Napoleon – and the barricades
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Arc de Triomphe

Apart from some spectacular bloodletting, and yet another occupation of the city by foreign powers in 1814, Napoleon's chief legacy to France was a very centralized, authoritarian and efficient bureaucracy that put Paris in firm control of the rest of the country. In Paris itself, he left his share of pompous architecture – in the Arcs de Triomphe and Carrousel, rue de Rivoli and rue de la Paix, the Madeleine and facade of the Palais-Bourbon, plus a further extension for the Louvre and a revived tradition of court flummery and extravagant living among the well-to-do. For the rest of the nineteenth century after his demise, France was left to fight out the contradictions and unfinished business left behind by the Revolution of 1789. And the arena in which these conflicts were resolved was, literally, the streets of the capital.

On the one hand, there was a tussle between the class that had risen to wealth and power as a direct result of the destruction of the monarchy and the old order, and the survivors of the old order, who sought to make a comeback in the 1820s under the restored monarchy of Louis XVIII and Charles X. This conflict was finally resolved in favour of the new bourgeoisie. When Charles X refused to accept the result of the 1830 National Assembly elections, Adolphe Thiers – who was to become the veteran conservative politician of the nineteenth century – led the opposition in revolt. Barricades were erected in Paris and there followed three days of bitter street fighting, known as les trois glorieuses, in which 1800 people were killed (they are commemorated by the column on place de la Bastille). The outcome was the election of Louis-Philippe as constitutional monarch, and the introduction of a few liberalizing reforms, most either cosmetic or serving merely to consolidate the power of the wealthiest stratum of the population.

As the demands of the disenfranchized poor continued to go unheeded, so their radicalism increased, exacerbated by deteriorating living and working conditions in the large towns, especially Paris, as the Industrial Revolution got underway. There were, for example, twenty thousand deaths from cholera in Paris in 1832, and 65 percent of the population in 1848 were too poor to be liable for tax. Eruptions of discontent invariably occurred in the capital, with insurrections in 1832 and 1834. When the lid blew off the pot in 1848 and the Second Republic was proclaimed in Paris, it looked for a time as if working-class demands might be at least partly met. The provisional government included Louis Blanc and a Parisian manual worker. But in the face of demands for the control of industry, the setting up of co-operatives and so on, backed by agitation in the streets, the more conservative Republicans lost their nerve. The nation showed its feelings by returning a spanking reactionary majority in the April elections.

Revolution began to appear the only possible defence for the radical left. On June 23, 1848, working-class Paris – Poissonnière, Temple, St-Antoine, the Marais, Quartier Latin, Montmartre – rose in revolt. Men, women and children fought side by side against fifty thousand troops. In three days of fighting, nine hundred soldiers were killed. No one knows how many of the insurgés – the insurgents – died. Fifteen thousand people were arrested and four thousand sentenced to prison terms.

Despite the shock and devastation of civil war in the streets of the capital, the ruling classes failed to heed the warning in the events of June 1848. Far from redressing the injustices which had provoked them, they proceeded to exacerbate them – by, for example, reducing the representation of what Adolphe Thiers called "the vile multitude". The Republic was brought to an end in a coup d'état by Louis Napoleon, who within twelve months had himself crowned Emperor Napoléon III.