KARL MARX
THE
EIGHTEENTH
BRUMAIRE
OF LOUIS
BONAPARTE
FOREIGN LANGUAGES PRESS
First Edition 1978
PEKING
(195x258).GIF)
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KARL MARXTHE
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The present English edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte substantially follows previous English translations. Certain adjustments of wording and style based on a check with the original have been made.
The footnotes and the notes at the end of the book are based on those in the Chinese and previous English editions.
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AUTHOR'S PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION |
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F. ENGELS' PREFACE TO THE THIRD GERMAN EDITION |
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EIGHTEENTH BRUMAIRE OF LOUIS BONAPARTE |
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Written between December 1851
Original in German page 2[blank]
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My friend Joseph Weydemeyer,[*] whose death was so untimely, intended to publish a political weekly in New York starting from January 1, 1852. He invited me to provide this magazine with a history of the coup d'etat. So, until the middle of February, I wrote him weekly articles under the title: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Meanwhile Weydemeyer's original plan had fallen through. Instead, in the spring of 1852 he began to publish a monthly, Die Revolution, the first number of which consists of my Eighteenth Brumaire. A few hundred copies of this found their way into Germany at that time, without, however, getting into the actual book trade. A German bookseller of extremely radical pretensions whom I approached for sales was filled with righteous horror at such an "ill-timed proposition."
From the above facts it will be seen that the present work took shape under the immediate pressure of events and its historical material does not extend beyond the month of
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February (1852). Its re-publication now is due partly to the demand of the book trade, and partly to the urgent requests of my friends in Germany.
Among the writings dealing with the same subject at approximately the same time as mine, there are only two which deserve notice: Victor Hugo's Napoléon le Petit [Napoleon the Little ] and Proudhon's Coup d'Etat.
Victor Hugo confines himself to bitter and witty invective against the man who was responsible for the coup d'etat. The event itself appears in his work like a bolt from the blue. He sees in it only the violent act of a single individual. He does not notice that he makes this individual great instead of little by ascribing to him a personal power of initiative, which would be unparalleled in world history. Proudhon, for his part, seeks to represent the coup d'etat as the result of the preceding historical development. Unnoticeably, however, his historical construction of the coup d'etat becomes a historical apologia for its hero. Thus he falls into the error of our so-called objective historians. I, on the contrary, demonstrate how the class struggle in France created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque and mediocre personality to play a hero's part.
A revision of the present work would have robbed it of its peculiar colouring. I have therefore confined myself to the mere correction of printer's errors and to striking out allusions now no longer intelligible.
The concluding words of my work: "But when the imperial mantle finally falls on the shoulders of Louis Bonaparte, the bronze statue of Napoleon will crash from the top of the Vendome Column," have already been fulfilled.
Colonel Charras opened the attack on the Napoleon cult in his work on the campaign of 1815.[2] Subsequently, particu-
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larly in the last few years, French literature has put an end to the Napoleon legend with the weapons of historical research, criticism, satire and wit. Outside France this violent breach with traditional popular belief, this tremendous mental revolution, has hardly been noticed and still less understood.
Lastly, I hope that my work will contribute towards eliminating the school-taught phrase now current, particularly in Germany, of so-called Caesarism. In this superficial historical analogy the main point is forgotten, namely, that in ancient Rome the class struggle took place only within a privilegged minority, between the free rich and the free poor, while the great productive mass of the population, the slaves, was merely the passive pedistal for these combatants. People forget Sismondi 's significant saying: The Roman proletariat lived at the expense of society, while modern society lives at the expense of the proletariat.[3] The difference between the material, economic conditions of the ancient and the modern class struggles is so complete that the political figures produced by them can likewise have no more in common with one another that the Archbishop of Canterbury has with the High Priest Samuel.
Karl Marx
London, June 23, 1869
OF LOUIS BONAPARTE[1]
and March 1852
Published as the first issue of the
magazine Die Revolution, New
York, 1852
* Military commandant of the St. Louis district during the American Civil War. [Note by Marx.]
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Published in the second edition |
Original in German |
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The fact that a new edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire has become necessary, 33 years after its first appearance, proves that even today this little book has lost none of its value.
It was in truth a work of genius. Immediately after the event that struck the whole political world like a thunderbolt from the blue, that was condemned by some with loud cries of moral indignation and accepted by others as salvation from the revolution and as punishment for its errors, but was only wondered at by all and understood by none -- immediately after this event, Marx came out with a concise, epigrammatic exposition that laid bare the whole course of French history since the February days in its inner connection, reduced the miracle of December 2[4] to a natural necessary result of this connection and in so doing did not even need to treat the hero of the coup d'etat with anything other than the contempt he so well deserved. And the picture was drawn with such a masterly hand that every fresh disclosure since made has only provided fresh proofs
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of how faithfully it reflected reality. This eminent understanding of the living history of the day, this clear-sighted appraisal of events at the moment of happening, is indeed without parallel.
But to achieve this, Marx's thorough knowledge of French history was needed. France is the country where, more than anywhere else, the historical class struggles were fought out to a decisive conclusion every time, and where, consequently, the changing political forms within which they move and in which their results are summarized have been stamped in the sharpest outlines. The centre of feudalism in the Middle Ages, the model of a unified monarchy based on social estates since the Renaissance, France demolished feudalism in the Great Revolution and established the rule of the bourgeoisie in a classical purity unequalled by any other European land. And the struggle of the aspiring proletariat against the ruling bourgeoisie appeared here in an acute form unknown elsewhere. This was the reason why Marx not only studied the past history of France with particular predilection, but also followed her current history in every detail, stored up the material for future use and, consequently, events never took him by surprise.
In addition to this, however, there was yet another factor. It was precisely Marx who had first discovered the great law of the motion of history, the law according to which all historical struggles, whether they occur in the political, religious, philosophical or some other ideological domain, are in fact only the more or less clear expression of the struggles of social classes, and that the existence of, and thereby the collisions, too, between these classes are in turn conditioned by the degree of development of their economic position, by the mode of their production and exchange determined by it.
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This law, which has the same significance for history as the law of the transformation of energy has for natural science -- this law gave him here, too, the key to an understanding of the history of the Second French Republic. He put his law to the test on these historical events, and even after 33 years we must still say that it has stood the test brilliantly.
Frederick Engels
TO THE THIRD GERMAN EDITION
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Written in 1885 |
Translated from the German |
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Hegel remarks somewhere that all the events and personalities of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Caussidiere for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848-51 for the Montagne of 1793-95, the Nephew for the Uncle. And the same caricature occurs in the circumstances attending the second edition of the eighteenth Brumaire!
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under given circumstances directly encountered and inherited from the past. The tradition of all the generations of the dead weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem involved in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never before existed, it is precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis that they anxiously conjure up the spirits
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of the past to their service and borrow names, battle cries and costumes from them in order to act out the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language. Thus Luther donned the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately as the Roman republic and the Roman empire, and the Revolution of 1848 could do nothing better than parody 1789 one minute, and the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95 the next. In a similar way a beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he has assimilated the spirit of the new language and can freely express himself in it only when he can use it without recalling the old and forgets his native tongue in the use of the new.
If we consider this conjuring up of the dead of world history, a salient difference is revealed immediately. Camille Desmoulins, Danton, Robespierre, Saint-Just, Napoleon, the heroes as well as the parties and the masses of the old French Revolution, performed the task of their time in Roman costume and with Roman phrases, the task of unchaining and setting up modern bourgeois society. The first ones smashed the feudal basis to pieces and mowed down the feudal heads which had grown on it. The other created inside France the only conditions under which free competition could be developed, parcelled landed property exploited and the unchained industrial productive power of the nation employed; and everywhere beyond the French borders he swept the feudal institutions away, to the extent necessary to provide bourgeois society in France with a suitable up-to-date environment on the European Continent. Once the new social formation was established, the antediluvian Colossi disappeared and with them resurrected Romanity -- the Brutuses,
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Gracchi, Publicolas, the tribunes, the senators, and Caesar himself. Bourgeois society in its sober reality had begotten its true interpreters and mouthpieces in the Says, Cousins, Royer-Collards, Benjamin Constants and Guizots; its real military leaders sat behind the office desks, and the hog-headed Louis XVIII was its political chief. Wholly absorbed in the production of wealth and in the peaceful struggle of competition, it no longer comprehended that the ghosts of Roman times had watched over its cradle. But unheroic as bourgeois society is, it nevertheless took heroism, sacrifice, terror, civil war and the battles of nations to bring it into being. And in the classically austere traditions of the Roman republic its gladiators found the ideals and the art forms, the self-deceptions that they needed in order to conceal from themselves the bourgeois limitations of the content of their struggles and to keep their zeal on the high plane of the great historical tragedy. Similarly, at another stage of development, a century earlier, Cromwell and the English people had borrowed speech, passions and illusions from the Old Testament for their bourgeois revolution. When the real aim had been achieved, when the bourgeois transformation of English society had been accomplished, Locke supplanted Habakkuk.
Thus the awakening of the dead in those revolutions served the purpose of glorifying the new struggles, not of parodying the old; of magnifying the given task in the imagination, not of fleeing from its solution in reality; of finding the spirit of revolution once more, not of making its ghost walk about again.
From 1848 to 1851 only the ghost of the old revolution walked about, from Marrast, the républicain en gants
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jaunes,[*] who disguised himself as the old Bailly, down to the adventurer, who hides his commonplace repulsive features under the iron death mask of Napoleon. An entire people, which had imagined that by means of a revolution it had imparted to itself an accelerated power of motion, suddenly finds itself set back into a defunct epoch and, in order that no doubt as to the relapse may be possible, the old dates arise again, the old chronology, the old names, the old edicts, which had long become a subject of antiquarian erudition, and the old minions of the law, who had seemed long decayed. The nation feels like that mad Englishman in Bedlam, who fancies that he lives in the times of the ancient Pharaohs and daily bemoans the hard labour that he must perform in the Ethiopian mines as a gold digger, immured in this subterranean prison, a dimly burning lamp fastened to his head, the overseer of the slaves behind him with a long whip, and at the exits a confused welter of barbarian mercenaries, who understand neither the forced labourers in the mines nor one another, since they speak no common language. "And all this is expected of me," sighs the mad Englishman, "of me, a free-born Briton, in order to make gold for the old Pharaohs." "In order to pay the debts of the Bonaparte family," sighs the French nation. The Englishman, so long as he was in his right mind, could not get rid of his fixation on making gold. The French, so long as they were engaged in revolution, could not get rid of the memory of Napoleon, as the election of December 10[5] proved They hankered to return from the perils of revolution to the fleshpots of Egypt,[6] and December 2, 1851 was the answer. They have not only a caricature of the old Napoleon, they
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have caricatured the old Napoleon himself as he must appear in the middle of the 19th century.
The social revolution of the 19th century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped off all superstition with regard to the past. Earlier revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to drug themselves against their own content. In order to arrive at its own content, the revolution of the 19th century must let the dead bury their dead. Then the words went beyond the content; now the content goes beyond the words.
The February Revolution was a surprise attack, a taking of the old society unawares, and the people proclaimed this unexpected stroke as a deed of world importance, ushering in a new epoch. On December 2 the February Revolution is conjured away by a cardsharper's trick, and what seems overthrown is no longer the monarchy but the liberal concessions that were wrung from it by a century of struggle. Instead of society having conquered a new content for itself, it seems that the state only returned to its oldest form, to the shamelessly simple domination of the sabre and the cowl. Such is the reply of the coup de tête < FONT SIZE=-2>[*] of December 1851 to the coup de main [**] of February 1848. Easy come, easy go. Meanwhile time has not been entirely wasted. During the years 1848-51 French society has made up for the studies and experiences -- albeit by a method which is condensed because it is revolutionary -- which, in a regular, so to speak, textbook course of development should have preceded the February Revolution, if it was to be more than a ruffling of the surface. Society
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how seems to have fallen back behind its point of departure; it has in truth first to create for itself the revolutionary point of departure, the situation, the relations, the conditions under which alone modern revolution becomes serious.
Bourgeois revolutions, like those of the 18th century, storm swiftly from success to success; their dramatic effects outdo each other; men and things seem set in sparkling brilliants; ecstasy is the everyday spirit; but they are short-lived; soon they have attained their zenith, and a long crapulent depression lays hold of society before it learns soberly to assimilate the results of its storm-and-stress period. On the other hand, proletarian revolutions, like those of the 19th century, criticize themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses and paltrinesses of their first attempts, seem to throw down their adversary only in order that he may draw new strength from the earth and rise before them again even more gigantic, recoil ever and anon from the indefinite prodigiousness of their own aims, until a situation has been created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves cry out:
Hic Rhodus, hic salta!
For the rest, every fairly competent observer, even if he had not followed the course of French developments step by step, must have had a presentiment that an unheard-of fiasco was in store for the revolution. It was enough to hear the self-complacent howl of victory with which Messieurs the Democrats congratulated each other on the expected favour-
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able consequences of the second Sunday in May 1852.[8] In their minds, the second Sunday in May 1852 had become a fixed idea, a dogma, like the day on which Christ should reappear and the millennium begin, in the minds of the Chiliasts. As ever, weakness had taken refuge in a belief in miracles, fancied the enemy overcome when he was only conjured away in the imagination, and it lost all understanding of the present in a passive glorification of the future that was in store and of the deeds it had in petto but which it merely did not want to carry out as yet. Those heroes who seek to disprove their demonstrated incompetence by offering each other their sympathy and by ganging together had tied up their bundles, collected their laurel wreaths in advance and were just then engaged on the exchange market in discounting the republics in partibus [9] for which they had already providently organized the government personnel with all the calm of their unassuming disposition. December 2 struck them like a thunderbolt from the blue, and the peoples, who in periods of pusillanimous depression gladly let their inward apprehension be drowned by the loudest bawlers, will perchance have convinced themselves that the times are past when the cackle of geese could save the Capitol.[10]
The Constitution, the National Assembly, the dynastic parties, the blue and the red republicans, the heroes of Africa,[11] the thunder from the platform, the sheet lightning of the daily press, the entire literature, the political names and the intellectual reputations, the civil law and the penal code, the liberté, égalité, fraternité and the second Sunday in May 1852 -- all has vanished like a phantasmagoria before the spell of a man whom even his enemies do not make out to be a sorcerer. Universal suffrage seems to have survived only for a moment, in order that with its own hand it may make its
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last will and testament for all the world to see and declare in the name of the people itself: All that exists deserves to perish.[12]
It is not enough to say, as the French do, that their nation was taken unawares. A nation and a woman are not forgiven the unguarded hour in which the first adventurer that came along could violate them. The riddle is not solved by such turns of speech, but merely formulated differently. It remains to be explained how a nation of 36 millions can be surprised and delivered unresisting into captivity by three swindlers.
Let us briefly retrace the phases that the French Revolution went through from February 24, 1848 to December 1851.
Three main periods are unmistakable: the February period ; May 4, 1848 to May 28, 1849: the period of the constitution of the republic, or of the Constituent National Assembly ; May 28, 1849 to December 2, 1851: the period of the constitutional republic or of the Legislative National Assembly.
The first period, from February 24, or the overthrow of Louis Philippe, to May 4, 1848, the meeting of the Constituent Assembly, the February period proper, may be described as the prologue to the revolution. Its character was officially expressed in the fact that the government improvised by it itself declared that it was provisional and, like the government, everything that was mooted, attempted or enunciated during this period proclaimed itself to be only provisional. Nothing and nobody ventured to lay claim to the right of existence and of concrete action. All the elements that had prepared or determined the revolution, the dynastic opposition,[13] the republican bourgeoisie, the democratic-republican petty bourgeoisie and the social-democratic workers, provisionally found their place in the February government.
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It could not be otherwise. The February days originally intended an electoral reform, by which the circle of the politically privileged among the propertied class itself was to be widened and the exclusive domination of the financial aristocracy overthrown. When it came to the actual conflict, however, when the people mounted the barricades, the National Guard remained passive, the army offered no serious resistance and the monarchy ran away, the republic appeared to be a matter of course. Every party construed it in its own way. Having secured it arms in hand, the proletariat impressed its stamp upon it and proclaimed it to be a social republic. In this way the general content of the modern revolution was indicated, a content which was in the strangest contradiction to everything that, with the material available, with the degree of education attained by the masses, under the given circumstances and relations, could be immediately realized in practice. On the other hand, the claims of all the remaining elements that had collaborated in the February Revolution were recognized by the lion's share that they obtained in the government. In no period do we, therefore, find a more confused mixture of high-flown phrases and actual uncertainty and clumsiness, of more enthusiastic striving for innovation and more deeply rooted domination of the old routine, of more apparent harmony of the whole of society and more profound alienation of its elements. While the Paris proletariat still revelled in the vision of the wide vistas that had opened before it and indulged in earnest discussions on social problems, the old powers of society had grouped themselves, assembled, reflected and found unexpected support in the mass of the nation, the peasants and petty bourgeois, who all at once stormed on to the political stage, after the barriers of the July Monarchy had fallen.
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The second period, from May 4, 1848 to the end of May 1849, is the period of the constitution, the foundation, of the bourgeois republic. Immediately after the February days not only had the dynastic opposition been surprised by the republicans and the republicans by the Socialists, but all France by Paris. The National Assembly, which met on May 4, 1848, had emerged from the national elections and represented the nation. It was a living protest against the pretensions of the February days and was to reduce the results of the revolution to the bourgeois scale. In vain the Paris proletariat, which immediately grasped the character of this National Assembly, attempted on May 15, a few days after it met, to forcibly negate its existence, to dissolve it, to disintegrate again into its constituent parts the organic form in which the proletariat was threatened by the reacting spirit of the nation. As everybody knows, the only result of May 15 was the removal of Blanqui and his comrades, that is, of the real leaders of the proletarian party, from the public stage for the entire duration of the cycle we are considering.[14]
The bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe can be followed only by a bourgeois republic, that is to say, whereas a limited section of the bourgeoisie ruled in the name of the king, the whole of the bourgeoisie will now rule in the name of the people. The demands of the Paris proletariat are utopian nonsense, to which an end must be put. The Paris proletariat replied to this declaration of the Constituent National Assembly with the June Insurrection, the most colossal event in the history of European civil wars. The bourgeois republic triumphed. On its side stood the financial aristocracy, the industrial bourgeoisie, the middle class, the petty bourgeois, the army, the lumpenproletariat organized as the Mobile Guard, the intellectual lights, the clergy and the ru-
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ral population. On the side of the Paris proletariat stood none but itself. More than 3,000 insurgents were butchered after the victory, and 15,000 were transported without trial. With this defeat the proletariat passes into the background of the revolutionary stage. It attempts to press forward again on every occasion, as soon as the movement appears to make a fresh start, but with ever decreased expenditure of strength and always slighter results. As soon as one of the social strata situated above it gets into revolutionary ferment, the proletariat enters into an alliance with it and so shares all the defeats that the different parties suffer, one after another. But these subsequent blows become the weaker, the greater the surface of society over which they are distributed. The more important leaders of the proletariat in the Assembly and in the press successively fall victims to the courts, and ever more equivocal figures come to head it. Part of the proletariat throws itself into doctrinaire experiments, exchange banks and workers' associations, hence into a movement in which it renounces the revolutionizing of the old world by means of the latter's own great, combined resources, and seeks, rather, to achieve its salvation behind society's back, in private fashion, within its limited conditions of existence, and hence necessarily suffers shipwreck. It seems unable either to rediscover revolutionary greatness in itself or to gain renewed energy from recently formed alliance, until all classes with which it contended in June themselves lie prostrate beside it. But at least it succumbs with the honours of the great, world-historic struggle; not only France, but all Europe trembles at the June earthquake, while the ensuing defeats of the upper classes are so cheaply bought that they require bare-faced exaggeration by the victorious party to be able to pass for events at all, and become the more ignom-
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inious the further the defeated party is removed from the proletariat.
The defeat of the June insurgents, to be sure, had now prepared and levelled the ground on which the bourgeois republic could be founded and built up, but it had shown at the same time that in Europe the questions at issue are other than that of "republic or monarchy." It had revealed that here bourgeois republic signifies the unlimited despotism of one class over other classes. It had proved that in countries with an old civilization, with a developed formation of classes, with modern conditions of production and with an intellectual consciousness in which all traditional ideas have been dissolved by the work of centuries, the republic signifies in general only the political form of revolution of bourgeois society and not its conservative form of life, as, for example, in the United States of North America, where, though classes already exist, they have not yet become fixed, but continually change and interchange their elements in constant flux, where the modern means of production, instead of coinciding with a stagnant surplus population, rather compensate for the relative deficiency of heads and hands, and where, finally, the feverish, youthful movement of material production, which has to make a new world its own, has left neither time nor opportunity for abolishing the old spirit world.
During the June days all classes and parties had united in the party of order against the proletarian class as the party of anarchy, of socialism, of communism. They had "saved" society from "the enemies of society." They had given out the watchwords of the old society, "property, family, religion, order," to their army as passwords and had proclaimed to the counter-revolutionary crusaders: "In this sign thou shalt con-
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quer!" From that moment, as soon as one of the numerous parties which had gathered under this sign against the June insurgents seeks to hold the revolutionary battlefield in its own class interest, it goes down before the cry: "Property, family, religion, order." Society is saved just as often as the circle of its rulers contracts, as a more exclusive interest is maintained against a wider one. Every demand of the simplest bourgeois financial reform, of the most ordinary liberalism, of the most formal republicanism, of the most shallow democracy, is simultaneously castigated as an "attempt on society" and branded as "socialism." And, finally, the high priests of "religion and order" themselves are driven with kicks from their Pythian tripods, hauled out of their beds in the darkness of night, bundled into prison vans, thrown into dungeons or sent into exile; their temple is razed to the ground, their mouths are sealed, their pens broken, their law torn to pieces in the name of religion, of property, of the family, of order. Bourgeois fanatics for order are shot down on their balconies by mobs of drunken soldiers, their domestic sanctuaries profaned, their houses bombarded for amusement -- in the name of property, of the family, of religion and of order. Finally, the scum of bourgeois society forms the holy phalanx of order and the hero Crapulinski installs himself in the Tuileries as the "saviour of society ."
Let us pick up the threads of the development once more. The history of the Constituent National Assembly since the June days is the history of the domination and the dis-
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integration of the republican faction of the bourgeoisie, of that faction which is known by the names of tricolour republicans, pure republicans, political republicans, formalist republicans, etc.
Under the bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe it had formed the official republican opposition and consequently a recognized component part of the political world of the day. It had its representatives in the Chambers and a considerable sphere of influence in the press. Its Paris organ, the National,[15] was considered just as respcctable in its way as the Journal des Débats. [16] Its character corresponded to this position under the constitutional monarchy. It was not a faction of the bourgeoisie held together by great common interests and marked off by specific conditions of production. It was a clique of republican-minded members of the bourgeoisie, writers, lawyers, officers and officials that owed its influence to the personal antipathies of the country against Louis Philippe, to memories of the old republic, to the republican faith of a number of enthusiasts, above all, however, to French nationalism, whose hatred of the Vienna treaties[17] and of the alliance with England it stirred up perpetually. A large part of the following that the National had under Louis Philippe was due to this concealed imperialism, which could consequently confront it later, under the republic, as a deadly rival in the person of Louis Bonaparte. It fought the financial aristocracy, as did all the rest of the bourgeois opposition. Polemics against the budget, which were closely connected in France with fighting the financial aristocracy, procured popularity too cheaply and material for puritanical leading articles too plentifully not to be exploited. The industrial bourgeoisie was grateful to it for its slavish defence of the French protectionist system, which it accepted, however, more on na-
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tional grounds than on grounds of national economy; the bourgeoisie as a whole, for the paper's vicious denunciation of communism and socialism. For the rest, the party of the National was purely republican, that is, it demanded a republican instead of a monarchist form of bourgeois rule and, above all, the lion's share of this rule. It was by no means clear in its own mind about the conditions of this transformation. On the other hand, what was clear as daylight to it and was publicly acknowledged at the reform banquets in the last days of Louis Philippe, was its unpopularity with the democratic petty bourgeois and, in particular, with the revolutionary proletariat. These pure republicans, as is, indeed, the way with pure republicans, were already on the point of contenting themselves in the first instance with a regency of the Duchess of Orleans, when the February Revolution broke out and assigned their best-known representatives a place in the Provisional Government. From the start, they naturally had the confidence of the bourgeoisie and a majority in the Constituent National Assembly. The socialist elements of the Provisional Government were excluded forthwith from the Executive Commission[18] which the National Assembly formed when it met, and the party of the National took advantage of the outbreak of the June Insurrection to discharge the Executive Commission also, and thereby to get rid of its closest rivals, the petty-bourgeois, or democratic, republicans (Ledru-Rollin, etc.). Cavaignac, the general of the bourgeois republican party who commanded the June massacre, took the place of the Executive Commission with a sort of dictatorial power. Marrast, former editor-in-chief of the National, became president in perpetuity of the Constituent National Assembly, and the ministries, as well as all other important posts, went to the pure republicans.
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The republican bourgeois faction, which had long regarded itself as the legitimate heir of the July Monarchy, thus found its fondest hopes exceeded; it attained power, however, not as it had dreamed under Louis Philippe, through a liberal revolt of the bourgeoisie against the throne, but through a rising of the proletariat against capital, a rising laid low with grape-shot. What it had conceived as the most revolutionary event turned out in reality to be the most counter-revolutionary. The fruit fell into its lap, but it fell from the tree of knowledge, not from the tree of life.
The exclusive rule of the bourgeois republicans lasted only from June 24 to December 10, 1848. It is summed up in the drafting of a republican constitution and in the state of siege of Paris.
The new Constitution was basically only the republicanized edition of the constitutional Charter of 1830.[19] The narrow electoral qualification of the July Monarchy, which excluded even a large part of the bourgeoisie from political rule, was incompatible with the existence of the bourgeois republic. The February Revolution had at once proclaimed direct universal suffrage in place of this qualification. The bourgeois republicans could not undo this event. They had to content themselves with adding the limiting proviso of a six months' residence in the constituency. The old organization of the administration, of the municipal system, of the judicial system, of the army, etc., remained intact, or, where the Constitution changed them, the change concerned the table of contents, not the contents; the name, not the subject matter.
The inevitable general staff of the liberties of 1848, personal liberty, liberty of the press, of speech, of association, of assembly, of education and religion, etc., received a constitutional uniform, which made them invulnerable. For each of
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these liberties is proclaimed as the absolute right of the French citoyen, but always with the marginal note that it is unlimited so far as it is not limited by the "equal rights of others and the public safety " or by "laws" which are intended to mediate just this harmony of the individual liberties with one another and with the public safety. For example: "The citizens have the right of association, of peaceful and unarmed assembly, of petition and of expressing their opinions, whether in the press or in any other way. The enjoyment of these rights has no limit save the equal rights of others and the public safety." (Chapter II of the French Constitution, §8.) -- "Education is free. Freedom of education shall be enjoyed under the conditions fixed by law and under the supreme control of the state." (Ibid., §9.) -- "The home of every citizen is inviolable except in the forms prescribed by law." (Chapter II, §3.) Etc., etc. -- The Constitution, therefore, constantly refers to future organic laws, which are to put into effect those marginal notes and regulate the enjoyment of these unrestricted liberties in such a manner that they will conflict neither with one another nor with the public safety. And later, these organic laws were brought into being by the friends of order and all those liberties regulated in such a manner that the bourgeoisie finds itself unhampered in its enjoyment of them by the equal rights of the other classes. Where it forbids these liberties entirely to "others" or permits enjoyment of them under conditions that are just so many police traps, this always happens solely in the interest of "public safety," that is, the safety of the bourgeoisie, as the Constitution prescribes. Consequently, both sides appeal with complete justice to the Constitution: the friends of order, who abrogated all these liberties, as well as the democrats, who demanded all of them. For each paragraph of the Con-
page 26
stitution contains its own antithesis, its own Upper and Lower House, namely, liberty in the general text, abrogation of liberty in the marginal note. Thus, so long as the name of freedom was respected and only its actual realization prevented, in a legal way of course, the constitutional existence of liberty remained intact, inviolate, however mortal the blows dealt to its existence in actual life.
This Constitution, made inviolable in so ingenious a manner, was nevertheless, like Achilles, vulnerable in one point, not in the heel, but in the head, or rather in the two heads where it ended up -- the Legislative Assembly, on the one hand, the President, on the other. Glance through the Constitution and you will find that only the paragraphs in which the relationship of the President to the Legislative Assembly is defined are absolute, positive, non-contradictory, and can not be distorted. For here it was a question of the bourgeois republicans safeguarding themselves. §§45-70 of the Constitution are so worded that the National Assembly can remove the President constitutionally, whereas the President can only remove the National Assembly unconstitutionally by setting aside the Constitution itself. Here, therefore, it provokes its forcible destruction. It not only sanctifies the division of powers, like the Charter of 1830, it widens it into an intolerable contradiction. The game of the constitutional powers, as Guizot called the parliamentary squabble between the legislative and executive power, is continually played va-banque * in the Constitution of 1848. On one side are 750 representatives of the people, elected by universal suffrage and eligible for re-election; they form an uncontrollable indissoluble, indivisible National Assembly, a National Assembly that enjoys legislative omnipotence, decides in the
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last instance on war, peace and commercial treaties, that alone possesses the right of amnesty and, by its permanence, perpetually holds the front of the stage. On the other side is the President, with all the attributes of royal power, with authority to appoint and dismiss his ministers independently of the National Assembly, with all the resources of executive power in his hands, bestowing all posts and deciding thereby on the livelihood of at least 1.5 million people in France, for that is how many depend on the 500,000 officials and officers of every rank. He has the whole of the armed forces behind him. He enjoys the privilege of pardoning individual criminals, of suspending National Guards, of discharging, with the concurrence of the Council of State, general, cantonal and municipal councils elected by the citizens themselves. Initiative and direction are reserved to him in all treaties with foreign countries. While the Assembly constantly performs on the boards and is exposed to daily public criticism, he leads a secluded life in the Elysian Fields, and that with Article 45 of the Constitution before his eyes and in his heart, crying to him daily: "Frère, il faut mourir! "[20] Your power ceases on the second Sunday of the lovely month of May in the fourth year after your election! Then your glory is at an end, there won't be a repeat performance and if you have debts, look to it in the meantime that you pay them off with the 600,000 francs granted you by the Constitution, unless, perchance, you should prefer to go to Clichy[21] on the second Monday of the lovely month of May! -- Thus, whereas the Constitution assigns actual power to the President, it seeks to secure moral power for the National Assembly. Apart from the fact that it is impossible to create a moral power by paragraphs of law, the Constitution here abrogates itself once more by having the President elected by all Frenchmen through direct suf-
page 28
frage. While the votes of France are split up among the 750 members of the National Assembly, they are here, on the contrary, concentrated on a single individual. While each separate representative of the people represents only this or that party, this or that town, this or that bridgehead, or even only the mere necessity of electing some one as the 750th without examining too closely either the cause or the man, he is the nation's choice and the act of his election is the trump that the sovereign people plays once every four years. The elected National Assembly stands in a metaphysical relation, but the elected President in a personal relation, to the nation. The National Assembly, indeed, exhibits in its individual representatives the manifold aspects of the national spirit, but in the President this national spirit finds its incarnation. In contrast with the Assembly, he possesses a sort of divine right; he is President 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 like Achilles, had its weak spot, had also, like Achilles, its presentiment that it must go to an early death. It was sufficient for the constitution-making pure republicans to cast a glance from the lofty heaven of their ideal republic at the profane world to perceive how the arrogance of the royalists the Bonapartists, the Democrats, the Communists as well as their own discredit grew daily in proportion as they approached the completion of their great legislative work of art, without Thetis having to leave the sea and communicate the secret to them. They sought to cheat destiny by a catch in the Constitution, through §111 of it, according to which every motion for a revision of the Constitution must be supported by at least three-quarters of the votes, cast in three successive debates at intervals of an entire month, with the added pro-
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viso that not less than 500 members of the National Assembly must vote. Thereby they merely made the impotent attempt still to exercise a power -- when only a parliamentary minority, as which in their mind's eye they already saw themselves prophetically -- a power which at the time, when they commanded a parliamentary majority and all the resources of governmental authority, was slipping daily more and more from their feeble hands.
Finally the Constitution, in a melodramatic paragraph, entrusts itself "to the vigilance and the patriotism of the whole French people and every single Frenchman," after it had previously entrusted in another paragraph the "vigilant" and "patriotic" to the tender, most painstaking care of the High Court of Justice, the "haute cour," invented by it for the purpose.
Such was the Constitution of 1848, which on December 2, 1851, was not overthrown by a head, but fell at the touch of a mere hat; this hat, to be sure, was a three-cornered Napoleonic hat.
While the bourgeois republicans in the Assembly were busy devising, discussing and voting this Constitution, outside the Assembly Cavaignac maintained the state of siege of Paris. The state of siege of Paris was the midwife of the Constituent Assembly in its labour of republican creation. If the Constitution is subsequently put out of existence by bayonets, it must not be forgotten that it was likewise by bayonets, turned against the people, that it had to be protected in its mother's womb and by bayonets that it had to be brought into existence. The forefathers of the "respectable republicans" had sent their symbol, the tricolour, on a tour of Europe. They in turn produced an invention that of itself made its way over the whole Continent, but returned to France with
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ever renewed love until it has now become naturalized in half her departments -- the state of siege. A splendid invention periodically employed in every ensuing crisis in the course of the French Revolution. But barrack and bivouac, which were thus periodically laid on French society's head to squeeze its brain and quieten it; sabre and musket, which were periodically allowed to act as judges and administrators, as guardians and censors, to play policeman and do night watchman's duty; moustache and uniform, which were periodically trumpeted forth as the highest wisdom of society and as its rector -- were not barrack and bivouac, sabre and musket, moustache and uniform finally bound to hit upon the idea of rather saving society once and for all by proclaiming their own regime as the highest, and freeing civil society completely from the trouble of governing itself? Barrack and bivouac, sabre and musket, moustache and uniform were bound to hit upon this idea all the more as they might then also expect better cash payment for their higher services, whereas little of substance was gleaned from the merely periodical state of siege and the temporary reprieves of society at the bidding of this or that bourgeois faction, save some killed and wounded and some friendly bourgeois leers. Should not the military at last one day play state of siege in their own interest and for their own benefit, and at the same time besiege the citizens' purses? Moreover, we should not forget in passing that Colonel Bernard, the same military commission president who under Cavaignac had 15,000 insurgents deported without trial, is at this moment again at the head of the military commissions active in Paris.
Whereas, with the state of siege in Paris, the respectable, the pure republicans[22] planted the nursery in which the praetorians of December 2, 1851 were to grow, they on the other
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hand deserve praise because, instead of exaggerating the national sentiment as under Louis Philippe, with the national power at their command, they now crawled before foreign countries, and, instead of setting Italy free, let her be reconquered by Austrians and Neapolitans.[23] Louis Bonaparte's election as President on December 10, 1848 put an end to the dictatorship of Cavaignac and to the Constituent Assembly.
In §44 of the Constitution it is stated: "The President of the French republic must never have lost his status of a French citizen." The first President of the French republic, L. N. Bonaparte, had not merely lost his status of a French citizen, had not only been an English special constable, he was even a naturalized Swiss.[24]
I have worked out elsewhere the significance of the election of December 10.[25] I will not revert to it here. Suffice it to remark here that it was a reaction of the peasants, who had had to pay the costs of the February Revolution, against the remaining classes of the nation, a reaction of the country against the town. It met with great approval in the army, for which the republicans of the National had provided neither glory nor additional pay, among the big bourgeoisie, which hailed Bonaparte as a bridge to monarchy, among the proletarians and petty bourgeois, who hailed him as a scourge for Cavaignac. I shall have an opportunity later of going more closely into the relationship of the peasants to the French Revolution.
The period from December 20, 1848 until the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, in May 1849, comprises the history of the downfall of the bourgeois republicans. After having founded a republic for the bourgeoisie, driven the revolutionary proletariat out of the field and reduced the democratic petty bourgeoisie to silence for the time being, they are them-
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selves thrust aside by the mass of the bourgeoisie, which justly impounds this republic as its property. This bourgeois mass was, however, royalist. One section of it, the large landowners, had ruled during the Restoration and was therefore Legitimist. [26] The other, the aristocrats of finance and big industrialists, had ruled during the July Monarchy and was consequently Orleanist. [27] The high dignitaries of the army, the university, the church, the bar, the academy and of the press were to be found on either side, though in various proportions. Here, in the bourgeois republic, which bore neither the name Bourbon nor the name Orleans, but the name Capital, they had found the form of state in which they could rule conjointly. The June Insurrection had already united them in the "party of Order."[28] Now it was necessary, in the first place, to remove the coterie of bourgeois republicans who still occupied the seats of the National Assembly. Now, when it was a question of maintaining their republicanism and their legislative rights against the executive power and the royalists, these pure republicans were as cowardly, meek, broken spirited and incapable of fighting in beating a retreat, as they had been brutal in their misuse of physical force against the people. I need not relate here the ignominious history of their dissolution. They did not succumb; they faded out of existence. Their history has come to an end forever, and, both inside and outside the Assembly, they figure in the following period only as memories, memories that seem to come back to life whenever the mere name of Republic is once more the issue and as often as the revolutionary conflict threatens to sink down to the lowest level. I may remark in passing that the journal which gave its name to this party, the National, was converted to socialism in the following period.
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Before we finish with this period we must still cast a retrospective glance at the two powers, one of which annihilated the other on December 2,1851, although from December 20, 1848 until the exit of the Constituent Assembly they had lived in conjugal relations. We mean Louis Bonaparte, on the one hand, and the party of the royalist coalition, the party of Order, of the big bourgeoisie, on the other. On acceding to the presidency, Bonaparte at once formed a ministry of the party of Order, and put Odilon Barrot at its head, the old leader, nota bene, of the most liberal faction of the parliamentary bourgeoisie. M. Barrot had at last secured the ministerial portfolio, the spectre of which had haunted him since 1830, and, what is more, the premiership in the ministry, but not, as he had imagined under Louis Philippe, as the most advanced leader of the parliamentary opposition, but with the task of putting a parliament to death, and as the confederate of all his arch-enemies, Jesuits and Legitimists. He brought the bride home at last, but only after she had been prostituted. Bonaparte seemed to efface himself completely. This party acted for him.
The very first meeting of the council of ministers resolved on the expedition to Rome, which, it was agreed, should be undertaken behind the back of the National Assembly and the means for which were to be wrested from it by false pretences. Thus they began by swindling the National Assembly and secretly conspiring with the absolutist powers abroad against the revolutionary Roman republic. In the same manner and with the same manoeuvres Bonaparte prepared his coup of December 2 against the royalist Legislative Assembly and its constitutional republic. Let us not forget that the same party which formed Bonaparte's ministry on
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December 20, 1848 formed the majority of the Legislative National Assembly on December 2, 1851.
In August the Constituent Assembly had decided to dissolve only after it had worked out and promulgated a whole series of organic laws that were to supplement the Constitution. On January 6, 1849, the party of Order had a deputy named Rateau move that the Assembly should disregard the organic laws and rather decide on its own dissolution. Not only the ministry, with Odilon Barrot at its head, but all the royalist members of the National Assembly told it in bullying accents that its dissolution was necessary for the restoration of credit, for the consolidation of order, to put an end to the indefinite provisional arrangements and to establish a definitive state of affairs; that it hampered the productivity of the new government and sought to prolong its existence merely out of malice; that the country was tired of it. Bonaparte took note of all this invective against the legislative power, learned it by heart and proved to the parliamentary royalists, on December 2, 1851, that he had learned from them. He reiterated their own catchwords against them.
The Barrot ministry and the party of Order went further. They called for petitions to the National Assembly to be made throughout France, in which this body was most politely requested to decamp. They thus led the unorganized popular masses into the fire of battle against the National Assembly, the constitutionally organized expression of the people. They taught Bonaparte to appeal against the parliamentary assemblies to the people. At last, on January 29, 1849, the day had come on which the Constituent Assembly was to decide on its own dissolution. The National Assembly found the building where its sessions were held occupied by the military; Changarnier, the general of the party of Order, in
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whose hands the supreme command of the National Guard and front-line troops had been united, held a great military review in Paris, as if a battle were impending, and the royalist coalition threateningly declared to the Constituent Assembly that force would be employed if it should prove unwilling. It was willing, and only bargained for a very short extra term of life. What else was January 29 but the coup d'etat of December 2, 1851, only carried out by the royalists with Bonaparte against the republican National Assembly? The gentlemen did not observe, or did not wish to observe, that Bonaparte availed himself of January 29, 1849 to have a portion of the troops march past him in front of the Tuileries, and eagerly seized on just this first public summoning of the military power against the parliamentary power to foreshadow Caligula. They, to be sure, saw only their Changarnier.
A motive that particularly induced the party of Order to forcibly cut short the duration of the Constituent Assembly's life was the organic laws supplementing the Constitution, such as the education law, the law on religious worship, etc. To the royalist coalition it was most important that they themselves should make these laws and not let them be made by the republicans, who had grown mistrustful. Among these organic laws, however, was also a law on the accountability of the President of the republic. In 1851 the Legislative Assembly was occupied with the drafting of just such a law, when Bonaparte anticipated this coup with the coup of December 2. The royalist coalition would have given anything to have found the Law of Accountability ready to hand in its parliamentary winter campaign of 1851, and drawn up, at that, by a mistrustful, hostile, republican Assembly!
After the Constituent Assembly had itself shattered its last weapon on January 29,1849, the Barrot ministry and the
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friends of order hounded it to death, left nothing undone that could humiliate it and wrested from the impotent, self-despairing Assembly laws that cost it the last remnant of respect in the eyes of the public. Bonaparte, occupied with his fixed Napoleonic idea, was brazen enough to exploit publicly this degradation of the parliamentary power. For when, on May 8, 1849, the National Assembly passed a vote of censure of the ministry because of the occupation of Civitavecchia by Oudinot, and ordered it to bring the Roman expedition back to its alleged purpose,[29] the same evening Bonaparte published in the Moniteur [30] a letter to Oudinot, in which he congratulated him on his heroic exploits and, in contrast to the ink-slinging parliamentarians, already posed as the generous protector of the army. The royalists smiled at this. They regarded him simply as their dupe. Finally, when Marrast, the President of the Constituent Assembly, believed for a moment that the safety of the National Assembly was endangered and, relying on the Constitution, requisitioned a colonel and his regiment, the colonel declined, cited discipline in his support and referred Marrast to Changarnier, who scornfully refused him with the remark that he did not like baionnettes intelligentes.* In November 1851, when the royalist coalition wanted to begin the decisive struggle with Bonaparte, they sought to put through in their notorious Quaestors' Bill [31] the principle of the direct requisition of troops by the President of the National Assembly. One of their generals, Le Flo, had signed the bill. In vain did Changarnier vote for it and Thiers pay homage to the far-sighted wisdom of the former Constituent Assembly. The War Minister, Saint-Arnaud, answered him as Changarnier
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had answered Marrast -- and to the acclamation of the Montagne!
Thus the party of Order, when it was not yet the National Assembly, when it was still only the ministry, had itself branded the parliamentary regime. And it makes an outcry when December 2, 1851 banished this regime from France!
We wish it a happy journey.
On May 28, 1849, the Legislative National Assembly met. On December 2, 1851, it was dispersed. This period covers the life span of the constitutional, or parliamentary, republic.
In the first French Revolution the rule of the Constitutionalists is followed by the rule of the Girondists [32] and the rule of the Girondists by the rule of the Jacobins.[33] Each of these parties relies on the more progressive party for support. As soon as it has brought the revolution to the stage where it can no longer keep up with it and, still less, overtake it, it is thrust aside by the bolder ally that stands behind it and is sent to the guillotine. The revolution thus moves along an ascending line.
It is the reverse with the Revolution of 1848. The proletarian party appears as an appendage of the petty-bourgeois democratic party. It is betrayed and dropped by the latter on April 16, May 15,[34] and in the June days. The democratic party, in its turn, leans on the shoulders of the bourgeois republican party. The bourgeois republicans no sooner believe themselves well established than they shake off the trouble some comrade and support themselves on the shoulders of
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the party of Order. The party of Order hunches its shoulders, lets the bourgeois republicans tumble and throws itself on the shoulders of armed force. It fancies it is still sitting on its shoulders when, one fine morning, it perceives that the shoulders have transformed themselves into bayonets. Each party kicks from behind at the one driving forward and in front leans in the direction of the party which is backing away. No wonder that in this ridiculous posture it loses its balance and, having made the inevitable grimaces, collapses with curious capers. The revolution thus moves in a descending line. It finds itself in this state of retrogressive motion before the last February barricade has been cleared away and the first revolutionary authority constituted.
The period that we have before us comprises a motley array of glaring contradictions: constitutionalists who conspire openly against the Constitution; revolutionaries who are avowed constitutionalists; a National Assembly that wants to be omnipotent but remains parliamentary; a Montagne that finds its vocation in patience and counters its present defeats by prophesying future victories; royalists who form the patres con scripti * of the republic and are forced by the situation to keep the hostile royal houses, which they support, abroad, and the republic, which they hate, in France; an executive power that finds its strength in its very weakness and its respectability in the contempt that it calls forth; a republic that is nothing but the combined infamy of two monarchies, the Restoration and the July Monarchy, with an imperial label -- alliances whose first proviso is separation; struggles whose first law is indecision; wild, inane agitation in the name of tranquillity, most solemn preaching of tranquillity in the name of revolution;
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passions without truth, truths without passion; heroes without heroic deeds, history without events; development, whose sole driving force seems to be the calendar, wearying with the constant repetition of the same tensions and relaxations; antagonisms that periodically seem to work themselves up to a climax only to lose their edge and fall away without being able to resolve themselves; pretentiously paraded exertions and bourgeois fears of the danger of the world coming to an end, and at the same time the pettiest intrigues and court comedies played by the saviours of the world, who in their laisser eller [*] remind us less of the Day of Judgement than of the times of the Fronde[35] -- the official collective genius of France brought to naught by the artful stupidity of a single individual; the collective will of the nation, as often as it speaks through universal suffrage, seeking its appropriate expression through the inveterate enemies of the interests of the masses, until, at length, it finds it in the wilfulness of a filibuster. If any section of history has been painted grey on grey, it is this. Men and events appear as inverted Schlemihls,[36] as shadows that have lost their bodies. The revolution itself paralyses its own activists and endows only its adversaries with passionate forcefulness. When the "red spectre," which is continually conjured up and exorcised by the counter-revolutionaries, finally appears, it appears not with the Phrygian cap of anarchy on its head, but in the uniform of order, in red breeches.
We have seen that the ministry which Bonaparte installed on December 20, 1848, on his Ascension Day, was a ministry of the party of Order, of the Legitimist and Orleanist coalition. This Barrot-Falloux ministry had outlived the republican
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Constituent Assembly, whose term of life it had more or less violently cut short, and found itself still at the helm. Changarnier, the general of the royalist alliance, continued to unite in his person the general command of the First Army Division and of the National Guard of Paris. Finally, the general elections had secured the party of Order a large majority in the National Assembly. Here the deputies and peers of Louis Philippe encountered a hallowed host of Legitimists, for whom many of the nation's ballots had become transformed into admission cards to the political stage. The Bonapartist representatives of the people were too few to form an independent parliamentary party. They appeared merely as the mauvaise queue [*] of the party of Order. Thus the party of Order was in possession of the governmental power, the army and the legislative body, in short, of the whole of the state power; it had been morally strengthened by the general elections, which made its rule appear as the will of the people, and by the simultaneous triumph of the counter-revolution on the whole continent of Europe.
Never did a party open its campaign with greater resources or under more favourable auspices.
The shipwrecked pure republicans found that they had dwindled to a clique of about 50 men in the Legislative National Assembly, the African generals Cavaignac, Lamoriciere and Bedeau at their head. The great opposition party, however, was formed by the Montagne, as the parliamentary social-democratic party had christened itself. It commanded more than 200 of the 750 votes of the National Assembly and was consequently at least as powerful as any one of the three factions of the party of Order taken by itself. Its numerical
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inferiority in comparison with the entire royalist coalition seemed compensated by special circumstances. Not only did the elections in the departments show that it had gained a considerable following among the rural population. It counted in its ranks almost all the deputies from Paris; the army had made a confession of democratic faith by the election of three non-commissioned officers, and the leader of the Montagne, Ledru-Rollin, in contrast with all the representatives of the party of Order, had been raised to the parliamentary peerage by five departments, which had pooled their votes for him. In view of the inevitable clashes of the royalists among themselves and of the whole party of Order with Bonaparte, the Montagne thus seemed to have all the elements of success before it on May 28, 1849. A fortnight later it had lost everything, including its honour.
Before we pursue parliamentary history further, some remarks are necessary to avoid common misconceptions regarding the whole character of the epoch that lies before us. Looked at through the eyes of democrats, the period of the Legislative National Assembly and the period of the Constituent Assembly are concerned with the same problem: the simple struggle between republicans and royalists. The movement itself, however, they sum up in the one shibboleth: "reaction " -- night, when all cats are grey and which permits them to reel off their night watchman's commonplaces. And, to be sure, at first sight the party of Order reveals a maze of different royalist factions, which not only intrigue against each other -- each seeking to elevate its own pretender to the throne and exclude the pretender of the opposing faction -- but also all unite in common hatred of, and common onslaughts on, the "republic." In opposition to this royalist conspiracy the Montagne, for its part, appears as the representa-
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tive of the "republic." The party of Order appears to be perpetually engaged in a "reaction," directed against press, association and the like, to the same extent as in Prussia, and which, as in Prussia, is carried out in the form of brutal police intervention by the bureaucracy, the gendarmerie and the law courts. The "Montagne," for its part, is just as continually occupied in warding off these attacks and thus defending the "eternal rights of man" as every so-called people's party has done, more or less, for a century and a half. If one looks at the situation and the parties more closely, however, this superficial appearance, which veils the class struggle and the peculiar physiognomy of this period, disappears.
Legitimists and Orleanists, as we have said, formed the two great factions of the party of Order. Was it nothing but lily and tricolour, House of Bourbon and House of Orleans, different shades of royalism which held these factions fast to their pretenders and kept them apart from one another, was it at all the confession of faith of royalism? Under the Bourbons, big landed property had governed, with its priests and lackeys; under the Orleans, high finance, large-scale industry, large-scale trade, that is, capital, with its retinue of lawyers, professors and smooth-tongued orators. The Legitimate Monarchy was merely the political expression of the hereditary rule of the lords of the soil, as the July Monarchy was only the political expression of the usurped rule of the bourgeois parvenus. What kept the two factions apart, therefore, was not any so-called principles, it was their material conditions of existence, two different kinds of property, it was the old contrast between town and country, the rivalry between capital and landed property. Who can deny that at the same time old memories, personal enmities, fears and hopes, prejudices and illusions, sympathies and antipathies, convictions,
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articles of faith and principles bound them to one or the other royal house? An entire superstructure of distinct and uniquely formed sentiments, illusions, modes of thought and views of life rises on the different forms of property, on the social conditions of existence. The entire class creates and forms them out of its material foundations and out of the corresponding social relations. The single individual, who derives them through tradition and upbringing, may imagine that they form the real motives and the starting point of his activity. While each faction of Orleanists and Legitimists sought to make itself and the other believe that it was loyalty to their two royal houses which separated them, facts later proved that it was rather their divided interests which forbade the uniting of the two royal houses. And as in private life one differentiates between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, so in historical struggles one must distinguish still more the phrases and fancies of parties from their real organism and their real in terests, their conception of themselves, from their reality. Orleanists and Legitimists found themselves side by side in the republic, with equal claims. If each side wished to effect the restoration of its own royal house against the other, that merely signified that each of the two great interests into which the bourgeoisie is split -- landed property and capital -- sought to restore its own supremacy and the subordination of the other. We speak of two interests of the bourgeoisie, for large landed property, despite its feudal coquetry and pride of race, has been rendered thoroughly bourgeois by the development of modern society. Thus for a long time the Tories in England imagined that they were enthusiastic about monarchy, the church and the beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of reckoning wrung the confes-
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sion from them that they are enthusiastic only about ground rent.
The royalist coalition carried on its internal intrigues in the press, in Ems, in Claremont,[37] outside parliament. Behind the scenes the royalists donned their old Orleanist and Legitimist liveries again and once more engaged in their old tourneys. But on the public stage, in their grand performances of state, as a great parliamentary party, they put off their respective royal houses with mere obeisances and adjourn the restoration of the monarchy in infinitum.[*] They do their real business as the party of Order, that is, under a social, not under a political title; as representatives of the bourgeois world-order, not as knights of errant princesses; as the bourgeois class against other classes, not as royalists against the republicans. And as the party of Order they exercised more unrestricted and sterner domination over the other classes of society than ever before under the Restoration or under the July Monarchy, a domination which, in general, was only possible under the form of the parliamentary republic, for only under this form could the two great divisions of the French bourgeoisie unite, and make the rule of their class, instead of the regime of a privileged faction of it, the order of the day. If, nevertheless, they, as the party of Order, also insulted the republic and expressed their repugnance to it, this was not merely as a result of royalist memories. Instinct taught them that the republic, true enough, makes their political rule complete, but at the same time undermines its social foundation, since they must now confront the subjugated classes and contend against them without mediation, without the concealment afforded by the crown, without being
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able to divert the national interest by their subordinate struggles among themselves and with the monarchy. It was a feeling of weakness that caused them to recoil from the pure conditions of their own class rule and to yearn for the former more incomplete, more undeveloped and, precisely on that account, less dangerous forms of this rule. On the other hand, every time the royalist coalition comes into conflict with the pretender who confronts it, Bonaparte, every time it believes its parliamentary omnipotence to be endangered by the executive power, every time, therefore, it must produce a political title to its rule, it comes forward as republican and not royalist, from the Orleanist Thiers, who warns the National Assembly that the republic divides them least, to the Legitimist Berryer, who, on December 2, 1851, as a tribune swathed in a tricoloured sash, harangues the people assembled before the town hall of the tenth arrondissement in the name of the republic. To be sure, a mocking echo calls back to him: Henry V! Henry V!
In contrast to the bourgeois coalition, a coalition between petty bourgeois and workers had been formed, the so-called social-democratic party. The petty bourgeois saw that they were badly rewarded after the June days of 1848, that their material interests were imperilled and that the democratic guarantees which were to ensure the realization of these interests were called into question by the counter-revolution, and so they came closer to the workers. On the other hand, their parliamentary representation, the Montagne, thrust aside during the dictatorship of the bourgeois republicans, had in the last half of the life of the Constituent Assembly reconquered its lost popularity through the struggle with Bonaparte and the royalist ministers. It had concluded an alliance with the socialist leaders. In February 1849, banquets
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celebrated the reconciliation. A joint programme was drafted, joint election committees were set up and joint candidates put forward. From the social demands of the proletariat the revolutionary point was broken off and a democratic turn given to them; from the democratic claims of the petty bourgeoisie the purely political form was stripped off and their socialist point thrust forward. From this grew Social-Democracy. The new Montagne, the result of this combination, contained, apart from some supernumeraries from the working class and some socialist sectarians, the same elements as the old Montagne, only in greater numbers. However, in the course of development, it had changed along with the class that it represented. The fact that democratic-republican institutions are required as a means, not of doing away with two extremes, capital and wage labour, but of weakening their antagonism and transforming it into harmony, epitomizes the peculiar character of Social-Democracy. However different the means proposed to achieve this end may be, however much it may be trimmed with more or less revolutionary notions, the content remains the same. This content is the transformation of society in a democratic way, but a transformation within the bounds of the petty bourgeoisie. Only one must not form the narrow-minded notion that the petty bourgeoisie, on principle, wishes to enforce an egoistic class interest. It believes, rather, that the special conditions of its emancipation are the general conditions within the frame of which alone modern society can be saved and the class struggle avoided. Nor should one imagine that the democratic representatives are all shopkeepers or enthusiastic champions of shopkeepers. According to their education and their individual position they may be as far apart as heaven and earth. What makes them representatives of the petty bourgeoisie is
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the fact that in their minds they do not get beyond the limits which the latter do not get beyond in life, that they are consequently driven, theoretically, to the same problems and solutions to which material interest and social position drive the latter in practice. This is, in general, the relationship between the political and literary representatives of a class and the class they represent.
It is obvious from the above analysis that if the Montagne continually contends with the party of Order for the republic and the so-called rights of man, neither the republic nor the rights of man are its final end, any more than an army, which one wants to deprive of its weapons and which resists, has taken to the field in order to remain in possession of its own weapons.
As soon as the National Assembly met, the party of Order provoked the Montagne. The bourgeoisie now felt it was necessary to make an end of the democratic petty bourgeois, just as a year before it had realized the necessity of settling with the revolutionary proletariat. Only the adversary's situation was different. The strength of the proletarian party lay in the streets, that of the petty bourgeois in the National Assembly itself. It was therefore a question of decoying them out of the National Assembly into the streets and causing them to smash their parliamentary power themselves, before time and circumstances could consolidate it. The Montagne rushed headlong into the trap.
The bombardment of Rome by the French troops was the bait that was thrown to it. It violated Article V of the Constitution which forbids the French republic to employ its military forces against the freedom of another people. In addition to this, Article 54 prohibited any declaration of war on the part of the executive power without the assent of the
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National Assembly, and in its resolution of May 8, the Constituent Assembly had disapproved of the Roman expedition. On these grounds Ledru-Rollin brought in a bill of impeachment against Bonaparte and his ministers on June 11, 1849. Exasperated by the stinging gibes of Thiers, he actually let himself be carried away to the point of threatening that he would use every means -- even armed force -- to defend the Constitution. The Montagne rose to a man and repeated this call to arms. On June 12, the National Assembly rejected the bill of impeachment, and the Montagne left the parliament. The events of June 13 are well known: the proclamation issued by a section of the Montagne, declaring Bonaparte and his ministers "outside the Constitution"; the street procession of the democratic National Guards, who, unarmed as they were, dispersed on encountering the troops of Changarnier, etc., etc. One section of the Montagne fled abroad; another was arraigned before the High Court at Bourges, and a parliamentary regulation subjected the remainder to the schoolmasterly surveillance of the President of the National Assembly. Paris was again declared in a state of siege and the democratic section of its National Guard dissolved. Thus the influence of the Montagne in parliament and the power of the petty bourgeois in Paris were broken.
Lyons, where June 13 had been the signal for a bloody insurrection of the workers, was, along with the five surrounding departments, also declared in a state of siege, a condition that has continued up to the present moment.
The bulk of the Montagne had left its vanguard in the lurch, having refused to subscribe to its proclamation. The press had deserted, only two journals having dared to publish the pronunciamento. The petty bourgeois betrayed their representatives, in that the National Guards either stayed
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away or, where they appeared, hindered the erection of barricades. The representatives had duped the petty bourgeois, in that the alleged allies from the army were nowhere to be seen. Finally, instead of gaining an accession of strength from it, the democratic party had infected the proletariat with its own weakness and, as is usual with the great deeds of democrats, the leaders had the satisfaction of being able to charge their "people" with desertion, and the people the satisfaction of being able to charge its leaders with deceiving it.
Seldom had an action been announced with more noise than the impending campaign of the Montagne, seldom had an event been trumpeted with greater certainty or longer in advance than the inevitable victory of democracy. The democrats certainly believe in the trumpets whose blasts blew the walls of Jericho down. And as often as they stand before the ramparts of despotism, they seek to imitate the miracle. If the Montagne wished to triumph in parliament, it should not have called to arms. If it called to arms in parliament, it should not have acted in parliamentary fashion in the streets. If the peaceful demonstration was meant seriously, then it was folly not to foresee that it would be given a warlike reception. If a real struggle was intended, then it was a queer idea to lay down the weapons with which it would have to be waged. But the revolutionary threats of the petty bourgeois and their democratic representatives are mere attempts to intimidate the antagonist. And when they have run into a blind alley, when they have compromised themselves to such an extent that they are forced to carry out their threats, then this is done in an ambiguous fashion that avoids nothing so much as the means to the end and tries to find excuses for giving in. The blaring overture that announced the contest
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dies away in a pusillanimous snarl as soon as the struggle has to begin, the actors cease to take themselves au sérieux, and the action collapses completely, like a pricked bubble.
No party exaggerates its resources or deludes itself more light-headedly over the situation than the democratic party. Since a section of the army had voted for it, the Montagne was now convinced that the army would revolt for it. And on what occasion? On an occasion which, from the point of view of the troops, meant only that the revolutionaries sided with the Roman soldiers against the French soldiers. On the other hand, memories of June 1848 were still too fresh for anything to exist but a profound aversion on the part of the proletariat towatds the National Guard and a thorough-going mistrust of the democratic chiefs on the part of the chiefs of the secret societies. To iron out these differences, it was necessary for great, common interests to be at stake. The violation of an abstract paragraph of the Constitution could not provide these interests. Had not the Constitution been repeatedly violated, according to the assurance of the democrats themselves? Had not the most popular journals branded it as counter-revolutionary botch-work? But the democrat, because he represents the petty bourgeoisie, that is, a transition class, in which the interests of two classes simultaneously mutually blunt each other, imagines himself elevated above class antagonism generally. The democrats concede that a privileged class confronts them, but they, along with all the rest of the nation, form the people. What they represent is the people's rights ; what interests them is the people's interests. Accordingly, when a struggle is impending, they do not need to examine the interests and positions of the different classes. They do not need to weigh their own resources too critically. They have merely to give the signal and the peo-
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ple, with all its inexhaustible resources, will fall upon the oppressors. Now, if, when it comes to the actual performance, their interests prove to be uninteresting and their potency impotence, then either the fault lies with pernicious sophists, who split the indivisible people into different hostile camps, or the army was too brutalized and blinded to comprehend that the pure aims of democracy are the best thing for it itself, or the whole thing has been wrecked by a detail in its execution, or else an unforeseen accident has this time spoilt the game. In any case, the democrat comes out of the most disgraceful defeat just as immaculate as he was innocent when he went into it, with the newly won conviction that he is bound to win, not that he himself and his party have to give up the old standpoint, but, on the contrary, that conditions have to ripen to suit him.
One must not, therefore, imagine the Montagne, decimated and broken though it was, and humiliated by the new parliamentary regulation, as being particularly miserable. If June 13 had removed its chiefs, it made room, on the other hand, for men of lesser calibre, whom this new position flattered. If their impotence in parliament could no longer be doubted, they were entitled now to confine their actions to outbursts of moral indignation and blustering declamation. If the party of Order affected to see embodied in them, as the last official representatives of the revolution, all the terrors of anarchy, they could in reality be all the more insipid and modest. They consoled themselves, however, for June 13 with the profound utterance: But if they dare to attack universal suffrage, well then -- then we'll show them what we are made of! Nous verrons! *
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So far as the Montagnards who fled abroad are concerned, it is sufficient to remark here that Ledru-Rollin, because, in barely a fortnight, he had succeeded in ruining irretrievably the powerful party which he led, now found himself called upon to form a French government in partibus ; that the lower the level of the revolution sank and the more dwarf-like the official bigwigs of official France became, the bigger his figure seemed to grow in the distance, removed from the scene of action; that he could figure as the republican pretender for 1852, and that he issued periodical circulars to the Wallachians and other peoples, in which the despots of the Continent are threatened with his own and his confederates' actions. Was Proudhon altogether wrong when he cried to these gentlemen: "Vous n'étes que des blagueurs "?[*]
On June 13, the party of Order had not only broken the Montagne, it had effected the subordination of the Constitution to the majority decisions of the National Assembly. And it understood the republic like this: that the bourgeoisie rules here in parliamentary forms, without, as in a monarchy, any restrictions such as the veto power of the executive or the right to dissolve parliament. This was a parliamentary republic, as Thiers termed it. But whereas on June 13 the bourgeoisie secured its omnipotence within the house of parliament, did it not afflict parliament itself, as against the executive authority and the people, with incurable weakness by expelling its most popular part? By surrendering numerous deputies without further ado on the demand of the courts, it abolished its own parliamentary immunity. The humiliating regulations to which it subjected the Montagne exalted the President of the republic in the same measure as it degraded
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the individual representatives of the people. By branding an insurrection for the protection of the constitutional charter an anarchic act aimed at the subversion of society, it precluded the possibility of an appeal to insurrection, should the executive authority violate the Constitution in relation to it. It is one of the ironies of history that the general who bombarded Rome on Bonaparte's instructions and thus provided the immediate occasion for the constitutional revolt of June 13, that Oudinot had to be the man offered by the party of Order imploringly and in vain to the people as the general of the Constitution against Bonaparte on December 2, 1851. Another hero of June 13, Vieyra, who was lauded 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 belonging to high finance circles -- this same Vieyra had been initiated into Bonaparte's conspiracy and he essentially contributed to depriving the National Assembly in the hour of its death of any protection by the National Guard.
June 13 had still another meaning. The Montagne had wanted to force the impeachment of Bonaparte. Its defeat was, therefore, a direct victory for Bonaparte, his personal triumph over his democratic enemies. The party of Order gained the victory; Bonaparte had only to cash in on it. He did so. On June 14 a proclamation could be read on the walls of Paris in which the President, reluctantly, against his will, as it were, compelled by the sheer force of events, comes forth from his cloistered seclusion and, posing as misunderstood virtue, complains of the calumnies of his opponents and, while he seems to identify his person with the cause of order, rather identifies the cause of order with his person. Moreover, the
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National Assembly had, it is true, subsequently approved the expedition against Rome, but Bonaparte had taken the initiative in the matter. After having re-installed the High Priest Samuel in the Vatican, he could hope to enter the Tuileries as King David.[38] He had won the priests over to his side.
The revolt of June 13 was confined, as we have seen, to a peaceful street procession. No war laurels were, therefore, to be won against it. Nevertheless, at a time as poor as this in heroes and events, the party of Order transformed this bloodless battle into a second Austerlitz.[39] Platform and press praised the army as the power of order, in contrast to the popular masses who represented the impotence of anarchy, and extolled Changarnier as the "mainstay of society," a deception in which he himself finally came to believe. Surrepticiously, however, the corps that seemed doubtful were transferred from Paris, the regiments which had shown the most democratic sentiments at the elections were banished from France to Algiers, the disruptive spirits among the troops were relegated to penal detachments, and the systematic isolation of the press from the barracks and of the barracks from bourgeois society was finally carried out.
Here we have reached the decisive turning point in the history of the French National Guard. In 1830 it was decisive in the overthrow of the Restoration. Under Louis Philippe every rebellion miscarried in which the National Guard stood on the side of the troops. When in the February days of 1848 it displayed a passive attitude towards the insurrection and an equivocal one towards Louis Philippe, he gave himself up for lost -- which indeed he was. Thus the conviction took root that the revolution could not be victorious without the National Guard, nor the army against it. This was the superstition of the army in regard to civilian
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omnipotence. The June days of 1848, when the entire National Guard, with the front-line troops, put down the insurrection, had strengthened the superstition. After Bonaparte's assumption of office, the position of the National Guard was to some extent weakened by the unconstitutional union, in the person of Changarnier, of the command of its forces with the command of the First Army Division.
Just as the command of the National Guard appeared here as an attribute of the military commander-in-chief, so the National Guard itself appeared as only an appendage of the front-line troops. Finally, on June 13 its power was broken, and not only by its partial disbandment, which from this time on was periodically repeated all over France, until mere fragments of it were left behind. The demonstration of June was, above all, a demonstration of the democratic National Guards. They had not, to be sure, carried arms, but worn their uniforms against the army; precisely in this uniform, however, lay the talisman. The army convinced itself that this uniform was a piece of woollen cloth like any other. The spell was broken. In the June days of 1848, bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie had united as the National Guard with the army against the proletariat; on June 13, 1849, the bourgeoisie let the petty-bourgeois National Guard be dispersed by the army; on December 2, 1851, the National Guard of the bourgeoisie itself had vanished, and Bonaparte merely registered this fact when he subsequently signed the decree for its disbandment. Thus the bourgeoisie had itself smashed its last weapon against the army, it had to smash it the moment the petty bourgeoisie no longer stood behind it as a vassal, but before it as a rebel, as, in general, it was bound to destroy all its means of defence against absolutism with its own hand as soon as it had itself become absolute.
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Meanwhile, the party of Order celebrated the reconquest of a power that seemed lost in 1848 only to be found again, freed from its restraints, in 1849, celebrated with invectives against the republic and the Constitution, with curses on all future, present and past revolutions, including that which its own leaders had made, and with laws which muzzled the press, destroyed association and regulated the state of siege as an organic institution. The National Assembly then adjourned from the middle of August to the middle of October, after having appointed a permanent commission for the period of its absence. During this recess the Legitimists intrigued with Ems, the Orleanists with Claremont, Bonaparte by means of princely tours, and the Departmental Councils in deliberations on a revision of the Constitution: incidents which regularly recur in the periodic recesses of the National Assembly and which I propose to discuss only when they become events. Here we shall just add that it was impolitic for the National Assembly to disappear for considerable intervals from the stage and leave only a single, albeit a sorry, figure to be seen at the head of the republic, that of Louis Bonaparte, while to the scandal of the public the party of Order fell asunder into its royalist component parts and followed its conflicting desires for Restoration. As often as the confused noise of parliament grew silent during these recesses and its body dissolved into the nation, it became unmistakably clear that only one thing was still wanting to complete the true form of this republic: to make the former's recess permanent and replace the latter's inscription: Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité by the unambiguous words: Infantry, Cavalry, Artillery!
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In the middle of October 1849, the National Assembly met again. On November 1, Bonaparte surprised it with a message in which he announced the dismissal of the Barrot Falloux ministry and the formation of a new ministry. No one has ever sacked lackeys with less ceremony than Bonaparte did his ministers. The kicks that were intended for the National Assembly were given in the meantime to Barrot & Co.
The Barrot ministry, as we have seen, had been composed of Legitimists and Orleanists, a ministry of the party of Order. Bonaparte had needed it to dissolve the republican Constituent Assembly, to bring about the expedition against Rome and to break the democratic party. He had seemingly effaced himself behind this ministry, surrendered governmental power into the hands of the party of Order and donned the modest character mask that the responsible editor of a newspaper wore under Louis Philippe, the mask of the homme de paille.* He now threw off the mask which was no longer a light veil behind which he could hide his physiognomy, but an iron mask which prevented him from displaying a physiognomy of his own. He had appointed the Barrot ministry in order to blast the republican National Assembly in the name of the party of Order, he dismissed it in order to declare his own name independent of the National Assembly of the party of Order.
There was no lack of plausible pretexts for this dismissal. The Barrot ministry ignored even the conventions that would
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have let the President of the republic appear as a power side by side with the National Assembly. During the recess of the National Assembly Bonaparte published a letter to Edgar Ney in which he seemed to disapprove of the Pope's[*] illiberal attitude, just as in opposition to the Constituent Assembly he had published a letter in which he commended Oudinot for the attack on the Roman republic. So when the National Assembly voted the budget for the Roman expedition, Victor Hugo, out of alleged liberalism, brought up this letter for discussion. The party of Order poured scorn on the suggestion, with exclamations of disbelief, that Bonaparte's ideas could have any political importance. Not one of the ministers took up the gauntlet for him. On another occasion Barrot, with his well-known hollow rhetoric, let fall from the platform words of indignation concerning the "abominable intrigues" that, he asserted, went on in the immediate entourage of the President. Finally, while the ministry obtained from the National Assembly a widow's pension for the Duchess of Orleans it rejected any proposal to increase the Civil List of the President. And in Bonaparte the imperial pretender was so intimately bound up with the adventurer down on his luck that the one great idea, that he was called to restore the empire, was always supplemented by the other, that it was the mission of the French people to pay his debts.
The Barrot-Falloux ministry was the first and last parliamentary ministry that Bonaparte brought into being. Its dismissal, therefore, forms a decisive turning point. With it the party of Order lost, never to reconquer it, an indispensable post for the maintenance of the parliamentary régime, the lever of executive power. It is immediately obvious that
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in a country like France, where the executive power commands an army of officials numbering more than half a million individuals and, therefore, constantly maintains an immense mass of interests and livelihoods in total dependence; where the state enmeshes, controls, regulates, superintends and tutors civil society from its most comprehensive manifestations of life down to its most insignificant stirrings, from its most general modes of being to the private existence of individuals; where through the most extraordinary centralization this parasitic body acquires a ubiquity, an omniscience, a capacity for accelerated mobility and an elasticity which finds a counterpart only in the helpless dependence, in the loose shapelessness of the actual body politic -- it is obvious that in a country like this the National Assembly forfeits all real influence when it loses command of the ministerial posts, if it does not at the same time simplify the administration of the state, reduce the army of officials as far as possible and, finally, let civil society and public opinion create organs of their own, independent of the governmental power. But it is precisely with the maintenance of that extensive state machine in its numerous ramifications that the material interests of the French bourgeoisie are interwoven in the closest fashion. Here it finds posts for its surplus population and makes up in the form of state salaries for what it cannot pocket in the form of profit, interest, rents and honorariums. On the other hand, its political interests compelled it to increase daily the repressive measures and, therefore, the resources and the personnel of the state power, while at the same time it had to wage an uninterrupted war against public opinion and mistrustfully mutilate and cripple the independent organs of the social movement, where it did not succeed in amputating them entirely. Thus the French bourgeoisie was compelled
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by its class position to annihilate, on the one hand, the vital conditions of all parliamentary power, including its own, and to render irresistible, on the other hand, the executive power hostile to it.
The new ministry was called the d'Hautpoul ministry. Not in the sense that General d'Hautpoul had received the rank of Prime Minister. Rather, Bonaparte abolished this office along with Barrot's dismissal, for true enough, it condemned the President of the republic to the status of the legal nonentity of a constitutional monarch, but of a constitutional monarch without throne or crown, without sceptre or sword, without unaccountability, without the inalienable possession of the highest office of state, and, worst of all, without a Civil List. The d'Hautpoul ministry contained only one man of parliamentary standing, the Jewish moneylender Fould, one of the most notorious of the high financiers. The ministry of finance fell to his lot. Look up the quotations on the Paris bourse and you will find that from November 1, 1849 onwards the French fonds * rise and fall with the rise and fall of Bonapartist stocks. While Bonaparte had thus found his ally in the bourse, he at the same time took possession of the police by appointing Carlier Police Prefect of Paris.
However, the consequences of the ministerial reshuffle could only come to light in the course of development. In the first place, Bonaparte had taken a step forward only to be rebuffed all the more conspicuously. His brusque message was followed by the most servile declaration of allegiance to the National Assembly. Every time the ministers dared to make a diffident attempt to introduce his personal fads as legislative proposals, they seemed to be performing, reluctantly
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and compelled by their position, comical tasks of whose fruitlessness they were persuaded in advance. Every time Bonaparte blurted out his intentions behind the ministers' backs and played with his "idées napoléoniennes,"[40] his own ministers disavowed him from the tribune of the National Assembly. His usurpatory ambitions seemed to make themselves heard only in order that the malicious laughter of his opponents might not be drowned. He behaved like an unrecognized genius, whom all the world takes for a simpleton. Never did he enjoy the contempt of all classes in fuller measure than during this period. Never did the bourgeoisie rule more absolutely, never did it display more ostentatiously the insignia of domination.
It's not for me to write the history of its legislative activity here, which is summarized during this period in two laws: in the law re-establishing the wine tax and the education law abolishing religious unbelief. If wine drinking was made harder for the French, they were presented all the more plentifully with the water of true life. If with the law on the wine tax the bourgeoisie declared the old, hateful French tax system to be inviolable, it sought through the education law to ensure among the masses the old state of mind that put up with the tax system. One is astonished to see the Orleanists, the liberal bourgeois, these old apostles of Voltairianism and eclectic philosophy, entrust their hereditary enemies, the Jesuits, with the supervision of the French mind. However the Orleanists and Legitimists could part company over the pretender to the throne, they understood that to secure their united rule they needed to combine the means of repression of two epochs, that the methods of subjugation of the July Monarchy had to be supplemented and strengthened by the methods of subjugation of the Restoration.
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The peasants, all their hopes disappointed, crushed more than ever by the low level of grain prices on the one hand, and by the growing burden of taxes and mortgage debts on the other, began to rouse themselves in the departments. The response to this was a drive against the schoolmasters, who were made subject to the clergy, a drive against the maires,[*] who were made subject to the prefects, and a system of espionage, to which all were subjected. In Paris and the large towns reaction itself has the physiognomy of its epoch and challenges more than it smashes. In the countryside it becomes dull, coarse, petty, tiresome and vexatious, in a word, the gendarme. One can understand how three years of the regime of the gendarme, consecrated by the regime of the priest, were bound to demoralize the immature masses.
However much the party of Order might declaim passionately against the minority from the tribune of the National Assembly, its speech remained as monosyllabic as that of the Christians, whose words were to be: Yea, or nay! As monosyllabic on the platform as in the press. Flat as a riddle whose answer is known in advance. Whether it was a question of the right of petition or the tax on wine, freedom of the press or free trade, the clubs or the municipal charter, protection of personal liberty or regulation of the state budget, the watchword constantly recurs, the theme remains always the same, the verdict is ever ready and invariably reads: "Socialism! " Even bourgeois liberalism is declared socialistic, bourgeois enlightenment socialistic, bourgeois financial reform socialistic. It was socialistic to build a railway where a canal already existed, and it was socialistic to defend oneself with a cane when one was attacked with a rapier.
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This was not merely a figure of speech, fashion or party tactics. The bourgeoisie had a true insight into the fact that all the weapons which it had forged against feudalism were turned against itself, that all the means of education which it had produced rebelled against its own civilization, that all the gods which it had created had deserted it. It understood that all the so-called bourgeois liberties and organs of progress were attacking and menacing its class rule at its social foundation and its political summit simultaneously, and had, therefore, become "socialistic." In this menace and this attack it rightly disccrned the secret of socialism, whose import and tendency it judges more correctly than so-called socialism knows how to judge itself; the latter cannot, therefore, comprehend why the bourgeoisie callously hardens its heart against it, whether it sentimentally bewails the sufferings of mankind, or in Christian spirit prophesies the millennium and universal brotherly love, or in humanistic style prattles about mind, education and freedom, or in doctrinaire fashion hatches a system for the conciliation and welfare of all classes. What the bourgeoisie did not grasp, however, was the logical conclusion that its own parliamentary régime, its political rule in general, was now also bound to meet with the general verdict of condemnation as being socialistic. As long as the rule of the bourgeois class had not been organized completely, as long as it had not acquired its pure political expression, the antagonism of the other classes, likewise, could not appear in its pure form, and where it did appear could not take the dangerous turn that transforms every struggle against the state power into a struggle against capital. If it saw "tranquillity" imperilled by every sign of life in society, how could it want to maintain at the head of society a régime of unrest, its own régime, the parliamentary régime, this régime that,
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in the words of one of its spokesmen, lives in struggle and by struggle? The parliamentary régime lives by discussion; how can it forbid discussion? Every interest, every social institution, is here transformed into general ideas, debated as ideas; how can any interest, any institution, maintain itself above thought and impose itself as an article of faith? The controversies on the platform provoke the controversies among the press hacks; the debating club in parliament is necessarily annexed by debating clubs in the salons and alehouses; the representatives, who constantly appeal to public opinion, give public opinion the right to speak its real mind in petitions. The parliamentary regime leaves everything to the decision of majorities; aren't the great majorities outside parliament bound to want to decide? When you play the fiddle at the top of the state, aren't the lower orders bound to dance?
Thus, by now branding as "socialistic " what it had previously extolled as "liberal," the bourgeoisie confesses that its own interests dictate that it should be delivered from the danger of its own rule ; that, in order to restore tranquillity to the country, its bourgeois parliament must, first of all, be silenced; that in order to preserve its social power intact, its political power must be broken; that the individual bourgeois can continue to exploit the other classes and to enjoy undisturbed property, family, religion and order only on condition that their class be condemned along with the other classes to a similar position of political insignificance; that in order to save its purse, it must forfeit the crown, and the sword that is to safeguard it must at the same time be hung over its own head as a sword of Damocles.
In the domain of the interests of the general citizenry, the National Assembly proved to be so unproductive that, for example, the discussions on the Paris-Avignon railway, which
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began in the winter of 1850, were still not ripe for conclusion on December 2, 1851. Where it did not repress or pursue a reactionary course it was stricken with incurable barrenness.
While Bonaparte's ministry partly took the initiative in framing laws in the spirit of the party of Order, and partly even outdid that party's harshness in their execution and administration, he, on the other hand, sought to win popularity by childishly silly proposals, to manifest his opposition to the National Assembly, and to hint at a secret reserve that was only temporarily prevented by conditions from making its hidden treasures available to the French people. The proposal to decree an increase in pay of four sous a day to the non-commissioned officers was in this spirit, as was the proposal of an honour system loan bank for the workers. Money as a gift and money as a loan, it was with prospects such as these that he hoped to allure the masses. Donations and loans -- the financial science of the lumpenproletariat, of high degree or low, is restricted to this. These were the only strings which Bonaparte knew how to pull. Never has a pretender speculated more stupidly on the stupidity of the masses.
The National Assembly flared up repeatedly over these unmistakable attempts to gain popularity at its expense, over the growing danger that this adventurer, spurred on by his debts and unrestrained by an established reputation, would attempt a desperate coup. The discord between the party of Order and the President had taken on a threatening character when an unexpected event threw him back repentant into its arms. We mean the by-elections of March 10, 1850. These elections were held for the purpose of filling the Representatives' seats that had been left vacant by imprisonment or exile after June 13. Paris elected only social-democratic candidates. It even concentrated most of the votes on an in-
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surgent of June 1848, on Deflotte. The Parisian petty bourgeoisie, in alliance with the proletariat, revenged itself for its defeat on June 13, 1849. It seemed to have disappeared from the battlefield at the crucial moment only to reappear there on a more propitious occasion with reinforcements and a bolder battle cry. One circumstance seemed to heighten the peril of this election victory. The army voted in Paris for the June insurgent against La Hitte, a minister of Bonaparte's, and in the departments largely for the Montagnards, who here, too, though indeed not so decisively as in Paris, maintained the ascendancy over their adversaries.
Bonaparte saw himself suddenly confronted with revolution once more. As he had done on January 29, 1849, and on June 13, 1849, so on March 10, 1850, he disappeared behind the party of Order. He made obeisance, he pusillanimously begged pardon, he offered to appoint any ministry it pleased at the behest of the parliamentary majority, he even implored the Orleanist and Legitimist party leaders, the Thiers, the Berryers, the Broglies, the Moles, in brief, the so-called burgraves,[41] to take the helm of state themselves. The party of Order proved unable to take advantage of this opportunity that would never return. Instead of boldly taking possession of the power offered, it did not even compel Bonaparte to reinstate the ministry dismissed on November 1; it contented itself with humiliating him by its forgiveness and attaching M. Baroche to the d'Hautpoul ministry. As public prosecutor this Baroche had stormed and raged before the High Court at Bourges, the first time against the revolutionists of May 15, the second time against the democrats of June 13, both times because of an attempt on the life of the National Assembly. None of Bonaparte's ministers subsequently contributed more to the degradation of the National Assembly, and after De-
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cember 2, 1851, we meet him once more as the comfortably installed and highly paid Vice-President of the Senate. He had spat in the revolutionists' soup so that Bonaparte might eat it up.
The social-democratic party, for its part, seemed only to be casting around for excuses for putting its own victory in question again and for taking the edge off it. Vidal, one of the newly elected Representatives of Paris, had been elected at the same time in Strasbourg. He was induced to decline the election in Paris and accept it in Strasbourg. And so, instead of making its victory at the polls conclusive and compelling the party of Order at once to contest it in parliament, instead of forcing the adversary to fight at the moment of popular enthusiasm and favourable mood in the army, the democratic party wearied Paris during the months of March and April with a new election campaign, let the aroused popular passions wear themselves out in this repeated provisional election game, let the revolutionary energy satiate itself with constitutional successes, dissipate itself in petty intrigues, hollow declamations and sham movements, let the bourgeoisie rally and make its preparations, and, lastly, weakened the significance of the March elections by a sentimental comment in the April by-election, the election of Eugene Sue. In a word, it made an April Fool of March 10.
The parliamentary majority understood the weakness of its antagonist. Its 17 burgraves -- for Bonaparte had left the direction of and responsibility for
OF LOUIS BONAPARTE
I
* Republican in kid gloves. --Ed.
* Rash act. --Ed.
** Unexpected stroke. --Ed.
Here is the rose, here dance! [7]
* Staking one's all. --Ed.
* Intellectual bayonets. --Ed.
* "Elected fathers," honorific of the ancient Roman senators. --Ed.
* Letting things take their course. --Ed.
* Evil appendage. --Ed.
* To infinity. --Ed.
* We shall see! --Ed.
* "You are nothing but windbags." --Ed.
* Man of straw. --Ed.
* Pius IX. --Ed.
* Government securities. --Ed.
* Mayors. --Ed.