Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) was a noble landowner, well-known writer, and deputy in the National Assembly elected in April 1848. As a political liberal, he supported the new republican government against the uprising of workers in the National Workshops. His description of the June Days comes from a memoir he wrote in 1850 about the events of the 1848 revolution. Although a fierce opponent of socialism, Tocqueville detected class struggle in the insurrection.

Now at last I have come to that insurrection in June which was the greatest and the strangest that had ever taken place in our history, or perhaps in that of any other nation: the greatest because for four days more than a hundred thousand men took part in it, and there were five generals killed; the strangest, because the insurgents were fighting without a battle cry, leaders, or flag, and yet they showed wonderful powers of co-ordination and a military expertise that astonished the most experienced officers.

Another point that distinguished it from all other events of the same type during the last sixty years was that its object was not to change the form of the government, but to alter the organization of society. In truth it was not a political struggle (in the sense in which we have used the word “political” up to now), but a class struggle, a sort of “Servile War.” It stood in the same relation to the facts of the February Revolution as the theory of socialism stood to its ideas; or rather it sprang naturally from those ideas, as a son from his mother; and one should not see it only as a brutal and blind, but as a powerful effort of the workers to escape from the necessities of their condition, which had been depicted to them as an illegitimate depression, and by the sword to open up a road towards that imaginary well-being that had been shown to them in the distance as a right. It was this mixture of greedy desires and false theories that engendered the insurrection and made it so formidable. These poor people had been assured that the goods of the wealthy were in some way the result of a theft committed against themselves. They had been assured that inequalities of fortune were as much opposed to morality and the interests of society, as to nature. This obscure and mistaken conception of right, combined with brute force, imparted to it an energy, tenacity and strength it would never have had on its own.

One should note, too, that this terrible insurrection was not the work of a certain number of conspirators, but was the revolt of one whole section of the population against another. The women took as much part in it as the men. While the men fought, the women got the ammunition ready and brought it up. And when in the end they had to surrender, the women were the last to yield. . . .

Down all the roads not held by the insurgents, thousands of men were pouring in from all parts of France to aid us. Thanks to the railways, those from fifty leagues [150 miles] off were already arriving, although the fighting had begun only in the evening of the previous day. The next day and the days following, they were to arrive from one and two hundred leagues [300–600 miles] away. These men were drawn without distinction from all classes of society; among them there were great numbers of peasants, bourgeois, large landowners and nobles, all jumbled up together in the same ranks.

Source: Alexis de Tocqueville, Recollections, ed. J. P. Mayer and A. P. Kerr, trans. George Lawrence (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), 136–37, 152.

Question to Consider

Why is Tocqueville so dismissive of the goals of those who participated in the June Days revolt in Paris in 1848?