Neue Rheinische Zeitung.
Politisch-ökonomische Revue.
Issue 4, April 1850

I. Literature.

*Latter-Day Pamphlets. Edited by Thomas Carlyle.* No. 1: *The Present
Time.*—No. 2: *Model Prisons.*—London, 1850.

Thomas Carlyle is the only English writer upon whom German literature
has exercised a direct and very significant influence. Out of mere
politeness, the German should not pass over his writings unheeded.

We have seen in the most recent work by Guizot (see Issue III of the
*N. Rh. Z.*) how the capacities of the bourgeoisie are in the process of
going under. In the two pamphlets by Carlyle before us we witness the
downfall of literary genius in the face of the historical struggles that
have become acute, against which it seeks to assert its misinterpreted,
immediate, prophetic inspirations.

Thomas Carlyle has the merit of having come out in literature against
the bourgeoisie, at a time when its views, tastes, and ideas completely
subjugated the whole of official English literature, and in a manner that
is at times even revolutionary. Thus in his history of the French
Revolution, in his apologia for Cromwell, in the pamphlet on Chartism,
in *Past and Present*. But in all these writings the critique of the present
is closely bound up with a curiously unhistorical apotheosis of the
Middle Ages, which is also frequently found among English
revolutionaries, e.g., in Cobbett and a section of the Chartists. While
in the past he at least admires the classical epochs of a particular phase
of society, the present drives him to despair, and the future fills him
with horror. Where he acknowledges the revolution

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or even apotheosises it, it is concentrated for him in a single individual,
a Cromwell or a Danton. To them he dedicates the same hero-worship
that he preached in his *Lectures on Heroes and Hero-Worship* as the
sole refuge from a present pregnant with despair, as a new religion.

As with the ideas, so with Carlyle’s style. It is a direct, violent
reaction against the modern-bourgeois English Pecksniff style, whose
affected flabbiness, cautious verbosity, and moral-sentimental,
distracted tediousness have passed over from its original inventors,
the cultivated Cockneys, to the whole of English literature. In
opposition to it, Carlyle treated the English language as a completely
raw material to be recast from the ground up. Antiquated turns of
phrase and words were brought out again, and new ones invented on
the German, and especially on the Jean Paul, model. The new style
was often heaven-storming and tasteless, but frequently brilliant and
always original. Here, too, the *Latter-Day Pamphlets* show a
remarkable regression.

Incidentally, it is significant that, of the whole of German literature,
the mind that exercised the greatest influence on Carlyle was not
Hegel, but the literary apothecary Jean Paul.

In the cult of genius that Carlyle shares with Strauß, the genius has
gone missing in the present brochures. The cult has remained.

*The Present Time* begins with the declaration that the present is the
daughter of the past and the mother of the future, but in any case a
new era.

The first phenomenon of this new era is a reforming Pope. With the
Gospel in his hand, Pius IX wished to proclaim “the law of truth” to
Christendom from the Vatican. “More than three hundred years ago,
the throne of St. Peter received peremptory judicial notice, an authentic
order, registered in the chancery of Heaven and since then legible in
the hearts of all | worthy men, to pack up and be off, to vanish,
and to give us no more to do with it and its deceptions and godless
deliriums; — and since then it has remained standing at its own peril,
and will have to render exact compensation for every day it has stood
so. Law of truth? What this Papacy had to do in accordance with the
law of truth was to give up its foul galvanised life, this disgrace before
God and man, honourably to die and be buried. Far from this was
what the poor Pope undertook; and yet on the whole it was essentially
just that. A

reforming Pope? Turgot and Necker were nothing by comparison.
God is great, and when a scandal is to end, He calls a believing man
to it, who sets his hand to the work in hope, not in despair.” p. 3.

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With his reform manifestos, the Pope had aroused questions, “mothers
of whirlwinds, world conflagrations, earthquakes ... questions which
all official men wished, and mostly also hoped, to postpone until the
Day of Judgment. The Day of Judgment itself had come; that was the
terrible truth.” p. 4.

The law of truth had been proclaimed. The Sicilians “were the first
people who set about applying this new rule, sanctioned by the Holy
Father: By the law of truth we do not belong to Naples and these
Neapolitan officials. With the favour of Heaven and the Pope, we wish
to free ourselves from them.” Hence the Sicilian revolution.

The French people, which considered itself a “sort of Messianic
people”, as the “chosen soldier of freedom”, feared that the poor
despised Sicilians might take this branch of industry (trade) out of its
hands—February Revolution. “As though by sympathetic subterranean
electricities, all Europe exploded, boundless, uncontrollable; and we
had the year 1848, one of the strangest, most disastrous, most
astonishing, and on the whole most humiliating years the European
world ever saw—Kings everywhere and the governing personages
stared in sudden terror, when the voice of the whole world bellowed
in their ears: Get you hence, | you weak-heads, hypocrites, histrions,
not heroes! Away with you, away! And what was peculiar, and heard
for the first time in this year: the kings all hastened to go, as if they
cried out: We are poor histrions, that we are—do you need heroes?

Do not kill us, what can we do about it!—Not one of them turned
round and stood firm upon his kingship as upon a right for which he
could die or risk his skin. This, I repeat, is the alarming peculiarity of
the present time. Democracy, on this new occasion, finds all the kings
conscious that they are nothing else but play-actors. They fled
precipitately, some of them with, so to speak, select disgrace—in fear
of the house of correction or worse. And the people, or the mob,
everywhere transferred its own government to itself, and open
kinglessness, which we call anarchy—happy if anarchy plus a street
constable—is everywhere the order of the day. Such was the history
from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, in Italy, France, Prussia, Austria,
from one end of Europe to the other in those March days of 1848. And
so no king remained in Europe, no king, except the public ‘haranguer’,
haranguing on the beer-barrel, in the leading article, or assembling
with his equals in the national parliament. And for roughly four months,
France entire, and to a high degree Europe entire, harassed by every

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kind of delirium, a surging mob up and down, presided over by
Mr. de Lamartine at the Hôtel de Ville. A spectacle fraught with care
for thinking men, so long as it lasted, this poor Mr. de Lamartine, with
nothing in him except melodious wind and soft salivation. Sad enough:
The most eloquent, last embodiment of rehabilitated ‘Chaos’, capable
of speaking for itself and palavering with smooth words that it is
‘Cosmos’! But you need tarry only a short while in such cases; all
air-balloons must let out their gas under the pressure of things and
collapse repulsively flabby before long.” p. 5—8.

Who was it that stirred up this general revolution, for which the material
was certainly available? “Students, | young literati, advocates,
newspaper scribblers, hot-blooded inexperienced enthusiasts, and wild,
rightly bankrupt desperadoes. Never until now have young people and
almost children conducted such a command in human affairs. Changed
times, since the word *senior*, *seigneur*, or alderman was first devised
to mean master or superior, as we find it in the languages of all men! ...
If you look more closely, you will find that the old man has ceased to
be venerable, and has begun to be contemptible, a foolish boy still,
but a boy without the grace, the magnanimity, and the luxuriant
strength of young boys.—This mad state of things will of course
shortly provide itself with relief, as it has already begun to do
everywhere; the ordinary necessities of daily life cannot subsist with it,
and these, whatever else may be cast aside, go their way onward. Some
arbitrary repair of the old machine under new colours and altered
forms will probably soon take place in most countries; the old theatre
kings will be admitted again on conditions, on constitutions with
national parliaments or similar fashionable appurtenances, and
everywhere the old daily life will try to start again from the beginning.
But for the present there is no hope that such settlements could last—
In such curse-fraught oscillations, driven as beneath abyssally raging
eddies and warring sea-currents, not standing on firmly founded
foundations, European society must continue to reel,—soon stumbling
disastrously, then laboriously pulling itself together again at ever
shorter intervals, until at last the new rock-foundation comes to light
and the surging deluges of mutiny and the necessity of mutiny ebb
away again.” p. 8—10.

So much for the history, which even in this form is little consoling for
the old world. Now comes the moral:

“Universal democracy, whatever one may think of it, is the

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the inevitable fact of the days we live in.” p. 10. What is democracy? It must have a meaning, or it would not exist. So everything depends on finding the true meaning of democracy. If we succeed in this, we can master it; if not, we are lost. The February Revolution was “a general bankruptcy of imposture; that is its short explanation”, (p. 14.) Appearance and semblances, “shams”, “delusions”, “phantasms”, names that have become meaningless in place of real conditions and things, in a word, lying instead of truth, have prevailed in modern times. The individual and social divorce from these semblances and spectres, that is the task of reform, and the necessity that all sham, all imposture should cease, is undeniable. “Admittedly this may seem astonishing to many; and to many a solid Englishman, who digests his pudding with healthy comfort among the so-called educated classes, it seems beyond measure astonishing, a mad, ignorant notion, thoroughly heterodox and pregnant only with ruin. He has grown accustomed throughout his whole life to forms of decorum that have long since lost their meaning, plausible modes of behaviour, ceremonies that have become purely ceremonial — what you in your iconoclastic humour call shams; never has he heard that any harm lay in them, that any progress was possible without them. Did not the cotton spin itself, did not the cattle fatten themselves, and did not colonial wares and groceries come in from east and west entirely comfortable alongside the shams?” (p. 15.)

Now will democracy, this necessary reform, the liberation from the shams, accomplish it? “Democracy, if organised by means of universal suffrage, will it carry through this healing universal transition from illusion to the real, from the false to the true, and gradually create a blessed world?” (p. 17.) Carlyle denies this. He sees in democracy and in universal suffrage only a contagion of all nations by the English superstition of the infallibility of parliamentary government. The crew of that ship that had lost its way round Cape Horn, and instead of looking out for wind and weather and using the sextant, voted on the course to be taken and declared the decision of the majority infallible — that is the universal suffrage that wants to steer the state. As for each individual, so for society, the only thing that matters is to discover the true regulations of the universe, the eternal laws of nature with regard to the task at hand, and to act accordingly. Whoever reveals those eternal laws to us, we follow, “be it the Czar of Russia or the Chartist parliament, the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Dalai Lama”. But how do we discover these eternal prescriptions of God? In any case, universal suffrage, which gives everyone a ballot paper and counts heads, is the worst way to go about it. The universe is of a very exclusive nature, and has from time immemorial imparted its secrets only to a few chosen ones, only to a small minority of nobles and wise men. Hence, too, no nation has ever been able to exist on the basis of democracy. Greeks and Romans? Everyone knows nowadays that they did not constitute democracies, that slavery was the foundation of their states. Of the various French republics it is quite superfluous to speak. And the model republic of North America? Of the Americans it cannot even be said as yet that they constitute a nation, a state. The American population lives without government; what is constituted here is anarchy plus a street constable. What makes this condition possible are the enormous stretches of still uncultivated land and the respect for the constable’s staff brought over from England. With the growth of the population, that too will come to an end. “What great human soul, what great thought, what great noble thing one could adore or to which one could pay loyal admiration, has America yet produced.” (p. 25.) — It has doubled its population every twenty years — voilà tout.

Thus on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean democracy is forever impossible. The universe itself is a monarchy and a hierarchy. No nation in which the divine everlasting duty of guiding and controlling the ignorant is not entrusted to the noblest with his chosen series of nobler ones, has the kingdom of God, corresponds to the eternal laws of nature.

Now we also learn the secret, the origin and the necessity of modern democracy. It consists simply in the fact that the false noble (sham-noble) has been elevated and consecrated by tradition or newly invented deceptions.

And who is to discover the true noble stone with its whole setting of smaller human jewels and pearls? certainly not universal suffrage; for only the noble can find out the noble. And so Carlyle declares that England still possesses a quantity of such nobles and “kings” and calls upon them, p. 38, to report to him.

One sees how the “noble” Carlyle proceeds from a thoroughly pantheistic mode of view. The entire historical process is conditioned not by the development of the living masses themselves, which is naturally dependent on definite, but themselves historically generated changing presuppositions; it is conditioned by an eternal, for all times unchangeable law of nature, from which it departs today and to which it draws near again tomorrow, and upon whose correct recognition everything depends. This correct recognition of the eternal law of nature is the eternal truth, everything else is false. With this mode of view, the actual class antagonisms, different as they are in different epochs, all dissolve into the one great and eternal antagonism of those who have fathomed the eternal law of nature and act accordingly, the wise and noble, and those who misunderstand it, distort it and work against it, the fools and knaves. The historically generated class difference thus becomes a natural difference, which one must even recognise and venerate as a part of the eternal law of nature, by bowing before the noble and wise of nature: cult of the genius. The whole view of the historical development process is flattened out into the shallow triviality of the Illuminati and Freemason wisdom of the last century, into the simple morality of The Magic Flute and into an infinitely degenerate and banalised Saint-Simonism. With that, naturally, comes the old question, who actually is to rule, which is discussed with a most important shallowness of the broadest kind and finally answered to the effect that the noble, wise and knowledgeable should rule; to which then quite unforcedly the conclusion attaches itself that much, very much must be governed; that one can never govern too much, since governing is the constant revelation and assertion of the law of nature vis-à-vis the masses. But how are the noble and wise to be discovered? No supernatural miracle reveals them; they must be sought. And here the historical class differences, turned into purely natural differences, come to light again. The noble is noble because he is wiser, more knowledgeable. He will therefore have to be sought among the classes that have the monopoly of education — among the privileged classes; and it will be these same classes that have to find him out in their midst, that have to decide upon his claims to the rank of a noble and wise man. Thus the privileged classes immediately become, if not exactly the noble and wise, yet the “articulated” class; the oppressed classes are naturally the “mute inarticulated”, and thus class rule is sanctioned anew. The whole highly indignant bluster transforms itself into a somewhat veiled recognition of the existing class rule, which merely grumbles and murmurs about the fact that the bourgeois assign no post at the head of society to their misunderstood geniuses and, for very practical reasons, do not enter into the rapturous drivel of these gentlemen. Moreover, how even here the high-flown twaddle turns into its opposite, how the noble, knowledgeable and wise man in practice turns into the common, ignorant and foolish one — of this Carlyle furnishes us striking examples.

Since for him everything depends on strong government, he turns with the utmost indignation against the clamour for liberation and emancipation:

“Let us all be free, the one from the other. Free without bond or connection, except that of cash payment; honest daily wage for honest daily work, fixed by voluntary contract and by the law of demand and supply; this people imagine to be the true solution of all difficulties and injustices that have occurred between man and man. To rectify the relationship that exists between two human beings, is there no other method than to abolish it altogether?” (p. 29.)

This complete dissolution of all bonds, of all relations between men, naturally reaches its peak in anarchy, the law of lawlessness, the condition in which the bond of bonds, government, is completely severed. And this is what people strive for in England as on the Continent, indeed even in “solid Germany”.

Thus Carlyle rants on for several pages, confounding in a most astonishing manner red republic, Fraternité, Louis Blanc etc. with Free Trade, the abolition of the Corn Laws etc. Cf. pp. 29–42. Carlyle thus mixes up and identifies the destruction of the remnants of feudalism still traditionally preserved, the reduction of the state to the unavoidably necessary and very cheapest, the complete carrying out of free competition by the bourgeoisie, with the abolition of these very bourgeois conditions, with the abolition of the antagonism between capital and wage-labour, with the overthrow of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat. A brilliant return to the “night of the absolute”, in which all cows are grey! Deep science of the “knower”, who does not know the first word of what is going on around him! Strange acuteness, which believes that with the abolition of feudalism or of free competition all relations between men are abolished! Thorough fathoming of the “eternal law of nature”, which believes in all seriousness that no more children will come into the world as soon as the parents no longer go to the town hall to “tie the knot”!

After this edifying example of the wisdom that amounts to pure ignorance, Carlyle also gives us the proof of how the high-protesting magnanimity instantly turns into unveiled baseness as soon as it descends from its heaven of phrases and maxims into the world of real conditions.

“In all European countries, especially in England, a class of captains and commanders of men, recognisable as the beginning of a new, real and not imaginary aristocracy, has already to some extent …”

...developed to such an extent: the captains of industry, fortunately the class | which, before all others, is needful in these times. And certainly, on the other side, there is no lack of people who need to be commanded: that sad class of brother-men whom we have described as Hodge’s emancipated horses, reduced to vagabonding starvation-misery; this class, too, has developed in all countries, and is developing more and more, in ominous geometric progression, at an alarming speed. On this ground it can truthfully be said that the organisation of labour is the universal life-problem of the world.” (pp. 42, 43.)

After Carlyle, on the first forty pages, has again and again given full vent to his entire virtuous rage against egoism, free competition, abolition of the feudal bonds between man and man, demand and supply, laissez faire, cotton-spinning, cash payment, etc., etc., we now suddenly find that the main representatives of all these shams, the industrial bourgeois, not only belong to the celebrated heroes and geniuses, but even constitute the most immediately necessary part of these heroes, that the trump card of all his attacks against bourgeois relations and ideas is the apotheosis of bourgeois persons. It appears all the more strange that Carlyle, after having found the commanders and the commanded of labour, i.e. a definite organisation of labour, nevertheless declares this organisation to be a great problem still to be solved. But let there be no mistake. The question is not the organisation of the regimented, but that of the unregimented, the leaderless workers, and this one Carlyle has reserved for himself. We see him at the end of his brochure suddenly stepping forward as British prime minister in partibus, summoning the three million Irish and other beggars, able-bodied have-nothings, nomadic or stationary, and the general national assembly of the British paupers outside the workhouse and in the workhouse, and “haranguing” them in a speech in which, first, he repeats to the have-nothings everything he previously confided to the reader, and then addresses the select company as follows:

 “Vagabonding have-nothings and good-for-nothings, foolish some of you, criminals many of you, wretched all of you! The sight of you fills me with astonishment and despair. Here are some three million of you, some of you fallen into the abyss of direct beggary, and, terrible to say, each one who falls, by his weight makes the chain that is pulling the others over so much the heavier. On the brink of this abyss hang uncounted millions, increasing, as I am told, by twelve hundred every day, falling, falling one after another, and

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the chain grows ever heavier, and who will be able to stand at last? — What now to do with you? ... The others, who still stand, are struggling with their own distresses, that I can tell you; but you, by defective energy and superfluous appetite, by too little work done and too much beer drunk, you have proved that you cannot. Know that, whoever may be the sons of freedom, you for your part are not and cannot be; you are palpably prisoners, not free men; you have the nature of slaves, or, if you prefer, of nomadically vagabonding bondsmen who know not how to find a master. Not as gloriously unhappy sons of freedom, but as notorious prisoners, as unhappy fallen brothers, who demand that I command them and, if necessary, control and subjugate them, you may from now on enter into connexion with me____ Before Heaven and Earth, and God, the Creator of us all, I declare it a scandal to see such a life maintained in you, by the sweat and the heart’s blood of your brothers, and that, if we cannot better it, death were preferable___ Enlist in my Irish, my Scottish, my English regiments of the new era, you poor wandering banditti, obey, labour, suffer, fast, as all of us had to do. Industrial colonels, taskmasters, overseers, lords over life and death, just as Rhadamanthus and inflexible as he, are needful for you, and they will be findable for you as soon as you are under articles of war___ To each of you I will then say: Here is work for you; fall to it bravely, with manly, soldier-like obedience and good courage, and conform to the methods which I here dictate — wages shall follow you without difficulty___ Refuse, shrink from sore labour, obey not the regulations, and I will admonish and try to spur you on; if in vain, I will flog you; if still in vain, I will finally shoot you down.” (pp. 46-55.)

The “new era,” in which the genius rules, is thus distinguished from the old era mainly by the fact that the whip fancies itself to be genius. The genius Carlyle differs from the first prison Cerberus or overseer of the poor only by his virtuous indignation and the moral consciousness that he only flays the paupers in order to raise them to his own height. We see here the high-protesting genius, in his world-redeeming wrath, fantastically justifying and exaggerating the infamies of the bourgeois. If the English bourgeoisie assimilated the paupers to criminals, in order to deter from pauperism, if it created the Poor Law of 1833, Carlyle accuses the paupers of high treason because pauperism breeds pauperism. Just as earlier the historically arisen ruling class, the industrial bourgeoisie, already participated in the genius merely because it ruled, so now every oppressed class, the more deeply it is oppressed, is the more excluded from the genius, the more exposed to the raging fury of our misunderstood reformer. Thus here the paupers. But his morally noble wrath reaches its highest peak against the absolutely base and ignoble, the “scoundrels,” i.e. the criminals. Of these he treats in the brochure on model prisons.

This brochure differs from the first only by a still much greater fury, all the more cheaply as it is directed against those officially cast out by existing society, against people under lock and key; a fury that strips off even the small amount of shame which the ordinary bourgeois still display for decency’s sake. Just as Carlyle in the first pamphlet sets up a complete hierarchy of the noble and tracks down the noblest of the noble, so he arranges here an equally complete hierarchy of scoundrels and base creatures, and strives to hunt down the worst of the worst, the greatest scoundrel in England, in order to have the voluptuous pleasure of hanging him. Suppose he caught him and hanged him; then another is the worst and must again be hanged, and then again another, until the turn finally comes to the noble, and then to the more noble, and at last no one is left but Carlyle, the noblest, who, as the persecutor of scoundrels, is at the same time the murderer of the noble, and has murdered the noble in the scoundrels, too; the noblest of the noble, who suddenly transforms himself into the most base of scoundrels, and as such has to hang himself. Therewith all questions concerning government, the state, the organisation of labour, the hierarchy of the noble would then be solved, and the eternal law of nature finally realised.

II.

Les Conspirateurs, par A. Chenu, ex-capitaine des gardes du citoyen Caussidière. — Les sociétés secrètes; la préfecture de police sous Caussidière; les corps-francs. — Paris, 1850.

La naissance de la République en Février 1848. Par Lucien de la Hodde. — Paris, 1850.

Nothing is more desirable than that the people who stood at the head of the movement party, whether before the revolution in the secret societies or in the press, or later in official positions, should at last be depicted in robust Rembrandtian colours, in all their vitality. Previous portrayals never show us these personalities in their real form, but only in their official guise, with the buskin on the foot and the aureole | around the head. In these raphaelite beatified pictures all truth of representation is lost.

The two works before us remove, it is true, the buskin and the aureole with which the “great men” of the February revolution used to appear. They penetrate the private lives of these persons, they show them to us in négligé, with their whole entourage of subordinate subjects of very various kinds. But for that reason they are no less far removed from a really faithful representation of persons and events. Of their authors, the one is an admitted long-standing mouchard of Louis Philippe, the other an old conspirator by profession, whose relations with the police are equally very ambiguous, and whose powers of apprehension are already characterised by the fact that he claims to have seen, between Rheinfelden and Basle, “that magnificent Alpine chain, whose silver peaks dazzle the eye,” and between Kehl and Karlsruhe, “the Rhenish Alps, whose distant peaks were lost on the horizon.” From such people, especially when they write, on top of everything else, to justify themselves personally, nothing but a more or less caricatured chronique scandaleuse of the February revolution is to be expected.

Monsieur de la Hodde, in his brochure, seeks to present himself as the spy of Cooper’s novel. He has, he maintains, rendered service to society by paralysing the secret societies for eight years. But from Cooper’s spy to Monsieur de la Hodde is a far, very far cry. Monsieur de la Hodde, collaborator on the “Charivari,” member of the central committee of the “Société des nouvelles saisons” since 1839, co-editor of the “Réforme” since its foundation, and at the same time paid spy of the police prefect Delessert, is compromised by no one more than by Chenu. His writing is directly provoked by Chenu’s revelations, but takes very good care not to reply by a single syllable to what Chenu says about de la Hodde himself. This part of Chenu’s memoirs, at least, is therefore authentic.

“In one of my nocturnal wanderings,” Chenu relates, “I observed de la Hodde walking up and down the Quai Voltaire. The rain streamed down, and this circumstance set me thinking. Could it be that this precious de la Hodde was also drawing on the fund of the secret service money? But I recalled his songs, his magnificent strophes about Ireland and Poland, and especially the violent articles he wrote in the journal ‘La Réforme’” (while Monsieur de la Hodde tries to present himself as the mollifier of the Réforme). “‘Good evening, de la Hodde, what the devil are you doing here at this hour and in this dreadful weather?’—‘I am waiting for a scoundrel who owes me money, and since he passes here every evening at this hour, he will pay me, or—’ and he struck violently with his stick on the parapet of the quay.”

De la Hodde tries to shake him off and makes for the Pont du Carrousel. Chenu moves off in the opposite direction, but only to hide under the arcades of the Institut. De la Hodde soon returns, looks carefully in all directions, and strolls up and down again.

“A quarter of an hour later I noticed the carriage with the two small green lanterns that my ex-agent had signalled to me” (a former spy, who in prison had revealed to Chenu a mass of police secrets and recognition signs). “It stopped at the corner of the Rue des Vieux-Augustins. A man got out; de la Hodde went straight up to him; they spoke for a moment, and I saw de la Hodde make the movement of a man putting money in his pocket. — After this incident I did everything to remove de la Hodde from our gatherings, and above all to prevent Albert from falling into a trap, for he was the cornerstone of our edifice. A few days later La Réforme rejected an article by Monsieur de la Hodde. His literary vanity was wounded. I advised him to revenge himself by founding another journal. He followed this advice, and even published with Pilhes and Dupoty the prospectus of a paper called ‘Le Peuple’, and during this period we were almost entirely rid of him.” — Chenu, pp. 46-48.

We see: the Cooper spy turns into a political prostitute of the vilest kind, who in the street in rainy weather lies in wait for the first policeman who comes along to hand over his *cadeau*. We see further: Not de la Hodde, as he would have it believed, but Albert stood at the head of the secret societies. This indeed follows from Chenu’s entire account. The police spy “in the interest of order” suddenly turns here into the insulted writer who is annoyed that *La Réforme* does not immediately accept the articles of the contributor to *Le Charivari*, and who therefore breaks with *La Réforme*, a real party organ, where he could have been useful to the police, in order to found a new paper, where he could at most satisfy his literary vanity. Just as prostitutes seek to save themselves from their filthy position by a certain sentiment, so the police spy sought to save himself by his literary pretensions. The hatred against *La Réforme*, which runs through his whole pamphlet, dissolves into the most trivial writer’s rancour. Finally we see that de la Hodde, in the most important period of the secret societies, shortly before the February revolution, was more and more driven out of them; and this explains why, in complete contrast to Chenu, in his account they fell more and more into decay during this period.

We now come to the scene in which Chenu describes the exposure of de la Hodde’s treachery after the February revolution. The party of *La Réforme* was gathered at Albert’s in the Luxembourg at Caussidière’s invitation. Monnier, Sobrier, Grandmenil, de la Hodde, Chenu, etc., were present. Caussidière opened the meeting and then said:

“There is a traitor among us. We shall constitute ourselves as a secret tribunal to judge him.” — Grandmenil, as the oldest person present, was appointed president, and Tiphaine secretary. Citizens, Caussidière continued as public prosecutor, for a long time we have accused brave patriots. We were far from suspecting what serpent had crept into our midst. Today I have discovered the real traitor: it is Lucien de la Hodde! — This man, who until then had sat quite calmly, jumped up at this direct accusation. He made a movement towards the door. Caussidière quickly locked it, drew a pistol and cried: If you stir, I’ll smash your skull! — De la Hodde vehemently protested his innocence. Good, said Caussidière. Here is a bundle of eighteen hundred reports to the Prefect of Police — and he gave each one of us the reports specifically concerning him. De la Hodde stubbornly denied that these reports, signed Pierre, came from him, until Caussidière read the letter published in his memoirs, a letter in which de la Hodde offered his services to the Prefect of Police, and which he had signed with his real name. From that moment the unfortunate man denied no more; he sought to excuse himself by the misery which had put the fatal idea into his head to throw himself into the arms of the police. Caussidière handed him the pistol, the last means of salvation remaining to him. De la Hodde then implored his judges, he whined for their mercy, but they remained relentless. Bocquet, one of those present, losing patience, seized the pistol and handed it to him three times, saying: *Allons*, smash your skull, coward, coward, or I’ll kill you myself! — Albert tore it from his hand: But remember, a pistol shot, here in the Luxembourg, would alarm the whole world! — Right, cried Bocquet, we must have poison. — Poison? said Caussidière, I have brought poison, of every kind. He took a glass, filled it with water, which he sugared, then poured a white powder into it, offered it to de la Hodde, who recoiled shuddering: So you want to assassinate me? — Yes, said Bocquet, drink. — De la Hodde was terrible to behold. His features grew pale, his very frizzy and well-dressed hair rose up on his head. Sweat streamed down his face. He implored, he wept: I will not die! But Bocquet, relentless, still held the glass to him. *Allons*, drink, said Caussidière, you’ll be with the devil before you know it. — No, no, I will not drink! And in his mental derangement he added with a terrible gesture: O, I will avenge myself for all these tortures!”

When it was seen that all appeals to the *point d’honneur* were fruitless, de la Hodde was finally pardoned on Albert’s intercession | and taken to the prison of the Conciergerie. (Chenu, pp. 134-136.)

The allegedly Cooper-type spy becomes ever more pitiful. We see him here in all his contemptibility, knowing how to resist his adversaries only through his cowardice. We reproach him not that he did not kill himself, but that he did not shoot down the first of his opponents that came to hand. He subsequently seeks to save himself by a writing in which he tries to portray the whole revolution as a mere *escroquerie*. The real title of this writing is: “The Disappointed Policeman”. It demonstrates that a real revolution is the exact opposite of the notions of the police spy, who, in agreement with the “men of action”, sees in every revolution the work of a small coterie. While all movements provoked more or less arbitrarily by coteries remained mere *émeutes*, it emerges from de la Hodde’s own account, on the one hand, that the official republicans at the beginning of the February days still despaired of winning the republic, and on the other, that the bourgeoisie had to help win the republic without wanting it, that therefore the February republic was necessarily brought about by circumstances which drove the masses of the proletariat, standing outside all coteries, into the streets and kept the majority of the bourgeoisie at home or forced them into common action with it. — What de la Hodde communicates moreover is extremely meagre and reduces itself to the most banal tittle-tattle. Only one scene is interesting: the meeting of the official democrats at the offices of *La Réforme* on the evening of 21 February, in which the chiefs declared themselves decidedly against a violent attack. The content of their speeches testifies, on the whole, for that day, to a correct understanding of the situation. Only the high-flown form and the later pretensions of the same people to have brought about the revolution from the outset with consciousness and intention are ridiculous. The worst thing de la Hodde can say about them, however, is that they tolerated him among them for so long.

Let us turn to Chenu. Who is Monsieur Chenu? He is an old conspirator, involved in all the *émeutes* since 1832, and well known to the police. Called up for conscription, | he soon deserts and remains undiscovered in Paris, despite his repeated participation in conspiracies and in the *émeute* of 1839. In 1844 he reports to his regiment, and strangely enough, despite his well-known antecedents, the court-martial is waived for him by the division general. More yet: he does not serve out his time with the regiment, but is able to return to Paris. In 1847 he is involved in the fire-bomb conspiracy; he escapes an attempted arrest, but nonetheless remains in Paris, although he is sentenced *in contumaciam* to four years. Only when accused by his fellow-conspirators of being in touch with the police does he go to Holland, whence he returns on 21 February 1848. After the February revolution he becomes captain in Caussidière’s Guards. Caussidière soon suspects him (a suspicion which has much probability) of being in touch with Marrast’s special police, and removes him, without much resistance, to Belgium and later to Germany. Monsieur Chenu allows himself quite willingly to be enrolled successively in the Belgian, German and Polish free corps. And all this at a time when Caussidière’s power was already beginning to totter, and although Chenu claims to have completely dominated him, he asserts that he forced him, through a threatening letter, to release him immediately after he had once been arrested. So much for the character and trustworthiness of our author.

The masses of paint and patchouli under which prostitutes seek to smother the less attractive aspects of their physical existence find their literary reproduction in the *bel-esprit* with which de la Hodde perfumes his pamphlet. By contrast, the literary character of Chenu’s book, in the naivety and liveliness of its presentation, is often reminiscent of *Gil Blas*. Just as *Gil Blas*, in the most diverse adventures, always remains a servant and judges everything by the standard of a servant, so Chenu, from the *émeute* of 1832 to his removal from the prefecture, always remains the same subaltern conspirator, whose specific narrow-mindedness, moreover, can be very precisely distinguished from the flat reflections of the literary *faiseur* assigned to him by the Elysée. It is clear that with Chenu, too, there can be no question of an understanding of the revolutionary movement. | Therefore only those chapters remain interesting in his writing where he describes more or less impartially from his own observation: *The Conspirators* and the hero Caussidière.

One knows the inclination of the Romance peoples to conspiracies and the role that conspiracies have played in modern Spanish, Italian and French history. After the defeats of the Spanish and Italian conspirators at the beginning of the twenties

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Lyon and especially Paris became the centres of the revolutionary alliances. It is well known how up to 1830 the liberal bourgeois stood at the head of the conspiracy against the Restoration. After the July Revolution the republican bourgeoisie took their place; the proletariat, trained to conspiring already under the Restoration, stepped into the foreground to the degree that the republican bourgeois were scared away from conspiracies by the vain street-fights. The société des saisons, with which Barbès and Blanqui carried out the émeute of 1839, was already exclusively proletarian, and so too were the nouvelles saisons formed after the defeat, at whose head stood Albert and in which Chenu, de la Hodde, Caussidière, etc. participated. Through its chiefs the conspiracy stood continually in contact with the petty-bourgeois elements represented in La Réforme, yet always maintained itself very independently. These conspiracies, of course, never embraced the great mass of the Paris proletariat. They limited themselves to a comparatively small, constantly fluctuating number of members, consisting partly of old, stationary conspirators regularly handed down by each secret society to its successor, partly of newly recruited workers.

Among these old conspirators, Chenu depicts almost exclusively the class to which he himself belongs: the conspirators by profession. With the development of proletarian conspiracies, the need for a division of labour arose; the members divided themselves into occasional conspirators, conspirateurs d’occasion, i.e., workers who engaged in conspiracy only alongside their other occupation, merely attended the meetings, and kept themselves in readiness, [38] at the orders of the chiefs, to appear at the assembly point; and into conspirators by profession, who devoted their whole activity to the conspiracy and lived from it. They formed the middle stratum between the workers and the chiefs, and often smuggled themselves even among the latter.

The station in life of this class determines in advance its whole character. The proletarian conspiracy naturally offers them only very limited and insecure means of existence. They are, therefore, constantly forced to draw on the funds of the conspiracy. Many of them also come directly into collisions with bourgeois society in general and appear, with more or less decency, before the police courts. Their fluctuating existence, dependent in detail more on chance than on their activity, their irregular life, whose only fixed stations are the taverns of the marchands de vin — the rendezvous-houses of the conspirators — their unavoidable acquaintances with all sorts of equivocal people, place them in that circle of life which in Paris is called la

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bohème. These democratic bohemians of proletarian origin — there is also a democratic bohemia of bourgeois origin, the democratic loafers and piliers d’estaminet — are therefore either workers who have given up their work and thereby become dissolute, or subjects who come out of the lumpenproletariat and transfer all the dissolute habits of that class into their new existence. One understands how under these circumstances almost every conspiracy trial finds a few repris de justice entangled in it.

The entire life of these conspirators by profession bears the most pronounced character of the bohemia. Recruiting sergeants of the conspiracy, they move from one marchand de vin to another, take the pulse of the workers, seek out their people, cajole them into the conspiracy, and have either the society’s funds or the new friend bear the cost of the inevitable consumption of litres. The marchand de vin is, in general, their real landlord. The conspirator mostly stays with him; here he has his rendezvous with his colleagues, with the people of his section, with those to be recruited; here, finally, the secret meetings of the [39] sections and section chiefs (groups) take place. The conspirator, in any case of a very cheerful nature like all Paris proletarians, soon develops into the most complete bambocheur in this uninterrupted tavern atmosphere. The gloomy conspirator, who in the secret sessions puts on an air of Spartan virtue and severity, suddenly thaws and transforms into a regular everywhere known, who well knows how to appreciate wine and the female sex. This tavern humour is heightened still more by the constant dangers to which the conspirator is exposed; at any moment he can be called to the barricade and fall there, at every step the police lay snares for him which can bring him to prison or even to the galleys. Such dangers precisely constitute the charm of the trade; the greater the uncertainty, the more the conspirator hastens to hold fast to the enjoyment of the moment. At the same time, the habit of danger makes him in the highest degree indifferent to life and liberty. In prison he is at home as with the marchand de vin. Every day he awaits the order for the outbreak. The desperate audacity that emerges in every Parisian insurrection is brought in precisely by these old conspirators by profession, the hommes de coups de main. It is they who throw up the first barricades and command them, who organize the resistance, direct the plundering of the gunsmiths’ shops, the seizure of arms and ammunition from the houses, and in the midst of the uprising carry out those venturesome coups de main which so often throw the government party into confusion. In a word, they are the officers of the insurrection.

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It goes without saying that these conspirators do not confine themselves to organising the revolutionary proletariat in general. Their business consists precisely in forestalling the revolutionary development process, driving it artificially to a crisis, making a revolution extempore, without the conditions for a revolution. The sole condition of the revolution for them is the adequate organisation of their conspiracy. They are the alchemists of the revolution and share completely the mental derangement and the narrow-mindedness in fixed ideas of the former alchemists. They throw themselves on [40] inventions which are supposed to perform revolutionary miracles: fire-bombs, destructive machines of magical effect, émeutes which are to work all the more marvellously and surprisingly the less they have a rational basis. Occupied with such project-mongering, they have no other purpose than the immediate overthrow of the existing government, and profoundly despise the more theoretical enlightenment of the workers about their class interests. Hence their not proletarian but plebeian vexation with the habits noirs, the more or less educated people who represent this side of the movement, from whom, however, as the official representatives of the party, they can never make themselves wholly independent. The habits noirs have to serve them from time to time also as a source of money. Apart from this, it goes without saying that the conspirators must, willingly or unwillingly, follow the development of the revolutionary party.

The main feature in the life of the conspirators is their struggle with the police, to which they stand in exactly the same relation as thieves and prostitutes. The police tolerates the conspiracies, and not merely as a necessary evil. It tolerates them as easily surveillable centres in which the most violent revolutionary elements of society come together, as workshops of the émeute, which in France has become just as necessary a means of government as the police itself, and finally as a recruiting-ground for its own political mouchards. Just as the most useful thief-catchers, the Vidocqs and consorts, are taken from the class of higher and lower rogues, thieves, escrocs, and fraudulent bankrupts, and often relapse into their old trade, just so the lower political police is recruited from the conspirators by profession. The conspirators constantly keep in touch with the police, they come into collision with it every moment; they hunt the mouchards as the mouchards hunt them. Espionage is one of their chief occupations. No wonder, therefore, that the little leap from the trade conspirator to the

40 paid police spy, facilitated by misery and imprisonment, by

threats and promises, is so often made. Hence the boundless system of suspicion in the conspi[41]racies, which makes the members completely blind, and lets them recognise mouchards in their best people, and in the genuine mouchards their most reliable people. That these spies recruited from the conspirators usually engage with the police in the good faith that they can dupe it, that for a time they succeed in playing a double role until they fall more and more prey to the consequences of their first step, and that the police is indeed often duped by them, is obvious. Whether moreover such a conspirator falls into the snares of the police depends on purely fortuitous circumstances and on a more quantitative than qualitative difference of firmness of character.

Such are the conspirators whom Chenu often very vividly presents to us and whose character he portrays now with, now against his will. He himself, moreover, right into his not entirely clear connections with the Delessert and Marrast police, is the most striking picture of a conspirator by trade. —

To the same degree as the Paris proletariat itself stepped into the foreground as a party, these conspirators lost their leading influence, were shattered, and found a dangerous competition in proletarian secret societies which had as their aim not immediate insurrection but the organisation and development of the proletariat. The insurrection of 1839 already had a decidedly proletarian and communist character. After it, however, there occurred the splits about which the old conspirators complain so much; splits that arose from the workers’ need to come to an understanding about their class interests, and that found expression partly within the old conspiracies themselves, partly in new propagandist alliances. The communist agitation which Cabet began with power soon after 1839, the controversial questions that arose within the communist party, soon grew over the heads of the conspirators. Chenu, as well as de la Hodde, admits that the communists at the time of the February Revolution were by far the strongest fraction of the revolutionary proletariat. The conspirators, in order not to lose their influence on the workers and therewith their counterweight against the habits noirs, had to follow this movement and adopt socialist [42] or communist ideas. Thus already before the February Revolution there arose the opposition of the workers’ conspiracies, represented by Albert, to the people of La Réforme, the same opposition that soon afterwards reproduced itself in the provisional government. It does not occur to us, by the way, to confuse Albert with these conspirators. It is evident from both writings that Albert knew how to maintain a personal independent position above these his tools and in no wise—

always belonged to the class of people who practised conspiracy as a trade.

The bomb affair of 1847, an affair in which the police intervened more directly than in all previous ones, finally blew apart the most stubborn and most absurd old conspirators and threw their former sections into the direct proletarian movement. —

These conspirators by profession, the most hot-headed people of their sections and the *détenus politiques* of proletarian origin, mostly old conspirators themselves, we find again after the February Revolution as Montagnards in the Prefecture of Police. But the conspirators form the core of the entire society. One can understand that these people, crowded together here all at once under arms, mostly quite familiar with their prefect and their officers, had to form a rather turbulent corps. Just as the Montagne of the National Assembly was the parody of the old Montagne and proved most strikingly through its impotence that the old revolutionary traditions of 1793 are no longer sufficient today, so the Montagnards of the Prefecture of Police, the reproduction of the old *sansculottes*, proved that in the modern revolution even this part of the proletariat is no longer sufficient, and that only the entire proletariat can carry it through.

Chenu depicts the *sansculottic* way of life of this honourable society in the Prefecture most vividly. These humorous scenes, in which M. Chenu evidently played an active part himself, are at times rather wild, but given the character of the old conspiring revellers they are most explicable and form a necessary and even healthy counterpart to the orgies of the bourgeoisie in the last years of Louis Philippe.

We quote only one example from the account of their installation in the Prefecture.

"When day broke, I saw the group leaders gradually arrive with their men, but mostly unarmed. I drew Caussidière's attention to this. I shall get them weapons, he said. Find a suitable place to quarter them in the Prefecture. I immediately carried out this order and sent them to occupy the post of the old city sergeants, where I had once been treated so ignominiously. A moment later I saw them come running back. Where are you going? I asked them. — The post is occupied by a swarm of city sergeants, Devaisse answered me; they are sleeping peacefully, and we are looking for instruments to wake them and throw them out. — They now armed themselves with whatever came to hand, ramrods, sabre scabbards, straps doubled up and broom handles. Then my lads, all of whom had more or less cause to complain of the insolence and brutality of the sleepers, fell upon them with upraised arm and gave them, for more than half an hour, so rough a lesson that some of them were ill for a long time. At their screams of terror I rushed up, and it was only with difficulty that I managed to open the door, which the Montagnards had very prudently locked from the inside. It was worth the trouble now to see the city sergeants, half naked, rush out into the courtyard; they jumped down the stairs in one bound, and it was a good thing for them that they knew all the secret passages of the Prefecture, in order to disappear from the eyes of the enemies hunting them. Once masters of the place, whose garrison they had relieved with so much courtesy, our Montagnards proudly adorned themselves with the cast-offs of the vanquished, and for a long time they could be seen walking up and down the courtyard of the Prefecture, sword at side, cloak over shoulder, and head adorned with the three-cornered hat, once so feared by the majority of them." (p. 83—85.)

We have become acquainted with the Montagnards; we come to their chief, the hero of Chenu's epopee, Caussidière. Chenu presents him to us all the more frequently as it is he against whom the whole book is really directed.

The main reproaches made against Caussidière relate to his moral way of life, bill-jobbing and other little attempts to raise money, such as can and do occur to every debt-ridden and pleasure-loving commercial traveller in Paris. In general, it depends solely on the magnitude of the capital whether the swindlings, profit-mongerings, cheatings and stock-exchange gambles on which the whole of trade rests touch more or less upon the *Code pénal*. On the stock-exchange coups and the Chinese fraud which characterise French trade in particular, see e.g. Fourier's piquant descriptions in the *Quatre mouvements*, the *fausse industrie*, the *Traité de l'Unité universelle* and his posthumous works. M. Chenu does not even attempt to prove that Caussidière exploited his position as Prefect of Police for his private ends. In general, a party may congratulate itself if its victorious opponents have to confine themselves to the disclosure of such commercially moral wretchednesses. The little experiments of the commercial traveller Caussidière and the grandiose scandals of the bourgeoisie of 1847—what a contrast! The whole attack has only one meaning, in so far as Caussidière belonged to the party of the *Réforme*, which sought to mask its lack of revolutionary energy and intelligence by republican protestations of virtue and a sombre earnestness of conviction.

Caussidière is the only amusing figure among the chiefs of the February Revolution. In his capacity as the jester of the revolution, he was the perfectly appropriate chief of the old conspirators by trade. Sensual and humorous, an old habitué of cafés and taverns of the most various kinds, who lived and let live, at the same time militarily brave, concealing beneath a broad-shouldered *bonhomie* and unconstraint great cunning, clever reflection and keen observation, he possessed a certain revolutionary tact and revolutionary energy. Caussidière was at that time a genuine plebeian, who instinctively hated the bourgeoisie and shared all plebeian passions to the highest degree. Scarcely installed at the Prefecture, he already conspires against the *National*, without neglecting the kitchen and cellar of his predecessor for all that. He immediately organises a military force for himself, secures a journal, launches clubs, distributes the roles and generally acts in the first moment with great assurance. In twenty-four hours the Prefecture is transformed into a fortress in which he can defy his enemies. But all his plans remain either mere projects or, in practice, come down to pure plebeian jests with no result. As the antagonisms become sharper, he shares the lot of his party, which remains standing undecided in the middle between the people of the *National* and the proletarian revolutionaries like Blanqui. His Montagnards split; the old revellers grow over his head and can no longer be restrained, while the revolutionary part goes over to Blanqui. Caussidière himself becomes more and more bourgeoisified in his official position as prefect and representative; on 15 May he cautiously holds back and justifies himself in the Chamber in an irresponsible manner; on 23 June he directly abandons the insurrection. As a reward, he is naturally removed from the Prefecture and shortly afterwards sent into exile.

We give below some of the most characteristic passages from Chenu and de la Hodde on Caussidière.

Hardly has de la Hodde been installed as general secretary of the Prefecture by Caussidière on the evening of 24 February, when the latter says to him:

"I need solid people here. The administrative boutique will always go on more or less as usual; I have provisionally kept on the old officials; as soon as the patriots have educated them, we shall balance them. That is a side issue. What matters is to make the Prefecture the citadel of the revolution; instruct our people accordingly; they are all to come here. Once we have a thousand or so sturdy comrades here, we shall hold the cat by the tail. Ledru-Rollin, Flocon, Albert and I understand each other, and I hope the thing will work. The *National* must topple. Once that has happened, we shall republicanise the country, whether it likes it or not."

Immediately afterwards, Garnier-Pagès, Mayor of Paris, under whose orders the *National* had placed the police, came to pay a visit, and proposed to Caussidière that instead of the unpleasant post at the Prefecture he should accept the commandant's post of the château of Compiègne. Caussidière answered him in that little fluting voice which was at his command and which contrasted so strangely with his broad shoulders: "I go to Compiègne? Impossible. It is necessary that I stay here. I have down there several hundred jolly fellows who are working bravely; I am expecting twice as many more. If good will or courage fail you at the Hôtel de Ville, I shall be able to help you. Ha, ha, *la révolution fera son petit bonhomme de chemin, il le faudra bien!*" — "The revolution? But it is finished!" — "Bah, it has not even begun yet!" — The poor mayor stood there like a simpleton. — (De la Hodde, p. 72.)

One of the most amusing scenes Chenu depicts is the reception of the police commissioners and *officiers de paix* by the new prefect, who was just at table when they were announced. "They are to wait," said Caussidière, "the prefect is working." He continued working for a good half-hour, and then arranged the scenery for the reception of Messieurs the commissioners, who in the meantime were standing along the great staircase. Caussidière sat down majestically in his armchair, his great sabre at his side. Two wild Montagnards with cannibalistic expressions guarded the door, musket at foot, pipe in mouth. Two captains with drawn sabres stood on either side of his desk. Moreover, all the section chiefs and the republicans who formed his general staff were grouped in the salon; everyone armed with big sabres and cavalry pistols, with rifles and fowling pieces. Everybody smoked, and the cloud of smoke that filled the salon darkened the faces still more and gave this scene a truly terrifying physiognomy. In the middle a space had been left free for the commissioners. Everyone kept his hat on, and Caussidière gave the order to show them in. These poor commissioners desired nothing more than to be elsewhere, for they were exposed to the rudeness and threats of the Montagnards, who wanted to fricassée them in every possible sauce. "Band of rogues," they roared, "we’ve got you now! You won’t get out again, you’ll have to leave your skins here!" — On entering the prefect's cabinet they believed they were falling from Scylla into Charybdis. The first who set foot on the threshold seemed to waver for a moment. He did not know whether he should go forward or back, so darkly did all eyes turn upon him. At last he took courage, advanced a step and bowed, another step and bowed more deeply, another step and bowed still more deeply. Each made his entry with deep bows to the terrible prefect, who received all these homages coldly and silently, his hand resting on the hilt of his sabre. The commissioners stared at this strange spectacle with gaping eyes. Some, whom terror confused and who no doubt wished to pay court to us, found the tableau imposing, majestic. — Silence! ordered

Reviews § II. Les Conspirateurs, par A. Chenu/La naissance... Par L. De la Hodde

a Montagnard with a sepulchral voice. — As soon as they had all entered, Caussidière, who had remained silent and motionless until then, broke the silence and said in his most terrifying voice:

‘A week ago you expected nothing less than to find me here, in this very spot, surrounded by faithful friends. They are therefore your masters today, the pasteboard republicans, as you once called them. You tremble before those upon whom you heaped the most ignoble treatment. You, Vassal, were the basest side of the overthrown government, the most violent persecutor of the republicans, and now you have fallen into the hands of your

most implacable enemies, for there is not one present here who escaped your persecutions. Were I to listen to the just complaints addressed to me, I would resort to reprisals; I prefer to forget. Go back to your functions, all of you; but if I ever learn that you lend a hand to any reactionary trickery, I will crush you like vermin. Go!’

The commissioners had run through the whole gamut of terror, and, satisfied to get away with just a sermon from the prefect, they took themselves off in a very jolly mood. The Montagnards, who were waiting for them at the foot of the stairs, escorted them to the end of the Rue de Jérusalem with a noisy charivari. No sooner had the last one disappeared than we burst into an immense roar of laughter. Caussidière beamed [48] and laughed more than all the rest at the splendid trick he had played on his commissioners.” — (Chenu, pp. 87-90.)

After 17 March, in which Caussidière had a large share, he said to Chenu: “I can, at my pleasure, raise the masses and hurl them upon the bourgeoisie.” (Chenu, p. 140.) Caussidière, incidentally, never got further with his adversaries than playing scarecrows with them.

Finally, on Caussidière’s relation to the Montagnards, Chenu says: “When I spoke to Caussidière of the excesses his men were indulging in, he would sigh, but his hands were tied. The great majority had shared his life, he had shared their misery and their joys, several had done him services. If he could not keep them down, it was the consequence of his own past.” (p. 97.)

We remind our readers that both these books were written at the time of the agitation for the elections of 10 March. Their effect is evident from the election result — the brilliant victory of the Reds.

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II.

Le Socialisme et l’impôt. Par Emile de Girardin. Paris, 1850.

There are two kinds of socialism, the “good” socialism and the “bad” socialism.

The bad socialism is “the war of labour against capital”. To its account fall all the horrors: equal division of the land, abolition of family ties, organised plunder, etc. [] The good socialism is “the harmony of labour and capital”. In its train are the abolition of ignorance, the removal of the causes of pauperism, the constitution of credit, the multiplication of property, the reform of taxation, in a word “the regime that most nearly approaches the idea which man forms of the kingdom of God on earth”.

One must make use of the good socialism to stifle the bad.

“Socialism has a lever; this lever was the budget. But it lacked a fulcrum with which to lift the world off its hinges. The revolution of 24 February gave it this fulcrum: universal suffrage.”

The source of the budget is taxation. The effect of universal suffrage on the budget, therefore, is supposed to be its effect on taxation. And this effect on taxation is what realises the “good” socialism.

“France cannot bear more than 1,200 million francs in annual taxation. How do you propose to reduce expenditure to that sum?”

“For thirty-five years you have written three times, in two charters and one constitution, that all Frenchmen are to contribute to the burdens of the state in proportion to their means. For thirty-five years this equality of taxation has been a lie___ Let us examine the French system of taxation.”

I. Land tax. The land tax does not fall evenly on the landowners: “If two neighbouring plots of land have received the same cadastral assessment, the two landowners pay the same tax, without any distinction being made between the apparent owner and the real owner”, i.e. between the mortgage-laden and the mortgage-free owner.

Furthermore: The land tax bears no proportion to the taxes falling on the other kinds of property. When the National Assembly introduced it in 1790, it was under the influence of the physiocratic school,

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which regarded the land as the sole source of net revenue [[]] and therefore shifted the whole burden of taxation onto the landowners. The land tax thus rests on an economic error. With an equal distribution of taxes, the landowner would have to bear 20 % of his income, whereas at present he pays 53 %.

Finally, according to its original purpose, the land tax was intended to fall only on the owner, never on the tenant farmer or the renter. Instead, according to M. Girardin, it always falls on the tenant farmer and the renter.

Here M. Girardin commits an economic error. Either the tenant is a genuine tenant, in which case the land tax falls on the owner or on the consumer, but never on him; or he is, under the guise of a tenancy, in reality merely the labourer of the owner, as in Ireland and frequently in France, and in that case the taxes imposed on the owner will always fall on him, whatever they may be called.

II. Personal and movable property tax. The aim of this tax, which was likewise decreed by the National Assembly in 1790, was to strike mobile capital directly. As a measure of the amount of capital, the rent of the dwelling was taken. In reality the tax falls on the landowner, the peasant and the industrialist, while it burdens the rentier only insignificantly or not at all. It is thus the complete perversion of the intentions of its authors. A millionaire may, besides, live in a garret with two rickety chairs — inequitable, etc.

III. Door and window tax. Assault upon the people’s health. Fiscal measure against the purity of the air and the daylight. “Almost

half of the dwellings in France have either only one door and no window, or at most one door and one window.” This tax was adopted on 24 Vendémiaire of the year VII (14 October 1799) out of pressing need for money, as a merely temporary, extraordinary measure, but was rejected in principle.

IV. Licence tax (tax on trades). Tax not on profit, but on the exercise of industry. Penalty for labour. Wherever it is supposed to strike the industrialist, it strikes the consumer for the most part. In general, when this tax was imposed in 1791, | the only object was again to satisfy a momentary need for money.

V. Registration and stamp duty. The droit d’enregistrement dates from Francis I and originally had no fiscal purpose (?). In 1790 compulsory registration was extended to contracts relating to property, and the fee increased. The tax is so contrived that purchase and sale pay more than gifts and inheritances. The stamp duty is a

purely fiscal invention, which strikes unequal profits equally.

VI. Beverage tax. Epitome of all inequity, hindrance to production,

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vexatious, the most expensive in collection. (Incidentally, see Issue III: 1848 to 1849, Consequences of 13 June.)

VII. Customs duties. A planless, traditionally accumulated hotchpotch of mutually contradictory, purposeless tariff rates harmful to industry. E.g., raw cotton pays in France per 100 kilogrammes a tax of 22 fr. 50 c. Let us pass on.

VIII. Octroi. Does not even have the pretext of protecting a national branch of industry. A customs barrier inside the country. Originally a local poor tax, now pressing mainly on the poorer classes and adulterating their means of subsistence. Sets up as many barriers to national industry as there are towns.

So far Girardin on the individual taxes. The reader will have noticed that his criticism is as shallow as it is correct. It boils down to three arguments:

1) that no tax ever falls on the class it is intended by the tax-imposers to fall on, but is shifted onto another class;

2) that every temporary tax takes root and becomes permanent;

3) that no tax is proportional to means, just, equitable, fair.

These general-economic objections to existing taxes recur in all countries. The French system of taxation, however, has a characteristic peculiarity. Just as the English are for public and private law, the French, who otherwise everywhere codified from general points of view, simplified and broke with tradition [52], are for the system of taxation the historical nation par excellence. Girardin says on this point:

“In France we live under the dominion of almost all the fiscal procedures of the old regime. Taille, poll tax, aide, customs, salt tax, tax on contrôle, insinuations, greffe, tobacco monopoly, excessive profits on the postal service and sale of powder, lottery, communal or state corvées, quartering of troops, octrois, river and road tolls, extraordinary levies — all this has been able to change its name, but all this continues to exist in substance and has become neither less oppressive for the people nor more productive for the state treasury. Our financial system rests on no scientific basis whatsoever. It reflects solely the traditions of the Middle Ages, which are themselves in turn the legacy of the ignorant and rapacious Roman fiscality.”

Yet our fathers already cried out in the National Assembly of the first revolution: “We made the revolution only in order to get taxation into our hands.”

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But if this state of affairs could persist under the Empire, under the Restoration, under the July monarchy, its hour has now struck:

“The abolition of the electoral privilege necessarily entails the

abolition of every fiscal inequality. There is absolutely no time to lose, therefore, in tackling financial reform, if force is not to take the place of science___ Taxation is almost the sole basis on which our society rests. People seek social and political reforms very far afield and very high up;

the most important ones are contained in taxation. Seek here, and you shall find.”

And what do we find now?

“As we conceive taxation, the tax should be an insurance premium, paid by those who possess, in order to insure themselves against all risks,”

...which could disturb them in their possession and their enjoyment... This premium must be proportionate, and of a rigorous precision. Every tax which is not the guarantee for a risk, the price of a commodity, or the equivalent for a service, must be abandoned — we allow only two exceptions: tax on foreign goods (customs) and tax on death (registration). Thus the taxpayer gives way to the insured... Everyone who has an interest in paying, pays and pays only according to the measure of his interest.____We go still further, and say: Every tax condemns itself already by bearing the name tax, impost. Every tax must be abolished, for the characteristic trait of a tax is to be compulsory, the character of insurance is to be voluntary.”

This insurance premium must not be confused with a tax on income; it is rather a tax on capital, just as the insurance premium does not guarantee the income, but the entire stock of wealth. The state proceeds exactly like the insurance companies, which want to know, not what the insured object yields, but what it is worth.

“French national wealth is estimated at an active of 134 milliards, from which a passive of 28 milliards is to be deducted. If the expenditure budget were reduced to 1,200 millions, only 1 per cent of capital would need to be raised, to bring the state to the level of a colossal mutual insurance company.”

From that moment on — “no more revolution!”

“In place of the word authority comes the word solidarity; the common interest becomes the bond of the members of society.”

Monsieur Girardin does not content himself with this general proposal, but gives us at the same time the scheme of an insurance policy or inscription, such as every citizen is to receive issued by the state.

Each year the former tax-collector gives the insured a policy consisting “of four pages of the size of a passport”. On the first page is the name of the insured with his immatriculation number, together with the form for the receipts for the premium instalments. On the second page is the precise personal description of the insured and his family, along with the duly certified detailed self-assessment of his total wealth; on the third page the state budget together with a general balance-sheet of France, and on the fourth all sorts of more or less useful statistical information. This policy serves as passport, as electoral card, as journeyman’s travelling book for workers, etc. The registers of these policies in turn serve the state for the making-up of the four great books, the great book of the population, the great book of the public debt, and the great book of the mortgage debt, which together contain a complete statistic of all the resources of France.

Thus the tax is now only the premium which the insured pays in order to be admitted to participation in the following advantages: 1) right to public protection, to gratuitous administration of justice, gratuitous religious worship, gratuitous education, credit on mortgage, savings-bank pension; 2) exemption from military service in peacetime; 3) preservation from destitution; 4) compensation for losses through fire, flood, hail, cattle plagues, shipwreck.

We note further that Monsieur Girardin intends to cover the compensation money which the state has to pay in the event of losses incurred by the insured, by various fines, etc., by the revenue of the national domains and the retained registration and customs duties, as well as the state monopolies. —

Tax reform is the hobby-horse of all radical bourgeois, the specific element of all bourgeois-economic reforms. From the oldest medieval philistines down to the modern English free-traders, the main struggle revolves around taxes.

Tax reform aims either at the abolition of traditionally inherited taxes that stand in the way of the development of industry, at cheaper state administration, or at more equal distribution. The bourgeois chases after the chimerical ideal of equal tax distribution all the more eagerly, the more it escapes his grasp in practice.

The relations of distribution, which rest directly on bourgeois production, the relations between wages and profit, profit and interest, ground-rent and profit, can at best be modified by the tax in secondary points, but never threatened in their foundation. All investigations and debates about the tax presuppose the eternal duration of these bourgeois relations. Even the abolition of taxes could only accelerate the development of bourgeois property and its contradictions.

The tax can favour particular classes and impose special burdens on others, as we see, for example, under the rule of the financial aristocracy. It only ruins the middle strata of society between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, whose position does not permit them to shift the burden of the tax on to another class.

The proletariat is forced one step lower by every new tax; the abolition of an old tax does not raise wages, but profit. In the revolution the tax, swollen to colossal proportions, can serve as a form of attack against private property; but even then it must drive on to new, more revolutionary measures, or finally lead back to the old bourgeois relations.

The reduction, the cheaper distribution, etc., etc., of the tax — that is the banal bourgeois reform. The abolition of the tax — that is bourgeois socialism. This bourgeois socialism addresses itself especially to the industrial and commercial middle estates and to the peasants. The big bourgeoisie, which already lives in its best of all worlds, naturally disdains the utopia of a best world.

Monsieur Girardin abolishes the tax by transforming it into an insurance premium. The members of society mutually insure, against payment of certain percentages, their property against fire and flood, against hail and bankruptcy, against every possible risk that nowadays disturbs the tranquillity of bourgeois enjoyment. The annual contribution is not only fixed by all the insured together, it is determined by each individual himself. He himself assesses his own wealth. The commercial and agricultural crises, the massive losses and bankruptcies, all the fluctuations and vicissitudes of bourgeois existence, epidemic since the introduction of modern industry, the entire poetic side of bourgeois society vanishes. Universal security and insurance is realised. The bourgeois has it in writing from the state that under no circumstances can he be ruined. All the shady sides of the existing world are removed, all its bright sides continue in higher brilliance, in short, the regime is realised “which comes closest to the idea the bourgeois forms of the kingdom of God on earth”. Instead of authority, solidarity; instead of compulsion, freedom; instead of the state, an administrative committee — and the egg of Columbus is found, the mathematically exact contribution of each “insured” according to his wealth. Each “insured” bears a complete constitutional state, a fully developed bicameral system, within his breast. The fear of paying the state too much, the bourgeois opposition of the Chamber of Deputies, drives him to state his wealth too low. The interest in the preservation of his possessions, the conservative element of the Chamber of Peers, inclines him to overestimate it. From the constitutional play of these opposed tendencies there necessarily emerges the true equilibrium of powers, the precisely correct statement of wealth, the exact proportionality of the contribution.

That Roman wished his house might be of glass, so that each of his actions lay open before all eyes. The bourgeois wishes not that his own house, but that of his neighbour, be of glass. This wish, too, is fulfilled. For example: A bourgeois wants to have advances from me or to associate himself with me. I demand his policy, and in it I have his complete detailed confession of all his bourgeois circumstances, guaranteed by his well-understood interest and countersigned by the administrative board of the insurance. A beggar knocks at my door and asks for alms. Out with the policy! The bourgeois must know that he is giving his alms to the right man. One takes on a domestic, introduces him into one’s house, entrusts oneself to him on chance: Out with the policy! — “How many marriages are contracted without either side knowing exactly, what it is to expect with regard to the reality of what is brought in or the mutually exaggerated expectations”: Out with the policy! The exchange of beautiful souls will in future be restricted to the exchange of the two parties’ policies. Thus the cheating that nowadays constitutes the enjoyment and pain of life vanishes, and the kingdom of truth in the literal sense of the word is realised. More than this: “In the present system the law courts cost the state some 7½ millions; in our system the offences bring it in revenue, instead of costing it money, for they are all transformed into fines and into damages — what an idea!” — In this best of worlds everything is profitable: crimes pass away, and offences bring in money. Finally, since in this system property is protected against all risks, and the state is only a universal insurance of all interests, the workers are always employed: “No more revolutions!”

If that’s not good for the bourgeois,
Then I don’t know what’s better!

The bourgeois state is nothing but a mutual insurance of the bourgeois class against its individual members as against the exploited class,

class, an insurance company which must become ever more costly and apparently ever more independent vis-à-vis bourgeois society, because the suppression of the exploited class becomes ever more difficult. Changing the name does not alter in the slightest the conditions of this insurance. The apparent independence that Monsieur Girardin momentarily ascribes to individuals vis-à-vis the insurance, he himself is immediately forced to relinquish. Whoever assesses his fortune too low is liable to punishment: the insurance fund buys his property from him at the declared value, and even provokes denunciations by offering rewards. More than that: whoever prefers not to insure his fortune at all is placed outside society, is directly declared an outlaw. Society, of course, cannot tolerate the formation within it of a class that rebels against its conditions of existence. The coercion, the authority, the bureaucratic interference that Girardin precisely wishes to remove, return to society. | If he abstracted for a moment from the conditions of bourgeois society, it was only in order to return to them by a roundabout route.

Behind the abolition of taxation there lurks the abolition of the state. The abolition of the state has meaning only for the communists as the necessary result of the abolition of classes, with which the need for the organised power of one class to suppress another disappears of itself. In bourgeois countries the abolition of the state means the reduction of state power to the scale obtaining in North America. Here the class antagonisms are only incompletely developed; class collisions are each time glossed over by the removal of the surplus proletarian population to the West; the intervention of state power, reduced to a minimum in the East, does not exist at all in the West. In feudal countries the abolition of the state means the abolition of feudalism and the establishment of the ordinary bourgeois state. In Germany what hides behind it is either the cowardly flight from the immediately pending struggles, the extravagant trick of swindling away bourgeois freedom into the absolute independence and autonomy of the individual, or, finally, the indifference of the bourgeois towards every form of state, provided that bourgeois interests are not hampered in their development. That this abolition of the state is preached in such a silly fashion “in a higher sense” is of course not something for which the Berliners Stirner and Faucher can be held responsible. La plus belle fille de la France ne peut donner que ce qu’elle a.

What remains of Monsieur Girardin’s insurance company is the tax on capital as distinct from the tax on income and in place of all other taxes. Monsieur Girardin’s capital

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is not limited to capital employed in production, it embraces all movable and immovable wealth and possessions. Of this tax on capital he boasts: “It is the egg of Columbus, it is the pyramid that stands on its base and not on its point, the stream that digs its own bed, the revolution without revolutionaries, progress without retrogression, movement without shock, in short, it is the simple idea and the true law.” |

 Of all the quack advertisements that Monsieur Girardin has ever produced — and their number is well known to be legion — this prospectus of the capital tax is certainly the master piece.

Incidentally, the tax on capital as the sole tax has its advantages. All economists, and Ricardo in particular, have demonstrated the benefits of a single tax. The capital tax as the sole tax does away at one stroke with the numerous and costly personnel of the existing tax administration, interferes least of all with the regular course of production, circulation and consumption, and is the only tax that hits luxury capital.

But for Monsieur Girardin, the capital tax does not stop there. It has quite special miraculous effects.

Capitals of equal magnitude will have to pay the same percentage of tax to the state, regardless of whether they yield 6%, 3% or no income at all. The consequence is that idle capitals are set in motion, thus increasing the mass of productive capitals; and that those already active exert themselves still more, i.e. produce more in less time. The result of both is a fall in the rate of profit and the rate of interest. Monsieur Girardin, on the contrary, asserts that profit and interest will then rise — a veritable economic miracle. The transformation of unproductive capitals into productive ones, and the growing productivity of capitals in general, has increased and intensified the course of industrial development and crises, and depressed the rate of profit and interest. The capital tax can only accelerate this process, sharpen the crises, and thereby augment the accumulation of revolutionary elements. “No more revolutions!”

A second miraculous effect of the capital tax, according to Monsieur Girardin, is that it would draw capitals from poorly yielding land to the more productive industry, bring down land prices, and transplant the concentration of landed property, large-scale English cultivation, and with it the whole developed English industry to France. Quite apart from the fact that for this to happen the other conditions of English industry would also have to emigrate to France, Monsieur Girardin commits some very peculiar errors here. In France, agriculture suffers

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not | from a surplus, but from a lack of capital. It was not by withdrawing capital from agriculture, but, on the contrary, by throwing industrial capital onto the land that English concentration and English agriculture came about. Land prices in England are far higher than in France; the total value of English land and soil is almost as high as the entire French national wealth, according to Girardin’s estimate. With concentration, land prices in France would therefore not only not fall, but, on the contrary, would have to rise. The concentration of landed property in England, furthermore, has completely swept away whole generations of the population. The same concentration, to which the capital tax must certainly contribute through the more rapid ruin of the peasants, would in France drive this great mass of peasants into the towns and make the revolution all the more inevitable. And finally, if in France the reversal from parcelling to concentration has already begun, in England large landed property is marching with giant strides towards its renewed break-up, and proves irrefutably that agriculture must continually move in this cycle of concentration and fragmentation of the soil as long as bourgeois conditions continue to exist at all.

Enough of these miracles. Let us come to credit on mortgage.

Credit on mortgage is initially opened only to landed property. The state issues mortgage certificates which correspond entirely to banknotes, except that not hard cash or bullion but land and soil provide the guarantee for them. These mortgage certificates are advanced by the state to indebted peasants at 4% in order to satisfy their mortgage creditors; in place of the private creditor, the state now has a mortgage on the land and consolidates the debt, so that it can never call it in. The total mortgage debt in France amounts to 14 milliards. Girardin, admittedly, counts only on the issue of 5 milliards in mortgage certificates; but the increase of paper money by such a sum would be enough, not to make capital cheaper, but to completely devalue the paper currency. At the same time, Girardin does not dare |

 to give this new paper a forced currency. To avoid devaluation, he proposes to the holders of these certificates to exchange them at par for 3% government bonds. The upshot of the transaction, then, is this: The peasant who formerly paid 5% interest and 1% in registration, renewal, etc., fees, now pays only 4%, thus gains 2%; the state borrows at 3% and lends at 4%, thus gains 1%; the former mortgage creditor, who previously received 5%, is forced by the threat of devaluation of the mortgage certificates to accept gratefully the 3% offered by the state;

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he thus loses 2%. Moreover, the peasant does not need to pay his debt, and the creditor can never recover his claim from the state. The business therefore amounts to a direct, poorly disguised plundering of the mortgage creditors of 2% out of 5, concealed by the mortgage certificates. Thus the only time that Monsieur Girardin, apart from the tax, wants really to change the social relations themselves, he is forced into a direct attack on private property, is forced to become revolutionary and to abandon his whole utopia. And this attack does not even originate from him. He has borrowed it from the German communists, who after the February revolution were the first to demand the conversion of the mortgage debt into a debt to the state, though in a quite different way from Monsieur Girardin, who even opposed it. It is significant that the only time Monsieur Girardin proposes a somewhat revolutionary measure he lacks the courage to put forward anything but a palliative which can only make the development of parcelling in France more chronic, put it back by only a few decades, only to bring about the present state of affairs again in the end.

The only thing the reader will have missed in Girardin’s whole presentation is the workers. But bourgeois socialism everywhere assumes, after all, that society consists of nothing but capitalists, in order then, from this standpoint, to be able to solve the question between capital and wage-labour.

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