts and techniques of economics and sociology. This does
not mean that the definitive history will be written in terms of
social pathology and economic depression and distress. The poli-
tical and constitutional struggle still remains central in the story,
and the action of the individuals - Charles X, Thiers, and La-
fayette, particularly - certainly shaped the course of events at
crucial moments, but these aspects of the subject can no longer
hold the exclusive position given them for more than a century
in the standard histories.

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University of Notre Dame Du Lac On Behalf of Review of Politics, Cambridge University Press The Review of Politics

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A New Look at the French Revolution of 1830

Author(s): David H. Pinkney

University of Notre Dame du lac on behalf of Review of Politics, Cambridge

A MONG the revolutions in France since 1789 one, the Revo-

on my own research into the shift in the governing elite of France

SLouis Chevalier, Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses a' Paris pendant

been distributed in the rues de Charenton and de Charonne, in the

7Chevalier, Classes laborieuses, p. 319.

Sociology provides a second vantage point from which to view

9 This section is based on Chevalier's Classes laborieuses et classes danger-

hand, the indices declined when the rate of population increase

In each instance the capital suffered from a social disequilibrium

notably higher. In 1830 at least a quarter of a million more

The novelist Eugene Sue, in his Mysteries of Paris, declared

- was there a revolution in France in 1830? Did the events of

"i Quoted in Charlety, Monarchie de Juillet, p. 5.

always passively received. In many departments it was a signal

Qu'on nous place

The official journal, the Moniteur universel, in the weeks fol-

13 Gonnet, "Esquisse de la crise Cconomique," p. 291.

August alone the Moniteur printed ordinances naming twenty-

18 Nouvelle Biographie Ginerale (Paris, 1855-70), XX, 726-28. Hereafter

20 N.B.G., V, 594-95; Dictionary of American biography (New York,

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