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 III. Consequences of June 13, 1849

On December 20 the Janus head of the constitutional
republic had still shown only one face, the executive face with
the indistinct, plain features of L. Bonaparte; on May 28, 1849, it showed its
second face, the legislative, pitted with the scars that the orgies of the
Restoration and the July Monarchy had left behind. With the
Legislative National Assembly the phenomenon of the constitutional
republic was completed, that is, the republican form of government in
which the rule of the bourgeois class is constituted, the common rule,
therefore, of the two great royalist factions that form the French bourgeoisie,
the coalesced Legitimists and Orléanists, the party of Order. While the
French republic thus became the property of the coalition of the royalist
parties, the European coalition of the counterrevolutionary powers embarked
simultaneously upon a general crusade against the last places of refuge of the
March revolutions. Russia invaded Hungary, Prussia marched against the army
defending the Reich constitution and Oudinot bombarded Rome. The European
crisis was evidently approaching a decisive turning point; the eyes of all
Europe were turned on Paris, and the eyes of all Paris on the Legislative
Assembly.

On June 11 Ledru-Rollin mounted its tribune. He made no speech; he
formulated an indictment of the ministers, naked, unadorned, factual,
concentrated, forceful.

The attack on Rome is an attack on the constitution; the attack on the Roman
republic is an attack on the French republic. Article 5 of the constitution[98] reads: “The French
republic never employs its forces against the liberty of any people
whatsoever” – and the President employs the French army against
Roman liberty. Article 54 of the constitution forbids the executive power to
declare any war whatsoever without the consent of the National Assembly. The
Constituent Assembly's resolution of May 8 expressly commands the ministers to
make the Rome expedition conform with the utmost speed to its original mission;
it therefore just as expressly prohibits war on Rome – and Oudinot
bombards Rome. Thus Ledru-Rollin called the constitution itself as a witness
for the prosecution against Bonaparte and his ministers. At the royalist
majority of the National Assembly, he, the tribune of the constitution, hurled
the threatening declaration: “The republicans will know how to command
respect for the constitution by every means, be it even by force of
arms!” “By force of arms!” came the hundredfold echo
of the Montagne. The majority answered with a terrible tumult; the President of
the National Assembly called Ledru-Rollin to order – Ledru-Rollin
repeated the challenge, and finally laid on the President's table a motion for
the impeachment of Bonaparte and his ministers. By 361 votes to 203, the
National Assembly resolved to pass on from the bombardment of Rome to the next
item on the agenda.

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

To be sure, the constitution forbade any attack on the liberty of foreign
peoples, but what the French army attacked in Rome was, according to the
ministry, not “liberty” but the “despotism of anarchy.”
Had the Montagne still not comprehended, all experiences in the Constituent
Assembly notwithstanding, that the interpretation of the constitution did not
belong to those who had made it, but only to those who had accepted it? That
its wording must be construed in its viable meaning and that the bourgeois
meaning was its only viable meaning That Bonaparte and the royalist majority of
the National Assembly were the authentic interpreters of the constitution, as
the priest is the authentic interpreter of the Bible, and the judge the
authentic interpreter of the laws Should the National Assembly, freshly emerged
from the general elections, feel itself bound by the testamentary provisions of
the dead Constituent Assembly, whose will an Odilon Barrot had broken while it
was alive? When Ledru-Rollin cited the Constituent Assembly's resolution of May
8, had he forgotten that the same Constituent Assembly on May 11 had rejected
his first motion for the impeachment of Bonaparte and the ministers; that it
had acquitted the President and the ministers; that it had thus sanctioned the
attack on Rome as “constitutional”; that he only lodged an appeal
against a judgment already delivered – that he, lastly, appealed from the
republican Constituent Assembly to the royalist Legislative Assembly? The
constitution itself calls insurrection to its aid by summoning, in a special
article, every citizen to protect it. Ledru-Rollin based himself on this
article. But at the same time, are not the public authorities organized for the
defense of the constitution, and does not the violation of the constitution
begin only from the moment when one of the constitutional public authorities
rebels against the other? And the President of the republic, the ministers of
the republic, and the National Assembly of the republic were in the most
harmonious agreement.

What the Montagne attempted on June 11 was “an insurrection within
the limits of pure reason,” that is, a purely parliamentary
insurrection. The majority of the Assembly, intimidated by the
prospect of an armed rising of the popular masses, was, in Bonaparte and the
ministers, to destroy its own power and the significance of its own election.
Had not the Constituent Assembly similarly attempted to annul the election of
Bonaparte, when it insisted so obstinately on the dismissal of the
Barrot-Falloux Ministry?

Neither were there lacking from the time of the Convention models for
parliamentary insurrections which had suddenly transformed completely the
relation between the majority and the minority – and should the young
Montagne not succeed where the old had succeeded? – nor did relations at
the moment seem unfavorable for such an undertaking. Popular unrest in Paris
had reached an alarmingly high point – the army, according to its vote at
the election, did not seem favorably inclined toward the government; the
legislative majority itself was still too young to have become consolidated,
and in addition it consisted of old gentlemen. If the Montagne were successful
in a parliamentary insurrection, the helm of state would fall directly into its
hands. The democratic petty bourgeoisie, for its part, wished, as always, for
nothing more fervently than to see the battle fought out in the clouds over its
head between the departed spirits of parliament. Finally, both of them, the
democratic petty bourgeoisie and its representatives, the Montagne, would,
through a parliamentary insurrection, achieve their great purpose, that of
breaking the power of the bourgeoisie without unleashing the proletariat or
letting it appear otherwise than in perspective; the proletariat would have
been used without becoming dangerous.

After the vote of the National Assembly on June 11, a conference took place
between some members of the Montagne and delegates of the secret workers'
societies. The latter urged that the attack be started the same evening. The
Montagne decisively rejected this plan. On no account did it want to let the
leadership slip out of its hands; its allies were as suspect to it as its
antagonists, and rightly so. The memory of June, 1848, surged through the ranks
of the Paris proletariat more vigorously than ever. Nevertheless it was chained
to the alliance with the Montagne. The latter represented the largest part of
the departments – it had increased its influence in the army; it had at
its disposal the democratic section of the National Guard; it had the moral
power of the shopkeepers behind it. To begin the revolution at this moment
against the will of the Montagne would have meant for the proletariat,
decimated moreover by cholera and driven out of Paris in considerable numbers
by unemployment, to repeat uselessly the June days of 1848, without the
situation which had forced this desperate struggle. The proletarian delegates
did the only rational thing. They obligated the Montagne to compromise itself,
that is, to come out beyond the confines of the parliamentary struggle, in the
event that its bill of impeachment was rejected. During the whole of June 13
the proletariat maintained this same skeptically watchful attitude, and awaited
a seriously engaged irrevocable melee between the democratic National Guard and
the army, in order then to plunge into the fight and push the revolution
forward beyond the petty bourgeois aim set for it. In the event of victory a
proletarian commune was already formed which would take its place beside the
official government. The Parisian workers had learned in the bloody school of
June, 1848.

On June 12 Minister Lacrosse himself brought forward in the Legislative
Assembly the motion to proceed at once to the discussion of the bill of
impeachment. During the night the government had made every provision for
defense and attack; the majority of the National Assembly was determined to
drive the rebellious minority out into the streets; the minority itself could
no longer retreat; the die was cast; the bill of impeachment was rejected by
377 votes to 8. The “Mountain,” which had abstained from voting,
rushed resentfully into the propaganda halls of the “pacific
democracy,” the newspaper offices of the Démocratie Pacifique.[99]

Its withdrawal from the parliament building broke its strength as withdrawal
from the earth broke the strength of Antaeus, her giant son. Samsons in the
precincts of the Legislative Assembly, the Montagnards were only Philistines in
the precincts of the “pacific democracy.” A long, noisy, rambling
debate ensued. The Montagne was determined to compel respect for the
constitution by every means, “only not by force of arms.”
In this decision it was supported by a manifesto[100] and by a deputation of “Friends of the
Constitution.” “Friends of the Constitution” was what the
wreckage of the coterie of the National, the bourgeois-republican
party, called itself. While six of its remaining parliamentary representatives
had voted against, the others in a body voting for, the
rejection of the bill of impeachment, while Cavaignac placed his saber
at the disposal of the party of Order, the larger, extra-parliamentary part of
the coterie greedily seized the opportunity to emerge from its position of a
political pariah and to press into the ranks of the democratic party. Did they
not appear as the natural shield bearers of this party, which hid itself behind
their shield, behind their principles, behind the
constitution?

Till break of day the “Mountain” was in labor. It gave birth to
“a proclamation to the people,” which on the morning of
June occupied a more or less shamefaced place in two socialist journals.[101] It declared the
President, the ministers, and the majority of the Legislative Assembly
“outside the constitution” and summoned the National
Guard, the army, and finally also the people “to arise.”
“Long live the Constitution!” was the slogan it put
forward, a slogan that signified nothing other than “Down with the
revolution!”

In conformity with the constitutional proclamation of the Mountain, there
was a so-called peaceful demonstration of the petty bourgeois on June
13, that is, a street procession from the Chateau d'Eau through the Boulevards,
30,000 strong, mainly National Guardsmen, unarmed, with an admixture of members
of the secret workers' sections, moving along with the cry: “Long
live the Constitution!” which was uttered mechanically, icily, and
with a bad conscience by the members of the procession itself, and thrown back
ironically by the echo of the people that surged along the sidewalks, instead
of swelling up like thunder. From the many-voiced song the chest notes were
missing. And when the procession swung by the meeting hall of the
“Friends of the Constitution” and a hired herald of the
constitution appeared on the housetop, violently cleaving the air with his
claquer hat and from tremendous lungs letting the catch – cry
“Long live the Constitution!” fall like hail on the heads
of the pilgrims, they themselves seemed overcome for a moment by the comedy of
the situation. It is known how the procession, having arrived at the
termination of the Rue de la Paix, was received in the Boulevards by the
dragoons and chasseurs of Changarnier in an altogether unparliamentary way, how
in a trice it scattered in all directions, and how it threw behind it a few
shouts of “To arms” only in order that the parliamentary call to
arms of June 11 might be fulfilled.

The majority of the Montagne assembled in the Rue du Hasard scattered when
this violent dispersion of the peaceful procession, the muffled rumors of
murder of unarmed citizens on the Boulevards, and the growing tumult in the
streets seemed to herald the approach of a rising. Ledru-Rollin at the
head of a small band of deputies saved the honor of the Mountain. Under the
protection of the Paris Artillery, which had assembled in the Palais National,
they betook themselves to the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers [Museum of arts and trades, an educational institution in
Paris], where the fifth and sixth legions of the National Guard were to
arrive. But the Montagnards waited in vain for the fifth and sixth legions;
these discreet National Guards left their representatives in the lurch; the
Paris Artillery itself prevented the people from throwing up barricades;
chaotic disorder made any decision impossible; the troops of the line advanced
with fixed bayonets; some of the representatives were taken prisoner, while
others escaped. Thus ended June 13.

If June 23, 1848, was the insurrection of the revolutionary proletariat,
June 13, I849, was the insurrection of the democratic petty bourgeois, each of
these two insurrections being the classically pure expression of the
class which had been its vehicle.

Only in Lyons did it come to an obstinate, bloody conflict.[102] Here, where the
industrial bourgeoisie and the industrial proletariat stand directly opposed to
one another, where the workers' movement is not, as in Paris, included in and
determined by the general movement, June 13, in its repercussion, lost its
original character. Wherever else it broke out in the provinces it did not
kindle fire – a cold lightning flash.

June 13 closes the first period in the life of the constitutional
republic, which had attained its normal existence on May 28, 1849, with
the meeting of the Legislative Assembly. The whole period of this prologue is
filled with vociferous struggle between the party of Order and the Montagne,
between the big bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie, which strove in vain
against the consolidation of the bourgeois republic, for which it had itself
continuously conspired in the Provisional Government and in the Executive
Commission, and for which, during the June days, it had fought fanatically
against the proletariat. The thirteenth of June breaks its resistance and makes
the legislative dictatorship of the united royalists a fait accompli.
From this moment the National Assembly is only a Committee of Public Safety
of the party of Order.

Paris had put the President, the ministers, and the majority of the National
Assembly in a “state of impeachment”; they put Paris in a
“state of siege.” The Mountain had declared the majority
of the Legislative Assembly “outside the constitution”;
for violation of the constitution the majority handed over the Mountain to the
haute cour and proscribed everything in it that still had vital force.[103] It was decimated to a
rump without head or heart. The minority had gone so far as to attempt
a parliamentary insurrection – the majority elevated its
parliamentary despotism to law. It decreed new “standing
orders,” which annihilate the freedom of the tribune and authorize
the president of the National Assembly to punish representatives for violation
of the standing orders with censure, with fines, with stoppage of their
salaries, with suspension of membership, with incarceration. Over the rump of
the Montagne it hung the rod instead of the sword. The remainder of the
deputies of the Montagne owed it to their honor to make a mass exit. By such an
act the dissolution of the party of Order would have been hastened. It would
have had to break up into its original component parts the moment not even the
semblance of an opposition would hold it together any longer.

Simultaneously with their parliamentary power, the democratic petty
bourgeois were robbed of their armed power through the dissolution of
the Paris Artillery and the eighth, ninth, and twelfth legions of the National
Guard. On the other hand, the legion of high finance, which on June 13 had
raided the print shops of Boule and Roux, demolished the presses, played havoc
with the offices of the republican journals, and arbitrarily arrested editors,
compositors, printers, shipping clerks, and errand boys, received encouraging
approval from the tribune of the National Assembly. All over France the
disbanding of National Guards suspected of republicanism was repeated.

A new press law, a new law of association, a new law
on the state of siege, the prisons of Paris overflowing, the political
refugees driven out, all the journals that go beyond the limits of the
National suspended, Lyons and the five departments surrounding it
abandoned to the brutal persecution of military despotism, the courts
ubiquitous, and the army of officials, so often purged, purged once more
– these were the inevitable, the constantly recurring
commonplaces of victorious reaction, worth mentioning after the massacres
and the deportations of June only because this time they were directed not only
against Paris but also against the departments, not only against the
proletariat but, above all, against the middle classes.

The repressive laws by which the declaration of a state of siege was left to
the discretion of the government, the press still more firmly muzzled, and the
right of association annihilated, absorbed the whole of the legislative
activity of the National Assembly during the months of June, July, and
August.

However, this epoch is characterized not by the exploitation of victory
in fact, but in principle; not by the resolutions of the
National Assembly, but by the grounds advanced for these resolutions; not by
the thing but by the phrase; not by the phrase but by the accent and the
gesture which enliven the phrase. The brazen, unreserved expression of
royalist sentiments, the contemptuously aristocratic insults to the
republic, the coquettishly frivolous babbling of restoration aims in a word,
the boastful violation of republican decorum – give its peculiar
tone and color to this period. Long live the Constitution! was the battle cry
of the vanquished of June 13. The victors were therefore
absolved from the hypocrisy of constitutional, that is, republican, speech. The
counterrevolution subjugated Hungary, Italy, and Germany, and they believed
that the restoration was already at the gates of France. Among the masters of
ceremonies of the factions of Order there ensued a real competition to document
their royalism in the Moniteur, and to confess, repent, and crave pardon
before God and man for liberal sins perchance committed by them under the
monarchy. No day passed without the February Revolution being declared a
national calamity from the tribune of the National Assembly, without some
Legitimist provincial cabbage-junker solemnly stating that he had never
recognized the republic, without one of the cowardly deserters of and traitors
to the July Monarchy relating the belated deeds of heroism in the performance
of which only the philanthropy of Louis Philippe or other misunderstandings had
hindered him. What was admirable in the February days was not the magnanimity
of the victorious people, but the self-sacrifice and moderation of the
royalists, who had allowed it to be victorious. One Representative of the
People proposed to divert part of the money destined for the relief of those
wounded in February to the Municipal Guards,[104] who alone in those
days had deserved well of the fatherland. Another wanted to have an equestrian
statue decreed to the Duke of Orléans in the Place du Carrousel. Thiers called
the constitution a dirty piece of paper. There appeared in succession on the
tribune Orléanists, to repent of their conspiracy against the legitimate
monarchy by Legitimists, who reproached themselves with having hastened the
overthrow of monarchy in general by resisting the illegitimate monarchy;
Thiers, who repented of having intrigued against Molé; Molé, who repented of
having intrigued against Guizot; Barrot, who repented of having intrigued
against all three. The cry “Long live the Social-Democratic
Republic!” was declared unconstitutional; the cry “Long live the
Republic!” was prosecuted as social-democratic. On the anniversary of the
Battle of Waterloo,[105]
a representative declared: “I fear an invasion of the Prussians less than
the entry of the revolutionary refugees into France.” To the complaints
about the terrorism organized in Lyons and the neighboring departments,
Baraguay d'Hilliers answered: “I prefer the white terror to the red
terror.” And the Assembly applauded frantically every time an epigram
against the republic, against the revolution, against the constitution, for the
monarchy, or for the Holy Alliance fell from the lips of its orators. Every
infringement of the minutest republican formality – for example, that of
addressing the representatives as citoyens – filled the knights of order
with enthusiasm.

The by-elections in Paris on July 8, held under the influence of the state
of siege and of the abstention of a great part of the proletariat from the
ballot box, the taking of Rome by the French army, the entry into Rome of the
red eminences[106] and,
in their train, of inquisition and monkish terrorism, added fresh victories to
the victory of June and increased the intoxication of the party of Order.

Finally, in the middle of August, half with the intention of attending the
Department Councils just assembled, half through exhaustion from the
tendentious orgy of many months, the royalists decreed a two – month
recess of the National Assembly. With transparent irony they left behind a
commission of twenty-five representatives, the cream of the Legitimists and the
Orléanists, a Molé and a Changarnier, as proxies for the National Assembly and
as guardians of the republic. The irony was more profound than they
suspected. They, condemned by history to help to overthrow the monarchy they
loved, were destined by it to conserve the republic they hated.

The second period in the life of the constitutional republic, its
royalist period of sowing wild oats, closes with the recess of
the Legislative Assembly.

The state of siege in Paris had again been raised, the activities of the
press had again begun. During the suspension of the Social-Democratic papers,
during the period of repressive legislation and royalist bluster, the
Siècle, the old literary representative of the
monarchist-constitutional petty bourgeois, republicanized
itself; the Presse, the old literary exponent of the
bourgeois reformers, democratized itself; while the
National, the old classic organ of the republican bourgeois,
socialized itself.

The secret societies grew in extent and intensity in the same
degree that the public clubs became impossible. The workers'
industrial cooperatives, tolerated as purely commercial societies,
while of no account economically, became politically so many means of cementing
the proletariat. June 13 had struck off the official heads of the various
semirevolutionary parties; the masses that remained won a head of their own.
The knights of order had practiced intimidation by prophecies of the terror of
the red republic; the base excesses, the hyperborean atrocities of the
victorious counterrevolution in Hungary, in Baden, and in Rome washed the
“red republic” white. And the malcontent intermediate
classes of French society began to prefer the promises of the red republic with
its problematic terrors to the terrors of the red monarchy with its actual
hopelessness. No socialist in France spread more revolutionary propaganda than
Haynau. A chaque capacité selon ses oeuvres! [To each man of talent according to his work!]

In the meantime Louis Bonaparte exploited the recess of the National
Assembly to make princely tours of the provinces, the most hot-blooded
Legitimists made pilgrimages to Ems, to the grandchild of the saintly Louis,
and the mass of the popular representatives on the side of order intrigued in
the Department Councils, which had just met. It was necessary to make them
pronounce what the majority of the National Assembly did not yet dare
pronounce, an urgent motion for immediate revision of the
constitution. According to the constitution, it could not be revised
before 1852, and then only by a National Assembly called together expressly for
this purpose. If, however, the majority of the Department Councils expressed
themselves to this effect, was not the National Assembly bound to sacrifice the
virginity of the constitution to the voice of France? The National Assembly
entertained the same hopes in regard to these provincial assemblies as the nuns
in Voltaire's Henriade entertained in regard to the pandours. But, some
exceptions apart, the Potiphars of the National Assembly had to deal with just
so many Josephs of the provinces. The vast majority did not want to understand
the importunate insinuation. The revision of the constitution was frustrated by
the very instruments which were to have called it into being, by the votes of
the Department Councils. The voice of France, and indeed of bourgeois France,
had spoken and had spoken against revision.

At the beginning of October the Legislative National Assembly met once more
– tantum mutatus ab illo.[7] Its physiognomy was completely changed. The
unexpected rejection of revision on the part of the Department Councils had put
it back within the limits of the constitution and indicated the limits of its
term of life. The Orléanists had become mistrustful because of the pilgrimages
of the Legitimists to Ems; the Legitimists had grown suspicious because of the
Orléanists' negotiations with London; the journals of the two factions had
fanned the fire and weighed the reciprocal claims of their pretenders.
Orléanists and Legitimists grumbled in unison at the machinations of the
Bonapartists, which showed themselves in the princely tours, in the more or
less transparent emancipatory attempts of the President, in the presumptuous
language of the Bonapartist newspapers; Louis Bonaparte grumbled at a National
Assembly which found only the Legitimist-Orléanist conspiracy legitimate, at a
ministry which betrayed him continually to this National Assembly. Finally the
ministry was itself divided on the Roman policy and on the income tax
proposed by Minister Passy, decried as socialistic by the
conservatives.

One of the first bills of the Barrot Ministry in the reassembled Legislative
Assembly was a demand for a credit of 300,000 francs for the payment of a
widow's pension to the Duchess of Orléans! The National Assembly
granted it and added to the list of debts of the French nation a sum of seven
million francs. Thus while Louis Philippe continued to play successfully the
role of the pauvre honteux, the shamefaced beggar, the ministry dared
not move an increase of salary for Bonaparte nor did the Assembly appear
inclined to grant it. And Louis Bonaparte, as ever, vacillated in the dilemma:
Aut Caesar aut Clichy! [8]

The minister's second demand for a credit, one of nine million francs for
the costs of the Rome expedition, increased the tension between
Bonaparte on the one hand and the ministers and the National Assembly on the
other. Louis Bonaparte had inserted a letter to his military aide, Edgar Ney,
in the Moniteur, in which he bound the papal government to
constitutional guarantees. The Pope, on his part, had published an address,
motu proprio[110], in
which he rejected any limitation of his restored rule. Bonaparte's letter, with
studied indiscretion, raised the curtain on his cabinet in order to expose
himself to the eyes of the gallery as a benevolent genius who was, however,
misunderstood and shackled in his own house. It was not the first time that he
had coquetted with the “furtive flights of a free soul.”[9] Thiers, the reporter of
the commission, completely ignored Bonaparte's flight and contented himself
with translating the papal allocution into French. It was not the ministry but
Victor Hugo who sought to save the President through an order of the
day in which the National Assembly was to express its agreement with Napoleon's
letter. Allons donc! Allons donc! [Let's go
then!] With this disrespectful, frivolous interjection the majority
buried Hugo's motion. The policy of the President? The letter of the President?
The President himself? Allons donc! Allons donc! Who the devil takes
Monsieur Bonaparte seriously? Do you believe, Monsieur Victor Hugo, that we
believe you that you believe in the president? Allons donc! Allons
donc!

Finally, the breach between Bonaparte and the National Assembly was hastened
by the discussion on the recall of the Orléans and the Bourbons. In
default of the ministry, the President's cousin [Joseph
Bonaparte], son of the ex-king of Westphalia, had put forward this
motion, which had no other purpose than to push the Legitimist and the
Orléanist pretenders down to the same level, or rather a lower level than the
Bonapartist pretender, who at least stood in fact at the pinnacle of the
state.

Napoleon Bonaparte was disrespectful enough to make the recall of the
expelled royal families and the amnesty of the June insurgents
parts of one and the same motion. The indignation of the majority compelled him
to apologize immediately for this sacrilegious concatenation of the holy and
the impious, of the royal races and the proletarian brood, of the fixed stars
of society and of its swamp lights, and to assign each of the two motions to
its proper place. The majority energetically rejected the recall of the royal
family, and Berryer, the Demosthenes of the Legitimists, left no doubt
about the meaning of the vote. The civic degradation of the pretenders, that is
what is intended! It is desired to rob them of their halo, of the last majesty
that is left to them, the majesty of exile! What, cried Berryer, would
the pretenders think of the President, who, forgetting his august origin, came
here to live as a simple private individual? It could not have been more
clearly intimated to Louis Bonaparte that he had not gained the day by his
presence, that whereas the royalists in coalition needed him here in France as
a “neutral man” in the presidential chair, the serious
pretenders to the throne had to be kept out of profane sight by the fog of
exile.

On November 1, Louis Bonaparte answered the Legislative Assembly with a
message which in quite brusque words announced the dismissal of the Barrot
Ministry and the formation of a new ministry. The Barrot-Falloux Ministry was
the ministry of the royalist coalition, the Hautpoul Ministry was the ministry
of Bonaparte, the organ of the President as against the Legislative Assembly,
the ministry of the clerks.

Bonaparte was no longer the merely neutral man of December 10,
1848. His possession of the executive power had grouped a number of interests
around him, the struggle with anarchy forced the party of Order itself to
increase his influence, and if he was no longer popular, the party of
Order was unpopular. Could he not hope to compel the Orléanists and
the Legitimists, through their rivalry as well as through the necessity of some
sort of monarchist restoration, to recognize the neutral pretender?

From November 1, 1849, dates the third period in the life of the
constitutional republic, a period which closes with March 10, I850. The regular
game, so much admired by Guizot, of the constitutional institutions, the
wrangling between executive and legislative power, now begins. More, 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 [secretly], 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.

Just as Kant makes the republic, so these royalists make the
monarchy the only rational form of state, a postulate of practical
reason whose realization is never attained, but whose attainment must always be
striven for and mentally adhered to as the goal.

Thus the constitutional republic had gone forth from the hands of the
bourgeois republicans as a hollow ideological formula to become a form full of
content and life in the hands of the royalists in coalition. And Thiers spoke
more truly than he suspects when he said: “We, the royalists, are the
true pillars of the constitutional republic.”

The overthrow of the ministry of the coalition and the appearance of the
ministry of the clerks has a second significance. Its Finance Minister was
Fould. Fould as Finance Minister signifies the official surrender of
France's national wealth to the Bourse, the management of the state's property
by the Bourse and in the interests of the Bourse. With the nomination of Fould,
the finance aristocracy announced its restoration in the Moniteur.
This restoration necessarily supplemented the other restorations, which form
just so many links in the chain of the constitutional republic.

Louis Philippe had never dared to make a genuine loup-cervier [stock-exchange wolf] finance minister. Just as his
monarchy was the ideal name for the rule of the big bourgeoisie, so in his
ministries the privileged interests had to bear ideologically disinterested
names. The bourgeois republic every where pushed into the forefront what the
different monarchies, Legitimist as well as Orléanist, had kept concealed in
the background. It made earthly what they had made heavenly. In place of the
names of the saints it put the bourgeois proper names of the dominant class
interests.

Our whole exposition has shown how the republic, from the first day of its
existence, did not overthrow but consolidated the finance aristocracy. But the
concessions made to it were a fate to which submission was made without the
desire to bring it about. With Fould, the initiative in the government returned
to the finance aristocracy.

The question will be asked how the coalesced bourgeoisie could bear and
suffer the rule of finance, which under Louis Philippe depended on the
exclusion or subordination of the remaining bourgeois factions.

The answer is simple.

First of all, the finance aristocracy itself forms a weighty, authoritative
part of the royalist coalition, whose common governmental power is denominated
republic. Are not the spokesmen and leading lights among the Orléanists the old
confederates and accomplices of the finance aristocracy? Is it not itself the
golden phalanx of Orleanism? As far as the Legitimists are concerned, under
Louis Philippe they had already participated in practice in all the orgies of
the Bourse, mine, and railway speculations. In general, the combination of
large landed property with high finance is a normal fact. Proof:
England; proof: even Austria.

In a country like France, where the volume of national production stands at
a disproportionately lower level than the amount of the national debt, where
government bonds form the most important subject of speculation and the Bourse
the chief market for the investment of capital that wants to turn itself to
account in an unproductive way – in such a country a countless number of
people from all bourgeois or semi-bourgeois classes must have an interest in
the state debt, in the Bourse gamblings, in finance. Do not all these
interested subalterns find their natural mainstays and commanders in the
faction which represents this interest in its vastest outlines, which
represents it as a whole?

What conditions the accrual of state property to high finance? The
constantly growing indebtedness of the state. And the indebtedness of the
state? The constant excess of its expenditure over its income, a disproportion
which is simultaneously the cause and effect of the system of state loans.

In order to escape from this indebtedness, the state must either restrict
its expenditure, that is, simplify and curtail the government organism, govern
as little as possible, employ as few personnel as possible, enter as little as
possible into relations with bourgeois society. This path was impossible for
the party of Order, whose means of repression, official interference in the
name of the state, and ubiquity through organs of state were bound to increase
in the same measure as the number of quarters increased from which its rule and
the conditions for the existence of its class were threatened. The gendarmerie
cannot be reduced in the same measure as attacks on persons and property
increase.

Or the state must seek to evade the debts and produce an immediate but
transitory balance in its budget by putting extraordinary taxes on the
shoulders of the wealthiest classes. But was the party of Order to sacrifice
its own wealth on the altar of the fatherland to stop the national wealth from
being exploited by the Bourse? Pas si bête! [Not
so stupid!]

Therefore, without a complete revolution in the French state, no revolution
in the French state budget. Along with this state budget necessarily goes the
lordship of the trade in state debts, of the state creditors, the bankers, the
money dealers, and the wolves of the Bourse. Only one faction of the party of
Order was directly concerned in the overthrow of the finance aristocracy
– the manufacturers. We are not speaking of the middle, of the
smaller people engaged in industry; we are speaking of the reigning princes of
the manufacturing interests, who had formed the broad basis of the dynastic
opposition under Louis Philippe. Their interest is indubitably reduction of the
costs of production and hence reduction of the taxes, which enter into
production, and hence reduction of the state debts, the interest on which
enters into the taxes, hence the overthrow of the finance aristocracy.

In England – and the largest French manufacturers are petty bourgeois
compared with their English rivals actually find the manufacturers, a Cobden, a
Bright, at the head of the crusade against the bank and the stock-exchange
aristocracy. Why not in France? In England industry predominates – in
France, agriculture. In England industry requires free trade; in France,
protective tariffs, national monopoly alongside the other monopolies. French
industry does not dominate French production; the French industrialists,
therefore, do not dominate the French bourgeoisie. In order to secure the
advancement of their interests as against the remaining factions of the
bourgeoisie, they cannot, like the English, take the lead of the movement and
simultaneously push their class interests to the fore; they must follow in the
train of the revolution, and serve interests which are opposed to the
collective interests of their class. In February they had misunderstood their
position; February sharpened their wits. And who is more directly threatened by
the workers than the employer, the industrial capitalists? The manufacturer,
therefore, of necessity became in France the most fanatical member of the party
of Order. The reduction of his profit by finance, what is that
compared with the abolition of profit by the proletariat?

In France, the petty bourgeois does what normally the industrial bourgeois
would have to do; the worker does what normally would be the task of the petty
bourgeois; and the task of the worker, who accomplishes that? No one. In France
it is not accomplished; in France it is proclaimed. It is not accomplished
anywhere within the national boundaries.[111] The class war within French society turns into a
world war, in which the nations confront one another. Accomplishment begins
only at the moment when, through the world war, the proletariat is pushed to
the fore of the people that dominates the world market, to the forefront in
England. The revolution, which finds here not its end, but its organizational
beginning, is no short-lived revolution. The present generation is like the
Jews whom Moses led through the wilderness. It not only has a new world to
conquer, it must go under in order to make room for the men who are able to
cope with a new world.

Let us return to Fould.

On November 14, 1849, Fould mounted the tribune of the National Assembly and
expounded his system of finance: an apology for the old system of taxes!
Retention of the wine tax! Abandonment of Passy's income tax!

Passy, too, was no revolutionist; he was an old minister of Louis
Philippe's. He belonged to the Puritans of the Dufaure brand and to the most
intimate confidants of Teste[10],
the scapegoat of the July Monarchy. Passy, too, had praised the old tax system
and recommended the retention of the wine tax, but he had at the same time torn
the veil from the state deficit. He had declared the necessity for a new tax,
the income tax, if the bankruptcy of the state was to be avoided. Fould, who
had recommended state bankruptcy to Ledru-Rollin, recommended the state deficit
to the Legislative Assembly. He promised economies, the secret of which later
revealed itself in that, for example, expenditures diminished by sixty millions
while the floating debt increased by two hundred millions – conjurers'
tricks in the grouping of figures, in the drawing up of accounts, which all
finally amounted to new loans.

Alongside the other jealous bourgeois factions, the finance aristocracy
naturally did not act in so shamelessly corrupt a manner under Fould as under
Louis Philippe. But once it existed, the system remained the same: constant
increase in the debts, masking of the deficit. And in time the old Bourse
swindling came out more openly. Proof: the law concerning the Avignon Railway;
the mysterious fluctuations in government securities, for a brief time the
topic of the day throughout Paris; finally, the ill-starred speculations of
Fould and Bonaparte on the elections of March 10.

With the official restoration of the finance aristocracy, the French people
soon had to stand again before a February 24.

The Constituent Assembly, in an attack of misanthropy against its heir, had
abolished the wine tax for the year of our Lord 1850. New debts could not be
paid with the abolition of old taxes. Creton, a cretin of the party of
Order, had moved the retention of the wine tax even before the Legislative
Assembly recessed. Fould took up this motion in the name of the Bonapartist
ministry and on December 20, 1849, the anniversary of the day Bonaparte was
proclaimed President, the National Assembly decreed the restoration of the
wine tax.

The sponsor of this restoration was not a financier; it was the Jesuit chief
Montalembert. His argument was strikingly simple: Taxation is the
maternal breast on which the government is suckled. The government is the
instruments of repression; it is the organs of authority; it is the army; it is
the police; it is the officials, the judges, the ministers; it is the
priests. An attack on taxation is an attack by the anarchists on the
sentinels of order, who safeguard the material and spiritual production of
bourgeois society from the inroads of the proletarian vandals. Taxation is the
fifth god, side by side with property, the family, order, and religion. And the
wine tax is incontestably taxation and, moreover, not ordinary, but
traditional, monarchically disposed, respectable taxation. Vive l'impôt des
boissons! [Long live the tax on drinks!] Three
cheers and one cheer more!

When the French peasant paints the devil he paints him in the guise of a tax
collector. From the moment when Montalembert elevated taxation to a god, the
peasant became godless, atheist, and threw himself into the arms of the devil,
of socialism. The religion of order had forfeited him; the Jesuits had
forfeited him; Bonaparte had forfeited him. December 20, 1849, had irrevocably
compromised December 20, 1848. The “nephew of his uncle” was not
the first of his family whom the wine tax defeated, this tax which, in
Montalembert's phrase, heralds the revolutionary storm. The real, the great
Napoleon declared on St. Helena that the reintroduction of the wine tax had
contributed more to his downfall than all else, since it had alienated from him
the peasants of Southern France. As far back as under Louis XIV the favorite
object of the hatred of the people (see the writings of Boisguillebert and
Vauban), abolished by the first revolution, it was reintroduced by Napoleon in
a modified form in 1808. When the Restoration entered France, there trotted
before it not only the Cossacks, but also the promises to abolish the wine
tax. The gentilhommerie [gentry] naturally
did not need to keep its word to the gens taillables à merci et
miséricorde [people taxed pitilessly]. The
year 1830 promised the abolition of the wine tax. It was not its way to do what
it said or say what it did. The year 1848 promised the abolition of the wine
tax, just as it promised everything. Finally, the Constituent Assembly, which
promised nothing, made, as already mentioned, a testamentary provision whereby
the wine tax was to disappear on January 1, 1850. And just ten days before
January 1, 1850, the Legislative Assembly introduced it once more, so that the
French people perpetually pursued it, and when they had thrown it out the door
saw it come in again through the window.

The popular hatred of the wine tax is explained by the fact that it unites
in itself all the odiousness of the French system of taxation. The mode of its
collection is odious, the mode of its distribution aristocratic, for the rates
of taxation are the same for the commonest as for the costliest wines; it
increases, therefore, in geometrical progression as the wealth of the consumers
decreases, an inverted progressive tax. It accordingly directly provokes the
poisoning of the laboring classes by putting a premium on adulterated and
imitation wines. It lessens consumption, since it sets up octrois
[toll houses] before the gates of all towns of
over four thousand inhabitants and transforms each such town into a foreign
country with a protective tariff against French wine. The big wine merchants,
but still more the small ones, the marchands de vins, whose livelihood directly
depends on the consumption of wine, are so many avowed enemies of the wine tax.
And finally, by lessening consumption the wine tax curtails the producers'
market. While it renders the urban workers incapable of paying for wine, it
renders the wine growers incapable of selling it. And France has a wine-growing
population of about twelve million. One can therefore understand the hatred of
the people in general; one can in particular understand the fanaticism of the
peasants against the wine tax. And in addition they saw in its restoration no
isolated, more or less accidental event. The peasants have a kind of historical
tradition of their own, which is handed down from father to son, and in this
historical school it is muttered that whenever any government wants to dupe the
peasants, it promises the abolition of the wine tax, and as soon as it has
duped the peasants, it retains or reintroduces the wine tax. In the wine tax
the peasant tests the bouquet of the government, its tendency. The restoration
of the wine tax on December 20 meant: Louis Bonaparte is like the
rest. But he was not like the rest; he was a peasant discovery,
and in the petitions carrying millions of signatures against the wine tax they
took back the votes that they had given a year before to the “nephew of
his uncle.”

The country folk – over two-thirds of the total French population
– consist for the most part of so-called free landowners. The
first generation, gratuitously freed by the Revolution of 1789 from its feudal
burdens, had paid no price for the soil. But the following generations paid,
under the form of the price of land, what their semi-serf forefathers
had paid in the form of rent, tithes, corvee, etc. The more, on the one hand,
the population grew and the more, on the other hand, the partition of the soil
increased, the higher became the price of the parcels, for the demand for them
increased with their smallness. But in proportion as the price the peasant paid
for his parcel rose, whether he bought it directly or whether he had it
accounted as capital by his co-heirs, necessarily the indebtedness of the
peasant, that is, the mortgage, also rose. The claim to a debt
encumbering the land is termed a mortgage, a pawn ticket in respect of the
land. Just as privileges accumulated on the medieval estate,
mortgages accumulate on the modern small allotment. On the other hand,
under the system of parcelisation the soil is purely an instrument of
production for its proprietor. Now the fruitfulness of land diminishes in
the same measure as land is divided. The application of machinery to the land,
the division of labor, major soil – improvement measures, such as cutting
drainage and irrigation canals and the like, become more and more impossible,
while the unproductive costs of cultivation increase in the same
proportion as the division of the instrument of production itself. All this,
regardless of whether the possessor of the small allotment possesses capital or
not. But the more the division increases, the more does the parcel of land with
its utterly wretched inventory form the entire capital of the small allotment
peasant, the more does investment of capital in the land diminish, the more
does the peasant lack land, money, and education for making use of the progress
in agronomy, and the more does the cultivation of the soil retrogress. Finally,
the net proceeds diminish in the same proportion as the gross
consumption increases, as the whole family of the peasant is kept back
from other occupations through its holding and yet is not enabled to live by
it.

In the measure, therefore, that the population and, with it, the division of
the land increases, does the instrument of production, the soil,
become more expensive and its fertility decrease, does agriculture decline
and the peasant become loaded with debt. And what was the effect becomes,
in its turn, the cause. Each generation leaves behind another more deeply in
debt – each new generation begins under more unfavorable and more
aggravating conditions; mortgaging begets mortgaging, and when it becomes
impossible for the peasant to offer his small holding as security for new
debts, that is, to encumber it with new mortgages, he falls a direct victim to
usury, and usurious interest rates become so much the more exorbitant.

Thus it came about that the French peasant cedes to the capitalist, in the
form of interest on the mortgages encumbering the soil and in
the form of interest on the advances made by the usurer without
mortgages, not only ground rent, not only the industrial profit – in
a word, not only the whole net profit – but even a part of
the wages, and that therefore he has sunk to the level of the Irish
tenant farmer – all under the pretense of being a private
proprietor.

This process was accelerated in France by the ever growing burden
of taxes, by court costs called forth in part directly by the
formalities with which French legislation encumbers the ownership of land, in
part by the innumerable conflicts over parcels everywhere bounding and crossing
each other, and in part by the litigiousness of the peasants, whose enjoyment
of property is limited to the fanatical assertion of their title to their
fancied property, their property rights.

According to a statistical statement of 1840, the gross production of French
agriculture amounted to 5,237,178,000 francs. Of this the costs of cultivation
came to 3,552,000,000 francs, including consumption by the persons working.
There remained a net product of 1,685,178,000 francs, from which 550,000,000
had to be deducted for interest on mortgages, 100,000,000 for law officials,
350,000,000 for taxes, and 107,000,000 for registration money, stamp duty,
mortgage fees, etc. There was left one-third of the net product or 538,000,000;
when distributed over the population, not 25 francs per head net product.[112] Naturally, neither
usury outside of mortgage nor lawyers' fees, etc., are included in this
calculation.

The condition of the French peasants, when the republic had added new
burdens to their old ones, is comprehensible. It can be seen that their
exploitation differs only in form from the exploitation of the
industrial proletariat. The exploiter is the same: capital. The
individual capitalists exploit the individual peasants through
mortgages and usury, the capitalist class exploits the
peasant class through the state taxes. The peasant's title to property
is the talisman by which capital held him hitherto under its spell, the pretext
under which it set him against the industrial proletariat. Only the fall of
capital can raise the peasant; only an anti-capitalist, a proletarian
government can break his economic misery, his social degradation. The
constitutional republic is the dictatorship of his united exploiters;
the social-democratic, the red republic, is the dictatorship
of his allies. And the scale rises or falls according to the votes the peasant
casts into the ballot box. He himself has to decide his fate. So spoke the
socialists in pamphlets, almanacs, calendars, and leaflets of all kinds. This
language became more understandable to him through the counter-writings of the
party of Order, which for its part turned to him, and which by gross
exaggeration, by its brutal conception and representation of the intentions and
ideas of the socialists, struck the true peasant note and overstimulated his
lust after forbidden fruit. But most understandable was the language of the
actual experience that the peasant class had gained from the use of the
suffrage, were the disillusionments overwhelming him, blow upon blow, with
revolutionary speed. Revolutions are the
locomotives of history.

The gradual revolutionizing of the peasants was manifested by various
symptoms. It early revealed itself in the elections to the Legislative Assembly
– it was revealed in the state of siege in the five departments bordering
Lyons; it was revealed a few months after June 13 in the election of a
Montagnard in place of the former president of the Chambre introuvable[11] by the Department of the Gironde;
it was revealed on December 20, 1849, in the election of a red in place of a
deceased Legitimist deputy[113] in the Department du Gard, that promised
land of the Legitimists, the scene of the most frightful infamies committed
against the republicans in 1794 and 1795 and the center of the white terror in
1815, when liberals and Protestants were publicly murdered. This
revolutionizing of the most stationary class is most clearly evident since the
reintroduction of the wine tax. The governmental measures and the laws of
January and February, 1850, are directed almost exclusively against the
departments and the peasants. The most striking proof of
their progress.

The Hautpoul circular, by which the gendarme was appointed
inquisitor of the prefect, of the subprefect, and, above all, of the mayor, and
by which espionage was organized even in the hidden corners of the remotest
village community; the law against the schoolteachers, by which they
(the men of talent, the spokesmen, the educators and interpreters of the
peasant class) were subjected to the arbitrary power of the prefect –
they, the proletarians of the learned class, were chased like hunted beasts
from one community to another; the bill against the mayors, by which
the Damocles sword of dismissal was hung over their heads, and they, the
presidents of the peasant communities, were every moment set in opposition to
the President of the Republic and the party of Order; the ordinance
which transformed the seventeen military districts of France into four
pashaliks and forced the barracks and the bivouac on the French as their
national salon; the education law, by which the party of Order
proclaimed unconsciousness and the forcible stupefaction of France as the
condition of its life under the regime of universal suffrage what were all
these laws and measures? Desperate attempts to reconquer the departments and
the peasants of the departments for the party of Order.

Regarded as repression, they were wretched methods that wrung the
neck of their own purpose. The big measures, like the retention of the wine
tax, of the 45-centime tax, the scornful rejection of peasant petitions for the
repayment of the milliard, etc., all these legislative thunderbolts struck the
peasant class all at once, wholesale, from the center; the laws and measures
cited made attack and resistance general, the topic of the day in
every hut; they inoculated every village with revolution; they localized
and peasantized the revolution.

On the other hand, do not these proposals of Bonaparte and their acceptance
by the National Assembly prove the unity of the two powers of the
constitutional republic, so far as it is a question of repression of anarchy
– that is, of all the classes that rise against the bourgeois
dictatorship? Did not Soulouque [Louis
Bonaparte], directly after his brusque message, assure the Legislative
Assembly of his dévouement [devotion] to
order, through the immediately following message of Carlier,[116] that dirty, mean
caricature of Fouché, as Louis Bonaparte himself was the shallow caricature of
Napoleon?

The education law shows us the alliance of the young Catholics with
the old Voltaireans. Could the rule of the united bourgeois be anything else
but the coalesced despotism of the pro-Jesuit Restoration and the
make–believe free–thinking July Monarchy? Had not the weapons that
the one bourgeois faction had distributed among the people against the other
faction, in their mutual struggle for supremacy, again been torn from it, the
people, since the latter was confronting their united dictatorship? Nothing has
aroused the Paris shopkeeper more than this coquettish étalage [display] of Jesuitism, not even the rejection
of the concordats à l'amiable [friendly
agreements].

Meanwhile the collisions between the different factions of the party of
Order, as well as between the National Assembly and Bonaparte, continued. The
National Assembly was far from pleased that Bonaparte, immediately after his
coup d'état, after appointing his own, Bonapartist ministry, summoned
before him the invalids of the monarchy, newly appointed prefects, and made
their unconstitutional agitation for his reelection as President the condition
of their appointment; that Carlier celebrated his inauguration with the closing
of a Legitimist club, or that Bonaparte founded a journal of his own, Le
Napoleon, which betrayed the secret longings of the President to the
public, while his ministers had to deny them from the tribune of the
Legislative Assembly. The latter was far from pleased by the defiant retention
of the ministry, notwithstanding its various votes of no confidence; far from
pleased by the attempt to win the favor of the noncommissioned officers by an
extra pay of four sous a day and the favor of the proletariat by a
plagiarisation of Eugène Sue's Mysteries by an honor loan bank; far from
pleased, finally, by the effrontery with which the ministers were made to move
the deportation of the remaining June insurgents to Algiers, in order to heap
unpopularity on the Legislative Assembly en gros, while the President
reserved popularity for himself en detail, by individual grants of
pardon. Thiers let fall threatening words about coups d'état and
coups de tête [rash acts], and the
Legislative Assembly revenged itself on Bonaparte by rejecting every proposed
law that he put forward for his own benefit, and by inquiring with noisy
mistrust, in every instance when he made a proposal in the common interest,
whether he did not aspire, through increase of the executive power, to augment
the personal power of Bonaparte. In a word, it revenged itself by a
conspiracy of contempt.

The Legitimist party, on its part, saw with vexation the more capable
Orléanists once more occupying almost all posts and centralization
increasing, while it sought its salvation principally in
decentralization. And so it was. The counterrevolution centralized
forcibly, that is, it prepared the mechanism of the revolution. It even
centralized the gold and silver of France in the Paris Bank through
the compulsory quotation of bank notes, and so created the ready war chest
of the revolution.

Lastly, the Orléanists saw with vexation the emergent principle of
legitimacy contrasted with their bastard principle, and themselves every moment
snubbed and maltreated as the bourgeois misalliance of a noble spouse.

Little by little we have seen peasants, petty bourgeois, the middle classes
in general, stepping alongside the proletariat, driven into open antagonism to
the official republic and treated by it as antagonists. Revolt against
bourgeois dictatorship, need of a change of society, adherence to
democratic-republican institutions as organs of their movement, grouping around
the proletariat as the decisive revolutionary power – these are the
common characteristics of the so-called party of social democracy, the
party of the red republic. This party of anarchy, as its
opponents christened it, is no less a coalition of different interests than the
party of Order. From the smallest reform of the old social disorder to
the overthrow of the old social order, from bourgeois liberalism to
revolutionary terrorism – as far apart as this lie the extremes that form
the starting point and the finishing point of the party of
“anarchy.”

Abolition of the protective tariff – socialism! For it strikes at the
monopoly of the industrial faction of the party of Order. Regulation
of the state budget – socialism! For it strikes at the monopoly of the
financial faction of the party of Order. Free admission of foreign
meat and corn – socialism! For it strikes at the monopoly of the third
faction of the party of Order, large landed property. The demands of
the free–trade party, that is, of the most advanced English bourgeois
party, appear in France as so many socialist demands. Voltaireanism socialism!
For it strikes at a fourth faction of the party of Order, the
Catholic. Freedom of the press, right of association, universal public
education – socialism, socialism! They strike at the general monopoly of
the party of Order.

So swiftly had the march of the revolution ripened conditions that the
friends of reform of all shades, the most moderate claims of the middle
classes, were compelled to group themselves around the banner of the most
extreme party of revolution, around the red flag.

Yet manifold as the socialism of the different large sections of
the party of anarchy was, according to the economic conditions and the total
revolutionary requirements of the class or fraction of a class arising out of
these, in one point it is in harmony: in proclaiming itself the
means of emancipating the proletariat and the emancipation of the
latter as its object. Deliberate deception on the part of some;
self-deception on the part of the others, who promote the world transformed
according to their own needs as the best world for all, as the realization of
all revolutionary claims and the elimination of all revolutionary
collisions.

Behind the general socialist phrases of the “party of
anarchy,” which sound rather alike, there is concealed the
socialism of the National, of the Presse, and of the
Siécle, which more or less consistently wants to overthrow the rule of
the finance aristocracy and to free industry and trade from their hitherto
existing fetters. This is the socialism of industry, of trade, and of
agriculture, whose bosses in the party of Order deny these interests, insofar
as they no longer coincide with their private monopolies. Petty bourgeois
socialism, socialism par excellence, is distinct from this bourgeois
socialism, to which, as to every variety of socialism, sections of the
workers and petty bourgeois naturally rally. Capital hounds this class chiefly
as its creditor, so it demands credit institutions; capital
crushes it by competition, so it demands associations
supported by the state; capital overwhelms it by concentration, so it
demands progressive taxes, limitations on inheritance, taking over of
large construction projects by the state, and other measures that forcibly
stem the growth of capital. Since it dreams of the peaceful achievement of
its socialism – allowing, perhaps, for a second February Revolution
lasting a brief day or so the coming historical process naturally appears to it
as an application of systems which the thinkers of society, whether in
companies or as individual inventors, devise or have devised. Thus they become
the eclectics or adepts of the existing socialist systems, of
doctrinaire socialism, which was the theoretical expression of the
proletariat only as long as it had not yet developed further into a free
historical movement of its own.

While this utopian doctrinaire socialism, which subordinates the
total movement to one of its stages, which puts in place of common social
production the brainwork of individual pedants and, above all, in fantasy does
away with the revolutionary struggle of the classes and its requirements by
small conjurers' tricks or great sentimentality, while this doctrinaire
socialism, which at bottom only idealizes present society, takes a picture of
it without shadows, and wants to achieve its ideal athwart the realities of
present society; while the proletariat surrenders this socialism to the petty
bourgeoisie; while the struggle of the different socialist leaders among
themselves sets forth each of the so-called systems as a pretentious adherence
to one of the transit points of the social revolution as against another
– the proletariat rallies more and more around revolutionary
socialism, around communism, for which the bourgeoisie has itself
invented the name of Blanqui. This socialism is the declaration of
the permanence of the revolution, the class dictatorship of the
proletariat as the necessary transit point to the abolition of class
distinctions generally, to the abolition of all the relations of
production on which they rest, to the abolition of all the social relations
that correspond to these relations of production, to the revolutionizing of all
the ideas that result from these social relations.

The scope of this exposition does not permit of developing the subject
further.

We have seen that just as in the party of Order the finance
aristocracy necessarily took the lead, so in the party of
“anarchy” the proletariat. While the different
classes, united in a revolutionary league, grouped themselves around the
proletariat, while the departments became ever more unsafe and the Legislative
Assembly itself ever more morose toward the pretensions of the French
Soulouque, the long deferred and delayed by–election of substitutes for
the Montagnards, proscribed after June 13, drew near.

The government, scorned by its foes, maltreated and daily humiliated by its
alleged friends, saw only one mean of emerging from this repugnant and
untenable position – revolt. A revolt in Paris would have
permitted the proclamation of a state of siege in Paris and the departments and
thus the control of the elections. On the other hand, the friends of order, in
face of a government that had gained victory over anarchy, were constrained to
make concessions, if they did not want to appear as anarchists themselves.

The government set to work. At the beginning of February, 1850, provocation
of the people by chopping down the trees of liberty. In vain. If the trees of
liberty lost their place, the government itself lost its head and fell back,
frightened by its own provocation. The National Assembly, however, received
this clumsy attempt at emancipation on the part of Bonaparte with ice-cold
mistrust. The removal of the wreaths of immortelles from the July column[118] was no more
successful. It gave part of the army an opportunity for revolutionary
demonstrations and the National Assembly the occasion for a more or less veiled
vote of no confidence in the ministry. In vain the government press threatened
the abolition of universal suffrage and the invasion of the Cossacks. In vain
was Hautpoul's direct challenge, issued to the Left in the Legislative Assembly
itself, to betake itself to the streets, and his declaration that the
government was ready to receive it. Hautpoul received nothing but a call to
order from the President, and the party of Order, with silent, malicious joy,
allowed a deputy of the Left to mock Bonaparte's usurpatory longings. In vain,
finally, was the prophecy of a revolution on February 24. The government caused
February 24 to be ignored by the people.

The proletariat did not allow itself to be provoked to revolt,
because it was on the point of making a revolution.

Unhindered by the provocations of the government, which only heightened the
general exasperation at the existing situation, the election committee, wholly
under the influence of the workers, put forward three candidates for Paris:
Deflotte, Vidal, and Carnot. Deflotte was a June deportee,
amnestied through one of Bonaparte's popularity-seeking ideas; he was a friend
of Blanqui and had taken part in the attempt of May 15. Vidal, known
as a communist writer through his book Concerning the Distribution of Wealth,
was formerly secretary to Louis Blanc in the Luxembourg Commission.
Carnot, son of the man of the Convention who had organized the
victory, the least compromised member of the National party, Minister of
Education in the Provisional Government and the Executive Commission, was
through his democratic public education bill a living protest against the
education law of the Jesuits. These three candidates represented the three
allied classes: at the head, the June insurgent, the representative of the
revolutionary proletariat; next to him the doctrinaire socialist, the
representative of the socialist petty bourgeoisie; finally, the third, the
representative of the republican bourgeois party whose democratic formulas had
gained a socialist significance vis-a-vis the party of Order and had long lost
their own significance. This was a general coalition against the
bourgeoisie and the government, as in February. But this time the
proletariat was at the head of the revolutionary league.

In spite of all efforts the socialist candidates won. The army itself voted
for the June insurgent against its own War Minister La Hitte. The party of
Order was thunderstruck. The elections in the departments did not solace them;
the departments gave a majority to the Montagnards.

The election of March 10, 1850! It was the revocation of June,
1848: the butchers and deportees of the June insurgents returned to the
National Assembly but returned, bowed down, in the train of the deported, and
with their principles on their lips. It was the revocation of June 13,
1849: the Montagne, proscribed by the National Assembly, returned to the
National Assembly, but as advance trumpeters of the revolution, no longer as
its commanders. It was the revocation of December 10: Napoleon had
lost out with his Minister La Hitte. The parliamentary history of France knows
only one analogy: the rejection of d'Haussez, minister of Charles X, in 1830.
Finally, the election of March 10, 1850, was the cancellation of the election
of May 13, which had given the party of Order a majority. The election of March
10 protested against the majority of May 13. March 10 was a revolution. Behind
the ballots lie the paving stones.

“The vote of March 10 means war,” shouted Ségur d'Aguesseau, one
of the most advanced members of the party of Order.

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

At the command of the party of Order, Bonaparte answers the election of
Deflotte, the June insurgent, by appointing Baroche Minister of
Internal Affairs, Baroche, the accuser of Blanqui and Barbès, of Ledru-Rollin
and Guinard. The Legislative Assembly answers the election of Carnot
by adopting the education law, the election of Vidal by suppressing
the socialist press. The party of Order seeks to blare away its own fears by
the trumpet blasts of its press. “The sword is holy,” cries one of
its organs; “the defenders of order must take the offensive against the
Red party,” cries another; “between socialism and society there is
a duel to the death, a war without surcease or mercy; in this duel of
desperation one or the other must go under; if society does not annihilate
socialism, socialism will annihilate society,” crows a third cock of
Order. Throw up the barricades of order, the barricades of religion, the
barricades of the family! An end must be made of the 127,000 voters of Paris! A
Bartholomew's Night for the socialists! And the party of Order believes for a
moment in its own certainty of victory.

Their organs hold forth most fanatically of all against the
“boutiquiers [tradesmen] of
Paris.” The June insurgent of Paris elected by the shopkeepers of
Paris as their representative! This means that a second June, 1848, is
impossible; this means that a second June 13, 1849, is impossible; this means
that the moral influence of capital is broken; this means that the bourgeois
assembly now represents only the bourgeoisie; this means that big property is
lost, because its vassal, small property, seeks its salvation in the camp of
the propertyless.

The party of Order naturally returns to its inevitable commonplace.
“More repression,” it cries, “tenfold
repression!” But its power of repression has diminished tenfold,
while resistance has increased a hundredfold. Must not the chief instrument of
repression, the army, itself be repressed? And the party of Order speaks its
last word: “The iron ring of suffocating legality must be broken. The
constitutional republic is impossible. We must fight with our true
weapons; since February, 1848, we have fought the revolution with its weapons
and on its terrain – , we have accepted its institutions; the
constitution is a fortress which safeguards only the besiegers, not the
besieged! By smuggling ourselves into holy Ilion in the belly of the Trojan
horse, we have, unlike our forefathers, the Grecs[12], not conquered the hostile town, but made
prisoners of ourselves.

The foundation of the constitution, however, is universal suffrage.
Annihilation of universal suffrage – such is the last word of
the party of Order, of the bourgeois dictatorship.

On May 4, 1848, on December 20, 1848, on May 13, 1849, and on July 8, 1849,
universal suffrage admitted that they were right.[119] On March 10, 1850, universal suffrage admitted
that it had itself been wrong. Bourgeois rule as the outcome and result of
universal suffrage, as the express act of the sovereign will of the people
– that is the meaning of the bourgeois constitution. But has the
constitution any further meaning from the moment that the content of this
suffrage, of this sovereign will, is no longer bourgeois rule? Is it not the
duty of the bourgeoisie so to regulate the suffrage that it wills the
reasonable, its rule? By ever and anon putting an end to the existing state
power and creating it anew out of itself, does not universal suffrage put an
end to all stability, does it not every moment question all the powers that be,
does it not annihilate authority, does it not threaten to elevate anarchy
itself to the position of authority? After March 10, 1850, who would still
doubt it?

By repudiating universal suffrage, with which it hitherto draped itself and
from which it sucked its omnipotence, the bourgeoisie openly confesses,
“Our dictatorship has hitherto existed by the will of the people; it
must now be consolidated against the will of the people.” And,
consistently, it seeks its props no longer within France, but without,
in foreign countries, in invasion.

With the invasion, this second Coblenz[13], its seat established in France itself, rouses all
the national passions against itself. With the attack on universal suffrage it
provides a general pretext for the new revolution, and the revolution
requires such a pretext. Every special pretext would divide the
factions of the revolutionary league, and give prominence to their differences.
The general pretext stuns the semi-revolutionary classes; it permits
them to deceive themselves concerning the definite character of the
coming revolution, concerning the consequences of their own act. Every
revolution requires a question for discussion at banquets. Universal suffrage
is the banquet question of the new revolution.

The bourgeois factions in coalition, however, are already
condemned, since they take flight from the only possible form of their united
power, from the most potent and complete form of their class rule, the
constitutional republic, back to the subordinate, incomplete, weaker
form of monarchy. They resemble the old man who in order to regain his
youthful strength fetched out his boyhood garments and suffered torment trying
to get his withered limbs into them. Their republic had the sole merit
of being the hothouse of the revolution.

March 10, 1850, bears the inscription:

Après moi le déluge! After me the deluge![14]

Notes

7. How great
the change since then (Virgil, Aeneid).

8. Either
Caesar or Clichy. Clichy was a debtors' prison in Paris.

9. From Georg
Herwegh, “Aus den Bergen” (“From the Mountains”).

10. Note
by Engels to the 1895 edition: On July 8, 1847, before the Chamber of
Peers in Paris, began the trial of Parmentier and General Cubières for bribery
of officials with a view to obtaining a salt works concession, and of the then
Minister of Public Works, Teste, for accepting such money bribes. The latter,
during the trial, attempted to commit suicide. All were sentenced to pay heavy
fines, Teste, in addition, to three years' imprisonment.

11. Note
by Engels to the 1895 edition: This is the name given by history to the
fanatically ultraroyalist and reactionary Chamber of Deputies elected
immediately after the second overthrow of Napoleon, in 1815.

12. Note
by Engels to the 1895 edition: A play on words: Greeks, but also
professional cheats.

13. Coblenz
was the center of the counterrevolutionary emigres during the French
Revolution.

14. Words
attributed to Louis XV.

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