June Rebellion

Also called: Paris Uprising of 1832, June Rebellion of 1832

In June 1832, with cholera sweeping Paris, republicans raised barricades against the July Monarchy after the funeral of General Lamarque. Crushed within two days, the rising is the setting of the barricade scenes in Hugo’s Les Misérables.

The July Monarchy of Louis Philippe, set up by the July Revolution of 1830, gave a political voice only to men of property, and students, workers and republican secret societies who wanted a republic were deeply discontented. In the spring of 1832 cholera killed some 18,000 people in Paris alone, the poorest districts suffering most. Prime Minister Casimir Perier died of it in May, and on 1 June General Lamarque, a hero of the Napoleonic wars turned deputy and a critic of the monarchy, followed.

On 5 June clashes broke out in the crowd gathered for his funeral procession, and the rising began. The insurgents barricaded streets in the centre and east of Paris, but the city did not rise with them; the government sent in the army and the National Guard, and on 6 June the last barricade, near the Cloître Saint-Merry, fell. About 800 were killed or wounded on the two sides together.

The young Victor Hugo, who heard the gunfire from the Tuileries Gardens that day and took shelter among the barricades, portrayed the rising thirty years later in Les Misérables (1862) as the barricade of Marius, Enjolras and their young friends. It is often mistaken for a scene from the French Revolution of 1789, but it is in fact this brief rising more than forty years later.