Once the constituent assembly established a new, republican constitution for France, the next step was to select a President for the republic, and this too would happen by universal suffrage in a single round on the 10 th of December Here again the forces of the Left would be gravely disappointed. Though he chastised those on the moderate left for imposing a tax increase, he saved his fiercest words for the peasantry, and if he had thought of it he might have even called them deplorables.
While Marx may have been unrivalled in his frustration, there were others who also had very sharp words for rural voters. The popular masses, as yet uncultured, half barbarous, and that is to say, unorganized the very word mass indicates it well are like primitive societies, inspired and driven uniquely by sentiment and imagination.
Following the events of December the peasants were not finished. Held over two rounds beginning on the 13 th of May , the election, again by party list for each French department, resulted in a substantial majority of seats for the Party of Order , a broad grouping, largely affiliated with Bonaparte, that was bound together by the idea of rejecting anything resembling socialism. The democratic socialists themselves, known at this time as the Montagne, obtained seats, a sufficiently large number to strike fear in the hears of Parisian wealth holders, but nothing even close to an electoral majority.
Once again, the peasants had spoken. There are several scholarly interpretations of why the shift to universal suffrage under the Second Republic failed to provide a majority for the Left. It is true that the provisional government had felt itself forced into a generalized tax increase prior to the April elections, and there was also a tax on salt. It is also true that in some cases during this election—which took place on Easter Sunday—citizens marched with their local priest directly from church to the polling place, and clerics were not known to be supporters of the Left.
But what most modern commentators seem to settle on is that the progressives based in Paris had fundamentally lacked any real understanding of the inclinations, desires, or voting intentions of French peasants. A look at the democratic socialist or Montagne platform of sheds light on what went wrong for the Left. The party did make efforts, recognizing after two defeats that the rural masses would need to be convinced, but the platform was one that did little to speak to many of the immediate needs in the countryside.
Had it passed, this would have been a revolutionary development because throughout the nineteenth century—and even up to —France maintained a strictly proportional system for taxing income and wealth.
The problem with the program presented by the Montagne was that much like rural voters today, the French peasants of seem to have been less enamored with the idea of progressive taxation than with other policies to meet their immediate needs. Key among these would have been promises to build new roads, to develop irrigation projects, and to help reform rural credit markets.
One thing that is true about the democratic socialists is that they were indeed sensitive to the needs of the urban poor, of whom there were an increasing number in Paris. We can see this in their writings. This motto fell into disuse under the Empire, like many revolutionary symbols. When the Constitution of was drafted, the motto "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" was defined as a "principle" of the Republic.
Discarded under the Second Empire, this motto finally established itself under the Third Republic, although some people still objected to it, including partisans of the Republic: solidarity was sometimes preferred to equality which implies a levelling of society, and the Christian connotation of fraternity was not accepted by everyone. This motto was inscribed again on the pediments of public buildings on the occasion of the celebration of 14 July Throughout the 19th century, the blue of the legitimist royalists contended with the three colours inherited from the Revolution.
The white flag was re-introduced under the Restoration, but King Louis-Philippe reinstated the "tricolore," surmounting it with the Gallic rooster. During the Revolution of , the provisional government adopted the "tricolore," but the people on the barricades brandished a red flag to signal their revolt.
Under the Third Republic, a consensus gradually emerged around the three colours. From onwards, the presentation of the colours to the armed forces, each July 14, came to be a moment of high patriotic fervour.
While the Comte de Chambord, claimant to the French throne, never accepted the "tricolore," the royalists ended up rallying round the national flag at the time of the First World War. The constitutions of and article 2 instituted the "blue, white and red" flag as the national emblem of the Republic.
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