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During most of the nineteenth century, France was governed by non-republican regimes that were hostile to the ideals of the French Revolution. Consequently, the manner in which the Bonapartes, the Bourbons, and the Orleans put into practice the age-old ceremony of the state funeral differed from that of the republicans, but it also took on a different shape in each regime. In order to gain access to the commemorative policy of these regimes, it was enough, during the nineteenth century, to enter the Panthéon that was ‘no longer a monument, but a thermometer’. Other monuments and edifices, such as the Invalides and the July Column, became important burial places during the nineteenth century, but they could never compete with the Panthéon, whose honourable past conferred on it a special aura. This chapter focuses on the state funerals given to kings and emperors during the years 1800–1870, covering Napoleon Bonaparte's reign in the First Empire, the return of the Bourbons to power, the July Monarchy, and the Second Empire under Napoleon III.

This chapter discusses how the Gendarmerie was on the lookout for political disaffection throughout the July Monarchy. There was a little serious political commotion to occupy Gendarmerie brigades across provincial France in the months and years following the July Revolution. Moreover, legislation under the Restoration and the July Monarchy sought to improve the situation of the country, but even in départements where the state of the roads was prominent, the peasantry could resent the resulting interference.

This chapter discusses the era of the “Jurys Censitaires” during the periods of the Bourbon Restoration (1815–30) and the July Monarchy (1830–48), when the panels were composed almost exclusively of notables. It adds two major developments which distinguished the era: one was that liberal support for the jury as the “palladium of liberty” now reached its peak; and, the significant expansion of jury-based mitigation of penalties through the law of 1832 on extenuating circumstances. The chapter observes that acquittal rates were quite high during the early years of the period, especially for violent crimes, and further, that a large proportion of those persons who were convicted were found guilty of lesser charges than the most serious ones brought by the prosecution.

This chapter considers how Victor Considerant's thinking changed radically during the period from 1840 to 1848. It explains that during the last years of the July Monarchy and after years of supporting Louise Philippe and the principle of monarchy, Considerant decided finally to separate himself from the government and join the opposition. During this period, Considerant also distanced himself from Charles Fourier and argued for the necessity of constraint and repression.

This chapter considers the question of the “fearsome faubourgs,” when and how the physical margins of urban life came to be so suspect. The urban periphery, the leading edge of urbanization and the future of the city, challenged government officials, urban elites, and the police. If, during the Restoration, the uncertainty of the city outskirts seemed fearsome, during the July Monarchy and, above all, after the revolution of 1848, faubourg and banlieue took on a more concrete image, that of increasingly organized workers contending for power.

This chapter focuses on the establishment of Gardiens de la Prix and a Gendarmerie unit, the Republican Guard in 1848. These guards were established because the gendarmes of Paris were disbanded due to their reputation of arrogance and brutality during the July Monarchy, and their fierce defence of the regime in February 1848 had left them with few friends. The Republican Guard was smaller than its predecessor of the July Monarchy, but the concern for order in Paris triggered the creation of a mobile Gendarmerie battalion of 700 men at Versailles in July 1848. Furthermore, a second battalion was established. This battalion was stationed in Paris in May 1850.

This chapter examines the political experiences of Victor Considerant relevant to the French Revolution of 1848. It explains that though Considerant was in Paris to participate in the revolution, through his writings he helped articulate the ideology of the democratic and socialist left. He also helped give currency to the concept of the right to work, initiated the demand for a Ministry of Progress, and repeatedly insisted the need to harmonize the interests of workers and employers, rich and poor. Like other members of the radical opposition to the July Monarchy, Considerant suddenly found himself thrust into a position of power and influence that was new to him.

Large-scale industrialization and the increased reach of the centralized state were not the only dynamics of change, but were arguably the two that most profoundly affected the lives of ordinary French men and women. The periphery, which at first was suspected as the campsite of “professional strangers” became identified with the collective threat of the “new barbarians,” as the political elite of the July Monarchy preferred to think of industrial workers. The extension of the authority of the urban police into the faubourgs and suburbs in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s represented the conquest of the threatening periphery. The process of urbanization was arguably most fundamentally that of organization. In the end, the organization of workers on the urban frontier emerged as a dominant concern of elite uncertainties and fear.

This chapter examines the civil disorders that led to the collapse of the July Monarchy under Louis Philippe. Despite the presence of a large French Army, a strong police force, and an essentially monarchist militia, the July regime, the last French monarchy, was overthrown by political opposition in Paris in February 1848. The February Revolution gave birth to the Second Republic but also provided the background to, and first clash of, an unstable social and political situation that troubled not only Paris but all of France for four months. In order to understand the 1848 February Revolution, also known as February Days, this chapter considers the troops and commanders available to defend the monarchy as well as their previous experience and their planning after the July Revolution of 1830. It also explores the manner in which those contingency plans were modified on the eve of the 1848 crisis and finally, how the government forces were defeated by the populace of Paris.

This introductory chapter discusses how Fryderyk Chopin stands like the protagonist of his own opera, an exiled Polish patriot whose tragic personal life is seen against the turbulent historical events of his time, while (paradoxically) his career continued to flourish in the warm glow of the July Monarchy, fading with the onset of the 1848 revolutions. Yet, as his gaze remained turned to the country of his childhood and the loved ones who stayed behind, many of his pieces spoke for and of Poland. The chapter cites Jankiel's “Concert of Concerts” as a way of introducting Chopin, being one of the most famous passages in Polish literature that describes a vision of Poland's history as expressed through music.

This book examines the development of archaeology in France during the Merovingian period to shed light on the ties that bound nineteenth-century French identity to early medieval artefacts, and how archaeology contributed to defining the country's ancestry and history. In constructing a narrative of the emergence of Merovingian and national archaeology in nineteenth-century France, the book considers the Frankish, Burgundian, and Visigothic invaders of France. This study of national and Merovingian archaeology opens with the regime of the July Monarchy and ends with the outbreak of World War I.

This chapter highlights the revolutionary moment from February to June 1848 and the difficulty of establishing the Second Republic in France that offers a particularly rich area of investigation. It describes 1848, which was the year of the third revolution since 1789 and has generated ample scholarship. It also mobilizes the most promising and the less convincing forms of counterfactual reasoning: causal or interpretative analysis, futures that were imagined or possible, paths not followed, and evaluation of changes, counterfactuals on the part of researchers and actors, and unique and multiple bifurcations. The chapter looks at the clusters of potentiality that constitute the 1848 movement. It begins with a banquet campaign that had been taking place for the last seven months across all of France, demanding that the king Louis-Philippe expand suffrage under the July Monarchy.

This chapter is about the politics of representation in science. During the 1820s and 1830s, scientific societies and academies began to publish journals of their own, modeled on commercial publications, with titles such as Proceedings, Comptes rendus, and Sitzungsberichte. To understand how and why this happened, this chapter focuses on the increasing publicity given to meetings of elite science during the 1820s. The rising political importance of newspaper reports on the meetings of government bodies set the stage for reporting on scientific meetings. “Public opinion” was invoked as the most legitimate judge in matters of science in opposition to the elite academies. The meetings of the Paris Academy of Sciences in particular attracted widespread coverage in political journals during the late Bourbon Restoration. Although the Academy increasingly accommodated such publicity, by the 1830s radical journals took a more aggressive approach to scientific journalism. This led to a confrontation between radicals such as François-Vincent Raspail and the Academy, pitting two distinct visions of the scientific public against one another. It is in this context that the Academy made the controversial decision to launch a weekly journal, the Comptes rendus hebdomadaires, which became a watershed in the history of scientific publishing.

Beginning in the 1820s, grand opera developed into a new artistic medium for the delivery of historical spectacles which, in turn, afforded audiences a new way of seeing and hearing the past. Afterwards, grand operatic spectacles fetischized the past while obfuscating the crisis of memory brought about by the 1789 revolution. They became vehicles for remembrance, relying on which Charles Baudelaire would later describe as a mnemotechnics. Jacques Fromental Halévy’s Derniers mémoirs et souvenirs (1863) provides us with a roadmap for reading opera as a medium of memory. Pursing a memnotechnical sense of grand opera, I investigate the introduction of new visual and musical technologies (gaslight illumination, the diorama, orchestration and singing) at the Opéra, and consider the role played by these technologies in shoring up the central concern with memory in grand opera.

The 1830 July Revolution brought a series of laws facilitating manumission and equal rights for free men of color. In Isle Bourbon, Joseph Lory expanded his sugar production with two large plantations in the parish of Saint-Benoît. Constance died of unknown causes in 1838. As a free man, Furcy continued to live in Port Louis, Mauritius, as a candy maker. He saved his money, bought a store in Port Louis and a farm in Moka, learned to sign his name, and eventually contacted allies in Paris, who arranged for him to travel to Paris to appeal his wrongful enslavement in French courts. In 1835, the Court of Cassation’s Petition Chamber allowed Furcy’s appeal to advance to the Civil Chamber of the Court of Cassation, which decided in 1840 that Furcy had been born free due to his mother’s early sojourn on the free soil of France.

Rousselin was part of a team of liberal Bonapartists who founded a newspaper during the Hundred Days. It struggled with censorship and finding a permanent name, but from 1819 until World War I, the newspaper became Le Constitutionnel. It was a swift success, becoming the bestselling newspaper on the planet by 1825; its profits made Rousselin wealthy. The paper became the liberal standard-bearer in criticizing the growing authority of the Roman Catholic Church and the Bourbon government for its heavy-handed censorship, fighting numerous battles in the courts and in public opinion. The liberal critique helped undermine support for the government among the elite, and facilitated the Revolution of 1830 and the installation of Rousselin’s friend Louis-Philippe d’Orléans as “King of the French.” Renewed attention to Rousselin’s terrorist past led him to sell his stake in Le Constitutionnel in 1838.

This chapter analyzes the relationship between Tocqueville’s passion for glory and his endorsement of total war in Algeria. It is now commonplace to acknowledge Alexis de Tocqueville’s support for Algerian colonization. Less well understood, however, is why he also endorsed the French strategy of “total war” in the regency. How was Tocqueville’s liberalism linked to the specific shape of violence in Algeria? This chapter situates Tocqueville’s Algerian writings in the intersecting intellectual contexts of the 1840s to argue that his apologies for total war were shaped by the lingering legacies of revolutionary republicanism and Bonapartism which defined glory in terms of national defense. By tethering modern liberty to this conception of glory, Tocqueville provided resources for rationalizing settlerism’s exterminationist violence.