“Neue Rheinische Zeitung” — The French Foreign Policy

The French Foreign Policy

[“Neue Rheinische Zeitung” No. 263, April 4, 1849]

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Cologne, April 3. The session of the French National Assembly of March 31 was distinguished by the speech of the “little nimble man”, M. Thiers, who with cynical frankness and unambiguous clarity apologised for the Vienna Treaties of 1815 and maintained them as the foundation of the existing political state of Europe. Was the little man not fully justified in holding up to ridicule the contradiction of allowing these treaties to subsist in fact, while repudiating them in legal phraseology? And that was the prudent modus vivendi of the Provisional Government as much as of Cavaignac. Barrot’s foreign policy was the necessary consequence of Cavaignac’s policy, just as Cavaignac’s foreign policy was the necessary consequence of Lamartine’s policy. Lamartine, like the Provisional Government as a whole, whose foreign organ he was, betrayed Italy and Poland under the pretext of not impeding the internal development of the French Republic. The clash of arms would have been a discord in his propaganda of fine phrases. Just as the Provisional Government pretended to be able to extinguish the antagonism between the bourgeois class and the working class with the phrase of “fraternisation” and to conjure away the class struggle, so it did with the antagonism between nations and foreign war. Under the aegis of the Provisional Government, the subjugators of the Poles, Italians, and Hungarians reconstituted themselves simultaneously with the French bourgeoisie, which at the end of June translated Lamartine’s fraternisation into deeds. Cavaignac maintained peace abroad in order to conduct the civil war undisturbed at home and not to endanger the annihilation of the vanquished red republic, the workers’ republic, by the respectable moderate republic, by the bourgeois republic. Under Cavaignac, the old Holy Alliance was restored in Europe, just as in France the new

holy alliance was formed among Legitimists, Philippists, Bonapartists, and “respectable” Republicans. The ministry of this double holy alliance is Odilon Barrot. His foreign policy is the policy of this holy alliance. He needs the victory of counter-revolution abroad in order to complete the counter-revolution in France itself.

In the session of the National Assembly of March 31, the Provisional Government disavowed Cavaignac; Cavaignac rightly maintains that he is a legitimate descendant of the Provisional Government, and in turn disavows Odilon Barrot, who, undisturbed, preserves a meaningful silence—that the meaning of the February Revolution is the Vienna Treaties of 1815. Flocon declares, without being disavowed by Barrot, that this ministry has for two days formally placed Italy under interdict and refused passports to all Frenchmen, Poles, and Italians who wish to go there. Does Barrot not deserve to become Prime Minister to Henry V!

Ledru-Rollin, in his reply to Thiers, for his part confesses:

“Yes, I must confess, I acted wrongly; the Provisional Government should have sent its soldiers to the frontiers, not to conquer, but to protect our oppressed brothers, and at this moment there would be no despots left in Europe. But if we then wavered in beginning the war, the fault lay with the monarchy, which had exhausted our finances and emptied our arsenals.”