Competitors and Mouchards

Abstract

“THE REVOLUTIONARY WORKER HAS PLACED HIS MUSKET in a secret redoubt,” proclaimed the workers’ journal L’Atelier in 1844; “he has thrown his last cartridges into the river, and the ordres du jour of the insurrectional society, save for a single example for history, have been fed to the fire by his own hands.”1 Republicans had won the battle for the working classes by 1848—the shape of la guerre des rues in February would prove that—yet in the 1840s, they seemed paradoxically in decline. They had no method: insurrection was impossible after 1839, the great secret societies were gone, and regicide was in disrepute. They had difficulty as well in carving out a distinct niche. As for political change, the half-loaf of suffrage expansion championed by radicals and the dynastic opposition promised a safer, less-sacrificial path. In social reform they had been outpaced by socialists, who offered an extended critique of the capitalist system and non-violent methods of remaking the world. In a blistering 1843 attack, Fourierist Victor Considérant asserted that the republicans had only one idea in their arsenal, the substitution of an elected head of state for a hereditary one; in the “matter of social and progressive ideas,” he added, the republican party was “lighter in baggage than the government itself.”2 The National responded to such assaults in an important December 1844 editorial: