MID-CENTURY CRISIS

In the preface to The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, Karl Marx described his purpose as being to ‘demonstrate how the class struggle in France created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero's part’. Alexis de Tocqueville similarly insisted that ‘a dwarf on the summit of a great wave is able to scale a high cliff which a giant placed on dry ground at the base would not be able to climb’. The ‘great wave’ was the intense mid-century crisis–economic, social, and political–lasting from 1845 until 1852, and marked by widespread popular protest, revolution, civil war, and the prospect (or threat) of a démocrate-socialiste electoral victory in 1852. These were the circumstances–widespread deprivation and misery combined with disappointed expectations and social fear–that made it possible for the nephew of Napoleon I to exploit the potency of the Bonapartist legend–‘this deplorable prestige of a name’ which, according to the exiled republican Victor Schoelcher, ‘entirely made the incredible fortune of M. Bonaparte’ – by ensuring that large sections of the population were tempted to look for a ‘saviour’.

At the middle point of the nineteenth century France might be defined as a transition society. Substantial continuities with the past survived. The economy remained predominantly agrarian. Within the manufacturing sector most workers were employed, using hand tools, in small-scale enterprise.