Class Struggles in France 1848-1850

Notes

64. The
Paris uprising of June 5 and 6, 1832, was prepared by the Left
republicans and by secret revolutionary societies including the Society of the
Friends of the People. The uprising flared up during the funeral of General
Lamarque, an opponent of Louis Philippe’s Government. The insurgent
workers threw up barricades and defended them with great courage; the red flag
was hoisted over them for the first time.

The uprising of Lyons workers in April 1834,
directed by the secret republican Society of the Rights of Man and the
Citizen, was one of the first mass actions by the French proletariat. The
uprising, supported by republicans in several other towns including Paris, was
brutally suppressed.

The Paris uprising of May 12, 1839, in which
the revolutionary workers played a leading part, was prepared by the secret
republican socialist Society of the Seasons led by Auguste Blanqui and Armand
Barbès; it was suppressed by troops and the National Guard,

65.
Robert Macaire – a character portraying a clever swindler,
created by the famous French actor Frederick Lemaître and immortalised in the
caricatures of Honoré Daumier. The figure of Robert Macaire was a biting satire
on the domination of the financial aristocracy under the July monarchy.

66. The
reference is to the repercussions of the suppression of the uprising in the
free city of Cracow (the Cracow Republic) which, by decision of the Congress of
Vienna, came under the joint control of Austria, Prussia and Russia, who had
partitioned Poland at the end of the eighteenth century. The insurgents
succeeded in seizing power in Cracow on February 22, 1846, established a
National Government of the Polish Republic and issued a manifesto abolishing
feudal services. The Cracow uprising was suppressed at the beginning of March;
in November 1846, Austria, Prussia and Russia signed a treaty incorporating
Cracow into the Austrian Empire.

67. In the
spring of 1847 at Buzaruçais (department of the Indre) the starving workers and
the inhabitants of neighbouring villages looted storehouses belonging to
profiteers, which led to a clash between the population and troops. Four of
those who took part were executed and many others sentenced to hard labour.

68. The
dynastic opposition – an opposition group in the French Chamber
of Deputies during the July monarchy (1830-48). The group, headed by Odilon
Barrot, expressed the sentiments of the liberal industrial and commercial
bourgeoisie and favoured a moderate electoral reform, which they regarded as a
means to prevent revolution and preserve the Orleans dynasty.

70. During
the first days of the revolution, the workers of Paris demanded that the French
Republic’s flag should be red, the colour of that hoisted in the
workers’ suburbs of Paris during the June uprising of 1832. Bourgeois
representatives insisted on the tricolour (blue-white-and-red) which had been
the national standard during the French Revolution and under Napoleon I. It had
been the emblem of the bourgeois republicans grouped around the newspaper
National even before 1848. In the end, the tricolour was accepted as
the national standard with a red rosette fixed to the flagstaff; later, the
rosette was removed.

71. In 1848
Le Moniteur universel printed reports on the sittings of the
Luxembourg Commission alongside official documents.

72. The
reference is to the sum assigned by the King in 1825 as compensation for
aristocrats whose property had been confiscated during the French Revolution,

73. The
Mobile Guards, set up by a decree of the Provisional Government on
February 25, 1848, with the secret aim of fighting the revolutionary masses,
were used to crush the June uprising of the Paris workers. Later they were
disbanded on the insistence of Bonapartist circles, who feared that if a
conflict arose between Louis Bonaparte and the republicans, the Mobile Guards
would side with the latter.

74.
Lazzaroni – a contemptuous nickname for declassed proletarians,
primarily in the Kingdom of Naples, who were repeatedly used in the struggle
against the liberal and democratic movement.

75. The Poor
Law adopted in England in 1834 provided for only one form of relief for the
able-bodied poor: workhouses with a prison-like regime in which the workers
were engaged in unproductive, monotonous and exhausting labour. The people
called these workhouses “Bastilles for the poor.” Here and later
Marx uses the English word “workhouses.”

76. The
reference is to the elections to the National Guard and the Constituent
Assembly which were to be held on March 18 and April 9, 1848, respectively.
Paris workers, grouped around Blanqui, Dézamy and others, insisted on a
postponement of the elections arguing that they should be prepared by thorough
explanatory work among the population. As a result of the popular demonstration
on March 17 in Paris, regular troops were withdrawn from the capital (after the
events of April 16 they were brought back), and elections to the National Guard
were postponed till April 5 and to the Constituent Assembly till April 23.

78.
Commission du pouvoir executif (the Executive Commission) – the
Government of the French Republic set up by the Constituent Assembly on May 10,
1848, to replace the Provisional Government which had resigned. It existed
until June 24, 1848, when Cavaignac’s dictatorship was established during
the June proletarian uprising. Moderate republicans predominated on the
Commission; Ledru-Rollin was the sole representative of the Left.

80. Under
the decree prohibiting congregations of people adopted by the Constituent
Assembly on June 7, 1848, the organisation of gatherings and meetings in the
open was punishable by imprisonment of up to ten years.

81. On June
22, 1848, Le Moniteur universel No. 174 in the section
‘’Partie non officielle” reported an order of the Executive
Commission of June 21 on the expulsion of workers between the ages of 17 and 25
from the national workshops and their compulsory enrolment in the army. On July
3, 1848, after the suppression of the June insurrection of the Paris workers,
the government passed a decree dissolving the national workshops.

83. In the
German original, the term Haupt- und Staatsaktion (“principal
and spectacular action,” “main and state action”) is used,
which has a double meaning. First, in the seventeenth and the first half of the
eighteenth century, it denoted plays performed by German touring companies. The
plays were rather formless historical tragedies, bombastic and at the same time
coarse and farcical.

Second, this term can denote major political events. It
was used in this sense by a trend in German historical science known as
“objective historiography.”

Leopold Ranke was one of its chief representatives. He
regarded Haupt- und Staatsaktion as the main subject-matter.

84. The
reference is to the by-elections to the Constituent Assembly in Paris on
September 17, 1848 (to replace former deputies, including those who were
deprived of their powers after the June insurrection was suppressed). Among the
newly elected was the revolutionary socialist Francois Raspail, imprisoned
after the events of May 15, 1848.

85. This
refers to a system of general treaties set up by the Congress of Vienna
(September 1814-June 1815), embracing the whole of Europe, apart from Turkey.
The Congress decisions helped to restore feudal order, perpetuated the
political fragmentation of Germany and Italy, sanctioned the incorporation of
Belgium into Holland and the partition of Poland, and outlined measures to
combat the revolutionary movement.

86. The
Projet de constitution présenté à l’Assemblée nationale drafted
by the commission was submitted to the National Assembly by Marrast on June 19,
1848. The draft was published in Le Moniteur universel No. 172, June
20, 1848. A German translation of the draft was published in the supplement to
No. 24 of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung on June 24, 1848. After the June
insurrection, this draft was thoroughly revised by its authors in a
conservative spirit. The Constitution of the French Republic was finally
adopted on November 4, 1848.

87. The lily
– a heraldic emblem of the Bourbon dynasty; the violet – a
Bonapartist emblem.

88. By a
decree of the Senate (Senatus consult) of May 18, 1804, Napoleon I, the founder
of the Bonaparte dynasty, was proclaimed Emperor of the French.

During the February uprising of 1848, King Louis
Philippe and the monarchist circles were compelled to make Guizot and other
unpopular ministers tender their resignations, and tried to form a government
of moderate liberals to save the monarchy. On the morning of February 24 Odilon
Barrot was authorised to head the Cabinet, but Louis Philippe was compelled to
abdicate and flee by the victory of the popular revolution. The Barrot Ministry
survived till that afternoon.

89. On
January 26, 1849, the Minister of Public Works Leon Faucher submitted and
demanded urgent discussion of a Bill on the right of association, prohibiting
clubs. The Constituent Assembly, however, refused to discuss the Bill as an
urgent matter. In spite of opposition from the Left deputies, who demanded the
Ministry’s resignation, accusing it of a breach of the Constitution, the
first clause of the Bill (better known as the Bill on Clubs) was adopted by the
National Assembly by a monarchist and moderate republican vote on March 21,
1849. This decision dealt a serious blow at the freedom of assembly and
association, primarily at the workers’ associations.

90. An
allusion to the similarity between the schemes for restoring the monarchy in
December 1848, when Changarnier assumed command of the National Guard and the
Paris garrison, and the part General Monk played in restoring the Stuarts in
1660.

91. In April
1849, President Louis Bonaparte and the French Government sent an expeditionary
corps to Italy under General Oudinot to intervene against the Roman Republic
proclaimed on February 9, 1849, and to restore the secular power of the Pope.
On April 30, 1849, the French troops were driven back from Rome. The main blow
was dealt by Garibaldi’s volunteer corps. Oudinot violated the terms of
the armistice signed by the French, however, and on June 3 started a new
offensive against the Roman Republic, which had just completed a military
campaign against Neapolitan troops in the south and was engaged in rebuffing
the Austrians in the north. After a month of heroic defence, Rome was captured
by the interventionists and the Roman Republic ceased to exist.

92. The
reference is to the defeat of the Piedmontese army during the second stage of
the Austro-Italian war which broke out on March 25, 1848, as a result of the
national liberation uprising in Lombardy and Venice against Austrian rule.
However, the Piedmontese were compelled by military setbacks, particularly the
defeat at Custozza on July 25 and 26, 1848, and the capture of Milan by the
Austrians, to conclude an onerous armistice with Austria on August 9, 1848. On
March 12, 1849, under public pressure, Charles Albert, King of Sardinia,
cancelled the armistice and on March 20 hostilities were resumed. Despite
national enthusiasm in Austrian-occupied Lombardy and throughout Italy, the
Piedmontese army was defeated at Novara on March 23. Charles Albert abdicated.
Victor Emmanuel II, the new King, concluded an armistice with the Austrians on
March 26, and on August 6 a peace treaty was signed restoring Austrian rule in
Northern Italy and the Austrian protectorate over a number of states of Central
Italy (Parma, Tuscany, etc.).

Engels gives a detailed account of the Austro-Italian
war of 1848-49 in his articles in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.

93. Le
Comité de saint public (the Committee of Public Safety) established by the
Convention on April 6, 1793; during the Jacobin dictatorship (June 2, 1793-July
27, 1794) it was the leading body of the revolutionary government in France. It
lasted until October 26, 1795.

95. General
Brea, who commanded some of the troops that suppressed the June insurrection of
the Paris proletariat, was killed by the insurgents at the gates of
Fontainebleau on June 25, 1848, for which two of the insurgents were executed.

96. The
reference is to the revolutionary events in Hungary and Germany in the spring
and summer of 1849. A counter-offensive by the Hungarian revolutionary army,
which routed the Austrian troops and almost cleared the Austrian invaders from
the whole country, began in April. Hungary declared its independence on April
14, the Habsburg dynasty was officially dethroned and Kossuth elected head of
state. However, a change unfavourable to the revolutionary movement shortly
took place in the Hungarian campaign. In mid-June 1849 the Tsarist army entered
Hungary to assist the Austrian counter-revolution. The Tsarist intervention was
in effect approved by the ruling circles of France and England. The combined
forces of the Habsburgs and the Tsar suppressed the Hungarian revolution.

Almost simultaneously with the counter-offensive by the
Hungarians, popular uprisings broke out in Saxony, Rhenish Prussia, the
Palatinate and Baden in defence of the Imperial Constitution drafted by the
Frankfurt National Assembly but rejected by the King of Prussia and other
German princes. On the development of these uprisings see Engels’ essays
The Campaign for the German Imperial Constitution.

97. The
reference is to the bombardment of Rome by Oudinot’s expeditionary corps
on June 3, 1849. Rome was repeatedly subjected to fierce bombardments during
the French siege, which lasted until July 3, 1849.

98. Article
V belongs to the introductory part of the Constitution. The articles of the
principal part of the Constitution are numbered in Arabic figures.

99. The
meeting of the Montagne leaders was held on the premises of the
Fourierists’ daily La Démocratie pacifique on the evening of
June 12, 1849. (Using the expression friedfertige [pacific]
Demokratie, Marx plays on the title of the newspaper and its trend.)
The participants refused to resort to arms and decided to confine themselves to
a peaceful demonstration.

100. In the
manifesto published in Le Peuple No. 206, June 13, 1849, the
Democratic Association of the Friends of the Constitution – an
organisation of moderate bourgeois republicans formed by the National
party members during the Legislative Assembly election campaign –
called upon the citizens of Paris to participate in a peaceful demonstration to
protest against the “presumptuous pretensions” of the executive
authorities.

101. The
Declaration of the Montagne was published in La Réforme and
in La Démocratie pacifique and also in Proudhon’s newspaper
Le Peuple No. 206,June 13, 1849.

102. The
events in Paris sparked off an armed uprising of Lyons workers and craftsmen on
June 15, 1849. The insurgents occupied the Croix-Rousse quarter and erected
barricades, but were suppressed by troops after several hours of staunch
struggle.

103. On
August 10, 1849, the Legislative Assembly adopted a law under which
“instigators and supporters of the conspiracy and the attempt of June
13” were liable to trial by the Supreme Court. Thirty-four deputies of
the Mountain (Ledru-Rollin, Felix Pyat and Victor Considerant among them) were
deprived of their mandates and put on trial (some of them, those who emigrated,
were tried by default). On June 13, the editorial offices of democratic and
socialist newspapers were raided and the main of these papers were banned.
Repressions were extended to emigrants residing in France, including Marx, who
was ordered to leave Paris for the department of Morbihan, a remote swampy area
in Brittany (on this see present edition, Vol. 9, p. 527). At the end of August
1849 Marx left France for England, not wishing to submit to the arbitrary
police decision.

104. The
reference is to the Municipal Guard of Paris formed after the July
1830 revolution and subordinated to the Prefect of Police. It was used to
suppress popular uprisings and was disbanded after the February 1848
revolution.

105. In the
battle of Waterloo(June 18, 1815) Napoleon’s army was defeated
by British and Prussian troops commanded by Wellington and Blücher.

106. The
reference is to the commission of three cardinals (who traditionally wore
scarlet mantles) which, after the suppression of the Roman Republic by the
French army and relying on support from the interventionists, restored the
reactionary clerical regime in the papal states.

108.
Alongside Wiesbaden, Ems was a permanent residence of Count Chambord, the
Legitimist pretender to the French throne (who called himself Henry V).

109. Louis
Philippe, who had fled from France after the February revolution of 1848, lived
in Claremont.

110.
“Motu proprio” (of his own motion) – initial words
of a special kind of papal encyclical adopted without the preliminary approval
of the cardinals and usually concerning the internal political and
administrative affairs of the papal states.

Here this refers to the statement of Pope Pius IX
“To My Beloved Subjects” of September 12, 1849 (the French text was
published in Le Moniteur universel No. 271, September 28, 1849).

111. The
proposition that the proletarian revolution could only be victorious in several
advanced capitalist countries simultaneously and not in a single country alone
was most clearly formulated by Engels in his work Principles of Communism
(1847) (see present edition, Vol. 6, pp. 351-52). By developing further
the Marxist theory and drawing on the law of uneven economic and political
development of capitalism in the era of imperialism, in 1915 Lenin came to the
conclusion that under the new historical conditions, the victory of the
socialist revolution would be possible initially in a few or even in a single
country.

112. The
figures do not tally: the text reads 538,000,000 instead of 578,178,000,
apparently a misprint. This does not, however, affect the general conclusion,
for the net per capita income is less than 25 francs in both cases.

113.
Lagarde, a supporter of the Mountain party, was elected to the Legislative
Assembly in the by-elections held in the department of the Gironde on October
14, 1849, to replace the deceased Right-wing deputy Ravez.

116. in his
message of November 10, 1849, Carlier, the newly appointed Paris Police
Prefect, called for a “social anti-socialist league” to be set up
for the protection of “religion, labour, family, property and
loyalty.” The message was published in Le Moniteur universel No.
315, November 11, 1849.

118. The
July column erected in Paris on Bastille Square in 1840 in memory of
those who fell in the July revolution of 1830 has been decorated with wreaths
of immortelles ever since the February revolution of 1848.

119. May 4,
1848 – the Constituent Assembly was convened; December 20, 1848 –
Louis Bonaparte became President; May 13, 1849 – elections were held to
the Legislative Assembly; July 8, 1849 – by-elections took place in Paris
as a result of which the party of Order strengthened its position in the
Legislative Assembly.

120.
Coblenz – a city in Western Germany; it was the centre of
counter-revolutionary emigration during the French Revolution.

121. The
reference is to the discovery of gold in California in 1848. Along with the
discovery of rich deposits of gold in Australia in 1851, the Californian
discovery added to the industrial and stock-exchange agitation in capitalist
countries.

122.
Proudhon expressed this point of view in his polemics against the bourgeois
economist Frederic Bastiat, published in La Voix du peuple from
November 1849 to February 1850 and reproduced in a separate edition which
appeared in Paris in 1850 under the title Gratuite du credit. Discussion
entre M. Fr. Bastiat et M. Proudhon.

123. In
1797 the British Government issued a special Bank Restriction Act making
bank-notes legal tender and suspending the payment of gold for them.

Convertibility was reintroduced only in 1821 in
conformity with a law passed in 1819.

125. The
reference is to the commission of 17 Orleanists and Legitimists - deputies to
the Legislative Assembly – appointed by the Minister of the Interior on
May 1, 1850, to draft a new electoral law. Its members were nicknamed
burgraves, a name borrowed from the title of Victor Hugo’s historical
drama as an allusion to their unwarranted claims to power and their reactionary
aspirations. The drama is set in medieval Germany where the Burggraf
was governor of a Burg (city) or a district, appointed by the
Emperor.

127.
Baiser-Lamourette (Lamourette’s kiss) – an allusion to an
incident during the French Revolution. On July 7, 1792, Lamourette, deputy to
the Legislative Assembly, proposed to end all party dissension with a fraternal
kiss, and the representatives of the hostile parties, in accordance with this
proposal, embraced one another. The following day, however, the struggle among
the parties flared up with fresh vigour.

129. The
reference is to a new ministry to be appointed if the Bourbon dynasty was
restored in the person of the Legitimist pretender to the throne, Count
Chambord. It was to consist of de Levis, de Saint-Priest, Berryer, de Pastoret
and d’Escars.

130. The
reference is to the so-called Wiesbaden Manifesto – a circular drawn up
in Wiesbaden on August 30, 1850, by de Barthélemy, secretary of the Legitimist
faction in the Legislative Assembly, on the instruction of Count Chambord (de
Barthélemy, La conspiration légitimiste avouée, in Le Peuple de
1850 No. 24, September 22, 1850). The circular was the
Legitimists’ policy statement in case they came to power. Count Chambord
declared that he “officially and categorically rejects any appeal to the
people, because it will signify a negation of the great national principle of
hereditary monarchy.” This statement evoked protests among the
Legitimists themselves, notably from a group headed by La Rochejaquelein, and
polemics in the press.

131. An
allusion to the expiration of Louis Bonaparte’s presidential powers. In
the text the date is not exact. According to the Constitution of the French
Republic, presidential elections were to be held every four years on the second
Sunday in May, on which day the powers of the incumbent President expired.

132. The
Society of December 10 (Dix Decembre) – a Bonapartist
organisation founded in 1849 and consisting mainly of declassed elements,
political adventurists, the reactionary military. Many of its members helped to
elect Louis Bonaparte as President of the Republic on December 10, 1848,
hence its name. This organisation played an active part in the Bonapartist
coup d’état on December 2, 1851. Marx describes the society in his
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850

Part IV

The Abolition of Universal Suffrage in 1850[14]

The same symptoms have shown themselves in France since
1849, and particularly since the beginning of 1850. The Parisian industries are
abundantly employed and the cotton factories of Rouen and Mulhouse are also
doing pretty well, although here, as in England, the high prices of the raw
material have exercised a retarding influence. The development of prosperity in
France was, in addition, especially promoted by the comprehensive tariff reform
in Spain and by the reduction of the duties on various luxury articles in
Mexico; the export of French commodities to both markets has considerably
increased. The growth of capital in France led to a series of speculations, for
which the exploitation of the California gold mines on a large scale served as
a pretext.[121] A swarm
of companies have sprung up; the low denomination of their shares and their
socialist-colored prospectuses appeal directly to the purses of the petty
bourgeois and the workers, but all and sundry result in that sheer swindling
which is characteristic of the French and Chinese alone. One of these companies
is even patronized directly by the government. The import duties in France
during the first nine months of 1848 amounted to 63,000,000 francs, of 1849 to
95,000,000 francs, and of 1850 to 93,000,000 francs. Moreover, in the month of
September, 1850, they again rose by more than a million compared with the same
month of 1849. Exports also rose in 1849, and still more in 1850.

The most striking proof of restored prosperity is the Bank's reintroduction
of specie payment by the law of August 6, 1850. On March 15, 1848, the Bank had
been authorized to suspend specie payment. Its note circulation, including that
of the provincial banks, amounted at that time to 373,000,000 francs
(14,920,000 pounds). On November 2, 1849, this circulation amounted to
482,000,000 francs, or 19,280,000, an increase of 4,360,000 pounds, and on
September 2, 1850, to 496,000,000 francs, or 19,840,000 pounds, an increase of
about 5,000,000 pounds. This was not accompanied by any depreciation of the
notes; on the contrary , the increased circulation of the notes was accompanied
by the steadily increasing accumulation of gold and silver in the vaults of the
Bank, so that in the summer of 1850 its metallic reserve amounted to about
141,000,000 pounds, an unprecedented sum in France. That the Bank was thus
placed in a position to increase its circulation and therewith its active
capital by 123,000,000 francs, or 5,000,000 pounds, is striking proof of the
correctness of our assertion in an earlier issue that the finance aristocracy
has not only not been overthrown by the revolution, but has even been
strengthened. This result becomes still more evident from the following survey
of French bank legislation during the last few years. On June 10, 1847, the
Bank was authorized to issue notes of 200 francs; hitherto the smallest
denomination had been 500 francs. A decree of March 15, 1848, declared the
notes of the Bank of France legal tender and relieved it of the obligation of
redeeming them in specie. Its note issue was limited to 350,000,000 francs. It
was simultaneously authorized to issue notes of 100 francs. A decree of April
27 prescribed the merging of the departmental banks in the Bank of France;
another decree, of May 2, 1848, increased the latter's note issue to
442,000,000 francs. A decree of December 22, 1849, raised the maximum of the
note issue to 525,000,000 francs. Finally, the law of August 6, 1850,
reestablished the exchangeability of notes for specie. These facts, the
continual increase in the circulation, the concentration of the whole of French
credit in the hands of the Bank, and the accumulation of all French gold and
silver in the Bank's vaults led M. Proudhon to the conclusion that the Bank
must now shed its old snakeskin and metamorphose itself into a Proudhonist
people's bank.[122] He
did not even need to know the history of the English bank restriction from 1797
to 1819;[123] he only
needed to direct his glance across the Channel to see that this fact, for him
unprecedented in the history of bourgeois society, was nothing more than a very
normal bourgeois event, which only now occurred in France for the first time.
One sees that the allegedly revolutionary theoreticians who, after the
Provisional Government, talked big in Paris were just as ignorant of the nature
and the results of the measures taken as the gentlemen of the Provisional
Government themselves.

In spite of the industrial and commercial prosperity that France momentarily
enjoys, the mass of the people, the twenty-five million peasants, suffer from a
great depression. The good harvests of the past few years have forced the
prices of corn much lower even than in England, and the position of the
peasants under such circumstances, in debt, sucked dry by usury and crushed by
taxes, must be anything but splendid. The history of the past three years has,
however, provided sufficient proof that this class of the population is
absolutely incapable of any revolutionary initiative.

Just as the period of crisis began later on the Continent than in England,
so also did prosperity. The process originated in England, which is the
demiurge of the bourgeois cosmos. On the Continent the various phases of the
cycle repeatedly experienced by bourgeois society assume a secondary and
tertiary form. First, the Continent exports to England disproportionately more
than to any other country. This export to England, however, depends on the
latter's position, especially in regard to the overseas market. England exports
disproportionately more to overseas countries than to the whole Continent, so
that the quantity of continental exports to those countries is always dependent
on England's foreign trade. Hence when crises on the Continent produce
revolutions there first, the bases for them are always laid in England. Violent
outbreaks naturally erupt sooner at the extremities of the bourgeois body than
in its heart, because in the latter the possibilities of accommodation are
greater than in the former. On the other hand, the degree to which continental
revolutions affect England is at the same time the thermometer that indicates
to what extent these revolutions really put into question bourgeois life
conditions, and to what extent they touch only their political formations.

Given this general prosperity, wherein the productive forces of bourgeois
society are developing as luxuriantly as it is possible for them to do within
bourgeois relationships, a real revolution is out of the question. Such a
revolution is possible only in periods when both of these
factors — the modern forces of production and the
bourgeois forms of production — come into opposition
with each other. The various bickerings in which representatives of the
individual factions of the continental party of Order presently engage and
compromise each other, far from providing an occasion for revolution, are, on
the contrary, possible only because the bases of relationships are momentarily
so secure and — what the reactionaries do not know — so
bourgeois. On this all the reactionary attempts to hold back bourgeois
development will rebound just as much as will all the ethical indignation and
all the enraptured proclamations of the democrats. A new revolution is only
a consequence of a new crisis. The one, however, is as sure to come as the
other.

Let us now turn to France.

The victory that the people, in conjunction with the petty bourgeois, had
won in the elections of March 10 was annulled by the people itself when it
provoked the new election of April 28. Vidal was elected not only in Paris, but
also in the Lower Rhine. The Paris Committee, in which the Montagne and the
petty bourgeoisie were strongly represented, induced him to accept for the
Lower Rhine. The victory of March 10 ceased to be a decisive one; the date of
the decision was once more postponed; the tension of the people was relaxed; it
became accustomed to legal triumphs instead of revolutionary ones. The
revolutionary meaning of March 10, the rehabilitation of the June insurrection,
was finally completely annihilated by the candidature of Eugene Sue, the
sentimental petty-bourgeois social-fantast, which the proletariat could at best
accept as a joke to please the grisettes. As against this well-meaning
candidature, the party of Order, emboldened by the vacillating policy of its
opponents, put up a candidate who was to represent the June victory. This comic
candidate was the Spartan paterfamilias Leclerc, from whose person, however,
the heroic armor was torn piece by piece by the press, and who experienced a
brilliant defeat in the election. The new election victory on April 28 put the
Montagne and the petty bourgeoisie in high feather. They already exulted in the
thought of being able to arrive at the goal of their wishes in a purely legal
way and without again pushing the proletariat into the foreground through a new
revolution; they reckoned positively on bringing Ledru-Rollin into the
presidential chair and a majority of Montagnards into the Assembly through
universal suffrage in the new elections of 1852. The party of Order, rendered
perfectly certain by the prospective elections, by Sue's candidature, and by
the mood of the Montagne and the petty bourgeoisie, that the latter were
resolved to remain quiet no matter what happened, answered the two election
victories with an election law which abolished universal suffrage.

The government took good care not to make this legislative proposal on its
own responsibility. It made an apparent concession to the majority by
entrusting the working out of the bill to the high dignitaries of this
majority, the seventeen burgraves.[125] Thus it was not the government that proposed the
repeal of universal suffrage to the Assembly; the majority of the Assembly
proposed it to itself.

On May 8 the project was brought into the Chamber. The entire
Social-Democratic press rose as one man in order to preach to the people
dignified bearing, calme majestueux, passivity, and trust in its
representatives. Every article of these journals was a confession that a
revolution would, above all, annihilate the so-called revolutionary press, and
that therefore it was now a question of its self-preservation. The allegedly
revolutionary press betrayed its whole secret. It signed its own death
warrant.

On May 21 the Montagne put the preliminary question to debate and moved the
rejection of the whole project on the ground that it violated the constitution.
The party of Order answered that the constitution would be violated if it were
necessary; there was, however, no need for this at present, because the
constitution was capable of every interpretation, and because the majority
alone was competent to decide on the correct interpretation. To the unbridled,
savage attacks of Thiers and Montalembert the Montagne opposed a decorous and
refined humanism. It took its stand on the ground of law; the party of Order
referred it to the ground on which the law grows, to bourgeois property. The
Montagne whimpered: Did they really want, then, to conjure up revolutions by
main force? The party of Order replied: One would await them.

On May 22 the preliminary question was settled by 462 votes to 227. The same
men who had proved with such solemn profundity that the National Assembly and
every individual deputy would be renouncing his mandate if he renounced the
people, his mandatory, now stuck to their seats and suddenly sought to let the
country act, through petitions at that, instead of acting themselves, and still
sat there unmoved when, on May 31, the law went through in splendid fashion.
They sought to revenge themselves by a protest in which they recorded their
innocence of the rape of the constitution, a protest which they did not even
submit openly, but smuggled into the President's pocket from the rear.

An army of 150,000 men in Paris, the long deferment of the decision, the
appeasing attitude of the press, the pusillanimity of the Montagne and of the
newly elected representatives, the majestic calm of the petty bourgeois, but
above all, the commercial and industrial prosperity, prevented any attempt at
revolution on the part of the proletariat.

Universal suffrage had fulfilled its mission. The majority of the people had
passed through the school of development, which is all that universal suffrage
can serve for in a revolutionary period. It had to be set aside by a revolution
or by the reaction.

The Montagne developed a still greater display of energy on an occasion that
arose soon afterward. From the tribune War Minister Hautpoul had termed the
February Revolution a baneful catastrophe. The orators of the Montagne, who, as
always, distinguished themselves by their morally indignant bluster, were not
allowed by the President, Dupin, to speak. Girardin proposed to the Montagne
that it should walk out at once en masse. Result: The Montagne remained seated,
but Girardin was cast out from its midst as unworthy.

The election law still needed one thing to complete it, a new press
law. This was not long in coming. A proposal of the government, made many
times more drastic by amendments of the party of Order, increased the caution
money, put an extra stamp on feuilleton fiction (answer to the election of
Eugène Sue), taxed all publications appearing weekly or monthly up to a certain
number of sheets, and finally provided that every article of a journal must
bear the signature of the author. The provisions concerning the caution money
killed the so-called revolutionary press; the people regarded its extinction as
satisfaction for the abolition of universal suffrage. However, neither the
tendency nor the effect of the new law extended only to this section of the
press. As long as the newspaper press was anonymous, it appeared as the organ
of a numberless and nameless public opinion; it was the third power in the
state. Through the signature of every article, a newspaper became a mere
collection of literary contributions from more or less known individuals. Every
article sank to the level of an advertisement. Hitherto the newspapers had
circulated as the paper money of public opinion; now they were resolved into
more or less bad solo bills, whose worth and circulation depended on the credit
not only of the drawer but also of the endorser. The press of the party of
Order had incited not only for the repeal of universal suffrage but also for
the most extreme measures against the bad press. However, in its sinister
anonymity even the good press was irksome to the party of Order and still more
to its individual provincial representatives. As for itself, it demanded only
the paid writer, with name, address, and description. In vain the good press
bemoaned the ingratitude with which its services were rewarded. The law went
through; the provision about the giving of names hit it hardest of all. The
names of republican journalists were rather well known; but the respectable
firms of the "Journal des Débats", the “Assemblée Nationale", the
"Constitutionnel", etc., etc., cut a sorry figure in their high protestations
of state wisdom when the mysterious company all at once disintegrated into
purchasable penny-a-liners of long practice, who had defended all possible
causes for cash, like Granier de Cassagnac, or into old milksops who called
themselves statesmen, like Capefigue, or into coquettish fops, like M. Lemoinne
of the Débats.

In the debate on the press law the Montagne had already sunk to such a level
of moral degeneracy that it had to confine itself to applauding the brilliant
tirades of an old notable of Louis Philippe's time, M. Victor Hugo.

With the election law and the press law the revolutionary and democratic
party exits from the official stage. Before their departure home, shortly after
the end of the session, the two factions of the Montagne, the socialist
democrats and the democratic socialists, issued two manifestoes, two testimonia
paupertatis [certificates of pauperism] in which
they proved that while power and success were never on their side, they
nonetheless had ever been on the side of eternal justice and all the other
eternal truths.

Let us now consider the party of Order. The “Neue Rheinische
Zeitung” had said: “As against the hankering for restoration on the
part of the united Orléanists and Legitimists, Bonaparte defends his title to
his actual power, the republic; as against the hankering for restoration on the
part of Bonaparte, the party of Order defends its title to its common rule, the
republic; as against the Orléanists, the Legitimists, and as against the
Legitimists, the Orléanists, defend the status quo, the republic. All these
factions of the party of Order, each of which has its own king and its own
restoration in petto, mutually enforce, as against their rivals’
hankering for usurpation and revolt, the common rule of the bourgeoisie, the
form in which the special claims remain neutralized and reserved — the
republic.... And Thiers spoke more truly than he suspects when he said:
‘We, the royalists, are the true pillars of the constitutional
republic’.”

This comedy of the républicains malgré eux [republicans in spite of themselves], the antipathy to
the status quo and the constant consolidation of it; the incessant friction
between Bonaparte and the National Assembly; the ever renewed threat of the
party of Order to split into its separate component parts, and the ever
repeated conjugation of its factions; the attempt of each faction to transform
each victory over the common foe into a defeat for its temporary allies; the
mutual petty jealousy, chicanery, harassment, the tireless drawing of swords
that ever and again ends with a baiser Lamourette[15] — this whole unedifying comedy of errors
never developed more classically than during the past six months.

The party of Order regarded the election law at the same time as a victory
over Bonaparte. Had not the government abdicated when it handed over the
editing of and responsibility for its own proposal to the Commission of
Seventeen? And did not the chief strength of Bonaparte as against the Assembly
lie in the fact that he was the chosen of six millions? Bonaparte, on his part,
treated the election law as a concession to the Assembly, with which he claimed
to have purchased harmony between the legislative and executive powers. As
reward, the vulgar adventurer demanded an increase of three millions in his
civil list. Dared the National Assembly enter into a conflict with the
executive at a moment when it had excommunicated the great majority of
Frenchmen? It was roused to anger; it appeared to want to go to extremes; its
commission rejected the motion; the Bonapartist press threatened, and referred
to the disinherited people, deprived of its franchise; numerous noisy attempts
at an arrangement took place, and the Assembly finally gave way in fact, but at
the same time revenged itself in principle. Instead of increasing the civil
list in principle by three millions per annum, it granted Bonaparte an
accommodation of 2,160,000 francs. Not satisfied with this, it made even this
concession only after it had been supported by Changarnier, the general of the
party of Order and the protector thrust upon Bonaparte. Therefore it really
granted the two millions not to Bonaparte, but to Changarnier.

This sop, thrown to him de mauvaise grâce [with
bad grace], was accepted by Bonaparte quite in the spirit of the donor.
The Bonapartist press blustered anew against the National Assembly. When in the
debate on the press law the amendment was made on the signing of names —
which, in turn, was directed especially against the less important papers
— the representatives of the private interests of Bonaparte, the
principal Bonapartist paper, the Pouvoir, published an open and
vehement attack on the National Assembly. The ministers had to disavow the
paper before the Assembly; the girant [manager] of the Pouvoir was summoned before
the bar of the National Assembly and sentenced to pay the highest fine, 5,000
francs. Next day the Pouvoir published a still more insolent article
against the Assembly, and as the revenge of the government, the public
prosecutor promptly prosecuted a number of Legitimist journals for violating
the constitution.

Finally there came the question of proroguing the Assembly. Bonaparte
desired this in order to be able to operate unhindered by the Assembly. The
party of Order desired it partly for the purpose of carrying on its factional
intrigues, partly for the pursuit of the private interests of the individual
deputies. Both needed it in order to consolidate and push further the victories
of reaction in the provinces. The Assembly therefore adjourned from August 11
until November 11. Since, however, Bonaparte in no way concealed that his only
concern was to get rid of the irksome surveillance of the National Assembly,
the Assembly imprinted on the vote of confidence itself the stamp of lack of
confidence in the President. All Bonapartists were kept off the permanent
commission of twenty-eight members who stayed on during the recess as guardians
of the virtue of the republic.[129] In their stead, even some republicans of the
Siècle and the National were elected to it, in order to prove
to the President the attachment of the majority to the constitutional
republic.

Shortly before, and especially immediately after the recess, the two big
factions of the party of Order, the Orléanists and the Legitimists, appeared to
want to be reconciled, and this by a fusion of the two royal houses under whose
flags they were fighting. The papers were full of reconciliation proposals that
were said to have been discussed at the sickbed of Louis Philippe at St.
Leonards, when the death of Louis Philippe suddenly simplified the situation.
Louis Philippe was the usurper, Henry V the dispossessed; the Count of Paris,
on the other hand, owing to the childlessness of Henry V, was his lawful heir
to the throne. Every pretext for objecting to a fusion of the two dynastic
interests was now removed. But precisely now the two factions of the
bourgeoisie first discovered that it was not zeal for a definite royal house
that divided them, but that it was rather their divided class interests that
kept the two dynasties apart. The Legitimists, who had made a pilgrimage to the
residence of Henry V at Wiesbaden just as their competitors had to St.
Leonards, received there the news of Louis Philippe's death. Forthwith they
formed a ministry in partibus infidelium[16], which consisted mostly of members of that
commission of guardians of the virtue of the republic and which on the occasion
of a squabble in the bosom of the party came out with the most outspoken
proclamation of right by the grace of God. The Orléanists rejoiced over the
compromising scandal that this manifesto[130] called forth in the press, and did not conceal
for a moment their open enmity to the Legitimists.

During the adjournment of the National Assembly, the Councils of the
departments met. The majority of them declared for a more or less qualified
revision of the constitution; that is, they declared for a not definitely
specified monarchist restoration, for a "solution", and confessed at
the same time that they were too incompetent and too cowardly to find this
solution. The Bonapartist faction at once construed this desire for revision in
the sense of a prolongation of Bonaparte's presidency.

The constitutional solution, the retirement of Bonaparte in May, 1852,[131] the simultaneous
election of a new President by all the electors of the land, the revision of
the constitution by a Chamber of Revision during the first months of the new
presidency, is utterly inadmissible for the ruling class. The day of the new
presidential election would be the day of rendezvous for all the hostile
parties, the Legitimists, the Orléanists, the bourgeois republicans, the
revolutionists. It would have to come to a violent decision between the
different factions. Even if the party of Order should succeed in uniting around
the candidature of a neutral person outside the dynastic families, he would
still be opposed by Bonaparte. In its struggle with the people, the party of
Order is compelled constantly to increase the power of the executive. Every
increase of the executive's power increases the power of its bearer, Bonaparte.
In the same measure, therefore, as the party of Order strengthens its joint
might, it strengthens the fighting resources of Bonaparte's dynastic
pretensions, it strengthens his chance of frustrating a constitutional solution
by force on the day of the decision. He will then have, as against the party of
Order, no more scruples about the one pillar of the constitution than that
party had, as against the people, about the other pillar in the matter of the
election law. He would, seemingly even against the Assembly, appeal to
universal suffrage. In a word, the constitutional solution questions the entire
political status quo and behind the jeopardizing of the status quo the
bourgeois sees chaos, anarchy, civil war. He sees his purchases and sales, his
promissory notes, his marriages, his agreements duly acknowledged before a
notary, his mortgages, his ground rents, house rents, profits, all his
contracts and sources of income called in question on the first Sunday in May,
1852, and he cannot expose himself to this risk. Behind the jeopardizing of the
political status quo lurks the danger of the collapse of the entire bourgeois
society. The only possible solution in the framework of the bourgeoisie is the
postponement of the solution. It can save the constitutional republic only by a
violation of the constitution, by the prolongation of the power of the
President. This is also the last word of the press of Order, after the
protracted and profound debates on the “solutions” in which it
indulged after the session of the general councils. The high and mighty party
of Order thus finds itself, to its shame, compelled to take seriously the
ridiculous, commonplace, and, to it, odious person of the pseudo Bonaparte.

This dirty figure likewise deceived himself about the causes that clothed
him more and more with the character of the indispensable man. While his party
had sufficient insight to ascribe the growing importance of Bonaparte to
circumstances, he believed that he owed it solely to the magic power of his
name and his continual caricaturing of Napoleon. He became more enterprising
every day. To offset the pilgrimages to St. Leonards and Wiesbaden, he made his
round trips through France. The Bonapartists had so little faith in the magic
effect of his personality that they sent with him everywhere as claquers people
from the Society of December 10,[132] that organization of the Paris lumpen
proletariat, packed en masse into railway trains and post chaises. They put
speeches into the mouth of their marionette which, according to the reception
in the different towns, proclaimed republican resignation or perennial tenacity
as the keynote of the President's policy. In spite of all maneuvers these
journeys were anything but triumphal processions.

When Bonaparte believed he had thus made the people enthusiastic, he set out
to win the army. He caused great reviews to be held on the plain of Satory,
near Versailles, at which he sought to buy the soldiers with garlic sausages,
champagne, and cigars. Whereas the genuine Napoleon, amid the hardships of his
campaigns of conquest, knew how to cheer up his weary soldiers with outbursts
of patriarchal familiarity, the pseudo Napoleon believed it was in gratitude
that the troops shouted: Vive Napoleon, vive le saucisson! [Long live Napoleon, long live the sausage!] that is,
Hurrah for the Wurst [sausage], hurrah for
the Hanswurst [buffoon]!

These reviews led to the outbreak of the long suppressed dissension between
Bonaparte and his War Minister Hautpoul, on the one hand, and Changarnier, on
the other. In Changarnier the party of Order had found its real neutral man, in
whose case there could be no question of his own dynastic claims. It had
designated him Bonaparte's successor. In addition, Changarnier had become the
great general of the party of Order through his conduct on January 29 and June
13, 1849, the modern Alexander whose brutal intervention had, in the eyes of
the timid bourgeois, cut the Gordian knot of the revolution. At bottom just as
ridiculous as Bonaparte, he had thus become a power in the very cheapest manner
and was set up by the National Assembly to watch the President. He himself
coquetted, for example, in the matter of the salary grant, with the protection
that he gave Bonaparte, and rose up ever more overpoweringly against him and
the ministers. When, on the occasion of the election law, an insurrection was
expected, he forbade his officers to take any orders whatever from the War
Minister or the President. The press was also instrumental in magnifying the
figure of Changarnier. With the complete absence of great personalities, the
party of Order naturally found itself compelled to endow a single individual
with the strength lacking in its class as a whole and so puff up this
individual to a prodigy. Thus arose the myth of Changarnier, the
“bulwark of society.” The arrogant charlatanry, the
secretive air of importance with which Changarnier condescended to carry the
world on his shoulders, forms the most ridiculous contrast to the events during
and after the [last] Satory review, which irrefutably proved that it needed
only a stroke of the pen by Bonaparte, the infinitely little, to bring this
fantastic offspring of bourgeois fear, the colossus Changarnier, back to the
dimensions of mediocrity and transform him, society's heroic savior, into a
pensioned general.

Bonaparte had for some time been revenging himself on Changarnier by
provoking the War Minister to disputes in matters of discipline with the
irksome protector. The last review at Satory finally brought the old animosity
to a climax. The constitutional indignation of Changarnier knew no bounds when
he saw the cavalry regiments file past with the unconstitutional cry: Vive
l'Empereur! [Long live the Emperor!] In order
to forestall any unpleasant debate on this cry in the coming session of the
Chamber, Bonaparte removed War Minister Hautpoul by appointing him governor of
Algiers. In his place he put a reliable old general of the time of the Empire,
one who was fully a match for Changarnier in brutality. But so that the
dismissal of Hautpoul might not appear as a concession to Changarnier, he
simultaneously transferred General Neumayer, the right hand of the great savior
of society, from Paris to Nantes. It was Neumayer who at the last review had
induced the whole of the infantry to file past the successor of Napoleon in icy
silence. Changarnier, himself attacked in the person of Neumayer, protested and
threatened. To no purpose. After two days' negotiations, the decree
transferring Neumayer appeared in the Moniteur, and there was nothing
left for the hero of Order but to submit to discipline or resign.

Bonaparte's struggle with Changarnier is the continuation of his struggle
with the party of Order. The reopening of the National Assembly on November 11
will therefore take place under threatening auspices. It will be a storm in a
teacup. In essence the old game must go on. Meanwhile the majority of the party
of Order will, despite the clamor of the sticklers for principle in its
different factions, be compelled to prolong the power of the President.
Similarly, Bonaparte, already humbled by lack of money, will, despite all
preliminary protestations, accept this prolongation of power from the hands of
the National Assembly as simply delegated to him. Thus the solution is
postponed; the status quo continued; one faction of the party of Order
compromised, weakened, made unworkable by the other; the repression of the
common enemy, the mass of the nation, extended and exhausted — until the
economic relations themselves have again reached the point of development where
a new explosion blows into the air all these squabbling parties with their
constitutional republic.

For the peace of mind of the bourgeois it must be said, however, that the
scandal between Bonaparte and the party of Order has the result of ruining a
multitude of small capitalists on the Bourse and putting their assets into the
pockets of the big wolves of the Bourse.

Notes

14. The
continuation of the three foregoing chapters is found in the Revue in the fifth
and sixth double issue of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, the last to appear.
Here, after the great commercial crisis that broke out in England in 1847 had
first been described and the coming to a head of the political complications on
the European continent in the revolutions of February and March, 1848, had been
explained by its reactions there, it is then shown how the prosperity of trade
and industry that again set in during the course of 1848 and increased still
further in 1849 paralyzed the revolutionary upsurge and made possible the
simultaneous victories of the reaction. With special reference to France, it is
then said: — Written by Engels for the 1895 edition, as an
introductory paragraph to Section IV.

15.
Lamourette's kiss. On July 7, 1792, Bishop Adrien Lamourette, a deputy in the
Legislative Assembly, proposed that party dissensions be ended with a fraternal
kiss. The deputies enthusiastically embraced each other then, but the fraternal
embrace was soon forgotten. French wits came to use the expression to denote a
trivial love affair.

16. In the
realms of the unbelievers; referring to the non-Christian dioceses to which
Catholic bishops were assigned by the Early Church.