Paris. The summer of 1848. Mobs filled the streets, building barricades just like in Les Mis. If they’d had cars, they probably would have been set on fire. In February of that year, the King, Louis-Phillipe, had abdicated in yet another French Revolution. There was a new government, what is called the Second Republic, but whatever it tried to do, it didn’t make anybody happy and there was more unrest. At the Collège de France, faculty complained that it had “slackened the zeal for research among all of the chemists, and all of their time … is absorbed by politics.”
Figure 1. The Revolution of 1848. Barricades on the Rue Soufflot (Horace Vernet)
Richard David Feinman 