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| 2. The July Monarchy |
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| The monarchy was marked by continued dissension on the Left and its overwhelming bourgeois character. Workers, particularly artisans, became disillusioned by Louis-Philippe because he failed to provide legislation that guaranteed their continued livelihood. | 1 |
| The printers who published the newspaper L'Artisan rallied behind the notion of Workers' Cooperatives (Sept. 1830) as a means of eliminating the exploitation they identified as the main cause of their difficulties. They argued that machinery was not evil itself, but was used for evil by capitalists. Workers also protested the unwillingness of the government to help them and staged insurrections in Lyons (1831) and Paris and Lyons (April 1834). The latter was put down with great severity. | 2 |
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| 1830 |
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| Beginning of expansion of the Parisian clothing shop Belle Jardinière into the first great department store. | 3 |
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| 1831 |
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| Jews granted equal status with other religious groups. | 4 |
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| 1832 |
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| Cholera epidemic in Paris. | 5 |
| Education and child labor laws sought to protect children from parents whose willingness to rely on child labor or leave children unattended offended bourgeois sensibilities. | 6 |
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| 1833, June 28 |
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| Primary Education Law, introduced by Guizot, established public elementary schools for boys in each commune. This law was expanded to include girls in 1836. Reformers such as Louis Villermé and Villeneuve-Bargemont urged the government toward further reform. | 7 |
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| 1835, Sept. 9 |
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| September Laws, enacted following an attempt on Louis-Philippe's life, gagged the opposition press by making it illegal to advocate a different form of government and by reviving state censorship. These laws also increased the cautionnement, or bond by newspaper proprietors, which had been established in Nov. 1830. The new law required these dealers to pay cash rather than post bonds. These acts effectively eliminated the free press in France. | 8 |
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| 1840s |
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| Growing socialist and anarchist ideology. Louis Blanc (1811–82) published Organization du travail (1839). L'Atelier, published by Philippe Buchez (1796–1865) between Sept. 1840 and July 1850, advocated a form of Saint-Simonian socialism. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–65) published Qu'est-ce que la propriété? (June 1840), which identified property as theft. | 9 |
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| 1841 |
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| After an inquiry (1837), the government enacted the Child Labor Law of 1841, which set age 8 as the minimum age for employment and limited the workday to 8 hours for children under age 12 and 12 hours for those between ages 12 and 16. This law proved very difficult to enforce because of falsified documents, lack of paid inspectors, and collusion between parents and employers. | 10 |
| Industrialization. The period of July Monarchy experienced rapid industrial growth (600 steam engines in France in 1830, compared to 4,853 in 1847). | 11 |
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| 1842 |
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| The Railway Act provided government financing for construction and helped the growth of heavy industry. | 12 |
| Family and children became an increasing concern to the government during this period. A growing number of bourgeois organizations sought to encourage correct behavior in the expanding urban working classes. These organizations concentrated on the problems of illegitimate births, child abandonment, and wet-nursing. Many working-class mothers continued to put their babies out to a wet nurse and swaddle their children, although this practice was declining among the middle class. Children, especially illegitimate children, were also frequently abandoned at hospitals and orphanages; special towers (tours) often made it easy to do this anonymously. The resulting high infant mortality led the government to close many of these towers during the July Monarchy. Private individuals also began to address the needs of working parents. | 13 |
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| 1844 |
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| F. Marbeau opened the first crèche (nursery) in Paris, providing care to infants. Other philanthropic individuals opened salles d'asile (daycare facilities), which cared for children too young for school but too old for the crèche. | 14 |
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| 1846 |
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| The oath required of Jews abolished. | 15 |
| Economic depression, aggravated by the potato blight and crop failures that struck France in 1846–47. The problems of urban development, industrialization, and the declining artisan trades, combined with the hardships caused by this depression, resulted in growing demands for change. This depression helped to precipitate the revolution of 1848. | 16 |
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| 1847–48 |
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| Thiers and others led banquet campaign to protest conservative ministries of the 1840s and parliamentary corruption and to demand broader suffrage. (See France) | 17 |
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