Armand Barbès

Armand Barbès (18 September 1809 – 26 June 1870) was a French Republican revolutionary and a fierce and steadfast opponent of the July monarchy (1830–1848). He is remembered as a man whose life centers on two days:

Barbès was again imprisoned, but he was pardoned by Napoleon III in 1854. He fled into exile in the Netherlands, where he died on 26 June 1870, only weeks before the end of the Second Empire in France.

A most colorful character, he was nicknamed the Bayard of Democracy, presumably in honor of the chevalier, Pierre Terrail, seigneur de Bayard (1476–1524). He was also known as the "peerless conspirator", and a modern historian has called him "a man of action without a program." Barbès is today the very paradigm of the nineteenth-century "romantic revolutionary" type, courageous, generous, and a true democrat. He was called the "scourge of the establishment" by Karl Marx.

Barbès was born into a middle-class family in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe. His father, an army surgeon from Carcassonne in the département of Aude, was born in Capendu, also in Aude. He was a veteran of Napoleon's Egyptian campaign. Posted to Guadeloupe in 1801, he remained there until the fall of the First Empire in 1814.

The family returned to Carcassonne, and the eldest son of the doctor, Armand, eventually arrived in Carcassonne also, in 1830, the place of his revolutionary baptism. At twenty, Armand, disposed to a Republican point-of-view early in the development of his consciousness, was as physically strong as he was precocious of intellect. He had an imposing physique, and he was chosen to lead the local battalion of the National Guard during the 1830 revolution. The battalion was financed by the elder Barbès out of his own pocket.

The following year, Armand went to Paris to study medicine, but he found the very sight of blood repugnant. So, with a passion reminiscent of the Flaubert hero, Frédéric Moreau in Sentimental Education (1869), he threw himself, body and soul, into a study of the law. Like Moreau, Barbès experienced his parents' deaths at an early age. As a consequence, he was left a large inheritance, so large, in fact, that Barbès was relieved of the need to work to earn his living, and he became free to submit to the passion of his life: conspiring to overthrow the ruling regime, in this case, the July Monarchy.

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