David H. Pinkney (1914–1993)
Autor/a de Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris
Obres de David H. Pinkney
Etiquetat
Coneixement comú
- Nom oficial
- Pinkney, David Henry
- Data de naixement
- 1914-7-02
- Data de defunció
- 1993-05-26
- Gènere
- male
- Nacionalitat
- USA
- Lloc de naixement
- Elyria, Ohio, USA
- Lloc de defunció
- Seattle, Washington, USA
- Educació
- Oberlin College (AB|1936)
Harvard University (AM|1937, PhD|1941) - Organitzacions
- American Historical Association (president | 1980)
American Association of University Professors
Society for French Historical Studies
Societe d'Histoire Moderne
Societe d'Histoire de Paris et d'Ile-de-France
Membres
Ressenyes
3 
setnahkt | Hi ha 1 ressenya més | Dec 22, 2017 |
setnahkt | Hi ha 1 ressenya més | Dec 22, 2017 | 
1330 The French Revolution of 1830, by David H. Pinkney (read 3 May 1975) This is a really well-put-together book and solid history. However I must confess it tells me a little more than I want to know. The Revolution turned out quite conservative: one is amazed that Charles X and his ministers, with the memories of the main French Revolution so clear and vivid, could be so obtuse as to precipitate the 1830 one by the promulgation of the Four Ordinances.
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- ISBN
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However, now that I’ve read it I might as well review it. Historian David Pinkney’s book is aimed at a scholarly audience that’s already familiar with French history, so I had to do frequent Wikipedia look-ups to figure things out. Charles X was Louis XVI’s younger brother, and came to the throne after the death of another brother, Louis XVIII (Louis XVII was never crowned). When Louis XVIII died in 1824, Charles X inherited. He was an ultraroyalist himself, but was stuck with a fairly liberal (for the time) constitution (the “Charter of 1814”) promulgated by his older brother after his ascension. Pinkney assumes the reader already knows about the Charter; it provided for a two-chamber legislature with an elected lower house (“The Chamber of Deputies”) and freedom of the press; however it still left the King with considerable power (only the King could introduce a bill in the Chambers, and he had veto power over any results), and the franchise was very limited. Pinkney doesn’t specifically discuss the limitations of the franchise, but does note offhand that one French province, Haute-Garonne, had a population of around 390000 but only 1500 eligible electors. Further, the elections to the Chamber of Deputies were conducted in two stages; first all the eligible voters picked about a third of the Deputies, then a couple of weeks later the quarter of the voters paying the highest taxes picked the remainder. You would think a procedure like this would always result in a rubber-stamp legislature, and until 1827 it did.
Pinkney notes a number of things went wrong for the King. First of the Opposition organized voters and presented candidates; then the economy went sour; then the King disbanded the National Guard, holdover from Napoleonic times (but allowed the officers and men to keep their uniforms and equipment, including weapons); banned streetwalkers (Pinkney doesn’t suggest that this actually had much to do with the Revolution but does note that the streetwalkers came out in enthusiastic troops afterward) and decided to invade Algiers (the Algiers war was actually popular with the public, or at least not unpopular, but it also moved a considerable part of the French Army out of France). Then the King appointed a Cabinet of ultraroyalists, and lost his majority in the Chamber in the 1827 elections.
That left Charles X with a legislature that refused to approve any of the proposals he submitted. Things hobbled along for three years, and finally in July of 1830 the King decided to act – staging what his opponents called a “Royal Coup-de-Etat” and demonstrating he was just as clueless – well, in fact even more clueless – than his guillotined brother. He issued four Ordinances – dissolving the current Chamber, setting a date for new elections, changing the election laws to insure a royalist majority (by changing the definition of “tax” to exclude taxes paid mostly by urban residents), and instituting press censorship.
The Opposition was divided four ways – Republicans (who had no actual power or organization but who the other groups could raise as threat to repeat the Terror); Orléanists, who wanted a constitution monarchy but with the king’s cousin Louis-Philippe, Duc d’Orléans on the throne (Louis-Philippe had been waiting in the wings for some time, carefully cultivating all the parties; his father had changed his name to Philippe Égalité during the Revolution, presented himself as a candidate for Regency, and voted for the execution of Louis XVI; it didn’t help much and Philippe Égalité was eventually shaved with the Republican Razor himself); Bonapartists, who wanted to restore the Empire with Napoleon II, currently more or less under house arrest in Vienna; and Royalists, who wanted Charles X. Interestingly, Pinkney reports that the Bonapartists were the ones the Royalists worried about the most; Charles X’s police reported numerous expressions of support for Bonaparte in the form of posters, graffiti, etc. and very little advocacy for a Republic.
One would expect the change in the election laws would set things off, but in fact it was the press censorship rules. According to Pinkney, the printers of Paris were one of the most educated of the working class groups – to be expected, I suppose – and they set off the Resistance by haranguing crowds about how their livelihood was being taken away (again the direction of protests is a little counterintuitive; freedom of the press doesn’t seem to be the direct issue, instead it was loss of jobs as printers were shut down). Groups of protestors began to gather around Paris, the military and gendarmerie responded, the populace responded back, and pretty soon there were barricades all over Paris, paving stones were torn up and thrown from windows, shooting started. (Pinkney reports one gun shop was looted of 600 muskets, which is rather more than I expect you’d find in a gun store nowadays, but I expect there was a lot of stuff left over from the Napoleonic Wars in the back room). The military had artillery and cavalry, but couldn’t use them very effectively in the narrow, crooked, barricaded streets and although the eventual body count was about 1:4 in favor of the military, soldiers eventually began to desert and Marshall Marmont went to Charles X and said he couldn’t defend him anymore. Charles, still clueless, was decided to abdicate in favor of his grandson (who would have ended up as Henri V if he had ever been crowned) and conducted a long, slow retreat to the Channel coast; eventually he and his entourage boarded a couple of chartered American ships and sailed to England and exile. His supporters still in France continued to encourage him, making increasingly out-of-touch claims (such as that the Czar was marching on France with 250000 troops, to link up with 40000 royalists from loyal provinces in the west and south); in fact the provinces went over to Louis-Philippe I almost without a murmur.
While all this was going on, the Liberal deputies did what Liberals always do – they talked to each other a lot. Eventually they reached a consensus to draw up a new constitution and invite Louis-Philippe to be King (on the stipulation that he be Louis-Philippe I, not Louis XIX or Philippe VI, thus emphasizing the break with the Bourbon dynasty). There were some further protests from that fraction of the crowd that wanted a Republic or Bonaparte, but apparently they were tired of throwing paving stones and being shot and settled down.
The famous painting by Delacroix was intended to show the Revolution as a popular revolt of all classes by displaying a student (guy on the left with characteristic hat of the École Polytechnique); bourgeoisie (guy in the center with top hat, neatly tied cravat, and musketoon); and street urchin (boy on the right with two pistols). Presumably the other party in the picture is one of the liberated ladies. However, Pinkney’s research, using records of the people killed in the conflict and those awarded compensation for wounds, paints a different picture; most of the people involved – at least those that got themselves shot or wounded – were lower middle class – mechanics, artisans, and craftsmen. Interestingly, although everybody agreed that the printers were instrumental in fomenting things, they apparently got out of the way once the trouble started; there were very few on the casualty lists. Similarly there were very few bourgeoisie, students, women or urchins and most seem to be people that got hit by stray bullets or paving stones rather than active participants.
Louis-Philippe I turned out to be good at intrigue but not all that great at being a head of state; he was eventually overthrown himself (and replaced by Napoleon III) in 1848. This is why there are currently three categories of pretenders to the throne of France – Bourbonists, Orléanists, and Bonapartists, with multiple claimants in each category; to further confuse things I think the Stuart pretenders to the throne of England are also technically claimants. The obvious question is “Why would you want it?” and apparently nobody really does, although it probably looks good on a resume.
Oh, so what about the Revolution of 1832, that figures in Les Misérables? Well, apparently the economy continued to stagnate and unrest in Paris continued off and on. Students organized a revolt in 1832, with the usual degree of enthusiasm, idealism and total lack of appreciation of reality generally displayed by student revolutionaries. There were some barricades thrown up but nobody in Paris was terribly interested and the revolutionaries were outnumbered around 20:1 by military and National Guard. The 1832 Revolution is sometimes called the June Revolution, with the 1830 one as the July Revolution; sometimes the two are considered the endpoints of one revolution. In 1832, Victor Hugo was busy writing a play when he heard gunfire and headed in its direction to see what was going on, demonstrating that literary talent is not necessarily connected with brainpower in other areas. He spent the night cowering in a doorway while bullets splattered around him but got revenge by writing one of the world’s longest novels about his experiences. I have it on my Kindle but I’ve never got around to reading it; will have to do so.
Overall, this turned out to be pretty interesting for a scholarly work about a relatively obscure historical event. There are extensive footnotes and references, but almost all are in French. There are no illustrations; a couple maps of contemporary Paris would have been really useful in following the events, but I’m something of a map fetishist. This would probably make a fairly good multi-player political game.… (més)