Support for Louis Philippe’s government had eroded among many classes in France by the beginning of 1848, a year that was to experience revolution and chaos across Europe (Wright 1987: 125–26). Parisian students and workers took to the streets, clashing with the police on 22 February 1848. Called upon to restore order, the National Guard proved disloyal to Louis Philippe, and the clashes turned into all-out rioting. The following day the king attempted to calm matters by firing Guizot, who had become hugely unpopular.
The news of Guizot’s dismissal inspired a public demonstration of thanks in front of the minister’s former office. Unfortunately, what started as a celebration ended in tragedy.
A column of students and artisans, unarmed, but singing ‘Mourir pour la patrie,’ came down the boulevards; at the same instant a gun was heard, and the 14th Regiment of the Line leveled their muskets and fired. The scene that followed was awful. Thousands of men, women, children, shrieking, bawling, raving, were seen flying in all directions, while sixty-two men, women, and lads, belonging to every class of society, lay weltering in their blood upon the pavement. (St. John 1848: 167–68)
After this the situation in Paris was beyond Louis Philippe’s control, and he abdicated in favor of his grandson. (Wright 1987: 126–27).
The citizens of Paris then declared a Second Republic (the first having been established during the French Revolution) and appointed a temporary government. At first it seemed that a new era of universal accord and understanding had dawned (Price 1972: 95–96). Despite this apparent harmony, the economy worsened bringing about even greater unemployment.
On 15 May the National Assembly came under attack as thousands of armed workers convened on its chambers demanding reform. On 21 June the situation got out of control when the Assembly issued a decree restricting membership in the National Workshops, which had provided some financial support for unemployed workers. The announcement was like a spark to tinder. Barricades immediately appeared all over Paris, and for the next five days skirmishes and pitched battles occurred across the city between working-class Parisians and the government’s soldiers. By the time the fighting ended, 900 soldiers along with 1,500 citizens, and perhaps as many as 3,000, lay dead (Knapton 1971: 392; Wright 1987: 134).
The fiercest battles took place around the enormous barricades near Place de la Bastille and Faubourg Saint-Antoine, immortalized by Victor Hugo in Les Misérables—across the Seine and some distance from the Boban family household. There also was intense fighting just across the river from them in the 3rd and 4th arrondissements, and the Left Bank and Latin Quarter up the street (Price 1972: 170). Living day-to-day in Paris during the June Days of 1848 had to have been frightening and disturbing for the family as for so many others. Eugène was only fourteen at the time, and the violence and killings must have affected him deeply. As order was restored in the weeks and months that followed, some 12,000 to 15,000 people were arrested, with about a third being deported to the French colony of Algeria (Wright 1987: 134; Knapton 1971: 392).
The bloody conflict of June 1848 was to have long-term repercussions for France’s prospects for peaceful reform and social progress. As British historian Roger Price notes:
The June days clearly revealed how far men’s attitudes had changed since the first relatively harmonious days of the Republic. They indicated the insufficiency of political reform, even that of granting universal male suffrage, as a means of giving satisfaction to the poor. They indicated the desperation with which those who had a vested interest under the status quo would defend this. Above all they indicated the shape of things to come by revealing this basic split in society and convincing many that differences between social groups could only be resolved by conflict. French society and its politics were for long to bear the mark of the hatreds generated by the insurrection of June 1848, and its brutal suppression. (Price 1972: 155)
The economic impact of the revolution of 1848, which grew out of the disenchantment and frustration of the working class unable to make a living wage, was devastating. The business class refused to invest capital in their operations, and “no real signs of recovery would be seen until 1851” (Traugott 1988: 22). Unemployment would continue to rise for the next few years, and workers would continue to be exploited by subcontractors and the growth of piecework, which was particularly prevalent in the textile industry.
With France in an economic tailspin at the end of 1848, the news that gold had been discovered in California at the beginning of the year came as a thunderclap of good news. The French had already begun developing a keen interest in the American West, due partly to the reports from John C. Frémont’s exploratory expeditions of the West and California throughout the 1840s, which had become available in translation. France considered Frémont a native son because of his French-Canadian ancestry, taking to heart his expansionist view that the American West was a land full of opportunity and adventure. Once gold was discovered, the bookstalls of Paris displayed more and more information about California—sailors’ reminiscences, accounts from Frenchmen living in California, articles taken from American publications—all of which added heat to the gold fever (Brands 2002: 94).
Figure 1.1 Duvergé sisters’ invoice (courtesy of Sylvain Bertoldi, Archives municipales d’Angers, 1 Num. 15).
According to an 1851 census, Boban’s grandfather, who had dropped the Boban surname and was known as André Michel Duvergé, had left Paris to return to Angers with his wife and two of their daughters, Fanny and Henriette. The youngest daughter, Victorine, may have stayed in Paris or perhaps had died, since she is no longer listed in census records in either Angers or Paris. André Michel, then seventy-two, is described as supported by the labor of “his children”4—his daughters, by then thirty-five and twenty-eight, who were corset makers or corsetières. René Victor’s younger half-sisters had followed the Boban Duvergé tradition to become successful in the textile industry, ultimately owning an award-winning business in Angers that manufactured corsets, “gilets de santé,” which may have been special vests or a type of undergarment, and men’s shirts.
Boban’s grandfather, André Michel, died in October 1851, but his third wife, Henriette Chardon, and his daughters continued to reside in Angers at least until the early 1860s. Their business seems to have prospered. Fanny married a blacksmith just a few months before her father’s death, and they had a domestic as a member of their household. Their names last appear in the Angers census in 1861.5
In 1852, Louis Napoleon, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, declared himself Emperor Napoleon III in a bloodless coup d’état that ended the Second Republic. One of his first enterprises was to design the modernization of Paris in collaboration with Georges-Eugène Haussmann, a civil servant and city planner who was prefect of the Seine region. Napoleon III and Haussmann envisioned the complete transformation of the capital into a safer city with better housing, sanitation, and more open communities. Additionally, they designed tree-lined boulevards too wide for the barricades that had figured so prominently in 1848, which would also provide easy access for the police and the military. There was a growing feeling in the country that the capital’s insurgents needed to be controlled. Eight times since 1827 Parisians had brought life and commerce to a standstill by erecting their infamous barricades, and this needed to be stopped (Merriman 2014: xiv).
In August 1853, the Bobans’ eldest daughter, Rose Louise, was married. The family was still living in two rooms at 22, rue des Grands Augustins in the 6th arrondissement, only a few blocks from their original home at rue Cardinale. Rose Louise’s husband, André Martial Backès, was a gainier like her father, and may have worked with him.6
Eugène André Boban was nineteen when his older sister was married in the St. Sulpice church. If he had completed his schooling around the age of twelve, he would have already been working with his father for about