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<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1346 ***</div>

<h1>The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte</h1>

<h2 class="no-break">by Karl Marx</h2>

<hr />

<h2>Contents</h2>

<table summary="" style="">

<tr>
<td> <a href="#pref01">Translator&rsquo;s Preface</a></td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td> <a href="#chap01">I.</a></td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td> <a href="#chap02">II.</a></td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td> <a href="#chap03">III.</a></td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td> <a href="#chap04">IV.</a></td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td> <a href="#chap05">V.</a></td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td> <a href="#chap06">VI.</a></td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td> <a href="#chap07">VII.</a></td>
</tr>

</table>

<div class="chapter">

<h2><a name="pref01"></a>Translator&rsquo;s Preface</h2>

<p>
&ldquo;The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte&rdquo; is one of Karl
Marx&rsquo; most profound and most brilliant monographs. It may be considered
the best work extant on the philosophy of history, with an eye especially upon
the history of the Movement of the Proletariat, together with the bourgeois and
other manifestations that accompany the same, and the tactics that such
conditions dictate.
</p>

<p>
The recent populist uprising; the more recent &ldquo;Debs Movement&rdquo;; the
thousand and one utopian and chimerical notions that are flaring up; the
capitalist maneuvers; the hopeless, helpless grasping after straws, that
characterize the conduct of the bulk of the working class; all of these,
together with the empty-headed, ominous figures that are springing into
notoriety for a time and have their day, mark the present period of the Labor
Movement in the nation a critical one. The best information acquirable, the
best mental training obtainable are requisite to steer through the existing
chaos that the death-tainted social system of today creates all around us. To
aid in this needed information and mental training, this instructive work is
now made accessible to English readers, and is commended to the serious study
of the serious.
</p>

<p>
The teachings contained in this work are hung on an episode in recent French
history. With some this fact may detract of its value. A pedantic, supercilious
notion is extensively abroad among us that we are an &ldquo;Anglo Saxon&rdquo;
nation; and an equally pedantic, supercilious habit causes many to look to
England for inspiration, as from a racial birthplace. Nevertheless, for weal or
for woe, there is no such thing extant as &ldquo;Anglo-Saxon&rdquo;&mdash;of
all nations, said to be &ldquo;Anglo-Saxon,&rdquo; in the United States least.
What we still have from England, much as appearances may seem to point the
other way, is not of our bone-and-marrow, so to speak, but rather partakes of
the nature of &ldquo;importations.&rdquo; We are no more English on account of
them than we are Chinese because we all drink tea.
</p>

<p>
Of all European nations, France is the on to which we come nearest. Besides its
republican form of government&mdash;the directness of its history, the unity of
its actions, the sharpness that marks its internal development, are all
characteristics that find their parallel her best, and vice versa. In all
essentials the study of modern French history, particularly when sketched by
such a master hand as Marx&rsquo;, is the most valuable one for the acquisition
of that historic, social and biologic insight that our country stands
particularly in need of, and that will be inestimable during the approaching
critical days.
</p>

<p>
For the assistance of those who, unfamiliar with the history of France, may be
confused by some of the terms used by Marx, the following explanations may
prove aidful:
</p>

<p>
On the 18th Brumaire (Nov. 9th), the post-revolutionary development of affairs
in France enabled the first Napoleon to take a step that led with inevitable
certainty to the imperial throne. The circumstance that fifty and odd years
later similar events aided his nephew, Louis Bonaparte, to take a similar step
with a similar result, gives the name to this work&mdash;&ldquo;The Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.&rdquo;
</p>

<p>
As to the other terms and allusions that occur, the following sketch will
suffice:
</p>

<p>
Upon the overthrow of the first Napoleon came the restoration of the Bourbon
throne (Louis XVIII, succeeded by Charles X). In July, 1830, an uprising of the
upper tier of the bourgeoisie, or capitalist class&mdash;the aristocracy of
finance&mdash;overthrew the Bourbon throne, or landed aristocracy, and set up
the throne of Orleans, a younger branch of the house of Bourbon, with Louis
Philippe as king. From the month in which this revolution occurred, Louis
Philippe&rsquo;s monarchy is called the &ldquo;July Monarchy.&rdquo; In
February, 1848, a revolt of a lower tier of the capitalist class&mdash;the
industrial bourgeoisie&mdash;against the aristocracy of finance, in turn
dethroned Louis Philippe. The affair, also named from the month in which it
took place, is the &ldquo;February Revolution&rdquo;. &ldquo;The Eighteenth
Brumaire&rdquo; starts with that event.
</p>

<p>
Despite the inapplicableness to our affairs of the political names and
political leadership herein described, both these names and leaderships are to
such an extent the products of an economic-social development that has here too
taken place with even greater sharpens, and they have their present or
threatened counterparts here so completely, that, by the light of this work of
Marx&rsquo;, we are best enabled to understand our own history, to know whence
we came, and whither we are going and how to conduct ourselves.
</p>

<p>
D.D.L. New York, Sept. 12, 1897
</p>

</div><!--end chapter-->

<div class="chapter">

<h2>THE EIGHTEENTH BRUMAIRE OF LOUIS BONAPARTE</h2>

</div><!--end chapter-->

<div class="chapter">

<h2><a name="chap01"></a>I.</h2>

<p>
Hegel says somewhere that that great historic facts and personages recur twice.
He forgot to add: &ldquo;Once as tragedy, and again as farce.&rdquo;
Caussidiere for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the &ldquo;Mountain&rdquo;
of 1848-51 for the &ldquo;Mountain&rdquo; of 1793-05, the Nephew for the Uncle.
The identical caricature marks also the conditions under which the second
edition of the eighteenth Brumaire is issued.
</p>

<p>
Man makes his own history, but he does not make it out of the whole cloth; he
does not make it out of conditions chosen by himself, but out of such as he
finds close at hand. The tradition of all past generations weighs like an alp
upon the brain of the living. At the very time when men appear engaged in
revolutionizing things and themselves, in bringing about what never was before,
at such very epochs of revolutionary crisis do they anxiously conjure up into
their service the spirits of the past, assume their names, their battle cries,
their costumes to enact a new historic scene in such time-honored disguise and
with such borrowed language Thus did Luther masquerade as the Apostle Paul;
thus did the revolution of 1789-1814 drape itself alternately as Roman Republic
and as Roman Empire; nor did the revolution of 1818 know what better to do than
to parody at one time the year 1789, at another the revolutionary traditions of
1793-95. Thus does the beginner, who has acquired a new language, keep on
translating it back into his own mother tongue; only then has he grasped the
spirit of the new language and is able freely to express himself therewith when
he moves in it without recollections of the old, and has forgotten in its use
his own hereditary tongue.
</p>

<p>
When these historic configurations of the dead past are closely observed a
striking difference is forthwith noticeable. Camille Desmoulins, Danton,
Robespierre, St. Juste, Napoleon, the heroes as well as the parties and the
masses of the old French revolution, achieved in Roman costumes and with Roman
phrases the task of their time: the emancipation and the establishment of
modern bourgeois society. One set knocked to pieces the old feudal groundwork
and mowed down the feudal heads that had grown upon it; Napoleon brought about,
within France, the conditions under which alone free competition could develop,
the partitioned lands be exploited, the nation&rsquo;s unshackled powers of
industrial production be utilized; while, beyond the French frontier, he swept
away everywhere the establishments of feudality, so far as requisite, to
furnish the bourgeois social system of France with fit surroundings of the
European continent, and such as were in keeping with the times. Once the new
social establishment was set on foot, the antediluvian giants vanished, and,
along with them, the resuscitated Roman world&mdash;the Brutuses, Gracchi,
Publicolas, the Tribunes, the Senators, and Caesar himself. In its sober
reality, bourgeois society had produced its own true interpretation in the
Says, Cousins, Royer-Collards, Benjamin Constants and Guizots; its real
generals sat behind the office desks; and the mutton-head of Louis XVIII was
its political lead. Wholly absorbed in the production of wealth and in the
peaceful fight of competition, this society could no longer understand that the
ghosts of the days of Rome had watched over its cradle. And yet, lacking in
heroism as bourgeois society is, it nevertheless had stood in need of heroism,
of self-sacrifice, of terror, of civil war, and of bloody battle fields to
bring it into the world. Its gladiators found in the stern classic traditions
of the Roman republic the ideals and the form, the self-deceptions, that they
needed in order to conceal from themselves the narrow bourgeois substance of
their own struggles, and to keep their passion up to the height of a great
historic tragedy. Thus, at another stage of development a century before, did
Cromwell and the English people draw from the Old Testament the language,
passions and illusions for their own bourgeois revolution. When the real goal
was reached, when the remodeling of English society was accomplished, Locke
supplanted Habakuk.
</p>

<p>
Accordingly, the reviving of the dead in those revolutions served the purpose
of glorifying the new struggles, not of parodying the old; it served the
purpose of exaggerating to the imagination the given task, not to recoil before
its practical solution; it served the purpose of rekindling the revolutionary
spirit, not to trot out its ghost.
</p>

<p>
In 1848-51 only the ghost of the old revolution wandered about, from Marrast
the &ldquo;Republicain en gaunts jaunes,&rdquo; [#1 Silk-stocking republican]
who disguised himself in old Bailly, down to the adventurer, who hid his
repulsively trivial features under the iron death mask of Napoleon. A whole
people, that imagines it has imparted to itself accelerated powers of motion
through a revolution, suddenly finds itself transferred back to a dead epoch,
and, lest there be any mistake possible on this head, the old dates turn up
again; the old calendars; the old names; the old edicts, which long since had
sunk to the level of the antiquarian&rsquo;s learning; even the old bailiffs,
who had long seemed mouldering with decay. The nation takes on the appearance
of that crazy Englishman in Bedlam, who imagines he is living in the days of
the Pharaohs, and daily laments the hard work that he must do in the Ethiopian
mines as gold digger, immured in a subterranean prison, with a dim lamp
fastened on his head, behind him the slave overseer with a long whip, and, at
the mouths of the mine a mob of barbarous camp servants who understand neither
the convicts in the mines nor one another, because they do not speak a common
language. &ldquo;And all this,&rdquo; cries the crazy Englishman, &ldquo;is
demanded of me, the free-born Englishman, in order to make gold for old
Pharaoh.&rdquo; &ldquo;In order to pay off the debts of the Bonaparte
family&rdquo;&mdash;sobs the French nation. The Englishman, so long as he was
in his senses, could not rid himself of the rooted thought making gold. The
Frenchmen, so long as they were busy with a revolution, could not rid then
selves of the Napoleonic memory, as the election of December 10th proved. They
longed to escape from the dangers of revolution back to the flesh pots of
Egypt; the 2d of December, 1851 was the answer. They have not merely the
character of the old Napoleon, but the old Napoleon himself&mdash;caricatured
as he needs must appear in the middle of the nineteenth century.
</p>

<p>
The social revolution of the nineteenth century can not draw its poetry from
the past, it can draw that only from the future. It cannot start upon its work
before it has stricken off all superstition concerning the past. Former
revolutions require historic reminiscences in order to intoxicate themselves
with their own issues. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the
dead bury their dead in order to reach its issue. With the former, the phrase
surpasses the substance; with this one, the substance surpasses the phrase.
</p>

<p>
The February revolution was a surprisal; old society was taken unawares; and
the people proclaimed this political stroke a great historic act whereby the
new era was opened. On the 2d of December, the February revolution is jockeyed
by the trick of a false player, and what seems to be overthrown is no longer
the monarchy, but the liberal concessions which had been wrung from it by
centuries of struggles. Instead of society itself having conquered a new point,
only the State appears to have returned to its oldest form, to the simply
brazen rule of the sword and the club. Thus, upon the &ldquo;coup de
main&rdquo; of February, 1848, comes the response of the &ldquo;coup de
tete&rdquo; December, 1851. So won, so lost. Meanwhile, the interval did not go
by unutilized. During the years 1848-1851, French society retrieved in
abbreviated, because revolutionary, method the lessons and teachings,
which&mdash;if it was to be more than a disturbance of the surface&mdash;should
have preceded the February revolution, had it developed in regular order, by
rule, so to say. Now French society seems to have receded behind its point of
departure; in fact, however, it was compelled to first produce its own
revolutionary point of departure, the situation, circumstances, conditions,
under which alone the modern revolution is in earnest.
</p>

<p>
Bourgeois revolutions, like those of the eighteenth century, rush onward
rapidly from success to success, their stage effects outbid one another, men
and things seem to be set in flaming brilliants, ecstasy is the prevailing
spirit; but they are short-lived, they reach their climax speedily, then
society relapses into a long fit of nervous reaction before it learns how to
appropriate the fruits of its period of feverish excitement. Proletarian
revolutions, on the contrary, such as those of the nineteenth century,
criticize themselves constantly; constantly interrupt themselves in their own
course; come back to what seems to have been accomplished, in order to start
over anew; scorn with cruel thoroughness the half measures, weaknesses and
meannesses of their first attempts; seem to throw down their adversary only in
order to enable him to draw fresh strength from the earth, and again, to rise
up against them in more gigantic stature; constantly recoil in fear before the
undefined monster magnitude of their own objects&mdash;until finally that
situation is created which renders all retreat impossible, and the conditions
themselves cry out:
</p>

<p class="poem">
&ldquo;Hic Rhodus, hic salta!&rdquo;<br />
[#2 Here is Rhodes, leap here! An allusion to Aesop&rsquo;s Fables.]
</p>

<p>
Every observer of average intelligence; even if he failed to follow step by
step the course of French development, must have anticipated that an unheard of
fiasco was in store for the revolution. It was enough to hear the
self-satisfied yelpings of victory wherewith the Messieurs Democrats mutually
congratulated one another upon the pardons of May 2d, 1852. Indeed, May 2d had
become a fixed idea in their heads; it had become a dogma with
them&mdash;something like the day on which Christ was to reappear and the
Millennium to begin had formed in the heads of the Chiliasts. Weakness had, as
it ever does, taken refuge in the wonderful; it believed the enemy was overcome
if, in its imagination, it hocus-pocused him away; and it lost all sense of the
present in the imaginary apotheosis of the future, that was at hand, and of the
deeds, that it had &ldquo;in petto,&rdquo; but which it did not yet want to
bring to the scratch. The heroes, who ever seek to refute their established
incompetence by mutually bestowing their sympathy upon one another and by
pulling together, had packed their satchels, taken their laurels in advance
payments and were just engaged in the work of getting discounted &ldquo;in
partibus,&rdquo; on the stock exchange, the republics for which, in the silence
of their unassuming dispositions, they had carefully organized the government
personnel. The 2d of December struck them like a bolt from a clear sky; and the
peoples, who, in periods of timid despondency, gladly allow their hidden fears
to be drowned by the loudest screamers, will perhaps have become convinced that
the days are gone by when the cackling of geese could save the Capitol.
</p>

<p>
The constitution, the national assembly, the dynastic parties, the blue and the
red republicans, the heroes from Africa, the thunder from the tribune, the
flash-lightnings from the daily press, the whole literature, the political
names and the intellectual celebrities, the civil and the criminal law, the
&ldquo;liberte&rsquo;, egalite&rsquo;, fraternite&rsquo;,&rdquo; together with
the 2d of May 1852&mdash;all vanished like a phantasmagoria before the ban of
one man, whom his enemies themselves do not pronounce an adept at witchcraft.
Universal suffrage seems to have survived only for a moment, to the end that,
before the eyes of the whole world, it should make its own testament with its
own hands, and, in the name of the people, declare: &ldquo;All that exists
deserves to perish.&rdquo;
</p>

<p>
It is not enough to say, as the Frenchmen do, that their nation was taken by
surprise. A nation, no more than a woman, is excused for the unguarded hour
when the first adventurer who comes along can do violence to her. The riddle is
not solved by such shifts, it is only formulated in other words. There remains
to be explained how a nation of thirty-six millions can be surprised by three
swindlers, and taken to prison without resistance.
</p>

<p>
Let us recapitulate in general outlines the phases which the French revolution
of February 24th, 1848, to December, 1851, ran through.
</p>

<p>
Three main periods are unmistakable:
</p>

<p>
First&mdash;The February period;
</p>

<p>
Second&mdash;The period of constituting the republic, or of the constitutive
national assembly (May 4, 1848, to May 29th, 1849);
</p>

<p>
Third&mdash;The period of the constitutional republic, or of the legislative
national assembly (May 29, 1849, to December 2, 1851).
</p>

<p>
The first period, from February 24, or the downfall of Louis Philippe, to May
4, 1848, the date of the assembling of the constitutive assembly&mdash;the
February period proper&mdash;may be designated as the prologue of the
revolution. It officially expressed its own character in this, that the
government which it improvised declared itself &ldquo;provisional;&rdquo; and,
like the government, everything that was broached, attempted, or uttered,
pronounced itself provisional. Nobody and nothing dared to assume the right of
permanent existence and of an actual fact. All the elements that had prepared
or determined the revolution&mdash;dynastic opposition, republican bourgeoisie,
democratic-republican small traders&rsquo; class, social-democratic labor
element&mdash;all found &ldquo;provisionally&rdquo; their place in the February
government.
</p>

<p>
It could not be otherwise. The February days contemplated originally a reform
of the suffrage laws, whereby the area of the politically privileged among the
property-holding class was to be extended, while the exclusive rule of the
aristocracy of finance was to be overthrown. When however, it came to a real
conflict, when the people mounted the barricades, when the National Guard stood
passive, when the army offered no serious resistance, and the kingdom ran away,
then the republic seemed self-understood. Each party interpreted it in its own
sense. Won, arms in hand, by the proletariat, they put upon it the stamp of
their own class, and proclaimed the social republic. Thus the general purpose
of modern revolutions was indicated, a purpose, however, that stood in most
singular contradiction to every thing that, with the material at hand, with the
stage of enlightenment that the masses had reached, and under existing
circumstances and conditions, could be immediately used. On the other hand, the
claims of all the other elements, that had cooperated in the revolution of
February, were recognized by the lion&rsquo;s share that they received in the
government. Hence, in no period do we find a more motley mixture of
high-sounding phrases together with actual doubt and helplessness; of more
enthusiastic reform aspirations, together with a more slavish adherence to the
old routine; more seeming harmony permeating the whole of society together with
a deeper alienation of its several elements. While the Parisian proletariat was
still gloating over the sight of the great perspective that had disclosed
itself to their view, and was indulging in seriously meant discussions over the
social problems, the old powers of society had groomed themselves, had gathered
together, had deliberated and found an unexpected support in the mass of the
nation&mdash;the peasants and small traders&mdash;all of whom threw themselves
on a sudden upon the political stage, after the barriers of the July monarchy
had fallen down.
</p>

<p>
The second period, from May 4, 1848, to the end of May, 1849, is the period of
the constitution, of the founding of the bourgeois republic immediately after
the February days, not only was the dynastic opposition surprised by the
republicans, and the republicans by the Socialists, but all France was
surprised by Paris. The national assembly, that met on May 4, 1848, to frame a
constitution, was the outcome of the national elections; it represented the
nation. It was a living protest against the assumption of the February days,
and it was intended to bring the results of the revolution back to the
bourgeois measure. In vain did the proletariat of Paris, which forthwith
understood the character of this national assembly, endeavor, a few days after
its meeting; on May 15, to deny its existence by force, to dissolve it, to
disperse the organic apparition, in which the reacting spirit of the nation was
threatening them, and thus reduce it back to its separate component parts. As
is known, the 15th of May had no other result than that of removing Blanqui and
his associates, i.e. the real leaders of the proletarian party, from the public
scene for the whole period of the cycle which we are here considering.
</p>

<p>
Upon the bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe, only the bourgeois republic
could follow; that is to say, a limited portion of the bourgeoisie having ruled
under the name of the king, now the whole bourgeoisie was to rule under the
name of the people. The demands of the Parisian proletariat are utopian
tom-fooleries that have to be done away with. To this declaration of the
constitutional national assembly, the Paris proletariat answers with the June
insurrection, the most colossal event in the history of European civil wars.
The bourgeois republic won. On its side stood the aristocracy of finance, the
industrial bourgeoisie; the middle class; the small traders&rsquo; class; the
army; the slums, organized as Guarde Mobile; the intellectual celebrities, the
parsons&rsquo; class, and the rural population. On the side of the Parisian
proletariat stood none but itself. Over 3,000 insurgents were massacred, after
the victory 15,000 were transported without trial. With this defeat, the
proletariat steps to the background on the revolutionary stage. It always seeks
to crowd forward, so soon as the movement seems to acquire new impetus, but
with ever weaker effort and ever smaller results; So soon as any of the above
lying layers of society gets into revolutionary fermentation, it enters into
alliance therewith and thus shares all the defeats which the several parties
successively suffer. But these succeeding blows become ever weaker the more
generally they are distributed over the whole surface of society. The more
important leaders of the Proletariat, in its councils, and the press, fall one
after another victims of the courts, and ever more questionable figures step to
the front. It partly throws itself it upon doctrinaire experiments,
&ldquo;co-operative banking&rdquo; and &ldquo;labor exchange&rdquo; schemes; in
other words, movements, in which it goes into movements in which it gives up
the task of revolutionizing the old world with its own large collective weapons
and on the contrary, seeks to bring about its emancipation, behind the back of
society, in private ways, within the narrow bounds of its own class conditions,
and, consequently, inevitably fails. The proletariat seems to be able neither
to find again the revolutionary magnitude within itself nor to draw new energy
from the newly formed alliances until all the classes, with whom it contended
in June, shall lie prostrate along with itself. But in all these defeats, the
proletariat succumbs at least with the honor that attaches to great historic
struggles; not France alone, all Europe trembles before the June earthquake,
while the successive defeats inflicted upon the higher classes are bought so
easily that they need the brazen exaggeration of the victorious party itself to
be at all able to pass muster as an event; and these defeats become more
disgraceful the further removed the defeated party stands from the proletariat.
</p>

<p>
True enough, the defeat of the June insurgents prepared, leveled the ground,
upon which the bourgeois republic could be founded and erected; but it, at the
same time, showed that there are in Europe other issues besides that of
&ldquo;Republic or Monarchy.&rdquo; It revealed the fact that here the
Bourgeois Republic meant the unbridled despotism of one class over another. It
proved that, with nations enjoying an older civilization, having developed
class distinctions, modern conditions of production, an intellectual
consciousness, wherein all traditions of old have been dissolved through the
work of centuries, that with such countries the republic means only the
political revolutionary form of bourgeois society, not its conservative form of
existence, as is the case in the United States of America, where, true enough,
the classes already exist, but have not yet acquired permanent character, are
in constant flux and reflux, constantly changing their elements and yielding
them up to one another where the modern means of production, instead of
coinciding with a stagnant population, rather compensate for the relative
scarcity of heads and hands; and, finally, where the feverishly youthful life
of material production, which has to appropriate a new world to itself, has so
far left neither time nor opportunity to abolish the illusions of old. [#3 This
was written at the beginning of 1852.]
</p>

<p>
All classes and parties joined hands in the June days in a &ldquo;Party of
Order&rdquo; against the class of the proletariat, which was designated as the
&ldquo;Party of Anarchy,&rdquo; of Socialism, of Communism. They claimed to
have &ldquo;saved&rdquo; society against the &ldquo;enemies of society.&rdquo;
They gave out the slogans of the old social order&mdash;&ldquo;Property,
Family, Religion, Order&rdquo;&mdash;as the passwords for their army, and cried
out to the counter-revolutionary crusaders: &ldquo;In this sign thou wilt
conquer!&rdquo; From that moment on, so soon as any of the numerous parties,
which had marshaled themselves under this sign against the June insurgents,
tries, in turn, to take the revolutionary field in the interest of its own
class, it goes down in its turn before the cry: &ldquo;Property, Family,
Religion, Order.&rdquo; Thus it happens that &ldquo;society is saved&rdquo; as
often as the circle of its ruling class is narrowed, as often as a more
exclusive interest asserts itself over the general. Every demand for the most
simple bourgeois financial reform, for the most ordinary liberalism, for the
most commonplace republicanism, for the flattest democracy, is forthwith
punished as an &ldquo;assault upon society,&rdquo; and is branded as
&ldquo;Socialism.&rdquo; Finally the High Priests of &ldquo;Religion and
Order&rdquo; themselves are kicked off their tripods; are fetched out of their
beds in the dark; hurried into patrol wagons, thrust into jail or sent into
exile; their temple is razed to the ground, their mouths are sealed, their pen
is broken, their law torn to pieces in the name of Religion, of Family, of
Property, and of Order. Bourgeois, fanatic on the point of &ldquo;Order,&rdquo;
are shot down on their own balconies by drunken soldiers, forfeit their family
property, and their houses are bombarded for pastime&mdash;all in the name of
Property, of Family, of Religion, and of Order. Finally, the refuse of
bourgeois society constitutes the &ldquo;holy phalanx of Order,&rdquo; and the
hero Crapulinsky makes his entry into the Tuileries as the &ldquo;Savior of
Society.&rdquo;
</p>

</div><!--end chapter-->

<div class="chapter">

<h2><a name="chap02"></a>II.</h2>

<p>
Let us resume the thread of events.
</p>

<p>
The history of the Constitutional National Assembly from the June days on, is
the history of the supremacy and dissolution of the republican bourgeois party,
the party which is known under several names of &ldquo;Tricolor
Republican,&rdquo; &ldquo;True Republican,&rdquo; &ldquo;Political
Republican,&rdquo; &ldquo;Formal Republican,&rdquo; etc., etc. Under the
bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe, this party had constituted the Official
Republican Opposition, and consequently had been a recognized element in the
then political world. It had its representatives in the Chambers, and commanded
considerable influence in the press. Its Parisian organ, the
&ldquo;National,&rdquo; passed, in its way, for as respectable a paper as the
&ldquo;Journal des Debats.&rdquo; This position in the constitutional monarchy
corresponded to its character. The party was not a fraction of the bourgeoisie,
held together by great and common interests, and marked by special business
requirements. It was a coterie of bourgeois with republican
ideas&mdash;writers, lawyers, officers and civil employees, whose influence
rested upon the personal antipathies of the country for Louis Philippe, upon
reminiscences of the old Republic, upon the republican faith of a number of
enthusiasts, and, above all, upon the spirit of French patriotism, whose hatred
of the treaties of Vienna and of the alliance with England kept them
perpetually on the alert. The &ldquo;National&rdquo; owed a large portion of
its following under Louis Philippe to this covert imperialism, that, later
under the republic, could stand up against it as a deadly competitor in the
person of Louis Bonaparte. The paper fought the aristocracy of finance just the
same as did the rest of the bourgeois opposition. The polemic against the
budget, which in France, was closely connected with the opposition to the
aristocracy of finance, furnished too cheap a popularity and too rich a
material for Puritanical leading articles, not to be exploited. The industrial
bourgeoisie was thankful to it for its servile defense of the French tariff
system, which, however, the paper had taken up, more out of patriotic than
economic reasons; the whole bourgeois class was thankful to it for its vicious
denunciations of Communism and Socialism. For the rest, the party of the
&ldquo;National&rdquo; was purely republican, i.e. it demanded a republican
instead of a monarchic form of bourgeois government; above all, it demanded for
the bourgeoisie the lion&rsquo;s share of the government. As to how this
transformation was to be accomplished, the party was far from being clear.
What, however, was clear as day to it and was openly declared at the reform
banquets during the last days of Louis Philippe&rsquo;s reign, was its
unpopularity with the democratic middle class, especially with the
revolutionary proletariat. These pure republicans, as pure republicans go, were
at first on the very point of contenting themselves with the regency of the
Duchess of Orleans, when the February revolution broke out, and when it gave
their best known representatives a place in the provisional government. Of
course, they enjoyed from the start the confidence of the bourgeoisie and of
the majority of the Constitutional National Assembly. The Socialist elements of
the Provisional Government were promptly excluded from the Executive Committee
which the Assembly had elected upon its convening, and the party of the
&ldquo;National&rdquo; subsequently utilized the outbreak of the June
insurrection to dismiss this Executive Committee also, and thus rid itself of
its nearest rivals&mdash;the small traders&rsquo; class or democratic
republicans (Ledru-Rollin, etc.). Cavaignac, the General of the bourgeois
republican party, who commanded at the battle of June, stepped into the place
of the Executive Committee with a sort of dictatorial power. Marrast, former
editor-in-chief of the &ldquo;National&rdquo;, became permanent President of
the Constitutional National Assembly, and the Secretaryship of State, together
with all the other important posts, devolved upon the pure republicans.
</p>

<p>
The republican bourgeois party, which since long had looked upon itself as the
legitimate heir of the July monarchy, thus found itself surpassed in its own
ideal; but it came to power, not as it had dreamed under Louis Philippe,
through a liberal revolt of the bourgeoisie against the throne, but through a
grape-shot-and-canistered mutiny of the proletariat against Capital. That which
it imagined to be the most revolutionary, came about as the most
counter-revolutionary event. The fruit fell into its lap, but it fell from the
Tree of Knowledge, not from the Tree of Life.
</p>

<p>
The exclusive power of the bourgeois republic lasted only from June 24 to the
10th of December, 1848. It is summed up in the framing of a republican
constitution and in the state of siege of Paris.
</p>

<p>
The new Constitution was in substance only a republicanized edition of the
constitutional charter of 1830. The limited suffrage of the July monarchy,
which excluded even a large portion of the bourgeoisie from political power,
was irreconcilable with the existence of the bourgeois republic. The February
revolution had forthwith proclaimed direct and universal suffrage in place of
the old law. The bourgeois republic could not annul this act. They had to
content themselves with tacking to it the limitation a six months&rsquo;
residence. The old organization of the administrative law, of municipal
government, of court procedures of the army, etc., remained untouched, or,
where the constitution did change them, the change affected their index, not
their subject; their name, not their substance.
</p>

<p>
The inevitable &ldquo;General Staff&rdquo; of the &ldquo;freedoms&rdquo; of
1848&mdash;personal freedom, freedom of the press, of speech, of association
and of assemblage, freedom of instruction, of religion, etc.&mdash;received a
constitutional uniform that rendered them invulnerable. Each of these freedoms
is proclaimed the absolute right of the French citizen, but always with the
gloss that it is unlimited in so far only as it be not curtailed by the
&ldquo;equal rights of others,&rdquo; and by the &ldquo;public safety,&rdquo;
or by the &ldquo;laws,&rdquo; which are intended to effect this harmony. For
instance:
</p>

<p>
&ldquo;Citizens have the right of association, of peaceful and unarmed
assemblage, of petitioning, and of expressing their opinions through the press
or otherwise. The enjoyment of these rights has no limitation other than the
equal rights of others and the public safety.&rdquo; (Chap. II. of the French
Constitution, Section 8.)
</p>

<p>
&ldquo;Education is free. The freedom of education shall be enjoyed under the
conditions provided by law, and under the supervision of the State.&rdquo;
(Section 9.)
</p>

<p>
&ldquo;The domicile of the citizen is inviolable, except under the forms
prescribed by law.&rdquo; (Chap. I., Section 3), etc., etc.
</p>

<p>
The Constitution, it will be noticed, constantly alludes to future organic
laws, that are to carry out the glosses, and are intended to regulate the
enjoyment of these unabridged freedoms, to the end that they collide neither
with one another nor with the public safety. Later on, the organic laws are
called into existence by the &ldquo;Friends of Order,&rdquo; and all the above
named freedoms are so regulated that, in their enjoyment, the bourgeoisie
encounter no opposition from the like rights of the other classes. Wherever the
bourgeoisie wholly interdicted these rights to &ldquo;others,&rdquo; or allowed
them their enjoyment under conditions that were but so many police snares, it
was always done only in the interest of the &ldquo;public safety,&rdquo; i. e.,
of the bourgeoisie, as required by the Constitution.
</p>

<p>
Hence it comes that both sides&mdash;the &ldquo;Friends of Order,&rdquo; who
abolished all those freedoms, as, well as the democrats, who had demanded them
all&mdash;appeal with full right to the Constitution: Each paragraph of the
Constitution contains its own antithesis, its own Upper and Lower
House&mdash;freedom as a generalization, the abolition of freedom as a
specification. Accordingly, so long as the name of freedom was respected, and
only its real enforcement was prevented in a legal way, of course the
constitutional existence of freedom remained uninjured, untouched, however
completely its common existence might be extinguished.
</p>

<p>
This Constitution, so ingeniously made invulnerable, was, however, like
Achilles, vulnerable at one point: not in its heel, but in its head, or rather,
in the two heads into which it ran out&mdash;the Legislative Assembly, on the
one hand, and the President on the other. Run through the Constitution and it
will be found that only those paragraphs wherein the relation of the President
to the Legislative Assembly is defined, are absolute, positive,
uncontradictory, undistortable.
</p>

<p>
Here the bourgeois republicans were concerned in securing their own position.
Articles 45-70 of the Constitution are so framed that the National Assembly can
constitutionally remove the President, but the President can set aside the
National Assembly only unconstitutionally, he can set it aside only by setting
aside the Constitution itself. Accordingly, by these provisions, the National
Assembly challenges its own violent destruction. It not only consecrates, like
the character of 1830, the division of powers, but it extends this feature to
an unbearably contradictory extreme. The &ldquo;play of constitutional
powers,&rdquo; as Guizot styled the clapper-clawings between the legislative
and the executive powers, plays permanent &ldquo;vabanque&rdquo; in the
Constitution of 1848. On the one side, 750 representatives of the people,
elected and qualified for re-election by universal suffrage, who constitute an
uncontrollable, indissoluble, indivisible National Assembly, a National
Assembly that enjoys legislative omnipotence, that decides in the last instance
over war, peace and commercial treaties, that alone has the power to grant
amnesties, and that, through its perpetuity, continually maintains the
foreground on the stage; on the other, a President, clad with all the
attributes of royalty, with the right to appoint and remove his ministers
independently from the national assembly, holding in his hands all the means of
executive power, the dispenser of all posts, and thereby the arbiter of at
least one and a half million existences in France, so many being dependent upon
the 500,000 civil employees and upon the officers of all grades. He has the
whole armed power behind him. He enjoys the privilege of granting pardons to
individual criminals; suspending the National Guards; of removing with the
consent of the Council of State the general, cantonal and municipal Councilmen,
elected by the citizens themselves. The initiative and direction of all
negotiations with foreign countries are reserved to him. While the Assembly
itself is constantly acting upon the stage, and is exposed to the critically
vulgar light of day, he leads a hidden life in the Elysian fields, only with
Article 45 of the Constitution before his eyes and in his heart daily calling
out to him, &ldquo;Frere, il faut mourir!&rdquo; [#1 Brother, you must die!]
Your power expires on the second Sunday of the beautiful month of May, in the
fourth year after your election! The glory is then at an end; the play is not
performed twice; and, if you have any debts, see to it betimes that you pay
them off with the 600,000 francs that the Constitution has set aside for you,
unless, perchance, you should prefer traveling to Clichy [#2 The debtors&rsquo;
prison.] on the second Monday of the beautiful month of May.
</p>

<p>
While the Constitution thus clothes the President with actual power, it seeks
to secure the moral power to the National Assembly. Apart from the circumstance
that it is impossible to create a moral power through legislative paragraphs,
the Constitution again neutralizes itself in that it causes the President to be
chosen by all the Frenchmen through direct suffrage. While the votes of France
are splintered to pieces upon the 750 members of the National Assembly they are
here, on the contrary, concentrated upon one individual. While each separate
Representative represents only this or that party, this or that city, this or
that dunghill, or possibly only the necessity of electing some one
Seven-hundred-and-fiftieth or other, with whom neither the issue nor the man is
closely considered, that one, the President, on the contrary, is the elect of
the nation, and the act of his election is the trump card, that, the sovereign
people plays out once every four years. The elected National Assembly stands in
a metaphysical, but the elected President in a personal, relation to the
nation. True enough, the National Assembly presents in its several
Representatives the various sides of the national spirit, but, in the
President, this spirit is incarnated. As against the National Assembly, the
President possesses a sort of divine right, he is by the grace of the people.
</p>

<p>
Thetis, the sea-goddess, had prophesied to Achilles that he would die in the
bloom of youth. The Constitution, which had its weak spot, like Achilles, had
also, like Achilles, the presentiment that it would depart by premature death.
It was enough for the pure republicans, engaged at the work of framing a
constitution, to cast a glance from the misty heights of their ideal republic
down upon the profane world in order to realize how the arrogance of the
royalists, of the Bonapartists, of the democrats, of the Communists, rose
daily, together with their own discredit, and in the same measure as they
approached the completion of their legislative work of art, without Thetis
having for this purpose to leave the sea and impart the secret to them. They
ought to outwit fate by means of constitutional artifice, through Section 111
of the Constitution, according to which every motion to revise the Constitution
had to be discussed three successive times between each of which a full month
was to elapse and required at least a three-fourths majority, with the
additional proviso that not less than 500 members of the National Assembly
voted. They thereby only made the impotent attempt, still to exercise as a
parliamentary minority, to which in their mind&rsquo;s eye they prophetically
saw themselves reduced, a power, that, at this very time, when they still
disposed over the parliamentary majority and over all the machinery of
government, was daily slipping from their weak hands.
</p>

<p>
Finally, the Constitution entrusts itself for safe keeping, in a melodramatic
paragraph, &ldquo;to the watchfulness and patriotism of the whole French
people, and of each individual Frenchman,&rdquo; after having just before, in
another paragraph entrusted the &ldquo;watchful&rdquo; and the
&ldquo;patriotic&rdquo; themselves to the tender, inquisitorial attention of
the High Court, instituted by itself.
</p>

<p>
That was the Constitution of 1848, which on, the 2d of December, 1851, was not
overthrown by one head, but tumbled down at the touch of a mere hat; though,
true enough, that hat was a three-cornered Napoleon hat.
</p>

<p>
While the bourgeois&rsquo; republicans were engaged in the Assembly with the
work of splicing this Constitution, of discussing and voting, Cavaignac, on the
outside, maintained the state of siege of Paris. The state of siege of Paris
was the midwife of the constitutional assembly, during its republican pains of
travail. When the Constitution is later on swept off the earth by the bayonet,
it should not be forgotten that it was by the bayonet, likewise&mdash;and the
bayonet turned against the people, at that&mdash;that it had to be protected in
its mother&rsquo;s womb, and that by the bayonet it had to be planted on earth.
The ancestors of these &ldquo;honest republicans&rdquo; had caused their
symbol, the tricolor, to make the tour of Europe. These, in their turn also
made a discovery, which all of itself, found its way over the whole continent,
but, with ever renewed love, came back to France, until, by this time, if had
acquired the right of citizenship in one-half of her Departments&mdash;the
state of siege. A wondrous discovery this was, periodically applied at each
succeeding crisis in the course of the French revolution. But the barrack and
the bivouac, thus periodically laid on the head of French society, to compress
her brain and reduce her to quiet; the sabre and the musket, periodically made
to perform the functions of judges and of administrators, of guardians and of
censors, of police officers and of watchmen; the military moustache and the
soldier&rsquo;s jacket, periodically heralded as the highest wisdom and guiding
stars of society;&mdash;were not all of these, the barrack and the bivouac, the
sabre and the musket, the moustache and the soldier&rsquo;s jacket bound, in
the end, to hit upon the idea that they might as well save society once for
all, by proclaiming their own regime as supreme, and relieve bourgeois society
wholly of the care of ruling itself? The barrack and the bivouac, the sabre and
the musket, the moustache and the soldier&rsquo;s jacket were all the more
bound to hit upon this idea, seeing that they could then also expect better
cash payment for their increased deserts, while at the merely periodic states
of siege and the transitory savings of society at the behest of this or that
bourgeois faction, very little solid matter fell to them except some dead and
wounded, besides some friendly bourgeois grimaces. Should not the military,
finally, in and for its own interest, play the game of &ldquo;state of
siege,&rdquo; and simultaneously besiege the bourgeois exchanges? Moreover, it
must not be forgotten, and be it observed in passing, that Col. Bernard, the
same President of the Military Committee, who, under Cavaignac, helped to
deport 15,000 insurgents without trial, moves at this period again at the head
of the Military Committees now active in Paris.
</p>

<p>
Although the honest, the pure republicans built with the state of siege the
nursery in which the Praetorian guards of December 2, 1851, were to be reared,
they, on the other hand, deserve praise in that, instead of exaggerating the
feeling of patriotism, as under Louis Philippe, now; they themselves are in
command of the national power, they crawl before foreign powers; instead of
making Italy free, they allow her to be reconquered by Austrians and
Neapolitans. The election of Louis Bonaparte for President on December 10,
1848, put an end to the dictatorship of Cavaignac and to the constitutional
assembly.
</p>

<p>
In Article 44 of the Constitution it is said &ldquo;The President of the French
Republic must never have lost his status as a French citizen.&rdquo; The first
President of the French Republic, L. N. Bonaparte, had not only lost his status
as a French citizen, had not only been an English special constable, but was
even a naturalized Swiss citizen.
</p>

<p>
In the previous chapter I have explained the meaning of the election of
December 10. I shall not here return to it. Suffice it here to say that it was
a reaction of the farmers&rsquo; class, who had been expected to pay the costs
of the February revolution, against the other classes of the nation: it was a
reaction of the country against the city. It met with great favor among the
soldiers, to whom the republicans of the &ldquo;National&rdquo; had brought
neither fame nor funds; among the great bourgeoisie, who hailed Bonaparte as a
bridge to the monarchy; and among the proletarians and small traders, who
hailed him as a scourge to Cavaignac. I shall later have occasion to enter
closer into the relation of the farmers to the French revolution.
</p>

<p>
The epoch between December 20, 1848, and the dissolution of the constitutional
assembly in May, 1849, embraces the history of the downfall of the bourgeois
republicans. After they had founded a republic for the bourgeoisie, had driven
the revolutionary proletariat from the field and had meanwhile silenced the
democratic middle class, they are themselves shoved aside by the mass of the
bourgeoisie who justly appropriate this republic as their property. This
bourgeois mass was Royalist, however. A part thereof, the large landed
proprietors, had ruled under the restoration, hence, was Legitimist; the other
part, the aristocrats of finance and the large industrial capitalists, had
ruled under the July monarchy, hence, was Orleanist. The high functionaries of
the Army, of the University, of the Church, in the civil service, of the
Academy and of the press, divided themselves on both sides, although in unequal
parts. Here, in the bourgeois republic, that bore neither the name of Bourbon,
nor of Orleans, but the name of Capital, they had found the form of government
under which they could all rule in common. Already the June insurrection had
united them all into a &ldquo;Party of Order.&rdquo; The next thing to do was
to remove the bourgeois republicans who still held the seats in the National
Assembly. As brutally as these pure republicans had abused their own physical
power against the people, so cowardly, low-spirited, disheartened, broken,
powerless did they yield, now when the issue was the maintenance of their own
republicanism and their own legislative rights against the Executive power and
the royalists I need not here narrate the shameful history of their
dissolution. It was not a downfall, it was extinction. Their history is at an
end for all time. In the period that follows, they figure, whether within or
without the Assembly, only as memories&mdash;memories that seem again to come
to life so soon as the question is again only the word &ldquo;Republic,&rdquo;
and as often as the revolutionary conflict threatens to sink down to the lowest
level. In passing, I might observe that the journal which gave to this party
its name, the &ldquo;National,&rdquo; goes over to Socialism during the
following period.
</p>

<p>
Before we close this period, we must look back upon the two powers, one of
destroys the other on December 2, 1851, while, from December 20, 1848, down to
the departure of the constitutional assembly, they live marital relations. We
mean Louis Bonaparte, on the-one hand, on the other, the party of the allied
royalists; of Order, and of the large bourgeoisie.
</p>

<p>
At the inauguration of his presidency, Bonaparte forthwith framed a ministry
out of the party of Order, at whose head he placed Odillon Barrot, be it noted,
the old leader of the liberal wing of the parliamentary bourgeoisie. Mr. Barrot
had finally hunted down a seat in the ministry, the spook of which had been
pursuing him since 1830; and what is more, he had the chairmanship in this
ministry, although not, as he had imagined under Louis Philippe, the promoted
leader of the parliamentary opposition, but with the commission to kill a
parliament, and, moreover, as an ally of all his arch enemies, the Jesuits and
the Legitimists. Finally he leads the bride home, but only after she has been
prostituted. As to Bonaparte, he seemed to eclipse himself completely. The
party of Order acted for him.
</p>

<p>
Immediately at the first session of the ministry the expedition to Rome was
decided upon, which it was there agreed, was to be carried out behind I the
back of the National Assembly, and the funds for which, it was equally agreed,
were to be wrung from the Assembly under false pretences. Thus the start was
made with a swindle on the National Assembly, together with a secret conspiracy
with the absolute foreign powers against the revolutionary Roman republic. In
the same way, and with a similar maneuver, did Bonaparte prepare his stroke of
December 2 against the royalist legislature and its constitutional republic.
Let it not be forgotten that the same party, which, on December 20, 1848,
constituted Bonaparte&rsquo;s ministry, constituted also, on December 2, 1851,
the majority of the legislative National Assembly.
</p>

<p>
In August the constitutive assembly decided not to dissolve until it had
prepared and promulgated a whole series of organic laws, intended to supplement
the Constitution. The party of Order proposed to the assembly, through
Representative Rateau, on January 6, 1849, to let the Organic laws go, and
rather to order its own dissolution. Not the ministry alone, with Mr. Odillon
Barrot at its head, but all the royalist members of the National Assembly were
also at this time hectoring to it that its dissolution was necessary for the
restoration of the public credit, for the consolidation of order, to put an end
to the existing uncertain and provisional, and establish a definite state of
things; they claimed that its continued existence hindered the effectiveness of
the new Government, that it sought to prolong its life out of pure malice, and
that the country was tired of it. Bonaparte took notice of all these invectives
hurled at the legislative power, he learned them by heart, and, on December 21,
1851, he showed the parliamentary royalists that he had learned from them. He
repeated their own slogans against themselves.
</p>

<p>
The Barrot ministry and the party of Order went further. They called all over
France for petitions to the National Assembly in which that body was politely
requested to disappear. Thus they led the people&rsquo;s unorganic masses to
the fray against the National Assembly, i.e., the constitutionally organized
expression of people itself. They taught Bonaparte, to appeal from the
parliamentary body to the people. Finally, on January 29, 1849, the day arrived
when the constitutional assembly was to decide about its own dissolution. On
that day the body found its building occupied by the military; Changarnier, the
General of the party of Order, in whose hands was joined the supreme command of
both the National Guards and the regulars, held that day a great military
review, as though a battle were imminent; and the coalized royalists declared
threateningly to the constitutional assembly that force would be applied if it
did not act willingly. It was willing, and chaffered only for a very short
respite. What else was the 29th of January, 1849, than the &ldquo;coup
d&rsquo;etat&rdquo; of December 2, 1851, only executed by the royalists with
Napoleon&rsquo;s aid against the republican National Assembly? These gentlemen
did not notice, or did not want to notice, that Napoleon utilized the 29th of
January, 1849, to cause a part of the troops to file before him in front of the
Tuileries, and that he seized with avidity this very first open exercise of the
military against the parliamentary power in order to hint at Caligula. The
allied royalists saw only their own Changarnier.
</p>

<p>
Another reason that particularly moved the party of Order forcibly to shorten
the term of the constitutional assembly were the organic laws, the laws that
were to supplement the Constitution, as, for instance, the laws on education,
on religion, etc. The allied royalists had every interest in framing these laws
themselves, and not allowing them to be framed by the already suspicious
republicans. Among these organic laws, there was, however, one on the
responsibility of the President of the republic. In 1851 the Legislature was
just engaged in framing such a law when Bonaparte forestalled that political
stroke by his own of December 2. What all would not the coalized royalists have
given in their winter parliamentary campaign of 1851, had they but found this
&ldquo;Responsibility law&rdquo; ready made, and framed at that, by the
suspicious, the vicious republican Assembly!
</p>

<p>
After, on January 29, 1849, the constitutive assembly had itself broken its
last weapon, the Barrot ministry and the &ldquo;Friends of Order&rdquo;
harassed it to death, left nothing undone to humiliate it, and wrung from its
weakness, despairing of itself, laws that cost it the last vestige of respect
with the public. Bonaparte, occupied with his own fixed Napoleonic idea, was
audacious enough openly to exploit this degradation of the parliamentary power:
When the National Assembly, on May 8, 1849, passed a vote of censure upon the
Ministry on account of the occupation of Civita-Vecchia by Oudinot, and ordered
that the Roman expedition be brought back to its alleged purpose, Bonaparte
published that same evening in the &ldquo;Moniteur&rdquo; a letter to Oudinot,
in which he congratulated him on his heroic feats, and already, in contrast
with the quill-pushing parliamentarians, posed as the generous protector of the
Army. The royalists smiled at this. They took him simply for their dupe.
Finally, as Marrast, the President of the constitutional assembly, believed on
a certain occasion the safety of the body to be in danger, and, resting on the
Constitution, made a requisition upon a Colonel, together with his regiment,
the Colonel refused obedience, took refuge behind the &ldquo;discipline,&rdquo;
and referred Marrast to Changarnier, who scornfully sent him off with the
remark that he did not like &ldquo;bayonettes intelligentes.&rdquo; [#1
Intelligent bayonets] In November, 1851, as the coalized royalists wanted to
begin the decisive struggle with Bonaparte, they sought, by means of their
notorious &ldquo;Questors Bill,&rdquo; to enforce the principle of the right of
the President of the National Assembly to issue direct requisitions for troops.
One of their Generals, Leflo, supported the motion. In vain did Changarnier
vote for it, or did Thiers render homage to the cautious wisdom of the late
constitutional assembly. The Minister of War, St. Arnaud, answered him as
Changarnier had answered Marrast&mdash;and he did so amidst the plaudits of the
Mountain.
</p>

<p>
Thus did the party of Order itself, when as yet it was not the National
Assembly, when as yet it was only a Ministry, brand the parliamentary regime.
And yet this party objects vociferously when the 2d of December, 1851, banishes
that regime from France!
</p>

<p>
We wish it a happy journey.
</p>

</div><!--end chapter-->

<div class="chapter">

<h2><a name="chap03"></a>III.</h2>

<p>
On May 29, 1849, the legislative National Assembly convened. On December 2,
1851, it was broken up. This period embraces the term of the Constitutional or
Parliamentary public.
</p>

<p>
In the first French revolution, upon the reign of the Constitutionalists
succeeds that of the Girondins; and upon the reign of the Girondins follows
that of the Jacobins. Each of these parties in succession rests upon its more
advanced element. So soon as it has carried the revolution far enough not to be
able to keep pace with, much less march ahead of it, it is shoved aside by its
more daring allies, who stand behind it, and it is sent to the guillotine. Thus
the revolution moves along an upward line.
</p>

<p>
Just the reverse in 1848. The proletarian party appears as an appendage to the
small traders&rsquo; or democratic party; it is betrayed by the latter and
allowed to fall on April 16, May 15, and in the June days. In its turn, the
democratic party leans upon the shoulders of the bourgeois republicans; barely
do the bourgeois republicans believe themselves firmly in power, than they
shake off these troublesome associates for the purpose of themselves leaning
upon the shoulders of the party of Order. The party of Order draws in its
shoulders, lets the bourgeois republicans tumble down heels over head, and
throws itself upon the shoulders of the armed power. Finally, still of the mind
that it is sustained by the shoulders of the armed power, the party of Order
notices one fine morning that these shoulders have turned into bayonets. Each
party kicks backward at those that are pushing forward, and leans forward upon
those that are crowding backward; no wonder that, in this ludicrous posture,
each loses its balance, and, after having cut the unavoidable grimaces, breaks
down amid singular somersaults. Accordingly, the revolution moves along a
downward line. It finds itself in this retreating motion before the last
February-barricade is cleared away, and the first governmental authority of the
revolution has been constituted.
</p>

<p>
The period we now have before us embraces the motliest jumble of crying
contradictions: constitutionalists, who openly conspire against the
Constitution; revolutionists, who admittedly are constitutional; a National
Assembly that wishes to be omnipotent yet remains parliamentary; a Mountain,
that finds its occupation in submission, that parries its present defeats with
prophecies of future victories; royalists, who constitute the &ldquo;patres
conscripti&rdquo; of the republic, and are compelled by the situation to uphold
abroad the hostile monarchic houses, whose adherents they are, while in France
they support the republic that they hate; an Executive power that finds its
strength in its very weakness, and its dignity in the contempt that it
inspires; a republic, that is nothing else than the combined infamy of two
monarchies&mdash;the Restoration and the July Monarchy&mdash;with an imperial
label; unions, whose first clause is disunion; struggles, whose first law is
in-decision; in the name of peace, barren and hollow agitation; in the name of
the revolution, solemn sermonizings on peace; passions without truth; truths
without passion; heroes without heroism; history without events; development,
whose only moving force seems to be the calendar, and tiresome by the constant
reiteration of the same tensions and relaxes; contrasts, that seem to intensify
themselves periodically, only in order to wear themselves off and collapse
without a solution; pretentious efforts made for show, and bourgeois frights at
the danger of the destruction of the world, simultaneous with the carrying on
of the pettiest intrigues and the performance of court comedies by the
world&rsquo;s saviours, who, in their &ldquo;laisser aller,&rdquo; recall the
Day of Judgment not so much as the days of the Fronde; the official collective
genius of France brought to shame by the artful stupidity of a single
individual; the collective will of the nation, as often as it speaks through
the general suffrage, seeking its true expression in the prescriptive enemies
of the public interests until it finally finds it in the arbitrary will of a
filibuster. If ever a slice from history is drawn black upon black, it is this.
Men and events appear as reversed &ldquo;Schlemihls,&rdquo; [#1 The hero In
Chamisso&rsquo;s &ldquo;Peter Schiemihi,&rdquo; who loses his own shadow.] as
shadows, the bodies of which have been lost. The revolution itself paralyzes
its own apostles, and equips only its adversaries with passionate violence.
When the &ldquo;Red Spectre,&rdquo; constantly conjured up and exorcised by the
counter-revolutionists finally does appear, it does not appear with the
Anarchist Phrygian cap on its head, but in the uniform of Order, in the Red
Breeches of the French Soldier.
</p>

<p>
We saw that the Ministry, which Bonaparte installed on December 20, 1849, the
day of his &ldquo;Ascension,&rdquo; was a ministry of the party of Order, of
the Legitimist and Orleanist coalition. The Barrot-Falloux ministry had
weathered the republican constitutive convention, whose term of life it had
shortened with more or less violence, and found itself still at the helm.
Changamier, the General of the allied royalists continued to unite in his
person the command-in-chief of the First Military Division and of the Parisian
National Guard. Finally, the general elections had secured the large majority
in the National Assembly to the party of Order. Here the Deputies and Peers of
Louis Phillipe met a saintly crowd of Legitimists, for whose benefit numerous
ballots of the nation had been converted into admission tickets to the
political stage. The Bonapartist representatives were too thinly sowed to be
able to build an independent parliamentary party. They appeared only as
&ldquo;mauvaise queue&rdquo; [#2 Practical joke] played upon the party of
Order. Thus the party of Order was in possession of the Government, of the
Army, and of the legislative body, in short, of the total power of the State,
morally strengthened by the general elections, that caused their sovereignty to
appear as the will of the people, and by the simultaneous victory of the
counter-revolution on the whole continent of Europe.
</p>

<p>
Never did party open its campaign with larger means at its disposal and under
more favorable auspices.
</p>

<p>
The shipwrecked pure republicans found themselves in the legislative National
Assembly melted down to a clique of fifty men, with the African Generals
Cavaignac, Lamorciere and Bedeau at its head. The great Opposition party was,
however, formed by the Mountain. This parliamentary baptismal name was given to
itself by the Social Democratic party. It disposed of more than two hundred
votes out of the seven hundred and fifty in the National Assembly, and, hence,
was at least just as powerful as any one of the three factions of the party of
Order. Its relative minority to the total royalist coalition seemed
counterbalanced by special circumstances. Not only did the Departmental
election returns show that it had gained a considerable following among the
rural population, but, furthermore, it numbered almost all the Paris Deputies
in its camp; the Army had, by the election of three under-officers, made a
confession of democratic faith; and the leader of the Mountain, Ledru-Rollin
had in contrast to all the representatives of the party of Order, been raised
to the rank of the &ldquo;parliamentary nobility&rdquo; by five Departments,
who combined their suffrages upon him. Accordingly, in view of the inevitable
collisions of the royalists among themselves, on the one hand, and of the whole
party of Order with Bonaparte, on the other, the Mountain seemed on May
29,1849, to have before it all the elements of success. A fortnight later, it
had lost everything, its honor included.
</p>

<p>
Before we follow this parliamentary history any further, a few observations are
necessary, in order to avoid certain common deceptions concerning the whole
character of the epoch that lies before us. According to the view of the
democrats, the issue, during the period of the legislative National Assembly,
was, the same as during the period of the constitutive assembly, simply the
struggle between republicans and royalists; the movement itself was summed up
by them in the catch-word Reaction&mdash;night, in which all cats are grey, and
allows them to drawl out their drowsy commonplaces. Indeed, at first sight, the
party of Order presents the appearance of a tangle of royalist factions, that,
not only intrigue against each other, each aiming to raise its own Pretender to
the throne, and exclude the Pretender of the Opposite party, but also are all
united in a common hatred for and common attacks against the
&ldquo;Republic.&rdquo; On its side, the Mountain appears, in
counter-distinction to the royalist conspiracy, as the representative of the
&ldquo;Republic.&rdquo; The party of Order seems constantly engaged in a
&ldquo;Reaction,&rdquo; which, neither more nor less than in Prussia, is
directed against the press, the right of association and the like, and is
enforced by brutal police interventions on the part of the bureaucracy, the
police and the public prosecutor&mdash;just as in Prussia; the Mountain on the
contrary, is engaged with equal assiduity in parrying these attacks, and thus
in defending the &ldquo;eternal rights of man&rdquo;&mdash;as every so-called
people&rsquo;s party has more or less done for the last hundred and fifty
years. At a closer inspection, however, of the situation and of the parties,
this superficial appearance, which veils the Class Struggle, together with the
peculiar physiognomy of this period, vanishes wholly.
</p>

<p>
Legitimists and Orleanists constituted, as said before, the two large factions
of the party of Order. What held these two factions to their respective
Pretenders, and inversely kept them apart from each other, what else was it but
the lily and the tricolor, the House of Bourbon and the house of Orleans,
different shades of royalty? Under the Bourbons, Large Landed Property ruled
together with its parsons and lackeys; under the Orleanist, it was the high
finance, large industry, large commerce, i.e., Capital, with its retinue of
lawyers, professors and orators. The Legitimate kingdom was but the political
expression for the hereditary rule of the landlords, as the July monarchy was
bur the political expression for the usurped rule of the bourgeois upstarts.
What, accordingly, kept these two factions apart was no so-called set of
principles, it was their material conditions for life&mdash;two different sorts
of property&mdash;; it was the old antagonism of the City and the Country, the
rivalry between Capital and Landed property. That simultaneously old
recollections; personal animosities, fears and hopes; prejudices and illusions;
sympathies and antipathies; convictions, faith and principles bound these
factions to one House or the other, who denies it? Upon the several forms of
property, upon the social conditions of existence, a whole superstructure is
reared of various and peculiarly shaped feelings, illusions, habits of thought
and conceptions of life. The whole class produces and shapes these out of its
material foundation and out of the corresponding social conditions. The
individual unit to whom they flow through tradition and education, may fancy
that they constitute the true reasons for and premises of his conduct. Although
Orleanists and Legitimists, each of these factions, sought to make itself and
the other believe that what kept the two apart was the attachment of each to
its respective royal House; nevertheless, facts proved later that it rather was
their divided interest that forbade the union of the two royal Houses. As, in
private life, the distinction is made between what a man thinks of himself and
says, and that which he really is and does, so, all the more, must the phrases
and notions of parties in historic struggles be distinguished from the real
organism, and their real interests, their notions and their reality. Orleanists
and Legitimists found themselves in the republic beside each other with equal
claims. Each side wishing, in opposition to the other, to carry out the
restoration of its own royal House, meant nothing else than that each of the
two great Interests into which the bourgeoisie is divided&mdash;Land and
Capital&mdash;sought to restore its own supremacy and the subordinacy of the
other. We speak of two bourgeois interests because large landed property,
despite its feudal coquetry and pride of race, has become completely bourgeois
through the development of modern society. Thus did the Tories of England long
fancy that they were enthusiastic for the Kingdom, the Church and the beauties
of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the
admission that their enthusiasm was only for Ground Rent.
</p>

<p>
The coalized royalists carried on their intrigues against each other in the
press, in Ems, in Clarmont&mdash;outside of the parliament. Behind the scenes,
they don again their old Orleanist and Legitimist liveries, and conduct their
old tourneys; on the public stage, however, in their public acts, as a great
parliamentary party, they dispose of their respective royal houses with mere
courtesies, adjourn &ldquo;in infinitum&rdquo; the restoration of the monarchy.
Their real business is transacted as Party of Order, i. e., under a Social, not
a Political title; as representatives of the bourgeois social system; not as
knights of traveling princesses, but as the bourgeois class against the other
classes; not as royalists against republicans. Indeed, as party of Order they
exercised a more unlimited and harder dominion over the other classes of
society than ever before either under the restoration or the July monarchy-a
thing possible only under the form of a parliamentary republic, because under
this form alone could the two large divisions of the French bourgeoisie be
united; in other words, only under this form could they place on the order of
business the sovereignty of their class, in lieu of the regime of a privileged
faction of the same. If, this notwithstanding, they are seen as the party of
Order to insult the republic and express their antipathy for it, it happened
not out of royalist traditions only: Instinct taught them that while, indeed,
the republic completes their authority, it at the same time undermined their
social foundation, in that, without intermediary, without the mask of the
crown, without being able to turn aside the national interest by means of its
subordinate struggles among its own conflicting elements and with the crown,
the republic is compelled to stand up sharp against the subjugated classes, and
wrestle with them. It was a sense of weakness that caused them to recoil before
the unqualified demands of their own class rule, and to retreat to the less
complete, less developed, and, for that very reason, less dangerous forms of
the same. As often, on the contrary, as the allied royalists come into conflict
with the Pretender who stands before them&mdash;with Bonaparte&mdash;, as often
as they believe their parliamentary omnipotence to be endangered by the
Executive, in other words, as often as they must trot out the political title
of their authority, they step up as Republicans, not as Royalists&mdash;and
this is done from the Orleanist Thiers, who warns the National Assembly that
the republic divides them least, down to Legitimist Berryer, who, on December
2, 1851, the scarf of the tricolor around him, harangues the people assembled
before the Mayor&rsquo;s building of the Tenth Arrondissement, as a tribune in
the name of the Republic; the echo, however, derisively answering back to him:
&ldquo;Henry V.! Henry V!&rdquo; [#3 The candidate of the Bourbons, or
Legitimists, for the throne.]
</p>

<p>
However, against the allied bourgeois, a coalition was made between the small
traders and the workingmen&mdash;the so-called Social Democratic party. The
small traders found themselves ill rewarded after the June days of 1848; they
saw their material interests endangered, and the democratic guarantees, that
were to uphold their interests, made doubtful. Hence, they drew closer to the
workingmen. On the other hand, their parliamentary representatives&mdash;the
Mountain&mdash;, after being shoved aside during the dictatorship of the
bourgeois republicans, had, during the last half of the term of the
constitutive convention, regained their lost popularity through the struggle
with Bonaparte and the royalist ministers. They had made an alliance with the
Socialist leaders. During February, 1849, reconciliation banquets were held. A
common program was drafted, joint election committees were empanelled, and
fusion candidates were set up. The revolutionary point was thereby broken off
from the social demands of the proletariat and a democratic turn given to them;
while, from the democratic claims of the small traders&rsquo; class, the mere
political form was rubbed off and the Socialist point was pushed forward. Thus
came the Social Democracy about. The new Mountain, the result of this
combination, contained, with the exception of some figures from the working
class and some Socialist sectarians, the identical elements of the old
Mountain, only numerically stronger. In the course of events it had, however,
changed, together with the class that it represented. The peculiar character of
the Social Democracy is summed up in this that democratic-republican
institutions are demanded as the means, not to remove the two
extremes&mdash;Capital and Wage-slavery&mdash;, but in order to weaken their
antagonism and transform them into a harmonious whole. However different the
methods may be that are proposed for the accomplishment of this object, however
much the object itself may be festooned with more or less revolutionary
fancies, the substance remains the same. This substance is the transformation
of society upon democratic lines, but a transformation within the boundaries of
the small traders&rsquo; class. No one must run away with the narrow notion
that the small traders&rsquo; class means on principle to enforce a selfish
class interest. It believes rather that the special conditions for its own
emancipation are the general conditions under which alone modern society can be
saved and the class struggle avoided. Likewise must we avoid running away with
the notion that the Democratic Representatives are all
&ldquo;shopkeepers,&rdquo; or enthuse for these. They may&mdash;by education
and individual standing&mdash;be as distant from them as heaven is from earth.
That which makes them representatives of the small traders&rsquo; class is that
they do not intellectually leap the bounds which that class itself does not
leap in practical life; that, consequently, they are theoretically driven to
the same problems and solutions, to which material interests and social
standing practically drive the latter. Such, in fact, is at all times the
relation of the &ldquo;political&rdquo; and the &ldquo;literary&rdquo;
representatives of a class to the class they represent.
</p>

<p>
After the foregoing explanations, it goes with-out saying that, while the
Mountain is constantly wrestling for the republic and the so-called
&ldquo;rights of man,&rdquo; neither the republic nor the &ldquo;rights of
man&rdquo; is its real goal, as little as an army, whose weapons it is sought
to deprive it of and that defends itself, steps on the field of battle simply
in order to remain in possession of implements of warfare.
</p>

<p>
The party of Order provoked the Mountain immediately upon the convening of the
assembly. The bourgeoisie now felt the necessity of disposing of the democratic
small traders&rsquo; class, just as a year before it had understood the
necessity of putting an end to the revolutionary proletariat.
</p>

<p>
But the position of the foe had changed. The strength of the proletarian party
was on the streets; that of the small traders&rsquo; class was in the National
Assembly itself. The point was, accordingly, to wheedle them out of the
National Assembly into the street, and to have them break their parliamentary
power themselves, before time and opportunity could consolidate them. The
Mountain jumped with loose reins into the trap.
</p>

<p>
The bombardment of Rome by the French troops was the bait thrown at the
Mountain. It violated Article V. of the Constitution, which forbade the French
republic to use its forces against the liberties of other nations; besides,
Article IV. forbade all declaration of war by the Executive without the consent
of the National Assembly; furthermore, the constitutive assembly had censured
the Roman expedition by its resolution of May 8. Upon these grounds,
Ledru-Rollin submitted on June 11, 1849, a motion impeaching Bonaparte and his
Ministers. Instigated by the wasp-stings of Thiers, he even allowed himself to
be carried away to the point of threatening to defend the Constitution by all
means, even arms in hand. The Mountain rose as one man, and repeated the
challenge. On June 12, the National Assembly rejected the notion to impeach,
and the Mountain left the parliament. The events of June 13 are known: the
proclamation by a part of the Mountain pronouncing Napoleon and his Ministers
&ldquo;outside the pale of the Constitution&rdquo;; the street parades of the
democratic National Guards, who, unarmed as they were, flew apart at contact
with the troops of Changarnier; etc., etc. Part of the Mountain fled abroad,
another part was assigned to the High Court of Bourges, and a parliamentary
regulation placed the rest under the school-master supervision of the President
of the National Assembly. Paris was again put under a state of siege; and the
democratic portion of the National Guards was disbanded. Thus the influence of
the Mountain in parliament was broken, together with the power; of the small
traders&rsquo; class in Paris.
</p>

<p>
Lyons, where the 13th of June had given the signal to a bloody labor uprising,
was, together with the five surrounding Departments, likewise pronounced in
state of siege, a condition that continues down to this moment. [#4 January,
1852]
</p>

<p>
The bulk of the Mountain had left its vanguard in the lurch by refusing their
signatures to the proclamation; the press had deserted: only two papers dared
to publish the pronunciamento; the small traders had betrayed their
Representatives: the National Guards stayed away, or, where they did turn up,
hindered the raising of barricades; the Representatives had duped the small
traders: nowhere were the alleged affiliated members from the Army to be seen;
finally, instead of gathering strength from them, the democratic party had
infected the proletariat with its own weakness, and, as usual with democratic
feats, the leaders had the satisfaction of charging &ldquo;their people&rdquo;
with desertion, and the people had the satisfaction of charging their leaders
with fraud.
</p>

<p>
Seldom was an act announced with greater noise than the campaign contemplated
by the Mountain; seldom was an event trumpeted ahead with more certainty and
longer beforehand than the &ldquo;inevitable victory of the democracy.&rdquo;
This is evident: the democrats believe in the trombones before whose blasts the
walls of Jericho fall together; as often as they stand before the walls of
despotism, they seek to imitate the miracle. If the Mountain wished to win in
parliament, it should not appeal to arms; if it called to arms in parliament,
it should not conduct itself parliamentarily on the street; if the friendly
demonstration was meant seriously, it was silly not to foresee that it would
meet with a warlike reception; if it was intended for actual war, it was rather
original to lay aside the weapons with which war had to be conducted. But the
revolutionary threats of the middle class and of their democratic
representatives are mere attempts to frighten an adversary; when they have run
themselves into a blind alley, when they have sufficiently compromised
themselves and are compelled to execute their threats, the thing is done in a
hesitating manner that avoids nothing so much as the means to the end, and
catches at pretexts to succumb. The bray of the overture, that announces the
fray, is lost in a timid growl so soon as this is to start; the actors cease to
take themselves seriously, and the performance falls flat like an inflated
balloon that is pricked with a needle.
</p>

<p>
No party exaggerates to itself the means at its disposal more than the
democratic, none deceives itself with greater heedlessness on the situation. A
part of the Army voted for it, thereupon the Mountain is of the opinion that
the Army would revolt in its favor. And by what occasion? By an occasion, that,
from the standpoint of the troops, meant nothing else than that the
revolutionary soldiers should take the part of the soldiers of Rome against
French soldiers. On the other hand, the memory of June, 1848, was still too
fresh not to keep alive a deep aversion on the part of the proletariat towards
the National Guard, and a strong feeling of mistrust on the part of the leaders
of the secret societies for the democratic leaders. In order to balance these
differences, great common interests at stake were needed. The violation of an
abstract constitutional paragraph could not supply such interests. Had not the
constitution been repeatedly violated, according to the assurances of the
democrats themselves? Had not the most popular papers branded them as a
counter-revolutionary artifice? But the democrat&mdash;by reason of his
representing the middle class, that is to say, a Transition Class, in which the
interests of two other classes are mutually dulled&mdash;, imagines himself
above all class contrast. The democrats grant that opposed to them stands a
privileged class, but they, together with the whole remaining mass of the
nation, constitute the &ldquo;PEOPLE.&rdquo; What they represent is the
&ldquo;people&rsquo;s rights&rdquo;; their interests are the
&ldquo;people&rsquo;s interests.&rdquo; Hence, they do not consider that, at an
impending struggle, they need to examine the interests and attitude of the
different classes. They need not too seriously weigh their own means. All they
have to do is to give the signal in order to have the &ldquo;people&rdquo; fall
upon the &ldquo;oppressors&rdquo; with all its inexhaustible resources. If,
thereupon, in the execution, their interests turn out to be uninteresting, and
their power to be impotence, it is ascribed either to depraved sophists, who
split up the &ldquo;undivisible people&rdquo; into several hostile camps; or to
the army being too far brutalized and blinded to appreciate the pure aims of
the democracy as its own best; or to some detail in the execution that wrecks
the whole plan; or, finally, to an unforeseen accident that spoiled the game
this time. At all events, the democrat comes out of the disgraceful defeat as
immaculate as he went innocently into it, and with the refreshed conviction
that he must win; not that he himself and his party must give up their old
standpoint, but that, on the contrary, conditions must come to his aid.
</p>

<p>
For all this, one must not picture to himself the decimated, broken, and, by
the new parliamentary regulation, humbled Mountain altogether too unhappy. If
June 13 removed its leaders, it, on the other hand, made room for new ones of
inferior capacity, who are flattered by their new position. If their impotence
in parliament could no longer be doubted, they were now justified to limit
their activity to outbursts of moral indignation. If the party of Order
pretended to see in them, as the last official representatives of the
revolution, all the horrors of anarchy incarnated, they were free to appear all
the more flat and modest in reality. Over June 13 they consoled themselves with
the profound expression: &ldquo;If they but dare to assail universal suffrage .
. . then . . . then we will show who we are!&rdquo; Nous verrons. [#5 We shall
see.]
</p>

<p>
As to the &ldquo;Mountaineers,&rdquo; who had fled abroad, it suffices here to
say that Ledru-Rollin&mdash;he having accomplished the feat of hopelessly
ruining, in barely a fortnight, the powerful party at whose head he
stood&mdash;, found himself called upon to build up a French government
&ldquo;in partibus;&rdquo; that his figure, at a distance, removed from the
field of action, seemed to gain in size in the measure that the level of the
revolution sank and the official prominences of official France became more and
more dwarfish; that he could figure as republican Pretender for 1852, and
periodically issued to the Wallachians and other peoples circulars in which
&ldquo;despot of the continent&rdquo; is threatened with the feats that he and
his allies had in contemplation. Was Proudhon wholly wrong when he cried out to
these gentlemen: &ldquo;Vous n&rsquo;êtes que des blaqueurs&rdquo;? [#6 You are
nothing but fakirs.]
</p>

<p>
The party of Order had, on June 13, not only broken up the Mountain, it had
also established the Subordination of the Constitution to the Majority
Decisions of the National Assembly. So, indeed, did the republic understand it,
to&mdash;wit, that the bourgeois ruled here in parliamentary form, without, as
in the monarchy, finding a check in the veto of the Executive power, or the
liability of parliament to dissolution. It was a &ldquo;parliamentary
republic,&rdquo; as Thiers styled it. But if, on June 13, the bourgeoisie
secured its omnipotence within the parliament building, did it not also strike
the parliament itself, as against the Executive and the people, with incurable
weakness by excluding its most popular part? By giving up numerous Deputies,
without further ceremony to the mercies of the public prosecutor, it abolished
its own parliamentary inviolability. The humiliating regulation, that it
subjected the Mountain to, raised the President of the republic in the same
measure that it lowered the individual Representatives of the people. By
branding an insurrection in defense of the Constitution as anarchy, and as a
deed looking to the overthrow of society, it interdicted to itself all appeal
to insurrection whenever the Executive should violate the Constitution against
it. And, indeed, the irony of history wills it that the very General, who by
order of Bonaparte bombarded Rome, and thus gave the immediate occasion to the
constitutional riot of June 13, that Oudinot, on December 22, 1851, is the one
imploringly and vainly to be offered to the people by the party of Order as the
General of the Constitution. Another hero of June 13, Vieyra, who earned praise
from the tribune of the National Assembly for the brutalities that he had
committed in the democratic newspaper offices at the head of a gang of National
Guards in the hire of the high finance&mdash;this identical Vieyra was
initiated in the conspiracy of Bonaparte, and contributed materially in cutting
off all protection that could come to the National Assembly, in the hour of its
agony, from the side of the National Guard.
</p>

<p>
June 13 had still another meaning. The Mountain had wanted to place Bonaparte
under charges. Their defeat was, accordingly, a direct victory of Bonaparte; it
was his personal triumph over his democratic enemies. The party of Order fought
for the victory, Bonaparte needed only to pocket it. He did so. On June 14, a
proclamation was to be read on the walls of Paris wherein the President, as it
were, without his connivance, against his will, driven by the mere force of
circumstances, steps forward from his cloisterly seclusion like misjudged
virtue, complains of the calumnies of his antagonists, and, while seeming to
identify his own person with the cause of order, rather identifies the cause of
order with his own person. Besides this, the National Assembly had subsequently
approved the expedition against Rome; Bonaparte, however, had taken the
initiative in the affair. After he had led the High Priest Samuel back into the
Vatican, he could hope as King David to occupy the Tuileries. He had won the
parson-interests over to himself.
</p>

<p>
The riot of June 13 limited itself, as we have seen, to a peaceful street
procession. There were, consequently, no laurels to be won from it.
Nevertheless, in these days, poor in heroes and events, the party of Order
converted this bloodless battle into a second Austerlitz. Tribune and press
lauded the army as the power of order against the popular multitude, and the
impotence of anarchy; and Changarnier as the &ldquo;bulwark of
society&rdquo;&mdash;a mystification that he finally believed in himself.
Underhand, however, the corps that seemed doubtful were removed from Paris; the
regiments whose suffrage had turned out most democratic were banished from
France to Algiers the restless heads among the troops were consigned to penal
quarters; finally, the shutting out of the press from the barracks, and of the
barracks from contact with the citizens was systematically carried out.
</p>

<p>
We stand here at the critical turning point in the history of the French
National Guard. In 1830, it had decided the downfall of the restoration. Under
Louis Philippe, every riot failed, at which the National Guard stood on the
side of the troops. When, in the February days of 1848, it showed itself
passive against the uprising and doubtful toward Louis Philippe himself, he
gave himself up for lost. Thus the conviction cast root that a revolution could
not win without, nor the Army against the National Guard. This was the
superstitious faith of the Army in bourgeois omnipotence. The June days of
1548, when the whole National Guard, jointly with the regular troops, threw
down the insurrection, had confirmed the superstition. After the inauguration
of Bonaparte&rsquo;s administration, the position of the National Guard sank
somewhat through the unconstitutional joining of their command with the command
of the First Military Division in the person of Changarnier.
</p>

<p>
As the command of the National Guard appeared here merely an attribute of the
military commander-in-chief, so did the Guard itself appear only as an
appendage of the regular troops. Finally, on June 13, the National Guard was
broken up, not through its partial dissolution only, that from that date
forward was periodically repeated at all points of France, leaving only wrecks
of its former self behind. The demonstration of June 13 was, above all, a
demonstration of the National Guards. True, they had not carried their arms,
but they had carried their uniforms against the Army&mdash;and the talisman lay
just in these uniforms. The Army then learned that this uniform was but a
woolen rag, like any other. The spell was broken. In the June days of 1848,
bourgeoisie and small traders were united as National Guard with the Army
against the proletariat; on June 13, 1849, the bourgeoisie had the small
traders&rsquo; National Guard broken up; on December 2, 1851, the National
Guard of the bourgeoisie itself vanished, and Bonaparte attested the fact when
he subsequently signed the decree for its disbandment. Thus the bourgeoisie had
itself broken its last weapon against the army, from the moment when the small
traders&rsquo; class no longer stood as a vassal behind, but as a rebel before
it; indeed, it was bound to do so, as it was bound to destroy with its own hand
all its means of defence against absolutism, so soon as itself was absolute.
</p>

<p>
In the meantime, the party of Order celebrated the recovery of a power that
seemed lost in 1848 only in order that, freed from its trammels in 1849, it be
found again through invectives against the republic and the Constitution;
through the malediction of all future, present and past revolutions, that one
included which its own leaders had made; and, finally, in laws by which the
press was gagged, the right of association destroyed, and the stage of siege
regulated as an organic institution. The National Assembly then adjourned from
the middle of August to the middle of October, after it had appointed a
Permanent Committee for the period of its absence. During these vacations, the
Legitimists intrigued with Ems; the Orleanists with Claremont; Bonaparte
through princely excursions; the Departmental Councilmen in conferences over
the revision of the Constitution;&mdash;occurrences, all of which recurred
regularly at the periodical vacations of the National Assembly, and upon which
I shall not enter until they have matured into events. Be it here only observed
that the National Assembly was impolitic in vanishing from the stage for long
intervals, and leaving in view, at the head of the republic, only one, however
sorry, figure&mdash;Louis Bonaparte&rsquo;s&mdash;, while, to the public
scandal, the party of Order broke up into its own royalist component parts,
that pursued their conflicting aspirations after the restoration. As often as,
during these vacations the confusing noise of the parliament was hushed, and
its body was dissolved in the nation, it was unmistakably shown that only one
thing was still wanting to complete the true figure of the republic: to make
the vacation of the National Assembly permanent, and substitute its
inscription&mdash;&ldquo;Liberty, Equality, Fraternity&rdquo;&mdash;by the
unequivocal words, &ldquo;Infantry, Cavalry, Artillery&rdquo;.
</p>

</div><!--end chapter-->

<div class="chapter">

<h2><a name="chap04"></a>IV.</h2>

<p>
The National Assembly reconvened in the middle of October. On November 1,
Bonaparte surprised it with a message, in which he announced the dismissal of
the Barrot-Falloux Ministry, and the framing of a new. Never have lackeys been
chased from service with less ceremony than Bonaparte did his ministers. The
kicks, that were eventually destined for the National Assembly, Barrot &amp;
Company received in the meantime.
</p>

<p>
The Barrot Ministry was, as we have seen, composed of Legitimists and
Orleanists; it was a Ministry of the party of Order. Bonaparte needed that
Ministry in order to dissolve the republican constituent assembly, to effect
the expedition against Rome, and to break up the democratic party. He had
seemingly eclipsed himself behind this Ministry, yielded the reins to the hands
of the party of Order, and assumed the modest mask, which, under Louis
Philippe, had been worn by the responsible overseer of the newspapers&mdash;the
mask of &ldquo;homme de paille.&rdquo; [#1 Man of straw] Now he threw off the
mask, it being no longer the light curtain behind which he could conceal, but
the Iron Mask, which prevented him from revealing his own physiognomy. He had
instituted the Barrot Ministry in order to break up the republican National
Assembly in the name of the party of Order; he now dismissed it in order to
declare his own name independent of the parliament of the party of Order.
</p>

<p>
There was no want of plausible pretexts for this dismissal. The Barrot Ministry
had neglected even the forms of decency that would have allowed the president
of the republic to appear as a power along with the National Assembly. For
instance, during the vacation of the National Assembly, Bonaparte published a
letter to Edgar Ney, in which he seemed to disapprove the liberal attitude of
the Pope, just as, in opposition to the constitutive assembly, he had published
a letter, in which he praised Oudinot for his attack upon the Roman republic;
when the National Assembly came to vote on the budget for the Roman expedition,
Victor Hugo, out of pretended liberalism, brought up that letter for
discussion; the party of Order drowned this notion of Bonaparte&rsquo;s under
exclamations of contempt and incredulity as though notions of Bonaparte could
not possibly have any political weight;&mdash;and none of the Ministers took up
the gauntlet for him. On another occasion, Barrot, with his well-known hollow
pathos, dropped, from the speakers&rsquo; tribune in the Assembly, words of
indignation upon the &ldquo;abominable machinations,&rdquo; which, according to
him, went on in the immediate vicinity of the President. Finally, while the
Ministry obtained from the National Assembly a widow&rsquo;s pension for the
Duchess of Orleans, it denied every motion to raise the Presidential civil
list;&mdash;and, in Bonaparte, be it always remembered, the Imperial Pretender
was so closely blended with the impecunious adventurer, that the great idea of
his being destined to restore the Empire was ever supplemented by that other,
to-wit, that the French people was destined to pay his debts.
</p>

<p>
The Barrot-Falloux Ministry was the first and last parliamentary Ministry that
Bonaparte called into life. Its dismissal marks, accordingly, a decisive
period. With the Ministry, the party of Order lost, never to regain, an
indispensable post to the maintenance of the parliamentary regime,&mdash;the
handle to the Executive power. It is readily understood that, in a country like
France, where the Executive disposes over an army of more than half a million
office-holders, and, consequently, keeps permanently a large mass of interests
and existences in the completest dependence upon itself; where the Government
surrounds, controls, regulates, supervises and guards society, from its
mightiest acts of national life, down to its most insignificant motions; from
its common life, down to the private life of each individual; where, due to
such extraordinary centralization, this body of parasites acquires a ubiquity
and omniscience, a quickened capacity for motion and rapidity that finds an
analogue only in the helpless lack of self-reliance, in the unstrung weakness
of the body social itself;&mdash;that in such a country the National Assembly
lost, with the control of the ministerial posts, all real influence; unless it
simultaneously simplified the administration; if possible, reduced the army of
office-holders; and, finally, allowed society and public opinion to establish
its own organs, independent of government censorship. But the Material Interest
of the French bourgeoisie is most intimately bound up in maintenance of just
such a large and extensively ramified governmental machine. There the
bourgeoisie provides for its own superfluous membership; and supplies, in the
shape of government salaries, what it can not pocket in the form of profit,
interest, rent and fees. On the other hand, its Political Interests daily
compel it to increase the power of repression, i.e., the means and the
personnel of the government; it is at the same time forced to conduct an
uninterrupted warfare against public opinion, and, full of suspicion, to
hamstring and lame the independent organs of society&mdash;whenever it does not
succeed in amputating them wholly. Thus the bourgeoisie of France was forced by
its own class attitude, on the one hand, to destroy the conditions for all
parliamentary power, its own included, and, on the other, to render
irresistible the Executive power that stood hostile to it.
</p>

<p>
The new Ministry was called the d&rsquo;Hautpoul Ministry. Not that General
d&rsquo;Hautpoul had gained the rank of Ministerial President. Along with
Barrot, Bonaparte abolished this dignity, which, it must be granted, condemned
the President of the republic to the legal nothingness of a constitutional
kind, of a constitutional king at that, without throne and crown, without
sceptre and without sword, without irresponsibility, without the imperishable
possession of the highest dignity in the State, and, what was most untoward of
all&mdash;without a civil list. The d&rsquo;Hautpoul Ministry numbered only one
man of parliamentary reputation, the Jew Fould, one of the most notorious
members of the high finance. To him fell the portfolio of finance. Turn to the
Paris stock quotations, and it will be found that from November 1, 1849, French
stocks fall and rise with the falling and rising of the Bonapartist shares.
While Bonaparte had thus found his ally in the Bourse, he at the same time took
possession of the Police through the appointment of Carlier as Prefect of
Police.
</p>

<p>
But the consequences of the change of Ministry could reveal themselves only in
the course of events. So far, Bonaparte had taken only one step forward, to be
all the more glaringly driven back. Upon his harsh message, followed the most
servile declarations of submissiveness to the National Assembly. As often as
the Ministers made timid attempts to introduce his own personal hobbies as
bills, they themselves seemed unwilling and compelled only by their position to
run the comic errands, of whose futility they were convinced in advance. As
often as Bonaparte blabbed out his plans behind the backs of his Ministers, and
sported his &ldquo;idees napoleoniennes,&rdquo; [#2 Napoleonic ideas.] his own
Ministers disavowed him from the speakers&rsquo; tribune in the National
Assembly. His aspirations after usurpation seemed to become audible only to the
end that the ironical laughter of his adversaries should not die out. He
deported himself like an unappreciated genius, whom the world takes for a
simpleton. Never did lie enjoy in fuller measure the contempt of all classes
than at this period. Never did the bourgeoisie rule more absolutely; never did
it more boastfully display the insignia of sovereignty.
</p>

<p>
It is not here my purpose to write the history of its legislative activity,
which is summed up in two laws passed during this period: the law
reestablishing the duty on wine, and the laws on education, to suppress
infidelity. While the drinking of wine was made difficult to the Frenchmen, all
the more bounteously was the water of pure life poured out to them. Although in
the law on the duty on wine the bourgeoisie declares the old hated French
tariff system to be inviolable, it sought, by means of the laws on education,
to secure the old good will of the masses that made the former bearable. One
wonders to see the Orleanists, the liberal bourgeois, these old apostles of
Voltarianism and of eclectic philosophy, entrusting the supervision of the
French intellect to their hereditary enemies, the Jesuits. But, while
Orleanists and Legitimists could part company on the question of the Pretender
to the crown, they understood full well that their joint reign dictated the
joining of the means of oppression of two distinct epochs; that the means of
subjugation of the July monarchy had to be supplemented with and strengthened
by the means of subjugation of the restoration.
</p>

<p>
The farmers, deceived in all their expectations, more than ever ground down by
the law scale of the price of corn, on the one hand, and, on the other, by the
growing load of taxation and mortgages, began to stir in the Departments. They
were answered by the systematic baiting of the school masters, whom the
Government subjected to the clergy; by the systematic baiting of the Mayors,
whom it subjected to the Prefects; and by a system of espionage to which all
were subjected. In Paris and the large towns, the reaction itself carries the
physiognomy of its own epoch; it irritates more than it cows; in the country,
it becomes low, moan, petty, tiresome, vexatious,&mdash;in a word, it becomes
&ldquo;gensdarme.&rdquo; It is easily understood how three years of the
gensdarme regime, sanctified by the regime of the clergyman, was bound to
demoralize unripe masses.
</p>

<p>
Whatever the mass of passion and declamation, that the party of Order expended
from the speakers&rsquo; tribune in the National Assembly against the minority,
its speech remained monosyllabic, like that of the Christian, whose speech was
to be &ldquo;Aye, aye; nay, nay.&rdquo; It was monosyllabic, whether from the
tribune or the press; dull as a conundrum, whose solution is known beforehand.
Whether the question was the right of petition or the duty on wine, the liberty
of the press or free trade, clubs or municipal laws, protection of individual
freedom or the regulation of national economy, the slogan returns ever again,
the theme is monotonously the same, the verdict is ever ready and unchanged:
Socialism! Even bourgeois liberalism is pronounced socialistic; socialistic,
alike, is pronounced popular education; and, likewise, socialistic national
financial reform. It was socialistic to build a railroad where already a canal
was; and it was socialistic to defend oneself with a stick when attacked with a
sword.
</p>

<p>
This was not a mere form of speech, a fashion, nor yet party tactics. The
bourgeoisie perceives correctly that all the weapons, which it forged against
feudalism, turn their edges against itself; that all the means of education,
which it brought forth, rebel against its own civilization; that all the gods,
which it made, have fallen away from it. It understands that all its so-called
citizens&rsquo; rights and progressive organs assail and menace its class rule,
both in its social foundation and its political
superstructure&mdash;consequently, have become &ldquo;socialistic.&rdquo; It
justly scents in this menace and assault the secret of Socialism, whose meaning
and tendency it estimates more correctly than the spurious, so-called
Socialism, is capable of estimating itself, and which, consequently, is unable
to understand how it is that the bourgeoisie obdurately shuts up its ears to
it, alike whether it sentimentally whines about the sufferings of humanity; or
announces in Christian style the millennium and universal brotherhood; or
twaddles humanistically about the soul, culture and freedom; or doctrinally
matches out a system of harmony and wellbeing for all classes. What, however,
the bourgeoisie does not understand is the consequence that its own
parliamentary regime, its own political reign, is also of necessity bound to
fall under the general ban of &ldquo;socialistic.&rdquo; So long as the rule of
the bourgeoisie is not fully organized, has not acquired its purely political
character, the contrast with the other classes cannot come into view in all its
sharpness; and, where it does come into view, it cannot take that dangerous
turn that converts every conflict with the Government into a conflict with
Capital. When, however, the French bourgeoisie began to realize in every
pulsation of society a menace to &ldquo;peace,&rdquo; how could it, at the head
of society, pretend to uphold the regime of unrest, its own regime, the
parliamentary regime, which, according to the expression of one of its own
orators, lives in struggle, and through struggle? The parliamentary regime
lives on discussion,&mdash;how can it forbid discussion? Every single interest,
every single social institution is there converted into general thoughts, is
treated as a thought,&mdash;how could any interest or institution claim to be
above thought, and impose itself as an article of faith? The orators&rsquo;
conflict in the tribune calls forth the conflict of the rowdies in the press
the debating club in parliament is necessarily supplemented by debating clubs
in the salons and the barrooms; the representatives, who are constantly
appealing to popular opinion, justify popular opinion in expressing its real
opinion in petitions. The parliamentary regime leaves everything to the
decision of majorities,&mdash;how can the large majorities beyond parliament be
expected not to wish to decide? If, from above, they hear the fiddle
screeching, what else is to be expected than that those below should dance?
</p>

<p>
Accordingly, by now persecuting as Socialist what formerly it had celebrated as
Liberal, the bourgeoisie admits that its own interest orders it to raise itself
above the danger of self government; that, in order to restore rest to the
land, its own bourgeois parliament must, before all, be brought to rest; that,
in order to preserve its social power unhurt, its political power must be
broken; that the private bourgeois can continue to exploit the other classes
and rejoice in &ldquo;property,&rdquo; &ldquo;family,&rdquo;
&ldquo;religion&rdquo; and &ldquo;order&rdquo; only under the condition that
his own class be condemned to the same political nullity of the other classes,
that, in order to save their purse, the crown must be knocked off their heads,
and the sword that was to shield them, must at the same time be hung over their
heads as a sword of Damocles.
</p>

<p>
In the domain of general bourgeois interests, the National Assembly proved
itself so barren, that, for instance, the discussion over the Paris-Avignon
railroad, opened in the winter of 1850, was not yet ripe for a vote on December
2, 1851. Wherever it did not oppress or was reactionary, the bourgeoisie was
smitten with incurable barrenness.
</p>

<p>
While Bonaparte&rsquo;s Ministry either sought to take the initiative of laws
in the spirit of the party of Order, or even exaggerated their severity in
their enforcement and administration, he, on his part, sought to win popularity
by means of childishly silly propositions, to exhibit the contrast between
himself and the National Assembly, and to hint at a secret plan, held in
reserve and only through circumstances temporarily prevented from disclosing
its hidden treasures to the French people. Of this nature was the proposition
to decree a daily extra pay of four sous to the under-officers; so, likewise,
the proposition for a &ldquo;word of honor&rdquo; loan bank for working-men. To
have money given and money borrowed&mdash;that was the perspective that he
hoped to cajole the masses with. Presents and loans&mdash;to that was limited
the financial wisdom of the slums, the high as well as the low; to that were
limited the springs which Bonaparte knew how to set in motion. Never did
Pretender speculate more dully upon the dullness of the masses.
</p>

<p>
Again and again did the National Assembly fly into a passion at these
unmistakable attempts to win popularity at its expense, and at the growing
danger that this adventurer, lashed on by debts and unrestrained by reputation,
might venture upon some desperate act. The strained relations between the party
of Order and the President had taken on a threatening aspect, when an
unforeseen event threw him back, rueful into its arms. We mean the
supplementary elections of March, 1850. These elections took place to fill the
vacancies created in the National Assembly, after June 13, by imprisonment and
exile. Paris elected only Social-Democratic candidates; it even united the
largest vote upon one of the insurgents of June, 1848,&mdash;Deflotte. In this
way the small traders&rsquo; world of Paris, now allied with the proletariat,
revenged itself for the defeat of June 13, 1849. It seemed to have disappeared
from the field of battle at the hour of danger only to step on it again at a
more favorable opportunity, with increased forces for the fray, and with a
bolder war cry. A circumstance seemed to heighten the danger of this electoral
victory. The Army voted in Paris for a June insurgent against Lahitte, a
Minister of Bonaparte&rsquo;s, and, in the Departments, mostly for the
candidates of the Mountain, who, there also, although not as decisively as in
Paris, maintained the upper hand over their adversaries.
</p>

<p>
Bonaparte suddenly saw himself again face to face with the revolution. As on
January 29, 1849, as on June 13, 1849, on May 10, 1850, he vanished again
behind the party of Order. He bent low; he timidly apologized; he offered to
appoint any Ministry whatever at the behest of the parliamentary majority; he
even implored the Orleanist and Legitimist party leaders&mdash;the Thiers,
Berryers, Broglies, Moles, in short, the so-called burgraves&mdash;to take hold
of the helm of State in person. The party of Order did not know how to utilize
this opportunity, that was never to return. Instead of boldly taking possession
of the proffered power, it did not even force Bonaparte to restore the Ministry
dismissed on November 1; it contented itself with humiliating him with its
pardon, and with affiliating Mr. Baroche to the d&rsquo;Hautpoul Ministry. This
Baroche had, as Public Prosecutor, stormed before the High Court at Bourges,
once against the revolutionists of May 15, another time against the Democrats
of June 13, both times on the charge of &ldquo;attentats&rdquo; against the
National Assembly. None of Bonaparte&rsquo;s Ministers contributed later more
towards the degradation of the National Assembly; and, after December 2, 1851,
we meet him again as the comfortably stalled and dearly paid Vice-President of
the Senate. He had spat into the soup of the revolutionists for Bonaparte to
eat it.
</p>

<p>
On its part, the Social Democratic party seemed only to look for pretexts in
order to make its own victory doubtful, and to dull its edge. Vidal, one of the
newly elected Paris representatives, was returned for Strassburg also. He was
induced to decline the seat for Paris and accept the one for Strassburg. Thus,
instead of giving a definite character to their victory at the hustings, and
thereby compelling the party of Order forthwith to contest it in parliament;
instead of thus driving the foe to battle at the season of popular enthusiasm
and of a favorable temper in the Army, the democratic party tired out Paris
with a new campaign during the months of March and April; it allowed the
excited popular passions to wear themselves out in this second provisional
electoral play it allowed the revolutionary vigor to satiate itself with
constitutional successes, and lose its breath in petty intrigues, hollow
declamation and sham moves; it gave the bourgeoisie time to collect itself and
make its preparations finally, it allowed the significance of the March
elections to find a sentimentally weakening commentary at the subsequent April
election in the victory of Eugene Sue. In one word, it turned the 10th of March
into an April Fool.
</p>

<p>
The parliamentary majority perceived the weakness of its adversary. Its
seventeen burgraves&mdash;Bonaparte had left to it the direction of and
responsibility for the attack&mdash;, framed a new election law, the moving of
which was entrusted to Mr. Faucher, who had applied for the honor. On May 8, he
introduced the new law whereby universal suffrage was abolished; a three years
residence in the election district imposed as a condition for voting; and,
finally, the proof of this residence made dependent, for the working-man, upon
the testimony of his employer.
</p>

<p>
As revolutionarily as the democrats had agitated and stormed during the
constitutional struggles, so constitutionally did they, now, when it was
imperative to attest, arms in hand, the earnestness of their late electoral
victories, preach order, &ldquo;majestic calmness,&rdquo; lawful conduct, i.
e., blind submission to the will of the counter-revolution, which revealed
itself as law. During the debate, the Mountain put the party of Order to shame
by maintaining the passionless attitude of the law-abiding burger, who upholds
the principle of law against revolutionary passions; and by twitting the party
of Order with the fearful reproach of proceeding in a revolutionary manner.
Even the newly elected deputies took pains to prove by their decent and
thoughtful deportment what an act of misjudgment it was to decry them as
anarchists, or explain their election as a victory of the revolution. The new
election law was passed on May 31. The Mountain contented itself with smuggling
a protest into the pockets of the President of the Assembly. To the election
law followed a new press law, whereby the revolutionary press was completely
done away with. It had deserved its fate. The &ldquo;National&rdquo; and the
&ldquo;Presse,&rdquo; two bourgeois organs, remained after this deluge the
extreme outposts of the revolution.
</p>

<p>
We have seen how, during March and April, the democratic leaders did everything
to involve the people of Paris in a sham battle, and how, after May 8, they did
everything to keep it away from a real battle. We may not here forget that the
year 1850 was one of the most brilliant years of industrial and commercial
prosperity; consequently, that the Parisian proletariat was completely
employed. But the election law of May 31, 1850 excluded them from all
participation in political power; it cut the field of battle itself from under
them; it threw the workingmen back into the state of pariahs, which they had
occupied before the February revolution. In allowing themselves, in sight of
such an occurrence, to be led by the democrats, and in forgetting the
revolutionary interests of their class through temporary comfort, the
workingmen abdicated the honor of being a conquering power; they submitted to
their fate; they proved that the defeat of June, 1848, had incapacitated them
from resistance for many a year to come finally, that the historic process must
again, for the time being, proceed over their heads. As to the small
traders&rsquo; democracy, which, on June 13, had cried out: &ldquo;If they but
dare to assail universal suffrage . . . then . . . then we will show who we
are!&rdquo;&mdash;they now consoled themselves with the thought that the
counter-revolutionary blow, which had struck them, was no blow at all, and that
the law of May 31 was no law. On May 2, 1852, according to them, every
Frenchman would appear at the hustings, in one hand the ballot, in the other
the sword. With this prophecy they set their hearts at ease. Finally, the Army
was punished by its superiors for the elections of May and April, 1850, as it
was punished for the election of May 29, 1849. This time, however, it said to
itself determinately: &ldquo;The revolution shall not cheat us a third
time.&rdquo;
</p>

<p>
The law of May 31, 1850, was the &ldquo;coup d&rsquo;etat&rdquo; of the
bourgeoisie. All its previous conquests over the revolution had only a
temporary character: they became uncertain the moment the National Assembly
stepped off the stage; they depended upon the accident of general elections,
and the history of the elections since 1848 proved irrefutably that, in the
same measure as the actual reign of the bourgeoisie gathered strength, its
moral reign over the masses wore off. Universal suffrage pronounced itself on
May 10 pointedly against the reign of the bourgeoisie; the bourgeoisie answered
with the banishment of universal suffrage. The law of May 31 was, accordingly,
one of the necessities of the class struggle. On the other hand, the
constitution required a minimum of two million votes for the valid ejection of
the President of the republic. If none of the Presidential candidates polled
this minimum, then the National Assembly was to elect the President out of the
three candidates polling the highest votes. At the time that the constitutive
body made this law, ten million voters were registered on the election rolls.
In its opinion, accordingly, one-fifth of the qualified voters sufficed to make
a choice for President valid. The law of May 31 struck at least three million
voters off the rolls, reduced the number of qualified voters to seven millions,
and yet, not withstanding, it kept the lawful minimum at two millions for the
election of a President. Accordingly, it raised the lawful minimum from a fifth
to almost a third of the qualified voters, i.e., it did all it could to smuggle
the Presidential election out of the hands of the people into those of the
National Assembly. Thus, by the election law of May 31, the party of Order
seemed to have doubly secured its empire, in that it placed the election of
both the National Assembly and the President of the republic in the keeping of
the stable portion of society.
</p>

</div><!--end chapter-->

<div class="chapter">

<h2><a name="chap05"></a>V.</h2>

<p>
The strife immediately broke out again between the National Assembly and
Bonaparte, so soon as the revolutionary crisis was weathered, and universal
suffrage was abolished.
</p>

<p>
The Constitution had fixed the salary of Bonaparte at 600,000 francs. Barely
half a year after his installation, he succeeded in raising this sum to its
double: Odillon Barrot had wrung from the constitutive assembly a yearly
allowance of 600,000 francs for so-called representation expenses. After June
13, Bonaparte hinted at similar solicitations, to which, however, Barrot then
turned a deaf ear. Now, after May 31, he forthwith utilized the favorable
moment, and caused his ministers to move a civil list of three millions in the
National Assembly. A long adventurous, vagabond career had gifted him with the
best developed antennae for feeling out the weak moments when he could venture
upon squeezing money from his bourgeois. He carried on regular blackmail. The
National Assembly had maimed the sovereignty of the people with his aid and his
knowledge: he now threatened to denounce its crime to the tribunal of the
people, if it did not pull out its purse and buy his silence with three
millions annually. It had robbed three million Frenchmen of the suffrage: for
every Frenchman thrown &ldquo;out of circulation,&rdquo; he demanded a franc
&ldquo;in circulation.&rdquo; He, the elect of six million, demanded indemnity
for the votes he had been subsequently cheated of. The Committee of the
National Assembly turned the importunate fellow away. The Bonapartist press
threatened: Could the National Assembly break with the President of the
republic at a time when it had broken definitely and on principle with the mass
of the nation? It rejected the annual civil list, but granted, for this once,
an allowance of 2,160,000 francs. Thus it made itself guilty of the double
weakness of granting the money, and, at the same time, showing by its anger
that it did so only unwillingly. We shall presently see to what use Bonaparte
put the money. After this aggravating after-play, that followed upon the heels
of the abolition of universal suffrage, and in which Bonaparte exchanged his
humble attitude of the days of the crisis of March and April for one of defiant
impudence towards the usurping parliament, the National Assembly adjourned for
three months, from August 11, to November 11. It left behind in its place a
Permanent Committee of 18 members that contained no Bonapartist, but did
contain a few moderate republicans. The Permanent Committee of the year 1849
had numbered only men of order and Bonapartists. At that time, however, the
party of Order declared itself in permanence against the revolution; now the
parliamentary republic declared itself in permanence against the President.
After the law of May 31, only this rival still confronted the party of Order.
</p>

<p>
When the National Assembly reconvened in November, 1850, instead of its former
petty skirmishes with the President, a great headlong struggle, a struggle for
life between the two powers, seemed to have become inevitable.
</p>

<p>
As in the year 1849, the party of Order had during this year&rsquo;s vacation,
dissolved into its two separate factions, each occupied with its own
restoration intrigues, which had received new impetus from the death of Louis
Philippe. The Legitimist King, Henry V, had even appointed a regular Ministry,
that resided in Paris, and in which sat members of the Permanent Committee.
Hence, Bonaparte was, on his part, justified in making tours through the French
Departments, and&mdash;according to the disposition of the towns that he
happened to be gladdening with his presence&mdash;some times covertly, other
times more openly blabbing out his own restoration plans, and gaining votes for
himself On these excursions, which the large official &ldquo;Moniteur&rdquo;
and the small private &ldquo;Moniteurs&rdquo; of Bonaparte were, of course,
bound to celebrate as triumphal marches, he was constantly accompanied by
affiliated members of the &ldquo;Society of December 10&rdquo; This society
dated from the year 1849. Under the pretext of founding a benevolent
association, the slum-proletariat of Paris was organized into secret sections,
each section led by Bonapartist agents, with a Bonapartist General at the head
of all. Along with ruined roues of questionable means of support and
questionable antecedents, along with the foul and adventures-seeking dregs of
the bourgeoisie, there were vagabonds, dismissed soldiers, discharged convicts,
runaway galley slaves, sharpers, jugglers, lazzaroni, pickpockets,
sleight-of-hand performers, gamblers, procurers, keepers of disorderly houses,
porters, literati, organ grinders, rag pickers, scissors grinders, tinkers,
beggars&mdash;in short, that whole undefined, dissolute, kicked-about mass that
the Frenchmen style &ldquo;la Boheme&rdquo; With this kindred element,
Bonaparte formed the stock of the &ldquo;Society of December 10,&rdquo; a
&ldquo;benevolent association&rdquo; in so far as, like Bonaparte himself, all
its members felt the need of being benevolent to themselves at the expense of
the toiling nation. The Bonaparte, who here constitutes himself Chief of the
Slum-Proletariat; who only here finds again in plenteous form the interests
which he personally pursues; who, in this refuse, offal and wreck of all
classes, recognizes the only class upon which he can depend
unconditionally;&mdash;this is the real Bonaparte, the Bonaparte without
qualification. An old and crafty roue, he looks upon the historic life of
nations, upon their great and public acts, as comedies in the ordinary sense,
as a carnival, where the great costumes, words and postures serve only as masks
for the pettiest chicaneries. So, on the occasion of his expedition against
Strassburg when a trained Swiss vulture impersonated the Napoleonic eagle; so,
again, on the occasion of his raid upon Boulogne, when he struck a few London
lackeys into French uniform: they impersonated the army; [#1 Under the reign of
Louis Philippe, Bonaparte made two attempts to restore the throne of Napoleon:
one in October, 1836, in an expedition from Switzerland upon Strassburg and one
in August, 1840, in an expedition from England upon Boulogne.] and so now, in
his &ldquo;Society of December 10,&rdquo; he collects 10,000 loafers who are to
impersonate the people as Snug the Joiner does the lion. At a period when the
bourgeoisie itself is playing the sheerest comedy, but in the most solemn
manner in the world, without doing violence to any of the pedantic requirements
of French dramatic etiquette, and is itself partly deceived by, partly
convinced of, the solemnity of its own public acts, the adventurer, who took
the comedy for simple comedy, was bound to win. Only after he has removed his
solemn opponent, when he himself takes seriously his own role of emperor, and,
with the Napoleonic mask on, imagines he impersonates the real Napoleon, only
then does he become the victim of his own peculiar conception of
history&mdash;the serious clown, who no longer takes history for a comedy, but
a comedy for history. What the national work-shops were to the socialist
workingmen, what the &ldquo;Gardes mobiles&rdquo; were to the bourgeois
republicans, that was to Bonaparte the &ldquo;Society of December
10,&rdquo;&mdash;a force for partisan warfare peculiar to himself. On his
journeys, the divisions of the Society, packed away on the railroads,
improvised an audience for him, performed public enthusiasm, shouted
&ldquo;vive l&rsquo;Empereur,&rdquo; insulted and clubbed the
republicans,&mdash;all, of course, under the protection of the police. On his
return stages to Paris, this rabble constituted his vanguard, it forestalled or
dispersed counter-demonstrations. The &ldquo;Society of December 10&rdquo;
belonged to him, it was his own handiwork, his own thought. Whatever else he
appropriates, the power of circumstances places in his hands; whatever else he
does, either circumstances do for him, or he is content to copy from the deeds
of others, but he posing before the citizens with the official phrases about
&ldquo;Order,&rdquo; &ldquo;Religion,&rdquo; &ldquo;Family,&rdquo;
&ldquo;Property,&rdquo; and, behind him, the secret society of skipjacks and
picaroons, the society of disorder, of prostitution, and of theft,&mdash;that
is Bonaparte himself as the original author; and the history of the
&ldquo;Society of December 10&rdquo; is his own history. Now, then, it happened
that Representatives belonging to the party of order occasionally got under the
clubs of the Decembrists. Nay, more. Police Commissioner Yon, who had been
assigned to the National Assembly, and was charged with the guardianship of its
safety, reported to the Permanent Committee upon the testimony of one Alais,
that a Section of the Decembrists had decided on the murder of General
Changarnier and of Dupin, the President of the National Assembly, and had
already settled upon the men to execute the decree. One can imagine the fright
of Mr. Dupin. A parliamentary inquest over the &ldquo;Society of December
10,&rdquo; i. e., the profanation of the Bonapartist secret world now seemed
inevitable. Just before the reconvening of the National Assembly, Bonaparte
circumspectly dissolved his Society, of course, on paper only. As late as the
end of 1851, Police Prefect Carlier vainly sought, in an exhaustive memorial,
to move him to the real dissolution of the Decembrists.
</p>

<p>
The &ldquo;Society of December 10&rdquo; was to remain the private army of
Bonaparte until he should have succeeded in converting the public Army into a
&ldquo;Society of December 10.&rdquo; Bonaparte made the first attempt in this
direction shortly after the adjournment of the National Assembly, and he did so
with the money which he had just wrung from it. As a fatalist, he lives devoted
to the conviction that there are certain Higher Powers, whom man, particularly
the soldier, cannot resist. First among these Powers he numbers cigars and
champagne, cold poultry and garlic-sausage. Accordingly, in the apartments of
the Elysee, he treated first the officers and under-officers to cigars and
champagne, to cold poultry and garlic-sausage. On October 3, he repeats this
manoeuvre with the rank and file of the troops by the review of St. Maur; and,
on October 10, the same manoeuvre again, upon a larger scale, at the army
parade of Satory. The Uncle bore in remembrance the campaigns of Alexander in
Asia: the Nephew bore in remembrance the triumphal marches of Bacchus in the
same country. Alexander was, indeed, a demigod; but Bacchus was a full-fledged
god, and the patron deity, at that, of the &ldquo;Society of December
10.&rdquo;
</p>

<p>
After the review of October 3, the Permanent Committee summoned the Minister of
War, d&rsquo;Hautpoul, before it. He promised that such breaches of discipline
should not recur. We have seen how, on October 10th, Bonaparte kept
d&rsquo;Hautpoul&rsquo;s word. At both reviews Changarnier had commanded as
Commander-in-chief of the Army of Paris. He, at once member of the Permanent
Committee, Chief of the National Guard, the &ldquo;Savior&rdquo; of January 29,
and June 13, the &ldquo;Bulwark of Society,&rdquo; candidate of the Party of
Order for the office of President, the suspected Monk of two
monarchies,&mdash;he had never acknowledged his subordination to the Minister
of War, had ever openly scoffed at the republican Constitution, and had pursued
Bonaparte with a protection that was ambiguously distinguished. Now he became
zealous for the discipline in opposition to Bonaparte. While, on October 10, a
part of the cavalry cried: &ldquo;Vive Napoleon! Vivent les saucissons;&rdquo;
[#2 Long live Napoleon! Long live the sausages!] Changarnier saw to it that at
least the infantry, which filed by under the command of his friend Neumeyer,
should observe an icy silence. In punishment, the Minister of War, at the
instigation of Bonaparte, deposed General Neumeyer from his post in Paris,
under the pretext of providing for him as Commander-in-chief of the Fourteenth
and Fifteenth Military Divisions. Neumeyer declined the exchange, and had, in
consequence, to give his resignation. On his part, Changarnier published on
November 2, an order, wherein he forbade the troops to indulge, while under
arms, in any sort of political cries or demonstrations. The papers devoted to
the Elysee interests attacked Changarnier; the papers of the party of Order
attacked Bonaparte; the Permanent Committee held frequent secret sessions, at
which it was repeatedly proposed to declare the fatherland in danger; the Army
seemed divided into two hostile camps, with two hostile staffs; one at the
Elysee, where Bonaparte, the other at the Tuileries, where Changarnier resided.
All that seemed wanting for the signal of battle to sound was the convening of
the National Assembly. The French public looked upon the friction between
Bonaparte and Changarnier in the light of the English journalist, who
characterized it in these words: &ldquo;The political servant girls of France
are mopping away the glowing lava of the revolution with old mops, and they
scold each other while doing their work.&rdquo;
</p>

<p>
Meanwhile, Bonaparte hastened to depose the Minister of War, d&rsquo;Hautpoul;
to expedite him heels over head to Algiers; and to appoint in his place General
Schramm as Minister of War. On November 12, he sent to the National Assembly a
message of American excursiveness, overloaded with details, redolent of order,
athirst for conciliation, resignful to the Constitution, dealing with all and
everything, only not with the burning questions of the moment. As if in passing
he dropped the words that according to the express provisions of the
Constitution, the President alone disposes over the Army. The message closed
with the following high-sounding protestations:
</p>

<p>
&ldquo;France demands, above all things, peace . . . Alone bound by an oath, I
shall keep myself within the narrow bounds marked out by it to me . . . As to
me, elected by the people, and owing my power to it alone, I shall always
submit to its lawfully expressed will. Should you at this session decide upon
the revision of the Constitution, a Constitutional Convention will regulate the
position of the Executive power. If you do not, then, the people will, in 1852,
solemnly announce its decision. But, whatever the solution may be that the
future has in store, let us arrive at an understanding to the end that never
may passion, surprise or violence decide over the fate of a great nation. . . .
That which, above all, bespeaks my attention is, not who will, in 1852, rule
over France, but to so devote the time at my disposal that the interval may
pass by with-out agitation and disturbance. I have straightforwardly opened my
heart to you, you will answer my frankness with your confidence, my good
efforts with your co-operation. God will do the rest.&rdquo;
</p>

<p>
The honnete, hypocritically temperate, commonplace-virtuous language of the
bourgeoisie reveals its deep meaning in the mouth of the self-appointed ruler
of the &ldquo;Society of December 10,&rdquo; and of the picnic-hero of St. Maur
and Satory.
</p>

<p>
The burgraves of the party of Order did not for a moment deceive themselves on
the confidence that this unbosoming deserved. They were long blase on oaths;
they numbered among themselves veterans and virtuosi of perjury. The passage
about the army did not, however, escape them. They observed with annoyance that
the message, despite its prolix enumeration of the lately enacted laws, passed,
with affected silence, over the most important of all, the election law, and,
moreover, in case no revision of the Constitution was held, left the choice of
the President, in 1852, with the people. The election law was the
ball-and-chain to the feet of the party of Order, that hindered them from
walking, and now assuredly from storming. Furthermore, by the official
disbandment of the &ldquo;Society of December 10,&rdquo; and the dismissal of
the Minister of War, d&rsquo;Hautpoul, Bonaparte had, with his own hands,
sacrificed the scapegoats on the altar of the fatherland. He had turned off the
expected collision. Finally, the party of Order itself anxiously sought to
avoid every decisive conflict with the Executive, to weaken and to blur it
over. Fearing to lose its conquests over the revolution, it let its rival
gather the fruits thereof. &ldquo;France demands, above all things,
peace,&rdquo; with this language had the party of Order been apostrophizing the
revolution, since February; with this language did Bonaparte&rsquo;s message
now apostrophize the party of Order: &ldquo;France demands, above all things,
peace.&rdquo; Bonaparte committed acts that aimed at usurpation, but the party
of Order committed a &ldquo;disturbance of the peace,&rdquo; if it raised the
hue and cry, and explained them hypochrondriacally. The sausages of Satory were
mouse-still when nobody talked about them;&mdash;France demands, above all
things, &ldquo;peace.&rdquo; Accordingly, Bonaparte demanded that he be let
alone; and the parliamentary party was lamed with a double fear: the fear of
re-conjuring up the revolutionary disturbance of the peace, and the fear of
itself appearing as the disturber of the peace in the eyes of its own class, of
the bourgeosie. Seeing that, above all things, France demanded peace, the party
of Order did not dare, after Bonaparte had said &ldquo;peace&rdquo; in his
message, to answer &ldquo;war.&rdquo; The public, who had promised to itself
the pleasure of seeing great scenes of scandal at the opening of the National
Assembly, was cheated out of its expectations. The opposition deputies, who
demanded the submission of the minutes of the Permanent Committee over the
October occurrences, were outvoted. All debate that might excite was fled from
on principle. The labors of the National Assembly during November and December,
1850, were without interest.
</p>

<p>
Finally, toward the end of December, began a guerilla warfare about certain
prerogatives of the parliament. The movement sank into the mire of petty
chicaneries on the prerogative of the two powers, since, with the abolition of
universal suffrage, the bourgeoisie had done away with the class struggle.
</p>

<p>
A judgment for debt had been secured against Mauguin, one of the
Representatives. Upon inquiry by the President of the Court, the Minister of
Justice, Rouher, declared that an order of arrest should be made out without
delay. Manguin was, accordingly, cast into the debtors&rsquo; prison. The
National Assembly bristled up when it heard of the &ldquo;attentat.&rdquo; It
not only ordered his immediate release, but had him forcibly taken out of
Clichy the same evening by its own greffier. In order, nevertheless, to shield
its belief in the &ldquo;sacredness of private property,&rdquo; and also with
the ulterior thought of opening, in case of need, an asylum for troublesome
Mountainers, it declared the imprisonment of a Representative for debt to be
permissible upon its previous consent. It forgot to decree that the President
also could be locked up for debt. By its act, it wiped out the last semblance
of inviolability that surrounded the members of its own body.
</p>

<p>
It will be remembered that, upon the testimony of one Allais, Police
Commissioner Yon had charged a Section of Decembrists with a plan to murder
Dupin and Changarnier. With an eye upon that, the questors proposed at the very
first session, that the parliament organize a police force of its own, paid for
out of the private budget of the National Assembly itself, and wholly
independent of the Police Prefects. The Minister of the Interior, Baroche,
protested against this trespass on his preserves. A miserable compromise
followed, according to which the Police Commissioner of the Assembly was to be
paid out of its own private budget and was to be subject to the appointment and
dismissal of its own questors, but only upon previous agreement with the
Minister of the Interior. In the meantime Allais had been prosecuted by the
Government. It was an easy thing in Court, to present his testimony in the
light of a mystification, and, through the mouth of the Public Prosecutor, to
throw Dupin, Changarnier, Yon, together with the whole National Assembly, into
a ridiculous light. Thereupon, on December 29, Minister Baroche writes a letter
to Dupin, in which he demands the dismissal of Yon. The Committee of the
National Assembly decides to keep Yon in office; nevertheless, the National
Assembly, frightened by its own violence in the affair of Mauguin, and
accustomed, every time it has shied a blow at the Executive, to receive back
from it two in exchange, does not sanction this decision. It dismisses Yon in
reward for his zeal in office, and robs itself of a parliamentary prerogative,
indispensable against a person who does not decide by night to execute by day,
but decides by day and executes by night.
</p>

<p>
We have seen how, during the months of November and December, under great and
severe provocations, the National Assembly evaded and refused the combat with
the Executive power. Now we see it compelled to accept it on the smallest
occasions. In the affair of Mauguin, it confirms in principle the liability of
a Representative to imprisonment for debt, but to itself reserves the power of
allowing the principle to be applied only to the Representatives whom it
dislikes,-and for this infamous privilege we see it wrangling with the Minister
of Justice. Instead of utilizing the alleged murder plan to the end of
fastening an inquest upon the &ldquo;Society of December 10,&rdquo; and of
exposing Bonaparte beyond redemption before France and his true figure, as the
head of the slum-proletariat of Paris, it allows the collision to sink to a
point where the only issue between itself and the Minister of the Interior is.
Who has jurisdiction over the appointment and dismissal of a Police
Commissioner? Thus we see the party of Order, during this whole period,
compelled by its ambiguous position to wear out and fritter away its conflict
with the Executive power in small quarrels about jurisdiction, in chicaneries,
in pettifogging, in boundary disputes, and to turn the stalest questions of
form into the very substance of its activity. It dares not accept the collision
at the moment when it involves a principle, when the Executive power has really
given itself a blank, and when the cause of the National Assembly would be the
cause of the nation. It would thereby have issued to the nation an order of
march; and it feared nothing so much as that the nation should move. Hence, on
these occasions, it rejects the motions of the Mountain, and proceeds to the
order of the day. After the issue has in this way lost all magnitude, the
Executive power quietly awaits the moment when it can take it up again upon
small and insignificant occasions; when, so to say, the issue offers only a
parliamentary local interest. Then does the repressed valor of the party of
Order break forth, then it tears away the curtain from the scene, then it
denounces the President, then it declares the republic to be in
danger,&mdash;but then all its pathos appears stale, and the occasion for the
quarrel a hypocritical pretext, or not at all worth the effort. The
parliamentary tempest becomes a tempest in a tea-pot, the struggle an intrigue,
the collision a scandal. While the revolutionary classes gloat with sardonic
laughter over the humiliation of the National Assembly&mdash;they, of course,
being as enthusiastic for the prerogatives of the parliament as that body is
for public freedom&mdash;the bourgeoisie, outside of the parliament, does not
understand how the bourgeoisie, inside of the parliament, can squander its time
with such petty bickerings, and can endanger peace by such wretched rivalries
with the President. It is puzzled at a strategy that makes peace the very
moment when everybody expects battles, and that attacks the very moment
everybody believes peace has been concluded.
</p>

<p>
On December 20, Pascal Duprat interpellated the Minister of the Interior on the
&ldquo;Goldbar Lottery.&rdquo; This lottery was a &ldquo;Daughter from
Elysium&rdquo;; Bonaparte, together with his faithful, had given her birth; and
Police Prefect Carlier had placed her under his official protection, although
the French law forbade all lotteries, with the exception of games for
benevolent purposes. Seven million tickets, a franc a piece, and the profit
ostensibly destined to the shipping of Parisian vagabonds to California. Golden
dreams were to displace the Socialist dreams of the Parisian proletariat; the
tempting prospect of a prize was to displace the doctrinal right to labor. Of
course, the workingmen of Paris did not recognize in the lustre of the
California gold bars the lack-lustre francs that had been wheedled out of their
pockets. In the main, however, the scheme was an unmitigated swindle. The
vagabonds, who meant to open California gold mines without taking the pains to
leave Paris, were Bonaparte himself and his Round Table of desperate
insolvents. The three millions granted by the National Assembly were rioted
away; the Treasury had to be refilled somehow or another. In vain did Bonaparte
open a national subscription, at the head of which he himself figured with a
large sum, for the establishment of so-called &ldquo;cites ouvrieres.&rdquo;
[#3 Work cities.] The hard-hearted bourgeois waited, distrustful, for the
payment of his own shares; and, as this, of course, never took place, the
speculation in Socialist castles in the air fell flat. The gold bars drew
better. Bonaparte and his associates did not content themselves with putting
into their own pockets part of the surplus of the seven millions over and above
the bars that were to be drawn; they manufactured false tickets; they sold, of
Number 10 alone, fifteen to twenty lots&mdash;a financial operation fully in
the spirit of the &ldquo;Society of December 10&rdquo;! The National Assembly
did not here have before it the fictitious President of the Republic, but
Bonaparte himself in flesh and blood. Here it could catch him in the act, not
in conflict with the Constitution, but with the penal code. When, upon
Duprat&rsquo;s interpellation, the National Assembly went over to the order of
the day, this did not happen simply because Girardin&rsquo;s motion to declare
itself &ldquo;satisfied&rdquo; reminded the party of Order of its own
systematic corruption: the bourgeois, above all the bourgeois who has been
inflated into a statesman, supplements his practical meanness with theoretical
pompousness. As statesman, he becomes, like the Government facing him, a
superior being, who can be fought only in a higher, more exalted manner.
</p>

<p>
Bonaparte-who, for the very reason of his being a &ldquo;bohemian,&rdquo; a
princely slum-proletarian, had over the scampish bourgeois the advantage that
he could carry on the fight after the Assembly itself had carried him with its
own hands over the slippery ground of the military banquets, of the reviews, of
the &ldquo;Society of December 10,&rdquo; and, finally, of the penal code-now
saw that the moment had arrived when he could move from the seemingly defensive
to the offensive. He was but little troubled by the intermediate and trifling
defeats of the Minister of Justice, of the Minister of War, of the Minister of
the Navy, of the Minister of Finance, whereby the National Assembly indicated
its growling displeasure. Not only did he prevent the Ministers from resigning,
and thus recognizing the subordination of the executive power to the
Parliament; he could now accomplish what during the vacation of the National
Assembly he had commenced, the separation of the military power from the
Assembly&mdash;the deposition of Changarnier.
</p>

<p>
An Elysee paper published an order, issued during the month of May, ostensibly
to the First Military Division, and, hence, proceeding from Changarnier,
wherein the officers were recommended, in case of an uprising, to give no
quarter to the traitors in their own ranks, to shoot them down on the spot, and
to refuse troops to the National Assembly, should it make a requisition for
such. On January 3, 1851, the Cabinet was interpellated on this order. The
Cabinet demands for the examination of the affair at first three months, then
one week, finally only twenty-four hours&rsquo; time. The Assembly orders an
immediate explanation Changarnier rises and declares that this order never
existed; he adds that he would ever hasten to respond to the calls of the
National Assembly, and that, in case of a collision, they could count upon him.
The Assembly receives his utterances with inexpressible applause, and decrees a
vote of confidence to him. It thereby resign its own powers; it decrees its own
impotence and the omnipotence of the Army by committing itself to the private
protection of a general. But the general, in turn, deceives himself when he
places at the Assembly&rsquo;s disposal and against Bonaparte a power that he
holds only as a fief from that same Bonaparte, and when, on his part, he
expects protection from this Parliament, from his protege&rsquo;, itself
needful of protection. But Changarnier has faith in the mysterious power with
which since January, 1849, he had been clad by the bourgeoisie. He takes
himself for the Third Power, standing beside the other Powers of Government. He
shares the faith of all the other heroes, or rather saints, of this epoch,
whose greatness consists but in the interested good opinion that their own
party holds of them, and who shrink into every-day figures so soon as
circumstances invite them to perform miracles. Infidelity is, indeed, the
deadly enemy of these supposed heroes and real saints. Hence their virtuously
proud indignation at the unenthusiastic wits and scoffers.
</p>

<p>
That same evening the Ministers were summoned to the Elysee; Bonaparte presses
the removal of Changarnier; five Ministers refuse to sign the order; the
&ldquo;Moniteur&rdquo; announces a Ministerial crisis; and the party of Order
threatens the formation of a Parliamentary army under the command of
Changarnier. The party of Order had the constitutional power hereto. It needed
only to elect Changarnier President of the National Assembly in order to make a
requisition for whatever military forces it needed for its own safety. It could
do this all the more safely, seeing that Changarnier still stood at the head of
the Army and of the Parisian National Guard, and only lay in wait to be
summoned, together with the Army. The Bonapartist press did not even dare to
question the right of the National Assembly to issue a direct requisition for
troops;&mdash;a legal scruple, that, under the given circumstances, did not
promise success. That the Army would have obeyed the orders of the National
Assembly is probable, when it is considered that Bonaparte had to look eight
days all over Paris to find two generals&mdash;Baraguay d&rsquo;Hilliers and
St. Jean d&rsquo;Angley&mdash;who declared themselves ready to countersign the
order cashiering Changamier. That, however, the party of Order would have found
in its own ranks and in the parliament the requisite vote for such a decision
is more than doubtful, when it is considered that, eight days later, 286 votes
pulled away from it, and that, as late as December, 1851, at the last decisive
hour, the Mountain rejected a similar proposition. Nevertheless, the burgraves
might still have succeeded in driving the mass of their party to an act of
heroism, consisting in feeling safe behind a forest of bayonets, and in
accepting the services of the Army, which found itself deserted in its camp.
Instead of this, the Messieurs Burgraves betook themselves to the Elysee on the
evening of January 6, with the view of inducing Bonaparte, by means of politic
words and considerations, to drop the removal of Changarnier. Him whom we must
convince we recognize as the master of the situation. Bonaparte, made to feel
secure by this step, appoints on January 12 a new Ministry, in which the
leaders of the old, Fould and Baroche, are retained. St Jean d&rsquo;Angley
becomes Minister of War; the &ldquo;Moniteur&rdquo; announces the decree
cashiering Changarnier; his command is divided up between Baraguay
d&rsquo;Hilliers, who receives the First Division, and Perrot, who is placed
over the National Guard. The &ldquo;Bulwark of Society&rdquo; is turned down;
and, although no dog barks over the event, in the Bourses the stock quotations
rise.
</p>

<p>
By repelling the Army, that, in Changarnier&rsquo;s person, put itself at its
disposal, and thus irrevocably stood up against the President, the party of
Order declares that the bourgeoisie has lost its vocation to reign. Already
there was no parliamentary Ministry. By losing, furthermore, the handle to the
Army and to the National Guard, what instrument of force was there left to the
National Assembly in order to maintain both the usurped power of the parliament
over the people, and its constitutional power over the President? None. All
that was left to it was the appeal to peaceful principles, that itself had
always explained as &ldquo;general rules&rdquo; merely, to be prescribed to
third parties, and only in order to enable itself to move all the more freely.
With the removal of Changarnier, with the transfer of the military power to
Bonaparte, closes the first part of the period that we are considering, the
period of the struggle between the party of Order and the Executive power. The
war between the two powers is now openly declared; it is conducted openly; but
only after the party of Order has lost both arms and soldier. With-out a
Ministry, without any army, without a people, without the support of public
opinion; since its election law of May 31, no longer the representative of the
sovereign nation sans eyes, sans ears, sans teeth, sans everything, the
National Assembly had gradually converted itself into a French Parliament of
olden days, that must leave all action to the Government, and content itself
with growling remonstrances &ldquo;post festum.&rdquo; [#4 After the act is
done; after the fact.]
</p>

<p>
The party of Order receives the new Ministry with a storm of indignation.
General Bedeau calls to mind the mildness of the Permanent Committee during the
vacation, and the excessive prudence with which it had renounced the privilege
of disclosing its minutes. Now, the Minister of the Interior himself insists
upon the disclosure of these minutes, that have now, of course, become dull as
stagnant waters, reveal no new facts, and fall without making the slightest
effect upon the blase public. Upon Remusat&rsquo;s proposition, the National
Assembly retreats into its Committees, and appoints a &ldquo;Committee on
Extraordinary Measures.&rdquo; Paris steps all the less out of the ruts of its
daily routine, seeing that business is prosperous at the time, the
manufactories busy, the prices of cereals low, provisions abundant, the savings
banks receiving daily new deposits. The &ldquo;extraordinary measures,&rdquo;
that the parliament so noisily announced fizzle out on January 18 in a vote of
lack of confidence against the Ministry, without General Changarnier&rsquo;s
name being even mentioned. The party of Order was forced to frame its motion in
that way so as to secure the votes of the republicans, because, of all the acts
of the Ministry, Changarnier&rsquo;s dismissal only was the very one they
approved, while the party of Order cannot in fact, condemn the other
Ministerial acts which it had itself dictated. The January 18 vote of lack of
confidence was decided by 415 ayes against 286 nays. It was, accordingly put
through by a coalition of the uncompromising Legitimists and Orleanists with
the pure republicans and the Mountain. Thus it revealed the fact that, in its
conflicts with Bonaparte, not only the Ministry, not only the Army, but also
its independent parliamentary majority; that a troop of Representatives had
deserted its camp out of a fanatic zeal for harmony, out of fear of fight, out
of lassitude, out of family considerations for the salaries of relatives in
office, out of speculations on vacancies in the Ministry (Odillon Barrot), or
out of that unmitigated selfishness that causes the average bourgeois to be
ever inclined to sacrifice the interests of his class to this or that private
motive. The Bonapartist Representatives belonged from the start to the party of
Order only in the struggle against the revolution. The leader of the Catholic
party, Montalembert, already then threw his influence in the scale of
Bonaparte, since he despaired of the vitality of the parliamentary party.
Finally, the leaders of this party itself, Thiers and Berryer&mdash;the
Orleanist and the Legitimist&mdash;were compelled to proclaim themselves openly
as republicans; to admit that their heart favored royalty, but their head the
republic; that their parliamentary republic was the only possible form for the
rule of the bourgeoisie Thus were they compelled to brand, before the eyes of
the bourgeois class itself, as an intrigue&mdash;as dangerous as it was
senseless&mdash;the restoration plans, which they continued to pursue
indefatigably behind the back of the parliament.
</p>

<p>
The January 18 vote of lack of confidence struck the Ministers, not the
President. But it was not the Ministry, it was the President who had deposed
Changarnier. Should the party of Order place Bonaparte himself under charges?
On account of his restoration hankerings? These only supplemented their own. On
account of his conspiracy at the military reviews and of the &ldquo;Society of
December 10&rdquo;? They had long since buried these subjects under simple
orders of business. On account of the discharge of the hero of January 29 and
June 13, of the man who, in May, 1850, threatened, in case of riot, to set
Paris on fire at all its four corners? Their allies of the Mountain and
Cavaignac did not even allow them to console the fallen &ldquo;Bulwark of
Society&rdquo; with an official testimony of their sympathy. They themselves
could not deny the constitutional right of the President to remove a General.
They stormed only because he made an unparliamentary use of his constitutional
right. Had they not themselves constantly made an unconstitutional use of their
parliamentary prerogative, notably by the abolition of universal suffrage?
Consequently they were reminded to move exclusively within parliamentary
bounds. Indeed, it required that peculiar disease, a disease that, since 1848,
has raged over the whole continent, &ldquo;Parliamentary
Idiocy,&rdquo;&mdash;that fetters those whom it infects to an imaginary world,
and robs them of all sense, all remembrance, all understanding of the rude
outside world;&mdash;it required this &ldquo;Parliamentary Idiocy&rdquo; in
order that the party of Order, which had, with its own hands, destroyed all the
conditions for parliamentary power, and, in its struggle with the other
classes, was obliged to destroy them, still should consider its parliamentary
victories as victories, and imagine it hit the President by striking his
Ministers. They only afforded him an opportunity to humble the National
Assembly anew in the eyes of the nation. On January 20, the
&ldquo;Moniteur&rdquo; announced that the whole the dismissal of the whole
Ministry was accepted. Under the pretext that none of the parliamentary parties
had any longer the majority&mdash;as proved by the January 18 vote, that fruit
of the coalition between mountain and royalists&mdash;, and, in order to await
the re-formation of a majority, Bonaparte appointed a so-called transition
Ministry, of whom no member belonged to the parliament-altogether wholly
unknown and insignificant individuals; a Ministry of mere clerks and
secretaries. The party of Order could now wear itself out in the game with
these puppets; the Executive power no longer considered it worth the while to
be seriously represented in the National Assembly. By this act Bonaparte
concentrated the whole executive power all the more securely in his own person;
he had all the freer elbow-room to exploit the same to his own ends, the more
his Ministers became mere supernumeraries.
</p>

<p>
The party of Order, now allied with the Mountain, revenged itself by rejecting
the Presidential endowment project of 1,800.000 francs, which the chief of the
&ldquo;Society of December 10&rdquo; had compelled his Ministerial clerks to
present to the Assembly. This time a majority of only 102 votes carried the day
accordingly since January 18, 27 more votes had fallen off: the dissolution of
the party of Order was making progress. Lest any one might for a moment be
deceived touching the meaning of its coalition with the Mountain, the party of
Order simultaneously scorned even to consider a motion, signed by 189 members
of the Mountain, for a general amnesty to political criminals. It was enough
that the Minister of the Interior, one Baisse, declared that the national
tranquility was only in appearance, in secret there reigned deep agitation, in
secret, ubiquitous societies were organized, the democratic papers were
preparing to reappear, the reports from the Departments were unfavorable, the
fugitives of Geneva conducted a conspiracy via Lyons through the whole of
southern France, France stood on the verge of an industrial and commercial
crisis, the manufacturers of Roubaix were working shorter hours, the prisoners
of Belle Isle had mutinied;&mdash;it was enough that even a mere Baisse should
conjure up the &ldquo;Red Spectre&rdquo; for the party of Order to reject
without discussion a motion that would have gained for the National Assembly a
tremendous popularity, and thrown Bonaparte back into its arms. Instead of
allowing itself to be intimidated by the Executive power with the perspective
of fresh disturbances, the party of Order should rather have allowed a little
elbow-room to the class struggle, in order to secure the dependence of the
Executive upon itself. But it did not feel itself equal to the task of playing
with fire.
</p>

<p>
Meanwhile, the so-called transition Ministry vegetated along until the middle
of April. Bonaparte tired out and fooled the National Assembly with constantly
new Ministerial combinations. Now he seemed to intend constructing a republican
Ministry with Lamartine and Billault; then, a parliamentary one with the
inevitable Odillon Barrot, whose name must never be absent when a dupe is
needed; then again, a Legitimist, with Batismenil and Lenoist d&rsquo;Azy; and
yet again, an Orleansist, with Malleville. While thus throwing the several
factions of the party of Order into strained relations with one another, and
alarming them all with the prospect of a republican Ministry, together with the
there-upon inevitable restoration of universal suffrage, Bonaparte
simultaneously raises in the bourgeoisie the conviction that his sincere
efforts for a parliamentary Ministry are wrecked upon the irreconcilable
antagonism of the royalist factions. All the while the bourgeoisie was
clamoring louder and louder for a &ldquo;strong Government,&rdquo; and was
finding it less and less pardonable to leave France &ldquo;without an
administration,&rdquo; in proportion as a general commercial crisis seemed to
be under way and making recruits for Socialism in the cities, as did the
ruinously low price of grain in the rural districts. Trade became daily duller;
the unemployed hands increased perceptibly; in Paris, at least 10,000
workingmen were without bread; in Rouen, Muehlhausen, Lyons, Roubaix,
Tourcoign, St. Etienue, Elbeuf, etc., numerous factories stood idle. Under
these circumstances Bonaparte could venture to restore, on April 11, the
Ministry of January 18; Messieurs Rouher, Fould, Baroche, etc., reinforced by
Mr. Leon Faucher, whom the constitutive assembly had, during its last days,
unanimously, with the exception of five Ministerial votes, branded with a vote
of censure for circulating false telegraphic dispatches. Accordingly, the
National Assembly had won a victory on January 18 over the Ministry, it had,
for the period of three months, been battling with Bonaparte, and all this
merely to the end that, on April 11, Fould and Baroche should be able to take
up the Puritan Faucher as third in their ministerial league.
</p>

<p>
In November, 1849, Bonaparte had satisfied himself with an Unparliamentary, in
January, 1851, with an Extra-Parliamentary, on April 11, he felt strong enough
to form an Anti-Parliamentary Ministry, that harmoniously combined within
itself the votes of lack of confidence of both assemblies-the constitutive and
the legislative, the republican and the royalist. This ministerial progression
was a thermometer by which the parliament could measure the ebbing temperature
of its own life. This had sunk so low by the end of April that, at a personal
interview, Persigny could invite Changarnier to go over to the camp of the
President. Bonaparte, he assured Changarnier, considered the influence of the
National Assembly to be wholly annihilated, and already the proclamation was
ready, that was to be published after the steadily contemplated, but again
accidentally postponed &ldquo;coup d&rsquo;etat.&rdquo; Changarnier
communicated this announcement of its death to the leaders of the party of
Order; but who was there to believe a bed-bug bite could kill? The parliament,
however beaten, however dissolved, however death-tainted it was, could not
persuade itself to see, in the duel with the grotesque chief of the
&ldquo;Society of December 10,&rdquo; anything but a duel with a bed-bug. But
Bonaparte answered the party of Order as Agesilaus did King Agis: &ldquo;I seem
to you an ant; but shall one day be a lion.&rdquo;
</p>

</div><!--end chapter-->

<div class="chapter">

<h2><a name="chap06"></a>VI.</h2>

<p>
The coalition with the Mountain and the pure republicans, to which the party of
Order found itself condemned in its fruitless efforts to keep possession of the
military and to reconquer supreme control over the Executive power, proved
conclusively that it had forfeited its independent parliamentary majority. The
calendar and clock merely gave, on May 29, the signal for its complete
dissolution. With May 29 commenced the last year of the life of the National
Assembly. It now had to decide for the unchanged continuance or the revision of
the Constitution. But a revision of the Constitution meant not only the
definitive supremacy of either the bourgeoisie of the small traders&rsquo;
democracy, of either democracy or proletarian anarchy, of either a
parliamentary republic or Bonaparte, it meant also either Orleans or Bourbon!
Thus fell into the very midst of the parliament the apple of discord, around
which the conflict of interests, that cut up the party of Order into hostile
factions, was to kindle into an open conflagration. The party of Order was a
combination of heterogeneous social substances. The question of revision raised
a political temperature, in which the product was reduced to its original
components.
</p>

<p>
The interest of the Bonapartists in the revision was simple: they were above
all concerned in the abolition of Article 45, which forbade Bonaparte&rsquo;s
reelection and the prolongation of his term. Not less simple seemed to be the
position of the republicans; they rejected all revision, seeing in that only a
general conspiracy against the republic; as they disposed over more than
one-fourth of the votes in the National Assembly, and, according to the
Constitution, a three-fourths majority was requisite to revise and to call a
revisory convention, they needed only to count their own votes to be certain of
victory. Indeed, they were certain of it.
</p>

<p>
Over and against these clear-cut positions, the party of Order found itself
tangled in inextricable contradictions. If it voted against the revision, it
endangered the &ldquo;status quo,&rdquo; by leaving to Bonaparte only one
expedient&mdash;that of violence and handing France over, on May 2, 1852, at
the very time of election, a prey to revolutionary anarchy, with a President
whose authority was at an end; with a parliament that the party had long ceased
to own, and with a people that it meant to re-conquer. If it voted
constitutionally for a revision, it knew that it voted in vain and would
constitutionally have to go under before the veto of the republicans. If,
unconstitutionally, it pronounced a simple majority binding, it could hope to
control the revolution only in case it surrendered unconditionally to the
domination of the Executive power: it then made Bonaparte master of the
Constitution, of the revision and of itself. A merely partial revision,
prolonging the term of the President, opened the way to imperial usurpation; a
general revision, shortening the existence of the republic, threw the dynastic
claims into an inevitable conflict: the conditions for a Bourbon and those for
an Orleanist restoration were not only different, they mutually excluded each
other.
</p>

<p>
The parliamentary republic was more than a neutral ground on which the two
factions of the French bourgeoisie&mdash;Legitimists and Orleanists, large
landed property and manufacture&mdash;could lodge together with equal rights.
It was the indispensable condition for their common reign, the only form of
government in which their common class interest could dominate both the claims
of their separate factions and all the other classes of society. As royalists,
they relapsed into their old antagonism into the struggle for the overlordship
of either landed property or of money; and the highest expression of this
antagonism, its personification, were the two kings themselves, their
dynasties. Hence the resistance of the party of Order to the recall of the
Bourbons.
</p>

<p>
The Orleanist Representative Creton moved periodically in 1849, 1850 and 1851
the repeal of the decree of banishment against the royal families; as
periodically did the parliament present the spectacle of an Assembly of
royalists who stubbornly shut to their banished kings the door through which
they could return home. Richard III murdered Henry VI, with the remark that he
was too good for this world, and belonged in heaven. They declared France too
bad to have her kings back again. Forced by the power of circumstances, they
had become republicans, and repeatedly sanctioned the popular mandate that
exiled their kings from France.
</p>

<p>
The revision of the Constitution, and circumstances compelled its
consideration, at once made uncertain not only the republic itself, but also
the joint reign of the two bourgeois factions; and it revived, with the
possibility of the monarchy, both the rivalry of interests which these two
factions had alternately allowed to preponderate, and the struggle for the
supremacy of the one over the other. The diplomats of the party of Order
believed they could allay the struggle by a combination of the two dynasties
through a so-called fusion of the royalist parties and their respective royal
houses. The true fusion of the restoration and the July monarchy was, however,
the parliamentary republic, in which the Orleanist and Legitimist colors were
dissolved, and the bourgeois species vanished in the plain bourgeois, in the
bourgeois genus. Now however, the plan was to turn the Orleanist Legitimist and
the Legitimist Orleanist. The kingship, in which their antagonism was
personified, was to incarnate their unity, the expression of their exclusive
faction interests was to become the expression of their common class interest;
the monarchy was to accomplish what only the abolition of two
monarchies&mdash;the republic could and did accomplish. This was the
philosopher&rsquo;s stone, for the finding of which the doctors of the party of
Order were breaking their heads. As though the Legitimate monarchy ever could
be the monarchy of the industrial bourgeoisie, or the bourgeois monarchy the
monarchy of the hereditary landed aristocracy! As though landed property and
industry could fraternize under one crown, where the crown could fall only upon
one head, the head of the older or the younger brother! As though industry
could at all deal upon a footing of equality with landed property, so long as
landed property did not decide itself to become industrial. If Henry V were to
die tomorrow, the Count of Paris would not, therefore, become the king of the
Legitimists, unless he ceased to be the King of the Orleanists. Nevertheless,
the fusion philosophers, who became louder in the measure that the question of
revision stepped to the fore, who had provided themselves with a daily organ in
the &ldquo;Assemblee Nationale,&rdquo; who, even at this very moment (February,
1852) are again at work, explained the whole difficulty by the opposition and
rivalries of the two dynasties. The attempts to reconcile the family of Orleans
with Henry V., begun since the death of Louis Philippe, but, as all these
dynastic intrigues carried on only during the vacation of the National
Assembly, between acts, behind the scenes, more as a sentimental coquetry with
the old superstition than as a serious affair, were now raised by the party of
Order to the dignity of a great State question, and were conducted upon the
public stage, instead of, as heretofore in the amateurs&rsquo; theater.
Couriers flew from Paris to Venice, from Venice to Claremont, from Claremont to
Paris. The Duke of Chambord issues a manifesto in which he announces not his
own, but the &ldquo;national&rdquo; restoration, &ldquo;with the aid of all the
members of his family.&rdquo; The Oleanist Salvandy throws himself at the feet
of Henry V. The Legitimist leaders Berryer, Benoit d&rsquo;Azy, St. Priest
travel to Claremont, to persuade the Orleans; but in vain. The fusionists learn
too late that the interests of the two bourgeois factions neither lose in
exclusiveness nor gain in pliancy where they sharpen to a point in the form of
family interests, of the interests of the two royal houses. When Henry V.
recognized the Count of Paris as his successor&mdash;the only success that the
fusion could at best score&mdash;the house of Orleans acquired no claim that
the childlessness of Henry V. had not already secured to it; but, on the other
hand, it lost all the claims that it had conquered by the July revolution. It
renounced its original claims, all the title, that, during a struggle nearly
one hundred years long, it had wrested from the older branch of the Bourbons;
it bartered away its historic prerogative, the prerogative of its family-tree.
Fusion, accordingly, amounted to nothing else than the resignation of the house
of Orleans, its Legitimist resignation, a repentful return from the Protestant
State Church into the Catholic;&mdash;a return, at that, that did not even
place it on the throne that it had lost, but on the steps of the throne on
which it was born. The old Orleanist Ministers Guizot, Duchatel, etc., who
likewise hastened to Claremont, to advocate the fusion, represented in fact
only the nervous reaction of the July monarchy; despair, both in the citizen
kingdom and the kingdom of citizens; the superstitious belief in legitimacy as
the last amulet against anarchy. Mediators, in their imagination, between
Orleans and Bourbon, they were in reality but apostate Orleanists, and as such
were they received by the Prince of Joinville. The virile, bellicose part of
the Orleanists, on the contrary&mdash;Thiers, Baze, etc.&mdash;, persuaded the
family of Louis Philippe all the easier that, seeing every plan for the
immediate restoration of the monarchy presupposed the fusion of the two
dynasties, and every plan for fusion the resignation of the house of Orleans,
it corresponded, on the contrary, wholly with the tradition of its ancestors to
recognize the republic for the time being, and to wait until circumstances
permitted I the conversion of the Presidential chair into a throne.
Joinville&rsquo;s candidacy was set afloat as a rumor, public curiosity was
held in suspense, and a few months later, after the revision was rejected,
openly proclaimed in September.
</p>

<p>
Accordingly, the essay of a royalist fusion between Orleanists and Legitimists
did not miscarry only, it broke up their parliamentary fusion, the republican
form that they had adopted in common, and it decomposed the party of Order into
its original components. But the wider the breach became between Venice and
Claremont, the further they drifted away from each I other, and the greater the
progress made by the Joinville agitation, all the more active and earnest
became the negotiations between Faucher, the Minister of Bonaparte, and the
Legitimists.
</p>

<p>
The dissolution of the party of Order went beyond its original elements. Each
of the two large factions fell in turn into new fragments. It was as if all the
old political shades, that formerly fought and crowded one another within each
of the two circles&mdash;be it that of the Legitimists or that of the
Orleanists&mdash;, had been thawed out like dried infusoria by contact with
water; as if they had recovered enough vitality to build their own groups and
assert their own antagonisms. The Legitimists dreamed they were back amidst the
quarrels between the Tuileries and the pavilion Marsan, between Villele and
Polignac; the Orleanists lived anew through the golden period of the tourneys
between Guizot, Mole, Broglie, Thiers, and Odillon Barrot.
</p>

<p>
That portion of the party of Order&mdash;eager for a revision of the
Constitution but disagreed upon the extent of revision&mdash;made up of the
Legitimists under Berryer and Falloux and of those under Laroche Jacquelein,
together with the tired-out Orleanists under Mole, Broglie, Montalembert and
Odillon Barrot, united with the Bonapartist Representatives in the following
indefinite and loosely drawn motion:
</p>

<p>
&ldquo;The undersigned Representatives, with the end in view of restoring to
the nation the full exercise of her sovereignty, move that the Constitution be
revised.&rdquo;
</p>

<p>
At the same time, however, they unanimously declared through their spokesman,
Tocqueville, that the National Assembly had not the right to move the abolition
of the republic, that right being vested only in a Constitutional Convention.
For the rest, the Constitution could be revised only in a &ldquo;legal&rdquo;
way, that is to say, only in case a three-fourths majority decided in favor of
revision, as prescribed by the Constitution. After a six days&rsquo; stormy
debate, the revision was rejected on July 19, as was to be foreseen. In its
favor 446 votes were cast, against it 278. The resolute Oleanists, Thiers,
Changarnier, etc., voted with the republicans and the Mountain.
</p>

<p>
Thus the majority of the parliament pronounced itself against the Constitution,
while the Constitution itself pronounced itself for the minority, and its
decision binding. But had not the party of Order on May 31, 1850, had it not on
June 13, 1849, subordinated the Constitution to the parliamentary majority? Did
not the whole republic they had been hitherto having rest upon the
subordination of the Constitutional clauses to the majority decisions of the
parliament? Had they not left to the democrats the Old Testament superstitious
belief in the letter of the law, and had they not chastised the democrats
therefor? At this moment, however, revision meant nothing else than the
continuance of the Presidential power, as the continuance of the Constitution
meant nothing else than the deposition of Bonaparte. The parliament had
pronounced itself for him, but the Constitution pronounced itself against the
parliament. Accordingly, he acted both in the sense of the parliament when he
tore up the Constitution, and in the sense of the Constitution when he chased
away the parliament.
</p>

<p>
The parliament pronounced the Constitution, and, thereby, also, its own reign,
&ldquo;outside of the pale of the majority&rdquo;; by its decision, it repealed
the Constitution, and continued the Presidential power, and it at once declared
that neither could the one live nor the other die so long as itself existed.
The feet of those who were to bury it stood at the door. While it was debating
the subject of revision, Bonaparte removed General Baraguay d&rsquo;Hilliers,
who showed himself irresolute, from the command of the First Military Division,
and appointed in his place General Magnan, the conqueror of Lyon; the hero of
the December days, one of his own creatures, who already under Louis Philippe,
on the occasion of the Boulogne expedition, had somewhat compromised himself in
his favor.
</p>

<p>
By its decision on the revision, the party of Order proved that it knew neither
how to rule nor how to obey; neither how to live nor how to die; neither how to
bear with the republic nor how to overthrow it; neither how to maintain the
Constitution nor how to throw it overboard; neither how to co-operate with the
President nor how to break with him. From what quarter did it then, look to for
the solution of all the existing perplexities? From the calendar, from the
course of events. It ceased to assume the control of events. It, accordingly,
invited events to don its authority and also the power to which in its struggle
with the people, it had yielded one attribute after another until it finally
stood powerless before the same. To the end that the Executive be able all the
more freely to formulate his plan of campaign against it, strengthen his means
of attack, choose his tools, fortify his positions, the party of Order decided,
in the very midst of this critical moment, to step off the stage, and adjourn
for three months, from August 10 to November 4.
</p>

<p>
Not only was the parliamentary party dissolved into its two great factions, not
only was each of these dissolved within itself, but the party of Order, inside
of the parliament, was at odds with the party of Order, outside of the
parliament. The learned speakers and writers of the bourgeoisie, their tribunes
and their press, in short, the ideologists of the bourgeoisie and the
bourgeoisie itself, the representatives and the represented, stood estranged
from, and no longer understood one another.
</p>

<p>
The Legitimists in the provinces, with their cramped horizon and their
boundless enthusiasm, charged their parliamentary leaders Berryer and Falloux
with desertion to the Bonapartist camp, and with apostacy from Henry V. Their
lilymind [#1 An allusion to the lilies of the Bourbon coat-of-arms] believed in
the fall of man, but not in diplomacy.
</p>

<p>
More fatal and completer, though different, was the breach between the
commercial bourgeoisie and its politicians. It twitted them, not as the
Legitimists did theirs, with having apostatized from their principle, but, on
the contrary, with adhering to principles that had become useless.
</p>

<p>
I have already indicated that, since the entry of Fould in the Ministry, that
portion of the commercial bourgeoisie that had enjoyed the lion&rsquo;s share
in Louis Philippe&rsquo;s reign, to-wit, the aristocracy of finance, had become
Bonapartist. Fould not only represented Bonaparte&rsquo;s interests at the
Bourse, he represented also the interests of the Bourse with Bonaparte. A
passage from the London &ldquo;Economist,&rdquo; the European organ of the
aristocracy of finance, described most strikingly the attitude of this class.
In its issue of February 1, 1851, its Paris correspondent writes: &ldquo;Now we
have it stated from numerous quarters that France wishes above all things for
repose. The President declares it in his message to the Legislative Assembly;
it is echoed from the tribune; it is asserted in the journals; it is announced
from the pulpit; it is demonstrated by the sensitiveness of the public funds at
the least prospect of disturbance, and their firmness the instant it is made
manifest that the Executive is far superior in wisdom and power to the factious
ex-officials of all former governments.&rdquo;
</p>

<p>
In its issue of November 29, 1851, the &ldquo;Economist&rdquo; declares
editorially: &ldquo;The President is now recognized as the guardian of order on
every Stock Exchange of Europe.&rdquo; Accordingly, the Aristocracy of Finance
condemned the parliamentary strife of the party of Order with the Executive as
a &ldquo;disturbance of order,&rdquo; and hailed every victory of the President
over its reputed representatives as a &ldquo;victory of order.&rdquo; Under
&ldquo;aristocracy of finance&rdquo; must not, however, be understood merely
the large bond negotiators and speculators in government securities, of whom it
may be readily understood that their interests and the interests of the
Government coincide. The whole modern money trade, the whole banking industry,
is most intimately interwoven with the public credit. Part of their business
capital requires to be invested in interest-bearing government securities that
are promptly convertible into money; their deposits, i. e., the capital placed
at their disposal and by them distributed among merchants and industrial
establishments, flow partly out of the dividends on government securities. The
whole money market, together with the priests of this market, is part and
parcel of this &ldquo;aristocracy of finance&rdquo; at every epoch when the
stability of the government is to them synonymous with &ldquo;Moses and his
prophets.&rdquo; This is so even before things have reached the present stage
when every deluge threatens to carry away the old governments themselves.
</p>

<p>
But the industrial Bourgeoisie also, in its fanaticism for order, was annoyed
at the quarrels of the Parliamentary party of Order with the Executive. Thiers,
Anglas, Sainte Beuve, etc., received, after their vote of January 18, on the
occasion of the discharge of Changarnier, public reprimands from their
constituencies, located in the industrial districts, branding their coalition
with the Mountain as an act of high treason to the cause of order. Although,
true enough, the boastful, vexatious and petty intrigues, through which the
struggle of the party of Order with the President manifested itself, deserved
no better reception, yet notwithstanding, this bourgeois party, that expects of
its representatives to allow the military power to pass without resistance out
of the hands of their own Parliament into those of an adventurous Pretender, is
not worth even the intrigues that were wasted in its behalf. It showed that the
struggle for the maintenance of their public interests, of their class
interests, of their political power only incommoded and displeased them, as a
disturbance of their private business.
</p>

<p>
The bourgeois dignitaries of the provincial towns, the magistrates, commercial
judges, etc., with hardly any exception, received Bonaparte everywhere on his
excursions in the most servile manner, even when, as in Dijon, he attacked the
National Assembly and especially the party of Order without reserve.
</p>

<p>
Business being brisk, as still at the beginning of 1851, the commercial
bourgeoisie stormed against every Parliamentary strife, lest business be put
out of temper. Business being dull, as from the end of February, 1851, on, the
bourgeoisie accused the Parliamentary strifes as the cause of the stand-still,
and clamored for quiet in order that business may revive. The debates on
revision fell just in the bad times. Seeing the question now was the to be or
not to be of the existing form of government, the bourgeoisie felt itself all
the more justified in demanding of its Representatives that they put an end to
this tormenting provisional status, and preserve the &ldquo;status quo.&rdquo;
This was no contradiction. By putting an end to the provisional status, it
understood its continuance, the indefinite putting off of the moment when a
final decision had to be arrived at. The &ldquo;status quo&rdquo; could be
preserved in only one of two ways: either by the prolongation of
Bonaparte&rsquo;s term of office or by his constitutional withdrawal and the
election of Cavaignac. A part of the bourgeoisie preferred the latter solution,
and knew no better advice to give their Representatives than to be silent, to
avoid the burning point. If their Representatives did not speak, so argued
they, Bonaparte would not act. They desired an ostrich Parliament that would
hide its head, in order not to be seen. Another part of the bourgeoisie
preferred that Bonaparte, being once in the Presidential chair, be left in the
Presidential chair, in order that everything might continue to run in the old
ruts. They felt indignant that their Parliament did not openly break the
Constitution and resign without further ado. The General Councils of the
Departments, these provisional representative bodies of the large bourgeoisie,
who had adjourned during the vacation of the National Assembly since August 25,
pronounced almost unanimously for revision, that is to say, against the
Parliament and for Bonaparte.
</p>

<p>
Still more unequivocally than in its falling out with its Parliamentary
Representatives, did the bourgeoisie exhibit its wrath at its literary
Representatives, its own press. The verdicts of the bourgeois juries,
inflicting excessive fines and shameless sentences of imprisonment for every
attack of the bourgeois press upon the usurping aspirations of Bonaparte, for
every attempt of the press to defend the political rights of the bourgeoisie
against the Executive power, threw, not France alone, but all Europe into
amazement.
</p>

<p>
While on the one hand, as I have indicated, the Parliamentary party of Order
ordered itself to keep the peace by screaming for peace; and while it
pronounced the political rule of the bourgeoisie irreconcilable with the safety
and the existence of the bourgeoisie, by destroying with its own hands in its
struggle with the other classes of society all the conditions for its own, the
Parliamentary regime; on the other hand, the mass of the bourgeoisie, outside
of the Parliament, urged Bonaparte&mdash;by its servility towards the
President, by its insults to the Parliament, by the brutal treatment of its own
press&mdash;to suppress and annihilate its speaking and writing organs, its
politicians and its literati, its orators&rsquo; tribune and its press, to the
end that, under the protection of a strong and unhampered Government, it might
ply its own private pursuits in safety. It declared unmistakably that it longed
to be rid of its own political rule, in order to escape the troubles and
dangers of ruling.
</p>

<p>
And this bourgeoisie, that had rebelled against even the Parliamentary and
literary contest for the supremacy of its own class, that had betrayed its
leaders in this contest, it now has the effrontery to blame the proletariat for
not having risen in its defence in a bloody struggle, in a struggle for life!
Those bourgeois, who at every turn sacrificed their common class interests to
narrow and dirty private interests, and who demanded a similar sacrifice from
their own Representatives, now whine that the proletariat has sacrificed their
idea-political to its own material interests! This bourgeois class now strikes
the attitude of a pure soul, misunderstood and abandoned, at a critical moment,
by the proletariat, that has been misled by the Socialists. And its cry finds a
general echo in the bourgeois world. Of course, I do not refer to German
crossroad politicians and kindred blockheads. I refer, for instance, to the
&ldquo;Economist,&rdquo; which, as late as November 29, 1851, that is to say,
four days before the &ldquo;coup d&rsquo;etat&rdquo; pronounced Bonaparte the
&ldquo;Guardian of Order&rdquo; and Thiers and Berryer
&ldquo;Anarchists,&rdquo; and as early as December 27, 1851, after Bonaparte
had silenced those very Anarchists, cries out about the treason committed by
&ldquo;the ignorant, untrained and stupid proletaires against the skill,
knowledge, discipline, mental influence, intellectual resources an moral weight
of the middle and upper ranks.&rdquo; The stupid, ignorant and contemptible
mass was none other than the bourgeoisie itself.
</p>

<p>
France had, indeed; experienced a sort of commercial crisis in 1851. At the end
of February, there was a falling off of exports as compared with 1850; in
March, business languished and factories shut down; in April, the condition of
the industrial departments seemed as desperate as after the February days; in
May, business did not yet pick up; as late as June 28, the reports of the Bank
of France revealed through a tremendous increase of deposits and an equal
decrease of loans on exchange notes, the standstill of production; not until
the middle of October did a steady improvement of business set in. The French
bourgeoisie accounted for this stagnation of business with purely political
reasons; it imputed the dull times to the strife between the Parliament and the
Executive power, to the uncertainty of a provisional form of government, to the
alarming prospects of May 2, 1852. I shall not deny that all these causes did
depress some branches of industry in Paris and in the Departments. At any rate,
this effect of political circumstances was only local and trifling. Is there
any other proof needed than that the improvement in business set in at the very
time when the political situation was growing worse, when the political horizon
was growing darker, and when at every moment a stroke of lightning was expected
out of the Elysee&mdash;in the middle of October? The French bourgeois, whose
&ldquo;skill, knowledge, mental influence and intellectual resources,&rdquo;
reach no further than his nose, could, moreover, during the whole period of the
Industrial Exposition in London, have struck with his nose the cause of his own
business misery. At the same time that, in France, the factories were being
closed, commercial failures broke out in England. While the industrial panic
reached its height during April and May in France, in England the commercial
panic reached its height in April and May. The same as the French, the English
woolen industries suffered, and, as the French, so did the English silk
manufacture. Though the English cotton factories went on working, it,
nevertheless, was not with the same old profit of 1849 and 1850. The only
difference was this: that in France, the crisis was an industrial, in England
it was a commercial one; that while in France the factories stood still, they
spread themselves in England, but under less favorable circumstances than they
had done the years just previous; that, in France, the export, in England, the
import trade suffered the heaviest blows. The common cause, which, as a matter
of fact, is not to be looked for with-in the bounds of the French political
horizon, was obvious. The years 1849 and 1850 were years of the greatest
material prosperity, and of an overproduction that did not manifest itself
until 1851. This was especially promoted at the beginning of 1851 by the
prospect of the Industrial Exposition; and, as special causes, there were
added, first, the failure of the cotton crop of 1850 and 1851; second, the
certainty of a larger cotton crop than was expected: first, the rise, then the
sudden drop; in short, the oscillations of the cotton market. The crop of raw
silk in France had been below the average. Finally, the manufacture of woolen
goods had received such an increment since 1849, that the production of wool
could not keep step with it, and the price of the raw material rose greatly out
of proportion to the price of the manufactured goods. Accordingly, we have here
in the raw material of three staple articles a threefold material for a
commercial crisis. Apart from these special circumstances, the seeming crisis
of the year 1851 was, after all, nothing but the halt that overproduction and
overspeculation make regularly in the course of the industrial cycle, before
pulling all their forces together in order to rush feverishly over the last
stretch, and arrive again at their point of departure&mdash;the General
Commercial Crisis. At such intervals in the history of trade, commercial
failures break out in England, while, in France, industry itself is stopped,
partly because it is compelled to retreat through the competition of the
English, that, at such times becomes resistless in all markets, and partly
because, as an industry of luxuries, it is affected with preference by every
stoppage of trade. Thus, besides the general crisis, France experiences her own
national crises, which, how-ever, are determined by and conditioned upon the
general state of the world&rsquo;s market much more than by local French
influences. It will not be devoid of interest to contrast the prejudgment of
the French bourgeois with the judgment of the English bourgeois. One of the
largest Liverpool firms writes in its yearly report of trade for 1851:
&ldquo;Few years have more completely disappointed the expectations entertained
at their beginning than the year that has just passed; instead of the great
prosperity, that was unanimously looked forward to, it proved itself one of the
most discouraging years during the last quarter of a century. This applies, of
course, only to the mercantile, not to the industrial classes. And yet, surely
there were grounds at the beginning of the year from which to draw a contrary
conclusion; the stock of products was scanty, capital was abundant, provisions
cheap, a rich autumn was assured, there was uninterrupted peace on the
continent and no political and financial disturbances at home; indeed, never
were the wings of trade more unshackled. . . . What is this unfavorable result
to be ascribed to? We believe to excessive trade in imports as well as exports.
If our merchants do not themselves rein in their activity, nothing can keep us
going, except a panic every three years.&rdquo;
</p>

<p>
Imagine now the French bourgeois, in the midst of this business panic, having
his trade-sick brain tortured, buzzed at and deafened with rumors of a
&ldquo;coup d&rsquo;etat&rdquo; and the restoration of universal suffrage; with
the struggle between the Legislature and the Executive; with the Fronde warfare
between Orleanists and Legitimists; with communistic conspiracies in southern
France; with alleged Jacqueries [#2 Peasant revolts] in the Departments of
Nievre and Cher; with the advertisements of the several candidates for
President; with &ldquo;social solutions&rdquo; huckstered about by the
journals; with the threats of the republicans to uphold, arms in hand, the
Constitution and universal suffrage; with the gospels, according to the
emigrant heroes &ldquo;in partibus,&rdquo; who announced the destruction of the
world for May 2,&mdash;imagine that, and one can understand how the bourgeois,
in this unspeakable and noisy confusion of fusion, revision, prorogation,
constitution, conspiracy, coalition, emigration, usurpation and revolution,
blurts out at his parliamentary republic: &ldquo;Rather an End With Fright,
Than a Fright Without End.&rdquo;
</p>

<p>
Bonaparte understood this cry. His perspicacity was sharpened by the growing
anxiety of the creditors&rsquo; class, who, with every sunset, that brought
nearer the day of payment, the 2d of May, 1852, saw in the motion of the stars
a protest against their earthly drafts. They had become regular astrologers The
National Assembly had cut off Bonaparte&rsquo;s hope of a constitutional
prolongation of his term; the candidature of the Prince of Joinville tolerated
no further vacillation.
</p>

<p>
If ever an event cast its shadow before it long before its occurrence, it was
Bonaparte&rsquo;s &ldquo;coup d&rsquo;etat.&rdquo; Already on January 29, 1849,
barely a month after his election, he had made to Changarnier a proposition to
that effect. His own Prime Minister. Odillon Barrot, had covertly, in 1849, and
Thiers openly in the winter of 1850, revealed the scheme of the &ldquo;coup
d&rsquo;etat.&rdquo; In May, 1851, Persigny had again sought to win Changarnier
over to the &ldquo;coup,&rdquo; and the &ldquo;Miessager de
l&rsquo;Assemblee&rdquo; newspaper had published this conversation. At every
parliamentary storm, the Bonapartist papers threatened a &ldquo;coup,&rdquo;
and the nearer the crisis approached, all the louder grew their tone. At the
orgies, that Bonaparte celebrated every night with a swell mob of males and
females, every time the hour of midnight drew nigh and plenteous libations had
loosened the tongues and heated the minds of the revelers, the
&ldquo;coup&rdquo; was resolved upon for the next morning. Swords were then
drawn, glasses clinked, the Representatives were thrown out at the windows, the
imperial mantle fell upon the shoulders of Bonaparte, until the next morning
again drove away the spook, and astonished Paris learned, from not very
reserved Vestals and indiscreet Paladins, the danger it had once more escaped.
During the months of September and October, the rumors of a &ldquo;coup
d&rsquo;etat&rdquo; tumbled close upon one another&rsquo;s heels. At the same
time the shadow gathered color, like a confused daguerreotype. Follow the
issues of the European daily press for the months of September and October, and
items like this will be found literally:
</p>

<p>
&ldquo;Rumors of a &lsquo;coup&rsquo; fill Paris. The capital, it is said, is
to be filled with troops by night and the next morning decrees are to be issued
dissolving the National Assembly, placing the Department of the Seine in state
of siege restoring universal suffrage, and appealing to the people. Bonaparte
is rumored to be looking for Ministers to execute these illegal decrees.&rdquo;
</p>

<p>
The newspaper correspondence that brought this news always close ominously with
&ldquo;postponed.&rdquo; The &ldquo;coup&rdquo; was ever the fixed idea of
Bonaparte. With this idea he had stepped again upon French soil. It had such
full possession of him that he was constantly betraying and blabbing it out. He
was so weak that he was as constantly giving it up again. The shadow of the
&ldquo;coup&rdquo; had become so familiar a spectre to the Parisians, that they
refused to believe it when it finally did appear in flesh and blood.
Consequently, it was neither the reticent backwardness of the chief of the
&ldquo;Society of December 10,&rdquo; nor an unthought of surprise of the
National Assembly that caused the success of the &ldquo;coup.&rdquo; When it
succeeded, it did so despite his indiscretion and with its anticipation&mdash;a
necessary, unavoidable result of the development that had preceded.
</p>

<p>
On October 10, Bonaparte announced to his Ministers his decision to restore
universal suffrage; on the 16th day they handed in their resignations; on the
26th Paris learned of the formation of the Thorigny Ministry. The Prefect of
Police, Carlier, was simultaneously replaced by Maupas; and the chief of the
First Military Division Magnan, concentrated the most reliable regiments in the
capital. On November 4, the National Assembly re-opened its sessions. There was
nothing left for it to do but to repeat, in short recapitulation, the course it
had traversed, and to prove that it had been buried only after it had expired.
The first post that it had forfeited in the struggle with the Executive was the
Ministry. It had solemnly to admit this loss by accepting as genuine the
Thorigny Ministry, which was but a pretence. The permanent Committee had
received Mr. Giraud with laughter when he introduced himself in the name of the
new Ministers. So weak a Ministry for so strong a measure as the restoration of
universal suffrage! The question, however, then was to do nothing in,
everything against the parliament.
</p>

<p>
On the very day of its re-opening, the National Assembly received the message
from Bonaparte demanding the restoration of universal suffrage and the repeal
of the law of May 31, 1850. On the same day, his Ministers introduced a decree
to that effect. The Assembly promptly rejected the motion of urgency made by
the Ministers, but repealed the law itself, on November 13, by a vote of 355
against 348. Thus it once more tore to pieces its own mandate, once more
certified to the fact that it had transformed itself from a freely chosen
representative body of the nation into the usurpatory parliament of a class; it
once more admitted that it had itself severed the muscles that connected the
parliamentary head with the body of the nation.
</p>

<p>
While the Executive power appealed from the National Assembly to the people by
its motion for the restoration of universal suffrage, the Legislative power
appealed from the people to the Army by its &ldquo;Questors&rsquo; Bill.&rdquo;
This bill was to establish its right to immediate requisitions for troops, to
build up a parliamentary army. By thus appointing the Army umpire between
itself and the people, between itself and Bonaparte; by thus recognizing the
Army as the decisive power in the State, the National Assembly was constrained
to admit that it had long given up all claim to supremacy. By debating the
right to make requisitions for troops, instead of forthwith collecting them, it
betrayed its own doubts touching its own power. By thus subsequently rejecting
the &ldquo;Questors&rsquo; Bill,&rdquo; it publicly confessed it impotence. The
bill fell through with a minority of 108 votes; the Mountain had, accordingly,
thrown the casting vote It now found itself in the predicament of
Buridan&rsquo;s donkey, not, indeed, between two sacks of hay, forced to decide
which of the two was the more attractive, but between two showers of blows,
forced to decide which of the two was the harder; fear of Changarnier, on one
side, fear of Bonaparte, on the other. It must be admitted the position was not
a heroic one.
</p>

<p>
On November 18, an amendment was moved to the Act, passed by the party of
Order, on municipal elections to the effect that, instead of three years, a
domicile of one year should suffice. The amendment was lost by a single
vote&mdash;but this vote, it soon transpired, was a mistake. Owing to the
divisions within its own hostile factions, the party of Order had long since
forfeited its independent parliamentary majority. It was now plain that there
was no longer any majority in the parliament. The National Assembly had become
impotent even to decide. Its atomic parts were no longer held together by any
cohesive power; it had expended its last breath, it was dead.
</p>

<p>
Finally, the mass of the bourgeoisie outside of the parliament was once more
solemnly to confirm its rupture with the bourgeoisie inside of the parliament a
few days before the catastrophe. Thiers, as a parliamentary hero conspicuously
smitten by that incurable disease&mdash;Parliamentary Idiocy&mdash;, had
hatched out jointly with the Council of State, after the death of the
parliament, a new parliamentary intrigue in the shape of a
&ldquo;Responsibility Law,&rdquo; that was intended to lock up the President
within the walls of the Constitution. The same as, on September 15, Bonaparte
bewitched the fishwives, like a second Massaniello, on the occasion of laying
the corner-stone for the Market of Paris,&mdash;though, it must be admitted,
one fishwife was equal to seventeen Burgraves in real power&mdash;; the same
as, after the introduction of the &ldquo;Questors&rsquo; Bill,&rdquo; he
enthused the lieutenants, who were being treated at the Elysee;&mdash;so,
likewise, did he now, on November 25, carry away with him the industrial
bourgeoisie, assembled at the Circus, to receive from his hands the
prize-medals that had been awarded at the London Industrial Exposition. I here
reproduce the typical part of his speech, from the &ldquo;Journal des
Debats&rdquo;:
</p>

<p>
&ldquo;With such unhoped for successes, I am justified to repeat how great the
French republic would be if she were only allowed to pursue her real interests,
and reform her institutions, instead of being constantly disturbed in this by
demagogues, on one side, and, on the other, by monarchic hallucinations. (Loud,
stormy and continued applause from all parts of the amphitheater). The
monarchic hallucinations hamper all progress and all serious departments of
industry. Instead of progress, we have struggle only. Men, formerly the most
zealous supporters of royal authority and prerogative, become the partisans of
a convention that has no purpose other than to weaken an authority that is born
of universal suffrage. (Loud and prolonged applause). We see men, who have
suffered most from the revolution and complained bitterest of it, provoking a
new one for the sole purpose of putting fetters on the will of the nation. . .
. I promise you peace for the future.&rdquo; (Bravo! Bravo! Stormy bravos.)
</p>

<p>
Thus the industrial bourgeoisie shouts its servile &ldquo;Bravo!&rdquo; to the
&ldquo;coup d&rsquo;etat&rdquo; of December 2, to the destruction of the
parliament, to the downfall of their own reign, to the dictatorship of
Bonaparte. The rear of the applause of November 25 was responded to by the roar
of cannon on December 4, and the house of Mr. Sallandrouze, who had been
loudest in applauding, was the one demolished by most of the bombs.
</p>

<p>
Cromwell, when he dissolved the Long Parliament, walked alone into its midst,
pulled out his watch in order that the body should not continue to exist one
minute beyond the term fixed for it by him, and drove out each individual
member with gay and humorous invectives. Napoleon, smaller than his prototype,
at least went on the 18th Brumaire into the legislative body, and, though in a
tremulous voice, read to it its sentence of death. The second Bonaparte, who,
moreover, found himself in possession of an executive power very different from
that of either Cromwell or Napoleon, did not look for his model in the annals
of universal history, but in the annals of the &ldquo;Society of December
10,&rdquo; in the annals of criminal jurisprudence. He robs the Bank of France
of twenty-five million francs; buys General Magnan with one million and the
soldiers with fifteen francs and a drink to each; comes secretly together with
his accomplices like a thief by night; has the houses of the most dangerous
leaders in the parliament broken into; Cavalignac, Lamorciere, Leflo,
Changarnier, Charras, Thiers, Baze, etc., taken out of their beds; the
principal places of Paris, the building of the parliament included, occupied
with troops; and, early the next morning, loud-sounding placards posted on all
the walls proclaiming the dissolution of the National Assembly and of the
Council of State, the restoration of universal suffrage, and the placing of the
Department of the Seine under the state of siege. In the same way he shortly
after sneaked into the &ldquo;Moniteur&rdquo; a false document, according to
which influential parliamentary names had grouped themselves round him in a
Committee of the Nation.
</p>

<p>
Amidst cries of &ldquo;Long live the Republic!&rdquo;, the rump-parliament,
assembled at the Mayor&rsquo;s building of the Tenth Arrondissement, and
composed mainly of Legitimists and Orleanists, resolves to depose Bonaparte; it
harangues in vain the gaping mass gathered before the building, and is finally
dragged first, under the escort of African sharpshooters, to the barracks of
Orsay, and then bundled into convicts&rsquo; wagons and transported to the
prisons of Mazas, Ham and Vincennes. Thus ended the party of Order, the
Legislative Assembly and the February revolution.
</p>

<p>
Before hastening to the end, let us sum up shortly the plan of its history:
</p>

<p>
I.&mdash;First Period. From February 24 to May 4, 1848. February period.
Prologue. Universal fraternity swindle.
</p>

<p>
II.&mdash;Second Period. Period in which the republic is constituted, and of
the Constitutive National Assembly.
</p>

<p>
1. May 4 to June 25, 1848. Struggle of all the classes against the house of Mr.
proletariat. Defeat of the proletariat in the June days.
</p>

<p>
2. June 25 to December 10, 1848. Dictatorship of the pure bourgeois
republicans. Drafting of the Constitution. The state of siege hangs over Paris.
The Bourgeois dictatorship set aside on December 10 by the election of
Bonaparte as President.
</p>

<p>
3. December 20, 1848, to May 20, 1849. Struggle of the Constitutive Assembly
with Bonaparte and with the united party of Order. Death of the Constitutive
Assembly. Downfall of the republican bourgeoisie.
</p>

<p>
III.&mdash;Third Period. Period of the constitutional republic and of the
Legislative National Assembly.
</p>

<p>
1. May 29 to June 13, 1849. Struggle of the small traders&rsquo;, middle class
with the bourgeoisie and with Bonaparte. Defeat of the small traders&rsquo;
democracy.
</p>

<p>
2. June 13, 1849, to May, 1850. Parliamentary dictatorship of the party of
Order. Completes its reign by the abolition of universal suffrage, but loses
the parliamentary Ministry.
</p>

<p>
3. May 31, 1850, to December 2, 1851. Struggle between the parliamentary
bourgeoisie and Bonaparte.
</p>

<p>
a. May 31, 1850, to January 12, 1851. The parliament loses the supreme command
over the Army.
</p>

<p>
b. January 12 to April 11, 1851. The parliament succumbs in the attempts to
regain possession of the administrative power. The party of Order loses its
independent parliamentary majority. Its coalition with the republicans and the
Mountain.
</p>

<p>
c. April 11 to October 9, 1851. Attempts at revision, fusion and prorogation.
The party of Order dissolves into its component parts. The breach between the
bourgeois parliament and the bourgeois press, on the one hand, and the
bourgeois mass, on the other, becomes permanent.
</p>

<p>
d. October 9 to December 2, 1851. Open breach between the parliament and the
executive power. It draws up its own decree of death, and goes under, left in
the lurch by its own class, by the Army, and by all the other classes. Downfall
of the parliamentary regime and of the reign of the bourgeoisie.
Bonaparte&rsquo;s triumph. Parody of the imperialist restoration.
</p>

</div><!--end chapter-->

<div class="chapter">

<h2><a name="chap07"></a>VII.</h2>

<p>
The Social Republic appeared as a mere phrase, as a prophecy on the threshold
of the February Revolution; it was smothered in the blood of the Parisian
proletariat during the days of 1848 but it stalks about as a spectre throughout
the following acts of the drama. The Democratic Republic next makes its bow; it
goes out in a fizzle on June 13, 1849, with its runaway small traders; but, on
fleeing, it scatters behind it all the more bragging announcements of what it
means do to. The Parliamentary Republic, together with the bourgeoisie, then
appropriates the whole stage; it lives its life to the full extent of its
being; but the 2d of December, 1851, buries it under the terror-stricken cry of
the allied royalists: &ldquo;Long live the Republic!&rdquo;
</p>

<p>
The French bourgeoisie reared up against the reign of the working
proletariat;&mdash;it brought to power the slum-proletariat, with the chief of
the &ldquo;Society of December 10&rdquo; at its head. It kept France in
breathless fear over the prospective terror of &ldquo;red
anarchy;&rdquo;&mdash;Bonaparte discounted the prospect when, on December 4, he
had the leading citizens of the Boulevard Montmartre and the Boulevard des
Italiens shot down from their windows by the grog-inspired &ldquo;Army of
Order.&rdquo; It made the apotheosis of the sabre; now the sabre rules it. It
destroyed the revolutionary press;&mdash;now its own press is annihilated. It
placed public meetings under police surveillance;&mdash;now its own salons are
subject to police inspection. It disbanded the democratic National
Guards;&mdash;now its own National Guard is disbanded. It instituted the state
of siege;&mdash;now itself is made subject thereto. It supplanted the jury by
military commissions;&mdash;now military commissions supplant its own juries.
It subjected the education of the people to the parsons&rsquo;
interests;&mdash;the parsons&rsquo; interests now subject it to their own
systems. It ordered transportations without trial;&mdash;now itself is
transported without trial. It suppressed every movement of society with
physical force;&mdash;now every movement of its own class is suppressed by
physical force. Out of enthusiasm for the gold bag, it rebelled against its own
political leaders and writers;&mdash;now, its political leaders and writers are
set aside, but the gold hag is plundered, after the mouth of the bourgeoisie
has been gagged and its pen broken. The bourgeoisie tirelessly shouted to the
revolution, in the language of St. Orsenius to the Christians: &ldquo;Fuge,
Tace, Quiesce!&rdquo;&mdash;flee, be silent, submit!&mdash;; Bonaparte shouts
to the bourgeoisie: &ldquo;Fuge, Tace, Oniesce!&rdquo;&mdash;flee, be silent,
submit!
</p>

<p>
The French bourgeoisie had long since solved Napoleon&rsquo;s dilemma:
&ldquo;Dans cinquante ans l&rsquo;Europe sera republicaine ou cosaque.&rdquo;
[#1 Within fifty years Europe will be either republican or Cossack.] It found
the solution in the &ldquo;republique cosaque.&rdquo; [#2 Cossack republic.] No
Circe distorted with wicked charms the work of art of the bourgeois republic
into a monstrosity. That republic lost nothing but the appearance of decency.
The France of to-day was ready-made within the womb of the Parliamentary
republic. All that was wanted was a bayonet thrust, in order that the bubble
burst, and the monster leap forth to sight.
</p>

<p>
Why did not the Parisian proletariat rise after the 2d of December?
</p>

<p>
The downfall of the bourgeoisie was as yet merely decreed; the decree was not
yet executed. Any earnest uprising of the proletariat would have forthwith
revived this bourgeoisie, would have brought on its reconciliation with the
army, and would have insured a second June rout to the workingmen.
</p>

<p>
On December 4, the proletariat was incited to fight by Messrs. Bourgeois &amp;
Small-Trader. On the evening of that day, several legions of the National Guard
promised to appear armed and uniformed on the place of battle. This arose from
the circumstance that Messrs. Bourgeois &amp; Small-Trader had got wind that,
in one of his decrees of December 2, Bonaparte abolished the secret ballot, and
ordered them to enter the words &ldquo;Yes&rdquo; and &ldquo;No&rdquo; after
their names in the official register. Bonaparte took alarm at the stand taken
on December 4. During the night he caused placards to be posted on all the
street corners of Paris, announcing the restoration of the secret ballot.
Messrs. Bourgeois &amp; Small-Trader believed they had gained their point. The
absentees, the next morning, were Messieurs. Bourgeois &amp; Small-Trader.
</p>

<p>
During the night of December 1 and 2, the Parisian proletariat was robbed of
its leaders and chiefs of barricades by a raid of Bonaparte&rsquo;s. An army
without officers, disinclined by the recollections of June, 1848 and 1849, and
May, 1850, to fight under the banner of the Montagnards, it left to its
vanguard, the secret societies, the work of saving the insurrectionary honor of
Paris, which the bourgeoisie had yielded to the soldiery so submissively that
Bonaparte was later justified in disarming the National Guard upon the scornful
ground that he feared their arms would be used against themselves by the
Anarchists!
</p>

<p>
&ldquo;C&rsquo;est Ic triomphe complet et definitif du Socialism!&rdquo; Thus
did Guizot characterize the 2d of December. But, although the downfall of the
parliamentary republic carries with it the germ of the triumph of the
proletarian revolution, its immediate and tangible result was the triumph of
Bonaparte over parliament, of the Executive over the Legislative power, of
force without phrases over the force of phrases. In the parliament, the nation
raised its collective will to the dignity of law, i.e., it raised the law of
the ruling class to the dignity of its collective will. Before the Executive
power, the nation abdicates all will of its own, and submits to the orders of
an outsider of Authority. In contrast with the Legislative, the Executive power
expresses the heteronomy of the nation in contrast with its autonomy.
Accordingly, France seems to have escaped the despotism of a class only in
order to fall under the despotism of an individual, under the authority, at
that of an individual without authority The struggle seems to settle down to
the point where all classes drop down on their knees, equally impotent and
equally dumb.
</p>

<p>
All the same, the revolution is thoroughgoing. It still is on its passage
through purgatory. It does its work methodically: Down to December 2, 1851, it
had fulfilled one-half of its programme, it now fulfils the other half. It
first ripens the power of the Legislature into fullest maturity in order to be
able to overthrow it. Now that it has accomplished that, the revolution
proceeds to ripen the power of the Executive into equal maturity; it reduces
this power to its purest expression; isolates it; places it before itself as
the sole subject for reproof in order to concentrate against it all the
revolutionary forces of destruction. When the revolution shall have
accomplished this second part of its preliminary programme, Europe will jump up
from her seat to exclaim: &ldquo;Well hast thou grubbed, old mole!&rdquo;
</p>

<p>
The Executive power, with its tremendous bureaucratic and military
organization; with its wide-spreading and artificial machinery of
government&mdash;an army of office-holders, half a million strong, together
with a military force of another million men&mdash;; this fearful body of
parasites, that coils itself like a snake around French society, stopping all
its pores, originated at the time of the absolute monarchy, along with the
decline of feudalism, which it helped to hasten. The princely privileges of the
landed proprietors and cities were transformed into so many at-tributes of the
Executive power; the feudal dignitaries into paid office-holders; and the
confusing design of conflicting medieval seigniories, into the well regulated
plan of a government, work is subdivided and centralized as in the factory. The
first French revolution, having as a mission to sweep away all local,
territorial, urban and provincial special privileges, with the object of
establishing the civic unity of the nation, was hound to develop what the
absolute monarchy had begun&mdash;the work of centralization, together with the
range, the attributes and the menials of government. Napoleon completed this
governmental machinery. The Legitimist and the July Monarchy contribute nothing
thereto, except a greater subdivision of labor, that grew in the same measure
as the division and subdivision of labor within bourgeois society raised new
groups and interests, i.e., new material for the administration of government.
Each Common interest was in turn forthwith removed from society, set up against
it as a higher Collective interest, wrested from the individual activity of the
members of society, and turned into a subject for governmental administration,
from the bridges, the school house and the communal property of a village
community, up to the railroads, the national wealth and the national University
of France. Finally, the parliamentary republic found itself, in its struggle
against the revolution, compelled, with its repressive measures, to strengthen
the means and the centralization of the government. Each overturn, instead of
breaking up, carried this machine to higher perfection. The parties, that
alternately wrestled for supremacy, looked upon the possession of this
tremendous governmental structure as the principal spoils of their victory.
</p>

<p>
Nevertheless, under the absolute monarchy, was only the means whereby the first
revolution, and under Napoleon, to prepare the class rule of the bourgeoisie;
under the restoration, under Louis Philippe, and under the parliamentary
republic, it was the instrument of the ruling class, however eagerly this class
strained after autocracy. Not before the advent of the second Bonaparte does
the government seem to have made itself fully independent. The machinery of
government has by this time so thoroughly fortified itself against society,
that the chief of the &ldquo;Society of December 10&rdquo; is thought good
enough to be at its head; a fortune-hunter, run in from abroad, is raised on
its shield by a drunken soldiery, bought by himself with liquor and sausages,
and whom he is forced ever again to throw sops to. Hence the timid despair, the
sense of crushing humiliation and degradation that oppresses the breast of
France and makes her to choke. She feels dishonored.
</p>

<p>
And yet the French Government does not float in the air. Bonaparte represents
an economic class, and that the most numerous in the commonweal of
France&mdash;the Allotment Farmer. [#4 The first French Revolution distributed
the bulk of the territory of France, held at the time by the feudal lords, in
small patches among the cultivators of the soil. This allotment of lands
created the French farmer class.]
</p>

<p>
As the Bourbons are the dynasty of large landed property, as the Orleans are
the dynasty of money, so are the Bonapartes the dynasty of the farmer, i.e. of
the French masses. Not the Bonaparte, who threw himself at the feet of the
bourgeois parliament, but the Bonaparte, who swept away the bourgeois
parliament, is the elect of this farmer class. For three years the cities had
succeeded in falsifying the meaning of the election of December 10, and in
cheating the farmer out of the restoration of the Empire. The election of
December 10, 1848, is not carried out until the &ldquo;coup d&rsquo;etat&rdquo;
of December 2, 1851.
</p>

<p>
The allotment farmers are an immense mass, whose individual members live in
identical conditions, without, however, entering into manifold relations with
one another. Their method of production isolates them from one another, instead
of drawing them into mutual intercourse. This isolation is promoted by the poor
means of communication in France, together with the poverty of the farmers
themselves. Their field of production, the small allotment of land that each
cultivates, allows no room for a division of labor, and no opportunity for the
application of science; in other words, it shuts out manifoldness of
development, diversity of talent, and the luxury of social relations. Every
single farmer family is almost self-sufficient; itself produces directly the
greater part of what it consumes; and it earns its livelihood more by means of
an interchange with nature than by intercourse with society. We have the
allotted patch of land, the farmer and his family; alongside of that another
allotted patch of land, another farmer and another family. A bunch of these
makes up a village; a bunch of villages makes up a Department. Thus the large
mass of the French nation is constituted by the simple addition of equal
magnitudes&mdash;much as a bag with potatoes constitutes a potato-bag. In so
far as millions of families live under economic conditions that separate their
mode of life, their interests and their culture from those of the other
classes, and that place them in an attitude hostile toward the latter, they
constitute a class; in so far as there exists only a local connection among
these farmers, a connection which the individuality and exclusiveness of their
interests prevent from generating among them any unity of interest, national
connections, and political organization, they do not constitute a class.
Consequently, they are unable to assert their class interests in their own
name, be it by a parliament or by convention. They can not represent one
another, they must themselves be represented. Their representative must at the
same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, as an unlimited
governmental power, that protects them from above, bestows rain and sunshine
upon them. Accordingly, the political influence of the allotment farmer finds
its ultimate expression in an Executive power that subjugates the commonweal to
its own autocratic will.
</p>

<p>
Historic tradition has given birth to the superstition among the French farmers
that a man named Napoleon would restore to them all manner of glory. Now, then,
an individual turns I up, who gives himself out as that man because, obedient
to the &ldquo;Code Napoleon,&rdquo; which provides that &ldquo;La recherche de
la paternite est interdite,&rdquo; [#5 The inquiry into paternity is
forbidden.] he carries the name of Napoleon. [#6 L. N. Bonaparte is said to
have been an illegitimate son.] After a vagabondage of twenty years, and a
series of grotesque adventures, the myth is verified, and that man becomes the
Emperor of the French. The rooted thought of the Nephew becomes a reality
because it coincided with the rooted thought of the most numerous class among
the French.
</p>

<p>
&ldquo;But,&rdquo; I shall be objected to, &ldquo;what about the farmers&rsquo;
uprisings over half France, the raids of the Army upon the farmers, the
wholesale imprisonment and transportation of farmers?&rdquo;
</p>

<p>
Indeed, since Louis XIV., France has not experienced such persecutions of the
farmer on the ground of his demagogic machinations.
</p>

<p>
But this should be well understood: The Bonaparte dynasty does not represent
the revolutionary, it represents the conservative farmer; it does not represent
the farmer, who presses beyond his own economic conditions, his little
allotment of land it represents him rather who would confirm these conditions;
it does not represent the rural population, that, thanks to its own inherent
energy, wishes, jointly with the cities to overthrow the old order, it
represents, on the contrary, the rural population that, hide-bound in the old
order, seeks to see itself, together with its allotments, saved and favored by
the ghost of the Empire; it represents, not the intelligence, but the
superstition of the farmer; not his judgment, but his bias; not his future, but
his past; not his modern Cevennes; [#7 The Cevennes were the theater of the
most numerous revolutionary uprisings of the farmer class.] but his modern
Vendee. [#8 La Vendee was the theater of protracted reactionary uprisings of
the farmer class under the first Revolution.]
</p>

<p>
The three years&rsquo; severe rule of the parliamentary republic had freed a
part of the French farmers from the Napoleonic illusion, and, though even only
superficially; had revolutionized them The bourgeoisie threw them, however,
violently back every time that they set themselves in motion. Under the
parliamentary republic, the modern wrestled with the traditional consciousness
of the French farmer. The process went on in the form of a continuous struggle
between the school teachers and the parsons;&mdash;the bourgeoisie knocked the
school teachers down. For the first time, the farmer made an effort to take an
independent stand in the government of the country; this manifested itself in
the prolonged conflicts of the Mayors with the Prefects;&mdash;the bourgeoisie
deposed the Mayors. Finally, during period of the parliamentary republic, the
farmers of several localities rose against their own product, the
Army;&mdash;the bourgeoisie punished them with states of siege and executions.
And this is the identical bourgeoisie, that now howls over the &ldquo;stupidity
of the masses,&rdquo; over the &ldquo;vile multitude,&rdquo; which, it claims,
betrayed it to Bonaparte. Itself has violently fortified the imperialism of the
farmer class; it firmly maintained the conditions that Constitute the
birth-place of this farmer-religion. Indeed, the bourgeoisie has every reason
to fear the stupidity of the masses&mdash;so long as they remain conservative;
and their intelligence&mdash;so soon as they become revolutionary.
</p>

<p>
In the revolts that took place after the &ldquo;coup d&rsquo;etat&rdquo; a part
of the French farmers protested, arms in hand, against their own vote of
December 10, 1848. The school house had, since 1848, sharpened their wits. But
they had bound themselves over to the nether world of history, and history kept
them to their word. Moreover, the majority of this population was still so full
of prejudices that, just in the &ldquo;reddest&rdquo; Departments, it voted
openly for Bonaparte. The National Assembly prevented, as it thought, this
population from walking; the farmers now snapped the fetters which the cities
had struck upon the will of the country districts. In some places they even
indulged the grotesque hallucination of a &ldquo;Convention together with a
Napoleon.&rdquo;
</p>

<p>
After the first revolution had converted the serf farmers into freeholders,
Napoleon fixed and regulated the conditions under which, unmolested, they could
exploit the soil of France, that had just fallen into their hands, and expiate
the youthful passion for property. But that which now bears the French farmer
down is that very allotment of land, it is the partition of the soil, the form
of ownership, which Napoleon had consolidated. These are the material condition
that turned French feudal peasant into a small or allotment farmer, and
Napoleon into an Emperor. Two generations have sufficed to produce the
inevitable result the progressive deterioration of agriculture, and the
progressive encumbering of the agriculturist The &ldquo;Napoleonic&rdquo; form
of ownership, which, at the beginning of the nineteenth century was the
condition for the emancipation and enrichment of the French rural population,
has, in the course of the century, developed into the law of their enslavement
and pauperism. Now, then, this very law is the first of the &ldquo;idees
Napoleoniennes,&rdquo; which the second Bonaparte must uphold. If he still
shares with the farmers the illusion of seeking, not in the system of the small
allotment itself, but outside of that system, in the influence of secondary
conditions, the cause of their ruin, his experiments are bound to burst like
soap-bubbles against the modern system of production.
</p>

<p>
The economic development of the allotment system has turned bottom upward the
relation of the farmer to the other classes of society. Under Napoleon, the
parceling out of the agricultural lands into small allotments supplemented in
the country the free competition and the incipient large production of the
cities. The farmer class was the ubiquitous protest against the aristocracy of
land, just then overthrown. The roots that the system of small allotments cast
into the soil of France, deprived feudalism of all nutriment. Its
boundary-posts constituted the natural buttress of the bourgeoisie against
every stroke of the old overlords. But in the course of the nineteenth century,
the City Usurer stepped into the shoes of the Feudal Lord, the Mortgage
substituted the Feudal Duties formerly yielded by the soil, bourgeois Capital
took the place of the aristocracy of Landed Property. The former allotments are
now only a pretext that allows the capitalist class to draw profit, interest
and rent from agricultural lands, and to leave to the farmer himself the task
of seeing to it that he knock out his wages. The mortgage indebtedness that
burdens the soil of France imposes upon the French farmer class they payment of
an interest as great as the annual interest on the whole British national debt.
In this slavery of capital, whither its development drives it irresistibly, the
allotment system has transformed the mass of the French nation into
troglodytes. Sixteen million farmers (women and children included), house in
hovels most of which have only one opening, some two, and the few most favored
ones three. Windows are to a house what the five senses are to the head. The
bourgeois social order, which, at the beginning of the century, placed the
State as a sentinel before the newly instituted allotment, and that manured
this with laurels, has become a vampire that sucks out its heart-blood and its
very brain, and throws it into the alchemist&rsquo;s pot of capital. The
&ldquo;Code Napoleon&rdquo; is now but the codex of execution, of
sheriff&rsquo;s sales and of intensified taxation. To the four million
(children, etc., included) official paupers, vagabonds, criminals and
prostitutes, that France numbers, must be added five million souls who hover
over the precipice of life, and either sojourn in the country itself, or float
with their rags and their children from the country to the cities, and from the
cities back to the country. Accordingly, the interests of the farmers are no
longer, as under Napoleon, in harmony but in conflict with the interests of the
bourgeoisie, i.e., with capital; they find their natural allies and leaders
among the urban proletariat, whose mission is the overthrow of the bourgeois
social order. But the &ldquo;strong and unlimited government&rdquo;&mdash;and
this is the second of the &ldquo;idees Napoleoniennes,&rdquo; which the second
Napoleon has to carried out&mdash;, has for its mission the forcible defence of
this very &ldquo;material&rdquo; social order, a &ldquo;material order&rdquo;
that furnishes the slogan in Bonaparte&rsquo;s proclamations against the
farmers in revolt.
</p>

<p>
Along with the mortgage, imposed by capital upon the farmer&rsquo;s allotment,
this is burdened by taxation. Taxation is the fountain of life to the
bureaucracy, the Army, the parsons and the court, in short to the whole
apparatus of the Executive power. A strong government, and heavy taxes are
identical. The system of ownership, involved in the system of allotments lends
itself by nature for the groundwork of a powerful and numerous bureaucracy: it
produces an even level of conditions and of persons over the whole surface of
the country; it, therefore, allows the exercise of an even influence upon all
parts of this even mass from a high central point downwards: it annihilates the
aristocratic gradations between the popular masses and the Government; it,
consequently, calls from all sides for the direct intervention of the
Government and for the intervention of the latter&rsquo;s immediate organs;
and, finally, it produces an unemployed excess of population, that finds no
room either in the country or in the cities, that, consequently, snatches after
public office as a sort of dignified alms, and provokes the creation of further
offices. With the new markets, which he opened at the point of the bayonet, and
with the plunder of the continent, Napoleon returned to the farmer class with
interest the taxes wrung from them. These taxes were then a goad to the
industry of the farmer, while now, on the contrary, they rob his industry of
its last source of support, and completely sap his power to resist poverty.
Indeed, an enormous bureaucracy, richly gallooned and well fed is that
&ldquo;idee Napoleonienne&rdquo; that above all others suits the requirements
of the second Bonaparte. How else should it be, seeing he is forced to raise
alongside of the actual classes of society, an artificial class, to which the
maintenance of his own regime must be a knife-and-fork question? One of his
first financial operations was, accordingly, the raising of the salaries of the
government employees to their former standard and the creation of new
sinecures.
</p>

<p>
Another &ldquo;idee Napoleonienne&rdquo; is the rule of the parsons as an
instrument of government. But while the new-born allotment, in harmony with
society, in its dependence upon the powers of nature, and in its subordination
to the authority that protected it from above, was naturally religious, the
debt-broken allotment, on the contrary, at odds with society and authority, and
driven beyond its own narrow bounds, becomes as naturally irreligious. Heaven
was quite a pretty gift thrown in with the narrow strip of land that had just
been won, all the more as it makes the weather; it, however, becomes an insult
from the moment it is forced upon the farmer as a substitute for his allotment.
Then the parson appears merely as the anointed blood-hound of the earthly
police,&mdash;yet another &ldquo;idee Napoleonienne.&rdquo; The expedition
against Rome will next time take place in France, but in a reverse sense from
that of M. de Montalembert.
</p>

<p>
Finally, the culminating point of the &ldquo;idees Napoleoniennes&rdquo; is the
preponderance of the Army. The Army was the &ldquo;point of honor&rdquo; with
the allotment farmers: it was themselves turned into masters, defending abroad
their newly established property, glorifying their recently conquered
nationality, plundering and revolutionizing the world. The uniform was their
State costume; war was their poetry; the allotment, expanded and rounded up in
their phantasy, was the fatherland; and patriotism became the ideal form of
property. But the foe, against whom the French farmer must now defend his
property, are not the Cossacks, they are the sheriffs and the tax collectors.
The allotment no longer lies in the so-called fatherland, but in the register
of mortgages. The Army itself no longer is the flower of the youth of the
farmers, it is the swamp-blossom of the slum-proletariat of the farmer class.
It consists of &ldquo;remplacants,&rdquo; substitutes, just as the second
Bonaparte himself is but a &ldquo;remplacant,&rdquo; a substitute, for
Napoleon. Its feats of heroism are now performed in raids instituted against
farmers and in the service of the police;&mdash;and when the internal
contradictions of his own system shall drive the chief of the &ldquo;Society of
December 10&rdquo; across the French frontier, that Army will, after a few
bandit-raids, gather no laurels but only hard knocks.
</p>

<p>
It is evident that all the &ldquo;idees Napoleoniennes&rdquo; are the ideas of
the undeveloped and youthfully fresh allotment; they are an absurdity for the
allotment that now survives. They are only the hallucinations of its death
struggle; words turned to hollow phrases, spirits turned to spooks. But this
parody of the Empire was requisite in order to free the mass of the French
nation from the weight of tradition, and to elaborate sharply the contrast
between Government and Society. Along with the progressive decay of the
allotment, the governmental structure, reared upon it, breaks down. The
centralization of Government, required by modern society, rises only upon the
ruins of the military and bureaucratic governmental machinery that was forged
in contrast to feudalism.
</p>

<p>
The conditions of the French farmers&rsquo; class solve to us the riddle of the
general elections of December 20 and 21, that led the second Bonaparte to the
top of Sinai, not to receive, but to decree laws.
</p>

<p>
The bourgeoisie had now, manifestly, no choice but to elect Bonaparte. When at
the Council of Constance, the puritans complained of the sinful life of the
Popes, and moaned about the need of a reform in morals, Cardinal d&rsquo;Ailly
thundered into their faces: &ldquo;Only the devil in his Own person can now
save the Catholic Church, and you demand angels.&rdquo; So, likewise, did the
French bourgeoisie cry out after the &ldquo;coup d&rsquo;etat&rdquo;:
&ldquo;Only the chief of the &lsquo;Society of December 10&rsquo; can now save
bourgeois society, only theft can save property, only perjury religion, only
bastardy the family, only disorder order!&rdquo;
</p>

<p>
Bonaparte, as autocratic Executive power, fulfills his mission to secure
&ldquo;bourgeois order.&rdquo; But the strength of this bourgeois order lies in
the middle class. He feels himself the representative of the middle class, and
issues his decrees in that sense. Nevertheless, he is something only because he
has broken the political power of this class, and daily breaks it anew. Hence
he feels himself the adversary of the political and the literary power of the
middle class. But, by protecting their material, he nourishes anew their
political power. Consequently, the cause must be kept alive, but the result,
wherever it manifests itself, swept out of existence. But this procedure is
impossible without slight mistakings of causes and effects, seeing that both,
in their mutual action and reaction, lose their distinctive marks. Thereupon,
new decrees, that blur the line of distinction. Bonaparte, furthermore, feels
himself, as against the bourgeoisie, the representative of the farmer and the
people in general, who, within bourgeois society, is to render the lower
classes of society happy. To this end, new decrees, intended to exploit the
&ldquo;true Socialists,&rdquo; together with their governmental wisdom. But,
above all, Bonaparte feels himself the chief of the &ldquo;Society of December
10,&rdquo; the representative of the slum-proletariat, to which he himself, his
immediate surroundings, his Government, and his army alike belong, the main
object with all of whom is to be good to themselves, and draw Californian
tickets out of the national treasury. An he affirms his chieftainship of the
&ldquo;Society of December 10&rdquo; with decrees, without decrees, and despite
decrees.
</p>

<p>
This contradictory mission of the man explains the contradictions of his own
Government, and that confused groping about, that now seeks to win, then to
humiliate now this class and then that, and finishes by arraying against itself
all the classes; whose actual insecurity constitutes a highly comical contrast
with the imperious, categoric style of the Government acts, copied closely from
the Uncle.
</p>

<p>
Industry and commerce, i.e., the business of the middle class, are to be made
to blossom in hot-house style under the &ldquo;strong Government.&rdquo; Loans
for a number of railroad grants. But the Bonapartist slum-proletariat is to
enrich itself. Peculation is carried on with railroad concessions on the Bourse
by the initiated; but no capital is forthcoming for the railroads. The bank
then pledges itself to make advances upon railroad stock; but the bank is
itself to be exploited; hence, it must be cajoled; it is released of the
obligation to publish its reports weekly. Then follows a leonine treaty between
the bank and the Government. The people are to be occupied: public works are
ordered; but the public works raise the tax rates upon the people; thereupon
the taxes are reduced by an attack upon the national bond-holders through the
conversion of the five per cent &ldquo;rentes&rdquo; [#9 The name of the French
national bonds.] into four-and-halves. Yet the middle class must again be
tipped: to this end, the tax on wine is doubled for the people, who buy it at
retail, and is reduced to one-half for the middle class, that drink it at
wholesale. Genuine labor organizations are dissolved, but promises are made of
future wonders to accrue from organization. The farmers are to be helped:
mortgage-banks are set up that must promote the indebtedness; of the farmer and
the concentration of property but again, these banks are to be utilized
especially to the end of squeezing money out of the confiscated estates of the
House of Orleans; no capitalist will listen to this scheme, which, moreover, is
not mentioned in the decree; the mortgage bank remains a mere decree, etc.,
etc.
</p>

<p>
Bonaparte would like to appear as the patriarchal benefactor of all classes;
but he can give to none without taking from the others. As was said of the Duke
of Guise, at the time of the Fronde, that he was the most obliging man in
France because he had converted all his estates into bonds upon himself for his
Parisians, so would Napoleon like to be the most obliging man in France and
convert all property and all labor of France into a personal bond upon himself.
He would like to steal the whole of France to make a present thereof to France,
or rather to be able to purchase France back again with French money;&mdash;as
chief of the &ldquo;Society of December 10,&rdquo; he must purchase that which
is to be his. All the State institutions, the Senate, the Council of State, the
Legislature, the Legion of Honor, the Soldiers&rsquo; decorations, the public
baths, the public buildings, the railroads, the General Staff of the National
Guard, exclusive of the rank and file, the confiscated estates of the House of
Orleans,&mdash;all are converted into institutions for purchase and sale. Every
place in the Army and the machinery of Government becomes a purchasing power.
The most important thing, however, in this process, whereby France is taken to
be given back to herself, are the percentages that, in the transfer, drop into
the hands of the chief and the members of the &ldquo;Society of December
10.&rdquo; The witticisms with which the Countess of L., the mistress of de
Morny, characterized the confiscations of the Orleanist estates:
&ldquo;C&rsquo;est le premier vol de l&rsquo;aigle,&rdquo; [#10 &ldquo;It is
the first flight of the eagle&rdquo; The French word &ldquo;vol&rdquo; means
theft as well as flight.] fits every fight of the eagle that is rather a crow.
He himself and his followers daily call out to themselves, like the Italian
Carthusian monk in the legend does to the miser, who displayfully counted the
goods on which he could live for many years to come: &ldquo;Tu fai conto sopra
i beni, bisogna prima far il conto sopra gli anni.&rdquo; [#11 &ldquo;You count
your property you should rather count the years left to you.&rdquo;] In order
not to make a mistake in the years, they count by minutes. A crowd of fellows,
of the best among whom all that can be said is that one knows not whence he
comes&mdash;a noisy, restless &ldquo;Boheme,&rdquo; greedy after plunder, that
crawls about in gallooned frocks with the same grotesque dignity as
Soulonque&rsquo;s [#12 Soulonque was the negro Emperor of the short-lived negro
Empire of Hayti.] Imperial dignitaries&mdash;, thronged the court crowded the
ministries, and pressed upon the head of the Government and of the Army. One
can picture to himself this upper crust of the &ldquo;Society of December
10&rdquo; by considering that Veron Crevel [#13 Crevel is a character of
Balzac, drawn after Dr. Veron, the proprietor of the
&ldquo;Constitutional&rdquo; newspaper, as a type of the dissolute Parisian
Philistine.] is their preacher of morality, and Granier de Cassagnac their
thinker. When Guizot, at the time he was Minister, employed this Granier on an
obscure sheet against the dynastic opposition, he used to praise him with the
term: &ldquo;C&rsquo;est le roi des droles.&rdquo; [#14 &ldquo;He Is the king
of the clowns.&rdquo;] It were a mistake to recall the days of the Regency or
of Louis XV. by the court and the kit of Louis Bonaparte&rsquo;s: &ldquo;Often
did France have a mistress-administration, but never yet an administration of
kept men.&rdquo; [#15 Madame de Girardin.]
</p>

<p>
Harassed by the contradictory demands of his situation, and compelled, like a
sleight-of-hands performer, to keep, by means of constant surprises, the eyes
of the public riveted upon himself as the substitute of Napoleon, compelled,
consequently, everyday to accomplish a sort of &ldquo;coup&rdquo; on a small
scale, Bonaparte throws the whole bourgeois social system into disorder; he
broaches everything that seemed unbroachable by the revolution of 1848; he
makes one set people patient under the revolution and another anxious for it;
he produces anarchy itself in the name of order by rubbing off from the whole
machinery of Government the veneer of sanctity, by profaning it, by rendering
it at once nauseating and laughable. He rehearses in Paris the cult of the
sacred coat of Trier with the cult of the Napoleonic Imperial mantle. But when
the Imperial Mantle shall have finally fallen upon the shoulders of Louis
Bonaparte, then will also the iron statue of Napoleon drop down from the top of
the Vendome column. [#16 A prophecy that a few years later, after
Bonaparte&rsquo;s coronation as Emperor, was literally fulfilled. By order of
Emperor Louis Napoleon, the military statue of the Napoleon that originally
surmounted the Vendome was taken down and replaced by one of first Napoleon in
imperial robes.]
</p>

</div><!--end chapter-->

<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1346 ***</div>
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