A. Calmette, "Le Carbonarie en France sous la Restauration, 1821-1830," La
Révolution de1848, IX (1912-1913); X (1912-1914).
Paul Dubois, "Souvenirs inédits," Revue Bleue
(1907-1908).
Leonce Grasilier, "Simon Duplay: Mémoire sur les
Société Secrètes et les Conspirations,"
Revue internationale de sociétés
secrètes, III (March 5, 1913): 510-554.
François Andre Isambert, De La Charbonnerie au
Saint-Simonisme (Paris, 1966).
Paris Revolutionnaire, 4 vols. (Paris, 1833-34).
Peter Savigear, "Carbonarism and the French Army,"
History, LIV (June 1969), 198-211.
Alan B. Spitzer, Old Hatreds and Young Hopes: The French
Carbonari Against the Bourbon Restoration (Cambridge,Mass.
1971).
JGC revised this file
(http://www.ohiou.edu/~chastain/ac/charbon.htm) on
October 15, 2004.
Please E-mail comments or suggestions to chastain@www.ohiou.edu
© 1998, 2004 James Chastain.
Charbonnerie Of all of the organizations, secret
societies, and conspiracies dedicated to the overthrow of the
R
estoration monarchy (1814-1830) the most formidable was that of
the charbonnerie. Between 1821 and 1823 a group of
young intellectuals, came together in the milieu of the
jeunesse des écoles, borrowed the title and
some of the techniques of the Italian carbonari to
fashion a secret society whose purpose was a revolutionary seizure
of power. The organization had been founded by students or
ex-students who had identified each other in various personal
net
works, discussion groups and ephemeral organizations in which
they could share mutual interests and an antipathy toward the
restored dynasty. The more militant elements formed a freemason
lodge, Les Amis de La Verité, as a front behind
which they could conduct a "patriotic" seminar for the students and
the commercial clerks in Paris. This became the center of a
militant activism which brought some of the students into a
coalition with disaffected soldiers, half-pay officers, and
certain
groups in other parts of France, of which the most notable was
Joseph Rey's organization, l'Union Libéral,
which radiated out from Grenoble to other urban centers, including
Paris. Thus, Les survivants de l'empire, le débris
de l'ancienne république et l'espoir de la nouvelle
united in the intention to topple the restored dynasty. This
effort, which took the form of an armed putsch in cooperation with
soldiers stationed in the military units
in the capital, was
aborted in August 1820. After this, the more determined, younger
radicals decided to form a tighter organization which became the
charbonnerie. This was a generational and political
coalition that included politicians and professional men in the
Paris region, including such dignitaries of the liberal opposition
as Lafayette and Voyer D'Argenson, and individuals and groups from
other parts of France of widely diverse backgrounds united in
hostility to the monarchy.
Young republicans conspired with
Bonapartist officers on half-pay and proto-Orleanist attorneys for
some vaguely asserted right of the French people to establish its
own form of government. The very existence of the organization
depended on a tacit avoidance of doctrinal issues made easier by
the death of Bonaparte in May 1821. The cellular and pyramidal
structure of the secret organization allowed it to spread rapidly
from Paris to various centers of dissent, notably in Alsace and in
the old pro
-revolutionary towns strung out from Thouars to Saumur
along the eastern edge of the counter- revolutionary borage, as
well as in various army units that were to join improvised columns
in their march on the capital. In the event, the clandestine
organization was not proof against infiltration and betrayal. In
1822 the scheduled insurrection was anticipated by the political
police who swept up the conspirators in the army before they could
take action. One ragged column did manage to assemble unde
r a
Napoleonic general and march on the town of Saumur before whose
gates it halted and then simply melted away. Although there was not
sufficient evidence to bring most of the leaders of the
organization to book, the police netted a sufficient number of less
prudent elements to stage a series of political trials that
contributed ten victims to revolutionary martyrology, notably
including the appealing, poignantly naive four sergeants of La
Rochelle who became, and remain to this day, the object of
a minor
cult. The arrest and executions of 1822 marked the end of a
large-scale attempt at the overthrow of the Bourbon regime through
plot and insurrection, and many of the activists of the
conspiratorial organization turned to the legal opposition that
contributed to the last crisis of the monarchy in 1830. While
ex-carbonari did not notably figure on the barricades in the Three
Glorious Days, they were actively engaged in consolidating the new
revolutionary administration in Paris. In retro
spect, perhaps the
most striking aspect of the history of the French
carbonari is in the distinguished careers of many of
its alumni. Out of that youthful cohort of sometime conspirators
emerged the Saint-Simonian coterie of Saint-Amand Bazard, Philippe
Buchez, Antoine Cerclet, and others; such social visionaries as
Pierre Leroux, Voyer D'Argenson, and F.V. Raspail; the circle of
neo-liberals and the acolytes of Victor Cousin, including Paul
Dubois, Theodore Jouffroy, Augustin Thierry;
and other fledgling
cultural dignitaries such as the brothers Scheffer who would find
their revolution in 1830 and comfortably occupy the cultural and
political heights of the July Monarchy. Indeed, the Restoration
conspirators would contribute the first three ministers of justice,
a minister of the interior, and a prefect of police to the security
of the succeeding regime. On the other hand, a faithful republican
remnant including the brothers Cavaignac, Ulysse Trélat, and
Armand Carrel,
having been "robbed" of their revolution in 1830,
would tend the torch throughout all those years until it was relit
in 1848. The ironies that characterize the historical intersection
of personal trajectories would find ex-Carbonari such as Ulysse
Trélat, the minister of public works who liquidated the national
workshops, Jules Bastide, minister of foreign affairs under the
second republic, and above all, Eugène Cavaignac, the
implacable repressor of the June rising, defending their mo
derate
republican version of the second republic while Louis Auguste
Blanqui and Étienne Arago occupied its prisons. In the history of
revolutionary movements the charbonnerie figures as a classic
example of the failed putsch, but it was remembered and celebrated
as a cradle for many versions of nineteenth-century reformist
idealism and as a contribution to the tradition, or the mythology,
of the long struggle for popular sovereignty in France.
Alan B. Spitzer
Bibliography