A crop failure in France in 1846 quickly develops into a full-scale economic crisis, as food becomes scarce and expensive.

Many businesses go bankrupt, and unemployment soars.

Within the French governing elite itself there are signs of a moral crisis: scandals that implicate some high officials of the regime and growing dissension among the Notables.

Along with this goes a serious alienation of many intellectuals.

Novelists such as Victor Hugo, George Sand, and Eugène Sue glorify the common man; historians such as Jules Michelet and Alphonse de Lamartine write with romantic passion about the heroic episodes of the Great Revolution; and the caricaturist Honoré Daumier exposes the foibles of the nation's leaders.