Revolutions - 7.19- The June Days

Episode Date: December 18, 2017

In June 1848, France discovered class conflict.  Give a Gift Get A Gift: www.hachettebookgroup.com/stormbeforethestorm Subscribe to Hardcore History Addendum

Hello and welcome to revolutions. Episode 7.19, the June days. So we left off in France on April the 23rd, 1848. The day of the first election in French history truly held on the basis of universal manhood suffrage. And I should add, this universality wasn't just theoretical. Turnout in the election was upwards of 50 percent, which is quite a bit better than some of those allegedly democratic votes during the original French Revolution that had like 1% turnout.

So it's fair to say that the Assembly elected in April of 1848 really did have a legitimate popular mandate in a way that no government in French history had really had before. So what happened to this Assembly was such a broad democratic mandate? That's right. It's going to collapse into a discredited, unpopular heap. So as we discussed at the end of the last episode, the election happened so fast that there was hardly time for anyone to organize and to define political parties. But we do know that most of the men elected were drawn from an ideological pool that one might call the radical moderates or

conservative radicals. Now that label seems like a bald-faced contradiction, but it's really not once you separate the political question from the social question. The radical part referred to the political question only. And these guys were radical Democrats. They had just supported the extension of mass suffrage without qualification, and they were passionately committed to the expansion of individual civil rights. This did indeed put them on the radical end of the political spectrum. But on the social question, nearly all of them leaned moderate to conservative. They did not want the world turned upside down. They did not favor social revolution, and no less than some crypto-royalist, They believed that the founding pillars of society were property, family, religion, and order.

So, politically radical, but socially conservative. That's going to be the prevailing majority opinion of the National Assembly. No one exemplified this opinion better than Alphonse de la Martín, who emerged from the election as by far the most popular politician in France. There was no residency restrictions for a candidate, nor rules about how someone could only stand in one department. So Le Martin was elected by the voters in no less than 10 districts, and he personally accrued more than 1.2 million votes.

No one else even came close to this sort of popular approval. And as Lamartin entered the assembly at the zenith of his power and popularity, he believed that he was about to take the reins of the first truly united and legitimate government in French history. Every previous assembly had been merely a closed-off club representing a minority faction who governed the nation not on behalf of the nation, but on behalf of their own partisan self-interest. Certainly the recent governments under the narrow and corrupt thumb of Francois Gisot fit this description, but now with 900 men elected by the whole population, at least the whole male population, the nation itself finally had a representative government worthy of the name. So surely they would all now come together and send the Second Republic soaring into the heavens. But yeah, that's not going to happen because this is the Revolution's podcast, and the Second Republic was about to prove itself about as capable of soaring into the heavens

as one of those awkward, herky-jurkey pre-right Brothers flying contraptions. You've seen these things. There's like a brief moment of hope followed by a painful and embarrassing crash. Now, before the Assembly even convened, there was already major complaining from the left about its legitimacy. Remember from last time, the left had begged the provisional government to hold off on the elections because they didn't have enough time to organize, and the accelerated schedule tended to favor conservative interests and established power brokers.

But the rushed election was just one complaint they had about the way things had gone since the end of the February Revolution. The working class Luxembourg Commission had turned out to be. toothless, the national workshops had been intentionally mismanaged. And most importantly, when the left had gathered demonstrators in march to the provisional government to press for their demands, even their so-called allies inside the government, men like Louis Blanc or Ledru-Roulin, had stood not with them, but against them. A demonstration in support of a new Ministry of Progress had been met by a phalanx of national guardsmen called in by Ledru-Roulin himself.

And now we have this election where the left-wing candidates were absolutely trounced. They barely sniffed 10% of the delegates who would go on to serve in the assembly. So it's fair to say that even before the assembly convened, the left was already thinking that maybe extracurricular activities were going to be the only way to fulfill the unfulfilled promises of the February Revolution. So the new national constituent assembly, not to be confused with any of. other national assemblies that we've talked about, convened on May the 4th, 1848. Their first order of business was to ratify the provisional government's proclamation of a republic. Now, I wasn't really clear about this, but in that proclamation that Le Martin read on February

the 25th, he said that the people would be consulted. But the form that consultation took was the assembly election. So there was not going to be a referendum on the republic. Instead, the people's representatives would vote to ratify the proclamation, and of course, the first thing they did was ratify the proclamation. So, with the existence and legitimacy of the Second Republic now established, the Assembly then offered its official congratulations to the provisional government on a job well done, and they ratified all of its decrees and orders and appointments.

This old business now dispensed with, it was time to take up new business, and the overriding task of the Assembly was going to be drafting a written Constitution for France that would serve as the permanent basis of political order in the Second Republic. But while the Constitution was being debated, France was going to need some kind of government, however temporary, to keep the lights on. So there were two options for what form this government would take. The Assembly could either vote as a whole on various ministers, or they could vote a small executive commission into existence who would handle the further business of appointments. Both forms had their merits and drawbacks, but in the main, the creation of an executive commission was favored

by the members and supporters of the now defunct provisional government, because the men who had served in the provisional government were the men most likely to be able to command votes in the assembly to get onto this theoretical executive commission. Because though in their role as members of the merely provisional government, they had been eager to transfer sovereign authority to a legitimately elected assembly, that did not mean that the individual members of the provisional government wanted to give up power. None of them wanted to give up power. Most of them, indeed, were planning to graduate seamlessly into the ministries of the new government. And they used their existing influence to get the assembly to agree that a five-man executive commission

would serve as the head of government during the interim period until the Constitution was complete. So with all that said, it should come as no surprise that the five names put forward to serve on this executive commission had all been members of the provisional government. Lamartin himself was, of course, at the top of the list, along with the world-famous Republican scientist Francois Arrago. Rounding out the list was Pierre Marie, who was the guy we talked about last week, who was put in charge of the national. workshops specifically to make sure that they failed. And then there was another guy named Louis Antoine Garnier Pages, who don't worry about him. And then finally, the radical Alexandra

L'Dru-Roulin. Now, the inclusion of L'Dru-Roulin was a shock to many conservatives. Even more shocking was the fact that Le Martin had used his own popularity and prestige to force the inclusion of his more radical colleague. La Martin had his reasons. The most important being that excluding Ledru-Roul-Lan would leave the radicals without any voice at all in government, and probably incite a rebellion against the government. But conservatives were acting like Lerlian was some kind of fanatical and narco-communist held bent on destroying the fabric of society, and they felt betrayed by Lamartin for demanding such a monster be given power inside the Executive Commission.

but the fight over including L'Roulogne on the Executive Commission was a fight misunderstood by everyone. Ledru Lerlón was not, in fact, some fanatical and narco-communist held bent on destroying the fabric of society, as he had already shown when he called out the National Guard to disperse that demonstration on April the 16th. A staunch political radical, when push came to shove,

Ledru-Roulon was for property, family, religion, and order. So, frankly, there was far less to fear from him than the conservative supposed. But on the other side, Le Martin, and likely at this point Lézreurlant himself, now overestimated his influence with the radical left. Le Martin thought that excluding him would give them cause for rebellion. Well, the workers already kind of feel like Lerlalan is some kind of Judas. And as we will see, his presence on the executive commission was not going to stave off a violent insurrection. But conservatives didn't realize this, and so they didn't really support the new executive commission. And so though the slate of candidates did command a majority,

it was a bare majority. They were approved just 411 to 385. So right out of the gate, the executive commission hardly has a powerful mandate to go forth and govern as they fit. Taking up their new posts on May the 10th, the Executive Commission started making appointments for who would lead what ministry, along with various other sub-cabinet and auxiliary posts. And further confirming that Lamartin and the rest of them were not actually pursuing, said fanatical anarcho-communist agenda, every former member of the provisional government was given some high-level job in the interim government, except, you guessed it, Louis Blanc and working class leader Albert. And in case anybody was going to miss the point, on May the 10th, Blanc

introduced a bill to form that Ministry of Progress that the Socialist Left wanted, and it was roundly defeated. So whatever the Executive Commission was, it was not a leftist vanguard, and conservative complaints really boiled down to their inability to discern real differences of opinion on the left end of the spectrum. I mean, they were talking as if Lamartin was giving Ladru-Lelan permission to hand France to the socialist rabble, while at the same time, that socialist rabble were muttering dark oaths about La Martine and L'Rourlon for conspiring to betray them. The left's portrait of the executive commission was certainly the more accurate of the two, but that didn't matter, and the commission was now held in disdain by both the left and the right.

Meanwhile, the now thoroughly agitated left wing of Parisian politics latched on to a very very particular cause that I have not yet introduced because of how much else we have on our plates, but we will be getting into it in the weeks to come. What issue was that? Ah, you guessed it. It's Poland, because nothing drives French history like Polish history. In the midst of everything else that's going on out there in Central Europe by mid-May, stuff that we haven't yet gotten to here on the Revolution's podcast, Polish nationalists were up in arms against the powers that had partitioned them, and they demanded the recreation of Poland based on the borders of 1793. Now, the cause of the polls had long been vibrant in the left wings of French politics,

and so on top of their various domestic grievances, they wanted to push the National Assembly to follow through on Le Martín's manifesto to Europe, which promised to support legitimate national aspirations. But the plans to hold a great demonstration on May the 15th on behalf of the polls, was seized by leaders of the left in even deeper back rooms to intimidate the assembly into doing their bidding. And if that wasn't enough, then maybe go ahead and stage a revolutionary coup and take control just like the Parisians of the original French Revolution.

So on May the 15th, 1848, the National Assembly convened as they would on any other day, not knowing at all what was in store for them. There was in fact so little hint that something truly huge was actually coming. down, that the National Guard was not put on any sort of alert, and they would only be lethargically mobilized. The result was that shortly after the Assembly opened for business, 20,000 workers, many of them armed, surrounded the building. With no one standing in their way, but for a handful of guards, the mob easily pushed their way into the building. Alexei de Tocqueville was himself a member of the National Assembly and said that the scene

was immediately reminiscent of the February Revolution, when the Chamber of Delegates had been invaded. And in the chaos, the original provisional government had been proclaimed. He said, it was a parody of the 24th of February, just as the 24th of February was a parody of other revolutionary scenes. For the next three hours, the assembly was occupied by these demonstrators. And more than anything else, it was just chaos that reigned. Men would mount the tribune to make speeches that could not be heard, only to be pushed aside and have other men make speeches that could also not be heard. Ledru La La Land tried to get everyone settled down, but he didn't have the juice that he used to, and he was ignored. Now, the immediate issue of Poland was raised as representatives

of the demonstrators demanded that France go to war in defense of the Poles, but it quickly shifted over to the rest of their demands. They wanted a ministry of labor to protect workers. They wanted a committee on social matters who could improve the lives of the poor. They wanted the forced resignation of the executive commission and the ministers that they had appointed. And then things started picking up as rumors that the National Guard was finally on its way went round. A speaker announced that the National Assembly was hereby dissolved and that a new provisional government was declared, and then he read a list of names drawn from the leaders of the socialist left. But with the National Guard on the way, the leaders led their demonstrators out

of the Assembly and down to the Hotel de Ville, where they hoped to install their new provisional government, as had happened back in February. But the events of May the 15th did not follow the events of February. There was no general armed uprising to accompany all these demonstrations and proclamations, and with the National Guard firmly with the assembly, they marched down to the Hotel de Ville and broke the demonstration up, and the whole thing just dissolved. The leaders were all arrested,

and National Guard units fanned out across the city to make sure there was no violence. And amazingly, there really wasn't any violence, and there was no loss of life on May the 15th. But there was going to be severe repercussions for those who had staged this quasi-revolution. Though the members of the Assembly were deeply committed to liberal civil rights, no one had ever said that there were not boundaries that could not be crossed. There were times when the order and safety of the state must take precedence over the liberty of individuals. And so it was in the weeks after May the 15th. Most of the left-wing leaders in Paris were arrested in great sweeps, joining those who had been arrested on May the 15th itself.

Left-wing newspapers were occupied and shut down. Left-wing political clubs were forbidden from meeting or organizing. The Workers-Luxemberg Commission was just unceremoniously shuttered. It was now clear that the so-called forces of order had declared war on the left. So much so that the executive commission also ordered more regular troops into Paris in case a full-blown insurrection did break out. But this all did little for the legitimacy of the Executive Commission in the eyes of conservatives. Despite the crackdown, conservatives blamed the Executive Commission for the events of May the 15th.

They accused some of the members of being openly complicit, and those that weren't were hopelessly incompetent. And the ranks of those conservatives grew day by day, as the threat posed by the socialist rabble was now starkly obvious to all. With the legitimacy of the Executive Commission now thoroughly compromised, along came the great controversial issue of the day that would help to destroy them and lead directly to the June days, that full-blown insurrection everyone was now waiting for. And what was that great controversial issue? It was the national workshops that we introduced last week. When they were first created back in February, the workshops were meant to address. the needs of about 10,000 unemployed workers in Paris.

While by mid-June, desperate families from across France flocked to the capital, and there were now more than 100,000 men enrolled in the national workshops. Now, as we discussed, under Pierre-Marie's intentionally poor management, the workshops were set up to be unpopular with everyone. And, well, this plan had worked. The workers were unhappy with the low wages, the military-style discipline, and more than anything, the utter pointlessness of their work. One worker complained that pretty soon they would be ordered to put the sen into bottles.

But conservatives also hated the workshops. They were a massive expense at a time when the budget deficit was already out of control. And with no real work being done, it was just subsidized laziness. It eroded the moral fiber of the nation. And a few, with a more practical eye, said that congregating that many angry and unemployed workers in Paris was probably pretty dangerous, which turned out to be true. Even moderate Republicans started arguing that the workshops were only meant to be a temporary emergency measure, and that it was time to bring the program to an end. But the threat to end the program rallied the left to the

defense of the national workshops. It wasn't that they liked them, but the workshops were now the one real tangible concession that had been made to the working classes after the February Revolution, The Luxembourg Commission had been a disappointment and was now closed. Their newspapers and political clubs were banned. However much they themselves complained about the workshops, the government's plan to shut them down was the final proof that the Second Republic had no interest in the workers' interests. And so, what was left of the left rallied to their defense.

Now, the government was not dumb, though. And only hard-line conservatives thought it would be a good idea to just shut down the workshops without any kind of plan for those who would be kicked back out into the streets. So ideas started floating around for how to disengage from the workshops with the most resilient proposal being to transition many of these unemployed workers into the army. The possibility of war with the rest of Europe in the chaotic summer of 1848 was still a possibility. So a proposal gained traction that all men ages 18 to 25 who were enrolled in the national

workshops would be given a choice. Either you enlist in the army or you be sent back to your place of origin. On May of the 23rd, the Executive Commission gave their seal of approval to the plan. If you were between the ages of 18 and 25 and had been living in Paris for less than six months, it was either to join the army or go home. As for the rest, the government would establish worker placement offices for businesses to submit requests for labor. Any man who refused a private sector job would be banished from the workshops. Now, as the assembly haggled over how and when to implement these new rules, another possibility presented itself. A company building a railroad between Paris and Lyon needed workers but couldn't really afford to pay any. So if the government

were to, say, invest some funds, they could use those funds to hire workers to complete the job. Now, as rumors about the fate of the workshop swirled, there were now three basic attitudes. Conservatives wanted to just shut them down. Enlist some men in the army, sure, but mostly get the government out of the business of guaranteeing wages to shift delayabouts. That attitude was matched on the left by those who argued the exact opposite. They didn't confirming all the provisional government's decrees, the National Assembly had confirmed the right to work, and so the workshops must not. be closed. Caught in the middle were those who did not like the form or result of the workshops, but who nonetheless wanted to do something about unemployment. And they thought schemes to

partner government with private business and subsidize the placement of workers into jobs that would actually be worth a damn, seemed like a pretty good idea. By mid-June, it was clear that the government was absolutely committed to closing the workshops, but they handled it very badly. A notice went out on June the 16th that said flatly that in five days any man ages 18 to 25 who did not enlist in the army would be evicted from Paris, and as for the rest, well, we're going to cut off funds for the national workshops. This sent angry and fearful ripples through the working classes, as you can imagine. So it was to an already hostile audience that the final decree was passed on June the 21st shutting down the national workshops, and unfortunately lost in the

shuffle was the fact that on that same day, the assembly voted six million francs for the Paris-Leon railway, which would provide a lot of jobs for those who were about to get the boot from the workshops. But that part didn't resonate. The only thing that resonated in the streets was that the bastards are closing down the workshops. So, you're either going to get enlisted in the army and get sent off to Algeria to die of dysentery, or you'll be sent home to die of starvation. Take your pick. So, the working classes decided to reject choices A and B, and instead went with C. Revolution. On the night of June the 21st, meetings were held throughout the working class districts of Paris.

And though most of their leaders were in prison, the organization still existed, and demonstrations were planned for the next day. On the morning of June 22, 1848, a mass demonstration paraded down to the offices of the executive commission, and they demanded that the commission receive a delegation from the workers. But in one of those history has a sense of humor moments, the only member of the executive commission currently at the office that morning was Pierre Marie, the man who hated the workshops, hated socialism, hated those workers, and had done everything in his power to bring about the destruction of the national workshops. So the delegation of workers demanded the shops be reopened,

and Pierre Marie said, and I quote, L-O-L-L-No-chance GTFO. I probably will regret having put that joke in the podcast. The now thoroughly enraged workers went away, but they planned even greater demonstrations for that afternoon, and soon tens of thousands gathered at the Pantheon for a march up the east side of Paris to the Place de la Bastille, shouting work and bread.

When the sunset on June the 22nd, the demonstrators retired to their own neighborhood, and the forces of order, no doubt hope that that would be the end of it. But it was just the beginning. When the sun came up on June the 23rd, the first barricades had been erected, and the June days began. A three-day Parisian insurrection that Karl Marx identified as essentially the first real-class conflict between the forces of the bourgeoisie and the working classes. He believed that this conflict would define politics for the next generation and ultimately lead to the triumph of the workers. But in the June days, they would be

utterly crushed under the heel of the forces of bourgeois order. So when the Parisians woke up on June the 23rd, they discovered that the working-class demonstrators from the night before had transformed themselves into working-class insurgents, and the first sporadic firing broke out at the Port Sandini on the north end of town. But unlike previous urban insurrections that we've covered, there was not a lot of fighting in the first two days of the June days. June the 23rd and June the 24th were mostly marked by the spread of more barricades all across the east side of Paris, with as many as 50,000 active working class insurgents consolidating their control over practically half of Paris.

In terms of territory controlled, the June 1848 insurgents held more than any previous group of insurgents ever had, and all the while, the official response was fairly negligible, which I'll explain here in America, minute. Now, those who manned these barricades were drawn from the same groups that we've seen at all of our barricades. They were radical students. They were workers and artisans drawn most especially from those trades that have been hit hard by the recent recessions. The construction trades, metal workers, cobblers and clothing makers, the builders of furniture. And as we've also seen before, neighborhood barricades were directed and overseen by army veterans or local National Guardsmen who ignored the call to mobilize against the insurgency and instead joined it.

So all told, out in the streets, this is looking a lot like July 1830 or February 1848. But there was a critical difference that made the June Rebellion of 1848 resemble nothing so much as the June Rebellion of 1832, just on a larger scale. These working-class insurgents were going to find no support or allies among the politicians. The rebellions that had turned into successful revolutions in July of 1830 and February of 1848 required the joining of the revolution in the streets with the revolution in the salons. When the fighting breaks out, you need somebody who can stride into the halls of power and make credible demands against the king or whatever else power exists. but the insurgents of June 1848 found no such support,

even though they were many of the same people who had fought in February of 1848. But almost to a man, those who had been in the left-wing opposition leadership, who had been friends of the insurrectionary workers four months earlier, now came out staunchly against them. So why the change? Well, two reasons. First, as we've already discussed here, the political radicalism was not matched by social radicalism.

They were terrified by the idea of social revolution, which is what this mass worker uprising seemed to represent. The other part of it is the difference between supporting an insurrection against an illegitimate government, like one led by Charles X, or Francoiseu, and supporting an insurrection against the recently elected National Assembly. I mean, you can complain that you did poorly in the election, but you can't say that the assembly doesn't have a claim to popular sovereignty. So this was not an uprising against the tyranny of the king or the stubborn corruption of Gizot.

This was an insurrection against a legitimately elected assembly that was at that moment creating a constitutional republic. So the forces of bourgeois order closed ranks against the working-class insurgents, and no one anywhere in any hall of power planned to support the workers. And so their inevitable defeat was inevitable. But with the barricades going up, the members of the National Assembly lost all faith in the executive commission, which had not been able to stop any of this. So the Assembly voted to give General Louis Eugène Kavignac command over all available government forces. And at the moment, those forces numbered about 50,000,

split almost evenly between units of the regular army, National Guard legions who rallied to the government, and these new things called mobile guards that had been created by the provisional government after the February Revolution. Drawing their ranks from poor young men, it was widely believed that the mobile guards would side with the insurgents. But they were so well paid and had so quickly developed their own espri de corps that they did not go over to the insurgents and in fact fought for the forces of order. The betrayal of these working class fighters led Marx to, to curse the name of the mobile guards and dismiss them as the unsavory dregs of the hopelessly ignorant lumpen proletariat. Now, General Cavaniac himself was a radical Democrat.

His father, Jean-Baptiste Cavaniac, had been a member of the National Convention back during the original French Revolution. He was a regicide who had voted for the King's death, and then who had spent most of the revolution running around France as a dependable representative on mission. Kavaniak's brother had been a hardcore member of the radical secret societies, the friends of the people who had orchestrated that 1832 uprising, but he had died back in 1848 before the next round of fun got going. So with General Kavniak's Republican bona fides beyond reproach, the assembly heaped authority on him. In addition to controlling the armed forces, the now fatally undermined executive commission all resigned their posts, and executive power was given. given to Kavanaughak, making him the head of government as well as of the army. Then the assembly voted to put Paris under martial law. And so, General Kavanaughak became basically a dictator.

And though he no doubt cast himself in the noble mold of the old Roman dictators who would see the republic through an emergency and then resigned, Kavniak certainly planned to use every ounce of his dictatorial power and ignore every law or ethical constraint that might get in the way of crushing the rebellion. So General Kavignac let two days pass before he made any move at all, using that time to bring in reinforcements from the surrounding areas, and with railroads now linking Paris to everywhere else,

he could bring in men faster than had ever been previously possible. On the morning of June the 25th, though, he was ready to go. Having studied the tactics of previous attempts to quell Parisian insurrections, General Kavniak concluded that the most frequent and stupid mistake was dividing up government forces and fanning them out in columns where they could be cut off from each other, or that would leave isolated units to fight insurgents on a numerically equal footing. Kavanaughk decided, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to keep everyone bunched together and then just go out on full frontal attacks, steamrolling everything in our path. And that's what

he did on June the 25th. Not bothering to spare the artillery or get queasy about killing civilians, Kavignac's force relentlessly and methodically blasted their way through the east end of Paris. Fighting was intense on both sides, and both sides suffered casualties well beyond the scale of previous revolutionary insurrections. July 1830 and February 1848 had seen total casualties on both sides number merely in the hundreds. The fighting in June of 1848, it was something like 1,500 to 2,000 killed on the government side, and somewhere between 2 and 5,000 on the insurgent side, depending on which source you want to cite. So this is orders of magnitude more violent than any previous revolutionary insurrection in Paris. With the entirety of the political classes arrayed against them, and General Kavanaugh, showing absolutely no mercy, the insurrection died a hard and bitter death.

When the sun rose on June the 26th, the insurrection was crushed, and those who had not been killed in the fight, surrendered and were herded into mass detention centers. Something like 12 to 15,000 people were arrested and held in these hastily constructed facilities. Many were let go in the days to come, but many others were summarily executed or deported without trial to one of France's colonial holdings. The scale of the killing and the exiling is always disputed. But what is not disputed is that the socialist left wing of French politics was crushed so thoroughly that many later claimed that the whole insurrection had been drummed up by agents provocateur to lead the working classes into a trap. So as Marx would later write in his 18 brumere of Louis Napoleon,

the bourgeois republic triumphed. On its side stood the aristocracy of finance, the industrial bourgeoisie, the middle class, the petty bourgeoisie, the army, the lump and proletariat organized as the mobile guard, the intellectual lights, the clergy, and the rural population. On the side of the Paris proletariat stood none but itself. More than 3,000 insurgents were butchered after the victory, and 15,000 were deported without trial. With this defeat, the proletariat passes into the background on the revolutionary stage. And that was all true. Further threats to the Second Republic would no longer come from the left, but rather from the right, as many of those in the quote-unquote forces of order did not, in fact, believe in the Republic. Thus, would the Second French Republic

hopple along to its ignominious transformation into the Second French Empire within just a few years? So, after spending a lot of episodes in France in the early part of this series on 1848, we are now going to leave them mostly behind. We will, of course, eventually need to come back for the presidential election that takes place in December of 1848. But for the most part, the June days represents the end of the revolutionary part of the French Revolution of 1848. From now until the coup of Louis Napoleon in 1851, it's mostly just tales of tragicomic French politics. And so we will now turn our attention mostly to Central Europe, where the Revolution of 1848 is still just, just getting warmed up.

But before we go, I do want to remind you of our little Storm Before the Storm Saturnalia promotion. If you give the book as a gift, you will get a gift from me. A special little audio epilogue that will discuss the specifics of how the Sullen Constitution was dismantled in the decade or so after Sulla's death. So if you buy two or more hardcover copies of the Storm before the Storm from any retailer by December the 25th, you can go to hashetbook.com slash Storm. Before the Storm Before the Storm.

Upload your receipts, and you will receive my exclusive audio epilogue. If you've already bought more than two copies, congratulations, you still qualify. Again, it is hashetbookbook.com slash storm before the storm. They will have all the information and terms and conditions. I must also mention before I go that after the two of us have worked parallel to each other for the last 10 years, Dan Carlin and I finally intersected. Dan has a new episode feed out called the Hardcore History Addendum. You can find it on iTunes or wherever else find podcasts are sold.

And the second episode of his Hardcore History Addendum is a long interview with me about the book and about all the other stuff that just popped into our heads as we talked. It was great fun. So by all means, if you want to listen to Mike Duncan and Dan Carlin, have a conversation about history and politics, go subscribe to his new show, Hardcore History Addendum.