The Revolution That Stopped Too Soon

Abstract

Neither Marx nor Lenin wrote much about the Revolution of 1830. This was largely because the revolution stopped too soon, thereby merely ratifying changes within the bourgeoisie instead of replacing the capitalist system (that existed to benefit the bourgeoisie) with a proletarian one. In the way the Bolsheviks explained it, the bourgeoisie split in the 1820s into more prosperous elements favouring the continuation of the Bourbon Restoration and less affluent ones that in 1830 were able to install the so-called Orléanists in power. This split, which continued, ensured the latter’s quick demise. But the proletariat was still too small and too weak and insufficiently radical politically to succeed it. However, despite its limited consequences, the Revolution of 1830 served the enormously important purpose of showing that the French Revolution, while sui generis in many ways, was also the first in a series of revolutions in the history of France that together constituted a genuine tradition of revolution.