French Newspapers and Ephemera from the 1848 Revolution
FRENCH NEWSPAPERS AND EPHEMERA FROM THE 1848 REVOLUTION MORNA DANIELS THE British Library has exceptionally fine holdings relating to the French Revolution of 1789. The three collections purchased from or on the recommendation of John Wilson Croker comprise 48,579 pieces and have been briefly listed with some indication of subject, but not all have been catalogued.^ The 'R* set, the last to be purchased in 1856, includes a few items from the revolution of 1830. In 1898 Francois Chevremont, Marat's biographer, presented seventy volumes of works by or about Marat. ^ Croker himself lived to see the French Revolution of 1848. This event sparked off uprisings thoughout Europe, in Milan, Hanover, Munich, Prague, Vienna, Hungary, Prussia and Poland, and encouraged the Chartist movement in London. It swept away the 'bourgeois' King Louis-Philippe, and ushered in a period of political instability in France which led to the rise to power of Louis-Napoleon, nephew of Napoleon I. It is represented in the British Library by an interesting small collection of newspapers, prints, election material and other ephemera, placed at shelfmark HS.74/1217. Who formed this collection is not entirely clear. Included among the ephemera is a registration form to vote in the plebiscite of 1852 filled in by Charles Viennot, an 'employe' (clerk) born in i8i8, and hving at 9 rue des Mathurins, noted as being in the ist arrondissement (fig. i). The rue des Mathurins, now in the 8th and 9th arrondissements, was named after a farm belonging to the Mathurin order."^ On maps of the time it is marked as rue neuve des Mathurins, as there was another rue des Mathurins near the Roman baths (now the Cluny Museum), which has since been destroyed.
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