The French Working Class and the Presidential Election

Friedrich Engels

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Paris, Raspail or Ledru-Rollin? Socialist or Montagnard? That is the question that now divides the party of the Red Republic into two hostile camps.

What is the real issue at stake in this dispute?

Ask the journals of the Montagnards, the *Réforme*, the *Révolution*, and they will tell you that they themselves are unable to discover it; that the Socialists are setting up literally the same programme of permanent revolution, of progressive taxation and inheritance tax, of the organisation of labour, that the Mountain had set up; that there is absolutely no dispute over principles and that the whole untimely scandal has been stirred up by a few envious and ambitious persons, who deceive the “religion and the good faith” of the people and cast suspicion on the men of the people's party out of selfish motives.

Ask the journal of the Socialists, the *Peuple*, and it will answer you with bitter expectorations about the ignorance and empty-headedness of the Montagnards, with interminable juridical-moral-economic treatises and, finally, with the mysterious hint that the real issue is the new panacea of Citizen Proudhon, which is about to supplant the old socialist phrases from the school of Louis Blanc.

Ask, finally, the socialist workers, and they will answer you briefly: Ce sont des *bourgeois*, les montagnards. <They are *bourgeois*, the Montagnards.>

The only ones who hit the nail on the head are once again the workers. They want nothing to do with the Mountain, because the Mountain consists of nothing but *bourgeois*.

The socialist-democratic party already consisted, before the February [Revolution], of two different factions: first, the spokesmen, deputies, writers, lawyers, etc., with their not inconsiderable tail of petty bourgeois, who formed the actual party of the *Réforme*; second, the mass of the Paris workers, who were by no means unconditional followers of the former, but, on the contrary, very distrustful allies, now attaching themselves more closely to them, now distancing themselves further, according to whether the people of the *Réforme* acted more decisively or more waveringly. In the last months of the monarchy, the *Réforme*, as a result of its polemic with the *National*, had taken a very determined stance, and the relationship between it and the workers was very intimate.

Thus, the people of the *Réforme* also entered the provisional government as representatives of the proletariat.

How, being in the minority in the provisional government, and, incapable of enforcing the interests of the workers, they merely served the “pure” republicans to keep the workers at bay until the pure republicans had reorganised public power, which now was *their* power against the workers; how the chief of the *Réforme* party, Ledru-Rollin, allowed himself to be persuaded by Lamartine's phrases of self-sacrifice and by the charm of power to enter the Executive Commission; how he thereby split and weakened the revolutionary party, placed it partly at the disposal of the government, and thus caused the May and June insurrections to fail, and even fought against them himself – all this need not be elaborated here. The facts are still too fresh in memory.

Enough: after the June insurrection, after the fall of the Executive Commission and the elevation of the pure republicans to exclusive rule in the person of Cavaignac, all illusions concerning the development of the republic had vanished for the party of the *Réforme*, the democratic-socialist petty bourgeoisie. It had been thrust into the opposition, it was free again, made opposition again and re-established its old connections with the workers.

As long as no important questions arose, as long as it was only a matter of exposing the cowardly, treacherous and reactionary policy of Cavaignac, the workers could put up with being represented in the press by the *Réforme* and the *Révolution démocratique et sociale*. The *Vraie République* and the genuine workers’ papers had in any case already been suppressed by the state of siege, by political trials and sureties. They could likewise put up with being represented in the National Assembly by the Mountain. Raspail, Barbès, Albert were arrested, Louis Blanc and Caussidière had to flee. The clubs were partly closed, partly placed under strict surveillance, and the old laws against freedom of speech still existed and continue to exist. Every day the newspapers provided ample examples of how to use them against the workers. The workers, unable to let their own representatives speak, had to content themselves once more with those by whom they had been represented before February – the radical petty bourgeois and their spokesmen.

Then the question of the presidency arises. Three candidates are there: Cavaignac, Louis Napoleon, Ledru-Rollin. There could be no question of Cavaignac for the workers. The man who had shot them down in June with case-shot and incendiary rockets could only count on their hatred. Louis Bonaparte? They could only vote for him out of irony, in order to raise him today by the ballot and to overthrow him again tomorrow by force of arms and, with him, the honourable, “pure” bourgeois republic. And finally, Ledru-Rollin, who presented himself to the workers as the only red, socialist-democratic candidate.

So after the experiences of the provisional government, of 15 May and 24 June, the workers were asked to give a vote of confidence to the radical petty bourgeoisie and Ledru-Rollin once again? To the same people who, on 25 February, when the armed proletariat ruled Paris, when everything was to be enforced, had, instead of revolutionary deeds, only sublime soothing phrases; instead of rapid, decisive measures, only promises and delays; instead of the energy of ’93, only the flag, the phrase, the titles of ’93? To the same people who, with Lamartine and Marrast, cried: One must above all appease the *bourgeois*, and thereby forgot to carry on the revolution? To the same people who were irresolute on 15 May, and who on 23 June sent for artillery from Vincennes and battalions from Orléans and Bourges?

And yet the people might perhaps have voted for Ledru-Rollin, in order not to split the votes. But then came his speech of 25 November against Cavaignac, in which he once again placed himself on the side of the victors, reproaching Cavaignac for not having intervened energetically enough against the revolution, for not having had still more battalions in readiness against the workers.

This speech thoroughly discredited Ledru-Rollin with the workers. Even now, after five months, after he has had to pay, so to speak, on his own person for all the consequences of the June battle, even now he sides, vis-à-vis the vanquished, with the victors, and prides himself on having demanded more battalions against the insurgents than Cavaignac could muster!

And the man for whom the June fighters were not defeated quickly enough wants to be the chief of the party that has taken up the legacy of the slain of June?

After this speech, Ledru-Rollin's candidacy was lost with the Paris workers. The counter-candidacy of Raspail, put forward earlier, already surrounded by the sympathies of the workers, had won in Paris. Had the ballots of Paris decided, Raspail would now be President of the Republic.

The workers know very well that Ledru-Rollin has not yet played his last card, that he can and will still render great services to the radical party. But he has forfeited the confidence of the workers. His weakness, his petty vanity, his dependence on high-flown phrases, by which even Lamartine dominated him, *they*, the workers, have had to pay for it. No service that he can render will efface this from memory. The workers will always know that, if Ledru-Rollin becomes energetic again, his energy is only that of the armed workers who will stand behind him, driving him forward.

In giving a vote of no confidence to Ledru-Rollin, the workers at the same time gave a vote of no confidence to the entire radical petty bourgeoisie. The irresoluteness, the dependence on the traditional phrases of *dévoûment* <devotion>, etc., the forgetting of revolutionary actions over revolutionary reminiscences, are all qualities that Ledru-Rollin shares with the class he represents.

The radical petty bourgeois are only socialist because they clearly see their ruin, their transition into the proletariat, before their eyes. It is not as petty bourgeois, as owners of a small capital, but as future proletarians that they enthuse about organisation of labour and the revolutionising of the relation between capital and labour. Give them political power, and they will soon forget the organisation of labour. For political power gives them, at least in the intoxication of the first moment, the prospect of acquiring capital, of salvation from the threatening ruin. Only when the armed proletarians stand behind them with levelled bayonets will they remember their allies of yesterday. This is how they acted in February and March, and Ledru-Rollin, as their chief, was the first to act in this way. If they are now disappointed, does that alter the attitude of the workers towards them? If they come back repentant, do they have the right to demand that the workers should now, under quite different circumstances, once again walk into the trap?

That the workers will not do this, that they know where they stand with the radical petty bourgeois, they make clear to them by not voting for Ledru-Rollin, but for Raspail.

But Raspail – what then has Raspail done to deserve so well of the workers? How can one present *him* as the socialist par excellence <of the purest water> over against Ledru-Rollin?

The people know very well that Raspail is no official socialist, no system-maker by profession. The people do not want the official socialists and system-makers at all, they are sick of them. Otherwise Citizen Proudhon would be their candidate, and not the hot-blooded Raspail.

But the people have a good memory and are by no means as ungrateful as misunderstood reactionary luminaries like to say in their modesty. The people still remember very well that Raspail was the first to reproach the provisional government with its inactivity, its preoccupation with mere republican twaddle. The people have not forgotten the *Ami du Peuple*, par le citoyen <by citizen> Raspail, and because Raspail was the first to have the courage – it really took courage – to come forward in a revolutionary manner against the provisional government, and because Raspail represents no definite socialist *couleur* <colouring>, but only the social *Revolution* – that is why the people of Paris vote for Raspail.

It is not at all a matter of the few petty measures, proclaimed most solemnly in the manifesto of the Mountain as world-saving. It is a matter of the social revolution, which will bring the French quite different things than these disconnected phrases which have already become empty clichés. It is a matter of the energy to carry through this revolution. It is a matter of whether the petty bourgeoisie will have this energy, after it has already once proved impotent. And the proletariat of Paris, by voting for Raspail, answers: *No*!

Hence the astonishment of *Réforme* and *Révolution* that one can accept their phrases and yet not vote for Ledru-Rollin, who after all represents these phrases. These worthy papers, which consider themselves workers’ papers and yet are now more than ever before papers of the petty bourgeoisie, naturally cannot see that the same demand, in the mouths of the workers, is revolutionary, in their mouths a mere phrase. For otherwise they would have to be without their own illusions!

And Citizen Proudhon and his *Peuple*? More on this tomorrow.

Written at the beginning of December 1848 during Engels’s stay in Switzerland for the *Neue Rheinische Zeitung*. The article remained in manuscript. According to the handwriting.