The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Translator’s Preface

“The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” is one of Karl Marx’ 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.

The recent populist uprising; the more recent “Debs Movement”; 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.

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 “Anglo Saxon” 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 “Anglo-Saxon”—of all nations, said to be “Anglo-Saxon,” 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

“importations.” We are no more English on account of them than we are

Chinese because we all drink tea.

Of all European nations, France is the on to which we come nearest.

Besides its republican form of government—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’, 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.

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:

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—“The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.”

As to the other terms and allusions that occur, the following sketch

will suffice:

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—the

aristocracy of finance—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’s monarchy is called the “July

Monarchy.” In February, 1848, a revolt of a lower tier of the

capitalist class—the industrial bourgeoisie—against the aristocracy of

finance, in turn dethroned Louis Philippe. The affair, also named from

the month in which it took place, is the “February Revolution”. “The

Eighteenth Brumaire” starts with that event.

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’, we are best enabled to understand our

own history, to know whence we came, and whither we are going and how

to conduct ourselves.

D.D.L. New York, Sept. 12, 1897

THE EIGHTEENTH BRUMAIRE OF LOUIS BONAPARTE

I.

Hegel says somewhere that that great historic facts and personages

recur twice. He forgot to add: “Once as tragedy, and again as farce.”

Caussidiere for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the “Mountain” of

1848-51 for the “Mountain” 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.

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.

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’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—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.

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.

In 1848-51 only the ghost of the old revolution wandered about, from

Marrast the “Republicain en gaunts jaunes,” [#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’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.

“And all this,” cries the crazy Englishman, “is demanded of me, the

free-born Englishman, in order to make gold for old Pharaoh.” “In order

to pay off the debts of the Bonaparte family”—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—caricatured as he needs

must appear in the middle of the nineteenth century.

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.

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 “coup de main” of February,

1848, comes the response of the “coup de tete” 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—if it was to be

more than a disturbance of the surface—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.

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—until

finally that situation is created which renders all retreat impossible,

and the conditions themselves cry out:

“Hic Rhodus, hic salta!”

[#2 Here is Rhodes, leap here! An allusion to Aesop’s Fables.]

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—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 “in petto,” 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 “in partibus,” 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.

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 “liberte’, egalite’, fraternite’,”

together with the 2d of May 1852—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: “All that exists deserves to perish.”

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.

Let us recapitulate in general outlines the phases which the French

revolution of February 24th, 1848, to December, 1851, ran through.

Three main periods are unmistakable:

First—The February period;

Second—The period of constituting the republic, or of the constitutive

national assembly (May 4, 1848, to May 29th, 1849);

Third—The period of the constitutional republic, or of the legislative

national assembly (May 29, 1849, to December 2, 1851).

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—the February period proper—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 “provisional;”

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—dynastic

opposition, republican bourgeoisie, democratic-republican small

traders’ class, social-democratic labor element—all found

“provisionally” their place in the February government.

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’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—the peasants and small traders—all of whom threw themselves on a

sudden upon the political stage, after the barriers of the July

monarchy had fallen down.

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.

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’ class; the

army; the slums, organized as Guarde Mobile; the intellectual

celebrities, the parsons’ 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,

“co-operative banking” and “labor exchange” 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.

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 “Republic or Monarchy.” 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.]

All classes and parties joined hands in the June days in a “Party of

Order” against the class of the proletariat, which was designated as

the “Party of Anarchy,” of Socialism, of Communism. They claimed to

have “saved” society against the “enemies of society.” They gave out

the slogans of the old social order—“Property, Family, Religion,

Order”—as the passwords for their army, and cried out to the

counter-revolutionary crusaders: “In this sign thou wilt conquer!” 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: “Property, Family,

Religion, Order.” Thus it happens that “society is saved” 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 “assault upon society,” and is

branded as “Socialism.” Finally the High Priests of “Religion and

Order” 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 “Order,” are shot down on their own balconies by drunken

soldiers, forfeit their family property, and their houses are bombarded

for pastime—all in the name of Property, of Family, of Religion, and of

Order. Finally, the refuse of bourgeois society constitutes the “holy

phalanx of Order,” and the hero Crapulinsky makes his entry into the

Tuileries as the “Savior of Society.”

II.

Let us resume the thread of events.

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

“Tricolor Republican,” “True Republican,” “Political Republican,”

“Formal Republican,” 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

“National,” passed, in its way, for as respectable a paper as the

“Journal des Debats.” 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—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

“National” 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 “National” 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’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’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 “National”

subsequently utilized the outbreak of the June insurrection to dismiss

this Executive Committee also, and thus rid itself of its nearest

rivals—the small traders’ 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 “National”, 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.

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.

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.

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’ 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.

The inevitable “General Staff” of the “freedoms” of 1848—personal

freedom, freedom of the press, of speech, of association and of

assemblage, freedom of instruction, of religion, etc.—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 “equal rights of others,” and by the “public safety,”

or by the “laws,” which are intended to effect this harmony. For

instance:

“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.” (Chap.

II. of the French Constitution, Section 8.)

“Education is free. The freedom of education shall be enjoyed under the

conditions provided by law, and under the supervision of the State.”

(Section 9.)

“The domicile of the citizen is inviolable, except under the forms

prescribed by law.” (Chap. I., Section 3), etc., etc.

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 “Friends of

Order,” 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 “others,” or allowed them their enjoyment

under conditions that were but so many police snares, it was always

done only in the interest of the “public safety,” i. e., of the

bourgeoisie, as required by the Constitution.

Hence it comes that both sides—the “Friends of Order,” who abolished

all those freedoms, as, well as the democrats, who had demanded them

all—appeal with full right to the Constitution: Each paragraph of the

Constitution contains its own antithesis, its own Upper and Lower

House—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.

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—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.

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 “play of constitutional powers,”

as Guizot styled the clapper-clawings between the legislative and the

executive powers, plays permanent “vabanque” 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, “Frere, il

faut mourir!” [#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’ prison.] on the second Monday of the beautiful month of May.

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.

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’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.

Finally, the Constitution entrusts itself for safe keeping, in a

melodramatic paragraph, “to the watchfulness and patriotism of the

whole French people, and of each individual Frenchman,” after having

just before, in another paragraph entrusted the “watchful” and the

“patriotic” themselves to the tender, inquisitorial attention of the

High Court, instituted by itself.

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.

While the bourgeois’ 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—and the bayonet turned against the

people, at that—that it had to be protected in its mother’s womb, and

that by the bayonet it had to be planted on earth. The ancestors of

these “honest republicans” 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—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’s jacket, periodically

heralded as the highest wisdom and guiding stars of society;—were not

all of these, the barrack and the bivouac, the sabre and the musket,

the moustache and the soldier’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’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 “state of siege,” 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.

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.

In Article 44 of the Constitution it is said “The President of the

French Republic must never have lost his status as a French citizen.”

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.

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’ 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

“National” 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.

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 “Party of Order.” 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—memories that seem again to come to life so

soon as the question is again only the word “Republic,” 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 “National,” goes over to Socialism during the following

period.

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.

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.

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’s ministry, constituted also, on December 2,

1851, the majority of the legislative National Assembly.

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.

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’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 “coup d’etat” of December 2, 1851, only

executed by the royalists with Napoleon’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.

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

“Responsibility law” ready made, and framed at that, by the suspicious,

the vicious republican Assembly!

After, on January 29, 1849, the constitutive assembly had itself broken

its last weapon, the Barrot ministry and the “Friends of Order”

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 “Moniteur” 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 “discipline,” and referred Marrast to

Changarnier, who scornfully sent him off with the remark that he did

not like “bayonettes intelligentes.” [#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

“Questors Bill,” 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—and he did so amidst the

plaudits of the Mountain.

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!

We wish it a happy journey.

III.

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.

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.

Just the reverse in 1848. The proletarian party appears as an appendage

to the small traders’ 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.

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 “patres conscripti” 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—the Restoration and the July Monarchy—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’s saviours, who, in their “laisser aller,” 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

“Schlemihls,” [#1 The hero In Chamisso’s “Peter Schiemihi,” 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 “Red Spectre,”

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.

We saw that the Ministry, which Bonaparte installed on December 20,

1849, the day of his “Ascension,” 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 “mauvaise queue” [#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.

Never did party open its campaign with larger means at its disposal and

under more favorable auspices.

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

“parliamentary nobility” 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.

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—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 “Republic.” On its side, the Mountain

appears, in counter-distinction to the royalist conspiracy, as the

representative of the “Republic.” The party of Order seems constantly

engaged in a “Reaction,” 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—just as in Prussia;

the Mountain on the contrary, is engaged with equal assiduity in

parrying these attacks, and thus in defending the “eternal rights of

man”—as every so-called people’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.

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—two different sorts of property—; 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—Land and Capital—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.

The coalized royalists carried on their intrigues against each other in

the press, in Ems, in Clarmont—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 “in infinitum”

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—with Bonaparte—, 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—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’s building of the Tenth Arrondissement, as a tribune in the name

of the Republic; the echo, however, derisively answering back to him:

“Henry V.! Henry V!” [#3 The candidate of the Bourbons, or Legitimists,

for the throne.]

However, against the allied bourgeois, a coalition was made between the

small traders and the workingmen—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—the Mountain—, 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’ 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—Capital and Wage-slavery—,

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’ class. No one must run away with the

narrow notion that the small traders’ 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 “shopkeepers,” or enthuse for these. They

may—by education and individual standing—be as distant from them as

heaven is from earth. That which makes them representatives of the

small traders’ 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

“political” and the “literary” representatives of a class to the class

they represent.

After the foregoing explanations, it goes with-out saying that, while

the Mountain is constantly wrestling for the republic and the so-called

“rights of man,” neither the republic nor the “rights of man” 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.

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’ class, just as a year before it had

understood the necessity of putting an end to the revolutionary

proletariat.

But the position of the foe had changed. The strength of the

proletarian party was on the streets; that of the small traders’ 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.

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 “outside the pale of the Constitution”; 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’ class in Paris.

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]

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 “their people” with

desertion, and the people had the satisfaction of charging their

leaders with fraud.

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 “inevitable victory of

the democracy.” 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.

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—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—, 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 “PEOPLE.” What they represent is the “people’s rights”; their

interests are the “people’s interests.” 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 “people” fall upon the “oppressors” 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 “undivisible people” 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.

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: “If they but dare to assail universal suffrage . .

. then . . . then we will show who we are!” Nous verrons. [#5 We shall

see.]

As to the “Mountaineers,” who had fled abroad, it suffices here to say

that Ledru-Rollin—he having accomplished the feat of hopelessly

ruining, in barely a fortnight, the powerful party at whose head he

stood—, found himself called upon to build up a French government “in

partibus;” 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 “despot of the continent” is threatened with the

feats that he and his allies had in contemplation. Was Proudhon wholly

wrong when he cried out to these gentlemen: “Vous n’êtes que des

blaqueurs”? [#6 You are nothing but fakirs.]

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—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 “parliamentary republic,” 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—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.

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.

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

“bulwark of society”—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.

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’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.

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—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’ 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’ 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.

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;—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—Louis Bonaparte’s—, 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—“Liberty, Equality,

Fraternity”—by the unequivocal words, “Infantry, Cavalry, Artillery”.

IV.

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 & Company received in the meantime.

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—the mask of “homme de paille.” [#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.

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’s under exclamations of contempt and incredulity as though

notions of Bonaparte could not possibly have any political weight;—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’ tribune in the Assembly, words of indignation upon the

“abominable machinations,” which, according to him, went on in the

immediate vicinity of the President. Finally, while the Ministry

obtained from the National Assembly a widow’s pension for the Duchess

of Orleans, it denied every motion to raise the Presidential civil

list;—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.

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,—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;—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—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.

The new Ministry was called the d’Hautpoul Ministry. Not that General

d’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—without a civil list. The

d’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.

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 “idees napoleoniennes,” [#2 Napoleonic ideas.] his own

Ministers disavowed him from the speakers’ 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.

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.

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,—in a word, it becomes “gensdarme.” It

is easily understood how three years of the gensdarme regime,

sanctified by the regime of the clergyman, was bound to demoralize

unripe masses.

Whatever the mass of passion and declamation, that the party of Order

expended from the speakers’ tribune in the National Assembly against

the minority, its speech remained monosyllabic, like that of the

Christian, whose speech was to be “Aye, aye; nay, nay.” 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.

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’ rights and

progressive organs assail and menace its class rule, both in its social

foundation and its political superstructure—consequently, have become

“socialistic.” 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 “socialistic.” 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 “peace,” 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,—how can it forbid discussion? Every single

interest, every single social institution is there converted into

general thoughts, is treated as a thought,—how could any interest or

institution claim to be above thought, and impose itself as an article

of faith? The orators’ 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,—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?

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

“property,” “family,” “religion” and “order” 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.

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.

While Bonaparte’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 “word

of honor” loan bank for working-men. To have money given and money

borrowed—that was the perspective that he hoped to cajole the masses

with. Presents and loans—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.

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,—Deflotte. In this way

the small traders’ 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’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.

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—the Thiers, Berryers, Broglies, Moles, in

short, the so-called burgraves—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’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 “attentats” against the National

Assembly. None of Bonaparte’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.

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.

The parliamentary majority perceived the weakness of its adversary. Its

seventeen burgraves—Bonaparte had left to it the direction of and

responsibility for the attack—, 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.

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, “majestic calmness,” 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 “National” and the “Presse,” two bourgeois

organs, remained after this deluge the extreme outposts of the

revolution.

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’ democracy, which, on June 13, had

cried out: “If they but dare to assail universal suffrage . . . then .

. . then we will show who we are!”—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: “The revolution shall not cheat us a third time.”

The law of May 31, 1850, was the “coup d’etat” 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.

V.

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.

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

“out of circulation,” he demanded a franc “in circulation.” 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.

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.

As in the year 1849, the party of Order had during this year’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—according

to the disposition of the towns that he happened to be gladdening with

his presence—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 “Moniteur” and the small private

“Moniteurs” of Bonaparte were, of course, bound to celebrate as

triumphal marches, he was constantly accompanied by affiliated members

of the “Society of December 10” 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—in

short, that whole undefined, dissolute, kicked-about mass that the

Frenchmen style “la Boheme” With this kindred element, Bonaparte formed

the stock of the “Society of December 10,” a “benevolent association”

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;—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 “Society of December 10,” 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—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 “Gardes mobiles” were to the

bourgeois republicans, that was to Bonaparte the “Society of December

10,”—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 “vive

l’Empereur,” insulted and clubbed the republicans,—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 “Society of December 10” 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 “Order,” “Religion,” “Family,” “Property,” and,

behind him, the secret society of skipjacks and picaroons, the society

of disorder, of prostitution, and of theft,—that is Bonaparte himself

as the original author; and the history of the “Society of December 10”

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 “Society of December 10,” 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.

The “Society of December 10” was to remain the private army of

Bonaparte until he should have succeeded in converting the public Army

into a “Society of December 10.” 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 “Society of December 10.”

After the review of October 3, the Permanent Committee summoned the

Minister of War, d’Hautpoul, before it. He promised that such breaches

of discipline should not recur. We have seen how, on October 10th,

Bonaparte kept d’Hautpoul’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

“Savior” of January 29, and June 13, the “Bulwark of Society,”

candidate of the Party of Order for the office of President, the

suspected Monk of two monarchies,—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: “Vive Napoleon! Vivent les saucissons;” [#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: “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.”

Meanwhile, Bonaparte hastened to depose the Minister of War,

d’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:

“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.”

The honnete, hypocritically temperate, commonplace-virtuous language of

the bourgeoisie reveals its deep meaning in the mouth of the

self-appointed ruler of the “Society of December 10,” and of the

picnic-hero of St. Maur and Satory.

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 “Society of December 10,” and the dismissal

of the Minister of War, d’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. “France

demands, above all things, peace,” with this language had the party of

Order been apostrophizing the revolution, since February; with this

language did Bonaparte’s message now apostrophize the party of Order:

“France demands, above all things, peace.” Bonaparte committed acts

that aimed at usurpation, but the party of Order committed a

“disturbance of the peace,” if it raised the hue and cry, and explained

them hypochrondriacally. The sausages of Satory were mouse-still when

nobody talked about them;—France demands, above all things, “peace.”

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 “peace” in his message, to answer “war.” 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.

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.

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’ prison. The National Assembly bristled up when it heard of the

“attentat.” 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 “sacredness of private

property,” 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.

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.

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 “Society of December 10,” 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,—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—they, of course, being as

enthusiastic for the prerogatives of the parliament as that body is for

public freedom—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.

On December 20, Pascal Duprat interpellated the Minister of the

Interior on the “Goldbar Lottery.” This lottery was a “Daughter from

Elysium”; 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 “cites ouvrieres.” [#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—a

financial operation fully in the spirit of the “Society of December

10”! 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’s

interpellation, the National Assembly went over to the order of the

day, this did not happen simply because Girardin’s motion to declare

itself “satisfied” 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.

Bonaparte-who, for the very reason of his being a “bohemian,” 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 “Society of December 10,”

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—the deposition of Changarnier.

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’ 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’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’, 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.

That same evening the Ministers were summoned to the Elysee; Bonaparte

presses the removal of Changarnier; five Ministers refuse to sign the

order; the “Moniteur” 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;—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—Baraguay d’Hilliers and St. Jean

d’Angley—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’Angley becomes Minister of

War; the “Moniteur” announces the decree cashiering Changarnier; his

command is divided up between Baraguay d’Hilliers, who receives the

First Division, and Perrot, who is placed over the National Guard. The

“Bulwark of Society” is turned down; and, although no dog barks over

the event, in the Bourses the stock quotations rise.

By repelling the Army, that, in Changarnier’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 “general rules” 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 “post festum.” [#4 After the act is done; after

the fact.]

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’s proposition, the National Assembly

retreats into its Committees, and appoints a “Committee on

Extraordinary Measures.” 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 “extraordinary

measures,” that the parliament so noisily announced fizzle out on

January 18 in a vote of lack of confidence against the Ministry,

without General Changarnier’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’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—the Orleanist and the Legitimist—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—as dangerous as it was senseless—the

restoration plans, which they continued to pursue indefatigably behind

the back of the parliament.

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 “Society of December 10”? 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 “Bulwark of Society” 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,

“Parliamentary Idiocy,”—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;—it required this

“Parliamentary Idiocy” 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 “Moniteur” 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—as proved by the January 18 vote, that fruit of the coalition

between mountain and royalists—, 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.

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 “Society of December 10” 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;—it was

enough that even a mere Baisse should conjure up the “Red Spectre” 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.

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’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 “strong Government,”

and was finding it less and less pardonable to leave France “without an

administration,” 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.

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 “coup d’etat.” 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 “Society of

December 10,” anything but a duel with a bed-bug. But Bonaparte

answered the party of Order as Agesilaus did King Agis: “I seem to you

an ant; but shall one day be a lion.”

VI.

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’

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.

The interest of the Bonapartists in the revision was simple: they were

above all concerned in the abolition of Article 45, which forbade

Bonaparte’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.

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 “status quo,” by leaving to Bonaparte only

one expedient—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.

The parliamentary republic was more than a neutral ground on which the

two factions of the French bourgeoisie—Legitimists and Orleanists,

large landed property and manufacture—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.

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.

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—the republic could

and did accomplish. This was the philosopher’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

“Assemblee Nationale,” 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’ 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

“national” restoration, “with the aid of all the members of his

family.” The Oleanist Salvandy throws himself at the feet of Henry V.

The Legitimist leaders Berryer, Benoit d’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—the only

success that the fusion could at best score—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;—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—Thiers, Baze, etc.—, 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’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.

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.

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—be it

that of the Legitimists or that of the Orleanists—, 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.

That portion of the party of Order—eager for a revision of the

Constitution but disagreed upon the extent of revision—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:

“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.”

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 “legal” 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’ 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.

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.

The parliament pronounced the Constitution, and, thereby, also, its own

reign, “outside of the pale of the majority”; 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’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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I have already indicated that, since the entry of Fould in the

Ministry, that portion of the commercial bourgeoisie that had enjoyed

the lion’s share in Louis Philippe’s reign, to-wit, the aristocracy of

finance, had become Bonapartist. Fould not only represented Bonaparte’s

interests at the Bourse, he represented also the interests of the

Bourse with Bonaparte. A passage from the London “Economist,” 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: “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.”

In its issue of November 29, 1851, the “Economist” declares

editorially: “The President is now recognized as the guardian of order

on every Stock Exchange of Europe.” Accordingly, the Aristocracy of

Finance condemned the parliamentary strife of the party of Order with

the Executive as a “disturbance of order,” and hailed every victory of

the President over its reputed representatives as a “victory of order.”

Under “aristocracy of finance” 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 “aristocracy of finance” at every epoch when the

stability of the government is to them synonymous with “Moses and his

prophets.” This is so even before things have reached the present stage

when every deluge threatens to carry away the old governments

themselves.

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.

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.

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 “status quo.” 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 “status quo” could be

preserved in only one of two ways: either by the prolongation of

Bonaparte’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.

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.

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—by its servility towards the President, by its insults

to the Parliament, by the brutal treatment of its own press—to suppress

and annihilate its speaking and writing organs, its politicians and its

literati, its orators’ 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.

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 “Economist,” which, as late

as November 29, 1851, that is to say, four days before the “coup

d’etat” pronounced Bonaparte the “Guardian of Order” and Thiers and

Berryer “Anarchists,” and as early as December 27, 1851, after

Bonaparte had silenced those very Anarchists, cries out about the

treason committed by “the ignorant, untrained and stupid proletaires

against the skill, knowledge, discipline, mental influence,

intellectual resources an moral weight of the middle and upper ranks.”

The stupid, ignorant and contemptible mass was none other than the

bourgeoisie itself.

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—in the middle of October? The

French bourgeois, whose “skill, knowledge, mental influence and

intellectual resources,” 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—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’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:

“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.”

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 “coup d’etat” 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 “social solutions”

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 “in partibus,” who

announced the destruction of the world for May 2,—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: “Rather an End With Fright, Than a Fright

Without End.”

Bonaparte understood this cry. His perspicacity was sharpened by the

growing anxiety of the creditors’ 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’s hope of a constitutional prolongation of his term; the

candidature of the Prince of Joinville tolerated no further

vacillation.

If ever an event cast its shadow before it long before its occurrence,

it was Bonaparte’s “coup d’etat.” 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 “coup d’etat.” In May, 1851, Persigny had again sought to win

Changarnier over to the “coup,” and the “Miessager de l’Assemblee”

newspaper had published this conversation. At every parliamentary

storm, the Bonapartist papers threatened a “coup,” 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 “coup”

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 “coup d’etat” tumbled close upon one another’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:

“Rumors of a ‘coup’ 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.”

The newspaper correspondence that brought this news always close

ominously with “postponed.” The “coup” 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 “coup” 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 “Society of December 10,” nor an

unthought of surprise of the National Assembly that caused the success

of the “coup.” When it succeeded, it did so despite his indiscretion

and with its anticipation—a necessary, unavoidable result of the

development that had preceded.

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.

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.

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

“Questors’ Bill.” 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 “Questors’ Bill,” 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’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.

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—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.

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—Parliamentary Idiocy—, had hatched out jointly with the Council

of State, after the death of the parliament, a new parliamentary

intrigue in the shape of a “Responsibility Law,” 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,—though, it must be admitted, one fishwife was equal to

seventeen Burgraves in real power—; the same as, after the introduction

of the “Questors’ Bill,” he enthused the lieutenants, who were being

treated at the Elysee;—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 “Journal des Debats”:

“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.” (Bravo! Bravo! Stormy bravos.)

Thus the industrial bourgeoisie shouts its servile “Bravo!” to the

“coup d’etat” 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.

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 “Society of December 10,”

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 “Moniteur” a false document, according to which

influential parliamentary names had grouped themselves round him in a

Committee of the Nation.

Amidst cries of “Long live the Republic!”, the rump-parliament,

assembled at the Mayor’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’ wagons and transported to the prisons of Mazas, Ham and

Vincennes. Thus ended the party of Order, the Legislative Assembly and

the February revolution.

Before hastening to the end, let us sum up shortly the plan of its

history:

I.—First Period. From February 24 to May 4, 1848. February period.

Prologue. Universal fraternity swindle.

II.—Second Period. Period in which the republic is constituted, and of

the Constitutive National Assembly.

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.

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.

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.

III.—Third Period. Period of the constitutional republic and of the

Legislative National Assembly.

1. May 29 to June 13, 1849. Struggle of the small traders’, middle

class with the bourgeoisie and with Bonaparte. Defeat of the small

traders’ democracy.

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.

3. May 31, 1850, to December 2, 1851. Struggle between the

parliamentary bourgeoisie and Bonaparte.

a. May 31, 1850, to January 12, 1851. The parliament loses the supreme

command over the Army.

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.

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.

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’s triumph. Parody of the imperialist

restoration.

VII.

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: “Long live the Republic!”

The French bourgeoisie reared up against the reign of the working

proletariat;—it brought to power the slum-proletariat, with the chief

of the “Society of December 10” at its head. It kept France in

breathless fear over the prospective terror of “red anarchy;”—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 “Army of Order.” It

made the apotheosis of the sabre; now the sabre rules it. It destroyed

the revolutionary press;—now its own press is annihilated. It placed

public meetings under police surveillance;—now its own salons are

subject to police inspection. It disbanded the democratic National

Guards;—now its own National Guard is disbanded. It instituted the

state of siege;—now itself is made subject thereto. It supplanted the

jury by military commissions;—now military commissions supplant its own

juries. It subjected the education of the people to the parsons’

interests;—the parsons’ interests now subject it to their own systems.

It ordered transportations without trial;—now itself is transported

without trial. It suppressed every movement of society with physical

force;—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;—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: “Fuge, Tace, Quiesce!”—flee, be silent, submit!—;

Bonaparte shouts to the bourgeoisie: “Fuge, Tace, Oniesce!”—flee, be

silent, submit!

The French bourgeoisie had long since solved Napoleon’s dilemma: “Dans

cinquante ans l’Europe sera republicaine ou cosaque.” [#1 Within fifty

years Europe will be either republican or Cossack.] It found the

solution in the “republique cosaque.” [#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.

Why did not the Parisian proletariat rise after the 2d of December?

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.

On December 4, the proletariat was incited to fight by Messrs.

Bourgeois & 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 & 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 “Yes” and “No” 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 & Small-Trader believed they had gained their point. The

absentees, the next morning, were Messieurs. Bourgeois & Small-Trader.

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’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!

“C’est Ic triomphe complet et definitif du Socialism!” 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.

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: “Well hast thou grubbed, old mole!”

The Executive power, with its tremendous bureaucratic and military

organization; with its wide-spreading and artificial machinery of

government—an army of office-holders, half a million strong, together

with a military force of another million men—; 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—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.

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

“Society of December 10” 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.

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—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.]

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 “coup d’etat” of December 2, 1851.

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—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.

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 “Code Napoleon,” which provides that

“La recherche de la paternite est interdite,” [#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.

“But,” I shall be objected to, “what about the farmers’ uprisings over

half France, the raids of the Army upon the farmers, the wholesale

imprisonment and transportation of farmers?”

Indeed, since Louis XIV., France has not experienced such persecutions

of the farmer on the ground of his demagogic machinations.

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.]

The three years’ 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;—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;—the bourgeoisie deposed the

Mayors. Finally, during period of the parliamentary republic, the

farmers of several localities rose against their own product, the

Army;—the bourgeoisie punished them with states of siege and

executions. And this is the identical bourgeoisie, that now howls over

the “stupidity of the masses,” over the “vile multitude,” 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—so

long as they remain conservative; and their intelligence—so soon as

they become revolutionary.

In the revolts that took place after the “coup d’etat” 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

“reddest” 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 “Convention together with a Napoleon.”

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 “Napoleonic” 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 “idees Napoleoniennes,” 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.

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’s pot of capital. The

“Code Napoleon” is now but the codex of execution, of sheriff’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 “strong

and unlimited government”—and this is the second of the “idees

Napoleoniennes,” which the second Napoleon has to carried out—, has for

its mission the forcible defence of this very “material” social order,

a “material order” that furnishes the slogan in Bonaparte’s

proclamations against the farmers in revolt.

Along with the mortgage, imposed by capital upon the farmer’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’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

“idee Napoleonienne” 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.

Another “idee Napoleonienne” 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,—yet another “idee Napoleonienne.” The expedition

against Rome will next time take place in France, but in a reverse

sense from that of M. de Montalembert.

Finally, the culminating point of the “idees Napoleoniennes” is the

preponderance of the Army. The Army was the “point of honor” 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 “remplacants,” substitutes, just as the second Bonaparte

himself is but a “remplacant,” a substitute, for Napoleon. Its feats of

heroism are now performed in raids instituted against farmers and in

the service of the police;—and when the internal contradictions of his

own system shall drive the chief of the “Society of December 10” across

the French frontier, that Army will, after a few bandit-raids, gather

no laurels but only hard knocks.

It is evident that all the “idees Napoleoniennes” 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.

The conditions of the French farmers’ 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.

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’Ailly thundered into their faces: “Only the devil in his Own

person can now save the Catholic Church, and you demand angels.” So,

likewise, did the French bourgeoisie cry out after the “coup d’etat”:

“Only the chief of the ‘Society of December 10’ can now save bourgeois

society, only theft can save property, only perjury religion, only

bastardy the family, only disorder order!”

Bonaparte, as autocratic Executive power, fulfills his mission to

secure “bourgeois order.” 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 “true Socialists,”

together with their governmental wisdom. But, above all, Bonaparte

feels himself the chief of the “Society of December 10,” 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 “Society of December 10” with decrees, without

decrees, and despite decrees.

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.

Industry and commerce, i.e., the business of the middle class, are to

be made to blossom in hot-house style under the “strong Government.”

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 “rentes” [#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.

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;—as chief of the

“Society of December 10,” 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’ 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,—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 “Society of December 10.” The

witticisms with which the Countess of L., the mistress of de Morny,

characterized the confiscations of the Orleanist estates: “C’est le

premier vol de l’aigle,” [#10 “It is the first flight of the eagle” The

French word “vol” 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: “Tu fai conto sopra i beni, bisogna prima

far il conto sopra gli anni.” [#11 “You count your property you should

rather count the years left to you.”] 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—a

noisy, restless “Boheme,” greedy after plunder, that crawls about in

gallooned frocks with the same grotesque dignity as Soulonque’s [#12

Soulonque was the negro Emperor of the short-lived negro Empire of

Hayti.] Imperial dignitaries—, 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 “Society of

December 10” by considering that Veron Crevel [#13 Crevel is a

character of Balzac, drawn after Dr. Veron, the proprietor of the

“Constitutional” 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: “C’est le roi des droles.” [#14 “He Is the

king of the clowns.”] It were a mistake to recall the days of the

Regency or of Louis XV. by the court and the kit of Louis Bonaparte’s:

“Often did France have a mistress-administration, but never yet an

administration of kept men.” [#15 Madame de Girardin.]

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 “coup” 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’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.]