L'age Des Ombres

From the Second Restoration until the repression of the Paris Commune, French politics presented the strange paradox of an extreme instability, between revolutions and coups d’état, which did not hinder the spread of a certain political modernity – that of representative democracy, male universal suffrage and respect of political liberties. In modern political history, improbable conspiracies hatched by small minorities formed to take a stand against an increasingly powerful government may seem very strange. Yet, whether deplorable or heroic, they were considered significant and fully political events, as shown by the popularity of the Four Sergeants of La Rochelle or of Armand Barbès, the careers of a Philippe Buonarroti or of a Louis-Auguste Blanqui, the Duchesse de Berry’s venture, or the unfortunate endeavours of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte before he became Napoleon III.Mysterious events – in every sense of the word – those imagined, hoped for, or dreaded plots which were sometimes carried out, coincided with the peak of Romanticism and the revival of a popular politicisation fostered by the collective memory of the French Revolution. This book is dedicated to exploring a delegitimised world which, for the most part, has been totally forgotten.It retraces the career paths, as well as the aspirations, of these special actors known as conspirators and places them back in their era’s political imaginings. Conspiracy plays an essential, yet fundamentally bifid role: heroised, its history is akin to revolutionary myths; demonised, its story is being refined to the point of relating to the darkest plot theories which abound today.