I. From February to June, 1848

With the exception of but a few chapters, the more important sections of the revolutionary annals from 1848 to 1849 bear the caption: Defeat of the Revolution!

What was vanquished in these defeats was not the revolution. It was the pre-revolutionary traditional appendicles, the result of social conditions, which had not yet come to the point of sharp class opposites—persons, illusions, conceptions, projects, from which the revolutionary party prior to the February revolution was not free, and from which not the February victory but only a series of defeats could free it.

In one word: Not with its direct tragi-comic gains did revolutionary progress break its way, but, contrariwise, through the generation of a closely-knit, powerful counter-revolution, the generation of a foe in the struggle, with whom the party ripened to the status of a truly revolutionary body.

To prove this is the purpose of these lines.

After the July revolution, when the liberal banker, Lafitte, conducted his compeer, the Duke of Orleans, in triumph to the Hotel de Ville, the former uttered the words: “From now on the bankers will rule.” Lafitte had revealed the secret of the revolution.

Not the French bourgeoisie ruled under Louis Philippe, but only a faction of the same, bankers, kings of the stock exchange, railroad kings, owners of coal and iron mines and of forests, a part of the land-owning element allied with them—the so-called aristocracy of finance. It sat upon the throne, dictated laws to the Chambers and handed out the political jobs from the Ministry down to the Tobacco Bureau.

The real industrial bourgeoisie formed a part of the official opposition, that is, it was represented in the Chambers only as a minority. Its opposition came to the front all the more sharply, the more clearly the sole rule of the financial aristocracy developed, and the more the latter felt secure in its power over the working class after the insurrections of 1832, 1834 and 1839 had been drowned in blood. Grandin, manufacturer of Rouen, who in the Constituent, as well as in the Legislative National Assembly, was the most fanatic upholder of bourgeois reaction, was in the Chamber of Deputies the most violent opponent of Guizot. Leon Faucher, later become known through his futile efforts to raise himself to the heights of a Guizot of the French counter-revolution, during the last phase of Louis Philippe’s regime conducted a pen war for industry and against speculation, as well as against its train-bearer, the Government. Bastiat agitated in the name of Bordeaux and of the whole of wine-producing France against the dominant system.

The petty bourgeoisie in all its gradations, also the peasant class, were wholly excluded from the exercise of political power. And, finally, there were to be found among the official opposition, or even entirely outside the pays légal, the ideologic representatives and spokesmen of the said classes, their scientists, lawyers, doctors, etc., in one word: their so-called capacities.

Because of financial tribulations, the July monarchy was dependent upon big business to begin with, and its dependence became an inexhaustible source of ever growing financial needs. Impossible, therefore, to subordinate the administration of the State to the interests of national production without balancing the budget, the balance between State expenditures and State income. But how was the budget to be balanced without restricting State expenditures, i.e., without injuring interests that were so many props of the ruling system, without regulating taxes anew, that is, without shifting a good part of the tax burden upon the shoulders of the upper bourgeoisie itself?

The indebtedness of the State was rather in the direct interest of the bourgeois faction that ruled and legislated through the Chambers. The State deficit was the very object of its speculations and the chief means of its enrichment. After the expiration of each year a new deficit. In the course of four or five years a new loan. And every new loan offered to the aristocracy of finance a new opportunity to mulct the State, artificially held on the brink of bankruptcy—it had to contract with the bankers under the most unfavorable conditions.

Each new loan furnished a second opportunity, this time to plunder the public which invests its capital in States rentes, by means of stock exchange operations in the secrets of which both the Government and the Chambers’ majorities had been let in. In general, the fluctuations of State credit, and the possession of State secrets, offered to the bankers and their affiliates in the Chambers and on the throne a chance to bring about violent and sudden fluctuations in the quotations of State securities, the inevitable result of which had to be the ruin of the smaller capitalists and the fabulously rapid enrichment of the big gamblers. Since the State deficit was in the direct interest of the ruling bourgeois faction, it becomes clear why the extraordinary State expenditures, during the last years of the Louis Philippe regime, exceeded the extraordinary State expenditures under Napoleon by more than double, aye, why they reached annually the sum of 400 million francs, while the annual export figures of France, on an average, seldom rose to the height of 750 million francs. The enormous sums, which thus flowed through the channels of the State, also produced opportunities for thieving contracts, bribery, defalcations and all kinds of pilfering. This plundering of the State, conducted on a large scale in the case of loans, was repeated in detail in the case of State work to be done. The relation between the Chambers and the Government, multiplied itself in the relations between the different administrations and the contractors.

As with State expenditures and State loans in general, so did the ruling class exploit railroad construction. The Chambers shifted the main burdens upon the State, and secured to the speculating financial aristocracy the golden fruits. One remembers the scandals in the Chamber of Deputies when, occasionally, it came to light that all the members of the majority, a part of the Ministers included, were stockholders in the same railway construction undertakings which, later on, and al in their capacity of lawmakers, they made the State pay for.

Even the smallest financial reform suffered shipwreck against the influence of the bankers. So, for instance, the postal reform. Rothschild protested. Could the State diminish sources of income from which the interest on an ever growing debt was to be drawn?

The July monarchy was nothing but a stock company for the exploitation of the French national wealth, the dividends of which were divided among Ministers, the Chambers and 240,000 voters and their hangers-on. Louis Philippe was the director of the company—Robert Macaire on the throne. Commerce, industry, agriculture, shipping, the interests of the industrial bourgeoisie—all these were constantly menaced and injured under this system. Cheap Government—government à bon marché—they had in the July days put upon their banner.

While the financial aristocracy made the laws, managed the administration, dominated the organized public powers, shaped public opinion and ruled it through the facts and the press, there was repeated in all spheres, from the Court to the Cafe-Borgne, the same prostitution, the same shameless deception, the same urge for enrichment, not through production but through the theft of other peoples’ wealth already in existence. There broke loose, notably at the very top of bourgeois society, the unrestricted accentuation of unwholesome and dissolute desires, every minute colliding with the very bourgeois laws, wherein wealth acquired by gambling naturally seeks satiety, where enjoyment becomes crapuleux [insatiate debauchery], where money, filth and blood flow into one. The financial aristocracy, in its methods of acquisition as well as in its enjoyments, is nothing but the reborn Lumpenproletariat, the rabble on the heights of bourgeois society.

The non-ruling factions of the French bourgeoisie cried “corruption!” The people cried: à bas les grands voleurs à bas les assassins! [down with the big thieves! down with the murderers!] when, in 1847, upon the most exalted podiums of bourgeois society, the same scenes were enacted which send the Lumpenproletariat regularly to the brothels, the poorhouses, the insane asylums, before the judges, to the bagnios and upon the scaffold. The industrial bourgeoisie saw their interests menaced, the petty bourgeoisie was morally shocked, popular sentiment was in revolt, Paris was flooded with pamphlets—“la dynastie Rothschild,” “le juifs rois de l’époque,” and the like—wherein the rule of the financial aristocracy was denounced and branded more or less aptly.

Rien pour la gloire!—glory does not pay! La paix partout et toujours!—war depresses the three and four per cent securities!—this is what the France of the stock exchange Jews had written upon her banner. Her foreign policy therefore lost itself in a series of affronts to French national sentiment, which flared up all the more when, with the incorporation of Cracow into Austria, the despoliation of Poland was completed and Guizot, during the Swiss Separatist war, went over to the side of the Holy Alliance. The victory of the Swiss Liberals in this sham war raised the self-confidence of the bourgeois opposition in France; the bloody insurrection of the people of Palermo acted like an electric shock upon the paralyzed popular masses and awakened their great revolutionary memories and passions.

The eruption of the general disaffection was finally accelerated, and discontent ripened to revolt by two economic world events.

The potato blight and crop failures of 1845 and 1846 intensified the general ferment among the people. The rise of prices in 1847 caused bloody conflicts in France and the rest of the continent. Contrasted with the shameless orgies of the financial aristocracy was the struggle of the people for the primary means of existence! At Buzancais, the rioters of famine executed; in Paris, the over-satiated Escrocs [sharpers, swindlers] snatched from the courts by the royal family!

The second great economic event, which accelerated the outbreak of the revolution, was a general commercial and industrial crisis in England, already signalled in the fall of 1845 by a mass liquidation of speculators in railway shares. Postponed during 1846 by a series of incidental points, such as the imminent abolition of the corn laws, it proclaimed itself in the fall of 1847 in the bankruptcy of great London colonial merchants, followed immediately by the failure of the country banks and the closing down of the factories in the British industrial regions. On the continent, the aftermath of this crisis had not yet been overcome when the February revolution broke forth.

The ravages of commerce and industry caused by the economic epidemic made the domination of the financial aristocracy still more intolerable. Throughout France, the oppositional bourgeoisie set on foot a banquet agitation for an electoral reform which was to gain for it a majority in the Chambers and therewith overthrow the Ministry of the stock exchange. In Paris the industrial crisis had specifically this result: a mass of manufacturers and wholesale merchants, unable to do business in foreign markets under the conditions prevailing, threw themselves upon the domestic market. They erected great establishments, the competition of which ruined epiciers and boutiquiers en masse. There was therefore a large number of failures among that part of the Paris bourgeoisie; hence their revolutionary attitude in February. It is known how Guizot and the Chambers met the reform propositions with an unmistakable provocation, how Louis Philippe resorted to the Barrot Ministry too late, how it came to a hand-to-hand fight between the people and the army, how the army was disarmed by the passive attitude of the National Guard, how the July monarchy had to make way for the Provisional Government.

The Provisional Government, rising on the February barricades, necessarily reflected in its composition the different parties that shared in the victory. It could be naught but a compromise among the different classes that had jointly overthrown the July throne, but whose interests were antagonistic. Its great majority was composed of representatives of the bourgeoisie. The republican petty bourgeoisie represented by Ledru-Rollin and Flocon, the republican big bourgeoisie by the men of the National, the dynastic opposition by Cremieux, Dupont de l’Eure, etc. The working class had only two representatives, Louis Blanc and Albert. Finally, Lamartine, a member of the Provisional Government; that was no real interest, no definite class, that was the February revolution itself, the joint insurrection with its illusions, its poetry, its imaginary content and its phrases. Moreover, this spokesman of the February revolution, by his position and his sentiments, belonged to the bourgeoisie.

If Paris, because of political centralization, dominates France, so do the workers dominate Paris in moments of revolutionary earthquakes. The first vital act of the Provisional Government was an attempt to escape this overwhelming influence by an appeal from Paris drunk to France sober. Lamartine denied to the barricade fighters the right to proclaim the republic; to do that was a function of the majority of Frenchmen whose decision by vote must be awaited; the Paris proletariat must not mar its victory by usurpation,—the usurpation of the struggle.

On February 25, at the hour of noon, the republic had not yet been proclaimed, but all the Ministries had been parceled out among the bourgeois elements of the Provisional Government and among the generals, bankers and lawyers of the National. But the workers were determined not to tolerate a thimble-rig this time, as in July, 1830. They were ready to take up the struggle anew and to enforce the republic arms in hand. With this message Raspail proceeded to the Hotel de Ville. In the name of the Paris proletariat he commanded the Provisional Government to proclaim the republic; in case this command of the people be not complied with inside of two hours, he would return at the head of 200,000 men. The corpses of the fallen had scarcely grown cold, the barricades had not yet been removed, the workers not disarmed, and the only force that could be ranged against them was the National Guard. Under these conditions vanished suddenly the statesmen-like hesitancy and juridic conscientious scruples of the Provisional Government. The two hours of grace had not yet expired and already all the walls of Paris displayed the historic gigantic letters: République française! Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité!

With the proclamation of the republic upon the basis of the general franchise there was erased even the memory of the limited purposes and motives that had driven the bourgeoisie into the February revolution. In place of but a few factions of the bourgeoisie, all the classes of French society were suddenly projected within the circle of political power, were forced to vacate the boxes, the orchestra, the gallery, and, in persona, to take their parts upon the revolutionary stage. With the constitutional kingdom vanished also the pretense of a State power seemingly sovereign toward bourgeois society, as well as all the minor conflicts called forth by this pretense!

The proletariat, by dictating the republic to the Provisional Government, and through the Provisional Government to the whole of France, immediately came to the front as an independent party, but also challenged to combat the whole of bourgeois France. What it conquered was the basis of the struggle for its revolutionary emancipation, by no means emancipation itself.

The February republic, first of all, had to complete the rule of the bourgeoisie, by admitting, side by side with the financial aristocracy, all the propertied classes into the circle of political power. The majority of the great landowners and the Legitimists were emancipated from the state of political nullity to which the July revolution had condemned them. Not in vain had the Gazette de France agitated jointly with the press organs of the opposition, not in vain had Larochejaquelin, at the session of the Chamber of Deputies, on February 24, taken the part of the revolution. By means of the general franchise were the nominal property owners, who form the great majority of all Frenchmen, the peasant proprietors, installed as umpires over the fate of France. Finally, the February revolution permitted bourgeois rule to come to the fore plainly and clearly by knocking off the crown behind which capital had concealed itself.

As the workers, in the days of July, had achieved the bourgeois monarchy, so in the days of February had they achieved the bourgeois republic. As the July monarchy had been forced to proclaim itself a monarchy surrounded by republican institutions, so did the February republic proclaim itself a republic surrounded by social institutions. The Paris proletariat also enforced this concession.

Marche, a workingman, dictated the decree wherein the Provisional Government, that had just been formed, agreed to secure the livelihood of the workers through labor, that is, to provide work for all citizens, etc. And when, a few days later, it forgot its promises and appeared to have lost sight of the proletariat, a mass of 20,000 workingmen marched to the Hotel de Ville with the slogan: Organization of work! Formation of a special Ministry of Labor! Reluctantly, and after protracted debates, the Provisional Government named a permanent special commission, charged with the task to ascertain means for improving the condition of the working classes! This commission was composed of delegates of the Paris trades corporations and presided over by Louis Blanc and Albert. The Luxembourg was assigned to it for its sessions. Thus were the representatives of the workers eliminated from the seat of the Provisional Government, the bourgeois part thereof retaining the real State power, keeping the reins of the administration well in hand, and, beside the Ministries of Finance, of Commerce, of Public Works, alongside of banks and the stock exchange, arose a Socialist synagogue, whose high priests, Louis Blanc and Albert, had the mission to discover the promised land, proclaim the new evangel and to keep the Paris proletariat busy. In contradistinction of the profane State power, they had at their disposal no budget and no executive power. They were to ram the foundation pillars of bourgeois society with their heads. While the Luxembourg was looking for the philosopher’s stone, the Hotel de Ville minted the current coins.

And yet, the aspirations of the Paris proletariat, in so far as they went beyond the bourgeois republic, could not attain an existence other than the nebulous one of the Luxembourg.

Jointly with the bourgeoisie the workers had made the February revolution, at the side of the bourgeoisie they sought to enforce their interests, as in the Provisional Government itself they had installed a workingman side by side with the bourgeois majority. Organization of labor! But wage labor, that is, the prevailing, the bourgeois organization of labor. Without it, no capital, no bourgeoisie, no bourgeois society. A special Ministry of Labor! But the Ministries of Finance, of Commerce, of Public Works, are not they the bourgeois Ministries of Labor? And, beside them, a proletarian Ministry of Labor would have to be a Ministry of Impotence, a Ministry of Pious Wishes, a Commission of the Luxembourg. When the workers believed that they could emancipate themselves at the side of the bourgeoisie, they meant that they could, side by side with the other bourgeois nations within the national walls of France, accomplish a social revolution. But the French conditions of production are governed by the foreign commerce of France, her position in the world market and the laws of same; how could France break these without a European revolutionary war, which would react upon England, the despot of the world market?

A class wherein the revolutionary interests of society are concentrated, as soon as it has risen, immediately finds in its own condition the content and the material for its revolutionary activity: to strike down enemies, to resort to measures dictated by the struggle—the consequences of its own deeds drive it ahead. It does not indulge in theoretic investigations of its own task. The French working class did not take this position; it was still unable to carry through its own revolution.

The development of the industrial proletariat is upon the whole predicated upon the development of the industrial bourgeoisie. Under its rule alone does it attain the extended national existence which can raise its revolution to a national one, and itself bring into being the modern means of production which then become so many means of its revolutionary liberation. Its rule first tears up the material roots of feudal society, and levels the field upon which alone a proletarian revolution becomes possible. French industry is more highly developed and the French bourgeoisie is, on revolutionary lines, more fully evolved than is the case on the rest of the continent. But the February revolution, was it not aimed directly at the financial aristocracy? This fact proved that the industrial bourgeoisie did not rule France. The industrial bourgeoisie can rule only where modern industry has shaped all property relations to suit, and, accordingly, only there can industry attain this power where it has conquered the world market, because the national boundaries do not suffice for its development. But the industry of France, for the most part, maintains itself in the domestic market only by a more or less modified system of prohibition. If, therefore, the French proletariat at the moment of a revolution in Paris possesses actual power and an influence that spurs it to an effort beyond its means, it is in the rest of France congested in single scattered industrial centers, almost disappearing among the superior numbers of peasants and petty bourgeoisie. The struggle against capital in its developed and modern form, in its essential point, the struggle of the industrial wage worker against the industrial bourgeois, is in France but a partial fact, which, after the days of February, could all the less form the national content of the revolution, since the struggle against the minor methods of capitalist exploitation, that of the peasants against mortgage sharks, of the petty trader against the wholesaler, banker and manufacturer, against bankruptcy in other words, was still veiled in the general insurrection against the financial aristocracy. Nothing more plausible therefore than that the Paris proletariat sought to enforce its interests side by side with those of the bourgeoisie; that it let fall the Red Flag before the Tricolor, instead of bringing them to the fore as the revolutionary interest of society itself. The French workers could not advance a step, could not turn a hair of the bourgeois order, before the course of the revolution had aroused the mass of the nation standing between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the peasants and petty bourgeoisie, against this order and against the rule of capital, and had forced them to attach themselves to the proletariat as the leader in the fight. Only through the overwhelming defeat in June could the workers purchase this victory.

To the commission at the Luxembourg, this creation of the Paris workers, is due the merit of having revealed the secret of the revolution of the 19th century from a European tribune: the emancipation of the proletariat. The Moniteur raged when, officially, it had to propagate these “wild visions,” hitherto buried in the apocryphal writings of the Socialists, and which had assailed the ear of the bourgeoisie from time to time only as half-terrifying, half-ridiculous legends. According to the idea of the proletarians, who confused the financial aristocracy with the bourgeoisie as such; in the imagination of republican respectabilities, who denied even the existence of the classes, or, at best, admitted the same only as a consequence of the constitutional monarchy; in the hypocritical phrases of the bourgeois factions hitherto excluded from power, the rule of the bourgeoisie had been abolished with the erection of the republic. At that time, all royalists transformed themselves into republicans, and all the millionaires of Paris into workingmen. The phrase, expressing this imaginary abolition of class relations, was fraternity,—general fraternization and brotherhood. This comfortable abstraction of class opposites, this sentimental adjustment of class antagonisms, this visionary rising above the class struggle, fraternité, it was the real cue of the February revolution. The classes had been split by what was purely a misunderstanding; and hence Lamartine christened the Provisional Government, on February 24, “un gouvernement qui suspende ce malentendu terrible qui existe entre les différentes classes” [a government that suspends the misunderstanding that exists between the different classes.] The Parts proletariat reveled in this magnanimous fraternity intoxication.

The Provisional Government itself, once it had been formed to proclaim the republic, did everything to make it palatable to the bourgeoisie and the provinces. The bloody horrors of the first French republic were disavowed by the abolition of the death penalty for political offences, the press was made free for all opinions, the army, the courts, the administrations, with few exceptions, remained in the hands of the old dignitaries, none of the great sinners of the July monarchy was called to account. The bourgeois republicans of the National amused themselves by changing monarchist names and costumes into old republican ones. To them the republic was naught but a new ball costume for the old bourgeois society. For its chief merit the young republic, rather than be repellent, itself sought to be constantly startled, and by soft yielding and lack of resistance to gain ground for its existence and disarm opposition. To the privileged classes within, and to the despotic powers without, it was loudly made known that the republic was of a peaceful disposition. To live and to let live was its motto. On top of that came this: shortly after the February revolution, Germans, Poles, Austrians, Hungarians, Italians revolted, each people according to its respective situation. Russia and England were unprepared, the latter herself shaken, the former intimidated. Hence, the republic was not confronted by a national foe. Therefore, there were no large-scale external complications which might kindle forceful action, accelerate the revolutionary process and either drive forward or throw overboard the Provisional Government. The Paris proletariat, which recognized in the republic its own creation, naturally acclaimed every act of the Provisional Government that enabled it more easily to make a place for itself within bourgeois society. It permitted itself to be used for police service by Caussidiére, in order to protect property in Paris, just as it permitted settlement of wage disputes between masters and men by Louis Blanc. It was its point of honor to maintain without blemish before the eyes of Europe the bourgeois honor of the republic.

The republic met with no opposition, neither without nor within. And, therewith, it was disarmed. Its mission was no longer to transform the world by revolution, it was to adapt itself to the conditions of bourgeois society. With what fanaticism the Provisional Government undertook this mission, there can be no more articulate witnesses than its financial measures.

Public as well as private credit was, of course, shaky. Public credit rests upon the confident assumption that the State will permit itself to be exploited by the Jews of finance. But the old State had vanished and the revolution was, first of all, directed against the financial aristocracy. The tremors of the last European commercial crisis had not yet subsided. Bankruptcies still followed bankruptcies.

Private credit also was paralyzed, circulation hampered, production stagnant, before the February revolution broke out. The revolutionary crisis augmented the commercial one. And if private credit is based upon the confidence of bourgeois production within the entire scope of its existence, that bourgeois order is unviolated and inviolable, what must be the effect of a revolution which questioned the economic slavery of the proletariat, the very foundation of bourgeois production, and which erected toward the stock exchange the sphinx of the Luxembourg? The rise of the proletariat means the abolition of bourgeois credit, because it implies the abolition of bourgeois production and order. Public and private credit are the economic thermometer wherewith one can measure the intensity of a revolution. In the same measure that these fall, rises, on the other hand, the glow-heat and the generative power of the revolution.

The Provisional Government sought to strip the republic of its anti-bourgeois appearance. To do so it had to secure, first of all, the exchange value of this new form of State, its rating on the stock exchange. With the price quotations of the republic on the stock exchange, private credit would necessarily be advanced.

In order to eliminate even the suspicion that the republic would not or could not meet the obligations taken over from the monarchy, and in order to induce confidence in bourgeois morals and solvency, the Provisional Government resorted to boastfulness as undignified as it was childish. In advance of the legal date of payment, it paid to the creditors of the State the interest on the 5, 4/2 and 4 per cent securities. Bourgeois aplomb, the self-reliance of the capitalists, was suddenly awakened when they observed the fearsome haste with which it was sought to purchase their confidence.

The financial embarrassment of the Provisional Government naturally was not reduced by a theatrical coup that deprived it of the funds in hand. The financial difficulty could no longer be concealed, and petty bourgeoisie, servants and workers had to pay for the pleasant surprise that had been provided for the State’s creditors.

Savings bankbooks, exceeding the amount of 100 francs, were declared non-convertible into cash. The funds deposited in the savings banks were confiscated and by a decree converted into a non-repayable public debt. Thereby the petty bourgeois, already hard pressed, was embittered against the republic. Receiving State loan certificates in place of his savings accounts, he was forced to go to the stock exchange and sell them, thus delivering himself directly into the hands of the stock exchange Jews against whom he had made the revolution.

The financial aristocracy which ruled under the July monarchy, had its high church in the bank. And as the stock exchange governs State credit, so does the bank govern commercial credit.

Directly menaced by the February revolution, not only in its rule but in its very existence, the bank, to begin with, sought to discredit the republic by making the credit famine universal. Credit was suddenly withdrawn from the bankers, the manufacturers, the merchants. This maneuver, in case it did not at once cause a counter-revolution, necessarily reacted upon the bank itself. The capitalists withdrew the money they had deposited in the vaults of the bank. The holders of bank notes stormed the cash window to exchange them for gold or silver.

Without forcible interference, in a purely legal manner, the Provisional Government could force the bank into bankruptcy; it had but to remain passive and leave the bank to its fate. The bankruptcy of the bank—that was the deluge that would sweep the financial aristocracy, the most powerful and most dangerous enemy of the republic, the golden pedestal of the July monarchy, in one fell swoop from French soil. The bank once bankrupt, the bourgeoisie would have to regard it as a last desperate attempt at rescue for the Government to create a national bank and subject the national credit to the control of the nation.

The Provisional Government, however, gave compulsory currency to the notes of the bank. It did more. It transformed all provincial banks into branch institutions of the Banque de France and permitted it to throw its net over the whole of France. Later, it pawned the State forests with the bank as security for a loan it contracted. Thus did the February revolution directly solidify and extend the “bankocracy” that it wanted to overthrow.

Meanwhile, the Provisional Government squirmed under the alp of an ever growing deficit. In vain did it beg for patriotic sacrifices. Only the workers threw it some alms. Heroic measures had to be resorted to—the levy of a new tax. But whom to tax? The wolves of the stock exchange, the banking kings, the State’s creditors, the rentiers, the industrialists? That was no way to insinuate the republic with the bourgeoisie. That meant, on the one hand, to jeopardize State and commercial credit, which, on the other hand, it had cost such great sacrifice and humiliation to purchase. But somebody would have to pay. Who, then, was sacrificed to bourgeois credit? Jacques le bonhomme—the peasant proprietor.

The Provisional Government decreed an additional levy of four centimes per franc upon the four direct taxes. The governmental press bamboozled the Paris workers by telling them that this tax would fall chiefly upon the large estates, upon the possessors of the milliard imposed by the restoration. In reality it hit above all the farmers, i.e., the great majority of the French people. They had to pay the costs of the February revolution, and from them the counter-revolution derived its chief material. The 45-centimes tax, that was a vital question for the French farmer, and he made it a vital question for the republic. From that moment on, the republic was for the French farmer the 45-centimes tax, and in the Paris proletariat he saw the profligate spender who took the world easy at his expense.

While the revolution of 1789 began with shaking the feudal burdens from the farmers, the revolution of 1848, in order not to endanger capital and to keep its State machinery in running order, proclaimed itself to the rural population through a new tax.

By only one means could the Provisional Government brush aside all these tribulations and pull the State out of its old rut—by a declaration of State bankruptcy. It will be remembered how Ledru-Rollin, in the National Assembly, subsequently recited the virtuous indignation with which he had rejected this proposition of the stock-exchange Jew Fould, the present Minister of Finance. Fould had handed to him the apple of the Tree of Knowledge.

Since the Provisional Government had honored the draft, which the old bourgeois society had presented to the State, it had become forfeit. It had been transformed into a harassed debtor of bourgeois society, instead of facing it in the role of a pressing creditor come to collect the revolutionary claims of many years. It had to prop up the shaky bourgeois conditions, so as to meet obligations which can only be met within these conditions. Credit becomes one of the conditions of existence, and the concessions to the proletariat, the promises made become so many fetters that must be broken. The emancipation of the workers—even as a phrase—grew into an intolerable danger to the new republic, being a constant protestation against the rehabilitation of credit which rested upon the undisturbed and untroubled recognition of the prevailing economic class relations. Therefore, an end must be made with the workers.

The February revolution had thrown the army out of Paris. The National Guard, that is, the bourgeoisie in its various gradations, formed the only power. But alone it did not feel a match for the proletariat. Moreover, it had been forced, although only after the most tenacious resistance, advancing a hundred different obstacles, gradually and fractionally to open its ranks and to admit armed proletarians to the Guard. Only one way out was left: to set one part of the proletarians against the other part.

For this purpose, the Provisional Government formed 24 battalions of a Mobile Guard, each of a thousand men, composed of youngsters between 15 and 20 years. Most of these belonged to the Lumpenproletariat which, in all large cities, forms a mass sharply distinct from the industrial proletariat, a recruiting place for thieves and criminals of all sorts, living upon the offal of society, people without a definite mode of making a living, loafers, gens sans feu et sans aveu [people without a hearth and without a home], different according to the degree of culture of the nation to which they belong, but never denying the lazzaroni character; at the youthful age the Provisional Government recruited them thoroughly impressionable, capable of the greatest deeds of heroism and the most exalted sacrifices, as well as of the meanest banditry and subject to the vilest bribery. The Provisional Government paid them fr. 1.50 per day, i.e., it bought them. It gave them a distinct uniform, that is, it differentiated them from the blouse. For commanders, officers of the standing army were assigned in part, and in part they themselves elected young bourgeois scions whose rodomontades about death for the fatherland and devotion to the republic captivated them.

Thus the Paris proletariat was confronted with an army of 24,000 youthfully vigorous daredevils drawn from its own midst. It cried: vivat! at the Mobile Guard in its marches through Paris. It recognized in them its leading barricade fighters. It regarded them as a proletarian guard in contradistinction to the bourgeois National Guard. Its error was excusable.

Side by side with the Mobile Guard, the Government decided to gather around itself also an industrial labor army. One hundred thousand workingmen, rendered unemployed by the crisis and the revolution, were enrolled by the Minister Marie in so-called national “ateliers” [workshops]. Behind this pretentious name was hidden nothing else but the employment of workers at long drawn-out, tedious, unproductive excavation work at a wage of 23 sous. English workhouses in the open air—that and nothing else were these national ateliers. With these the Provisional Government believed that it had formed a second proletarian army against the workers themselves. This time the bourgeoisie erred in the matter of the national ateliers, just as the workers had erred in the matter of the Mobile Guard. They had created an army for a mutiny.

But one purpose was accomplished.

National ateliers—that was the name of the people’s workshops for which Louis Blanc had preached at the Luxembourg. The ateliers of Marie, planned in direct contrast to those of the Luxembourg, because of their common designation gave rise to an intrigue of errors worthy of the Spanish servants’ comedy. The Provisional Government itself surreptitiously spread the rumor that these national ateliers were the invention of Louis Blanc, and this seemed the more plausible because Louis Blanc, the prophet of the national ateliers, was a member of the Provisional Government. And in the half-naive, half-purposeful confusion of the Paris bourgeoisie, in the artificially maintained opinion of France and of Europe, these workhouses were the first realization of Socialism which, together with them, was thus put in the pillory.

Not through their content but through their name were these national ateliers the incarnated protestation of the proletariat against bourgeois industry, bourgeois credit, and the bourgeois republic. Upon them rolled the full hatred of the bourgeoisie. In them it had also found the point upon which to direct its attack, as soon as it had grown strong enough openly to break with the February illusions. All the displeasure, all the ill humor of the petty bourgeoisie also centered upon these national ateliers, the common target. With real wrath they figured up the sums swallowed up by the proletarian idlers, while their own condition became daily more intolerable. “A State pension for the mere pretense of work, that is Socialism,” they muttered to themselves. The national ateliers, the declamations of the Luxembourg, the marches of the workers through Paris—in these they sought the reason for their misery. And nobody fanaticized himself more against the alleged machinations of the Communists than the small bourgeois, himself hopelessly dangling on the brink of bankruptcy. Thus, for the prospective clash between bourgeoisie and proletariat, all the advantages, all decisive posts, all the middle layers of society were in the hands of the bourgeoisie at the very time when the waves of the February revolution dashed high over the entire continent, when every mail brought a new revolutionary bulletin, now from Italy, now from Germany, now from the farthest southeastern corner of Europe, maintaining the general delirium of the people by bringing constantly tokens of a victory it had already lost.

March 17 and April 16 were the days of the first skirmishes in the great class war which the bourgeois republic concealed under its wings. March 17 laid bare the ambiguous situation of the proletariat which made impossible decisive action. Its demonstration originally intended to throw the Provisional Government back upon the road of the revolution, according to circumstances to bring about the elimination of its bourgeois members, and to enforce postponement of the elections for the National Assembly and the National Guard, made a hostile demonstration against the Provisional Government. With the cry: à bas Ledru-Rollin [down with Ledru-Rollin!], they pressed upon the Hotel de Ville. And on March 17 the people were forced to cry: Long live Ledru-Rollin! Long live the Provisional Government! The proletariat was forced to take a stand against the bourgeoisie, and yet for the bourgeois republic, which appeared endangered. It stabilized the Provisional Government instead of subjecting it. March 17 detonized in a melodramatic scene and if, on that day, the Paris proletariat once more paraded its gigantic body, the bourgeoisie within and without the Provisional Government was all the more determined to break it.

April 16 was a “misunderstanding,” arranged for by the Provisional Government with the bourgeoisie. The workers had gathered en masse on the Field of Mars, and at the Hippodrome, in order to prepare for their elections of the General Staff of the National Guard. Suddenly there was spread throughout Paris, from one end to the other and with lightning speed, the rumor that the workers had gathered at the Field of Mars fully armed, and, under the leadership of Louis Blanc, Blanqui, Cabet and Raspail, were about to march to the Hotel de Ville to overthrow the Provisional Government and proclaim a Communist government. The general alarm was sounded—Ledru- Rollin, Marrast and Lamartine later squabbled as to who had taken the initiative—and in an hour 100,000 men are under arms, at all points of the Hotel de Ville National Guards are stationed, the cry: Down with the Communists! Down with Louis Blanc, with Blanqui, with Raspail, with Cabet! thunders throughout Paris and the Provisional Government receives the homage of innumerable delegations, all of them ready to save the fatherland and society. When the workers finally appear before the Hotel de Ville in order to tender to the Provisional Government a patriotic collection, gathered on the Field of Mars, they learn, much to their astonishment, that bourgeois Paris, in a carefully planned battle, has defeated their shadow. This terrible attempt of April 16 furnished the pretext for the recall of the army to Paris—the real purpose of the clumsily-staged comedy—and for the reactionary federalist demonstrations of the provinces.

On May 4 was convened the National Assembly chosen by the direct and general elections. The general franchise did not possess the magic power ascribed to it by the old style republicans. Throughout France, at least in the majority of Frenchmen, they saw citizens with the same interests, the same understanding, etc. It was their cult of the people. In place of their imaginary people, the elections brought to light the real people, that is, representatives of the different classes into which it is divided. We have seen how the peasant proprietors and the petty bourgeoisie had to vote under the leadership of the militant bourgeoisie and the great landowners aching for restoration. But if the general franchise was not the magic wand the republican innocents mistook it for, it did possess the far greater merit of unfettering the class struggle, to enable the different middle layers of petty bourgeois society quickly to live through their illusions and disappointments, to pitch all the factions of the exploiting class with one heave into the possession of the powers of State, and thus to tear from them the deceiving mask, while the monarchy, with its census, permitted only certain factions of the bourgeoisie to show their hand and to compromise themselves, leaving all the others hidden behind the scenery and bestowing upon them the halo of a common opposition.

In the Constituent Assembly, which met on May 4, the bourgeois republicans, the republicans of the National, had the upper hand. Legitimists and Orleanists at first dared to show themselves only under the mask of bourgeois republicanism. Only in the name of the republic could the fight be started against the proletariat.

From May 4, not from February 25, the republic is dated, that is, the republic recognized by the French people; it is not the republic which the Paris proletariat forced upon the Provisional Government, not the republic with social institutions, not the dream picture that was envisioned by the barricade fighters. The republic proclaimed by the National Assembly, the only legitimate republic, is the republic that does not constitute a revolutionary weapon against the bourgeois social order, but rather aims at its political reconstruction, the political re-enforcement of bourgeois society, with one word, the bourgeois republic. From the tribune of the National Assembly this claim went forth, and in the entire bourgeois and anti-bourgeois press it found an echo.

We have seen how the February republic in reality was nothing else, and could be nothing else, but a bourgeois republic, how the Provisional Government, under the direct pressure of the proletariat, was forced to proclaim it a republic with social institutions, how the Paris proletariat was incapable itself to go beyond the bourgeois republic, except in conception and imagination, how it acted everywhere in its service when it came to real action, how the promises made to it came to be an intolerable danger for the new republic, and how the entire vital processes of the Provisional Government condensed themselves in a continuous struggle against the demands of the proletariat.

In the National Assembly the whole of France sat in judgment over the Paris proletariat. Breaking at once with the social illusions of the February revolution, it proclaimed without equivocation the bourgeois republic, and nothing but the bourgeois republic. At once did it exclude, from the Executive Commission that was chosen, the representatives of the proletariat: Louis Blanc and Albert; it rejected the proposal of a special Ministry of Labor; it received with stormy applause the declaration of Minister Trélat: “It is only a matter of leading labor back to its former conditions.”

But all that did not suffice. The February republic had been fought for and gained by the workers with the passive assistance of the bourgeoisie. The proletarians justly considered themselves the victors of February, and they made the haughty demands of the victor. They had to be defeated upon the streets, had to be shown that they would lose as soon as they fought not with but against the bourgeoisie. As the February republic, with its Socialist concessions, required a battle of the proletariat allied with the bourgeoisie against the monarchy, so a second battle was needed to separate the republic from these Socialist concessions, and to work out the bourgeois republic as the official and dominating one. Arms in hand, the bourgeoisie had to counter the demands of the proletariat. And the real natal day of the bourgeois republic is not the February victory, it is the June defeat.

The proletariat accelerated the decision when, on May 15, it invaded the National Assembly, sought without success to regain its revolutionary influence, and only delivered its energetic leaders to the jailers of the bourgeoisie. Il faut en finir!—this situation must be ended! With this cry the National Assembly gave vent to its determination to force the proletariat into decisive battle. The Executive Commission issued a series of provocative decrees, such as the prohibition of popular gatherings, etc. Directly from the tribune of the National Assembly were the workers provoked, maligned, mocked. But the real point of attack, as we have seen, was furnished by the national ateliers. To them the Constituent Assembly had imperatively directed the attention of the Executive Commission, which was only waiting to hear its own plan pronounced as an order of the National Assembly.

The Executive Commission began by making access to the national ateliers more difficult, to change time wages into piece wages, to exile workers not born in Paris to the Sologne, ostensibly for excavation work. But this work was only a rhetorical formula to gloss over the deportation, as the returned and disappointed workers informed their comrades. Finally, on June 21, a decree appeared in the Moniteur ordering the forcible elimination of all unmarried workers from the national ateliers, or their enrollment in the army.

No choice was left to the workers, they had to starve or fight. They answered, on June 22, with an insurrection of great magnitude, wherein the first great battle was fought between the two classes that split modern society. It was a struggle for the preservation or the destruction of the bourgeois order. The veil that had concealed the republic was torn asunder.

It is known how the workers, with unexampled bravery and genius, without a common plan, without leaders and without means, most of them without arms, held in check for five days the army, the Mobile Guard, the Paris National Guard and the National Guard drawn from the provinces. It is known how the bourgeoisie, to compensate itself for the deadly scare it experienced, massacred more than 3,000 prisoners with unheard-of brutality.

So much were the official representatives of the French democracy blinded by the republican ideology, that only a few weeks later did they begin to sense the meaning of the June battle. They were as though benumbed by the smoke of gunpowder wherein their fantastic republic was dissipated.

The direct impression, which the news of the June defeat made upon us, the reader will permit us to depict in the words of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (June 29, 1848):

“The last official remnant of the February revolution, the Executive Commission, has been dissolved like a nebulous picture before the seriousness of events. Lamartine’s luminous rockets have changed themselves into the fire-balls of Cavaignac. The fraternity, the brotherhood of antagonistic classes, wherein one exploits the other, this fraternity, proclaimed in February, written with big letters upon the brow of Paris, upon every prison and every barracks—has its true, unadulterated, its prosaic expression in the civil war, civil war in its most terrible form, the war between capital and labor. This fraternity flamed from every Paris window, on the evening of June 25, when the Paris of the bourgeoisie sparkled and glowed, while the Paris of the proletariat gasped in the throes of death, burnt and bleeding. Fraternity endured just so long as the interests of the bourgeoisie were allied to those of the proletariat.—Pedants of the old revolutionary tradition of 1793; Socialist systematicians, who went to the bourgeoisie begging for the people, who were permitted to preach long sermons and to compromise themselves so long as was needed to lull the proletarian lion to sleep; republicans, who demanded the entire old bourgeois order minus the crowned head; dynastic oppositionists, to whom accident, instead of a change of Ministry, had given the fall of a dynasty; Legitimists, who, though they did not want to doff their livery, did want to change its style and cut,—these were the allies with whom the people made its ‘February.’—The February revolution was a nice revolution, a revolution of general sympathy, because the antagonisms that within it acted jointly against royalty, still undeveloped slumbered peacefully side by side, because the social struggle that formed its background had gained but an airy existence, the existence of the phrase, of the word. The June revolution is the ugly revolution, the repellant revolution, because the phrase has been supplanted by the cause, because the republic itself bared the head of the monster when it struck off the shielding and concealing crown.—Order! was the battle cry of Guizot. Order! cried Sebastiani, the Guizotin, when Warsaw became Russian. Order! cries Cavaignac, the brutal echo of the French National Assembly and of the republican bourgeoisie. Order! thundered his ca nister-shot when it mangled the body of the proletariat. None of the many revolutions of the French bourgeoisie since 1789 was an attack upon order, because it preserved the rule of class, preserved the slavery of labor, preserved the bourgeois order no matter how often the political form of this rule and this slavery was changed. The June revolution has laid hands upon this order. Woe to the June revolution!”

The Paris proletariat was forced by the bourgeoisie into the June insurrection. Therein alone lies the judgment of condemnation. Its immediate and admitted requirements did not urge it forcibly to bring about the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, nor was it equal to the task. The Moniteur had officially to inform the workers that the time was past for the republic to honor their illusions, and only their defeat convinced them of the truth that the slightest improvement of their condition remains a utopia within the bourgeois republic, a utopia which becomes a crime when it seeks realization. In place of demands exalted in point of form, but petty and even bourgeois in essence, the concession of which the proletariat wanted to pry from the February revolution, came the bold revolutionary watchword: Overthrow of the Bourgeoisie! Dictatorship of the Working Class!

While the proletariat made its field of death into the birthplace of the bourgeois republic, it compelled the latter to stand forth at once in its true form—as the State—the avowed purpose of which is to perpetuate the rule of capital and the slavery of labor. In sight of this battle-scarred, irreconcilable, unconquerable foe—unconquerable, because its existence is the sine qua non of its own life—bourgeois rule, freed from all trammels, was bound at once to turn into bourgeois terrorism. The proletariat temporarily swept from the stage, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie officially recognized, the middle layers, in the measure that their condition became more intolerable and their opposition to the bourgeoisie more pronounced, had to line up more and more with the proletariat. As, formerly, in its rise, they had now in its defeat to find the cause of their own misery.

If the June insurrection, everywhere upon the continent, raised the self-confidence of the bourgeoisie and caused it openly to enter into an alliance with the feudal kingdom against the people, who was the first victim of this alliance?—the continental bourgeoisie itself. The June defeat prevented it from solidifying its rule and causing the people to stand stock-still upon the lowest rung of the bourgeois revolution, half content and half disgruntled.

Finally, the June defeat revealed to the despotic powers of Europe the secret that France, under any and all conditions, must maintain peace without in order to carry on the civil war within. And thus were the people, who had entered upon the struggle for national independence, delivered to the overwhelming power of Russia, Austria and Prussia, but at the same time was the fate of these nationalist revolutions subordinated to the fate of the proletarian revolution, deprived of their seeming self-existence, their independence of the great social transformation. The Hungarian shall not be free, nor the Pole, nor the Italian, so long as the worker remains a slave!

Finally, Europe, through the victories of the Holy Alliance, took on such shape that every new proletarian insurrection in France would at once become coincident with a world war. The new French revolution would be forced at once to go beyond the national confines, and to conquer the European terrain upon which alone the social revolution of the 19th century can establish itself.

Only through the June defeat were created all the conditions within which France can take the initiative in the European revolution. Only when dipped in the blood of the June insurgents did the Tricolor become the banner of the European revolution—the Red Flag.

And we exclaim: The revolution is dead!—Long live the revolution!