French Revolution of 1848

The revolution began with a crisis of the July Monarchy and a breakdown of confidence in Louis-Philippe’s government. France suffered a commercial and industrial downturn in 1846–47, poor harvests, unemployment, and rising food prices, while the electoral system restricted political power to a small propertied minority.²

Opposition politicians organized “banquet campaigns” to demand electoral reform after public meetings were restricted. When authorities banned a reform banquet scheduled for Paris on 22 February 1848, demonstrations expanded into an insurrection. Barricades appeared, troops clashed with crowds, and the king dismissed François Guizot, the dominant minister. Louis-Philippe abdicated on 24 February and fled to Britain. Deputies and republican activists formed a provisional government, declaring the monarchy ended and the Second Republic established.¹

The provisional government combined republican constitutional change with an unprecedented claim that the state should address workers’ insecurity. It introduced universal male suffrage, raising the electorate from roughly a quarter-million privileged voters to millions of adult men, and abolished the death penalty for political offenses. The government also proclaimed a right to work and created the Luxembourg Commission to discuss labor conditions.²

National Workshops were established to provide employment for the jobless, although they became a costly and administratively difficult relief program rather than a comprehensive reorganization of industry. The government abolished slavery in French colonies on 27 April 1848, extending the emancipation associated with the revolution beyond metropolitan France.³ Elections for a Constituent Assembly in April produced a largely moderate and republican body, revealing a widening gap between Parisian socialist expectations and conservative opinion in the provinces.

The closure of the National Workshops turned social tension into armed conflict in Paris. On 21 June the government ordered their dissolution or conversion, prompting workers and unemployed men to erect barricades from 23 to 26 June. General Louis-Eugène Cavaignac suppressed the June Days after severe street fighting, mass arrests, and deportations; the revolt permanently weakened cooperation between social republicans and political republicans.¹

The Constitution of 4 November 1848 created a legislature elected by universal male suffrage and a directly elected president with a four-year term. In December, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte won the presidency by a large margin, benefiting from his famous name, rural support, and opposition to both monarchism and revolutionary socialism.⁴ His later coup of 2 December 1851 ended the republic and prepared the creation of the Second Empire.

The revolution’s political citizenship was expansive by contemporary standards but still excluded women from voting and office-holding. Women participated in clubs, demonstrations, journalism, and charitable relief, and activists such as Jeanne Deroin pressed for political equality; the new republic nevertheless rejected women’s suffrage. The February government also included tensions that its celebratory republican image can obscure: workers demanded concrete economic rights, while many provincial voters favored order and property.

The upheaval had an important colonial dimension. The abolition decree of April was associated with Victor Schœlcher and ended legal slavery in French colonies, though emancipation unfolded amid disputes over labor, compensation, and colonial authority.³ France’s events also helped trigger the wider European Revolutions of 1848, but the French case was distinctive in moving rapidly from popular insurrection to universal male suffrage, a failed social program, presidential government, and authoritarian reversal.⁵

July Monarchy

The constitutional monarchy ruled by Louis-Philippe from 1830 until its overthrow in February 1848.

National Workshops

State-sponsored employment projects created in 1848 to provide work or relief for unemployed people in Paris.

June Days

The armed workers’ uprising in Paris from 23 to 26 June 1848, suppressed by the government.

Second Republic

The French republican regime established in February 1848 and ended by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s coup in 1851.