France
After the bourgeois republican government suppressed the June Revolution, it began courting disaster in ever more inventive ways.
In order to win over interest groups, the bourgeois government chose to compromise with the monarchists and clericalists. It first abandoned the economic platform of the bourgeois republicans, then restored the fiscal and tax system of the July Monarchy.
On July 3, the French government announced the abolition of the railway nationalization plan; on July 11, it restored heavy taxes on newspapers and publishing houses; on August 9, it began restricting freedom of publication and assembly...
None of this amounted to much. Ordinary people did not feel the pain directly, and some of these policies even helped consolidate the regime. But what the French government did next was true self-destruction.
On August 30, the French government began implementing a decree imposing an additional tax of 45 centimes;
On September 6, the French government announced the abolition of the eight-hour workday, extending working hours to twelve to fourteen hours;
On September 7, the French government announced the repeal of the Labor Protection Act, the Minimum Wage Guarantee Act...
The French government raised taxes while repealing laws that protected working-class interests, naturally provoking the dissatisfaction of the French people.
The French people were not so easily bullied. Workers and farmers whose interests had been harmed naturally resisted. Beginning in September, worker and peasant uprisings broke out in twenty-three provinces in succession.
With such a self-destructive government in place, the French people naturally used their ballots in the following presidential election to tell the bourgeois government to get lost.
Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte—Napoleon III—miraculously won 75 percent of the vote. One had to know that Article 44 of the French Constitution stipulated that anyone who had lost French citizenship could not be elected president.
Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte