III. From June 13, 1849, to March 10, 1850

On December 20, the Janus head of the constitutional republic had shown but one face, the executive face, with the confused, flat features of Louis Bonaparte; on May 20, 1849, it showed its second face, the legislative one, sown all over with the scars the orgies of the restoration and the July monarchy had left behind. With the advent of the Legislative National Assembly, the phenomenon of the constitutional republic had been completed, that is, the republican form of State wherein the rule of the bourgeois class is constituted, therefore, the joint rule of the two great royalist factions which form the French bourgeoisie, the coalesced Legitimists and Orleanists—the party of order. While thus the French republic, like a piece of property, fell to the coalition of the royalist parties, the European coalition of the counter-revolutionary powers undertook at the same time a general crusade against the last places of refuge of the March revolutions. Russia invaded Hungary, Prussia marched against the army of constitutional Germany and Oudinot bombarded Rome. The European crisis obviously was developing toward a decisive turning point, the eyes of all Europe were centered upon Paris and the eyes of all Paris upon the Legislative Assembly.

On June 11, Ledru-Rollin mounted the tribune. He made no speech, he formulated a requisitorium against the Ministers, naked, without display, actual, concentrated, violent.

The attack upon Rome is an attack upon the constitution, the attack upon the Roman republic an attack upon the French republic. Article V of the constitution reads: “The French republic never employs its armed forces against the freedom of any one people”—and the President employed the French army against Roman freedom. Article IV of the constitution forbids the executive power to declare any kind of war without the consent of the National Assembly. An act of the Constituent Assembly, of May 8, expressly ordered the Ministry to bring the Roman expedition back to its original aim, and, therefore, it inhibited just as expressly the war against Rome—and Oudinot bombarded Rome. Thus did Ledru-Rollin call upon the constitution itself as a witness for the prosecution and against Bonaparte and his Ministers. At the royalist majority of the National Assembly he, the tribune of the people, hurled the threatening declaration: “The republicans will know how to compel respect for the constitution by all and any means, if need be by force of arms!” “By force of arms!” repeated the hundredfold echo of the Montagne. The majority answered with a terrible tumult, the President of the National Assembly called Ledru-Rollin to order, the latter repeated his provocative declaration and, finally, deposited upon the President’s table the resolution calling for the impeachment of Bonaparte and his Ministers. The National Assembly, by a vote of 361 against 203, decided to proceed from the bombardment of Rome to the order of business.

Did Ledru-Rollin believe that he could beat the National Assembly by means of the constitution, and by means of the National Assembly beat the President?

The constitution, indeed, does prohibit every attack upon the freedom of foreign peoples, but what the French army attacked at Rome was, according to the Ministry, not “freedom,” but the “despotism of anarchy.” Had not the Montagne, despite all experience in the Constituent Assembly, perceived that the interpretation of the constitution does not fall to those who made it, but rather to those who accepted it? That its text must be elucidated in its vital sense, and that the bourgeois sense is its only vital sense? That Bonaparte and the royalist majority in the National Assembly were the only authentic interpreters of the constitution, just as the priest is the authentic interpreter of the Bible, and the judge the authentic interpreter of the law? Should the National Assembly, just fresh from the lap of a general election, feel itself bound by the testamentary dispositions of the dead Constituent Assembly whose living will had been broken by an Odilon Barrot? While Ledru-Rollin took his stand upon the action of the Constituent Assembly of May 8, he had forgotten that the same Constituent Assembly had rejected his first resolution aiming at the impeachment of Bonaparte and his Ministers, that the body had exonerated the President and his Ministers, that it had thus sanctioned the attack upon Rome as “constitutional,” and that now he only appealed from a judgment already rendered, and that, finally, his appeal was one from the republican Constituent Assembly to the royalist Legislative Assembly. The constitution itself calls insurrection to its aid in that, in a special article, it calls upon every citizen for its protection. Ledru-Rollin banked on this article. But are not the public powers simultaneously organized for the protection of the constitution, and does not the violation of the constitution begin the moment one of the public constitutional powers rebels against the other? And the President of the republic, the Ministers of the republic, the National Assembly of the Republic, all these found themselves in the most harmonious accord.

What the Montagne tried to do on June 11, was “an insurrection within the boundaries of pure reason,” that is, a purely parliamentary insurrection. The majority of the Assembly, intimidated by the prospect of an armed uprising of the popular mass, was to break in Bonaparte and his Ministers its own power and the import of its own election. Had not the Constituent Assembly, in like manner, attempted to cashier the election of Bonaparte when it insisted so stubbornly upon the dismissal of the Barrot- Falloux Ministry?

Neither were there lacking, from the time of the Convention, instances of parliamentary insurrections which had suddenly and from the bottom upward transformed the relation between majority and minority—and should not the young Montagne succeed where the old one had been successful?—nor did the conditions of the moment appear unfavorable for such an undertaking. Popular excitement in Paris had reached a critically high point; the army, judging by the way it had cast its vote during the election, did not seem to favor the government; the legislative majority itself was yet too young to have been consolidated, and, moreover, it was composed of old men. If the Montagne should succeed in a parliamentary insurrection, the helm of the State would immediately fall into its hands. The democratic petty bourgeoisie, on its part and as always, desired nothing more ardently than to see the struggle between the departed spirits of the Parliament fought to a finish above its head and up in the clouds. Finally, both the democratic petty bourgeoisie and its representative, the Montagne, would have attained their great purpose of breaking the power of the bourgeoisie without unfettering Parliament, or to make it appear other than in perspective; the proletariat would have been utilized without becoming dangerous.

After the vote of the National Assembly of June 13, a conference took place between some members of the Montagne and delegates of secret workers’ organizations. The latter insisted upon militant action on that self-same evening. The Montagne decisively rejected this plan. At no price did it want to surrender leadership; its allies were as suspicious of it as its foes; rightly so. The recollection of June, 1848, pervaded the ranks of the Paris proletariat more vividly than ever. Nevertheless, it was bound by the alliance with the Montagne. The latter represented the greater part of the departements, exaggerated its influence with the army, controlled the democratic part of the National Guard and had behind it the moral influence of the boutique. To begin the insurrection at this moment and against its will, meant for the proletariat, already decimated by cholera and driven out of Paris in great numbers by lack of employment, uselessly to repeat the June days of 1848, without the situation that had then precipitated the desperate struggle. The proletarian delegates did the only rational thing. They obligated the Montagne to compromise itself, i.e., to come out from the boundaries of the parliamentary struggle in the event that its impeachment proceeding be rejected. During the whole of June 13 the proletariat maintained the same sceptically observant position, awaiting a serious engagement, an irrevocable hand-to-hand fight between the democratic National Guard and the army, in order then to enter the struggle and to push the revolution beyond the petty bourgeois purpose. In the event of victory, the proletarian Commune had already been formed that was to take its place beside the official government. The Paris workers had learned something in the bloody school of June 1848.

On June 12, the Minister Lacrosse himself made the motion at once to proceed to the discussion of the impeachment resolution. During the night the government had made all preparations for defense and attack; the majority in the National Assembly was determined to drive the rebellious majority out upon the streets; the minority itself could no longer back out; the die had been cast; 377 votes against 8 rejected the impeachment resolution, and the “Mountain,” which had refrained from voting, descended thunderingly to the propaganda halls of the “peaceful democracy,” the newspaper offices of the Démocratic pacifique.

The removal from the Parliament building broke its power, just as the loss of contact with the earth broke the strength of Antaeus, its giant son. A Samson at the sessions of the Legislative Assembly, it was only a Philistine in the abodes of the “peaceful democracy.” A long, vociferous, yet infirm debate ensued. The Montagne was determined to enforce respect for the constitution with all means “except by force of arms.” In this determination it was supported by a manifesto and by a deputation of the “friends of the constitution.” “Friends of the constitution”—thus did the remnants of the coterie of the National, the bourgeois republican party, designate themselves. While of their remaining parliamentary representatives six had voted against, and all the others for the rejection of the resolution of impeachment, while Cavaignac had placed his sabre at the disposition of the party of order, the larger part of the coterie outside of Parliament eagerly seized upon the occasion to come out from its political parish position and to filter into the ranks of the democratic party. Did not they appear as the natural shield-holders of a party which itself was hidden under its shield, under its principle, under the constitution?

Until the break of day the “Mountain” labored. It gave birth to “a proclamation to the people” which, on the morning of June 13, found a more or less bashful place in two socialistic journals. It declared the President, the Ministers and the majority of the Legislative Assembly “outside of the constitution” (hors la constitution) and called upon the National Guard, the army and also the people “to rise.” “Long live the constitution!”—was the watchword it gave out, a watchword that meant naught else but “Down with the revolution!”

In keeping with this constitutional proclamation of the Mountain was a so-called friendly demonstration of the petty bourgeoisie on June 13, i.e., a street procession from the Château d’Eau through the boulevards, 30,000 in line, mostly National Guards—men, intermingled with members of the secret workers’ sections, moving along with the cry: “Long live the constitution!” uttered mechanically, icily, and with a bad conscience by the participants in the procession, ironically cast back by the echo of the people that lined the sidewalks, instead of swelling up thunderously. The many-voiced song lacked the resonant chest-notes. And as the procession swayed past the building where the “friends of the constitution” were in session, and a hired herald of the constitution appeared at the attic of the house, vigorously sawing the air with his claqueur hat, and letting free out of his lusty lungs the watchword “Long live the constitution!” as thick as hail upon the heads of the pilgrims, these themselves seemed for the moment overcome with the comedy of the situation. It is known how the procession, arrived at the mouth ot the rue de la Paix, was received at the boulevards by the dragoons and chasseurs of Changarnier in a thoroughly unparliamentary manner, was scattered in a trice on all sides and only threw behind it the sparse call “to arms” so that the parliamentary call to arms of June 11 would be vindicated.

The bulk of the Montagne, gathered at the rue du Hazard, dispersed when this violent breaking up of the peaceful procession, vague rumors of the murder of unarmed citizens at the boulevards, and the growing street tumult, seemed to herald the coming of a riot. Ledru-Rollin, at the head of a small number of deputies, saved the honor of the Mountain. Under the protection of the Paris artillery, which had gathered at the Palais National, they proceeded to the Conservatoire des arts et métiers, where the fifth and sixth legions of the National Guard were to have assembled. But the Montagnards waited in vain for the fifth and sixth legions; these cautious National Guardsmen left their representatives in the lurch, the Paris artillery itself prevented the people from erecting barricades, a chaotic confusion made any decision impossible, the troops of the line advanced with bayonets fixed, a part of the representatives was arrested, the other part escaped. Thus ended the 13th of June.

If June 23, 1848, stands for the insurrection of the proletariat, June 13, 1849, stands for the insurrection of the democratic petty bourgeoisie, and each of the two insurrections is the classically pure expression of the class that carried it.

Only at Lyon things came to a stubborn, bloody conflict. Here, where the industrial bourgeoisie and the industrial proletariat meet directly face to face, where the labor movement, unlike that of Paris, is not confined and determined by the general movement, the 13th of June, in its recoil, lost its original character. Wherever else in the provinces it struck, it did not catch fire—like cold lightning.

The 13th of June terminates the first life period of the constitutional republic which, on May 29, 1849, had attained its normal existence. The entire duration of this prologue is filled with the noisy struggle between the party of order and the Montagne, between the upper bourgeoisie and the lower bourgeoisie, which latter vainly strove against the fixation of the bourgeois republic in favor of which it had uninterruptedly conspired in the Provisional Government and in the Executive Commission, and in behalf of which it had fanatically battled against the proletariat. The 13th of June breaks its resistance and makes the legislative dictatorship of the united royalists an accomplished fact. From this moment onward, the National Assembly is but a Committee of Safety for the party of order.

Paris had put the President, the Ministers and the majority of the National Assembly in a “state of impeachment”; the latter put Paris in a “state of siege.” The Montagne had declared the majority of the Legislative Assembly as “outside of the constitution,” and for violation of the constitution the said majority handed over the majority of the Montagne to the High Court and proscribed everything in it that still had a Spark of vitality. It was reduced to a headless and heartless trunk. The minority had gone as far as an attempt at a parliamentary insurrection; the majority elevated its parliamentary despotism into law. It decreed a new order of business which destroyed the freedom of the tribune and authorized the President of the National Assembly to punish the representatives for a breach of order with censure, with monetary fines, with deprivation of indemnity moneys, with temporary expulsion and with incarceration. Over the trunk of the Montagne, instead of the sword, it hung the rod. The balance of the deputies of the Montagne should, in honor, have resigned en masse. By such an act the dissolution of the party of order would have been accelerated. It would have to fall apart into its original elements, the moment when not even the semblance of an opposition would hold it together.

Simultaneously with their parliamentary power, the democratic petty bourgeoisie were deprived of their armed forces by the dissolution of the Paris artillery, as well as of the eighth, the ninth and the twelfth legions of the National Guard. The legion of high finance, however, which on June 13 had raided the printing plants of Boulé and Roux, had smashed the presses and had devastated the bureaus of the republican journals, arbitrarily arresting editors, compositors, mailers and errand boys, received from the tribune of the National Assembly encouraging commendation. The dissolution of the National Guard suspected of republican tendencies was repeated throughout the entire confines of France.

A new law governing the press, another to regulate associations, a new law to define the state of siege, the prisons of Paris overcrowded, the political exiles scattered, all journals that went beyond the boundaries of the National suspended, Lyon and the five adjoining departements abandoned to the brutal chicanery of military despotism, the “parquets” [office of public prosecutor] omnipresent, the army of officials, so often cleansed and now once more purified—these were the inevitable and ever recurring commonplaces of the victorious reaction, and, after the massacres and deportations of June 1848, worthy of mention only because this time they were directed not only against Paris, but also against the departements, not only against the proletariat, but, first of all, against the middle classes.

The laws of repression, whereby the imposition of a state of siege was made optional with the government, the press gagged and the right of association destroyed, absorbed the entire legislative activity of the National Assembly during the months of June, July and August.

But for all that, this epoch is characterized, not by the actual but by the theoretical exploitation of the victory, not by the enactments of the National Assembly but by the motivation of these enactments, not by the matter itself but by the phrase, not by the phrase but by the accent and by the gestures which enliven the phrase. The recklessly insolent expression of royalist sentiments, the contemptuously haughty insults of the republic, the coquettishly frivolous chatter about the purpose of restoration, in one word, the boisterous breaches of republican decorum give to this period a peculiar tone and color. “Long live the constitution!”—that was the battle cry of the vanquished of June 13. The victors were therefore released of the hypocrisy of holding constitutional, that is, republican language. The counter-revolution subjected Hungary, Italy, Germany, and the restoration was already believed to be at the gates of France. Among the fuglemen of the factions of order a veritable competition ensued to document their royalism in the Moniteur, to confess their liberal sins, if any, under the republic, to repent the same and to be absolved of them before God and man. Not a day passed but what the February revolution, from the tribune of the National Assembly, was pronounced a public calamity; or that some provincial clod-hopping Junker solemnly declared never to have recognized the republic; or that one of the cowardly deserters and betrayers of the July monarchy told of intended deeds of heroism, the consummation of which had only been prevented by the philanthropy of Louis Philippe or some other misunderstanding. What was to be admired of the February days was not the magnanimity of the people in victory, but the self-immolation and moderation of the royalists, who had permitted the people to win. One representative proposed that a part of the moneys intended for the support of the wounded of February be turned over to the Municipal Guards, who alone in those days had served the fatherland well. Another wanted an equestrian statue of the Duke of Orleans to be erected on the caroussel place. Thiers designated the constitution a dirty piece of paper. One after another, there appeared upon the tribune Orleanists who regretted their conspiracy against the legitimate kingdom, Legitimists who accused themselves of having hastened the fall of royalty as such by their opposition to the illegitimate kingdom, Thiers who regretted having intrigued against Molé, Molé who regretted having intrigued against Guizot, and Barrot who repented of having done the same thing against all three. The cry: “Long live the social-democratic republic!” was declared unconstitutional; the cry: “Long live the republic!” was prosecuted for being social-democratic. On the anniversary of the battle of Waterloo a representative declared: “I fear less the invasion of the Prussians, than the influx of the revolutionary exiles into France.” To complaints about the terror, organized in Lyon and the adjoining departements, Baraguay d’Hilliers answered: “I prefer the pale terror to the red terror.” And the Assembly frantically applauded each time an epigram against the republic, against the revolution, against the constitution, for the kingdom, and for the Holy Alliance, fell from the lips of its speakers. Every omission of the smallest republican formalities, such as the salutation of the representatives with “Citoyen,” enthused the knights of order.

The Paris supplementary elections (held under the state of siege and with the abstention of a large part of the proletariat from the ballot box), the taking of Rome by the French army, the entrance of the red “Eminences” and in their train the inquisition and the monkish terror in Rome, all this added new victories to the victory of June and augmented the intoxication of the party of order.

Finally, toward the middle of August, partly because they wanted to attend the departmental councils just convened, partly because fatigued by the veritable debauch of many months’ indulgence in their political tendencies, the royalists decreed a two-months’ adjournment of the National Assembly. With transparent irony they left behind, as the proxy of the National Assembly and guardian of the republic, a commission of twenty-five representatives, the cream of the Legitimists and Orleanists with a Molé and a Changarnier. The irony was deeper than they anticipated. They, condemned by history to help destroy the kingdom which they loved, were destined by history to conserve the republic which they hated.

With the adjournment of the Legislative Assembly closes the second life period of the constitutional republic, its period of royalist insolence.

The state of siege in Paris had again been raised, the action of the press had again begun. During the suspension of the social-democratic papers, the period of repressive legislation and of royalist blustering, the Siècle, the old literary representative of the monarchist-constitutional petty bourgeoisie, republicanized itself, the Presse, the old literary expression of the bourgeois reformers, turned democratic, and the National, the old classic organ of the republican bourgeois, socialized itself.

The secret societies grew in extent and intensity in the measure that public clubs became impossible. The industrial workers’ associations, tolerated as purely commercial companies, economic ciphers, suddenly became politically so many means of binding the proletariat together. The 13th of June had struck off the official heads of the different half-revolutionary parties and the remaining masses gained their own head. The knights of order had intimidated by means of the predicted terror of the red republic, but the base excesses, the hyperborean atrocities of the triumphant counter-revolution in Hungary, in Baden, in Rome, washed the “Red Republic” white. And the malcontented middle classes of French society began to prefer the promises of the red republic with its problematical terror to the terror of the red monarchy with its actual hopelessness. No Socialist made in France more revolutionary propaganda than Haynau. A chaque capacité selon ses oeuvres! [To each according to his deeds.]

Meanwhile, Louis Napoleon took advantage of the vacation of the National Assembly to make princely journeys to the provinces, the most hot-blooded Legitimists made pilgrimages to Ems to the grandson of St. Louis, and the mass of the pro-order representatives of the people intrigued in the departmental councils which had just been convened. It was a case of making them express that which the majority of the National Assembly did not yet dare to express—a resolution of urgency for the immediate revision of the constitution. According to the constitution, that instrument could be revised only in 1852 by a National Assembly called for that specific purpose. But if the majority of the departmental councils did express themselves in this sense, must not then the National Assembly sacrifice the virginity of the constitution to the voice of France? The National Assembly entertained in regard to these provincial gatherings the same hopes which the nuns in Voltaire’s “Henriade” entertained of the Pandoors. But the Potiphars of the National Assembly, barring a few exceptions, had to deal with as many Josephs in the provinces. The overwhelming majority did not want to understand the importunate insinuation. The revision of the constitution was frustrated by the very tools that were to have brought it to life through the vote-taking in the departmental councils. The voice of France, that is of bourgeois France, had spoken, and it had spoken against revision.

At the beginning of October the Legislative National Assembly was reconvened, but tantum mutatus ab illo—its physiognomy had been thoroughly changed. The unexpected rejection of revision on the part of the departmental councils had forced the Assembly back within the boundaries of the constitution and had pointed out to it the limits of its term of life. The Orleanists had become distrustful because of the pilgrimages of the Legitimists to Ems, the Legitimists, on the other hand, had become suspicious because of the negotiations of the Orleanists with London, the journals of both factions had added fuel to the fire and had weighed the respective claims of their respective pretenders. Orleanists and Legitimists jointly grumbled about the intrigues of the Bonapartists, brought to the fore by the princely journeys of the President, by his more or less transparent attempts at emancipation and by the arrogant language of the Bonapartist press; Louis Napoleon grumbled about the National Assembly which considered proper only the Orleanist-Legitimist conspiracy, and about a Ministry which constantly betrayed him to the National Assembly. The Ministry, finally, was split within itself about the Roman policy and about the income tax, proposed by Minister Passy and denounced as socialistic by the conservatives.

One of the first measures, submitted by the Barrot Ministry to the reconvened Legislative Assembly, was a credit demand in the amount of 300,000 francs for the payment of the widow’s allowance of the Duchess of Orleans. The National Assembly granted this and added to the debt register of the French nation the sum of seven million francs. While thus Louis Philippe continued to play with success the role of the pauvre honteux—of the abashed beggar—the Ministry dared not to propose an increase of salary for Bonaparte, nor did the Assembly seem inclined to grant it. And Louis Napoleon, just as ever, swayed in the dilemma: Aut Caesar aut Clichy! [either Caesar or Clichy!]

The second credit demand of the Ministry in the amount of nine million francs for the expenses of the Roman expedition, increased the tension between Bonaparte and the Ministry, on the one hand, and between the Ministry and the National Assembly on the other. Louis Napoleon had published in the Moniteur a letter addressed to his orderly officer, Edgar Ney, wherein he sought to bind the Papal Government to constitutional guarantees. The Pope, on his part, had issued an address “motu proprio” [of his own free will], wherein he rejected every restriction of his restored rule. The letter of Bonaparte, with intentional indiscretion, lifted the curtain of his Cabinet in order to expose himself to the gaze of the gallery as a well-meaning but misunderstood and hampered genius. He did not for the first time coquet with the “furtive wing-beats of a free soul.” Thiers, the reporter of the commission, completely ignored Bonaparte’s wing flutterings and confined himself to translating the Papal allocution into French. Not the Ministry, but Victor Hugo endeavored to save the President by means of a point of order wherein the National Assembly was to have expressed its consent to the letter of Napoleon. Allons donc! Allons donc! [Let us go, then! Let us go!] With this irreverently flippant interjection did the majority bury the motion of Hugo. The policy of the President? The letter of the President? The President himself ? Allons donc! Allons donc! Who the devil takes Monsieur Bonaparte au serieux? Do you, Monsieur Victor Hugo, believe that we believe you, that you believe in the President? Allons donc! Allons donc!

Finally the breach between Bonaparte and the National Assembly was accelerated by the discussion over the recall of the Orleanists and Bourbons. The Ministry failing to do so, the cousin of the President, son of the ex-king of Westphalia, had made this motion, which had no purpose other than to force the Legitimist and Orleanist pretenders down to or rather below the level of the Bonapartist pretender, who, at least in point of fact, stood at the head of the State.

Napoleon Bonaparte was irreverent enough to link together, in one and the same motion, the recall of the exiled royal families and the amnesty of the June insurgents. The indignation of the majority at once forced him to apologize for this nefarious interlinking of the holy and the heinous, of the kingly races and the proletarian brood, of the fixed stars of society and its jack o’ lanterns, and to assign to each of the two motions its proper rank. It rejected energetically the recall of the royal families, and Berryer, the Demosthenes of the Legitimists, left no manner of doubt as to the significance of this vote. The bourgeois degradation of the pretenders, that is what is aimed at! It is intended to rob them of their halos, of the last remnant of majesty left to them, the majesty of exile! “What,” exclaimed Berryer, “would one think of any one of the pretenders who, forgetting about his illustrious origin, would come here to live as a simple private citizen?” More plainly Louis Bonaparte could not have been told that he had gained nothing by his presence, and that, if the coalesced royalists needed him here in France as a neutral figure in the presidential chair, the real and serious pretenders to the crown must continue to be removed from the gaze of profane eyes in a nebulous exile.

On November 1, Louis Bonaparte answered the Legislative Assembly in a message which, in rather curt language, announced the dismissal of the Barrot Ministry and the formation of another. The Barrot-Falloux Ministry was the Ministry of the royalist coalition, the d’Hautpoul Ministry was the Ministry of Bonaparte as against the Legislative Assembly, the Ministry of the commis [clerks].

Bonaparte was no longer the mere neutral man of December 10, 1848. The possession of executive powers had grouped around him a number of interests, the struggle against anarchy forced the party of order itself to add to his influence, and if he no longer was popular, the party itself was unpopular. And could he not hope to force the Orleanists and Legitimists, through their rivalry, as well as through the necessity of some kind of monarchist restoration, to a recognition of the neutral pretender?

From November 1, 1849, is dated the third life period of the constitutional republic, the period that closes on March 10, 1850. Now only begins the regulation play of the constitutional institutions, which Guizot so very much admired—the quarrel between the executive and the legislative authority. As against the restorational desires of the united Orleanists and Legitimists, Bonaparte represents the title of his de facto power, the republic; as against the restorational desires of Bonaparte, the party of order represents the title of its joint rule, the republic; as against the Orleanists, the Legitimists, and as against the Legitimists, the Orleanists, represent the status quo, the republic. All these factions of the party of order, each one of which has in reserve its own king and its own restoration, mutually assert, as against the usurpational and restorational desires of their rivals, the joint rule of the bourgeoisie, the form within which all the special claims are neutralized and deferred—the republic.

Just as Kant makes the republic, as the only rational form of State, a postulate of practical reason, the realization of which is never attained but the attainment of which must ever be striven for and held fast in purpose and in aim, so these royalists regard the kingdom.

And thus the constitutional republic, emanating from the hands of the bourgeois republicans as a hollow ideological formula, became in the hands of the coalesced royalists a substantial vital form. And Thiers spoke more truly than he guessed when he said: “We, the royalists, are the real pillars of the constitutional republic.”

The fall of the Ministry of the coalition, the appearance of the Ministry of the commis, had a second significance. Its Minister of Finance was Fould. Fould, Minister of Finance, that is the official surrender of the French national wealth to the stock exchange, the administration of the State treasury by the stock exchange in the interest of the stock exchange. With the appointment of Fould the financial aristocracy announced ITS restoration in the Moniteur. This restoration necessarily supplemented all the other restorations, which formed so many links in the chain of the constitutional republic.

Louis Philippe never had dared to make a real loup-cervier (stock exchange wolf) Minister of Finance. As his kingdom was but the ideal name for the rule of the upper bourgeoisie, the privileged interests must in his Ministries bear ideologically uninteresting names. The bourgeois republic forced everywhere into the foreground what the different monarchies, Legitimist and Orleanist, kept hidden in the background. It made earthly what the others had made celestial. In place of the names of saints it put the bourgeois surnames of the ruling class interests.

Our entire presentation has shown how the republic, from the first day of its existence, did not overthrow but consolidated the financial aristocracy. But the concessions that were made to it were made as to a decree of fate, to which one bows without seeking to bring it about. With Fould, governmental initiative fell back to the financial aristocracy.

It may now be asked: How could the coalesced bourgeoisie endure and tolerate the rule of finance which, under Louis Philippe, was predicated upon the exclusion or the subordination of the other bourgeois factions?

The answer is simple.

In the first place, the aristocracy of finance itself forms a decisive and weighty part of the royalist coalition whose joint governmental power is called the republic. Are not the spokesmen of the Orleanists the old allies and accomplices of the aristocracy of finance? And, itself, is it not the golden phalanx of Orleanism? As concerns the Legitimists, these had, already under Louis Philippe, practically participated in all the orgies of stock exchange, mine and railway speculations. Generally, the connection between large landed property and high finance is a normal state of affairs. Proof: England; proof: even Austria.

In a country like France, where the volume of national production occupies a relatively subordinate position as compared with the volume of the national debt, where the State rentes form the most important object of speculation, and the stock exchange offers the chief market for the investment of capital seeking to augment itself in unproductive channels, in such a country a numberless mass of people from all the bourgeois and half-bourgeois classes will be interested in the public debt, in stock exchange speculation and in finance generally. All these subaltern participants, do they not on the whole find their natural supports and directors in that faction which, in the most colossal outline, represents these interests?

And the surrender of the State treasury to high finance, upon what is that conditioned? Upon the ever growing indebtedness of the State. And the indebtedness of the State? Upon the constant excess of its expenditures over its income, a discrepancy which at the same time is cause and effect of the State loans.

In order to escape indebtedness, the State must either restrict expenditures, that is, simplify the governmental apparatus, curtailing and governing as little as possible, employing a smaller personnel and as little as possible getting into relationship with bourgeois society. But this way was impossible for the party of order whose means of repression, whose official interference, and whose omnipresence through State organs had to be increased in the same measure that its rule and the vital conditions of its class were menaced on many sides. One cannot reduce the gendarmerie in the same measure that attacks upon persons and property increase.

Otherwise, the State must seek to circumvent the debts and bring about a momentary but transitory balance in the budget by piling extraordinary taxes upon the shoulders of the wealthiest classes. In order to withdraw the national wealth from the exploitation of the stock exchange, the party of order would have to offer its own riches upon the altar of the fatherland! Pas si bête!—They are not such fools.

Therefore, without a complete transformation of the French State, no transformation of French finances. With such State finances, necessarily State indebtedness, State creditors, bankers, money mongers and stock exchange wolves. Only one faction of the party of order was a direct participant in the overthrow of the aristocracy of finance—the manufacturers. We do not speak of the middle-sized or the smaller industrialists, we speak of the regents of the factory interests who, under Louis Philippe, had formed the broad basis of the dynastic opposition. Their interest, without question, lies in the reduction of production costs, therefore in the reduction of taxes which burden production, also in the reduction of the State indebtedness, the interest on which increases taxes, and, therefore, in the overthrow of the aristocracy of finance.

In England—the biggest French manufacturers are petty bourgeois compared with their British rivals—we really find manufacturers, a Cobden, a Bright, at the head of the crusade against the bank and the stock exchange aristocracy. Why not in France? In England, industry is dominant; in France, agriculture. In England, industry requires free trade, in France it needs protective tariffs, a national monopoly alongside of the other monopolies. French industry does not dominate French production, therefore the French industrialists do not dominate the French bourgeoisie. To enforce their interests against the remaining factions of the bourgeoisie, they cannot, like the British, walk at the head of the movement and at the same time drive their class interest to a point; they must become part of the following of the revolution and serve interests which are often contrary to the common interests of their class. During February they had misunderstood their position, but it was February that sharpened their wits. For who is more directly menaced by the workers than the employer, the industrial capitalist? The manufacturer, in France, necessarily became one of the most fanatical members of the party of order. The impairment of his profit by high finance, what is that as compared with the elimination of profit by the proletariat?

In France, the petty bourgeois does what, normally, should be done by the industrial bourgeois; the worker does what, normally, should be the task of the petty bourgeois; and the task of the worker, who will solve that? Nobody. It will not be solved in France, it will be proclaimed there. It will nowhere be solved within the national walls, the class war within French society will turn into a world war wherein the nations will face each other. And the solution, it only begins when, through the world war, the proletariat will be driven to head that people which dominates the world market at the head of England. The revolution which does not find its end here, but only its organized beginning, is not a short-winded revolution. The present generation resembles the Jews, led by Moses through the desert. Not only must it conquer a new world, but it must perish in order to make way for the men who are equal to a new world.

But to get back to Fould.

On November 14, 1849, Fould mounted the tribune of the National Assembly and explained his system of finance: apology for the old tax system! retention of the wine tax! revocation of the Passy income tax!

Passy, too, was no revolutionary, he was an old Minister of Louis Philippe. He belonged to the Puritans of the force of Dufaure and to the most intimate confidants of Teste, the scapegoat of the July monarchy.Passy, too, had praised the old system of taxation, had advocated the retention of the wine tax, but he had also torn the veil from the State deficit. He had declared for the need of a new tax, the income tax, unless the bankruptcy of the State were aimed at. Fould, who had recommended to Ledru-Rollin State bankruptcy, recommended to the Legislative Assembly the State deficit. He promised economies, the secret of which was later revealed in that, for instance, expenditures were reduced by sixty millions, while the floating debt had increased by two hundred millions—sleight-of-hand tricks in the grouping of figures, in drawing a statement of accounts, all of which, in the end, tended toward new loans.

Under Fould, the aristocracy of finance, like the other jealous bourgeois faction, did not, of course, proceed in so shamelessly corrupt a manner as was done under Louis Philippe. But, for one thing, the system was the same, constant increase of the public debt, concealment of the deficit. In time, the old stock exchange swindle became more barefaced. Proof: the law about the railroad of Avignon, the mysterious fluctuations of government securities—for a brief moment the talk of all Paris—and, finally, the miscarried speculations of Fould and Bonaparte in the matter of the election of March 10.

With the restoration of the aristocracy of finance, the French people would soon have to arrive again at a “February 24.”

The Constituent Assembly, in a misanthropic fit against its heir, had abolished the wine tax for the year of our Lord, 1850. With the abolition of old taxes new debts could not be paid. Creton, a crétin [idiot] of the party of order, had moved the retention of the wine tax prior to the adjournment of the Legislative Assembly. Fould, in the name of the Bonapartist Ministry, took up this motion and, on December 20, 1849, the first anniversary of the proclamation of Bonaparte, the National Assembly decreed the restoration of the wine tax.

The chief advocate of this restoration was no financier, it was the Jesuit chief Montalembert. His deduction was strikingly simple: The tax, that the maternal bosom from which the government nurses. The government comprises the tools of repression, the organs of authority, the army, the police, the officials, the judges, the Ministers, the priests. An attack upon the tax, that is an attack of the anarchists upon the sentries of order, who protect the material and intellectual production of bourgeois society against the encroachments of the proletarian vandals. The tax, that is the fifth God, in line with property, the family, order and religion. And the wine tax unquestionably is a tax, moreover, not a common tax but a time-honored one, a tax of royalist sentiment, a respectable tax. Vive l’impôt des boissons! [Long live the tax on grape-juice.] Three cheers and one cheer more!

The French peasant, whenever he paints the devil on his wall, depicts him in the shape of a tax collector. From the moment that Montalembert raised the tax to the rank of godliness, the peasant became godless, an atheist, and threw himself into the arms of the devil—Socialism. The religion of order had lost him, the Jesuits had lost him, and so had Bonaparte. The 20th of December, 1849, has irreparably compromised the 20th of December, 1848. The “nephew of his uncle” was not the first of his family whom the wine tax vanquished, this tax which, according to Montalembert, scents the revolutionary storm. The real, the great Napoleon, declared at St. Helena that the reintroduction of the wine tax had contributed more to his fall than all else, because it had alienated the peasants of Southern France. Already under Louis XIV, the favorite of popular hatred (see the writings of Boisguillebert and Vauban), abolished by the first revolution, it had been reestablished by Napoleon in 1808 in a modified form. When the restoration invaded France, there trotted before it not only the Cossacks, but also the promises regarding the abolition of the wine tax. The gentilhommerie did not, of course, have to keep faith with the gent taillable à merci et miséricorde [people without mercy and pity]. 1830 promised the abolition of the wine tax. It was not its way to do what it said and to say what it did. 1848 promised the abolition of the wine tax as it promised everything else. Finally, the Constituent Assembly, which promised nothing, made, as already pointed out, a testamentary disposition, according to which the wine tax was to vanish on January 1, 1850. And just ten days prior to January 1, 1850, the Legislative Assembly re-established it, so that the French people continuously chased that tax, and, having kicked it out of doors, saw it come back through the window.

The popular hatred of the wine tax is to be explained by the fact that it combined within itself all the invidiousness of the French system of taxation. The manner of its collection is malevolent, the manner of its assessment is aristocratic, for the tax rate is the same for the most common as for the most expensive wines, increasing, therefore, in geometric ratio as the capacity of the consumer declines—an inverted progressive tax. It provokes for that reason the direct poisoning of the working people, offering a premium for adulterated and imitation wines. It reduces consumption, in establishing tolls at the gates of all cities above 4,000 inhabitants, thereby transforming every city into a foreign country with a protective tariff against French wine. The big wine dealers, and more yet the little ones, the marchands de vins, the wine taps, whose profits are dependent most directly upon wine consumption, are just so many declared foes of the wine tax. And, finally, in that the wine tax reduces consumption, it cuts the market for wine production. While it renders the city worker incapable of buying the wine, it renders the peasant wine grower incapable of selling it. France contains a wine-growing population of about 12 millions. That makes it easy to understand the hatred of the people in general and, particularly, the fanaticism of the peasants against the wine tax. And, moreover, they saw in the reintroduction of the tax not an isolated, more or less accidental event. The peasants have a way of historic tradition that is all their own, handed down from father to son. In this historic school it is rumored that every government that wants to deceive the peasants will promise the abolition of the wine tax, and, as soon as it has deceived the peasants, will either retain or reintroduce the wine tax. The reintroduction of the wine tax, on December 20, meant: Louis Napoleon is like all the others. But he wasn’t like all the others, he was a peasant invention, and, in petitions against the wine tax, containing millions of signatures, they took back the votes which only a year ago they had given to the “nephew of his uncle.”

The rural population, more than two-thirds of the French total, consists for the most part of so-called free owners of the soil. The first generation, freed gratuitously by the revolution of 1789 from feudal imposts, had paid nothing for the land. But the succeeding generations did pay in the shape of land prices what their semi-serf ancestors had paid in the form of rents, tithes, forced labor, etc. The more the population grew, and the more, in consequence, the division of the land increased, all the higher went the price of each parcel, because with the decline of its size, the extent of the demand for it was augmented. In the measure, however, that the price which the peasant paid for his parcel rose, either if he bought it directly or it was charged to him as capital by his co-heirs, in that same measure rose, necessarily, the indebtedness of the peasant, the mortgage. The title of debt attached to the soil, the mortgage, is the pawn ticket for the property. As privileges accumulated upon the medieval property in realty, so do the mortgages upon the modern peasant’s parcel. On the other hand, in the regime of parceling, the soil is purely an instrument of production to its owner. In the same measure that the land is divided does its fertility decline. The application of machinery in agriculture, the division of labor, the great means of improving the soil, such as drainage and irrigation, etc., become ever more impossible, while the overhead costs of cultivation grow in the same measure as the division of the instrument of production proceeds. All this aside from the fact whether the owner of the parcel possesses capital or not. But the more division increases, the more the property with its most wretched inventory constitutes the sole capital of the parcel-owning peasant, the more the investment of capital in realty property declines, the more the cottager lacks land, money, knowledge, in order to apply the progress of husbandry—all the more will soil cultivation become retrogressive. Finally the net yield will decline in the same measure that the gross consumption grows, as the entire family of the peasant is prevented by that very property from taking up other employments, and yet is not able to live upon it.

In the same measure, therefore, that the population grows, and with it the division of the land, in that same measure will the instrument of production, the earth, become dearer while its fertility declines, and in that same measure agriculture declines and the peasant runs into debt. What once was effect, now becomes cause. Each generation leaves the succeeding one in greater debt, each new generation begins under more unfavorable and more difficult conditions, hypothecation generates hypothecation, and when it becomes impossible for the peasant to find in his parcel a pledge for new loans, i.e., to burden it with a new mortgage, then will he fall victim to the usurer and all the more enormous will be the usurer’s rate of interest.

And so it came about that the French peasant, in the form of interest on mortgages attached to the soil, in the form of interest on unsecured loans of usury, yielded to the capitalist, in one word, not only his entire net profit, but also a part of the labor wages, and that he sank down to the level of the Irish tenant—all this on the pretext of being the owner of private property.

This process was accelerated in France by the ever growing burden of taxation and by the cost of litigation, caused partly by the formalities with which French legislation surrounds property in realty, and partly by the numberless conflicts growing out of the many boundaries of the everywhere crisscrossing parcels, and again by the litigiousness of the peasants themselves, whose enjoyment of property was confined to the fanatic assertion of the rights in their imaginary property.

According to a statistical compilation of 1840, the gross product of French soil amounted to 5,237,178,000 francs. Of this sum 3,552,000,000 must be deducted for labor costs, including the consumption of those who did the work. This leaves a net product of 1,685,178,000 francs from which must be deducted 550 millions for interest on mortgages, 100 millions for judicial officers, 350 millions for taxes and 107 millions for records, stamp and mortgage fees, etc. There remains but one-third of the net product, 338 millions, which, distributed per capita among the population, amounts to not quite 25 francs. In this calculation no account has been taken of the cost of usury nor of the expenses for lawyers, etc.

It will be perceived what the condition of the French peasant was when the republic added new burdens to the ones they already carried. It will be seen that their exploitation differs from the exploitation of the industrial proletariat only in point of form. The exploiter is the same: Capital. The individual capitalists exploit the individual peasants through mortgages and usury, and the capitalist class exploits the peasant class through State taxation. The title deed of the peasant is the talisman whereby capital hitherto held him enthralled, the pretext under which it incensed him against the industrial proletariat. Only the fall of capital will enable the peasant to rise, only an anti-capitalist, proletarian government will break his economic misery and social degradation. The constitutional republic, that is the dictatorship of his united exploiters; the social democratic, the red republic, that is the dictatorship of his allies. And the beam of the scale rises or falls, according to the votes which the peasant deposits in the ballot box. It is he himself who must determine his fate. Thus spoke the Socialists, in pamphlets, in almanacs, in calendars, in leaflets of all kinds. The language used became intelligible to the peasant through the language used in the counter-publications of the party of order, which, addressing itself to him in its behalf, by means of gross exaggeration, by the brutal conception and presentation of the purposes and ideas of the Socialists, struck the true peasant tone and over-stimulated his covetousness for the forbidden fruit. But most intelligibly spoke the experience the peasant class had had in using the suffrage, and the disappointments which came to it, blow upon blow, with revolutionary rapidity. Revolutions—they are the locomotives of history.

The gradual transformation of the peasants manifested itself through different symptoms. It had already appeared in the elections to the Legislative Assembly, it showed itself in the state of siege imposed upon the five departements bordering upon Lyon, it showed itself, a few months after June 13, in the election of a Montagnard in place of the former President of the Chambre introuvable in the Departement du Gironde, it showed itself on December 20, 1849, in the election of a red deputy to fill the place of a deceased Legitimist deputy in the Departement du Gard, the promised land of the Legitimists, scene of the most terrible atrocities against the republicans in 1794–95, center of the white terror of 1815, when Liberals and Protestants were openly murdered. This revolutionizing of the most stationary class comes to the fore most strikingly after the reintroduction of the wine tax. Governmental measures and laws during January and February 1850 are directed almost exclusively against the departements and the peasants—a striking proof of their progress.

The circular of d’Hautpoul, whereby the gendarme was made the inquisitor of the prefect, of the under-prefect, and, above all, of the mayor, whereby espionage was organized way into the most secret recesses of the most distant villages; the law against the school teachers, whereby they, the spokesmen, the educators and interpreters of the peasant class were subjected to the capricious arbitrariness of the prefects, they, the proletarians of the literate class, were hunted like wild beasts from one community to another; the proposed law against the mayors, whereby deposition, like the sword of Damocles, was hung over their heads, and whereby they, the presidents of the peasant committees, were to be confronted at any moment by the President of the republic and the party of order; the order, whereby the seventeen military divisions of France were changed into four pashalics, and which imposed upon Frenchmen the barracks and the bivouac as the national salon; the educational law, whereby the party of order proclaimed the insensibility and forcible stultification of France as a vital condition of its existence under the regime of the general suffrage—what were all these laws and measures? Desperate attempts to reconquer the departements and the peasants of the departements for the party of order.

Regarded as means of repression, these were wretched makeshifts that frustrated their own purpose. The big measures, such as the retention of the wine tax, the 45-centime tax, the scornful rejection of the peasant petitions for repayment of the milliard, etc., all these legislative thunderbolts struck the peasant class only once, in full, from the central seat of government; but the aforesaid laws and measures made attack and resistance the talk of the day in every hut, they inoculated the revolution in every village, they localized and “peasantized” the revolution.

On the other hand, did not these measures of Bonaparte, and their acceptance by the National Assembly, prove the concord of the two powers within the constitutional republic, in so far as it was a matter of repressing “anarchy”—that is, of all classes rebelling against the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie? Had not Soulange, right after his harsh message, assured the Legislative Assembly of his devotion to order by means of the immediately following message of Carlier, that filthily-common caricature of Fouche, just as Louis Napoleon himself was the flattened-out caricature of the first Napoleon?

The educational law shows us the alliance between the young Catholics and the old Voltairians. Could the rule of the united bourgeoisie be aught else but the coalesced despotism of the pro-Jesuit restoration and the July monarchy pretending to free thought? Must not the weapons distributed among the people by one bourgeois faction against the other, in their struggle for dominance, be wrested again from the people as soon as it stood face to face with their united dictatorship? Nothing has more incensed the Paris boutiquier than this coquettish sell-out to Jesuitism, not even the rejection of the concordat à l’amiable.

Meanwhile the collisions between the different factions of the party of order continued, as they did between the National Assembly and Bonaparte. Little did it please the National Assembly that Bonaparte, right after his coup d’état, after the creation of his own Bonapartist Ministry, summoned before him the invalides [disabled veterans] of the monarchy, now made prefects, and made their anti-constitutional agitation for his reelection as President a condition for holding office; that Carlier celebrated his inauguration with the suppression of a Legitimist club; that Bonaparte founded his own journal, le Napoléon, which revealed to the public the secret desires of the President which his Ministers had to deny upon the tribune of the Legislative Assembly. And little did the National Assembly relish the defiant retention of the Ministry, disregardful of its several votes of lack of confidence; little did it like the attempt to win the favor of the subaltern army officers by an increase of their daily pay in the amount of four sous, and the favor of the proletariat by means of a plagiarism from the Mysteries of Eugene Sue and by an honorable pawnshop; little, finally, the insolence with which the deportation of the remaining June insurgents to Algier was proposed by the Ministers in order to burden the Legislative Assembly with wholesale unpopularity, while the President reserved for himself popularity in retail by means of isolated acts of pardon. Thiers dropped some threatening words about coups d’état and coups de tète, and the Legislative Assembly revenged itself upon Bonaparte in that it rejected every law that he proposed for himself, and to examine with noisy suspicion every one that he proposed in the general interest in order to see whether the augmentation of the executive power would not profit the personal power of Bonaparte. In one word, it revenged itself through the conspiracy of contempt.

The Legitimist party on its part saw with displeasure how the more capable Orleanists recaptured nearly all the posts and how centralization grew, while they, as a matter of principle, sought their well-being in decentralization. And, really, the counter-revolution did forcibly centralize, that is, it prepared the mechanism of the revolution. By means of a compulsory currency rate of the bank notes, it even centralized the gold and silver in the Bank of Paris, and thus created a ready treasury for the revolution.

The Orleanists, finally, saw with displeasure how the rising principle of Legitimacy was held against their bastard principle and how they themselves were every moment slighted and maltreated like a bourgeois misalliance by a noble husband.

Little by little we saw how peasants, petty bourgeoisie, the middle layers generally, lined up with the proletariat, driven into open opposition against the official republic, and treated by it as opponents. Opposition to the bourgeois dictatorship, desire for a social change, holding fast to democratic-republican institutions as their organs of motion, grouping around the proletariat as the decisive revolutionary power—these are the common characteristics of the so-called party of the social democracy, the party of the red republic. This party of anarchy, as it was designated by its foes, is no less a coalition of different interests than the party of order. From the smallest reform of the old social disorder up to the transformation of the old social order, from bourgeois liberalism to revolutionary terrorism, so far apart lie the extremes which form the point of inception and the point of fulfillment of the party of “anarchy.”

Abolition of protective tariffs?—that is Socialism, because it attacks the monopoly of the industrial faction of the party of order. Regulation of the State budget?—that too is Socialism, because it attacks the monopoly of the financial faction of the party of order. Free importation of foreign meat and grains?—Socialism again, because that attacks the monopoly of the third faction of the party of order, the large landowners. The demands of the Free Trade party, the most advanced British bourgeois party, appear in France like so many Socialist demands. Voltarianism?—that also is Socialism, because it attacks a fourth faction of the party of order, the Catholic one. Free press, right of association, general popular school instruction—Socialism! Socialism! All of these attack the collective monopoly of the party of order.

So swiftly had the course of the revolution ripened conditions, that the friends of reform of all shades, and even the most modest aspirations of the middle classes, were forced to group themselves about the banner of the most extreme party of revolution, about the Red Flag.

However diverse the Socialism of the different large groups of the party of anarchy might be, varying according to economic conditions and the joint revolutionary requirements of each class or class faction flowing therefrom, in one point all agreed: to proclaim themselves as the means of emancipation of the proletariat and to announce that emancipation as their aim; intentional deception on the part of some, self-deception on the part of others; to present a world remodeled according to their requirements as the best world for all, as the realization of all revolutionary aspirations and the abolition of all revolutionary collisions.

Below the rather consonant general socialistic phrases of the “party of anarchy,” there is hidden the Socialism of the National, of the Presse, and of the Siècle, which aims more or less consistently at overthrowing the rule of the financial aristocracy, and wants to free industry and commerce from the fetters that bind them. This is the Socialism of industry, of commerce and of agriculture, the regents of which deny these interests in the party of order in so far as they do no longer correspond with their private monopolies. From this bourgeois Socialism which, quite naturally, like every other variant of Socialism, rallies a part of the workers and petty bourgeoisie, the real petty bourgeois Socialism, the Socialism par excellence, differentiates itself. Capital harasses this class chiefly in the role of creditor, hence it demands credit institutions; it crushes it through competition, hence the demand for associations subsidized by the State; it overwhelms it through concentration, hence the call for progressive taxes, inheritance restrictions, the taking over of large enterprises by the State, and other measures that are to retard the expansion of capital. Since this class dreams of the peaceful introduction of its Socialism—barring, perhaps, a brief second February revolution—the oncoming historic process naturally appears to it as the application of systems which the thinkers of society, working either in groups or as individual inventors, have evolved or are going to evolve. Thus these become the eclectics or adepts of the existing socialistic systems of doctrinaire Socialism, which remained as the theoretic expression of the proletariat only so long as the latter had not yet developed its free historic movement.

Thus, while utopia, the doctrinaire Socialism, which would subordinate the collective movement to one of its moments, and which puts in place of the cooperative social production the ratiocination of individual pedants, and, above all, removes by sheer fancy the revolutionary struggle of the classes with its requirements by means of petty tricks or large sentimentalities—while this doctrinaire Socialism, which, in the last analysis, only idealizes present society, takes a shadowless picture of it, and seeks to put through its ideal against the reality, while this Socialism is ceded by the proletariat to the petty bourgeoisie, while the struggle of the different Socialist chiefs among themselves reveals each of the so-called systems as a pretentious adherence to one of the transition points of the social transformation as against another—while all this goes on, the proletariat groups itself more and more around the revolutionary Socialism, around Communism, for which the bourgeoisie itself has invented the name Blanqui. This Socialism is the declaration in permanency of the revolution, the class dictation of the revolution, the class dictation of the proletariat as the needful transition point toward the abolition of class divisions as such, toward the abolition of all the conditions of production upon which they rest, toward the abolition of all the social relations conforming to these conditions of production, toward the transformation of all ideas that proceed from these social relations.

The space for this presentation does not permit entering more fully upon this matter.

We have seen that, just as in the party of order the financial aristocracy necessarily came to be the head, so the proletariat came to be the head in the party of “anarchy.” While the different classes bound together in one revolutionary league grouped themselves around the proletariat, while the departements became ever more unreliable and the Legislative Assembly itself grew ever more surly against the pretensions of the French Souloque, there approached the long postponed and deferred elections to fill the vacancies caused by the proscription of the Montagnards of June 13.

The government, despised by its foes, maltreated and daily humiliated by its professed friends, saw but one way to escape from this distasteful and untenable situation—a riot. A riot in Paris would have permitted the imposition of the state of siege in Paris and the departements, and would have made it possible to dominate the elections. On the other hand, the friends of order, toward a government that had won the victory over anarchy, would be forced to make concessions, unless they themselves would appear as anarchists.

The government went to work. Early in February, 1850, came provocations of the people through the chopping down of the liberty trees—in vain. When the liberty trees lost their place, the government lost its head and recoiled in fright before its own provocation. The National Assembly viewed this awkward attempt at emancipation on the part of Bonaparte with icy distrust. No more successful was the removal of the wreaths of immortelles from the July column. It gave to a part of the army occasion for revolutionary demonstrations and to the National Assembly a chance for a more or less concealed vote of lack of confidence against the Ministry. In vain also was the threat of the government press organs about the abolition of the general suffrage and the invasion of the Cossacks. And to no purpose was the direct invitation of d’Hautpoul, addressed right in the Legislative Assembly to the parties of the Left, to come out on the street where the government was ready to receive them. All that d’Hautpoul gained was a call to order by the President, and the party of order, with quiet but malignant joy, permitted a deputy of the Left to make persiflage of the usurpatory desires of Bonaparte. In vain, finally, was the prophecy of a revolution for the 24th of February. The government’s action brought it about that the 24th of February was quietly ignored by the people.

The proletariat did not let itself be provoked into a riot, because it was just about ready to start a revolution.

Undeterred by the provocations of the government, which only added to the general irritation against existing conditions, the election committee, entirely under the influence of the workers, set up three candidates for Paris: Deflotte, Vidal and Carnot. Deflotte was a deported June insurgent, amnestied by one of the popularization whims of Bonaparte, a friend of Blanqui, and he had participated in the attack of May 15. Vidal was a Communist writer, known through his book About the Distribution of Wealth, and a former secretary of Louis Blanc in the commission of the Luxembourg. Carnot, son of the Carnot of the Convention who had organized the victory, was the least compromised member of the National party, Minister of Education in the Provisional Government, and, because of his democratic bill aiming at popular instruction, a living protest against the educational law of the Jesuits. These three candidates represented the three associated classes; at the head the June insurgent, representative of the revolutionary proletariat; beside him the doctrinaire Socialist, representative of the socialistic petty bourgeoisie; the third, representative of the republican bourgeois party, whose democratic formulas, as against the party of order, had attained a socialistic sense, having long ago lost their own. This was a general coalition against the upper bourgeoisie and the government, just as in February. But this time the proletariat was the head of the revolutionary league.

In spite of all counter-efforts the Socialist candidates triumphed. The army itself voted for the June insurgent and against its own Minister of War, Lahitte. The party of order was thunderstruck. The elections in the departements gave it no solace—they resulted in a majority of Montagnards.

The election of March 10, 1850! It was the recall of June, 1848: the massacrers and deporters of the June insurgents did return to the National Assembly, but bowed and in the train of the deported and with their principles upon unwilling lips. It was the recall of June 13, 1849: the Montagne, proscribed by the National Assembly, returned to that body, but as advance heralds of the revolution, no longer as its commanders. It was the recall of December 10: Napoleon was defeated, together with his Minister, Lahitte. The parliamentary history of France knows but one analogy: the defeat of d’Haussy, Minister of Charles X, in 1830. The election of March 10, 1850, finally, was the cassation of the election of May 13, which had given a majority to the party of order. The election of March 10 protested against the majority of May 13. The 10th of March was a revolution. Behind the ballots lie the paving stones.

“The vote of March 10 means war,” exclaimed Ségur d’Auguesseau, one of the most advanced members of the party of order.

With March 10, 1850, the constitutional republic enters upon a new phase, the phase of its dissolution. The different factions of the majority are again united among themselves and with Bonaparte; they are again the saviors of order, he is again their neutral man. If they still remember that they are royalists, it is only because of despair in the possibility of the bourgeois republic; if he remembers that he is President, it is only because he despairs of remaining such.

The election of Deflotte, the June insurgent, Bonaparte answers, at the command of the party of order, with the appointment of Baroche as Minister of the Interior, Baroche, the accuser of Blanqui and Barbès, of Ledru- Rollin and Guinard. The election of Carnot is answered by the Legislative Assembly with the adoption of the educational law, and the election of Vidal with the suppression of the socialistic press. By means of a trumpet fanfare in its own press the party of order seeks to blare, away its fright. “The sword is holy,” exclaims one of its organs; “the defenders of order must take the offensive against the red party,” says another; “between Socialism and Society exists a duel to the death, an incessant pitiless war. In this desperate duel one or the other must go down, if society does not destroy Socialism, then Socialism will destroy Society,” crows a third cockerel of order. Erect the barricades of order, the barricades of religion, the barricades of the family! An end must be made with these 127,000 voters of Paris! Bartholomew night for the Socialists! And the party of order really did believe for a moment in its own assurance of victory.

Most fanatically do its organs declaim against the “boutiquiers of Paris.” The June insurgent of Paris elected as a representative by the boutiquiers of Paris—that means that a second June, 1848, is impossible; that a second June 13, 1849, is impossible; it means that the moral influence of capital has been broken, that the bourgeois Assembly only represents the upper bourgeoisie, and it means that big property is lost because little property, its feudatory vassal, seeks refuge in the camp of the propertiless.

The party of order naturally returns to the inevitable commonplace. “More repression!” it cries, “ten-fold repression! “—but its repressive power has been reduced to one-tenth, while the power of resistance has grown a hundredfold. The chief instrument of repression, the army, must it not be reproved? And the party of order again speaks the last word: “The iron ring of a strangling legality must be broken. The constitutional republic is impossible. We must battle with our true weapons. We have since February, 1848, fought the revolution with its weapons and upon its basis, we have accepted its institutions; the constitution is a fortress which only protects the besiegers, not the besieged! While we have smuggled ourselves into holy Ilion in the belly of a Trojan horse, we have, unlike the Grecs,our ancestors, not conquered the hostile city but have made prisoners of ourselves.”

But the foundation of the constitution is the general suffrage. The destruction of the general suffrage is the last word of the party of order, it is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

The general suffrage vindicated them on May 24, 1848, on December 20, 1848, on May, 13, 1849, on July 8, 1849. The general suffrage turned against itself on March 10, 1850. Bourgeois rule as an emanation and a result of the general suffrage, as an express act of the sovereign will of the people, that is the sense of the bourgeois constitution. But from the moment when the content of this right to vote, of this sovereign will, is no longer the rule of the bourgeoisie, does the constitution still have a sense? Is it not the duty of the bourgeoisie so to regulate the right to vote that it always wants that which is reasonable—its rule? Does not the general suffrage, in that it constantly annuls the existing State power and then creates it anew out of itself, put an end to all stability, call in question at every moment all the existing powers, destroy authority, and does it not threaten to raise anarchy itself to the seat of authority? After March 10, 1850, who would still have a doubt?

The bourgeoisie, when it rejects the general suffrage with which it had hitherto draped itself, and from which it had sucked its omnipotence, admits candidly: “Our dictatorship has hitherto existed through the will of the people; it must now be consolidated against the will of the people.” And, consistently enough, it now seeks its support no longer in France, but abroad, in foreign lands, in invasion.

With the invasion it arouses against itself (a second Coblenz that has established its seat in France itself) all the national passions. With the attack upon the general suffrage it furnishes the new revolution with a general pretext, and the revolution needs such a pretext. Any specific pretext would tend to separate the factions of the revolutionary league and permit their differences to come to the fore. The general pretext benumbs the half-revolutionary classes, permits them to deceive themselves as to the definite character of the oncoming revolution and as to the consequences of their own deeds. Every revolution requires a question for discussion at banquets. The general suffrage is the banquet question of the new revolution.

The coalesced bourgeois factions have already been condemned when they flee from the only possible form of their collective power, from the most powerful and most complete form of their class rule, the constitutional republic, back to the subordinate, incomplete and weaker form of the monarchy. They resemble the old man who, to regain the strength of his youth, took out the garments of his childhood and sought to force his withered limbs into them. Their republic has but one merit, that of being the hothouse of the revolution.

The 10th of March, 1850, bears the inscription:

Après moi le déluge—after me the deluge!