Real Causes Why the French Proletarians Remained Inactive 213 

papers of the stockjobbers, the cotton-lords, and the landed 
aristocracy strive to out-blackguard each other. These gentlemen 
might as well be remembered of the real state of the question. 
They have every reason to cry out, for whatever Louis Napoleon 
took from others, he took it not from the working-classes, but 
from those very classes whose interests in England the aforesaid 
portion of the press represents. Not that Louis Napoleon would 
not, quite as gladly, have robbed the working-classes of anything 
that might appear desirable to him, but it is a fact that in 
December last the French working-classes could not be robbed of 
anything, because everything worth taking had already been taken 
from them during the three years and a half of middle-class 
parliamentary government that had followed the great defeats of 
June 1848. In fact, what, on the eve of the 2nd of December, 
remained to be taken from them? The suffrage? They had been 
stripped of that by the Electoral Law of May 1850. The right of 
meeting? That had long been confined to the “safe” and 
“well-disposed”’ classes of society. ‘The freedom of the press? Why, 
the real proletarian press had been drowned in the blood of the 
insurgents of the great battle of June, and that shadow of it which 
survived for a time, had long since disappeared under the 
pressure of gagging laws, revised and improved upon every 
succeeding session of the National Assembly. Their arms? Every 
pretext had been taken profit of, in order to ensure the exclusion 
from the National Guard of all working-men, and to confine the 
possession of arms to the wealthier classes of society. 

Thus the working-classes had, at the moment of the late coup d état, 
very little, if anything, to lose in the chapter of political privileges. 
But, on the other hand, the middle and capitalist classes were at that 
time in possession of political omnipotence. Theirs was the press, the 
right of meeting, the right to bear arms, the suffrage, the parliament. 
Legitimists and Orleanists, landholders and fundholders, after thirty 
years’ struggle, had at last found a neutral ground in the republican 
form of government. And for them it was indeed a hard case to be 
robbed of all this, in the short space of a few hours, and to be 
reduced at once to the state of political nullity to which they 
themselves had reduced the working people. That is the reason why 
the English “respectable” press is so furious at Louis Napoleon’s 
lawless indignities. As long as these indignities, either of the 
executive government or the parliament, were directed against the 
working-classes, why that, of course, was right enough, but as soon as 
a similar policy was extended to “the better sort of people,” the 
“wealthy intellects of the nation,” ah, that was quite different, and it 

behoved every lover of liberty to raise his voice in defence of 
“principle.” 

The struggle, then, on the 2nd of December lay principally 
between the middle-classes and Louis Napoleon, the representative 
of the army. That Louis Napoleon knew this, he showed by the 
orders given to the army during the struggle of the 4th, to fire 
principally upon “the gentlemen in broad-cloth.” The glorious 
battle of the boulevards is known well enough; and a series of 
volleys upon closed windows and unarmed bourgeois was quite 
sufficient to stifle, in the middle-class of Paris, every movement of 
resistance. 

On the other hand, the working-classes, although they could no 
longer be deprived of any direct political privilege, were not at all 
disinterested in the question. They had to lose, above all, the great 
chance of May 1852, when all powers of the state were to expire 
simultaneously, and when, for the first time since June 1848, they 
expected to have a fair field for a struggle; and aspiring as they 
were to political supremacy, they could not allow any violent 
change of government to occur, without being called upon to 
interpose between the contending parties as supreme umpires, and 
to impose to them their will as the law of the land. Thus, they 
could not let the occasion pass without showing the two opposing 
forces that there was a third power in the field, which, if 
momentarily removed from the theatre of official and parliamen- 
tary contentions, was yet ever ready to step in as soon as the scene 
was changed to its own sphere of action,—to the street. But then, it 
must not be forgotten that even in this case the proletarian party 
laboured under great disadvantages. If they rose against the 
usurper, did they not virtually defend and prepare the restoration 
and dictatorship of that very parliament which had proved their 
most relentless enemy? And if they at once declared for a 
revolutionary government, would they not, as was actually the case 
in the provinces, frighten the middle-class so much as to drive 
them to a union with Louis Napoleon and the army? Besides, it 
must be remembered that the very strength and flower of the 
revolutionary working-class have been either killed during the 
insurrection of June, or transported and imprisoned under 
innumerable different pretences ever since that event. And finally, 
there was this one fact which was alone sufficient to ensure to 
Napoleon the neutrality of the great majority of the working- 
classes: Trade was excellent, and Englishmen know it well enough, 
that with a fully employed and well-paid working-class, no 
agitation, much less a revolution, can be got up. 

Real Causes Why the French Proletarians Remained Inactive 215 

It is now very commonly said in this country that the French 
must be a set of old women or else they would not submit to such 
treatment. I very willingly grant that, as a nation, the French 
deserve, at the present moment, such adorning epithets. But we 
all know that the French are, in their opinions and actions, more 
dependent upon success than any other civilised nation. As soon as 
a certain turn is given to events in this country, they almost 
without resistance follow up that turn, until the last extreme in 
that direction has. been reached. The defeat of June 1848 gave 
such a counter-revolutionary turn to France and, through her, to 
the whole continent. The present ascension of the Napoleonic 
empire is but the crowning fact of a long series of counter- 
revolutionary victories, that filled up the three last years; and once 
engaged upon the declivity, it was to be expected that France 
would go on falling until she reached the bottom. How near she 
may be to that bottom it is not easy to say; but that she is getting 
nearer to it very rapidly every one must see. And if the past 
history of France is not to be belied by future deeds of the French 
people, we may safely expect that the deeper the degradation, the 
more sudden and the more dazzling will be the result. Events, in 
these times of ours, are succeeding each other at a tremendously 
rapid rate, and what it took formerly a nation a whole century to 
go through, is now-a-days very easily overcome in a couple of 
years. The old empire lasted fourteen years; it will be exceedingly 
lucky for the imperial eagle if the revival, upon the most shabby 
scale, of this piece of performance will last out so many months. 
And then? 

II 

[Notes to the People, No. 48, March 27, 1852] 

Although at a first glance it might appear that in the present 
moment Louis Napoleon, in France, sways with undisturbed 
omnipotence, and that, perhaps, the only power, besides his own, is 
that of courtly intrigues that beset him on all sides, and plot 
against each other for the purpose of obtaining sole favour with, 
and influence over, the French autocrat; yet, in reality, things are 
quite different. The whole secret of Louis Napoleon’s success is 
this, that by the traditions of his name he has been placed in a 
position to hold, for a moment, the balance of the contending classes of 
French society. For it is a fact that under the cloak of the state of 
siege by military despotism which now veils France, the struggle of 

the different classes of society is going on as fiercely as ever. That 
struggle, having been carried on for the last four years with 
powder and shot has only now taken a different form. In the same 
way as any protracted war will exhaust and fatigue the most 
powerful nation, so has the open, bloody war of the last year 
fatigued and momentarily exhausted the military strength of the 
different classes. But class-war is independent of actual warfare, 
and not always needs barricades and bayonets to be carried on 
with; class-war is inextinguishable as long as the various classes 
with their opposed and conflicting interests and social positions 
are in existence; and we have not yet heard that since the blessed 
advent of the mock-Napoleon, France had ceased to count among 
her inhabitants large landed proprietors, and agricultural labour- 
ers, or métayers, large money-lenders, and small mortgaged 
freeholders, capitalists, and working-men. 

The position of the different classes in France is just this: the 
revolution of February had for ever upset the power of the large 
bankers and stockjobbers; after their downfall every other class of 
the populations of the towns had had their day. First, the 
working-men, during the days of the first revolutionary excite- 
ment,—then the petty republican shopkeepers under Ledru- 
Rollin,—then the republican fraction of the bourgeoisie under 
Cavaignac,—lastly, the united royalist middle-classes, under the 
late National Assembly. None of these classes had been able to 
hold fast the power they for a moment possessed; and latterly, 
among the ever reappearing divisions of the legitimist royalists, or 
the landed interest, and the Orleans royalists, or the moneyed 
interest, it appeared inevitable that power would again slip from 
their hands, and return to those of the working-class, who 
themselves might be expected to have become fitter to turn it to 
account. But then there was another mighty class in France, 
mighty, not by the large individual properties of its members, but 
by its numbers and its very wants. That class—the small, 
mortgaged freeholders, making up at least three-fifths of the 
French nation—was slow to act, and slow to be acted upon, as all 
rural populations; it stuck to its old traditions, distrusted the 
wisdom of the apostles of all parties from the towns, and 
remembering that it had been happy, free from debt, and 
comparatively rich in the time of the Emperor,* laid, by the means 
of universal suffrage, the executive power in the hands of his 
nephew. The active agitation of the democratic socialist party, and 

* Napoleon I.— Ed. 

Real Causes Why the French Proletarians Remained Inactive 217 

more still the disappointment which Louis Napoleon’s measures 
soon prepared for them, led part of this peasant-class into the 
ranks of the Red party; but the mass of them stuck to their 
traditions, and said that if Louis Napoleon had not yet proved the 
Messiah he was expected to be, it was the fault of the National 
Assembly that gagged him. Besides the mass of the peasantry, 
Louis Napoleon, himself a species of lofty swell-mob’s man, and 
surrounded by the élite of the fashionable swell mob, found 
support in the most degraded and dissolute portion of the 
population of the towns. This element of strength he united into a 
paid body called the “Society of the 10th of December.” Thus, 
relying upon the peasantry for the vote; upon the mob for noisy 
demonstrations, upon the army, ever ready to upset a government 
of parliamentary talkers, pretending to speak the voice of the 
working-classes, he could quietly wait for the moment when the 
squabbles of the middle-class parliament would allow him to step 
in and assume a more or less absolute sway over those classes, 
none of which, after a four years’ bloody struggle, had proved 
strong enough to seize upon a lasting supremacy. And this he did 
on the 2nd of December last. 

Thus the reign of Louis Napoleon is not superseding the’ 
class-war. It merely suspends for a while the bloody outbreaks 
which mark from time to time the efforts of this or that class to 
gain or maintain political power. None of these classes were strong 
enough to venture at a new battle, with any chance of success. The 
very division of classes favoured, for the time being, Napoleon’s 
projects. He upset the middle-class parliament, and destroyed the 
political power of the middle-class; might not the proletarians 
rejoice at this? And certainly, the proletarians could not be 
expected to fight for an assembly that had been their most deadly 
enemy! But at the same time Louis Napoleon’s usurpation 
menaced the common fighting-ground of all classes, and the last 
vantage-grounds of the working-class—the Republic; why, as soon 
as the working-men stood up for the defence of the Republic, the 
middle-class joined the very man that had just ousted them in 
order to defeat, in the working-class, the common enemy of 
society. ‘Thus it was in Paris—thus in the provinces,—and the 
army won an easy victory over the contending and opposing 
classes; and after the victory, the millions of the imperial- 
ist peasantry stepped in with their vote, and with the help of 
official falsifications, established the government of Louis 
Napoleon as that of the representative of almost unanimous 
France. 

But even now, class struggles and class interests are at the 
bottom of every important act of Louis Napoleon’s, as we shall see 
in our next. | 

iil 

[Notes to the People, No. 50, April 10, 1852) 

We repeat: Louis Napoleon came to power because the open 
war carried on during the last four years between the different 
classes of French society had worn them out, had shattered their 
respective fighting armies, and because under such circumstances, 
for a time at least, the struggle of these classes can only be carried 
on in a peaceful and legal way, by competition, by trades’ 
organisations, and by all the different means of pacific struggle by 
which the opposition of class against class has now been carried on 
in England for above a century. Under these circumstances it is in 
a manner of speaking in the interest of all contending classes that 
a so-called strong government should exist which might repress and 
keep down all those minor, local and scattered outbreaks of open 
hostility, which, without leading to any result, trouble the 
development of the struggle in its new shape by retarding the 
recovery of strength for a new pitched battle. This circumstance 
may in some way explain the undeniable general acquiescence of 
the French in the present government. How long it may be ere 
both the working and capitalist classes may have regained strength 
and self-reliance enough to come out and openly claim, each for 
themselves, the dictatorship of France, of course nobody can tell; 
but at the rate events are going now-a-days, either of these classes 
will most likely be brought into the field unexpectedly, and thus 
the fight of class against class in the streets may be renewed long 
before, from the relative or absolute strength of the parties, such 
an occurrence might seem probable. For, if the French revolution- 
ary, that is the working-class party, has to wait till it is again in 
the same conditions of strength as in February 1848, it might 
resign itself to submissive passiveness of some ten years, which it 
certainly will not do; and at the same time, a government like that 

of Louis Napoleon is placed in the necessity, as we shall see by and - 

by, to entangle itself and France into such difficulties as ultimately 
must be solved by a great revolutionary blow. We will not speak of 
the chances of war, nor of other occurrences which may, or may 
not come to pass; we will only mention one event which is as sure 
to come as the sun is sure to rise tomorrow morning, and that is a 

« } ON ‘S810N jUalIng,, JaquinN sTyy uy peay 

Vol. II.) Saturday, March 27, 1852. —[No. 48. 

ERNEST JONES, 

OF THE MIDDLE TEMPLE, BARRISTER AT LAW, 

Author of the Wood Spirit, Lord Lindsay, My Life, History of the 
Working Classes, Confessions of a King, Recollections of a Student, 
The New World, Beldagon Church, Painter of Florence, 
Canterbury versus Rome. &c., §e. 

PRICE TWOPENCE. 

CONTENTS: 
The People’s Anthem wee ste 933 Labor's Grievances _ ses 942 
Current Notes... aes ee 933 THe Craatisr Movement ies 944 
Woman's Wrongs... ne sis 939 | Continental Notes ise ite 948 
Wondon: 

J. PAVEY, 47, HOLYWELL STREET. 

1852. 

Green & Co., Printers, 32, Castle Street, Holborn. 

Read in this Number “Continental Notes.” 

at ‘SHoday istz1ey),, Jaquinyy sry} ur peay 

Title-page of the journal Notes to the People, in which Engels’ article “Real Causes 
Why the French Proletarians Remained Comparatively Inactive in December Last” 

was published — 

Real Causes Why the French Proletarians Remained Inactive 221 

general commercial and industrial revulsion. The bad trade and 
bad harvests of 1846 and 1847, made the revolution of 1848; and 
there are ten chances to one, that in 1853 trade, all over the 
world, will be far deeper uprooted and far more lastingly upset 
than ever it was before.'*” And who is there who thinks the ship, 
Louis Napoleon sails in, [is] sea-worthy enough to stand the gales 
that then must of necessity spring up? 

But let us look at the position in which the bastard-eagle found 
himself on the evening of his victory. He had for supporters the 
army, the clergy, and the peasantry. He had been opposed in his 
attempt by the middle-class (comprising the large landed pro- 
prietors), and the Socialists or revolutionary working-men. Once 
at the head of the government, he had not only to retain those 
parties that brought him there, but also to gain over, or at least to 
conciliate to the new state of things, as many as possible of those 
that had opposed him hitherto. As to the army, the clergy, the 
government officials and the members of that conspiracy of 
place-hunters by which he had long since surrounded himself, 
direct bribes, ready money, open plunder of the public resources, 
was the only thing required; and we have seen how quick Louis 
Napoleon has been at coming down with the cash, or at finding 
out berths for his friends which gave them glorious opportunities 
for enriching themselves at once. Look at DeMorny, who went into 
office a beggar, crushed by a load of debts, and who, four weeks 
afterwards, walked out again with debts paid and what even in the 
neighbourhood of Belgrave Square’*° would be called a handsome 
independence besides! But to deal with the peasantry, with the 
large landed proprietors, with the funds, monied, manufacturing, 
shipping, trading and shop-keeping interests, and lastly with that 
most formidable question of the century, the labour- 
question—that was quite another thing. For all the silencing 
measures of the government notwithstanding, the interests of 
these different classes remained as opposed as ever, although 
there was no longer a press, a parliament, a meeting-platform to 
proclaim this unpleasant fact; and thus, whatever the government 
might try to do for one class, was sure to hurt the interest of 
another. Whatever Louis Napoleon might attempt, he was to be 
met everywhere by the question, “who pays the piper?”—a 
question which has upset more governments than all other 
questions, Militia questions, Reform questions, &c., together. And 
although Louis Napoleon has already made his predecessor Louis 
Philippe contribute a good share to pay the piper,'”’ yet the piper 
requires a good deal more. 

We shall begin, in our next, to trace the position of the different 
classes of society in France, and to inquire how far there were any 
means at the disposal of the present government to improve that 
position. We shall at the same time review what that government 
has attempted and will most likely attempt later on for this 
purpose, and thus we shall collect materials from which to draw a 
correct conclusion as to the position and future chances of the 
man who is now doing his best to bring into disrepute the name of 
Napoleon.