Armand Barbès (18 September 1809 – 26 June 1870) was a French Republican revolutionary and an opponent of the July Monarchy (1830–1848).
He is remembered as a man whose life centers on two days:
- 12 May 1839, the day of the uprising the Republicans tried to overthrow the king, Louis Philippe. His ill-considered actions on this day led to a sentence of life imprisonment; he was, however, released by the revolution of 1848; and
- 15 May 1848, the day when demonstrators invaded the Assemblée Nationale, where Barbès had been serving as a deputy for about three weeks. The demonstrators' apparent aim was to urge the government to exercise whatever influence it could to support Poland's liberation. Things got out of hand, however, and Barbès got caught up in what was perceived as a coup d'état through the imposition of a provisional government.
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.
He was nicknamed the Bayard of Democracy, presumably in honor of the chevalier Pierre Terrail, seigneur de Bayard (1476–1524). He was called the "scourge of the establishment" by Karl Marx.
Youth
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.
In 1828, he moved to Paris, joined the Republican party, and started to study Law. His parents died that year, leaving him a hefty inheritance.