The June Rebellion and French Revolution
A Look at French History and Uprisings

A Look at French History and Uprisings

The June Rebellion, also called the Paris Uprising of 1832, was an anti-monarchist rising by Parisian republicans on 5 and 6 June 1832. Many people first meet it in Les Misérables, which is often assumed to be set during the Revolution of 1789. This page sets out how the two are connected, what happened in 1832, and why it matters that the king the rebels faced was Louis Philippe, not Charles X.

The French Revolution: A Revolution of Ideals

The Seeds of Revolution

The French Revolution was a period of political and social change that began with the Estates General of 1789 and ended with Napoleon’s coup of 18 Brumaire on 9 November 1799. It was caused by a combination of social, political and economic factors, and historians still weigh them differently.

Key Events of the Revolution

The storming of the Bastille in Paris on 14 July 1789 led to a series of radical measures, including the abolition of feudalism and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The monarchy was replaced by the First Republic in September 1792. The Reign of Terror followed in 1793 and 1794. Napoleon, who rose to prominence as a general during the Revolution, became Emperor of the French on 18 May 1804.

Why you have probably heard of it: Les Misérables

The barricade in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables belongs to this rising. The novel begins in 1815 and climaxes with the battles of the June Rebellion of 1832. Its secret society, the Friends of the ABC, made up mostly of students, is led by Enjolras, and Marius fights on the barricade. The stage musical and the films are based on the novel.

Hugo was in Paris on the day. On 5 June 1832 he was writing a play in the Tuileries gardens when he heard gunfire from the direction of Les Halles. He followed the sound, turned into the Passage du Saumon, and found himself shut in between barricades; for a quarter of an hour, bullets flew both ways while he sheltered between some columns. He published Les Misérables thirty years later, in 1862.

So the rising is a real event that many people know through a musical, which is a good reason to keep track of which parts are history and which are Hugo’s.

The June Rebellion: A Lesser-Known Chapter

Origins of the June Rebellion

In the July Revolution of 1830 the elected Chamber of Deputies had set up a constitutional monarchy and replaced Charles X with his more liberal cousin, Louis Philippe. That angered republicans, who saw one king replaced by another, and by 1832 there was a feeling that their revolution, for which many had died, had been stolen. The June Rebellion was an attempt to reverse the July Monarchy of Louis Philippe. It was not aimed at Charles X, who was no longer king.

Triggers and Catalysts

France had been through hard years from 1827 to 1832: harvest failures, food shortages and a rising cost of living. Then, in the spring of 1832, Paris suffered a widespread outbreak of cholera, which killed 18,402 people in the city and 100,000 across France, by the figures Wikipedia gives from the historian Jill Harsin. The poor neighbourhoods were devastated, and suspicion spread that the government had poisoned the wells.

The epidemic took two well-known victims: the prime minister, Casimir Perier, who died on 16 May, and General Jean Maximilien Lamarque, who died on 1 June. Lamarque was a hero of the Napoleonic Wars and, from 1828, a deputy on the left in the Chamber of Deputies, which made his public funeral an opportunity for the opposition to show its strength.

What happened

When	5–6 June 1832
Where	Paris: the insurgents held much of the eastern and central districts for one night
Against	King Louis Philippe and the July Monarchy
Rebels	Roughly 3,000
Government	20,000 National Guard and about 40,000 regular troops (Wikipedia’s summary box gives 30,000 for the whole government side)
Casualties	About 800 killed and wounded on both sides
Outcome	Suppressed. The last fighting, at the Cloître Saint-Merry, went on until the early evening of 6 June

Republican conspirators made their move at Lamarque’s funeral on 5 June. Demonstrators took charge of the procession and redirected it to the Place de la Bastille. When a red flag reading La liberté ou la mort (“liberty or death”) was raised, the crowd broke into disorder and shots were exchanged with government troops. Lafayette, who had spoken in praise of Lamarque, called for calm, but the outbreak spread.

The roughly 3,000 insurgents held much of eastern and central Paris for one night. During that night the 20,000 part-time militiamen of the Paris National Guard were reinforced by about 40,000 regular army troops. The insurgents made their stronghold in the Faubourg Saint-Martin, building barricades in the narrow streets around the rue Saint-Martin, and the final struggle came at the Cloître Saint-Merry. The army and National Guard lost 73 killed and 344 wounded; the insurgents 93 killed and 291 wounded.

Those identified afterwards were mostly working people: 66% working-class, a high proportion of them construction workers, and 34% shopkeepers or clerks.

Was Lamarque’s death the cause? Not on its own. Historians treat it as the occasion rather than the cause. In the words of the historian Mark Traugott, there were “simmering discontents, especially strong among republicans, who felt that they had spilled their blood on the 1830 barricades”, only to see their revolution “stolen”.

Contrasting the French Revolution and the June Rebellion

Scope and Scale

The Revolution of 1789 ran for ten years and changed the whole country. The June Rebellion lasted two days, was fought in the streets of Paris, and failed to spread further.

A Difference in Aims

The Revolution set out to remake French society and government. The June Rebellion had a narrower aim: to undo what republicans saw as the betrayal of 1830 and replace Louis Philippe’s monarchy with a republic.

Legacy and Influence

The French Revolution’s Enduring Legacy

Many of the Revolution’s ideas are considered fundamental principles of liberal democracy, and its values remain central to French political discourse today.

The Impact of the June Rebellion

In the short term the rising changed little. The government portrayed the rebels as an extremist minority. Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, a painting of the 1830 revolution, had been bought by the state in August 1831. The art historian Albert Boime wrote that after the rising “it was never again openly displayed for fear of setting a bad example”. The Louvre’s own record is a little different: it lists the painting at the Musée du Luxembourg in 1832 and 1833, then in storage from about 1833–34. The state reclaimed it from Delacroix in March 1848, showed it at the Exposition Universelle of 1855, and moved it to the Louvre in November 1874. Louis Philippe’s reign lasted until the revolution of 1848, when he abdicated and the Second Republic was founded.

What you can do with this

• Check which king. “Against the monarchy” in 1832 means Louis Philippe. A date and a name are the quickest way to tell one French revolution from another.
• Separate the spark from the fuel. Lamarque’s funeral set the day; cholera, hunger and the sense of a stolen revolution were already there.
• Enjoy Les Misérables as a novel. Hugo was near the fighting, but the book is fiction; the history is the frame, not the story.
• Read numbers with their source. The count of government troops differs between sources, so a single figure is worth checking before you repeat it.

Sources

• Wikipedia, “June Rebellion” (dates, causes, the funeral, the numbers on each side, casualties, aftermath, Hugo on 5 June), and the works it cites for them: Mark Traugott, The Insurgent Barricade (2010); Jill Harsin, Barricades: The War of the Streets in Revolutionary Paris, 1830–1848 (2002); Philip Mansel, Paris Between Empires (2003); William Duckett (ed.), Dictionnaire de la conversation et de la lecture, vol. 11 (casualties); Graham Robb, Victor Hugo: A Biography (1998); Albert Boime, Art in an Age of Civil Struggle, 1848–1871 (2008).
• Wikipedia, “Jean Maximilien Lamarque” (citing Traugott, and Charles Mullié’s Biographie des célébrités militaires, 1852).
• Wikipedia, “French Revolution” (dates and key events, citing among others Simon Schama, Citizens, 1989, and Frank McLynn, Napoleon, 1997), “Reign of Terror” (citing Will Durant, The Age of Napoleon, 1975) and “Napoleon”.
• Wikipedia, “Louis Philippe I” (his abdication in 1848, citing the Library of Congress research guide on the revolutions of 1789, 1830 and 1848).
• Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, translated by Isabel F. Hapgood (1887), Project Gutenberg (the Friends of the ABC; Marius at the barricade).
• Tim Masters, “Bon anniversaire! 25 facts about Les Mis”, BBC News (1 October 2010).
• Musée du Louvre, collections record for Le 28 juillet 1830. La Liberté guidant le peuple (RF 129), object history.

Checked September 2026. Wikipedia is used here only where it gives a citation for the sentence, and the work it cites is named above; the Louvre’s record is used for the painting, and the novel itself for its characters. Where sources give different numbers (the government’s troops) or accounts (the painting after 1832), the page gives both.