Reviews from the
“Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-ökonomische Revue”.
Second Issue, February 1850

I

G. Fr. Daumer, *Die Religion des neuen Weltalters. Versuch einer combinatorisch-aphoristischen Grundlegung*, 2 vols., Hamburg 1850

“A man in Nuremberg, otherwise very liberal and not at all unreceptive to the new, conceived a tremendous hatred for the democratic goings-on. He venerated Ronge and had his picture hanging in his room. But when he heard that Ronge sided with the democrats, he hung the picture in the privy. He once said: Oh, if only we were living under the Russian knout, how happy I should feel! He died during the disturbances, and I suspect that, although he was already old, it was merely displeasure and grief over the course of events that brought him to the grave.” (Vol. II, pp. 321, 322.)

If this lamentable Nuremberg philistine, instead of dying, had cobbled together his scraps of thought from the “Correspondent von und für Deutschland”, from Schiller and Goethe, from old schoolbooks and new lending-library material, he would have spared himself death and Herr Daumer his laboriously produced two volumes of a “combinatorial-aphoristic foundation”. We, of course, should not have been granted the edifying opportunity to become acquainted, simultaneously with the “Religion of the New World Age”, with its first martyr.

Herr Daumer’s work is divided into two parts, a “preliminary” and an “actual” one. In the preliminary part, the faithful Eckart of German philosophy expresses his deep concern that even thinking and educated Germans have, in the last two years, allowed themselves to be led astray into abandoning the inestimable achievements of thought for the merely “external” revolutionary activity. He considers the present moment suitable for appealing once more to the better feelings of the nation; he points out what is involved in frittering away so frivolously the whole of German culture, through which alone the German burgher still amounted to something. He compiles the entire content of German culture in the most forceful core sayings that the treasure-chest of his reading offers, and thereby compromises this German culture no less than German philosophy. His anthology of the most sublime products of the German mind surpasses even the most ordinary reader for daughters of the educated classes in flatness and triviality. From the philistine outbursts of Goethe and Schiller against the first French Revolution, from the classic “Dangerous is it to rouse the lion” down to the latest literature, the high priest of the new religion diligently hunts for every passage in which the German pigtail, with sleepy discomfort, stiffens against the historical movement that is repugnant to it. Authorities of the calibre of Friedrich Raumer, Berthold Auerbach, Lochner, Moriz Carrière, Alfred Meißner, Krug, Dingelstedt, Ronge, “Nürnberger Bote”, Max Waldau, Sternberg, German Mäurer, Louise Aston, Eckermann, Noack, “Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung”, A. Kunze, Ghillany, Th. Mundt, Saphir, Gutzkow, a “born Gatterer”, etc., are the pillars on which the temple of the new religion rests. The revolutionary movement against which so polyphonous an anathema is here pronounced is, for Herr Daumer, limited on the one hand to the most banal tinkering, such as is the order of the day in Nuremberg under the auspices of the “Correspondent von und für Deutschland”, and on the other to mob excesses, of which Herr Daumer harbours the most adventuristic notions. The sources from which he draws here are worthy of the above-mentioned: alongside the repeatedly cited Nuremberg “Correspondent” there figure the “Bamberger Zeitung”, the Munich “Landbotin”, the Augsburg “Allgemeine Zeitung”, etc. The same philistine baseness that always sees the proletarian only as a dissolute, depraved ragamuffin and contentedly rubs its hands over the Paris June massacres of 1848, when more than 3,000 of these “ragamuffins” were slaughtered, this same baseness is outraged at the ridicule to which the sentimental societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals have fallen victim.

“The appalling tortures,” exclaims Herr Daumer on p. 293 of Vol. I, “that the unhappy animal endures under the cruel tyrannical hand of man are ‘dirt’ to these barbarians, about which one need not bother oneself!”

The whole modern class struggle appears to Herr Daumer only as a struggle of “coarseness” against “culture”. Instead of explaining it from the historical conditions of these classes, he finds its cause in the seditious stirrings of certain evil-minded persons who incite the lower passions of the mob against the educated classes.

“This democratic reformism … stimulates the envy, the wrath, the rapacity of the lower classes of society against the higher ones; a fine means to make human beings nobler and better and to found a higher level of culture.” (Vol. I, pp. 288/289.)

Herr Daumer does not even know the struggles of “the lower classes of society against the higher ones” which it cost to bring about even a Nuremberg “level of culture” and to make possible a Moloch-catcher à la Daumer.

The second, “actual” part then contains the positive side of the new religion. Here the whole vexation of the German philosopher is expressed at the oblivion into which his struggles against Christianity have fallen, at the indifference of the people towards religion, the only subject worthy of the philosopher’s contemplation. In order to bring his craft, which has been pushed aside by competition, back into esteem, nothing remains for our sage but, after having barked enough against the old religion, to invent a new one. This new religion, however, in appropriate continuation of the first part, limits itself to an ongoing anthology of sententious sayings, album verses, and versus memoriales (memorial verses) of German philistine culture. The suras of the new Koran are nothing but a series of phrases in which existing German conditions are morally glossed over and poetically decked out. Phrases which, for having cast off the directly religious form, are none the less intergrown with the old religion.

“Entirely new world conditions and world relations can come into being only through new religions. As examples and proofs of what religions are capable of, Christianity and Islam may serve; as a very illuminating and palpable proof of the impotence and resultlessness from which the abstract, exclusive politics that were set in motion in the year 1848 suffer, the movements of that year may be cited.” (Vol. I, p. 313.)

In this pregnant sentence we encounter the entire shallowness and ignorance of the German “thinker”, who regards the petty German and specifically Bavarian “March achievements” as the European movement of 1848 and 1849, and who demands of the very first, still quite superficial eruptions of a great revolution that is gradually working itself out and concentrating itself that they should already give rise to “entirely new world conditions and world relations”. The whole complicated social struggle that, between Paris and Debreczin, Berlin and Palermo, came to its first skirmishing engagements in the last two years is limited, for the sage Daumer, to the fact that “in January 1849 the hopes of the constitutional associations of Erlangen receded into an immeasurable distance” (Vol. I, p. 312), and to the fear of a new struggle that might once again startle Herr Daumer unpleasantly out of his occupations with Hafiz, Mohammed, and Berthold Auerbach.

The same shameless superficiality makes it possible for Herr Daumer totally to ignore that Christianity was preceded by the complete collapse of the ancient “world conditions”, of which Christianity was merely the expression; that “entirely new world conditions” did not come about from within through Christianity, but only when the Huns and Germans fell upon the corpse of the Roman Empire from without; that after the Germanic invasion, the “new world conditions” did not conform to Christianity, but rather Christianity changed with each new phase of these world conditions. Incidentally, let Herr Daumer give us an example in which the old world conditions changed with a new religion, without at the same time the most powerful “external” and abstractly political convulsions occurring.

It is clear that with every great historical upheaval of social conditions, the outlooks and ideas of men and therewith their religious ideas are also revolutionised. The difference between the present upheaval and all earlier ones consists, however, precisely in the fact that men have at last got behind the secret of this historical process of upheaval, and instead of once again deifying this practical, “external” process in the extravagant form of a new religion, they cast off all religion.

After the gentle moral teachings of the new worldly wisdom, which in this respect even surpass Knigge by containing the necessary precepts not only on intercourse with human beings but also on intercourse with animals – after the Proverbs of Solomon comes the Song of Songs of the new Solomon.

“Nature and Woman are the truly Divine, as distinct from Man and the Male.... Surrender of the Human to the Natural, of the Masculine to the Feminine is the true, the only true humility and self-renunciation, the highest, indeed the only virtue and piety that exist.” (Vol. II, p. 257.)

Here we see how the shallow ignorance of the speculative founder of a religion transforms itself into a very pronounced cowardice. Herr Daumer flees from the historical tragedy that is approaching him menacingly too close into alleged nature, i.e., into the stupid peasant idyll, and preaches the cult of Woman in order to cover up his own womanish resignation.

Herr Daumer’s cult of nature is, incidentally, of a peculiar kind. He has succeeded in taking up a position that is reactionary even compared with Christianity. He attempts to restore the old pre-Christian nature religion in a modernised form. In so doing, he of course manages only to produce a Christian-Germanic-patriarchal drivel about nature, which, for example, expresses itself as follows:

“Sweet, holy Nature,
Let me walk upon thy track,
Lead me by thy hand,
Like a child on leading-strings!”

“Such things have gone out of fashion; but not to the advantage of culture, progress and human happiness.” (Vol. II, p. 157.)

The cult of nature restricts itself, as we see, to the small-town dweller’s Sunday walks, during which he displays his childish wonder at the fact that the cuckoo lays its eggs in strange nests (Vol. II, p. 40), that tears are destined to keep the surface of the eye moist (Vol. II, p. 73), etc., and finally declaims Klopstock’s Spring Ode to his children with holy shudders (Vol. II, p. 23 ff.). Of modern natural science, which in conjunction with modern industry revolutionises the whole of nature and, among other childishnesses, puts an end to the childish attitude of men towards nature, there is naturally no word. Instead we get mysterious intimations and astonished philistine presentiments about Nostradamus’s prophecies, the second sight of the Scots and animal magnetism. It would, by the way, be desirable that the sluggish peasant economy of Bavaria, the soil on which priests and Daumers grow equally, be at last thoroughly turned over by modern agriculture and modern machinery.

The cult of woman is exactly like the cult of nature. It goes without saying that Herr Daumer says not a word about the present social position of women, that, on the contrary, it is solely a matter of woman as such. He seeks to console women for their bourgeois misery by devoting to them a cult of phrases just as empty as it is mysterious. Thus he reassures them by saying that their talents cease with marriage, as they then have to do with children (Vol. II, p. 237), that they possess the ability to suckle children even up to the age of sixty (Vol. II, p. 251), etc. Herr Daumer calls this “the surrender of the masculine to the feminine.” In order to find the requisite ideal female figures for his masculine surrender in his fatherland, he is compelled to take refuge in various aristocratic ladies of the previous century. The cult of woman thus reduces itself once more to the oppressed literary man’s relationship to revered patronesses — Wilhelm Meister.

The “education” over whose decline Herr Daumer intones Jeremiads is the education of the time when Nuremberg flourished as a free imperial city, when Nuremberg industry, that hybrid of art and craft, played a significant role, the education of the German petty bourgeoisie, which perishes together with this petty bourgeoisie. If the downfall of earlier classes, such as the knighthood, could provide the stuff for great tragic works of art, the philistine bourgeoisie, quite appropriately, brings forth nothing more than impotent utterances of fanatical malice and a collection of Sancho Panza-like proverbs and rules of wisdom. Herr Daumer is the dry, entirely humourless continuation of Hans Sachs. German philosophy, wringing its hands and lamenting at the deathbed of its foster-father, the German philistine bourgeoisie — that is the touching picture which the “Religion of the New Age” unfolds before us.

II

Ludwig Simon of Trier,

“A Word of Justice for All Fighters for the Imperial Constitution,
Addressed to the German Jurymen”
,

Frankfurt a. M. 1849

“We had voted against the hereditary character of the head of the Reich; we abstained from the election the next day. But when the whole work, which had emerged from the will of the majority of an assembly elected by universal suffrage, stood completed, we declared that we would submit. Had we not done so, we would have proved that we were not fitted for bourgeois society at all.” p. 43.

According to Herr L. Simon “of Trier”, therefore, even the most extreme members of the Frankfurt Assembly were no longer “fitted for bourgeois society at all.” Herr L. Simon “of Trier” thus appears to conceive the limits of bourgeois society in general as even narrower than the limits of St. Paul’s Church.

Incidentally, Herr Simon possessed the right tact to reveal in his self-confession of 11 April 1849 the secret of both his earlier opposition and his later conversion.

“Out of the turbid waters of pre-March diplomacy cold mists have risen. These mists will contract into clouds, and we shall have a storm big with destruction, which threatens first of all to strike the tower of the church in which we sit. Watch and provide for a lightning-conductor that will conduct the lightning away from you!”

That is to say, gentlemen, it’s now a matter of our own skins!

The beggarly motions, the miserable compromises which the Frankfurt Left offered to the majority on the imperial question and after the shameful return of the imperial deputation, merely in order to keep it in the Assembly, the dirty attempts at agreement which it then made in all directions, receive their higher consecration in the following words of Herr Simon:

“The word agreement has, through the events of the past year, become the object of very serious mockery. One hardly dares speak of it any longer without being laughed at. And yet only one of two cases is possible: either men agree with one another, or they fall upon each other like wild beasts.” p. 43.

That is to say, either the parties fight out their struggle, or they postpone it by some arbitrary compromise. The latter is at any rate “more educated” and more humane. Incidentally, by his above theory Herr Simon opens up for himself an infinite series of agreements by means of which he will remain possible in every “bourgeois society”.

The blessed Imperial Constitution is justified in the following philosophical deduction:

“The Imperial Constitution was quite properly the expression of what was possible without new exertions of force ... It was the living (!) expression of democratic monarchy, hence of a contradiction in principle. But many a thing has actually existed which contradicted itself in principle, and it is precisely from the actual existence of contradictions in principle that further life develops.” p. 44.

One sees that the application of Hegelian dialectics still remains somewhat more difficult than quoting Schiller’s little verses. The Imperial Constitution, if it was to exist “actually” despite its “contradiction in principle”, would have had at least to express “in principle” the contradiction that existed “in actual fact”. “In actual fact” there stood on the one side Prussia and Austria, military absolutism, on the other side the German people, cheated out of the fruits of their March insurrections, cheated to a great extent by their foolish trust in the wretched Frankfurt Assembly, and on the point of finally venturing a new struggle against military absolutism. This actual contradiction could only be resolved by an actual struggle. Did the Imperial Constitution formulate this contradiction? Not in the remotest degree. It formulated the contradiction as it had existed in March 1848, before Prussia and Austria had regained their strength, before the opposition was split up, weakened, disarmed by partial defeats. It formulated nothing more than the childish self-delusion of the gentlemen from St. Paul’s Church, who imagined that in March 1849 they could still dictate laws to the Prussian and Austrian governments and secure for themselves for all time the equally lucrative and safe position of German Reichsbarrots.

Herr Simon then congratulates himself and his colleagues that, in their interested blindness about the Imperial Constitution, they were not to be made waver by anything:

“Confess with shame, you renegades of Gotha, that we, in the midst of the press of passions, resisted every temptation, faithfully kept our word and did not alter one iota of the common work!” p. 67.

He then points to their heroic deeds in relation to Württemberg and the Palatinate and to their Stuttgart resolution of 8 June, by which they placed Baden under the protection of the Reich, although at that time the Reich essentially stood under the protection of Baden, and their resolutions merely proved that they were determined not to deviate “by one iota” from their cowardice and forcibly to cling to an illusion in which they themselves no longer believed.

The reproach that “the Imperial Constitution was only the mask of the republic” is refuted by Herr Simon most ingeniously as follows:

“Only if the struggle against all governments without exception had to be fought out to the end, ... and who tells you, then, that the struggle against all governments without exception had to be fought out to the end? Who can calculate all the possible vicissitudes of the struggle and the fortunes of war, and if, after bloody wrestling, the hostile brothers (governments and people) had stood exhausted and undecided facing one another, and the spirit of peace and reconciliation had come over them, had we damaged the banner of the Imperial Constitution, under which they could have stretched out their brotherly hands for reconciliation, even in the slightest? Look around you! Hand on heart! Search your innermost conscience honestly, and you will, you must answer: No, no and again no!” p. 70.

This is the true quiver of eloquence from which Herr Simon drew those arrows which he discharged with such astonishing effect in St. Paul’s Church! — Despite its flatness, this touching pathos is not without interest. It proves how the Frankfurt gentlemen sat quietly in Stuttgart and waited until the hostile parties had fought themselves weary, so as then, at the right moment, to step between the exhausted ones and offer them the panacea of reconciliation, the Imperial Constitution. And how heartily Herr Simon here speaks the mind of his colleagues is shown by the fact that these gentlemen still carry on their sessions in Berne at the inn of landlord Benz in Kesslergasse and are only waiting for a new struggle to break out, so that, when the parties “stand exhausted and undecided facing one another”, they can step between them and offer them for agreement the Imperial Constitution, that perfect expression of exhaustion and indecision.

“But I tell you in spite of all this, and however much it pains me, far from the fatherland, far from the homeland, far from aged parents, to wander the lonely paths of exile, I do not exchange my clean conscience for the pangs of conscience of the renegades and the sleepless nights of the rulers, even if one offered me the superfluity of all earthly goods of fortune!” p. 71.

If only it were possible to send these gentlemen into exile! But do they not carry the fatherland after them in their trunks in the shape of the Frankfurt stenographic reports, from which a stream of unadulterated native air and the fullness of the most beautiful self-satisfaction rushes out to meet them?

If, by the way, Herr Simon claims to be interceding a word for the fighters for the Imperial Constitution, he commits a pious fraud. The fighters for the Imperial Constitution did not need his “word of justice”. They defended themselves better and more energetically. But Herr Simon must put them forward in order to conceal that he considers it indispensable, in the interest of the Frankfurters compromised on all sides, in the interest of the makers of the Imperial Constitution, in his own interest, to deliver an oratio pro domo <speech in his own cause>.

III

Guizot, “Pourquoi la révolution d’Angleterre a-t-elle réussi? Discours sur l’histoire de la révolution d’Angleterre”, <Guizot, “Why did the revolution in England succeed? Lecture on the history of the English revolution”>, Paris 1850

The pamphlet of M. Guizot aims to prove why Louis Philippe and the policy of Guizot ought not really to have been overthrown on 24 February 1848, and how it is the reprehensible character of the French which is to blame for the fact that the July Monarchy of 1830, after eighteen years of arduous existence, collapsed ignominiously and did not achieve the permanence which the English monarchy has enjoyed since 1688.

One sees from this pamphlet how even the ablest men of the *ancien régime* [the old regime], how even men whom one cannot by any means deny a certain historical talent, have been thrown into such complete confusion by the fatal February event that they have lost all historical understanding, that they have even lost the understanding of their own former course of action. Instead of being driven by the February Revolution to an insight into the completely different historical circumstances, the completely different position of the classes of society in the French monarchy of 1830 and the English monarchy of 1688, M. Guizot dissolves the whole difference into a few moral phrases and asseverates in conclusion that the policy overthrown on 24 February, “just as it preserves states, so alone can it master revolutions.”

Stated precisely, the question which M. Guizot seeks to answer is: Why did bourgeois society in England develop longer in the form of a constitutional monarchy than in France?

The following passage may serve to characterise M. Guizot’s acquaintance with the course of bourgeois development in England:

“Under the reign of George I and George II the public spirit took a different direction: foreign policy ceased to be its principal concern; domestic administration, the preservation of peace, questions of finance, the colonies, trade, the development and struggles of the parliamentary regime became the predominant occupation of the government and the public.” (p. 168.)

In the reign of William III, M. Guizot finds only two moments worth mentioning: the preservation of the balance between Parliament and the Crown and the preservation of the European balance through the struggle against Louis XIV. Under the Hanoverian dynasty, “the public spirit” then suddenly “takes a different direction”, one knows not how or why. One sees here how M. Guizot transfers the most commonplace phrases of French parliamentary debate to English history and imagines that he has thereby explained it. It was just in this way that M. Guizot, as a minister, likewise fancied he was balancing on his shoulders the balance between Parliament and Crown and the European balance, while in reality he did nothing else but piece by piece sell off the entire French state and the whole of French society to the financial Jews of the Paris Bourse.

The fact that the wars against Louis XIV were purely wars of competition for the annihilation of French trade and French sea power, that under William III the rule of the financial bourgeoisie received its first sanction through the establishment of the Bank and the introduction of the national debt, that the manufacturing bourgeoisie was given a new stimulus by the consistent enforcement of the protective tariff system – M. Guizot does not consider it worth his while to speak of these things. For him, only political phrases have significance. He does not even mention that under Queen Anne the ruling parties were only able to preserve themselves and the constitutional monarchy by extending, through a coup d’état, the duration of Parliaments to seven years and thus almost completely destroying the influence of the people on the government.

Under the Hanoverian dynasty, England had already advanced far enough that it could wage the competitive war against France in its modern form. England itself fought France only in America and the East Indies, while on the Continent it contented itself with paying foreign princes like Frederick II to make war on France. And when the foreign war thus assumes a different form, M. Guizot says: “Foreign policy ceases to be the principal concern”, and “the preservation of peace” takes its place. As to the extent to which “the development and struggles of the parliamentary regime became the predominant occupation of the government and the public”, one should compare the bribery stories under the Walpole ministry, which, to be sure, look remarkably similar to the scandals that became the order of the day under M. Guizot.

The reason why the English Revolution had a more prosperous course than the French, M. Guizot explains above all by two causes: first, because the English Revolution had an altogether religious character, and consequently by no means broke with all the traditions of the past, and secondly, because from the outset it did not proceed destructively but conservatively, because Parliament defended the old existing laws against the encroachments of the Crown.

As regards the first point, M. Guizot forgets that the free thought that fills him with such horror in the case of the French Revolution was imported into France from no other country than precisely England. Locke was its father, and in Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke it already assumed that brilliant form which later underwent so splendid a development in France. We thus arrive at the singular result that the same free thought at which, according to M. Guizot, the French Revolution foundered was one of the most essential products of the religious English Revolution.

In relation to the second point, M. Guizot entirely forgets that the French Revolution began just as conservatively, indeed far more conservatively than the English. Absolutism, particularly in the form in which it finally appeared in France, was here also an innovation, and it was against this innovation that the parlements rose up and defended the old laws, the *us et coutumes* [customs and usages] of the old monarchy of the estates. And while the first step of the French Revolution was the revival of the Estates-General, which had been dormant since Henry IV and Louis XIII, the English Revolution, by contrast, cannot point to a single fact of equally classical conservatism.

According to M. Guizot, the main result of the English Revolution was that the king was rendered incapable of governing against the will of Parliament and of the House of Commons in Parliament. The whole revolution now consists in the fact that at the beginning both sides, Crown and Parliament, overstep their limits and go too far, until they eventually find the right balance under William III and neutralise each other. That the subordination of the monarchy to Parliament is its subordination to the rule of a class, M. Guizot considers superfluous to mention. He therefore need not go further into the question of how this class acquired the necessary power to make the Crown its servant at last. For him, the entire struggle between Charles I and Parliament revolves solely around purely political prerogatives. Of what Parliament and the class represented in it needed these prerogatives for, one learns not a word. Just as little does M. Guizot speak of the direct encroachments of Charles I on free competition, which made the trade and industry of England more and more impossible, or of the dependence on Parliament into which Charles I fell ever deeper through his constant financial distress the more he tried to defy Parliament. The whole revolution is therefore explicable to him only through the ill will and religious fanaticism of a few disturbers of the peace who could not content themselves with a moderate freedom. About the connection between the religious movement and the development of bourgeois society M. Guizot is equally unable to give any enlightenment. The republic is naturally likewise the mere work of a few ambitious men, fanatics and malefactors. That at the same time attempts were made in Lisbon, Naples and Messina to introduce the republic, and indeed, as in England, also with an eye to Holland, is a fact which is not mentioned at all. Although M. Guizot never loses sight of the French Revolution, he does not even arrive at the simple conclusion that the transition from absolute to constitutional monarchy everywhere comes about only after violent struggles and after passing through the republic, and that even then the old dynasty, being unusable, has to make way for a usurping collateral line. He therefore knows how to relate only the most trivial commonplaces about the overthrow of the English Restoration monarchy. He does not even adduce the immediate causes: the fear of the new great landowners, created by the Reformation, of the restoration of Catholicism, in which event they would naturally have had to surrender all their plundered former Church property, i.e., in which event seven-tenths of the entire surface of England would have changed hands; the dread of the commercial and industrial bourgeoisie of Catholicism, which by no means suited their commerce; the nonchalance with which the Stuarts, to their own advantage and that of their court nobility, sold the whole of English industry and trade to the government of France, i.e., of the only country which at that time offered a dangerous and, in many respects, victorious competition to the English, etc. Since M. Guizot everywhere omits the most important elements, nothing remains for him but a highly inadequate and banal narrative of purely political events.

The great riddle for M. Guizot, which he can decipher only by the superior intelligence of the English, the riddle of the conservative character of the English Revolution, is the continuous alliance in which the bourgeoisie finds itself with the greater part of the large landowners, an alliance which essentially distinguishes the English Revolution from the French, which destroyed the great landed property by parcellation. This class of large landowners, in alliance with the bourgeoisie, which had, moreover, already come into existence under Henry VIII, found itself not in contradiction, as French feudal landed property did in 1789, but on the contrary in complete harmony with the conditions of life of the bourgeoisie. Their landed property was in fact not feudal, but bourgeois property. On the one hand, they supplied the industrial bourgeoisie with the population necessary to operate the manufactories; on the other hand, they were in a position to give agriculture the development appropriate to the state of industry and trade. Hence their common interests with the bourgeoisie, hence their alliance with it.

With the consolidation of the constitutional monarchy in England, English history, for M. Guizot, comes to an end. Everything that follows is reduced, for him, to a pleasant interplay between Tories and Whigs, i.e., for him, to the great debate between M. Guizot and M. Thiers. In reality, on the contrary, it is only with the consolidation of the constitutional monarchy that the grandiose development and transformation of bourgeois society in England begins. Where M. Guizot sees only gentle calm and idyllic peace, in reality there developed the most violent conflicts, the most incisive revolutions. First, under the constitutional monarchy, manufacture expanded to an extent hitherto unknown, only then to make way for large-scale industry, the steam-engine, and the colossal factories. Whole classes of the population disappear, new ones take their place, with new conditions of life and new needs. A new, more colossal bourgeoisie arises; while the old bourgeoisie fights the French Revolution, the new one conquers the world market. It becomes so all-powerful that, even before the Reform Bill puts direct political power into its hands, it compels its opponents to enact laws almost solely in its interest and according to its needs. It conquers direct representation in Parliament and uses it to destroy the last vestiges of real power remaining to the landed property. Finally, at this very moment, it is busy demolishing from the ground up the beautiful edifice of the English Constitution, before which M. Guizot stands in admiration.

And while M. Guizot pays his compliment to the English for the fact that among them the reprehensible excrescences of French social life, republicanism and socialism, have not shaken the pillars of the one-and-only-saving monarchy, in England the class antagonisms in society are developed to a height unparalleled in any other country; here a bourgeoisie, with wealth and productive forces without equal, confronts a proletariat that is likewise without equal in power and concentration. The tribute M. Guizot pays to England thus ultimately amounts to the fact that here, under the shelter of the constitutional monarchy, far more and far more radical elements of a social revolution have developed than in all other countries of the world taken together.

Where the threads of English development converge in a nodal point that even he cannot, for appearance’s sake, cut through any longer with a mere political phrase, M. Guizot takes refuge in the religious phrase, in the armed intervention of God. Thus, for example, the Spirit of God suddenly comes over the army and prevents Cromwell from proclaiming himself king, etc., etc. Before his conscience Guizot saves himself by means of God, before the profane public by means of style.

In fact, not only les rois s’en vont <the kings are vanishing>, but also les capacités de la bourgeoisie s’en vont <the capacities of the bourgeoisie are disappearing>.