A REVOLUTION IS ALWAYS A SORROWFUL THING

A revolution is always a sorrowful thing. We accept all things from the hand of God. He will give us the strength to support the trials which are in store for us. Double your prayers for us that we who are going to be in the thick of it may be benefitted by your peaceful serenity in serving God well and the Church.

Letter to Fr Augustin Gaudet in Montreal, Canada, 29 April 1848, EO I n 94

Hubenig continues to give us the background to the events of 1848 in France.

“In Marseille, Émile Olivier set up a government arbitration board to settle workers’ complaints, the first of its kind in France. Perhaps the most daring measure of the new government, however, were the subsidized ateliers nationaux – socialized national workshops meant to allay the hunger of the poor in Paris. The brainchild of socialist Louis Blanc, the idea was meant to give work to some fifty or sixty thousand unemployed men and women in a wide range of worker-run industries, all at two francs daily. Unfortunately, lack of preparation, planning and technical know-how, combined with outright bourgeois sabotage, damned the project to failure almost from the beginning.

By the end of May the workers had grown increasingly frustrated. They had given the government three months during which they were prepared to tighten their belts more, but they wanted to see results. When their lot became even worse because of panic in the economic and industrial sectors, the mood became ugly.”

Living in the Spirit’s Fire excerpts from pages 165 – 166.

REFLECTION

“When the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century brought a rapid increase in wealth, the demand of workers for a fair share of the wealth they were creating was conceded only after riots and strikes.” (J. Orr)