The Social Equality of the Whole People: Laborers, Reformers, and the French Revolution of 1848

American poet and labor reformer Augustine Duganne viewed France’s 1848 Revolution as an event with profound implications for economic egalitarianism among an increasingly broad category of working people. His 1848 poem, “The Laborers of France,” insisted that the establishment of the French Republic had un-manacled both wage laborers and bonded workingmen (enslaved people) in the Caribbean. Characterizing Black slaves as “workers” and wage workers as “slaves,” Duganne maintained that the February Revolution had been instigated by workingmen and presented a victory for workingmen everywhere because it had freed an especially oppressed subset of the laboring population. At the same time, antislavery reformers including Parker Pillsbury and Wendell Phillips viewed the Revolution as, above all, part of the international drive against slavery that was a prerequisite for any broader drive for what Frederick Douglass called “the natural equality of all men.”

This paper explores how the French Revolution of 1848 both exposed and altered ideas about equality among the first American left. In particular, I am interested in how trade unionists and antislavery reformers commemorated the Revolution and what that commemoration revealed about how they interpreted “égalité,” understood property, and conceived a more democratic society. Scholars have explored how 1848 shaped the antislavery enterprise in the United States and argued that white workers failed to celebrate French emancipation by denouncing Black slavery. This paper examines how the cultural responses to French emancipation spoke to not only the class and ideological discrepancies between workers and abolitionists, but also contributed to a common language of rights, freedom, and equality. By expanding the French concepts of “fraternité” toward what we now term “solidarity,” Duganne, Pillsbury, and others demonstrated the changing connections between political and economic equality that would form the basis of the early Republican Party and the antislavery alliance during the Civil War.