As the revolution receded into the still very recent past, its charisma and its hold over the political imagination faded fast. In Paris, conservatives used the debates of the assembly to unpick the ‘principles of February’, focusing their efforts, for example, on extirpating the right to work, which had once been such a central preoccupation of the ‘social revolution’, from successive drafts of the new constitution.[118] Already in early June, the writer Fanny Lewald noticed, the word ‘revolution’ seemed to have fallen out of favour; instead, people spoke of the ‘occurrences’ or the ‘events’
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