II. From June, 1848, to June 13, 1849

The 25th of February, 1848, had imposed upon France the republic, the 25th of June thrust upon her the revolution. And revolution, after June, meant transformation of bourgeois society; while, prior to February, it had meant transformation of the form of the State.

The struggle of June had been led by the republican faction of the bourgeoisie, and, with the victory, the powers of State necessarily fell to that element. The state of siege laid Paris resistlessly at its feet, while in the provinces reigned a moral state of siege, the brutally threatening arrogance of the bourgeois victor, and the unchained property fanaticism of the farmers. Therefore, no danger from below.

With the revolutionary power of the workers broke also the political influence of the democratic republicans, that is, of the republicans in the sense of the petty bourgeoisie, represented in the Executive Commission by Ledru-Rollin, in the Constituent National Assembly by the party of the Montagne [the Mountain], in the press by the Réforme. Jointly with the bourgeois republicans they had, on April 16, conspired against the proletariat, and in the days of June had jointly with them warred upon it. Thus, they themselves blasted the background from which their party had stood forth as a power, because the petty bourgeoisie can maintain a revolutionary attitude against the upper bourgeoisie only so long as the proletariat stands behind it. They were dismissed. The sham alliance, into which the bourgeois republicans entered with them, reluctantly and with mental reservations during the period of the Provisional Government and the Executive Commission, was openly broken. Rejected and repelled as allies, they sank to a position of subordinate satellites of the Tricolor, from whom they could wring no concession but whose rule they were forced to support each time it, and with it the republic itself, was called into question by the anti-republican bourgeois factions. These factions, finally,—Legitimists and Orleanists—found themselves right at the start in a minority within the Constituent National Assembly. Prior to the June days, they dared to assert themselves only under the mask of bourgeois republicanism, but the June victory for the moment caused the whole of bourgeois France to hail Cavaignac as its Messiah, and when, shortly after the June days, the anti-republican party again began to gain its self-reliance, the military dictatorship and the state of siege permitted it to put out its feelers only very timidly and with great care.

Since 1830, the bourgeois republican faction, with its journalists, its spokesmen, its capacities, its deputies, generals, bankers and lawyers, had been grouped around a Paris journal, the National. In the provinces, this paper had its branches. The coterie of the National constituted the dynasty of the Tricolor republic. At once it took unto itself all the powers of State, the Ministries, the Police Prefecture, the Post Office, the Prefect positions, the army positions of higher rank that had become vacant. At the head of the executive power stood its general, Cavaignac; its editor in chief, Marrast, was made the permanent President of the Constituent National Assembly. In his salons, as master of ceremonies, he made at the same time the honneurs for the virtuous republic.

Even revolutionary French writers, because of a kind of awe of the republican tradition, have strengthened the error as though the royalists had ruled in the Constituent National Assembly. The Constituent National Assembly, quite otherwise, remained since the June days the exclusive representative of bourgeois republicanism, and all the more markedly did it show this side, the more the influence of the Tricolor republicans collapsed outside of the Assembly. If it became a matter of maintaining the form of the bourgeois republic, it had the votes of the democratic republicans; if it became a matter of essence, then even their talk did not separate them from the royalist bourgeois factions, because the interests of the bourgeoisie, the material conditions of its class rule and class exploitation, form the very content of the bourgeois republic.

Not royalism but bourgeois republicanism found its realization in the life and the deeds of this Constituent Assembly, which, in the end, did not die, neither was it killed, but which simply rotted away.

During the entire duration of its rule, so long as it played the chief and State role before the scenes, there was enacted in the background an uninterrupted sacrificial feast—the continuous court-martial condemnation of captured June insurgents, or their deportation without trial. The Constituent Assembly had the tact to admit that, in the case of the June insurgents, it did not adjudge criminals, it crushed enemies.

The first deed of the Constituent National Assembly was the appointment of a commission to inquire into the events of June, of the 15th of May and into the participation of the Socialist and Democratic party chiefs in those days. The inquiry was directed against Louis Blanc, Ledru-Rollin and Caussidière. The bourgeois republicans burned with impatience to rid themselves of these rivals. The carrying through of their rancor they could not entrust to a better tool than Odilon Barrot, former chief of the dynastic opposition, liberalism become incarnate, the nullité grave [grave cipher] of thorough shallowness, who not only had to revenge a dynasty but who also had to ask of the revolutionaries an accounting for a frustrated presidency of the Ministry. A certain guaranty of his inexorability. This Barrot was made the president of the commission of inquiry and he built up a complete case against the February revolution, summed up as follows: March 17, Manifestation; April 16, Plot; May 15, Attack; June 23, Civil War! Why did he not extend his learned and criminalist investigations to the 24th of February? The Journal des Débats answered: The 24th of February, that means the founding of Rome. The origin of States runs back to a myth, in which one may believe, but which one must not discuss. Louis Blanc and Caussidière were abandoned to the courts. The National Assembly completed the work of cleansing itself, which it had begun on May 15.

The plan of imposing a tax upon capital—in the shape of a tax upon mortgages—conceived by the Provisional Government and again taken up by Goudchaux, was rejected by the Constituent Assembly, the law limiting the hours of labor to ten was repealed, debtor imprisonment was reintroduced, and the greater part of the French population, because unable to read or write, was excluded from jury service. Why not also from the suffrage? The bond [of good behavior] for the press was again introduced and the right of association curtailed.

But in their haste to give back to the old bourgeois conditions the old guarantees, and to blot out every trace left behind by the waves of the revolution, the bourgeois republicans met with an obstacle threatening unexpected danger.

No one had, during the June days, fought more fanatically for the safety of property and the restoration of credit than the Paris petty bourgeoisie—cafétiers, restaurateurs, wine merchants, small merchants and traders, professionals, etc. The boutique [small shop] had roused itself and had marched against the barricade in order to restore circulation that leads from the street to the boutique. But behind the barricade stood the customers and debtors, before it stood the creditors of the boutique. And after the barricades had been smashed and the workers crushed, and the shopkeepers, victory-drunk, had rushed back to their shops, they found the entrance barricaded by a savior of property, an official agent of credit, who held before them some menacing documents: Overdue notes! Overdue house rent! Overdue obligations!—and, therefore, a foreclosed boutique! a foreclosed boutiquier!

Safety of property? But the house wherein they dwelled was not their property; the shop which they tended was not their property; the goods they dealt in were not their property. Not their business, not the plate from which they ate, not the bed wherein they slept, still belonged to them. As against themselves, it was a case of saving that very property for the house owner, who had rented them the house; the banker, who had discounted the note; the capitalist, who had made cash advances; the manufacturer, who had consigned merchandise to these petty traders; the wholesaler, who had given raw material to the professionals on credit. Restoration of credit? But credit, again grown stronger, proved itself a lively and diligent God, who threw the non-paying debtor with wife and child out of his four walls, abandoned his imaginary property to the capitalist, and confined the debtor himself in the debtor's prison, which had again been threateningly re-erected upon the corpses of the June insurgents.

The petty bourgeoisie perceived with dread that, after they had knocked down the workers, they had delivered themselves, without chance of resistance, into the hands of their creditors. Their dragged-out and seemingly overlooked bankruptcy, become chronic since the days of February, was after the June days openly announced.

Their nominal property had been left unchallenged when it was a case of driving them upon the scene of battle in the name of property. But now, after the great settlement with the proletariat had been attended to, the little business with the epicerie [grocery] could also be settled. In Paris, the mass of protested notes, etc., amounted to more than 21 million francs, in the provinces to over 11 millions. Occupants of places of business in more than 7,000 houses in Paris had not paid rent since February.

The National Assembly having extended its inquiry into the political debt up to the borders of February, the small traders now demanded an inquiry into the civil debts up to February 24. They gathered en masse in the hall of the stock exchange and threateningly demanded for every merchant who could prove that he had failed only because of the crisis caused by the revolution, and that his business was in good shape on February 24, an extension of time for payment by decree of the commercial court, and to compel the creditor to liquidate his claim on payment of a moderate percentage. In the National Assembly this question came up as proposed legislation in the form of the concordat à l’amiable [amiable agreement]. The Assembly hesitated; suddenly it learned that, at the Porte St. Denis, thousands of wives and children of the insurgents were preparing an amnesty petition.

In the presence of the resurrected June ghost the petty bourgeoisie trembled, and the Assembly regained its inexorableness. The concordat à l’amiable, the friendly agreement between creditor and debtor, was rejected as to its essential points.

After the democratic representatives of the petty bourgeoisie had, within the National Assembly, been thus repulsed by the republican representatives of the bourgeoisie, this parliamentary breach of relations received its bourgeois, concrete economic interpretation by the abandonment of the indebted small trader to his bourgeois creditors. A great part of the former was utterly ruined, and the rest were permitted to continue business only under conditions that made them the unquestioning serfs of capital. On August 22, 1848, the National Assembly rejected the concordat à l’amiable; on September 19, 1848, in the midst of the state of siege, Prince Louis Bonaparte and the prisoner of Vincennes, the Communist Raspail, were elected as representatives in Paris. But the bourgeoisie elected the Jewish money-changer and Orleanist Fould. Therefore, on all sides sudden declarations of war against the Constituent National Assembly, against bourgeois republicanism, against Cavaignac.

It requires no explanation to show how the mass-bankruptcy of the Paris petty bourgeoisie, in its after effects, rolled far beyond those immediately affected, again interrupted bourgeois commerce, while the State deficit, due to the June insurrection, increased anew, and the State income, because of the stoppage of production, restricted consumption and lowered imports, declined continuously. Cavaignac and the National Assembly could have recourse to no other means than that of a new loan, which forced them still more under the yoke of the financial aristocracy.

If the small traders had harvested bankruptcy and juridical liquidation as the fruit of the June victory, the Janissaries of Cavaignac, the Mobile Guard, on the other hand, found their reward in the soft arms of the Lorettes, and they also received, as the “youthful saviors of society,” homage of all sorts in the salons of Marrast, the gentilhomme of the Tricolor, who also served as the amphitryon [host] and troubadour of the virtuous republic. Meanwhile, this social preferment and, more yet, the much higher pay of the Mobile Guard embittered the army, while, at the same time, vanished all the national illusions whereby bourgeois republicanism, through its journal, the National, had managed to attach to itself in the time of Louis Philippe a part of the army and the farmer class. The go-between role which Cavaignac and the National Assembly had played in North Italy, only to betray it to Austria conjointly with England—this one day of domination annihilated eighteen years of opposition of the National. No government was less national than that of the National, none more dependent upon England, and under Louis Philippe it lived on the daily circumscription of the Catonic: Carthaginem esse delendam [Carthage must be destroyed]; none more servile toward the Holy Alliance, and from a Guizot it had demanded that he tear up the Vienna treaties. The irony of history made Bastide, former editor of the National, France’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, so that he might contradict every one of his articles in every one of his despatches.

For a moment both the army and the farmers had believed that, with the military dictatorship, external war and glory had been put on France’s order of the day. But Cavaignac, that was not the dictatorship of the sabre over bourgeois society—it was the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie via the sabre. Of the soldier they now needed only the gendarme. Cavaignac concealed under the stern features of anti-republican resignation the insipid submissiveness to the humiliating conditions of his bourgeois office. L’argent n’a pas de maître!—money has no master! This old motto of the tiers-état [third estate] he idealized, as did the Constituent Assembly, by translating it into political parlance: The bourgeoisie has no king, the true form of its rule is the republic.

To work out this form, to fashion a republican constitution, therein consisted the “great organic labor” of the Constituent National Assembly. The rebaptism of the Christian calendar into a republican one, of St. Bartholomew into St. Robespierre, made no more change in wind and weather than this constitution changed or was to have changed bourgeois society. Wherever it went beyond a change of costume, it made existing facts part of the record. And so it solemnly registered the fact of the republic, the fact of the general suffrage, the fact of a single sovereign National Assembly in place of the two restricted constitutional Chambers. Thus it registered and regulated the fact of the Cavaignac dictatorship, by substituting for the stationary, non-responsible, hereditary kingship, an ambulant, responsible, elective kingship, by means of a quadrennial presidency. And thus, none the less, it raised to the dignity of constitutional law the fact of the extraordinary powers wherewith the National Assembly, after the terrors of May 15 and of June 25, had providentially invested its President in the interest of its own security. The balance of the constitution was a matter of terminology. From the works of the old monarchist machine the royalist labels were torn off and republican labels put up instead. Marrast, former chief editor of the National, but now chief editor of the constitution, discharged this academic task not without talent.

The Constituent Assembly resembled the Chilean official, who wanted better to regulate the conditions of property in realty by means of a cadastral survey, at the very moment when subterranean rumblings had already announced the volcanic eruption that was to sweep the real estate from under his feet. While in theory it advanced the precise form wherein the rule of the bourgeoisie was to be expressed in republican fashion, in reality it maintained itself only through the suspension of all formulas, through force sans phrase, through the state of siege. Two days prior to its taking up the work on the constitution, it proclaimed continuance of the state of siege. Formerly, constitutions were made and adopted after the process of social transformation had arrived at a point of repose, when the newly-formed class relations had had time to set, and the warring factions of the ruling class had sought refuge in a compromise which permitted continuance of the fight among themselves while at the same time excluding therefrom the tired-out popular mass. This constitution, however, sanctioned no social revolution, it sanctioned the momentary victory of the old society over the revolution.

In the first draft of the constitution, made after the June days, there was yet the droit au travail—the right to work—the first awkward formula wherein the revolutionary aspirations of the proletariat are condensed. It was transferred into the droit à l’assistance—the right to public alms—but which modern State does not, in one form or another, feed its paupers? The right to work, in the bourgeois sense, is a contradiction, a miserable pious wish, but behind the right to work looms up the power over capital, behind the power over capital the expropriation of the means of production, their subjection to the organized working class, therefore, the abolition of wage labor, of capital and of their mutual relations. Behind the “right to work” stood the June insurrection. The Constituent Assembly, which practically had placed the proletariat hors la loi—outside of the law—had to throw out of the constitution, the law of laws, as a matter of principle this formula, had to pronounce anathema the “right to work.” But it did not stop there. Just as Plato banned the poets from his Republic, so did it ban from its republic forever and evermore—the progressive tax. The progressive tax is not only a bourgeois measure, applicable within the existing conditions of production in greater or lesser degree; it was the only means to attach the middle layers of bourgeois society to the “virtuous” republic, to reduce the public debt, to checkmate the anti-republican majority of the bourgeoisie.

At the time of the concordat à l’amiable, the Tricolor republicans had actually sacrificed the petty bourgeoisie to the upper bourgeoisie. This isolated fact they raised to the level of a principle by the legal interdiction of the progressive tax. They put a bourgeois reform on the same plane with the proletarian revolution. But which class did then remain as the mainstay of their republic? The upper bourgeoisie. But they, in the mass, were anti-republican. When they exploited the republicans of the National, in order again to strengthen the conditions of the old economic life, they meant, on the other hand, to exploit the reestablished social conditions in order to restore the political forms most suiting them. Even at the beginning of October, Cavaignac was forced to make Dufaure and Vivien, former Ministers of Louis Philippe, into Ministers of the republic, no matter how much the headless puritans of his own party grumbled and blustered.

While the Tricolor constitution rejected all compromise with the petty bourgeoisie, without knowing what new element of society could be attached to the new form of State, it hastened, on the other hand, to restore the traditional immunity of a body wherein the old State found its most obstinate and fanatical defenders. It made the indeposability of judges, called in question by the Provisional Government, part of the fundamental law. The one king, whom they had deposed, rerose by the scores in these indeposable inquisitors of legality.

The French press has in many ways explained the contradictions in the constitution of Monsieur Marrast as, for instance, the co-existence of two sovereigns, the National Assembly, the President, etc., etc.

The most comprehensive contradiction of the constitution consists in this: The classes, whose social slavery it is to perpetuate, proletariat, farmers and the petty bourgeoisie, it puts by means of the general suffrage in possession of political power. And from the class whose old social power it sanctions, the bourgeoisie, it withdraws the political guarantees of this power. It crams its political rule into democratic conditions, which at any moment may help the hostile classes to victory and may call in question the very foundation of bourgeois society itself. From the one it demands that they shall not, from the political emancipation, go forward to social emancipation; and from the others it demands that they shall not, from the social restoration, go back to the political.

These contradictions trouble the bourgeois republicans but little. In the same measure that they ceased to be indispensable—and indispensable they were only as leaders in the fight of the old society against the revolutionary proletariat—a few short weeks after their victory, they sank from the status of a party down to that of a coterie. And the constitution—they treated it as a great intrigue. What above all was to be constituted in it, was the rule of the coterie. The President was to have been the prolonged Cavaignac, the Legislative Assembly a prolonged Constituent Assembly. The political power of the popular masses they hoped to reduce to a sham, and yet to play upon this sham power in a measure sufficient to keep hanging, permanently, over the majority of the bourgeoisie, the dilemma of the June days: rule of the National, or the rule of Anarchy.

The work on the constitution, begun on September 4, was finished on October 23. On September 2, the Constituent Assembly had decided not to adjourn until the organic laws, supplementing the constitution, had been passed. Notwithstanding this, it now decided to call into being its very own creature, the President, on December 10, long before the circle of its own labors had been closed. It felt confident to be able to greet in the constitution Homunculus, the son of his mother. As a matter of precaution it had been arranged that in case neither of the candidates drew two million votes, the election would pass from the nation to the Constituent Assembly.

Vain precautions! The first day of the realization of the constitution was the last day of the rule of the Constituent Assembly. In the abyss of the ballot box lay its sentence of death. It sought the “son of his mother” and found the “nephew of his uncle.” Saulus Cavaignac struck one million votes, but David Napoleon struck six millions. Six times was Saulus Cavaignac defeated.

December 10, 1848, was the day of the peasant insurrection. Only from this day dates the “February” for the French farmers. The symbol which expressed their entrance into the revolutionary movement, awkwardly-cunning, rascally-naive, lumberingly-sublime, a premeditated superstition, a pathetic burlesque, an ingeniously-silly anachronism, a world-historic waggish trick, an undecipherable hieroglyphic for the mental powers of the civilized—this symbol carried unmistakably the physiognomy of the class which, within civilization, represents barbarism. The republic had announced itself to it via the tax collector, it announced itself to the republic via the Emperor. Napoleon was the only man who had completely represented the interests and the imagination of the peasant class created anew in 1789. By writing his name upon the frontispiece of the republic, it declared for war without, and for the assertion of its class interests within. Napoleon, he was for the peasants not a person, but a program. With flying banners and sounding brass they marched to the hustings with the cry: plus d’impôts! à bas les riches! à bas la république! vive l’Empereur!—No more taxes! Down with the rich! Down with the republic! Long live the Emperor! Behind the Emperor was hidden the peasant war. The republic, which they had voted down, was the republic of the rich.

December 10 registered the coup d’état of the peasants, which overthrew the existing government. From this day on, when they took from France one government and gave it another, they kept their eyes inflexibly fixed upon Paris. For a moment the active heroes of the revolutionary drama, they could no longer be forced back into the inactive, will-less role of supernumeraries.

The other classes contributed to complete the electoral victory of the peasants. The election of Napoleon meant to the proletariat the deposition of Cavaignac, the overthrow of the Constituent Assembly, the abdication of bourgeois republicanism, the cashiering of the June victory. To the petty bourgeoisie, Napoleon meant the rule of the debtor over the creditor. To the majority of the upper bourgeoisie, the election of Napoleon meant an open breach with the faction it had been compelled to make use of for the moment and against the revolution, but which became intolerable to it as soon as the latter sought to fortify the position of the moment as a constitutional position. Napoleon in place of Cavaignac; it was to them the monarchy in place of the republic, the beginning of a royalist restoration, Orleans timidly indicated, the lilly hidden under the violets. The army, finally, voted through Napoleon against the Mobile Guard, against the peace idyl, and for war.

And so it happened, as stated by the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, that the most simple man in France attained the most multiplied importance. Just because he was nothing, he might mean everything except himself. However diverse the meaning of the name Napoleon might be in the mouths of the different classes, each one of them wrote with this name upon its bulletin: Down with the party of the National! Down with Cavaignac! Down with the Constituent Assembly! Down with the bourgeois republic! One Minister, Dufaure, openly declared in the Constituent Assembly: The 10th of December is a second February 24.

Petty bourgeoisie and proletariat had voted en bloc for Napoleon in order to vote against Cavaignac, and by this pooling of votes to wrest from the Constituent Assembly the final decision. True, the most progressive part of both classes did put up its own candidates. Napoleon was the collective designation for all the parties coalesced against the bourgeois republic, Ledru-Rollin and Raspail were the surnames, the former for the democratic small bourgeoisie, the latter for the revolutionary proletariat. The votes cast for Raspail—as was openly declared by the proletarians and their Socialist spokesmen—were to be but a demonstration, just so many protests against any kind of presidency, that is, against the constitution itself, so many votes against Ledru-Rollin, the first act whereby the proletariat, as an independent political party, cut loose from the democratic party. This party however—the democratic petty bourgeoisie and its parliamentary representative the Montagne—treated the candidacy of Ledru-Rollin in all seriousness, having always had the solemn habit of duping themselves. This was, however, its last attempt to appear as an independent party against the proletariat. Not only the republican bourgeois party, but also the democratic petty bourgeoisie and its Montagne were defeated on December 10.

France now had, besides a Montagne, a Napoleon; proof that both were only the inanimate caricatures of the great realities whose names they bore. Louis Napoleon, with the imperial hat and eagle, parodied the old Napoleon no less miserably than the Montagne with its phrases borrowed from 1793, and its demagogic poses, parodied the old “Mountain.” The traditional superstition in regard to 1793 was thus simultaneously stripped off with the superstition about Napoleon. The revolution had only arrived at itself, as soon as it had gained its own original name, and it could do that only as soon as the modern revolutionary class, the industrial proletariat, stepped dominantly to the front. It may be said that the 10th of December nonplussed the Montagne, and caused it to doubt its own judgment, for the reason that it laughingly broke off the classic analogy with the old revolution by means of a vile peasant’s jest.

On December 20, Cavaignac resigned his office, and the Constituent Assembly proclaimed Louis Napoleon President of the Republic. On December 19, the last day of its exclusive rule, it rejected a motion of amnesty for the June insurgents. To recall the decree of June 27, whereby it had condemned 15,000 insurgents to deportation with evasion of judicial procedure, did not that mean to recall the June battle itself?

Odilon Barrot, the last Minister of Louis Philippe, became the first Minister of Louis Napoleon. Just as Louis Napoleon did not date the day of his rule from December 10, but from a Senate consultation in 1806, so did he find a Minister-President who dated his Ministry not from December 2o, but from a royal decree of February 24. As the legitimate heir of Louis Philippe, Louis Napoleon mitigated the governmental change by the retention of the old Ministry, which, moreover, had not had time to wear off because it had not found time to come into life.

The chiefs of the royalist bourgeois factions advised this selection. The head of the old dynastic opposition, who had insensibly formed the bridge to the republicans of the National, was even better qualified to form, in full consciousness, the bridge from the bourgeois republic to the monarchy.

Odilon Barrot was the chief of the only old opposition party, which, ever and vainly striving for the Minister’s portfolio, had not worn itself seedy. In rapid succession, the revolution pitched all the old opposition parties to the heights of State power, so that not only in point of action, but with the phrase itself they had themselves to disown and renounce their old phrases, until, finally, united in a disgusting admixture, they were flung by the people upon the flaying-ground of history. No apostasy was spared this Barrot, this incarnation of bourgeois liberalism, who, for eighteen long years, had concealed the rascally hollowness of his mind behind a serious demeanor of his body. If, at certain moments, the too glaring contrast between the thistles of the present and the laurels of the past disconcerted even him, a look in the mirror would restore the ministerial composure and human self-admiration. What the mirror reflected back at him was Guizot, whom he had always envied and who had always mastered him, Guizot himself, but Guizot with Odilon’s olympian brow. What he overlooked were the Midas ears.

The Barrot of February 24 was revealed only in the Barrot of December 20. He, the Orleanist Voltairian, was joined in the capacity of Minister of Education by—the Legitimist and Jesuit Falloux.

A few days later, the Ministry of the Interior was bestowed upon Leon Faucher, the Malthusian. The law, religion, political economy! The Barrot Ministry contained all these and, in addition, a union of the Legitimists and Orleanists. The Bonapartist alone was missing. As yet, Bonaparte concealed the longing to signify Napoleon, because Soulouque did not as yet play Toussaint l’Overture.

At once the party of the National was ousted from all the higher posts wherein it had nested. Police Prefecture, General Procurator, Mayoralty of Paris—all this was manned by the old creatures of the monarchy. Changarnier, the Legitimist, received the combined high command of the National Guard of the Seine Department, of the Mobile Guard, and of the line troops of the first military division; Bugeaud, the Orleanist, was made the commander in chief of the Army of the Alps. This change of officials continued uninterruptedly under the Barrot administration. The first act of his Ministry was the restoration of the old royalist administration. In a trice the official scenery became transformed—curtain, costumes, speech, actors, figurants, supernumeraries, prompters, the position of the parties, motifs of the drama, content of the collision, the entire situation. Only the antemundane Constituent Assembly still held its place. But from the moment the National Assembly had installed Bonaparte, when Bonaparte had installed Barrot and Barrot in turn Changarnier, France emerged from the formative period into the new era of the constitutional republic. And in the constituted republic, what use is there for a Constituent Assembly? After the earth had been created, nothing was left for the creator but to flee to heaven. The Constituent Assembly was determined not to follow his example, the National Assembly being the last asylum of the bourgeois republican party. If all the holds upon the executive power had been wrested away, was there not left to it constituent omnipotence? To maintain under all circumstances the sovereign post that it held, and from there reconquer the lost ground, that was its first thought. The Barrot Ministry crowded out by a Ministry of the National, the royalist personnel would triumphantly reenter. The National Assembly decided upon the overthrow of the Ministry, and the Ministry itself presented an opportunity for attack such as the Assembly could not have better invented for itself.

It will be recalled that, to the peasants, Louis Bonaparte meant: No more taxes! Six days did he sit on the presidential chair and on the seventh day, December 27, his Ministry proposed the retention of the salt tax, the abolition of which had been decreed by the Provisional Government. The salt tax shares with the wine tax the privilege of serving, particularly in the eyes of the rural population, as the scapegoat of the old French system of finance. The Barrot Ministry could not put into the mouth of the peasants’ chosen idol a more biting epigram against his electors than the words: Restoration of the salt tax!—With the salt tax, Bonaparte lost his revolutionary salt,—the Napoleon of the peasants’ insurrection faded like a nebulous picture and nothing remained behind but the Great Unknown of the royalist bourgeois intrigue. Not without purpose did the Barrot Ministry make this act of rude disenchantment the first official act of the President.

The Constituent Assembly, on its part, seized with avidity upon the twin opportunity to overthrow the Ministry and, as against the chosen one of the peasantry, itself to pose as the representative of peasant interests. It rejected the proposal of the Minister of Finance, reduced the salt tax to one-third of its former amount, increased thereby by 60 millions a State deficit of 560 millions, and, after this vote of misconfidence, calmly awaited the retirement of the Ministry. So little did it comprehend the new world by which it was surrounded and its own changed position. Behind the Ministry stood the President, and behind the President stood 6 million voters, who had deposited in the ballot box so many votes of lack of confidence against the Constituent Assembly. The Constituent Assembly returned to the nation its vote of lack of confidence. Ridiculous exchange! It forgot that its decisions had lost their compelling currency. The rejection of the salt tax only ripened the determination of Bonaparte and his Ministry to make an end of the Constituent Assembly. Then began the long duel which filled entirely one-half of the life of the Constituent Assembly; January 29, March 31, May 3, are the journées, the great days of this crisis, so many forerunners of June 13.

Frenchmen, Louis Blanc, for instance, have conceived the 29th of January as the emergence of a constitutional contradiction, the contradiction between a sovereign, indispersable National Assembly emanating from the general suffrage, and a President, literally responsible to it, in reality not only also sanctioned by the general suffrage, but uniting in his person all the votes cast which, distributed among the individual members of the National Assembly, are split up a hundredfold, and who is, moreover, in full possession of the entire executive power, above which the National Assembly soars only as a moral force. This interpretation of the 29th of January mistakes the language of the struggle on the tribune, through the press, in the clubs, with its real content. Louis Bonaparte, in juxtaposition to the National Assembly—that was not a constitutional power on the one side as compared with another, it was not the executive power as compared with the legislative, but it was the constituted bourgeois republic itself as compared with the tools that fashioned it, as compared with the ambitious intrigues and ideologic demands of the revolutionary bourgeois faction that had founded it, and now found to its astonishment that its constituted republic looked like a restored monarchy, and which would now forcibly hold fast the formative period with its conditions, its illusions, its language and its persons and prevent the ripened bourgeois republic from coming forth in its complete and proper form. Just as the Constituent National Assembly represented Cavaignac, who had fallen back into it, so did Bonaparte represent the Legislative National Assembly, not yet separated from him, i.e., the National Assembly of the constituted bourgeois republic.

The election of Bonaparte could be interpreted only by putting in place of the one name its manifold significations, by repeating itself in the election of a new National Assembly. The mandate of the old had been cashiered by the 10th of December. What on January 29 faced each other was not the President and the National Assembly of the republic to be, and the President of the republic in being, two powers that embodied entirely different periods of the life process of the republic, it was the small republican faction of the bourgeoisie which alone could proclaim the republic, wrest it from the proletariat through the street battle and the reign of terror and, in the constitution, draft its ideal fundamental features; and, on the other side, the entire royalist mass of the bourgeoisie, which alone could rule in this constituted bourgeois republic, strip the constitution of its ideologic frills and realize the unavoidable condition for the subjugation of the proletariat through its legislation and its administration.

The thunder cloud, which broke on January 29, had gathered its elements during the entire month of January. The Constituent Assembly, by its vote of lack of confidence, wanted to drive the Barrot Ministry to abdication. The Barrot Ministry, on the other hand, proposed to the Constituent Assembly that it give to itself a vote of lack of confidence, that it resolve upon its suicide and decree its own dissolution. Rateau, one of the most obscure Deputies, at the behest of the Ministry, made this motion in the Assembly on January 6, the same Constituent Assembly which already in August had decided not to adjourn until a whole series of organic laws had been passed that were to round out the constitution. The ministerial Fould told it point-blank that its dissolution was needed “for the restoration of the disturbed credit.” And would it not disturb credit by prolonging the provisorium and calling in question Bonaparte through Barrot, and through Bonaparte again calling in question the constituted republic? Barrot, the Olympian, become a raging Roland at the prospect of seeing the scarcely captured Minister-Presidency, after only two weeks’ enjoyment, snatched from him by the same republicans who had once before withheld it from him for a decennium, that is, for ten months, this Barrot out-tyrannized the tyrant toward this miserable gathering. The mildest of his words were that “with it no future is possible.” And, in truth, it represented only the past. “It was incapable,” he added ironically, “of surrounding the republic with institutions that were needed for its solidification.” Indeed! With the exclusive counterpose against the proletariat, bourgeois energy had been broken, and with the counterpose against the royalists their republican exaltation had been revived. Thus were they doubly incapable of solidifying the bourgeois republic, which they no longer understood, by means of suitable institutions.

With the proposition of Rateau, the Ministry at the same time unloosened a storm of petitions throughout the country, and daily and from all corners of France there came flying at the head of the Constituent Assembly bales of billet-doux wherein it was called upon in more or less categoric fashion to dissolve and to make its last will and testament. The Constituent Assembly, on the other hand, caused counter-petitions to be issued, wherein it let itself be called upon to continue life. The electoral battle between Bonaparte and Cavaignac renewed itself as a petition battle for and against the dissolution of the National Assembly. The petitions were to be the supplemental commentaries of the 10th of December. During the entire month of January this agitation was continued.

In the conflict between the Constituent Assembly and the President, the former could not go back to the general election for its origin, because the appeal was from it to the general suffrage. It could not lean upon a legal power, because it was a case of struggle against the legal power. It could not overthrow the Ministry by voting a lack of confidence, as again it tried on January 6 and 26, because the Ministry did not ask for its confidence. There remained only one possibility, that of insurrection. The fighting forces for an insurrection were the republican part of the National Guard, the Mobile Guard and the centers of the revolutionary proletariat, the clubs. The Mobile Guard, the heroes of the June days, formed also in December the organized fighting force of the republican bourgeois faction, as before the June days the national ateliers had formed the fighting force of the revolutionary proletariat. Just as the Executive Commission of the Constituent Assembly directed its brutal attack upon the national ateliers when it had to make an end of the demands of the proletariat which had become intolerable, so did the Bonaparte Ministry direct its attack upon the Mobile Guard when it had to make an end of the demands, become intolerable, of the republican bourgeois faction. It decreed dissolution of the Mobile Guard. One half of the same was dismissed and thrown upon the street, the other half received a monarchist organization in place of its democratic one, and its pay was reduced to that of the level of the line troops. The Mobile Guard found itself in the position of the June insurgents, and daily did the press print public confessions, acknowledging their guilt of June and begging the proletariat for forgiveness.

And the clubs? From the moment when the Constituent Assembly called in question the President via Barrot, and through the President the constituted bourgeois republic, and within the constituted bourgeois republic the latter as such, all the constituent elements of the February republic necessarily rallied around it all the parties that would overthrow the existing republic and by means of a forcible process of retrogression would transform it into the republic of their class interests and principles. That which had taken place was again undone, the crystallizations of the revolutionary movement had again come into flux, the republic that was fought over was again the indefinite republic of the days of February, the definition of which each party reserved for itself. For a moment, the parties occupied again the old February positions, without sharing the illusions of February. The Tricolor republicans of the National again leaned upon the democratic republicans of the Réforme and pushed them as front rank fighters into the foreground of the parliamentary struggle. The democratic republicans again leaned upon the socialistic republicans—a manifesto, published on January 27, announced their reconciliation and alliance—and these prepared for themselves in the clubs their insurrectional background. The ministerial press, justly so, treated the Tricolor republicans of the National as the resurrected insurgents of the June days. In order to maintain themselves at the head of the bourgeois republic, they called in question the bourgeois republic itself. On January 26, Minister Faucher proposed a law governing the right of association, the first paragraph of which read: “The clubs are prohibited.” He made a motion at once to bring this bill to discussion as urgent. The Constituent Assembly rejected the motion of urgency and, on January 27, Ledru-Rollin submitted a motion, bearing 230 signatures, to indict the Ministry for violation of the constitution. The indictment of the Ministry at a moment when such an act implied the tactless admission of the impotence of the judge, that is, the Chamber majority, or a futile protest of the accuser against the majority itself, that was the great revolutionary trump which from now on the Montagne, born too late and to no purpose, played at every culmination of the crisis. Poor Montagne, crushed by the weight of its own name!

Blanqui, Barbès, Raspail, etc., had on May 15 tried to disperse the Constituent Assembly by forcing an entrance into its session at the head of the Paris proletariat. Barrot prepared for the Assembly a moral “May 15” in that he would dictate its self-dissolution and close its place of meeting. The Assembly had charged Barrot with the investigation against the May attackers and now, at this moment, when he appeared to it as a royalist Blanqui, when it sought allies against him in the clubs, with the revolutionary proletarians and in the party of Blanqui, at this very moment the pitiless Barrot tormented the Assembly with the motion to deprive the May prisoners of a jury trial and to have them tried by the High Court invented by the party of the National. Strange how the whipped-up fear about a Minister’s portfolio could strike from the head of a Barrot points worthy of a Beaumarchais! After much hesitation, the National Assembly adopted his motion. As against the May prisoners, it reassumed its normal character.

As the Constituent Assembly in the case of the President and the Ministers, so were the President and the Ministry in the case of the Constituent Assembly driven toward a coup d’état, because they possessed no legal means to dissolve it. But the Constituent Assembly was the mother of the constitution, and the constitution was the mother of the President. With a coup d’état, the President would tear up the constitution and would wipe out his republican legal title. He would then be forced to draw forth the imperial legal title; but the imperialist legal title would awaken the Orleanist one, and both would pale before the Legitimist one. The downfall of the legal republic could only cause the extreme opposite pole to be jerked up, the Legitimist monarchy, at a moment when the Orleanist party was only the vanquished one of February and Bonaparte only the victor of December 10, when both could oppose the republican usurpation only by presenting their equally usurped monarchist titles. The Legitimists were conscious of the favor of the moment, and they conspired in broad daylight. In General Changarnier they could hope to find their Monk. The advent of the white monarchy was in their clubs proclaimed as openly as was the red republic in the proletarian clubs.

By means of a happily suppressed riot the Ministry would have escaped all difficulties. “Legality is killing us,” cried Odilon Barrot. A riot would have made possible, under the pretext of the salut public, the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the violation of the constitution in its own behalf. The brutal attitude of Odilon Barrot, the motion aiming at the dissolution of the clubs, the noisy deposition of 50 Tricolor Prefects and their substitution by royalists, the demobilization of the Mobile Guard and the mistreatment of their chiefs by Changarnier, the rehabilitation of Lherminiers, the professor impossible even under Guizot, the toleration of the Legitimist boisterousness—all that constituted so many provocations to riot. But Riot remained silent. It awaited its signal from the Constituent Assembly, not from the Ministry.

Finally came the 29th of January, the day on which there was to be a decision as to the motion of Mathieu (de la Drôme) aiming at the unconditional rejection of the Rateau resolution. Legitimists, Orleanists, Bonapartists, Mobile Guards, Montagne, clubs, they all conspired on this day, each against the pretended foe as well as against the pretended ally. Bonaparte, high on horseback, inspected a part of the troops at the Concordia Place, Changarnier performed with quite a display of strategic maneuvers, the Constituent Assembly found its meeting place occupied by the military. The Assembly, central point of all the crisscrossing hopes, fears, expectations, ferments, tensions, conspiracies, this lion-hearted Assembly hesitated not a moment when it approached the world spirit closer than ever. It resembled the warrior who not only fears to use his own weapons, but who also feels obligated to preserve the weapons of his foe. With utter contempt of death it signed its own death warrant and voted against the unconditional rejection of the Rateau resolution. Even under the state of siege it set a limit to a constituent activity the necessary framework of which had been the Paris state of siege. It revenged itself, quite worthily, in that, on the next day, it started an inquiry into the fright which the Ministry, on January 29, had given it. The Montagne proved its lack of revolutionary energy and political understanding by permitting itself to be used by the party of the National as a speaking-trumpet in this great comedy of intrigues. The party of the National had made a last effort to retain in the constituted republic the monopoly of rule which it had possessed during the formative period of the bourgeois republic. It had suffered shipwreck.

If, during the January crisis, there was at stake the existence of the Constituent Assembly, during the crisis of March 21 it was a case of the existence of the constitution; there it was about the personnel of the National party, here about its ideal. It requires no intimation that the honest republicans more readily abandoned the exaltation of their ideology than the mundane enjoyment of governmental power.

On March 2l, there was on the order of business of the National Assembly the Faucher bill against the right of association—the suppression of the clubs. Article 8 of the constitution guarantees to all Frenchmen the right to organize. Prohibition of the clubs was, therefore, a plain violation of the constitution, and the Constituent Assembly itself was to canonize the ravishment of its saints. But the clubs, these were the gathering points, the conspiracy centers of the revolutionary proletariat. The National Assembly itself had forbidden the coalition of the workers against the bourgeoisie. And the clubs, what were they but a coalition of the entire working class against the entire bourgeois class, the formation of a workers’ State against the bourgeois State? Were they not just so many constituent assemblies of the proletariat, and as many detachments of an army of revolt ready for action? What the constitution, first of all, was to have constituted was the rule of the bourgeoisie. Evidently, the constitution could therefore mean by the right of association only such associations as were in harmony with the rule of the bourgeoisie, i.e., with the bourgeois order. If, for reasons of theoretical decorum, it expressed itself in general terms, was not the government and the National Assembly there to interpret and apply it in specific cases? If, during the antediluvian epoch of the republic, the clubs were actually inhibited through the state of siege, must they not, in the regulated, constituted republic be inhibited by law? The Tricolor republicans could oppose this prosaic interpretation of the constitution with naught but the exalted phrase of the constitution itself. Some of them, Pagnerre, Duclerc and others, voted for the Ministry and so gave it a majority. Others, the arch-angel Cavaignac and the church warden Marrast at the head, after the article about the inhibition of the clubs had gone through, retired in union with Ledru-Rollin and the Montagne to a separate room of the bureau—and “held a council.”—The National Assembly was lamed, it did no longer have a quorum. In the nick of time, M. Cremieux reminded those gathered in council that from there the way led directly to the street, and that it was no longer February 1848 but March 1849. The party of the National, suddenly enlightened, returned to the session of the National Assembly, trailed by the once more duped Montagne, which, constantly tormented by revolutionary desires, with equal constancy snatched at constitutional possibilities and always felt itself in the right place behind the bourgeois republicans rather than in front of the revolutionary proletariat. Thus, the comedy was played. And the Constituent Assembly itself had decreed that the violation of the text of the constitution was the only adequate realization of its literal sense.

Only one point remained to be regulated, the relation of the constituted republic to the European revolution, its foreign policy. On May 8,1849, an unusual stir prevailed in the Constituent Assembly, the term of which was to expire in a few days. The attack of the French army upon Rome, its repulse by the Romans, its political infamy and military disgrace, the assassination of the Roman republic by the French republic, the first Italian campaign of the second Bonaparte—all that was on the order of the day. The Montagne had again played its great trump, Ledru-Rollin had deposited on the President’s table the inevitable accusation against the Ministry for violation of the constitution and had this time also included Bonaparte.

The motif of May 8 later repeated itself as the motif of June 13. Let us get clear about that Roman expedition.

Cavaignac, as early as the middle of November, 1848, had despatched a war fleet to Civita Vecchia to protect the Pope, take him on board and sail back to France. The Pope was to have blessed the virtuous republic and make certain the election of Cavaignac as President. With the Pope, Cavaignac would fish for the clerics, with the clerics for the peasants, and with the peasants for the presidency. An election maneuver in its immediate purpose, the Cavaignac expedition was at the same time a protest and a threat against the Roman revolution. It contained in embryo the intervention of France in favor of the Pope.

This intervention for the Pope, in conjunction with Austria and Naples and against the Roman republic, was decided upon at the first session of the Bonaparte ministerial council on December 23. Falloux in the Ministry,—that was the Pope in Rome, in the Rome of the Pope. Bonaparte no longer needed the Pope to become the President of the peasants, but he needed the conservation of the Pope in order to conserve the peasants of the President. Their credulity had made him President. With their faith they lost their credulity, and with the Pope their faith. And the coalesced Orleanists and Legitimists who ruled in Bonaparte’s name! Before the king was restored, it was needful to restore the power that consecrates the kings. Aside from their royalism—without the old Rome, subject to Papal secular rule, there could be no Pope, without the Pope, no catholicism, without catholicism no French religion, and without religion what would become of the old French society? The mortgage, held by the peasant on the heavenly estates, guarantees the mortgage held by the bourgeoisie on the peasant estates. The Roman revolution was, therefore, an attack upon property, upon the bourgeois order, terrible like the June revolution. Reconstructed bourgeois rule in France required the restoration of Papal rule in Rome. Finally, by striking at the Roman revolutionaries, one could strike at the allies of the French revolutionaries; the alliance of the counter-revolutionary classes in the constituted French republic, necessarily was supplemented by the alliance of the French republic with the Holy Alliance—with Austria and Naples. The decision of the ministerial council of December 23 was no secret to the Constituent Assembly. Already on January 8 Ledru-Rollin had interpellated the Ministry about it; the Ministry had denied it and the National Assembly had proceeded with the order of business. Did it trust the words of the Ministry? We know that it spent the whole month of January with passing votes of lack of confidence. But if it was within its role to lie, was it within its role to feign a belief in its lie and therewith to save the republican déhor [appearances] ?

Meanwhile, Piedmont had been defeated, Carl Albert had abdicated, and the Austrian army pounded at the gates of France. Ledru-Rollin interpellated strenuously. The Ministry proved that in Northern Italy it had but continued the policy of Cavaignac, and that Cavaignac had only continued the policy of the Provisional Government, i.e., the policy of Ledru-Rollin. This time the Ministry obtained even a vote of confidence and was authorized temporarily to occupy a suitable point in Upper Italy in order to provide a basis for the peaceful negotiations with Austria about the integrity of the Sardinian territory and the Roman question. It is known that the fate of Italy is determined upon the battlefields of Northern Italy. With the fall of Lombardy and Piedmont, Rome had fallen, or France would have to declare war against Austria and, therewith, against the European counter-revolution. Did the National Assembly suddenly mistake the Barrot Ministry for the old Committee of Safety? Or itself for the old Convention? Why, therefore, the military occupation of a point in Upper Italy? Under this transparent veil was concealed the expedition against Rome.

On April 14, 14,000 men sailed under Oudinot to Civita Vecchia; on April 16, the National Assembly appropriated for the Ministry a credit of 1,200,000 francs to maintain for three months the intervention fleet in the Mediterranean. Thus it gave to the Ministry all the means to intervene against Rome, while it pretended to intervene against Austria. It did not see what the Ministry did, it only heard what it said. Such faith was not found in Israel; the Constituent Assembly had got into the position not to be permitted to know what the constituted republic had to do.

Finally, on May 8, was played the last act of the comedy. The Constituent Assembly demanded of the Ministry swift measures to bring back the Italian expedition to the aim that had been set it. Bonaparte, on the same evening, inserted a letter in the Moniteur, wherein he bestowed upon Oudinot the highest praise. On May 11, the National Assembly rejected the impeachment of the same Bonaparte and his Ministry. And the Montagne, which, instead of tearing asunder this web of deceit, takes seriously this parliamentary comedy in order that itself might play therein the role of Fouquier Tinville, did it not, under the borrowed lion’s skin of the Convention, betray the congenital petty bourgeois calfskin?

The latter half of the life of the Constituent Assembly may be summed up this way: On January 29, it admits that the royalist bourgeois factions are the natural superiors of the republic constituted by it; on March 21, that the violation of the constitution means its realization; and, on May 11, that the bombastically announced passive alliance of the French republic with the struggling peoples means its active alliance with the European counter-revolution.

This infamous Assembly made its exit from the stage after it had, two days before the anniversary of its natal day, May 4, given itself the satisfaction of rejecting the resolution of amnesty for the June insurgents. Its power broken, hated by the people with a deadly hate, repelled, manhandled, contemptuously thrown aside by the bourgeoisie whose tool it had been, forced in the second half of its life-epoch to disavow the first, bereft of its republican illusions, without great creative work in the past, without hope for the future, dying piecemeal, it could galvanize its own corpse only by constantly recalling to itself the June victory, by again living through it, and by attesting itself through the ever repeated condemnation of the condemned. A vampire, living upon the blood of the June insurgents.

It left behind a State deficit, increased by the cost of the June insurrection, by the elimination of the salt tax, by the indemnities granted to the plantation owners at the abolition of negro slavery, by the cost of the Roman expedition, by the elimination of the wine tax, the abolition of which it decided upon when drawing its dying breath, a malicious old man, happy to be able to burden his laughing heirs with a compromising debt of honor.

Since the beginning of March, the electoral agitation for the Legislative National Assembly had started. Two main groups faced each other, the party of order and the Democratic-Socialist or Red party, and between them stood the “friends of the constitution” under which name the Tricolor republicans of the National endeavored to impersonate a party. The party of order formed itself immediately after the June days; only after the 10th of December had permitted it to shed the coterie of the National, the bourgeois republicans, did the secret of its existence reveal itself—the coalition of Orleanists and Legitimists in one party. The bourgeois class was divided into two great factions, which, successively, had exercised the monopoly of rule—the large landowners under the restored monarchy, the financial aristocracy and the industrial bourgeoisie under the July monarchy. Bourbon was the royal name for the predominant influence of the interests of the one faction, Orleans the royal name for the predominant influence of the interests of the other faction—the nameless realm of the republic was the only one wherein both factions could, in equally balanced rule, maintain the common class interest without giving up their mutual rivalry. If the bourgeois republic could be nothing else but the complete, clearly developed rule of the entire bourgeois class, could it be anything else but the rule of the Orleanists supplemented by the Legitimists, and of the Legitimists supplemented by the Orleanists, the synthesis of restoration and of the July monarchy? The bourgeois republicans of the National did not represent a large faction of their class resting upon an economic foundation. They possessed only the significance and the historic title of having asserted, under the monarchy and against the two bourgeois factions which could only comprehend their specific regime, the general regime of the bourgeois class, the nameless realm of the republic which they idealized and ornamented with antique arabesques, but wherein they hailed, above all, the rule of their coterie. If the party of the National became confused as to its own reason when, on the summit of the republic it had founded, it discovered the coalesced royalists, the latter deceived themselves no less as to the fact of their joint rule. They did not comprehend that, if each of their factions taken by itself was royalist, the product of the chemical combination necessarily had to be republican, that the white and the blue monarchy had to be neutralized in the Tricolor republic. Forced by their counter-position to the proletariat and to the transitory classes gathering more and ever more around the proletarian center to exert their joint power, and to conserve the organization of this joint power, each faction of the party of order, as against the restoration and vainglorious inclinations of the other, had to assert the general mastery, i.e., the republican form of bourgeois rule. And so we find these royalists, at first believing in an imminent restoration, later conserving the republican form, though foaming at the mouth and with deadly invective against it, and, finally, admitting that only within the republic can they endure each other, and postponing the restoration indefinitely. The enjoyment of their joint domination itself strengthened each of the two factions and made them still more incapable and unwilling to subordinate themselves one to the other, that is, to restore the monarchy.

The party of order proclaimed directly in its election program the rule of the bourgeoisie, that is, the maintenance of the vital conditions of its rule, of property, the family, religion, order! Naturally, it presented its class rule and the conditions of the same as the rule of civilization and as the necessary condition of material production, as well as of the conditions of social intercourse emanating therefrom. The party of order commanded immense financial resources, it organized in the whole of France its branches, it had all the ideologists of the old society on its payroll, it disposed of the influence of the prevailing governmental power, it possessed an army of unpaid vassals in the great mass of petty bourgeoisie and peasants, who, standing as yet aloof from the revolutionary movement, saw in the grand dignitaries of property the defenders of their small property and of their petty prejudices. Represented throughout rural France by an immense number of diminutive kings, the party of order could punish the rejection of its candidates as an insurrection, discharge the rebellious workers, the reluctant agricultural laborers, servants, clerks, railway officials, copyists—all the functionaries subordinated to its bourgeois rule. Finally, it could here and there maintain the fiction that the republican Constituent Assembly had prevented the Bonaparte of the 10th of December from a revelation of his miraculous powers. We have not, in considering the party of order, thought of the Bonapartists. These formed no serious faction of the bourgeois class, but rather an assortment of old, superstitious, disabled veterans and of young, unbelieving knights of fortune.—The party of order won the election; it sent the great majority to the Legislative Assembly.

As against the coalesced counter-revolutionary bourgeois class, the already revolutionized portions of the petty bourgeoisie and of the peasants necessarily had to attach themselves to the grand dignitary of revolutionary interests, the revolutionary proletariat. We have seen how the democratic spokesmen of the petty bourgeoisie in the Parliament, that is, the Montagne, by the parliamentary defeats that it suffered, was driven toward the Socialist spokesmen of the proletariat; and how the real petty bourgeoisie, outside of Parliament, through the concordats à l’amiable, through the brutal assertion of bourgeois interests, and through its own bankruptcy was driven toward the real proletarians. On January 27, the Montagne and the Socialists had celebrated their reconciliation; at the great February banquet, in 1849, they repeated their act of union. The social and the democratic, the party of the workers and that of the petty bourgeoisie, united as the Social Democratic, that is, as the Red party.

Lamed for a moment by the agony that had followed the days of June, the French republic, ever since the raising of the state of siege, on October 14, had experienced a running series of feverish excitements. First the struggle for the presidency; then the conflict between the President and the Constituent Assembly; the struggle about the clubs; the trial at Bourges, which, as compared with the puny statures of the President, the coalesced royalists, the virtuous republicans, the democratic Montagne, the Socialist doctrinaires of the proletariat, made the real revolutionists of the latter look like antediluvian monsters, such as only a deluge could leave behind on the social surface, or such as would only precede a social deluge; the election agitation; the execution of the Bréa murderers; the continuous prosecutions of the press; the forcible police interferences of the government with the banquets; the insolent royalist provocations; the exhibition in the pillory of the portraits of Louis Blanc and Caussidière; the incessant struggle between the constituted republic and the Constituent Assembly, which might at any moment force the revolution back to its point of inception, which might at any moment turn victor into vanquished and vanquished into victor, and in a trice turn upside down the position of parties and classes, their divisions and their ties; the rapid course of the European counter-revolution, the glorious Hungarian fight; the German armed risings; the Roman expedition; the disgraceful defeat of the French army before Rome—in this whirl of movement, this pain of historic unrest, this dramatic high and low tide of revolutionary passions, hopes and disappointments, the different classes of French society had to reckon their epochs of development by weeks, as, formerly, they had reckoned them by half-centuries. A considerable portion of the peasants and of the provinces had been revolutionized. Not only that they were disappointed about Napoleon, but the Red party offered them in place of the name a content, in place of the illusory freedom from taxation the repayment of the milliard paid to Legitimists, the regulation of mortgages and the abolition of usury.

The army itself had become infected by the revolutionary fever. In voting for Bonaparte it had voted for victory, and he had given it defeat. It had in him voted for the “little corporal,” behind whom is concealed the great revolutionary captain, and he gave back to it the great generals behind whom is hidden the pipe-clay drill sergeant. No doubt that the Red party, that is, the coalesced democratic party would gain, if not the victory, at least great triumphs; that Paris, the army and a great part of the provinces would vote for it. Ledru-Rollin, chief of the Montagne, was elected in five departements; no chief of the party of order gained such a victory, and no candidate of the real proletarian party. This election reveals the secret of the Democratic-Socialist party. If the Montagne, the parliamentary champion of the democratic petty bourgeoisie, was forced, on the one hand, to unite with the Socialist doctrinaires of the proletariat—the proletariat, compelled by the terrible material defeat of June again to raise itself through intellectual victories, not yet able, because of the backward development of the other classes, to seize the revolutionary dictatorship, perforce had to throw itself into the arms of the doctrinaires of its emancipation, the Socialist founders of sects—then, on the other hand, there stood behind the Montagne the revolutionary peasants, the army, the provinces, and thus it became the commander in the revolutionary camp after its agreement with the Socialists had removed every contraposition within the revolutionary party. During the latter half of the life of the Constituent Assembly, the Montagne represented its republican pathos; its sins, during the Provisional Government, the Executive Commission and the June days, it had allowed to sink into oblivion. In the same measure that the party of the National, in keeping with its hybrid character, permitted itself to be held down by the royalist Ministry, the party of the “Mountain,” eliminated during the days of dominance of the National, rose up and asserted itself as the parliamentary representative of the revolution. Indeed, the party of the National, as against the other royalist factions, had no objections to offer but those of ambitious persons and idealistic pretensions. The party of the “Mountain,” however, represented a mass suspended between bourgeoisie and proletariat, whose material interests demanded democratic institutions. As compared with the Cavaignacs and the Marrasts, Ledru-Rollin and the Montagne stood for the verity of the revolution, and from the consciousness of so weighty a situation they derived all the greater courage, the more the expression of revolutionary energy was confined to parliamentary sallies, the deposition of impeachment charges, threats, increase of votes, thundering speeches and extremes which were driven only up to the phrase. The peasants found themselves in about the same position as the petty bourgeoisie, and they made about the same social demands. All the middle layers of society, in so far as they had been driven into the revolutionary movement, had to find their hero in Ledru-Rollin. Ledru-Rollin was THE personage of the democratic petty bourgeoisie. As against the party of order, these half conservative, half revolutionary and wholly utopian reformers of that same order had first to be forced to the front.

The party of the National, “the friends of the constitution quand même” [even so], the républicains purs et simples [republicans pure and simple], was thoroughly beaten in the elections. A tiny minority of the same was sent to the Legislative Chamber, their most notorious chiefs vanished from the stage; even Marrast, the editor in chief and Orpheus of the virtuous republic.

On May 29, the Legislative Assembly convened; on June 11 was renewed the collision of May 8. Ledru-Rollin, in the name of the Montagne, deposited a demand for impeachment against the President and the Ministry for violation of the constitution and the bombardment of Rome. On June 12, the Legislative Assembly rejected the demand for impeachment, just as the Constituent Assembly had rejected it on May 11, but this time the proletariat drove the Montagne out on the street, not for battle but only for a street procession. To say that the Montagne stood at the head of this movement is sufficient to know that it met with defeat and that June 1849 was as ridiculous a caricature of June 1848 as it was vile. The great retreat of June 13 was obscured only by the still greater battle report of Changarnier, the great man whom the party of order had improvised. Every social epoch needs its great men, and if it does not find them, then, as Helvetius says, it invents them.

On December 20, there existed only one-half of the constituted bourgeois republic, the President; on May 29 it was completed by the other half, the Legislative Assembly. In June 1848, the constituting bourgeois republic, by an unspeakable battle against the proletariat, and in June 1849, the constituted bourgeois republic, by an unnameable comedy with the petty bourgeoisie, had engraved themselves upon the natal register of history. June 1849 was the Nemesis for June 1848. In June 1849, not the workers were defeated, but the petty bourgeoisie was felled, who stood between them and the revolution. June 1849 was not the bloody tragedy between wage labor and capital, but the prison-filled, lamentable spectacle between creditor and debtor. The party of order had been victorious. It was omnipotent. It must now show what it was.